Caught in a Moment

Field Notes From A Religion-Less Christian

February 13, 2022

Why I Pray for Help When I Know God Will Not Give It

“But as for me, I am poor and needy; come to me speedily, O God” (Psalm 70)

I don’t actually think or believe God will supernaturally change my circumstance or condition. So why does this prayer of Psalm 70 still have significance, vitality and value? At least this: it speaks to the truth of God’s total power (omnipotence) in determining my destiny (aka eternal salvation) while stating then too the corollary: my total lack of power (impotence) in the same. Rather than speaking of where I do have agency and impact, decisions to go the store or not, decisions to change careers or not – all things in the temporal order – this prayer speaks of where I have no effect, in the realm or place of what will become of me in any or all eternal order. 

Martin Luther was able to untie or unravel the Gordian Knot of how God could be God (omnipotent and benevolent)  while suffering, death, malevolence and all kinds of evil find footing everywhere. He did it by letting revelation, as embodied in the written Scripture, say what it says without equivocation, without having the God of the Bible live within the definition or straightjacket of being the Law itself. God is not subject to another and greater power, the Law, with its livelihood found in obedience and merit. God is God – powerful and loving – and calls all things to subjugation to that, to Godself. Luther called this powerful love “Promise,” as opposed to Demand. All Law is subject to God, not the other way around. God is not the Law. Who or What is God? Unadulterated and Unmerited Mercy, one who lives by a different set of rules (Steven Paulson calls this the “Outlaw God” See Luther’s Outlaw God, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3). God is an Outlaw. God is the Outlaw. God gives to the undeserving, all. 

The problem then, of course, and the reason we resist this outlandish assertion, is that this makes God responsible for evil and makes us responsible for nothing. If, rather than Promise, God is the Law then that which disobeys has the potential to obey (obedience is the holy grail) and is not itself God but could potentially be God if and when obedience is attained. And, if God is the Law, we live with the possibility, the potential, of engaging the transactions, finding the correct ingredients, to reach and meet God on God’s terms. 

But, if, rather, God is pure Promise, all things happen for and in promise. 

God cannot help being God – totally above our pay grade. This is a problem for us for a couple of reasons. First, because evil is, well, destructive, not redemptive. There is no silver lining in that dark cloud. None. Evil is not a path or does not provide a path toward righteousness, but is rather purely unrighteous. Secondly, because we have no say in the matter of God’s relation to us, God’s decision(s) about us. We do not like being taken out of the game. Luther called this “above our pay grade” God the “unpreached God.” What’s a God to do when by God’s very Godness all hell breaks loose and all creatures hate God? God can only redeem this madness by engaging and defeating Godself: showing up with bells on to dispel the silent and sleeping God (Silent: no answer comes to the call for help. Sleeping: sets things in motion and takes a nap waiting to see if anybody can make good on and with those things) who lurks, awaiting our obedience. What loudness do the bells bring? All kinds of noise about the undeserving getting what they don’t deserve. Mercy! In other words, showing up in Jesus. Luther called this the “preached God.”

If we cannot see Jesus as the pure expression of the Outlaw God, the one who declares absolution on all whether deserving or not – “preached” – we will be left with God as the Law – “unpreached,” no word declared but rather word withheld until we make the grade. 

God has dealt the deathblow to Godself (the unpreached finds fulfillment, is complete, is done, dies, not because it is satiated, but because it is extinguished). The Promise eliminates Demand. The Preached overrules (overshouts?!) the Unpreached.

Will we but hear?

We did not listen then – we killed Jesus. The fact that something happened wherein and whereby the Promise was not forsaken – they said Jesus was raised from the dead – is why we can listen now and be transformed, go from death to life.

Will we but hear?

I know that I am desperately and daily all ears.

Recent Wanderings on Cumberland Island, GA.

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

February 9, 2022

America Will Be Great Again When It is Not Great

“The nations make much ado, and the kingdoms are shaken; God has spoken, and the earth shall melt away” (Psalm 46)

Russia has 100K troops and weapons galore surrounding Ukraine. The United States and Europe respond and negotiate. Such ado. Leaders play with the fate of the common citizen trying to make a living and a life – as if the leaders in their policy and politics matter and the citizens don’t. Our war mongering is so self-important. It’s absurd, tragic and so small-minded. Yesterday reading in former President Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land, a good section on how the U.S. has its own history of empire building, not without running roughshod over peoples and nations, to arrive where we are now. While we may not be a physical border invader, saber rattling, we still invade countries with our consumerism that feeds on the natural and human resources of other countries, all supported and defended by a military apparatus that is world-wide, ubiquitous and too structured by an economic system of loans and debts that keep the poor marginalized and the wealthy prioritized. 

I bought last year a winter jacket, high end Columbia Sportswear brand, and got a good deal on it. I saw the other day that it was made in Viet Nam. Viet Nam of all places. Nothing new there, I know. But think about how the French colonialized that country and we (the U.S.) destroyed it (while killing 60,000 of our own) in order to maintain a dominance over any Eastern (aka Chinese, Communist) threat against our ever-spreading economic hegemony. We destroyed resources in order to maintain and gain resources. We lost that military “battle” of Viet Nam but still won the “war” of Dominance somehow. People live in poverty (by our standards) by the millions, eking out a living by providing me with my cold weather creature comforts. 

I know, there is nothing wrong with providing goods and services. All I am saying is that we need to realize the real cost of our expected “First World” standard of living. America can lead the world into a global community of equality and justice only if we are clear and sober about how we got to this place of dominance. Contrary to popular belief (especially with the way we teach our American history as a matter of white ingenuity instead of a matter of dependence on black enslavement) America has not been great yet. Really, with all its wonderment and amazing feats and a democracy success story bar none, America is still one of many nations making “much ado.” We could be great if we considered justice rather than comfort (and safety and security) as our standard of living. By justice I mean distributive justice, where all get everything they need instead of some getting everything they want. 

I just saw a few minutes of NYTimes columnist and author Thomas Friedman interviewed  by Joe Scarborough on the Cable Show Morning Joe (Friedman of Hot, Flat and Crowded and Thankyou for Being Late and so much more, should be President as far as I am concerned!). In his usual smart ability to synthesize in a short fashion a ton of information into comprehensive categories that can direct policy or at minimum, help us name what it is we have before us (e.g. all this national turmoil we face is over the fact that so many Americans feel they are losing what “home” feels like and means to them). Friedman said we need to see that “Out of Many – One” could be better said now, or should be said now, as “Out of Many – We.” He just published today and OP-ED about how America is now a place where everybody has rights but nobody has responsibilities. A couple of things about that:

1) Notice how it highlights how we have lost the sense of “we” for all the glorification of “me.”

2) It’s interesting, and a telling story of why religion has lost its footing with a disillusioned Boomer generation and distinterested Millenial and Gen X generations , that the church isn’t the bully pulpit for this kind of moral call for justice and that rather it is enlightened and impassioned journalists and others that are stating the case and lighting the way.

Ok, where do I land this plane today? 

America can only be great it if sees itself as one nation among many who make “much ado.” America can only be great if it realizes and then acts on the truth that it is not great and will never be great. Great by only not being Great? Sounds like something I have heard before: “but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:43-45). 

Sound like pie in the sky? Tell that to Jesus. 

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

January 23, 2022

Atheists and Theists Alike Get Nervous Around Jesus

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Psalm 111

Nobody has to be told to fear God. It is not a command. Rather, it is natural and inevitable. For the atheist, it is the dark night of the soul. For the theist, it is the anger of the divine. So there we all are, unbeliever and believer alike, trying to make good with our destiny, hopeful that what will become of us will be something other than nothing. This is what Luther called the “unpreached God,” the silent One with hands off, waiting for some good to arise from us that we might be worthy of blessing. There is indeed good that arises, but alas, not only is it ephemeral, it is never free of its own self-interest. 

But it’s not as if any moral purity matters anyway. We are the ones who have created a Monster Tyrant out of God. We are the ones who have created the meritorious system that is religion in order to fight off, to have some weaponry to go to battle, against the Darkness that will not let us know our fate. 

I’m struck by Nathaniel’s question to Philip (John 1): “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” The answer is yes and no. Of course the question’s referent is Jesus, one showing up in public with a call to radical reliance on God and radical obedience to God. And yes, this is one who is good in every sense of the word. But note that. Every sense of the word. There is the sense of good that makes it clear that the higher moral ground is absolutely nothing on which to stand. What makes Jesus good, it becomes clear very early on in his public ministry work, is that all barriers to God are nonexistent. Class, gender, race, sexuality, origin and all else are stripped of significance in relation to the relation(ship) with God. It is Isaiah 55 all over the place: you without money, come and buy! What makes Jesus good is not moral standing but rather a clearing of the deck of all pretense before God. 

It is the shame of the church that this good news of Jesus is delivered not unvarnished but rather cloaked in equivocations of politics and power. The church hedges all the time, calling people to believe that believing is the standard for access to God. 

Wouldn’t one who is afraid be attracted to one who rebukes and eliminates the fear?

Neither atheists nor theists, however, are attracted. Neither like Jesus. Jesus makes the fearless life all too easy. There must be more to it, we think, this end of darkness. There must be more to it than this itinerate Jew of 1st century Palestine. Quick, let me find stoicism or epicureanism instead! It is the quest that matters! Quick, let me find orthodoxy instead. It’s fidelity that matters!

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, not the final word. It is the fear that drives us, gets us going. But to what end? To what place? To what person? For me it is to the one who is the end of the Law (Galatians), the one who takes the fear and replaces it with an eternal embrace. That would be Jesus of Nazareth. Where is he that I might meet him and be fearless? Philip says, “come and see.”

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

January 10, 2022

Bled Out by the Psalms

For some time now I have thought that if I kept up the patterned discipline of reading the Psalms daily, 150 each month, that at some point they would break into my consciousness and rather than I remembering them, I using them, things would turn and they would remember me and they would use me. 

Today, with Psalm 51, I had a lot of that. That one is deep confession, of course. Nothing new there. But it was in the practice of making those words actually my words, not a recognition of the significance of confession as I read the words, but in actually confessing as I read the words, where the switch came on and the change happened. 

What I have been finding is that it’s very important to speak the words in the first person in real time – not observe them as being first person address, but actually try the words on and see how they fit. Too tight? Too loose? Just right? How do I look in the mirror? Is that me or somebody else? Do this with the readings that are first person and then too do the same with second person, with statements about God, evil, life, trust.

It’s a lot, this number of Psalms each day in order to complete 150 each month. Who has time for this? Well, really? Yesterday I spent 2 hours watching a movie. Who has time for that? We see, then, it’s not the time it takes, but the heart it takes. By that I mean the exposure of your actual and authentic self. It’s not the intuitive way to heal, this being cut open and bleeding that happens when you let the Psalms in. But just like the dynamic of salvation that is faith alone, where there is no life until a death occurs, there is no life in the psalms until you are bled out, until you are dead. You can’t stop mid-way in your exposure and get out the gauze and ointment and work to wrap the wound up to protect yourself from dying. But oh, who wants to do this kind of daily death? Who sets out daily to do that? Why would I intentionally give myself an hour in the day to do that?

I’m reminded of Jacob wrestling the stranger through the night and insisting on holding on until the stranger would bless him (where is that in Genesis?….I don’t have a Bible handy to look!).  To read the psalms you have to realize you are not appropriating spiritual wisdom that you can apply as a salve for your wounds or suggest to your friends over brunch or editorialize in the newspaper. Rather, you are in a wrestling match with God, and God will pin you down and you will be defeated. Well, more than that. You will die. If you cannot do that, if you cannot be utterly destroyed and be left with nothing but a waiting for somebody to come along and find you and give you a second chance, another life (call it hope in the resurrection), don’t waste your time with the Psalms. Watch that movie instead. I’m afraid that movie will not bless you, and only instead entertain you. Not that there isn’t something to be said for that (I’ll keep watching movies). But if you want to be blessed….torn open and killed and brought back to life with more vigor than you can imagine,  read the Psalms. Pray the Psalms. Use the Psalms. Or, rather, let them use you.

                                                                 A Recent Day in our Kitchen

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Thursday, January 20, 2022

How to Stop Using the Bible (and let it start using you)

“What is worse, speculation refers to something said elsewhere in another time and place to which one is ordered to submit” (Luther’s Outlaw God, Vol. 1:  Hiddenness, Evil and Predestination, Steven Paulson, 2018, p. 100)

When we read the quotes of others, their wisdom on life, we engage them as something we are to take and do something with, something we are to use to gain agency or position up against what is possible (possibility is the modality, not necessity). The things that are said are something for us to “understand,” stand under, as in submit to as authoritative for us to accept (or reject) and use (or not use) to move us forward in our quest for completion of the law (law = whatever demand(s) is held over us, whether self-imposed or otherwise). What’s important for us in life is to get things right. This assumes that there is such a thing as “the correct, “the right,” a law, the law, that should be if not more accurately said, must be, fulfilled, completed. 

We normally read and use Scripture in this fashion. It is a compilation of accounts and stories that we are to use in order to get things right. What matters to us is getting things right (again, this is what it means to live by and with the infrastructure of the law). 

All of this pertains to what Luther was explaining to Erasmus in the Bondage of the Will (1525). Erasmus insisted that Scripture was obscure and needed to be understood (and one could only go so far in that understanding until things “were above us” and not for us to know). Luther insisted that Scripture was as plain as day and simply needed to be heard. The difference was in the seeing how God lives, operates in relationship to creation. For Erasmus, God lives in the modality of possibility within space and time. There is this understanding of life with God, relation to God, that is expressed in the modalities, the ways of communicating/relating from life in relationship to time: possibility, contingency and necessity. Erasmus saw the true nature of the relationship to be possibility because God would not have given the law, the commands, without the expectation that they be enacted, obeyed, completed. Luther saw that true nature as “necessity,” but bridled under that philosophical term because what he was describing of God’s foreknowledge and determination was a “necessity” that did not act within a legal superstructure. It was a necessity that was outside of the Law altogether. Life was (is) not about getting it right, and finding ways to do that with some combination of strengths, agencies, from persons (what is our responsibility) and God (what is God’s responsibility). For Luther, necessity operated out of the Promise of God to and for us because that is who and what God is. God is unmerited mercy. God has laws to give (with a  2-fold purpose: civil order and pressing us toward the mercy) but God is not the Law. 

Thus, the stories of the Scripture are not to be used by us to figure out how to get life right. They are the story of God and how God’s mercy will not be denied. Not about how we are to work to get things right but about how God works to get things right: that “rightness” being where there is no meritorious relationship, there is no “righteousness” save for the righteousness of God (Luther in the Hiedelberg Disputation: “We are not loved because we are lovely. We are lovely because we are loved”). The gospel, good news, is not then about how God fixes us so we can now get things right (or has made us right by Godself in relation to the Law), but that there is no law that requires in the first place that we get things right. Christ, God enfleshed so as to make no mistake about it, is the end of the law. 

Christ fulfills the law (Jesus: “I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill the law”) by demolishing its use as a tool for relationship to God [when Jesus says he isn’t going to “abolish” what he means is that the law’s purpose of civil order and spiritual pressure bringing us to confession of our total reliance on God still stand, still are viable [the Lutheran tribe of Christianity’s Book of Concord’s (1580), and still the working confessional documents today) so-called “civil use” and “theological use]. What Jesus is doing in “fulfilling’ the law is demolishing its “third use, “ the way of using the law to make good with God. Of course, Jesus had no familiarity or use for the later developed theologies about the law that I am talking about here. He did not think (I’m pretty sure of it!) “hey, I’m going to demolish the third use of the law. Watch me.” No, it was simply that the legal standard of the Torah that he and his religious contemporaries knew so well was not about a standard for a standing with God. His arguments, for example, about how we are not to worry about life, look at how the flowers in the field and the birds of the air have no cares….why would you worry?, are all about seeing the relationship to God as a given, a gift. 

The Bible, the Scripture, then is not then a book for us to use to understand God, but rather is a book God uses to understand us. 

We don’t figure out obscurities in the narrative. The narrative is as plain as day. We may not be comfortable with it, but there it is (e.g. Exodus 4 where God is the assassin, Job, where God sets Satan loose on Job, 1 Samuel 2 where God kills, passim, and even this one: Romans 1 where homosexuality is called a sin. Now on that one, the homosexual one, there is a lot to say, but I’ll just say this: I think Paul’s words on that in Romans 1 are just wrong, in that they are culture bound and lack the knowledge of science. I am not a Biblicist, I am a Jesus follower and I think Paul got following Jesus wrong on the homosexuality question. That being said, the text itself is as plain as day. Paul says homosexuality is a sin. I’m not going to say he didn’t say that. I’m going to say he is wrong based on my take on the science of today and the unconditional hospitality of Jesus).

God who creates also redeems and also sustains, all.  And this God will not be denied, not even by our denial.

The Bible is a strange book for us not because it has ancient incantations that are culturally anachronistic  but because it speaks a language where God does all things in relationship to us and we do nothing in relationship to God. This language is just not natural for us. In fact, and here’s the sin of it all, in it all, we object to it because we no longer are the operative player. We are benched by God in the game of salvation.

But, miracle of miracles, even our objection is overruled because it cannot be otherwise. It is of necessity. Since God is God and God is Mercy, there simply will be nothing than complete and utter mercy, in all space and time. End of story. Beginning of life!

 (pictured here: five stories, looking down, the grand staircase at Orlando's Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center, January 15, 2022, at the Center's Open House featuring the newly opened Steinmetz Hall)

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

November 24, 2021

Assassination and Anfechtung

“Yet as with all of the stories of the hidden God outside the law, the text remains there as a gouty foot that laughs at our doctoring” (Luther’s Outlaw God, Vol. 1: Hiddenness, Evil and Predestination. Steven Paulson, 2018)

The text is Exodus 4:24: “On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met him and tried to kill him”

What if the whole definition, reality, thing about God is not morality at all. Not even social justice. What if the mission of God is the Promise of God delivered, not just the justice of humanity experienced. Then, “Katy, bar the door!” Look out! God will not be denied! In order to ensure that the Promise be delivered God will even become an Assassin. God will work to kill the Preacher in order to force the Preacher to deliver on the mission. It, God, forces the Preacher to rely on and know only the Promise, and nothing more, not even an easy or difficult path to delivering the Promise. Martin Luther called this full court press “Anfechtung.” Not simply an experience of human reason or feeling that questions whether God exists or delivers, but an action of God that presses the issue, moves us forward to the only thing that can and will save us: God Godself.

Field Notes from a Religion-Less Christian

January 1, 2022

How Does the Cross Work?

There is the understanding of the saving work of God actually working because of a compassion for us who have been disobedient. The Anselmian Atonement Theory embraces this. What is assumed here is that sin is a breaking of a covenant law.  Sin is a disobedience. Salvation, or rectifying, is a forgiveness that is and can only be instituted by sacrifice on our behalf. And so faith becomes the appreciation for this intervention on our behalf. And preaching becomes this grand admonishment to an ever deeper appreciation for the selfless act of God in and through Jesus on our behalf. 

How wonderful it is that God is so self-less for us!

Of course, this is a smoke-screen to hide the truth, which is, again, of course, that we killed Jesus and would do it again in a heartbeat. 

When we make God the Lawgiver, or the Law itself, we have a metaphysical infrastructure that supports our position as Agent on our own destiny. If and when we repair the breach, even employing God to do the dirty work for us, all is well. God works for us. We are the Owner, the Employer and God works for us. 

If, though, we own nothing, God is set loose. God is rogue. God is the Outlaw. 

This state of affairs, this nakedness and empty-handedness, is simply too painful for us to tolerate. We must respond, lash out, with creating theologies that support our philosophy of self-development and self-enlightenment. 

The biblical narrative is all too easily hijacked to support a theology about the cross which keeps us alive within the law’s superstructure wherein we have a say in the matter of our destiny. If we cannot repair the damage ourselves we can at least participate and change things, make things whole, by believing somebody else has fixed it. 

Contrast this to a theology where the cross alone is our theology (Crux sola est nostra theologia, a phrase Martin Luther employed). When this happens we don’t have God-thinking (theology) about the cross, we only have the starkness and darkness that is the cross itself. The killing of God is our doing and all we are capable of doing and all we actually want to do. We kill God because God does not do our bidding of redeeming the righteous and condemning the wicked. God does not play by our rules and only, instead, gives mercy to the deserving and undeserving alike. 

What dies on the cross is the law, this "metaphysical superstructure." God as the law dies. God dies.  Christ is the end of the law (Romans 10:4). Yes, Jesus dies, but he is the one of mercy who only gives mercy and this one, this mercy one, dies, which means to say retributive justice which would have lashed out and taken no prisoners, that one dies.  Mercy prevails. It is all that is left. The last word is the word of forgiveness. Everything else is literally dead. Mercy does not win because it is better (“oh, how lovely is God’s love!” we like to say because such admiration displays our enlightenment: “we get it! Before we did not see it. Now we do!”) Mercy wins because it is the only thing left standing. 

The cross shuts us up, destroys all recriminations and retributions. Mercy does not win as if there ever was a competition. It rather envelopes and encompasses and embraces all that ever existed and exists. 

And so, I don’t find myself enamored with an appreciation attitude toward God, a spirituality of gratitude. Rather, I am laid bare and find in that darkness only the light of God. In my world’s construction of retribution and payback and earning a place, I find only mercy. And that is simply too good not to be true. I don’t applaud this mercy, as if I am some spectator admiring benevolence. I am more like a sputtering breathless one laying prone on the ground at the water’s edge after drinking desperately, gulping gaspingly the fresh water provided me at the oasis in my desert.