Helping Your Neighbor is a good thing...

...it's just not exclusively a Christian thing. You might say that God created us (or, mechanistically, we're made that way) to help each other. You don't need to believe in God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit in order to help someone out. That much is pretty clear, I believe.

So, if you're a Christian, why do you help other people? Is it only because you're made like the rest of us? Or, does your faith in God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit make a difference in why you help people? You can see where I am going with this. If you're helping people, and your faith doesn't make a difference in that helping, why do you practice a faith? If you have a faith, but aren't helping people, how does your faith actually make you LESS human? That is, all humans seem to want to help, but your faith encourages you not to help? So, you're actually denying that portion of your createdness? That seems weird.

So, for this let us assume that we help people, or want to help people, and that we want our faith to make a difference in our "helping." Since everyone helps faith cannot serve as your reason TO help. In other words, it does nothing for your faith to say, "I help because I am a Christian." Clearly, if others without faith are helping, faith cannot be a motivator for helping.

You might say that "faith" in whatever or whomever is required to help. But if it is just faith or "believing in something a lot," then again, your specific Christian faith is irrelevant to your helping. You'd just need some kind of faith in that scenario, and it wouldn't have to be Christian. This, by the way, is the most popular understanding of faith these days. Faith might have a reason to exist, but whatever particularities your faith carries is a matter of taste and opinion.

So the way to ask the question this week after Easter is: does the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God, make any difference in whether you help people or not? Although most of us would wish to say to "Yes," to that question, it's almost impossible for us to know if it is or not. If people help without believing in those events, how can one who believes in those events say they impact their helping? As the great Schleiermacher pointed out long ago, you really can't.

If your Christian faith cannot determined why you help other, perhaps it can help guide HOW you help others? Probably not though because helping people is giving them what they need, and so how you help is often determined by the other. Of course, Christians have tried this road too, and this is why you see so many "meals for homeless" that include a Bible study or some kind of Christian teaching. A hungry person needs food, and no matter how you decorate that food delivery, you still gave them food, which was the point of helping.

So if your Christian faith has no bearing on WHY you help or HOW you help, perhaps it can influence Who, or When, or Where you help? These are questions your Christian faith can begin to make a difference in helping. Who you help? Well, that might depend on your faith. If like the prophets or Jesus you are going to help those God has a predilection for, the widow, the orphan, and the poor, you could say your faith a direct influence on your helping then. However, no matter who you help the person is a person in need, the kind of person you help is often the second question.So although answering the "who" question gets us closer to having our faith influence our helping, it doesn't get us all the way there. When and Where questions follow in the same way.

No matter where or when you help someone, they have a when and a where that determines your helping more so than your own Christian faith. So, we are left after all this with the rather unsettling understanding that our faith seems to have absolutely NO influence or bearing on our helping people. It seems like it should be a influence, but it really is not. So what is faith good for in terms of helping people, others?

For me, faith encourages me to persevere and to keep going until there is no more helping left to do. In other words, faith doesn't influence me to start helping, it allows me to keep helping. You may have heard Jesus of Nazareth once said, "the poor will always be with you." It seems like such a defeatist thing to say. But what he seems to be getting at is that there will always be a need and opportunity to help. But the question is whether you will have the energy to help all the time? Faith is the energy that influences your helping out when you no longer have the human desire or need to help.

From my experience this is why people tend to get  more "conservative" as they age. We no longer have the energy we once had to keep helping all the time, so we pick and choose our helping, and that's the definition of "conserve." But people of strong faith in a God for whom death and failure are not the worst things, they keep helping no matter how old they get. They way they help might change because of age, but they are still helping. In fact, in my experience, once people retire they can help even more, especially those convinced of the temporariness of suffering under the power of a gracious God.

So faith is not about why you help, or how or when or where or who, but rather faith encourages you to keep helping. To not succumb to the inhumane-ness (not being human) of not helping, but rather to keep helping even when the rest of your body, your mind, and your community tells you you don't have to do that anymore. The death and resurrection is nothing else if it is not a testament to God who wants to keep helping even though death wants to win. The resurrection is God sticking with us so we can continue to stick with others and help.

May your tables be full and your conversations be true.

Jesus was NOT an immigrant

I saw a lot of social media about Easter yesterday. Most were friends and their families celebrating a day of food and fun, and for those in the upper Midwest, snow-shoveling. Every now and then some posts brought up the reason for the day--the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. The He is risen, he is risen indeed part of the day.

But remember the upside down is right side up these days, and a few of the resistance noted the irony of a bunch of white, racist, Christian nationalists celebrating an "immigrant who was killed by the empire." The irony is not lost upon me, and yes Jesus was killed the empire and the religious authorities (which you would think would give Christian nationalists a pause, but they don't actually think about the things they claim to think about.) But Jesus was NOT an immigrant.

I hate to break this to my friends of the resistance to our current regime of stupidity, because I really do want us to resist the stupid of the world, but you do a great dis-service to Jesus and his mission in the world, at least as we have it in the Bible. I do not pretend that what we know of Jesus could be entirely make-believe, but we do have four stories about him, and in none of those four stories is he an immigrant. In fact, in one of them, he may not even be the country preacher, rural religious savant bringing about a revolution to the city folk that so many Christians, especially the politically motivated ones, want him to be.

Take this line from the story of Jesus according to some writer named "John." He tells the story this way:
Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. They asked him (John the Baptizer), "Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah nor Elijah, nor the prophet?" John answered them, "I baptize you with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal." This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing." (John 1.24-28)

Usually this text is interpreted to talk about how John sees himself not as the messiah, or even any very important prophet. Rather, he is just pointing that his baptizing is a precursor to someone really powerful, who becomes, by the end of John's story, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God. Here's the interesting line from John in this text: "Among you stands one whom you do not know" and in John's mind, at least, he will be the Messiah. The Gospel of John assures us of John's trustworthiness, so why might we assume John did NOT get this point right too? In other words, one of the people standing with these questioners is Jesus of Nazareth. And the people questioning John are a bunch of Pharisees or their scribes. Jesus of Nazareth is standing with a bunch of folks who come from Jerusalem, sent by Pharisees to question John.

And John says, one of you, whom you do not know, is going to be the messiah. If John got this piece of historical accuracy right, in all probability, Jesus, at one point in his life, was a Pharisee and connected to the religious authority and elite of Jerusalem. He was definitely not a country preacher who learned his Torah at night in a woodshop in Nazareth. But regardless of whether you believe Jesus started out as a Pharisee or some kind of religious elite, he was not an immigrant.

He was born in Judea. He died in Judea. It is true that one of the stories about Jesus has him as a refugee early in his life, but all four stories have him dying in Jerusalem, and those that tell about his birth have him born near there too. Here's some other interesting questions that the story of Jesus in the Gospel of John presents to me, and why I overwhelmingly believe Jesus was a Pharisee before he was baptized by John the Baptizer, at least in that story, although I tend to believe if Jesus was real than he was probably a Pharisee living in Jerusalem. (That just seems to be how God works. See Moses.)

1. Why does John put Jesus cleansing the temple at the beginning of Jesus' public ministry rather than near the end?
For me, the answer to that question is because Jesus is in the earliest stages of his rebellion against the religious system that is slavishly devoted to the wrong thing. That is, not God, but rather religion itself. You tend to only know if your religion is going off the tracks if you are a devotee of your religion and through your ardent zeal try to bring it back to its roots and to God. And if that's the case, there has to be a "straw that breaks the camel's back," and in John's story, the temple and its day-to-day operations is that straw. That's the kind of action from which there is no going back. When Jesus overthrows the moneychangers, his days of being a Pharisee are over. For good.

2. Who is Nicodemus?
Usually the answer is he is some kind of "closet" believer who has to sneak over to see Jesus by night so that no one can see him. Possibly. It certainly makes for good Hollywood drama that way. But what about this? What if Nicodemus visits Jesus by night because he's busy during the day? In other words, what if Nicodemus has a day job? Or, here's another one: what if Nicodemus and Jesus were friends back when Jesus was a Pharisee, and he just came over for a late-night drink and some conversation with his friend? Who is still his friend, even if they now have some religious disagreements? Jesus says to Nicodemus, "Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you don't understand these things?" (John 3.10) Have you never kidded or chastised one of your friends when they don't seem to understand you? Haven't you ever said to someone, "how do you not know this?" And chances are the person you said it to you know pretty well. That's what makes it so incredulous to you. They should know it, and you know them and know they should know it, but they don't.

(This is the last one, I could go on forever.)

My point is to remind us that we have to be careful when we let our political ideologies define the story of Jesus. As Albert Schweitzer pointed out, we're going to do it, but let's at least be aware of our assumptions. And that's the biggest problem right now: we're not talking about our assumptions. We're talking about the results of our assumptions, and a lot of people are being led astray by those results because they sound innocent enough. But those results harbor assumptions of fear, resentment, hatred, and jealousy. The very things Jesus of Nazareth, whether a Pharisee or not, found to go against a life in God.

May your tables be full and your conversations be true.