Wayside Pulpit

Follow Me

“After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’” -- Luke 5:27

Follow me.

What if those two words are the core of the message of Christ? I mean, really, what if? What would it mean to look to the life of Jesus as a guide for living, instead of looking to his resurrection as a guide for salvation? What would it mean to follow?

Give up your money to those who need it
Change your livelihood to one that focuses on the oppressed
Sit in silence with god
Heal those in need of healing
Share meals with those who are very much unlike you
Preach about injustice
Walk in unfamiliar areas
Read the Hebrew Bible
Leave organized religion
Never whine about being a victim
Be involved in an intentional community working for change
Press against the prevailing social/political/religious system so hard you are executed for it . . .

This is so different than simply believing that one is to live by faith alone, isn’t it? How many Christians, if they were told tomorrow morning at church that THIS is Christianity, would keep being Christian?

I aspire to follow.

Unjust Rules

Today was just one of those mornings. The keys were lost, the dog vomited on the floor and every single pair of socks was dirty. I didn’t get it all together in time and my daughter was late for school. They had already started their morning assembly when we rolled into the parking lot. The rule at the school is to get a tardy slip before joining the assembly. So, hand in hand with my eight year old we went to the school office. I asked for an excused tardy slip. The school secretary handed me a small piece of blue paper and asked, “Why is she late?”

“She’s late because mom couldn’t get it all together this morning.” I answered.

“That’s not an excused tardy!” She snapped back, giving me a look that screamed, “Slacker mom!”

I felt my face heat up and I was angry. My thoughts were clear, “How in the world can you penalize a child for a parent’s mismanagement of time? She doesn’t drive. She can’t fly. How could she have gotten to school without me. She was ready to head out the door on time. However, I wasn’t.”

I looked at the secretary and asked, “Well then, what qualifies an excused tardy?”

Again sporting the same look of disdain, “A doctors appointment, something legitimate like that.”

I took a pen off the counter and filled out the excused tardy slip. When it asked why, I wrote, “Doctor’s appointment.” She was shocked. So was my daughter who has been told time and time again never to lie. I handed the slip to my daughter and in a genuinely nice voice told the secretary to have a nice day.

This afternoon when I picked the kid up at school we talked about the slip. I told her that some rules are unjust and this was one of them. I told her I felt badly about lying on the form, but I was not going to allow the system to penalize her (no recess for the day) for something beyond her control. She said to me, “Rules like the tardy rule make me think that the school doesn’t like kids.”

I replied, “I can see why you feel that way, the rule does not respect you and your rights as a child.”

We began talking about unjust rules and laws and that many of them need to be broken. We talked about Rosa Parks. We talked about San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and his response to the ban on same sex unions. We talked about the United States’ faulty immigration policy and illegal border crossings.

She’s questioning how the system works, just like Jesus did.

A Ring

A few days ago a small ad appeared in the Want-Ads of a local paper. The ad was simple, it said, “Ring found call to identify.” This morning when I opened the paper the front page of the local section had an article about this particular ring. Apparently the ring was a rather expensive wedding ring and the grief was quite profound to the woman who lost it. Also, the woman who found the ring was deeply concerned about returning the ring to its rightful owner. As a result, the ring was returned, much joy ensued and they made headline news.

The woman who lost her ring wrote the following, “My aunt prayed with me and told me that God loves me and knows my pain and that He has sent a Christian to find the ring and return it to me.”

It seems, from their perspective, that only a Christian would return a diamond ring. A Muslim, a Jew, an Atheist, a Buddhist, or really anyone that wasn’t Christian, wouldn’t be the type of person that would work to find the rightful owner of something precious.

The woman who returned the ring was in fact Christian (just like the overwhelming majority of people in the community), but she returned the ring because she was the kind of person who would return a ring. Did her Christianity make her more likely to find the owner of the ring? Maybe, Maybe not. Christianity doesn’t necessarily make a person good, it simply makes them a Christian.

Honesty, trustworthiness, kindness, love, compassion do not come from any religion, rather they come from the heart. Good happens in the world because people do good things, not because they follow any particular faith tradition.

Stagnant

I distract myself from things that I really want to do. If I was avoiding doing things I didn’t want to do, well, it would make more sense. But, these are things that I want to do, but seem to continually find reasons for not doing them.

I turn my attention, instead, to the internet, reading the newspaper, napping, going for walks, cooking elaborate recipes and doing “busy work.” These are tasks that are not moving me in the direction I wish to go, rather they are things, the minutiae that keep me in place. Still, I can’t seem to remove myself from their grasp, their hold on my life is stronger than I would like to admit. This all reminds me of Paul’s writing in Romans, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

What is it that runs much of what I do? I’m not exactly sure but I do know that when I start to push against “it,” with ideas of creativity and moving my life beyond the status quo, it pushes back. It makes dreams and desires seem unimportant, while the nap is the best I can do. It takes the fun out of most activities and labels them a waste of time. I sense it will do whatever it can to make sure that I do not carry out my creative ideas or even enjoy the life I am living.

What to do about all of this? I think, as in most things spiritual, the first step is awareness, knowing that this is how I have been conditioned to operate. I’ve been formed by society, by my upbringing and the structures in which I exist, to meet the norm, to stick with the way things “ought” to be, rather than moving toward a new kind of “could.” Seeing this is the first step to moving beyond it. Because it is hard to turn onto the road less traveled when all you see are the old sidewalk cracks beneath your feet.

The second step is walking beyond the conditioning. It is hearing the pleas for the naps, the extended surfing times, the myriad of distractions and simply letting them be. It is giving them no energy, no opposition, but also no agreement.

Paul asks, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” The answer for him was simply, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Center to Paul was Christ. Center for me is the breath. Center for some is god. Whatever you call it, it is your divinity that has the ability to transcend the limits that imprison you.

A proper God

God is a process, a phenomenon. Is the process natural? Is the process created by humankind? I really don’t know the answers to these questions. A part of me is perfectly okay with not knowing, because knowing isn’t all that important. In fact, as I’ve said before, true theology does not rejoice in knowing, it rejoices in seeking. Knowing may come, but it isn’t the goal.

However, I struggle with not capitalizing god. Yet I know as I go forward writing and reflecting on my faith, I want to stop capitalizing God. However, tradition runs hard, even for someone like me who is focused on recreating how a Christian life is understood and undertaken. Something looks wrong with that little “g,” it looses, it seems, its grandeur and magic. It becomes just another word in the sentence, rather than falling full force into the reading eye.

Yet, I also know that I cringe every time I capitalize God, because I know that god is not a proper noun. Making god a proper noun limits the meaning behind the symbol. It is like trapping all the mountains of the world into one single color snapshot. It takes your idea of god and my idea of god and assumes that they are exactly the same, that we are talking about the same proper God.

The argument I hear is that god must be capitalized to show respect and reverence. Do we capitalize the phenomenon of gravity? Do we turn the abstract notion of time into a proper noun? No. Yet, god is no more or less important than many improper nouns like these; nouns that have a direct bearing on how we carry out our daily living.

There is no proper God. There is only god.

Indefinitely Christian

Those speaking for Christianity, and those speaking against it, love to use the definite article. In fact, if I were to go back and reread many things I’ve written, I would suspect that I do the very same thing. It seems to come out something like this, “The Christian view of such and such….” I’m hear to tell you, and to remind myself, that there is no one Christian view.

It is often said, “Well, I don’t believe in the Christian God.” What is the Christian God? What defines it? What makes it so definite enough that it deserves a “the” before its capital G? If by “the” you mean the big white guy with the beard in the sky, then I’m sorry to say that many Christians I know don’t hold that view. If by “the” you mean a God that has a hand in how things come to play in our lives, I’d again have to tell you this view doesn’t fit all Christians. Simply, there is no one view that can sum up how God is understood from one end of Christendom to the other.

This same semantical play works for other theological and political statements as well. There is no one Christian view on Jesus, abortion, Christ, sex, communion, LGBT issues, afterlife, the death penalty, peace, war, evolution, marriage, guns…. It isn’t the monolithic structure that appears creeping out of newspapers, court cases, tomes decrying Christian faith and glossy television pulpits. It is infinitely multifaceted and to sum it up in a single “the” takes its beauty and turns it into a beast.

Past Three O'clock

I sung a song, as part of St. Olaf’s Manitou Singers, titled, “Past Three O’clock.” The song, an old English carole, is a Christmas piece about the birth of the christ child. Though I sung it nearly eighteen years ago, I still remember the melody and the strange winter magic that the composer captured in that particular arrangement. The song plays loud in my head this early morning as I look at the clock on my cell phone and see that it is just past three A.M..

Just past three A.M.. An hour when thieves seem to run my neighborhood streets stealing cars and breaking into homes. An hour that isn’t quite night, but isn’t quite morning. An hour that stretches long enough for murders to be undertaken, for cars to crash and babies to need feeding. An hour where the moon has set but the sun is far from rising. An hour, just like any hour, some would say. But it is for me, an hour that always seems to catch me off guard with how it holds my fears, my concerns and my deep desire to leave this life.

Am I talking about suicide? Not really. I am talking about the desire to leave the life I am living, Am I talking about packing up and changing towns, houses, jobs? Not really. I am talking about the quest for my soul, and how, somehow, I just can’t find it in this life. There is something tangible missing inside of me. This isn’t something I’ve lost, rather it is something that I have never had. This magical conglomeration of beauty, contentment, peace, groundedness has never been mine, rather it has been the grail that haunts my dreams.

My mind turns to, “Three O’clock Blues,” by B.B. King. It is nice to know that I am not alone in this hour. In fact, I am comforted to realize, through a quick search on iTunes, that the hour of three A.M. holds unlimited grief and longing within the hands of sixty minutes.

well now its three o' clock in the mornin’
and I can't even close my eyes
three o' clock in the mornin’
and I can't even close my eyes
can't find my baby
and I can't be satisfied

I think of the magi and their archetypal quest for the christ child. The myrrh, the incense, the golden nugget; everything is brought on the search. It all has to come because there is no other search like it and it takes everything to survive the journey. This isn’t the pursuit for just a swaddling clothed mewing human child. Rather, it is the all out expedition for the divinity within, the flash of creativity that started the world and the desire to know why your heart keeps beating.

A Declaration

My practice of Zen has finally turned how I hear the ancient writings of Christianity. Many years ago my traditional interpretations of scripture were dismantled, but I wasn’t able to reformulate them. Rather, they were a jumbled mess of, “I don’t believe.” However, now, without really trying to see the texts in a new way, the new ways are revealing themselves.

Theology is not stagnant, it is something that must remain in flux, or it is not theology. I expect to be amazed at the new ways that I see the text, the symbols and even the rituals of Christianity. If I stop being amazed, I have stopped being Christian. See, as I walked through traditional Christianity (or rather slogged through it), there was so little that touched me and allowed me to see the magic that existed within the act of living. Yet, with a theology in motion, the magic never ceases.

As I’ve turned my practice toward a tradition that is not my own, I see the world differently. Not only are the cities different, the cars, the trees, the people eating pretzels in the mall, but Christianity is different. I’m beginning to not only see through the suppositions, the certainties and the beliefs, but I’m able to let them go to be owned by someone else. As they’ve floated away, like a released red balloon, I have been gifted incredible space in which to create something new.

The echo that hits me each time I speak into this space is that, “Christianity is not what you think. It is something completely different.” Yet, the strange thing, for me, is that there is relatively no anxiety within this newly found place. I see not only potential, but the absolute necessity that the time has come for me to add my voice to the New Reformation.

Compassion

Years ago, for a wedding gift, I received a large framed copy of 1 Corinthians 13:4-13. This is the often quoted bible piece about love being patient and kind, not jealous, not boastful. I hung the gift in the bathroom for a number of years, right above the toilet. The colors matched the bathroom, and the bathroom, being a well visited place, was a good location in the house for a good message.

Paul’s writing to Corinth is about compassion; the kind of compassion that exists when awareness is brought to a situation. The love he speaks of is the compassion that is available when conditioning is not ruling the day. It is the compassion that exists when judgment (either good or bad) is not present. It is a tall order to experience this love or to show this love to ourselves, because we are socially conditioned to beat ourselves up, to try to change ourselves, to judge ourselves, to hate ourselves.

Compassion does not rejoice in wrong doing or even right doing, rather it rejoices in the truth. The truth is that compassion is the only thing that will not end, it is the only thing that passes on once our bodies have died. It is what observes the world without judgment. It is our true nature.

When we were children we knew this nature, we acted upon it, we rejoiced in it. Then social conditioning turned us into, “adults.” It helped us to become what society wanted us to become, not who we truly were. Therefore, we put an end to “childish ways,” and lost the magic of living.

Yet, even as adults, we still have within ourselves, burning brightly, the magic of who we truly are. But, like a dream that is hidden upon waking, you can’t quite catch its tail as it rounds a corner in your mind. You see it in a mirror dimly, but the reflection is fuzzy and it seems, well, almost unreal. Yet it is the most real thing that you have. It is the truth of who you are.

I may have prophetic powers. I may be brilliant and knowledgeable about intellectual things. I may lay claim to a faith that can move mountains. Yet, if I have given up my true nature, my compassion, my love, then I am nothing.

Interfaith

I just returned from attending the Earl Lectures and Pastoral Conference at Pacific School of Religion. The topic of the conference this year was interfaith work from the perspective of Christianity. I found the conference interesting because it raised more questions for me than answers.

I do not believe that interfaith work can truly happen from the context of a single religion. I cannot stand in my “Christianness” and claim to do interfaith work. I must move myself from that which makes me Christian, and stand in a different context, an interfaith context.

It is like a street with many houses, or even a settlement with many dwellings. Each dwelling is a religion. It contains within its walls the symbols, the history, the traditions, the spirituality and the beliefs that are known to those who hold title to that religion. Many religions have different perspectives and beliefs under one name, still the house holds all that which is attached to a particular faith system.

To be in an interfaith context I must walk out of the house of Christian, just as another must walk out of the house of Jew, Muslim or Buddhist. The area that exists outside of the specific symbols, rules and beliefs; the sidewalks, the driveways, the shared park down the street, becomes the new context for being religious. It is only when we move beyond our own doorways and meet in a community space can we enter the place of interfaith.

I do think, though, that there is something in each house that gets some of us out the door. I don’t know if the foundational belief to move beyond our own knowing is the same in every house, but each house has those that step down the stoops and leave comfortable couches and overstuffed chairs. In fact, maybe it is discomfort with the certainty of our home that pushes us outside.

There are Christians that would say we must stand in Christ to be in interfaith relationships or to enter into interfaith dialogue. I am not one of these Christians. Christian responsibility in an interfaith world requires that I must walk down from Calvary, leave its ominous shadow behind and turn into the bright fertile plain of something “all together” different.