The First Part of My Journey

Recently, someone asked me to talk a little about myself, my faith, and how it has evolved. It was a very worthwhile exercise. Here is what I came up with. I am a product of churches of Christ. I was born into the Antioch Church of Christ. When I started the third grade, my family transitioned to the Rural Hill Church of Christ. It was at Rural Hill that I was baptized when I was 12 years old. I stated that I believed that Jesus was the Son of God, and was baptized for the forgiveness of my sins and that I might receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. All this at age 12. These matters are mysterious to me even now. I strongly suspect that at 12, I had not a clue what I was claiming to believe and be committing myself to. I certainly was not ready to be married when I was 12, and committing your life to following Jesus seems every bit as significant as taking a spouse. However, I had been taught that unless one was baptized, he would go to hell. Fear of eternal torment, I have learned, can be a powerful motivator, and to avoid the thought that one might actually go to hell, a person might claim to believe all sorts of things, and might actually believe that they believe those things, when in fact they deep down do not. I will reflect more on this later. I should add that in the time around my baptism, not once did anyone advise me and not once did it dawn on me of my own accord that by being baptized, I was pledging allegiance to a king and a kingdom that oppose the kings and kingdoms of the world. Not once did I think that I was committing myself to nonviolence, to love of enemies, to radical hospitality, to generosity, to care for the hungry, the sick, the unhoused, the orphan, the imprisoned, the immigrant. It did not dawn on me that by being baptized, I was saying no to the values and priorities of the world, where greed and lust and celebrated on Wall Street and in Hollywood, where retribution and revenge masquerade as justice, and where racism and sexism are excused as simply the way the world works. Not once was I informed or did I think that the way of Jesus constitutes an alternative ethic, an alternative politic, an alternative community that not only stands alongside the oppressed, the marginalized, the minorities who suffer violence and injustice at the hands of the power brokers, the institutions, the domination systems, but also actively stands against the systems that promote and perpetuate such injustices, the principalities and powers that enslave humanity. And not once did I think that baptism is the beginning of a life of unconditional love and service to others, indiscriminate compassion so counter-cultural, so contrary to conventional wisdom, tradition, and the status quo, so scandalous, that false accusation, even persecution and suffering are the likely result. No, my baptism was essentially based on people telling me what I needed to say I believed in order to obtain a get-out-of-hell-free card. I wonder how many other church folks, in their honest moments, might have a similar story to tell. While I was in high school, my family started attending the Donelson Church of Christ. It was somewhat less legalistic, and had far better preaching, but it was still pretty conservative. My parents switched back to Rural Hill several years ago, where my Dad now serves as an elder. While I was in law school, my wife and I attended the Laurel Church of Christ in Knoxville. When we returned to Nashville, we started attending the Otter Creek Church of Christ, where we’ve been from 2002 until this past spring. Not only have I always attended churches of Christ, I was educated by church of Christ schools. From kindergarten through second grade, I was at David Lipscomb campus school. From third grade all the way through high school, I was at Ezell-Harding Christian School. When I graduated from Ezell, I went to college at Lipscomb University in Nashville, a church of Christ-affiliated institution. My family goes way back with Lipscomb. My grandmother was the secretary in the History Department for years and years. My mom, two aunts, uncle, sister, cousins, and countless friends all went there. I met my wife there. I majored in American Studies and minored in Political Science, Literature, and Speech Communication. Now I teach law-related classes there as an adjunct professor in the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy. All this time in church and church schools had a pretty profound effect on me. I was in daily Bible classes and chapel services from the time I was 5 until I was 22. I was a Bible Bowl champ. I memorized stuff and knew the Bible stories and characters from an early age. In college in particular, I studied under some very well-respected theologians. The classes I took on Job and Ecclesiastes, Biblical Ethics, and Systematic Theology were particularly outstanding. I learned answers to questions I had not really even thought of asking. If they weren’t already, my doctrinal ducks were in a neat row. I was very happy with my understanding of God, faith, the Bible, etc. I had a firm grip on it all, had a chapter and verse to support my assertions, and had no qualms about instructing others regarding their doctrinal errors and theological missteps. It felt good and safe to be so right about the big stuff, such as penal substitutionary atonement theory, trinitarianism, and the proper understanding of the function of baptism, as well as the smaller stuff, such as instrumental worship and women’s roles in the church. About the time I graduated from law school at age 25, my mind began to change about a few things. First, I began to notice that there were good-hearted, well-intentioned, and very intelligent people who thought differently about God, Jesus, the Bible, and faith than I did. Second, I began to notice that Christians generally, and I specifically, looked no different from the world. The parking lot of a church building looks exactly like the parking lot of a nice mall. We wear the same clothes, work the same jobs, take the same vacations, use the same language, have the same ideals and goals, watch most of the same television shows and movies, etc. Surely the Christian faith isn’t just about believing the right things. There has to be some tangible, objectively observable difference, some fruit, for lack of a better word, that distinguishes the Christian from someone who has not pledged to follow Jesus. The fact that I saw so little outward manifestations of people who claimed to be following Jesus, myself included, really ate away at me. Third, I began paying closer attention to the teachings of Jesus. Up to that point, I had been taught mostly to pay attention to Paul. Paul’s letters formed the basis of more of the preaching I had heard than did Jesus’ own teachings. I think there are several reasons for this. Jesus’ teachings are just harder and more demanding. Not that Paul doesn’t have some difficult teachings, but Jesus blows him away in this regard. Also, Jesus’ teachings are more difficult to understand. He used those mystical parables to describe the kingdom of God, whereas Paul often just makes lists of people who won’t be enjoying the kingdom. Additionally, Jesus doesn’t teach much doctrine, if you notice. As the great renegade Baptist preacher Will Campbell once quipped, you can’t build a steeple on top of Jesus. He was a prophet who harshly critiqued organized religion and its leaders. Paul, on the other hand, was a product of organized religion. It was what he knew and was comfortable with. Related to that point is that Jesus reserved his most severe condemnation for religious people, people like me who thought they had it all figured out doctrinally and theologically, who looked down their noses at people who were not as “holy,” “orthodox,” or “enlightened.” But as one of my college Bible instructors is fond of saying, even demons have excellent theology. They knew precisely who Jesus was way before anybody else got it. The problem was no matter how sound their theology, the hearts of the religious people were far from God. And God desires not merely good theology, not merely atoning “sacrifice,” but a life of mercy. So Jesus takes religious people to task, but if you’ll notice, he does not speak the same way to “sinners,” whom he says are entering the kingdom of God ahead of all the doctrinally-sound church folks. Preachers don’t want to tell their congregations that Jesus welcomed prostitutes, while calling right-believing church people sons of hell. It’s easier to preach Paul, from whom we learn how to do church right, so to speak, as well as who we can properly exclude from our cozy little fold. Anyway, the realization that Jesus speaks more harshly to religious people than he does “sinners” knocked me down a peg, which was much needed. When you start taking the harsh criticism Jesus directed toward the religious folks of his day and see how it might apply to the modern church in America, things get kind of troublesome. In fact, I’d argue that in virtually every respect, the American church has missed the mark at least as badly, and in many cases, far worse than the Pharisees and teachers of the law that Jesus railed against. I started seeing how un-Christ-like a lot of Christians, myself included, tended to be. For people who were following the prince of peace, Christians seemed very angry, particularly with anyone who saw things differently from them. Why are Christians so intolerant, so unwilling to listen, so quick to judge, so reluctant to try to understand the “other?” Why do we perceive so many other groups of people as a threat? And whereas Jesus instructed people to sell their possessions and give to the poor, American Christians seemed awfully greedy, materialistic, and anxious to drive a new gas-guzzling luxury SUV, live in houses that would be reserved for royalty in other parts of the world, and use the latest mind-numbing technological gadgets that serve to keep us perpetually entertained/distracted. Jesus taught his followers not to worry, but Christians seemed anxious about everything. Jesus was so welcoming and hospitable to the outcasts of society, but the vast majority of American Christians have little to no regard for the poor, the dying, the imprisoned, the immigrant, the orphan, and the modern equivalent of an unclean leper for the modern church, the homosexual. Jesus preached and practiced non-violence to the point of death, but conservative Christians are statistically some of the most violent people around, supporting war, torture, and the death penalty in numbers significantly higher than their secular counterparts. It seems to me that the modern American church worships not Lord Jesus, but the unholy trinity of nationalism, militarism, and capitalism. Thus, the church is guilty of widespread idolatry. Perhaps most significant of all, Jesus’ most frequent command is to not be afraid. Yet modern American Christians are afraid of just about everything and everyone, and our fear causes us to be irrational, thinking for example that somehow we are serving God by waiting in line for an hour to buy a fried chicken sandwich at Chick-Fil-A. Lord, have mercy. Our fear has caused us to be illogical, angry, hateful, judgmental, and in the end, violent. Belief and fear are juxtaposed against each other in the Bible. As belief increases, fear decreases, thus we see Jesus instructing Jairus to not fear but believe just prior to raising his daughter from the dead. As I alluded to above, I am convinced that many modern Christians have no real, true, deep-down-in-the-gut, this-is-what-I’m-staking-my-life-on belief. They would say they do, of course, because to acknowledge that they did not believe would place them at risk for an eternity in hell. Thus, even their “belief” is a product of their fear. If you threaten me with eternal pain, I will claim to believe in Santa Claus or unicorns. And I will believe that I believe it. My mind is sophisticated enough to consciously think that I believe in Santa, to be convinced that I believe, when I in fact do not. And my unconscious mind plays this trick on my conscious mind because the consequence of unbelief, hell, is too terrifying a possibility to even consider. I will not acknowledge any doubt, even if it’s there, because doubt places my eternal well-being at risk. No, I must believe that I believe because the alternative, eternal suffering, is too awful to contemplate. Obviously, such a “belief,” which is based entirely on fear, is utterly useless, and is in fact pretty much the opposite of true belief. False belief is about playing a mind game to avoid hell, and as such, is pretty unrelated to the way I spend my money, my politics, etc. True belief, on the other hand, has a lot less to do with the hereafter and a lot more to do with the here and now. And it is to this kind of transforming belief that Jesus calls us. After all, the kingdom of God, as explained by Jesus, is not about where your soul goes when you die. The kingdom of God, he said, is at hand, here, now, in our midst, if we only have eyes to see it, the will and courage to live it. This kind of belief is marked by a different way of being in the world, a different politic as I said earlier. This kind of belief informs a politic of love, which casts out fear. So, in the place of fear of Islam, there is love of Muslims. Out of that love springs a desire to understand them. In order to understand them, I must listen to them. Listening, after all, is the most fundamental act of hospitality in which we can engage. I should do the same for other groups of people with whom I do not feel reconciled, whether they are homosexuals, people of different races and cultures, people from different socio-economic backgrounds, or just people who generally see the world differently from me. After all, many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. I have found a great deal of freedom in letting go of my desire to be right about everything and my tendency to try and make other people think I’m right about everything. I am pretty confident now that I don’t have everything figured out and probably never will, certainly not everything about God. I sure haven’t cornered the market on truth, and I am highly suspicious of any individual or group of people who claims that they have. Consequently, I no longer live in fear that if I do not believe everything correctly and have all my doctrinal ducks in a row, that I might pay for it eternally. The love and grace of God are bigger than that. There is a sacredness to questioning everything, to use the title of a book written by my friend David Dark. I also feel that being humble about my understanding about such things as the nature of the divine is a more faithful posture than to act like I have interpreted everything correctly. Pride, as we know, is not well-regarded by God, and I tend to be a very prideful person, convinced that my viewpoint is sound. But when I stop to consider why I see things the way I do, even that is humbling. I am a Christian because my parents raised me that way, as their parents had raised them. This was cultural Christianity, where pretty much everybody in the community, even non-church-goers, held Christian beliefs. Had I been born in Iran, however, I would be a Muslim, my holy book would be the Quran, and I would hold to my belief in Islam just as tenaciously as I have held to Christianity. Had I been born in India, I would be a Hindu, and had I been born in Bhutan, I would be a Buddhist. Not only would I practice a different faith than I do as a result of being born in Nashville, Tennessee, I would be just as convinced of the rightness of my beliefs as I was as a Christian. I would believe in the inspiration of a different book, place my trust in the wisdom of a different teacher, and assume that anyone who believed differently from me was wrong, and possibly in danger of eternal suffering. It seems strange and arbitrary that these faith convictions are fundamentally a matter of geography. I tend to think that a follower of Jesus, by definition, has to be humble and maintain an open mind. Anything less is putting new wine in old wineskins. He has a habit of breaking apart my forms, assumptions, prejudices, and suppositions. If I hold something too tightly in a clinched fist, I may not be ready to let it go if He asks me to, and I may not be able to receive anything new when He wants to give it to me. And the tighter I hold on, the more fearful and less free I tend to become. Grasping and attachment, our Buddhist friends teach us, are the root of suffering. “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.” – Leo Tolstoy. Along the way, I have been exposed to serious scholarship regarding the origin of the Bible, who wrote it, how the collection was formed, etc. It’s too much to recount here, but that is a huge topic that most Christians neglect. The church is prone to abusing scripture because they do not understand who wrote it, the historical context, or the purpose of the writing. It’s easier to claim that the Bible is infallible and inerrant, which it simply is not. Sometimes, I’m afraid the church worships the Bible rather than the God to whom it points. I guess this is only natural, as people would rather worship something that they can master, hold in their hands, and use to manipulate and judge other people with, than a God who tends to be wild, unpredictable, and downright offensive and scandalous in His great love, in His acceptance of sinful people, and in His methods of reconciling the world unto Himself. But this failure to understand scripture has serious consequences. Take for example the creation account in Genesis, which is wonderful, mythological literature. In church, people abuse it by trying to make it a scientific explanation for the origin of the world, and in so doing miss out on the deeper truths of the tale, such as how God has provided us with many things to enjoy, but only within certain parameters. When we ignore those parameters, when we try to live as though we need no limits, when we forget that we are finite, when we try to experience everything outside of covenant, when our pride, our desire for power, our greed gets the best of us, we often lose the good that God entrusted to us in the first place. This is the predicament in which humanity finds itself; this is the brilliance of the garden story. But this is not how we talk about it in church. Talk about adventures in completely missing the point. Anyway, as of 6 or 7 years ago, my understanding and appreciation of Jesus, faith, and the Bible had been somewhat deconstructed. Fortunately, I was not alone on this journey, and had a valuable spiritual friend who listened, gave advice, and steered me in new, helpful directions. Through this friend I was exposed to the wonderful body of contemplative Christian thought and literature, from the desert fathers of the third and fourth centuries, to men like Thomas Kempis in the Middle Ages to Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, and Thomas Keating of the 20th century. These people understood that God remains a mystery, that when we speak of God we have only metaphor, that we cannot own or tame God, and that we most honestly encounter God in times of deep silence and solitude. The life of faith consists of more than formulas. Instead, it is about learning to see as God sees. It is about discovering my true self, the me that God created me to be, the image of God in me. Seeing myself as I truly am, I am able to see others as they truly are, also bearing the divine image. And I am able to see all of creation as it truly is. No longer subject to meaningless distractions like celebrity worship, non-stop televised sports, etc., we are able to focus on the work we have been given to do. Faith and life with God is mysterious in many ways. God’s Spirit blows where it pleases and answers to no man. We see its fruits – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control – in many different and often unexpected places. And anyone who is led by the Spirit of God is a child of God. He who loves is born of God. This mysterious life of faith requires that we be born again to a new way of being and of seeing. It requires that we unlearn what we have learned. Faith is not simply a matter of intellectual hoolahoops. It is a matter of our lives being hidden with God in Christ, my true self is Christ living in me, a union that I cannot possibly fully comprehend. I’m afraid that our best formulas, doctrines, and theologies simply are inadequate. The contemplatives know this well, that often knowing God is a matter of un-knowing. I do not know what would have become of my faith had I not found something old, which was to me new. Through another friend, who was a History professor of mine in college, I began to see more clearly where contemplative faith intersects with meaningful social and political engagement. In contemplation and prayer, we are liberated from the greedy, lustful, selfish, power-hungry false self. We put away the old man, so to speak. By the same token, we are called to be agents of liberation from the power of injustice, oppression, greed, lust, and violence at work in the world. My professor pointed me to the thinking of Will Campbell, William Stringfellow, and Howard Thurman. These men understand that the gospel is political, but not in the Republican/Democrat sense. No, those are mere principalities that stand in opposition to the kingdom of God. The politic of the gospel is about God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven, which will never come about through an election, a war, or a strong economy. The kingdom of God is based on something that all institutions, political parties, and nation-states roundly reject: love that suffers. So, my belief is that Love does in fact win. I have not read Rob Bell’s book, but my wife has, and she holds it in high regard. I believe that Love wins because that is the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, through whom we have been reconciled to God and to each other. We do not need to accomplish this reconciliation; it is a finished work. In Christ, Love triumphed over death. Even death, the great enemy of humanity, has been destroyed. Now that is the kind of good news that the world so desperately needs to hear. The things I learned as a boy, the judgmental doctrines and fear-based pseudo-beliefs, I count as rubbish compared to the knowledge of the overwhelming, death-defeating Love that is God. This Love is good news indeed to the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned, the hungry. God is Love, so of course Love wins. What other possible outcome could there be? And it makes sense that we are then called to love as Jesus loved us. Love is the currency of God’s economy. Consider this quote from the great Thomas Merton: “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.” So that’s my only job, to love. I should love everybody. And because justice is what Love looks like in public, to quote Cornell West, part of my loving vocation is to work for justice for the poor, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the people who are discriminated against based on their skin color, socio-economic status, criminal history, or sexual orientation. What else would I do, as a follower of the whore-loving, Temple-clearing, truth-telling Nazarene? Jesus said to love. His closest friend John likewise said to love. The story that I am trying to stake my life on begins and ends with Love. Love, not all of the other trash you see when you look at the institutional church in America, is the mark of a Christian. By our love, and only by our love, will they know who we are. I have no time for anything but Love. “Love all of God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky