The other day I was mopping the floor at the sandwich shop where I work part-time and saw two men with their heads bowed over their food, thanking God for their meal. I started to mop a little closer to them and when they finally noticed me I looked over and asked if they were believers. The man to the left of me, as he finished a bite of his food, nodded his head and said “Yes sir, I am.” But the other smiled at me and gave me an intense look, then he asked, “Believers in what?” His question knocked me off guard. I stuttered and found myself not even able to answer it. In the end the only thing I could come up with was, “Jesus.” He smiled at me and said “Amen. Now that’s a good answer.” So I began talking to him and to the other man and found out that one of them worked for a mentoring organization to college-aged Christians and the other was a Methodist pastor. It was the pastor who had asked me the question.
Believers
in what? As someone who works for
the Episcopal Church and has had an ongoing love affair with the liturgical
traditions, I could have easily recited the Nicene Creed and outlined what
exactly it was I believed, but I didn’t.
In the heat of the moment of being asked what not only I believed as a
Christian but what other members of the community believe all I could say was
“Jesus.” It sounded like a third-grader
answering a question in Sunday school.
Jesus was always the answer, but when you’re an eight year old you
always want to make sure before you say it so you don’t get it wrong. But I wasn’t in third-grade Sunday school
anymore and I could have given a much more articulate answer. After all, growing up I had been a preacher
on youth Sundays, I was the high-school choir chaplain, a leader in Inter
Varsity in college, received my Bachelor’s degree in religious studies, and
even spent a semester at seminary, but in end the only answer I could give was
Jesus.
It sounds like such a
spiritual-but-not-religious answer; I believe in a being and in a relationship
with Him. But it’s true, at its core
Christianity is all about relationship.
It’s about our relationship to God, God’s relationship to the Church,
God’s relationship to the world, our relationship to one another, and our
personal relationships with Christ.
Christianity is a relational faith.
Unfortunately I think some of American Christianity has turned it into a
relationship just between “me and Jesus” and we often don’t acknowledge our
communal relationship with our Savior, but regardless of whether we acknowledge
it or not we do have both a personal and corporate relationship with God.
I don’t want to in any way deflect from the
importance and neccesity of the creeds in describing what Christians believe
in. The Nicene and Apostles Creed were written and are recited for a purpose; to
declare that we believe as a community that Jesus was a real person who lived
in a real time and died physically and spiritually for a real purpose. But it was because God loved us and sought a
deeper relationship with us that he took human form, walked among us, taught
us, died, and resurrected for us so that we can have the possibility of eternal
life. It is because of God’s relationship
with us and our relationship with him that we are saved, and ultimately that
relationship would mean nothing without Jesus.
In her book Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New
Spiritual Age, author and theologian Diana Butler Bass wrestles with this
growing trend of describing Christianity in less “religious” terms and in more spiritual-relational
ones. She recalls a moment in high
school when she was asked about why she had kept a bible in her locker. “I’m not religious,” she recalls saying. “I’ve got a relationship with God. I don’t really like religion. Religion keeps us away from Jesus. It’s more of a spiritual thing.”[i] She nailed perfectly on the head a trend that
I’ve seen years later, especially since moving to the south and encountering
Evangelicalism on a large scale for the first time. My friend the other day looked at me and said
“Honestly, I don’t even like calling myself ‘Christian.’ I just tell folks I have a relationship with
Jesus.” It certainly wasn’t the first
time I had heard a statement like that.
But I wondered, had I given the pastor the answer I did for similar
reasons? Was a relationship more
“spiritual” than “religious?” Were the
religious words less adequate in describing what exactly it means to be a
Christian? What is religion anyway? And does Christianity need it?
My answer believe it or not is
actually yes; religion is fundamental to the Christian faith. Without it our community would be dead. What I think we need to do as believers,
however, is re-envision what religion means and reclaim it in a way that gives
life to our communities and to ourselves as followers of Christ.
So
what is religion anyway? Our good friend Merriam-Webster defines religion
as “the service and worship of God or the supernatural” and also as “a personal
set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices.”
I think more simply we can just say that
religion is a common set of beliefs and practices of a community and its
individuals that relate to God or the supernatural and its’ worship. If Christianity at its’ core is a
relationship, than its’ religion is the process of how Christians carry out
that relationship. To put it in another
way, it’s sort of like dating. At the
core of dating is a relationship, but the dating itself is a process. When I met my high school girlfriend I asked
her out on a date to get ice cream and watch a movie. It went well, so afterwards I asked her on
another date to go mini-golfing. After
that went well I took her out another time to dinner, then for a walk in the
park, biking, rollerblading, then more movies, more dinners etc. Dating was how we maintained our
relationship; we did stuff together. And
I wasn’t the only one doing these things, so were my other friends who were in
relationships. In fact we did some of
those things together as a group.
It may sound crazy that I’m
comparing religion to dating, but I didn’t come up with the idea, it goes back
all the way to St. Francis and Clare of Assisi.[ii] Our religious practices are how we maintain
our relationship with God. Quakers,
historically, for example have the common practice of “centering” down in
silent worship in order to commune with the Holy Spirit or the Living
Christ. At one time you could go to any
Quaker gathering and find a large part of the service, if not all, in silent
worship. Catholics, Anglicans, and
Lutherans for example build their entire worship service around the
Eucharist. Taking communion lies at the
center of the worship and around it lies common liturgical scripture readings, prayers,
creeds, hymns, etc. You can go to any
Catholic mass in the world and they will be using the same liturgy as all the other
Catholic services. The word “Catholic”
itself means universal, which means it has universal religious practices.
But Mass doesn’t work for some
people and neither does silent worship.
Many Evangelical churches focus their common practice around a
particular way of approaching scripture, or using a particular version of the
bible, or singing common praise songs in worship. Often now in bigger Evangelical churches you
see stages and lights and the pastor will often sit on a stool with a clip-on
microphone as they give the sermon.
There are praise bands and worship teams as well, sometimes intercessory
prayer teams and other groups of “prayer warriors.” Many pastors will give a
sermon in a similar style as the others, whether it be casual, direct, intense,
or all of the above. But that doesn’t work
for some people either. There are many
folks out there, especially many young adults, who most if not all of these
religious practices whether they be Quaker, Catholic, Anglican, or Evangelical
hinder their relationship with Christ.
And you know what, I think that’s ok.
Religious practices are not met to be to stagnant. God is infinite, eternal, unchangeable, but
we humans are constantly changing so our ways in which we relate to God change
to.
The problem is when our religious
practices become more important to us than our relationship with God, or when
we continue the same practices without getting anything out of them. The early Quakers called these “dead forms”
which is why, among other things, they stopped taking communion and baptizing. They felt that the practices no longer held
spiritual significance because they were being performed without much thought
and had become very much a secular thing as opposed to a spiritual one. And at the time that was very true in the
Church of England, but since and before those practices did in fact have
significant meaning and I for one certainly encounter Christ in the Eucharist
and in baptism, hence why I don’t consider myself a Quaker as I once did. Religious
practices can be revived, reborn, re-evaluated, and reused as long as its’ done
in a way which gives life to our relationship with God. If we’re following practices that aren’t giving
life to that relationship than we should really question why it is we’re doing
them. I think the Church may be at a point now where its’ doing that on a much
larger scale than normal, hence the whole ‘emergent” and “emerging” church movements,
who certainly don’t have it all right either.
There are some practices, however,
that I don’t think are up for debate. As
Christians we must come together regularly to worship God and to pray. We must break bread together, share our
resources, love one another, care for the poor and the sick, give all things in
prayer and supplication to God, and proclaim the Gospel until our dying
breathe. But how we do these things and
how we formalize them as communities can be altered, as long as their purpose
is not forgotten. But it’s also, hate to break to ya’ll, not just about
us. It’s about having practices that
give honor and glory to God and reflect the teachings of Christ. We must be obedient to Christ’s commands in
the Scriptures and ensure that our religious practices are in line with His teachings;
otherwise, we’ve just plain messed up.
So why didn’t I use one of the
common religious practices of Christianity to explain what it is Christians
believe in? Honestly, because those
creeds would mean nothing without Jesus and neither would our faith. Christianity is dependent on Jesus and having
a relationship with Him. The creeds
outline more specifically why Jesus is so essential and sets a precedent for
Orthodoxy which is sorely needed in both the time they were written and today. (I once had to argue in a seminary class for
the divinity of Jesus and why it was essential to the Christian faith…this is
why have the creeds, to not let us get too far off the map.) But again we would have no orthodoxy without
Jesus. If we didn’t believe in Jesus and
have a relationship with Him than there would be no Christianity. But neither would there be Christianity
without ways of carrying out our relationship with Him. These are our religious practices.
Religion is and will always be an essential
aspect of Christianity. It’s the process
of how we relate to God and how we foster our relationship with Him, His Son,
and with one other. Without religion, we
could not have a relationship with Christ.
But religion is not stagnant and our religious practices can, will, and
must be re-evaluated, re-examined, and revived in ways which give life to our
relationship with God and to our faith communities. We should not idolize religious practices
but rather use them as tools which get us closer to Christ.
Diana Butler-Bass in her book re-states a
question asked by the great theologian, author, and martyr Dietrich Bonheoffer,
“What is a religionless Christianity?”
My answer, is a dead one.
