Is Jesus our Lord?

I don't have any original thoughts this week but I stumbled across this from Brian McClaren...

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would write a book about how Christianity has successfully dethroned Jesus as Lord to such a degree that the "Jesus" who is preached, pasted on bumper stickers, serenaded in gooey love songs on religious radio and TV, and prayed to is an impostor. Here's how I might make that argument:

1. We retained Jesus as Savior but promoted the apostle Paul (or someone else) to Lord and Teacher. (Even as Savior though, we limited Jesus to saving us from hell, which explains why we have had comparatively little interest in his saving us from greed, gossip, prejudice, violence, isolation, carelessness about the poor or the planet, hurry, hatred, envy, anger, or pride.)

2. We did this in various ways: by assuming that the purpose of Jesus and his gospel was to get people's souls into heaven after death and therefore concluding that the only really important thing about Jesus was his death (or birth, or resurrection) to solve our guilt problem that kept us out of heaven. Or by deciding that Jesus' message was "spiritual" and therefore pertained to "eternity" and not "history," and/or by deciding that Jesus' life and teachings were completely interpreted by Paul (or a particular church hierarchy) so they deserved little attention on their own, apart from the uses which Paul (or whoever) put them.

3. We developed theological systems that taught us how to avoid many of Jesus' teachings and reinterpret those we couldn't avoid.

4. We made up for our demotion of Jesus from being our Lord and Teacher by saying or singing his name more often, and by saying "Lord, Lord" as much as possible, preferably with deep feeling and high volume. This allowed us to still feel like good Christians whether or not we did, or cared about doing, anything he said.