ken wilson online

Writing a book, like having a conversation or putting words to your thoughts in any form, is an exercise in learning what you believe. It’s not just that you believe something and then put it into words. You discover what it is that you believe in the process of putting it into words. You read the book you write, or you hear the words formed by your thoughts in a conversation, for the first time. Like God in Genesis, chapter one, orchestrated the creation, made what he made, and then saw it himself for the first time, pondered it, and said, “It’s good.” Here’s a crack at summarizing what I believe after more than a few decades of organizing my life in fits and starts around Jesus of Nazareth and his path through this world:

I believe we are intended to discover Jesus in the process of lending him a hand as he goes about his business of repairing and transforming the world. His spirituality, in other words, is active. The gospel is first of all a call to action. And as we participate with him in the business of repairing the world–that sounds so presumptuous, I know, but it is what he’s about and we at least have to try to help him–he goes about the business of repairing our hearts, healing them, soothing them, rearranging them. We get saved–for all it’s strangeness, I love the word still–while we’re following him who is about the work of saving the world from itself.

I believe his path is also contemplative. Active and contemplative. Because he had a life of prayer that informed everything he did. And the spirituality he forged was all about intimacy, but of a particular kind: improving our conscious contact with God as Abba, Father. God as Jesus knew, experienced, revealed him. He wants us to have mystical contact with God as Abba, Father, meaning direct contact. The kind where you feel yourself to be pickled in love. It’s not direct as in “on our own” contact. It’s a contact with God that we have with Jesus, or through him. But it’s real. And everything about prayer is about that, properly understood, one way or another, just like the everyday and the mundane and the spectacular and the woo-woo is all part of a marriage that’s in the process of happening.

I believe his path his biblical. Meaning our contact with God doesn’t happen in a storyless vacuum shaped by principles, universal or otherwise. But that our contact occurs within the bigger context of the greatest story ever told–the Love Story of God, missing us, in search of us. Active, contemplative, and biblical. Each of these dimensions hopelessly interconnected with the others. So we enter the biblical story not just in our reading or study, but in our doing, our putting things into practice. And we don’t treat the Bible like some text to master, but we engage it prayerfully, like the Narnia kids walking through the wardrobe.

I believe his path–ours if we will follow–is communal. Because everything about God, beginning with God, is relational. God is a relational network–Father, Son, Holy Spirit–and hence a God who is not simply loving, but who is, within himself, LOVE, irreducible relationship. Expanding ever outward. Giving birth to matter, space-time, what eye can see and ear can hear. Physical-material stuff which is also irreducibly relational. Giving birth to what we call life, and as part of this intricate fabric, us. Us who is an Us, a one-another, and not an isolated anything. Without a community, without a church, to use that word, without a coming together to express what cannot exist except within relationship, it’s all just words.

So yes, this here book has that subtitle: He Wants His Religion Back. Because the Jesus path is particular, and yes it is part of a broader phenomenon called religion. This idea that Jesus can be separated somehow, or lifted above religion is boo-honkey. It’s like trying to free float him above humanity, and that’s exactly not the point. Religion is with us, so long as we are. Jesus wants to reform his religion–all religion I think–not walk away from it into some ether-spiritsphere that doesn’t exist except in some ideal that ain’t real, and he is the heart and soul of reality, in my book.

But much of the religion that bears his name in the cultural context I’m imbedded in–21st Century America–is misrepresenting him. The most powerful influence of the last thirty years or so has been the Religious Right. I like conservative thinkers: David Brooks, George Will is worth a listen for sure, William F. Buckley in his day. But some of the main voices in the Religious Right I have a bone to pick with. This blind marriage between one particular political philosophy–right now it’s conservatism, at an earlier time is was a Marxist liberalism–this marriage between that and the name of Jesus, has at times, bordered on the blasphemous. Crossed the line sometimes. It’s been an exercise in using the Lord’s name in vain. You say that, and people call you a liberal, but I’m of the opinion that liberal-conservative, when applied to matters of faith is a category error and I don’t buy it. So I’ve got this feisty thing going. And some of my best friends are conservative and some are liberal and if you had to characterize me as a political animal, I’d probably want to pick and choose the best of both those categories, the ones that when cobbled together would most closely resemble in some hodge-podge fashion the One I really trust, Jesus of Nazareth.

But all that last paragraph, that’s just the day’s cultural context. It pertains because it has shaped the way people view Jesus of Nazareth. It has amounted to a kind of trademark infringement on the Jesus brand, to use that language of the marketplace and the public square where Jesus is not afraid to hang out. And so it’s a minefield that has to be walked through. But it’s not the point. The point of the book is the path–the active, contemplative, biblical, communal path forged by Jesus of Nazareth, the treasure buried in the field of religion.

Tags: active, biblical, boo-honkey, communal, contemplative, jesus freak, religious right, trademark infringement

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 6:21 am and is filed under jesus brand spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.