The Sweet New Year

Last year, at around this time, I was celebrating the Jewish High Holy Days with my family.

It was a remarkable Yom Kippur, as I sat up there on the bimah with my wife on the holiest day in Judaism, and had the honor of removing the Torah from the ark.  It felt more than a little bit magical.  I'm sure others of my Presbyterian pastor colleagues must have had that privilege at some point, but I think it's safe to say this ain't a typical occurrence. This generally doesn't happen when you're not just a random one a' tha goyim, but a professional gentile.

This week, as the new year began, I was up on the bimah again with my wife for Rosh Hashanah.  Again, I took the Torah from the ark and gave it to her, and again watched her circle the synagogue, the congregants kissing their prayerbooks and touching them to the covered scroll.

It was the Head of the Year, the point where those days of repentance and change begin.  It's the point where we both celebrate the promise of a year to come, but also look to the year that has passed, thinking of the ways we might change for the better in the coming year.  It's a time for intentional reconciliation, for seeking ways to heal those things that were broken.

What I reflected on, in this new year, was the challenging year it was for relationships between Judaism and my denomination.  The choice of our General Assembly to selectively divest from three American companies providing security/military resources to Israel was a choice to push a particularly large red button.  Though I know people of good conscience who disagree, it wasn't a hateful choice, or an anti-semitic choice, or even a choice that was meaningfully anti-Israel.  It couldn't be, any more than choosing not to invest in Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, or the Corrections Corporation of America is bad and anti-American.  If you have a socially responsible investment policy based on your faith principles that prevents you from profiting from war or incarceration, that's just where you end up.

But rationally explicable though it was, it was a button nonetheless, the sort of thing that tends to cause a binary reaction.

That was early summer, and the heat and light of debate and missives and editorials burned bright and fierce.  "This is the thing we are fighting about right now!"  But now months have passed, and the chatter and hum has disappeared, its afterglow as difficult to detect in the collective subconscious as the cosmic background radiation from the dawn of our sliver of the multiverse.

Though it had been a hard year, now it is a new one.  And at the dawn of that year, there I was, a Presbyterian pastor, up again on the bimah.  Still in relationship, just as I'd been the year before.  My wife and I sat close, and shared her prayerbook.  We read and chanted the prayers together, her Hebrew solid and confident, mine mostly there most of the time.  We sang the shema, and all the sacred songs which I know by heart after 23 years of High Holy Days, 23 years and change since we stood under a canopy on that very bimah.  I stood by the opened ark, and listened to the shofar.  I heard the rabbi's voice mingle with the sound of my older son's baritone ringing from the choir.  I stood around at the reading of the Torah, and watched as my younger son held the microphone for the rabbi's wife as she chanted.

It was as sweet as honey on my soul.

I'm hoping, in this year 5775, that things are a little sweeter for all of us.

The Shabbos Goy and the Torah

It's Yom Kippur today, the Day of Atonement, the day that ends the High Holy Days in Judaism.  It's a day of fasting and reflection, and this year, it's also on a Sabbath.

On most Yom Kippurs, I tend to serve as the shabbos goy, the non-fasting, adequately-caffeinated gentile who helps get things done while the Chosen People wrestle with both God and their low blood sugar.  That certainly happened today, as I trundled into town seeking bagels and whitefish salad for the break-the-fast that comes at sundown.  And did dishes.  And cleaned.

But this year, my wife is on the board of the synagogue, and that meant that she was to sit up on the bima at the front of the synagogue.  It was her responsibility to carry the Torah scrolls into the congregation, as the Torah is honored before the reading.

And as her spouse, I was expected to be up there with her.  And so I was.  A shabbos goy?  On the bima?  Huh.

At the appointed time, another board member opened up the Ark.  And then it was my job, as the partner of the board member, to take the Torah from the Ark.   So I did, but not without awareness of my actions.  Here I am, on Yom Kippur, in front of the whole congregation.  A Gentile.  But not just any Gentile.

I'm a Presbyterian Teaching Elder, a pastor of a congregation, and a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth.  On the bima.  In a synagogue.  On Yom Kippur.  Taking the Torah from the Ark.

For a moment, that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark fluttered into my head.  But I am comfortable and at ease with the faith, with my Jewish wife, and both boys mitzvahed, my older adding his fine baritone to the synagogue choir, my younger helping lead the later family service.  I'm reasonably sure that the Creator of the Universe is copacetic with this.

So into my arms I took the scrolls, the tall ones, the ones that were hidden away in Poland and survived the Holocaust.  I the Gentile handed them to my Jewish wife.  Then it's back into the Ark I went, where the crowns...silver and covered in tiny bells...awaited.  I put them on the Torah, gently, and then watched Rache as she walked it through the synagogue.

When she returns, I take the bells off, and then she places that old Torah into my arms.  It is surprisingly light, and I hold it like a sleeping child, and return it to the Ark.  If objects had memory, what a strange thing that would seem.  A relief of sorts, perhaps.

As we sat afterwards, the congregation coming forward for the first reading, Rache slipped her hand in mine.  "That was special," she whispered in my ear.

It was.  How many shabbos goyim can claim such an honor?

Christian Pastor, Jewish Children

This weekend, my youngest son led worship.

As a pastor dad, it was an interesting service for a variety of reasons, the most significant of which was that he'd been preparing for it for years.  Though the kids in my little church did a rockin' job of leading worship for Sunday School Sunday this weekend, my son was not part of that event.  

The worship he guided was, finally, his bar mitzvah.  

Both my wife and my kids are Jewish, making me the sole gentile in my household, and both of my boys part of a rare breed: The Jewish Preacher's -Kids.  I'm not sure how many PKs are bar mitzvahed every year, but I suspect the numbers aren't high.

The little guy did fine, rolling unphased through even some unplanned hiccups in the service, ones that might have shaken more anxious souls.

He chanted Torah, chanted his haftarah portion, and delivered a challenging d'var torah in a tag team with his cousin, who was being bat mitzvahed at the same service.

I watched it all with pride in how much he's done, and with a deep awareness of where he is relative to faith.  He's a thoughtful, complex kid, and his views on faith reflect that complexity.  He's Jewish, but struggles with issues of suffering and justice and textual authority, and is honestly engaged with exploring his identity.  It's an identity I respect.

That I'm a Christian pastor with Jewish kids tends to spark questions with some folks.  How can I be such a thing?

It's not particularly difficult, honestly.

Judaism itself is so utterly compatible with my faith that I have no difficulty embracing it.  When worshipping in the lively, musical services at my wife's synagogue, there's not a single thing said or prayed that I find myself troubled by.  At least, not more so than I'd find worshipping with a similarly-oriented Christian community.  The emphasis on justice, forgiveness, faith, and repentance are completely in line with the teachings of my Teacher.   This is hardly surprising, given that he was kinda Jewish himself.   I am fully backwards-compatible, as they say.

I've talked about faith with both of my boys, and told them about Jesus and why he is so important to me.  They get it, I think, in a way that inspires some respect for both what he taught and who he was.

But I've not forced my faith upon them.  I don't do that, not with them, not with anyone.  I've argued for it, defended it as they've encountered those angry and bitter souls who use Jesus as an excuse for their hatreds, and presented it in a way that shows it is gracious and self-evidently good.  But evangelism is about manifesting and articulating grace, not about blunt force suasion.

Some might argue that I should be terrified for the disposition of their mortal souls, but I just can't get there.  Relative to their Jewish identity, Paul argues at length in Romans, the covenant with Israel hasn't been revoked.  Just expanded and deepened.  

And as Jesus himself articulates in Matthew, what matters isn't our ability to articulate complex theological positions or to defend the propositions of orthodoxy.

What matters is that the manner and nature of our lives express the fundamentally just and gracious nature of our Creator.   Living in the Kingdom isn't a cognitive construct.  It's existential, woven into our doing and being.

So far as my kids do that, they're fine.

And no matter what, I'll love 'em.

Sounding Like a Buddhist

Yesterday, during a lovely extended lunch with two fellow pastors, we wandered from talking shop to talking Big Picture.  It was a delicious discussion, as we wandered into areas of theological complexity that I thoroughly enjoy.

At one point, things wandered into a conversation about predestination and free-will.  I used to be more traditionally orthodox Calvinist on the subject, but my view has...changed...over the past several years.  My engagement with Many Worlds and the multiverse understanding of creation has caused me to drift away from that old and unresolved argument.

Or perhaps that argument has drifted away from me.  It just doesn't seem relevant any more, a question that is as meaningless as asking about the sound of one hand clapping.

I was endeavoring to explain my viewpoint, but the burrito I'd just eaten was evidently taking up too much of the oxygen in my system, and I could hear myself not making myself clear.  Or I thought I wasn't.  So hard, it is, to hear with others ears.

Midway through an obscure sounding explication of the nature of God, one of my colleagues smiled to the other and said, "He sounds like a Buddhist."

I didn't respond, but smiled serenely, which probably didn't make me seem less Buddhist.

But I thought, hey, no, I sound like a Christian.  Christians sound like this.

In the context of that good company, that observation wasn't what it might have been in other Christian circles.  There are plenty of earnest Christians who might utter that phrase as a cautionary note to a brother or sister who's in danger of wandering off the reservation.  That was not its intent.  It was simply an observation.

I've always respected the teachings of the Buddha, and my depth study of it has only deepened that respect.  I see the value in the Four Noble Truths, and the wisdom of the Noble Eightfold Path.  But it is not the Way I have chosen to follow.   My intention and my focus is teaching what Jesus taught, and guiding people to follow him in intention and deed.

The reality I am describing is the same reality that Buddhism attempts to describe, sure.  But it's not my way.  That does not make it evil, or my enemy, or the enemy of my Master.  There are such paths, and I see their fruits in the world around me.  Those are worth opposing.

Buddhism is simply... different.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with difference.

Most Beautifully Various

Thomas Bayes was the Presbyterian pastor who came up with the equation underlying all modern probability theory, but he was also a Nonconforming Christian.

That meant a very particular thing at that particular place and time in human history.  In reading his short essay on God's goodness, I did find myself wondering about how that might have formed and shaped how he thought.

His faith meant that during his lifetime, he was legally a second class citizen of England.   He had chosen not to swear fealty to the state religion of his time, and that made him ineligible for public benefits and public office.

But that also made him free.  As a Christian, Bayes didn't have to hew to any particular and mandated patter of belief or worship.   Having attended a Free Church myself for a while as a kid living in England, I suddenly have a clearer idea of just where that came from.  That peculiar PresbyBaptiMethoCongregationalism of my youth comes from the very corner of Christianity that Bayes inhabited.

It also meant that his view of dogma, doctrine, and orthodoxy would have been shaped by a deep awareness of being different.  Of being outside of the acceptable norm.  And from that place, openness to the new and the different is considerably easier.

As I worked through his 1731 essay on God's goodness, his openness to the creative power of difference surfaces repeatedly.  He resists, in particular, the idea that there is only one way to be Good.   That, from his Nonconforming perspective, seems both oppressive and limiting, and too much like the state religion that tried to enforce a single order.   He writes things like this:

"If the universe were to consist of one uniform sort of beings, however happy they might be, 'tis evident that they could not in some respects enjoy so great happiness as they might by variety..."

As for Creation itself, he sees variation and difference as amazing things, and a necessary part of a loving God's creative power.  As he describes it:

"..a most happy universe is so far from being unbeautifully uniform, that it must be most beautifully various..."

From that place, seeing chaos as creativity and possibility wouldn't have been much of a stretch.  I think Bayes would have liked the multiverse.

Interfaith Roundup

Yesterday's conference of Clergy Beyond Borders made for an interesting day. It's always a bit difficult for me, as a near-pathological introvert, to assimilate myself into a gathering in which I know absolutely no-one. Yet conversation and relational connection was the point, so I leavened my desire to wander and contemplate and just plopped myself into things. And new experiences aplenty were there to be had.

It was a bit unusual, for example, to hear the director of an organization of Muslim women lawyers describing her love of Korean soap operas. The need for prolonged emo melodrama is one of those universal human desires, I suppose.

It was intriguing to talk with an evangelical and a Muslim who were both struggling with the challenge of making inroads in secular Europe. As much of Europe is hostile to Islam, and either indifferent to or hostile towards Christianity, faith communities really have a very difficult struggle there. I have a tendency to think the standard toolset of the American evangelical movement tends to be the wrong one. The reflexive resistance to the modern era and enlightenment principles that has come to define much of American Christianity fails miserably in Europe. The Prosperity Gospel also fails miserably, as preaching endlessly about Health-And-Wealth serves no purpose in cultures where they aren't required to fret so much about those things. Honestly, I think the only Christianity that has any hope of gaining a small foothold in Europe is the real thing. You know, focused on the core teachings of Jesus, and content with being a community of intimate faith and service that bears no resemblance to Christendom.

It was heartening to hear that the little cluster of rabbis who gathered in the early evening to light the Hannukah candles were joined by imams and pastors. Wish I'd been there and hadn't been out walking. That's two nights in a row I've missed the menorah. Fiddle. But I needed to move my legs and be out in creation for a bit. There's only so much sitting on my tushie I can take.

It was awkward sitting across from an Indian Muslim imam at lunch, endeavoring repeatedly to connect on a human level, but finding that he seemed to have no interest whatsoever in doing anything other than telling me his name and giving me his card. The card announced his leadership of HALF-A-MILLION-MUSLIM-IMAMS, a fact that he managed to slip in when we went around the room to share our names, and that appears in nearly every google return of his name. Eye contact? Pleasant sharing about family and background? Nothing. I seemed little more than an inconvenient inanimate object that impeded his view of the people he'd rather be talking with. Ah well. So it goes.

On the flip side, it was delightful seeing the light of warmth and friendship that shone between many of the participants, connections that existed before and were being renewed. It was a genuinely hopeful event, filled with grace and promise and mutual understanding. Seeing the rabbi and the imam who organized the event beaming as they described the deep warmth and connection that they and their families shared was an impressive and joyful thing. Another thousand such relationships would change the face of Israel and Palestine.

Also joyful, although not surprising, was the face presented by the Christian evangelicals who were attending the event. Unlike my oldline brethren, who often hem and haw and fret about the awkwardness of non-inclusive semiotics when in mixed company, these folks were unapologetically Christ-centered, each and every one of them. They were as Jesus-focused as the imams were Qu'ran focused, and the rabbis were Torah focused. What my brethren were not, however, was rigid, judgmental, and dogmatic. Instead, they were leading with grace, and following with grace. The Jesus they professed as Lord and Savior...and they did say that...was described in terms that were so suffused with love and kindness towards all that it was impossible to hear him described and not know you were hearing something fundamentally good. As one panelist talked about the heart of Christ's teachings about love for the other, both the rabbi and the imam next to him seemed genuinely impressed. It was a real and significant witness.

Yeah, You're a Nice Person, but Jesus Hates You Anyway

One of the biggest sticking points I have with the core evangelical savedness script is the peculiar insistence that Hell is full of people who don't appear to in any conceivable way to have merited eternal damnation.

I was reminded of this while watching the highly entertaining film Ghost Town, in which Ricky Gervais plays an isolated and insufferably misanthropic dentist who ends up able to "see dead people." His partner in practice is a kind, gentle, genial Hindu. Even though he's constantly being graceful and pleasant to his maddening workmate, he's also precisely the sort of person who...according to the Good News of Jesus Christ, American Evangelical Edition...is going to burn forever in the fires of Gehenna as his nice unbeliever flesh is flayed from his nice unbeliever bones by an unrelenting personal incubus.

The reasons that Christians invariably give for this are twofold. First, you can only be saved by Jesus Christ. Not a Christian? Not saved. Of course, that's not how Jesus describes the final judgment in the only place in the Gospels he talks about it directly...but that's a minor detail. We're sure Jesus didn't actually MEAN that.

The second and more prevalent is this: we Christians assert that you are saved by grace, and not by works. Therefore, or so the argument goes, someone who does good but has not proclaimed Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior is just doing "works righteousness," which is pointless and worthless.

There is, under this rubric, no difference between an "unbeliever" finding you injured in a wreck, stopping, bandaging your wounds, and getting you to the hospital and that same "unbeliever" finding you injured in a wreck, taking your wallet and shoes, punching you repeatedly, and then slitting your throat so you can't tell anyone. From the perspective of the evangelical movement, any distinction between these acts is meaningless to God. Both are equally evil, for the person undertaking them is automatically damned no matter what they think or how they act.

What's most difficult about this for me..beyond it's self-evident disconnect from the idea of "Good News"...is that it seems to radically misrepresent Paul's essential point about works, faith, and righteousness. What are "works?" Well, they're anything you do. Anything. Building a Habitat for Humanity house? That's a work. Popping a cap into some fool who disrespected you? That's a work. Taking a dump? That's a work.

What is Apostle Paul is talking about when he describes "works" that do not save? Random actions? Any actions? Evil actions? No. The "works" being challenged are "works under the law." What Paul is challenging is the idea that obedience to an external code of conduct...in this case, the Torah...has any power to restore our relationship with God. Why?

Because law and legality assume an underlying enforcement through coercion. It's how the state runs. In the contract between a ruler and their people, failure to comply with the terms of a social compact will result in unpleasantness for those who mess up. That ranges from small fines to more unpleasant things, particularly if you live in the district of Sen. Vlad Dracul (R-Transylvania).

But if that's the reason you engage in moral action it means that you are, as Paul puts it, a slave to fear. You are not acting as one moved by Christ's grace, meaning you are not inwardly conformed to God's will through the action of the Spirit. You're just doing what you're told. It's a shallow, meaningless, untransformed obedience, rooted in a terror of divine punishment.

What Paul was doing was to proclaim that through Christ, that whole dynamic was shattered and replaced with an awareness of God's grace. Not God the divine autocrat...but God who moves to change our hearts to the good with a relentless and inexorable grace.

Yet when we see individuals who are not law-driven, when we experience souls that seem driven to show care for others not because fear of God but by some deep upwelling grace, for some reason we feel compelled to declare them damned by the name of Jesus.

In the name of grace, a sizable percentage of Christians are willing to be graceless. To fairly paraphrase Paul, "you who brag about grace, do you dishonor God by showing no grace? As it is written: 'God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.'"