Faith

“This I Know”

~ Elizabeth ~ 7 Comments

jesuswithchild

In my faith tradition, this is Holy Week between yesterday’s celebration of Palm Sunday and this Sunday’s celebration of Easter. I thought I would write this week about music I have encountered in various faith settings. There has been a wide variety, as I think back about it, and worth a week’s worth of postings.

My parents were not religious, and I had minimum exposure to church. My grandfather was an Episcopal priest, but he lived 3000 miles away and was not a direct influence on my faith. The summer I was 11, however, we spent a month with my grandparents in the small town of Pike, New York where they had a summer farm. Pike was so small that our visit was announced in the town paper. My friend Gwen, with whom I daily rode bikes and swam in Wiscoy Creek, invited me to come with her to Vacation Bible School at the local Baptist Church. My grandmother was slightly suspicious of Baptists, but she agreed I could go with my friend.(Grannie was a religious snob!)

I remember little of that time, but I know I really enjoyed myself. We made great pictures with cotton balls glued to colored paper to represent the sheep that Jesus cared for. I am not sure that I understood the metaphor, but I loved those little fuzzy sheep. The one tune that stuck was “Jesus Loves Me.”(I have not inserted a link to this since the online versions have troubling lines we never learned.) We sang it every day and it sunk deeply into me. I didn’t make much sense of the line “the Bible tells me so,” that supports the idea that “Jesus loves me,” but I really grabbed onto the idea that God loved me.

My faith journey was interupted many times in the years to come, but that song stuck with me. When I moved to Connecticut and saw signs for Vacation Bible School, I called the little church in Pike. I asked them if they still did Vacation Bible School. When they said yes, I asked them what the program cost them. I sent them the $100 to run the camp that summer, to pay them back in some tangible way for the truth they had planted in me. I would never succumb to “hell fire and damnation” preaching in life because “this I know,” “Jesus loves me.”

Meeting the Face of Jesus

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment
arthurroberts
Arthur Roberts

Long before I was Catholic, long before I was Christian even, I was a deist. That is, I believed there was a God, but thought that Jesus was a good man who lived a long time ago and had good things to say to us. The only religious education I had ever received, and that very very occasionally, was Unitarian. The Unitarians, as revealed in their name, rejected the idea of Trinity and spoke of Jesus, when they did at all, in similar terms as my own.

A fellow graduate student attended a place called Reedwood Friends Church, and he invited me to attend it. This was an Evangelical Friends congregation which meant they were Quakers who had a pastor. They had long periods of silent worship and they adhered to all the testimonies of the Quakers such as peace and social justice.

I visited with great trepidation. Most of what I knew of Christianity was negative, informed by street preaching and door to door evangelizing. To my surprise, a distinguished looking man came up to me after the service and welcomed me. He asked me why I was visiting. I explained I was not a Christian but was intrigued by Christianity.

He said, “You are welcome to sojourn with us as long as you like. You don’t have to do anything else.” With all pressure off, I attended church there for many years, gradually having a conversion, quiet and true, to Christianity.

Arthur Roberts, a now retired professor from George Fox University, was that welcoming face of Christ.

Thanks to those who share, rather than impose, their faith.

 

Micah 6:8

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment

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“He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God?”

My grandparents lived through two world wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. They survived the Spanish Flu, which nearly claimed my grandfather. They lived through the Great Depression. During that economic crisis, the faculty at the University of Buffalo where my grandfather was a Dean, chose to take an across the board pay cut rather than lay off junior faculty members. They understood ordeal, suffering and sacrifice. Yet they remained loving and hopeful throughout their lives. Their faith gave them a firm foundation on which to stand.

My foundation is God, not the United States. This morning as I deal with a new and troubling national reality, I look to Micah for instruction. It is pretty clear that despair is not from God. I will continue to try to walk out my life justly, kindly and humbly.

As the New England abolitionist Theodore Parker said in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”