While reading an article by Barbara Brown Taylor recently, I realized she and I have at least one thing in common."I spend a lot of time with the followers of Jesus. Some exercise their ministries as clergy while others do the trickier work of ministering while they do business, take depositions, teach school or care for grandchildren. They come from a wide variety of churches. Many serve as leaders in their congregations. Others have left institutions that no longer engage their energies or imaginations. What they have in common is their fascination with Jesus."

A fascination with Jesus……these words found in the ‘Faith matters’ column of April’s Christian Century magazine, caused me to sit taller in my seat. A fascination with Jesus. It would make sense that in ‘my line of work’ I would be surrounded by people who have a fascination with Jesus. But, like Brown Taylor, I also have many friends outside the institutional church that share that same fascination, those who spend time devouring the latest book on the historical Jesus but have generally given up on church. At parties, these same people will find interesting ways to bring up questions, to enter into the fascination dance, to once again try to make further sense of this central character of the Christian faith. And themselves.

For some people Jesus is simple. For me, I fall into the always questioning, always trying to understand, a little doubt here, a little faith there fascination with Jesus. I am humbled and amazed by his deep knowledge of God’s movement and call upon his life, by his attention to healing, by his alignment with the poor and the marginalized, by his justice and unconditional love. I love the stories he told and the room there is to walk around in them, how they challenge me to see myself in the characters. I am frightened by his willingness to die for all he believed, all he was.

I am sure his life calls me to follow.  Most often that is where things get tricky. Brown Taylor writes:" What if ministering in his name meant answering questions with more questions? What if it included refusing to do for others what they must do for themselves? What if it meant maintaining a critical distance from our most beloved institutions, declining to fulfill the roles assigned to us?"

I guess my fascination with Jesus doesn’t call me to ask the question "what would Jesus do?" Instead, it calls me to ask "What would I do?" See, now it gets tricky.