Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse to give this love to anyone?
Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim the huge fluid freedom.
—Rumi
I know a couple who begin each day with a brief ritual they call “canopy.” Married many years, this husband and wife engage in a simple, wordless, predawn ritual. They sit facing each other, legs entwined, hands clasped behind each other’s back, their foreheads lightly touching. In silent meditation, they stagger their inhaling and exhaling so that, quite literally, they take in and then breathe out each other. No prayers are spoken; no requests of God are made; no human professions of any kind are offered. There is just silent, sacred proximity—the resting of heads together and the exchange of breath. If “canopy” is forgotten, the day does not go as well, I’m told.
This simple act bears witness to more than just a couple’s desire to stay connected to each other. The deeper truth is one that could save the church from its own preoccupation with sin and salvation: it is relationships, not transactions, that hold the key to human happiness. We are as we relate—not as we possess, control, believe, or conquer. The most sacred space in all of creation is the space in between.
Such a truth is easy to verify, for indeed life itself provides all the evidence. Our deepest misery, as well as our most sublime moments, are the result of our relationships. Beginning with children and parents, the Little gods observe the Big gods in the temple of the home,1 and daily domestic liturgies create meaning, value, order, and often a most insidious form of competition. Broken covenants between children and parents underlie much of the dysfunction in the world, and the unfinished business between fathers and sons has launched wars, deceived nations, and even led to madness.
In the West, we speak of happiness in quantifiable terms as it relates to accomplishments and possessions. But when love is new, lovers seem to need nothing but each other, and they often remember the times when they were poor as the happiest times. The wealthy are just as often miserable beyond belief and so consumed with the objects that separate them from one another as to suggest an inverse relationship between wealth and happiness. Too much stuff can clutter the space “in between.”
Aristotle noted that of all the most prized possessions in the world (including health and wealth), humans end up prizing friendship above all—especially old friends.2 There is not a human joy that is not relational at its core, whether it is the mystery of love between lovers, between a child and a best friend, between a musician and the epiphany of sound, between an athlete and a respected opponent, between an artist and the created work, between a reader and a book, between a disciple and a teacher, or between a seeker of wisdom and the Ultimate Mystery. Real wisdom is never achieved in isolation or by objectifying the other. Wisdom is the by-product of the mystery of human communion with the nonobjectified other, met with humility and vulnerability in the sacred space that appears when one is asked to dance.
Faith itself is a relationship, and scripture cannot be objectified without destroying that relationship. We continue to speak of a “battle for the Bible,” when in fact the Bible is a conversation. We overhear it at a great distance, translated (and corrupted) from foreign tongues, and spoken by those who never imagined us as the intended audience. It is always wise to remember that not a single word of the Bible was written for you or for me—so how can we be having a “battle” over it? One only competes for what one wishes to possess, yet how does one “possess” a conversation? We can only listen carefully and thoughtfully and in the posture of one who, in search of wisdom, is listening through a keyhole to the distant echoes of a love affair.
Those who use the Bible as a weapon or as a kind of “holy encyclopedia in which one may look up information about God”3 have turned the conversation into an object and then into an idol. The relationship no longer has integrity. Metaphors get demoted to the rank of reports, and then people argue over whether they are “true.” The scriptures are songs of wonder and amazement over the birth of a new relationship to God, but we have turned them into a test for true believers—as if you can give lovers an exam and then assign a grade to the accuracy of their passion.
When the sacred conversation we now call the New Testament conversation first began, it was between an itinerant Galilean teacher and his peasant-class student entourage. By the time it ended, he was divine, and every great Judaic theme had reputedly been reinterpreted and completed by his coming. At first, he was spoken of as the son of Adam, who would return at the end of the age as messiah and whose resurrection was a sign that God had vindicated a righteous servant. Then the conversation began to change—and with it, of course, the relationship changed.
As his followers grew in number and the second coming did not occur, the point on the time line at which Jesus became the Christ was moved back. For Paul, it happened at the resurrection, when he was “adopted” as the Son of God. For Mark, it was moved back to his baptism, when a voice from heaven announced the verdict. Matthew and Luke moved it back farther, from a grown man standing waist-deep in the muddy waters of the Jordan to the miraculous conception of an infant with only one human parent. Finally, as the second century dawned, the last gospel of John was written in the heat of the Christian-Jewish divorce, and the divinity of Christ was moved back as far as possible—to the beginning of time, where he is preexistent and fully divine, begotten of no human parent, except as he chooses to “humble himself” and assume the form of a servant in a plot to save the world.
By the time the bishops gathered at lakeside Nicea in 325, it was clear that the only way to put the Christ above all other royal figures was to make him coequal with God, for “anything less would have put him on a par with other royal figures who could boast of one divine parent.”4 Half-human, half-divine lords were commonplace, so the bishops sealed the transaction with the Nicene Creed, and the sage became the Savior. He is the “only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.”
Notice what happens to the life of Jesus of Nazareth in this most formative of all creeds. He “came down, … was made man, and was crucified.” The gospel is reduced to a cosmic loop with eternal consequences. Gone and rendered superfluous are the Sermon on the Mount, the maddening parables, the open table, the boundary-breaking mission to the Gentiles, the elevation of women, the touching of the untouchables—and not a word of the creed testifies to the redeeming power of unconditional love to cure and to restore.
Why should we be surprised? The earliest creed, the Apostles’ Creed, had already eliminated the life and message of Jesus. Countless Christians have mouthed these lines in worship for centuries: “Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate…” Look carefully at what separates the birth of Christ from his death. The world’s greatest life is reduced to a comma.
Strange as it sounds, we must demote Christ now and recover him as Jesus once more, if we are to enter and survive the new age that is upon us. As long as the relationship remains one between a fearful and ignorant people looking for favors in exchange for beliefs and an alien invader who swoops out of heaven and back again to recruit and claim believers, we will worship passively from a distance, instead of following closely enough to smell his breath and be made wise. The church meant well by its promotion, of course, but unwittingly sowed the seeds of separation between all that is human and all that is divine. In so doing, we have reversed the message of Jesus, who was trying to arrange an unlikely marriage and then keep us together.
True religion is relationship, not righteousness. It must play out “on earth as it is in heaven.” For this we need clarity and self-consciousness about the nature of our relationships and what makes them authentic and life-changing—as opposed to inauthentic and death-dealing. If a first-century Jew can model a new relationship with God for his disciples, then a twentieth-century Jew can define the true nature of the sacred as a personal dialogue. The latter’s name is Martin Buber, and the church would do well to remember what he said.
I AND THOU
Martin Buber was a philosopher, a theologian, and one of the great minds of the twentieth century. He spelled out his essential belief that life at its depth is dialogical and that reality itself is defined by personal dialogue: “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”5 Influenced by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and the eighteenth-century Jewish movement called Hasidism, Martin Buber was an early Zionist but then became one of the leading proponents of cooperation with the Arabs. His tense, paradoxical, spiritual philosophy has influenced Christian theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth. His landmark work is entitled I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923).
According to Buber, human beings may adopt one of two attitudes toward the world: either I-Thou or I-It. The former is the relationship between a subject and another subject and, as such, is a relationship in which human beings are aware of each other as having a “unity of being.” Instead of thinking of the other as having specific, isolated qualities, in an I-Thou relationship human beings engage in a dialogue that involves each other’s whole being and is thus a model for the divine relationship.
I-It relationships, on the other hand, involve a “dialogue” between a human being and an object. This subject-object relationship may involve another human being, but only if that person has been turned into an object—as when an employer treats employees as cogs in a machine or a predatory lover reduces the subject of seduction to an object and the union to a “conquest.” Even when people appear to be in love, they may in fact only be attracted to a projection of themselves in the other, and thus the other is “objectified.” In religion, when believers use God just for peace of mind, for special favors, or as a substitute Parent, the relationship becomes one of subject-Object. William Blake’s image of Nobodaddy, the punishing father in the sky, comes to mind.
For this reason, Buber rejected the idea that God was “wholly Other,” as Barth believed, or the mysterium tremendum, as Rudolph Otto believed. “Of course God is the ‘wholly Other,’ but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present,” said Buber. “Of course He is the mysterium tremendum that appears and overthrows, but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.”6
The distinction between I-Thou and I-It is more than just a philosophical curiosity. It is crucial for the recovery of Christianity as incarnate wisdom, not salvation. An I-Thou relationship is a direct interpersonal relationship that is not mediated by any intervening system of ideas or objects of thought. It is a direct subject-to-subject relationship, and thus it is an end in itself, never a means to an end. For Buber, I-Thou stood for the kind of meeting in which two beings face and accept each other as truly human. Thus, the relationship is not utilitarian or self-serving; rather, it is an ultimate relation involving the whole being of each subject.
Love, as a relation between I and Thou, is the supreme subject-to-subject relationship, characterized by caring, respect, commitment, and responsibility. It is a covenant in which both subjects find completion in a shared reality, a unity of being that is impossible if either party in the relationship is objectified. For Buber, God is the eternal Thou and, as such, represents the ultimate in a nonobjectified relationship, since God can never be known, investigated, or examined as an object of thought. Instead, God is Being Itself and transcends all attempts at objectification. The relationship with God is the foundation for all other I-Thou relations, and faith becomes a matter of dialogue, not fear or ritual conformity.
Buber never wavered in his belief that the ultimate compliment one could pay to God was to be in constant dialogue with God, like his servant Job, as if God were like a member of the family to be submitted to, but nonetheless argued with: “See, he will kill me; I have no hope,” says Job, “but I will defend my ways to his face” (13:15). Even when things seem hopeless, the dialogue must continue. Hope vanishes when we stop talking to one another.
It was Buber’s study of Hasidism, which emphasized an awareness and celebration of holiness in everyday life, that led him to believe in a “worldly holiness.” God was no remote abstraction but could “be seen in every thing, and reached by every pure deed.” Because he was committed to an understanding that God was nonsectarian, irreducible, and never the “object” of thought, he resisted the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state and bitterly opposed what he called “the disease of nationalism.” Instead, he promoted what he called “Hebrew humanism.” Because both the Jews and the Palestinians had a common love for the land, he believed that a just and cooperative arrangement could be worked out. Instead, the war that accompanied the establishment of Israel in 1948 came as a bitter fulfillment of his worst fears.
It should come as no surprise that Martin Buber wrote extensively on Jesus and Christianity, even though he rejected Christian claims for the divinity of Christ. One can only wonder what he might have thought of a Christian who referred to Jesus as a misunderstood Jew and regarded the Bible as a conversation. Martin Buber believed that the Galilean sage had exemplified the highest ethical and spiritual ideals of Judaism and wanted most of all for the dialogue between Christians and Jews to continue. “Whenever we both, Christian and Jew, care more for God Himself than for our images of God,” he wrote, “we are united in the feeling that our Father’s house is differently constructed than our human models take it to be.”7
The dogmatic tenets of the world’s religions have turned God into an It, into a Lawgiver and Judge, and faith into a subject-Object relationship. No wonder faith is a “product” now in a consumer culture, a vindication of war and a guilt-alleviating justification for lavish lifestyles. The creeds have offered us a deal instead of a dialogue, salvation in place of an encounter, a pension in place of a purpose. It was Buber who said, “Success is not one of the names of God.”
When we enter into relationship with Thou, we perceive that we are now responsible for all those whom we once considered strangers, but in whom the Face of Thou resides. The echo of Jesus’ disciples is unmistakable here: “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?’” (Matt. 25:37, emphasis added). This applies also to our enemies, the ones our former president refused to sit down and speak with (the ultimate example of an I-It relationship). Martin Buber profoundly observed that when we enter into an I-Thou relationship, we have “abolished moral judgment forever; the ‘evil’ man is simply one who is commended to him [or her] for greater responsibility, one even more needy of love.”8
If Martin Buber’s philosophy is taken seriously, then it represents a danger to all external authorities and institutions, because it assumes that people can enter into authentic relationships and live as free, mature, and independent adults. “Religious faith does not result from the mindless recitations of religious formulas or from the adherence to unintelligible liturgical routines, but from the total commitment of one’s being and one’s life to the eternal Thou.”9
JESUS AS THE ANTI-IT
If the Bible is a conversation inspired by God, but not infallible, then what can we say is normative about it for either Jewish or Christian communities? And what does the voice of Jesus mean for Christians in that conversation? The answer lies in the distinction between a formative and a final conversation. We never have the last word, and the prophets urge us to go on listening and then go on speaking truth to power. The dialogue is always the dialogue of covenant, and the struggle is always about how to move beyond I-It relationships to authentic and transforming I-Thou relationships.
In the beginning, in the poetry to Genesis, God speaks the world into being and then pronounces it good. Not only is creation itself a rhetorical act, symbolized by speaking, but it is a relational act, born in the movement of the breath of Thou and its life-giving effect over what was a “formless void,” dark and deep—a lifeless It. Creation unfolds in the relationship between each It (darkness, lack of separation, barrenness, lifelessness) and its opposite, a Thou (light, land, swarming creatures, and finally human beings). It may seem arrogant that humans should crown themselves as the final act of creation, the imago Dei, but in our world only humans have developed a consciousness sufficient to ask where creatures like us and everything else came from. As separated as we still are from Thou, we have taken our first tentative steps away from being an It.
Every creation story seeks to answer this question and to establish life as meaningful, as opposed to meaningless, by daring to imagine that the universe has intentionality and thus purpose. If everything is just a fantastic accident, then we can assume that we are little more than fantastic Its, participating in no way with a creator Thou. But if we exist because we were meant to exist, then our very being is a statement of value—it is better that we are than that we are not. This is the starting point for all theology. Why is there matter, and does it matter?
No one can, or should, try to answer this question for anyone else, but an affirmative answer has obvious consequences. It compels us to ask additional questions about our relationship to Thou, so that we will know something about not just our origins but also our responsibilities. The answer comes immediately in the Hebrew scriptures with the myth of the garden of Eden, where human prototypes display the innate ability to disobey, to be vain, to be victims, and to be tempted to believe that they might become as Thou—and end up relating to all creation as if it were an It.
Why does Cain kill Abel in the Bible’s first murder? Because the ancient prejudices between farmers and shepherds rendered one offering acceptable and the other unacceptable—just as to this day one sibling often suspects that he or she is not the favorite and jealously renders the other an It. Abraham’s wanderings are the supreme example of one who trusts Thou so deeply as to leave all comfort and wealth behind to act on the promise of fulfillment—the land of Canaan and a multitude of descendants. Sarah gives birth to Isaac against all odds, but this is not a biological miracle; it is wisdom—when dealing with Thou, we do not figure the odds. When Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery and leave him for dead, he ends up saving their lives and giving the credit to Thou. Jealousy can turn you into an It, but covenant can reverse the process and restore your relationship to Thou.
When the Israelites find themselves turned into an It in the land of Egypt, they are led out of bondage by someone who insists that a subject-object relationship is not the will of Thou. It turns out to be easier to escape one kind of bondage than to enter into the bondage of a covenant, however, and the rest of the Hebrew Bible can be read through this simple lens: keep the covenant, inherit the promise; break the covenant, lose the promise. Objectify the other, or turn God into a tribal deity who shares your superstitions and tribal bias, and the idea of faith itself is perverted and forsaken.
No one made this point more dramatically than the Jewish prophets, whose remarkable lives and writings are often overlooked by Christians who dismiss the entire “Old Testament” as the gospel of loveless legalism while holding that the “New Testament” is the gospel of translegal grace. Also, because gospel writers used the prophets to “predict” things, like the circumstances of the birth of Jesus, it is easy to mistake a prophet for a clairvoyant. What they did, in fact, was demonstrate what an authentic I-Thou relationship looks like, sounds like, and acts like. By refusing to be made into Its for the king (“Tell me what I want to hear”), many paid with their lives.
As masters of oral speech, the prophets had a passion for social justice that was, in the case of Amos, “downright electrifying.”10 They did not just entertain radical thoughts; they embodied radical lifestyles to draw attention to their ideas. Hosea named two of his children Lo-ruhamah and Lo-ammi, which in Hebrew mean “Not pitied” and “Not my people.” Isaiah named two of his children after Hebrew phrases that predicted what would happen to Judah and walked naked and barefoot through the streets of Jerusalem over a period of three years to symbolize that Judah should not enter a military alliance with Egypt against Assyria, for Assyria would conquer Egypt and carry the people off naked and barefoot as prisoners of war.11
Jeremiah was a prophetic performer, shattering a clay jug and announcing, “Thus says the LORD of hosts: So will I break this people and this city” (19:11). Once he wore a wooden yoke to symbolize what Jerusalem and Judah should do to bear the yoke of Babylon and not join an alliance against it. Another prophet, Hananiah, broke Jeremiah’s wooden yoke to make the opposite point. Ezekiel was perhaps the “star of prophetic street theater”; just before the Babylonian conquest and destruction of Jerusalem, he was told by God to make a model of Jerusalem surrounded by a siege wall, camps, and battering ram (4:1–17):
In a public place, he is to lie on his left side for 390 days, then on his right side for 40 days, to symbolize the number of years that Israel and Judah are to spend in exile. During all this time, he is to eat starvation rations such as would be available in a city under a prolonged siege, and he is to bake bread using human dung as fuel. All of this would symbolize what was soon to happen to Jerusalem.12
And to think that today we arrest people for stepping over imaginary lines, or when they gather to protest war, or when they try to form a union. We shame dissident pastors into silence and warn them not to discuss “controversial” issues like immigration or equal rights for gays. The truth is, we have few pastors in the church today who qualify as outrageous for the cause of justice, and in fact the most common model for ministry now is someone who is well married (preferably with children), respected, pious, and doesn’t “cause trouble.” In this sense, the church has made an It out of the ministry—turning it into a profession demanding decorum, rather than recognizing it as a divine calling with disturbing consequences.
These God-intoxicated Hebrew prophets brought the abstract ideas of religion down to earth and fearlessly shared what they believed was wrong with the domination systems of the world. Abraham Heschel describes “their breathless impatience with injustice” and recognizes that they possessed “sympathy with the divine pathos.”13 They stood with the poor and against the elites as shamelessly as Hosea stood by his fallen wife and then claimed that it was never too late to go in search of her and bring her home, as if the porch light is always on in the kingdom of I-Thou.
Jesus was a product of this prophetic tradition, and he soaked up the wisdom teachings of Israel. He also stood in the tradition of “street theater,” and he knew the value and the danger of “acting out” alternative social visions in public. He spoke intimately of God, incurring charges of blasphemy, and healed without credentials in a way that undercut the Temple and the business of religion. But in all things, from the beginning to the end of his memorable public ministry, he was, to put it in the paradigm of Martin Buber, the “Anti-It.”
“It” was any and all dehumanizing objectifications—of God as lawgiver and judge, remote, inaccessible, angry, and in need of appeasement; of the Temple as a place of corruption and stifling legalism; of the poor as expendable ciphers; of the sick and insane as mad dogs to be chained up in graveyards; of Samaritans as untouchables; of women as invisible and inferior; of the rich as unredeemable; of common fishermen as incapable of wisdom; and of children as undeserving of simple patience and a loving touch. If the world defined anything or anyone as an It, Jesus demonstrated that it could be redefined in relationship to Thou. Even inanimate objects could become lessons about Thou: seeds, salt, wineskins, yeast, empty jars, hidden treasure, or stones that would cry out if the truth could find no other voice. Our artificial distinctions between secular and sacred did not matter to Jesus, because he was a mystic. He knew that the way we relate to anything ultimately determines how we relate to everything—including God.
Born in scandal, he redeemed scandal. A student of John the Baptist, he graduated from judgment to compassion. A member of the peasant class, he redefined royalty. A student of Moses, he instituted a higher law. A man of prayer, he expanded the practice to include every good deed done for the sake of an It that deserved to be in relationship with Thou. Enemies were to be prayed for, not killed; broken relationships with brothers and sisters were to be repaired before coming to the altar; anxiety about what to eat, drink, or wear is wasted energy, because in the kingdom of right relationships you get what you need, not necessarily what you want. Storing up treasures on earth is foolishness, asking for what you need is a good idea, and treating others as you wish to be treated is the signature of I-Thou. Religion is relationship, not righteousness, because love changes everything.
WAKING UP WORTHY AND WALKING
The last book in the Bible concludes with a famous warning: “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book; if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share of the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book” (Rev. 22:18–19).
Whether this describes a warning about adding to or taking away from the book of Revelation or the whole Bible does not matter now. The warning itself must be ignored. The page must be turned, and the conversation must continue. The voices in the Bible are like the major premise in a syllogistic argument. They launch the conversation with an assertion, but they are not self-evident. They are an invitation, not a pronouncement, the first words of an emerging community, but hardly the last word. The Bible is not literally the word of God but a collection of human words about God, inspired, but covered with human fingerprints. Taken out of context, scripture has been and continues to be used to defend the indefensible: slavery, anti-Semitism, and the degradation of women, minorities, and those outside the sexual, social, or economic mainstream.
It has been used to smear science, to sanction war, and to hide the abuses of its own priests. Instead of filling kings with compassion, it has been used to support the divine right of kings. As God has revealed new truth to each generation, the Bible has often been used to resist it, justify violence against its adherents, and divide creation into those who are saved by believing certain things and those who are lost and dispensable because they dared to question them. The very book that preserves the remarkable teachings of Jesus, the wise and enlightened one, is now the hammer of orthodoxy and thus betrays the spirit of the Galilean sage to whom it testifies. One can find nothing in the Sermon on the Mount to suggest that faith can be reduced to a tract, available at the grocery store, listing the eight rungs up the ladder of glory.
The old way of being Christian in the world cannot stand; and a new way cannot be avoided if the faith is to endure and the human race is to survive. Christianity requires no sacrifice of the intellect; it can withstand any question we dare to ask and any answer we are brave enough, in the service of truth, to offer. The belief that the Bible is the unique revelation of God, containing the literal words of God and defining faith as a set of beliefs that are required now for the sake of heaven later, is not only indefensible, but socially, politically, and now environmentally fatal. Fundamentalism in any form is the enemy of the future. Thus, when we model fundamentalism in any form, we are hypocrites to condemn it in others.
In her wonderful book Christianity for the Rest of Us, Diana Butler Bass confounds the common belief that all mainline churches are dying. Those that are thriving, in fact, may seem very different inside and out, but they have at least three characteristics in common. First, there is an embrace of tradition, but not traditionalism in a postdenominational age. Second, there is an emphasis on practice not purity among legions of churchgoers who are fed up with exclusivist Christianity. And third, the objective of the spiritual life is wisdom, not certainty in a changing world, where the questions are even more important than the answers. “Counter to the prevailing view that people want certain answers, mainline pilgrims rest comfortably with ambiguity. They resist dogmatism in favor of being part of a community where they can ask life’s questions—a circumstance that they identify as necessary for the spiritual life.”14
What is required now is a shift in human consciousness about the nature of faith and the object of religion itself. We should cease to ask, “Are you a believer?” and ask instead, “Are you a follower of Jesus?” We must not inquire, “Are you saved?” but instead ask, “Are you able to drink of this cup?” And we must be ever vigilant about the meaning of discipleship, so that it does not turn into courtship. The operative question for the new age is not, “Do you love Jesus?” but, “Has Jesus ever been a radically disturbing and transforming presence in your life?”
This new Reformation, which is now in its infancy, will focus its attention not on the Trinity or justification by faith or works but on Christian practice. Grounded in the open table, forgiveness as reciprocal, and devotion as a private activity divorced from public acts of piety, it will look and sound a lot like the earliest strands of the Jesus tradition—because that’s precisely what it is. Before disciples were called Christians, they were a collection of misfits who practiced radical hospitality by eating a sacred meal without a guest list or a bouncer. Now one can be called a Christian just by mouthing a creed. So how will we reverse this perversion and recognize a disciple in our time?
Here’s how we will know. Access to God, the unnamed and unknowable One, will be unbrokered and therefore never denied to anyone outside of any religious franchise. Jesus may have started a new religion in spite of his true intentions, but we should base it on his teachings, not ours. The notion of “privilege” will be anathema to Christian practice. As John Dominic Crossan so pointedly puts it, “Jesus robs humankind of all protections and privileges, entitlements and ethnicities that segregate human beings into categories. His Father is no respecter of persons. Does that not include the label Christian?”15
In the emerging church, faith will be not a transaction (benefits for beliefs) but a beloved community in which the rewards of I-Thou relationships are intrinsic. Love will be its own reward, and the church will stand by its most sacred duty—to slay the self in service to Something More. Easter will be reclaimed as a spiritual, not a metaphysical, moment, and latter-day disciples will have an opportunity to be resurrected in this world, rather than the next. The myths that proclaim divinity and human sexuality to be mutually exclusive must be rejected, lest we continue to suffer a body-spirit duality that is death-dealing instead of redemptive. If that means Jesus was a bastard, then perhaps the gospel becomes an even more miraculous story than if he is the preexistent Lamb of God. Otherwise, the claim that God meets us in our brokenness and suffering is a lie. For God so loved the world that he sent an alien?
In a world shredded by absent or emotionally crippled fathers, Jesus needs a real one—and if that was Joseph, so be it. I want to see his figure in the crèche as something more than a contrived and awkward “extra.” I want fathers to consider what sort of man raises such a wise son, and women to consider why devotion is not limited to purity but encompasses faithfulness in the midst of uncertainty and ridicule. The false dichotomy created by “Mary the mother of God” and the “other” Mary, falsely portrayed as a prostitute, has made women in the church spiritually schizophrenic for centuries.
My beloved preaching professor, Fred Craddock, said once, “Perhaps people are obsessed with the second coming because, deep down, they are really disappointed in the first one.” Christianity should be future-oriented to the extent that it works to build a world that is fit for children, but it should never play the role of apocalyptic racketeer. We must all stand up together now and tell the end-times preachers, “Methinks thou doth enjoy this fear-mongering too much.” God is in it for the long haul.
Finally, the gospel is “good news” not for adherents but rather for practitioners. And the practice of Christianity is made possible not by intellectual assent to propositions but by an existential embrace of worthiness. Most of the harm done in this world is the result of people who are compensating for deep insecurities, who are trying to “prove” something to someone, but who always come up short. That’s why the premise of the gospel deserves to be called “good news.” It is a call not to accept a formula for salvation but to act on an unearned inheritance: that we are created by God, children of God, beloved by God, and accepted by God.
It means that every morning, we can wake up worthy and walk. This is the grace that brings radical freedom and the end of striving. Faith is something we do, against the odds, in loving defiance of a world gone mad. We do not become a good person by believing in God; we become a good person by loving God, especially the God we meet in every living thing. For the prophet Micah, his successor Jesus, and all the rest of us who are praying for a new day in the church, the most important question we can ask now is not about what we believe. It is about how we relate.
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Mic. 6:8).