Electric Circuit Rider

I was the first to arrive at the morning session of a continuing education seminar at an inner city church in Detroit . The seminar leader asked me if I would stand by the door and let in my fellow students, but keep out the people who were already lining up for a hot meal that would not be served until noon.

I cracked the door open and looked for the faces of the people whom I had met the night before. I let in Sarah and Don and Howard and Cathy (with a C!) and Tony and, at the same time, I politely refused to let in the mostly African-American young men who were trying to enter early for the meal. One seemed to be especially aggressive, he tried to put his arm through the door opening and he was saying something to me, but I was pushing back when I realized he was saying, “I’m Robert!”

Robert was a member of the seminar. He was a young, African-American pastor whom I had met – and liked – the night before.

 In 1 Samuel and in John, people make judgments based on appearances. They think they see. The disciples ask Jesus a question about religion (see the previous post) “Was this man born blind because of his sins or his parents?”

If they were to ask a religious question, it would be, “When I look at a man born blind, what kind of person – and what kind of God – do I see? And what does that say about me?

I wince when I remember myself trying to push Robert out the door and I ask myself what that says about me and my own blindness. What does it say about what I believe about God and our relationship to God, regardless of the color of our skin?

Do you have times in your life when you were sure you were right – and you weren’t? When you misjudged someone? When your internal assumptions got in the way of seeing external reality? It may not be fun, but spending some time this week asking what those experiences said about who you are and what you believe would probably be the best Lenten discipline you could follow.

Our friend, Reid Isaac, wrote a book called What’s God Doing Today? Talks with Parents and Children, back in 1967. In it, he makes a profound distinction in a simple way. The distinction is between religious questions and questions about religion.

The Woman at the Well (John 4:5-42) asks questions about religion when she asks Jesus about where they are supposed to worship; in the Jerusalem Temple of the Jews or the mountain-top sanctuary of the Samaritans?

The religious questions are a lot deeper and just as the woman wanted to change the subject from her marital history to questions about where to worship, so we also want to get away from the religious questions by asking questions about religion: What did Jesus mean by “Living Water”? How did he know about the woman’s husbands? What do the woman and Jesus understand the word “Messiah” to mean, and did they understand the concept in the same way? Is there something significant about this being “Jacob’s Well”? Who is this woman, anyway?

This story raises other questions that are less comfortable and far more religious:

• What am I thirsting for in my life?  What in me is unfulfilled? Unsatisfied?
• What would it be like for me to worship God in spirit and in truth? Am I thirsting for a new spirit – a holy spirit? Am I thirsting for truth – the truth about God and the truth about me?
• Have I ever had an encounter with Jesus that excites me enough that I would want to tell someone else about it? Is that what I’m thirsting for?

My temptation as a preacher/pastor/teacher is to focus on the questions about religion that would let me hide behind my book-learning, because I really have answers for those questions. If I try to answer the religious questions, I would just stumble around and reveal more about myself than I am comfortable showing. But the truth is, only the religious questions matter. The questions about religion are like the water from Jacob’s well, you have to keep coming back for more.

The religious questions lead to living water that satisfies the soul. What are your religious questions?

In our readings for this past weekend, Paul tells us we are not saved by obeying the law, and Jesus says we do not enter the Kingdom of Heaven (or “kin-dom of heaven” as my associate, Dianne Covault, likes to say) through knowledge – even (maybe especially!) the knowledge that religious leaders, like Nicodemus (and yours truly) prize.

Paul says we are saved by faith, instead.

Yes, yes, we have heard that before, but what does faith look like?

It looks like someone being born again, Jesus says.

Thanks, big help that is. What does that look like?

Way back near the beginning of the Bible (and some say this is where the Bible really begins) we see what it looks like. It looks like a guy who has dutifully worked in the family business for, uh,75 years, who, just when he should be moving into Wesleyan Village, decides to sell his house, buy a Winnebago and set out on a road trip his wife and his nephew, but without a map or a compass because God is going to show him a place where his life will make a lasting difference; a place where he and his barren wife, who is a whole decade younger than he is, are going to have babies and create a genetic and religious legacy that will last for thousands of years. It looks like a guy who is sometimes incredibly brave and other times embarrassingly cowardly, who is sometimes naively trusting and other times subtly scheming, and who is sometimes a compassionate neighbor and other times a fierce warrior, who somehow never gives up hope or, yes, faith, that God will keep this incredible promise.

Unless you are about to jump off a bridge, my guess is that you haven’t given up hope, either. Your hold may feel like it’s slipping, but so far, you have kept the faith. You may not believe (or understand) every last word in the Apostles’ Creed, but my guess is that you believe some of it, and you probably believe, maybe in spite of any evidence, that the mess of contradictions you call a life actually has a meaning. That’s not much less crazy than a couple who should be headed for the geriatric ward believing that they are going to wind up in a delivery room, instead. 

And that, my friend, is what faith looks like and that is what saves us.

Just as I was beginning pastoral ministry, the winds of the charismatic movement began to blow through mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches bringing with it Pentacostalism’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit and its miracles. Although I never signed on as a card-carrying charismatic, I admit that my initial skepticism was overcome by the sincerity of friends, fellow seminary students and pastors who were charismatic. I liked them and [usually] believed their remarkable stories.

I also admit that I was intrigued by the possibilty of working miracles. I was feeling pretty inadequate as a 23-year-old student pastor who, as one aged saint said of a similar young preacher, “He hasn’t sinned enough to have repented enough to have been forgiven enough to know what he is talking about.”

I thought it might give me a kind of authority if it got around that I was known to have performed a miraculous healing or two. So, I prayed extra hard at the bedsides of my hospitalized parishioners. One did, in fact, experience a miraculous healing, but the event was so strange that no one would think that I had healed him – in fact, I was sure that I hadn’t. It was just God working the way God does in ways too subtle and wonderful to trace back to any particular source.

I smile, now, at that ambition I had to work miracles when I was young. I smile even though I know that I’ve taken on a job that would require a miracle for me to claim anything resembling success.

I wondered if Jesus smiled at Satan when he proposed that Jesus grab the world’s attention by tossing himself off the top of the temple. Jesus knew that he would perform miracles that Satan couldn’t even imagine, but they would all be God’s miracles, done God’s way in God’s time for God’s purposes.

One of the temptations that afflict relgious people is the longing for spectacular religion – a religion that puts the spotlight on us and not on God. When we give in to that temptation, we often fall on our heads.

Roger Talbott