Apophatica

When I was living in Japan, I would often attend the Buddhist temple that my father-in-law attended.  I gleaned a lot of good insight and in fact learned how to be a better Christian there.  How’s that for irony?  We would occasionally have special guests come and talk to us and on one such occasion a priest and professor came from Otani University in Kyoto.  I will never forget what he said.  He explained that a tadpole will naturally become a frog; however, a human child will not naturally become a humane human being.  A human must intentionally exhibit love, compassion, and empathy in order to consider him or herself a humane human being.  Before we perform any action or utter any word, we must consider the effect that it will have on those around us. This, he told us, is what it means to be enlightened.  This is what it means to be a Buddha.

When I heard this explanation I let it roll around in my head for a while as I pondered it imagining that there was some great significance until it eventually sunk into my heart – Eureka!  This is what it means to be more Christ-like!  This is the essence of being Christian!  When we are able to shed our attachments to a level that we are actually capable of considering another before ourselves every time we do something, then not only will be a living example of the love that Jesus taught, but we will also necessarily experience God so much more deeply as Jesus also taught.

Now, as I use the word “attachment”, I realize that I have to be cautious and clear about what I mean.  In the traditional Buddhist definition, an attachment is something that we create that leads to suffering.  For example, if I am getting off work after a rough day, I might think of how great it will be to get home, pop the top off of a cold one (whatever a “cold one” is in your definition), and watch a ball game.  The day has been rough, but with that cold one and ball game in mind, I can make it all better.  In fact, I equate those things with happiness.  So, I am driving home and I get stuck in traffic.  I get upset because they are getting in the way of me and my happiness.  I may start to road rage or at the very least just have a very stressful drive.  Sound familiar?  How many attachments in our lives do we create that just make us suffer?  Wealth?  Power?  Our own image of bodily perfection?

The desert fathers and mothers of the early church recognized how much these attachments and distractions could interfere with our experience of God.  Certainly there was persecution that they were running from and they against the eventual marriage of church and state as a viable form of spirituality, but mostly, many engaged in the practice of Hesychasm – a form of solitude where practitioners could encounter God in spiritual disciplines.  The Hesychasts realized that our attachments could lead to temptations, because, after all, if we are not attached to something it cannot tempt us.  So, through the practice of spiritual disciplines, they sought detachment which led to less temptations, which led to a stronger and deeper experience of God.

Jesus realized this also.  We often look at Jesus’s temptations as a malevolent being trying to take advantage of Jesus when he is at his weakest point.  He’s hungry, he’s apparently hopeless, and assumedly feeling powerless.  I think such a reading doesn’t really do justice to the story or to its point.  I don’t think that Jesus was weak at this point.  I think he was strong because he was in solitude and fasting.  He practicing spiritual disciplines out away from the distractions and all he had to contend with was his own mind.  Sometimes it’s our own wandering thoughts that are our biggest enemy.  Look at that beautiful car, I’d be happy if I had that!  Look how much money they have, man, if I was loaded like that I would never have to worry about a thing!  It must be nice to have so much power.  I could do whatever I want if I had that kind of power!

Jesus goes away from these things and finds himself able to overcome these temptations.  Jesus became quite popular with the people and many of them wanted to make him king.  He could have easily claimed power and riches for himself, but that wasn’t what he was about.  Because he was intentionally seeking God in all things, he found himself able to overcome the temptations when they were thrown at him.  Jesus doesn’t, however, say that overcoming attachments and the temptations that they lead to will be easy.  Just ask the disciples.  One rebuke followed another when the disciples were seeking power and prestige for themselves at the right hand of Jesus.  As we saw last week in the transfiguration story, Peter especially is always getting himself in trouble because of his attachments even though Jesus constantly keeps pointing the way toward God.

I wonder what it would look like if we followed Jesus’s example.  I wonder what it would feel like if we intentionally sought solitude and centered ourselves while shedding our attachments.  It would probably lead to less temptation.  Imagine that we aren’t as phased and stressed by the things that life throws at us and when things don’t go our way we just roll with it.  Imagine if we weren’t constantly looking ahead to some time in the future when things will be alright and we take what we have and say it is alright right now.  Why don’t we take these 40 days of Lent and start own own journey into the wilderness to find solitude and find God?

Imagine the renewal that would take place in ourselves and in the entire church if we were at such peace that we didn’t have to say “I’ll be happy when I get that bonus, or when this is done or that is done, or I get this or that,” but instead say “I am not going to let myself be attached to those things.  Instead I am going to sit right here and appreciate, recognize, focus, and experience the fact that I am in the presence of God.”

My daughter is quite a simple human being.  If you smile at her, she will smile back.  If you laugh at her or sing to her, usually she will laugh or sing back.  When she is hungry, she cries.  When she is full, she sleeps.  When she thinks she’s alone she gets anxious and when she realizes we are near, she is at peace.  She sees the world as being full of endless possibility and accepts it as it is in all of her, and its, simplicity.

I haven’t asked her, but to the best of my knowledge, she does not lie there and ponder why my wife is feeding her or with what motives we smile at her.  I doubt she calculates the probability and timing of her next feeding and assesses our characters based upon how often she is fed.  Instead, she encounters us and the rest of the world around her in wide-eyed amazement, accepting life as it comes along.

Unfortunately, though, at some point in her life, she will do as the rest of us do.  Somewhere along the way she will lose this ability to appreciate life and to see the world with eyes of simplicity and gratitude.  At some point, we all begin to feel the need to make sense of everything and start to put everything in to its own logical category.  Thinking about this made me realize that rarely ever is theology actually done.

I realized at some point in seminary that I was not actually studying theology, but rather the history of other people’s theology.  We were given the categories and options and asked to choose which one fit us best.  While saying that we were free to choose, the professor would inevitably nudge us ever so gently in a particular direction lest we should go astray.  But rarely if ever were we asked how we encounter God and where.

This may be an overstatement, but I am hard pressed to find any place in the New Testament where Jesus described God.  There are plenty of places where he talks about experiencing God, but none where he gives a theological treatise on the existence of God.  Jesus set an example that was experiential that embraced the closeness of God.

It didn’t take the early church long to start pushing God away.  As human beings we have a great fear and dis-ease around mystery, so we feel compelled to explain everything.  How can Jesus be God, the Holy Spirit be God, and God be God when we are monotheists who only believe in one God?  Oh, well let me tell you about this formula I came up with.  We’ll call it the trinity.  How can God be good, but if God is the creator of all, then doesn’t that mean God also created evil?  Let me figure that one out.  I’m not at all saying that we shouldn’t think.  We should!  There is definitely a time and place for thought and reflection.  But we keep on coming up with ideas (some old and some new) to understand God and make sense of who and what God is.  In doing so, all we do is push God farther and farther away out of the realm of possibility for a genuine encounter.  We make that which is to be experienced at the very depths of our being into a mere cognitive theory.

Recently, one of the regular attendees of The Crossing handed me a book.  She said, “This is for you.  It’s Father Moon’s formula for the Original Principle of the Divine Substance and the existence of God.”  I smiled kindly and told her thank you.  But in my mind I was wondering, “Are we humans really that presumptive to assume that we can reduce the essence of all of existence to a single formula?  Are we so deluded that we think we can build a logical shelter to contain God for the benefit of our own understanding?

Peter tried to do that.  Rather than be astounded and silenced by the fact that he was standing in the presence of God, during the transfiguration he basically says, “This is great that we’re all gathered here!  Let’s build some little tabernacles for you holy folk to memorialize this event. Let’s concretize this so that we can come back and ponder on it later.”

We could sit and try to figure out what happened that day.  We could study the text carefully and consider in its context and judge the validity and facticity of the statements made in it.  Were they really on a mountain or even a hill?  Were Elijah and Moses actually physically standing there with them?  I don’t think it matters.  Elijah had encountered God on a mountain.  Remember that in 2 Kings?  He went up the mountain and there was a wind and fire and God was in neither.  Instead, God was in the sound of sheer silence.  Or what about Moses?  Westyn just read to us that in Exodus Moses climbed a mountain and after encountering God was aglow from the experience.  Now Peter and the others are on the mountain or wherever they are with Jesus and Peter is told “This is the one who knows how to experience me.  Be quiet for a change and just listen.  Don’t talk, don’t conjecture, don’t make up formulas, just be still and aware that you are in the presence of God.”

The next day, when they head back to be with the others they are met with a crowd.  A frantic man who seems to understand more than even the disciples meets Jesus and begs him to heal his son who is having some sort of fit.  A demon?  Epilepsy?  Some mental disorder?  We don’t know.  It’s not important.  What matters is that Jesus heals the boy in some way that we don’t even need to try explaining.  Being so close to God, having encountered the God of creation and been set aglow by the experience, Jesus is able to calm this boy in a way that none other could.

But Jesus is upset.  Not at the man for coming to him, but at the disciples for not doing anything.  “I begged them to cast out the demon, but they couldn’t do it,” the boy’s father said.  In the beginning of chapter nine in Luke, Jesus had commissioned the disciples and told them that they too could heal.  He told them that they too could do the things that he was doing.  But like Peter, they were too busy panicking, too busy trying to figure out what to do, too busy with their ideas to realize that an encounter with God and the amazing effects that come with it were right there at their fingertips.

In Celtic Christianity it is believed that there are places where the veil between this world and the world of the sacred is thin.  Barbara Brown Taylor says that “thin places are those places on this earth where the veil between this world and the next is so sheer that it is easy to step through.”  Although these thin places can be out in nature with beautiful scenery all around, she says “But thin places aren’t always lovely places, and they’re not always outdoors.  Hospital rooms can be thin places.  So can emergency rooms and jail cells.  A thin place is any place that drops you down to where you know you’re in the presence of the Really Real—the Most Real—God.”

I would imagine that each of us can recall at least one time where we were somewhere or doing something and we suddenly became aware that we were in the presence of the sacred or standing on sacred ground.  I’m sure we have all been to a thin place where the hairs on our neck and arms stand up on end and we just can’t explain, but we take it in and enjoy the presence of God rather than think of it.

When I was in college, I was learning so much about the Bible and what people thought about God that it kind of shook up my faith.  I still remember when my wife was pregnant with Westyn, the professor congratulated me and said, “See?  In those ultra sounds can’t you see proof that God exists?”  I told him no.  The other day my wife said that she couldn’t believe that Selah was nothing before the cells that came together and grew formed her and she was eventually born.  Although I realize that he was using the existence of babies to prove the existence of God, I came to understand what my professor was saying even if he didn’t mean it this way.  Cradling a baby who is so much more aware than we of the simplicity, yet amazing wonder of this creation is to be in a thin place.

The thin places are everywhere.  We don’t have to build a tabernacle on the mountain to commemorate an experience.  We don‘t have to figure out just the right formula to be in the presence of God, but instead, we can find God even right here by merely listening and being aware of the presence of our creator.  We can have an encounter with the divine that will set us aglow and make us feel like we have been to the mountaintop right here – even down here in the valley.

In 1972, Bruce Anderson arrived at Fort Hood after a tour in Vietnam.  He was from Toledo and went outside of the base to a nearby gas station to see if he could get a ride.  A man named Larry Johnson was a traveling salesman who happened to be gassing up at the station and upon seeing the approaching young man in an army uniform carrying a duffel bag asked where he was headed.  Anderson replied that he was heading home to Toledo and Johnson said he could get him as far as Chicago.

As they headed northeast, Bruce, who was a devout Christian, kept feeling a nudge to tell Larry about his faith.  He kept fighting it because he didn’t want to upset his ride and wasn’t sure how his kind driver would take it.  Finally, at about St. Louis, Bruce began to talk about his faith with Larry and explained to him that Jesus had died for his sins and by simply believing in the fact he could avoid hell and have eternal life. After about an hour, Larry pulled over the car and the two prayed.  Larry dedicated his life to Christ there on the side of that highway.

Larry dropped Bruce off at the bus station in Chicago and left to make the short drive home.  Roughly five years later Bruce was in Chicago on business and decided to look Larry up.  With a name like Larry Johnson, he wouldn’t have been easy to find, but Bruce remembered that he said he lived in the Western Roger’s Park area of Chicago.  Bruce parked his car across the street from the simple brown brick bungalow and trudged up the sidewalk and steps to the front door.  A tired looking woman came to the door and after Bruce asked for Larry, the woman informed him that she had been Bruce’s wife.  Bruce had been killed in a car accident not far from home on his way back from a business trip to Texas.

Bruce’s widow invited Larry in for tea and he explained that Bruce had given him a ride from Texas and dropped him off at the bus station on that fateful day.  He explained how Bruce had pulled over the car on the highway outside of St. Louis and given his life to Christ.  The widow began to weep and said that she could finally have peace because she had always been trying to get Bruce to accept the gospel.  Finally, at the bidding of a stranger, he had accepted his Lord and Savior as his own before meeting his death.

Phew!  Thank goodness.  I hope that in hearing this story not too many of you are feeling moved.  This story didn’t happen.  It’s a made up tale on a website on the internet for pastor’s to find sermon illustrations.  Apparently when you’re not preaching what Jesus actually said, you have to find cute little made up stories to make your point.  It’s a terrible example of what the church calls the gospel.  It may have happened in some form or another at some time or another, but it didn’t happen like this.  Neither did the gospel, not the church’s version anyway.  This story is supposed to be a warm fuzzy example of someone being saved by the gospel.  But it isn’t.  If we are to go along with what the church has painted as the gospel over the centuries, then Jesus is the most divisive, condemning person who ever walked the face of the earth.  And I’m here to tell you he’s NOT!  As a matter of fact, when Jesus read from Isaiah 61:1-2, he purposely left out the last part of verse two – “and the day of vengeance of our God”.  See?  That wasn’t Jesus’ message.  He intentionally shows that condemnation is NOT his game.  The idea that everyone has to believe one specific way wasn’t and still isn’t the gospel.

It is no accident that Jesus starts off his ministry with this speech.  He comes and tells people what he has come to proclaim, not do.  And then, the funny or sad thing, depending on how we want to look at it, is that Jesus says “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  Nope.  It wasn’t.  Yes, in one way he was saying that the reading of this scroll fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy, but two thousand years later the church has forgotten what the gospel is and is preaching a warped version.  This is not to say that all churches are this way, but one doesn’t have to go far to find Christians who think that John 3:16-18 is the gospel.  Well, ain’t that good news?  So, the church is left making stories like the one that I told to make the gospel what it means – good news.

Imagine with me, if you will, that the church one day decides it’s going to rediscover the gospel and be honest about what it means.  Imagine that the church takes Jesus seriously when he says that the kingdom of God is within us.  Everything that Jesus teaches points to us doing things.  When I was hungry, you fed me.  When I thirsted, you have me drink.  These 5,000 people are hungry?  You feed them.  Seriously.  Just take a moment to imagine hundreds of thousands of churches with billions of members actually doing the gospel as Jesus described it.  This means that the gospel is a verb.  It’s about the doing, not about the believing.

In my typical sermonic form, this would be the spot where I insert an illustration of what the gospel according to Jesus would look like.  I was going to tell a true story about someone who actually brought freedom to the oppressed, release to the captives, sight to the blind or good news to the poor.  There are in fact many stories like this, but I don’t think Jesus said and did what he did just for us to sit around and talk about them.  So I’m not going to give an example.  Instead, let’s go out and make some stories of our own.  Not fake ones to match up with a fake version of the gospel, but real ones to reflect the real gospel based on acts that we actually do.

I still have faith that some churches are starting to get it.  I maintain hope because some churches, like this one, are willing to go straight to the horse’s mouth, so to speak, and find what the gospel really is.  I am convinced that some day we will wake up and realize that the Kingdom of God has come, not because of some supernatural or cataclysmic event, and not because the church decided to agree on a particular view of Jesus, but because the church decided to take Jesus seriously and start doing the gospel instead of arguing about what it is.

I’m glad to be back at blogging!  Over Christmas, a kind person whom I will not name at this point took it upon herself to hack several accounts including this one.  She deleted the blog, but luckily WordPress was able to recover it.  So, between the hacking, harassing phone calls and emails, and a bunch of other stuff, I have just let the Attorney General deal with things.  Because this person is out of state, most of her crimes are federal.  According to the AG, she currently has 87 counts against her with separate sentences including harassment, cyber crime, hacking, cyber stalking, etc.  The calls are all forwarded directly to the AG’s office, so I’m not sure if she’s still calling.  Each call is a separate charge.  They have also been working with the FBI (since they are interstate crimes) and apparently even with the IRS.  They won’t give me any info on that since it doesn’t relate to me.

So . . . I’m left with the conundrum of either pressing charges or turning the other cheek.  The AG says we should wait and see if she keeps harassing to get the maximum charges, but I do have a soft spot that feels sorry for her.  Anyone who would waste their time in such a fashion instead of using their time to better themselves or the world must have issues.  Without any sarcasm whatsoever, I do hope that she can find some better meaning in life and be able to enjoy her family more often.  In the meantime, there is always the statute of limitations . . .  Hopefully she will just leave me alone and we can go on with our lives doing the things in the world that we are supposed to.

Many of us will be greatly disappointed on December 26th.  The fog of Christmas and the blinding that comes from Christmas lights will fade away and we will be able to see.  We will see that things are the same as they were a few days before and we will wonder.  We will wonder why every year we anticipate, commemorate, celebrate the birth of hope into the world only to find that nothing changes.  Sure, we will have those who will make the concerted effort to be less abrasive over the holidays, but once the Christmas cheer has worn off it will be business as usual.  And then we will feel let down.  We will feel that somehow we have been shafted or maybe even lied to.  We will ask ourselves where this great hope is and what the point is of celebrating this false expectation.  We may even start to think about the story itself and become cynical wondering how anyone can believe in such a story anyway.  Then we will sit in this mindset until advent next year when we start to tell ourselves again, just maybe.  Maybe this time things will be different . . .

A few days ago I told my oldest son that we were going to the Hanover Park Community Center to hand out food and toys to the underprivileged children and he got mad.  My youngest was asking me if he could go and was excited to do it, but my oldest wanted to sit and play video games and was upset that I dare interrupt his game time with something as mundane as handing out stuffed animals.  How dare I?  I told him it was ok, he didn’t have to go.  I would just tell Jay that he had better things to do than help children who were less fortunate than him.  He threw down his controller and said “FINE!” and went along begrudgingly.

When we arrived I gave him a bag of stuffed animals and stepped back to watch.  His eyes got bigger and bigger as these children, some barely walking and some older than him, had their faces lit up as they received gifts that they could not have otherwise received.  Mothers and fathers sat with tears in their eyes as their children were given a Merry Christmas that they could not afford to provide.  More than once my eyes welled up with tears.  When it was time to leave we ran through the snow that had started to fall heavily and jumped into the car to get warm.  I heard a voice from the back seat.  “Did you see that?  Did you see how happy they were?  Those cute little kids were so happy with things that I wouldn’t even think of.  Wow.  We really are lucky.  You were right dad.  That was a lot better than playing video games.”

It sure is funny how pleased we can be with things that aren’t what we expected.  But we can also be pretty disappointed when we expect something out of misunderstanding and it never comes.  I wonder if this is what we have done with the Christmas story.  Jesus is born under a time of great oppression.  A time when the Jews felt that God had become far from them.  It was also near the winter solstice – the longest night of the year.  Wow, what imagery!  Into the darkest night comes the brightest light . . .  Immanuel, God with us.  The word, the light had come to dwell among humankind.  What if these scriptures are trying to tell us something?  What if Jesus was trying to tell us and remind us of a great truth that we completely misunderstood and as a result led to great disappointment and hopelessness?

Isaiah 9 says “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who liven in a land of deep darkness – on them a light has shined. . . For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, has been broken.”  And so we wait.  We wait for this to come true.  We wait with great expectation for the day when bad things don’t happen anymore and the burden upon our shoulders – life, death, debt, loss, sickness, hunger – is finally lifted.  We wait and wonder why Jesus doesn’t hurry up and do something and how can God be cruel enough to make us wait like this.  But what if, just what if we missed something very important?

John 1 tells us that the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness did not overcome it.  Jesus carried the light of God.  The spark of the divine.  The kingdom of God.  What if Jesus actually meant it when he said “the kingdom of God is within you.”  What if John 1 is telling us that Jesus showed the way for us to realize that we, too, have the spark of the divine within us?  After all, we are told that we are made in the image of God.  What if Jesus meant it when he said “go and do as I have done.”  WHAT IF, the whole time Jesus was telling us that, as carriers of the light of God, that we can actually bring hope to life and that this is the meaning of the Christmas story – when our world is in darkness, sadness, great need and oppression, a child of God is born as a light to the world and that great light is in each of us.  Perhaps by this understanding we can see that we need not be disappointed on December 26th, but instead should rejoice and sing because God is truly with us and working in and through us!  Then again, that would mean that we have a lot of work to do . . . I think we can handle it.  Let us experience great joy to the depths of our souls in knowing that regardless how bad life gets, no matter how much we endure, no matter how heavy the burden, God is with us and we do not have to bear the burden alone.  Let us so let our light shine among humankind that a new hope is restored and that EVERY day we can say unto us a child is born, unto us a child is given.”

Many couples that I encounter when I am doing weddings and many people in society that I chat with tell me that they consider themselves “spiritual, but not religious.”  It is easy to hear such a self-categorization and take it as a cop-out of sorts.  It sounds like an excuse not to go to church and that is often how we in the church take it.  We are very quick and ready to accuse such people of being irreverent heathens.  But what does it really mean to be spiritual?  What does it mean to be religious?

In my own mind, I equate religion with church buildings, mosques, synagogues, temples, and the like.  I associate it with the rituals and practices of organized sacred institutions and the list of creeds and beliefs that we subscribe to.  Spirituality, on the other hand, seems to me more equatable with the search for or awareness of the divine.  In other words, I would opine that spirituality is the encounter of the sacred and religion is the material remnant that is created to commemorate those encounters.  If this is the case, then Abraham Heschel’s quote about religion (one of many) makes perfect sense to me:

“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion–its message becomes meaningless.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

If Heschel is correct here, then the post-modern individual’s rejection of religion should come as no surprise.  We have numerous choices to find religion.  There are literally hundreds of churches and other places of worship in any area that we live in, but to today’s society, this is not good enough.  It is not what they are looking for.  So what is it they are looking for?  I think first and foremost we need to ask and have the discussion.  This time, it is the Church’s turn to listen.  For millennia the Church has been giving decrees and telling folks the way it’s gonna be, but isn’t it time that the church start listening to culture for a change?  I plan to have this discussion at my church very soon.

In the meantime, however, I have some idea of what is happening here.  At my own seminary (Northern Theological Seminary) most people are evangelical and set in their beliefs.  On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be much searching.  At other seminaries that I have had the opportunity to study at, however, it is another story entirely.  Surely there are those who are already “convinced” that their beliefs are correct and feel no reason or inclination to seek.  I have encountered many people recently, however, who are in seminary and mentioned that they have been Buddhist, Jewish, Episcopalian, UCC, Southern Baptist, etc.  Sometimes this is one person undergoing all of these conversions!  Are these people just fickle and ridiculous?  Perhaps.  But I would rather think that they are searching for something profound that they don’t seem to be able to find.  Namely – God.

I don’t think that it is too unrealistic to see that, in many cases, the Church has divorced religion from spirituality at the expense of pushing rituals and doctrines that must be entertained at the intellectual (or not) level, but have not left room for a true encounter with the divine.  What would it look like if we had a genuine discussion with the “spiritual, but not religious” and then actually did something with what we learned?  What if we not only “allow” folks to be spiritual, but help and guide them in the process?  Perhaps, then, we could reconnect the spiritual aspects with the religious aspects once again giving meaning to the Church?  Then again, we could just stick with the status quo.  Let’s not forget though that like the old proverb says – if we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.

In a Zen koan that is attributed to the 9th century Buddhist master Lin Chi, it is said if a Buddhist meets the Buddha on the road, he or she should kill him.  Other versions of this story take place with a conversation where the master is teaching the student a valuable lesson.  What lesson is it?  The master teaches his student that whatever conceptions one has of the Buddha, they are wrong and as a result they impede the path to enlightenment.  If the practitioner’s mind is wrapped around a particular view of Buddha and his teachings, then all other possibilities become impossibilities.  This is no different in the Christian church when we consider the person of Jesus.

In a church that is united under one central figure I am constantly baffled by how dividing Jesus is.  I obviously do not think that Jesus intentionally created division in what would become the Christian church, but the beliefs that we hold result in division.  If we view Jesus as the savior of the world who was God in human form and hold that any other view is condemnable, then we miss out on the possibility of Jesus being a mystic who was deeply in touch with God.  We say that it is our goal as Christians to be Christ-like, but when we attempt this by embodying the love and compassion that Jesus had, we are accused of turning Jesus in to a mere principle.  In doing so, we are accused of removing the hope that Jesus brought as “true God of true God”.  (Admittedly, if we make Jesus in to a simple revolutionary or a radical mystic, we miss out on the beauty and other possibilities of who Jesus was or could have been.)

Where though, I ask, is the hope for the common person if we lose sight of Jesus as a mystic deeply in touch with God?  If Jesus was God, then what was so exceptional about his relationship with God?  We are left then with only waiting in anticipation for this God-man to return and redeem the fallen world and save us from ourselves.  If, however, Jesus was a human who got so in touch with God so as to have divine knowledge revealed to him, then there is hope that we too can have such a connection with God.  If Jesus was a mystic who was awakened to the fact that God dwells within humankind and the possibility exists to be in touch with that God and embody the God-like, ultimate good traits of love, compassion, and respect, then the kingdom of God can be made real right here among us.  Jesus himself said that “the kingdom of God is within you” and “the kingdom of God is among you”.  How heretical is it, then, to think that Jesus was trying to tell us something quite profound here – namely that we, too, can commune with God and bring hope to reality as a result of this interaction with the divine?

Many have criticized those like H. Richard Niebuhr who opined that we cannot possibly know all truth and that truth is subjective.  Theologians such as John Howard Yoder accuse such people of not committing to the true meaning of the gospel.  But what if Jesus really was human and yet somehow divine?  Would that just be too much of an uncomfortable mystery that we feel the need to explain away?  Many of us do adhere to belief in the trinity, after all.  What can be more confusing than this age-old attempt at putting our intellectual tension at ease?  What would it look like to admit that none of us have all of the answers?  What might we be missing out on to state that Jesus must have been one particular “thing” and those who do not accept this are in grave danger?  Jesus?  A mystery?  Maybe we can get some more insight by doing what he did and exploring other views of who he was instead of arguing that we already have all the answers.  What a concept . . .  As we enter the Advent season, the time is ripe for such discussions.

I’m a Christian and unapologetically so.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does.  I am showing all of my cards here, but I think it’s appropriate now.

I was listening to NPR as an author was explaining how she had left the Catholic church decades ago and considered herself an atheist, but still wished that she had faith.  I have had many conversations with atheists and have considered myself one at different points in my life.  After leaving the church for about five years when I was living in Japan and going to a Buddhist temple, I eventually came to realize that I didn’t have to throw away my faith and have nothing to do with the church.

Today, I would say that atheists have more faith than I do.  I often hear them rallying against God and saying what a jackass God is.  I find this ironic.  Doesn’t the very meaning of atheism point to the complete disbelief in a deity?  If this is the case, then how can an atheist think that God is a jerk?  I’m just sayin’ . . .  So, what do I mean by saying that atheists have more faith than I do?  I certainly do not mean to say that atheists are bad or wrong or to degrade them in any way.  In fact, I find that I have more in common with them when it comes to belief than I do many Christians.  Many atheists that I encounter though, are either very upset with God or are sure that there is no God.  If one is sure of anything then there is no need for faith.  I would rather call myself an agnostic because I do not know any answers or what is true or not, but I have faith.  This faith does not give me a sense of false confidence that I am correct in my beliefs, but rather lets me accept the fact that God is a mystery and that I can find peace amidst that tension.

To me, the matter of God or God’s existence or non-existence is an issue of semantics.  Many atheists have rallied more against the Church than they have against God.  Ironically, though, they have accepted the Church’s antiquated definition of God.  The God that many atheists rally against is the God the church created in its own image, not necessarily the real God.  Unfortunately, many people do not realize that not every Christian believes that there is a sadistic father-like deity that sits on a throne above the clouds and just waits for the chance to send someone to the fires of hell if they do not accept accept the son that he sent to save us from our terrible misdeeds.  Those who hold fast to this view of God are the loudest and therefore, the rest of us let them define who God is.

Take the Bible for example.  Some believe that it is a literal document that is the 100% inerrant word of God.  I don’t think so.  I do, however, still believe that the Bible is one of the most important documents ever written.  I see the Bible as a compilation of perceptions of God at different times in history for specific people and cultures for specific issues.  I think it is dangerous to apply the Bible literally to every situation.  Some churches have attempted to do this and warned that if we do not accept their interpretations then we are going to face God’s wrath.  I think we can still keep the Bible as a great book that contains great insight and great wisdom and even still call it a “divine” book without accepting it as literal.

One goal of the United Church of Christ in a recent vision statement is to become “theologically conversant”.  I like this idea.  I think if we start bringing theology to the lay level and not being afraid to discuss things without assuming that we have all the answers, we can learn a lot from one another.  Those who have left the church or thrown God away may come to realize that some of us believe that God is inside us, in nature, mysterious, mystical, inexplicable, and evolutionary and that the loudest voice is not necessarily the most representative of the belief of the masses.

So, what about the matter of semantics?  What the Buddhist calls nothingness and the great reality within that is the essence of the universe, I call God.  What the atheist calls forces of nature that create through evolution, I call God.  What the humanist calls the innate ability that is at the very core of our existence to know the difference between right and wrong, I call God.  Do we have to accept the picture of God that was painted by the Constantinian church millennia ago for a specific agenda?  I don’t think so.  I think we are free to discuss who and what we think God is and in doing so, the church just might become relevant again.  Maybe the church could be a place where we do what is right for one another and help each other when in need.  Maybe we can get to a point where we are not so vehement about defending what we believe, but can be more focused on doing what is right.  Ok, I’ll shut up now.  You can find more of my rants on “traditional” religion and the like at other places in this blog.

Want to get involved in that kind of discussion where nobody assumes they have all the “truth” and answers and isn’t out to convert anyone to a specific belief system?  Then join us at the Schaumburg Theology Pub or at The Crossing.

A few days ago I was perusing the youth books at Target for a birthday gift.  I picked one up and and was thumbing through it when I found a tract inside the book.  The tract was a “friendly” reminder that, without Jesus, we are headed for eternal fire without a single drink of water.  Awww, it gives me the warm fuzzies.

It occurred to me, as it has many times, that we sometimes have a very unhealthy view of God.  We have created a God that is angry and vengeful that would just as soon send us to hell as to look at us.  Most of this is based on how we interpret the Bible.  We read it as if it were a transcribed account of God’s dictation.  I think it’s helpful to remember that the Bible was written by humans about God, not the other way around.  This is not to say that I don’t think that the Bible is inspired.  Just read some of the Psalms or other parts of the Bible and one can readily see where God has touched humans and inspired us to things that we could not have possibly conceived on our own.

So, what am I saying?  I am proposing that we learn from our Jewish antecedents and start wrestling with God again.  Jacob was blessed for wrestling with God.  Abraham bargained with God.  Moses called God out when God wanted to wipe out the Israelites.  What about us?  Christianity has taken the God of the Israelites and made God out to be a vengeful megalomaniac who is unconcerned with the welfare of the created order and those who struggle within it.  God conveniently only exists for some when needed to keep another in line as seen in the tract I mentioned.  How sad is this?

We have created a box for our angry God and placed this deity inside and put a pretty bow on it never to be let out.  What if we talked back to God and wrestled with our Creator to find out who this deity really is.  What if we quit relying on how others thousands of years ago have described God and actually started experiencing God.  Leonard Bernstein has some wonderful lyrics in his Third Symphony showing what such a spoken struggle might look like.  What’s the worst that can happen?  Is God going to get angry with us?  I don’t think so.  That would be hypocritical.  Instead, I would opine that it is in the struggling and wrestling with God that we really get to know and experience God.

When a person has Alzheimer’s Disease, it is generally believed that there is a lack of amylase, an enzyme that breaks down proteins in the brain.  The proteins therefore build up on the dendrites and cause what they cause plaques and tangles.  This results in a short circuiting of neurochemical transmission leaving the person confused and unable to recall memories.  Doctors try very hard with different medications to slow this process, if not reverse it.  Family and friends, however, are more focused on another task – namely, “getting through” to their loved one.  They look for some sign that the patient is hearing and understanding them.  I like to think of this as the God in me communicating with the God in you.  Here’s why:

When I was about 10 years old, my great-grandfather was in the nursing home in the end stages of Alzheimer’s.  He could not recognize anyone and the few words that he could say made no sense.  I would sit by his side and have “conversations” with him in whatever language he was using for the day.  We had given up on being able to communicate with him and were resigned to the fact that the man we knew and loved was no longer in there.  BUT . . .  One day, shortly before he died, he held up a picture of me as a baby, looked me straight in the eye, and said “This is you.”  I couldn’t control my crying or my wonderment at his ability to reach out from where ever he was in there.

I have heard other stories like this.  I met with some chaplains last week who were hospice chaplains and also worked with dementia patients.  These were patients who had been given up on for any possibility of meaningful communication.  There was no way that these people any longer understood what was being said to them or even comprehended who they were or what was going on around them.  That is, until a chaplain started playing the piano and singing old hymns and one of these patients started singing along.  Or the chaplain who was charting after seeing a patient.  She was holding a children’s book, The Giving Tree, and handed it to an end stage AD patient who hadn’t spoken in years and was assumed to be completely “gone” so that she could do her charting.  When she looked back it appeared that the patient was actually reading the book.  She said, “Are you reading that?”  The patient nodded.  “Ok, I’ll give it to you.”  The patient said nothing and appeared to keep reading.  Sarcastically, the chaplain said, without looking up from her computer, “You could at least thank me.”  The patient replied, “Thank you for the book.”  The chaplain wept.  When technical, medical, and rigorously tried methods did not work, the God in the patients were able to communicate with the God in the chaplains – right there in the silence and simplicity.

One of the most intriguing passages in the Bible, I think, is 1 Kings 19:11-18.  Elijah is on the mountain because God has sent him there telling him that God will pass by:

“Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but theLord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but theLord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ “

Wow.  There is something like Zen to this passage.  A “sound” of sheer silence.  This sounds like a koan.  God was not in the loud cacophony, or where God was sought, or expected to be.  God was right there in the silence.  We are constantly searching for something – assurance, peace, affirmation.  No matter what name we give to this particular sense or feeling that we are seeking, I think it’s safe to call it God.  We seek God daily and try to get some sense that God is present.  We get in the car and crank up the Christian radio station so that we can feel God.  Listen for the voice of God in the thunder to give us some proof that God is there.  Isn’t it ironic then, that if God is there in the silence speaking to us, that the very methods we use to find the Divine are the very things that prevent us from finding or hearing God?   Hmmm . . . .