Pastor Tim Ahrens on Loving Kindness and Interfaith Alliances

Tim Ahrens leads the First Congregation Church in Columbus, Ohio. He has been a social activist for more than two decades. He and I spoke in September of 2016 about loving kindness and interfaith alliances.
“My foundation for the values in my life is the teachings of Jesus Christ. My interpretation of Christ is —speaking of maximizing loving kindness— that he wasn’t out to found a religion. He was, in a sense, out to form a movement. The movement was one in which the Kingdom of Heaven was the centerpiece of his teaching, and that is — if you read the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount—– the core values were founded on bringing the best out of people, the blessedness out of people. That’s without a doubt the foundation of my faith, and shapes everything I say or do. Or I hope that’s the case, on good days at least.”
” I happen to believe it’s more than that. If the Kingdom of God is inside myself, that’s where it ends. But I think it’s also in a symbiotic relationship with that which is outside of ourselves. It’s not outside or inside. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and. So, I have a strong sense of social salvation. It’s not enough that my soul is saved, but (it matters that) the soul of society, the larger, the goodness of all (is saved and ) is the work of God.”
Ahrens said he is part of the Social Gospel tradition.
“It’s very rich in the story of this particular congregation, but it certainly has been part of Dr. King’s and part of other movements of faith such as Dr. Barber’s who’s now leading the Moral Mondays movement.”
I asked Ahrens what he thought of the claim justice is the public face of love.
“I think that’s a good definition of what justice looks like. ‘Justice for all’ is a foundational belief about the way justice should roll out, both Biblically and legally in a social setting. It doesn’t always get worked out that way. We can talk about that whole story, but the sense is that justice should be for all, and not just for some, that’s love. That really is the definition of love, something that is shared across all faiths, all traditions,  and all economic backgrounds.”
Ahrens has for more than 20 years advocated for the rights of the LGBT community. I asked him how he decides which causes to get involved with.
“The places where injustice seems to reign supreme, where lack of love is guiding a power structure, definitely draw me in. Jesus  said we have an obligation to the least, the last, the forgotten, the forsaken. If I see a pattern that’s systemic, or just see individuals who are hurting, I’m called to that. It’s not necessarily a particular issue. It’s larger than an issue. It’s about people, ultimately. Certainly education is an area and also the criminal justice system itself, both the incarceration and the release of men and women back into society. The laws are set up against them. If you come to bat in a baseball game, and you have three strikes against you, then you’re already out. Why even  show up for the game, when you’ve already been counted out?”
I asked Ahrens what red letter passages in the New Testament compel or inspire him the most.
“There’s really only one commandment that Jesus gives, and it’s very clear. ‘I command you to love one another.’ He says it three or four times. Red letters in the Bible stand for what Jesus said. There is a lot of discussion about which things Jesus actually said and which things were written in there later for the church. It’s almost to say, if you think of a friend, who, by his or her nature, presents themselves one particular way all the time, then you’ve  got to ask yourself why they would say this other thing that is out of character for them.”
“Jesus said love God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. But then he says, ‘I tell you to leave your father and mother, your wife, your children, split everything up.’ So you say, whoa, whoa, whoa, that doesn’t sound like Jesus, and you think, who wrote that ? What was the purpose of that?  So, it can go in the red letter section , but it sounds like a different color than red in this case. It sounds like someone else wrote that in. If you dig deeper, you find that for the church’s purposes, in the first century, they needed to separate themselves in a way that established identity. They needed to say to people, ‘Come and be in this movement. You might have to leave family. You might have to separate yourself from what has been, to be a part of what will be.’  But that’s the motivation of the disciples, not the founder of the faith. Jesus identifies himself pretty clearly in his language with compassion and kindness.”
Regarding where to draw the line in determining what it means to be a Christian, in light of how one may or may not interpret the Bible, Ahrens said, “Those are the struggles of the ages. They’re not insignificant.”
Ahrens said there’s a sense with Scripture such that we take what we like, and leave the rest if we’re honest about it.
“I’ve spent my life in these texts, and I think it’s a mistake to throw it all out, if we don’t like some parts of it.”
Ahrens said Scripture is the inspired word of God.
“But it’s not written by God, and infallible as some would tell you. Anyone who’s taking time with the Scripture would look at it that way, instead of a small group of people carrying a tradition forward which says it’s infallible, and saying we can’t possibly question anything that’s in there. The truth of the matter is we question things all of the time, in our lives and in the world and in Scripture.  So we need to be honest about what we’re doing.  It’s all interpretation when we get into it. We’re doing our best to figure out what it means.”
I asked Ahrens what motivates his interfaith work.
“We don’t pick our neighbors. In my neighborhood, there are Hindus, Christians, Jews, Agnostics, and Atheists. There are some Jains that live down the street.” He lives in Northern Columbus.
“To say I’m only going to relate to the neighbors that are Christian means I’m going to miss out on the relationships I can have with everyone else. The Bible does say ‘love your neighbor.’
Ahrens said interfaith work is a lot like living in a neighborhood.
“It’s about acknowledging those who are in relation to us and who also have some very clear understandings of their relationship to God or their lack of relationship to God. It’s a messy world. You enter the mess. The root of the word ‘humility’ is humus or mud. It means you get into stuff… I don’t feel I have enough time on Earth to be exclusive and get away with it.”
Ahrens said when we’re exclusive, we miss out on new understandings we could have otherwise gained.
“When I’ve encountered interfaith settings, I’ve actually returned to my own faith with a deeper understanding and appreciation, not to wall myself in the fortress of my faith, but to understand how it relates to the world. Actually, I like my faith. So, interfaith work doesn’t threaten my beliefs. It enriches them.”
I asked him to say more about how an ethic of loving kindness, if politically applied, could be empowering, and reduce the chances of people being manipulated by demagogues seeking to divide and rule over people by stoking hatred.
“I’ve spent most of my life here in Columbus working on relationships between people. Washington Gladden  was the pastor of this church for 36 years. At the end of his life he wrote  a book called Recollections. One of my favorite passages is where  he said ‘When it all comes down to it, religion is about friendship, between God and humanity, and friendship with one another.’ He said that’s all there is to it.”
Ahrens said building relationships with people a diversity of faiths as well as no religious faith is  like a “tapestry that’s woven of many different fabrics of people”  that make us more able to resist demagoguery.
He  said  it’s the relationships that will hold us together when confronted with crises. I asked Ahrens what he thought of  global solidarity.
“To a greater or les ser extent, different frameworks of thought and connection and reality, if you will, in spirituality, have greater strengths in certain areas than others do. For example, a wonderful book that was written by a professor at Union Seminary in New York, Paul Knitter, is Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian.
“At the end of the book, he talks about how thru Buddha he learns to be peace, thru Christ he learns to make peace. To use that illustration, I think Buddhism is better at the interior work for a peaceful being, and Christianity has been better, when it’s working well together— and I’m not going to claim it always has— for making peace in the world.  Some of the great peacemakers of our time and thru generations have been people who find their essence in Christ.”
I asked Ahrens what he thought about ecology as a form of spirituality.
“There are certain things I learn from my environmentalist friends and from people who have really given of themselves to the care of the Earth.”
He recommends the Green Bible.
“It’s  made on recyclable paper, and in green letters are all of the passages in Scripture about care for creation. It may surprise some people, but care for the Earth is actually a dominant theme in the Bible. More than 1500 passages talk about caring for the Earth. Christians who don’t have a connection to caring for the Earth are missing their connection to their own Scripture.”
Ahrens said sometimes we don’t know the richness and depth of our own traditions.
“We’re better served if we’re communicating with one another the strengths of our traditions and beliefs. There’s more strength in the vastness than in the singleness of beliefs.”
Ahrens said there are more than 2,000 passages in the Bible  about care for the poor, the widow, and the orphan.
“In the New Testament, Jesus’ main concern is stewardship of gifts, not just how much you give to the church, though we in the churches sometimes frame it that way. Jesus was talking about stewardship for the Earth, stewardship of our resources, and how  we share what we have with those  who are without. It’s a very economic way of looking at the universe. There’s an economy-of-scale in how we care for the poor and care for our own material resources. It’s a big theme for him.”
I asked Ahren’s about socially conservative Christian interpretations of the Bible.
“If I want to push you away, I’m going to find something to do that with, right? It might be a taser, or a cattle prod, or it might be a book of the Bible or a passage in the Bible. I’ve seen people beaten with the Bible, spiritually, emotionally, and apparently people do that physically. People have told me they’ve been literally beaten with the Bible. So, you can use ‘the gospel gun’ to shoot people.”
Ahrens has advocated on behalf of Queer folk for many years.
“I’ve done a lot of writing, preaching and teaching on questions about homosexuality. There are maybe seven texts that have reference to that, but until the middle of the 19th Century, ‘homosexuality’ wasn’t even a word.  So for  it to appear in the Bible is ludicrous. It’s not in the Latin, not in the Vulgate or Aramaic or Hebrew or Greek. There’s not a word for it. So, we sort of impose that in later translations.”
Ahrens said those are bad descriptions of what even those seven passages are talking about.
“There are seven questionable texts about a thing that’s not even validly addressed in Scripture, compared with 2,000 texts talking about care for the poor…A lot of people will say, ‘the Bible is against homosexuality.’ Well, that’s not fair to the Bible, let alone all of its authors and the spirit of God that’s there.”
Ahrens said movements of intolerance within religious communities grow from fear, not faith.
“There’s plenty in this world that I can wake up in the morning and be afraid of. But I think faith calls you to overcome fear. You overcome fear in many ways. As for loving kindness, the word in Hebrew is ‘hesed’ or ‘chesed’ which is the centerpiece of much Scriptural writing in the psalms and even in the prophetic writings. Hesed is loving kindness, and it gets strangely interpreted sometimes  but it really is that sense that kindness in and of itself, has to be wedded with love. I can be kind in a functional way but loving kindness goes beyond a measure of a pact, agreement, or contract. It’s greater than that.”
Ahrens said loving kindness is what changes the world.
“A good example of loving kindness is the Bishop in Les Miserable. One of the characters has been put in prison for 30 years because he stole a loaf of bread. When he gets out, he’s hungry, and the bishop takes him in. While the bishop is asleep the thief runs off with the silver candle sticks. He gets caught and the police take him back to the rectory. The bishop tells the police, ‘No, no, no. He didn’t steal these. I gave them to him. It was a gift.’ That’s loving kindness. It’s grace upon grace. It’s giving someone an opportunity.”
I asked Ahrens why not just focus on loving kindness, without religious doctrine.
“In the world we live in, we can’t go wrong, with more understanding of loving kindness. I would never contend that Christianity has, or that Judeo-Christian texts, the Old and New Testaments, have it all together, with loving kindness…I always tell the teenagers in the church, ‘I’m sort of like a frog. I’m in a pond and I like to visit other lily pads and rocks and I like to go to the shore, and I like to learn about the pond from other perspectives, and every day I return to my rock in the center of the pond.'”
Ahrens said he has an inclusive understanding of God’s grace and love, and of loving kindness.
“I find it appalling that someone would see a Hindu from India and say they’re going to hell, simply because they are not a Christian.  I don’t get that. I certainly don’t think that’s what Jesus was about.”
Ahrens said his church respects and holds sacred everyone’s interpretation of the principles of the Christian faith.
“That’s been with us for 164 years. That’s our covenant. You might consider that to be a radical Christian concept but to us it’s not. It’s part of our tradition in this church. It’s just who we are. That’s where I come from. You don’t have to call yourself a Christian but you interpret the principles of the Christian faith a certain way and I hold that as sacred too. It’s a very open understanding of who you are and what you believe.”