Spirituality Column #359
October 1, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters
 
“Complaining never helps us find God.” – Pope Francis, August 2013

I am a Jesus-first, Bible-believing Evangelical Christian, and also a bit of a gym-rat when it comes to religious news and commentary.

So it caught my full attention recently when the media reported that Pope Francis, six months into his papacy, declared with a possibly negative insinuation that the Catholic Church was “obsessed with abortion, gay marriage and contraception.”

Imagine, a Pope putting God above secular culture and political correctness.

I have a BA in journalism and my favorite definition for “news” is, “The news is what’s not supposed to happen.”  In the spirit of that definition, Popes aren’t supposed to minimize “abortion, gay marriage and contraception.”  But living daily with, and being sensitive to, the characteristic liberal agnostic slant and frequent technical ignorance of the mainstream media when it comes to all things religious, I hastened beyond the headlines to discover what the Pope actually said.

And as it turns out, Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Bishop of Rome, actually did say that.  It was in an unprecedented one-on-one interview conducted over three separate sessions in August, at the Vatican, by an Italian magazine editor (and brother Jesuit priest) at the behest of the U.S. Jesuit magazine, America.

The lengthy interview titled “A Big Heart Open to God” (link) was released Sept. 19 in 16 Jesuit journals worldwide including the post-dated Sept. 30 issue of America.  It covers the gamut of Church issues, doctrine, theology, cultural challenges, the Pope’s personality, tastes and pastoral concerns.  I read all 10,000 words.

My takeaway?  I think Christians everywhere should 1) read the actual interview before passing judgment and 2) applaud the Pope for his priorities.

The Pope sees the Church as a “field hospital” where the wounded and broken are healed and loved, not berated and punished.   That’s what Jesus did.  The Pope steadfastly champions Church teaching, says it’s a mistake for her to complain about culture, and says the Church’s time, energy, and spiritual capital should be primarily focused on the Glory of God and human salvation offered only through Jesus Christ.

My Evangelical friends likely wonder why I’m talking about the Pope, and my Catholic friends likely wonder why this is any of my business.  Let’s just say the Pope’s message covers several important Christian basics.

He’s not promoting the acceptance of sin; the Pope is extolling Christians to have compassion for sinners – all of us – including, he emphasizes, himself.

The Pope is telling us, without complaining, that Jesus is the best company we can find.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recommends 1) having a dictionary handy when digesting the Pope’s interview, 2) reading America’s editorial The Pope’s Progress, and 3) viewing The New York Times’ story (excellent overview).

Spirituality Column #358
September 24, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Spirituality Column #357
September 17, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Spirituality Column #356
September 10, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

We live in a culture that doesn’t want to know what we really think.

But Jesus Christ is a Savior who does.

In each of the first three Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke (the “Synoptic” Gospels, meaning “similar”) – Jesus asks the disciples who other people, the crowds, think He is.  Each time it is followed closely by the most important question in the entire Bible.  Jesus asks the disciples directly:

Spirituality Column #355
September 3, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Too often too many of us think Jesus is smaller than He is.

I have often written in this column about how I attended church as a child, learned quite a bit about how to do the liturgy (religious service) as an altar boy through my early teens, and then by high school drifted out of the open church doors and away from a Jesus it seems I never properly knew.

In those early years I “understood” Jesus – who I now know is the Christ, the Savior, and the Son of the living, eternal, creator God – to be contained within what I saw and heard in church.  I was a child with little intellectual ignition toward imputing a bigger and proper picture of this enormous, righteous, unlimited, loving, merciful God, his servant Son and comforting Spirit.  My immature mind saw only the church “package” of Jesus.

In my ignorance, Jesus looked finite, contained and limited; safely tucked into an ecclesiastical box.

That made it easy to walk away.  And I did.

But let’s not knock church.  The Church is the Bride of Christ, a biblical  image of marriage that speaks to love, longing, patience, joy and completeness in relationship with the Bridegroom (John 3:29).  But all that is easily lost on an arrogant teenager, self-absorbed young adult, and a self-sufficient “I am the master of my fate” thirty-something career professional.

No smallish “God in a box” was worth my time.  Jesus seemed both a personal and cultural complication: an anchor I didn’t want, a sail I couldn’t rig.

I couldn’t explain it so I didn’t want it.

Three decades after falling away, I randomly attended church one Sunday.  It was Sept. 2, 2001.  My elder son Eric, then entering eighth grade, had inquired about going to church.  I was neither looking for nor expecting a revelation; I was just answering, in the active, fatherly affirmative, my son’s curiosity.

Yet for no reason I could understand, the Jesus I had relegated to the shadows of my intellect and emotion exploded into a bright light with which I was fascinated and a real person toward whom I was powerfully drawn.  Faith suddenly made sense.  I was now listening (Mark 9:7).  God wound up answering questions I didn’t know I had, and teaching me lessons I would never forget.

Jesus, I realized, isn’t someone about whom one learns and moves on; Jesus is about living life in continually growing, uniquely personal and ultimately eternal relationship with God.

And that it is a life-diminishing mistake to put Jesus in a box.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) figures we shouldn’t put ourselves in a box, either.  BTW, today Eric works in Dallas and is also a Young Life volunteer.

Spirituality Column #354

By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column #353
August 20, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

In my summer reading I encountered Oxford theology professor Alister McGrath’s assessment that the force and clarity of C.S. Lewis’s Christian apologetics were due in large part to Lewis’s sophisticated literary understanding of mythology.

That’s right, Christianity and mythology combined in a sensible and thought-provoking essay, “A Gleam of Divine Truth: The Concept of Myth in Lewis’s Thought”, in McGrath’s book,The Intellectual Life of C.S. Lewis.

Lewis (1898-1963) famously authored the descriptive Mere Christianity, the satirical Screwtape Letters, the classic children’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia, and several other works that shed broad, accessible and reasonable understanding of the Christian faith onto the 20^th Century intellectual scene.

Our culture has long understood “myth” and “mythology” to mean either “things that are not real” or “a primitive way of understanding things.”  Lewis, as an atheist in his mid-teens through late 20s, himself described faith in terms of untrue, non-rational, primitive “mythology.”  But in his early 30s, following a period that included intense discussion with close friend, fellow scholar, and later Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, Lewis reluctantly but irreversibly came to terms with a deep, personal faith that declared the reality of Christianity.

Lewis, from circa 1931 on, publicly presented a consistently logical and rational portrait of Christianity.  It wasn’t something imaginary and unreal but Truth requiring our greatest, spirit-driven human faculties of imagination, myth, and reality to comprehend the idea of an external, omniscient, omnipotent, creative God who through Jesus Christ is as intimately personal to each of us as our own psyches, souls and personalities.

McAlister writes, “Lewis came to see that myths possess an innate capacity to expand the consciousness and imaginations of their readers.  A myth awakens imaginatively a longing for something that lies beyond the grasp of reason.”

While I find Lewis’s journey to Christian faith and development as a world-renowned author fascinating, it is this idea of de-mythologizing our popular but errant cultural concept of Christian “myth” that I think most brightly shines persuasive, contemporary light into the unseen mysteries of God’s deepest truths.

Twice in Matthew 6 Jesus refers to God the Father as “unseen.”  In 2 Corinthians 4:18, the Apostle Paul is describing eternal glory and says, “so we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

Many believing Christians, just like secular doubters, mistakenly insist on defining and “seeing” every bit of their faith rather than accepting the unseen, undefined and yet boundary-less, elegant, true mythology of God’s inexplicably infinite glory.

That acceptance, that trust, defines real faith.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), like Lewis, sees Jesus as imaginative, not imaginary.