God is living In our moccasins

Walking in our moccasins

Many native Americans had the saying, Walk in another’s moccasins to understand him.

Early in working as a pastor a member who had a serious drinking problem phoned. He asked me to come talk about how he could stop drinking. After we talked, and with his permission I called a local club of Alcoholics Anonymous. As I expected, an A.A. was ready to come. When they started talking, I could tell they had significant common ground. The man from my church was being understood and was understanding in a special way.

Many years later I visited a member in the hospital who had just learned that he must have a leg amputated. I said what I could, but after I left I called a member of our church who lost most of one leg in World War II. Amazingly, most members of our church did not know that, for he walked and worked as any other man in our church. I explained to him about the man in the hospital, and he quickly agreed to go after work. After he got there, he did what he did for me some time before. After I got to know him, one day he said he wanted to show me something, and pulled up a pants leg to show me his prosthesis. In the hospital that afternoon he did the same, then talked with this frightened man about living after losing a leg — as he had for twenty years!

The Almighty to feel what we know as humans became a human, so that the Almighty could walk in our moccasins, could experience the vast variety of our human experience, including death.

The poetic Christmas narrative and carols are the beautiful stage dressing that backdrops this event — the haunting beauty, color, music. The heart of the event is what happens at center stage. This One who:

...no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived...."

Whom did he consult for his enlightenment,
and who taught him the path of justice?…
Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales.

At center stage this One became a child, dependent on parents and the local synagogue school and rabbi to learn about the God of their people, to learn to endure as enslaved people. He was a child subject to the taunts of bullies and injured in normal childhood incidents. I think and believe that Jesus the youth, the man reached and yearned for this One who was his God. Branch Rickey said, "Would that I knew the turbulence of his adolescence, and his questionings (during) his young manhood."

Like all Jewish boys, he learned the craft of his father, a carpenter. Working as a teen-age apprentice he had calluses on his hands and listened to the men of the village of Nazareth. As a grown man he heard the expectant talk about a prophet who had appeared at the Jordan River. He joined many others going to hear John the Baptizer. Just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and a voice from heaven said, "You are my Son. With you I am well pleased." Then as Jews of many generations, he went out into the wilderness alone to think, to listen, to pray.

A Greek mystic, Nikos Kazantzakis, wrote an enchanting, fictional version of Jesus’ life that was made into a film by Martin Scorsese. In the book as Jesus walks in the wilderness he comes across a skeleton. Knowing the Jewish Law and tradition well, having been to the Jerusalem Temple with his family, he knew that once a year in the Feast of Atonement the High Priest drove a goat, a special goat, the scapegoat into the wilderness. It symbolically carried the sins of the people. Now Jesus looks at a skeleton, recognizes that it is a goat, that it must be the scapegoat, and as he looks at it, Kazantzakis visualizes that Jesus begins to see that he himself must carry the sin of the people in death — Jesus is the scapegoat. But we may ask how can a goat — or Jesus carry the sins of others. For further thoughts click here.

The New Testament says very little about how the Almighty One could have been a man — that is too theoretical, too Western — but rather tells us what this man did and said. Returning from the wilderness, he began to teach and to heal.

The religious leaders began to take offence at what he taught. He was not teaching the party line. One provocative reading is in the Gospel of Mark, starting at 2.13 (chapter 2 verse 13) and ending at 3.6. Notice how at first the criticism is spoken to the disciples, but later directly to Jesus, then at the end leaders of two groups who seldom spoke to each other conspired to get rid of Jesus. He challenged their understanding of the Sabbath observances. He threatened their turf and challenged their assumptions and values. He confronted oppressive Pharisees and priests. Large numbers of people did not like the Pharisees, and welcomed the new teaching of Jesus. Unlike the Pharisees he welcomed, ate, and conversed with any one.

Thomas Moore writes, "He is outrageously forgiving and accepting. He deals directly with the demonic in people and rids them of its influence. He heals people of their suffering. He teaches a rule of love rather than obligation. This set of values is fairly simple yet mind altering."

One remarkable quality of Jesus was his welcoming women just like men. This was almost unknown in his paternalistic culture in which women were to be subjugated. Women were in his inner circle and very close to him. He related to women just as he did to men. He depended on his women followers. He talked with and responding to sisters Mary and Martha openly and directly. There is no sign of Jesus condescending or looking down on them as inferior or secondary. On Easter morning the women were the first to go to where Jesus had been laid after the crucifixion. He also included tax collectors and other outsiders. Perhaps one of the best words to describe Jesus is welcoming.

In the Old Testament Torah or Law — Genesis through Deuteronomy — the command repeated most often is to welcome the stranger. They are to welcome the stranger, because they were strangers in Egypt. Jesus placed love of God and love of neighbor, being neighborly, at the center of our life. He reiterates the Law to welcome strangers. If we love neighbors, if we are neighbors, we welcome strangers. What we do for the stranger, feeding, visiting, clothing we are doing to God as he told in Matthew 25.31–46.

At the end he had a last supper with his closest followers. This supper was a reminder of or an echo of the single greatest liberation event in Jewish history — Passover — when Jews were "passed-over" by death the night before they left enslavement in Egypt.

Jesus then was seized, bound, beaten, and tried before the religious leaders — Jews then but not today's Jews! Religious leaders are frequently most interested in their position and power. They often want to control and be dominant, to subjugate people. Review the history of Christian Churches or Islam whenever either could get their tentacles into power or government.

Jesus was then tried before the Roman ruler, and lynched. He died late on Friday, just before the Sabbath that is our Saturday. As part of religious traditions of cleanliness and defilement, he was hastily put in a tomb before Sabbath began at sundown.

Think of pictures of lynchings. The distorted body of the man — usually Black — who later information may show to be innocent. And see the others around grinning or satisfied, including children. To visualize the crucifixion see the horrors of a lynching, for it was like that. The New Testament refers to crucifixion as "hanging from a tree."

Why did Jesus die? Because religious leaders rejected him and his vision of life. The Ground of our Being was frustrated, just as this One is saddened by deaths of children and adults.

At sunup after the Sabbath — our Sunday — the women went to the tomb to begin the rituals for the body that could not be done earlier because of the Sabbath. They claimed they felt he was alive, and the major way we can understand that is what happened to people. The New Testament skips theoretical questions about what happened to tell what it means to people. Simon Peter was a man of loud boasts but little courage under fire, but after Easter he courageously confronts his enemies, and speaks out wisely and forcefully — utterly changed. And one of the persecutors of the early Church, hurrying to Damascus, is confronted by the risen Jesus — that is his own description — and Paul is utterly changed. Changes in people continue through the centuries. The man who started my faith-tradition was scared, until he felt a warm presence while listening to Martin Luther's preface to Paul’s letter to the Romans. Then like Peter he speaks boldly to large crowds with courage and insight. He organizes his followers into groups to study, to learn, to worship, to serve. Today the church is the body of Christ, alive, at work according to the New Testament. As the church works for healing between groups and people, works for health and peace and justice, Christ is alive in-deed!!

What is the New Testament Greek word for saved? It means deliverance in this life — deliverance from disease or imprisonment. We are imprisoned by habits and addictions not only to chemicals but to work — workaholics who spend more time at work than with their children and partners. We are delivered to become humane!

Salvation is the turbulent meeting of self-centeredness and loving neighbor. It is the clash of independence and interdependence. It is the balance between self-interest and community interest. In that turbulence we want to feed, clothe, shelter, and take care of our own, but our community intrudes. Salvation is within ourselves as we are conflicted by our humane and selfish thoughts. Christ comes to liberate us from self-centeredness, so we can actually be neighbors. Grace awakens our sensitivity to the people around us. Grace awakens us to the masks that self-centeredness wears. God shows his loving care for us while we are caught up in our self-centeredness.

All the power of self-centered interests, control freaks, manipulators got rid of him — but he lives! Someone said he is let loose on the world. He works among us and through us and in us!

Albert Schweitzer wrote:

He comes to us as one unknown,
     as of old by the lake side he came to those men who knew him not.
He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me,"
     and sets us to the tasks he would have us fulfill in our time.
He commands, and to those who obey him,
     whether they be wise or simple,
He will reveal himself;
     in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings
     they will pass through in his presence,
And as an ineffable mystery,
     they will discover in their own experience,
     who He is.

So I see three major insights.

First insight: really human
One insight is that the Almighty One who no eye has seen nor ear heard really became thoroughly human — a man; Many theories try to explain this reality, but fall short. Our minds are numbed by thinking of this One who is beyond our thoughts being a man with all our human limitations.

We know that one who has lived successfully for 20 years without one leg can help in an unusual way one who is about to lose a leg. This fact seen often in alcoholics and drug addicts in recovery as well as many others demonstrates that the Almighty One learned incredibly by being a real human. Today many people find this One meaningful because he has experienced from within the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings of people. He experienced the breadth and depth of human experience! This One has felt what we feel.

Second insight: the cross
People from earliest times sacrificed to their gods. Tribes and other groups left evidence thousands of years ago of a feeling that killing one’s child or an animal pleased the Unknown Powers and benefited the people who did it. Blood carried almost mystical qualities. The Old Testament includes detailed descriptions of such a sacrificial system that rejected human sacrifice but used animal sacrifice.

When Jesus died, it was easy for those nurtured in this sacrificial system to understand Jesus’ death in those terms. Hebrews in the New Testament expands on the meaning of a priestly, sacrificial understanding of Jesus. But the Apostle Paul has minimal references to Jesus’ death as a blood sacrifice. Today many churches minimize those images to follow Paul in emphasizing God acting to break down whatever barriers we may feel separate us from the God of Jesus reaching us.

Many theories try to plumb the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Most of those theories are dated and reflect the philosophies of their time. We want to think, to reason, to have answers, but this One wants us to feel and to trust before we think.

One intriguing theory I find meaningful is that in the crucifixion the forces of evil in government and organized religion of turf building and influence peddling, of control freaks and manipulators confronted the force of love and grace in Jesus, so they got rid of him. In the resurrection the One conquered those forces, and is at work now when his deputies confront those same powers of evil. The Apostle Paul may have been thinking similar thoughts in Romans 8.37 – 38.

To grasp what happened in the crucifixion and resurrection, consider the feelings of a group of soldiers or marines in close combat when a grenade is hurled into their midst, and one falls on it, absorbing the explosion, and liberating the others. We glimpse what the crucifixion and resurrection mean in events of our lives, in the lives of people, and in plays and films that probe into reconciling and liberating people.

We may see some meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection in some hymns that relate our feelings to his:

Died he for me? Who caused his pain!
For me? Who him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be, that thou, my God,
Shouldst die for me?

Third insight: in our lives
The third insight is that this Almighty One wants us and needs us — our voices and our examples. This One works through us in our individual ways — women and men of all cultures and orientations so we can embody Jesus for the needs of people.

We are to be neighbors, to be sensitive to needs of individuals and groups, and respond to them.

To understand more, read the Gospel of Mark — the first gospel to be written. Read it in a recent translation with the same attitude that you read the news. Read it freshly, trying to enter into the feelings of the persons. Visualize yourself as the leper who falls at Jesus feet — yourself with all your feelings and hurts. Visualize yourself as the cripple lowered through the roof to the feet of Jesus — crippled in whatever limits you. Put yourself in the persons listening intently, trying to understand his words. Feel the impact that this amazing One had on people.

George F. Macleod of Scotland put it well, "Always remember, there is a man in God!" There is a Guy in God!

See George F. Macleod's book Only One Way Left.