Shuffling the Deck

I'm writing from Tower Hill Camp, where our two confirmation classes and some members of our High School Youth Community have headed off to the Warren Dunes, leaving me alone with my thoughts. Part of what happens on this retreat is that members of our 2nd year group work hard at writing "statements of faith." We push them to try to think "theologically" (kind of like the theme of our next gathering on April 28th), and to articulate some of what they think and feel about what most of us would call "religious" ideas.

In a lecture he called "An Ocean of God: The Innerconnectedness of all Being," Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, in response to a question about the vitality and viability of the world’s great religions, suggests:

“Imagine that there are an arbitrarily finite number of great religious ideas:
o you gotta worry about what happens when you die…
o you gotta worry about how to make atonement…
o you gotta worry about experiencing love…
o you gotta be aware of the presence of the Creator…
…fill in the list of holy ideas that every religion should have.

“[Now, for the sake of discussion,] let’s say there are 52 of them, 52, like a deck of cards. All religions are playing with a full deck. They all have all the cards. The only real difference among the religions, in my hunch,” posits Rabbi Kushner, “is the way the deck is stacked.

“If you are an orthodox Christian,” he continues, “the first card is perhaps you’re guilty and you’re going to need a lot of help right away. Jews have that card, too,” Kushner jokes, “it comes up at number 10. For Jews the top card is, What does God want now?’ Christians have that card in there, too, somewhere.”

It seems to me that you and I in our day and time and place have all those things at our disposal, that we, too, are playing with a full deck of great religious ideas. Our card game has fewer rules than some others, and, in our game, sometimes the rules change as the nature of the game and the participants in the game change, and the game itself changes to reflect and embrace new participants, rather than forcing new participants into rigid rules that reflect the realities of another day and time and place. I think our great theological task has always been to determine how that deck of great religious ideas is to be stacked. If pressed I'd argue that Jesus' instruction to “love your neighbor as yourself" is the "card" that should sit at the top of our "deck."

If the Gospels are any indication, Jesus spent very little time and energy engaging in great theological debate. While in conversation with scholars and religious bureaucrats, they talked about ancient traditions and rules and regulations, and Jesus talked about attitude and behavior. In the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, someone presses him to be more precise than “Love your neighbor as yourself” by asking the question, “Who is my neighbor?” Rather than citing chapter and verse, Jesus tells a story that reflects attitude and behavior. A man on the Jericho road is mugged, beaten left for dead. A public official and a religious muckety-muck pass by the victim, and, for one reason or another leave him there in his suffering. Then a man deemed “unworthy,” a man labeled “outcast” because of the accident of his birth happens by, binds up the victim, carts him off to a place where he can be cared for, and arranges to pay for any future care the victim may need.

“Who was a neighbor to that poor man?” Jesus asks, already knowing there is only one answer, and knowing that they know there is only one answer, and knowing that the theological debate intended to justify their relatively cold and distant and superior attitude. When they mumble, “The man who helped him,” Jesus simply says, “Go and do likewise.”

So, it seems to me, Jesus suggests that the top card in the deck may well be “love your neighbor as yourself…go and do likewise."