"My Way or the Highway?"

On third Sundays we offer a more contemplative service. Instead of a sermon, there is a briefer reflection on one of of the lections and silence.  We usually conclude with options of several prayer stations that allow us to engage in active prayers. What follows is an excerpt from our contemplative service with my reflection on the Gospel reading included.

Texts:    I Peter 2: 2-5, 10;   Acts 2: 55-60;   John 14:4-11

*GOSPEL READING              John 14:4-11                               

Jesus said, “⁴And you know the way to the place where I am going.” ⁵Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” ⁶Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. ⁷If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” ⁸Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” ⁹Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? ¹⁰Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. ¹¹Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.”

REFLECTION                    “My Way or the High Way?”                                 

“It’s my way or the highway," said Jesus never.  But many readers of John’s Gospel hear something very like that in one of the Bible’s most divisive verses: “I am the way, the truth, the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.” And usually people emphasize the article “the” in quoting it. The community who composed the Gospel of John seventy years after Jesus was crucified wanted to convey something vitally important about the one they still devotedly followed. They were valuing and sharing his living-giving way and truth. But were they intending to say that followers of all other spiritual paths were damned?

Many Biblical scholars insist, with a range of arguments, this verse was not intended to signal that only those who believe in Jesus will know God. Marcus Borg passes along a story about a Hindu professor in a Christian seminary who insisted on the rightness of John 14: 6 with this explanation: “'This verse is absolutely true—Jesus is the only way.’ Then he continued, 'And that way—of dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being—is known in all the religions of the world.'  The ‘way’ of Jesus is a universal way, known even to millions who have never heard of Jesus.” (http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2000/08/Jesus-The-Way-The-Truth-The-Life.aspx).

Look back at the context for this verse that many use to prove they’ve cornered the market on God.  Jesus had been lecturing about his impending death.  And then he opened for Q and A.   Hoping the disciples were tracking his spiritualized language, John’s Jesus asserts: “And you know the way to the place where I am going, right?”  “Uh no,” Thomas admitted. “I mean, how can we know the way if we don’t know the place where you are going?”  Which was a logical question if John’s Gospel is referring to a literal destination for Jesus.  If the point of Jesus’s lecture had been to direct them to a particular literal place, then, yes, the disciples would need to enter that address in their 1^st century GPS to know the way.  But the book of John is high flying, spiritualized poetry.  John seems interested in a spiritual journey, not a literal destination.  Jesus says the destination isn’t the point. The point is the way.  Follow my way, he says. And Jesus’s way is the way of death.  Or actually it’s the way of death that leads to new life. Jesus is teaching this lesson as he anticipates his own death.

The saving work of Jesus’s life and death, according to John’s Gospel, is not about believing certain factoids about Jesus.  Jesus offers a saving way of living—which is to be on this path or way to God, a way of hard truth, a way of abundant life—after a death of the old life.  It’s the way of loving one another as Jesus loved us, even to the point of death. 

No sooner had Jesus corrected Thomas’s literalism than another disciple, Phillip, demanded to see “the Father.” Jesus said Phillip was also literalizing the spiritual lesson.  “It’s like this, Phillip: If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen God. This is as close as we’re going to get to seeing ‘God.’ Because the divine is in me and in you—when we love.  Being on this path of self-giving, loving relationships in a sense makes God visible.”

Thomas wants to make discipleship into a place.  

Phillip wants to make salvation into a person. 

Jesus—whom John sees as the embodiment of God--makes the life of faith all about the journey, the way.  A way of truth.  A way of Life, a life that defies death. 

Look back at George Herbert’s lyric we sang earlier: “Come, My Way.”  This poem, based on John 14:6, is a love song.  Herbert understands that John 14:6 has nothing to do with who is in with God and who’s out. 

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:

Such a way as gives us breath;

Such a truth as ends all strife;

Such a life as conquers death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:

Such a light as shows a feast:

Such a feast as mends in length;

Such a strength as makes a guest.

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:

Such a joy as none can move;

Such a love as none can part;

Such a heart as joys in love.

Open Table’s mission statement says we strive to follow in the way of Jesus.  We require no subscription to dogma, no test of faith.  We’ve been as general as Jesus in simply rallying people around a way.  That way is both simple and hard.

What does that mean to you?   Has your understanding of the way of Jesus evolved?  Why?  How?

SILENCE 

Where are you now in this life-of-death journey? What have you lost and what have you gained because of that loss?  Is there some “truth and life” for you in this Easter-y way of life-out-of-death?

SILENCE

What do you hope will be the next stage of your faith journey?  

SILENCE

PRAYER OF THE PEOPLE OF THE WAY  a paraphrase of The Lord’s Prayer        

Love’s Source and Sustainer, hallowed be your ways.

Your realm should come, your ways be done on earth as in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our sins

As we forgive those who sin against us.

Save us from the times of trial and deliver us from evil

For the power of love and mercy is yours now and forever.  Amen

PRAYER STATIONS

Prayer station 1:  FORGIVENESS CHALLENGE 

Review Acts 2: 55-60, which we read earlier in the service. Remember the dying forgiveness of Stephen--and Jesus. 

The stones on this table represent words or actions that have been thrown at you, harming you emotionally, spiritually, maybe even physically. Call to mind a fresh or an old hurt for which you may not have yet fully forgiven someone. Now choose a stone that represents that hurt.  The stone may seem small for the injury it represents. Simply hold this symbol. At this point you could choose to throw it back, figuratively, in retaliation. Or you could choose to hide it from sight and hope you can forget it.  Or you could acknowledge the hurt and forgive that person. Feel the stone’s smooth surface, its solid but light heft.  This is a real hurt you are remembering, but you can choose to deny this stone its continuing harm if you hold it with compassion for the one who threw it and compassion for yourself. Take this stone with you to the next prayer station.

Prayer station 2:  CONSTRUCTING THE WAY

Recall the metaphor from I Peter about our lives as living stones. You are invited to incorporate your stone into the pathway we are paving with the events of our lives.  To forgive means we don’t forget the past or deny harm but we use past injuries in healing ways.  To make this stone part of your journey, place the stone decisively but gently on the path.  Imagine yourself using this gesture toward forgiveness as a move forward spiritually.  Pray for ongoing compassion for yourself and for other flawed but beloved children of God.   

Prayer station 3:  OFFERING OUR GIFTS

I Peter 2 :5 urges us to “let [our]selves be built into a spiritual house, . . .  to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”  We offer our now our spiritual and material sacrifices because this discipline strengthens us and the spiritual house of God.  Pray for those your gifts will reach in love.

Prayer station 4:  RECEIVING GOD’S GIFTS

I Peter 2: 2-3  helps us imagine the Eucharistic cup as milk from a mothering God:  ^“Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation— if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

Julian of Norwich, a 14^th Century English mystic, wrote: “The mother can give her child suck from her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with Himself; and He does it most graciously and most tenderly with the Blessed Sacrament which is the precious food of true life . . . . The mother can lay the child tenderly on her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus can more intimately lead us into His blessed Breast.” Words from scripture and Christian mystics have described Jesus as a mother.  Does your experience of the presence of Jesus change when you image the Christ as feminine, as Mother?  How does your experience of Holy Communion change If you imagine the chalice brimming with Mother’s milk (rather than the Son’s blood)?  Taste and see that God is good.

SHARING CIRCLE

Reflections on Doubt and Belief

Text: John 20: 19-31

I offer three brief responses to the familiar story of “Doubting Thomas”:

I want to praise Thomas for doubting.

I want to probe the meaning of Thomas’s doubting.

I want to practice Thomas’s response to doubting.

First, I praise Thomas for doubting.  More than that, I praise him for being willing to express his doubts and not keep them to himself since, by expressing his doubts, he moved toward belief.  By telling his friends he had not experienced what they experienced and by insisting he needed to rely on his own experience, Thomas helps us value our unique sacred experiences.  Your experience of the Sacred is not mine and will not suffice for me.  And it does me no good to pretend I’ve felt what you've felt.  Often people don’t admit their doubts even to themselves, and that traps them into faked faith, which is no faith.  I want to praise Thomas for his authenticity.

Second, I want to probe the meaning of Thomas’s doubting. Since the opposite of doubt is belief, let’s recall Marcus Borg’s definition of belief as “setting one’s heart toward.” To believe in Jesus is to direct one’s life toward him.  Of course I affirm intellectual questioning that advances understandings. But belief is not so much about intellectually assenting to certain facts as it is heart-felt commitments to a way of living.

Lauren Winner explains, “On any given morning, I might not be able to list for you the facts I know about God.  But I can tell you what I wish to commit myself to, what I want for the foundation of my life, how I want to see.  When I stand with the faithful at [my church] and declare that 'we believe in one God’ . . . I am saying, ‘Let this be my scaffolding. Let this be the place I work, struggle, play, rest.   I commit myself to this.’”[i]

Perhaps Thomas’s doubt was a loss of vision, of heart, a feeling of discouragement and despair, a disappointment perhaps with Jesus or Jesus’s way.  I’m making a leap here, but I even wonder if Thomas had given up on Jesus’s way of peace.  After all, we can’t help noticing that Jesus gave three greetings of peace in this terse dialogue. “Peace be with you” could even be taken as a command to “be at peace.”  Put that repeated phrase together with Thomas’ absence from the group after Jesus’s violent death and then factor in the “honor culture” of the ancient Near East and I can imagine (yes, this is just in my imagination, not in the text) that Thomas had left the others to roam the back streets of Jerusalem,  to consort with the Zealots, and to consider possibilities for revenge and revolt.

However, one week earlier Jesus had breathed into the other disciples the Holy Spirit, and in that same breath Jesus commissioned them to forgive.  If they’d been aching for vengeance, the Spirit quelled that impulse.  Jesus had said to the others, ^“If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:23).  Some have used this verse to claim for themselves the authority to judge others.  But maybe Jesus is describing the simple reality that others cannot FEEL forgiven, cannot feel the effects of God’s forgiveness, if we do not live toward them as if they have really been forgiven.  The cycle of violence cannot end unless someone begins to forgive.  And we cannot let go of the burden of our mistakes until we sense forgiveness.  We must forgive people of the tiny slights and major offenses against us, real and imagined, so that others experience genuine forgiveness. Which is not “I forgive you and now I have a handy thing to hold over your head” forgiveness.  Not “I forgive you and now I feel superior.”  Not “I forgive. Sort of.” If the power of God’s forgiving spirit is going to be known in this world, it’s going to be known when human beings bestow real forgiveness on one another.  And if we do not--if we do not let one another off the hook--then we all suffer. 

This scripture suggests that the church’s Great Commission according to John’s Gospel is forgiveness.  As one writer has said, “The church is not in the morals enforcement business.  The world is in the morals business, and it has done a fine job of creating moral philosophy and moral codes and judicial systems.  But the church is in the forgiveness business.” Jesus breathed into us a spirit of forgiveness.  Which comes from the spirit of peace.  We refrain from getting even.  But we go one step further.  We reach out in kindness and forgiveness.  Maybe Thomas had been ready to give up on Jesus’ way.  But how can you see the wounds of Jesus, recall his ability to forgive from the cross, and not believe that forgiveness is possible and is, in fact, the only path to peace.

Finally, I want to practice Thomas’s response to doubts.  “My Lord and my God,” Thomas replies when he reconnects with Jesus.  Jesus let Thomas touch his woundedness and then Thomas could breathe in forgiveness, not retaliation. 

I want to move from my inevitable moments of doubt to reaffirm Jesus’s Way.  It can often seem impossible that vulnerable love will have the last word, that forgiveness is stronger than anger or bitterness or defensiveness or self-righteousness or fear.  Sometimes it seems I have the most trouble forgiving the people I love the most or the slights that are the least.  But when I look to Jesus . . . when I am able to do that, I find I can honor no other way but his.  “My Lord and my God,” I pray as I try, as I try by God's grace, to forgive. 

PRAYER FOR PEACE

In this quiet moment, breathe your peaceful Spirit on us, Force of Love.  Call to our minds the people and situations we need to forgive.  We may even need to let you off the hook, O God.  Let us give up our needs for control to find harmony without and within.  Let us be at peace with you and with all your creatures.   Let us also resolve to WORK for peace with courageous hearts that believe and do not doubt that peace will one day reign.

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[i] Winner, Lauren F.  Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. New York: HarperOne, 2012  (p. 169)