Some of life’s tests may have already passed you by, but another will come, and even if you responded poorly in past tests, you can react differently in the future. You can change. Lady Gaga is wrong: she was not “Born this Way.” She was not born wearing a meat suit and starved for fame; she chose that path. She was born with an amazing talent, yes, and I enjoy her songs. But the meat suit did not form on Lady Gaga in the womb, that was a bolt-on after-market addition.

Likewise, you were not born a drunk or sex obsessed or not-good-enough or quick to anger or food-crazed. You allowed all that to happen. You chose those patterns, just like I did. God did not make you surf porn or drink Jack Daniels or post mean comments online. We are being guided to that idea, however, that we are “born” in these states, which is the greatest lie our world today is selling, with massive reach and power through media.

While you may have done bad things in the past, and yes, we are fallen creatures, we also have free will. If you are convinced that you can’t change, that you can’t control what thoughts enter your mind, then you have lost what it means to be human.

We are the gatekeepers of our thoughts. While we are born with the instinct to do the wrong thing, we don’t have to do the wrong thing. We choose it, and we do so because someone or something is suggesting and inviting us into temptation. That is the job of modern marketing, in case you were unaware. The notion to pick up your phone and go to a porn site is a thought that you allow to enter your consciousness. Because you are convinced that it’s harmless, that it doesn’t hurt anyone, and that it’s natural instinct, you have walked your free will right into the trap. The choice is made, but a different choice could have been made. There is nothing “natural” about picking up a phone and looking at nude people having sex. There is nothing so objectifying and cheapening to human beings than to see them as nothing more than gyrating pleasure monkeys who can titillate your base desires. And there is nothing so damaging to your existing relationships than to satisfy your need for interaction with images on a screen, while real people who want love and respect sit in another room, occupying the same house or apartment as you do.

We can rip out the old thoughts and plant a garden of good thoughts that lead us to Christ. But first you have to choose it. What you have been told is that you were “born this way” because the entertainment and advertising worlds transmit that thought to you constantly, because you are a consumer, a customer. You are not a person to them. Convincing you that you do not have free will is a full-time job. You are a data point, a row in a database, an object. They will never try to remind you that you were made in the image and likeness of God and that you have free will. They will never tell you that what you are searching for is rest, for peace, for something to fill the emptiness you feel on Sunday nights. If they tell you that, you will likely stop pursuing the accumulation of goods and services and achievements. They want you walled in with your fear and pride, because then you receive their transmissions. What you receive, what you allow to enter your thoughts, becomes what you believe. If you doubt this, sit quietly in a room with no sound, no phone, no book, no TV, and see what thoughts enter your mind. What enters your mind will be telling: a song, an insult, an idea, a political issues, an issue at your kid’s school, a grudge, a product, a TV show, a news story that irritated you. Distractions will come because the thoughts you allow in are what your mind and soul are gnawing on.

To be free today, to be the curator of your own thoughts, you must take action. It requires effort. Believe it or not, a lifetime of pop-culture and subliminal messages can be boxed up and moved out. But you have to take action.

The best way to break free is to start now. Say and repeat the Jesus prayer, constantly: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Say it now.

“Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Say it again.

Pause your reading or listening, and say it fives times slowly.

Ok, welcome back.

Make that prayer the default thought in your head, a rolling meditation, and it will be like Jesus is in your mind, cleaning up your soul. When you say that prayer, he is flipping tables in your temple. He’s like ServPro restoring a house after a fire. That little prayer alone can chase out the cattle, shame the money-changers, and soon, you will be sweeping a tidy floor. All of the garbage begins to leave when that prayer becomes the song you hear at all times. And for God’s sake, literally, for God, put down the damn phone. Leave it behind.

You have to keep doing this practice. Just like any shop floor or school hallway, there is a lot of traffic in your temple. You must be sweeping every day. Like with fitness, you don’t get fit in a single day. You don’t get saved one day and never have to think about it again. If someone believes they were saved five years ago and he needs no work today, that is like someone who ran a half-marathon five years ago and tells you that he’s still fit, but you can see his beer-gut hanging over his pants. There is work to be done. Always. Humility and conversion and working on salvation is an active, daily task. Don’t be fooled, because that is how you slide backward. Thinking you are done is how the cattle and money-changers re-enter the temple. Pick your metaphor. You must weed the garden. You must stay fit. You must sweep the floor daily. You were not born to sin. You choose to do so, and you’ll do it again as soon as you become complacent.

Humility is a derivative word of humiliation. Humility sounds better, but the full experience is humiliation and no one wants that. That sounds really bad. It feels really bad. Why would anyone want that? We don’t, but we get to experience it whether we want to or not.

This is why this is so hard for Nicodemus and the characters in Jumanji, because no one in their right mind wants to be humiliated. No one seeks to become helpless, despised, ill, cast out, hated, diseased, beat up, kicked, laughed at, mocked, or excluded. Nicodemus is none of these things. As a Pharisee he is admired, wealthy, even healthy. In terms of today, he has it all. A job that is respected, status in the community, a fine education, good prospects for the future, and like many of us today, because of all this he will never be born in the spirit.

Who will be? The prostitutes and the tax collectors. Jesus is inviting Nicodemus to change, but he’s not sending back the RSVP. Nicodemus could take up his cross, but he won’t. He could reject his status and power, but it’s not registering and probably not the least bit inviting. He believes in his own righteousness too much, just like the Israelites before the snakebite, just like the Jumanji characters before the game begins.

What the story of the bronze serpent “raised up” and the story of Jesus “raised up” on the cross have in common becomes apparent after you compare the two stories. I find that it helps to think of both of these images. This is why I don’t like bare wooden crosses, ones that lack the body of Christ. The risen Jesus was never hanging on the cross. You’ll see these images of a Jesus with his arms out, rising up, kind of hovering outward from the cross. I understand the artist’s vision, or I think I do. They want to merge the death with the resurrection. The symbol of torture becomes the symbol of hope. Yes, I’m totally with that. I get it. There’s no way to heaven except through the cross. There is no resurrection without the death. I get it, the artist wants to merge the pain and suffering with the hope and glory. I don’t mean to imply these are bad. Bring on the scared art! There are so many amazing portrayals of Christ. Yes…it’s great - these are beautiful statues. But…to see the purpose of his death, I think we are meant to see that death.

The crucifix with the crucified Jesus, with the nails in his hands and feet, with his sagging body, with the crown of thorns, with the spear gash in his side, with the whip marks on his legs and back, with the emaciated and dehydrated body, with all of that suffering and pain - that is what sin looks like. As I’ve mentioned before, you can imagine the writhing and squirming that happened on that cross for three hours. The image almost becomes like a serpent if you meditate on it, because the ugliness of it is undeniable. It is a sickening image to press into, but that is where we have to go, into that suffering and pain. That’s three hours, 180 minutes, of brutal pain and mockery and thirst before getting to the words, “It is finished.”

That is what we must see, it’s what we have to look at, and witness. Like the Israelites looking up at the cause of their pain, so must we look up at the cause of our pain. Did Christ cause our pain? No. Sin caused your pain. God did not cause your pain; our sin, yours and mine, caused it. We are all in this together. We are all made in the image and likeness of God, and we are all fallen. It’s incorrect to say that my sins only affect me, or that I don’t do anything to hurt anyone else. We all hurt each other. There is a popular saying going around today that goes like this: “Hurt people, hurt people.” And it’s true. It’s accurate. The only problem is that we’ve all been hurt. We usually trot out this line to explain someone else’s behavior, to project a reason onto their apparent flawed actions. But all of us have been hurt. All of us hurt others. The great mistake we are making today is to pretend that our actions are sinless and that we have no flaws. We like to act like Nicodemus and the Israelites before the snakebite.

To make sense of this need to see our flaws, we must look up and accept our shortcomings and defects and weaknesses, because what we thought was strength was weakness.

If we acknowledge our weaknesses and sins, we must stare up at them. To feel them staring back at us is a good start. On that cross with the body of Jesus we can see what has bitten us. What is it? What’s bitten us? Sin. The serpent is sin. The body of Jesus shows us our sin.

What has brought us pain and suffering? What is the cause of our struggle? We are never too concerned about God when our strengths are getting us what we want, but we are quick to blame God, and we become desperate for a solution from God when our usual fixes and band-aids stop working. To be re-born, you must look upon the weaknesses and you must nod in agreement. True self-knowledge is this: you are not perfect. You will never be perfect. More importantly, the day is coming when you cannot save yourself and no one around you can save you either. That coach was lying about how strong you are. That advertisement about you being flawless was just selling product to hit a quarterly goal. That song about the fierceness and the fight in you didn’t account for your weakness. But life will raise them up for you to see, someday, somehow, somewhere along the way.

The instrument of torture that the Romans used is a piece of wood, but what was raised up and put on the cross is the embodiment of our sins. God came to us here in the form of Jesus, and he allowed us to see what sin does, what it looks like, how vulgar and ugly it is. We were able to see true goodness in the life of Jesus, in the holy family. Then we were shown the wretchedness of what our sin does, through his passion and death. God came here to make clear what we cannot easily see. In the Catholic church we believe that the Sacraments make what is invisible, visible. Jesus on the cross makes the invisibility of our sins fully visible. When we deny that we have sin, we deny God. God doesn’t disappear when we deny him or deny that sin exists. No, he’s still there. We go down the path of self-harm, thinking we have no flaws. Then the flaws flourish and lead us directly to the place where we have to acknowledge what we attempted to flee or ignore.

The funny thing is that we can talk about God all day, like Nicodemus, but if we deny that we have weaknesses, then we cannot know God. That is what God came here to show us, because the other signs and metaphors and prophecies weren’t getting through. The pain and suffering of Jesus, who is God, must be witnessed, because he was everything that was good, true, and beautiful. And we killed him. And we’d do it again. Except we won’t get a second chance because the second arrival will be like lightning across the sky, with no time to react or respond. We cannot fathom how the second coming will be, just as no one, aside from the prophets, could have imagined how the first coming would happen.

God walked among us, and in our sins we rejected him, just like we do every day, and to be healed we must look upon our error and admit it. Without this admittance, we cannot be healed, we cannot be born in the spirit. We’re like Nicodemus looking at God like he’s our little brother instead of Our Father. We want to pat him on the head. We think we are in charge, but we’re not. In order to love God and to love one another we have to see our own failures and weaknesses in their fullness. Believing requires that we admit our flaws. This is why Jesus tells the Pharisees that the prostitutes and tax collectors will enter the kingdom before anyone else. The ones who are in open rebellion against God and despised by the world, are dangerously close to hitting bottom, to reaching the state of helplessness that is required to be born in the spirit. Today the prostitutes and the drunks and the mentally ill are still the ones that find the kingdom, and many of those people that you hate today will find the kingdom before you, because they are, like Dante, heading all the way down to the bottom, all the way, and as long as they don’t get stuck on one of the rings of hell and stay there, they will make it. The mistake most of us make is to cling to one of those rings of hell and think we’ve made it to the bottom, and so we just remain in hell without falling to feel the full impact of helplessness, which is what we really want and need, because once in that state, you will pop out the other side. You cannot get to the mountain of Purgatory without going all the way down into the Inferno, just like you cannot get to heaven without going through the cross.

That is what the end of the movie Jumanji shows in the transformation of the characters. They entered detention as mostly unlikable people. They went down into the Inferno. Through the ordeal, the characters have all been re-born into the world. They are changed. They will never be the same. Why? Because they went all the way down, all the way to the bottom, and saw their hideous flaws in the light of their vulnerability. All of them died in the game and received a second chance. They experienced the fear of death, came to understand loss. Through that journey of pain and suffering and rebirth, they came to believe. In their helplessness, they found the jewel of faith. They believed in the mystery and the miracle and they made it back. When someone says they don’t believe in God because of the pain and suffering in the world, you can assure them that no one ever comes to believe in God until they have suffered. The faith of a child becomes lost in adulthood, and only through pain and suffering can we return to that childlike faith and be reborn in the spirit. Spiritual birth comes by pain just like physical birth. That is how you are set free. That is how you come to know God. That is the only way that anyone is ever set free.

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