Embracing the Left and the Right and Everything Else

Indulge me for a moment. You (whoever you are) are walking down a street and you encounter a group of men and women who seem to be connected with each other – arguing, laughing, talking thoughtful, playing a bit. And somewhat towards the front is a man who for all appearances looks about like any local walking that street.

Except for his eyes when he looks at you. In the movies, when they portray Jesus, his eyes tend to have this ghostly, other-worldly appearance as if an alien creature had possessed that Jewish body. Which is not at all how I picture Jesus. What I think of when I encounter him walking that dusty street is someone who, with very human eyes, has the ability to peer right inside you in a way that is both full of love and acceptance and full of anticipation that you will rise above whatever you are not now rising above, if only as he enables you to do so.

I heard it again somewhere today: "Hate the sin and love the sinner" – and in that order. Not what I read of Jesus in the Gospels. Can't even proof text that one. What I see in Jesus' eyes is just "love you, son" (I happen to be male). And as I experience that amazing and unprecedented love, I so much want to shed all that is not right and become as much like him as I humanly can. And when I find I can't, I beg him to help, heal, forgive, transform me, whatever it takes. And he does, bit by careful bit, while all along he hugs me like there is no letting go.

Indulge me a little more. Watch Jesus walk past you now. See how he encounters others on that street – a bent-over elderly woman, a rough-looking Roman soldier, a lonely prostitute, a conniving businessman, a crying child. Does he change each time he meets someone new and different? Or do those piercing eyes convey the same message every time?

Having read through those gospels so many times I cannot even make a guess, I am confident his message is as consistent as the most predictable thing you can conceive of in our present human reality. Even more so.

Not everyone responds to Jesus the same way. Some avert their eyes. Some lock eyes for a moment and then forcibly look away or down, out of fear or shame or disdain. Some respond like a long lost puppy. But his gaze and its message doesn't change.

So why do my eyes change, dependent as they are on who they see? Why do I avoid eye contact with some, fear this one or write off that one? Why do I look for the ones I think deserve my attention or who will be most receptive or who are most like me? Or who will most like
me? Why do I preface loving the sinner with "hating the sin" as if it were a clarifying clause?

Because I want to make sure everyone understands that God hates sin? Of course God does. But is that what defines God? Nope. Otherwise we'd all be charcoal briquettes. So, is "hate the sin" even a close second clause to "love the sinner"? Nope, again (with apologies to Miss Miller, my ninth grade English teacher).

What I see in Jesus' eyes is simply "Follow me". That is not a command as in "you're in trouble now." That is an invitation as in "follow me and wait and see how you change and how you will transform others around you!"

So I am sitting at a table in China with a Communist official, a businessman, a teacher and a car driver. (Not a joke) And I'm thinking, how is Jesus looking at them?

So I am sitting at a table in the USA with a Democrat/government official, a Tea Party businessman, a teacher and a truck driver. (Again, not a joke) And I'm thinking, how is Jesus looking at them?

I think about my friend who pastored a church in Central America where pro-government loyalists and revolutionary Communists attended side by side. And I wonder if that is possible here in Portland? Can they do it if they avoid talk of politics? Or is politics included along with everything else in what Jesus wants them to discuss and grow together in?

I wonder about all that. Can a church survive with Communists and Tea Partiers sitting side by side in the worship service? Oh sure, as long as one of them goes to the altar – you pick which one J Or maybe they've already been (to the altar, that is) and in fact they remain a Communist and a Tea Partier even as they've met Jesus and are trying to follow him. Only they're each still working out their salvation with fear and trembling, and so haven't quite wound up seeing eye to eye on everything.

I think about all this and wonder and hope that next time I go to a worship service or encounter someone on the street, it is the eyes of Jesus which embrace me and not another. For I know another upon seeing me – despicable as I am – is inclined to shudder and chant, "I hate your sin, though of course I love you nonetheless." And somehow it would feel like anything but love gazing out at me from such eyes.

And I pray, May I have the eyes of Jesus next time I look at another.

Neighboring

The path was muddy and steep, buildings nowhere in sight, as I climbed toward what I assumed was a residence. I hesitated at the gate, eyeing barbed wire and warning signs, but only for a minute, resolute was I to fulfill my constitutional responsibility to enumerate the population. ("How noble of you," was one noncompliant nonresponder's sarcastic reply.) 

When I found the house, amid thick undergrowth and perched on the hill like a hawk seeking prey, it felt dark and empty. The door was to the back, meeting the path and the ground at the same place. Like homes in Asia, shoes neatly lined up to the side. My, how big they are, I thought, and images of "Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum" sprung to mind. 

I knocked tentatively on the door. As I waited, it dawned on me that the door was fairly new and substantial, a stock purchase from Home Depot. How on earth did they get this door up that path? A sneeze could blow the whole building down, all but this door and its frame. 

This house, remote as if in the Canadian Tundra, sits less than half a mile from a tired, squat apartment building crouching on the edge of one of Portland's busiest streets. Like the house in the woods, the apartments are fortressed, only with bars instead of briers. 

I wonder about community in all this, these people cut off from neighbors who have no idea who each other are. In a nearby apartment building, a tenant doesn't even know the last name of her roommate. I've discovered that age, gender, ethnicity, marital or economic status, even population density do not determine connectivity. And I wonder why two neighborhoods identical in all the externals can be either so neighborly or so reclusive. 

Community is an essential characteristic of what it means to be human. The defining sign of the fall of Adam and Eve was separation – from God, from each other, with divisiveness even creeping into the relationship between humanity and the rest of the created order. Moreover, the hallmark characteristic of the new community of faith, the people of God, as portrayed in the New Testament, is a community based on love. "This is how they will know you are my disciples," Jesus said, "that you have love one for another." (John 13:35)

We sat in a hotel lounge, this provincial government official and I, drinking tea and talking like the old friends we were. He, a member of the Communist Party, and I had worked on many projects together, but never had I been able to share my faith with him. He, mentioning some foreigners kicked out for doing "religious activity," was passing on a caution without saying as much.

I took a chance. "You know I am a Christian and so are the people in my team." 

"We know that," he replied. We talked in soft tones, feebly attempting a private conversation.

"How do you know that?" I ventured.

"By how you relate to and treat each other," he said. "And that is why we like working with you."

We'd been found out without saying a word to "them" about our faith. 

I love the story of the Good Samaritan, particularly how Jesus uses it to transform the noun "neighbor" into a verb. We do right when we neighbor other people, when we love them as we love ourselves, the way we want to be loved.

And I think about the next time I trek up that winding path. I won't say it, but I will demonstrate it by my effort. I come here to enumerate you today, not because the Founding Fathers ordained it, but because my God calls me to treat you as I wish to be treated. 

Maybe the way he wants to be loved is to be left alone. Not really. "To be left alone" really means I don't want to be bothered, troubled, be given new pain. 

I am bothered when someone treats me poorly, doesn't protect my sense of boundary, of personhood, of space. I am not bothered when someone truly loves me. Love has no barriers. At least that is what Jesus teaches me.

Now, taking someone's census isn't like taking their temperature when they are sick, but it is a sign of community, just as much as gathering the whole family for the annual picture. 

I don't think we are any more or less communal as a society than we were a generation or two or five ago. Every age has its problems with building true, biblical community. I just think that we have to learn at every turn how to build community anew and in ways that demonstrate God's love to each other.

The census will come and go. The need for neighboring each other, like serving the poor, remains with us.

Nine Minutes More

"It is true that there are certain things that libertarians believe that will seem just shocking and scandalous to most people unless we're given 10 minutes to explain ourselves." At least.

Tim Woods, a scholar at the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute, is being quoted in the latest issue of Time magazine ("Rand and Ron," 7 June 2010). In response, journalist Michael Crowley writes "that's about nine minutes more than anyone in modern politics gets."

Actually, Misters Woods and Crowley, it's more than anyone gets these days. Decades ago, preachers, politicians and professors could wax and wane for an hour or two and the sermon or speech was socially acceptable. That was before TV and radio even, certainly long before sound bites and 24/7 cycles and instant messaging.

I tend to be what is called a biblical theologian rather than a systematic theologian – it would take more than 10 minutes to explain the difference. I like my theology as well as my politics anchored in a Scriptural context several thousand years long and Church Universal wide, and I don't like said Word reconstructed to fit my (or anyone's) system du jour. So I tend to bristle at what my friend George Paul Wood calls taxonomy when it comes to sorting out political (or religious) classifications. I much prefer a thorough analysis of where a person stands than a sound bite that conveniently stuffs said person in a hole for safekeeping, because people rarely stuff so conveniently.

George does have a point – to a point. But labels are not the end-all of understanding. And on this I think he would agree with me because he is a thinking Labelist. (As I wrote another thinking Facebook friend, Jack Niewold, the other day, there are two kinds of people in this world, those who categorize people and those who don't.) Don't get me wrong. Labels can be useful – and certainly Jesus did use labels, as Jack reminded me in a Facebook thread that lasted at least 10 minutes. But labels no more define a person than skin does. Which is to say, labels do work – but only to a point.

When life is going at the speed of light as it tends to do in our own day and age, who has time to think, to process, to analyze, to look at all sides of any one issue? Maybe it is better to boil it all down to two simplistic poles and let them go at each other for five minutes on Fox or MSNBC – far more entertaining than listening to a Libertarian or a Communitarian, Calvinist or Arminian or Sacramentalist actually talk out his or her ideas ad nauseum.

But this is where we miss it. Talking something out is not just for supposedly thinking people. Talking something out is a part of relating, of hanging together, of coming to understand another as more than just the sum of a few short conclusions. And some of the best relaters are those who, while they cannot put two words together, do know how to hang together.

One of the headlines in today's news cycle is that Tipper and Al Gore are calling it quits after 40 years, hardly newsworthy in my book. Except that one sound biter is saying that is an accomplishment because people live longer these days and 40 years of commitment is a long time.

Well, it sure is. And I'm barely over halfway there with my bride of 23 years. But 40 years is not all that long to really, truly understand another. I won't comment on the Gores' predicament. I only say, generally speaking, that 40 years is only when you get to the end of the beginning stage of understanding another, be it your spouse or someone on the other side of your religious or political spectrum.

If I did wear labels more easily, I might call myself a Libertarian or a Communitarian or a Calvinist or an Arminian or a Sacramentalist or an anti-Sacramentalist. But I don't wear labels very easily and it mostly has to do with not wanting someone to stop listening after one minute. Even if they don't have ten minutes, I don't want to give them the satisfaction of thinking they can move on simply because they have found a useful label for me. They are free to move on. They are not free to think they so easily understand me.