Why Call Yourself a Christian

A couple of weeks ago our small congregation held a potluck lunch. While thinking about what to bring, I decided to bring Helen Swanson’s rice pudding. It’s a food I cherish because it brings back memories of my life as a young rural Wisconsin pastor. I found the recipe that she had written for me in my recipe box and set about to make it.

Helen died over a decade ago, but seeing her handwriting and lying under the crocheted blanket she made me brings her presence back to me. What I remember most about her, though, is that she lived a generous Christianity. As she understood our faith, to be a Jesus follower meant to be someone who both rested in the love of God and embodied that love wherever she could. As I prepared her recipe, I felt her spirit, how she welcomed me, a newly ordained pastor, into her life and the life of her family, and what a quiet witness to the love of Jesus she was.

What is the essence, the core, of being a Christian? Who is that preacher Jesus, whose life so changed the course of the western world, and to whom so many confess loyalty? The New Testament gospels tell four different versions of the story of the historical Jesus, written to different audiences and in different decades following his first century death and resurrection. Each has at its core the religious message that the creator God loves the world and yearns to have all human persons know that love and forgiveness. Each tells of young rabbi Jesus seeking people out on the edges of Jewish culture for conversation, healing, teaching and friendship.

And the people Jesus most sought out were the vulnerable and cast aside of his time: the mentally and physically sick, women, children, the elderly, widowed and the chronically poor.

Jesus was also a prophet to his religion, speaking words of criticism and anger at those who labeled themselves of God and used it to cloak their own grasping for security, power and ambition. It was this same group of religious men who demanded the Roman occupiers to put Jesus to death as a threat to Jewish life and to the supreme power of Rome. In three short years his preaching, healing and growing band of followers became so threatening to the entrenched powers of the empire, he was crucified in order to be silenced.

So little has changed in the human condition: as the centuries pass, the principalities, powers, and empires simply put on different clothes. Today in America, a large portion of those who claim Jesus as their spiritual guide or savior use that label to cloak and mask all kinds of abuses of human power. Using scripture as a weapon, and under the guise of the Christian church, they promote a malignant individualism, a poisonous masculinity, unbridled greed, deep racism, love of warfare and military-style weapons, a biblical gender and sexual hierarchy that enforces their disdain for women and anyone who questions this worldview. They have aligned themselves with political power, winning elections and writing laws in every corner of the country. Does this sound like Christian discipleship to you?

I believe that to follow Jesus is to trust the love of God for my very life. To daily remember I belong to the living God, and to take that unearned grace and apply it to the challenge of living in the world with others. Jesus called this the Golden Rule: to love the neighbor as ourselves. One of the many conversations described in the gospels has Jesus responding with a parable to this very question: just who is my neighbor?

Your neighbor is not just the family that lives on the other side of your interior wall or property line. Not just your difficult brother-in-law or your classmate. Your neighbor, teaches Jesus, is also the one you have trouble seeing. The one you want to walk by, the one you can’t quite understand.

June is Pride month. A month that recognizes and celebrates the diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity across the human experience. It is a hard won, bitter battle for those who don’t feel they fully fit into the heterosexual or male/female either/or that we have baked into our culture. To finally be freer to be themselves, to live their life without fear of shame, fear of even death. LGBTQIA people are your neighbors. They are among those we are called by Jesus to see, to understand, to support, and to love.

Christians are always called to decide: to align with the principalities and powers that promise a return to old values, old beliefs, security and belonging; or to know what power is for and to live as best we can with compassion and curiosity. To live with concern for the natural world, for the life of all our neighbors, for well-being of the weak, the left out, and the vulnerable.

God in spirit calls us who profess the name of Christ to know what that can look like in our time and place. I know this is how Helen lived her faith. May it be the way you proclaim Jesus, too.

Written for and published in the Savage (MN) Pacer newspaper, June 25, 2022. 

 

This is What I Do it For

After three years of private practice, I’m beginning to anticipate its natural rhythms.

There are some months that I have a steady schedule, and the phone rings with some regularity with requests for information and appointments. These months tend to follow the school calendar and extend into early summer. And then there are weeks that the phone stops ringing, current clients miss appointments and don’t return my phone calls, and the calendar starts to have big holes in it. These weeks coincide with major religious and national holidays, and the last weeks before Labor Day.

I now understand why therapists have traditionally taken the whole month of August off. Remember Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss in the 1991 comedy, “What About Bob?” (The busy New York City doctor rents a home in New Hampshire for the whole month of August only to be followed there by his newest, most eager patient, Bob.)

So while I have some unwelcome time on my hands, I have been reading. And I have been seeing some of my long term clients. And this is what I have seen: healing. While I can’t give you details, I hope it is enough to tell you that just today, I saw a client who had a difficult mental disorder that was controlling her life a year and a half ago. She told me today that she is really feeling “her normal self,” the self she remembers before the disorder took over. I smiled through her session.

The same thing happened last week, as a couple client told me that they had “completely changed” the way they moved in their relationship. Wow. We talked about what they were doing differently, and what they had learned. I remembered what it was like for them when we began. And I smiled, and congratulated them on their hard work.

That kind of healing of emotions, mind, spirit and behavior is what I have experienced in therapy as a client, and what I strive for with each new client who comes to me for help. It doesn’t always work, for a wide number of reasons. But when it does, I have to tell you: it’s joyful for me. This is what I do it for.