The 'Three Mile an Hour God’
"Jesus is a
walking God; God is a 'three mile an hour God.'"[1]
For which is easier,
to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?
This statement of Jesus is found in the Gospels of Matthew,
Luke, and Mark: (Mt 9:5, Lk 5.23, Mk 2.9). This is, as I shall pick up later, not a
rhetorical question. But first I want to discuss the restoration of mobility to
the paralytic which in part restored his ability to practice
his culture.
The prophets and disciples were people who walked.
Prodigiously. Jesus instructs his disciples to walk out into the surrounding
villages to testify and preach. He commands the paralytic to walk forth from
his bed. Walking is a central feature in
the spread Jesus’s announcement of the Kingdom of God. Abraham is commanded by God repeatedly to ק֥וּם לֵךְ֙ (qûm lek,“arise and go forward” [Gen. 28:2,
cf. 12:1 et al.]), get up and walk, get up and
go as a nomad toward the promised land.
The activity of sustained walking, and the centrality of it
as transportation, may be one of the most distinguishing differences between
the Biblical age and ours. A culture that devoted 4 hours a day or more to
walking developed virtues seemingly foreign to us: virtues of contemplation,
recollection, stillness of mind, disinterestedness, and asceticism. Virtues tie body and soul together. The
virtues of walking tie our ruminations of mind with the rhythms of our somatic,
bodily exertions.
"Knowledge is a
rumor until it lives in muscle," an African proverb states. The soul’s
religious insights are developed in harmony with the body. The Resurrection confirms that our soul’s destiny
is not to evacuate the body, but to be reconciled and integrated with it. The soul’s work and insights during long
walks become integrated with memory of the body’s movements in the Biblical
anthropological portrait of Homo ambulans.
Henry David Thoreau proposed walking as a spiritual
discipline. It was for him a reflective
activity that took place necessarily away from society where he could discern
and discover his true identity. Thoreau proposed a contemplative narrative to
guide his walks and structure what he found both inside and outside himself
during the walks. In his essay, “Walking”[2]
(based on Lectures he began in the 1850s), Thoreau employed the “metaphor of
the walker as a crusader to the Holy Land and places the devil himself in
opposition to the freedom and wildness that the walker craves… The ‘Prince of
Darkness’ is the surveyor who places the stakes that keep the walker away from
the landscape.” [3]
During these reverie-structured “saunters,” Thoreau would
encounter the "Whoa!" of the Evil one to the wildness [and freedom] he
sought.” It was the devil, he concluded, who fenced off the private ownership of
what was communally-owned nature –its springs of Enlightenment it provided him.
In his daydreams during walks, Thoreau placed obstacles and
encounters into a framework of good and evil. In this, Thoreau displayed a Judaic
consciousness. The singer Leonard Cohen endorsed the same narrative plot: "It's
good to be between a ruined house of bondage and a holy promised land." And
Wendell Berry: “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and
desecrated places.” Distinguishing these states of ruin and holiness during our
own pastoral wandering may illuminate what we personally find necessary for social
life versus what is cordoned off for our private and personal use. Employing Thoreau’s narrative of walking in a
Holy Land is a way of not only living more closely—resonating--with nature. It
is also a way of living more closely with our own spirit. We need only take care not to make this walk
among community solely about our right to solitude lest we assert ownership
over it in conflict with others’ –God’s--rightful claims. It’s a crowded world,
and we must conclude that God wills it so.
As an injunction for sauntering in wilderness, Earth-Firster
Dave Forman proposed that all surveyor stakes and ribbons encountered be
obliterated as a protest of economic development. However, an appropriate
solitude of walking inside an appreciation of creation’s goodness--and wildness’s
fall from grace--is implicitly a spiritual discipline of generosity and
covenant-keeping worthy of the Sabbath.
The walker in this state seeks spiritual knowledge of self and creation
that may be rare or fleeting in apprehension, but with repetition may add up to
a revelation about God and self.
Through walking in God’s Kingdom, we can remain alert to
evidence of possibly unfathomable knowledge. Thoreau writes: "Give me a
wildness whose glance no civilization can endure…My desire for knowledge is
intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet
is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain is not Knowledge, but
Sympathy with [Cosmic Nature’s] Intelligence."[4] This distinction between a personal knowledge
and God’s grant of Cosmic Intelligence demonstrates the necessity of the virtue
of humility to the walk and the work, lest one be misled into thinking that the
spiritual insights one develops is self-merited. Rather, our walk ideally aligns us with the
giver of all good gifts, what I would call the Divine logos which Thoreau defines as Nature.
Thoreau uses the image of the rooster as the bragging
"expression of the health and soundness of Nature," rousing humanity
to alert perception--to "a pure morning joy" in our journeying.
A spiritualized narrative of walking excludes, of course,
the immobilized who may suffer a profound physical disability. We must look for alternative visions for our journey
through the world that can encompass these folks. As an alternative to walking in the promised
land, descrying its ruins and obstacles, Melville in Moby Dick offers the vision of sailing: "What could be more
full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part…and the bow
must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul
is first [encountered]. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a
voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow."
One immobilized advances as if situated and perched on the
prow of a bouncing ship. The wheelchair- or bed-bound might note the rhythms of
the breezes and the direction of the birds signaling land. We might contemplate
the narrative of Nature from the perspective of their discovery--that their
narrative encounters society as the Sea.
And from that perspective, it might be as if the world turns past us on
the sea as we sit on an unmoving boat. The weather changes, the breezes shift, the
birds fly by, the dolphins circle underneath and beside. The movements are all
relative, it is our perspective that shifts from an immobile body to a moving
cosmos.
The Bible is full of these metaphorical alternatives
regarding God’s activity: these
metaphors empower devotion and understanding.
But some aspects of society and the natural condition that surround and
overshadow it are not of God. I think of
the anti-Christic sin of warfare, specifically of Drone warfare. Zubair Rehman,
a 13-year-old Pakistani, uttered this evaluation of his environmental
condition: “I no longer love blue skies. I prefer grey skies. The drones don’t
fly when the skies are grey." How tragic, how foreign to God’s intended
creation and humanity where drones have taken away the freedom of mobility and its
potential to bond with Nature and neighbors. Drone warfare inhibits the walking
cultures of the East, inhibiting it as much as a wall or barrier. Perhaps worse
than impeding relationship with others, drones impede a relationship with
nature--with the full creation. Drone warfare leads to fear and huddling in
shadow and structure. Drones disable civilians in their flight path, creating
invalids, the type that Jesus healed and which we are instructed also to heal. 90% of casualties by weaponized drones are
civilians.[5]
Drones dehumanize by maiming and inhibiting the human capability of mobility.
They also depersonalize individuals by substituting their identity with a geographical
coordinate. The latter is precise, the first is neglected. Drones also
depersonalize through its technology’s racial bias that cannot recognize facial
features in dark skin as effectively as it can lighter skin.[6] Drone “signature strikes,” especially when
automatized inside Artificial Intelligence, lead to the injustice of a sloppy
slaughter of black and brown innocents.
Resisting the advent and spread of drone warfare is a way of
healing the immobilized and depersonalized—restoring the presence of nature and
community in their lives. Code Pink pickets at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada,
for its drone warfare operations. Another
picketing and resistance operation against drone warfare is happening by
employees and community members at Google’s headquarters. Google’s Project
Maven participates in the application of the military-industrial complex to
weaponize and automate big data inside drone warfare./
Jurgen Moltmann writes of the walk of faith that “seek[s]
community with the human Christ in every situation in life, and in every
situation experiencing his own history." To find Christ, and to sustain the human
Christ in his struggle, God sends us into “a real world, a world of starving
children and murderous competition, of lonely rooms and smug clubs, of
shattered dreams and burned out hopes,”[7]
of corrupt politics and closed minds, of resentful bigots and phony pieties. It
is up to us to counter and resist the misreadings of the Gospel. The authentic announcement
of God’s Kingdom forgives sins, announces release to captives, and justice for
the oppressed. The good news humanizes
and identifies. It does not kill persons and personalities, it does not kill
the capabilities of free thought and free mobility. It does not link riches
with God’s favor and poverty with God’s hatred.
Albert Einstein said, “A human being…experiences himself,
his thoughts, and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of
optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is kind of a prison for
us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons
nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening
our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the
striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and
foundation for inner security.” We can
expand our human circle and our experience of it by walking the neighborhoods
that God has placed us amidst.
Our journeying may be better visualized as a shared dance in embrace with the Holy. If, as Kurt Vonnegut writes, "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God," our guided saunters and joyous waltzes through creation honor God and embraces the wisdom God graces to impart to us. We dance that we become movements in joy. Our joyous journeying obeys the “summons to think about how the world can be practiced differently.”[8] The walk that dances meets God and neighbors “in the middle,” establishing new centers for eternity, transforming dead space into living place. The ramifying circumincessions of creatures, Logos, and Spirit divinize. They are process by which the living Christ is becoming all-in-all, the onset of new hypostatic union(s) of Spirit and incarnated beings, bringing forth a new Creation with creatures becoming increasingly intimate and familiar with, and accomplished toward, the divine will. At the eschaton, the process will come complete.
Moving through nature either by walking or sailing or
dancing within a contemplative Christian narrative presupposes the virtue of
disinterestedness—a determined lack of greed in grasping what is natural and
shared to privatize it for personal gain. Our journeying with a grasping gaze—a
greed of spirit--is not the kind of walk Jesus engaged. Our mobility leads us
astray if it is done without a generous spiritual outlook.
Pay heed to your journeys; pay heed to your capability of
mobility, for the freedom of movement to discover the wonder of the world.
Listen to your body—when walking and when praying--and do not think of it as
your enemy. What do you do with the miraculous gift of the body? You have the
capacity to see, to feel and to hear and to understand. To move about. What do
you do with it? Do you bless, do you curse, do you forgive, do you begrudge?
To return to Jesus’ question that began this sermon, “For
which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?” It’s not rhetorical. Ancient Israel thought
only God could forgive sins, so they would never dare to pardon their
neighbor. The Jews of Jesus’s time would
have expected healing to be an easier vocation for the religion. Healing requires presence, but the
restoration of mobility to one immobilized by the weaponized drones flying
overhead requires a political and cultural commitment out of reach for most. Yet Jesus shows us that we can bring about
neighborhoods of shalom through forgiveness. By Jesus’s question, we are to
understand, I think, that we are to forgive the trespasses of others against
our prerogatives to ownership, to privacy, to self-respect. We CAN forgive because He forgave us. The
injunction to heal and the injunction to forgive in our Scriptural passage this
morning is the defining character of God’s love, as is the Abrahamic injunction
to get up and walk. Get up and dance. The love from God
intended for us, and the intention for us to love God back, and oh, our
neighbor as well: these I considered on walks.
May this spiritual journeying that walks and dances by faith be for
you and me. Amen.
[1] http://justiceunbound.org/carousel/the-three-mile-an-hour-god-and-the-imago-dei-within-us/
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/
accessed 22 April 2018
[3] https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/thoreau-emerson-and-transcendentalism/thoreaus-walking/major-themes
accessed 22 April 2018.
[4]
Ibid
[5]
Marjorie Cohn, Bay Area Interfaith Conference on Drone Warfare, Pacific School
of Religion Chapel. April 28, 2018.
[6]
Ibid.
[7]
Clyde Fant. https://books.google.com/books?id=apjJGa26LzwC&pg=PA139&lpg=PA139&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
accessed 26 April 2018
[8]
Attributed to Walter Brueggemann.
