The Empty Closet

Jerusalem passageway, 1981 -crg

Approaching Easter, I found myself in a kind of Holy Saturday malaise—you know, that dreary interim when Jesus is in the tomb, and all is lost. I read again the narratives around the empty tomb, the resurrection stories, one Gospel each day. I wanted to encounter the risen Christ. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!

Then it occurred to me that I was looking for a literal resurrection, like Thomas demanding to see the prints of the nails in Jesus' hands and feel the wound in his side. In truth, the stories that most appeal to me are the mystical ones, like the Emmaus disciples experiencing Jesus in the kerygma of “opening scriptures” and the sacrament of breaking bread.

The literal miracle I was overlooking was what came out of that empty tomb: a new faith and spiritual community that would attract much of humanity and change the world; a fresh understanding of God and, to take it personally, a fresh understanding of myself. “God brought us to life with Christ,” in the words of Ephesians 2:5 (NJB). I recognized the resurrection of Jesus in countless others, thanks to his passion and compassion.

Coming out of the closet helped me better grasp resurrection. I know how differently life and God and the world are experienced when free of confinement, restriction, and hiddenness. Everything is new and seen/felt/heard/smelled/tasted as if for the first time. It’s wonderful and terrifying, uplifting and burdensome. It calls for an entirely different way of being, acting, speaking, and loving.

It entails both freedom and responsibility. Its heights and depths make one soar and sink at the same time. It helps one focus and broaden all at once. Suddenly, when first coming out, I was in the “rapids” of my life excursion, exhilarating and frightening, both limiting and opening possibilities, tearing me away from safer shores and hurling me toward the unknown. “Thar be dragons thar,” I feared.

In my 1998 book Coming Out as Sacrament, I used “coming out” as a hermeneutic for biblical interpretation. One reviewer groused about my introducing yet another hermeneutic, or lens, through which to view scripture, but I believe “the more the merrier,” the greater the opportunity for diverse populations to understand and apply the spiritual wisdom of the Bible to their own lives and the lives of their communities.

I boldly asserted that the Bible was God’s coming out story.  After all, in Christian tradition, self-revelation is how we know God. From the burning bush to Jesus of Nazareth to the Holy Spirit, all awareness and knowledge of God comes at divine initiative. I suggested God came out of the closet of heaven to dwell with us and even dwell within us.

The empty tomb may be viewed as a kind of empty closet. “Do not hold on to me!” Jesus told the weeping Mary in another one of those mystical resurrection stories. “Do not hold onto me!” each of us says to peers and colleagues as Jesus calls us from confining beliefs, practices, prejudices, perspectives, and expectations.

Jesus goes before us into Galilee, or any region or culture or community or vocation or workplace or movement in which we live and move and have our being, if only we have eyes to see and hearts to feel. With his dearly beloved Lazarus, he challenges us, “Come out!”

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

A Bone to Pick with Scripture

By her mere presence, sleeping at my feet as I write this, our dog Hobbes reminds me to lighten up after my last post’s earnest struggling with the Book of Revelation. For me, she truly is one of those “thin places” of Celtic spirituality through which I glimpse heaven on earth.

And I repeatedly witness that she does the same for others. When she rides in the car with me while out running errands, she often elicits a smile from those we pass. For a moment they transcend their stress and preoccupations and the traffic and enter a place of joy, good humor, and tenderness, like a child glad to be given a new stuffed animal. At first I think they are smiling at me, and then I realize it’s my passenger of the canine persuasion sitting attentively in the front seat.  I don’t mind basking in the overflow of goodwill she generates.

A neighbor along our route home after walking in Grant Park has two bumper stickers on his truck: “I BELIEVE IN DOG,” says one, and “DOG IS MY CO-PILOT” says the other. And it’s true, I do believe in Hobbes, and she is definitely my anamchara, or soul friend, also from Celtic Christianity. She’s a very good listener, puts up with my singing, and is always looking out for me.  In turn, I take pleasure in her snoring, her big round eyes (alternately wistful, pitiful, or ecstatic, working her wiles), her sloppy wet ear kisses, and her nosing the doorknob when it’s time to go out.

That’s why I was shocked, toward the end of  Revelation, to discover it said of the New Jerusalem come down from heaven, that “Others must stay outside: dogs, fortune tellers, and the sexually immoral, murderers, idolaters, and everyone of false speech and false life” (22:15). And there was no footnote explaining the reference to dogs in the New Jerusalem Bible I was reading!

I immediately thought of what I remember as an old Twilight Zone episode, a story that not long ago found new life on the internet, about a man who refuses to enter heaven’s gate without his dog, only to find the true heaven’s gate further down the road and that the gate he resisted entering was, in fact, “the other place.” The true heaven welcomed man and dog.

In her early life, when I was out of town, Hobbes’s favorite dog sitters were both transgender. One was a Muslim, and I had to be careful scheduling around the holy month of Ramadan, when he could not be around a dog during daylight hours. Religion sometimes considers dogs “unclean,” and I wondered if that were the origin of the taboo in Revelation.

So I checked the Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version. It, too, listed “dogs” as unwelcome in the New Jerusalem, but this time a footnote clarifies it meant, “impure, lascivious persons,” though it also references Philippians 3:2, where dogs referred to those who insisted on circumcision—in other words, those who were religious purists, the fundamentalists of their time.

Hobbes’s companion, Calvin, who passed on in San Francisco when I served a church there as an interim pastor, wrote “On Dogs in Scripture” in his book Unleashed: The Wit and Wisdom of Calvin the Dog. Calvin noted that dogs were “not positively portrayed in the scriptures of various religions,” but “associated with depravity, paganism, heresy, enemies, and the lowest of the low.” Then he pointed out, “Jesus said not to give us what’s holy, but agreed, at least, that we had a right to eat the crumbs that fall from our master’s table.” He continued:

This last reference must serve as the can-opener [Canine for hermeneutic, or method of interpretation] to reveal God’s intentions with regard to dogs. Canine prejudice abounded when most religious canons were written. Surely this admittedly fleeting reference to our right to whatever falls from our masters’ tables gives dogs new status in scriptural dogma. Only those who don’t like us would use the other scriptures against us. And, reading scriptures as a whole, it’s clear that God is usually on the side of the underdog, and there’s nothing more ‘under’ than us dogs! (60-61).

Calvin sat in the back seat of the car when Hobbes joined our family. But he took a back seat to no one when it came to biblical interpretation.

For more excerpts from Calvin’s book, click here.

Other posts about Hobbes or Calvin:

My Dog Ate My Scripture

Let God Rub Your Belly

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Photos and words Copyright © 2013 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.  

Fear, Flight, Fight, and Fancy--A Revelation

The last two weeks I’ve been reading Revelation again, this time during my morning prayer time. My favorite part? When the Lamb breaks the seventh seal and there is “silence in heaven for about half an hour.”  

Because of the way I was brought up, the Revelation to John has always been the scariest text in the Bible. And confusing—how do you wash a garment white as snow in blood? So it’s a good example for testing a new approach to all scripture. 

Growing up, I read, or heard interpreted, Revelation with fear. And there’s much to be afraid of, like a really bad nightmare, and neither God nor Jesus could comfort me, because they, too, come across as frightening in this depiction. The violence and torture in this book makes Zero Dark Thirty, 24, and vicious video games seem tame by comparison. Many of you might consider Revelation just another example of toxic words that I wrote about in last week’s post. And it’s texts like these in every religion that prompt the more literal among us to forget that spiritual warfare is best treated as a metaphor for the spiritual struggle. 

As I “evolved” as a Christian, I simply took flight from Revelation. After all, even Martin Luther wished it were not in the biblical canon. It was easy for me to ignore it with so much better “stuff” in the Bible, or use the few parts that appealed to me. Its writer was clearly an over-the-top Goth-style drama queen who needed a good editor, one who might have helped avoid the bored and snarky critic in me, muttering, “The end of the world seems endless.” Preferable are end-of-the-world sagas like The Day After (nuclear holocaust) and The Day After Tomorrow (instant ice age due to climate change) that move more swiftly! 

When contemporary Christians began to read it as a description of our times, I fought that notion with biblical scholarship, which teaches that its context was the persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire, the Beast, and specifically Nero, 666 or 616 depending on which early manuscript one relies on. That explains why the writer seems fixated on retributive bloodshed, burning, drowning, and disease. That’s also why Revelation (and I would say the whole of the Bible) should not be read in a version without footnotes, or worse, a paraphrased version (which means the paraphraser has interpreted the text from their own bias). I’m presently using the New Jerusalem Bible, which has footnotes.  

So, having used three approaches to Revelation—fear, flight, and fight—I find myself now using fancy to understand what the mystic John was trying to reveal.  (Fancy can be used to understand other scriptures too, which is where midrash comes in handy. Midrash, a rabbinical tool of discernment, is a creative re-telling of old stories, sometimes with humor.) 

Think of Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Narnia Chronicles, Harry Potter, Avatar, and other literary fantasies, such as fables, legends, science fiction, comic book heroes and graphic novel epics. They all require fancy to watch or read them as somehow “true.” And their truth lies in what they are trying to impart. 

Reading Revelation, I could see George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Dreamworks, Pixar, and like-minded creative fanciers producing it, using current technology to make it seem real. 

Meanwhile, what truths am I gleaning from it? Here’s my list so far: 

1.      The good’s struggle with its opposition is real, externally and internally, materially and spiritually.

2.     The good includes those of “every nation, race, language, and tribe,” a refrain appearing multiple times throughout Revelation.

3.     Empire—world domination—whether as government, corporation, or religion, endangers our soul collectively and individually, as well as all creation.

4.     Idolatry, represented in our time by consumerism, materialism, nationalism, militarism, and ideological and dogmatic certainty, distracts us from what is spiritually vital and eternal.

5.     In the words of the praise song, “our God is an awesome God” who is best understood metaphorically, even in Jesus.

6.     Worship lifts us up, but its central purpose is to honor the holy.

7.     We are surrounded by saints—past, present, and future.

8.    God is on the side of the good and of the future, inspiring, challenging, chastening, comforting, and refreshing creation.

9.     Joy and life, peace and justice, will overcome what opposes them, thanks be to God, who ultimately wins, as do the good.

10.  In trial and triumph, in truth and in time, God is with us. 

Don’t take my word for it, though. Read Revelation yourself, but not literally. Read it with fancy. 

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Copyright © 2013 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.