Field Notes from a Religion-Less Christian

November 4, 2021

On Coming to Faith

Who am I?

Where do I belong?

What is the meaning of my life?

What is to become of me?

Identity.

Community.

Purpose.

Destiny.

These questions have for years been a guiding principle for my engagement with any and all divine relationship to my very human, that is to say mortal, life.

These questions are answered but always remain and are revisited daily, either spoken or unspoken.

These questions drive commerce and economy, power and politic, personal relationships, psychology and mental health. They drive individual as well as nation-state wellbeing.

It is a mistake to think that I as an individual have any autonomy or agency in forging the substance of the content that might be an answer to any of these questions.  The only hope of an answer, a resolution, is to find, to discover, that I have no choice in the matter of determining any answer. Instead, all are answered for me. In other words, there is a fundamental orientation to these questions that can (and must) be appreciated and then appropriated in order to find not only a personal peace but also a social justice.

This orientation, a way of positioning oneself, is to allow to be reversed what is our natural inclination. Naturally, we are the center. But this now is to be taken out of the center and have placed another there. I will cease to be the subject of the sentence and instead I will be the object. I am not the Subject and Another, and all, the Object. Instead, Another, and all, is (are) the subject and I am the object.

This is not to turn to Determinism, breeding then Stoicism. This is rather a turn to Predestination producing Hope.

By nature we are wont to control each of these four dimensions or areas of our life. We are driven to be the Subject. When we see we cannot be, we do not give in. When a word is given that is a Promise it is too good to be true and we push back because it is not self-produced. Until, what? Until it is too good not to be true. And so, then, we do not give in but rather we are done in. We are taken over. Rather like falling in love, we have no choice in the matter and now, then, finally, this inability to choose is the best state of affairs, the best human condition, possible [I’m reminded of West Side Story’s Maria singing to Anita that Maria’s love for Tony is impossible not to engage, impossible to relinquish no matter the circumstance. It is out of Maria’s control (“I have a love, and it’s all that I have, right or wrong…”). She has been done in]

Identity, Community, Purpose and Destiny are not mine to produce? Who can live with that state of affairs? Well, we see, we cannot! We will not! Something, Someone, must die in order for this Life to live! So when we hear, then, Jesus speak of dying to self we see what it is of which he speaks. Self is no longer Subject. Another is Subject. Call this God. 

And Jesus called God “Father,” which meant only, simply, profoundly that the controlling one, this Another, is unconditionally merciful and compassionate. And so, this death to self is not suicide, but rather homicide. And God, the merciful one, is the perpetrator, the killer. God kills, and makes alive (1 Samuel 2:6, Exodus 4:24 passim). And homicide is not God’s choice, an option out of many.  God cannot and will not do other than give life to creation, and when our life (oh, we are lively in our spiritual calisthenics!) gets in the way of God’s life for us, watch out. God will use death to give life. God cannot raise a live body. It is not dead.  Only dead bodies get raised. 

This Another, this Other, without regard and reservation, gives away identity, community, purpose and destiny. Receiving all this, having our Self-Project done in so only Another remains for us, is called faith.

 

Field Notes from a Religion-Less Christian

December 1, 2021

“Even if You Do Buy that Lexus, There is Hope” (Idolatry and Christmas)

A friend of mine recently on a Facebook post stated that our Christmas TV commercials promoting giving upscale automobiles as a celebration of somebody’s birthday (could it be Santa’s birthday? The Ad does not say and we don’t know!), even though the occasion for the giving (that is, the birthday) is never stated, is a raw reminder of how we have lost the spirit and letter of Christmas. True enough. The prophet Amos would be proud of my buddy for echoing Amos’ acerbic words. What are we to do? How are we to live with this accusing judgement that withers us?

We become grim and cast stones at the idol of materialism while looking to buy our next car. Or even this, we don’t buy that car now but feel as though we have paid the right price and God’s righteousness will notice. We are absolutely caught in the web of sins and sin and find no rest even in the awareness and acknowledgement of it all. We hear the word of God that speaks directly to our practical and situational behaviors, “You shall have no other Gods,” and find there only accusation that oppresses. 

Where is any liberation?

Only when that same Subject, God, transforms those words of demand to promise. God will make the way, will do the deed, the justice for all, the making us have no other gods, including us in our entrapment. From the Exodus to the Resurrection, the biblical narrative breaks out in a freedom song: liberation comes only from God and in God. 

Do we need to sell the Lexus and give to the poor? Yes, still. But do we also live in the peace of God because God’s mercy simply will not be denied even if and when we instead sell or trade-in that Lexus in order to upgrade to a Mercedes? Well, yes still. There is just no stopping God’s work of righteousness upon us. 

“Unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ, the Lord.” No wonder the angels sing “Glory to God in the Highest and Peace to God’s people on Earth!” 

Field Notes from a Religion-Less Christian: 40 Years a Pastor

          December 18, 2021 

On 40 Years of Public Ministry

Pastors: Delivering Everything But Accomplishing Nothing

October 11, 2021

40 years ago today I was ordained into the Office of Public Ministry. 44 years ago, after graduating from college, I entered seminary, a 4 year graduate degree program, motivated to unpack and then use the weapon of God’s love to get at and destroy the core of human sin that is the cause of environmental and social injustice (my undergraduate degree in environmental education taught me well of our ecological calamity). I thought that justice (distributive justice that means peace comes by sharing, through non-violence, rather than retributive justice that means peace comes by victory, through violence) would come by knowing and practicing a better law, the law of love, the law that is Jesus, to change injustice. 

What I came to learn and then live over these years of public ministry of Word and Sacrament (aka being a pastor) is that, of course, we don’t and can’t use Jesus for anything or do anything of agency in our relationship with God. We can do lots to fight injustice, and well we should, and please, let’s get on with it. But we can’t do anything to impact what God has decided to do with the likes of us and our world. We’d like to think we have agency there, and sin is the thinking and acting as though we do. But we don’t. We have nothing when it comes to God. But we see that the life and message of Jesus is that this is actually just well and good. In fact, it is good news because God has decided our destiny willy-nilly without our cooperation, and that destiny is unmerited, unconditional mercy, no holds barred. 

Yes, in fact, the world would be a better place if we practiced the love that Jesus lived: peace comes from distributive justice (sharing), through non-violence. But that way of life in our hands only becomes a new violence if we force it on others – which is what religion of any stripe, the Jesus type or any type, is wont to do. Jesus lived it, but we forget what happened. We killed him for it. He forced nothing and in many ways changed nothing (the poor still wake up today, even after his resurrection). 

But if the way of Jesus is righteous and benevolent but changed nothing then, and the poor are still with us now,  but, “Jesus saves,” what gives?

This saving must be of a different sort. 

And so we have discovered and so the office of public ministry is here to declare and accomplish (not just talk about, but deliver): the saving is from our own self-righteousness, the place we go to do spiritual calisthenics to get a leg up on the divine, for the world’s righteousness (where we can actually do some good and actually accomplish something – namely the restoration of humanity and the entire world order!)

The world needs pastors to shut up our spiritualities and close up our religious enterprise and simply change us, free us, by delivering the promise of God that is unmerited mercy given at all costs. Pastors mostly get popular today because they deliver a message of human potentialities (by God’s mercy, of course!), and manage a community (church, congregation) where the push to making a difference in the world (for God, of course) is central. Jesus is not central. Our potential and our difference making is central. Pastors that don’t deliver the message, the message that says Jesus saves by giving us all we need to maximize our life if we but participate by assent and action (it’s usually called “faith,” a misnomer if there ever was one) don’t get much attention these days. But they are life giving.

But, does distributive justice not matter? And our ability to make justice happen, does it not matter? 

Of course it does. It makes all the difference in the world, but no difference to God. This is to say not that God does not care. It’s pretty clear that by looking at Jesus and what he did with the poor and marginalized that God cares about justice. But this: no difference in how God see us or treats us or will treat us by how well we perform, be that action (behaviors) or speech (beliefs). 

We need pastors to deliver (in Word and Sacrament) the goods. Not tell us to be better or how to be better, but tell us we are now and forever better because of Jesus Christ. And do all this not so that we wonder if we will ever know or experience this liberation, as if we stand now gazing at a beautiful artifact but not experiencing it. But do this so that we actually know it and own it now. That, my friends, doing that, being that pastor, is truly an art and a science and is a work not to be taken up lightly, which is why, of course, the church doesn’t confer the office simply because somebody feels moved by God, but rather takes pains to evaluate and graduate to such an office. 

So, I went to seminary to use Jesus to save the world and I found that Jesus uses me to declare that the world is already saved by him and since we are taken out of the salvation business we can turn to the only business we have: taking care of neighbor and creation. 

So, maybe I can use Jesus to save the world after all. He takes care of our relationship to God (“saves” us) so that we can take care of the world (“save” the world). Let’s get busy

Field Notes from a Religion-Less Christian

November 28, 2021

Luther’s Breakthrough on Grace

Martin Luther’s breakthrough Scripture passage, “the righteous shall live by faith,” (Romans 1:16-17) is not liberating, is no breakthrough, until or unless we see that the schemata and structure of law – the necessity of “reciprocity, preparation, contribution or mutuality, however small,” is defeated, nay destroyed, by God. Righteousness is given, not attained. Created by God, not found by God when God encounters us. Thus, the “forgiveness of sin” is the absolution on our way of living that sees our contributions as not only important, but literally vital. 

The whole enterprise of religion is built upon the foundation that we have ability and desire to love God if we would just get the proper, correct, accurate thinking and actions formulated and enacted. When God in Scripture, from the First Commandment (You shall have no other Gods before me) on, calls upon us to find singular and particular allegiance in Godself, we assume (and do so because it allows us agency and self-sufficiency) we can and should do this. But what if we cannot and we will not? Then what becomes of the demand? It is a pressing us to the point of seeing the only way out: Promise from and in God Godself. “You shall have no other Gods before me” becomes “I will have my way with you come hell or high water.” “You shall have no other Gods before me” is transformed from a Demand to a Promise. 

The Scholastic Tradition that Luther grew up in, and later rebuffed, had the spiritual practices sequenced to overcome our inability to love and serve God: Lectio, Meditatio, Oratio, Comtemplatio. The promise is that we are in darkness but can climb to the Light, given God’s aid. Grace was an Assist. A necessary assist, but nevertheless an assist to our own capabilities. Luther saw, or perhaps better described, felt the trap that this places on us. We are always striving and never secure. His breakthrough was, however, exegetical first, and then experiential. Romans 1:16-17 gave him opportunity to see how righteousness is not defined by our making a grade, but rather by God conferring a judgement. And that judgement is mercy, at all costs. Given, not merited. Luther, then, redefined the spiritual practices: Lectio, Meditatio, Tentatio. We are brought to judgment and it leads us to a suffering of God, the suffering of allowing God to be all in all, to be alongside no other God but to be only God, and at precisely that point and not in some sequence of enlightenment, to discover faith. The moment you are damned is the moment you are saved. But be clear, the one who damns is the one who saves. One and the same. “You shall have no other Gods before me” then becomes the promise. Not a demand that we must meet, but a promise to be received.

What Progress on Earth Day 2021? Get Real.

On the Today Show I saw Weather Broadcaster Al do a little dance jig on a lawn as he was on location for Earth Day with a litter grabber tool in his hand and in the background many others picking up trash. It was clean up project time. Every year it seems so many places, municipalities and organizations sponsor litter patrols, while the earth burns. 

We like to say we “celebrate” Earth Day every April 22 but we are ahead of ourselves. We should not be celebrating as if something has been accomplished. Ok, you say, “but we can celebrate progress can’t we, shouldn’t we, not least because it engenders more action?” Well, yes, but I would lead you to “Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World,” (PBS.org) wherein she forthrightly challenges our world’s significant political leaders for chronicling their political action “progress” on reducing carbon emissions while matter-of-factly not reaching or accomplishing the specifically stated goal of not increasing the global average temperature more than 1.5 degrees centigrade over pre-industrial era temperatures. “Progress over Perfection” is a laudable maxim for most pursuits but in this challenge of warming that we have it is not something to hold up as an acceptable report. 

What Thunberg interestingly points to regarding “progress” against this challenging goal is this past year’s global response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. What can happen and did happen when billions in dollars and total multi-disciplinary attention in research, development, education and delivery of a solution to the virus’s devastating effects was given on a global scale: multiple vaccines developed and massive public-health measures instituted to slow down and stop the virus’s death march. Why do we not do the same with reducing carbon emissions? Why indeed.

I like to say that no matter how bad the numbers, numbers are our friends. They tell the truth. We cannot succeed if we deny the numbers or fake the numbers to fit our politics or popularity. Right now we sit at carbon dioxide emissions bringing us to a 2.5 – 3.0 degrees C average increase in temperature by 2100. That number is catastrophic for our ecologies. We cannot claim “progress” as success if “progress” means environmental collapse. It needs to be 1.5 degrees or nothing. 

What will it take to get us there? Political will, financial investment, personal commitment and shared sacrifice. 

Right now, this month of our 51st Earth Day, we must start with being real about “progress.” As Thunberg notes: “don’t listen to me, listen to the science.”

Oh my, do we hear?

Easter Morning 2021: Needing Liberation, Not Inspiration

The sermon at the Easter Day outdoor worship I attended came close to naming the truth of what gospel actually is, but then retreated. Recognizing the fear and exhilaration of the Resurrection witnessed in Mark 16:1-8, instead of saying that the fear is real and defeated, destroyed by the exhilaration (the unpreached God is swallowed whole by the preached God, to use Martin Luther’s way of describing God’s knowing of us and our knowing of God), the pastor told us we live with the fear, it is not cast out albeit it is engaged. We live with the tension of knowing fear and experiencing joy…..and thus, though the preacher did not articulate the result to be a wished-for freedom (for who actually tries to point to a pie-in-the-sky bye and bye? Not many thankfully) the preacher still ended up there: we were given only hope for a liberation now instead of actually being liberated right then and there on a Sunday morning after the Easter baskets and before the Easter Dinner. 

But… good in this Easter sermon was a quote from Jurgen Moltmann: something relaying that resurrection is not an appreciation for or a believing in a fact but rather a participation in life. Also good, a poem segment by Walt Whitman about our life being the next verse to be written. 

It is very good to turn the Easter message away from a gift of the afterlife toward, instead, the gift of this life and how we participate in God’s life, resurrection, in the living and giving of justice and love in and through our daily lives. 

True enough, and good enough, almost. 

Almost good enough. 

My friend Jill posted on social media on Easter Day wondering just how those living with the grief of lives dead, like her 20 year-old son now gone 8 years, are not simply to live in a wish for a resurrection that somebody else knows but we do not know. In the preaching I heard Easter Day, if Jill were there to hear it, she would have been encouraged to live her life striving to fulfill a completed justice that someday she will know completely but does not know now and her job,  our job, if you will, today, is to stay the faithful course (which usually means stay positive, loving, giving, believing in God even as we hedge our bets that any of this God thing is real at all). We sat, in this Easter morning Service, on the pavement of the parking lot outside on the church campus, facing the Sanctuary building. We sat on the outside looking in. It was a metaphor for me on where I was placed upon hearing this pastor’s proclamation: on the outside of complete joy, looking at what someday will be ours, and told that this is our existential truth (my words) that we are to endure if not also embrace.

Here is the truth (may I be so bold): we do not now see and feel resurrection.  The last thing we need to do is constantly attempt death-defying and death-denying antics to convince ourselves, and others, that we do. All the church-talk about being blessed (seeing the good, receiving the good) as the method of choice to banish the darkness falls short. Those who speak it know it’s short-comings even as they converse but it is a testimony, it seems to me, in their own hearts to say it (“blessed!”) and so it continues. 

I have no problem with recognizing the good and reveling in it. I wish, in fact, I could do more of that (as you are likely to also wish I would as you are furthered depressed by my inability to look the other way and just get on with it: either in epicurean delight or stoic demand!). But please don’t tell me this good is a sign of God. Not when I also see and feel the opposite and, if God be omnipotent (an attribute one cannot redefine away as much as we try to justify God and blame ourselves or some Devil for the evil and suffering we experience) for which, then, God is responsible. 

The early disciple of Jesus named Paul writes correctly, I think, that the good news of and from God comes by hearing (Romans letter, chapter 10). This hearing is literal and excludes other senses, including vision (seeing) and emotions (feeling). What this tells us is that there is indeed a way to know God’s goodness even as we flee (and rightly so, but we try to talk ourselves out of it because, well, we aren’t supposed to be afraid of God!) God’s destroying power. Luther called it, as I referenced earlier, knowing and encountering the “preached God” (note the audibleness of it all) even as we run from the “unpreached God” (the majestic divinity who simply acts with impunity and cannot do otherwise). I cannot see or feel God but I can hear God and that word that I hear, “I forgive you and I love you, by my virtue, not yours,” is not only all that I have but also all that I need. So, Luther radically points out, God battles God, not some other supernatural power, and ends victorious. The preached God, revealed audibly, even and perhaps especially now because there just is no seeing Jesus these days, swallows up and eats for lunch the unpreached God, no thanks to us. It is important to remember we are not inventing a second God here. Both unpreached and preached are one God. It is just that God cannot help being less than God unpreached in very much the same way we cannot help being human. But God can help being more than unpreached. God can be preached, the naked God (unpreached: raw, poisonous in majestic glory) clothed (preached: cooked, nutritious in humbled infamy) now and forever in Jesus Christ. 

So, don’t try to talk yourselves into seeing and feeling blessed when it is not there. And don’t deliver Easter sermons that rightly acknowledge the tension of knowing a curse while the world parties on but do not deliver a word that resurrects now. Instead, curse the darkness of the unpreached God with the blessing of Christ (not the blessings of Christ!). 

Job’s wife told him to curse God and die. He did not. He cursed God and lived. How can such a thing happen? Job got the whirlwind word that changed his life. He received, against all odds and the majestic, all powerful (unpreached) God, the word (preached) that saved him no thanks to him. Blessed there, he lived. 

A year ago I penned this poem and as part of my commemoration today of Bonhoeffer's I share it again. 

April 9, 2020

On the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

As I lay in bed early today

Before dawn I could hear the birds

Start their singing.

“This is the end. But for me, the beginning.”

It was dawn that he died. 

He knew so well the earthsong

And there was never more than that.

He knew so well the God of all creation and there was never

Less than that.

This milestone of his death’s observation falls on commandment Thursday where the feast of

 

inclusion and liberation is spread and the towel and water applied to transform a life, our life,

 

into one of freedom from self and freedom for others.

Bonhoeffer finally ended up calling Jesus “a man for others.”

After April 9, 1945’s morning hanging there was no grave marker constructed but it simply

Should say that.

And after his death on that day the birds went on singing.

I hear them today. I hear them.

They were the song of world and God that cannot be silenced no matter death.

Thank you, O God, for this life that died that April day and that lives forever in you.

Thank you, O God, for this day’s dawn and your song that sings in the trees outside my window

And in my heart.

 

Ashes on A Wednesday, Confessing what is Real

I did a little exercise on this Ash Wednesday that I thought I would share. I took Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay “Guilt, Justification, Renewal” from Ethics (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 6, part of the manuscripts he intended to use to refine and publish as a full book, Ethics, but which was left unfinished because of his execution by the Nazi Regime in April 1945) and wrote down only the first sentence from each paragraph of that large manuscript. Thus compiled, and realizing that each sentence is only the lead in lengthy sections (and if you want to dive deeper I invite you there), I used the aggregate for my confession, and a hearing of a word of forgiveness not of my own making or machinations, today. I invite you along. 

Here we go.

“The issue is the process by which Christ takes form among us.”

“There is only one way to turn back, and that is acknowledgement of guilt toward Christ.”

“The place where this acknowledgement of guilt becomes real is the church.”

“The church is today the community of people who, grasped by the power of Christ’s grace, acknowledge, confess, and take upon themselves not only their personal sins, but also the Western world’s falling away from Jesus Christ as guilt toward Jesus Christ.”

“That there are people whose knowledge of this falling away from Jesus Christ is kept fresh – not only by finding it in others but also by confessing it in themselves – is a sign of the living presence of Christ.”

“With this confession the whole guilt of the world falls on the church, on Christians, and because there it is confessed and not denied, the possibility of forgiveness is opened.”

“First of all, the quite personal sin of each individual is acknowledged here as a source of poison for the community”

“The church confesses that is has not professed openly and clearly enough its message of the one God, revealed for all times in Jesus Christ and tolerating no other gods besides.”

“The church confesses that is has misused the name of Christ by being ashamed of it before the world and by not resisting strongly enough the misuse of that name for evil ends.”

“The church confesses it is guilty of the loss of holidays, for the barrenness of its public worship, for the contempt of Sunday rest.”

“The church confesses that it is guilty of the breakdown of parental authority.”

“The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred, and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them.”

“The church confesses that is has not found any guiding or helpful word to say in the midst of the dissolution of all order in the relationships of the sexes to each other.”

“The church confesses that is has looked on silently as the poor were exploited and robbed, while the strong were enriched and corrupted.”

“The church confesses its guilt toward the countless people whose lives have been destroyed by slander, denunciation and defamation.”

“The church confesses that is has coveted  security, tranquility, peace, property and honor to which it has no claim, and therefore has not bridled human covetousness, but promoted it.”

“The church confesses itself guilty of violating all of the Ten Commandments.”

“Is this going too far?”

“In confessing its guilt the church does not release people from their personal confession of guilt, but calls everyone into a community of confession.”

“The church and the individual, convicted in their guilt, are justified by the one who takes on and forgives all human guilt, namely, Jesus Christ”

“The justification of the West, which has fallen away from Christ, lies only in God’s justification of the church, leading it into full confession of guilt and into the form of the cross.”

“Are expressions such as ‘justification and renewal of the West’ impermissible hyperbole, since obviously the whole West can never be justified and renewed by faith in Jesus Christ?”

“The nations bear the heritage of their guilt.”

“The ‘justification and renewal’ of the West can therefore only happen in the restoration of justice, order and peace in one way or another and then by the ‘forgiveness’ of past guilt.”