Our pastor and neighbor and her daughter doing chalk artwork
on Saturday in support of the protests. (Our house is in upper left corner.)
Jesus
did not come to save you, nor to make you prosper. Jesus came to save the world
and help it prosper. Of course that includes you, but not exclusively.
The
morning I write this, these thoughts came to mind after hearing a discussion on
NPR of an evangelical pastor about personal salvation and individual prosperity
followed by reading a New York Times column by David Brooks about
reparations best going to communities rather than individuals. All of this in
the context of the pandemic and the racial divide.
I
grew up as the kind of Baptist that emphasized personal salvation. I had no
idea that there were other kinds of Baptist and other kinds of Christian that
emphasized the salvation of our world, our environment and our communities. To
my knowledge, at the time there was no “prosperity gospel,” though The Power
of Positive Thinking of Norman Vincent Peale came close, influencing President
Trump’s father and apparently himself.
In
high school, I remember being moved by John Hersey’s novel A Single Pebble
that offered a different perspective, that of Asian religions and cultures, featuring
the greater importance of the collective, of the community, over individual
concerns.
And
then I became a Presbyterian my first year of college and learned for the first
time that salvation was not my personal escape clause from hell but sought the
redemption of a fallen world. “God's got the whole world in God’s hands,” we had
sung as evangelical fundamentalist children, though with male pronouns. “Jesus
is coming” was not seen as a joyous occasion of transformation but as a threat
to nonbelievers and Christian “backsliders.” The cosmic Christ would end the
world.
Only
through a Spiritual Formation course at Columbia Seminary a few years ago did I
fully “get” that the whole Bible is about God coming to be with us, first
“tabernacling” with the Hebrews, becoming Emmanuel (“God-with-us”) for
Christians, and, in Revelation, not destroying the world but making his/her/their
home with us, renewing and refreshing heaven and earth.
And
the story of the Incarnation is that Jesus did not “come” from anywhere else,
but was, in the psalmist’s words, “knit together in a mother’s womb, fearfully
and wonderfully made” as we all are. The gospel he proclaimed was of a
commonwealth already in our midst, even within us, if we only shared a divine
vision, empathy, and desire for us to heal one another and our world.
The
story of the Bible is that God has been with us all along. And in all of
us. “Red and yellow, black and white—all are precious in his sight,” we sang in
Sunday school. And, I have come to believe, in all of us regardless of
religious perspective.
Mere
personal survival was Jesus’ first temptation (“turn these stones into bread”) and
is ours as well. Through his ministry and his teachings Jesus transforms personal
survival to personal sacrifice, encouraging all to offer our lives to others for
the sake of and in the realization of the commonwealth of God.
That’s how the bread and wine of mere survival become the body and blood of full
communion with the world. We are called to be, in the apostle Paul’s words,
“living sacrifices.”
That’s
how God loves us, how God saves us, how God lives in us—unless we mess it up.
Recent
posts that offer hope during our pandemic:
Two
of many posts that address our racial divisions:
“I Can’t Breathe!” (last
week’s post)
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Copyright
© 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with
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