Morning Flight

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

November 3, 2022

Restless and Rested

“I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand I shall not fall. My heart, therefore, is glad and my spirit rejoices; my body also, shall rest in hope” (Psalm 16)

I have a certain restlessness instead of rest when it comes to bedtime, going to sleep. It’s a mental thing, somehow, about what I should be feeling when it comes to rest, and it’s retirement related, and it's end of life and shortness of life related. I do not want to go through my days wasting them, not being who I want to be, not doing what I want to do. The ability to rest for me comes when I am complete, not when I am only tired. But then there is the mourning over the brevity of it all, the fact that when doing things there will be an end to them and an end to me. So, an antidote to this restlessness is putting myself “out there,” taking steps into what concerns me (e.g. trying to make political support phone calls recently). If I am active I am more at rest.

What does it mean to say “my body rests in hope” (Psalm 16)? Hope here cannot be wishful thinking or fanciful dreams. Hope here means meaningful action. Then, think of it. When we say “our hope is in God” what are we, or what am I saying? The Bible’s God is not passive and blissful serenity, but rather active and righteously angry justice (“Smoke rose from his nostrils and a consuming fire out of his mouth; hot burning coals blazed forth from him” Psalm 18). Hope is not passive longing, but rather active love. So then, “my body rests” in active love, not passive dreaming. That all makes sense. I rest when I have done my job in justice and I am restless if I have not done my part. This is not the tyranny of needing to make a difference. It's certainly not about doing my part before God (what I do makes no difference to God, but all the difference in the world, literally. God, amazingly, pays attention to me from God’s point of view, which is unconditional love, and not from measurements of my merit. The attention to merit is a human construction projected on God). But also not doing my part before the success of the endeavor: what matters is being in the game, not whether my side wins. 

Today I will do my part. And I will rest. I will rest in hope. 

 The "Meet and Greet" Area in Orlando International Airport's New Terminal C.

We should all be so welcoming!

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

November 19, 2022

Be Careful For What You Ask

On How Actually Praying “The Lord’s Prayer” Could Be the Start of a New World

It is an absurd and tragic irony that we so many of us who have little to no connection to the church of Jesus Christ, let alone the way of Jesus Christ, know and can speak aloud by memory what we call “The Lord’s Prayer.” The whole thing, when you break it down, but particularly “thy kingdom come.” 

This entreaty, this request, this plea, is not for a release from worldly woes or circumstances no matter how dire, but rather a call to radical justice in all things economic, political and social here in our very earthly and mortal endeavors. It is a prayer that the Way of God would rule and reign, and that opposed to and in conflict with and conquest over the Way of Civilization (aka humanity) and its insufferable exploitation and oppression of peoples over one another and creation. 

When Jesus was cornered to answer about allegiance to Roman rule with the question about taxation and monetary tribute (Matthew 22) he did not equivocate when he answered that one should give to each, Caesar and God, the “things” that belong to each. Yes, the answer left his incriminators suspended in mid-air without the ability to lay a hammer blow to him in that moment, but it also reverberated then and continues to upend us today by pointing out the difference and distinction between how humanity sues for peace by violent victory of one over the other and how God sues for peace by distributive justice for all. 

Caesar, the way of retributive justice that categorically and completing creates caste by self-domination is simply not God, the way of distributive justice that intentionally and comprehensively creates equality by self-subordination.

When we pray “thy kingdom come” we call for the uprooting and upheaval of all civilization’s disastrous and deadly structures that protect one ethnicity/race or class of persons over against another. We call for equity, forgiveness of debt, equality, fair play, human rights, consideration and compromise and all of what Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13 (that again, by the way, is a bible passage known culturally by so many because of its use at weddings, these many of whom give no regard to Jesus and his ethic except perhaps to appreciate at a distance how selflessness is a nice idea to which to aspire, not that I’m cynical or anything) as self-giving love: patient, kind, generous, never rude, and never insisting on one’s own way. 

Since so many people who care little of God, let alone God’s way, but still do know “The Lord’s Prayer” in these days of the church’s decline and the marginalization of Christianity, it might be wise for the church not to bemoan its loss of position and power but rather welcome that loss as the opportunity to realign itself to the actual Way of God that conflicts with and confronts the Way of Caesar. And it might be strategic to use “The Lord’s Prayer” as the communicative, constructive and contemplative way to teach and reach that realignment. Using John Dominic Crossan’s The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer would be a great place to start. 

 

                                                  More Walking in St. Louis Last Week

Field Notes From A Religion-Less Christian

October 23, 2022

Things Are Bad. I Need Hope. And There It Is. 

“Happy are they who fear the Lord…..their descendants will be mighty in the land, the generation of the upright will be blessed.” (Psalm 112)

I do not believe that God will intervene in our affairs and make things right. Oh, if only that were true. Too, I have to be honest enough to say that my idea of right could be just as damaging and destructive as yours. 

But I do believe that all will be well. All is, and will be, held in God’s care and security even though the world burns and the nations roar and plunder. 

This is where I live. 

I am bereft at how the authoritarian and anti-democratic leaders and forces are gaining ascendancy, the climate change science hasn’t created the urgency necessary, the world’s population swells with all striving for sustainable standards of living….all this, and I do not believe God will do anything to change this march to our demise.

But I do believe we can do something. I do believe many of us are doing something. I know no certainty that all of our efforts will work.

All that, but I do believe all will be well as we, the human race, suffer and die. 

How so? What could possibly give hope within such pessimism, light within such darkness? It is quite simply that one, Jesus of Nazareth, who was killed because of incarnating distributive justice, was raised from the dead, and rules/reigns now. Jesus is Risen. Jesus is Lord. Not to be missed in that declaration short-hand (Jesus is Risen/Lord) is the actual Jesus, one who lived for the economically, politically, socially and religiously least, last, lost, little and dead, and was executed because of that living. He did not die to save us from a troubled conscience or from an angry God. He died, we killed him, because we didn’t like how he lived. So this: to say He Lives and He is Lord is to say the way he lived then now lives and rules/reigns, despite our killing ways. 

And then, for me, there is one more step that must be taken in order for this to hold water. It is that this truth that Jesus is Risen and Jesus is Lord is not true because it is true. It is true because it is too good not to be true. What this means is that while we do not see today any intervening salvation we have indeed heard of such and it turns out that hope has always come from the promise stated, not the situation on the ground actualized. Faith, the wherewithal to live in hope, comes by hearing (Romans 10). 

Today I hear the promise. Not always, alas, loud clear, but I do hear it. And I am delivered. 

                                         

                                       Fall fire while out on a walk in St. Louis this past 

November 3, 2022

Back in July my wife Janet and I with some friends took an amazing bicycle tour in the high desert country around Bend, Oregon and Crater Lake National Park for some 190 miles or so. Yes, that was something. The new friends made on these trips are a real gift as well. One such new friend is Jayne, to whom I later wrote a letter and from whom I got permission to publish that letter. I’d like to tell that on this day when we are on the verge of the Nov. 8 huge election where democracy itself is at stake (please get out there and vote!) that this letter has something to do with all that. It does not. However, it is about how we find our way in our challenging world. Use it, apply it, as you will.

July 23, 2022

A Letter to Jayne (You Have Already Arrived)

I’m going to suggest you not search too hard for who you are or for what you are made to do. Maybe even don’t search at all. If you do you may miss everything while in that search for something. 

Just think of it: you walked the woods of the entire Appalachian Trail in 2019 – some 2,194 miles including 14 States! I envy you that hike. I know you told me you felt something unique and different about your life, about life itself, after some time there in that Trail traveling. It was something full and real and wonderful, so much so that as you described it to me more than once you placed your hand over your heart. And you said you have rarely, or was it never, have felt that again, whatever it was, since. 

What was it?

What is it?

Whatever it was it came to you, it happened to you, simply as you were walking along. Ok, some days strolling and some days straining, but each day doing exactly one thing, putting your one foot out after another and paying attention to what was around you – in front, behind, beside. 

I told you that coincidental to our Crater Lake Bike Tour I am reading Barry Lopez’s Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. Its language is extensive and thought expansive. Lopez is new to me, but his attention to paying attention (to what is in our life right before our very eyes) is not new and I mentioned to you that in that appreciation (too light a word for it, but leave that be for now) he is much like Frederick Buechner, the author and long-time mentor of mine (by his literature). Buechner’s by-word is “listen to your life.” To listen to another person is to actively engage what they are saying and doing so without any agenda or projection of your own self upon them. To listen to another is to listen to them, not yourself. How can we learn to listen in this way, to pay attention in this way, to our own life, our own self? To pay attention to our self without trying to apply something, say, meaning, to our self?

In his essay “Invitation” Lopez writes, 

“If the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuously attentive, and to stifle the urge to stand outside the event, to instead stay within the event, leaving its significance to be resolved, later, the second lesson, for me, was to notice how often I asked my body to defer to the dictates of my mind, how my body’s extraordinary ability to discern textures and perfumes, to discriminate among tones and colors in the world outside itself, was dismissed by the rational mind. 

As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was traveling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the surfacing of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place. The ear heard the song of a vesper sparrow; and then heard the song again, and knew that the second time it was a different vesper sparrow singing. The mind, pleased with itself for identifying those notes as the song of a vesper sparrow, was too preoccupied with its summary to notice what the ear was still offering. The mind was making no use of the body’s ability to be discerning about sounds. And so the mind’s knowledge of the place remained superficial”

I tend to reflect, not to say analyze, on the daily stuff to perhaps the point of personal oppression. While I find the reflection “meaning full” I also find that not finding meaning (perhaps “meaning empty”) by thinking but rather finding, what?, significance?, by touching is the way that burden (that “oppression”) is lifted. Years ago now, my wife and I started to practice Hot Yoga. Now pandemically, regular yoga, but we try too to use the heat offered outdoors on our back porch in Florida. I have noted to others in conversation that the thing about yoga that is most liberating and exhilarating for me is the sheer physicality of the thing. I am, well, less than graceful or complete in any given posture on the mat. But it is in the movement of muscle, bone, ligament, tendon, skin and whatever else there is that comprises me bodily (do I have sinew?), I am released.  I seem to know myself again, more directly if not also clearly, than any thinking about my life could ever provide. 

It's popular today to say that life is a journey. While well intended (people are trying to say by that, it seems to me, that we can be too focused on completing things while in that focus actually miss the getting there) I don’t think it’s the best way to describe what we’re doing, what life is that is life. In fact I don’t think its accurate at all. And while the “don’t miss the getting there” may sound alike like what I am describing here as “paying attention” to your life, it’s really not that at all. Rather, “paying attention” means life is not a journey, but if I might continue to use location language, it is a destination. In other words we aren’t going somewhere to find something, say, ourselves. Instead, this: we have already arrived. We are here. 

Before I retired last year I was a lunch-bucket theologian (a working church pastor) most informed and shaped and imagined by what the discipline calls “the theology of the cross” (named such and attributed to Martin Luther most directly from his writing in The Heidelberg Disputation of 1518).  Now I am still, and I suppose will always be, a theologian most enlivened by this theology and discovering it’s depths. At the heart of this theology is the notion that any spiritual quest we might consider ourselves to be on is not only misguided but could in the end be downright dangerous and life-threatening to our “selve’s” soul (by this I am not saying somehow God condemns us. I mean we condemn ourselves). Life is not a journey, it is a destination. We have already arrived: all we are is all we have and it is also all we need. We do not find God. God finds, has found, us. Luther said a rather pithy thing in that 1518 Disputation that relates to this: “The thirst for glory is not ended by satisfying it but rather by extinguishing it.” How this applies here: when we think we are on a journey to find meaning and purpose that is somehow mysteriously out there for us to discover we will simply always keep looking and never be satisfied (thirst not satiated) because we’ll be thinking there is something, just there, around the corner, that will bring a completion for us. So, rather, this: it’s not that there is no meaning and purpose in life, it’s that it’s not out there for you to find but right there exactly where you are. 

All this is not to say, of course, that there is not room for improvement in the things of our life: the disciplines around learning, finances, health/nutrition/fitness, vocation, interpersonal-social relationships, and emotional wellness are always with us and call out to us for engagement. It is to say that there is nothing Ultimate there in any of that. They are vital and important, even fun. But they are not Ultimate. They will not provide you with your Meaning and Purpose if you seek to find that there. Meaning and Purpose can only be given to you, never attained, never searched for and found. 

So, to “pay attention” to our surroundings, to “pay attention” to our life, to listen to our life is to rest in knowing that all we have and need is given to us and will never be lost to us. We are forever found.

So, live on my friend! And remember how I told you the story of my friend Bishop Harold Jansen’s years ago talk to those young people at a conference most yearning to know what direction they were to take in life and how God’s answer to their question of “what am I supposed to do with my life” is the amazingly liberating word of “Surprise me!”?

Well, that is what I wish for you: that freedom in knowing that wherever you go and whatever you do you have already arrived and it is the best place ever to be!

Grace, and all best,

Johan

        Our tent last week on Governor's Island with One World Trade Center across the water.

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

October 25, 2022

On Dying and Not Being Here

I talked with a friend who is dying. She wanted some spiritual guidance, some direction. Her concerns: the uncertainty of what’s coming physically, but also the uncertainty of what’s coming metaphysically. She shared with me that she knows and appreciates the New Testament Book of Romans. That prompted my talking with her about Romans 10: hearing. We need to hear the Promise, and this daily, because it fades for all of us. 

She said she can’t imagine “not being here,” meaning, not being alive. I think I know what she means. How can we understand living not as living the only kind of living we know? But just now listen to that. Listen to that phrase: the only kind of living we know. Is that true? Do we know only one way of living? While that is true, that we live this only physical, tangible, emotional, intellectual life we now have, don’t we also know another kind or dimension of living while we live this living we know so well? While we live the only life we know we can have spoken into this life other things. One thing, not to be taken as a given, as if it’s ubiquitous and just lies around waiting to be discovered: the love, the unconditional promise that transforms our life with wholeness. You can say it this way:  You Do Enough, You Have Enough, You Are Enough.  We have, daily, conditional promises that saturate our souls with insufficiency and insolvency :“if you do enough, have enough, and are enough then I will pay attention to you.” But this unconditional promise puts to rest, destroys, all the “if” and “then.”

And because every day is either filled with utter silence that makes us wonder (and worry) or these conditions (“if….then”) are stated that imprison us in inadequacy, while living now we need to know and hear that promise (You Do Enough, You Have Enough, You Are Enough) and we get it, we receive it, in Christ Jesus. We have that unconditional promise “while we are here” and we will have that “when we are not here.” It is the unconditional promise that gives us life no matter the physicality. And so we can imagine at least that foundational piece of “not being here,” that foundational piece that is perhaps the fundamental reality: We are always, across all time and space, in Christ Jesus.

                                      Live, Drying Up, a Touch of Fall in the Kitchen

Field Notes From a Religion-less Christian

Tuesday, October 11, 2022 (my 41st Ordination Anniversary)

                                    Getting What You Deserve – Or Not!

“Steadfast love is yours, O Lord, for you pay everyone according to his deeds” (Psalm 62)

Psalm 62 is spot on in matching up with my theology and sense of how our relationship with God operates. Until that last line (see above). This says we get attention and “payment,” whatever that might mean in our imagination, that, justly or not, goes to getting good because we’ve done well or getting bad because we’ve poorly. That, to me, does not hold water. 

There are a couple of approaches to all of this that come to mind. 

One, the passage does mean we get punishment for bad “deeds” and reward for good. This is how the Law operates, no surprises. But while this is so, there is another action and communication from God which engages this Law and puts it to death. This action, this communication is called Gospel, the unmerited mercy of God. It’s not represented here in this last line of Psalm 62. When it does, however, show up, it puts this reward and punishment saga to death. 

Two, the Psalmist has it all wrong. They are writing within a Deuteronomic theology which sees God as relating to us transactionally, relating to us with a give and take based on how we behave and believe. In other words, the Psalmist is writing from the Law’s perspective, writing within the legal superstructure where behavior or belief are rewarded or punished, depending upon how well one measures up. And, to get at how this could be wrong as distinct from what I say above about what is being said (“you get what you deserve”) as being not wrong but incomplete, in this case, the writer is not thinking or realizing there is more to be said that mitigates and destroys the Law, but rather, simply believes the Law is the last word and we either live, or die, with it. 

One of Lutheran theology’s biblical interpretive tenets is to do something called “using the plain language of the text.” This means taking the text fundamentally at face value. It says what it means and it means what it says. This comes from Martin Luther’s pushback and abandonment of the Scholastic model of biblical interpretation (in which he was initially trained) that said the text actually has four different meanings, all of which should be considered for instruction and proclamation (teaching and preaching): the literal meaning, the allegorical meaning, the tropological meaning, and the anagogical meaning. When using this approach of the scholastics two things tend to happen, both of which Luther found offensive and off-key, not to say, just plain wrong. One, it tends to help us have the text say what we want it to say. Two, it tends to put us, instead of God, in the driver’s seat when it comes to who does the work of salvation.

If, rather than scholasticism’s attempt to make gospel out of law, putting God’s work of bringing salvation within a legal superstructure, one separates gospel from law, putting God’s work of salvation outside a legal superstructure, one can accept this legalism for what it is (e.g.  the text that says “you pay everyone according to his deeds”) but realize that is only a portion of God’s communication to us, not the whole story.

Indeed, there is a further word from God that is starkly illegal: humanity does not get what it deserves. There is neither reward for the good nor punishment for the bad. Clearly, this is an offense to the Law. It is outside the law, it does not operate within the law’s dictates or strictures. 

Where do we come up with such a notion as this, this notion that we will not get what we deserve in relation to God but rather get what God decides we will get? It comes from reading the Scripture for what it actually says, in two overarching narratives that actually end up being one big story. 

One narrative is the Christian Old Testament wherein the people of Israel keep getting beat up by God for their mistrust and disobedience (that’s what the texts say: God was doing the punishing and the killing). Then, there ends up a group of the people of God (the so-called “remnant”) that God does not destroy because God simply cannot give up on trying to make good on her creation. It’s important to note that this notion of a remnant being left, where some make it and most do not, as actually being good news for all, even those who do not make it, is a strange notion to us in most 21st century western culture, especially in the U.S. It is strange because we today in this western culture do not buy into the same cultural values of ancient Hebrew culture (and actually many peoples/cultures still today). What we don’t buy, that they did, is that what happens to one person actually happens to all of the people in the tribal community and what happens in the tribal community to all actually happens to each individual person. So, if some, a “remnant,” come out good in the end, that same goodness applies to all, no matter the past circumstances, including death. Western culture values the individual as sovereign, not interdependent. So, for this western culture, to say that when a  remnant remains means that actually all remain simply does not compute.  

In the end, then, the people of Israel do not end up with what they deserve. Not only do they not get chosen because they are good (cf. Abraham and Sarah are selected to be blessed, to be a blessing, mind you, out of the blue, or should we say out of obscurity and a foreign people) but they also do not get, as I have been saying here, punished or destroyed as a people because they are bad. Israel does not get what it deserves by the letter or the spirit of the Law. God decides there is another approach that God will use to counter God’s own legalities. It’s called Gospel – a promise given, for no good reason and against all odds, that will not be denied. This is one large narrative that tells the Big Story of Promise. 

Then there is the second narrative of the Christian New Testament with its Jesus who simply operates from Day One in not giving people what they deserve. From the call of the fishers and others with no credentials to be religious or spiritual leaders (actually, quite the opposite) to the acceptance of the death penalty from Rome, aided by the Jewish Religious Elite, without violent resistance or revolt, Jesus is just one big outlaw, one who works outside of the law,  who kept giving people space, forgiveness, the benefit of the doubt and freedom from the curse of the Law. 

So, to reiterate, where do we come up with the idea that our relationship with God depends totally upon God’s actions and initiative and this God activates and initiates only a promise to all of creation (not just an exclusive clan of ancient or contemporary Middle Easterners, or, to extend that, to any exclusive 21st century Christian group)? We get it all from the written narrative we now call Scripture.

[By the way, too, the whole highly elevated and popular maxim of 16th century Reformation theologians of “Sola Scriptura” (Scripture Alone) is Luther’s way of saying not that we exclude reason and experience in our total enterprise of doing theology (as if we are to neglect good science. No! Science is part of doing good theology as well as part of our way of doing smart living!) but that, rather, when it comes to the component of doing theology that is “revelation” (direct communication from God) that we use in addition to reason and experience, we do not turn to Tradition (which means the teachings surmised and espoused by ecclesiastical authorities (in Luther’s Day: The Pope and Curia or Ecumenical Councils). For revelation directly from God we can and should solely (sola!) rely on Scripture. Whether you buy that or not, it's what Luther meant.]

Again, we get the big story of giving and having mercy, without merit from start to finish and for all, from where and when the Christian Old Testament and New Testament (aka Bible) declares and delivers Gospel. This Gospel, this unconditional promise of God, pushes back against and then destroys all legalities. This Gospel defangs and defeats law (the New Testament book of Romans (chapter 10 verse 4) states it: Christ is the end of the law). Not all of the Christian Scripture contains or delivers Gospel [In fact, Luther famously said the New Testament book of James, for example, should be removed from the Bible because it doesn’t clearly present Jesus Christ as the one who does the saving].

So I will read Psalm 62 plainly and realize that either way, whether the Psalmist got it right, deeds matter in the salvation equation when the Law speaks, but there is another Word from God that destroys that Word from God (call this stronger and last word from God Gospel and you have just been liberated). Or, whether the Psalmist got it wrong and simply missed the mark with bad theology that was not using the law to drive us to confession and dependence on God but rather using the law to further our attempts to take God out of the decision-making position and insert our own beliefs and behaviors as determining salvation. Either way, the text says what it says but the Promise of God rules the day.

We do not get what we deserve. We get what God decides. And God has decided to never give up on us and never give in against the curse of the Law but rather put it to rest, put it to death.  And in so doing, profoundly and directly, God hands over to us the freedom to live and the freedom to love, both now and eternally.

 

                                                       That Mushroom in Our Yard

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Sunday, October 9, 2022

Where Do You Live?

Yesterday my wife and I took six person hours to trim the Viburnum hedges and Bottlebrush bushes, one ornamental Laurel Oak and a Croton hedge that surround and fill the lot on which we live here in the City of Ocoee, Orange County, State of Florida, Country of The United States, on the North American continent on the Planet Earth. As a satellite spinning around the globe would snap a picture of us out there working it would be a telling photo of how small and particular we are in the multiverse as we attend to what to us is such an important activity taking up a significant portion of our day. 

The house in which we live was built in 1999. Before we moved in that year, who was here? Orange groves, a small air strip nearby? And before that? Upland Pine Forest, I would think. And what Indigenous Native American Tribe – Seminole? And before that? Timucua? And before that? And do not forget, as I am doing here even as I write it now, the other native species, flora and fauna, who have been here and are here as well today.

Barry Lopez in his essay “Location,” writes of “ground-truthing” that scientists will do to visit and catalog what is actually on a given site to add to data of that site’s satellite image. On another level, a level of recognizing the animal and plant and human history of a specific location, what is the “ground-truth” of a place? What is the ground-truth of our place? And, mind you, then, how could I possibly call it mine, something I own? Psalm 24 knows this, of course, and has spoken it forthrightly for centuries: the earth is the Lord’s. No matter what your belief system, the ground-truth of that is the same: wherever we are certainly does not belong to us as much as we belong to it. 

Where do you live?

                 Give With Generosity. Rebuild with Brains and Brawn. Act on CO2 Emissions.

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

October 2, 2022

Two Today

“Ashes, Dust and Mom” 

and

 “On Contemplation…How Your Ship Has Finally Come In”

Sunday, September 18, 2022

Ashes, Dust and Mom

“You turn us back to the dust and say “Go back, O child of earth” (Psalm 90)

Mom was cremated yesterday. Back to dust. Back to the earth. Back to Earth. In Psalm 91 we hear how God will deliver, protect, rescue, show salvation those “who have made the Lord your refuge.” To that I say to the Lord today, “you had better do what you promised to Mom!” She, one who awakened to the dawn each day assured and certain that God provided that new day’s light and time to live and breathe. She, one who made God her daily refuge. And so, O God, do not lie. Take her, keep her, give her the eternal joy you promised her. Do not lie.

Thursday, September 22, 2022

On Contemplation…How Your Ship Has Finally Come In

On the quest, the spiritual journey, the search for God….

It’s actual, but at its core more self-serving and self-aggrandizing than anything else. What we want is not really God, but rather peace and security, safety and security. If God will help us get there, all the better.

What I want to say here is that God does in fact get us there, but not through assistance in our quest. God gets us there by announcing to us, in an auditory and audacious way, that our quest is over and done and that because God has arrived, we have arrived. 

Announcement. Auditory. Audacious. Arrival. 

Thomas Merton’s wisdom for us is that the Contemplative doesn’t need to be cloistered. Rather, like Frederick Buechner, listen to your life, and, just as importantly, like Martin Luther, listen to God. 

And, so, just there, the search for God is not completed as if you have reached your goal of finding.  It is rather interrupted and destroyed. It’s what Paul meant by “Christ is the end of the law.” (Galatians). 

If we are lucky, the search for God is over before it gets started. If we are lucky, we hear the cacophony of the noisy God that God is, from a baby crying in the manger to the young man crying out on a cross, rather than hear only the dead quiet of a silent God that hides and waits for us to find her as if we are playing hide and seek. 

Who would have thought this daily search would be put to death, put to rest, in such an unassuming and certainly not beautifully sleek and perfumed by incense and set apart from the world kind of way in literal mountains like that trip we are so eager to share or the figurative mountains like enjoying doing nothing or even the best conversations over wine with friends. 

Who would have thought this daily search’s flame would not be emboldened but instead extinguished, and that by, well, such a pedestrian and available thing as a sermon. By sermon I mean a literal word spoken to us and provided in that local pulpit down the street. But you have to be fortunate here. Not every pulpit provides the word that puts our search to rest, stops all the nonsense of spiritual calisthenics. Most do the opposite: set us up for another try at it in the coming week. 

When you listen to your life and listen to God at the same time there can be what Paul calls “the peace that passes understanding” (Philippians). But you have to be lucky enough to have found a word from God that regularly and without reservation tells you contemplation, this listening to your life and to God,  is not a taking you out of the world but deeply into it and regularly and without reservation tells you that You Do Enough, You Have Enough, You Are Enough…..all instead of claiming the word from God, of God, takes you out of the world and sets you on a path and gives you tools and traveling gear to find another world, a world, the world, of God.

Wanting peace, safety, security is only natural. I am not saying it is something to be denied or avoided. We cannot and we will not.  I am only saying we don’t have to treat it as if it’s not already ours and we need to go and find it.

However, the normal, which is to say, religious, way to getting to “not searching anymore” is to stay on the search by doing something like “humbling ourselves” to the point where, we are so often told, we will finally find it. The abnormal, religion-less way to peace, safety, security is to let the truth happen to us and not try to hide from it: God, any divine being with destiny and control in their hands scares us down to the bone and this God, so the Christian story has it, knows this and calms us down and settles our souls by showing up at our doorstep and holding on to us for dear life (the Tradition calls all this truth-telling this: “we are to fear and love God.”). 

There is no way for us to be humble. We are, rather, humbled. 

To be Contemplative is to be humbled by our life and God. 

And there it is, right there in the middle of your busy life: peace, safety, security. 

Announcement. Auditory. Audacious. Arrival. 

                                        While Biking I Found a Fern Stately Standing

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

August 26, 2022

A Word About Resurrection. A Word Of Resurrection.

Yesterday at my Book Club, a bunch of us guys who enjoy reading and gathering monthly at selected breweries in our Orlando area (we call our club “Half Finished” but actually we do finish the books the majority of the time…..it just gives us some breathing room!), one of our group shared a story of a recent visit to Oberammergau and it’s Passion Play. Though an atheist or a deist, which I am not sure, and of course could be something else, he told us he thoroughly enjoyed the production. He told us the production has little about the resurrection of Jesus, that the majority of the attention was on the life and death of Jesus. I told our group that I conjectured the production’s little display or attention to the resurrection is such because the four Gospel book texts (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) actually have no description of the event of Jesus getting up and leaving the tomb. Appearances yes, after the event, but actual rising, no. 

Then, the next day in my daily Scriptural reading was Matthew 28:1-10, the resurrection! And the reflection reading for the day was Adam Soderblum who wrote this about the “effects,” of the resurrection event, by which he meant what actually happened historically and how it might match our science and experience: “But it would do us little good to study these effects in the hope that they might throw additional light on the manner in which the disciples, through a divine intervention, a miracle of God, arose out of the grave of disappointment and despair to a new and transfigured existence.”

How does that happen, this rising “from the grave of disappointment and despair”? Not just then, but now.  

My contention about what happened then is that something, some event, some experience of the presence of Jesus, conversation with Jesus, encounter with Jesus, happened to any number of people that catapulted them into a new way of seeing the world and living in the world. We cannot question the results of the experience even while we might question the experience itself. And this ‘new way’ was defined as the way of unconditional love, for others, at all costs. It was the way of Jesus himself. 

About what happens now – it’s all about the hearing, not the seeing. It’s Romans 10: faith comes by hearing.  We cannot and do not come to a resurrection from “disappointment and despair” because we see tangible changes in conditions or lives, as inspiring as such may be (and so readily told, even “NBC Nightly News” closes its broadcast with an “Inspiring America” piece meant lift our spirits out the mayhem). We come, rather, by hearing a Promise that is too good not to be true. We come by way of hearing, being told, that We Do Enough, We Have Enough, We Are Enough. This word of liberation from the tyranny of carving out our own identity, community, meaning and destiny brings the opportunity then to share all things, materially and emotionally, with all others. 

So, would someone please tell me and the rest of us again today, that I Do Enough, I Have Enough and I am Enough? Oh, ok, somebody is telling me. That’s right! The local church down the street is charged with such a Word, if they would but speak it. Alas, too many do not.                                                          

                                                        A Mushroom in My Yard

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian*

(from July 23, 2022)

                                                      “Say Something!”

I am struck by Barry Lopez’s simple, non-technical and straightforward language when it comes to naming the local and global ecological as well as political, social, and economic devastations that befall us. Before I describe that a bit, let me tell you a story.

Today, while awaiting Delta Flight 1016 to Orlando, in the airport at Salt Lake City, I walked over from my waiting area seat to use the restroom. There, plunked right in the middle of the expansive concourse walkway was a lone backpack on the floor with not a person in sight attending. I looked, waited, looked. Nobody. And as I walked around still looking still the bag sat isolated in the middle of the pedestrian way. I knew I had to get somebody to check the safety of that bag. I could see, in my mind’s eye, an explosive device and I could hear in my mind’s ear what we all know: “If you see something, say something!” I turned to a nearby traveler who was walking by and asked “Ma’am, is that bag yours?” No. I turned to another nearby, “Sir, is that bag yours?” No. I looked up and down the busy way for any Security Personnel. Nobody. So I walked to the closest store adjacent to the walkway and in direct sight of the bag across the way and alerted the cash register clerk that we needed her to contact Security about this, what to me was a looming disaster. 

Simultaneous to my telling the clerk and the clerk’s move to her nearby phone I turned and saw a woman across the way walk up to the back-back and retrieve it. I announced to the store clerk that all was well. 

I’m happy I did not wait for somebody else to alert us to the danger. It would have been easy to assume the best and have the place blown to smithereens.

Lopez asks, in his 2020 essay “Love in a Time of Terror,” (published posthumously in his 2022 Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World – Essays, Random House, New York), “…is it possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”

Yes, it is possible.

Here is what I mean by Lopez’s non-technical and straightforward naming: “Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc – ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war – we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out.  We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans.” (Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World – Essays)

This is not a time for us to wait for somebody else with all the technical data, somebody official (like a Security Guard or armed Officer in an airport) to see and say what is going down around us. Besides, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other like them have been sounding the alarm for years.

We absolutely must speak from the heart, from the place of love even if from the mind the full story or complete information may not be at hand. 

The luggage, the baggage, of humanity’s abuse and exploitation of our Earth’s natural resources is sitting right out there in the middle of the airport concourse. What will we say? What will we say?

Others have helped me with language along the way. 

I am thinking of Robert Capon’s alliterative description of where Jesus spent his time while in Palestine: with the least, the last, the lost, the little and the dead. If one wants a guidepost to name how the Christian tradition defines and describes love it’s possible to search the accounts of Jesus in the Christian Bible for his opposite of the most, the first, the found, the big and the alive. Find a story, an accounting in the biblical narrative, and use it to illustrate the love to which we are called. 

I’m thinking of Brian McClaren’s (Everything Must Change) naming of the three keys areas of life that Jesus and his gospel redefined: prosperity, equity, security.  If one wanted to see the bigger picture, the larger scope of what ails us, start with these areas and look for stories or accountings from our daily life and news where prosperity and equity and security are defined by the values of Jesus and not by the values of Empire. Find a story so that we talk about not just concepts but about people and places. 

Or, forget all that and simply pay attention to what you see and feel and let somebody know about it. 

It is too late for silence.

Say something!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

*What Do I Mean By “Religion-Less Christian”?

It occurs to me that I should regularly note just what I mean by “religion-less” Christianity. I think most people these days equate “religion” with formal God-minded organizations and the member disciplines there found. This, contrasted to what many then call “spiritual,” many want to stay away from because those organizations and disciplines are too restrictive and constrictive. People want instead of being “religious” with a “religion” want to still appreciate the metaphysical and God. So, what to call this? Usually people say they are spiritual and not religious. 

And so when one hears “religion-less” many would think that’s exactly what they are: spiritual, or in other words,  down with religion that is a confining life, up with spirituality.

But no, that is not what I mean by “religion.”

What I am doing with naming my field notes as “religion-less” is taking the term “religion-less Christianity” named by theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (see Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers From Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8, 2010, Fortress Press). It is a specific way of seeing God (and Jesus Christ), a specific consciousness of God and the world that Bonhoeffer called a “world come of age consciousness.” This “world come of age consciousness” is contrasted with “religion” or a “religious consciousness.” Religion (religious consciousness) can be characterized if not defined by a couple of significant ways of seeing God (and thus, too, the world): 1) God is a supernatural being if not simply a theological hypothesis to explain all the unexplainable things in life 2) God is a “deus ex machina,” a supernatural being who is called upon to be involved and intervene in human affairs to correct or make right what has gone wrong. A world-come-of-age consciousness can and does see the world and all its natural and social processes but does not need to posit or turn to divinity to face or answer life’s questions and challenges. 

Bonhoeffer engaged and embraced this world-come-of-age consciousness but simultaneously embraced and engaged God. He asked, in the letter of April 30, 1944 to his friend Eberhard Bethge, where he first mentions his developing thought on a “religion-less Christianity,” “…who is Christ actually for us today?” In other words, who is Jesus in our world-come-of-age consciousness. It was not “in this world-come-of-age there is no Jesus and no God.” It was rather in this world (come of age, not a world of religion) who is Jesus and God? Bonhoeffer rejected a religion that saw persons at the center and God on the periphery where God is called upon to assist the human endeavors, however laudable, or where God is called upon to redeem human failures, however actual. Instead, Bonhoeffer saw faith as the experience where God is at the center of all things, good and bad and indifferent, and God is trusted (faith) and followed (love). 

So, back to “religion” vs. “spirituality.”  Here’s what I have shared before about this: “Unfortunately, what happens more than not is that folks who believe they are now engaging ‘spirituality’ instead of ‘religion’ have more or less simply acquired another form of religion as we have defined it here. When people state they are tired of ‘religion’ but they still believe in God and are thus ‘spiritual,’ what they normally mean is not that they are tired of religion (God is the supernatural that explains the unexplainable and God is the ‘deus ex machina’) but rather that they are tired of religious practices (e.g. worship services, prayers, church membership and its requirements) and want to find or experience the God of religion (again, supernatural rescuer) in some more palatable if not enjoyable format. Most folks today are tired of the way of being religious but they are not tired of religion” (Religion-Less Christianity and Renewing the Church: On Being a Follower of Jesus in God, for God, without God, Johan Bergh, 2018, Amazon).

Rather than being an approach to the Christian faith that diminishes or drops bible, prayer, sacraments and service to others, religion-less Christianity embraces all of that while serving God who lives in the world, incarnationally so. 

                                   Grandkids and Building Train Tracks Just Last Week

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

August 15, 2022

Only Love is Left Standing: God’s Problem with God

“The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up” (I Samuel 2:6)

I watched the tail end of a movie I really like the other night; ran across it while cable channel scrolling. Unforgiven, with Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris.  In the last dramatic scene where Eastwood’s character, William Munny, gun blasts away multiple men in a revenge-filled and calculated calm he is asked by a fear-filled journalist bystander who Munny in his life has killed and how many he has killed before even this now witnessed massacre. Munny answers, without bravado and also without any apparent foreboding of accused guilt, that he has killed many people. He has just murdered in cold blood 5 or so men and without hesitation announces his history of annihilation and yet we, the viewer of this cataclysmic story, are cheering him on (weren’t you? I certainly am!) with righteous if not cheerful abandon. 

What? Didn’t these men Munny just murdered have a good side to them? Didn’t they have families they cared for and “how about that time he went out of his way to help rebuild his neighbor’s destroyed barn?” and the other righteousness of their lives? When Munny stood gun-barreled over injured (by Munny’s gunshot) archenemy “Little Bill” Daggett (the Sheriff: How is it that good can be so evil?), didn’t Munny see there was some good reason, however miniscule, to let Little Bill live? And didn’t we expect that leniency just like we would from any self-respecting Bad Guy because the Bad Guy isn’t just through and through a Bad Guy is he? No, no leniency. Munny shot Little Bill point blank – and though bewildered, we the story viewer cheer him on (how is it that evil can be so good?). 

What is going on here that this mass murderer could be such a hero? How could we possibly feel vindicated and feel the world is a safer and just place as Munny rides away, not into the sunset mind you, but into the absolute deluge of a pouring rain (the symbolism is just too rich)? It is because we the viewer know something of this Munny, we know he is doing all this carnage out of love and the need to establish wholeness and will do anything, including pushing madness and murder forward, making it all happen, to accomplish it. 

The Old Testament of the Christian Bible establishes just such a narrative about God as God “hardens the heart of Pharaoh” and wipes out entire tribes if not ethnicities (those Amorites and others end up in the trash heap of history in the glory story of Israel). Israel defined itself by knowing and remembering that their God, the only God, cleared the way for them (meaning destroying whole cities and peoples) and they prided themselves in reminding themselves and others that it was not their mortal strength and weaponry that did the killing and the cleaning out but the immortal strength and power of their God, the Lord God, Yahweh. 

What is going on here that such a Mass Murderer is such a hero? It is a theological story, an interpretation of history, told about how the God who liberates does so without regard to the Law, without regard to who gets what because they deserve it or not without regard for anyone or anything who would stand in the way of this God’s purpose and intent of liberating those to whom she has promised liberation.  Notice how the writer of “Unforgiven” places the one person who witnesses Munny’s murdering and survives in the room and is the only one who talks to Munny after the killing is done. Notice this person is a self-stated, self-confessed, journalist by trade. And so how do we think we know of such a story of triumph over evil by evil means, victory over godlessness by the godlessness of God? The guy wrote it all down. He told the story of what he saw, but it was, of course, the story of what he believed he saw. Such too is how we received the Bible’s narrative of God’s glory that uses all means, including evil, to accomplish the promised liberation. Many people saw what they saw and wrote down what they believed they saw. 

Then there is this Jesus who comes along and the story told about him is that of the great Liberator who stands in the tradition of Yahweh who gives people everything they need even though they don’t deserve it and does so in a way that he gets himself killed because of it and continues to do so because his death could not kill what he does, which is give people life for no good reason at all. He is alive and well, and so are we who take his word for it. 

What is his word? You do enough, you have enough, you are enough. Now and for eternity. That truth is a story which humanity has pushed back on and rebelled against from the dawn of creation. The biblical narrative of Yahweh with Israel, embodied finally in Jesus, is the story of how God will stop at nothing, not even delivering death, in order to seal this truth, this “you do enough, you have enough, you are enough because I say so” upon every person in all history. 

But it is important to realize this narrative of God destroying peoples for the sake of God’s promise is God’s story to enact, not ours to emulate. And it is critical to see how the story is completed, how the story ends. God will stop at nothing, not even mass murder, to keep God’s promise of enlivening all of creation through the people of Israel. This we say because an omnipotent God has no option but to “potent” against all comers. But how dangerous and destructive this is, how ungodly. It cannot stand if the world is to survive. Killing others for the sake of God in God’s name means only death for all. The vengeance of God knows no boundaries unless God steps in and stops God. Unless God takes on God Godself. Life can only overcome death, be the overarching creation story, if death is defanged and defeated. And the only way for death to be defeated in a life-giving way is to let death have its way, to not retaliate against death with death, to not fight fire with fire. But rather, straightforwardly and simply in love, die. 

Love, then, wins. Life does not win a battle with Death. Love wins the battle over Death and Life. 

No death given back, thrown back at death in order to find life.  Only love done that transforms all death and life. 

And so, Jesus.

Jesus. God taking on God Godself. 

 

                                 Dawn at Crater Lake Oregon on a Recent July Morning

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

July 23, 2022

One Big Mistake

“The heaven of heavens is the Lord’s but he entrusted the earth to its peoples” (Psalm 115)

As much as I love the mountains, plains, forests, oceans, lakes, sky, insects, mammals, reptiles, birds, meadows, rivers, flowers, clouds, rain, moon glow, sun shine, ice, snow, heat, cold, hail, storms, sunrise, sunset, plants, trees (yes, already said forests), and, what am I missing? Ok, rocks, dirt, magma and volcanic flow, the air itself. As much as I love the earth entrusted to us, I’m afraid the stewardship giving was a monumental mistake. In this 21st century we are now at diminishing returns and over capacity. We know so much that what’s happened is we know too little. Or rather, we have no will to do well with what we know. God will let us be and will never let us go. One will be our death. The other our life. 

                                                             Some of our July

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

July 31, 2022

Finding a Good Sermon is Hard to Do

For the past year or so I’ve been re-reading sermons by Frederick Buechner on Sunday mornings with “Spa Music” from Alexa quietly humming and a candle burning across the room. All of us, whether we consider ourselves “religious” or even “spiritual” could use a good sermon each week by the time Sunday rolls around. Life is not easy. But, of course, as you know only too well, we have to be careful here in finding that sermon that actually doesn’t feed the beast of our incurable need to sit up and fly right and so get our lives together to meet the demands of the Approving One, whomever that may be. A good sermon does not bring hope by giving us the correct formula but rather by breaking us apart and then we realize, when we open our eyes, that we are still there. There is life after all. Now. Not Later. That is what I call resurrection. 

I was a Christian Preacher by trade for 39 years and Sunday morning was hard work, and the rest of the week prior as well, not least because God would not let go of me but rather kept me in a tight grip so that I would give everything I had to not demand and oppress but rather promise and liberate (this, to say nothing of the demand of running a small business with shrinking market share and social, economic, political and cultural pressures outside of the control of even any prudent organizational management).  I don’t know how successful I was overall in that endeavor of delivering the Promise. I do know there were days that I know the score was zero and there were days when I felt it was a ten. And, I do know this. Reading, and re-reading (I’ve had this book for some time) Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark – A Life in Sermons, one at a time, on Sundays, does me a world of good. Here’s something good from “Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain” that caught my attention: “I don’t think it is always necessary to talk about the deepest and most private dimensions of who we are, but I think we are called to talk to each other out of it, and just as importantly to listen to each other out of it, to live out of our depths as well as our shallows.”

All of which makes me think of what I try to share here in these weekly or so “Field Notes”: I like a good hot dog with mustard on it at a ballgame as much as the next person but I like as well a good confession that I cannot and will never trust God but that God nevertheless will not take “no” for an answer. 

I'm back from a break in July. I'll do my best to talk and listen out of and into all depths. 

                                                                  Just the Other Day

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

June 27, 2022

The Supreme Court is Not the Last Word

The Supreme Court has released its Decision on expanding legal gun carrying and its Decision on reversing Roe Vs. Wade and a women’s right to choice. I am appalled at both Court Decisions. Last week I took a dive into the waters of describing the difference between Theologians of the Cross and Theologians of Glory. As a Theologian of the Cross I live in this expansive and grace-filled place where I do not attach these Decisions to God’s will but rather simply see them for what they are: Decisions by very human beings trying to make their way through challenges. True enough, I see “how they made their way” as the legalizing of the inhumanity of humanity against humanity. Others, of course, see these current Decisions as the protections of humanity. 

If the Decisions had gone the other way, the way of those of us who see the Decisions as inhumane, those Decisions would also not be God’s will. It is the attachment of very human decisions to the coattails of God where decisions that could be bad enough on the face of it become so much worse and so deadly. If I think the power of God is behind what is taking place rather than the driver being my best efforts at justice (again, on either side of the issue) then not only am I inclined to beat down and subdue the opposition, destroy them, for the sake of Divine Right, for the sake of Ultimacy, but I am also inclined to be beaten down and subdued, destroyed, myself when things fall apart and justice, however it is defined, loses the day.

But wait, then is there not anything that we can point to that is the will of God? It can be only this: that we, humanity, would stay in our lane. We are mortal, not immortal. We are flesh and blood, not shining light. 

It’s not that we can’t look at the story of Jesus and accurately describe his life’s focus and mission. He lived for the liberation of the least, the last, the lost, the little and the dead. If we are inspired by this and work to emulate this in our own lives then good, and the world is a better place because of it. But did he win? Did his mission of a better place and life for the marginalized get accomplished? No, he was killed, and savagely so. Then what in the world is going on here in this biblical narrative of Jesus where the way of peace that is accomplished by distributive justice through non-violence gets destroyed (by the way of peace that is accomplished by retributive justice through violence)? Could it be that there is something more promising, more gospel (good news), more liberating than even the vision of distributive justice that we embrace as the way of God? Could it be the fact that Jesus was killed (and he disappeared, not to be seen again, after his brief engagement with his followers in those heady resurrection days) is the defeat of our grandiosity, the destruction of our insatiable demand to step out of our lane and drive in God’s lane?

Just what is “the gospel” of the New Testament of the Bible anyway? To get at the answer you have to start with the actual account of Jesus life and death and resurrection. That sounds logical enough. And when you spend time there, which I am thinking most people today in America who call themselves Christian do not, you will see that the love your enemies thing, the serving others thing, the disparaging of righteous religious judgment thing, the forgiveness thing, the acceptance of the outcast thing, and the care for the poor thing are not a side-bar of Jesus’ agenda. They are the main event.  

But the clincher is that you have to end there too. You have to begin with the actual account of Jesus and you have to end with the actual account of Jesus.  You cannot make the account more than it is. So this: Jesus lost and he has left the building. 

Wait just a minute. 

Oh my, that means my dreams of grandeur for you and me and for our world are gone too. 

Do we see? This is exactly what a Theologian of the Cross does. She says “what a thing is” (Luther, Heidelberg Disputation Thesis 20).

I am driven to fight non-violently to Overturn the Overturn (to at least get back to where we were before Roe V. Wade was thrown out) and to make gun violence a thing of the past.  I believe this is humane and destroys inhumanity. But I do not see this as the will of God. What God wills is that I would shut up about God, quit usurping God’s position, and focus all of my attention and energy to taking care of the Garden (see the bible book of Genesis). Taking care of life as we see it right before us, not some ultimate destiny to which we aspire.  

Post-script

To my dear readers who actually are gracious enough to read this far today and too take the time to read my other postings, a note: I am going to be losing myself in some weeks of summer now and will not be back at Greengracepostings until the end of July, or so. May you all know joy and may our world know peace! Talk to you soon.