A Gospel of Which I am not Ashamed

Periodically, I am challenged to "like", "honk" or otherwise acknowledge that I "am not ashamed of the Gospel" (St. Paul's quote). As I thought about it, I realized I might just be ashamed of the Gospel. So what exactly is the "Good News" I should not be ashamed of? Was it the Evangelical "Roman Road"? Getting people to "accept Jesus"? Or were these classical definitions in fact not the good news at all? Perhaps these definitions represented religious ideology.  Was faith was reduced to a past sacrament or agreeing to a list of assertions? The definition of the "Gospel" was critically important to answering this question. Whether or not it was "good news" depends upon how it would be received by its' hearers.

Is it good news only to those with wealth, status, or those of a certain ethnicity? Is it more about being right rather than compassionate?  Is it about hate rather than love? Is it concerned about being "left behind", but not about those being left behind by inequality and injustice? Is is about the Kingdom of God in the here and now and not just in heaven?

In Evangelli Gaudium, Pope Francis described a Gospel which is indeed "good news." It is a message that can be claimed by all Christians. Moreover, it is accessible to everyone. It expresses the full scope of the Gospel to meet all human needs, emotional, physical,  and spiritual. It is the Gospel that I have been looking for and longing to hear expressed so clearly.

Evangelli Gaudium is a scathing criticism of the current economic order where the preeminence of finance, profit, and trade are assumed. Destructive side effects are accepted without question. It is a system of economic Darwinism that knows only the survival of the fittest and destruction of the weak as the cost of doing business. A human person is only a consumer or producer, an object to be discarded when they are of no further value. It is a system that American believers bought in too easily; it was a system that I had accepted too readily.

The Gospel, the "Good News" that Jesus' disciples were instructed to share was the nearness of the Kingdom! The proclamation to the people was that the "Kingdom of God is Near". It was embodied. First by Jesus himself. Then by his disciples. The message was not a definition of the Kingdom; it was the presence of the Kingdom! Embodied first in Jesus, then by His disciples, and ultimately those of us who have chosen to be His followers.

A Gospel of which I am not ashamed, thereby one I can be "proud" of, is one that is embodied. It is made near by my presence as I follow Christ. It must be radically inclusive, radically accepting, and radically gracious. Since I cannot be perfect, it must be radically honest, quick to accept the blame for failure, and even quicker to apologize and ask for forgiveness. Since others cannot be perfect, it must readily accept that imperfection, whether accompanied by an apology or not. It must forgive because people do not realize what they are doing. It must manifest love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness. It must be radically generous. That is the Gospel of which I am not ashamed.

Forgetting and Remembering Again

Those who know me know that I don't talk about my mother much. Actually I don't talk about her at all. My most vivid thoughts are about her final years and those were not pleasant to recall. Somehow I came to believe that those final years represented the totality of my mom. I had forgotten all the good things my mom brought into my life.

The first thing, the most obvious thing was that my mom brought me life. If it wasn't for Mom, I wouldn't be here. The next thing was that my mom worked outside the home to help support us. But Mom's best quality was that she knew how to enjoy life.

Mom instilled a fun ethic. If it was not for Mom, I'd be all work and no play. Mom took us to the zoo, Bob-Lo (an amusement park island), and the art institute. Mom orchestrated holiday trappings that made those days a child's delight. As I got older, I recall having some nice heart-to-heart conversations with Mom, conversations you can only have with a mom.

I had to reach far back in my memories to recall good times with Mom. I have had to cross barriers of some very unpleasant stuff to do so. There are so many ways that parents can disappoint or fail us. We can look back and try to understand, to attempt to find a satisfactory explanation, but there may be no answers except one, that they were human.

So take time to appreciate your mom. Hopefully you will have many reasons to do so. If you can't think of any, there remains one: the fact you are here on this planet. I have recounted many reasons to appreciate my Mom's life. Unfortunately my opportunity to express appreciation are long gone. Except perhaps in this blog.

The Resurrection of Forgiveness

Recently I read the story of Iranian parents who forgave their son's killer and removed the noose moments before the condemned man's execution. The man was allowed to go free in accordance with Sharia law.

For that condemned man, the family's forgiveness was his resurrection. For us, forgiveness is new life as well.

We equate life with existence. Humans exist only in relation to other humans. Without someone to hear our voice, see our expressions,  and read our words, how do we exist? How are we alive in a way that matters? "Eternal life" is a religious abstraction if we cannot find a way to live in peace on this earth.

Yet we may not want to acknowledge the existence of others.  We may find others irritating or worse. This is  particularly true of the person who has injured us; the one we consider our enemy. Bonhoeffer states it succinctly: "with our hearts burning with hatred, we seek to annihilate his moral and material existence". This is the hatred Jesus equated with murder.  Instead Jesus modelled a new response to insult, injury, and betrayal: "Father forgive them for they don't know what they are doing." He not only modelled forgiveness,  he expects forgiveness from anyone who would seek peace with God or man.

Eternal existence is only apprehended by faith. This is the same faith through which we know that peace is found through forgiveness.  The parents who forgave and pardoned their son's killer understood this. Their faith led them to forgive and find peace. In the end, the families embraced. What a picture of the kingdom of God!

Ministering in Weakness

"See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey"  - Zechariah 9:9

This verse came to mind as I was reflecting on this past week. It has been a week where my presence seemed to offer very little. I became reacquainted with my own vulnerabilities. Then I thought about Palm Sunday.

This verse predicts Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem, but it certainly is an oxymoron. A king? Riding on a donkey? In one sentence we have a picture of both strength and weakness. Perhaps that's a picture of Jesus' followers: strength and weakness. 

As a follower of Christ, I'd like to think that I was always helping, always ministering from a vantage point of strength. As an educated professional, a male of European descent, it is too easy to fall into this conceit. But Jesus demonstrates another way. He deliberately chooses his ride. A peasant's borrowed  beast. A symbol of weakness. 

The Western Church, ("Christendom") has only known how to operate from a position of strength. It is the legacy of Constantine, who made Jesus the patron of Imperial Rome. But now the Western Church has found that strength fading. It finds itself less welcome in halls of power. And if it is accepted at all, it is to legitimize civil ceremonies and war. But mostly, it finds itself irrelevant and bereft of power. 

"For more than two centuries [Western power] has provided the framework in which the Western churches have understood their world missionary task. To continue to think in the familiar terms is now folly. We are forced to do something that the Western churches have never had to do since the days of their own birth – to discover the form and substance of a missionary church in terms that are valid in a world that has rejected the power and the influence of the Western nations. Missions will no longer work along the stream of expanding Western power. They have to learn to go against the stream. And in this situation we shall find that the New Testament speaks to us much more directly that does the nineteenth century as we learn afresh what it means to bear witness to the gospel from a position not of strength but of weakness." -Lesslie Newbigin

So this Palm Sunday, we are all reminded of weakness: our own, the church, and perhaps most importantly the weakness Jesus deliberately chose to manifest as he entered the world. It was out of that weakness that he most clearly identified with us, atoned for us, and changed the world. Not through the coercion of power, but through the vulnerability of love. That is where we will find our strength.

Who for Our Sakes Became Accessible

"For your sakes, he became poor..." - St. Paul

This Advent, I thought about how much God gave up to enter our world in the person of Jesus Christ. I also thought about why He did it. He did it to become accessible....to all people. To do that, he had to become one of us, and not just the "one percent", but the "ninety-nine percent". He had to choose the lowest common denominator. To that end, he had to enter the world poor. To be poor is to have neither resources nor status. God gave up both. Christ was born in a barn, with animals. He was born as a refugee.  In many respects he was born in circumstances similar to what a great many displaced people experience in the modern world.

To be poor is to be denied access. Access to food, housing, medical care, a safe environment, dignity, and social standing. There were many barriers to access in Jesus' day. Being a Gentile, Being diseased ("unclean"). Being a foreigner. Being a woman. These barriers were used by the elite to keep out the undesirables. However, it seemed that everyone who was barred from approaching God by the religious elite was welcomed by Jesus. In fact, breaching social and religious barriers was a hallmark of Jesus' ministry. 

From what we know, Jesus grew up as the son of a tradesman. For most of his life, he worked in the family business. His first recorded public appearance was submitting to John's baptism. This was certainly an act of humility, as the religious leaders of the time would not submit to John's baptism. This public act of humility was the first of many. Subsequent acts of humility would have the dual effect of distancing Jesus from the religious elite and drawing him closer to the poor and outcast. Jesus did not exclude the elite. But the elite excluded themselves: either they admitted no need of the prophet from Galilee or would not risk their social status to associate with him.

The birth of Christ was announced with the message of unrestricted access: "Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all people". Despite the message of open access, subsequent church history has more than enough examples of walls being built. Today, the same people-groups are excluded along with some new categories: race, gender-identity, the elderly, and the undocumented. However, the greatest barriers come from our comfortable but isolated first-world lives, our technology, and ultimately modernity itself. Differences of belief and social status still separate us as human beings and from God.

So if these barriers trouble us, what are we to do? This Christmas, might I suggest something different, non-traditional, and non-religious. Reach out to those who are otherwise forgotten. Buy a cup of coffee for the bell-ringer outside your grocery store. The person inside the gas station booth. Public safety personnel working the holidays. The homeless person holding up a sign at the intersection. Nursing home residents and workers. Acts of kindness chip away at the barriers, the walls separating people from each other. If you will permit yourself an open mind, ponder the meaning of Jesus' words: "If you have done it for the least of these, you have done it to me". Beginning with simple acts of kindness, you might find Jesus in the place you least expected to find him.

Merry Christmas

Taking the Exit - Why I left the Institutional Church

This past July I attended my last Sunday morning service. Most likely it is the last institutional church I will ever be a member of. I had been coming to this point for a long time.

I have been a Christ-follower for 40 years. I started out Catholic but left my faith when I was 14. I returned to faith in a small Evangelical church when  I was 18. In all I have been a part of four different churches. Of the four, two had moral failures of the leadership and one had a culture clash and power struggle that decimated the church.

At first glance, these problems would appear to be the weaknesses and failures of men. However, I realized that the failures were structural. Because of the power structures in place, the failures of men became the failures of institutions. I realized that the power structure itself was the problem.

I have always wondered how we went from Christ's teaching "call no one master", "do not Lord over others", and "you have one teacher and you are all brothers" to the hierarchies we see today. I finally found the "tipping point" in history. It occurred between ~100 AD to ~150 AD. St Clement taught obedience to a hierarchy (bishop, presbyter, elder). The result was a passive laity totally subordinate to clergy. After that, Ignatius of Antioch sealed the deal by affirming this arrangement in his writings before he was martyred. At that point the church became a power structure. Despite major and minor attempts at reform, the power structures of the institutional church remain until this day.

But is that what Jesus intended? Was His kingdom meant to be another earthly power structure? Or was it to be a place with only one head, Christ himself?  A place where all men and women are brothers and sisters. A place where everyone is empowered to serve one another. A place with no agenda but the well being of another. I had been looking to the institution to reflect this kind of kingdom and found it wanting. I might hope to find Jesus' kingdom in another institution, but that would be like panning for gold in the shower. It is possible in theory, but just not likely.

So now my faith journey has taken me outside of the institutional system I have been a part of for 40 years. I would be lying if I did not admit its effect on me. I had become dependent on it.

"These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That's institutionalized. " - Red (Shawshank Redemption)

So what will this require of me? It will require me to mature in my faith. I can no longer be dependent on someone else to set the course or to take the initiative. I will need to be more open. I will need to be more hospitable. I will need to be more receptive to God's work in the world, both inside and outside of the institution.

Taking the exit and leaving the main highway is scary when the roads do not show up on your GPS. However I have a feeling a great many others have taken the exit as well.  Sooner or later, I expect to find them. I may even find people who are willing to journey with me. Time will tell.




 

Fathers - An Unexpected Love

I am thinking about Father's day...probably because it is June already. My father-in-law has been gone for years now, and my own Dad has been gone since 1995. So now as patriarch of the family, I am the object of Father's Day. My boys are grown men now and live in different states. I may be surprised by a card or a gift, but mostly I anticipate a couple of  Father's Day phone calls. My sons still want to communicate with me and I claim that as a return-on-an-investment....of love.

Contrary to a father's love, a mother's love is expected. We expect a mother to nurture and show affection to her children. Open displays of affection are no problem....for a mom. We would consider it abnormal if she did not display affection for her children. However, open displays of affection are not expected from fathers. Being a man is all about displaying courage, but how about the courage to love? ....and the courage to show it? 

In the Gospel book of Luke we find the story of the prodigal son. Too often this passage is preached emphasizing the waywardness of the son. However it is the behavior of the father that we should take note of. The father who looks up expectantly and upon seeing his son runs out to meet him.  The father embraces his son and kisses him. That is the point of the story: a father who loves his son unconditionally and isn't afraid to show it. Certainly the story speaks of God's love for his children, but it also speaks of a father's love for his son.

I was brought up not to show love, because a man is not supposed not openly display tenderness. I had to learn how to express love. I thank God I was able to learn it, much of it from my wife's family. I made it a point (and still do) to tell my sons that I love them and give them a hug when I see them. The hugs are tighter now because I don't get to see them all that often.

In the last three years of his life, my father and I lived in different cities, two hours distant. My visits to his home were less frequent, but distance was a catalyst for change. Upon entering the door, I hugged my father lightly and cautiously, but my father hugged me tighter! Knowing your father loves you is one thing, but feeling it is all encompassing.

So my challenge to fathers is to love.... and be courageous enough to show it! Don't squander your unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show love to your children. If you are older, if you have no children or they have moved on, look for opportunities to express a fathers' love. There is no lack of want for it in the world. You might explore fostering or mentoring.  You might become a Big Brother. Do whatever it takes to bring a father's love into a world that sorely needs it.