January 29, 2010

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (left) shakes hands with Rabbi Abraham Heschel during a 1967 meeting of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam in Washington. A UMNS photo © John C. Goodwin

Over the last few years, I’ve been reading Abraham Joshua Heschel off and on, including God in Search of Man and The Prophets. I find Heschel inspiring because he was a reformer/restorer of Judaism at a time when it had suffered huge loss, experienced great grief, and was floundering in its understanding of the faith. Big questions loomed over the hearts and minds of those who survived the death camps of Germany and came to the U.S.

In the beginning of God in Search of Man, Heschel says something that could have been written by any youth member of our churches today or many a soul who has wandered out of our congregations, looking for a more palpable sense of God’s presence in their lives and feeling abandoned by us.

Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless. . . . The moment we become oblivious to ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in [p. 3].

Read this quote again and this time, imagine the year it was written: 1955. One might expect Heschel to be a little more sympathetic to people who are struggling to figure out where God was in the midst of the Holocaust. Yet his words strike home in most generations and contexts that have lived in the “splendor of the past” or at least haven’t struggled with what it means to be a person of faith in the midst of uncertain and difficult times.

Though others did, Heschel wasn’t inclined to reorganize Judaism to make it more relevant. He called people to a much deeper, more profound experience of the holy, to the voice of the prophets, and to an outward demonstration of that commitment. He was mystical and prophetic. He delved deeply in the Hebrew scriptures and he felt that his “legs were praying” when he walked with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma to protest racial inequality. He worked for justice for people who weren’t “his own,” because that’s what the prophets called him to do.

If Heschel weren’t Jewish, he could have been United Methodist! He held together the deepest inward and outward expressions of his faith that we aspire to when we claim John Wesley’s call to personal and social holiness. He could have bolted not only from Europe but from Judaism, but he didn’t. Instead he went to work on himself, going deep and wide: deep into his soul and a relationship with God, wide to address the injustices of the day. As a result, he inspired and invigorated Judaism within a few decades (not overnight!).

Heschel calls us to the “ultimate questions” of our faith: who are we in our human condition and who is God? Ultimate questions are unsettling and yet they are the way forward. We’ve been a people who like to have and give answers when our culture calls us to address the ultimate questions in light of our lives, in light of the struggles within our communities, and in light of what it means to be faithful in our present age. This is an age of wondering, pondering, and asking questions. Maybe even figuring out what the right questions are.

Recently I received an e-mail suggesting that not enough has been done with the United Methodist Church’s Rethink Church project. It’s a great idea but nobody has been putting this “movement on steroids,” the writer said. I wondered what a church on steroids would be like!

I fully appreciate what this person was saying. This person wanted more information and hands-on training that would help a congregation rethink what it means to go deep and wide in its faith and outreach.

But I couldn’t help but play with the idea in my mind about a church on steroids! It was coupled with Mark McGwire’s recent admission that he used steroids as a professional baseball player. (Oh, surprise!) A church on steroids would be one that looks for an easy way to “pump it up.” A church on steroids wants the easy answers to help it reach its community: a program, a gimmick, an approach that worked somewhere else. The easy way might work for a while—steroids do—but when a congregation hasn’t done the hard work of exercising its own faith, delving deep, and reaching wide, it jeopardizes the health of the congregation.

McGwire said he just wanted his body to feel normal again. I guess hitting home runs year after year begins to wear and tear an aging body.

Likewise, we as churches want to “feel normal again,” meaning that we wish we were the church in the culture and in the time when we didn’t seem to have to delve deep within ourselves and our own faith. “Feeling normal again” might be a desire that we don’t have to invite and be so deliberate at hospitality; people will just show up and stay. Eventually McGwire must have had to accept a “new normal”! And so do we!

Rethink Church is not a pill that you take or a cookie-cutter approach to growing our church. It’s the hard work of returning to who we are as followers of Jesus with a Wesleyan tradition in our culture today. It begins with each one of us and it spreads throughout the church. My correspondent is right: It’s meant to be a movement and you can’t have a movement if it isn’t based in each person moving with the Spirit to go deep and reach wide.

Years ago Cher was in a commercial in which she stood looking all buff and said, “If you could get a body like this from a bottle, everyone would have one.” That is, in order to be physically buff, one has to work pretty hard at it. And frankly the same is true for looking at who we are, who we’ve been, and what God is calling us to be in the culture around us today—Heschel’s “ultimate questions.”

Go to www.rethinkchurch.org and look at the resources for Rethink Church. They’re starters for conversation. The conversations are ours to have with each other and within each local church. When we have them, I think we’ll find a more vibrant spirituality within each one of us and our local church and a desire to reach new people with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Bishop Sally Dyck

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