I first met Anne outside a building near Cass Park, in Detroit, called “The Dog Pound.” The building, housing some fifty family units, got its endearing name for two reasons. First, I’m told, the man who owns the building keeps dogs in the basement, so dogs bark and howl at all hours of the night. Second, the residents who live in this low-income building say they feel as if they live in a kennel. The first time I met Anne was in February—the dead of a Michigan winter. I noticed Anne right away because she wore a summer dress with no shoes. In the middle of winter.

Twenty degrees outside. She has no shoes, I thought to myself.

A few of us paid attention to Anne over the next several months—nothing spectacular, just little works of love to let her know she wasvalued. But then, from my experience, transformation usually happens“one phone call, twenty dollar check, home cooked casserole” at a time.On a perfect day in October, while hosting a love feast in Cass Park, my cell phone rang. It was Anne.

“You gonna come get me?”

“What do you mean? Who is this?”

“This is Anne. You got to come get me. I’m in my new house.”

I couldn’t believe it. Anne was no longer living in The Dog Pound. She’d gotten back on her feet, rented a house in a better part of the city, regained custody of her kids. “I want you to come get me and bring me back to Cass Park so I can tell everyone about my new place. I want to have a party.” When I picked Anne up some thirty minutes later, she was as proud as a young child hosting her first lemonade stand, as proud as acollege graduate. Her smile exceeded her physical face.

“See my house,” she said.

“I see your house, Anne. I’m proud of you.”

So we planned to have a party at Anne’s house.

But before we had an opportunity to party in Anne’s new digs, she left us tragically, dying from complications with diabetes.  I’ve taken solace in the notion that Anne was likely going to die, whether or not our lives intersected her life. But for a few moments in time, we were able to help Anne see herself as God sees her: beautiful, beloved, cherished, and welcomed. Our friendship produced life, joy, and, most importantly, hope in the midst of great struggle. This is why I’m so attracted to the Jesus Way. In Jesus’ economy, everyone has a place at the table. Everyone’s invited; we don’t get to check over the guest list for approval.

It’s not our party. The only thing we can boast in is the invitation. We’re all invited.

I’m preparing for my last BBT class at Columbia Seminary (coming in July). If you peruse this blog much, you know how important Taylor has been to my formation as a human, writer, story-teller and preacher. I would dare say she has shaped me more than any other preacher/writer. Period.

Two of the books we’re reading for this class are Speaking of Fatih and America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity. The class (discussion, lectures, research) is focused on the role of the church in an ever-changing religious climate. That is, there are no more people who do claim atheism/agnosticism than at any point in history (which, by the way, is still a relatively low number). The number of adherents to Buddhism, Islam, Baha’i, Hindu, and Judaism is on the rise (due to many factors, not the least of which being immigration and a post-institutionalist mindset in America). We love the new baby. That’s not all bad.

In Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith, she does a remarkable job of describing how Christianity might “sound” in the diverse neighborhood of American religion.  Ruminating upon Annie Dillard’s belief that “love is greater than knowledge” Tippett writes, “I forget that love is more important than knowledge all the time. I have forgotten it, willfully, for long stretches of life, and at my peril. Yet even as the loves in my life are in disarray I recover a sense of its centrality. And every time I let myself go deeper into the mess and mystery of human loving, I am hit over the head again by theology–an insistence that the love of God is so much fuller than we can usually imagine or take in . . . love is not the starting point but the goal. It is not something we are born knowing how to do, not something we fall into. It is something we spend our whole lives learning,” (223-224).

In Wuthnow’s America and the Challenge of Religous Diversity, he distinguishes between three groups within American Christianity (note how these groups transcend Catholic, Mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant): spiritual shoppers, Christian inclusivists, and Christian exclusivists. The book is full of interesting data based upon detail research. A few of the most troubling to me: Only 42 percent of Christian exclusivists (of which many evangelicals fall into), believe that religious diversity is good for the U.S.   Almost 60 percent of Christian exclusivists used the word strange to describe Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists in a litany of adjective choices.

He ends the book by highlighting characteristics of “reflective pluralism”–a community rigorously maintaining their fidelity to core principles of faith (Trinity, love of others, redemption through Jesus’ life and death, etc.) while holding a genuine posture of humility and curiosity towards other faiths. While I am a Yoderite to the core (church as alternative community), I don’t think we have the luxury of ignoring Wuthnow’s insights.

He was, as he had predicted, imprisoned for challenging the Machine that was the Third Reich. One of his prison-mates recorded this story that captures the essence of the tension Acts presents to us:

Pastor Bonhoeffer held a little service and spoke to us in a manner which reached the hearts of all, finding just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment and the thoughts and resolutions which it had brought. He had hardly finished his last prayer when the door opened and two evil-looking men in civilian clothes came in and said: “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready to come with us.” Those words “come with us”—for all prisoners they had come to mean one thing only—the scaffold. We bade him good-bye—he drew me aside—“This is the end,” he said. “For me, the beginning of life,” (Bonhoeffer, Clyde Fant, 24).

Since I can remember, I’ve struggled intellectually with the resurrection of Jesus. Not that resurrection could happen, but, that resurrection did happen. After all, when’s the last time you witnessed someone raised from the dead (I still joke with some charismatic friends, “Take me to the graveyard”).

Many (especially men) in our churches struggle with this. It does not help when people offer an attitude of “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” While I envy such belief, it is an act of grace from God.

I shared with our church the two reasons I (currently) believe in the Christian claim that God raised Jesus from the day that Sunday morning celebrated around the world.

1. I believe because something happened. The disciples (women and men) had virtually nothing to gain and everything to lose in claiming that the itinerant preacher from Nazareth had been raised in the middle of human history. Another way to say it: The greatest argument for the resurrection is the church. Despite the church’s many sins and atrocities, the church transcends tribe, culture, and race.

Early followers of Jesus had no categories for resurrection in the midst of human history (like Native Americans who had no categories for Europeans who came in ships to Central and North America–some philosophers and sociologists believe that Native Americans could not visibly see the Europeans until they reached shore)–and yet, they were open to the conviction that God could do something new.

2. I believe because I want to believe. I want justice to reign, poverty to end, crooked made straight, wars to end, hunger to be undone. It’s the reason why children are drawn to Tolkien and Disney–humans are wired for a grand conclusion to the narrative that is human experience. I think for instance, this is one reason Peter ran to the tomb in Luke’s story, after the other men have disregarded the women’s testimony. Peter needed the story to be true. I used to apologize for this second element, but now I think it’s the difference between faith and belief. Those (until recently) have been separate ideas, now I’m beginning to understand why.

If God could do what God has done in Creation (debates between fundamentalists and evolutionists notwithstanding), why couldn’t God raise Jesus from death? I want to believe, “God, give me the gift of faith.”

The tendency in many confessions (public/private; religious/secular) is for the one confessing to tell the amount of truth necessary to convince the audience of a contrite heart without telling too much as to increase one’s chances of being completely marginalized for the sin/violation/transgression under examination. I like how Mark Twain wrote that if “you always tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said.”

Tiger’s first confession was an example of the former. His second was an example of a profound awareness that perception and reality were as distant as Republicans and Democrats on health care reform. It appears now that his second confession has cleared the landscape for authentic healing.

Confession’s ultimate power is it’s ability to create a community without barriers. When we talk about how great we are, we become competitors. When we talk about the darkness within, we become family (to paraphrase Karl Barth).

U2 calls this, on their newest album, a “Moment of Surrender.” That speaks to me. That makes me want to find someone I trust and get on with the business of confession.

Jews do these things with more attention and wisdom not because they are more righteous nor because God likes them better, but rather because doing, because action, sits at the center of Judaism. Practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christianity. That is not to say that Judaism doesn’t have dogma or doctrine. It is rather to say that, for Jews, the essence of the thing is a doing, an action. Your faith might come and go, but your practice ought not waver . . . This is perhaps best explained by a midrash (a rabbinic commentary on a biblical text). This midrash explains a curious turn of phrase in the Book of Exodus: “Na’aseh v’nishma,” which means “we will do and we will hear” or “we will do and we will understand,” a phrase drawn from Exodus 24, in which the people of Israel proclaim, “All the words that God has spoken, we will do and we will hear.” The word order, the rabbis have observed, doesn’t seem to make any sense: How can a person obey God’s commandment before they hear it? But the counter-intuitive lesson, the midrash continues, is precisely that one acts out God’s commands, one does things unto God, and eventually, through the doing, one will come to hear and understand and believe. In this midrash, the rabbis have offered an apology for spiritual practice, for doing (Lauren Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath).

“One day, rummaging through a dusty old attic in a small Austrian town, a collector comes across a faded manuscript containing many pages of music. It is written for the piano. Curious, he takes it to a dealer. The dealer phones a friend, who appears half an hour later. When he sees the music he becomes excited, then puzzled. This looks like the handwriting of Mozart himself, but it isn’t a well-known piece. In fact, he’s never heard it. More phone calls. More excitement. More consultations. It really does seem to be Mozart. And, though some parts seem distantly familiar, it doesn’t correspond to anything already known in his works.

. . . What they are looking as it is indeed by Mozart. It is indeed beautiful. But it’s the piano part of a piece that involves another instrument, or perhaps other instruments. By itself it is frustratingly incomplete. A further search of the attic reveals nothing else that would provide a clue. The piano music is all there is, a signpost to something that was there once and might still turn up one day.”