Busch Light and Learning to Belong

The other night I stumbled upon a tail-gate at the Grove Park Inn. It's not the first place I'd expect to find a group of burly men grabbing cans of Busch Light from a cooler. The Grove Park Inn is bougie—Presidents stay there. Retirees sit on balconies overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains drinking twenty dollar cocktails. But it turns out that Duke Power sent down a group of linemen from Indiana to help the state of North Carolina deal with the hurricane Florence aftermath and put them up for a few nights in the nicest place in Asheville. On this day, these ordinary, beer-drinking linemen from Indiana were the guests of honor.

The contours of belonging change when a hurricane is barreling through your state. Status disappears and suddenly we belong together—all of us—and not because we subscribe to a particular religion or political ideology or we have a specific race and socio-economic status. We belong together because we all have beating hearts—we are human beings created for community.

It’s unfortunate that we’re at our best only when we are most in danger.

The Church might learn something here, in the midst of the wrath from wind and water, about the ways we place parameters on belonging. Jesus said that the  kingdom of God is like a table—and I suspect it to be one where a can of Busch Light is sitting next to a flute of champagne.

Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence notes how we've created two different frameworks for belonging: “believe-behave-belong” and “belong-behave-believe.” The Church has long operated with the former, or the assumption that one’s belonging in a Christian community only takes place after one’s beliefs and behaviors are in order.  Churches place strict boundaries on what we must believe—whether that’s the Nicene-Chalcedonian Creeds or the Fundamentals or a ‘literal’ resurrection—and then you must set your behaviors in line with those beliefs. Get your head and heart straightened out, a pastor will put some water on you in the name of the Trinity, and you’re one of us. 

Too often Christian orthodoxy often functions as nothing more than an ‘in-out’ boundary marker instead of the Church’s historic endeavor to share the best and most faithful kind of news of how God was in Christ restoring the world unto God. And part of the fracture in the Methodist Church today is a result of a framework that tells us we can belong to each other only when we believe and behave in uniformity.

This isn’t good news. There are profound cultural, experiential, and personal reasons for believing what we do and to demand a strict and unwavering belief in a set of propositions as a prerequisite for belonging is antithetical to Gospel. I’ve noted before that believing harder doesn’t work.  After all, Jesus didn’t ask his followers to memorize propositions; he asked a clan of disciples to drop their nets and follow even though they would fail to fully grasp their Rabbi’s identity and significance. Still, somehow our intellect has become the chief signifier to our belonging. 

We'd even do well to ask the question whether our actions are a better signifier of our identity than our beliefs. Soren Kierkegaard muddies the water when he asks whether a ‘believer’ who lives in ‘untruth’ is more truthful than an ‘idol worshipper’ who lives ‘in truth’. He writes this:

“If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol—where, then, is there more truth? The one prays in truth to God although he is worshiping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and is therefore in truth worshiping an idol.”

As followers of the way, we’re also to pay at least equal attention to our discipleship as our mental assent to dogma. And if that’s the case, there are plenty among us  who talk a game that we don’t walk. What’s more faithful for a  Jesus follower?

Tickle shares that a postmodern understanding of religious believing and Christian discipleship reverses the order. Let’s start with the assumption that we belong to one another and then we can brew our theologies together as we continue along the Way of following this crucified and risen Savior. But the only precondition to your acceptance into the family of God is God—God loves you and there’s nothing you can do, or should I say believe, to earn that. Grace is enough.  This is true whether you believe in classical theism or the latest fashion. Your identity as God’s beloved is not dependent upon a belief in a particular metaphysic about Jesus’ divine and human atoms. God can even use our brothers and sisters who don’t believe in a literal resurrection to participate in God’s healing of the world.

Sure, belief matters. To speak otherwise is to ignore the schism and death suffered as a resistance to bad God-talk. Beliefs, especially those founded in the ancient creeds, give us our location, boundaries, and frameworks to profess our faith, begin building theologies, and state historically unhelpful ways to speak about God. We don’t get to reinvent the wheel and that’s incredibly liberating, even if we're still tasked with theologizing in our own historic situatedness. Still, doctrine functions formationally when it's at its best and not as the primary or most important determinant of your relation to God and the Church. 

This is the good news: you are more than your beliefs.
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 We might garner something from our sacramental theology here, particularly baptism, because it joins us to a community. We baptize infants and not because of their intellect, but because God claims us before we are able to rationally comprehend and pronounce a creed. Belonging is always primary because we depend upon a community that promises to join us on our way toward our affirmation of faith. Children will grow and then start asking really hard questions about the Christian faith. Don't be scared of the questions; God's not. The great tradition and its commentators will be your friends as you develop your beliefs together. There’s a sense, as Anne Lamott quotes Ram Daas, that “we’re all just walking each other home."

Shall our churches be more exclusive than Jesus? Luke’s Gospel gives us this story: there was one Sabbath when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, or a place with people who likely believed all of the right things and tried to elbow their ways into the place of honor. During the meal Jesus told them a story, “When someone invites you to dinner, don’t take the place of honor. Somebody more important than you might have been invited by the host. Then he’ll come and call out in front of everybody, ‘You’re in the wrong place. When you’re invited to dinner, go and sit at the last place. What I’m saying is, If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face."  (The Message)

 In God’s kingdom, we’ll surprised by who gets the spot of honor so we should never be too confident with our lines of demarcation. It’s often the outsider, the misfit, and the excluded who end up getting Jesus’ attention first. If the Grove Park Inn taught me anything that night its that we're all in desperate need of belonging and not only when a hurricane is colliding against the coast of our country.

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