Meeting Jesus on the road
The authors of a new Lenten study are the guests on ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’
LOUISVILLE — The writing team of the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Campbell and the Rev. Christine Coy Fohr, which previously gave us “Meeting Jesus at the Table: A Lenten Study,” has a new book that’s been published by Westminster John Knox Press, and the two stopped by the virtual studios of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” to talk about it. Listen to their 49-minute conversation with hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe here.
Campbell served in ministry, taught at seminaries and was the ninth president of McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Coy Fohr is head pastor at Harvey Browne Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. Their new book is “Meeting Jesus on the Road: A Lenten Study.” Videos to aid group studies of the book are here.
Campbell said the title for the new book came from a collection of essays from Kosuke Koyama called “Three Mile an Hour God.” “His point was if you walk and try to have a conversation at the same time, 3 miles per hour is probably as much as you can do,” Campbell said. “God slowed God’s self down to 3 miles per hour. The incarnation happens in the bodies we actually inhabit, with all the limitations and all the possibilities.”
“Thinking about Jesus walking and talking — that was for me the spur of the idea of the book. I hope it helps us think about Lent not just as a mental spiritual practice, but an embodied set of practices.”
“Oftentimes, by the time Ash Wednesday rolls around [this year it’s Feb. 18], we’ve given up a lot of things,” Coy Fohr said. Really, Lent is a season for trying to prepare yourself, trying to re-orient your life and live with intentionality and in a meaningful way.”
“It’s actually good timing that after you’ve maybe failed on some of the more secular things you’re trying out, Lent rolls around,” she said. “Its purpose was to prepare people for baptism — that during the Easter Vigil you’d be ready to be baptized because you’d gone through this season of preparation.”
Lent is about hearing and pondering “stories that we believe really happened,” Coy Fohr said. Jesus and the disciples “met people on the road and at tables.” Part of Lent involves “thinking about how we can try that on in our own bodies while we’re trying to live our lives ina new way and prepare ourselves for Easter.”
“If we believe in this 3 miles per hour God who chose to be incarnate and take on flesh, we should let our spiritual and physical lives do the same,” she said, “that they can come alongside one another and build one another up.”
Doong said it’s been his mother’s Lenten practice to go for a walk with different people a couple of times each week to “reflect and pray for that person.”
Walking prompts are included in the book, Campbell noted.
“I love the idea of holding a person or an issue in your mind or your heart as you take a walk,” she said. What Doong described “would have been a great addition to our book.”
As people walk their neighborhood or one nearby, they’re asked, “What did you see? What does that tell you about who lives there?” Campbell said. “Jesus lived in a real location. You can go to Israel-Palestine and there are guides who will say, ‘this is exactly where the Sermon on the Mount happened.’ We don’t know that, but what we do know is that he was in the whole region, and you can look around. Context matters, and being aware of that is a very important spiritual discipline.”
Coy Fohr wrote a chapter on walking a labyrinth. “People for centuries have tried to slow down and be mindful and prayerful,” she said. “There’s a spiritual practice in walking unattached to wherever we’re going.”
The very act of slowing down “can be so important to being present in a way that we see Jesus being present to people,” she said. “That can be part of that intentionality we can try to practice in Lent.”
In Mark’s gospel, Jesus tries multiple times to explain to the disciples what discipleship entails, Campbell said. “It’s about decentering yourself. It’s about changing allegiance from the reign of Caesar to the reign of God, to living in this new, dynamic, different way,” she said. “I think Jesus had to understand there was not way these folks would really get it until they are on the other side of the resurrection, which is where the gospels are written.”
“These are hard questions,” she said. “Who am I loyal to? What’s the center of my values, and what am I willing to put on the line for that? How much of me am I willing to invest in living in a different way?”
Coy Fohr also wrote the final chapter, on Easter itself. In that chapter, the authors note that after his resurrection, Jesus instructed the people to “go back to Galilee and there you’ll find me,” she said. “We explored what that means, to go back to the thing that first captured your heart, that first got you on this journey, and it just keeps going.”
“You’re not thinking, I’ve reached the endpoint and I’m good to go,” she said. “It’s an ongoing process, and it’s not an easy process.”
“It’s also about going back to that place where you were first captivated by Jesus and by this joy of living your life differently, and the possibility that holds.”
Campbell said it’s important to note that Jesus “was not a solo act.”
“We think of superheroes in pop culture, and that’s not Jesus. He build a community of men and women around him,” she said. “That’s at the heart of what the Christian faith is all about. All an institution is is a community built to endure over time.”
“I can’t baptize myself, and I can’t feed myself,” she said. “That’s at the heart of what we in our tradition have to proclaim and to demonstrate. We’ve got to show people what that looks like.”
New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.
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