Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: March 2015

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

"It Is Finished"

Jesus’ Seven Last Words, sayings offered from the cross, may serve as guidance for the spiritual life. You are invited to contemplate each saying during the seven Wednesdays of Lent and Holy Week.

Not to demean the abject nature of Jesus’ final words, according to John—but how nice to be able to say, “It is finished.”

I have often written that, in the spiritual life, there is no finish line. And that believing you’re done or that you’ve arrived is spiritually dangerous. Lillian Hellman’s memoir title, An Unfinished Woman, is more realistic. (Though given the way Hellman apparently tended to fictionalize her own life, she may have been referring to a future version of her life events!)

Personally I fantasize about being able to say “I’m done” and go off to lie on a beach of a tropical island with a full library and an open bar.

You might say, “in your dreams!” but even my dreams will not let me rest in peace. In one speech I gave during what author and friend Mary Ann Woodruff has humorously christened my “legacy tour,” I said:

If my dreams are any indication, I have much unfinished business with the church as well as with my colleagues in the LGBT movement; also with the organizations and congregations I have served. I’m hoping this opportunity to talk about the meaning of the movement might be an occasion to exorcise some of the demons and heal some of the wounds inflicted by the friction between what I consider a movement of the Holy Spirit—perhaps even an uprising of the Holy Spirit—and the inertia inherent in any longstanding institution, such as the church.

More than sixty longtime Presbyterian catalysts of change on LGBT inclusion will gather next month at Stony Point, New York, to compare such notes at “Rock Stars and Prophets” following the recent denominational approval of same-gender marriage.

In recent months I have revisited almost every significant venue of my “uncommon calling” in my dreams. Sometimes I am welcomed back with grace and gratitude, more often with reservations and resistance. I’ve also revisited every place I’ve lived and all my significant relationships with people, partners, and relatives—again, with mixed results. It reminds me of those cartoon images of a character’s life passing before his/her eyes while falling off a cliff. I’m not dying, at least not in any way we aren’t all “dying.” I’m aging, and looking back on a life sometimes well-lived and sometimes not so well-lived. Many of you either share that experience or will share that experience.

If we can claim Jesus as a “Christian,” which may be a stretch, he was the first Christian interim or transitional minister. In three short years he revolutionized the way we view power, privilege, tradition, government, religion, spirituality, ourselves, and God. In the Gospels’ telling of the story, he lived and breathed and taught the common spiritual wealth we have from God. But he also sacrificed for it: he risked his well-being, his family, his religion, his very life, and he did so with grace, forgiveness, generosity, resistance, and love—above all else, love.

And that love has never finished.

For those who would like daily readings for this week of Lent, click here and scroll down to the end of “The Double Feature.”

My book, The Final Deadline: What Death Has Taught Me about Life was mentioned in a current column by Kay Campbell.

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers. This year, I offer a signed gift copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium, to each one who donates $100 or more (at once or in installments) over the course of 2015.

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

"I Thirst"

When we carry bottles of water with us everywhere, run water from the tap to rinse a dish, or make a cup of coffee or tea, it’s a challenge to wrap our minds around a concept of thirst. Obviously I am speaking to the minority of the world’s population, for whom such conveniences are commonplace, the most probable readers of this blog. Maybe our “contemplation” of thirst will prompt our action environmentally and politically on behalf of those with limited access to unpolluted water. “Whoever gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones” will be rewarded, Jesus said.

Forty years in the wilderness seeking the Promised Land or forty days in the wilderness discerning the Commonwealth of God would have made thirst a frequent companion.

The Hebrews complained to Moses, Moses kvetched to God, and water was provided from solid rock. In his hunger, Jesus was tempted to turn rocks into bread, and responded that we don’t live by bread alone, but by God’s word to us.

But what was his temptation when thirsty? Are we missing a fourth temptation? A convenient oasis, perhaps, or rain, if only he would bow to “the powers that be”?

Did Jesus long for the plentiful waters of his baptism, which had initiated this trek into the wild? We too know what it’s like for our baptism to wear thin in the real world.

How would Jesus have answered? Maybe quoting Yahweh from Isaiah 55? “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters… For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout…so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish what I purpose.”

Or his own beatitude in Matthew 5? “Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they shall be filled.” Or, “happy are those who hunger and thirst for saving justice, they shall be satisfied.”

Jesus asked the Samaritan woman for water, and offered her “living water,” which is water from a stream moving beneath the surface of the ground, thus living, and of course also implies something deeper than earthly needs.

Jesus’ supplication “I thirst” was true on the surface, the well-being of his body, but maybe was more, a confession of his spirit, like that of the Psalmist: “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?”

The writer of this psalm (42-43) was prevented from going to the house of God and laments, “As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’ … Why must I walk around mournfully because of the oppression of the enemy?” In his ministry and on the cross, Jesus endured wounds that went deeper than Roman torture and execution.

Every day in the paper and on the news, in our neighborhoods and in our cities, we witness those who thirst physically, spiritually, grieving oppression, prevented from entering houses of God.

“I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.”

For those who would like daily readings for this week of Lent, click here and scroll down to the end of “A Single Unified Force.”

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you! This year, I offer a signed gift copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium, to each one who donates $100 or more (at once or in installments) over the course of 2015.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

"My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?"

A misrendering of Jesus’ quote from Psalm 22 unveils for me the deeper theological nature of this question. One list of Jesus’ last words renders this “My God, my God, have you forsaken me?” which is very different from asking why God has forsaken him. “Have you forsaken me?” might merely suggest doubt in God’s presence. To ask why implies an awareness of God’s absence and a desire for a rationale. The plaintive tone in the repetition “my God, my God” suggests existential, spiritual dread.

One traditional answer is that Jesus bore our sins on the cross. If that is so, one could imagine Jesus so disfigured by sin that he is unrecognizable or unwelcome even to God. This is such a simplistic plot that it could serve a dramatic episode on TV, like a parent who fails to recognize her or his child after a tragic accident or a drug addiction. But surely we think more of God than that! The women disciples gathered at the cross still recognized their rabbi and were the first to “welcome” him off that cross.

Rather, it suggests to me the necessity of God’s absence to experience God’s presence. There is much in the spiritual tradition to suggest a “dark night of the soul” for many we now regard as mystics. And biblically, the empty wildernesses of the ancient Hebrews and of Jesus’ temptations proved opportune for discerning their spirituality. In Jesus’ case, he discerned that his survival, his credibility, and his power could only come from God. These were the same lessons learned by his Hebrew ancestors.

Much of our lives are given over to things from which God seems absent, which makes our intentional prayer lives potentially rich with God’s presence. And the deeper our prayer lives, the more noticeable God’s presence in everyday, ordinary things, even our suffering.

But I would say also that, the deeper our prayer lives, the more noticeable God’s absence may be in religious, even spiritual things, including our prayer times, especially when facing trials and temptation.

The psalm Jesus quotes cannot be said to end happily, but it does end hopefully, and I’ve heard preachers suggest that’s why Jesus quotes it, expressing hope in past deliverance, and ultimately expecting, if not rescue, at least that the psalmist and Jesus may prove a witness to future generations.

That may very well be, but I think such a resolution detracts from the immediate and overwhelming terror and anguish in Jesus’ outcry.

For those who would like daily readings for this week of Lent, click here and scroll down to the end of “Bill Maher’s Fundamentalism.”

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

"Woman, Behold Your Son. Son, Behold Your Mother."

I was surprised when I first learned that our word atonement is simply the combination “at-one-ment.” We tend to think of atonement as something God does with us or Jesus does for us or the Holy Spirit does inside us to join us to God. But these words of Jesus to his mother Mary, “Woman, behold your son,” and to his beloved disciple, “Son, behold your mother,” suggests the at-oneing is among us as well.

“Isn’t that nice that Jesus would provide for his mother in this way,” we might think. But what if we’re taking the story only at face value, a literal reading?

What if the intention of the story is to open our eyes that every woman should be valued as our mother and that every man should be cared for as the beloved disciple? What if the hope of the story is that we create family outside familiar criteria?

“Behold,” Jesus says, “behold!”

Behold the grieving mother. Behold the starving girl. Behold the sexually assaulted female. Behold the woman awaiting execution. Behold a female fetus about to be aborted for being the “wrong” gender. Imagine women in all kinds of suffering and imagine Jesus saying to us, “Child, behold your mother.”

Behold the abandoned son. Behold the uneducated boy. Behold the adolescent male in poverty. Behold the man being tortured. Behold the man unjustly imprisoned. Imagine men in all kinds of suffering and imagine Jesus saying to us, “Mother, behold your son.”

It’s not so far-fetched when we remember Jesus’ parable of final reckoning, “As much as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it so to me.”

The spiritual life for Christians is about stretching our imaginations, wrapping our minds around the “new thing” that God is doing, opening our hearts to share our common wealth, seeing others as if for the first time, living “as if” Jesus is in charge.

Our spirituality is sterile if it’s just “me and Jesus” or just “me and God.” Spirituality becomes fertile if it’s “me and everyone and everything else.” Spiritual growth is possible only as our spirit expands to include all there is. Yes, we may focus, but we can’t forget that every body and every thing carries its own sacred value.

“Behold,” Jesus says, “behold!”

Yes, we may gaze at the cross and contemplate Jesus’ passion, but we may also look around at one another with his compassion. That too is at-one-ment.

For those who would like daily readings for this week of Lent, click here and scroll down to the end of “My Loneliness Led Me to God.”

Thanks be to God for the life, writings, ministry, and friendship of Malcolm Boyd. Our prayers are with his partner, Mark Thompson. Malcolm still runs with Jesus!

A post about Malcolm: Everybody Has a Story

Think about it:

“A Death Row Inmate Finds Common Ground with Theologians”

This year, I offer a signed gift copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium, to each one who donates $100 or more (at once or in installments) over the course of 2015.

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