The great nineteenth-century Christian philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, proposed that those, like me, who keep trying to figure out what it might mean to follow Jesus, should ponder what Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.” That used to make lots of sense to me. Still does, in many ways. But now, as I’m in my nineties and looking back on a long life in the church, I’m increasingly preoccupied with – the limp of faith.
As an ecojustice theologian of longstanding, for example, I have begun to slow down proposing answers. I’ve become increasing preoccupied with figuring out what the questions are, a challenge that I already confronted as an undergraduate when I first listened to Paul Tillich’s lectures. But now that challenge’s front and center for me.
A thought in point: years ago, I used to relish the then often told story about two peasants in the Middle Ages who were walking along a muddy road together. Along the way, someone asked them, “where are you going?” The one answered: “I’m going to work.” The other replied: “I’m going to build the cathedral at Chartres.” Counter-intuitively perhaps, I’m now tending to think that the first guy was on to something: that that putting one foot in front of the other heading toward your place of work might be a real faith-option for many of us these days, rather than always thinking about striding forth to build a cathedral.
Consider this question, therefore. Could Jesus be calling you and me to limp as well as to leap? A case in point, famously: just about everybody knows the story about the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer who decided to participate in the plot to assassinate Hitler, how that plot failed, and how Bonhoeffer himself was eventually hanged as a traitor. He became a martyr. Praise God for that. Relatively few know the story about Bonhoeffer’s earlier and equally passionate decision to foster the life of an anti-Hitler theological seminary hidden in the woods.
Can you imagine Bonhoeffer urging students at that seminary to throw themselves into their study of Koine Greek, the better to understand the New Testament, as well as encouraging them to seek out paths of discipleship that would allow them more faithfully to follow Jesus in Nazi Germany? I mean: study Greek in a time of crisis, when your life’s at stake?
With that situation in mind, I have a question for you. Might you now want to reaffirm your own commitment to the limp of faith, as well as to the leap of faith? And as an encouragement to that end, let me tell you how the members of my most-cited parish, St. Swithens Around the Block, get it done. They do all the visible Sunday morning stuff, of course. But St. Swithens, like just about all local churches, also fosters some often amazing invisible stuff, too.
I wish I could tell you more. Perhaps the only downside of clergy keeping confidences is that scores and scores of beautiful stories about church people enduring illnesses or caring for each other or making sacrifices for coworkers during the week or standing on principle in their own neighborhoods, like standing up for refugees, cannot be told. Facing the congregation over the years from behind the Table, I’d often think: what a beautiful garden of lilies, the kind Jesus loved. If only they could see each other more knowingly, as I see them!
True, if the stories of each of these congregants were told publicly, that probably wouldn’t make the nightly news. Still, I know this for a Gospel fact: that in every setting, urban, suburban, rural, or off in the mountains, wherever they live: droves of ordinary church people just keep limping along following Jesus. Typically, it’s not dramatic, but it’s almost always oh so beautiful.
Hence I’d like to shout this from my church’s rooftop if I could: even as we praise the Lord for the leapers, let’s hear it for the limpers.
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