If You Walk By Some Flowers, Notice Them. It's Good for You.

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

May 28, 2022

Uvalde: I Don’t Want My Hurt to Go Away

Garrison Keillor in his Garrison Keillor and Friends blog, “What We Know Is Not Nearly Enough,” on May 27th included this:

“Senator Lee of Utah who has voted against mandatory gun registration said that “glorification of violence” and “breakdown of the family” are responsible for the shooting, and how do you address those? Censorship of Netflix and Hulu? Requiring regular church attendance? Senator Romney said, “Grief overwhelms the soul. We must find answers.” Apparently he feels that prayer is an answer, but it’s dismaying to see, according to Newsweek, that Romney has received $14 million in donations from the National Rifle Association over the years. Evidently his soul was not sufficiently overwhelmed.”

Then, after more, and I do commend the entire blog to you, Keillor concluded with this: 

“I propose that Mr. Lee and Mr. Romney take the $14 million and use it to make nonviolent TV shows that glorify good families. I wish them well. Meanwhile, I don’t care to do any shows in Texas.”

What is going through my mind and heart about Uvalde?

I am aghast, appalled, angry and heart-broken and like Steve Kerr implores, urgently trying not to get numb to this. 

Keillor’s above summation is spot on.

Crazy and absurd and tragic and sick is the influence of political support money and the lack of decision-making based on the practicality of what works (if you take AK-47's off the streets they cannot be used to kill children) in favor of taking money for your campaigns from whomever comes along and accusing others, the "left,"  of having bad values and, evidently, thinking the solution is changing their values by imposing yours (half of which are just as violent as the so-called "bad values" of the "left": let's take, for example, wives being submissive to their husbands or, state governments executing criminals. These are not violent actions of a violent culture with violent values?).

Not all of us Americans have lost our minds. We still support things that actually work.

Nor have we lost our hearts. We still will not knowingly benefit from the donations of those who traffic in violence. 

When a bully brother is beating up his little sister with a stick, you take the stick away and ensure he will not get it again. You do not give a big(ger) stick to the little sister and tell her good luck. 

There is a difference between a fundamental right and an absolute right. Fundamentally, the bully should be able to pick up sticks. But he should not be able to beat up others with it. Fundamental means you have the right. Absolute means you have the right no matter what you do with that right. Gun ownership is not an absolute right. It is a fundamental right.  Is there an absolute involved? Yes, the bully absolutely should not be able to beat up others with his or her weapons and when they do they have given up their fundamental right because they absolutely will beat up others if they keep getting their sticks. 

I live in Florida. Yes, I know, Florida. I wrote to my two U. S. Senators yesterday, Senators Rubio and Scott. Yes, I know, Rubio and Scott. I told them to vote “Yes” on H.R. 8 that had its Second Reading in the Senate on May 25. Yes, I know the chances. But I will write them again today. Many of you are doing much more than me in working to control and reduce gun violence. I am trying to find out more ways to help, things that I can do. What do you suggest? I know there must be a strong combination of advocacy and action. 

I am trying not to become numb to this.

 On Mother's Day this Year in our House: There's Cake, and then there's Raspberry Elegance

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Tuesday May 10 and Saturday May 14, 2022

Just Another Psalm and Boom, There It Is, The Problem of Evil

In reading Psalm 98 today it occurred to me that if you ask most Christians what it says to them, what it means to them, it is that it is a way of expressing how they are thankful to God for when God does well by them (which means that when things go well they attribute that good to be something provided to them by a Benevolent Being). Then, too, if you asked them about what is happening when things go badly for them they would be perplexed because God’s goodness to them is not an act of charity but rather a character trait. And so there would be perhaps only two logical choices for why the sordidness arrives: one, God’s goodness has seen fit to provide badness for our own good. Or two, our badness deserves more badness because God’s goodness cannot withstand such badness. And there you have the classic answers to the vexation of evil. What’s troubling (to me, and the history of theology and philosophy) is that both are rationales constructed to let an Omnipotent God (the very definition of a god) off the hook for allowing (not really powerful in the end) or inciting (not really loving in the end) evil. 

Well then. I have a small mind and will not proport that what the paragraph above poured out on a Tuesday in May surmises things comprehensively when it comes to the vastness of why evil. But I will say it’s helpful to me as an encapsulation. 

But there is, alas, more. Or at least more to say. And so on the following Saturday, more: God chooses, not based on merit, but based on God’s decision. Not within any legal structure or system, but outside of it. So, a Zacchaeus (Corrupt Tax Worker) has just as much of a chance with God as a Nicodemus (Pristine Pharisee). It’s God’s decision, election, that is the operating system at work, not a legal structure, Law, that causes, drives God to select or bless. 

God chose Israel, without merit, just like God created the world, out of nothing, not legal structure, no merited reason. God is just simply life, given. Only God gives life and life is only what God gives. And this is precisely what evil is when law is the operating and guiding system – because God can and does choose to give life or take it and I, we, have nothing to say about it. I have no agency, not way to influence the choice being made for me. That is not good in my book. It is evil. 

Steven Paulson, in Luther’s Outlaw God, Volume 1 (Evil, Predestination and the Hiddenness of God), writes this:

“In hardening Pharaoh’s heart, we learn that the term necessity is confusing not just because it is inadequate to describe what Pharaoh’s heart actually wants but because it says two opposing things. Necessity says one thing concerning the law, but says something opposite this law when necessity concerns a promise. In the law, necessity means coercing a recalcitrant human will to will what God’s will wants in the future – that is, to get your untamed will to align with God’s steady, cultivated will and so finally accomplish the law’s demands. But Luther’s necessity means certain, and certain means opposite things in the law and in the gospel. In the law, certain means forced; in the gospel it means what no opposition, even my own, can overcome.”

God’s will of only giving life where and when God decides will not and cannot take any quarter. God doesn’t destroy the earth (the flood story) based on the law (humankind deserved it because they did bad things) but because something got in God’s way, something opposed the Life-Only Giving God. God doesn’t destroy the Canaanites (the promised land story) based on the law (they deserved it because they were, among other things, polytheistic) but because they got in the way of God’s deciding to give life to Israel. 

The fact that God destroys, “hardens Pharaoh’s heart,” should not offend us or scare us but rather alert us and encourage us to the fact and truth that God does not Lie. When God promises, nothing can or will get in the way of the promise. 

[A detour for a moment, if you will allow. One of the key tenet’s in Martin Luther’s working exegetical approach to Scripture (his day job was as a Bible scholar/professor) was something we describe today as the “plain sense of Scripture.” Luther engaged, and worked in opposition to what the classical biblical scholarship of the time (in the mode of Scholasticism) used as the accepted biblical interpretive approach: all Bible accounts/stories/narrative could and should be interpreted in one or more of four ways: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (moral) and the anagogical (concerning future heaven/hell). Luther, said, no, don’t layer on these four meanings as options for understanding. Instead, just take the “plain sense.” Meaning, take it at face value. This means if a passage is obviously, plainly, figurative language (“The Lord is my Shepherd….”: God is not a literally a herder of sheep; God takes care of us like a herder cares for the flock), then let it be that. But if a passage says “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” as in our focus here, for example, then take it to mean what is plainly says. It does not say “God allowed Pharaoh’s heart to be hardened” or “Pharaoh hardened his own heart.” Erasmus, not a shabby theologian and philosopher himself, whom Luther famously engaged in his 1525 treatise, The Bondage of the Will, used just this trope to get God off the hook of what looks like God driving Pharaoh to do something Pharaoh himself didn’t want to do. Luther insisted the text means what it actually says, plainly:  It says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. God did the deed. When you take a text to mean plainly what it says you run into some challenging stuff concerning God’s will and predestination and evil. But Luther wasn’t afraid of the challenge. Nor should we be. Here’s another example: Exodus 4 where God tries to kill Moses. Read it and wince.]

But wait! What if God chooses someone else and not me and I have nothing to say in the matter! What if I am Pharaoh? That is not fair – and of course that is true enough when you operate in the legal structure of deserving or not deserving. But if I operate in the illegal structure of gospel, the non-legal structure of gospel, nobody gets anything they deserve. They only get what God decides and, remember this,  God decides only Good. Will I be saved? I do not know based on my life. I only know (certainly!) based on God’s life. And God only creates and resurrects. 

God’s election, choosing, omnipotence of certainty (as opposed to the omnipotence of force) is distasteful, unnerving, evil to us because we have no agency, no power, no decision-making influence.

So how can we say God only creates/resurrects when too, God clearly killed Pharaoh? We can only say it if we say the killing is life-giving – and it was, it liberated Israel. But that’s not fair! What about poor Pharaoh!? He’s just a pawn? No, because the fact that God does not lie, that God makes good always on God’s Promise (creation of world and election of Israel are the meta-narrative) means that for even Pharaoh there is hope. Even after God took him out. The salvation story does not tell us God is fair, it tells us that God does not Lie, that God is only creating and resurrecting because that is what God promises. 

Because God is hope and we are not hope, there is always and only hope. For all people. For all creation (let’s get off the high horse of making everything about people and forgetting the flora and fauna and igneous rock, passim. Scripture says clearly all creation is God’s focus).

And so how will we know this – that there is hope delivered by God without a legal system, outside of a legal structure of fairness, that is not about fairness but about unconditional love, about only life and resurrection, that mercy is not leniency in the law but rather is the abolition of the law as the deciding factor for and in destiny?

We know all this in Jesus of Nazareth. 

Watch him, listen to him, follow him until you can’t take anymore, this unfettered and untethered (the law, and grave, cannot hold him) man who chose all the wrong people for the right reason, and you kill him (and so, just to be clear and absolute about it, you have nothing to do with your salvation – you destroyed it, you destroyed him).

It is not fair. He is only Good.

And good for nothing?

No, good for something, or more correctly, and precisely, good for you.

When he said “this is my body and blood” for you, he meant it. 

Again, how will we know there is hope for us outside of fairness, especially important and relevant to us when we know we haven’t been fair at all (we killed him and we kill him still) and, mind you, when we have been fair and think that that is going to get us somewhere? Only when it is given to us.

There is Hope. 

Take God’s word for it. 

Take it verbally – Scripture and Sermon (the very reason you must find yourself a good Preacher).

Take it visibly – Sacrament (the very reason you must get yourself to that wine and bread hebdomadally).

Just Take it. 

Lose the Fear. Find the Hope. 

Take it. 

                                                            What's Next for You?

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

What Kind of Believer Am I?

“Early in the morning I cry out to you, for in your word is my trust” (Psalm 119)

When I read the Scriptures in the morning I don’t usually talk to God in what we might call the traditional or regular prayer conversation practice or approach. I talk a lot with God, but rarely in the first-person. When I do actually talk in the first-person to God it is, I will say, a bit refreshing. There is a certain freedom that comes therein from not accumulating information or understanding or insight in those moments of sharing, but rather just relating who and what I am and what I already know and feel and think. The way I most do the first-person conversation is in reading and thus praying the Psalms in the first person, when, of course, the writing is actually such (make sure you know who in the Psalm is doing the talking. Things can shift from person talking to God talking in a heartbeat with nary a comma). 

One can read the first-person without being that first person. Instead, you read it as an observer of the person in conversation with God. When doing that, that listening in on the conversation, I am in the mode of gleaning insight, analyzing theology, growing in faith and life understanding. But when I am rather in the conversation, myself the speaker, I am loosed from the task of learning and thus active in experiencing the thought and emotion expressed, something that has redeeming value whether or not any insight is gained or solution to challenges, even those perhaps talked directly about, found. At the risk of characterizing the nature of the relationship we have with God as one of equal partners and thus cozying up to God as if in any given moment the conversation might turn and God would be the beneficiary of my attention and companionship, what happens in these first-person conversations with God is rather like a good conversation with a friend. Even if circumstances or conditions don’t change, even if direction or solution is not found, you feel better nevertheless.

Excursus: on God as a friend. I have never liked the old hymn “What a Friend We Have In Jesus.” Not only is the tune sappy but the text sentimentalizes the relationship we have with God and promotes the identification of God as The Great Explainer of all things perplexing and The Great Helper from all things debilitating. This is the God of Religion, the Divine One who bails us out and not, to corrupt the whole thing even more, simply unconditionally, but does the saving within the concocted (by us) covenant that demands our obedience to the law and if we disobey we get no saving after all, thank you very much. So, lose the hymn, please. And abandon the theology of glory. But, now, don’t lose sight of the fact that Jesus purportedly said a very interesting thing about friendship with us. He in fact calls us his friends and says this is because he has let us in on everything he knows of God (John 15:15). Interesting. He confides. It’s what good friends do. It seems to me only fair that we might be polite about it all and reciprocate. And so, friends. But please, realize what is going on here. Jesus made the first move and made himself vulnerable, and it killed him. This is a friendship of equals because he intentionally and deliberating made this so (see Philippians 2 for how Paul famously describes this changing of status, position and power). And so, we are equals, in awe.

So, back to the business at hand. 

I am not a Supernaturalist, one who sees God as intervening to change circumstances whether called for or not. But I am also not a Deist, one who sees God originating and setting the world in motion and then stepping away with hands off to see how it all evolves. I am a Christian, one who claims that Jesus of Nazareth is who God is (peace through distributive justice by non-violence) and that all the biblical accounts of God’s extra-natural, supernatural actions (hardening Pharaoh’s heart, parting the Red Sea, Elijah’s fire, you name it, including, mind you, the physical resurrection of Jesus) are mythologies to illuminate and declare (not just describe, but actually enact this truth by virtue of the declaration – in other words what we mean by Promise instead of Demand, Gospel, instead of Law) that unconditional love (“agape” type, the type Paul uses to describe love in I Corinthians 13, opposed to “phileo” or “eros”), short hand for “peace through distributive justice by non-violence,” is in the end (and from the beginning) the only thing standing, and left standing, forever. 

 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?