Are you a Christian?

     “Are you a Christian?”

     The questions hung there, suspended between heaven and earth, slowly twisting as the train hissed and clattered down the tracks. I paused, gathering my thoughts, looking into her steady soft brown eyes.

     “Are you a, you know, Christian?” she asked again without obvious rancor.  Shifting my gaze out the window I considered as the scenery flicked past, postcard moments. The train slowed a bit as the tracks bent to the north and the ancient Worms Dom, cathedral, marched into view.  Martin Luther, the unrepentant monk rose up crying out, "Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders! Gott helfe mir, Amen!" (Here I stand and cannot otherwise! God help me, amen!) Other images vie for primacy in my mind.   

     Flick-angry middle class men and women haranguing haggard, tearful young women, unwilling to

raise their heads as they hustle into a grim dark place, jostle the smiling missionary in Africa handing out gloves and hats to shivering discarded children of the dump scrabbling among the refuse for semi-edible scraps.

     Flick-two men arguing politics debate the government role in ameliorating the ills of poverty driven drug abuse, plaguing inner cities, crowd a thin bearded, beaded, tie-dyed young man, his blousy wife and their friends pooling resources as they convert an abandoned inner-city church building into a community dwelling.

     Flick-a heroic sized Jesus hawking something or other staggers past, eyes sad and hands outstretched over-written by a strong, capable carpenter cum teacher who touches the disfigured beseeching leper, saying, “I will…be clean.”

     Flick-well coifed men with arctic white, capped teeth proudly proclaim, “I am the ‘family values’ candidate as confetti and balloons reign on the cheering sign-tossed crowd, fade as an aging man tenderly, lovingly dabs errant oatmeal from the cheek of a once vibrant wife, hobbled by a stroke.

     Flick-a committee of well-dressed men peruse a set of blueprints of a campus expansion which includes two story stained glass and chrome fountains dissolve, as a sweaty group of jeans clad volunteers grin in front of a just finished home as they hand the keys to a young mother and three children.

     Flick-two well-dressed men chat; their voices muted by the large water feature in the foyer. “I can’t believe you would vote for him, especially after what the preacher said,” snaps the florid-faced man. “It just seemed right to me,” sighs the other resignedly as a gaunt young mother in last year’s fashion passes, two small children in tow, furtively scanning the hall looking for the right classroom.

     Flick-a small group of toga-clad men murmur, “There goes another one. Christians they call them, always trying to help out. They claim that they merely follow their master, a carpenter, who went about doing good in Judea of all places. Not Athens, not Corinth, and not Rome. Weirdos…Christians.”

     Flick-the small group of nervous men gathered round their earnest young rabbi, desperately trying not to let their apprehension show, as they soak up his every word, drawing strength from his calm presence. “Remember, it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher…,” His words ringing out across the Judean countryside and eventually settling into my soul.

     “Well,” she insists, “Are you?”

     “I don’t know,” I reply, “What do you think?”