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