Authentic friendship is notoriously different and inescapably risky. True friendships are not relationships we control but adventures we enter into; indeed friendship is more surrender than conquest, more a loss of control than a calculated plan. …
Ultimately the goal of Christian worship is to create and sustain a community of friends of God who precisely because they are friends of God commit themselves to embodying and proclaiming and practicing the ways of God’s reign in the world.
Such a life is not without risk — the faith of martyrs attests to this — but it is the vocation of the friends of God, a vocation into which we are initiated as we learn and practice the ways of Jesus, the perfect embodiment and exemplar of friendship with God.
— Paul Wadell, Becoming Friends: Worship, Justice and the Practice of Christian Friendship
Christians in other parts of the world, especially those experiencing direct persecution or hardship, generally have a heightened sense of their need and dependence on God. Following Christ is tremendously costly. It can mean expulsion from one’s home and community or imprisonment, torture, rape or death.
Not so in suburbia, where our spiritual awareness is often blunted by our general sense of safety and comfort. In a religiously pluralistic context where freedom of religion is the law of the land, Christians tend not to experience overt persecution and opposition. The threats to suburban Christians are far more subtle: materialism, secularism and the temptation to live as if God does not exist. …
We suburban Christians must resist the lie that comfort and painless existence are the ultimate ideals. Our goal is not a life without pain, though we may do what we can to alleviate others’ suffering. Our call is to live a life of faithful witness even in the midst of difficulty, pain and suffering.
Many words, such as care and compassion, understanding and forgiveness, fellowship and community, have been used for the healing task of the Christian minister. I like to use the word hospitality, not only because it has such deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also, and primarily, because it gives us more insight into the nature of response to the human condition of loneliness.
Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveler. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes closed-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights. …
When loneliness is among the chief wounds of the minister, hospitality can convert that wound into a source of healing. Concentration prevents the minister from burdening others with his pain and allows him to accept his wounds as helpful teachers of his own and his neighbor’s condition. Community arises where the sharing of pain takes place, not as a stifling form of self-complaint, but as a recognition of God’s saving promises.
Love does not operate according to the rules of power, and it can never be forced. In that fact we can glimpse the thread of reason behind God’s use (or non-use) of power.
He is interested in only one thing from us: our love. That is why he created us. And no pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence will achieve that, only his ultimate emptying to join us and then die for us. Herein is love.
The New York Times has a moving story about one pastor’s efforts to gather the stories of those who lived through lynching in the 20th century.
The Rev. Angela Sims visits people one at a time, and with care encourages and coaxes them to share their stories for the sake of history — and healing. She tells the Times:
I’m listening for what salvation and redemption might look like. I’m listening for how grace might play out and for notions of forgiveness.
I think about some of the individuals I’ve met and the way they’ve talked about having to get rid of racial hatred — to be in relationship with God, to not hate themselves. I’m looking for a way to articulate this ethic of resilience.
The story leaves one with the sense that Sims is still working out what she means by an ethic of resilience. At this point, the Times story better conveys what such an ethic looks like in the stories of survivors. At its core, Sims’ work wades into the mystery of evil’s presence in the world, juxtaposed against God’s goodness. As the Times story notes:
For Ms. Sims, such interviews went beyond racial issues to ontological ones. “The question of where God was in the midst of this evil,” she said, “is held in tension with the way God acted. They name the evil, but they recognize something beyond it.”
In trying to form a “theology of resilience,” Ms. Sims has combined the firsthand testimonies with Biblical teachings, particularly the Book of Micah with its cry for moral justice and the Gospel of Matthew with its mandate for disciples to travel the land. She has also been inspired by the essays of Alice Walker and a lecture by James H. Cone, the leading exponent of black liberation theology, about the lynching tree being the crucifix of African-American Christianity.
In helping others to bear witness, Sims is charging all our memories so that we might do more than leave the past behind. Instead, we must let the past shape how we all listen to others in the present and consider with humility how God might want us to live better in the future — for the sake of justice, for the sake of peace, and for the sake of reconciliation.
As for Sims, though it is taxing to hear such stories, she is undaunted:
There is no rest for a weary soul when you’re doing the work you were called to do.
I can remember the first time I heard John Lennon’s song “God.” It was late night in 1970, and I was listening to KQV radio in Pittsburgh. Back in those days KQV was the city’s king of Top 40 radio, and it was a time when disc jockeys could actually break from their playlists. In this case, the DJ noted that Lennon’s “God” could be “controversial,” so he was wondering what listeners would think of it.
Then I heard those first words:
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
Just in case we missed the point, Lennon then said, “I’ll say it again” and did just that. Then he poured out a litany of all the things he didn’t believe in, from Jesus to Bob Dylan to The Beatles.
This is the angriest song I’ve ever heard, I thought.
The song’s coda, a note of self-discovery and lamentation, tempered the anger with a touch of melancholy — but just slightly. As I later realized, “God” was only a reflection of a whole: Lennon’s “Plastic Ono Band” album, which was laced with raw emotion and anger. Many have argued that it reflected Lennon’s experience with Primal Scream therapy.
“God” certainly felt primal.
Having just embraced the Christian faith myself, his sentiments seemed like a world away from me. Over the next decade, I listened at a distance to Lennon’s solo work, which mostly left me cold. But memories of “God” always lingered.
Then he was dead.
Thirty years ago today Lennon was shot to death, and like so many others I first heard the news via Howard Cosell on ABC’s Monday Night Football. It was a cathartic moment for those of us who had grown up with The Beatles. (Just read these reflections today in The New York Times and Washington Post.)
The band’s breakup may have been filled with acrimony, but fans’ memories of The Beatles are fond and joyful. And as we often do with artists and athletes, we tend to project onto those we admire traits that go far beyond the persons’ true selves — which are always more complicated than we imagine.
So when Lennon died, many took it as an assault on their hopes, their aspirations and their memories. A part of themselves died as well, a portion that had felt safe from the vagaries of life. The last words of “God” were “The dream is over,” and that’s how many felt.
In recent years, with the help of satellite radio, I’ve re-listened to a number Lennon’s songs, along with some of his Beatles songs. I’ve come to appreciate a bit more just how much Lennon opened himself up in his music, at times uncomfortably so. Listening to Lennon can prompt one to say, “That’s TMI.”
And 40 years after first hearing “God,” I still see God very differently than Lennon. But I appreciate the candor, which sure beats hollow platitudes.
Lennon certainly made an impression on Bono, and his lyrics for U2’s “God, Part II” are both a tribute and a response. Like Lennon, Bono offers a litany of all the things he doesn’t believe in. But while Lennon concluded by singing “I just believe in me,” Bono responded by singing “I believe in love.”
What does Glenn Beck have in common with Martin Luther King, Jr., and God? You’d be surprised — I certainly was when I watched Stephen Colbert last night.
Signs of Grace 