Walk humbly

Walk humbly.
Last week, I participated as a facilitator in my local diocese's bishop election "walkabouts." We're electing a new bishop in a few weeks, so we had all eight nominees and petition candidates come around to various places in the diocese and spend 20 minutes a pop with different small groups (~30-50). I facilitated two groups over the week, and feel deeply blessed to have been a part of such a process. The first night, I was focusing a little more on the facilitation than bishop-ness, and on how inexperienced and inarticulate and socially inept I am, and how everyone was going to think that Julia fucked up their chances of getting a solid, basic knowledge of each candidate. The second time around, sure, I was still all of those things, but I had a chance to actually pay attention to the answers a little more and try to process who I want as our bishop.

Interestingly, despite the frantic first night worries and concerns circulating in my weary mind, a response from Canon Jim Mathis from the diocese of Chicago pierced me. He asked us to fire back our own quintessential scripture message, something that defined our faith. I immediately thought of Micah 6:8. I hate to like, quote bible verses on here, but it's part of my story so hang in there. "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" This is how I live my life. I don't feel like my God requires much else of me than to be a just, kind, loving, humble person, standing up for what I believe is the right thing, and doing all of this hand in hand with God. Were God to have hands, of course.

Other people responded to the question with the God-gave-his-only-son stuff. It suddenly struck me that as a Christian, maybe I should be concerned that Jesus isn't at the forefront of my faith. My "quintessential verse" is from the old testament.

I've spent the rest of the week and weekend in a mixture of wonder and concern, going back over the questions that I've gone over so many times before, thinking I'm a lousy excuse for a Christian. This time, though, I have a more mature view of scripture and spirituality than I did when I was first coming to terms with the whole Jesus business as a child. Jesus was the son of God. A part of God himself. He was a radical in his time and as followers, it's our duty to live Christ-like lives, loving everyone as we ourselves would wish to be loved, and feeding and clothing and caring for the less-fortunate long before feeding and clothing and caring for the more-fortunate. Etc.

But I'm not sure I fully believe in sacrificial atonement -- that Jesus "had" to die to forgive all of our sins, or that it was some sort of necessary sacrifice for the sake of worldy sin. I don't fully believe that "none shall come to the father except through [Jesus]," either. I'm borrowing this thought from someone else, but if I were to go to heaven, and find out that my non-Christian neighbor (whom I loved and who loved me and was a very good person) ended up not in heaven, heaven would then cease to be heaven for me.

If we take those little disobediences, and toss in that I don't even rattle off a Jesus verse first when defining my faith, then I really don't know what to think. I may be walking humbly, but I feel totally lost.