What motivated you when you first embraced faith? For some, it was simply part of the family tradition into which you were born. I hear this a lot for folks raised Catholic. Catholics have done a good job cultivating that with their rituals and sacraments. I was a Baptist version of the same thing. I grew up in the church – a pastor’s kid, no less. It was a huge part of our life. I have never really known a season of my life without the Church or faith.
Some people embrace the faith for purely practical reasons. They heard that heaven is in the balance of their decision. So, even if they aren’t sure about the faith or heaven, what’s the harm? This is reminiscent of Pascal’s wager that we learned about a few weeks back.
I knew another person who embraced the faith very late in life – deep into retirement – because he finally understood the magnitude of God’s grace and accepted, it, weeping. He wept because of the release of shame and guilt he had carried for decades after the Korean War where he took many lives in battle. He felt completely unworthy of God’s love and welcome due to his actions.
I’ve also known people who were directly and indirectly told that they were no good from a young age. Their parents and family, by their words and actions, created and reinforced an awful self-image that they assumed reflected God as well. These people are victims of others’ awful behavior. Hearing and believing that God loves them – that at their core they have value – is absolutely transformative.
What compelled you to embrace the faith? Were any of the above part of the motivation?
Jesus’ first sermon after returning from his post-baptism camp trip touched on some of these themes. In that Nazareth Shabbat gathering, Jesus chose what text to speak on. He was intentional when he read Isaiah’s vision of what God’s anointed one would be about (Luke 4:18-19 CEB):
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,
to proclaim release to the prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to liberate the oppressed,
and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
In another space, Jesus was remembered saying, “I am the Door; anyone who enters in through me will be saved (will live). He will come in and he will go out [freely] and will find pasture... The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, until it overflows). (John 10:9-10 AMPC). And in yet another, “This is eternal life: to know you, the only true God... I’m not asking that you take them out of this world but that you keep them safe from the evil one. They don’t belong to this world, just as I don’t belong to this world... I pray they will be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. I pray that they also will be in us, so that the world will believe that you sent me. (John 17:3, 15-16, 21 CEB)
Mark Feldmeir, in his book, Life After God, notes what isn’t mentioned in Jesus’ borrowed vision of what he was to be about. There is nothing about heaven, or saving your soul, or asking Jesus into your heart. And yet for many churches, this has become a primary reason to embrace and nurture the faith. In the 1800’s, preachers began using the threat of hell in earnest to coerce people into accepting Christ. Billy Sunday led massive crusades in the 1920’s; Billy Graham picked up his mantel and packed stadiums for decades with this central question: are you going to say yes to Jesus or eternity in hell? Fear is effective. That’s why with every election cycle, we hear commercials for political candidates filled with fearful rhetoric. Facts don’t matter much, apparently, because they don’t seem to make much difference in our current election. They haven’t mattered a lot for many who were frightened into the loving arms of Jesus with the threat of facing a wrathful God if they didn’t. The horrible logic in this sales pitch should have been enough to cause many to balk. Yet millions have caved under fear. Fear is powerful.
How did fear factor into your decision to embrace faith?
Jesus wasn’t about fear. He won people to faith with love, welcome, hope, and what might be possible for the future. For those of you who came to faith wooed by love and grace that overcame the shame and guilt of decisions past and/or the voices of many in the present, who were not so much won over with the promise of heaven but emotional healing now, consider yourselves lucky. You experienced the invitation of Jesus that he extended to everyone. If you embraced faith for lesser reasons, maybe it’s time to let go of the fear filled lies and trade up to unconditional love.
Feldmeir suggests that our embrace of faith isn’t a singular decision, but a process where we decide again and again whether to follow Jesus. It’s not so much about becoming born again as it is about being born again and again and again and again... In the first death and birth of faith, we shed the lie that we are unworthy of love, acceptance, and dignity. Religion wraps this in God language. We believe that God loves us unconditionally, wholly, which therefore means these things are true for us. Some stay there, content with this very good news.
In the second death and birth, we awaken to the truth that everyone and everything is loved as much as we are, worthy of love, acceptance, and dignity. This is the beginning of the death of egocentrism and is difficult, because it feels like we are losing our specialness. If we’re not more loved than others, that somehow devalues us, which is, of course, not true. Just because everyone is special doesn’t wipe out anyone’s specialness. When this takes root, we begin to see and treat others differently, more graciously, because we recognize their inherent worth. This leads us to give people a break for being human just like us. This allows room for the forgiveness process as well.
The third death and birth: we die to self and embrace the vision of Jesus, willing to expand our personal vision to invest in the wellbeing of others, including our enemies. (Life After God, 187-189)
Each of these moves and more require a death before a birth, a letting go of the past and an openness to the new. Like a lobster molting out of its too-small-outer shells, the process is difficult, probably painful, and leads to an incredibly vulnerable in-between period as the new shell grows into place, only to happen again and again as the lobster grows.
Have you ever met a lobster who refused to leave its shell? They are infamously grumpy. So are Christians who refuse to grow, which requires letting go. It’s hard. It’s painful. Babies cry at the top of their lungs when they leave the womb, and we generally act like babies with every significant change. By the way, Jesus let go of former ways to embrace the new. He encouraged others to do the same – what do you think the parable of the wineskins was about?
Where are you in your unfolding faith and life process? According to theologian Bernard Loomer, a sign that we are growing is an enlarged heart, where we become increasingly concerned about the wellbeing of others. Why is this a sign? Because the salvation offered by God and proclaimed by Jesus was shalom for all. Wellbeing. Wholeness. Equanimity. Healthy relationships. Healthy planet. Love abounding. Peace. I believe shalom is what we all truly want for ourselves and for everyone and everything.
The late Will Campbell was a preacher and civil rights activist who escorted black students into the newly integrated Little Rock High School. As hate mail from conservatives came in, he recognized he hated the haters as much as they hated him and the integration itself. In his estimation, he was no better that those he was accusing of hatred. So, he began sipping whiskey with KKK members, even becoming known as the Chaplain to the Klan. He slowly began winning them over. In time, however, he began receiving hate mail from more liberal people who challenged his relationship with the Klan members. His response? “If you’re gonna love one, you’ve got to love ‘em all.” (191). That’s evidence of a person who has been born again and again and again and again.
For many who came to faith based on the threat of hell and the promise of heaven, the above is hopefully a breath of fresh air. Yet we also cling to the hope of heaven. What do we do with that?
Jesus is remembered as not shying away from the question about what happens when we die. According to those who wrote down what they remembered of his teachings, Jesus believed there was more to come, all awash in the love of God. We can often get caught up in literal details and miss the themes Jesus was trying to communicate. In John 14, Jesus cast a wonderful vision of post-grave life as being spent in a sprawling complex built by God for us. I hope that’s not literal. Can you imagine how big that place must be by now? How long will it take to catch an elevator? And what about parking? Let’s hope and pray something more was being communicated. Hint: it was. The disciples would have been terrified after Jesus’ crucifixion and likely accused of being his followers, making them apostates as well. Sure religious leaders would have told them of God’s coming wrath for their heresy. In those moments, perhaps they would recall Jesus’s point: God accepts them now and forever. Believe it. Trust in it.
Yet my confidence is not only my intellectual conclusion that the God Jesus proclaimed is indeed experienced as graceful, loving, and forgiving, which means I will be allowed to pass through the Pearly Gates. Jesus was offering a time-stamped expression of hope to his audience and all audiences who wonder about the nature of God as it relates to our lukewarm devotion to the Spirit. The bottom line for Jesus was that everyone is loved even if not everything we do is lovely.
My confidence is in my ongoing, growing awareness and experience of the “more” that we call God (to borrow a Marcus Borg phrase). The “more” is gracious and spacious, is present, is supportive, is the sense of love itself. This love has held me my whole life, has shaped me, wooed me toward love for the sake of love. This love seems to be always flowing, has been forever, and will be forever.
What, then, is the final act for me and the whole world? It seems to me that Jesus’ insight and that of his followers was that love was the end goal: shalom for everyone and everything. I trust that. If that means there will be a massive family reunion of sorts where everyone is somehow their best selves and still recognizable, and everyone gets along and forgets and forgives the reasons they haven’t before, I’m cool with that. If the end is more like rivers flowing to the sea, becoming one, where all of our drips make up the whole, always part of the whole, becoming the ocean and discovering we’ve been the ocean? I’m cool with that. If, when I draw my last breath, there is no breath here or beyond the grave, I won’t have any capacity to be anything other than cool with that!
Regardless of the vision that will become reality, I live in hope and with hope. I trust love. I choose love as much as I am able, even if I struggle most of the time. Love has held me, saved me, continues to woo me. I don’t think love will ever let me go, and that gives me great peace. To not have any anxiousness about our end may not be possible. No getting around that. Yet I am okay trusting in the “thisness” that is the fabric of life itself. I am a part of it. It is part of me. That will never change. So, until I draw my last breath, I simply choose to breath.