Easy Answers

The members of the Sunday School class I teach and other friends that know me, know that when it comes to my faith, I do not accept easy answers for tough questions.  I am a skeptic by nature and faith does not come easy to me.  I have lived enough life to have suffered a little and struggled a lot.  The seemingly trite explanations of suffering or the traditional answers to biblical questions are not always easy for me to accept.  When I sit down with my Sunday School Class on Sunday mornings, I want us to wrestle with meaning of difficult passages.  I don’t want to skip over the unpleasant or difficult passages of the Bible.  When it comes to the familiar passages, I want us to slow down and not just accept traditional understandings.  In short, I take the bible and faith seriously, but it is not “easy”.

On a recent Sunday Morning, one of my longtime class members asked, “Just out of curiosity, is there any “easy answer” that you accept?  The class laughed and I blushed a bit.  I did not think of an answer right off, but the question stayed with me all week.  I reflected on the basic tenants of our faith.  I thought about various “truths” I have been taught through the years.  Ultimately, I came to the answer that I usually come to when thinking such thoughts – God is Love (I John 4:8).

I was eating lunch with a new friend this week and we were sharing the respective stories of our lives and how we came to be the people we are and do the work that we do.  I was struck, as I often am in hearing other’s stories, that though my friend’s story was nothing like mine on the surface, what we shared was an overwhelming experience of God’s love.  In my own story, I talk about a time in my life when I felt unloved and unloveable and a friend reached out to me and offered me love.  This act was followed by other friends demonstrating love to me – not wholesale approval of where my life was, but love and acceptance in the place that I was.  I have also experienced incredible love from my wife, Lynda.  This love demonstrated to me by friends has become an internalized experience of what I had previously professed as God’s love, but did not truly understand.  This love has become a living reality for me and the experience has been so profound, I want only to help others have such an experience. 

In a training I recently attended, I heard Richard Rohr say, “I am better at talking about love than doing it.” That sentiment immediately resonated with me.  Having had an experience of transforming love and having done study on the power of love, I am woefully aware of the times that I fail to provide it to others.  At times when I am tired, insecure, frustrated, hurt, anxious, fearful, among other feelings, I can let those other emotions cover and smother the desire to be loving.  Each day I pray that God would make me more loving; that I would live out in my life the love that I have experienced from God through others. 

All of that to say, while I may have questions about some of the fundamentals of my own faith tradition, I cannot just walk away from my faith because there is an experience of love that I have had that literally changed my life.  When I read the bible now, I see that love in the pages.  I desire to love others because I have experienced the love of God.  I desire to be an embodiment of that love for others.  There may be one or two others, but I know that the one “easy answer” that I accept is that God is love and God loves me (and you).  The journey to understanding that and learning to live that out in every circumstance of life is not all that easy, but I can imagine no other truth that is greater for me.  

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Matthew 22:37-39)

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

I know it is a cliché question that really seems laughable, but I really don’t understand the level of divisiveness that seems to have permeated our society, our politics, and our churches.   I understand that people feel strongly about what they believe and they don’t want to compromise their beliefs.  The problem I see is that people think that if they try to understand another’s ideas or beliefs that they will somehow lose something of themselves.  The reality that I have experienced is that when I more fully understand another’s beliefs or ideas I gain something for myself.  I either come away with a better understanding of why I believe what I do or I come away with something that alters or enhances my beliefs.  I do not come away feeling like I have lost anything.  I have also found that when I enter into conversations with others with whom I differ, but who are willing to be open, I gain relationship.  When we close ourselves off to interactions with others, we only gain loneliness.  When we insist that others must be like us or be against us, we walk a path to division and shallow connection. 

I am so weary of people who interrogate others and question their integrity simply because they hold different ideas.  If a person is so sure of what they believe, why should they fear what others have to say?  I am also saddened by those that when they encounter another’s idea, their first response is to look for how the other is wrong or different rather than looking for places of commonality.  Jesus gave his followers the COMMANDMENT to Love one another just as he has loved us (John 15:12).  He also instructed us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44).  If we are looking for ways to ostracize others and if we are referring to the world in terms of “Us” and “Them”, then we are not seeking to build community and love.  If we remove the “Us” and “Them” thinking, then we are only left with “Us”.  If I approach another with the attitude of, “I am not sure what to do with my thoughts and feelings, but I am committed to figure out how to live well with you and love you” that seems very different than, “You are not like me, therefore you must be bad and wrong.  I can’t associate with you and must do what I can to discredit you.”  

 Too often the public interactions of our leaders seem more motivated by the preservation of power, than finding a common good.  There is more talking than listening going on.  In order to build community, we need to learn to listen.  We have to realize that true power is accomplishing something great together, not in defeating the one another.  As long as people are afraid of losing their power or are afraid of losing…period, then they will act as if all interactions are competitions.  I know some of my worst moments have been motivated by anxiety.  However, the Bible is clear that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love (2 Timothy 1:7).  In fact we also read that perfect love casts out fear (I John 4:17-19).  Jesus’ most harsh words were for those that used their power to take advantage of others and those who thought themselves better than others.  Likewise, Jesus’ most compassionate words were for those who were vulnerable and repentant.  I continue to pray that the love of God would overcome the hatred and fear that divides us.  May the people of God demonstrate God’s love to one another and to the world.