Faith, Purpose, and Identity

Faith, as I understand it, is that which defines every other thing that you do.

It provides the answer to the question, "Why?"  It provides the overarching and unifying purpose, the moral measure of every action.   It is, in evangelical Christian terms, the thing that makes life "purpose-driven," or so Rick Warren once described it.

I share that essential understanding, although I came to it via a quite different route.  When I began my return to faith, it was through the writings of 20th century Christian existentialists.  Kierkegaard, of course, but also Tillich.  Tillich's understanding of faith was that it was our "ultimate concern," meaning it was that goal that defined all other goals, that was not "contingent," but defining.

I've not taught Tillich over the years, or preached explicitly from Tillich, for two reasons.  One, people just don't get him, and I see why.  His big thinky theology tended to be a wee bit abstracted from the day-to-day choices that define our moral lives.  Second, his form of Christian faith has no purchase in contemporary Christian debates.  His philosophizing ain't gonna fly if you're conservative and evangelical, nor does he...as a dead white man...have any lingering voice amongst the progressive oldline.

But still, that basic truth about faith remains, and it's the plumb line against which I measure both my actions and my inactions.  If I'm committed to following Jesus, which I am, then that commitment defines all other commitments.  It's how you operationalize the Great Commandment.  "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind," said Jesus, and if that's not a clear indicator of Ultimate Concern in the Gospel, I don't know what is.

I was meditating on this reality yesterday, after I bumped into one of those peculiar little faith factoids that regularly drop from the table of Ryan Burge.  Burge is an American Baptist Convention pastor and a professor, who gathers and discusses the state of religion in the United States.  

The data point that caught my eye tracked the responses of Americans to this survey question:  

How important are your views about religion to your identity and how you think of yourself?  

The possible responses were: 1) Not at all, 2) A little, 3) Somewhat, and 4) Very much.  Now, I'd prefer a Likert approach to this data, myself.  Four possible responses doesn't provide a meaningful midpoint, eh?  That, and I don't quite like the phrasing, which modifies importance.  "Very much important?"  That's kinda clumsy sounding.  

But the replies, broken down by forms of faith, showed a striking outlier.  

Self-identified evangelicals responded to the question with a resounding supermajority going with the highest category.  As Burge noted, this is a strong signal, twice that of every other group.  Non-evangelicals, which presumably includes the oldline denominations?  Seventy percent replied with an answer ranging from Not at all to Somewhat.

Having bumped into this data point on very progressive BlueSky, the responses I encountered there were all from progressive folks who inhabit the non-evangelical category.  All equated the evangelical response with extremism and oppression.

But I took this another way.  

The Gospel and the teachings of Jesus aren't secondary, or one input among many.  There is nothing in them that would suggest that's an option.  They define all other categories.  They are more important than my race and my gender.  They define my moral actions as a father and a husband, as a neighbor and a citizen.

Why do I stand for the rights of the last, the least, and the lost?  Because it's what Jesus did and taught.  Why do I reject the politics of dominance, resentment, and ethnonationalism?  Because Jesus demands that his disciples set down that sword.  Why do I reject crass mammonism?  Because resisting the corruption of greed is a core theme in Christ's teachings.  Why do I press back against willful cruelty to the stranger and the foreigner in our land?  'Cause Jesus makes it real clear that's a non-negotiable.

If religion does not shape identity, does not form our souls at the most fundamental level, then what is it?  Faith that does not clearly give us both purpose and Ultimate Concern has buried the lede.

It is salt without saltiness, as a friend once put it.

  

Faith, Brand, and Identity

What is it that defines us, as beings?  What gives cohesion to our sense of ourselves, and from that establishes our relationship to others?

These questions were bopping around in my head the other day while walking the dog, hovering about like the summer gnats that flew around me in a cloud.

Two ways of understanding identity surfaced and played off of one another.  On the one hand, identity as "brand."  On the other, faith.

Brand identity is the Big Buzzy Thing in our consumer culture.  It used to be less all pervasive, less radically defining.  I mean, shoot, back when I was a kid there was Tide and Ivory, Coke and Pepsi, Chevy and Ford, but those lived in their own domain.  Now, with the net-driven commodification of all human interaction, we're all supposed to attend to our brand.

But what is this identity, that brand-focus creates within us?  Brand is about the relationship between a product/service and a consumer of said product/service.  It is intended to develop a pattern of repeat or customary purchase, based on the consumer's perception of qualitative dynamics of the brand.

I use Google products, for instance, like this blog platform, and Gmail, and my Chromebook.  I use them because Google represents, for me, innovation coupled with an imperfect but intentional beneficence.  I eat at Chipotle, because, again, there's a general focus on doing less harm, plus it's dang tasty and a heck of an option for non-carnivores like myself.

Brand does more than confer corporate identity.  It "rubs off," by intent, in the relation.  The brands we consume are meant to modify our own sense of self, to be a social marker within culture as to our place and status.

I'm composing this on an iMac, which bears the Apple brand, as does my iPhone.  That is meant to tell me that I have disposable income, that I am successful, and that...from the suite of creativity software bundled with the iMac, that I am part of the self-styled "creative class."  This is a good thing, because those folks are the only people still allowed to make a living in our culture.

Out in the carport and driveway, we have a Honda and a Toyota, which tell us that we are a practical, reliable, comfortably bourgeois family.  The more we internalize the brands we interact with as shaping our own identity, the more we are embedded as a consistent and reliable consumer.

And so the question becomes: what is the relationship between brand identity and an identity shaped by faith?

It's an important question, because as branding becomes the defining feature of both corporate and individual self-understanding, there's bleed over into the realm of faith.  Churches need to "think about their brand" in the process of the endless self-promotion we're now obligated to pursue.  Our living out of spirituality together becomes both shaped and expressed in terms of the market ethic.  Is that an issue?

Honestly, it is.  Because faith shapes identity in ways that are radically different from "brand."

Brand, after all, is about ownership and possession.  It is driven by commodified self-interest.  The point and purpose of branding is to promote the corporate or individual person being branded.  While it creates relationship, that relationship is essentially grasping, oriented to benefit the brand itself.

And in that, brand identity is the inverse of the identity created by faith.

Faith is oriented not towards the self, but the self orienting itself towards a purpose that transcends self.  Or the organization orienting itself towards a purpose that transcends organization.   The telos created by faith--or at least, an existentially valid faith--challenges persons to be grounded in something that will continually demand their own growth.  It is relation with the other rooted in the other.

An identity shaped by faith is a different thing, a different thing entirely, and that's worth keeping in mind before we press that hot metal against the surface of our souls.

Who Is and Is Not a Pastor

Who is a "pastor?"  Who speaks meaningfully for the Christian faith?

That question popped and hummed around my mind this morning, as some of my progressive friends anguished over the latest terrible thing circulating on the Huffington Post about what a Christian leader has said.  Michael V. Wilson is the pastor/preacher in question, as he'd posted a peculiar and inflammatory video calling for a Constitutional Amendment to incarcerate gays in some sort of gay gulag.  

A constitutional amendment to imprison gays would insane and antithetical to the liberty outlined in the rest of the Constitution, of course, so wildly off that it'd go nowhere.  It is, however, the sort of thing that people get riled about and pass around on the interwebs.  Look!  A horrible, offensive, insane pastor!  Oh, what a horrible thing Christianity has become!  This being controversial and all, there were hundreds of comments, many reposts, and in just a day or so, over 100,000 Google-hits.  

I'm a curious sort, so I actually bothered following up on Pastor Wilson.  Who is he?  What sort of community does he lead?

Real pastors are not hard to trace.  Like say, me.  As the part-time pastor of a very small church, I'm not exactly the biggest fish in the sea.   But you can know who I am.  

Right here on the blog, you can see my social media identity, and the identity of my congregation.  Google my very very common name and the name of my church?  There it is.  More information about me.  You can hear my voice, and see news articles from local media quoting me.  Go deeper, and you'll find record of me through my denomination.  I am the person I say I am, and you can independently verify that.

Why is this?  Because I'm not hiding anything.  Why in the blessed name of Jesus would I?  I actually want you to know about my church, where it is, and how to come experience it and consider being part of the gracious Way we walk together.   Because, you know, that's my job as a pastor.  That's perhaps the most important part of being a pastor.

It shouldn't be hard to find a pastor, particularly a pastor with an intentional media presence.

So I went looking for my dear brother Pastor Wilson.

Wilson's website is called "Preaching Politics," and it has extensive links to the radical right wing media.  It's all wild, inflammatory, fringe-politics stuff.  Link-images on the home page network him in with groups affiliated with the Pajamas Media blog network, along with a few fundamentalist sites, and a link to BibleGateway, which is an utterly awesome online bible resource.  I use it all the time.

But anyone can link to anything, so that tells me nothing about who he actually is.  And Wilson?  He doesn't seem to claim to be a pastor, frankly.  He doesn't claim to be much of anything.

I tried to go deeper, and it got weird.  There's no link to a social media profile or page, which is odd for any media-savvy leader.  There's no information about his identity at all, just a picture or two.  He appears to be Texan, and at one point took a picture with a kid who he claims as his grandchild, but even that's vague.  He does not want you to know who or where he is.

Vaguer still is his "church."  His website indicated some unclear affiliation with something called The Church on the Rock, so I clicked through to the page.  It's a picture of a dark brown church building across an empty parking lot.  There are no people, just an empty building.  It's a drab, lifeless picture, the sort you could take if you cruised through any mid-sized church parking lot at seven-fifteen on a Monday morning before the staff arrived.  

On that page there was no text, no information at all about the church.  Not what they believe, not where they are.  Instead, there were four "announcement" videos, presumably for a congregation.  Each was 40 seconds long, so I watched them.

It got weirder.  Each one of the four videos is a video of Wilson, standing in front of a green screen.  Yes, a green screen.  Using the green screen, he's "in front" of a blurry generic church office background.

"Hello, I'm Michael Wilson," he says in the first video.  "Next month is Januarynthat means it's time for the discipleship class."  Where he said "Januarynthat," the video had been crudely cut.  What followed the cut was a generic description of a new members class in a stereotypical fundamentalist church.  

In the second video, he says, "Hello, I'm Michael Wilson.  Next month is Aprilnthat means it's time for the discipleship class."  Same cut.  Same place.  And after the cut, the same video sequence, exactly.

That was true for all of the "church" videos.  

There's nothing else about the church, or where to find this "discipleship class."  No address.  No phone.  No sermons.  Just four very odd videos.  If you've spent any time around evangelical churches, you know this is seriously, seriously sketchy.

So to Google I went, with some targeted searching.  While there are many congregations called "Church on the Rock," and some are in Texas, but none of them has a Michael Wilson formally affiliated with them.  None.

For some small church pastors, particularly pastors of tiny, rural congregations, this might not be surprising.  A lot of little family-sized churches don't have a web presence, as they still relate to one another the same way they did forty years ago.   But those congregations are old, and part of the old-line.  They also don't have pastors who are web-savvy enough to produce green-screened videos...but who won't do the same for the community they're trying to build.

If you went looking for other far-right small-church conservative pastors--like that bushy dude who burned the Quran, or the bizarre Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor in the last Virginia election cycle--you could find them.  They were crazy, but they were real.  You could find their churches.

This is something else.  This is a thing that does not add up.  Michael Wilson's identity as a "pastor" comes apart like wet tissue paper in your hands, the way that any untrue thing does when you dig into it deeper.

Is he a preacher?  Perhaps, sure, in the technical sense of the term.  In the pre-web days, anyone with a bullhorn could ensconce themselves on a street corner and berate passers by.  But as someone woven together with a community, the shepherd of a flock?  No.

He's just an eccentric right-wing guy with a video camera, editing software and some opinions.  Which are his right to express, but which should be mine to ignore.

What I struggle with, honestly, is why...just a few days after he pitched it out there...so many souls would briefly care enough to worry about it.

Or, frankly, why I would care.  Jeez.  I have other things to do.

Sigh.

Sometimes I think the internet is driving us insane.

A Flurm By Any Other Name Glorps as Plurk

There's a new big congregation sprouting near my home.  They're conservative and vigorously evangelical, and maintain a laserlike focus on growth.  And Lord, grow they have.  They've got a sprawling new building, lots of parking, and a pastor with a solidly selling book on Christian weight loss.  Bod4God, I think it's called.

They're on the go and up and coming, as they say, and every month or two we'll get another glossy, professionally produced mailer from them at my home.  I read them all, out of collegial interest, and the last one we got caught my eye.  It seemed notable not so much for what it said, but for what it did not say.

It was a "teaching series," an opportunity to learn practical lessons for your life.  Each part of the series had a practical theme.  Parenting.  Sexuality.  Relationships.  Money.  Work.  "Womanhood," although how their very notably not-a-woman pastor was going to speak authoritatively about that is beyond me.  

Meaning, in other words, this was what they used to call a "sermon series" back in the day.  But nowhere was the word "sermon" used.  This didn't surprise me.  Sermons, unfortunately, have something of a negative reputation, for being long and dull and judgmental.  You'd be outraged and storm out, if you hadn't been bored into a stupor beforehand.  Why? Can't? I? Move?

Sermons?  Ew icky icky ew.  Stay away from that idea.  "Not a Sermon, Just A Thought," as the local megahumongochurch pastor says in his ads, right before preaching an awkward mini-sermon.

Then I realized that the pastor of the Baptist church...and he is called their pastor on their website...is referenced in the flyer as the "author and speaker."  The word "pastor" is never used. This seemed noteworthy.  Also noteworthy was that the "teaching series" was happening on Sunday, during what I'm sure some folks there think of as "worship."  But that term is not used.

Neither, I realized, was there any other faith content on the mailer, beyond the congregation's logo identifying them as some flavor of Baptist.  No mention of God, or of faith.  The word "Jesus" did not appear.   

Huh.  It felt oddly coy, peculiarly indirect, particularly for a solidly conservative church.  Were they Unitarians or a Humanist Chapel, sure.  That'd make sense.  But they're not.  It felt a teensy bit bait-and-switchy, like a mask.  In seeking to be more palatable, the marketing folks had blurred identity to the point where it didn't feel quite on the up and up.

Not quite like one of those cults that draws you in by talking about world peace, and the next thing you know you're living on a compound in Guatemala as the brother-husband of a stark eyed woman who claims to be an emissary from the K'tall Nebula.

But closer than should be comfortable.

I didn't know the Jesus brand was hurting that badly.  What are we, xFinity?

Former Selves

Today was strikingly gorgeous, one of those days-without-flaw when its hard to do anything other than bask in the Maker's work.   After a week of stanky moist Washington heat, this morning came crisp and perfect in the 60s.  Skies?  Blue and clear.  Clouds?  Intermittent and puffy as unspun cotton.

With the missus off in El Ay for a few days doing her jet-setting Executive thing, I herded boy number one off to the bus, and then wrangled boy number two to the bus stop, all prepped for Field Day.  From bus stop number two, I took our faithful pup for an hour long walk through the 170+ acres of heavily-wooded county parkland right near our house.  It was, in every way, lovely.

And then I came home, and settled in behind the keyboard, and kept up with a promise I made to my former self earlier this year.

This Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, I resolved to get a children's novel I wrote back in college into e-publishable form.   It's been a challenging year personally and vocationally, which has occasionally gotten in the way of getting things done.   But once I make a promise, I'll endeavor to keep it.  Even if that's a promise I made to me.

One manuscript remains.  Scanning it?  Too messy.  Even with good OCR,  I'd have to significantly edit it.  So I'm doing it the old fashioned way.  I'm retyping it as time allows.  One page here.  A couple of pages there.

Today, I worked my way through 12 pages of text.   It's a bit odd, like reading an old journal.  Here are these words, this story.  I wrote them.  But the "I" that wrote them was very different.  I was twenty-one.  I was half my age.    I knew far less than I do now.  I was in a long-distance relationship with the woman who would become my wife, in an era that was pre-email.  Pre-Skype.  Pre-anything-but-expensive-long-distance-phone-calls-and-long-handwritten-letters.    This "me" was very different.  I'd never seen a child born, let alone my own sons.  I'd never seen another human being die.   So much life had not yet happened.

Yet this was me.  I feel myself in the words.  They're somehow still mine.  It's my voice.  Different, but still my voice.

Typing it again, as I physically connect with the text by recreating it in the same way I created it, stirs so many memories.  Of being in a computer lab where not a single computer was connected to the internet. Of the feel of 5 1/4 inch floppy disks.  Of walking home to 1508 Grady Avenue in Charlottesville in the early morning after hours of writing, breathing the cool spring air as I walked dead center up the Lawn, alone,  towards the lit Rotunda in the darkness.

Sixteen thousand, five hundred words down.  Another fifteen thousand words to go.

Faith and Self Love

In a post over at thehardestquestion, Carol Howard Merritt recently pitched out a really solid reflection on 1 Corinthians 3:1-9.   The essence of her reflection revolves around the contrast between Spirit and Flesh that the Apostle Paul glances off of in this section, but develops more fully elsewhere.  She then uses that to reflect on the toxic approach our culture takes towards the flesh, particularly the flesh of women who look at themselves and find that they are not the airbrushed perfection they're told they're supposed to be.   It's open, honest and thought provoking, as her writing tends to be.

In response to a comment I left, Carol said:


"How do you understand/explain the nuances between loving oneself and self-seeking?"

This had the unfortunate effect of sending me off into a conceptual cascade that was waaay to long for a comment, which I'm going to subject you to here.   Just warnin' ya.  There's still time to escape.

Honestly, when I went a-parsing down that road, I found myself mightily struggling with the idea of "loving myself."

Love, as I understand it both conceptually and from the ground of my faith, is relational.  It's something that exists between selves.  In it's highest form, it bridges the chasm of existential separation that divides us, as in it we share in the joys and sorrows of the beloved.  Not to mention it being both the Most Excellent Way and the essential nature of God.

But when I look to the heart of Christian faith, to the Great Commandment, self-love is hard to find.  Love of God?  Check.  Love of Neighbor.  Check.  But of self?  Hmmm.  It's the measure of how you love your neighbor...but...um...there's not much else there.

Meaningfully saying "I love myself" requires a fragmentation of being, a separation of self from self.  You can only love yourself if you are not at one with yourself.  This is the odd actuality of our existence as sentient and self-aware creatures.  In self-awareness, the self reflects on itself, and is aware of itself as a being relative to other beings.  There is, in self-awareness, the capacity to look at who you are and be either pleased or horrified.   It's an essential characteristic of being human.

I'd insert a Sarah Palin joke here, but my self awareness tells me that wouldn't be gracious.

Oh.  Oops.

But unlike loving others unconditionally, loving yourself unconditionally often results in sociopathic unpleasantness.   That's Narcissus in a nutshell, forever poring over his beauty and the wonder that is him, trapped in a recursive feedback loop of self-regard.  It's true for self-hate, too.  Dark Narcissus can sit by that bleak pool, forever lamenting his thin lipped pimply visage and his stammering incompetence at all things.   That form of self-seeking-self-love is a closed circle prison, harming not just an individual but also those around them.

For self-love to be transforming and liberating, it needs to be both rational and ecstatic.   The rational part springs from our self-awareness as a thinking being.  Presbyterians do this great.  Ecstasy, though, comes harder for us.  The term "ecstasy" means essentially to "stand outside" of oneself.   Love does this.  And the love of God that is the first element of the great commandment does this best.  Pouring all your heart and all your mind and all your soul into the Love from which we all spring is the highest form of human ecstasy.

This love, as I see it, is also a form of love of self.  That's not to say that we are God.  Not at all.  Do I look like Feuerbach?   Yeah, ok, maybe a little, but I don't think like him theologically.

Rather, this comes from the rather theologically basic statement that God knows us completely, and that God knows what we would be were we fully conformed to God's grace.  It is that self that is worthy of love.  That's not a love of the self you know.  Not the love of the self whose value is defined by your sociocultural context.  But a love of the self God sees, a self transformed as you empty yourself into God, and the love of God fills you and transforms you and heals and completes you.  George MacDonald, C.S. Lewises master, described this as your "True Name," your identity as you would be were you perfected.  As, in the knowledge of my Creator, I already am. 

That is the self that I am not.  And as I love God, that is the self that I love, unconditionally. 

That, as I still struggle my way through it, is the difference.

Journey's End

I'd wanted to ride motorcycles since back when I was sitting around with an old friend in GT Bio, and we'd both sit there ignoring the teacher and kicking back chopper style behind our desks, making a quiet variant on the Mouse and the Motorcycle noise.

As soon as I left for college, much to the lament of my mom, I procured myself one. It was a big loud sloppy CB750 with a snarling shot exhaust. It got me to school. It got me home to cast my first vote in a presidential election. I used to ride it in circles around my fraternity, go tearing around the countryside in the middle of the night, and give occasional rides to some of the women who hung around the house. It was fun.

In the summer of 1989, it got me to my second date with my wife. We blatted into town to hit the museums, and when it rained and we wound up under a bridge with four other bikers, she wasn't just not complainy. She was laughing and having fun. It was a good day.

My CX500 came next, and took me back and forth from Charlottesville to Williamsburg dozens of times to see her. It was a torquey little pig of a bike, as trusty as a stone. Then a careworn 750 Sabre, which failed me again and again, it's electrics giving out in the most inopportune moments.

Then a Shadow VLX, which was slow and short of breath, but utterly reliable. It got me to and from work for years, shaving an hour a day off my commute and giving me precious time with my then-baby boys. It sliced and diced through the city to get me to the ministry that reignited my calling. It got me to the church where I interned. It got me to seminary. Four seasons a year, in everything but ice and snow...and sometimes that, too.

From there, a bikeless lull, as I looked for a church. I'd whine and make sad puppy noises whenever a motorcycle rode by, much to the exasperation of the wife.

Then, with my ordination, a used YZF600R. A fine bike, trusty and fast, with remarkable range and more speed than I need. For six years, it got me where I need to go. It mixed getting places with moments of adventure. It was both practical and exuberant and a great conversation starter. I have been "the pastor with the bike." It has been part of my identity.

But somewhere in the last year, that part died. I'm not sure exactly when. But I found I cared less and less. It just no longer mattered. Rides for pleasure had long since stopped happening. Kids needed to be picked up. Things needed to be ported from one place to another. I'd look at the bike, and think, is riding on that same godforsaken quarter-loop of Beltway...again...really worth it? Do I want to throw a leg over the thing? And the answer, which had for more than two decades been yes even if it was 20 degrees out or storming, kept coming back "No."

Things started to fail on the YZF, and rather than fixing them, I just rode less. When the battery died in late summer, I did nothing. It has not started since then. A thick layer of dust covers it. I can't even remember the last time I rode it.

Over a month ago, I determined to sell the thing...and while the missus was convinced that this was just an elaborate ruse to get a newer scoot, it isn't. I'm just ready to have it gone. Not now, of course. With blizzards pounding us, ain't no selling a bike. But come Spring, when the air is sweet and warm, and the trees are speckled with new green life, someone will be more than happy to buy it once it's fixed up a bit. I know I would have been, years ago.

For everything there is a season, I guess.

There Was No Point At Which He Was Not

I'm going to spiral back to my previous thread on the Christian assertion of the pre-existence of Christ and how that relates to the flesh-and-blood of Jesus of Nazareth. We say he's part of creation from the very beginning...but how? And which part of Jesus is eternal? Lil' Baby Jesus, Eternally Asleep on the Hay? Tweener Jesus eternally wowin' 'em in the temple? Jesus the carpenter's apprentice? Teaching Jesus? Jesus dying on the Cross? Jesus strangely shrouded and unrecognized at the tomb, or walking the Emmaeus road?

But that big mess o' Jesuses gets too confusing. Instead, most of us carve ourselves out an eternal Christ that is separate from the man who lived and died, that familiar and resplendantly white-robed Caucasian with a neatly trimmed beard and feathered, touchable hair who floats smiling towards us from a golden cloud. But that seems to make the life and the death and the cross a brief and tangential codicil to Christ's eternity, a blip, a 33 year flicker of flesh instead of the central fulcrum of God's self-expression to humanity.

As I struggle to wrap my head around this, it's always a useful caveat to remember that when it comes to talking about things that are eternal, our language is a fumbly and clumsy thing. Our words are imprecise symbolic instruments, and while they're useful for describing the structures and movements in the world around us, they're far less helpful when we wrassle with the transcendant.

That said, I've found the distinction between the Greek terms chronos and kairos to be helpful in understanding the eternity of Christ. To which you might say, rolling your eyes, there's nothing like bringing in Greek philosophical terms to clear things up. Fair enough, but hear me out. Where English only has one term for time, Greek has several. Chronos time is clock time, the generic passing of moment to moment. Kairos, on the other hand, is best translated as "God's time," or a time set aside in which something is fulfilled. (see Luke 21:8) It's not about the ephemeral, but about the permanent.

I see the life of Jesus of Nazareth as a life lived as an indwelling of the eternal God's self expression into the flow of our time. The moments of His life are all kairos moments, not fleeting and substanceless, but of God and part of God's plan for creation since the dawn of creation. From the moment our universe was spoken into being, that Jesus-event was already part of it. Every instant of that life reflected God, and every instant of that life is part of God, eternally.

Angels on the Head of a Pin, Shakin' Dey Booty

I know this doesn't matter much to most contemporary Big Stadium Christians, but I find myself struggling now and again with the question of Christ's pre-existence. This tends to come after I've done any significant reading in the Gospel of John. Christ is the Word, the Logos that is God's own creative power and self-expression. This, I get. Fine.

But in what way does that relate to Jesus of Nazareth? This is Jesus the human being, who wept and taught and laughed and went potty like the rest of us. Without the event of that particular life, I can't see any way to meaningfully parse out where the pre-existent Christ begins and the Holy Spirit ends. I can't say Christ without seeing Jesus, nor do I think that term has any meaning without the specific phenomenon of his life.

Part of my wrestling is that I do grasp...and conceptually embrace...the foundation of Trinitarian doctrine in Aristotelian categorical structure. Yeah, I know. Take a deep breath, and try to bear with me. When the early church was struggling to articulate who Jesus was, the Cappadocian fathers (following Tertullian) used the philosophy of their day to show how he was essentially united with God. That ancient articulation, found in the fourth Century Nicene Creed, used the Aristotelian principles of "substance" and "accident" to express how the persons of the Trinity interrelate. When they say that Jesus is of the same substance as the Father, we're saying that He shares an ineffable "Godness" with God the Father. At his very core, he is God. All of the particulars of who Jesus is are "accidents." His height, his skin tone, his genetic composition, the way his vocal cords vibrated to produce Aramaic in his unique voice...all of those things do not get us to his "Godness," to his substance, which is shared with the Father and the Holy Spirit. It is in those "accidents" that we are able to distinguish the persons of the Trinity.

As I assess the role of Christ in my faith, I find that all of the accidents that define "Christ" revolve around the life, death, and strange return of that first century Judean. Without the particularity of those events and that life, I have great difficulty seeing my way to a meaningful Trinitarian faith. How do I resolve this? More later...

The Scandal of Universality

What is salvation? Salvation comes when we stand in right relationship with God. It's a healing of the rift that exists between we selfish, solipcistic creatures and our Creator.

All of the terms and images that are used throughout the Gospels and Epistles point to Jesus of Nazareth as the One who fully manifested the self-emptying servanthood that is required if we are to conform our wills to God. He's the physical reality of the logos that underlies the universe, so woven up into who God is that parsing out where the man ends and God begins is a fools errand. Or the errand of theologians. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

More importantly, through him we come to see that this logos isn't just the disengaged Enlightenment clockmaker or the abstraction of an Aristotelian unmoved mover. Instead, Jesus expresses the logos to us as love. He has soteriological power..that means savin' power, kids...because he is God's own self-expression. He's not the Ba'al of a neo-Canaanite Trinity, sacrificed and raised by El like a subordinate mediator god in a tripartite pantheon. At his most essential, substantial level, Jesus is God.

As such, being Christian..and being saved...is less about emulating Christ and more about participating in Christ. It's not about our own heartfelt emo conviction that we've been adequately spattered with His plasma and corpuscles. It's not measured by our ability to memorize and recite scripture or the doctrinal assertions of our particular tradition.

It's measured by our participation in that love that is God the Father, which Christ expressed through his life, and which the Spirit struggles every day to manifest in us.

Word Up, Y'all

The Greek phrase "En arche en ho Logos" begins John's Gospel. It's the soaring start to John 1, and Jesus People have heard it a trillion times. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

For John of course, the Word with a capital W was Jesus. We hear that easily. It's nice and familiar. What is harder for us to do, living outside of the first century Greco-Roman world, is for us to hear the beginning of John's Gospel in the same way as the people who would first have heard it read in a small assembly of early Christians.

The term logos can be translated to mean a verbal utterance. It does mean that. However, the reason we slap a great honking uppercase Dubyah onto it has everything to do with the broader meaning of that term in the philosophical movements of that time. Logos was a term that had deep roots in Greek philosophy, having been used since the time before Socrates to describe the underlying order and nature of the universe. It can equally well be translated as "reason," or "meaning" or "thought."

During the time of the early church, it was used by the Stoic movement to describe the creative power that caused all things. The Stoics believed that fragments of that power, the logos spermatikos, resided in every human being as the power of reason.

At it's very outset, John's Gospel is making a stunning claim for Jesus...that he is, in fact, the embodiment of the underlying creative power that formed the universe. "Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made." If you heard that in the first century, you knew exactly what that meant. Logos. The Word.

Just as the universe was spoken into existence, Jesus is God's own self-expression, in human form. Can we call him Rabbi? Does he teach? Sure. Can we call him prophet? Does he proclaim God's justice? Yup. But the most essential assertion we make about Jesus is that Jesus is integrally woven into the Creator's intent for the universe, that he manifests that intent, that in some ineffable way he was and is that intent.

How, if at all, does this relate to the way we Christians understand salvation?

The Baked Good from the Sky

While the three synoptic gospels do tell us a great deal about who Jesus was, the primary focus in each of them is his 'splainin' to us what it means to live in the Kingdom of God.

If we want a more intimate discussion of who Jesus is, we go to John's Gospel. The witness of the Beloved Disciple comes to us from a different set of oral and written traditions about Jesus, which focus much more intently on Jesus himself. Who is he? Well, let's ask him.

John contains a series of what are called ego eimi, or "I am" statements, in which Jesus tells us who he is. So who are you, big guy?

"I am the bread of life. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. I am the light of the world. I am the gate for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the true vine."

To which we might say, huh? You're a baked good from the sky? A gate for livestock? A plant that does well on polygraph tests?

But we'd only say that if we were metaphorically challenged. Jesus speaks about who he is in ways that demand thought, that use symbols and language to force us to see him in a more complex way. He's what sustains us. He's what lights and guides our way. He's what gives us life and growth.

Why is he all those things? The answer is found in this Greek phrase: "En arche en ho Logos."

Where do we find that, and what does it mean?

Who Is This Guy?

So just who is He? Who is this peculiar figure around whom we Christians build our entire worldview, and in whose name we make such intense claims?

Among those who respect him, there are many who view him as a teacher of wisdom, a sage, a rabbi. Certainly, there were many times he was called rabbi (for example-Mark 9:5; John 3:2), and he did fulfill many of the roles of a rabbinic teacher. But delimiting his function to that alone just makes him one among a thousand other voices of wisdom. If we take that route, eventually, we end up Unitarian. Which, as we've all been told, is just half a notch on the dial away from becoming a Wiccan, or worse yet, a...Democrat. And we all know what awaits Democrats in the afterlife. Shudder.

There's also the "he's a prophet" meme, which I think also has some merit. This, however, only points you towards who he is if you understand what a prophet actually is. Prophets aren't primarily soothsayers, or prognosticators of future events. Neither are they only folks who make a clarion call for justice for the oppressed...although they certainly do that, too. Understood in a biblical sense, they are individuals who act as conduits for God. They don't just tell us about God, but are instead so filled with God that their voice ceases to be entirely their own.

This gets us closer, but it's still not quite it. Of all of the Gospels, which focuses most intently on who Jesus was?

Dropping the Ba'al

One of the larger challenges we have as Christians is telling the world about who Jesus is, and why we feel he's important. As important as John 3:16 is to all of us from this side of the looking glass, I think that unless we can unpack that a teensy little bit the rest of the world just hears us talkin' loud and sayin' nothing.

"He's the Son of God," we say, sounding much like Uhura on that Star Trek episode most Trekkers would rather forget. What, you mean like Hercules? Is Jesus the demi-god offspring of divine canoodling? Has the Holy of Holies, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, just become the Jewish Zeus as a goose, coming down to do the humpty hump with an underage Judean Leda? No, of course not. That's not what we say at all, but I'm not sure that most of us have an adequate grasp on the depth of what orthodox Trinitarian theology actually says to be able to fend off that sniping.

"He died for our sins and was raised again, so that we might have eternal life," we say, and we really mean it. But then some jaded former Christian with a chip on their shoulder asks us how that's different from the Canaanite Ugaritic stories of Ba'al the lifegiver, who dies in battle with Mot, the god of sterility and death. In his death, the hold of Mot over the earth is shattered, and Ba'al is then resurrected, restoring life to the earth, giving a great harvest and hope to humanity. "It's...different...,"we stammer, but they're hardly going to be convinced if that's all we have to offer. There are plenty of distinctions, but to really surface them, we have to both know the witness of Scripture and tradition.

Then...and I think this is the hard part...we have to be able to tell the story of who He is in such a way that a world that no longer is steeped in Bible stories can understand it. If all we can offer are what amount to terms of art, the language of our own in-group conversation, I think our ability to show the world who Jesus was and what He meant will fade to nothing.