May 16, 2012

Replanted

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Psalm 1 is sort of awful and wonderful, all at the same time. It exhorts us to live by the law of the Lord and promises that things will go well with us if we do. Don’t sit with the scoffers, it warns, because things are surely going to suck for them.

For the righteous faithful, things sound better:

They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper. (Ps 1:3, NRSV)

I haven’t always felt so fruitful as that, despite my best efforts to be faithful. Sometimes the streams of water, of grace, of love have seemed unreachably far away.

Today I read this Psalm in a new translation, the Common English Bible, and I found something I needed to see. Here’s the fresh look at verse 3.

They are like a tree replanted by streams of water,
which bears fruit at just the right time
and whose leaves don’t fade.
Whatever they do succeeds. (Ps 1:3, CEB)

RE-planted! I love it!

A tree can be transplanted, and while it’s not always successful, it is possible for a tree to thrive. The apple tree planted in my backyard came to us from a nursery, root ball in a burlap sack. It had already been growing somewhere else, clearly. I thought it was simply a flowering tree and looked forward to enjoying its blossoms. But in my backyard it found a home and sunk down roots and even gave forth unexpected apples.

Of course the trick is we have to be willing to risk ourselves, to choose to be transplanted, away from the things and people and habits of mind and heart that separate us from God.

The truly happy person
doesn’t follow wicked advice,
doesn’t stand on the road of sinners,
and doesn’t sit with the disrespectful. (Ps 1:1, CEB)

So it takes more than passive, nice, safe faithfulness. And don’t kid yourself; being active and rigorous and discerning involves risk, because it upsets other people who like us the way we always were before. Loving the Lord’s instruction (again CEB) requires an energetic commitment. We have to choose away from the disrespectful, the road of sinners, the wicked advice. We have to choose toward God. That’s when  we will find ourselves planted anew, by streams of water.

And maybe, just maybe, our leaves won’t fade.

Filed Under: Common English Bible, Easter 7B, Faith, Psalm 1 ·
Feb 18, 2011

Who Rescues Who?

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Yesterday, walking down our block with the Visiting Dog, I felt a lift of spirits, and when I searched for a word to describe it, I said to myself, “I feel delivered!”

(For public purposes, I was speaking to the dog, you understand.)

It’s a spiritual concept, the idea that God delivers us from strife and difficulty.

We associate it with the Israelites being delivered from Egypt.

We sing it: “Strong deliverer, strong deliverer, be thou still my strength and shield.”

We find it in the Psalms: “O Lord, my Lord, my strong deliverer, you have covered my head in the day of battle.” (Psalm 140:7)

We pray it: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

I think I’ve prayed that gingerly, or unconsciously. Evil. Evil? What does that even mean in my day-to-day life as a mom and a pastor, I might have asked?

I might have.

But in that moment, just about the time we got to the last house on the block, the thought had formed fully, and the prayer of thanksgiving was not far behind.

The idea, of course, is that a person rescues a dog, delivering a dog from evil or difficulty or abandonment or neglect.

A little later in the day I drove off the street, and pulled into a line of cars waiting for a red light at the nearby intersection, and I had enough time to see this magnet on the car in front of me.

So naturally, Visiting Dog is a permanent delivery as well as a fluffy deliverer.

We’re calling him Hoagie.

Filed Under: A Dog's Life, Faith ·
Feb 27, 2010

Loving Ferociously

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At Confirmation class the other night, we did an exercise called Spiritual Gifts Bingo. I'm not sure I ever understood the rules as laid down in the teacher's book–my co-teacher has taught this for so many years, I get to skate on some of those details–but what we did in practice was go around and suggest to one another which of the gifts listed the person might have, and if they agreed they put their initials in the appropriate square.

I loved seeing the reactions of the students when I suggested to them they were "fair" or "empowered others," the smiles that crossed their faces in surprise or appreciation. I liked the things they thought I might be: "caring leader," which I accepted, and "patient," which I did not. Sometimes I'm patient…but not always. I'm quite patient with them, but generally not at all patient with myself.

And I wonder if these aren't things so programmed into us from early life that they are nearly impossible to change, at the same time I would, no doubt patiently, encourage the Confirmands that our faith is all about the possibility of transformation.

A long time ago, so long ago it seems like another life, I moved to Maine and started attending a church where they used Inclusive Language for God. What that meant most of the time was leaving out the masculine pronouns. We still sang from the very old-fashioned Pilgrim Hymnal (which I love in many ways), but our Doxology spoke of Creator, Christ and Holy Ghost rather than Father and Son. Coming from a Baptist background, I didn't have much experience with liturgy, so that part didn't throw me. 

But later, later, I realized there were people around me thinking of Goddess rather than God, of Mother rather than Father, and I had to grapple with my understanding of God. It was the beginning of a long period of transformation, a spiritual turning point with no apparent destination at the moment the turn began. I came to love the idea of God as Mother, and eventually I moved onto a place where I could see both masculine and feminine characteristics in the First Person of the Trinity, but to have neither of them feel very important to me.

Jesus, however, remained a guy.

George_HenWithChicks_Large  Today I talked with a group of women about the feminine image of God in tomorrow's gospel lesson, when Jesus speaks of feeling like a mother hen, wishing to gather her chicks beneath her outspread wings. I shared a Barbara Brown Taylor piece from the Christian Century that pointed up how brave the hen is as she defends her young with nothing but her body. She has no weapons to use against the predators. She puts herself in the way to give the little ones a chance to escape. 

I struggle when I hear of the triumphal theology that some contemporary Christians have, the kind that says Jesus is the buff defeater of evil. 

No. His wings are spread, his chest exposed, his life given vulnerably, going down without a fight. 

It's a ferocious love, that willingness to sacrifice yourself, to be hurt yourself.

At the end of our session this morning, I asked the group, and I'm asking myself, to look around us this week and see who or what needs our ferocious love? Now, I'm not suggesting we can be Jesus. We can't. Everyone in the room identified with that image of the protective mother, of doing that protecting, and I'm pretty there's a place for us to employ it.

But I'm not sure I've ever been on the receiving end of such love in this life.

And in a phase when I am quite impatient with myself, I wonder if I don't need to show it to me, to fend off my own predatory perfectionism, to own my vulnerability as a shield instead of a weakness.

Filed Under: Faith, Generation Hug, If I Were Preaching, Mothering · Tagged: ,
Dec 15, 2009

“An Unusual Patois”

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The December after Hurricane Katrina, I went down to Mississippi
to volunteer, mostly by filling in for a Methodist pastor whose home had been
flooded. It seemed like a great idea at the time; I really wanted to go to the Gulf
Coast, but I have very few
practical skills in the area of demolition or rebuilding. When a blogging
friend asked for preachers to come and give a break to her colleagues who were
in distress, I thought that might be something I could do. I had the
opportunity, thanks to Small Church,
to take ten days for the mission trip. This gave her two Sundays off in a row,
a huge gift of time for a preacher.

But shortly after I offered to go, I began to worry. I
looked ahead to see what texts I would be preaching, and they offered little
comfort. Instead they contained references to God in the mighty waters of a
storm (Psalm 29) or the water coming over Jesus’ head as he was baptized.

“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was
baptized by John in the Jordan.
And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart
and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.” (Mark 1:9-10, NRSV)

Water, water…everywhere.

What made me think I had anything to say to people whose
lives had been quite literally covered by the storm surge? I began to think I
should be sending a plumber instead.

In the end, I realized that if I truly believed the Holy
Spirit had nudged me to go to Mississippi,
I ought to trust that the same Spirit would be with me when it came time to
preach on those Sunday mornings in January.  The first was New Year’s Day, 2006, and I
remember having a sense that although the weather seemed bleak, hope could be
found in the community of that Methodist church. The pews in the back third of
the sanctuary were filled with donated food and clothes; a teacher arrived
early to teach Sunday School on New Year’s Day, which amazed me; and the people
came eagerly to worship, to sing and pray and give thanks to God.

I’m not sure I had anything brilliant to say that day, but
people definitely noticed the way I said it. As one older gentleman put it, my
Maine-with-notes-of-Virginia accent made for “an unusual patois.”

And that’s the dialect of faith, isn’t it? We speak an
unusual patois of fear and hope, of death and life, of disconnection and
reconciliation. I’ll be in Mississippi
again, on my fifth annual trip, from January 1 to 6, and I promise to bring
back stories to share with you. The people who hear them in person will no doubt chuckle to hear my languorous vowel sounds.

Filed Under: Faith · Tagged:
Nov 22, 2009

Oh, crap!

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When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, "The LORD has done great things for them."

The LORD has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.

Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like the watercourses in the Negeb.
May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.

Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves. (Psalm 126, NRSV)

One of the things that gives me hope is quite simply the flip side of the thing that makes me frustrated about my own life and the lives of those around me: we tend to repeat ourselves. Sometimes I wonder if I am caught in a feedback loop, and I really worry when it sounds like I am my mother or my father having a conversation with me when I so strive to be a more awake and enlightened parent than they ever were, in my opinion. Although looking back I guess they didn't do such a bad job, really–after all, my brother and I are both productive members of society, raising kids who are thriving in one way or another, smart kids with interests and talents, and even one adult among them now, gone out into the world with his own harvests to anticipate.

But I don't love it when I hear frustration creep into my voice, when my old wounds and rejections become part of my parent-child relationships.

In fact, I hate that crap.

I'm pretty familiar with crap this morning. Sam strained or sprained something the other day and has been on a regimen of Tramadol and rest since Thursday afternoon, and this has thrown off his schedule of "bidness," and this morning I came downstairs to find a big pile of…that stuff. It cleaned up easily enough, but it served as a reminder of the way we all have habits to which we return unconsciously, primal tendencies that assert themselves in moments of stress, or exhaustion. 

They're not all as charming as the way I slip back into my Southern accent at the end of a long day or when speaking to an unknown group of people.

Communities have habits, too, patterns of relationship to which they revert when things aren't going well, or even when they are going *too* well. Even churches do this. If things aren't going well, God must not care about us, we think. Or if things are going extremely well, we may neglect the life of the spirit in favor of the more visible successes of life.

This psalm provides a vehicle for getting back on track. It's a song that says, oh, yes! We have become disconnected at times, and we thought God might be neglecting us or punishing us, and we plodded along watering our work with our tears–but we came back from the field with shouts of joy!!!

It sounds simplistic. God took stuff away, then for some reason God gave it back. I sometimes think we don't give those ancient writers of hymns and psalms full credit for the ritual nature of their compositions. Come back to God, they are saying, knowing full well that even a faithful person may have a bad crop or a dry season. Come back to God, because why ever you do it, it's a good thing. Come back to God, because believing you can handle it all yourself will surely lead to saying, "Oh, crap! Why did I think that?"

Come back to God, and be renewed by the natural mystery of cycles and seasons. Come back to God and give thanks that going away was always part of the human condition. Come back to God and give thanks that it is never too late to rejoice. Come back to God and give thanks that it is never too late to return.

Filed Under: Bearnaise Sauce Dogs, Faith, Grace, If I Were Preaching, Midway, Psalms · Tagged: , ,
Nov 5, 2009

My Cup of Hope

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Light Princess came downstairs this morning as the kitchen counter TV, tuned to the news, blared a commercial with Christmas music.

Offended, she exclaimed, "It's not even Thanksgiving yet!"

I agreed. "I got a Christmas cup at Starbucks yesterday."

I prepared for her disgust, but instead she smiled.

"Well, they sort of put me in a good mood, so I guess it's okay."

And it was true, that on a morning when I felt discouraged, my first response to a Christmas cup was to cry out, "No! It's barely November!!" But then I noticed the words on the cup, which include "Wish" and "Joy."

And the first one I saw was "Hope."

Some of us might be about up to here with the idea of hope. We hoped and hoped all last year, and we rejoiced on Election Night, but on the other side of the country, people felt then the way my friends and I feel now.

It's possible that word got to bound up with a human being, one who doesn't share my position on the issue of marriage. I mean, he really, really doesn't. 

Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. (Psalm 146:3, NRSV) 

I don't like thinking of this verse in reference to a President for whom I voted. It felt like a *great* verse six years ago, when we were going to war and the colleagues in my preaching group were still trying to figure out how to talk about it in a sermon. He even acted like a prince, that President–in my opinion–but I see how inclined we are to make them into princes, all of them, even if only the ones we prefer. Princes or fools or mustachioed villains, however we dress them in our minds, do not put your trust in them. They cannot manifest our hopes single-handed. They may not share them. They may not even care about them.

We've got to find our hope in other places. 

I start with my kids. They are 23 and 19 and 14, and two of them voted, and all of them are angry. They're learning a hard lesson that other Christian people did not hear the gospel the same way they heard it in this house and in the churches that formed them. It makes no sense.

LP will go tonight to the big GSA meeting where LGBT students and their straight allies from many schools will gather to unpack what has happened.

For my No on 1-voting neighbors and the onlookers from away who don't reckon these things from a faith perspective, it's almost easier. They can shut out the religious voices, or try to, and make plans for the next campaign. They don't have to figure out a way to talk to the ecumenical colleagues at the next community event or clergy group meeting.

My friend, RevFun, went to see a priest yesterday. God, he's brave. He's braver than I am. He wanted to tell a priest how this felt and why it was wrong.

I know the priest he went to see, not as well. I've met him once. I wonder if he felt equipped to have the conversation. I wonder if any of them do.

My friend E wrote a beautiful reflection on the power of the widow who gave her mite, and another E wrote he would "watch the sun come up tomorrow, and go back to work repairing the world. Who's in?"and my musical colleague J used Facebook to share his feelings about how this experience led to deeper self-acceptance and my friend B simply said in a status update, "B W is not going away…"

We are all in some way part of the United Church of Christ, and we are motivated by our understanding of the gospel message that we are to love God with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds and our neighbors as ourselves. Make no mistake about it.

That's my cup of hope this morning. I put no faith in princes, but in the next generation and in the people of God, who are not going away.

Filed Under: Faith, Friendship, Marriage Equality, Politics · Tagged: , ,
Oct 15, 2009

Yes, I’m a Spong

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It's not hard to find out who I really am, since I link to my newspaper columns and have been none-too-secretive over the past couple of years. I still use a nickname simply because I *enjoy* using a pseudonym. My kids have a different last name, so I'd like to think they are somewhat shielded.

But one thing from which I cannot be shielded despite pseudonymity is the way other bloggers talk about someone I love a lot, my Cousin Jack (Bishop Spong). I don't agree with everything he's written–I'm a solidly Trinitarian Christian, but I find his post-theistic understanding of the Divine not only informative but inspirational. I admire the way he continues his lifelong spiritual practices, such as the reading of scripture and prayer, even though he has long since left behind the childhood faith experiences in which they were based. I have been the recipient of his hospitality, eaten meals he has prepared with his own hands, hands which have held mine and my children's as grace has been spoken around a family table.

Anyway, it's a popular thing to give him crap. I hope you won't mind if I skip those discussions at your blogs. In fact, I'm likely to stay away for a while. I find the hostility people feel toward him mysterious and troubling. I'm reminded of the death threats issued against my dad, Jack's first cousin, when he did not toe the white, conservative line in his political career, when he fought the people who thought closing the public schools in Virginia and opening "private" white schools would be the best way to fight integration and when he voted against a Supreme Court nominee who belonged to an all-white country club.

We need people who push the edges of how we think and what we believe, or we grow stagnant. We may not agree with all of their conclusions, but they stretch us. Without such people, we wouldn't be voting to affirm the new law allowing same sex marriage here in Maine. We wouldn't think twice about the Louisiana Justice of the Peace who recently refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple.

We need prophets.

I believe the world needs Cousin Jack. I believe God works through him, even if my understandings, some of them, differ from his. I hope you can understand. He poured the water of baptism on the head of my oldest child. In my home he is beloved.

Filed Under: Faith, Family · Tagged: ,
Sep 16, 2009

Over Coffee

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I'll confess it. There are a lot of days I have my coffee with Morning Joe (brewed by Star$$$$$).

Some of those days I have to change the channel due to the palpable rise in my blood pressure. This was one of them. On the subject of President Carter's remarks on racism being directed at President Obama, the Morning Joe regulars seem unwilling to accept the notion that racism plays any part in objections to and demonstrations against the current administration.

I think it's very easy for comfortable white people to deny racism. I say this as a person who grew up in the virtual apartheid of otherwise genteel Jane Austen's Village. I say this as a person who realizes that she often *doesn't* realize her own internalized racism.

This morning I would probably be happy to smack the smug faces of the Morning Joe crew. They're describing the vitriolic attacks against President Bush. Why, someone once called him a monkey, too, says Maria Bartiromo. Is it possible someone needs to explain to her the difference between an insult and an epithet?

They're talking about poll numbers and saying "It can't just be racism. He used to have 70% approval and now it's only 50%." But if racism drives the debate through its ugliness, does it matter what the percentage of racists is?

They're asking, if we were so enlightened in November, how is it that we're so backwards now? It seems to me we were always both, in some measure.

They're saying President Carter shouldn't have said it, that he's making trouble for the ever-so-careful Obama administration in its insistence that race has nothing to do with these things. I like their post-racial attitude. But we live in a world that is both modern and post-modern (right, church people?), where some people continue to fight battles that other people want to insist are no longer relevant. Maybe both things are true. And among the "moderns," there is still racism. I'll admit it, even if Joe and Mika would rather I didn't.

Filed Under: Faith, Living in This World, Politics · Tagged: ,
Aug 20, 2009

Armor Class, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DM

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I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time at age 40. Pure Luck, then my boyfriend, had a long D&D history, and he offered to run a game for my boys, as a way they could all get to know each other better. The only trouble was, he wanted me to play, too.

For several years, I had been aware the boys were playing pencil-and-paper D&D with a good friend and his siblings, but this would be a major production. Pure Luck had created his own world (with a little help from some favorite books) with a particular pantheon of gods and goddesses. He had cases and cases full of little figures, carefully hand-painted by a savant of the art, a fellow unusual enough to be a character in a game himself. Pure Luck held back the biggest, most terrifying monsters and brought them onto the game table shielded behind a screen, that they might be revealed to the greatest effect.

Until #1 Son left for college, we played as often as Pure Luck's work schedule would allow: #1 Son and Snowman and Snowman's friend, J-Bass, and even yours truly. We changed characters to please someone, then no one was all that happy, and finally college and jobs brought us to a halt.

Then #1 Son asked if we could play when he came home this summer, and we decided to bring back the old crowd, and Pure Luck allowed Light Princess to roll up a character of her own, and thus we all gathered around the dining room table with our little figures last Wednesday night, to play "The Game."

My character is a druid priestess, Trillium, and she is pretty powerful in many respects, but because she is a druid and therefore a follower of the Earth goddess, she can't wear metal armor. Leather armor is at best a 13 armor class, as compared to the 18 J-Bass's Paladin sports or the 20 LP's new Fighter wears. So I'm much more vulnerable to damage, since all that stuff is subject to twenty-sided dice rolls for damage, and it's harder for the bad guys to injure someone with a 20 armor class than a 13.

I must admit I worry about these things while we are playing. I worry about the hit points and the risk of character death, and you would think after eight years I would stop catastrophizing and just play the darn game, but I am so invested in everyone's enjoyment that I sometimes ruin mine.

Here's why. At the near-climax of last week's gaming event, while fighting some sort of robot (which I didn't even know we HAD in this universe, but apparently there was always a lesser god named Teknos in the pantheon and maybe I should have been paying attention to him) in the tight hallway of an evil, modernist tower, J-Bass our Paladin rolled to hit and got a 1.

If you've ever played D&D, you know that's bad. A 1 is the worst roll you can get. You roll some percentile dice to determine whether it's just a losing effort at that part of the battle or something worse: a critical fumble. And if it is, you roll percentile dice again, and the DM looks at his list to see what terrible thing is going to happen next. Some of the terrible things are fairly lightweight. You knock yourself unconscious and are no help until the battle is all over, or you accidentally hit your companion with your staff and he takes several points of damage.

But Sabin the Paladin was standing right next to Snowman's character, Timballisto the Elf/Fighter, and on Pure Luck's chart, the number indicated, "You sever your companion's arm at the shoulder joint."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Armor class made no difference.

An odd mixture of shock and hilarity ensued, nervous laughter that went on until tears welled in some of our eyes. Snowman went around the DM's shield to see the words on his computer screen, then left the room. I, the Mother, began to worry that the character would die, would simply bleed out, then quickly realized it was my job to keep him alive until the DM figured out something more permanent.

He was surprised, too, you see. It took a few minutes for all of us to gather ourselves and continue.

Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but
against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers
of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the
heavenly places.Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able
to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand
firm. (Ephesians 6:11-13, NRSV)

I really didn't need to worry, but I did. I forgot something important.

In a world threatened by elementals and dragons and giants and trolls and owl bears who drop wizards with few hit points from terrible heights, the ultimate goal of our particular DM is not to harm us, but rather to stretch our imaginations and employ our complementary strengths as people and characters to make the game a good one. Whether our armor is leather or plate or happily enchanted by elves, the maker of our game will be sure we are equipped for what is coming next, whether or not we realize it.

We can count on this in our spiritual lives, too, that whatever befalls, we will be equipped if we draw on our natural gifts and turn to those around us for support and call upon the God who made us, whose spiritual armor, worn faithfully, will not fail us. 

(Yes, I'm thinking about Proper 16B…)

From left to right: Trillium the Druid, Sabin the Paladin, Timballisto the Elf, Marlowe the Wizard and his bodyguard, Gwyn the Fighter. Oh, and an Owl Bear, just because.

Our Party Dark

Filed Under: Ephesians, Faith, Games · Tagged: ,
Oct 7, 2007

Crafting a Creed

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(Part of a sermon on 2 Timothy 1:1-14 and The Apostles’ Creed)

It’s easy for us to forget how new Christianity was when the epistles were written. It’s easy for us to forget it had a learning period. Yet at the same time it may surprise us that the concerns of First Century Christians were not unlike ours. Many people in both churches I’ve served have asked me, why don’t we see more young families here? Why is the church so changed? Oddly enough, the Bible speaks to our concern in this very passage. The recipient leads a young church and has worried that the next generation will not understand the meaning of the faith. The author reminds him that just as his mother and grandmother passed the faith along to him, so he will pass it along to the next generation.

To do that, we need to know just what it is we believe. What statement of faith can we truly affirm?

The trouble with old words intended to communicate spiritual principles is that over time we lose our common ground of understanding. Things the author of this epistle, thing the crafters of the creeds assumed to be comprehensible, are now out of context and confusing and even at times abhorrent.

The Congregational tradition that informs the United Church of Christ is non-creedal. That means we respect the historic creeds, but we would never use them as a test to prove someone believes the right thing or thinks the right way. Someone asked me recently why we say the Apostle’s Creed on some Communion Sundays. And I said, “Oh, I used it because I saw it in an old bulletin!” For many the Apostle’s Creed is familiar but puzzling, for some it is even offensive. But for early Christians it sought to put into words the complex ideas people had been arguing since the earliest days of the church. They needed that assurance so desperately that they claimed the 12 articles of the Creed had been dictated on Pentecost by the twelve apostles themselves.

We wonder why it mattered so much to describe Jesus’ death in emphatic fashion, to say he descended into hell, and that’s because we don’t understand what sort of views of reality were common in those early centuries after his life. The creed attempts to refute the view of the Gnostics, people who believed Jesus was never really human. They could not believe that any part of God, or any higher spirit, would ever take human form. They saw human form as repellent and flawed.

But for other Christians, the humanity of Jesus mattered most of all. What triumph would it be to overcome death if he were not a person at all?

You see the problem. The answer, as is so often true in human systems, seemed to be codifying the particular beliefs that made sense to those engaged in the discussion, beliefs that may seem very, very distant to us.

As non-creedal people, we do the same thing. We create a code in a faith community by the way we do things, by the habits we form, by the manner in which we speak to one another. We set up our own tests to be sure the right people are in our community, whether or not we realize it. It might be the way we dress or the vehicles we park in the parking lot or the kind of music we sing or the version of scripture we read.  It might be our graciousness to visitors, or a more reserved attitude toward making newcomers welcome. Churches often separate themselves on lines of education or income, of ethnic heritage or race.

It seems like that wouldn’t need to be true in the 21st century, but somehow it is.

Other people will decide they know what we believe whether we tell them or not. They will read our lives like a book, unless (and even if) we find words to express what so many people down through the ages have struggled to preserve and renew.

The authors of the Apostle’s Creed and I might quibble with one another about the details, but I believe we were all on the same quest to understand God. They believed a well-crafted statement proved they were right in their interpretation. Here is what I respond to in the creed, how it moves my thinking, shared with the understanding that your mileage may vary, and that is perfectly all right with me and I suspect with God, too.

I believe in God, a divine creative force that set the spark of all that was and all that is and all that will be.

I believe in Jesus, a real man so much more closely in touch with God than we usually are that some say he must have been part of God, and therefore God himself.

I believe there is a Spirit that moves among us that communicates in subtle ways the wishes of God, always allowing us to do as we will but hoping we will do as God desires.

I believe that creativity, that presence and that flexibility are all signs of a Love greater than our small minds and hearts could ever truly imagine, and that it is because of that love that we are forgiven and will experience something also beyond our imagining when we leave this existence.

I believe that being the church is still worth doing. And I believe that no one else will know unless we tell them.

How about you?

Filed Under: Faith ·
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