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.