If someone were to ask you to describe the central tenet of your faith; what is it at the heart of your spiritual and religious life… in just a sentence: What would you say? In the Christian church we have at our disposal a rich library of scripture; we have the multifaceted theologies developed over the tradition; and the wealth of experience of living out the faith in practice over the ages. The discipline of the faith involves engaging these three sources of understanding keeping open always to new knowledge and new revelation. Surely God is forever about new revelation as the created order continues to become and evolve. But still… When we distill this ever evolving faith of ours to its essence, what is it that is steadfast, the proverbial bedrock upon which we stand… What is at the heart of the matter? And really, why does it matter?
What I would say in a sentence, if asked, is this: The long and the short of the Christian faith is that we are to love God with all our heart and mind, and the way to love God is to love one’s neighbor. That’s it. Over the vast sweep of scripture, Old Testament and New, we are told of ancient mythologies carried down through the oral tradition, of genealogies, of the sagas of the patriarchs, of slavery, of liberation, of religious practice, of the laws and mores of society, of the trials of monarchy… genocidal violence, love poetry. Scripture contains a rich diversity of literary genres, but when one sifts through the cultural chaff with a critical eye, one sees that there is a golden thread that wends its way from Genesis to Revelation, and that thread is that our singular vocation, that for which we are made, is to love our neighbor.
We live in a post-modern western culture that holds the spiritual quest to be one of self fulfillment. The me and Jesus culture; that if we just believe in Jesus in the “right way”, we will be rewarded with all manner of material blessing… or, if that doesn’t pan out, then eternal wealth in the life to come. Culture has an insidious habit of co-opting religion for its own purposes… but at its heart the spiritual quest has always been counter-cultural. Jesus indeed was a radical prophet, a revolutionary calling for an egalitarian society… a sharing of wealth… a reversal of fortune… What he called for in short is that we are only in this world to take care of each other in shared abundance… That is the vision of the gospels. That is the divine life… the kingdom of God… nothing pie in the sky… just a world in which we recognize that we are all children of God with a sacred right to well-being and dignity.
This of course raises the stakes for us religious types. We don’t live for ourselves. We live for our brothers; our sisters. The gospels compel us to engage our world, socially, economically, and politically. How we live together matters to us profoundly. The well-being and dignity of all of our species, recognizing the sacred contingency among us, matters profoundly. The well-being of our planet, matters to us profoundly… Our life’s work is to be about the business of creation, that is, the artful work of improvising the history of our world for the good in every small act of seeing to the good of our neighbor. If we’re not doing that, we shouldn’t use the moniker, “Christian.”
I shudder at the heresy of our country’s conflicted, ambiguous response to the so-called “border crisis.” If one is Christian then it is simple: We take care of our neighbors, and particularly if they are children, those whom Jesus dubbed, “the least of these.” These are our brothers and sisters fleeing oppressive violence and degradation from countries whose poverty we can’t imagine. If we can spend countless billions of dollars on two immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then we certainly can spring for funds to address issues of poverty and violence in Central America whose economic plight we have ignored for centuries. Now this plight, in which we have been complicit, has become visible on our doorstep. I raise this example because it is a case in point as to how we call ourselves a “Judeo-Christian Nation,” a country of welcome and equal opportunity… and then we act otherwise. President Obama, Representative Byrne and Senators Sessions and Shelby call themselves Christian… Honorable Sirs, start acting like it.
Who is our neighbor? They are the ones who come to our door sick and hungry… they come to our door in despair, in fear… They are the least and the lost. And they are our responsibility… They are ours to love. The great irony of the Gospel, in God’s alchemical imagination, is that when we take care of our lost and least, we find fulfillment and true happiness, and growth and maturity and wisdom for ourselves, because in nurturing others we nurture our own souls… Such is the nature of God’s abundance. Such is the nature of God’s love.
The matter is that faith matters. It matters for the good of our world… for the world’s very salvation… It’s time for faith in our world to become the enlightened action it is meant to be, because the world waits for its salvation… The stakes couldn’t be higher… It’s on us… really.
Very well said Jim. This is the essence! We miss you two ! Let’s get together soon!