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!

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*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.