Free To Think…Bound to Serve

Christianity is more Doing than Doctrine:

Half of every relationship with God is the individual.  God, who is timeless and constant, is known “as in a mirror dimly” while we live.  We, who change and die, find our knowledge of God change throughout our lives.  And we not only differ from our younger selves or who we shall become. We differ from each other.  Temperament, experience, inclination give our approach to life different emphases.  We each have our own perspective.

Some Christian traditions address this fact by establishing doctrine as definitive.  Individuals subscribe to set teachings, by an act of will, and forgive themselves privately for being puzzled or unpersuaded by some of the formulations.  Personal conviction is in the authority of the church which has decreed dogma.

Our tradition takes a different approach.  We urge that for religion to be real, it must be based on a person’s honest beliefs.  This means that each individual trusts himself or herself as a reader of scripture and a thinker about what is revealed there about God.  We know we shall each understand God a bit differently from each other, and that the inevitable limitation of our understanding will carry through all the concepts which are part of our religious life.  We trust God’s grace and the Spirit’s work to keep us in community, and to keep us ministering to the world.

We are required, as followers of Jesus Christ, to love others.  Feeding, healing, forgiving, clothing, and paying attention to those with needs is the way Jesus embodied God’s approach to life.  We must do the same. The twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s gospel states that it is caring for other people, and not profession of religious views, which counts with God.

The church long has aimed to make its Christianity a matter of active service, and long has accepted open, earnest inquiry as part of its character.  For twenty years we’ve summed up this approach to discipleship with the credo “Free to Think, Bound to Serve.”

THIS MONTH’S ESSAY FROM THE PASTOR

The Jews of Jesusʼ day attempted to build a trustworthy arena for the ancestral religion in the presence of a collaborationist government and a corrupted Temple. They did this by emphasizing synagogue teaching and personal piety, both within reach of many of the population as ways to practice Judaism apart from suspect structures or leadership.

One problem with this solution was that there were lots of Jews whose material or cultural poverty prevented them from being part of it. Those who had barely enough when working all the time probably neither could read nor easily follow teaching from scripture, and not give the time and energy to synagogue attendance. Whether they could afford to have garments always in accord with Levitical law or maintain the ritual purifications–presuming they knew them–or observe the dietary niceties of their faith is doubtful. Whatever liabilities they always had possessed with regard to the old sacrificial cult– had they made pilgrimages and offered sacrifices when the Temple had respect?–were magnified by the focus on individual effort.

A certain amount of affluence and leisure was required to be spiritually healthy in Jesusʼ time. Thatʼs one of the things against which Jesus worked. He decried the judgmentalism and hypocrisy of those who had developed a form of religion which didnʼt fit their poorer brothers and sisters.

We twenty-first century Americans have a similar problem with regard to our physical health, and await a Jesus to teach us how to evade illness even when we are materially or culturally poor. We live in a society in which steady physical exercise, a healthful diet, and routine medical attention are largely in the province of the prosperous. If a person follows the diet offered by Dr. Dean Ornish for heart disease, for example, he or she soon is spending a disproportionate amount of time and money acquiring foods from health food stores and preparing them.

Compared with their more comfortable neighbors, the poor tend to be more sedentary, more obese, have higher blood pressure, and more often suffer from forms of mental illness related to situational depression and low self-regard. The religion of health which competes for Americaʼs interest with the religion of a relationship with God tends to perpetuate an approach to physical well being which involves money and leisure. It involves wealth because health care has been one of the few segments of the economy generating increasing pay for persons working in it. Our approach to keeping well requires leisure because health is no longer offered by attendance at the Temple, at festivals– routine doctorʼs visits and hospital tests– but by constant, self-motivated efforts such as self-exams, home exercises learned from therapists, and good habits like the time- consuming diet of fresher and home-prepared foods.

Worthy efforts like low-cost clinics and making health insurance more available are not the whole solution. Education seems promising– Jesus, was, after all, hailed as Teacher among other things– but what would be the content of the lessons? In the gospel Jesusʼ message makes a difference in the lives of “the people of the land”–his poor neighbors– in part because he tells them they already have the nucleus of a healthy religion within themselves, and those who look down on them are less spiritually fit than they presume. What would be the equivalent in terms of physical health now? What advantage might the ordinary person possess? Is it possible that physical health today isnʼt quite what we think it is?

These are and will continue to be questions of public policy and medical ethics. Finding a way to encourage the needy to be less vulnerable, as measured medically, also remains one of the missions of the church. Before Jesus made much headway as a teacher, he won attention as a Healer.

Peace, Mac