Faith Venture

I saw news recently again about leaders in American Christianity wishing to flex their power muscles trying to coerce people into agreeing with their policy or opinion.

This, of course, is not something relegated only to American Christians. The intertwined histories of the Church and kings for a thousand years of European history contain great stories of power and the lust for it.

And not only America and Europe and not only Christianity.

But, back to Christianity—a religion purporting to follow the teachings of Jesus. And just what were his teachings on this very subject?

On the night before he stood before the power of Rome and essentially told it that it could destroy his body but not the Spirit and not the movement, Jesus had a bunch of his top lieutenants at dinner.

Jesus taught them, then he took off his “dress clothes” and proceeded to wash their feet. He performed the task of a servant. He told them that this is the role of a leader.

Jesus gave his followers an example of leadership—it is all about the Will to Serve not the Will to Power.

Slavery dominated US politics in the 19th century. In a subtle way, it also was present at the drafting of the US Constitution. After the armed forces defending slavery were defeated, slaves in Texas were informed by US troops that they had been freed. That was on a June 19. So, we have Juneteenth.

We have a holiday to remember the contributions and life of Martin Luther King, Jr. This seems to be a fitting additional day of remembrance.

Although our holiday to remember people who fought in our wars seems more like a day to have a cookout and officially start summer activities than a day of remembrance. Sometimes the meanings of holidays become lost.

The problem is—we are still fighting for equality and justice. Politics in the US is still dominated by vestiges of that long ago fight. We just can’t get along.

The early church faced those problems. It took the Apostle Paul going to the headquarters and facing down Peter and James to get equal standing for different races within the church.

If you read what Paul actually wrote rather than what some white man told you he wrote, you’ll see that his ekklesia (communities) were expected to mix genders, races, economic status, slave or free. It took overcoming some prejudices even in those times.

We still have a way to go. But we’re improving.

We live in a “I need to be noticed” culture. And not only in the United States. It seems to be something that spread globally faster than the need for tattoos.

We have several Congresspeople whose politics center solely on getting noticed. “Hey, look at me” they shout. Until the past few years, new people in Congress kept their heads down and learned the ropes.

Some of these even proclaim themselves to be followers of Jesus. Or, at least Christians.

But Jesus warned us about such behavior.

When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everyone can see them. I tell you the truth, that is all the reward they will ever get.

Matthew 6:5

Getting a social media “like” is a dopamine hit. One makes us crave more. This trick is used by social media companies to keep you on their site or application. Even LinkedIn, the business social site, uses many of the same tricks as Facebook to keep you there and show you more ads.

And we get sucked in. “Hey! Notice me…”

Once again, it’s about attitude and intent. Let us be aware of ours.

I changed my schedule around this morning to go out for aerobic exercise at 5:30, breakfast at 6:30, so that I could attend a press conference and presentation on a new technology. I suppose in a different year I might be in Frankfurt, Germany attending a conference called ACHEMA (chemical industry). But, I’m watching from my patio just like all conferences since March 2020.

Did you know that there was no Christian Bible for the first 300 years of the movement? Bishops and teachers used documents that circulated through underground channels as source material for teaching. The actual fact is that there was a single channel of communication—to God through Jesus.

The Bible was assembled from a variety of documents in the 4th Century (mid-300s) when the church became an official religion of the Roman Empire.

As the Church grew more powerful and then as the Bible grew in importance (especially with the Protestant Reformation), it seems there were multiple channels of communication to God. For some, the Bible became more important than even Jesus himself.

I was jarred into these thoughts by the press conference I just attended. Twenty years ago, engineers were looking for better ways to communicate from the control system to the instruments in the field in large process plants—refineries, petrochemical plants, chemical plants.

Some hoped for a single, standard “fieldbus” for the communication. But every company wanted its own “standard” technology. So, we have been living with many “standard” fieldbus technologies much to the chagrin of the original engineers.

The topic of today’s press conferences was a new technology that allows all those other fieldbuses to come together into one new technology. If you’re curious, it is called Ethernet Advanced Physical Layer.

My connection—there seems to be a movement in its early stages to bring Christianity back to a focus on a single channel of communication—Jesus. We have so many channels now, and even with a single Christian Bible we have myriad interpretations of what it says.

May we bring all of our channels of reaching God together into a new (but actually old) channel—Jesus, the Messiah, himself! For 300 years, Christians experienced Jesus in their midst as they gathered for prayer and teaching and worship. How often does that really happen today where you are? Can you make it happen?

This has been an unusual 16-17 months for most of the population of the world. One thing is that we have witnessed science being done in real time. And it’s a messy process. While people were looking for certainty, scientists had to follow the scientific method.

• Observe
• Think
• Test
• Revise

Everyone was caught by surprise. Observations started pouring in, but no one knew exactly what was going on with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Scientists would think about what they observed. They compared the observations with known viruses. Then they had to test the ideas. New facts inevitably came in causing revision to the ideas. And then iterate.

I hope we all learned that everything we read and heard about the situation from news outlets as disparate as The New York Times or Washington Post, or Fox or CNBC, or Facebook or Twitter was all wrong.

I don’t think I’ve met or read a journalist who really understands science. Especially when writing or speaking to an audience where the main objective it to get a story published that will attract readers. They think the more spectacular the story line, the more readers will come. Of course, more readers means happier advertisers. And so goes the wheel.

But this process helps us with our spiritual lives if we are self-aware and observant. We observe (or listen when a wise person close to us mentions an observation) and compare to where our spiritual life ought to be. We can consider what went wrong and make corrections. Then we live it out. Then we observe ourselves and our effect upon others. Are we becoming the kind of person we desire to be? Perhaps we need further course corrections.

It’s the way of growth. It’s the way of life.

We do things. Some things we repeat daily or several times daily. We must beware unless these little daily practices take us where we don’t wish to go.

I had my first face-to-face interview this week in 16 months. That is over a year of developing certain practices. This one is training my eyes to look at the camera on my device rather than the image of the other person on the screen. If I look at the person, it appears on the other side that I am not looking at them.

After 16 months of that practice, I discovered I was looking beside the person I was with trying to find the camera. Then I remembered the old skill of actually looking at the person.

It’s amazing how we can train ourselves not to see.

We do the same with our spiritual development. How easily we train our eyes to look away from the goal at something we think is the right way.

How important it is to be aware of our practices and not become distracted.

You make a big pot of soup and take a container to a neighbor. It seems that before you even return home, the container is waiting on your doorstep filled with some delicious food from her kitchen.

You do some act of kindness for a friend just to be of service. Before you can even settle back in, a return gift arrives.

Sometimes you wonder if what you are doing is a form of manipulation. I learn that if I do a small thing for someone, they’ll return the favor with something I like.

Or, maybe you are that person who reciprocates. You just can’t stand feeling like you owe someone something. Or, perhaps unlike me you were taught to return favors. (It would be a long post to talk about the social graces I was not taught as a child.) But, you become obsessive about doing a return favor.

Intention forms one of key attributes of our spiritual formation. Are we careful to check our intentions regularly to assure that we are following Jesus’ command to do things in love?

Yesterday, I wrote about practice, or the lack thereof.

Here is a thought attributed to people as widely varying as Yogi Berra and Albert Einstein, but probably a Yale student called Benjamin Brewster writing in 1882 said, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.”

That sounds profound, yet also seems a bit of nonsense.

However, I can (and do) have theories about practicing on my guitar. I know various scales to practice fingering, chord progressions for a variety of songs, maybe even a theory of tuning before I begin.

My practice should follow those theories.

I pick up the guitar. It is out of tune. I don’t feel like tuning it just then. I put it down. The theory might have been good. The practice sucked.

I sit to meditate. I know about posture. The theory of breath. Techniques of prayers and mantras. Some days I sit in a slouch. Can’t focus on my prayer verse.

I suppose there must be a phrase in all cultures uttered by parents and teachers, “Practice makes perfect.” But that is not accurate.

Perfect practice makes perfect. And that requires intention, attention, and energy.