Learning and Walking the Unknown Path

It’s been a busy couple of weeks with the Multi-Faith Centre at KPU. Since the new semester has started we have been busy attending different orientation events, trying to raise awareness and create some student interest and energy around the MFC. We’ve also been internally working on expanding and bringing on board new chaplains and new faith traditions – the latest on that front is a new Buddhist chaplain on the Richmond campus and there will soon be a humanist chaplain joining me on the Surrey campus. Things are moving along!

As for creating a Christian community here on campus, things have been slow but relatively steady, probably to be expected in the first year on campus. I’ve made a number of positive connections with Christian students and staff, and I’ve enjoyed these first steps of developing a friendship with them; I look forward to more. But students are very busy and have widely different schedules, which makes bringing us all together something of a challenge. I continue to work on finding a common time and I trust that the Lord will provide. Morning Prayer is happening on Thursdays at 8: 40 regardless of who joins me, but I look forward to sharing the scriptures with fellow Christians as the semester and school year moves along and I make stronger and more frequent connections.

This morning for prayer I read Psalm 25: “Show me your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths; guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.” What are God’s ways on this university campus? What paths of God can I follow as I walk down these halls? God seems often frustratingly silent on the details. But I trust that his paths run “to the ends of the earth,” and so in that spirit I can tentatively hope that as I walk down to the student café for a coffee in the morning the simple journey I am taking can become obedient to God’s divine providence, guidance, and direction. I am by no means certain or confident of what that precisely means. But I have no choice other than deep trust that my presence at Kwantlen can join in with the very action of God.

"The Spirit Blows Where it Wills"

Last week at orientation on KPU’s I was hosting the Multi-Faith Centre table as the Christian Reformed Chaplain. On the Richmond campus a few years ago the MFC created an “I believe in…” board, where students write what they “believe in” on a small card and pin it to a large board. We decided to take up that same project on both the Richmond and the Surrey campuses this year. At the end of a day of orientation we have a large board filled with objects of belief, representing something of the diversity at Kwantlen. We’ll continue the project next week during “Welcome Week”, but orientation alone resulted in lots of different answers. I believe in…: myself, opportunity, God, respect, family, food and eating, and Jesus Christ, to name a few.

What does it mean to “believe in” Jesus Christ? And especially, what does it mean to believe in Jesus Christ in the context of so many other beliefs, from the trivial examples of “food” to the incredibly vague examples of “opportunity”? Not only that, but there are certainly religious traditions at KPU and in Surrey who aren’t represented on the board; think about the major world religions of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. What does “belief in Jesus Christ” mean alongside this myriad of differing traditions?

Jesus is the one who shows us what God is like. He is the Son who is so utterly dependent on his Father that that relationship of dependence is the ultimate thing that controls his life, a life of love, compassion, even to death. And we are invited into that relationship. Jesus invites us to stand where he stands, to pray “Our Father who art in heaven”. And this invitation is so powerful, so moving, so completely reconciling, that the invitation itself has made its way into the way Christian’s talk about God: the Holy Spirit. So to “believe in Jesus” means to inhabit and dwell within the beauty and assurance of Jesus’s invitation to stand with him, beside him, and have him stand and dwell within us as we pray to the Father, the source of Life, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

But can we do this alongside other traditions? How would we do this alongside other traditions? Jesus says to Nicodemus in John 3: “The wind blows where it wills. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit”. There is a mystery about the spirit who invites us into relationship with God. God has shown us himself in Jesus, but Jesus himself wasn’t entirely predictable. He refused final definition, a figure on the move. So it is of those born of the spirit. We might be tempted to label non-Christians cleanly and easily as “wrong” or “misguided”; and as Christians we do certainly need to make judgements about right and wrong, about true and false. But an important part of that act of judging is to be open to the spirit working in us and working beyond us. 

I hope this can open us to a simultaneous posture of confidence and humility. Confidence in God’s revelation in Christ and our participation in it through the Holy Spirit, but also humility in recognizing that the very spirit in whom we have salvation also is free to work and blow where it wills. I certainly seek bear witness to God in Christ, but part of that seeking is watching and waiting for the Lord in quiet confidence and assurance.

Belief in Christ is never a “finished task” in itself, let alone face to face with other traditions. And certainly the Christian task is not to water down our faith to make it palatable for everyone and anyone; the distinctiveness of the gospel in Christ is the gospel. But the gospel is clearly so much more than the mere truth that “Jesus is God”. If Jesus himself is the truth, then the Christian task is not necessarily to convince others of our faith but to combine our words with our actions, not only actions of service, but also our acts of prayer and acts of receptivity to the life of the Spirit which blows where it wills.