God is not a Christian
My early years of Christian formation were dominated by a triumphant Jesus, a messiah who saved only those believers who had it right – everyone else was destined for eternal torment and punishment.
In an ironic twist, it was my four years of philosophical and biblical training at a private Christian college where my thinking on what it meant to be a follower of Jesus radically shifted. If I could sum the existential crisis up, it would be the basic recognition that God is not a Christian.
God isn’t Jewish, or Muslim either.
And yet, I am struck by how often we retreat into the binary, into the “safety” of the either/or – when we try to pour new wine into old wineskins.
This retreat into what is familiar is not unusual during times of trauma, grief, or stress. Anger, fear, and sadness impede our ability to empathize, to reason, and to engage difference. To some degree, this makes sense. Being in a legitimately unsafe situation requires us to move to safety first.
And, we cannot remain paralyzed by fear. We cannot expect to transcend the seemingly intractable concerns of our time by walking the paths the got us there in the first place.
In his most recent Christmas Eve sermon, Pope Francis noted the “futile logic of war,” a logic expressed “by the clash of arms that today prevents Jesus from finding room in the world.”
The logic is distressingly appealing. We do not have to look very far back in our own history as a nation to see the stunning failures of our attempt to solve our intractable concerns with violence. Of our impulse to exact retribution on our enemies through the logic of war, a logic that has left countless wounded, dead, and dehumanized.
Harder for us to see are the ways that power shields our moral thinking from the challenge presented to us by those without power, by those without the means to speak their truth. Justification for the imposition of our will upon the world does not proceed from the manger.
A truth I am still growing into is the challenge of praying for all, of embracing the theological notion that all belong to and are loved by God. On Sunday mornings, when we pray for Ukraine, we pray for Russia. When we pray for the victims of gun violence, we pray for the perpetrator. When we pray for the victims of the October 7th attack in Israel, we pray for all victims in Gaza.
We are a world torn asunder by grief, divided into our camps, uncertain of what it looks like to move forward together. We are also a world with the tremendous capacity to love, forgive, and create.
I doubt very much that the parents of children who have died in Gaza grieve any less than the parents of children who have died in Israel. And because I cannot understand the profoundness of these losses, I choose to live into love, empathy, and compassion.
One thing is for certain. We will not resolve the conflict of today with the logic of yesterday, with moral justifications anchored in a power and privilege that shield us from transcending our simple binaries.
And we cannot move forward until every human being, child of God that they are, are safe from the futility of war, violence, and hatred.
Amen.
