Finding Your Bearings: How Words That Guided Jesus through Crisis Can Guide Us

By James, A. Harnish and Paul W. Chilcote

If you feel you've lost your bearings, you aren't alone!

Global pandemic . . . Economic crisis . . . Racial tensions . . . Political polarization . . . Climate change. The converging crises expose our timeless need for an internal compass to guide us through disruption, disorientation and change. James Harnish invites you into six crucial moments when Jesus found his bearings by recalling words and stories from the Old Testament. By connecting Jesus' story with your own, you can find your bearings as you walk the way Jesus walked in the way that Jesus walked it. It's the way that leads to life!

Questions for Reflection create an opportunity for you to pause, find your place in the story, and determine your next step along the way. These may also be used for journaling or small group discussion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jul 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781725295896

James, A. Harnish

I retired after 42 years of pastoral ministry in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. Martha and I are enjoying our 51th year of marriage at home in Longwood, Florida. I keep engaged by writing for the United Methodist Publishing House (http://www.abingdonpress.com/james_a_harnish) and Upper Room Books (https://upperroombooks.com/author/james-a-harnish/). I also serve as a facilitator for the Institute of Preaching and a member of the Board of Visitors at Duke Divinity School. We have two fantastic daughters. Carrie Lynn is married to Andy. They live in Orlando with our grandchildren Julia, Alex and Luke. Deborah Jeanne is married to Dan. They live in Charleston, South Carolina, with our two granddaughters, Mattie, and Molly.

Book preview

1

Finding Your True North

Read: Mark

12

:

28

–

34

, Deuteronomy

6

:

1

–

9

Curly, the rugged, weather-beaten cowboy played to perfection by Jack Parlance in the 1991 hit movie City Slickers , asked Mitch, the upwardly mobile, success-driven, soul-empty New York account executive played by Billy Crystal, Do you know what the secret of life is? Holding up a gnarled, old index finger, Curly went on, One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.

In anxious anticipation, Mitch asked, But what is the ‘one thing’?

Curly smiled and said, That’s what you have to figure out.¹

Sooner or later, through crises large and small, the relentless forces of reality force us to find one thing that will provide inner certainty and clarity of direction when the external signposts we’ve followed are shaken, rearranged, or taken away. Searching for bearings along the way demands that we wrestle with some unsettling questions.

What is the one thing that will help us find our bearings when our external signposts are taken away?

What is the center of certainty that can provide stability in disruptive and uncertain times?

How will we find what Harvard Business School professor Bill George called True North, which he defined as the internal compass that guides you . . . [and] represents who you are as a human being at your deepest level?²

The urgency in any crisis is to find our True North, a center of certainty that is rooted in the past, provides stability in the present, and will guide us into the future. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose personal search for faith continues to inspire spiritual seekers, named it as our innate need for a certitude that goes beyond reason and beyond simple faith.³

Three of the four Gospels include the story of a nameless man identified as a scribe. He was a legal expert, an authority on the Scriptures. I see him as a person like many of us who in the anonymity of our own souls are searching for True North. He wanted to find one thing that would provide a center of certainty in the crises of his life.

One of the legal experts heard their dispute and saw how well Jesus answered them. He came over and asked him, Which commandment is the most important of all? (Mark

12

:

28

)

We enter the story at the conclusion of vigorous discussion about the fine points of the law. Perhaps this scribe was weary of spiritually vapid, intellectually exhausting debates when he stepped away from the nit-picking religious legalists and came over to Jesus. He spoke with the ruthless honesty of a persistent question that percolates quietly in some silent corner of the soul until it bursts into speech, Which commandment is the most important of all?

Questions for Reflection

What do you think brought this scribe to Jesus?

How can you identify with his search?

How would you define True North for your life?

Searching for Certainty

The scribe in the Gospel story wasn’t alone in his search for certainty. Gil Rendle, writing as an authority on leadership in times of change, asserts that certainty stands with convergence.⁴ He pointed to the cultural convergence of the post-WWII era that provided certainty for me and for many people in my generation.

I’m a Medicare-card-carrying product of the Baby Boom generation. I grew up in the middle of the middle class, in a solidly white, politically conservative, county seat town in the hills of Western Pennsylvania. I found my bearings in the supposedly ideal family portrayed on our black-and-white television by Ozzie and Harriett and Father Knows Best. The roots of my faith were planted in the soil of white, mainline, American Methodism and what is known as the holiness tradition. The convergence of the culture provided unquestioned certainty for my adolescent development. I was naïve enough to be absolutely sure of just about everything!

But Rendle calls those post-WWII years an aberrant era when a convergence of unique conditions creates an environment . . . that is uniquely tied to that moment but cannot continue beyond the moment that created it. He stresses that we are now in a divergent culture in which divergence takes certainty away.⁵

Times have changed! Things we assumed were nailed down have been shaken loose. Ozzie and Harriet died a long time ago. Demonic powers of racism, sexism, economic injustice, and inequality that slithered beneath the surface of the Father Knows Best culture have been laid bare as people from outside our convergent culture bubble have found their voices and are once again calling our country to live up to the promise of liberty and justice for all.

While we were reeling under the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, we were brutally confronted with the virulent virus of racism that has infected our nation’s bloodstream since the first slaves were unloaded on these shores four-hundred years ago. Video coverage of George Floyd dying under the knee of a white police officer forced white people to see with brutal clarity the racism that Black people have seen for generations. It opened the flood gates for massive demonstrations calling for fundamental and systemic change. The all-too-predictable backlash unleashed white supremacists carrying their guns and waving Confederate- and Nazi-emblazed flags.

At the same time, the cultural convergence rooted in an Americanized version of the Christian faith has been blown away so that none is the most rapidly growing religious preference among young adults. Pope Francis named the religious crisis when he declared, "Christendom no longer exists! . . . We are no longer living in a Christian world, because faith . . . is no longer an evident presupposition of social life. He warned of the temptation to fall back on the past . . . because it is more reassuring, familiar, and, to be sure, less conflictual. He challenged us to avoid a rigidity born of the fear of change, which ends up erecting fences and obstacles on the terrain of the common good, turning it into a minefield of incomprehension and