It sometimes happens that the two busiest hours of snow on a weekend are right around the time we were preparing for church; this was the case on Sunday. I got stuck for a minute on the driveway into church- my back wheels spun a bit as I was turning, so i lost my momentum coming up the little hill from big beaver, and as this was before the plows came, I got stuck. I ended up backing up and getting some momentum, and made it up just fine. In the future, I'll take the "back way" through the neighborhood, that has no hills on it.
On Wednesday, I had everything prepared for this sermon; a nice little talk about how we need to be better about not just telling what our faith and values stand for, but showing them as well in our actions. The old hypothetical came to mind, "if there was a case against you for being a (progressive) Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict?"
These calm waters were troubled by two things: one, was that in the Sermon Prep Bible Study (On Wednesday Mornings at 10:30 in Person and on Zoom), Pat Parker noted that Jesus struggled with a similar thing in the reading: didn't John the baptist and his people see Jesus get baptized and the whole miracle at the river Jordan thing? I came away from Bible Study with much more sympathy for us than I had previously; after all, if Jesus tried and only partially succeeded, perhaps we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves.
The second event that troubled me was a lecture and discussion that I went to on Thursday night, hosted by the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, a project of my Alma Mater, Davidson College. The initiative hopes to reinvigorate and provide experiences for people to listen and learn from each other across differences, a goal shared by many of us at CCB. This particular event was about Religion in Public Life: the guest speakers included a Muslim professor, two Protestant Christian pastors, a Roman Catholic lawyer, and a member of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. It was a great discussion and we broke up into small groups afterwards to talk about the same issues.
What I really left with was two questions that ended up intersecting our bible reading for the week in interesting ways: 1) What actually is religion? 2) What is Public Life/ The Public Square?
The first question might be surprising, but Religious Studies Scholars have struggled to come up with a definition of religion that actually fits most world religions. Most of the early work in the field was done by Protestant Christians (One of the first was Protestant German pastor Freidrich Schleiermacher, father of liberal theology, who we've talked about before), and so early modern definitions of religion came from that perspective. Even some of the language we use- of faith as a synonym for religion, for example, showcase this bias. For many religious traditions, "faith"- as understood in the protestant Christian sense as a sense of trust in God- is simply not a component of their religion. Even in our cousin Abrahamic religions, Jews and Muslims do not posses faith in the same way that Christians do, and we believe in the same God! Religions from other cultural locations are often even farther apart.
In our reading, we are supposed to know that John the Baptist was really concerned about if Jesus was the one they were waiting for- so much so its repeated twice within 3 sentences. Yet Jesus doesn't just say yes, and he certainly could have! Instead, he shows the envoys his work, with healings and evil sprits being banished. Jesus is answering a completely different question from the one being asked; his primary concern in this moment is not being the "one", it's healing and preaching the Good News (to the poor). It's a different concept of religion!
As for the second question, my life pre college was in the pre-social media era; I got onto facebook in my freshman year of college (2005), and my whole adult life has been in the post-social media era. I truly don't know what public life is now; is it town council meetings? The mass protests of the anti-Iraq War or the women's march (or January 6th?)? Or is it Tiktok and Instagram videos?
I think the self-critique that we have of not presenting or promoting ourselves in the best way is a fair one....AND, not but, but AND, if we are to truly love, our efforts at making it real in our actions must be about be about doing good, not looking good. For love, as Paul tells us, does not boast, but it does endure. So as we think about our missions and social justice going forward; in a time when our voice is very much needed in the public square, we must center the love that we have for each other, and the world, a reflection of the love God has for us.
Keep the faith friends, have courage, and hang in there.