Risking the Brokenness of the Body, Part 1

Mt. Calvary courtyard

I occasionally took personal retreats at an Episcopalian retreat house overlooking Santa Barbara. Mount Calvary was run by the Order of the Holy Cross. As one might suspect with names like that, there were many depictions of Jesus on the cross in sculptures, carvings, and paintings.

One stormy afternoon, sharing pizza and wine in front of a cozy fireplace, one of the brothers and I discussed the ramifications of the relatively recent decision of the Episcopal Church in the United States to ordain women. I was surprised that, despite his liberal views, he opposed women’s ordination. He did so not because he opposed it per se, but because it would interfere with any hope of reunion between the Anglican and Roman Catholic communions. “I’d have no problem with it if Rome ordained women,” he explained.

I considered the many similar objections to the ordination of lesbians and gays in my own Presbyterian Church. The impending reunion of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and the Presbyterian Church, U.S., which had split over the abolition of slavery one hundred years earlier, might have been impeded if the more liberal northern congregations had approved ordination of homosexuals.

So the constant cry that ordaining homosexuals would split the church was sounded even more to muster our defeat. (I believe the church would do more to keep its dwindling fold if it banned ordination of boring preachers and belligerent clergy!)

Also fresh in my mind were the recent concerns expressed over the unity of the National Council of Churches in the United States, if it accepted the membership of the predominantly gay Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches.

As I considered all these perceived threats to the church as the Body of Christ, I reflected on the many images of Jesus on the cross in the retreat center. Repeatedly reminded of the brokenness of our Lord, a response to the brother who opposed women’s ordination came to me. I rhetorically asked him, “When Jesus was faced with the choice of doing what was right or keeping his own body from being broken, which did he choose?”

Paul wrote to the church at Philippi that Jesus “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in our likeness. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8).

“He learned obedience through what he suffered,” affirms the epistle to the Hebrews, which some biblical scholars assert may be the only book in the Bible written by a woman (Heb. 5:8). But, she explains, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear” (Heb. 5:7).

This is clearly a different vision of God than the Almighty presented in the Old Testament. This is a God who, out of sacrificial love, leaves the closet of heaven to descend to earth and become like us, “tempted in every way as we are,” willingly living and working among us and dying at our hands—all to bring us God’s Word of love (Heb. 4:15). This is a deity who risks the brokenness of the body to call us home to God.

Many Christians feel uncomfortable with this image of God. They want to believe that God is all-powerful as well as all-loving. Our imperfect world belies the possibility that God is both. If God is both, God may be blamed for either causing or allowing human suffering.

In his book The Divine Relativity, process theologian Charles Hartshorne suggests that, facing a contradiction between an all-loving yet all-powerful God, it would be better to sacrifice our understanding of God as all-powerful than to sacrifice our understanding of God as all-loving. We conceive of God as the best possible entity, and when we think of the best possible person we know, we are more likely to choose the most loving over the most powerful. Even the Superman hero in comic books is not attractive because he is super powerful, but because he uses his super powers for good, in other words, lovingly.

For many years I found this reasoning worked for me. But then it occurred to me that perhaps our understanding of power was distorted, for we think of power in terms of possession and control. In my own loving experiences, I found that my attempts at possession and control had nothing to do with love, nor did they bear any resemblance to the spiritual power I witnessed in others whom I considered more mature in faith.

In his temptations in the wilderness, Jesus’ response to the Tempter’s offering him possession and control of all the kingdoms of every age on earth was, “Begone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and God only you shall serve’” (Matt. 4:10). Possession and control do not characterize God’s power. Love is God’s power. Possession and control is worldly power, love is spiritual power.

Process theology understands God as one whose love is persuasive rather than controlling. Biblically there is much basis for that perception. God leads us as a shepherd, challenges us in a prophet, models human life for us in Jesus Christ, influences us as a teacher, empowers us like a counselor, and inspires us as the Spirit.

This and next week’s posts are excerpts from the chapter “Risking the Brokenness of the Body” from my 1990 book Come Home! Reclaiming Spirituality and Community as Gay Men and Lesbians, published by Harper & Row, with added chapters in its 1998 Second Edition, published by Chi Rho Press. These excerpts fit well the themes of the present season of Lent. Today, of course, I would add transgender, intersex, and bisexual people. 

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Copyright © 1990, 1998 and 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

God Is Not a Control Freak

God is not a control freak! Evolution should be enough to prove this point. Evil too. And free will.

And yet, when faced with tragedies, such as Sandy or Newtown or AIDS, many people expect God to be at “his” control panel avoiding them. There is much theological handwringing in commentaries and blogs, even by—or especially from—those uncertain about God’s very existence.

With his book, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God, Process philosopher-theologian Charles Hartshorne helped me shed my need to believe in a God in absolute control when I was a college student in the early ’70s.  Who are you most likely to love, he posits, the most loving person or the most powerful person? Most of us would opt for the most loving. So it is with God.

Do we want a God who is all-powerful or all-loving? We can’t have both and be satisfied with a God who permits the Holocaust, genocide, war, and tsunamis.

But by the time I published my second book (1990), Come Home!, a book reclaiming Christianity for LGBT people, I found I wasn’t completely satisfied with this resolution, one that gets God off the hook for bad things happening to good and bad people. I had come to the realization that love is God’s power.

Our human notion of power is distorted, I came to believe, a notion of power that’s about coercion rather than persuasion, control rather than compassion. And a central thread of the Bible depicts a God of persuasion, a Good Shepherd more than a king, a Servant more than a master, Empowering more than in power. Yes, there are biblical texts that depict God and even Jesus as king, master, in charge—but that’s more our need than God’s, in my view. God demonstrates leadership, that gift of persuading us to do the right thing, to practice the way of justice and mercy. That’s the power of love.

The final phrase of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples is “deliver us from evil.” Putting this request last indicates to me its importance. When I began saying the prayer daily, I thought I was praying that God would keep evil things from happening to me. But now I believe—no, now I know that I am praying that I root out the potential for evil in myself: my indifference, my cruelty, my selfishness, my inattentiveness, my ignorance, my insensitivity, my sins. I should have “gotten” this long ago by the phrase that precedes “deliver us from evil”: “lead us not into temptation.”

I have also come to believe that everything that happens to us—good and evil—is an opportunity for what Thomas Moore calls soul-shaping, and what Henri Nouwen described as turning negatives into positives, the one-time alchemy of the photographer. The apostle Paul understood this when he said “nothing can separate us from the love of God” in the same epistle to the Romans that he opined “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.” In a mirrored understanding of the first sentence, everything may connect us to the love of God. Faith gives us a context of meaning in which even the evil we encounter may transform us into more loving and therefore more godly beings.

The public is invited to Henri Nouwen: The Wounded Healer, a spiritual formation course led by Rev. Chris Glaser, a student and friend of the late Christian author, Feb 28-Mar 3, Columbia Theological Seminary, Atlanta, GA. No prerequisite course is required. Glaser’s book, Henri’s Mantle: 100Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy, is available on Amazon.

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.  This ministry is entirely funded by your donations. Please click here to make a tax-deductible contribution. Thank you!