OCCASIONS LIKE THANKSGIVING can bring to mind varied thoughts of persons who have been present in years past. November includes the birthday of my maternal grandmother (the 11th) and my father (the 25th), plus my parents’ wedding anniversary (the 22nd). The preceding month of October includes my maternal grandfather’s birthday (the 4th). The four of these have not “been around” together since 40 Thanksgivings ago, but memories of them still come to mind.
My maternal grandmother (by example and instruction) taught me how to milk a cow, churn butterfat milk, make cornbread, and respect others. Her “work for pay” was in an elementary school cafeteria. Most often she had a smile on her face. When she did not, it was an occasion for serious conversation and adjusted behavior.
From a Christian faith perspective, my maternal grandmother wanted everyone to be able to avoid two categories. She hoped no one would be classified as an infidel (a non-believer as she understood saving Christian belief) or as a universalist (one who believes that in the end, all will be saved). Her traditional Christian faith from the late 1800s could not understand or endorse either one.
My maternal grandfather was tolerant and respectful of my grandmother’s faith perspectives, but he was mostly indifferent and detached in relation to church as an institution and an authority in people’s lives. A farmer and public school bus driver and custodian, he was the type of person who quietly (even secretly) would give someone in need a shirt out of his own closet. (He was too modest and concerned with hygiene to give the shirt off his own back.)
My parents are located on the third point of this family faith-triangle. My mother, professionally a nurse, and my father, professionally an attorney, combined my maternal grandmother’s profession of faith and significant participation in a community of faith (church) with my maternal grandfather’s healthy critique of religious dogmatism, authority and tradition.
One time my father quoted theologian Richard Niebuhr to the adult Sunday school class he led: “There is no such being, or source of being, surely, as a Christian God, or Jewish God or Muslim God … The object of our inquiry in life, as Christians or as non-Christians, is not exclusively the Christian perspective, but rather human moral life in general” (from “The Responsible Self”).
In the county-seat town where we lived, my grandmother heard about this. While she thought my father was almost perfect, she fretted that he might be classified by the community into one of those two fearsome categories, as either an infidel or a universalist. She wasn’t sure which. He was convinced, though, that such respectful faith-seeking was at the heart of the Protestant Reformation and the faiths of the Abrahamic traditions (Jewish, Christian, Muslim).
God understands that we do not always agree. Otherwise the stories from Scripture of Job and his wife and “friends” and of Jesus and his critics and detractors would not be relevant to us today, as they should be relevant to the depths of our souls.
This Thanksgiving, I pray that we might grow in God’s sacrificial and unearnable love. To the extent that we do we will recognize our sometimes significant differences, and both communities of faith and secular communities will notice children, youth and adults exploring diversity of belief and abiding respect for differences, making visible a far more authentic witness of God’s grace than dismissing one another based on triumphal dogmatism.
TED FOOTE is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Bryan, Texas, and author of “Being Presbyterian in the Bible Belt” and of “Being Disciples of Jesus in a Dot.Com World.”
