Goodbye, Mariners. Their season ends today, the first Sunday of Autumn. Thanks to manager Lloyd McClendon, his staff, and the Mariners players for the best baseball season in Seattle in a long time! Today’s game had a playoff feel to it. Had the A’s lost, with a Mariners win, the two teams would have played a one-game playoff tomorrow. One game does not make a playoff series, of course, but the general public is sold on this one-game format as a legitimate playoff.
The week before this last week saw our last temperatures as high as 80. This last week could have had our last temperatures in the 70s. Autumn comes as quick as that. September has Summer days. Beginning the month, September seems firmly in the category of Summer, but by month’s end– especially after four straight days of rain, and sunsets before 7:00– Autumn is here.
Ever been stuck next to a born-again, evangelical Christian on a broken down bus? Happened to me last week. On a bus, strangers generally don’t talk to each other, but if someone does talk to me, I try to take it in the spirit intended, and try to be open-minded, try to be mindful that this might be more interesting than the average bus ride, which isn’t interesting, and of which I have had thousands, and will have thousands more, although I might never again sit next to someone who will ask, “How’s your day been? What book are you reading these days?” (John Muir’s “The Yosemite,” which is very good. He scrambled under, over, and around everything– small and big, and expertly knew his trees, mountains, and geological formations, conveyed with abundant wit and accomplished descriptive narrative and literary skills).
I explained the book a bit. He said, “God’s creation is a wonderful thing!” He took a slim book out of his briefcase and laid it on top of it, holding a yellow highlighter pen, as if he wished to convey that he was reading this book, but wasn’t sure if he wanted to open it just then– “God Has A Wonderful Plan For Your Life,” by Ray Comfort, with a fragment of a painting on the front depicting, I’m almost positive, the stoning of St. Steven. Not exactly Kierkegaard, or Schillebeeckx.
“What are you reading?” I asked, thinking it would be polite to ask him the question I thought he might be fervently praying that I would ask him. And I hoped I would be able to hold my own in any conversation that might result, though I certainly didn’t expect that the bus would break down, and he and I would hold our ensuing (politely quiet) conversation in the back of an eerily quiet bus weighty with the suspense of a busload of people in anticipation of learning what was wrong with our bus and what would happen next by way of our getting on with our trips.
My new friend told me that, out of the Ten Commandments, he would just tell me about the first four, all of which he had broken, and he had broken all ten, so that made him guilty. I had to say– a person doesn’t have lust in his heart just because he looks at a woman with desire. If he had a bad intent and would act on it given the chance, that’s different, but is that the treasure in my new friend’s heart? Or is that treasure rather his knowledge that he might struggle against the temptation, but he would do the right thing instead? If he had to choose between “sin” and “don’t sin,” wouldn’t he choose “don’t sin?” Okay then. Innocent, I say!
“Here we are, stuck on this bus, and we’re not at each others’ throats,” he said. “That’s because God’s law is in our hearts!”
Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Jesus. Much is made of this, but rarely does one encounter someone who has anything interesting to say on that. My friend thinks it means accepting Jesus as Saviour, as Christ, and if you don’t, forget about going to the Father. Forget about going to Heaven. You’re going to Hell. My dismay is in thinking, is God that easy to figure out?
I wish I had a really good rebuttal to that to bring back down to Earth people who are so smug in the idea that a little lip service to a simple, bookbound Jesus is their ticket out of doubt and into all tomorrow’s parties in the afterlife. I hope my new friend isn’t that simpleminded. Maybe that’s just how he explains it, because he thinks anything deeper would go over his audience’s head.
My thinking is that, “No one comes to the Father except through Me” has a lot to do with that last “Me.” Jesus refers to Himself as a subjective person, “I,” an individual, in relation to the Father. I can identify myself too as “me” versus “you,” an “I” in relation to my/our Father, Who is my creator, creator of us all.
Perhaps Jesus means not, “Come to the Father through Me” in a way that is different from the way a person naturally comes to the Father. Perhaps He is asserting a level of kinship between the way He comes to the Father and the way we all naturally come to the Father– the simple, intuitive recognition of a common origin of our species.
Although Jesus the Christ is “the Way” to the Father for His people, inasmuch as He is the Savior, the Alpha and the Omega, He Who is the “Yes” to God’s promises of salvation for His people, and “the truth,” the revelation of God in His Son.
“Look!” my friend said. “We’re next to a church (Calvary Christian Assembly on Roosevelt)! How cool is that?”
We had to wait for the next bus to come, complicated by our being on a Sound Transit bus, not on a much commoner Metro bus. As many of us as could fit got onto the next bus. Had I known not all of us could transfer over, I would have let someone else go instead of me, because I wasn’t in a hurry. After that, I don’t know what happened.
One never does get all the answers.