Category: DOC Thoughts
Questions for Christians
Who are you looking for? That’s my paraphrase of a question asked of Mary Magdalene when she went to the tomb where Jesus was buried after the sabbath. BTW, the gospels give different details of the resurrection story, but they agree that Mary Magdalene was one of the women present. They also all agree that the disciples, the men, were held up somewhere hidden away. No doubt they were afraid, grieving, and wondering what would happen next. The women must have shared those emotions.
Who are you looking for? That’s a faith question about Jesus of Nazareth that people who claim Christianity answer at Christmas, at Easter, and during every day. That answer, it seems to me, is not grounded in creeds, confessions of faith, the definition of scared music, or mode of baptism. It is grounded, I think, in how one treats a stranger, family, friends, and enemies.
Some of us seek a savior that will balance our account with God. A balanced account might help us live a balanced life. Some of us seek a teacher who can help us connect with God; to love God and our neighbor as ourselves. Some of us don’t know who we are looking for, but follow the community or crowd because it is popular or comfortable. No matter what she believed, Mary Magdalene went out to do right by Jesus. Did someone ask her to go or tell her to go? The text doesn’t say. It does say that Magdalene returned to tell the disciples about who she had met and what she had seen. That sounds like what Christian tradition calls preaching.
When you look back at your life from the time you became conscious of others, and of right and wrong, what is the arc of your life bending toward? My guess is the answer to that question informs who you expect to find when you go with Mary Magdalene to the tomb. “Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” (Unknown author often attributed to St Francis.)
God bless your journey in faith.
Segregated by . . .
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr is said to have observed that the most segregated hour of a Christian America is Sunday morning. He was working to shame white clergy and community leaders by appealing to their identity as practicing Christians and with a morality that has welcomed the stranger in their midst. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail, is the best example of King’s prophetic witness to a Christianity too comfortable with its segregation. But, that is part of the Christian narrative. A majority of Christians agree on the object of faith, some version a confession of faith, “Jesus is the Christ. The son of the living God and I accept him as my personal savior.” Oddly, Jesus always pointed to God rather than himself as the object of faith. But, Christians disagree on what Jesus’ example means for what I call “how to be gospel” for each generation, for the outcast, in war zones, for the refugee, through governing, and for the “blessed” in every culture. It is hear where Christians struggle with one another and with “culture” to be gospel.
Back on October 19, Martin Marty’s, Sightings, observed in the opening paragraph:
Cynics, but not only cynics, like to observe, not always inaccurately, that Christians are never happy unless they are fighting—each other. Certainly, their scriptures have notes of militancy. Most of these signal fighting—evils at a distance or evils within the self.
There are good people on each side of the argument, it’s probably ok to characterize it as a “fight,” within Christianity about what a faithful response is: for immigrants that entered the country legally and illegally; the change in the law that allow same-sex couples to marry; acceptable levels of destruction to the environment and workers in the advance of capitalism, energy, and consumerism. These seem the popular topics of the day.
Christians Fighting Christians
Martin Marty | October 19, 2015It is not the business of bystanders in Sightings to say how these conflicts will finally be resolved or to predict whether they can be moderated “globally.” It is on our agenda to observe “religion-in-public-life,” a safe place from which to observe that there seems to be “no place to hide” from this century’s conflict-of-choice in the global church.