Who’s Right?

I need to begin by telling you that I have been diagnosed as clinically depressed. This is not a new assessment, as it is a condition I’ve dealt with for a number of years. Medication seems to help most of the time, but there are other times when the symptoms seem overwhelming. And this is why I’ve chosen to share my “secret” with you, because I really can’t tell if my dark feelings about what is going on in today’s world are affected by my illness, or if they’re legitimate.

I cannot explain how or why I was born a Caucasian male into a middle-class American home in the mid-twentieth century. I cannot explain how or why I live comfortably in a suburban condominium that three-quarters of the world’s population would regard as luxuriousness they cannot even imagine. I can explain my ongoing battle with the bulge by the fact that I like to eat and that food is never in short supply, but I cannot explain how or why such is not the lot of the majority of Earth’s inhabitants.

Nor can I explain how it is that when I find myself in this privileged and blessed state of being it is not that difficult to be envious of those that have even more than I, and to catch myself aspiring to keep up with their lifestyle. How is it that I own a Subaru and a Toyota but that there are influences that lead me to think that I can’t really be happy without a Lexus and a Mercedes? How is it that when I have so much, I find myself wanting more? And more disturbingly, what allows me to think that I am deserving of what I already have, much less to conceive of deserving more?

It is this aspect of our contemporary culture that I find particularly troubling. If I ever dare to stop to think about it, I realize that my relative degree of comfort is at the expense of many, many others. It’s not that I’m intentionally subjecting others to my oppression, but that doesn’t keep my attitude of believing that I deserve – that I’m entitled to – the better life from subordinating “them” to the inferior status which they somehow “deserve”. Predictably, I am of the opinion that theology is involved.

My faith is literally the rock upon which my life is built. Further, the most critical aspect of this faith is my understanding that, by virtue of the phenomenon that my tradition has labeled the Christ, I am not only capable, but actually worthy, of direct communication with my Creator, with the Higher Power, with God! Regardless of what it is called: prayer, meditation, etc., it is universally accepted by all but genuine atheists that such a thing is possible. The variations and distinctions between different traditions have primarily to do with who is entitled to participate in such a relationship under what conditions.

This is where it gets tricky, and where it also serves to generate a degree of doubt for someone like myself. The doubt is not about my relationship to and with God. This is experientially validated for me on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis. There is no question in my mind about who, and whose, I am, or about the ongoing “conversation” I enjoy with the Higher Power. The questions arise from how very different the messages I am “hearing” are as compared to the messages being heard by those who are very public in their conviction that they unequivocally know the mind of God on every matter.

Examples of what I am talking about are unfortunately plentiful on today’s American scene. In this election year we are bound to be increasingly subjected to the conservative/liberal debate, and not just on the political front. The unprecedented alliance in this country of the political and religious right is influencing socio-economic ideology in ways that we have heretofore never had to deal with in quite the same way. Is Christianity superior to Islam? Is heterosexual marriage the only kind sanctioned by God? Is publicly displaying the Ten Commandments unconstitutionally instituting a state religion? If President Bush was ordained by God to be President of the United States, does that make his decisions like the one to preemptively attack another nation infallible and inerrant?

The attempts by the Democratic candidates to prove that they, too, have “got religion” are, in my opinion, pathetically feeble. I know a little something of how stereotyping in this arena works. When someone finds out that I’m a pastor, there is an almost immediate rush to judgment regarding how I think and where I stand on the issues. Genuinely liberal (what I prefer to term as “progressive”) theological thought is so foreign to the popular mindset as to almost be unknown, and as a result even those who would identify themselves a politico-socio revolutionaries end up espousing a relatively tired theology.

As this series (yes, I think it is going to develop into a series) progresses, I am either going to be so brave or so stupid as to share how my faith is being informed by the relationship I have with God. I am going to wonder openly how it is possible for the Creator of us all to be communicating such disparate and contradictory messages to the faithful. For, you see, I am not ready to count myself out just yet in my understanding of such things as scripture, experience, tradition and reason. I am going to hold on to the notion that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are perhaps just as apt to be in error as am I, and that the “message” I am “hearing” from God is no less credible than theirs.

I humbly follow in the footsteps of one who some two millennia ago dared to do the same thing, although his ability to effectively turn the theological world upside down remains to this day unsurpassed. I continue to be inspired by this thought of the nineteenth century preacher, Phillips Brooks:
“In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical….His religion has so long been identified with conservatism…that it is almost startling sometimes to remember that all the conservatives of his own times were against him; that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him.” Amen.