6/50: Christianity is a conversation
A song to hold the conversation.
“Religion in its best form is this thousands of years long conversation that’s been going on before we were born and will be going on after we die. And what brings you into the community is not the shared position as to what the particular religion means but the shared conversation about it — the arguments, the fighting, the back and forth.”
It started by being about whether I agreed or not.
Did I think homosexuality was biblical or not?
Were women allowed to be pastors or not?
Did Jesus die on the cross to save us from our sins or not?
Did the resurrection literally physically happen or not?
Was institutional religion valid or not?
Should I homeschool or not?
Is there a hell or not?
Is there a heaven or not?
Is the Bible without error or not?
Should you baptize babies or not?
So many questions with answers that marked you as in or out. Orthodox or heretic. Believer or non-believer.
Somewhere along the way I stopped caring about right answers and realized that faith is not a set of beliefs but a lifelong conversation.
A conversation that engages your soul.
A conversation that breaks and heals your heart.
A conversation that challenges your deepest held beliefs with a mystery that you can never fully write into a faith statement.
A conversation that holds you when you are three years old and only know the world as it comes to you through your caregivers.
A conversation that holds you when you are thirty and wonder if you will be able to forgive your parents for the ways they weren’t all that you needed.
A conversation that holds you when you are forty-nine and wonder who you are apart from the commitments, vows and identities that you have taken on.
A conversation that holds you when you are seventy-seven and wonder what you will take with you when you die.
Faith is a conversation that never ends because the conversation partner is a Mystery that can not be contained, codified, corrected, or controlled.
I tell you that as a pastor and lifelong follower of Jesus, this is the most orthodox, honest-to-God (literally), faithful way I know how to describe Christianity.
What breaks my heart over and over is that hardly any of us were given Christianity this way. So many of us are stuck reacting against a way of faith that wasn’t ever fit for true soulful human habitation.
We have been told that we have to choose to stay open to the world or closed in a system of belief. We agonize over unconditionally loving our gay cousin or rejecting him because someone told us that’s what the Bible says we have to do. Our stomach turns when we are told that our Jewish coworker who doesn’t confess the name of Jesus will suffer in hell for eternity. Our breath catches in our throat when a beloved uncle conflates nationalism with Christianity. It doesn’t sit right and for good reason — none of that has resonance with the Jesus of the gospels, the trajectory of the Scriptures and the God that Jesus revealed.