The Sauntering Pilgrim

Our healing, perfect integrity in our relationship with God, the realization of life in perfect harmony with the whole of creation, is not something we can attain by anything we do. It’s not a goal to be achieved, nor is it a future reward for right behavior today. It is a pure, unconditional, contemporary gift from God, offered to anyone who trusts it enough to accept it as the central reality and guiding principle of daily life.

Read that again. In that paraphrase of St. Paul (Rom. 3:19-28) is the whole gospel of Jesus Christ.

As I began preparing these ruminations, it dawned on me I was producing a little dissertation on the Protestant Reformation, the 506th anniversary of which we observe today. I was starting to explain how the church kept tying up God’s gift of grace in rules and requirements and was selling it for a price. I was explaining how Martin Luther wanted to reform the institution and make it more accountable to the spirit of God’s gift.

The whole thing was becoming complicated, academic, and frankly, pretty dull even for me. So I pulled out Occam’s Razor, the principle that among competing ways of explaining something, the simplest explanation is generally the best. Here’s my take on it in a nutshell.

The Protestant Reformation, I believe, was essentially a shift of authority for our relationship with God, from external to internal, from the institution of the church and the growing weight of tradition to the integrity of the converted disciple of Christ living in community with other converted disciples of Christ. Our relationship with God, Luther believed, depended not upon grace meted out by the institution for a price. It depends upon grace freely given by God and received by faith in fellowship with other believers.

That’s an oversimplification, but I believe it gets to the point Jeremiah was making in describing the new covenant God would make with us. “I will put my law within them,” he heard God say, “and I will write it on their hearts. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer. 31:33-34 sel.). Eugene Peterson paraphrased that last part this way: “They will no longer go around setting up schools to teach each other about God. They’ll know me first-hand, the dull and the bright, the smart and the slow (The Message).

The shift from external to internal authority can sometimes be hard to imagine, so here’s a personal example that illustrates what I mean. I spent my childhood and high-school years with an emotionally and physically abusive father, and I learned at an early age that the best way to keep peace with him was to be the person he expected me to be. I externalized the authority for being who I was and gave it to him. As I grew into adulthood, I began to reclaim authority over my own life, and I began to recognize and express my own innate, personal identity. As a result, the problems I had in relating to authority figures in a healthy way began to disappear. I began to live authentically. Authority over my life shifted from external to internal.

And here’s a professional example. In seminary, when I was first learning the business of being a pastor and preacher, I relied heavily on scholarly commentaries and church tradition to develop my sermons. Now, more than forty years later, I still use commentaries but not as much, and I still respect the tradition of the church in context, but they have become secondary resources. Most of all I rely on the word of God, the basic principles of life, that are written on my heart, encoded in my spiritual DNA, as I discover it in sharing my faith with others. I feel I’m working from an inner authenticity and authority unlike anything any book can hold.

Ralph Waldo Emerson must have had Jeremiah in mind when he wrote in the introduction to his essay Nature: “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? The sun shines to-day also. There are new lands, new [persons], new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

Growing into an original relation to the universe, embracing a philosophy of insight and not of tradition, nurturing a religion of revelation to us and not the history of someone else’s – I believe that’s the best way to celebrate the Reformation today – by following St. Paul’s urging and working out our own salvation with fear and trembling, knowing that God is at work in us (Phil. 2:12-13), and by following the example of the early Christians, who devoted themselves to study, fellowship, sharing common meals, and praying together (Acts 2:42). In opening their lives to each other, they opened themselves to God.

What Jeremiah envisioned, I believe, is this: the word of God that frames our life and is our focus will no longer to be found in a book. Nor will it be found in an institution or a tradition, nor in anything outside ourselves. It will no longer be written on tablets of stone, external, objective, unchangeable. The living word of God will be met in our daily experience of life. It will be subjective, written on the human heart, on flesh and blood, something that grows with us and matures with us. And it will be the fruit of a living relationship with God, born of our experience of ecstasy and struggle as we share the life given to us by the grace of God. ▪