Befriending Jesus: Life With God
Image courtesy of RenewalWorks a ministry of Forward Movement. Learn more at https://www.renewalworks.org.
Over the last week, I have been pondering my own spiritual journey with and toward God. Admittedly, my focus on reflecting on this came out of the Renewal Works work that is ongoing in our parish. In the first meeting of the Renewal Works team, we were asked to create a timeline of our life with key experiences - both highs and lows - charted along a line graph. Next, we were asked to do the same - with highs and lows - about our relationship with God. I found it to be a really helpful exercise if for no other reason than revisiting the key events of my life and my relationship with God. When the two line graphs are laid over each other, it is interesting to see when it was that I drew closer to God and when I felt that I drifted further away from God.
As I had this in the back of my mind, I continued my reading project for Lent with the next chapter in Tarry Awhile. In this week’s chapter, Dr. Stone highlighted the importance of living rightly in the Black church. Writing of her own experience, she says, ““My parents had learnt from their parents that, while we might not be able to get our head around the Trinity or how exactly to understand the power of God in a wildly unfair world, we were responsible for living right.” While orthodoxy gets a lot of attention in places like The Episcopal Church, it is rather rare that we hear about the term orthopraxy or living out our faith and the impact that has on the lived experience. She goes on to say, ““Black theologians and believers, as a result, have developed a deep concern for being doers and not only hearers of the word, for neighbour love as well as the love of God.”
Dr. Stone is highlighting for us the importance of being able to entertain both notions: having right doctrine (orthodoxy) and living a life aligned with our faith (orthopraxy). The truth is that we need both. We need sound doctrine or teaching from our faith if we are also to be a people who live that faith out in all the other areas of our lives - from the ways we drive on the roads to the decisions we make in business to the things we value in elected and appointed officials in our communities. We are being encouraged, in the ways that we draw close to God, to carry the teaching of the church in the thoughts of our hearts, as the Collect for Purity says (BCP, p. 355) and then to allow those thoughts to become the ways we live in relationship with others.
Perhaps, the key to connecting these two big ideas is how we understand our relationship with God through Christ. On the one hand, we might only have understood Christ as king and Lord. For me, I find this imagery as creating distance between me and Jesus. I need something that is closer, warmer, more relatable, and I rather think that is true for almost all of us. We need a way to draw near to Christ in a way that feels like friendship.
Dr. Stone highlights the importance of the circumstances of Jesus during his earthly pilgrimage. He was not born to elite parents in the empire of the day. Instead, he inhabited flesh that existed under the rule of that empire and thus knew intimately the struggle of the majority of human beings who are simply doing their best to get from one day to the next in spite of the powers and principalities swirling around in the world. Dr. Stone shares with us this wonderful quote from Howard Thurman to underscore how important it can be for us to remember the way that Jesus came into the world: ““The economic predicament with which [Jesus] was identified in birth placed him initially with the great mass of [people] on the earth. The masses of the people are poor. If we dare take the position that in Jesus there was at work some radical destiny, it would be safe to say that in his poverty he was more truly Son of man than he would have been if the incident of family or birth had made him a rich son of Israel.”
And here, I am brought full circle to the lines that I drew on a timeline to examine my own life and my relationship with God. In almost every instance in which I felt, as Howard Thurman puts it, that my back was against the wall, I drew closer to God through Christ. Though I have not shared the struggles of Black people or other people of color in the world, I do know what it means to feel like my back is against the wall and in which I have no power to help myself. In those moments, I needed the comfort of a close relationship with Christ. I needed a reminder that in God, as Julian of Norwich writes, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
For reflection:
Take a moment to reflect on your life. Use the timeline document to create your own chart of your life and your spiritual journey. What are the moments in which you have drawn closer to God in Christ?
How do you understand Christ Jesus? Is he more king and Lord? Friend? Something else?
Think about a time in which you felt your back was “against the wall.” Where did you turn for help? How can your experience help you connect with others who have had different experiences of the world?
