A friend stopped to talk with me after a Sunday service.   He told me that someone had told him that “Phillip had gone off the rails.”  

“But,” my friend said, “I don’t believe him.” 

Thanks.

 I got home and Googled the phrase and read this: “The phrase has been used since the mid-1800s and is a reference to a train derailment.  When a train goes off the rails it is no longer progressing along its preordained track and is uncontrollable and chaotic.”  

Well, that doesn’t sound good at all.    Derailed trains are tragic. 

Have I gone off the rails? 

I guess going “off the rails” meant that I was, at one time, “on the rails.”

Whose rails? Who laid the rails? Are the rails of theology set?  

I get it.  Sometimes it’s good to stay on the rails – if you’re a train. 

It’s good to…

• Stay in our lane when we drive.
• Stay in our lane when we are riding in the Kentucky Derby!  It was a wild ride at the Derby.  Maximum Security crossed the finish line first but got a DQ when it was determined that he got out of his lane and interfered with other horses.  Just like football I guess.  So, Country House, a 65-1 underdog, won the first American Triple Crown race.  The lesson here, I guess, is, “Never throw away your ticket in anger.”  Or, in horse racing, stay in your lane.  

But is it good to stay on the rails of theology?  In no way am I putting myself in the same category as the following folks, but their story certainly makes me question the rigidness of rails.

-Jan Hus, a precursor to the Protestant Reformers, asserted that:

*no pope or bishop had the right to take up the sword in the name of the Church, and

*that a Christian should pray for his enemies and bless those who curse him, and

*that a person is forgiven of sins by true repentance, not by making a donation to the church (Not a bad way to increase the offering!) 

Hus was burned at the stake on July 6, 1415.

-C.S. Lewis, a hero to Evangelicals: 

*accepted evolution, 

*did not hold to the penal substitutionary theory of atonement, 

*thought and taught that it is possible for people in other religions to inherit the kingdom of God without knowing it, and, perhaps the biggest derailment of all, 

*rejected the view of Biblical Inerrancy.   

And, last but not least, 

-Jesus, according to the religious authorities of the day, went off the rails (John 5:18; Mark 2:5-7; Matthew 9:2-3; Luke 5:20-21; John 8:58-59; John 10:30-33; Mark 14:61-64).

Then there is Rachel Held Evans – writer, blogger, reformer.   I read her first book, Evolving in Money Town in 2010.  Reading it brought relief.  With each page, I thought, “I’m not alone with my questions, with my exhaustion with a constricted, restricted view of God and spirituality.”   Her words on paper removed my feeling of weirdness for thinking and feeling what I was thinking and feeling.    Rachel was raised between conservative evangelical rails. I lived on those rails as well.  

Rachel died Saturday from massive brain swelling after receiving treatment for an infection. Words of grief,  appreciation and honor have poured in. But, so have ominous words of judgment and warning.  

When she was facing death, the nicest of the comments went something like, “We don’t agree with her theologically but we are praying for her.”  Upon her death, other writers were just mean.   One website carried two articles, one titled, “Heretical Author, Rachel Held Evans Dead at 37.”  The other is titled, “How Do We Respond to the Death of an Apostate?”  

Some might say she has “Gone off the rails.”  

Rachel showed a different way to understand God, to love the Bible, to follow Jesus.  For many, her way is the reason they remained Christian. Instead of throwing out God and Christianity, she showed a spirituality outside the rails between which she was raised.  

As a Baptist by birth, I was born into a tradition that valued reform.  We were products of the reformation.  People today still value reform – 

In the past.

  It’s strange isn’t it?  We honor, respect, revere the people who colored outside of the lines, the risk-takers, the revolutionaries. We honor them…

• from a distance. 
• in the past.

Not up close and in the present.

The person who said I had “gone off the rails” may have said it out of concern. Or warning.  Or judgment.  I don’t know.  

I do know that I’m ok with it.  

I know that I don’t have it all figured out.  

I know that we are reformed and need to keep being reformed to the image of the Christ.

I know that that means we have to, at times, get off the track.     

“Home Improvement,” the T.V. show starring Tim Allen, was a family favorite of ours in the 90s.  And it’s the closest I get to actual home improvement.  “The Look” is the name of an episode in the series.  The premise is that women have found a way to make the men in their lives melt in fear with a “look.”  

Tim gets the “the look” from his wife, Jill, after spending $4000 on Piston season tickets.  

Wilson, the behind the fence philosopher, explains that “the look” has been around for centuries and believed to have been the reason women wear veils at their wedding.  “The penetrating stare of a bride could weaken her husband and render him impotent!”  Yikes!

There is power in “the look.”  

God looks at us.  

What is God’s “look?”

In  my  mind I’m singing the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, “The Look of Love.” 

Don’t know it?  Take a listen: 

In my youth, it was Dusty Springfield. 

Today it is Diana Krall. 

“The look of love is in your eyes” is how the song starts. 

So, what is God’s look toward us?  What does God’s look look like? 

Is it a “Home Improvement” or a Bacharach look? 

Too many of us in church world have been told that God’s look toward us is a look of anger, judgment, disappointment.  Maybe that’s why we don’t want God to look at us.   We’ve been told God doesn’t like what he sees.  Have we been misinformed?

When Jesus looked at the “rich young ruler,” the writer says, “Jesus looked at him and loved him” (Mark 10:21).  I like that.  

“Let me look at you,” a loving relative says to a child.  Do you hear, in the phrase, encouragement, love, acceptance, pride?

When God says, “Here’s looking at you, kid” it is a look of  love.

“You look marvelous,” says Fernando Lama – the Billy Crystal character.  

The writer to the Hebrews describes God’s throne (kingdom language) as a “throne of mercy/grace” – not a throne of judgment and punishment and lectures.  

How we think God looks at us shapes how we look at the world.  Mark Matousek writes in Psychology Today that, “You learn the world from your mother’s face…The mother’s gaze, or the father’s (if he is the primary caretaker), determines more than you might realize about how you come to see yourself, your place in the world, and the moral nature of people around you.”

Does a mean look create mean people?

Does a kind look create kind people?

How we think God looks at us shapes how we look at ourselves, others and our world.  

In his book, The Church of Mercy, Pope Francis asks, “Do you let yourself be looked at by the Lord?” He continues, “God looks at us, and this is itself a way of praying.”

I don’t think I’ve done that enough  through my life.  Praying, for me has been, telling, listing, begging – but not sitting and looking and being looked at.  

“The Look”. God’s giving it to us.  It is the Look of Love.  See it.  Reflect it.

“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”

So begins the first line of the poem a lot of us learned in school about the man who got a day named after him – today.  Columbus Day.

Columbus was presented as a hero.  A Christian hero at that!  And Christians warmly embraced him. I had a book in my library for years that extolled the virtues of Columbus: The Light and the Glory.  Just look at his name!  Christopher Columbus.  We can’t miss the “Christ” in there, can we? 

“Christopher” means “Christ-bearer” and Columbus understood his name as his destiny to carry the gospel(good news) of Christ to far-off lands.  Sounds honorable, doesn’t it?

Christopher Columbus.  The man who discovered America with the purpose of telling people about Jesus.  Who wouldn’t celebrate this man?

But, as Paul Harvey used to say, there is “The Rest of the Story.”  And it’s not pretty.  Not honorable.  Not worth celebrating.  

What we celebrate reveals our character.  Paul tells us that “Love does not rejoice in unrighteousness” (1 Corinthians 13:6)…

“isn’t happy with injustice”  Common English Bible

“does not rejoice at wrongdoing”  English Standard Version

“is not happy with evil” Good News Translation

“does not delight in evil” New International Version

I don’t celebrate Columbus but I do think we should study and learn from him.  Here’s why:

*Let’s be clear,  Columbus did not discover America.  People were already here.  You can’t  discover lands where people are already living.   But that’s what Columbus, much of Europe, early American colonists and the USA did.  The operative word here is “people.”  Columbus and other “discoverers” didn’t see the inhabitants of this land as “people.” 

“Savages”  “Pagan”  “Enemies of Christ,” but not “human.”  It’s easier to dominate, hurt, and kills someone when that someone is dehumanized.  Seeing someone as less than we is the essence of racism.  

Even if someone wanted to credit Europeans with “discovering” America, the prize would go to Viking explorer Leif Ereicson  who “found” the New World 500 years before Columbus set sail.

BTW – Columbus didn’t land on the higher 48.  He landed in what is present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  

*Columbus discovered America like a meteor discovered dinasours.  Columbus was awful. 

Columbus initiated the two greatest crimes in the history of the Western Hemisphere – the Atlantic slave trade and the American Indian genocide.  Bartolome De Las Casas, a former slave owner who became Bishop of Chiapas described the exploits of Columbus and his troops, “Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight as no age can parallel.  My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature that now I tremble as I write.”  

*Here’s the clincher.  This is really tough for me to understand.  The treatment of the indigenious people was not justified primarily by race, but by religion.  Spanish colonizers, relying on Pople Nicholas V’s papal decree, enslaved people because they were “enemies of Christ.”

Typically, after “discovering” an island and encountering the people living there, the Spaniards would read aloud – in Spanish – what came to be called “The Requirement.”    What’s up with that? Did they intentionally not want the people to understand what was being read?   It went something like this:

“I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and in the name of the Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his mandates.  If you do not do it, I tell you that with the help of God I will enter powerfully against you all.  I will subject you to the yoke and obedience to the Church and to his majesty.  I will take your women and children and make them slaves…The deaths and injuries that you will receive from here on will be your own fault and not that of his majesty nor of the gentlemen that accompany me.”  

Christopher (Christ-bearer) Columbus wanted to take the “good news” to the people.

I don’t think they heard these words as “good news”.

“Convert or die.”  “Convert or become slaves.”  That’s one way to grow a church.  

Columbus used the name of Jesus as a rationale to cheat, rob, rape, enslave and murder people who had been made in God’s image.  

Schools in Germany are required to teach the holocaust, so that they will never repeat it.  

So, let’s not celebrate Columbus.  But, let’s learn from Columbus and other periods and persons that tell stories of injustice so that we will grow, mature, and truly:

•  “form a more perfect union,”  (from Preamble of the U.S. Constitution), and
• represent the person of Jesus.