Sunday, May 21, 2006 Living Epistle Once a month at my church, we have what is called a "Living Epistle" -- what in less "high-church" traditions might be called a "testimony" -- where a member of the congregation talks about the ways in which God has been moving in their lives recently. Today, I gave the Living Epistle at my church. The text is posted here.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to deliver a living epistle to all of you as I finish up my studies at Harvard Divinity School. As I look toward the future, which will most likely take me away from Massachusetts after graduation, I wanted to share with you all the ways in which you, the people of St. James, have played an invaluable role in my spiritual life during the nearly three years I have lived here and been a part of this community. I am certain that God has brought me to this community and I wanted you all to know the ways in which God has used you in my life to strengthen my faith and my Christian journey.

When I arrived in Cambridge in September 2003, I was not at a very high point spiritually. My faith, which had been sparked during my late high school years and really burned brightly during my early college years, had dwindled to a small glimmer, having endured many turmoils, questions and challenges over the previous four years. My faith had been through the wringer in college, hitting all extremes from adamant evangelicalism in my freshman year, a time in which I felt I was on a "spiritual high" almost every day and felt the abiding presence of Christ in my daily life, to serious skepticism and doubt, when I wasn't even sure I could call myself a Christian anymore, or if I even wanted to.

I wrestled with tough questions about "historicity" of the Gospels in academic religion classes. I struggled with theodicy in making sense of the suffering I saw in the world as my eyes were opened to global current events and history. I resisted exclusive theology that told me that my non-Christian friends were deceived by the devil and not in touch with God. And I grasped to find God's presence in the face of senseless death, which seemed all too prevalent in my college years ––the sudden death of my sister's best friend's father my sophomore year, the massive scale deaths of 9/11 during my junior year, and the sudden death of a classmate to leukemia my senior year. Life didn't seem to make much sense, and trying to "figure it all out" intellectually wasn't helping. But, without answers to those intellectual questions, I found it difficult to take that step toward trusting in faith.

 When I came to Cambridge, I had just spent a summer doing research on religious diversity in my hometown of Columbia, S.C. I had spent the summer hanging out with Hindus and Buddhists, Sikhs and Muslims, and attending their worship services rather than any Christian ones (logistics often made it so that I had to attend some other religious event on Sundays for my research). I found beauty and the presence of God in those people and in those faiths, and I admired many aspects of them. And yet, as I moved to Cambridge, I knew that I wanted to actively seek out a church and try to find my place within Christianity. Despite all my "interfaith" sensibilities and my ability to see the presence of God in other faiths, there was something there that kept me hanging on to my Christian faith.

I struggled a lot in college with traditional doctrines about Jesus -- was he really "God" in the flesh? Was he really born of a virgin? What if I don't think Jesus was God, but an inspired human teacher? At times my roommate (a fellow religion major) and I would joke that if we were honest with ourselves, we probably should just be Jewish, since we were fine with most everything in Christianity except the claims it made about Jesus... and, well, if you take Jesus out of the equation, it's not really Christianity anymore, now is it?

But ultimately, I came to realize that yes, Jesus WAS important to me. Despite my inability to "prove" the "factual" nature of any of the truths that the church holds about Jesus, I knew that the story of Jesus, the very simple basic Gospel story of his life, death and resurrection, had deeply touched me and moved me in a way that nothing else had in my life. Although I had rejected just about everything that I used to believe or hold dear during my evangelical days, I realized that I couldn't reject Jesus. I had let my frustrations with and anger towards the evangelical community I had once been a part of obscure the fact that it was there that I had really found my first real experience of CHRIST and what that could mean in my own personal life. I loved those communities for their passion for Christ and for the gospel, for their contagious sense that they really KNEW the power of the love of God expressed through Christ Jesus, and yet I disagreed with many of their social and political opinions. My problem was that in many of the more "mainline" churches I had visited, people seemed to be simply lackluster in their approach to worship, reciting words and turning pages, but not truly WORSHIPPING God. In some mainline churches I'd been to, I felt like slapping everyone upside the head and screaming, "PEOPLE!! Do you know what you're singing about?? Christ is RISEN!!! My GOD, act like you understand what you're saying!!"

And so, I found myself in a bit of a quandary. Go back to the evangelical community? I knew I couldn't do that; I could never subscribe to many of their views, especially on women's leadership and homosexuality. At the same time, what was my alternative? A life of lifeless worship with a bunch of walking dead in a more mainline church?

And then, praise be to God, I found St. James. This community was the answer to a prayer for me. I found a place that truly expressed the joy of the Christian life, people who sang like they knew what they were saying, at least most of the time -- and as we choir members all know, if we don't, Pat will remind us! I discovered missionaries DID exist who were not condescending and belittling towards the people they worked among, who did not bring a brand of Christianity that smacked of cultural imperialism, but instead offered an image of the radicially inclusive love of Christ for all people. At St. James, I finally found people who saw many of the same things in the gospels that I did -- a Jesus who was concerned with caring for the poor and the outcast of society. I found people who worked for social change for the marginalized, motivated by the love of Christ, rather than people who seemed to do the marginalizing, in the name of Christ. I found people who found joy in the liturgical forms of worship but weren't stuck on tradition to such an extent that they elevated it to a place of idolatry. In short, I found what resonated with me as truly authentic Christian life, finally!

In many more ways than you realize, just by being who you are and loving the stranger in your midst, you have, perhaps unknowingly, directed me back to find the peace that passes all understanding in Christ my Savior. And for that, let us all give God the glory! God is using you in the lives of others. I pray that you would continue to be open and humble messengers of God's love and grace to the many more newcomers in your midst that you will surely see over the years. Students like me may come and go from St. James, but I know that I, for one, will always carry this community in my heart as my first true spiritual home, the place where I discovered for the first time what I feel to be authentic gospel-living.