Wed 26 Apr 2006
I am a member of the Session (governing board) of our small Presbyterian church, and our pastor, as a leadership and spiritual development exercise, asked us to identify some themes, images, or metaphors that are important to our understanding of Christian faith.
This isn’t a brief statement of personal faith - those kinds of writings are hopefully more well thought out than this is, but at the very least this identifies what are for me the important themes in my faith journey, the ideas that excite me, and the tensions that I struggle with - as illustrated by some central Biblical stories for me.
Aaron and the Golden Calf
We are idol-makers from way back, and we’re good at it. This is a constant theme in the Hebrew Testament writings - Israel as a “stiff-necked people” (Exodus 32), and I think a central habit of the human mind and heart. In our modern sophistication we no longer worship graven images, but rather raise up altars of “national security”, “decency and orderliness”, and “personal growth” to which we give our unconscious devotion and allegiance. We are no better in our churches sometimes, where we lift up the Bibleinstead of hearing its message, and even our notions of Jesus Christ,focusing on the man instead of the way that he pointed.
I think of us like my cat or a small child: you point, and they will look at your finger instead of what you are pointing at. We are like that as a people. Perhaps God is working, slowly and over a great span of time, to teach us to overcome this immaturity.
What I hope for in my own life is a deeper appreciation of God’s care for and presence in my life, and to trust God enough to no longer need those false sources of security. The call to Christian life requires a radical recentering of one’s life on God in the manner of Jesus Christ.
The Kingdom In Our Midst
Jesus says many times that the Kingdom of God is at hand, it is in our midst, it is all around us. I understand Jesus to mean that the Kingdom is a new kind of human consciousness, a way of seeing, thinking, living, and feeling that transforms the world. It is a reordering of allegiances, a returning of our hearts and our minds towards God (not Caesar or Mammon), and the living of it is both extraordinarily simple, and yet painfully complex in a world that requires us to choose seemingly on a moment by moment basis where to put our faith and our trust.
We say Jesus’ words from his first sermon every week in our charge (”The Spirit of God is upon us.”). How do we find the Kingdom? By doing what Jesus did: preaching goods news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, receiving of sight to the blind, to free the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Jubilee. And in Jesus’ way of speaking, to say was to do.
Lazarus
The story of Lazarus (John 11) has always moved me deeply, particularly because of John 11:35 “Jesus wept.” It’s the shortest verse in the entire Bible, and perhaps says the most about Jesus, and by extension, about God.
God, who in the person of Jesus lived intimately with his family and community of friends and followers, suffers with us. God mourns with our losses. God knows our pain, our sorrow, and our death. God weeps.
And God calls us forth from our tombs. In the story, Lazarus is really raised from the dead. God brings real comfort, real renewal, and real resurrection. In the midst of seemingly utter finality God brings something new. So it was with Lazarus, so it was with Jesus, and so it is with us.
Also here we see the costly discipleship that Jesus calls us to. For it is the raising of Lazarus that prompts Caiaphas and company to, for fear of Roman retribution at the potential disturbance of the social order, to plot against Jesus life, and ultimately to have him condemned to death as a political criminal. So too our discipleship as followers of the risen (and raising!) Christ may be risky and costly. We must, at the least, risk the death of the life that we know and cling to in order to allow God to create something new in us and in the world.
April 26th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
For me, the image of the New Jerusalem and the realized eschatology of Quakerism joined to create in me a similar sense of another reality being just a half-step out of phase from where we are. Sometimes I’ve had glimpses of being there and here at the same time; more often I’ve been aware that there is, well, just right over there; and most often, of course, I go through life all-too-unaware.
April 26th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
“A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees. ‘If you are willing, you can make me clean.’ Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. ‘I am willing.’ he said. ‘Be clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured.” (Mark 1:40-42)
Two things are noteworthy about this passage: 1) Before even uttering a word, Jesus touched the man. 2) To touch a leper was against the Mosaic Law code.
For Christians this may perhaps illustrate two points:
1) Willingness is useless without action; a desire to help and do good must be accompanied by engaging our neighbors, even (if not especially) the “sick” ones. In this day and age we cannot cure people with a touch, but we certainly can aid them in their inward healing by reaching out to them AND listening, which was actually Jesus’ very first act of love and compassion in this circumstance.
2) Like Jesus violating God’s law, sometimes exercising love and compassion requires us to cross boundaries, shun constraints, or otherwise break through (or out of) dogmatic barriers that society or modern-day Pharisees would put up and self-righteously defend.
So perhaps, for Christians, that’s the answer to “how” one goes about fulfilling the Christian life.
Just a thought.
April 26th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
And a very good one, at that. Thanks for commenting.
April 26th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
A comment from a friend at Session tonight, who noted that it was interesting in my comments above about idolatry of the Bible that I used the Bible as my source of authority.
See my post on Pagel’s “Gnostic Gospels” book and the questions about the sources of religious authority. This question is definitely something that is present in my mind these days.
April 26th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
Using the Bible to make a point about idolatry is a far cry from idolatry “of” the Bible.
In fact according to the Bible, God himself at times used graven images for his people to “put faith in” (so to speak) in order to stress a point and achieve a desired result.
See Numbers 21:8.
Idolatry is only idolatry when the heart makes it so. (compare Colossians 3:5)