Dear Friends in Christ,
I have a sense of excitement, sometimes bordering on agitation, as I preach, teach, counsel, and celebrate the Liturgy in these tumultuous times of ours. A comment made by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (interestingly enough, a remark made during the Great Depression) helps me to think about this spiritual excitement:
Mankind is now in one of its rare moods of shifting its outlook.
The mere compulsion of tradition has lost its force. It is our
business—philosophers, students, and practical men—to
re-create and re-enact a vision of the world, including those
elements of reverence and order without which society lapses
into riot, and penetrated through and through with unflinching
rationality. Such a vision is the knowledge which Plato identified
with virtue.
This comment resonates for me because I have this powerful, intuitive feeling that we humans are trying to find a Third Way spirituality today because the old models have reached a dead end. In Adult Sunday Forum, we used ideas of Martin Luther to ask if we could find a third way between nihilism or fideism. Capitalism and communism are both social and economic philosophies that seem to have exhausted themselves Most of us decline the hard and fast boxes of Left or Right, especially as these have been traditionally understood—they have led us to political gridlock, stalemate. There must be a better way. Most Christians are fed up with denominationalism as religious chauvinism. I’m a proud Lutheran theologically, but have found that that has little to do with the denomination to which you belong.
Isaiah describes God as the one who is doing a new thing. Jesus articulated that new thing in his Love Ethic. He also embodied that Love, which we call “Incarnation.” My faith is that this Love ethic could be the Third Way the human race is looking for. I think it could revitalize the Church into an institution providing a spirituality and a theology that could underwrite change. It could move Jesus (and, indeed, the Holy Trinity) into an open space. This Jesus would see Buddha as a brother, Judaism as his mother, and Islam as a cousin (one can debate one’s cousin). His ethic would not close down conversation or community beyond all our old walled-in churches, but open it up. He wants us to see each other as kinfolk.
What if economic policy or political structure or our relation to the well-being of the biosphere were a deliberate attempt to live out the Love ethic of Jesus? I find that a pretty exciting idea. Skeptics will dismiss it; paleo-Christians will call it heresy; but I suspect that Whitehead is right: humankind is now in one of its rare moods of shifting its outlook. Millions of people, wearied by the old dead-end ways, are open to considering new ideas. What a great time in which to preach the Gospel! I hope our ELCA will step forward, open its arms to all, initiate the conversation, and tell in a new, fresh way the story of the One who came among us with only one commandment: that you love one another—even as I have loved you, so you should love one another.
Yours in Christ,
–Pastor Bastien
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