Answers.com says that “a radical Christian is someone who takes their beliefs over the edge.”
Choosing a title for this blog has kept me from actually making it because, for the longest time, I had no idea what to call it. How do you summarize your beliefs into something concise and catchy... and something that hasn’t been used before? But in the end, I chose “Radical Christian”, not because it’s unique (I haven’t coined the term), because I believe it’s what best describes me now at this point in my life.
My church, St. Bartholomew’s in New York City, is an Episcopal congregation that promotes the “radical” welcome of Jesus. That phrase always resonated with me. I love to study languages, and I appreciated immediately the many connotations the word “radical” offers. We use the word commonly to mean “extreme” or “drastic”, but the root of the word itself actually means “root”. It’s ironic, then, that a word can mean both “pertaining to the root or origin” of something, as well as “drastically breaking away” from something, but this irony works to my advantage.
I returned to the Christian faith three years ago after having left it entirely for almost a decade. But I didn’t simply pick up where I left off. (For starters, I left Roman Catholic and returned Episcopalian, though I can already hear some of you mutter “same thing!”) I feel I have returned with insight that is new and refreshing to me. The insight itself is not new because I know there are many others who share my opinions, but it’s still new to me. It’s an interpretation of the faith that sets practice over ideology, trust over creed, and love over dogma. It strives to focus more on the teachings of Jesus and not necessarily on the teachings about Jesus, something which the Christian church hasn’t always differentiated between. And it also seeks not to blindly follow, but to question, that which has been handed down to us.
At the same time, however, I have a newfound reverence for Christian tradition, a love for, and a curiosity about, those teachings about Jesus. Why does liturgical Christianity have the “church year”? Why is it traditional (at least in Western Christianity) to refrain from saying ‘alleluia’ during Lent? I think you can see better now why I love the word ‘radical’.
It’s been about two weeks since the Doomsday that never happened. Here in New York City, the event was well publicized in trains and buses, and people gathered in Times Square around the man who spent his life savings ($140,000) on the Judgment Day campaign. I read later that there were others who left their jobs, or budgeted themselves so that they would have no more money after May 21.
Of course, nothing happened, and we’re still here (despite Harold Camping’s assurance that we have all been ‘spiritually raptured’ - whatever that means). And so many people, including me, have been so quick to mock the whole thing and laugh at the followers. But a friend of mine set me straight (so to speak, I’m not actually ‘straight’!) by asking me why I was doing that.
Reading the Bible, I know that the first generations of Christians were probably very much like these Doomsday prophets. They expected Jesus to return in their lifetime. St. Paul, writing to the Thessalonian church, warned that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” and that “sudden destruction will come... as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape!” (1 Thes. 5:3, NRSV). And of course that didn’t happen, which is when one begins to detect in the Bible different explanations as to why Jesus didn’t return (a “man of lawlessness” is supposed to come first and lead people astray, there will be wars and destruction first, etc.). They had to radically break away from what they were taught in order to harmonize their faith with the present.
When I thought about this, I remembered a sermon given at my church regarding this same topic. The priest said that he of course believes in Christ’s second coming, as well as in his third, and fourth, and so on, for Christ comes whenever one calls. The same one who promised that “I will not leave you orphaned” (John 14:18, NRSV) will indeed be with us always (cf. Matthew 28:20).
This past week’s celebration of the Ascension of Christ better expresses this view. After Jesus is taken to heaven before the disciples’ very eyes, the book of Acts reports that two mysterious, white-robed men asked them: “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:11, NRSV). It’s as if the text, by presenting Jesus’ second coming as a simple certainty, invites us to seek Christ, not in heaven, but in our hearts. Suddenly I saw the recorded promises of Jesus in a new light.
I don’t know if these events happened exactly as if they were written. Certainly there are many, many reasons to believe that they did not, and there’s probably more myth here than factuality. I’m okay with that. For you see, this story serves as my guide to being a radical Christian. In the same way that the disciples are taught not to worry about where Jesus went and how he is to return, so too, I believe, I am not supposed to dwell on the details of the faith, but follow the Christ within. What matters more? That Mary Magdalene was alone when she discovered the empty tomb of the risen Lord, or that the teachings of Jesus rise up through history and still speak to us today?
Of course, though, we can’t and shouldn’t throw out 2,000 years of history. We have much to learn from our forebears’ experiences. St. Paul may have been wrong about Jesus’ imminent second coming, but I believe him wholeheartedly when he said he experienced Christ (1 Cor. 15:8). So have many other Christians for two millennia. And so many more people of different faiths experience the divine in their own genuine way. Whether it’s a chemical, and therefore natural, experience matters less to me than whether it leads you to do to others as you would have them do to you, or to love both your friends and your enemies, and to forgive those who sin against you. And, though I personally am drawn more to traditional Western Christian ritual, I believe that Christian practice in general, from the solemnity of a Catholic mass, to the ecstasy of Pentecostal worship; from the mystical liturgies of the East, to a simple and silent Quaker meeting; from the medieval Lutheran church down the street to the Baptist mega-church outside the town helps us open our spirit and hear the voice of the Christ that, as promised, is already within.
This is the journey I’m on now and have been on for the past three years. It is not one that everyone will agree with, and that’s okay too. I look forward to the future by looking to the past, taking with me those things that enrich my life, and appreciatively learning from those things that no longer speak to me. I look forward to meeting others who share my journey, which traditional doctrine may consider to be too “radical”... and it is - in every sense of the word.
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