The Devil You Say

 

The Devil You Say

 

1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11

God sustains those who suffer 

 

4:12 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.

 

4:13 But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.

 

4:14 If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.

 

5:6 Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time.

 

5:7 Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.

 

5:8 Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.

 

5:9 Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering.

 

5:10 And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.

 

5:11 To him be the power forever and ever. Amen.

 

Many moons ago, a Black comedian—Flip Wilson—crafted a character who used to say, “The DEVIL made me do it!” He always got a laugh out of it, but as the years went by, we began to see people doing horrible things—even killing throngs of people in nightclubs, outdoor concert venues, schools, and even a synagogue here in Pittsburgh, because “the devil” put such a deep hatred in their hearts that ideas and bigotry mattered more than human lives. Someone has said, “The devil is in the details.” Perhaps the devil IS the details, for it is in the details that so many have lost their souls and came to believe that only THEIR “details” are the right details, or the most “spiritually correct” ones. When people act out of such strong, often deluded confidence, “devilish” things can happen, and they are usually swallowed up in them, themselves, before the debacle is all over. This is how the “devil” works. It’s important to note how this general epistle describes “the devil” as prowling like a “roaring lion.” Lions prowling as they hunt for food is perfectly normal thing; it’s nature working as nature does. What has been labeled as “the devil” works through perfectly “normal” human processes, but evil happens when they become distorted by overzealousness, misplaced passion, or are enacted “out of proper context,” kind of like letting a lion loose from a zoo, or removing it from its natural environment and dropping it off in a child’s playground. Metaphorically, this is what happens when persons’ ideas grow distorted and they act upon them. Is “the devil” for real?

 

Most of the first-century Christ followers had been Jews. The Jewish people were—and are—strict monotheists, believing in only ONE God. The famous Shema is: “Here O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD is One.” While this is why these early Jewish Christ followers had trouble grasping the “divinity” of Jesus Christ, it is also why they didn’t accept the idea that “satan” or “the devil” was in any way a god-like being, with any of the power or traits of the Eternal. (The early Gentile Christ followers were a different matter. Many of them had come from pagan traditions where they had gods for everything, so one that was a “dark-sider” would not have been unusual, in their thinking.) While the Jewish people had little to do with a “devil,” and tended to either place evil in the purview of GOD (yes, just read your Old Testament; such strict monotheists HAD to believe that their ONE God was somehow even responsible for evil events), OR in the hearts of human beings. Note that we’re not talking about random “bad events” that can happen to any of us. The Jews did NOT believe that EVERY happening had to be either caused by or “permitted” by Yahweh. Bad things can happen to good people in life, and most of the time, “evil,” either personified in a “devil” or personalized in the evil acts of an individual or a government, are not “of God.” 

 

The Christian church did extract belief in a “satan” figure, based on some of the accounts they read in scripture. Most especially, we have the “temptation of Christ” stories in the Gospels, where Jesus is put to the test by “the devil.” But again, these are just the passed-down accounts from the authors of the text, as they were NOT eyewitnesses to these events, so they could be more “theological excurses” than historical accounts of what molded and formed Jesus before he began his earthly ministry. Modern fundamentalists and certain Pentecostals have formulated very definite “doctrines” around a satanic persona—the “roaring lion” of I Peter—and even specific procedures of how to deal with “him” or to hold power over “him.” I may be starting to sound like I deny the existence of such a being, and in a way, I am, but I have my reasons, which I’ll address now.

 

First of all, “blaming” some external “perpetrator of evil” like a “satan” figure is so often used as a scapegoat to excuse evil human behavior. We humans have proven time and time again that we are quite capable of such incredible evil, from pogroms, to World Wars, to genocide, to mass shootings. These things are far worse than anything that should be attributed to some “devil,” and they are of our own doing—no “devil” needed. Furthermore, it seems each generation births its own horrors of human evil, the latest in our time being excessive, excused bigotry against persons of color, other ethnicity, or members of the LGBTQ community, as well as the near continuous “rash” of murder-suicides we see almost daily in our nation, a nation that has made an idol out of the gun, which makes such horrors so possible. Again, no “devil” needed. It would be so easy and convenient to have someone like “satan” to blame these things on, but honestly, we must take the responsibility for these devastating events. That we are capable of such things, as well as having the chutzpah to RATIONALIZE them, in many cases, should school us on the lack of need for a devil. How simple it would be to believe we could just perform some kind of “exorcism” to end such suffering! “Be GONE, Satan, in the name of JESUS!”, and everything would return to the steady state.

 

If there IS a “devil” in the world, a better name for him would be “Deceiver.” The power to deceive is an awesome and terrible thing. We are living in a time when our own national government is using deception and outright lies as a “super power” to grab and maintain a tremendous amount of power. Some of the poorist and most oppressed people have been convinced that supporting acts that increase their own suffering and disenfranchisement is what’s best. Folk who work hard to care for themselves and their families are being convinced that losing their healthcare and paying higher prices is “in the national interest” and “for their own good.” And this deception is so effective that many of these same people are wearing the symbols of their oppressors on their heads, tattooing it on their appendages, and erecting signs and banners of tribute in their front yards. That we have national leaders who perpetrate such deceptions and use them to maintain “legitimacy” may sound REALLY evil, but honestly, from a political standpoint, it’s just what “roaring lions” do, in this arena. It’s quite natural for them. That their modus operandi is so blatant and so uncontested (or so it seems), is a sign that more than “human” evil may be at work here. If there IS a devil, he is certainly in the details of this dastardly drama.

 

The writer of this text in I Peter warns believers to “resist” this devil, and by “this” devil, I mean any who would use their power to deceive to further their own agenda and feather their own nest. Down through history, countless purveyors of this “art” have effectively done this, and they have been so good at it that the “victims” they fleeced basically shouted, “Thank you, Sir, may I have another!” They, too, have engaged in petting the lion who is devouring them, even in the act of doing so. What do you think this author of scripture was warning against? In his time, it was Rome, which, under the guise of the “Pax Romana,” was enslaving and controlling the “common folk” in order to fund and preserve the “peace” of the illuminati. Is today any different? That “roaring lion” is just so beautiful, isn’t he?

 

All right, where is the GOOD NEWS here? In the big picture, it is that Jesus Christ himself flew right into the maw of the “roaring lion,” and while he endured the cross, he triumphed over the ultimate “threat” of “the devil”: death! Resurrection is the Christian belief that this “final word” on who’s in charge is NOT the final word, and its finite condemnation has no power over the grace of the Eternal, who came to rescue us, and to judge the perpetrators of this “devil/evil.” 

 

The “final word” of this Good News is that the “God of all grace” has visited us in Jesus Christ to “restore, support, strengthen, and establish” us! The collective term used in ecclesiology is “edify” the Body of Christ. Jesus Christ IS the final authority on this wonderful ministry of reconciliation, renewal, and resilience of God’s people. Those who cling to their manipulation, deception, and victimizing of the innocent (in some cases, the ignorant) will be judged by a “higher power.” Those who have been marginalized and oppressed will continue to be set free by “the God of all grace.” The “devil,” be he real, imagined, or incarnated in the selfish desires of powerful people, will be dispatched with a word, even as he was by Jesus in the temptation stories.

 

Friends, this is not just an eschatological promise—it’s for right now, for all to invoke! “Resist the devil and he will flee from you” is something that all Christ-followers have the power to do. Just don’t be surprised that when you invoke it, who leaves! There is evil masquerading as your economic, political, and even “moral” saviors, and in their hearts, they mean you no good. Resist them, for our world and our church will not recover until we do. Amen.

Entanglement

Entanglement

 

Acts 17:22-31

Paul's message to the Athenians 

 

17:22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way.

 

17:23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, 'To an unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

 

17:24 The God who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth, and does not live in shrines made by human hands,

 

17:25 nor is God served by human hands, as though God needed anything, since God himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.

 

17:26 From one ancestor he made all people to inhabit the whole earth, and God allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live,

 

17:27 so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for God and find God--though indeed God is not far from each one of us.

 

17:28 For 'In God we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we, too, are God’s offspring.'

 

17:29 "Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

 

17:30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now God commands all people everywhere to repent,

 

17:31 because God has fixed a day on which the world will be judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this God has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead."

 

 

What if I told you that science has proved the bizarre theory that two subatomic particles—photons—can be given a like charge, and then split apart as far as the East is from the West, and because of something called “quantum entanglement,” if the nearest one has its charge reversed, the other particle, with which it is entangled, will instantaneously change its charge to match? And this “entanglement” phenomenon seemingly happens at much faster than the speed of light, which the General Theory of Relativity (Einstein’s work of genius) says is impossible. Now, there are lots of “explanatory” theories as to how this may happen, the most unusual of these having to do with how the very act of observing the particles itself changes them. But how can one particle know what is happening to the other, especially if it has been sent halfway across the galaxy? This is the “magic” of quantum entanglement. I say “magic” because it is, actually. The stuff of quantum theory that has already been proven, much of it in the laboratory, has left little room for questioning its validity. The quantum understanding of the nature of existence is so “real” that we have already tapped its “magic” to build the earliest of quantum computers. I read recently that one of these “primitive” quantum computers, when fed mathematical “chum” (complex problems set up by a “regular” computer of current technology), was able to perform calculations that would have taken the current “fastest” computers over 10,000 YEARS to do, and it did them in a matter of seconds. You see, a quantum computer is not limited to the “off” and “on” binary states of current digital computers, but has all of the various quantum states as operators. Unbelievable.

 

No, I’m not going to tell you more about quantum entanglement and quantum mechanics, because most of what you have just read is all I know, and this is after years to reading about it and trying to understand it. And, believe me, most of what you have just read will be disputed, corrected, and even totally debunked by the latest of quantum theorists. I’ve already read, for example, that the “Bell’s theorem” about the entangled photons may be true because the two “particles” (and yes, there are serious questions in quantum mechanics as to whether “particles” actually exist) may not be “apart,” even when we think we have moved them thusly. Their relationship to each other, according to this wrinkle, cannot be altered, even when we think we’ve done so. Think this is weird? How about the little particle we have dubbed a QUARK? Quantum theorists tell us there are six “flavors” of Quarks they have named: up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm. These are the kinds of strangeness the just-emerging quantum computer can tap to do its magic! You think we have a problem with computers now, just imagine when they are millions of times faster, come in “flavors,” and are so “related” to each other through entanglement that we can’t turn them off. Where can we go to make any sense out of this stuff? How about the Bible…

 

Yes, the Bible. Some in the community of faith believe the Holy Spirit “inspired” the writers of the Bible to get it perfect, which is how we must interpret it and believe it. Not me. My belief in the Holy Spirit “inspiration” of the Bible comes from its postulates that sound a lot like modern Quantum physics, yet written thousands of years ago, and no, aliens weren’t involved. You know that little, modern praise ditty we sing, “Our God is an awesome God”? I like to redact it to “Our God is a Quantum God,” which is actually more awesome than the original songwriter could have imagined. 

 

If we believe God exists, and has been around for a long while, at least long enough to have been the Creator of all we are and see, then we would necessarily have to believe that God is also the author of all of this Quantum weirdness out of which we somehow exist. If I were to put my life experiences up against the Quark’s, I think I can match it, for my life has seen up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm, many times and manifest in many ways. And after 49 years dedicated to the same partner, I can say that we are close to mastering entanglement, and yet this relationship definitely has had its “strange” and “charmed” moments. Just this morning, in fact. 

 

If there is a biblical author with even a primitive scientific context to his work, it is Dr. Luke, the author of this weekend’s text. Of course, he’s reporting on what the Apostle Paul allegedly said to the gathered braintrust of the Areopagus, the Athenians who liked to parse the meaning of life. And we should not forget that Paul was highly schooled, himself a student of the great Gamaliel, so he was no piker when it came to throwing out some astute postulates to rattle his intellectual audience. Paul starts with their statue to an “Unknown God,” a kind of catchall deity they crafted as a contingency for those things not covered by the myriad other gods festooning the Areopagus. Nothing like a little educated “CYA,” as they say. However, Paul takes the “Unknown God” to extremes, suggesting this God doesn’t just exist to pick up the loose ends, but is instead the CREATOR of it all. It certainly got their attention. He tells them this God can stand alone quite well, thank you, and has no need of anything, particularly from US, whom this God actually created in the first place. This REALLY got their attention, for I’m pretty sure the Areopagus gang felt that by standing around philosophizing, they were “doing God’s work,” and were invaluable to the continuance of reality. I have to ask myself, how far have we progressed from this idea? 

 

I do happen to believe that we humans are called into a “partnership” with God to the ministry of “tikkun olam,” as our Jewish siblings would say. It means “fixing the world.” But it is God who calls us into this service, and not because God “needs” us, but because we need to take some ownership in the task. If God in genie-like fashion just fixed it for us, we would promptly “subdue” it again, if not in the name of profit, then at least power. But God doesn’t “need” us, any more than a modern parent “needs” children. (There was a time in earlier agrarian America when a fleet of children were necessary to help the subsistence farming efforts of the family, but we are long past that.) We tend to have children today for a variety of reasons, the best of which is we want a family to love, and to build into a supportive, growing, and interdependent “community.” And if we do it correctly and ethically, we might just turn our children out into the world as responsible adult citizens who will continue to engage in tikkun olamin their generation, for let’s face it, there is a lot more “fixing” to do than we can get done in our time. 

 

This “partnership” God is calling us into is not furthered by our doing the “Athenian coffee hour” kind of thing, standing around “doing theology” and making up religious rules to make disinterested others do what we believe they should be doing. We are in an era when a lot of this is going around. In our own faith of Christianity, we have more than enough “thinkers” who preach a brand of Christianity that “clearly” lays out the correct doctrines and dogmas, pontificates on the “appropriate” interpretations of scripture, and tacks the label “biblical authority” on its own version of the catchall “Unknown God.” The kind of partnership God is calling us may well be helped, not hindered, by alliances with humanists and believers of other religions who share the goal of fixing the world, not proselytizing it. 

 

In a book I’m reading right now, Unapologetic: Why despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense, by Francis Spufford, he makes a case for expanding the partnership. He quotes Irish novelist and playwright, Samuel Beckett, as defining his own atheism in a single statement, “God doesn’t exist, the bastard!” Beckett, like so many other atheists, would like to believe there IS a deity who desires all humans to live together in peace and harmony, but he just doesn’t see it, and he’s sad about that. (I found Beckett’s statement both haunting and insightful, and am still pondering it.) And while I DO believe God exists, I am tempted to echo Woody Allen’s thought that God may well be an “underachiever.” But perhaps it’s WE who are the underachievers?

 

And this brings me to my final point: entanglement. Paul, at least in Dr. Luke’s testimony here, says something quite insightful that would have grabbed the Areopagus crowd right in the groin, regarding their “Unknown God”: In God we live and move and have our being, a statement Paul attributes to one of their own poets. Talk about entanglement! Couple that with what Paul tells the Colossians, that “God is all and in all, and that which holds all things together,” and you pretty much have a decent first-century description of what the Quantum scientists are telling us. We, the creation, AND the Creator are forever entangled, and even as the quantum computer people are just scratching the earliest surface of what a quantum computer will look like, so we, as humans may just be about to embark on a cursory understanding of what this entanglement with each other, God, and the universe may look like. At the very least, it pretty much kills off the “Lone Ranger” version of religious narrative. I happen to believe that this “entangled” God DOES exist, and until we “get it” about just how entangled we all are under the sun, then WE are the bastards—the ones needing reconciliation to the model. 

 

Speaking about “under the sun,” there is the Son to be dealt with. God has “so entangled the world that God sent the only Son into the world that none should perish.” Heard something like that before? God is SO entangled with us that God Almighty sent Jesus into the human world as PART of the human world, and as soon as he was able to speak, he began connecting us to the “quantum” scriptures of the Torah and teaching us about how to live as people forever “entangled” with God and our neighbor. 

 

This text ends up talking about judgment. Why do we always connect biblical talk of “judgment” with punishment? (And yes, I know there are texts that do that, but what if this “judgment” is just an entangled God’s way of saying we would be periodically “graded” to help improve our efforts at partnering with all this fixing, redeeming, and reconciling stuff? Even Paul in this text seems to equate this judgment with the hope of the resurrection, leading me to believe that this is precisely what God wants to do, when the word “judgment” is thrown around. An “entangled” God wouldn’t “judge and punish,” but would instead “grade and correct,” for to quote the immortal Steve Smith (“Red Green”), “We are all in this together.” Maybe all those quarks, mu mesons, photons, and Higgs bosons are just following our lead? After all, Jesus DID try to teach us how to cope with all of life’s up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm moments of life! Amaze, amaze, amaze! Amen.

 

Waze

 

Waze

 

John 14:1-6

Christ the way, truth, life 

 

14:1 "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.

 

14:2 In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?

 

14:3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.

 

14:4 And you know the way to the place where I am going."

 

14:5 Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?"

 

14:6 Jesus said to him, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

 

There are a lot of electronic “gizzies” and modern innovations in the automobile these days, and I am fortunate to own a “state of the art” model. It is a fully electric car with more screens, lights, computers, and “thinking” control systems than even Captain James T. Kirk could have imagined. I heats and cools us passengers using a “heat pump,” something fairly recent on the technological horizon. The car pumps over 250 horsepower almost instantaneously through its front-wheel drive, directly from its powerful permanent magnet electric motor. It goes off like a rocket. Its two large display screens feed me more data than I can possibly use, regarding what the car is up to, and my model even has a projected, “heads-up” display, like a third-generation fighter jet. I don’t have to take my eyes off the road to take in all of the information it can feed directly to the windshield in front of me. And it’s a good thing I keep my eyes peeled on what’s ahead, because a camera is watching me, and should I let them wander away for more than about five seconds, the car vibrates my driver’s seat, and even nudges the steering wheel to center the car, if I let it drift. And there’s more. This car has something called “Super Cruise.” When traveling on one of the almost a million miles of satellite-mapped roadways, I can engage it, and the car takes over the driving. I take my hands off the wheel, and it just drives! On four-lane roads like Interstates and turnpikes, it will even detect a slower vehicle ahead, check all of its 360 degrees of camera to see if the coast is clear, will signal into the passing late, and will pass the other car, signaling and returning to the main lane of travel afterwards. As someone has said, “Amaze, amaze, amaze!” Oh, and while doing all of this passing stuff, it vibrates my seat on the left cheek to warn me it is moving into the passing lane, and then on the right cheek, when it returns to the right lane. If its internal camera sees me doing more than a few seconds of looking away, however, it vibrates the whole driver’s seat, flashes a few attention-getting lights on the steering wheel, and “kicks out,” telling me to take the wheel because I’ve been a bad boy. So no, Super Cruise does not let me check my email or surf social media, but it does allow me to relax and “leave the driving to us,” as the old Greyhound commercial used to say. We travel enough on Interstates that I am quite pleased my “gadget-mobile” has this feature! Between the extreme quiet of an electric car, a comfortable interior including a soothing sound system, and driver and passenger seats that warm your buns in the Winter and chill your cheeks in the Summer, these innovations make the journey a joy.

 

And the journey is the ticket, isn’t it? It is my conviction that our spiritual life in Christ is not only a grace-filled and Spirit-empowered one, but is built on a “journey” theology, as taught by Jesus and shown to us personally by Jesus. We know from reading the Gospels that Jesus’ life and ministry was a peripatetic one, moving from one town and region to another to encounter God’s children, offering healing, salvation, and peace. He even rode on state-of-the-art modes of transportation of his day—boats and a donkey! And on a few occasions, the scriptures use language that sure makes it sound like he pops in and out of threatening venues as only the Son of God can (there’s that “Star Trek” vibe again…) When Jesus is risen from the dead, the angel at the tomb tells the women to let the men know that the risen Jesus “has gone on ahead to Galilee,” and that they can find him there. Even after such a momentous event, Jesus hits the road again. The New Testament, from the Gospels through Revelation, is filled with journeys, journey language, and journey theology. The disciples, history tells us, scattered and took the Gospel message with them wherever they went. Some traditions have Thomas in India and Mary, the mother of Jesus, going as far as Spain. We know that Paul was a traveler. Why, his first encounter with Jesus of Nazareth was on the road to Damascus. The early church and its principal leaders were a “portable” bunch, not confining themselves to any one location. Of course they were following Jesus’ command to “go into all the world and make disciples,” but I think there’s more to it than that. They were also sent to “encounter” new people, to build and encourage community among believers wherever they journeyed, and to keep the work of the Holy Spirit “portable,” too. I think God knew that if the church too quickly became an “institution,” it would bog down and lose its direction, the “vision” of where it was going. 

 

While Dara and I are approaching our 49^th year together, and have loved to take car trips all along the way, “navigating” and keeping on course has often been a sore spot of said journeys. Dara loves maps, and is our map reader, but as we all know, maps can be outdated, confusing—especially when there is new construction—and not able to warn of hazards on the road ahead. Being an incurable gadget freak, for Christmas many years ago, my loving family bought me one of the very first GPS car navigation units called a “Tom Tom.” Suddenly, we could set this thing on the dashboard, dial in our destination, and it would speak the directions and give us a little three-inch digital representation of the road ahead. Amaze, amaze, amaze! Eventually though, a few cars later, this “navigation” became built right into the car, and with a larger screen. Now, it could tell us where gas stations and rest stops were! The journey became easier and so much more fun, especially for a technology geek like me. Initially, this “tech” was a downer for my co-pilot, who to this day keeps her stash of state road maps up to date, thanks to the AAA, but rarely do we use them to plot our course. 

 

In this weekend’s text from John 14, verse six has become rather a famous “memory verse,” especially in the evangelical community: Jesus said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” This is a very important verse, but not for the reason many think it is. There are those who point to John. 14:6 as “proof” that Jesus is saying that he is the “exclusive” way to the Father, which they take to mean that he negates all other religions and theological perspectives on salvation. Jews? Muslims? Unitarians? Sorry guys, you’re out in the cold unless you “confess Jesus.” I don’t think this is what is being said in this verse at all! Look at it again. The language is JOURNEY language! Jesus is “the way,”  meaning he will give directions and lead the journey. Jesus is “the truth,” which is not objective here, but an on-going “truth-finding and learning” journey which will be guided by Jesus. And Jesus is “the life.” It is this last phrase that gives us the larger meaning of the whole clause—Jesus, the peripatetic Jesus, the “going on before you to Galilee” Jesus—will lead us in the way and the truth, all along the journey of our lives. Not only is this not “exclusive” to the Christian, but promises that for each of us, Jesus will be our guide, and he will invite ALL PERSONS to journey along, regardless of cultural beliefs, religious expressions, or even if one currently has ANY faith at all. This is a verse about God’s desire that “none should perish,” and that all of life is a journey wherein these truths shall be revealed to us along the way. Never was it intended to be a “litmus test” for who is “in” and who is “out.” And look at the objective—“the Father.” We’re not talking about heaven here, friends, we’re talking about seeking knowledge of God the Creator, and our relationship TO God, and it will be opened to us as we journey along with Jesus, and with others. 

 

Have you ever heard of the Camino de Santiago (literally “Way of St. James”)? To quote Google, it is a “network of ancient pilgrim routes across Europe, mainly Northern Spain, culminating at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. It was established WAY back in the 9^th Century. Each year, hundreds of people take this “Camino” hiking journey that takes between four and five weeks to experience spiritual enlightenment and grow closer to God through the experiences of the others who have gone on the journey before. I have personally known a number of folk who have taken this “Camino,” and believe me, it was transformational for them. [Incidentally, there is a wonderful movie about an American going on a Camino called, interestingly, “The Way,” and it stars Martin Sheen. I HIGHLY recommend it!] What is so powerful about the Camino is that it LIVES OUT the Journey theology of Jesus, himself! However, you don’t have to go to Spain and walk the 100k of the Camino de Santiago to start living your Christian life as a peripatetic journey, as opposed to a collection of biblical/theological/doctrinal rules or precepts that “must be obeyed.” Jesus is the journey guy, not the judging rule-maker, and like the Camino walkers, he is engaged in a timeless, worldwide journey to make sure that God’s desire that “none should perish” becomes a reality. The journey invites ALL to join in, with the necessary enlightenment and “commitment” coming in stages, as we walk along together! THIS is what John 14:6 is trying to tell us, Dear Ones.

 

One of the latest new “add-ons” to my car’s fancy navigation system is something called “WAZE.” Waze lets us know if there is a hazard ahead, including something in the roadway, construction, slowed traffic, and accident, or even a policeman monitoring along the road. Waze even suggests alternate routes, if the hazard or inconvenience is bad enough to really hold us up. If we stay on the route, and come upon the issue in question, it asks us if “it is still there,” to which we can answer, and it then can keep its warning to those on the journey after us, current and helpful. What a wonderful metaphor for how Jesus, through the “WAZE” of the Holy Spirit, guides our journey, getting us around the rough spots, keeping us on course, and using our experience and feedback of same to help those yet to come! How wonderful! All I can say is, AMAZE, AMAZE, AMAZE, WAZE! And to you, an AMEN!