My Liberal Manifesto- Part One

I still do a lot of thinking about Heaven and Hell. Maybe that’s a result of some kind of Baptist-itis I suffer as a result of years of Baptist Sunday School classes run by mean, blue-haired old ladies with attitude problems and horrific gas. Maybe it’s because I am drawing closer to 40 years old and the inevitability of that old friend Death. Maybe it’s because as I get older, what it really means to be Christian diverges so greatly from what I was originally taught and I worry that I am straying from the path. “Where will I go when I die if I think a lot of the stuff that preached to me when I was a child is bunk?” I still wonder. “Is there an afterlife? If there is, who will be there? Will I go to the bad place now because I doubt the literal truth of the virgin birth??”
Previously, my relationship to Christ was to function as a recruiter .We had backyard bible schools, collected clothes for the poor, invited folks to the Jesus Gym for basketball and a sauna. All of this we did because we wanted to keep the “unsaved” people who were our friends from going to hell by “saving their souls.” If the great unwashed just said a simple prayer and “asked Jesus into their hearts” they would be assured of going to the good place. They would join an elite society of people who were assured pleasure and happiness eternal when they died. All of our interaction with outsiders to out faith was in the end of getting others to agree with us. Ultimately, it was us and them and “them were not going to the good place unless they agreed with us. The more I know about who Jesus really was and what he really said and did the more I have to reject my old view of what it means to be Christian.
However, I find myself stymied by the force and emotional effectiveness of the preaching and “evangelizing” from the other ideological extremes of the protestant world. I shy away from theological argument with my “fundie” brothers and sisters silently suffering as a “liberal Christian ” I keep my mouth shut. At its best, my silence is my sincere effort to be present with others and really understand who they are. At its worst it is because I have lingering doubts that go back to my fear of the afterlife. “Maybe they are right…” I think. I must stop being a theological milquetoast. Through some good work done by theologians and historians whose work I have come to respect a great deal I see that the way I think is “biblical” and solidly based in who I think Christ really was. However, I am still, for the most part, part of a quiet group of seekers who shy away from confrontation and argument with the other side- these days especially. We are content to let the fundamentlists hold sway over their ego-gratifying TV shows, pulpits and 30,000 member mega churches with McDonalds franchises and Bible colleges.
Keeping my mouth shut, however, is to do a disservice to God and to the church as a whole. It is time to have theological arguments with others in “the church” (the body of all believers).
The Gospel, the good news, reveals itself in many unexpected ways. We watched Bruce Almighty again recently. I don’t care for Jim Carrey, usually. He’s a little over the top and most movies he is in become “Jim Carrey Movies” that are more about his schtick and less about the story. Who knew one of his movies held a big key to the Gospel according to who Jesus really was??
Morgan Freeman – The God character in the movie, says to Jim Carrey (Bruce) at one point, “You people keep looking up when the answer is in there (points to his heart). “You want a miracle….be the miracle…” In other words, this Hollywood God was saying that we spend so much time thinking about what is next versus what is here and now. We spend so much time begging God for the miraculous to occur without recognizing it in the every day or making it happen ourselves. Fundamentalist Christians want us to worry about where we go in the next world and to get everyone to agree with them so that they can go too. They are so busy selling fire insurance that they miss the flood of need, beauty and God’s truth in this world.
Fundamentalism is so attractive to folks because it is: 1) simplistic enough that our TV-addicted culture can get it quickly; 2) it provides a highly structured intellectual environment (“God said it, the bible says it, that settles it…”) 3) it provides comfort through a (usually male) authority figure who provides black and white solutions to problems- most of which are full of beautiful ambiguities that cannot be ignored.
Maybe the mission of “liberals” like myself is to come up with an alternative theology we can serve up as an alternative to the fear that most of the popular denominations preach. If the Kingdom of God is within us and surrounding us, is becoming present in each moment, that changes the spiritual landscape considerably. If we are walking in God’s Kingdom now it becomes incumbent upon us to create pockets of people who act accordingly: people who do what they say, who are kind to one another, who practice hospitality to everyone and are grateful for everything, recognizing the divinity in each person and moment. When we do this we cease being recruiters for the angelic ranks - we become worker bees who exist to do the work of love, forgiveness, reconciliation and truth that Jesus Christ did in his time here on earth.
However, if we are what God made us, why did God make us with minds that are so attracted to these types of isms? If moving beyond this type of legalistic fundamentalism to a new type of fundamentalism that embraces fundamental truth about Jesus represents an evolution of faith, shouldn’t it be apparent and simple enough to spread and evangelize to the masses? I mean, really, how many folks out in the Lakeshore Mall that you see Christmas shopping can stomach tomes like Spong’s “Liberating the Gospels” and Laughlin’s “Remedial Christianity?” How many folks are going to wade through The Five Gospels? Not many, I’m afraid, because that type of thinking is hard to do and pretty esoteric and boring to most folks.
If the truth we are finding is so apparent and real, it must be, in some form, easily discernible somehow to people who sit in the pews listening to Chuck Stanley feeling guilty ‘cause they notice his comb-over more than what he is saying from the pulpit. I would contend that there is another way that the people in God’s kingdom can and will embrace but we must shape, spread and evangelize with that message with a fervor equal to Mr. Stanleys and his weight-challenged counterparts on TBN. What a world we would live in if there were people on TV who, each week, found a new way to remind us to appreciate the present moment, love our neighbors, tell the truth and love God. It may never happen because it makes horrible ratings. Truth just can’t compete with hellfire and brimstone and fear.
Tell “the people”- The Kingdom of God is now and just now and not off in the clouds. Preach that the Kingdom of God is that woman who is suicidal from grief who needs someone to hang out with her and bring her dinner. Yell from the rooftops that the kingdom of God is paying attention and listening. Just doing those small acts is the hardest work there is in the human condition. . “Being the Miracle” means we have to be awake, pay attention and do what God requires us to do, which is 1) love our neighbor, 2) Love God 3) don’t tell lies. Who among us does this every day? Our job as “liberal evangelists” is to come up with ways to do these things and convince others to do them with us.
In this season of Advent, when our miracle began in some kind of birth of Jesus it is my prayer that all of us listen more than we speak, pay attention to the need that surrounds us and act accordingly. “Ye must be born again” we are told. Being born again happens to us every day and not just once. We are born again and again and again every time we are the miracle. Remember this during this season that speaks so strongly of birth and beginning. Begin to become the miracle and the Kingdom of God will reign in that moment.

A Clean Out Day

It is funny how bitter arguments and hostility with someone you really love can just evaporate after a while. I think it can be true that the sun won't go down on the anger you have towards someone you love, sometimes.

My predictions as the househusband were correct: the amount of work was not satisfactory and she was upset with the state of the old house I have been fixing up. I could see her point- here I am, a teacher on summer hiatus, with no summer job lined up and all I have to do is get the other house fixed up. There still remained, as of yesterday, a lot of stuff to do. I had to finish the trim in the garage, begin the last stages of cleaning out the basement and many other little things that added up to not having enough done to be able to put the house up and sell it.

When we drove up to our shingled, three bedroom two and half bath house, I felt really tense. I even wondered if I had left the garage door down. I had, but things were not as they should have been.

No sugar tonight in my coffee, I sang to myself as my ass got chewed.

God I love her.

To Begin at the Beginning

Today is post number one. How many people have begun a blog with this heading I will never know. Really unoriginal.

Today begins as a Sunday like many others. NPR til 10:00, paper and a smoothie- heading off to work on my old house I am trying to sell now. I have been working on this damned house for the entire summer and cannot seem to get it done yet. Today I am taking my wife with me to help. Undoubtedly she will be dissatisfied with:

1) The amount of work I have gotten done.
2) The quality of the work I have done.
3) The choices in decor that I have made (carpet style, stain color, etc) .

So what's the deal here? Do I apologize for the lack of taste and work and grovel at the feet of humility, recognizing that I am probably not a hard worker and have bad taste? Or do I defend my work as competent and adequate? Does it really matter and does any part of the universe hang in the balanace? I probably could have done more work and made better choices, but I like thinking that I do thebest I can.

later