Three Mile an Hour God

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Love has its speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore the speed the love of God walks.’ So, when we begin to read a passage like that in the light of human disability, and allow it to illuminate us, things begin to change. Certainly, my own attempts to love mercy and do justly have faltered every time I’ve tried to muster them on my own. I just don’t have it in me. I can’t dredge up enough mercy or love to get me going or enough justice to prime the pump. These things only ever come when I’m close to God: the One who loves mercy and does justly, and the One who shares His inner life with me. I spoke to one of my colleagues, who works in a busy hospital, about the three-mile-an-hour God. He said: “This place means that I have to move at nine miles an hour!” I said to him, “Well, who are you following?” If Jesus is walking at three miles an hour, and you’re walking at nine miles an hour, who is following whom? You can guess where Buchanan takes this. We hear a little bit on Gnosticism (“incarnation’s mortal enemy”), followed by the preposterous assertion that the “Christian faith” once had “a corresponding physical discipline” but “then lost it.” And this discipline, of course, was walking.

May we take this seriously: that a group of Presbyterian strangers became friends over many miles, in a ‘three mile an hour’ world, to witness to the forced migration of climate change refugees and to discern the imago Dei in the PC(USA) on our dying planet Earth. May we stop and know that God is a ‘three mile an hour God,’ who sees it all—sees us all, and all of each of us. This is the Good News.

Black Friday Deals

We lived on the same east coast seminary campus for two years, peripherally revolving around each other, but we didn’t take the time to know each other until this walk—and after much reflection, we believe it was meant to be this way. Here’s why:

Here’s the problem; even though I get the main idea of God moving really slow in the work of reconciliation. The false self wants reconciliation to happen now, in my time, with my agenda and so that I can control it. I get really frustrated at the God who moves three miles an hour. What happens when we literally walk out our Christian life? What does our physical being have to do with our spiritual life? What does the Bible actually mean when it exhorts us to walk in the light, or walk by faith, or walk in truth? How did Jesus model walking as spiritual formation?We couldn’t help but think about how God matched our steps, and those of the many who walk around the world, as we were walking and talking along the road, re-introducing ourselves to our home—to our ‘fly-over states.’ Like the travelers on Emmaus, our hearts burned within us as we shared our dreams for the Church, for each other, for our beloved ‘fly-over states,’ and for those frontline communities forced to migrate to sanctuary from the effects of climate change. He cites Luke 24:32, a scripture passage from the Emmaus Road where travelers remember how Jesus walked and talked with them. Jesus is a walking God; God is a ‘three mile an hour God.’ The disciples had a singular view of the mission of Jesus: Get to Jarius’ house. They didn’t want any interruptions. However, Jesus was a man who never minded being interrupted. He did not run to Jairus’ house. He wasn’t in a big hurry. He continued walking. There is a book by a Latin American Christian entitled, “ The Three Mile Per Hour God.” The thrust of the book is that the reason most of us miss the Lord in our daily lives is that we are running and dashing through life while God is moving at three miles per hour, which is the pace of walking. We are commanded in Scripture to “walk” with God. Jesus walked through the world. It is amazing to realize that Jesus accomplished the redemption of the entire world at three miles per hour. Jesus said to the woman, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering!” By this time, Jairus’ daughter was already dead. About the time this woman was receiving new life, the 12-year old girl was losing her battle. But Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life. Even death itself flees from His life. He took the dead girl by the hand, and the text retains the very language of Jesus as He spoke to her in Aramaic: “ Talitha Koum” which means, “Little girl, get up.” Immediately death fled from her and, like the woman with the hemorrhage of blood, life fled into her. It started very early with a God in the habit of walking in the garden in the cool of the day. Likely, he invited our first parents to join him, until that terrible day they ran away and hid instead. (See Genesis 3:8.) Even after that, holiness and walking with God were the same thing. “Enoch walked with God… Noah… walked with God” (Genesis 5:22; Genesis 6:9). Recently I was sitting with a brother in the fight for reconciliation, Donell Woodson and he said something that has been ringing in my head since we met; “Take the long arc of reconciliation.” His encouragement to me was to see the work of reconciliation as a marathon, not a spring because the history of racial injustice in our country.

The second half of the chapter is about intentional prayer walking. I look at how I and a few others in the church I used to pastor became present to our neighbors and to one another by walking and praying together in and for our community. Koyama was born in Tokyo in 1929, of Christian parents. He later moved to New Jersey in the United States, where he completed his B.D. at Drew Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary, the latter on the interpretation of the Psalms of Martin Luther in 1959.[2]

Koyama died at a hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts, of pneumonia complicated by oesophagal cancer, on March 25, 2009. His wife Lois died April 13, 2011. He is survived two sons, a daughter, and five grandchildren. [1] Writings [ edit ] God Walk is published by HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc., the parent company of Bible Gateway. Walking certainly helps us get and stay fit physically. However, I’m suggesting it also helps us get and stay fit spiritually. Jesus Did It!

Christianity, the world’s most incarnational faith, has nothing. Except—and this is the argument of my book—it has walking. It’s always had walking. I wrote the book to recover, for myself and others, that ancient way of embodiment. But it’s its own little miracle. Dr. JoAnn E. Manson of the Harvard Medical School says: “If there was a pill that people could take that would nearly cut in half the risk of stroke, diabetes, heart disease, reduce the risk of cognitive decline, depression, reduce stress, improve emotional well-being—everyone would be clamoring to take it, it would be flying off the shelf. But that pill, that magic potion, really is available to everyone in the form of 30 minutes a day of brisk walking.”

His last work was Theology and Violence: Towards A Theology of Nonviolent Love, published in Japanese in 2009 by Kyobunkwan, a publishing firm in Tokyo. Disability theology desires to explore what happens when the different perspectives and questions that emerge from human disability are placed alongside scripture and tradition and the practices of the Church. What does the gospel look like if we ask such different questions? I wish that Buchanan had done more to tease out the implications of a “slow God” who condescends to us, walking with us at the speed of love, which is also the speed of thought. Alas, he does so only very intermittently. Instead, in his first chapter, he makes a move that left me scratching my head and tugging at my beard. Under the subhead “A Physical Discipline,” he tells us that the “seed of this book was annoyance, or grief, or something in between.” What caused this feeling? Well, you see, “many spiritual traditions have a corresponding physical discipline and Christianity has none. Hinduism has yoga. Taoism has tai chi. Shintoism has karate. Buddhism has kung fu. Confucianism has hapkido. Sikhism has gatka.” But Christianity? Zilch. There may be no reason for this. But I have a couple of suggestions. First, Jesus walked with God. He was living into and working out of His own relationship with the three-mile-an-hour God and took all the time He could get.