This is for my students and anyone who has ever asked about what made me tick as a Christian.
I love a good Chili cookoff, all the varieties lined up in the school cafeteria or the fellowship hall at church. Every recipe a unique mix of ingredients. Everything in it comes together to be that singular thing: Chili.
My point is invite me to your Chili cookoffs. But I’m also thinking of the recipe of my faith. Sometimes I get a compliment about the example I set as a Christian, and so I wonder what it is is people are noticing. I think they are noticing a recipe, because for me, faith in Christ in not one thing. Not one statement or practice or even one tradition. I prefer a mix of ingredients, and a chili cookoff where I can try different tastes and meet the cooks.
Here are some ingredients in my recipe of faith:
A base is a place to start, and what everything else simmers in. For me, it starts with a memory verse I learned in a small Sunday School classroom, in a small church, in small town in Indiana, but it was big: “For God so loved the world…” I’m not sure I thought about much else in the verse. I was fortunate to have parents who fostered this simple, first thing in faith, through their kindness and welcoming people from around the world into our home. Later, I would learn Jesus’ first thing in faith: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. God’s love and our love of God and loving our neighbor fit snugly together – I often say there was no hope after this. Anytime somebody tried to sneak in or make room for hate, I knew that was no base to build on. I’d rather be a heretic than not love my neighbor.
I was the wide eyed kid walking down the street who wanted to make friends with every stranger, but eventually I learned some people are mean. Sometimes we hurt each other. And I started to feel spicy about it, especially when it was done in the name of Jesus. That wasn’t the Jesus I knew. Once I learned another of the classic bible verses, Micah 6:8, I had a shape to that spice: “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” These are more than instructions; they are prophetic call outs of the haughty, the cruel, and the exploiters. Us, when the shoe fits.
You’re going to need some solids to fill things out, meats, proteins, veggies, beans. Nutrients, rich and complex. For me, that started with an unexpected discovery in college. When my faith felt most fragile, when I had deconstructed before it was called that but did not know what to build in place, a professor invited me to a talk by John Phillip Newell on Celtic Christianity. This unearthing and reimagining of an ancient indigenous intimacy with the Spirit of God from the land of my ancestors, in a cathedral of earth, sea, and sky, where human and sacred life are not separate from but woven through the earth and into the rhythms of the days and seasons, has nourished me for decades. Christ above me and below me, beside me, in all who see me. God’s presence in all creation. Goodness at our heart, in our faces as newborns, below and before all that twists and hurts us. Salvation is restoration to what God created us for: goodness with the earth and each other.
Another hearty ingredient which flowed with and beyond the streams of Celtic consciousness was contemplative practice. My prayer is silence and stillness and breath. Prayer is loving attention to the divine at our own hearts and at the heart of all things. Newell calls it listening for the heartbeat of God. The mystics of the faith like Hildegaard and Theresa found depths of imaginative worlds to make the soul sing. The imagination too can pray. These are fearful methods for those who want to control what people hear and experience with God. Doctrine and orthodoxy have carried traditions which can be prayed and imagined anew but this threatens the power of orthodoxy defenders. But the spirit blows where it will, into open space where controlling words do not dominate, where attentiveness leads to insight and integration.
There are some ingredients whose taste and consistency complement each other, like they belong. It has felt natural to integrate Liberation theology into this stew. I learned from Black Liberation theologians like James Cone, who shows the painful truth of the lynching tree as the American cross, just as he celebrates the beauty of black thriving through church and jazz. I learned from queer people who were grassroots liberationists, coming out and bible quizzing in conservative churches too, because God’s liberating love means that boundaries are sacredly transgressed. I learned to look to women to understand the mothering ways of God, to see into the deep pain and pervasiveness of patriarchy. I learned to trust pregnant people to make liberated choices for their lives.
And what about that secret, special ingredient? The one that surprises, that no one saw coming. The peaches or the mangoes. It is doubt for me. It is a bit cliche at this point to say that faith and doubt go together, though I won’t assume it is a given for all. It goes back to walking humbly with God for me. Certainty is not as important as loving my neighbor, and loving myself. We all deserve grace. So I have learned to love and accept the part of me who is an atheist some days. Other days I’m an agnostic, unsure we can know at all. So if you are fully one of those people – I am with you at least some of the time! And I learn from you, am challenged by you.
Another way to look at all of this is as one big chili cookoff. A friendly competition to put together delicious recipes for each other. Sharing. Remixing. Trying new ways for ourselves and together. Maybe we can get it right in this world.
But if all this is my chili pot, what I’ve gathered and stirred in were all these parts which go so well together. God’s love, woven through the world, redeeming us from the ways we harm each other, liberating us in the life of Jesus, calling to us in moments when we can be still and know that the spirit is through all and with all, never leaving us. As Christ taught us, I am with you, even to the end of the age.
Matt Hartley 