Essenes

I will be writing about my last post on "What does it mean to be a Christian" in more detail for the next few days. I will be discussing the groups that Jesus encountered in the world and why he did not become a part of their tribe. The challange will be to see how we as a Christian community actually have become one of these three ourselves - personally and corporately.


The first group is the Essenes. Essenes where a Jewish religous group that was flourishing about the time of Jesus and the Roman empire. They lead a life that was seperate from the rest of the world. They belived in a life that was not lived as a part of this world. They attempted to live seperate from the Jewish establishment at the time and the Roman Empire. They did not want to overthrow the Roman Empire, nor did they want to join with it. They kept themselves seperate waiting for the Messiah. The Essenes have gained fame in modern times as a result of the discovery of an extensive group of religious documents known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, commonly believed to be their library. These documents include preserved multiple copies of the Hebrew Bible untouched from as early as 300 BC until their discovery in 1946.



What makes this important? I wanted everyone to think about we ourselves may be like Essenes. We seperate ourselves from the world. We like to hide out in the cave of church where we think it safe and keep the scriptures, the bible, the wisdom in it to ourselves. We use words that someone from the outside would never understand, and we never venture out to get to know anyone, and we are just holding on until "Jesus comes." We are not in this world to make a difference, but just hope that God will save us from this evil world and rescue us to heaven in the near future. We do not think that we will be able to make a difference. We think that no act of kindness or love will really make a difference to anyone, so we do not try. We huddle together in church, only speak to church people, and keep ourselves under the illusion that we are important.

Then Jesus entered and walked through Jericho. There was a man there, his name Zacchaeus, the head tax man and quite rich. He wanted desperately to see Jesus, but the crowd was in his way—he was a short man and couldn't see over the crowd. So he ran on ahead and climbed up in a sycamore tree so he could see Jesus when he came by.
When Jesus got to the tree, he looked up and said, "Zacchaeus, hurry down. Today is my day to be a guest in your home." Zacchaeus scrambled out of the tree, hardly believing his good luck, delighted to take Jesus home with him. Everyone who saw the incident was indignant and grumped, "What business does he have getting cozy with this crook?"

Luke 19: 1-7

Jesus did not isolate himself from some evil world. He actually made himself a part of the world around him. He was "getting cozy with this crook." Jesus went out and actually interacted with this sinful, evil world, and saw the beauty in it. He brought grace to those that were in desperate need of it. He brought love and acceptance to those that were desperately looking for it. He helped people become a part of God's story again! He helped people realize that they had forgotten whose they were and who had made them! The only way to do this was to interact with the world, make friends with people that needed him, and let them know by his actions that they were needed and loved.

So do we have any Essenes within ourselves? We want to live a life seperated, isolated from the world. We want to keep this amazing grace and love secret because we could not defile ourselves, it would not make a difference anyway. This world is so evil. How often do you/we want to live away from the "evils" of this world. We isolate our children from situations and ideas that are God's but they grow up thinking that those ideas and God are two totally seperate things. We think that you have to believe one and discount the other. We wonder why our young people have such a hard time when they go to college being able to integrate their faith into what they learn. We isolate ourselves. We become irrelavant to the culture around us because we refuse to understand it and interact with it. We just want to sit back and wait for the day Jesus comes and saves us.

Do not isolate yourself anymore if you have some Essene in you. Begin to get involved in the story of other people's lives and see that God is actively involved in their lives too, they just need someone to point them in the right direction. They just need someone to love them and believe in them. They just need to be shown what grace truly means. Begin to have conversations with people, they are spiritually hungry and desperately looking for God.

Namaste'