Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God;[g] for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
--Romans 12:17-21 NRSV

In my daily email messages to PHCC folks this week, I have been reflecting on the book Almost Everything: Notes on Hope by Anne Lamott.  If you missed the emails, you can read them at the new church blog page on the church web site that Kathy Hendrix and Sara Riggs have set up.  I highly recommend Lamott’s writings.  She’s a Christian writer who is vulnerable about her own failings, which is a great relief to me, because she reminds me I’m not alone with my many screw ups.

In Almost Everything, Lamott has a chapter titled “Don’t Let Them Get You to Hate Them.”  When I saw the title, I knew she had written it for me.  She laments the increasing levels of hate in our society coming from all sides, and then she admits to her own difficulties giving in to the partisan hatred so prevalent right now. 

“A friend once said that at the end of his drinking, he was deteriorating faster than he could lower his standards, and this began happening to me recently with hate.”
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She began to struggle so much with hate, she finally prayed and asked God to help her.  God immediately sent two people.  The first was one of the kids in the Sunday School class she teaches:

“I asked one of my Sunday school kids if he believed God was always with him, helping him.  He thought about this for a moment and replied, ‘Maybe forty percent.’  Forty percent!  What if I could reduce my viral load [of hate] by forty percent!”

The second person was Martin Luther King, Jr.  She saw MLK quoted on Twitter: ”Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can.”  As if for effect, her pastor used the same quote in a sermon soon afterward. 

“I thought, ‘I heard it the first time.’  Then at the end of the sermon, wrapping up, she said, sighing, ‘Just don’t let them get you to hate them.’  I have not been the same since.  She ruined hate for me.”

Lamott continues to struggle with hate, but she accurately describes the effects hate has on us.

“Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking.  It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky.  The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground.  So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can.  We square our shoulders and lift our gaze”

In fact, Lamott writes that instead of viewing the people we hate as objects to destroy, we can begin to see adversaries as “people who are helping you do a kind of emotional weight training, Nautilus for your character.”  They help us to surrender our hate in the end.  As Lamott notes, when we surrender, we hold our palms forward like “someone is pointing a gun at you” or palms up “begging for help.”  Either way our hands are empty, because we have to put down our weapons.

For Lamott (and for me, maybe for you too), she reached a point of hating the way she was feeling—hating the toll hate was taking on her soul. 

“Hating the way I was feeling helped me give up Camel cigarettes thirty-two years ago, and then alcohol.  It is good to surrender things that poison us and our world.  Am I free of such toxicity now?  Well about forty percent, and that is a pretty good deal.  I’ll take it.”

I wish you forty percent less hate in the coming week.

Grace and Peace,
Rev. Chase Peeples

     For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will
     save it.
     --Luke 9:24 NRSV

For most of human history, we humans were so focused on survival we had little time for introspection.  Indeed, in many places today, people live in conditions where daily survival takes all the energy they possess.  For those of us, however, who are privileged enough to have our essential needs met, we get to work on self-actualization.  If you spend much time studying religion, philosophy, psychology and so on, much of the wisdom of the world boils down to finding answers inside of yourself, at times a difficult task since a consumer-based capitalist society insists in millions of ways what you need can only be found in what you buy and possess.  In Christian terms, this process might be called discovering who God created you to be or the “image of God” inside.

This week, I am reflecting on Anne Lamott’s book, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope.  In a chapter titled “Inside Job,” she writes, “There is almost nothing outside you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you are waiting for a donor organ.  You can’t buy, achieve, or date serenity.  Peace of mind is an inside job, unrelated to fame, fortune, or whether your partner loves you.”   This disappointing news comes with a corollary: “Horribly, what this means is that it is also an inside job for the few people you love most desperately in the world. . . They have to find their own ways, their own answers.”   In other words, most of what we fill our days with—trying to “fix” ourselves and/or “fix” others—accomplishes little to nothing.

Lamott notes most people develop two tactics for survival in the world: constructing a success-based personality and hoarding as much as possible.  Both tactics ignore our inner world.  She describes them as looking for nourishing bread in the hardware store.  “I can live on Paydays and Corn Nuts for only so long.”  If we are fortunate, along the way we discover “spiritual bakeries” where we are truly known, connected to the world and valued for who we are.  In such spaces, we find belonging “in new friends, communities, the most ordinary elements: we break the bread, bless the cup, and share.”

In relationships and communities of belonging, we discover the truth about ourselves: we have value.  Lamott asks, “Could you say this about yourself right now, that you have immense and intrinsic value, at your current weight and income level, while waiting to hear if you got the job or didn’t?”  If we are enough right now as we are, if we cannot add value to ourselves by finding something out there “for sale or to achieve,” where is it?  Lamott answers her own question, “It’s everywhere, within and without, around and above, in the most ordinary and trivial, in bread and roses, a glass of water, in dawn or midnight.  All you have to do is want to see.”

Accepting one’s own value comes with a price: accepting everyone else is enough as they are too.  “Even the horrible relatives you can’t stand.’  Accepting the truth that nothing outside of anyone else will “fix” them means accepting your efforts to “help” them won’t work.  By “help” Lamott refers to the “unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves.  Help is the sunny side of control.” 

Lamott has written extensively about the family she was raised in and her parents’ alcoholism.  She is a recovering addict and so are her brothers.  Surrendering to her higher power, God as known in Jesus Christ, was painful and difficult.  Accepting the fact that she could not do the same for her brothers, that they had to do it on their own, was excruciating.  When her son’s addictions became evident, Lamott couldn’t resist trying to save him. 

She shares, “Grace helped me throw in the towel.  Or rather it helped pry it out of my cold, dead hands.  I got help—for me.  I stopped routinely giving my son money and a place to sleep.  I accepted that he might end up dead and that I absolutely could not save him.  It was the very, very worst time of my life.”

Finally, when her son ended up in jail, she refused to bail him out.  She “found the strength in the old formula of failure, terror, impotence and grace, the terror that if I fished my kid out again, this person I had loved far more than anyone else on earth would die.  I had gotten him an apartment, a good used truck, a credit card, and I could see he was worse.”
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Her “default setting” of saving and fixing her alcoholic son resulted in her spending tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of sleepless nights until she hit bottom.  She says, “I became a recovering higher power.”

The good news is that when she stopped trying to save her son, he ended up hitting his own bottom.  He found the help he needed in an AA group where older sober men offered him the support he needed.  Her son is alive and in recovery, but she still counts the months, weeks, days and hours since his last drink.

Letting go of the illusion that we can buy or achieve something “out there” to “fix” ourselves is a lifelong struggle.  Letting go of the illusion that we can “fix” the ones we love instead of letting them find their own way is an even more difficult lifelong struggle.  Yet, with God’s help we can get better and better at it along the way.  This is what Jesus meant when he said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”  When we discover the “life” we are losing isn’t really life but just a bad imitation, we begin to discover what true life really is.

Grace and Peace,
Rev. Chase Peeples

     Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
     --Hebrews 11:1 NRSV

How are you holding up in this pandemic summer?

Me?  I feel like every day is blurring into the next day.  Summertime can be like that in the best of times, but during the coronavirus it’s easy to look up and find a week or two has just blown past without my realizing it.  I think part of my loss of a clear sense of time is a defense mechanism.  There’s been so much bad news in this dumpster fire of a year that I feel like I’m more than a bit mentally fatigued.  Covid-19, the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breanna Taylor and so many others, no baseball, businesses being shut down, crazy high unemployment—and weren’t we supposed to have “murder hornets” at some point?

I’m looking for some hope right now to smack me out of the daze I’m in.  So, I picked up a book on my shelf that I’ve meant to read for some time: Almost Everything: Notes on Hope by Anne Lamott.  Lamott has been a favorite author of mine since I read her 1999 memoir, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.  Lamott’s brutal honesty about how difficult life can be mixed with her stubborn optimism and faith in spite of those difficulties has given me the permission I needed at times to simply sulk or wallow in my helplessness so I could get it out of my system and get on with my life.

In her acerbic way, Lamott admits how difficult life can be: “I have just always found it extremely hard to be here, on this side of eternity, because of, well, other people; and death.”

Since childhood, Lamott shares, whenever she is in a tall building or a high place, she has had the irrational urge to jump, not because she particularly wanted to die but because life was just hard.  A life spent dealing with psychiatrists and therapists has revealed she is not suicidal but rather just someone who struggles with anxiety and has trouble filtering the pain she sees around her. 

A therapist made her promise that whenever she felt the irrational urge to jump she would tell whoever she was with in order to “break the spell” and begin thinking rationally again.  This has resulted in a lot of friends, family and even strangers becoming quite alarmed.  The most helpful response she received came from a Coptic priest she was with on a mountain in Egypt.  She confessed all her life she had felt an urge to jump off high places.  The priest shrugged and replied, “Oh, who doesn’t?”  Robbed of her own shame, Lamott could laugh at herself and move back from the edge.

Lamott writes that all of life’s truths are paradoxes.  We may feel overwhelmed, hopeless and irrationally pulled toward the edge, but at the same time, if we are honest, we cannot avoid the miracles and beauty in life.  She describes friends who have experienced unimaginable tragedies in their lives who somehow find life again, eventually.  She writes, “[Such people] are blown over by something this catastrophic—how can they not be?—and their roots barely stay in the shifting soil.  But life holds on. Little by little, nature pulls us back, back to growing.  This is life.  We are life.”

If we feel overwhelmed by the pain of life—pulled toward the edge—we are at the same time pulled toward the joy of life.  This paradox turns out to be a reason for hope.  “If you arrive at a place in life that is miserable, it will change, and something else about it will also be true.”  She points to the daily headlines and says, ‘I have never witnessed both more global and national brutality and such goodness in the world’s response to her own.”  For every horrible occurrence, one can find people and organizations struggling against the odds to repair what has been broken.  Life keeps going.

Lamott is a Christian and can’t help but believe there is another reality just out of sight, going on at the same time as ours.  She writes, “Is there another room, stage left, one we cannot see?  Doesn’t something happening in the wings argue a wider net of reality?  If there are wings off to the side or behind us, where stuff is unfolding, then reality is more than we can see and measure.  It means there are concentric circles rippling out beyond the life we see being acted out on stage.  I believe there is another room, and I have experienced this reality, beyond our agreed upon sense of actuality.  But that’s just me, with perhaps an overeager spiritual imagination and a history of drugs.  I don’t actually know that a deeper reality exists, but I believe that it does.”

So in this hazy summer of the pandemic where time seems to paradoxically stand still and move by too fast, if you find yourself needing some hope to wake you up, trust there is more going on behind the scenes and just offstage than you can see.  It’s a paradox.  Life is hard, but despite the evidence to the contrary, God is working in the world right in front of you and me in ways we cannot perceive but that are nonetheless real.

Grace and Peace,
Chase

     “47As for everyone who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice, I will
     show you what they are like. 48They are like a man building a house, who dug down deep and
     laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not
     shake it, because it was well built.” Luke 6:47 – 48

Our bedrock is Jesus Christ. It is on this rock we stand at Park Hill Christian Church. There is no other ground, no shifting sands that we want to build upon, but it is the “rock of our salvation”, Jesus Christ! And it is on this foundation that our vision for the future rests.

Out of our time of discernment we gathered a vision for our future. We have a vision of Bold Hospitality for our community. And while the Coronavirus has delayed some aspects of putting this vision into action, there is much we can do now to get ready to “open” our house.

Like the man in the parable, we have dug down deep into the bedrock and set the foundation for our house. We are committed to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ and through His Spirit we will complete our mission. The foundation is in place. Now is the time to build the structure.

On Tuesday, July 7th we had a wonderful Zoom meeting with Rev. Bill Rose-Heim, the Regional Minister and President for the Greater Kansas City Region, Disciples of Christ. In the meeting we embraced our vision for our future, Bold Hospitality to our community. As we discussed what that means, we felt a bit discouraged that much of what we envision is being delayed by this pandemic. But Rev. Rose-Heim pointed out something crucial to our success, something we can be doing right now.

A house just doesn’t appear on a foundation. It must be built. And to build a house we must know what resources we have and what we need.

We already know many of our resources, a great location, a wonderful facility and good, loving, strong people to carry through this vision. But, even in knowing these pieces, there is more to learn. For instance, what gifts do our people have? Some, we know full well are prayer warriors. Some we know to be leaders and teachers, but what else do we know? How can we build coalitions with the different individuals in our church? What gifts are sitting in our pews?

We know that there are many things we can’t do. We are not a young congregation, so there are many physical things, like swinging a hammer that may not be in our strength’s column. But that’s ok. We don’t need to worry about what strengths we do not have, we need to find what strengths we do have.

A great example of this is how many of our wonderful people are involved with SPEAC and the food pantry! As Rev. Rose-Heim pointed out, it is all the little things we have to offer that are important. These are the things that we will be able to share with our community.
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To find our “skill” resources, we will be doing work through surveys, virtual meetings and individual outreach to find what strengths we bring. We will also be reaching out to Park Hill School District, non-profits groups such as, Parents as Teachers, and Home School associations, behavioral health organizations and asking, “What do you need?”. In finding what we have, we will be able to find what we can be to the community around us.

A little known, fact is, that in a small way, we have already started sharing from our resources. As many of you may recall, we have musical bells for a bell choir. Recently James Farley from Weston Christian Church contacted us and asked if his group might borrow our bells. Rajean was able to set things up and now, Weston Christian Church has a bell choir (we are hoping to setup a special from them soon). In this small, seemingly ‘insignificant’ way, we have already begun moving toward our vision. We had a resource that enabled another congregation to further their ministry and that is at the heart of what Bold Hospitality is all about.

Our foundation is in Jesus Christ. It is unfailing and will buffet any storm, even the Coronavirus. We may not be at a place where we are meeting except for worship, but that certainly is not going to stop us from building our “house”. We have been blessed with amazing resources, technological, physical and personal. Let us now dig deep and gather all our resources together and build on our vision so that when the pandemic is behind us our vision will already be running the good race.

To God’s glory our house will rise, and our Lord will be known throughout our community, because we, servants of Jesus Christ, have built a house that weathers all storms. 

Kathy Hendrix

In this week’s daily emails, I have been sharing about how there is more than one way to understand basic ideas of the Christian faith.  The dominant American Protestant narrative is in large part a conservative Evangelical one, and many who end up rejecting that narrative feel they have no choice but to reject Christianity as a whole.  Yet, Christian tradition and scripture offer many different ways for a person to remain Christian without holding on to a narrow and exclusive perspective.

This week I’m sharing my reflections on Marcus Borg’s book Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power—and How They Can be Restored.  I’m not a fan of all of Borg’s writings, but I do feel this book is a great resource for people who are looking to expand their understandings of some of the central terms of Christianity.  On Tuesday, I shared about Borg’s views on “salvation,” Wednesday “the death of Jesus.,” and Thursday “faith.”   If you missed those emails, you con find them on the church web site at the new “Church Blog” set up by Kathy Hendrix and Sara Riggs.  Today I’ll be sharing about Borg’s views on being “born again.”

I grew up Southern Baptist and proudly understood myself to be “born again.”  By this, I understood myself to have made a “profession of faith” in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.  This understanding was in opposition to Catholics and some Protestants (I had no idea what the Orthodox church was) who taught one was a Christian when they were baptized as infants or young children.  The profession of faith was made when one reached “the age of accountability” or when one was old enough to make their own decision about what they believed.  I don’t recall ever learning about the idea of confirmation in Catholic and Protestant churches which is largely the same principle.  When I did learn of it, confirmation was dismissed as not a true “profession of faith” but just something people raised Catholic were expected to do.  It was an empty ritual, just another box on the checklist of sacraments needed to get to heaven.

In time, I began to see that most of the criticisms levelled at denominations who practiced infant and/or child baptism along with confirmation could likewise be levelled at traditions like mine which emphasized professions of faith (often described as “getting saved” or being “born again”).  Southern Baptists (and Disciples of Christ!) have “baby dedications” in which a new child is presented to the church, thanksgiving to God for this new life is made by parents, family and congregation, and then commitments are made by parents and congregation to raise that child in the faith until they are old enough to make their own decision.  This is essentially the same thing that happens in an “infant baptism” just under a different name.  Of course, Catholics have a different meaning for “sacrament” than most Protestants, but in terms of function and purpose it too is largely the same.

A problem with the “age of accountability” is nobody can agree when that actually occurs, since some children develop faster than others.  Being the son of a Southern Baptist minister, I recall praying with my father to “accept Christ” and be “born again” at the age of 4.  Later on I had to admit I didn’t fully understand the decision I was making and so on multiple occasions I “rededicated my life to Christ,” which I guess means I was “born again” again and again.  Working in Baptist churches, routinely nervous parents would bring young children to me and other church staff anxious that their child was old enough to “accept Christ” but had not yet done so.  Would little Jonny or Sara go to hell if they died?  I was grateful when I worked in Methodist and Disciples churches which had something like a “pastor’s class” or “confirmation” in middle school, so at least parents could rest easy before their children reached that age.  Similarly, I always enjoyed teaching confirmation classes as a United Church of Christ minister which usually happened in the 8th grade.

All of these events I was a participant in or an officiant of tended to focus on beliefs.  Certainly feelings were involved, as an Evangelical/Southern Baptist I was relieved to be going to heaven.  Of course every time I committed a sin, I worried that I still wouldn’t get in the pearly gates.  When I heard sermons about being “born again,” described in terms of being a “new creation” in Christ I knew I continued to do the same “sinful things” as I did before.  There was nothing “new” about me.  I took my religion far more seriously than my peers, who considered themselves “born again” because they prayed a prayer at church or youth camp.  For them, it was a one-time thing that ensured they were going to heaven that they seemed to give little thought to as they went about their lives. 

Sadly, I feel sure many of the kids I’ve taught in confirmation classes or pastor’s classes viewed it much the same way as my peers.  Although, the classes I’ve taught in more moderate to progressive Christian churches didn’t seem to produce any kids worried about going to hell, as I did growing up, I wonder how many real life transformations occurred at the moment those kids made their confessions of faith on confirmation Sundays. 

I find it helpful to read Marcus Borg’s description of being “born again.”  He notes that the words “born again” have become largely a negative term to people who are not members of the Religious Right.  It’s associated with a particular kind of Christianity rightly understood as intolerant, unwavering on particular political issues like abortion and homosexuality, committed to a literalistic reading of the Bible, and a militaristic understanding of the end of the world.  That’s too bad, because it is a beautiful and important Biblical image.

It comes from John chapter 3 where Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus’ words about being “born of the Spirit” as literally being physically born a second time.  The Greek words originally translated as “born again” in many English translations really should be translated “born from above,” meaning born of the Spirit (which Jesus says three times in the chapter).  Borg notes what John calls being “born from above” is in many ways the same idea as what Paul talks about being “in Christ” or “dying and rising with Christ.”  None of these concepts refer to a one-time confession of belief in order to get a person into heaven.  Instead they are talking about a transformation of the self by God from a life lived for a person’s own benefit to a life lived for the benefit of others and all God’s creation.  In sum, this transformation is a movement from an unhealthy obsession with self to a healthy love for one’s self, others, Creation and most of all, God.

The New Testament writers understood this transformation happening now in this world but only completed when this world is totally transformed by God.  They understood that this transformation of being “born of the Spirit” or a “new creation” was not a finished product.  The people Paul called the “body of Christ” he also criticized for some pretty lousy behavior.  This transformation is not a one-time thing but a process that continues all our lives.

As I described, in my teen years, I “rededicated my life to Christ” again and again.  I took my religion way too seriously.  I thought I had to be perfect and I knew I wasn’t.  I thought I had to believe completely without doubts, but I had plenty.  So, I walked the aisle at youth rallies at Worlds of Fun’s amphitheater, at revival services, at youth camp, etc. because I thought being “born again” was a one-time deal that I had to get right or I might spend eternity in hell. 

Along the way, various ministers tried to assure me of God’s grace, but the language of the Evangelical world we were in was absolute.  It wasn’t until my college years I met a minister who explained Baptists needed more options on how to respond to God.  In a typical service if one felt God move in one’s heart, there were only three responses one could make:
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1. a profession of faith/accept Christ as Lord and Savior,
2. rededicate one’s life, or
3. accept a call to ministry. 

If I knew it wasn’t option one or three, I was left with only option two.  My minister friend said we needed a fourth option: “I want to be the best follower of Jesus I can be from this moment forward.”  That’s not a one-time decision to be “born again” but an openness to the new life God offers in new ways every day.

Borg notes that being “born from above,” “born again,” or “born in the Spirit” all points to participating in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.  We become passionate about what Jesus is passionate about, namely being transformed by God in order to help the world be transformed by God.  This transformation from one identity to another happens every day, every moment we open ourselves up to God’s radical love for us, others and all of Creation.  It’s not a “Get Out of Hell Free” card but becoming a whole different person.  That new life happens at any moment and all moments throughout our lives.

Grace and Peace,
Chase

     For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.
     --James 2:26

In this week’s daily emails, I have been sharing about how there is more than one way to understand basic ideas of the Christian faith.  The dominant American Protestant narrative is in large part a conservative Evangelical one, and many who end up rejecting that narrative feel they have no choice but to reject Christianity as a whole.  Yet, Christian tradition and scripture offer many different ways for a person to remain Christian without holding on to a narrow and exclusive perspective.

This week I’m sharing my reflections on Marcus Borg’s book Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power—and How They Can be Restored.  I’m not a fan of all of Borg’s writings, but I do feel this book is a great resource for people who are looking to expand their understandings of some of the central terms of Christianity.  On Tuesday, I shared about Borg’s views on “salvation,” and on Wednesday I shared about his views on “the Death of Jesus.”  If you missed those emails, you con find them on the church web site at the new “Church Blog” set up by Kathy Hendrix and Sara Riggs.  Today I’ll be sharing about Borg’s views on “faith.”

Borg provides a word study of what we mean by the modern English words “faith” and “believe/belief” and shows that what we mean is different from what the writers of the New Testament meant.  In modern English usage, the verb “believe” means “believing that” a statement is true with varying degrees of certainty.  In religious contexts, the verb “believe” means “having faith” and “faith” becomes a collection of statements a person believes.  This understanding of the English verb “believe” as “believing that” a statement is true has existed only since about 1600.  Prior to 1600 it meant “believing in” someone.  That preposition makes a huge difference! 

Believing that a statement someone said is true is different from believing in or having confidence in or trusting that person.  A person I don’t trust can still say something true.  “In a Christian context,” Borg says of this pre-1600 understanding of the verb, “it meant having confidence in God and Jesus, trusting God and Jesus.”  The English word “believe” comes from the Old English “be loof” which means “to hold dear” or “belove.”  So, prior to 1600, the English word “believe” actually meant to “belove” and in a Christian context it meant holding God as one’s “beloved.”  The roots of this Old English word comes from the Latin word “credo” which means “I give my heart to.”  (Interestingly, most ministers who attend seminary are required to write a “Credo” or statement of beliefs, but nowhere in that assignment was I ever asked to state what “I give my heart to.”)

Borg notes that when New Testament writers are talking about “belief” and “faith” what they had in mind was closer to the modern English words “loyalty” and “trust.”  When Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Why do you worry, you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:25-34) his is not talking about a lack of belief in particular statements but a lack of “trust” in God.  Similarly, when James is talking about “faith” without “works” he is talking about a “faithfulness” or “trust” in God resulting in a transformed way of life.  Borg references the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who described “faith” in terms of buoyancy.  A person in deep water sinks when they thrash around to keep themselves up, but they float when they trust the water will do so.  This image brings to mind Jesus walking on the water and Peter joining him but then sinking.  Jesus says to Peter, “You of little faith” (Matthew 14:31).  Jesus wasn’t referring to Peter’s lack of belief in a group of statements, but a lack of trust.

Borg sums up the problem with the modern understanding of “faith” as a collection of statements one believes this way. “To put the contrast very concisely, it is the difference between:

Believing that a set of statements about God, Jesus, and the Bible are true.

Beloving God—and for Christians, this means beloving God as known especially in Jesus.

For some, perhaps a majority of American Protestants and some Catholics, the former is what “saves us.”  But does believing that a set of statements are true save us, transform us?”

From the beginning of Christianity, there has been a problem: people who say they are Christian but do not act like it.  In Matthew 7:21, Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.”  One can say all the right things, but act in all the wrong ways.  One need only look at recent polling data that shows so many people who consider themselves to be “Christian” in America today simultaneously approve of policies that harm the powerless such as separating children from their parents and detaining them on the southern border, a criminal justice system that imposes harsher sentences upon non-white people, and a denial of basic scientific facts at the cost of elderly, sick and impoverished people’s lives.  Clearly believing a set of statements to be true is not enough to transform us in ways that result in the kind of compassion and love Jesus demonstrated.  One can believe all kinds of statements about God to be true without ever trusting God with one’s life and death.

Grace and Peace,
Chase 

     but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles
     1 Corinthians 1:23 NRSV

In yesterday’s email, I shared about how there is more than one way to be Christian.  The dominant American Protestant narrative is in large part a conservative Evangelical one, and many who end up rejecting that narrative feel they have no choice but to reject Christianity as a whole.  Yet, the tradition and scripture of the Christian faith is a deep well with many different perspectives that allow one to remain Christian without holding on to a narrow and exclusive perspective.

This week I’m sharing my reflections on Marcus Borg’s book Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power—and How They Can Be Restored.  I’m not a fan of all of Borg’s writings, but I do feel this book is a great resource for people who are looking to expand their understanding of some of the central terms of Christianity.  Borg feels there is a two-fold crisis in American Christianity: religious illiteracy and a literalism which distorts Christianity by narrowing down the possible understandings of what it means to be Christian.  Yesterday I shared about Borg’s views on “salvation,” and today I will share his views on “the Death of Jesus.” 

In the dominant American Protestant (and Catholic) narrative of Christianity, Jesus died for our sins in our place--a substitution.  This view is often called “substitutionary atonement.”  It comes as a surprise to many (if they ever learn of it) that this view of Christ’s death is less than a thousand years old, which means Christianity existed for over a thousand years without any Christians holding this view!  A theologian named Anselm of Canterbury first wrote about in 1097.  Anselm wrote that God’s justice requires someone to pay for sin and only a human death can pay that price.  Since humans are sinful, only a perfect human would do, so God came as Jesus Christ to die and pay the penalty for our sin.

Just because the “substitutionary atonement” view of Christ’s death isn’t ancient doesn’t automatically make it invalid.  The Holy Spirit is still at work in the world and many changes in theology through the centuries are good ones—think of changes like considering slavery to be wrong, gender equality, and inclusion of LGBTQ people.  Yet, “substitutionary atonement” has a number of significant weaknesses that make it problematic.
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• It obliterates the historical meaning of his death.  Jesus was crucified, a particular form of execution reserved for those who opposed Roman imperial rule.  In the Gospels, when Jesus predicts his coming death it is always because political and religious authorities will cause it not because he must be a substitution.

• It makes God’s character primarily about judgment and punishment rather than love.  Although this view is often “spun” as loving (i.e. God loved us and sent his Son to die in our place), but even then God’s judgment and punishment is greater than God’s love.  This type of God will not be satisfied except with blood.  I’ve often heard this view of God sending his son to die described as “divine child abuse.”

• It distorts what Christianity is about.  This view says Jesus’ death was merely part of God’s plan to get believers to heaven.  It says nothing about transforming people’s lives now nor about transforming the world here and now.

In the New Testament, Christ’s death by crucifixion is at the heart of the message but not as a substitution.  Borg supplies several of the most common understandings.

• Christ is crucified, a particular form of death reserved for offenders against Roman rule.  If authorities wanted Jesus dead, they could have done so any number of less public ways, but they wanted him dead to communicate a message: “This is what happens to those who oppose us.”  So when Paul emphasizes Jesus crucifixion, his readers would have held this understanding of what Jesus’ death was about (e.g. 1 Corinthians 2:1-2, Philippians 2:3-11).

• Dying and rising with Christ was how early Christians described a personal and communal transformation.  In Galatians 2:19-20, Paul writes “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”  This image was and remains the meaning behind Christian baptism (see Romans 6:1-4).  In the Gospels (see Matthew 16:24), Jesus urges his followers to “take up their cross and follow me,” an invitation for followers to die to themselves and serve the greater cause of the Kingdom of God rather than any earthly kingdom.

• Jesus’ death is described as a “sacrifice,” but never a substitution.  In Judaism, there were many sacrifices: thanksgiving, petition, purification for sin and even a communal meal with God.  None of these sacrifices required the one making the sacrifice to God to die.  Often the idea of the “scapegoat” ritual is compared with Christ’s death, but that animal was never killed but rather was sent out from the community.

Borg urges readers to think of Jesus as a “sacrifice” but not a substitution for our own deaths because a punishing God demands it be so.  He notes how people often sacrifice themselves out of love for others.  A soldier may die for their country or a firefighter dies rescuing someone from a fire.  He gives the examples of three Christian “martyrs” of the 20th century: Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was executed for resisting Hitler’s Germany; Martin Luther King, Jr. who was assassinated for advocating equal rights for African Americans; and Archbishop Oscar Romero who was assassinated for standing with the poor against El Salvador’s military government.  We would describe each as sacrificing their life, but we would not describe them as substitutions.

Borg says the most important way to understand the death of Jesus is as a revelation of God’s love.  In Jesus, Paul and the early Christians believed, we have “the decisive revelation of God.  In Jesus, “we see what God is like.”  “Thus, in Jesus’ passion for the Kingdom of God and his challenge to the powers at the risk of his own life, we see the depth of God’s love for us. . . not a punitive God who sends Jesus to die for our sins, but a God who is passionate about transformation of the world.”

Grace and Peace,
Chase

     The Lord is my light and my salvation;
         whom shall I fear?
     --Psalm 27:1 NRSV

I was raised with one understanding of Christianity, a conservative Evangelical view.  To be Christian meant “to be saved” from Hell and to have eternal life in heaven.  I was “saved” by the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.  Jesus died for my sins and everyone’s sins, because God was above all just.  The penalty for our sins (which meant individual actions contrary to God’s will) was death.  God loved us, so God’s son Jesus was sent to die in our place.  This was a free gift of God, but I had to accept Jesus Christ as my “personal savior” to escape Hell  Any form of so-called Christianity that did not teach the faith this way was not “true” Christianity.  Needless to say, any other religion was also “false.”  Our job as “true Christians” was to convince others they were wrong, so they wouldn’t go to Hell.

Along my faith journey, much has changed in my understanding of Christianity.  The biggest change of all, probably, is my understanding that the Evangelical Christianity I was raised in is largely a modern invention having been created in the last several centuries.  A Christianity concerned chiefly with individuals and their individual choices leading to an eternity in heaven was not the primary concern found in scripture.

I came to this broader understanding of Christianity through being a religion major in college, attending seminary and spending several years in a New Testament Ph.D. program before I turned to local church ministry.  A common refrain among clergy is that this broader understanding of Christianity is taught in most non-evangelical seminaries but never makes it to church pews.  I believe the Evangelical worldview is deeply embedded in American Protestant Christianity, and most clergy value job security over doing the difficult work of teaching and leading their congregations to consider a different way.  Also, tools for Christian education from a non-evangelical perspective have largely ceased to exist—Bible study guides, Sunday School literature, and individual devotional guides have largely become the province of Evangelical Christianity alone.

As a minister to congregations who are theologically middle of the road to progressive, I have struggled to find resources for church members who essentially have a reactionary faith.  By reactionary faith, I mean they know what they do not believe (Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christianity), but they are hard pressed to articulate their faith in terms of what they do believe.  It turns out, there are a multitude of ways to articulate Christianity in terms that are not the same words as the Religious Right, but unfortunately, you have to work hard to discover them. 

This week in my emails to PHCC, I am going to share ideas from one resource for Christians looking to articulate their faith in new ways: Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their meaning and Power—and How They can Be Restored by Marcus Borg.  This is one of Borg’s books aimed toward a popular, rather than academic, audience.  It’s accessible and I think it’s solid, unlike much of Borg’s more scholarly work.

Borg would summarily be declared a heretic by Evangelicals, and truth be told, I’m not a fan of much of his academic writings.  Borg, who died in 2015, was a part of The Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars active in the early nineties who sought to discover the “Jesus of history” rather than the “Christ of faith.”  The problems with this effort are too many to list here, but I’d simply say it is fraught with logical inconsistencies and a general lack of self-awareness.  I wouldn’t recommend any of Borg’s stuff on the so-called “historical Jesus” (e.g. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary)

Yet, later in Borg’s career, he became a popular writer and speaker who did a very good job of articulating a form of Christianity that I believe is more faithful to scripture and Christian tradition than most of what is preached and taught in American Protestant churches today (e.g. The Heart of Christianity and Speaking Christian).  In these later works, I read a pastoral sensitivity and desire to redeem Christianity from its current American form rather than merely deconstructing it.

In Speaking Christian, Borg notes the crisis in contemporary American Christianity and says its causes are two-fold.  The first cause is illiteracy, or a lack of knowledge about basic symbols, language and scripture.  The second cause is a form of literalism that distorts Christianity by narrowing down the possible understandings to a select few.  The result is an exclusive faith focused on individuals getting eternity in heaven rather than a communal faith focused on transformation of the world here and now.  The former version, the version taught by Evangelical Christianity, is being rejected by younger generations at a dramatic rate, and because those younger generations do not know there are alternative forms of Christianity to choose from, they are thus rejecting Christianity altogether.

An example of the alternatives Borg describes comes in his chapter on “salvation.”  Borg notes that “salvation” expressed as only eternity in heaven comes with a negative flipside, the majority of humanity spending eternity in Hell.  Even in churches that downplay this side of “salvation,” many who are taught it experience anxiety, fear and in some cases spiritual abuse due to feeling responsible for getting “saved” and making sure their loved ones are “saved” too.  This limited view of “salvation” is being roundly rejected, and I would argue rightly so.

Instead, Borg argues we should look to scripture where “salvation” is primarily described not in heavenly terms but in down-to-earth and here-and-now terms.  Borg lists the following dominant understandings of “salvation” in the Bible.

• Salvation as liberation from bondage—the “primal narrative” of Israel is the Exodus, the freeing of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, bondage that took economic, political and religious forms (e.g. Exodus 13:2, Hosea 13:4);

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• Salvation as return from exile—the second greatest narrative of Israel is the return from Babylonian exile, the prophets described God, the savior, as loving, present on their journey and providing freedom from fear (e.g. Isaiah 43:1-4, 45:17);

• Salvation as rescue from peril—the Psalms especially speak of God rescuing Israel from immediate threats to livelihood (e.g. Psalm 27:1, 65:5);

• Salvation as deliverance and transformation—the New Testament occasionally is concerned with afterlife but much more commonly describes “salvation” as the movement from death to life, blindness to seeing, infirmity to well-being, and fear to trust—all in this present life (e.g. Matthew 23:16, Romans 6:3-11, John 3:1-10, Luke 12:22-31, 1 peter 1:7);

• Salvation as justice and peace—throughout scripture God’s “salvation” in this life takes the form of justice for the oppressed, as well as peace, more than the absence of violence but the world operating according to God’s intentions (e.g. Isaiah 2:3-4, Micah 4:2-3, Luke 19:41-42. 

Unfortunately, holding to these broader and immediate understandings of “salvation” will result in any who accept them being branded ‘liberal” or “politically correct.”  I would argue, however, that taking back the word “salvation” from the Religious Right is actually a more conservative position, if one understands “conservative” as meaning faithful to tradition and scripture.  Of course there is the very real danger of Christians reading contemporary movements into ancient traditions and texts, but I feel the greater danger is a Christianity that is largely irrelevant to the social, political, economic and environmental crises of our day.  Worse still is an exclusive Christianity unconcerned with the problems of real people that contributes to today’s problems of oppression and injustice. 

The choice between the Christianity of the Religious Right and no Christianity at all is a false choice.  The well of Christian tradition and scripture is deep and offers room for many different perspectives that have everything to do with the problems we struggle with as individuals and societies. 

Grace and Peace,
Chase

     “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke
      upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for
      your souls. 30For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28 – 30

In this world it is so easy to become weary. The burdens of daily life can weigh down on us like tons of rock. It has been that way since the fall from Eden.

Today, we face not only the burden of daily life; not only the weariness from just trying to stay alive, but also the added pressures of a pandemic and a county divided by a political minefield that is permeating every facet of our lives. Yes, weariness is abundant. The burden we carry is nearly overwhelming.

Hear the good news! We just have to come to Jesus, and He will give us rest. That does not mean that the troubles of the world will go away. That does not mean the burden will suddenly be lessened, or our weariness will evaporate. What it means is we have a comforter, a companion, a champion in this daily fight.

So, what does “coming” to Jesus look like. Wasn’t that taken care of when we accepted Him as our Savior? Well, yes, but as with any relationship, it isn’t a one-time deal. Coming to Jesus is an ongoing process. We must develop a habit of coming to Jesus.

Coming in prayer. Coming in communion. Coming by ‘putting on Christ’ in our daily lives. We are called to be Christ like in our dealings with the world at large.

“Take my yoke….”; ‘take on my ways’, ‘be like me’, Jesus says.

When we take on the yoke of Jesus, we are guided by the Spirit and the way becomes easier. The worry of the world can be replaced by the peace of Christ. It is an ongoing process.

When we come to Jesus in prayer about all things, He will send the Spirit of peace upon us and we can raise our voices in praise even in the prisons of this world. When we actively seek out Jesus for communion, sitting with Him, walking with Him in our spirit, He sends His Spirit of joy to us so that we, like the apostles, can sing of His praises.

When we ‘put on Christ’, we will be servants even to the harshest task masters and that love will overcome weariness. The power of Christ is in the strength of humility. It is in the gentleness that displays patience and love toward all people. Finding rest in Jesus comes from knowing He is with us in all we encounter.

The yoke of Jesus is easy and the burden light, not because it is a simple thing to do, but because we have a companion, a champion in Jesus. We have an example of how to reach the world.

When we come to Jesus in daily life, we are led by the Spirit of God. When we are open to the Spirit, we see beyond the trials and troubles of a broken world and see what God intended for His world to be like.

When we humble ourselves, like Jesus, we can serve our brothers and sisters without fear or weariness.

When we take on the gentleness of Jesus, we can face daily life with confidence and hope.
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When we take on the yoke of Jesus, no pandemic or divide can overcome us. We have the power that overturned the grave on our side. 

We are not called to be burdened. We are not called to be weary.

We are called to be at rest in the Lord.

We are called to be servants that show humility and gentleness to a world stuck in oppression; a broken world, tired and fading into death.

We are called to be examples of hope and love. His ‘yoke is easy and the burden light’, for it is the yoke and burden of love for God and one another.

Kathy Hendrix