I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I keep noticing how the last couple of months have worn down my patience, stretched my tolerance, and just generally been exhausting. When I look at the world around me, it seems like many people are experiencing the same thing. It is very hard to be living through a time when so many things feel like they are challenging everything to which we are accustomed.
For years I have read the stories of the call of the disciples and Jesus’ invitation to leave everything you know and come and follow him. In the past I have named my journey into ministry as a glimpse into answering that call. But the last many months have highlighted Jesus’ challenge in extraordinary new ways. When the whole world is cast into uncertainty and grief and nobody has the answers for how this will proceed, it leads to a very different relationship with leaving behind what we know so that we might follow Jesus’ way. That expression, “the way,” is how Jesus’ earliest disciples described themselves. They were not yet known as Christians, just followers of The Way. And the way of Jesus that we encounter in the Gospels is quite distinct from the ways of the world. It seems like every time that the disciples try to hold on to something, or control something, or to gain advantage for themselves, that Jesus challenges them and us with a different directive. Jesus was offering a way of being more than something to be attained.
I found myself thinking about this while I was away for a few weeks. I was reading an ancient Chinese epic novel (the abridged version) and remembering an experience that I had as a college student studying in Thailand. We were learning about Buddhism and spent a number of days in a Buddhist temple learning to meditate, to go around the town begging with the monks for their daily food, doing the simple work around the temple that was supposed to focus our minds and help us to let go of our attachments to desires – part of the heart of Buddhism. During this time, I had a conversation with one of the young monks who had been there for some time. He talked about how wonderful this new way was for him; how he was learning to let go of his attachments, to begin to extinguish the desires that led to attachment that led to loss that then led to suffering. In the midst of his description of learning to let go of his attachments, he began to talk about the power of meditation and how if you worked hard enough that you could attain all kinds of magical abilities. The more that he talked, the clearer it became that his great motivation for practicing religion was to gain cool new abilities. The novel that I was reading had Buddhists and Taoists constantly struggling with this same tension between the core of their faith and their very human desire to attain power or prestige, or to have fine extravagant religious articles around them. I started thinking about so much of our world and our journeys of faith.
While we were driving, we passed a couple of billboards that sounded like echoes of this conflict; there was one that said “Believe in Jesus Christ and you will gain eternal life”, another just had chapter and verse of scripture that pointed you toward believing so that you will be saved. I was reminded of how often faith can be transformed into something that sounds transactional – if I do this then I will receive that. In so many ways this is the very opposite of the way that Jesus taught and the life that he led. A transactional faith seems to reinforce the ways of the world that are always asking “what’s in it for me?” This contrasts with the ways of Jesus which keep pushing us beyond transactional thinking toward relational thinking. It is not about what do I get, it’s about how am I to be, how am I to live, how am I to care for the other and God equally.
As I sat in the campgrounds a series of words kept popping through my head: Boomboxes, Billboards, Beer, Facemasks, and Faith. There was one campsite where the neighbor had a really old boombox sitting on the end of their picnic table. They had the speakers pointed away from them and toward us as they decided that we all wanted to spend the day listening to their country music station. It was not the experience that I had settled in to enjoy. But they seemed quite oblivious to the fact that their desires might impact those of their neighbors. Those Billboards seemed to sell a curiously similar self-focused way of life with their curious expression of a piety that seemed to be selling something transactional rather than relational. I do not think that was their intent any more than the Monk of my youth was trying to suggest that his pursuit of Buddhism was about what he would gain, but that seemed like the way that faith was being marketed.
So, then the beer… Well, in another campground the neighbor had needed to walk through our site to get to the water spigot and in the process had asked about our plans. As we shared that we were hoping to do some hiking and exploring a few waterfalls, he eagerly offered some of his favorites. A few minutes later he appeared with a well dog-eared book that he offered to us for the day to look through to see if it would be helpful. There was nothing about his engagement that was imposing, just wanting to be helpful and neighborly. That morning, several of the people in the campsites around us politely offered a kind word, a thoughtful interaction. At the end of the day I told Laura that I would love to see if the tiny brewery in this tiny town had a decent IPA. As it turned out, they did not have any of their bottles left, so with some encouragement from my non-beer drinking wife I picked up a growler to take back to the campsite.. Now I had no idea how much beer comes in a growler… but I can tell you that my glass tasted pretty nice, but the part that tasted even better was asking all of the neighbors if they liked beer and sharing a glass full with a number of them before using the last of that jug on the fire. It was a simple reminder of the joy that God offers us when he points us away from the transactional and toward the relational. Our faith is not supposed to be about us and what we get from it. Instead, our faith is about a different way of being. We are called to leave behind the things that we cling to so that we can follow a new way of abundant love, a love that thinks about the neighbor alongside of God. That journey of letting go of our desires and our ways in favor of compassion has never been easy. All the religions of the world seem to focus on that transformative journey. Indeed, the prayer to believe in Jesus so that we might take hold of a life that really is life is fundamentally about getting out of our own way and focusing on the love with which Jesus would lead us. And yet every tradition also stumbles over our very human desire to be in control and to place ourselves at the center of the story.
One of the ironies of the way that we are created is that study after study shows that we receive more joy from doing something for someone else than we do by doing for ourselves. And yet most of us are bound to a culture that encourages living the opposite of that.
So, there was one more word that was running through that litany: facemasks. I don’t like wearing facemasks. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who likes wearing facemasks, or being told to wash their hands constantly, or social distance… but I do very much like doing anything that I can to try to help to keep my neighbor healthy and to do my part to help our world to get back to a little greater normalcy. And if that means leaving behind the normal that I have known in order to embrace a different way, then I am going to try to live that way rooted in the love to which Jesus calls us. Jesus calls to each of us to leave behind what we have known and follow him. What better time to ponder that invitation?
I pray that when we find ourselves grieving or frustrated, exhausted or focused on our own wants, that we might slow down and take a deep breath of kindness. Look around and see the wonder with which God continually surrounds us and then live The Way that is not our way or the world’s way, but the way of God's love for all. God bless us,