THE LAST RIVER MILE

Thoughts near the take-out.

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GEOFF POSEGATE

Retired United Methodist pastor and leadership coach.

  • GOD’S HEART BREAKS FOR EVERY CHILD, ON EVERY SIDE

    “God’s heart breaks for every child, on every side.” – from The Deaconess Community

    Two years ago yesterday Hamas militants launched a vicious attack into Israeli settlements. I listened yesterday to podcasts featuring two fathers. One was an Israeli taken hostage, who was released and returned home only to find that his children had been slaughtered in the assault. The other was a Palestinian man, whose only daughter has been killed in a recent Israeli rocket attack into Gaza.

    As in any conflict, there are voices claiming that God is fully on one side or the other in the midst of the killing. To me, one of the worst of human blasphemies is to make presumptions about which flag God has chosen to wave when the guns are firing. Even in wars in which it may seem obvious to us which outcome God would favor (World War II, for example), it remains dangerous to declare, “God is completely on OUR side!”

    This is not just because God is not reducible to any particular political position. More than that, God has declared which “side” he is on, regardless of what any of us decide about God. “God is close to the brokenhearted…” (Psalm 13:18.) God sides with both grieving fathers noted about, and with all who are the “acceptable collateral damage” of warfare. God is a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows. (Psalm 68:5.) God chooses to side with all who have loved ones ripped from them because of designs of any who claim they have chosen the righteous path. God is with those who are deemed the least valuable of humanity in the eyes of international politics (Matthew 28:40), even as they may be little more than a blip on a newsfeed for those of us who happen to be in safety and comfort.

    If I claim to follow Jesus, I forfeit the right to say that God is on my “side” to the exclusion of others. God is on the side of every human being drawing breath, especially those who are treated as expendable…especially innocent, suffering children.

    I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.

  • JESUS FOR ME; JESUS FOR OTHERS

    It occurred to me the other day that my faith may have come full circle.

    When I was a child, about two years before the invention of dirt, my parents took me to Sunday School at a large church in the suburban St. Louis, Missouri area. One of my earliest memories there is hearing the phrase, “Love one another.” Vague as that may have been to me at the time, I remember making the connection between this Jesus guy and love. He was the link between how much God loved me and the way I was suppose to love other people. Even Jesus’ death and resurrection, frightening as all that was to four and five-year-old kids, somehow expressed this uncommon level of love. Without fully understanding all this, I remember liking it. Our longing from birth is to be loved, after all.

    As time went on, though, I began to hear more emphasis on specific benefits Jesus offered. This became a long list: getting to go to heaven, getting various specific blessings, getting problems solved, receiving healing, getting rescued from dire situations, and a host of other perks. I even started to hear Jesus invoked for getting your team to win on the playing field, getting an election to turn out the way you want it, and getting your country to win a war. It seemed to me that many people connected themselves to Jesus just for the personal fringe benefits of that connection.

    This no doubt contributed to the short time I spent away from organized religion. I just wasn’t very impressed by something that boiled down to little more than gaining reward and avoiding punishment. If that’s all it is, I thought, how is a follower of Jesus any different than Pavlov’s dog? Did Jesus go to the cross just so we would respond the right way and behave correctly?

    I am more impressed by those drawn to Jesus, those who exemplified Jesus, and those who promoted Jesus apart from any personal benefit to themselves. Google St. Francis of Assisi. That’s an example of someone immersed in God’s love and radiating God’s love apart from any personal gain. It’s not that certain benefits of a relationship with Jesus aren’t there. But they are not the primary motivation or the main aim.

    I’m impacted by a character in the Bible, Job, who lost any and all outward benefits and blessings. He said, “Though he (God) slay me, yet will I hope in him…” (Job 15:13.) What would it be like to have faith like that? I once heard someone ask this discussion question: “Do you love God and love others so much that you would give up your own salvation so someone else could have it?” (This is a hypothetical question: salvation doesn’t work this way!) What would it be like to not only not be motivated by the perks of a relationship with Jesus, but to be willing to give t up those benefits up or another?

    Since I’ve retired I’ve spent a lot of time with the writings and thoughts of those who are in the contemplative Christian trajectory: Richard Rohr, James Finley, Brian McLaren and others. For them, God as the embodiment and definition of foundational love undergirds and defines everything and everyone. They speak of being welcomed so deep into this love that one can’t help but long for everyone to experience it and know it. It is to hunger for and to be enveloped in a love that the circumstances of the world cannot give, nor can they take it away.

    So, it’s almost like I have circled back to the faith of my childhood, and yet entered into it as if for the first time. Pealing everything else back, it’s about loving God and loving others as God loves us, made known in Jesus. Everything else answers to this.

    I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.

  • THE “ENEMY WITHIN”

    “The fastest, easiest way to galvanize people together is to give them something to hate.” – Bill Posegate (among others)

    My dad was a veteran, who loved God and who loved his country. (In that order, with the latter answerable to the former.) He grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, and he believed in the power of a free democracy to withstand unchecked authoritarianism. From him I learned to value a society in which differing opinions are not only accepted, but expected. Dad liked the idea of political opponents fiercely defending their views, but respecting each other as “worthy adversaries.”

    One thing my late father would not tolerate is opposing parties labeling each other as “the enemy within.” He would have pointed out to me how many totalitarian regimes in history have gained popular power by pinpointing a particular group or viewpoint as “the enemy within.” To be sure, any nation has real threats within its borders, bent on that nation’s downfall. But I fear the line is blurring between that small number, and the vast number of citizens who love the United States of America but who do not agree with an administration at any given point in history. Political opposition and “enemy of the nation” have become interchangeable. That, my father pointed out, is dangerous territory.

    Those of us who have chosen to be Jesus-followers have forfeited the right to demonize opposition. We are under the mandate of Matthew 5:43-44. Hard as this is, we have neighbors to love more than we have enemies to defeat.

    Any human movement built on vanquishing enemies is doomed to die. Pick any empire on earth built on force at any point in history: The Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottomans, the Aztecs, the British Empire, the Third Reich, etc., etc. Where are they all now? They have drifted off into the increasingly waning dust of historical record. But the empire built on love, the empire forgiving the crucifiers, the empire that doggedly sees every human being as worthy of the life, death, resurrection, and promised return of the God’s own Son refuses to die.

    That doesn’t happen by labeling opponents as “the enemy within.”

    I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.

  • MASS SHOOTINGS AS A SYMPTOM

    If I’m on a canoe float on a river and my canoe keeps turning over, that’s a symptom that something is wrong. I’m not maintaining balance in the vessel, weight in the canoe is poorly distributed, I’m not leaning correctly in turns, the person in the bow and I are not in sync, I’m guiding us into the “V” in the rapids… something or some combination of factors is working against a good float. The last thing I want to do is to just ignore that it keeps happening, put up with it, and go from one swamping to another.

    In the health of an individual human being, if a symptom persists or increases in severity or frequency, to ignore it, to just endure it, or to dismiss it is denial. Denial of symptoms usually doesn’t end well.

    Think of the massive prevalence of gun violence of all kinds and mass shootings in particular as a symptom in the organism which is our great nation. Something is terribly wrong. In schools, stores, churches, public settings, political rallies, concerts…whatever the virus is, it is spreading. It seems to me that all of us are participating in a kind of denial. We respond to every event the same way. There’s a flurry of outrage, sadness, anger, blaming, finger-pointing, polarized presumption of causation, and demands for action (from someone other than us). Then we settled back into business as usual until the next one happens. Our programmed response follows a predictable trajectory, becomes in fact a way to avoid doing anything, and changes nothing. How is that not having a symptom and in effect denying it? We wouldn’t practice such denial on a canoe float. We shouldn’t engage in such denial with a person’s health. Why are we willing to practice denial with innocent people, including our own children and grandchildren?

    I sure don’t know how to address this deadly symptom. But somehow we need to work together (yes; right and left, conservative and progressive, TOGETHER), to focus on the complexity that is causing it and to actually address it. What we’re doing now, or actually not doing, is not working. The overworked cliche is nonetheless true – insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results.

    I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.

  • ENOUGH?

    Think about how much of American life depends on the presumption of “not enough.”

    Marketing has to convince each of us that we must correct the “not enough” in our lives. You don’t have enough money. Your car isn’t new enough. Your house isn’t big enough. You don’t have enough stuff. Your bandwidth isn’t strong enough. You haven’t experienced enough. You haven’t scrolled on your phone enough. And that phone isn’t current enough. If we suddenly, magically had enough, economies would crash.

    “Not enough” has driven much of human history. Rulers and governments lived in fear of not exercising enough power. Nations and tribes scrambled for enough resources and space. If another kingdom had more than yours, then yours had “not enough”, and no price tag of human life was too high to pay to achieve enough.

    “Not enough” surrounds and measures every human being. You’re not smart enough, successful enough, pretty enough, popular enough, influential enough. Ask most people whatever their “enough” is and they don’t feel that they have it.

    Even faith can be infected with the “not enough” virus. Your faith isn’t strong enough. You’re not praying hard enough or often enough. You don’t go to church enough. You’re not saved enough. You don’t act religious enough. No wonder the number of people self-reporting no religious affiliation continues to skyrocket in this country. Religion becomes just one more thing telling us that we’re not enough.

    The great Franciscan thinker and author, Richard Rohr, suggests that the truly radical nature of the good news of Jesus the Christ is this: We have been declared enough. Simply through the enormity of the unimaginable love of the God who breathed life into each of us, we are enough. Enough is not something we can earn, deserve, or anticipate. It is given us. Jesus the crucified and risen is the embodiment of God’s power over all that would define any of us as not enough.

    Is it any wonder that the majority of those drawn in wonder to Jesus in the first century were those who had been told all their lives that they were “not enough” by the hierarchies that ruled and defined them? No wonder Jesus was (is) so dangerous.

    What would it be like if the good you do or could do wasn’t about trying to overcome not being enough, but rather was done precisely because you ARE enough? How would your life change if you truly believed that God in Christ has gifted you and everyone around you with being enough?

    I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.

  • The Last Mile Paddling

    I went on my first canoe float trip on an Ozark Missouri stream at twelve years old, in 1965. That started a love affair with canoeing and kayaking that has lasted sixty years. That first float covered about 90 miles on the Current River. On my very first day in a canoe on a river our trained paddling group covered thirty-two miles. (I have NEVER canoed that much in one day since!)

    Experienced floaters in my region will recognize stream names like the Current, Jack’s Fork, the North Fork of the White River, the Spring River, The Meramec, Huzzah Creek, the Courtois (pronounce “Cut-away” by canoeists, for some reason), the Big Piney, the Little Piney, the Gasconade, and others. I’ve been on them all. Most of my floats have been day trips, with a few overnighters. Generally, my float trips have covered anywhere from five-to-seven miles up to fifteen miles or so in a day. As I age, the length of time on the water leans shorter.

    In my experience, the last mile or so of a canoe trip creates an interesting phenomenon. Most paddlers get tired by that point, and they’re ready to call it a day. Simply put, the last mile is the longest. It’s as if time warps and slows, or geographic distance elongates. To be honest, I’m tempted (if I’m REALLY tired) to wonder if we’ve floated into some kind of Twilight Zone on a trip that will never end. And then the takeout landmark comes in sight around the next bend in the river. At that point I feel an odd mix of relief and sadness; relief that I can put down the paddle and rest, but sadness that another great day on a river is over.

    I’m approaching the last river mile of my life. The feelings are much the same as the last mile on a stream. The last long mile affords me time to make a lot of observations about things. I have strong opinions on a multiplicity of things involving faith, politics, and just life. And I’m energized by engaging the thoughts of others, whether they concur with mine, challenge mine, or just invite whole new possibilities of thought. That’s what this space will be about.

    I invite you to paddle with me. I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.