Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

My theology guides me to seek experience to understand events. I began with searching the books between the bookends of Jesus’ life, the actual history of what Jesus said and did. I now turn to my search for the experiences of the church expressed in the bookends of Christmas and Easter. I move from what Jesus said to what was said about Jesus, from proclaimer to proclaimed.

When I was young I used to hear the story that the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, at just the time when the Bolsheviks overthrew the rather moderate Mensheviks, were holding a great national conference on vestments. This story was told, not to deny the importance of proper vestments in worship, but to illustrate the inability of Christians, and, indeed, people in general, to make sound judgments of relative importance. As a youth I was shocked, and I naively assumed that we American Protestants would never make mistakes of this kind.

Let Jesus speak. Alas, the words of Jesus have waxed and waned in the 2000 years since he uttered them. Dr. Alfred North Whitehead spoke of Jesus as the “brief Galilean flicker.” In the church today we celebrate the bookends of Jesus’ life, his birth and death. Few pay much attention in that period of the church year called Kingdomtide, yet we all anticipate and lavishly celebrate Christmas and Easter. For me, however, the Kingdom is central, for there I find the voice of Jesus. In the bookends I hear the voice of his followers, the church. I value what Jesus said more than what the church said about Jesus.