Faith and Religion

            I have a memory of Sunday school when I was a kid.  We were making Jacob’s ladders out of paper for some reason. I had mine made with all of the rungs of the ladder in place when the kid next to me reached over and tore mine apart.  I was devastated.  I had worked hard on this thing and his tearing it apart was a terrible thing to do.  What I remember next is the teacher coming to me and helping me to make another Jacob’s ladder.  I don’t remember anything bad happening to the kid who tore it, but I never forgot her care in helping me to get over what was really in retrospect a minor bump in the road.   The wonderful part of all of this has nothing at all to do with Jacob’s ladder; but with that teacher taking a moment to take care of me.  I think that in essence is what faith is all about.

                 The Pharisees were criticizing the disciples of Jesus for not following the rituals surrounding eating meals.  They said that the disciples ate with “unwashed hands”.  Jesus cited Isaiah when he responded to them telling them:

                              'This people honors me with their lips,

                             but their hearts are far from me

                             in vain do they worship me,

                             teaching human precepts as doctrines.'

                            You abandon the commandment of God

                            and hold to human tradition."

            That, for me is the essence of religion; rules that we have made up over time for our comfort.  Faith is entirely different.  It is an acting out of our relationship with our God in our relationship with other people.  That is what that Sunday school teacher was doing for me in that class when my Jacob’s ladder was ruined.  She was taking care of me, and teaching me something far in excess of whatever the lesson about the ladder was about.  She taught me that she cared about how I felt and about what was going on in my life. 

            Every week in church, we recite the Nicene Creed; a list of doctrinal items that we say that we believe about God.  These are vague enough to mean different things to different people.  That is what religion is all about.  Faith is something else.  It is the stamp of God’s love that we keep inside us that helps us to look at other people and see God in them also. 

            Sometimes we get all of this mixed up and believe that our religion is more important than our faith.  This is why we have so many religious denominations in the world.  Each of them is a moment when we couldn’t agree on our doctrine.  When that happened, we sometimes also lost our friendship with each other and became terrible examples of what faith is all about in this world.  

            I know that is what is going on in the Middle East with ISIS confronting other Muslims about the “true” way to practice their religion.  It has resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people and endless grief for their survivors. I know that God weeps when this is seen.  It is essential that we find ways to agree about our religion in this world.  The way to do that is to practice our faith; to do what our Lord taught us: to love one another as we love God.  When we really practice that, we show the essence of God to this fractured world.  I believe that is why we are here, and why our religion is not the end, but the means to do this. 

Black Lives Matter!

            We have had an incredible month.  August 6 was our sixtieth wedding anniversary and our kids produced a wonderful event at our oldest daughter’s lake house in Ohio.  We spent the whole week celebrating, enjoying family and friends in a great atmosphere.  Rosie sparkled as I have seen her do for all of these years and that I remember from the first time that I saw her.  I was reminded again that we have a remarkable family. 

            Also, our youngest daughter, Heather is moving to San Diego, California with her fiancé, where I know that they will get married in the near future.  Her happiness is something that we have hungered for and she is certainly deserving of it.  She has had a chaotic month, selling her furniture, getting her house ready and getting ready for the move.  There has been a lot going on. 

            We thank God for our family and for the love that has endured for all of these years.  We have appreciated the good wishes that have been sent our way.  We know how fortunate we are.

            Faith has been a large part of not only our marriage, but also of our family.  We have been constantly upheld by our daughters and we have watched them grow into glorious women.  I know that God has been watching over us all from the beginning, being with us through all of the difficult times and giving us strength to get to here.

             I love what St. Paul tells the Ephesians in his letter to trust in God’s power to help us in our troubles.    He speaks in frank military terms telling his followers to put on the armor of God and to know that God’s power is there to defend us from all of the assaults of the enemy.  Sometimes it sounds like those enemies are all celestial, the allies of the devil and such.  I think that Paul is more concerned about the enemies that we have around us.  Sometimes the assumptions that we make about our culture that leads to great problems.  Sometimes, we are the enemy.

            There has been an explosion of concern over the assault on black people by police in this time.  We just had the first anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown on the streets of Ferguson, MO and the policeman who killed him never indicted for it.  There was a remarkable amount of rationalization around it by the white community; the kids stealing cigars, as though that was a capital offence.  I was struck by the callousness of this nation when it came to the problems in Ferguson.  We stretched every way that we could to find blame.  It was the police, it was the black crowds, it was anything at all except our culture.

            The phrase that has come up through all of this has been Black Lives Matter!  That has been posted on signs and carried through our streets.  Strangely, it has been countered by another phrase:  All Lives Matter, which in essence sends the black lives to the back of the bus.  Of course all lives matter.  We all know that.  The cry of the black community though is to take those black lives seriously.  To pay particular attention to them while this problem persists.  To work to care that in our culture we work to take special care to insure that blackness in itself is not a crime, as it has seemed to be in so many circumstances lately.

            I am appalled at the amount of violence that we see on television every day.  A lot of this is black on black crime; desperate people with guns trying to make their way in a culture that often makes no space for them at all.  Now, we have instances of white on black killing, not only by police, but occasionally by self appointed vigilantes.  Coincidentally, we have more black people incarcerated than any nation in the world.  When I was a part time chaplain at Western Penitentiary, I saw a yard full of black inmates trying as hard as they could to make their own way in that place.  Most of the guards were white and the contrast was monumental.  It still is. 

            What we need so desperately to do is to take this problem seriously.  Not make excuses for it, not cast blame; but look at ourselves and how it is that we still segregate in this culture.  This is the enemy that we must counter with our faith.  It is necessary, maybe even essential that we find ways to bridge the gap between the races and come to some understanding of what is needed in order for us to live together as a people.  We are really not white and black; we are all a people with an enormous history.  We need to take the history seriously, look at it and come to terms with what it all means.  Inclusion is the necessary issue.  Love is what we are called to do.

            Putting on the armor of God isn’t easy.  It involves setting aside some assumptions that we carry with us.  I wasn’t born white of my own volition.  None of my black friends chose their color.  It is what we have in common in this culture.   But we have been given more than our race.  We have also been given faith that is strengthened and sustained by our God over our lives.  Faith is what got me to this place in my life.  It is also what brought Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu to our attention as magnificent representatives of humanity.  That is what I want to follow in this world.  Black lives certainly matter.  You and I need to be certain that we all know that. 

Humility and Wisdom

          There is a hymn in our hymnbook that I don’t like at all.  It is an evangelical hymn that lifts up the sacrifice of Jesus and bids us all to partake of it.  The part that I don’t like is a direct quote from the Gospel of John, which says: unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  John 6: 53  That is certainly what Jesus meant when he was arguing with the Pharisees about his identity, the Pharisees who were so arrogant and self assured that they only included themselves in God’s world; but that isn’t how the singers of our hymn mean it.  They have taken those words and applied them to the Eucharist with the claim that if you don’t take communion, you really aren’t Christian.  This is exactly the arrogance that Jesus was speaking to when that verse from John originated.  This hymn verse is a holdover from those frantic charismatic years that we had in our church when people sang hymns and raised their arms in the air to show to everyone around them their true faith.  It was a judgmental time and one that I don’t want to revisit. 

            We are an inclusive people, a people of community who open our arms who everyone who walks through our doors. The great mark of community is humility; the ability to look at other people and their merits apart from our own, and include them as they come.  Our first job as a people is to listen to those whom we meet, not exclude them with feisty statements that provide harsh rules before they even have a chance to worship with us. 

            Church is hard work and it requires a great deal of wisdom.  The wonder of Solomon is the humility with which he approached God after he became King in the place of his father David.  He asks God only for an understanding mind and the ability to govern his people.  He doesn’t ask for riches or for long life.  Because of this humility, God grants to Solomon wisdom and the ability to govern his people in the way of God’s rule; and Solomon’s kingdom became the wonder of the nations around him.  The people of Israel prospered under Solomon and God’s creation flourished.  Humility is the father of wisdom.  That is the lesson that God gives us through Solomon.

            In the book of Proverbs is a wonderful statement that echoes all of this: 

                      Wisdom has built her house,

            she has hewn her seven pillars.

                   She has slaughtered her animals,

                   she has mixed her wine,

            she has also set her table.

                   She has sent out her servant girls, she calls

            from the highest places in the town,

                 “ You that are simple, turn in here”

            To those without sense she says,

                  "Come, eat of my bread

            and drink of the wine I have mixed.

                   Lay aside immaturity, and live,

            and walk in the way of insight

                                                --Proverbs 9: 1-6

What a wonderful invitation that is to the whole world to come into our churches and join us in the community life of Christianity.  It isn’t at all judgmental, it is simply an invitation to those “without sense” and “who are simple” to come into the wisdom that God provides for us all with his unabated love.  That love is expressed through the people of God in the church. 

            Sometimes we get too proud of our accomplishments and forget about the wholeness that is provided in the simple Wisdom that God provides through humility.  The best of our theologians have always been known for their humility.  Certainly Dietrich Bonheoffer, who died at the hands of the Nazis was a man of ultimate humility and so was Marcus Borg, who died recently. Borg said that he was an "agnostic about the afterlife".  When I read their works, I am taken in by the beauty of their lives, which is a measure of the humble way that they lived. There was no pretentiousness, they lived lives that exuded humility.  That is why when I read their writings, I see the greatness of their wisdom.   It is certainly the way of the Lord.