Though many people would like to dispute this, the best pizza in the known world is found in Columbus, Ohio. Just off of Lane Avenue is a pizza joint that is a favorite haunt of locals called Tommy's. Started by an Italian family, the restaurant had many locations throughout town that were divided up among the kids. While a couple of kids stuck to the recipe, others did not. Years after the split, I ordered a pizza from one of the other storefronts. It was not what I expected. It wasn't that it didn't taste like pizza, but it was that it wasn't anything like the pizza I bragged about to friends and family. It wouldn't be a fair comparison to the thing I was talking about.
N.T. Wright, a pastor and writer from England, talks about running into young people all the time who tell them they do not believe in God. He asks them then to describe God to him. After listening, he says, "Well, I don't believe in that god either." For many people in America (and especially young people), the god they are worshipping or have been told about is not the real God that we visit with on a Sunday morning or pray to during our getting up for work, sitting down for dinner, and going down for bed. This god is an impersonal god of rules and morals, but no relationship. Where did such confusion come from though?
It is never so easy to boil down a relationship to things we do with that person. Time spent with friends is always more than favorite shared activities or a good conversation. But perhaps that is just what we have told a needy world what our relationship with God is like. We say that it is about the activity of going to worship or our conversation time in prayer; but no Christian is ever going to describe what it truly is like. John 15:15 illustrates this perfectly. Here Jesus states, "No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." (ESV) In other words a servant is defined by what they do, but a friend is defined by the relationship. Furthermore, in 1 John 3:1, we are told we have been brought into the family of God, but that the people who are not in the family just don't recognize the call to a relationship.
So, like the pizza joint, many people haven't tasted real Christianity. They have only heard about or seen an imitation of it. They have happened upon someone passing out a product that looks like what we talk about, but it is nothing like what we have experienced. At the heart of the Christian story is the Gospel proclamation. It does not say that if we do this or that, then we will be loved; but rather that because we are loved, we welcome our friends and family where we can sit down and taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8). And, just as the invitation has been made to us, we get to make it to others.
