Metropolitan United Church

   Which is more important, belief or response? This decision seems to be the great watershed. To ride the rivers of belief takes you to a sea of structures, to systems meant to get you through life and beyond. To slide down the waterfalls of response brings you to an ocean of gathered experiences, and to a host of unrelated people who have reached out, touched the moment and changed their world.

   Often the two groups are suspicious of each other. Responders find Believers guarded and rigid in their social philosophies. If it isn't in the belief system it is heretical and must be shut down. Believers find Responders to be unpredicatable, sitting loose to established values and practices, a threat to order and good judgement. It is Establishment versus Counter-culture, Empire against the Rebels.

    As I read the Gospels I see both possiblities modelled. Jesus, (if we can trust anything in the texts as actually coming from his life), seems to have been know for his response. He wades into the lives of hopeless people, burdened with a mountain of trouble, and by his presence and touch gives them a way to a new start. Although he is shown worshipping in the local synagogue and teaching in the Temple, he sits loose to the system they respresent, and has harsh things, to say to those who hide behind it for their power and way of life. (We must be cautious here because the writers and editors of the Gospels may have structured their story-telling to reflect a Saviour that names where they, themselves are, and take a heavenly poke at their systemic enemies.)

    When the Gospels swing over to the Passion and Death of the Messiah, a system of belief comes into play. Early church theology in the Gospels, Acts, and Letters of Paul, lays out a well-developed belief system by which we are received or rejected in Heaven. Although we are warned, a little, that "faith without works is dead", centuries of church history have seen us hone sharp that belief system, building empires on it, accepting and rejecting tribes and nations with it. The balance has swung so far over towards the gridlock of belief, that Jesus, "the Responder", takes a very distant second-place to "Jesus, the Eternal Godhead who loves the High Church and condemns all critics and competitors."

    Each of us stands at the high point of decision. We must wrestle to choose which watercourse we will slide down to express our lives. To me, more and more, the choice of belief is the easy one. It may even be the cheap and cheesy one. We can pick and choose among the rich morsels of the Christian church and its systems, fill our plate, then hoard our feast against the assaults of time, change, opinions, controvery, and the cry of a world longing to be touched and healed. "I've got my faith, too bad about your situation!" 

    Meanwhile the world of response calls us at a deeper and more natural level. It cries, "What do you see, hear, feel? What do you need to do in order to be alive and to make a difference? What values go deeper than any system or nation? What level of courage do you need to give those values their day in the sun?"

    That is a scarey option. There is no certainty, no guarantee of truth, success or safety, no hiding place. Traditional home fires may turn us away. Those we most love may shut us down. Those we dare to hear and touch may stab us in the heart. Yet these things ring with an authority deeper than any four-square system of belief. They have about them the freshness of real people, alive in a real world. They offer such a stark and surprising alternative to all the other half-measures we settle for that, when we see them, we dare to call their story a "Gospel", and those who participate in them  "Saints and Angels," "Children of God".