The Granary Graveyard, Boston, April 2022, "hic jacet" Sam Adams, Paul Revere, the Massacre Five and just a few Others.

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

What are We Waiting For?

On God, Climate Change, Waiting Around, and Just What is the Business of Church

“I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope” (Psalm 130)

What are we waiting for? I had not heard this Psalm’s words before today as a wait for the declaration of forgiveness. But look at the context – the whole prayer is about sinning and being forgiven. I guess, actually, what I mean is that normally when I hear “wait for the Lord” I’m thinking of how we long for a change in circumstance or condition and that we need and we strive to have patience for those things to change. But no, this Psalm is not about waiting for things to change but rather about waiting for a word that frees – a word of forgiveness that looses and liberates. 

Our hope is not in a changed condition but in a declared relationship (“in his word is my hope”). Martin Luther’s “gouty foot laughs at our doctoring” speaks of our theological machinations to fix our problem with evil and suffering by exonerating God and blaming ourselves so we are empowered to patch up the wrong and the relationship (if we are to blame then we can also turn that around and make things right). In that way, our hope is in our word, not God’s. That is sadly laughable and laughably sad. 

But to rely and wait without agency, for God to right the wrong of how we break the relationship with who we are (identity) and what will become of us (destiny), without any help from anywhere within us, including our wokeness, that is what the “waiting for God” is all about. Note, there is the stuff done wrong that is culpable – saying we can’t fix the relationship and we can’t dismiss the wrong stuff does not mean the wrong stuff does not matter. We dare not wait around to fix things, to right the wrongs. Not if we expect sustainability and comfort rather than decline and chaos. But we do, we must, for we have no choice in the matter (bound will over free will), wait for God to give those three words that right the relationship and so right the world no matter what conditions prevail: I forgive you. The gouty foot then laughs no more. It is healed. 

And so the business of the church is revealed here. Somebody must declare in real time those three words, the “word” that is our hope, in order for the healing to happen. The church is not in the business of talking about God, but rather talking as God, to say to us daily what God says: I forgive you. 

What are we waiting for? There is embedded in that question the urgency of the moment. When it comes to many things, not the least of which and in my mind the most critical, righting global warming, we must act.

But when it comes not to things but to our relationship with our destiny, we don’t get going. Rather, we shut up, we stop, we open our hands and receive. 

                                   Easter Weekend 2022 Springs Up for Us in Boston

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

“Watch Out for That Easter Candy”

“….this is something quite different from the popular ‘Easter Joy’ which we know, which is founded primarily in that our soul swings in harmony with the constant rhythm of nature which surrounds and moves through us.” Martin Niemoeller, Easter Sermon, Berlin, 1934

“Our soul swings in harmony with the constant rhythm of nature….” is a good way of describing the feelings we have when things are going well for us, when we have peace and security and serenity. And this is what we commonly think God is here to deliver for us – God is about serving us so we feel good in our skin no matter what. 

Of course God wants good for us but of course, too, we stand in the way. We not only maim and kill the natural world but we also refuse God’s mercy and kill that too. Witness Golgotha. 

What passes for Christian proclamation today is approval and appreciation for our person with little to no recognition of our selfish murdering of others and creation.

God hates us before God loves us. Ok, the Love is primal but our use and abuse of it brings on God’s hatred. And to recognize and admit this truth is too much for us. Rather, we either deny God and God’s existence or we remake God into a divinity that is here to cater to our needs. 

Neimoeller preaches, in the crucible, that our Easter Joy is not because we know that God provides and powers our agenda, but rather that we discover that God’s hatred is overcome by Godself, that God’s hatred is overcome by God’s compassion. Candies at Easter are not only not good for us bodily, but also easily mask the liberation of the soul that is the joy of which the resurrection narrative speaks. Candies are not the problem. I like them too. Just watch out that you take them on, eat them, as forgiveness, not a job well done.

 

                                                        

                                                        Find the Easter Bunny

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

“I Did Not Retire From Holy Week”

In Holy Weeks past I had such high hopes for a people gathered daily to be immersed in the story of earthbound love that can only lead to death when up against oppression. That the story of salvation weekly draws us to a Sunday celebration – what are we seeking there, the Great Explainer? The Great Helper? – would penetrate in such a way as to lead only to a holiness of Holy Week, an inevitable landing in the days of Holy Week where you could not but wring out of the seven days as much as you could of the One Who Loves with such fury.

But, no. Few Came. Very few. After the Sunday Palms (and why again do we wave them?) on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday few to nobody came to any gathered worship of any kind. Then Thursday and Friday were usually weaker than imagined. Holy Saturday, with all its deep fire and glory, forget about it. It was less than an afterthought but for a few, and then only it seems, out of duty to support the organizer’s efforts. 

Holy Week ended up being Empty Week for me because most seemed to treat it like a relic from the past that was to be appreciated out of respect for the pastor or leaders who care about such things. That, if it was treated as anything at all.

Well, that’s all okay. I did work hard, however, at carving out and naming the cross’s significance, tethering it to the very real account rather than letting it float up and hover above in a mythology. Had you been there you would have heard of Jesus’ compassion and utter defeat. And resurrection you would know not as reversal of that devastation but as confirmation of love as the way of healing (call it the salve, the salvation).  You would have heard the Story in those Holy Weeks. I say that now not as an exercise in comparisons to other tellings. I say it just as fact, that too gives me a satisfaction that I gave it all I could in those years. 

I’m retired from that now, but not from Holy Week. It is Wednesday and we are approaching Jerusalem. 

                               Wood Duck on Wood on a Spring Day in Downtown Orlando

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

April 9, 2022

On Becoming Religion-Less

It was the April 30, 1944 letter from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Eberhard Bethge that launched what we know of specific reference and writing on “religion-less Christianity.” Just a couple of excerpts of that letter here:

“What keeps gnawing at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today? The age when we could tell people that with words – whether with theological or with pious words – is past, as is the age of inwardness and of conscience, and that means the age of religion altogether. We are approaching a completely religionless age: people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.”

“……and if we eventually must judge even the Western form of Christianity to be only a preliminary stage of a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become Lord of the religionless as well? Is there such a thing as a religionless Christian? If religion is only the garb in which Christianity is clothed – and this garb has looked very different in different ages – what then is religionless Christianity?”

Today is Dietrich’s death day and I am drawn to my continued work on opening up and exploring what Dietrich, because of his tragic execution never himself was able to develop fully, this life of a person of faith who is a religion-less Christian. Back in 2018 I mashed and smashed out a raw book on the topic (Religion-Less Christianity and Renewing the Church: On Following Jesus in God, for God and without God) and self-published it. I say “mashed and smashed” and “raw” because I did it in the last 30 days of my sabbatical and it’s an editor’s nightmare, but at least I got some fundamental stuff of my thinking down on paper. Since then I retired from work as a congregational pastor and have toyed with but not committed to writing more, tightening up the initial work and expanding and developing it all in some way, that way of which I am not sure. I have a bunch of reading that has to be done – I need to see who has recently published on this aspect of Dietrich’s work, this religion-less Christianity.

All that being said, as you are reading this now you know I started writing my blog under the title of “Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian.” But I did this not because the weekly notes from my daily journal do any focused explication of just what “the religion-less Christian” looks like but because my notes, I believe, come from what I understand the bi-fold nature of a religion-less Christianity to be: 1) God is not a supernatural being or a theological hypothesis to explain the unexplainable things in life 2) God is not the “deus ex machina” called upon to achieve what we cannot achieve in our goals and aspirations; is not a supernatural being called upon to intervene in human affairs to correct what has gone wrong. 

Dietrich saw and understood God to be the center of all life, not on the margins as someone to be called into the center of our life. And he saw God, as Luther described God, only in suffering and death – meaning we suffer, we live with and put up with, the pain of a God who does what God wills, not what we will – and we die – not meant physically in this specific reference – to Self, and that not because we can do so or want to do so but because God kills our Self in order to give us, to resurrect us, to full and real life. But then Dietrich too took us to the place of seeing and living life fully only by taking on, then, all of life from the perspective and life-situation of those who are suffering physically, economically, emotionally, politically and socially….and those marginalized from life by exploitation by others. Dietrich called us to see life, and there find life, “from below.”

I have become religion-less. I have been done in by God and I am working to see and live life “from below.” I have no pretensions about how I am doing. I am suspicious of my motivations. I leverage daily confession in order to see clearly and be humbled, then freed, then to start again. I am religion-less, with a focus on healing and renewing the world’s rot, not for my sake or for God’s sake but rather because I am put there by what I see and hear from God. 

It is my hope that as I write weekly from my journal daily I can develop more deeply and widely just what this religion-less Christianity is and can be. I do know this: the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer affects me greatly and I am learning and growing continually. 

On this anniversary of Dietrich’s death I wonder aloud with you what he penned in that April 30, 1944 missal: Just who is Jesus Christ actually for us today?

                                          On a Recent Walk in St. Louis. No Fooling. 

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

March 15, 2022

Just Watch

“ ‘Can God set a table in the wilderness…?’ ” (Psalm 78)

What is this lengthy and elegiac poem and prayer that is Psalm 78 that recounts God as savior and destroyer of God’s own people, and then, yet, faithful in the end?

Why recount and remember all this Heilsgeschichte?

It must be about the faithfulness, the trustworthiness of a God who does not blink, let alone sleep, in the face of all created life. But, rather, does this: throws GodSelf into the maelstrom so as to provide, so as to providence, so as to set a table in the wilderness. 

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

March 10, 2022

Life is Not Some Deal to Be Struck, Nor Does it Last Forever

“Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and make good your vow to the most High” (Psalm 50)

Here in Psalm 50 God rejects both the religious (“I will take no bull-calf from your stalls…”) and the irreligious (“since you refuse discipline and toss my words behind your back”) but looks only for a word of appreciation (two times here: “offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving”), though watch this carefully: needs it not (“if I were hungry I would not tell you, for the whole world is mine and all that is in it”). 

What is God daily doing to us? Not demanding a deal, some righteousness from us in order to reap righteousness from God. Rather this: providing a magnificent home wherein we live out our days (“the Lord, the God of gods, has spoken; he has called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting”). This encouragement, not caution, to “offer thanksgiving” means to open us up to what is most real and true. Life is a gift to be lived out until it is exhausted, not a deal to be struck so as to claim victory. It is an invitation to full expression, not an admonition to proper obeisance. 

                                                              Take That Road

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

March 14, 2022

On Confidence in the Face of Annihilation

“Arise, O God, maintain your cause.” (Psalm 74)

It deserves an exclamation point. There is none. I want to place an exclamation point. There is none. So is it written in exasperation of realizing nothing will come of it? Or is it rather written in the firm and steady confidence that the advent has already begun and all will be rectified and all will be well?

Will something this week with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine plunge us into a global conflagration? Chemical or nuclear weapons unleashed?! The specter of such changes all war. But what is the cost of “allowing” Russia to swallow Ukraine? This is insane that we have nation-states invading others. But why would be think we have evolved to something more civilized?

When I realize that Jesus’ death and resurrection is the merciful love at all costs (death) declared to be the eschaton on and over all human endeavor (resurrection), I end up with the conclusion of “the firm and steady confidence that the advent has already begun and all will be rectified and all will be well.” “Arise, O God and maintain your cause,” means that. 

But how could I say such a preposterous thing? On what basis? What evidence? Why is it not some pipe-dream of the innocent and the poor?

[Excursus on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and confidence in God: Bonhoeffer, in “After Ten Years,” writing in 1942 of the previous 10 years of resistance to Nazism and companionship therein with family and colleague and friends, 1 year before his imprisonment for such and 3 years before his murderous hanging for the same, asks “Who Stands Firm?” and answers not one who has confidence in godliness but rather one who has confidence in God (this is my language, the way I can say it). He writes, “Who stands firm? Only the one whose ultimate standard is not his reason, his principles, conscience, freedom or virtue; only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these when, in faith and in relationship to God alone, he is called to obedient and responsible action” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, Vol. 8, p 40). This is a difficult distinction for us to make – this godliness vs. God, because we cannot not think of ourselves as the actors on every stage, the subject of every sentence. Outcomes always and only depend on our ability to act, whether in behavior or belief. We cannot, we will not allow ourselves to be taken out of the game so that our outcomes, our destiny, lies solely in someone else’s hands. Faith in God, confidence in God, is not an add-on to virtues (e.g. reason principles, conscience or virtue) but rather the annihilation and lose of virtue, just so there is nothing left of Self, only God remains. Faith is being bereft of Self and filled by God. Luther writes in his Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1531, LW 26): “And this is why our theology is certain; it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience or works, but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.”

If we cannot allow ourselves to give up our place on the playing court so as to win the game by letting somebody else play, how do we get to that victory?  How do we come to such faith, this faith that is the absolute opposite of weakness, the opposite of an atrophy in the face of evil, but rather a confidence in God so that all godliness can falter and fall and in fact be killed, but always “stand firm”? We come to it only kicking and screaming all the way as God drags us out of the game, benches us. How do we come to such faith, such confidence in God? How do we stand firm? We are placed there, put there, killed (of any agency) (I think of Colossians 1 here: taken from darkness and transferred to the Kingdom). We come to such confidence in God by God. 

The great irony then occurs. The one bereft of all virtue and ability to affect any change becomes the most powerful resistance to evil, the only thing that defeats evil, a confidence in God alone and not a confidence in positive outcomes. Who stands firm? The one who cares not anymore of stability and strength but only God, who is unmerited and unconditional mercy. The one who loves at all costs simply because faith in God alone means only that that action and option, faith active in love, is left on the table. You cannot trust in God alone and not only love (bring mercy) at all costs and to the end.]

The one born in Nazareth (and the story says Bethlehem so to ensure we know his salvific lineage) is hung up on a tree, ignominiously, and savagely executed by the State. That is the evidence. After that, you see, there is nothing left of our aspirations to wealth and well-being. There is nothing left standing. It is a nuclear and chemical war let loose on creation and it is an annihilation. Not maybe. Not could be. But actual and done. It is finished. That is the way Jesus put it, of course, and it makes sense that we should take him at his word. Nothing left, then, but what? But what? Anything left when nothing left? What can come of nothing? Only that whom created nothing in the first place and then created something out of nothing. 

God. 

Arise, O God, and maintain your cause!