Religion or Faith?

Today’s OT lesson from the Daily Office (Nehemiah 1:1-11) the author reflects on an encounter he had in Susa—the fortified city in the Kingdom of Persia. One day he was approached by a group of fellow Jews, and he asked them how things had fared with their kindred back in Jerusalem. “Did they escape the captivity? How are they doing? How is the Holy City?” The answer he received was disheartening: “The survivors there in the province who escaped captivity are in great trouble and shame; the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire.”

It’s one of those Planet-of-the-Apes moments when the reality of the destruction of one’s homeland sinks in. Overcome with sadness, guilt, and despair, Nehemiah falls down and mourns for days, weeping and fasting and praying on behalf of his people. His cry to God is explicit: “O LORD God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments; let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you.”

It just so happens that over the past few months I’ve been participating in a men’s bible study on the Book of Esther. That story also takes place in Susa, and, when I read the word in the opening line of today’s lesson, I began to look for comparisons. But that’s where the similarities end. In Esther, no mention of God is ever made. No prayers are recorded in the whole book. Although there is fasting, no explicit direction is ever attached to the pious act. Instead, the reader is left to wonder, “Where is God in all of this? How does God’s salvation work in a secular setting?”

Other students of the bible have made these kinds of observations long before I am, but it’s amazing to me how two different books that are set in the same place at roughly the same time can be so different. Nehemiah is utterly devoted to the reestablishment of the Jerusalem Temple and the specific religious apparatus that goes with it. Esther makes no mention of God at all, and the reader is left to ask how faith is supposed to be practiced in the diaspora. One is a book about going home to God, and the other is about finding God far from home.

Where is God in our lives? Do we need to rebuild the apparatus of our faith to make our relationship with him more real to us? Should we instead continue on in our journey with God even though the world around us might not notice? What should the place of religion be in the 21^st century? What’s the relationship between religion and faith?

John Wyclif and Playing with Knives

My father loves working in the kitchen. He always enjoyed dabbling when the opportunity presented itself, but, when my mother started working full-time as a director of children’s ministry in the church where I grew up, Dad started cooking more frequently. At one point, he became the primary chef for the family, and it was my mother’s turn to dabble when the opportunity presented itself.

Whenever they come to visit, my dad likes to cook a meal. He’s a good cook and knows his way around the kitchen. Like me, he’s not very good at keeping things clean, but he can use every pot and pan and utensil available to whip up something pretty decent. One day, he was chopping vegetables with our chef’s knife and remarked how sharp the knife was. It seemed like a nice, polite thing to say to the person whose knives one is using. I thanked him and went on with my evening. I happened to be passing back through the kitchen when he was scraping those vegetables off the cutting board and into a pan, an action he was roughly completing by dragging the blade of my chef’s knife across the surface of the board. “You know,” I said, “that knife won’t be very sharp for long if you keep doing that.”

I said it too sharply (no pun intended). Instincts had taken over. I had reprimanded my father for the way he was treating my knife while he was preparing a meal for my family. He looked at me a somewhat taken aback and apologized. Now, whenever he is in town and is in the kitchen, he goes out of his way to mention again and again how sharp our knives are. They aren’t really that sharp, but I hear what he’s saying.

“The word of God is living and active,” the author of the letter to the Hebrews writes, “sharper than any two-edge sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” That’s part of the Epistle Lesson for the commemoration of John Wyclif (Hebrews 4:12-16). And, when I read that passage that personifies the “Word of God” and captures that beautiful double-meaning of our faith—that the second person of the Trinity is the same “Word of God” that was spoken into the scriptures and that came incarnate from heaven as Jesus Christ—I ask myself whether God’s word is as sharp today as it once was.

Like a knife or a sword or a scalpel or any other implement, the power and sharpness of the Word of God depends on who is using it and how it’s being used and whether it’s being properly handled. Is it being roughly dragged across a cutting board—has it become a spoon or scraper simply because of the intention of the person who’s holding it? Is it being used to bash someone’s head in—more a blunt club that is wielded in clumsy battle than the delicate instrument it was designed to be? Has it been intentionally dulled so as to be used in a children’s cooking class—left to wear out so no one will cut himself?

John Wyclif lived two-hundred years before Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses on the church house door. He died two-hundred years before Thomas Cranmer wrote the first Book of Common Prayer. Yet Wyclif was committed to some of the same principles that guided the Reformation two centuries after his ministry was over. He argued that in political and financial ways the local church should be governed by its own monarch—in his case the King of England—and not be subject to the pope. He believed that individuals should have a direct and personal relationship with God and not one that needed to be mediated by the church or a priest. He believed that the scriptures should be available to all who could read them, and he translated the Latin bible into English. And it is for this last achievement that he is most often remembered.

What happens when the Word of God is put into the hands of an “ordinary” person? What happens when the institutional church trusts that laypeople have the ability to wield it as powerfully and skillfully as its most celebrated theologians? What happens when a priest looks at his congregation and asks, “What do you think it means?”

The Word of God is in your hands—sometimes literally. That hasn’t always been the case. You don’t have to go to college or seminary to understand it, but you can’t just whip it out once a year and use it to fillet a delicate trout. It takes practice. It takes effort. Read it. Study it. Practice with it. Let it cut you to your core—all the way to joints and marrow. Recognize its power and use it wisely.

Woe, Now, and Give

I admit I'm behind this week. I have some excuses, but they aren't good ones. There is a post scheduled to upload at 1:00 this afternoon on today's Epistle lesson for the commemoration of John Wyclif. Really, though, I've wanted to post on the gospel lesson for All Saints' Sunday, so here goes.

As I would guess is true for many preachers, the first thing that caught my eye was the "woe" statements in Sunday's gospel. Only Matthew and Luke give us the Beatitudes, and their versions, although clearly from the same source, are still remarkably different. Matthews "Blessed are the poor...meek...hungry...etc." has been watered down in my mind. Because I hear them so often (e.g. ever year on Thanksgiving Day), these kingdom statements have become quaint. And the kingdom of God is not quaint. They're sappy little statements that call to mind the contradiction between life on earth and life in the fully present Kingdom of God. But that's not right. They're supposed to be earth-shattering statements that convict the part of us that holds on to this world so that we might be set free to live completely in God's kingdom. And that's where Luke comes in.

Woe to you who are rich...to you who are full now...to you who are laughing now. That's the Jesus I'm looking for. The woe-statements let me know that this isn't a hypothetical. It's real. And it's spoken to me. How am I hanging on to this earthly life in ways that interfere with my kingdom identity? How might the "woe to me" bits shake me up?

The next thing on my mind is the "now" statements. It's related to the bit above about the woes, but it shifts the meaning for me a little bit. Blessed are the hungry now and the mournful now. Woe to the full now and the laughing now. There's a temporal piece in this that is missing in Matthew's version. Jesus wants us to think about the difference between now and later, but he doesn't want us to rest on the "maybe-someday" fairy tale that can come across in Matthew 5. This isn't just about hoping that someday God will make everything right. It's about living today in a way that reflects God's promise of one day making everything right. The "now, now, now" tells me that Jesus expects this new ethic of kingdom-living to break in...well, now.

Lastly (for today) is the line that is shaping my sermon for Sunday: "Give to everyone who begs from you." I have a lot of people who beg from me, and I usually say yes. Sometimes I say no. Jesus says always say yes. Why? How does that change the role of giver? I'm no longer allowed to evaluate the worthiness of a request. I don't get to look at a person's circumstance and judge. I can't even consider whether I have anything to give. Jesus simply says give. Always. That kind of approach to giving and charity and generosity will change my life I feel sure. What about you?

Unspoken Prayer

Thank God I’m not like…

It’s a prayer we probably never actually give voice to, but I’d bet it’s one we say silently all the time. Thank God I’m not homeless like that guy on the street. Thank God I’m not depressed like my sister. Thank God I’m not experiencing the kind of crisis he is. Thank God I’m not as arrogant as my brother-in-law.

There’s a game I like to play even when Luke 18:9-14 isn’t the gospel lesson for Sunday. It’s to say that sort of prayer out loud to see if anyone is listening. I mean it in a South-Park kind of way—as a satirical commentary on how common such a thought is. I was on a mission trip to Honduras with some youth, who were whining a little bit too much about having to get up early and work hard. Almost under my breath, I said, “Thank God I’m not like these Honduran people, who have to work so hard for so little.” One of the more perceptive youth challenged me, saying, “Wait, you can’t say that. Didn’t Jesus say something about that somewhere in the bible?” I just looked at him and shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know. Did he?”

This gospel lesson should flay us wide open. Every single person in church this Sunday should be staring at his or her shoes when the gospel lesson is read, and first among them should be clergypeople like me. We’re supposed to hear this parable and realize just how much we are the Pharisee. But we won’t. We know that the Pharisees are the bad guys, and we know (of course) that we’re the good guys. We’re on Jesus’ side. He’s not talking about us. If you’re an Episcopalian, you think he’s talking about Baptists. And, if you’re a Baptist, you think he’s talking about members of the Church of Christ. “We’re not hypocrites,” we all say. “He’s not talking about me…Thank God I’m not like those other Christians whom he’s talking about. They could sure benefit from hearing this story.”

It’s us. It’s you. It’s me. It’s everything about the culture we live in. We’re in; you’re out. We’re good; they’re bad. Thank God we’re not like them. Thank God we’re better than that. Guess what. We’re not. 

He's My Brother

Growing up, I remember kids in my class being called by their older brother or sister’s name. On the first or second day of class, the teacher would say, “Are you so-and-so’s brother? I taught him.” And then for the rest of the year the teacher would accidentally mix the two up. As an eldest child, that wasn’t ever a problem for me. In fact, it seemed kind of neat to have someone go before you. I can see, however, that it might be pretty annoying, too.

When I was in high school, I got to know Richard Simmons’ brother. You know, the crazy “Sweating to the Oldies” guy from the television commercials and programs back in the 80s? Well, I was active in Key Club, and his brother, Lenny, was an advisor. Trust me—he wasn’t the one who made the connection for me. I can’t remember whether it was another student or an adult, but someone introduced him by saying, “Hey, have you met Lenny? He’s Richard Simmons’ brother!” Immediately and still to this day, his identity and that of his cult superstar brother get mixed together in my mind. That isn’t fair, but it happens.

So what do you think it was like to be Jesus’ brother? Matthew tells us of James, Joseph, Simeon, and Judas. They were, it seems, his brothers. (There is, of course, a difference of opinion in the Roman Catholic tradition and other Christian traditions about whether Jesus actually had any brothers who were born of the same mother, but I choose not to engage that here.) Can you imagine what it was like to grow up in that household? How do you even live your life when Jesus is your brother? “Oh!” people would exclaim, “you’re Jesus’s brother! How amazing! Tell me what he was like…”

James of Jerusalem, the saint of the church whom we remember today, was one of those brothers, and, despite continually being identified as such, he managed to have a career of sorts. He was an important figure in the Council of Jerusalem—the first great council where the doctrinal controversy of how to treat the Gentiles was resolved. Paul names him as one of the apostles to whom Jesus revealed himself (though I bet James would tell that story a little differently). He was a leader of the church who helped carry the good news of Jesus Christ—his brother—to the ends of the earth. How strange and joyful and frustrating and wonderful that must have been!

It’s not fair to James and his own witness, but I wonder whether the kernel of truth for me today is to acknowledge that Jesus had brothers—that he had other people growing up alongside him who knew him as a real, skin-and-bones-and-blood person. Even though we might be conscious of the “fully God, fully man” belief of the Christian church, too often we forget that Jesus was a real person. He was the kind of person who tumbles around with his brothers. He was the kind of person whose family had good days and bad days together. He was the kind of person who got into arguments (and probably lost a few). In other words, he was a real person. God became a real person. God had brothers and probably sisters, too. Let the fullness of that strange belief sink in.

Comparative Gratitude

I’m working my way through some of the 39 Articles in a Sunday-morning class called “We Used to Believe What?” I’m picking the controversial topics that 21^st-century Christians don’t think about quite as often, and yesterday’s subject was predestination. We had a great discussion. At one point, when I asked the group to talk about their experience of predestination, someone said, “Have you ever thought about the fact that you were born in the small, southern town where you were born and not in a slum in Calcutta? What does that say about predestination?” It says everything. And the conversation that ensued was eye-opening. As best I can tell, whether you think God had a hand in that or not, every morning you should still be thankful for the life you have been given no matter where you wake up in the morning.

This coming Sunday’s gospel lesson (Luke 18:9-14)  isn’t about predestination, but the parable of the Pharisee and tax collector has a line in it that reminds me of yesterday’s discussion: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” It’s the prayer of the self-righteous (though admittedly grateful) Pharisee. As I read this story and hear that prayer, I find myself wanting to humanize the easy-to-disparage Pharisee. Why? Because he’s me and everyone I go to church with every Sunday.

I am grateful to God that I have been given the life I live. So little of it is the product of my own work. Parents, social network, personal skills and abilities, childhood experiences—all of it is gift. I could have just as easily been born into a difference circumstance—poverty, instability, conflict, hopelessness. Should I be thankful for that? Yes. Should I respond to it by fasting twice a week and giving away a tenth of my income? Yes. Should I sit in my office and look out my window at the people walking up the sidewalk with overdue power bill in hand coming to ask me for financial assistance and be grateful that I’m not them? I don’t think so. But why not?

There’s a line between being thankful for what one has been given and being thankful for whom one is not. Comparative gratitude works in the abstract hypothetical but not in the specific. Yes, I’m thankful I’m not a starving child in India. But I don’t know any starving children in India. I’ve never been to India. When I give thanks for that, my focus isn’t really on the possibility that exists so far away. My focus is on what I have been given—that for which I’m genuinely grateful. But when that abstract becomes tangible—when the thing I’m thankful to not be walks in my door—I’ve instantly gone from being grateful to haughty.

Many of us know this parable. We know the shock-value it contains. “How could a tax collector—the scum of the earth—possibly be justified in place of the clearly righteous Pharisee?” Yeah, yeah, we get it. But I want to go deeper. I want to say that the Pharisee’s mistake is ignoring the fact that even if he had been a thief, rogue, adulterer, or tax collector, he would still have the opportunity to be grateful. Even when born in the most pitiable of circumstances, we still have the opportunity to be grateful. The sin I want to hear more about isn’t the sin of self-righteousness. It’s the sin of denying the potential righteousness of others—even in a prayer of genuine gratitude. That’s complicated. That’s closer to home.

Heavenly Reward?

I was driving out in the country the other day, and I passed by a big sign in someone’s yard, which read “Reward for Information about Stolen Property.” It was a large, well-manicured lawn with a big house set well back from the road. Although I was driving pretty quickly, I saw enough to realize that there was a collection of antique memorabilia and signs on and around a building near the house. I allowed myself to imagine the owners and their frustration when items they valued—not just for their monetary worth—were taken from them. The sign was an odd cry for help and an expression of anger and hurt.

In the gospel lesson for today (Matthew 10:34-42), Jesus puts a big reward sign in the front yard of faith: “Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple-truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward." Actually, I’d like to see that sign—“Reward for being nice”—in someone’s yard, but I don’t really like reading it in the gospel.

I experience an icky feeling when someone starts talking about the product of our faith in terms of our “heavenly reward.” I’m already over-motivated by money. I don’t need Jesus waving a fat stack of bills in my face. In fact, I’d rather him do the opposite. I’d rather him smile from the shadows—just visible to me.

Earlier this week, I was visiting a parish for a stewardship consultation, and I enjoyed a back-and-forth with a woman in the congregation about the tithe. We sparred for a while, and I think our conversation helped the whole group get a better sense of why God asks us to give him the first 10% of our resources. But, after the session was over, she and I finished our conversation as we turned to the issue of how we offer to God not only our money but also our time and talent. “Sure!” I said, “Give to God 10% of your time, too.” The response I got surprised me a little bit: “I give way more than 10% of my time!” “That’s great!” I responded. “Keep it up! We’ll give you a pat on the back and a shiny gold star.” I was joking—perhaps even teasing a little bit—but the joke was lost on my audience.

“We don’t want that,” she protested. “We don’t do it for a gold star or a pat on the back. We do it because we love it. Those of us who give our lives to something don’t do it for a reward.” She’s absolutely right, and I told her so. We don’t give our hearts to God in order to receive a reward. The giving itself is the reward we treasure.

What is a prophet’s reward? What sort of reward do the righteous get? What does Jesus offer us in exchange for a glass of cool water? Maybe it’s lying down at night with a sense that you have a calling and a purpose. Maybe it’s the sense of selfless satisfaction that comes from serving God by serving others. Maybe it’s the comfort of approaching the end of one’s life in faith rather than fear. We aren’t Christians because there’s a reward waiting for us. We’re Christians because being Christians is a reward now.