With a wide worldview, Rev. Luidens says God calls people away from ‘destructive religiosity’

The Enterprise — Michael Koff

From the pulpit, Reverend Robert Luidens delivered sermons at Altamont Reformed Church for over 30 years, but a large part of his ministry was in visiting those who could not get to his church on Lincoln Avenue.

 

ALTAMONT — Those close to Reverend Robert Luidens — who will soon be retiring as pastor of the Altamont Reformed Church after 31 years — will tell you about his dedication to visiting people confined to a hospital or a nursing home or their own home. He does this not just for members of his church but also for their friends, for village residents, and for friends of the church from other denominations. And he does it not just once but as often as may be needed, they say.

Visits are indeed a huge part of his ministry, Luidens (pronounced LY-dens) said recently in a wide-ranging conversation with The Enterprise.  But another, it emerged, is his worldview, which is so broad and egalitarian that it does not conform strictly to traditional church teaching.

“I am known as a heretic among my peers,” he said.

Luidens was born in Iraq, to missionary parents. The grandson of two ministers, he is “deeply bred” in the Reformed Church in America.

As a toddler living in the Middle East until age 3½ , he would sit down to lunch while hearing the call to prayers at the nearby mosque. “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” the muezzin would chant, as Luidens and his older brother and sister prayed, “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for his food.” 

He spoke both English and Arabic in his earliest years. But he forgot his second language soon after returning to the States, despite going back to the Middle East, this time to Beirut, as a grade-schooler for three more years. “Everybody in Beirut speaks English and French, as well as Arabic,” he said.

He graduated from college with a degree in philosophy and math, and then returned to Bahrain for a year, to volunteer with the mission station there. This was his version of a rebellion: he went to get away from everyone who simply assumed that he would be going into the ministry. He did not feel a calling at that point, and “wasn’t simply going to go [into the ministry] because everybody figured I would.”

Ironically enough, though, it was during that year in Bahrain that he did first feel the calling.

So he returned home and went to Yale Divinity School instead of doing the graduate work he had planned in Arabic studies in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This kept him separated for an additional year from his fiancée, Mary, whom he had met in college and who was now in medical school in Ann Arbor. But they were married after his first year in divinity school “and have been pairing it up together ever since,” he said. They have three grown children and two small grandchildren.

An endocrinologist on the faculty of Albany Medical College for a quarter century now, Mary Luidens hardly fits the traditional image of the minister’s wife, but, said her husband, “The congregation I don’t think has suffered as a result of that.” She has taught Sunday school and sung in the choir “just like a member of the church.” Luidens recognizes and respects that his wife’s “place of vocation” is Albany Medical Center.

They have already bought a house in Holland, Michigan, where Luidens and his wife attended college and first met and where they both have family roots. Luidens will be “moving into full-time retirement” as of Jan. 1. But not Mary, who will be providing primary care to veterans at a Veterans Affairs satellite clinic in Muskegon, Michigan.

Luidens will “find places to do volunteer work,” he said “probably in a church, but not as pastor.” He plans to continue to visit shut-ins, to teach Sunday school, and perhaps mentor seminary students about what to expect from ministry in a local parish.

He also anticipates “writing a short memoir of my experiences.”

At the suggestion that perhaps his memoir will find a lot of readers among Altamont residents, he jokes, “Well, they’re going to be the subjects of it, so they’ve already been forewarned.”

He has never had any interest in working in a church larger than Altamont Reformed, he said, because the congregation’s size, “inclusive of the number of shut-ins and the routine of who at any given time might be in the hospital, fills my time more than I could even want.”

He enjoys that part of the vocation. In fact, if he goes a number of days without taking time to visit with people in their homes or in nursing homes or in the hospital, “I feel exhausted.”

Of course, it’s exhausting, too, to spend hours each day visiting and talking with people, he said, but that is “a fulfilled sense of exhaustion,” without which he just feels “dried up.”

For him, he said, visiting is essential for being able to prepare properly for church leadership and preaching, because it “enables and forces” him to keep relevant to people’s real-life experience.

Is it awkward to sit there in a hospital room and try to think of things to say?

“It’s work,” he acknowledged. He tries to listen well, and, anyone who does that, whether it’s ministry or teaching or medical care, he said, knows that it takes energy and intentionality, even for those who “have that inclination and that gift.”

Luidens asked about the reporter’s church experience, prompting a conversation about the study of philosophy, and about having fallen away from religion because of a sense that the world’s three great monotheisms — Islam, Judaism, and Christianity — are fundamentally opposed and can’t all be correct, and being repulsed by the idea of consigning large swaths of the world’s faithful to hell.

At that, Luidens began to describe a sermon he gave several weeks ago, in which he told his congregation about those prayers he and his siblings offered over lunch years earlier as the muezzin chanted in the background. For years, he said, he thought “it was kind of cool” that the two prayers were the same.

But as the years have gone by and he has “kind of become more sophisticated in trying to interpret the various tones within Islam, Judaism, and Christianity,” he has learned that the two prayers are not the same, even though the words may be the same.

What he suggested to the congregation was that, in Islam, true to the very nature of the word “Islam,” which he said is rooted in the Arabic word for “slave,” the image of Allah is “of a God who expects his people to understand that we are to be his slaves, a God who expects servitude.” And that, he said, is interpreted by fundamentalist Muslims as being “a fiat for a kind of judgment of those who are infidel.”

All three of the world’s monotheistic religions can retreat to a baseline setting of, he said, “Some are in, and some are out, meaning by definition that we’re in, and everybody else is out.”

That kind of thinking — whether done by fundamentalist Muslims or by fundamentalist Christians — is anathema to Luidens. That kind of judgment of other faiths is not, he believes, God’s agenda, but a “human agenda that we give religious veneer to,” causing each other deadly harm and also harming ourselves in the process. What God calls us away from, he says, is exactly that “destructive religiosity.”

He is deeply convinced that the creator is one who “embraces without condition every single one of his children,” without condition and without limit, like any parent. “If God is the Father of every single human being,” he asks, “how could God possibly not love, without condition, every single human being?”

Noting that this is where his belief departs from church tradition, Luidens said he believes that “in the end there will be none who are barred from communion with our God and with every other human being who has ever lived.”

He believes that every single person on Earth is “the object of unconditional love and grace that frees us from having to be worried about pleasing God or winning God’s favor.” He calls it “unfortunate” that the world’s monotheisms “forget that regularly.”

So he believes that heaven is big enough for all human beings?         

“I think it’s bigger than all human beings. I think it is the size of creation,” he answered.   

He told a story about a formative experience from his youth, when he was 12 or 13 years old and spent the night sleeping under the stars for the first time, on Bear Mountain with his Boy Scout troop. “I had just learned about light years, and about the notion of the expansion of the universe.” He had just begun, he said, to wrap his mind around “what is impossible to wrap our mind around,” the enormity of the universe.

“And what hit me was, lying there on the top of that mountain, God knew who I was and where I was and loved me, and God was 13 billion light years away, doing what God is doing. And I’m convinced that God is planting life in countless places around the universe, that’s how big God is. Because, if God’s making creation, why would he limit life to this tiny little speck in this tiny little corner of the galaxy that is one of a hundred billion galaxies?

“No,” he concluded, “God’s got stuff going on all over the place.”

And so, from his perspective, “what the next life is about, and I can’t wait for this, quite frankly, is being introduced to the rest of the universe and to the rest of humanity that I’ve never had a chance to meet, or to humanity that have called me enemy and don’t want to relate to me as their brother.”

He then continued — just a few days after the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria terrorist attacks in Paris that were much on everyone’s mind — “I can’t wait to get to know my ISIS friends who want to kill me, but who are my brothers. And obviously it’s not going to happen in this life, but I do believe it’s going to happen. And it’s not going to be, ‘Well, they’re not going to be there.’ No! Why should they not be there? They’re my brothers. Except that they will be changed, and I will be changed, and we will look at each other and we will embrace each other and not see an enemy.”

And in that heaven — his sense of which gives him purpose and enlivens him, he said — “there will be room for everyone.”

He looks forward to traveling after his retirement. He has been to the Far East before, but would love to go again. He “can’t wait” to go back to the Middle East.

“And man, I want to hit Paris again.”

He would very much like to go to Paris right now — not despite, but because of, the attacks — to stand with Parisians as a friend.

Maybe that fits my theological image, he said, of God as “the one who walks with us through our pain, and doesn’t just say, ‘Take care of yourself!’”      

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