Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian......Has Moved!

Starting January 1st, 2023 the new location for "Field Notes" is my new website beinganddoingmatters.com!

The website is my coaching website, but it houses my blog "Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian." And, get this, when you subscribe there to the blog, you will actually get an email notification when a new blog drops (unlike my current and dedicated subscribers whose "subscription" is a bit clunky)!

I'm excited to share my website with you, and too to have a sharp and clean forum and format to post my blog and actual blog notifications and comments that work!

So, please visit now beinganddoingmatters.com! First up this year in Field Notes: "God Has Left the Building (Law) and Lives in the Wild (Gospel)"

Thanks for the conversation with you via Field Notes!

beinganddoingmatters.com

                                                                       

 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.