Moving in Faith

Lately, a major attention-getter in the congregation whose website graciously houses this column is an impending move to a new campus just up the road. A lot of praying, dreaming, planning, and sacrificial giving have gone into making this happen, and around the soon to be old place there is an understandable combination of excitement, enthusiasm, and more than just a little relief. The almost finished buildings are spacious, beautiful, and inviting. And there may even be, for a while at least, enough parking spaces.

A while back, I wrote about what can happen to churches that get caught up in edifice complexes --- big building projects tend to suck up already scarce resources from outreach and mission --- and I expressed a concern that it could happen here, too. Well, it hasn’t. And that is the really big news about the move ahead. New buildings are good. But ministering to people is even better, and the indications are that First Methodist, Richardson has not lost its missional momentum in the process of its Moving in Faith. It may even have ratcheted the momentum up. 

Some people in this congregation with whom I have talked about the relocation have been reluctant to put too much divine significance into it, primarily out of a deep and abiding trust that, were this particular move somehow not to take place, God would not go off in a huff and leave us behind. I share with them that trust. Nevertheless, it is something to ponder just who will be taking up residence in these left behind facilities, and what they plan to do there: The Buddhist Compassionate Relief Tzu Chi Foundation. Aha: a Temple! Nope: a center for young people, for books, for a Chinese language school, and maybe even for a food bank and a medical center. Rumor has it that the Buddhists have had to take more time doing this deal than the Methodists wanted because they were too busy helping people in the aftermaths of the Asian tsunami, Katrina, Rita and a host of other disasters besides, overseas and close by. Reserve me a seat in the Welcome Wagon.

Two other lines of pondering have occupied my thoughts this past week. One is that the coming of this Foundation to this location (assuming that the transacting continues to go well) will make even more visible the Asian --- and especially the Chinese --- presence in an increasingly multi-cultural Richardson environment. Symbolically, I think it means a lot that yet another Asian religious constituency is crossing Central Expressway to the West. In the much broader context of East and West, all of America is also becoming more pluralistic religiously, and Richardson’s mirroring of this particular national trend is something worth celebrating.

My second line of pondering has been stimulated by the new possibilities the Foundation’s coming presents for dialogue about how best to help people who are suffering from any or all of the conditions that compound human misery in every community and society: poverty, ignorance, disease, despair, and death. Many things about the world’s religions fracture human relationships and keep people at enmity with one another. But compassion is not one of them. In fact, compassion is exactly the theme that holds the greatest hope for bringing and keeping humanity together in a global village, no matter how fiercely the demons of division, hatred, and violence rage outside. 

In some respects, Buddhism is as evangelically-oriented as Christianity is. And because it is, the fact that Buddhists were attracting new members centuries before Christians even got started could easily become a cause for alarm among church people for whom the only world worth living in is a world whose horizons are forcibly shrunk to Christian specifications. Their paranoia about other faiths’ encroachments exhibits the same kind of mental derangement that is threatening freedom and privacy in the name of making America safe from terrorists.

25 years ago, I experienced my first Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and learned in the process that my Buddhist theological colleagues are every bit as adept at the give and take of debate about spiritual matters as my Christian colleagues and I like to think that we are. The dialogues continue, and from them --- from the seriousness of the debates themselves, and from the mutual compassion shared by the debaters --- Buddhists and Christians continue to learn more about each other, and in the process discover the greater depths of their own personal religious heritages as well. Wouldn’t it be something if the half mile between a new Methodist complex and a new Buddhist Center becomes a Road of Compassion itself?

The Light of the World: A Meditation for Epiphany

When the Magi headed off to greet the true king of the Jews, the dark nights and uncertain roads ahead of them were offset by a star that eventually got them to Bethlehem safely. A minor wonder in the story is that they ever made it through Jerusalem on their way. Rashly, we might recall, they there named the star as “his” star in the very presence of King Herod, whose star it most definitely was not.

There is something supremely --- actually,divinely --- fitting about a star signaling the birth of a man who would become, in one rendering, the Light to the Gentiles, and in another, the Light of the World. Charles Wesley used a close to hand solar rather than a distant stellar image for the sign: “Hail the Sun of Righteousness!” But he still captured the one, really big point of both Matthew’s and John’s narratives: “Light and life to all he brings.”

It is not likely that we will ever stop situating those Wise Men from the East alongside the shepherds and angels from an altogether different narrative, amd staging all of them next to a pondering mother and an overwhelmed father somewhere out east of David’s city at census time. I wish we could, though. Feeding troughs are more down to earth without them, and “We Three Kings” makes for better music long after the Christmas wrappings and trees have been disposed of and our minds can turn again to the real meaning of all the preparation, gifts, and exhaustion. The Orthodox tradition understands this much better than Protestants tend to do.

By the time Jesus was born in Bethlehem, it was clear that the liberation of humankind was going to take more than the best efforts of any and every earthly society, Jewish or Gentile, to become “a light for peoples.” (Isaiah 49:6) No one merely human being, not even a David --- old or new --- , and not even a God-chosen community would be up to the job. Only God Godself could do it. And because this was so, earthly symbols that he would do it, like caves and swaddling clothes, had to be given over to heavenly ones as well: a star, a rising sun, an ascension into heaven, and eventually the descending of a Holy City, the New Jerusalem.

So, why not look to that one, and only one, eternally significant star, without which the darkness can so easily overtake and overcome us ? Why not look to Jesus, as the one, and only one, eternally significant savior with whom all the world’s peoples eventually will have to deal? Is it not, after all, he, and none other, who is the light and life for all humankind, outside of whom there is no salvation at all? Why would you want to be a Herod, or a Siddartha, or a Muhammed, when you can be a Caspar, or a Melchior, or a Balthassar?

Well, for one thing, newborn babies may be easy to gaze upon, but bright light is not, especially when the light is like that of a blazing star right in front of you. Try staring into the sun for a second --- please, only for a second --- and you will see, painfully, what I am getting at. Things go better when we use the sun’s light the way we should use it, to see everything but the sun better because of it. The Light of the World is like that. He shines in the darkness, so that all things in that darkness can be seen as God has seen them from the very beginning, as things once called good and things having to be made good all over again, repeatedly. That light, the darkness will never overcome.

The other reason for not staying at the manger too long is that a desperate world needs both for its sanity and survival all the shepherds and Magi that we can muster to tell it on every mountain everywhere what the light shining all around us is for. It is for helping everyone --- the good and the bad, the committed and the indifferent, the believer and the sceptic, yes, even the traditionalist and the progressive --- to see the one thing in an ever-changing, sometimes threatening, but always glorious universe that never changes, and never fails: love. Love that reaches out, embraces, gathers in, affirms, encourages, reassures. Love that creates people anew and whole, lost in wonder and praise, grace and mercy, hope and joy, through all the ages to come.