Forgiveness and Neighborliness

Our neighbor Mary took this slip from

her rosebush and rooted it for us.

Reminds me of The Little Prince.

In recent weeks I’ve been writing about the relationship of community and compassion. Last week I summed up my post, “Loving our neighbors as ourselves requires first recognizing them as neighbors.”  That post also explained the role of confrontation on behalf of our neighbors. This post from October 22, 2014 talks about how forgiveness plays into neighborliness.

I recite the Lord’s Prayer daily, and often the most challenging phrase for me is the second part of “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

Though I’ve received everything I have from a generous and gracious God, it’s hard to let go of grudges and wrongs and the feeling that others owe me something or that somehow I have unfairly missed out.

Or if I pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” I think about how often I impinge on God’s territory by profaning the sacred, by judging or pre-judging others, by invading the space of one of God’s creatures, by polluting God’s property: earth, water, and air; or by playing God—a role which, in all modesty, I play rather well. 

To the poor who followed Jesus, “forgive us our debts,” must’ve sounded pretty good. It sounds pretty good to us today, weighed down as we are with loans, credit cards, church pledges, expectations from elderly parents or children of any age or our beloved pets, not to mention Comcast bills.

To the sinners who followed Jesus, “forgive us our trespasses” or “sins” must’ve sounded pretty good. It also sounds pretty good to us today, burdened by moral failings, hurt we’ve inflicted on those we love most, toes we’ve stepped on or boundaries we’ve crossed, injustice we’ve ignored.

Thank God, there’s a lot of forgiveness in the Bible, and, according to Old Testament professor Walter Brueggemann, longtime oracle of Columbia Theological Seminary, forgiveness may involve money, land, power, politics, morality, and religious pretensions.

Religious scruples are what the late-converted apostle Paul often addressed. Paul when he was Saul was a Torah fundamentalist who followed every jot and tittle of the Law of Moses, not simply the Ten Commandments on which it’s based, but all the interpretations, applications, court rulings, and explications of Mosaic Law.

As we know from our own Christian tradition, no one can claim the moral high ground better than a self-righteous legalist, traditionalist, or fundamentalist. As an aside, Brueggemann also points out that no one can claim the moral high ground better than a self-righteous liberal, progressive, non-literalist such as myself. All of us tend to equate God’s views with our own, what Brueggemann calls “the cunning little secret of certitude.”

And that’s the tension in the early church—legalists wanting other Christians to follow the Laws of Moses, including dietary restrictions and Sabbath observance, and others who experience freedom in Christ as to such spiritual beliefs and practices. Paul comes down on the side of freedom in Christ, but urges all Christians to respect and regard one another’s positions. Paul is truly a recovered fundamentalist, but doesn’t twist others’ arms to come to 12-step meetings of Legalists Anonymous.

“Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?” Paul rhetorically questions the Romans, and then observes, “It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.”

Christians have entered into a covenant with Jesus and with one another that requires the interweaving of our lives, beliefs, and practices. Every strand is needed to create the fabric of our spiritual community, one that hopefully reflects Jesus’ meaning for our neighborhood and for the world.

Discussing the Ten Commandments in his book of essays, The Covenanted Self, Brueggemann affirms that the first three commandments about Yahweh give rise to the other seven, which all have to do with living in community, being good neighbors, and loving the neighbor as oneself.

In awe of God, we are called to, in a sense, privilege the neighbor to be truly neighborly and faithful to God. We are to consider their needs, their beliefs, their practices above our own needs, beliefs, and practices. It’s like what is said about marriage, each partner must give 150%. 50% doesn’t cut it, not even 100%. But if we strive to give 150% we are more likely to make a marriage or a spiritual community work.

That requires forgiveness—forgiving that the other is not all we expected, forgiving mistakes and ignorance and insensitivity, forgiving wrongs and inabilities and limitations. And forgiving ourselves these things as well. We are not perfect people. We are forgiven people.

Our model is Jesus, of whom our Christian tradition says that he emptied himself to be a servant. Jesus emptied himself into the neighbor, Brueggemann asserts, and urges us to “imagine that neighborliness is more important than good economics or good politics or good morality or good orthodoxy.” While accepting that challenge, I would add that truly good economics, politics, morality, or orthodoxy must be based in neighborliness.

In Living Buddha, Living Christ, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a woman who invoked the name of the Buddha hundreds of times a day for ten years, but “was still filled with anger and irritation.” Noticing this over the years, a neighbor knocked on her door and called to her. Annoyed, she struck her meditation bell hard to make it clear she was chanting. The neighbor called again and again, and finally the woman shouted, “Can’t you see I’m invoking the name of the Buddha? Why are you bothering me now?”

The neighbor responded, “I only called your name twelve times, and look at how angry you have become. Imagine how angry the Buddha must be after you have been calling his name for ten years!”

 

Related posts:

Recovering Compassion

Compassion and Community

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Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Faith, Reason, and Virtue: The Religion of Utopia

Last week’s post on Thomas More’s Utopia promised this week I’d focus on the religion of the Utopians. Some of you might have been puzzled by Mildred Campbell’s understanding of More’s Christian humanism as a “fusion of faith with the pagan belief in reason and virtue…a kind of humanitarian deism which abhorred religious intolerance.”

“Isn’t that what we progressive Christians believe?” you might have asked yourself, “What’s pagan about reason and virtue?”

Though I’ll get to that, I first want to point out what I’ve been saying all along on this blog. Progressive Christianity is not new, it is traditional. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who say that our ideas are some kind of contemporary accommodation to modern day values and beliefs are mistaken. Actually, they are the new kids on the Christian block.

Let me clarify that when I use the term “evangelical” I mean the political movement bent on enforcing their limitations on belief and behavior. I happen to consider progressive Christians as evangelical in the traditional—since Jesus—sense of the term, as bearers of good news (gospel).

American founding fathers and mothers are best described as humanitarian deists, in my view, not as fundamentalist or evangelical Christians. Their faith was as much informed and inspired by the Enlightenment (Reason) as the classical concepts of virtue and truth. They may have read some Bible stories literally, but they recognized truth and virtue beyond its pages and valued human reason.

So now I get back to explaining Campbell’s reference to More’s faith, mirrored in that of his Utopians, as being combined with “pagan belief in reason and virtue.” More was influenced by Plato, a “pagan” only because anyone who was not Christian was so-called, and frankly, in Plato’s defense, he preceded Christ by four centuries. But Plato has something in common with the monasteries of More’s age as well as the first church: his support of communal property. More believed deeply in the ideals of monastic orders, which included shared property.

Not surprising then, that More’s “mouthpiece” explaining Utopia, the mariner Raphael Hythloday, would explain that in Utopia there was no private property. (See last week’s post.) There were other monastic influences on the religion of Utopia, including the belief that meditation and worship focused better in the shadows of worship centers, lit by candlelight and stained-glass windows. But in Utopia, women could be priests, though reserved for the widowed and very old.

What is surprising is how Utopia itself came to be. It makes me think of our own religious and political divisions in this country and beyond. Its predecessor nation was so divided by religion and religious quarrels, King Utopus could use their divisiveness against them to conquer the country. (Think, win the election!) Their religious divisions resulted in political divisions that prevented their unifying to fight him off! Thus, when he assumed control, he decreed freedom of religion, believing that “God likes and inspires a variety and multiplicity of worship” and further, that such freedom would increase rather than diminish religion.

Utopians did resist those who refused to believe in the human soul, or who believed “that the universe is carried along by chance without an over-ruling providence,” disallowing them from public service, but no more, “for [Utopians] are persuaded that no one can make himself believe anything at will.”

When the mariner’s colleagues introduced Christianity they gained some converts (especially Utopians appreciated that early Christians held all things in common). But one whose zeal and testimony “began to wax so hot on his subject that he not only praised our religion above all others, but also utterly despised and condemned all others, calling them profane, and the followers of them wicked and devilish and children of everlasting damnation,” was punished not for his different beliefs but as “an inciter of dissension among the people.”

The most and wisest number [of Utopians]…believe that there is a certain divine power, unknown, everlasting, incomprehensible, inexplicable, far above the capacity and reach of [human] wisdom, dispersed throughout the world, not in size, but in virtue and power. … To [this God] alone they attribute the beginnings, the increasings, the proceedings, the changes and the ends of all things.

One person commented on last week’s blogpost about Utopia that she had read the book as “dystopian” rather than “utopian,” because of its seeming inability to incorporate all human conditions. But, like what I said about saints not being perfect: utopian treatises point the way without necessarily arriving.

The preamble to the U. S. Constitution includes the high-minded goal, “in order to form a more perfect union,” and we’ve been trying to get there ever since!

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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.

Spiritual Scotomas

I had to Google “scotoma” to learn that it is essentially a blind spot. Oliver Sacks reminds us that Orwell called it a “memory hole.”

Sacks describes such blind spots in reference to science and medicine. I wonder how many of you remember Disneyland’s “Carousel of Progress” ride, presented by G.E., in which the audience rotated around various stages of technological progress, contrasting home appliances through the years, with an uplifting theme song that I will probably not be able to get out of my head the rest of the day?!

But in his chapter in The River of Consciousness entitled “Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science,” Sacks demonstrates that the history of science, medicine, and by inference, technology, is not a simple movement of “stages” of discovery, but rather, an uneven back and forth of trial and error, oversight and rediscovery, given blind spots in the scientific perspective. Citing a 1913 paper by Wolgang Köhler, “premature simplifications and systemizations in science, psychology in particular, could ossify science and prevent its vital growth.”

Reading that line, I was struck by how easily that can be said of religion, theology, and spirituality as well. Fresh in my mind was my discomfort with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat dividing religious attitudes in America into three categories: traditional, secular, and spiritual. The first is based on inherited teaching and scripture; the second is “post-religious” and “scientistic”; the third he describes as “religious individualism” that [among other demerits] “blurs the line between the God out there and the God within,” “a do-it-yourself form of faith.” (To get the full story, I encourage you to follow this link.)

Admitting nuance, he writes, “Where the spiritual world blurs into secularism, it’s usually claiming scientific bona fides; where it blurs into traditional religion, it’s usually talking about Jesus.”

I can’t help but think this latter category is where he might place me and this blog.

I admit to some truth in his characterizations, especially his questioning of “health-and-wealth theology,” but I think what’s missing in his analysis is the fluidity of traditional faith. Except for the fundamentalist, biblical literalist, and dogged dogmatist,* traditional religion is no more a locked-down, certain enterprise than science is. We too have our blind spots, our scotomas, which have been noted in every age. We too have ignored wisdom of our own saints, as well as the wisdom of other cultures and religions and of science itself.

According to Sacks and the scientists he cites, anomalies—unexpected exceptions to scientific orthodoxy—in a sense, offer opportunities for reformation: “a phenomenon contrary to the accepted frame of reference” may “enlarge and revolutionize that frame of reference.”

At the risk of columnist Douthat accusing me of pulling Jesus out of a hat, I would say Jesus was such an anomaly, at least for those who followed and follow him.

*See next week’s post, “The Fundamentalist Memory Hole.”

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

A Letter to My Younger Gay Self

Chris in high school.

Three years ago, Presbyterian Promise invited me to write to my younger gay self as part of a national “It Gets Better” campaign. This was the result.

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Dear Chris (at 17),

You fear you are the only one with same-sex attractions, or the only “normal” one, and that you will never find someone to love and to love you in a lasting, intimate relationship—but you will, and the church and culture will even come to recognize your relationship within your lifetime. In your extreme loneliness right now, I know that’s hard to imagine.  Put away your suicidal thoughts, and know that you are NOT alone!

You know already you are loved: by God, by your family, and by your friends. But you fear they might not approve of your desire to be with a man or love you still. Let me tell you, your fear and anxiety and anticipation in telling them is really the beginning of birth pangs—in some ways, the worst part. Once it’s out there, you can talk about it—with God, with your folks, with your friends.

God loves you, and has made you who you are. That’s difficult for you to accept right now and sounds too good to be true. But be logical—why would God create gay people and not let them love, marry, and pursue ministry, or whatever vocation they feel called to fulfill?

Yours is a gift to love, deeply and intimately, someone of your own gender, and all ability to love comes from God. And you have loved God, tried to do what’s right, and have heard a call to ministry. Harmonizing your sexuality and spirituality will give content to your ministry, believe me! Many, many people do not know how to put the two together.

You especially fear your father’s reaction, afraid even that he might attempt to block your call to ministry. You are closer to your mom, but she will have the greater trouble because she will worry about your safety, happiness, and future—that’s what moms do!

And Dad, think about how he’s handled every REAL crisis (not the petty stuff). He gets quiet, ponders, tries to respond both with reason and love. He will be there for you, both your parents will be there for you, even before their questions are answered and their doubts addressed.

Mom will worry about what she did wrong, and both will hope you might change with therapeutic help. But they will read the materials you give them and they will find other information on their own until they understand you and who you are, and they will become your greatest advocates.

You know your friends hold you dear, just as you hold them dear. You know how open they are—it’s the 60’s, after all. Especially when you get to college, your friends will be liberal, compassionate, concerned for justice, and not the fundamentalists you were raised with. And what will surprise you is that those fundamentalist childhood friends for the most part will also become liberal and progressive, and accepting of you. Not all of your friends will welcome you, but most will. Focus on the many, not the few.

However, I must warn you that coming out to the church will prevent your ordination. Yet it will give you a broader ministry. If you’re looking for financial or job security, don’t come out to the church, or do something else. But if you’re looking to make a difference in the church and world, to have a ministry that reaches beyond an individual congregation, presbytery, or denomination, coming out openly and honestly is God’s calling for you.

Mind you, you will then be typecast and your spiritual insights will be ignored or dismissed by the vast majority of Christians, but the people who need you and want you and love you will appreciate your gifts. And you will come closer to God and to Jesus, which is what you hope for.

You will shed many tears, endure hardships, have your heart broken or disappointed in love and in ministry many times, but it WILL be worth it, let me tell you. Joy and love, God and writing will always lift you up again.

And know that I love you. I suffer with you in your struggle. And I admire you. It does get better.

With love, always,

Chris (at 62)

Related Post:

My Loneliness Led Me to God

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Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Out of the Closets and into the Kingdom

Forty years ago this coming fall I wrote a paper for liberation theologian and feminist Dr. Letty Russell, for her course “Issues in Liberation Theology.” I had forgotten its title until decades after, when I returned to speak on the campus of Yale Divinity School and Letty introduced me.

She proudly held up the paper, still in her files, “Out of the Closets and into the Kingdom: The Call of the Kingdom for Gay Christians within Liberation Theology.” Some of you will know the title is a play on a rallying cry for the nascent LGBT movement, “out of the closets and into the streets!”

What follows is the introduction to my paper. I’ve only changed spacing, bolded some sentences, and included references in text rather than as footnotes. At the end I’ve also added a sentence from the paper’s concluding paragraph, quoting Letty.

There is a knock at the door of my closet. I tremble with fear. It is the persistent Jesus again, asking that the door be opened, asking to be given hospitality, asking me to remove the walls between us and between me and the rest of the Kingdom.

“I don’t want any!” I shout, in my desire to live in peace. But the possible joy, despite my initial denial, eventually overcomes my fear, as it has in the past and will again in the future, and I open the door. Jesus comes in, smiling, hugs me. He sometimes chastens me for taking so long to answer the door. As we drink the new wine which he brings, in my ecstasy I see the walls of another closet disappear. And I inevitably think with surprise, “He’s done it again,” and smile at my lack of faith.

For gay people and indeed for everyone, the Kingdom of God is somewhere outside the closet.  A closet is a cramped place in which to hide, with little room to breathe and the inevitable storeroom for unwanted items and unsightly clutter which one also wishes to hide.

It has similarities to a box, and for some, a box belonging to one Pandora, which has been forbidden to be opened. Humans prefer boxes in which to live, travel, file, categorize, love, find entertainment, worship, pray, etc. At their worst these boxes symbolize death (coffins); at their best they symbolize the Kingdom which is yet to come (churches), though they are never to be confused with that Kingdom.

As Letty Russell speaks of the constantly changing horizon of freedom, in the same way it is possible to speak of the constant opening of each of our successive closet doors. Sometimes we who are inside open the door to the Kingdom outside (conversion); sometimes the Kingdom “breaks in” (incarnation); and sometimes the door rots and simply falls off its hinges (novelty, chance, serendipity, time).

But the nature of the Kingdom, from this perspective, is that it is always outside of the closet, waiting to enter or waiting to be entered. It is the Kingdom which inspires movement or moves itself; it is above all a moving event. It is “the driving force of salvific history,” and as such is “the very key to understanding the Christian faith.” [Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 162.]

As a fundamentalist I identified the Kingdom with a literal understanding of God setting up the Kingdom on earth at the end of time—sort of a heaven on earth. As James Cone, however, aptly points out, to the oppressed with whom I began to identify, the “eschatological promise of heaven is insufficient.” [James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 44.]

As a social activist I identified the Kingdom with a kingdom on earth which we “liberals” were going to bring into existence—the old social gospel. Here Gustavo Gutierrez’s differentiation between promises and the Promise proves helpful. [Gutierrez, 162.] Though the in-breakings of the Kingdom may occur in the process of social activism, they cannot be understood as the Kingdom itself, or the fullness of the Promise, but rather only as promises of the future fulfillment of God’s Promise of the Kingdom.

As Günther Bornkamm puts it, “the Kingdom of God cannot be described as can an earthly thing or distant wonderland—every attempt to ‘define’ it can thus only come to grief—for it is a happening, an event, the gracious action of God.” [Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, 77.]

The Kingdom of God is not a static reality, but a movement. Bornkamm also states “all the beatitudes are directed towards the coming Kingdom of God and are embraced in one idea, that God wills to be present with us and will be with us all, in as manifold and individual a way as our needs are manifold and individual.” [Bornkamm, 77.]

God wills to be present with gay persons and all who wish to be free in their movement from their closets of humiliation, despair, loneliness, isolation and secrecy to the kingdom of exaltation, exultation, companionship, community and openness (which includes freedom and responsibility).

As the experience of many gay persons will testify, “coming out” is not a once-and-for-all experience, but a continuing process. So the movement towards the Kingdom, somewhere outside the closet, or the Kingdom’s movement toward the closeted, is one which continues until the final Promise is fulfilled: God’s gift of God’s own future, the Kingdom.

As the Church, as people who wish to be free in the Body of Christ, whether female, male, black, brown, red, yellow, white, gay, straight, and so on, we must respond to our “calling to be a community that lives, not by the standards of the world, nor of the past, but by the memory of hope.” [Letty Russell, Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective, 162.]

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description or by 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!

Copyright © 1976 and 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Miracle Scrooge

Along with supportive comments, I got some friendly pushback from my post last week in which I expressed doubt about Jesus’ miracles, and I think readers deserve a fuller explanation. One longtime friend kidded that I was being a “spiritual Scrooge,” setting my 21^st century mindset against so many who attested to his healings at the time!

My first “date” with my only fundamentalist boyfriend was watching the charismatic healer Kathryn Kuhlman on late Sunday night television in L.A.  Stan Schobert accompanied the singing during the evening services of the MCC in the Valley that I attended the summer I was home from my first year in seminary.

After worship and an evening snack with other worshipers at a nearby coffee shop, he invited me to his home to watch Kuhlman. Thinking he was kidding, I laughed, “I couldn’t think of anything more boring to do!” He smiled and said, “I thought you’d say that,” and I realized he was serious. And so I watched the program with him.

I grew up in the heyday of another faith healer, Oral Roberts. But though my family members were fundamentalist Baptists, we didn’t take him seriously. When our television wasn’t working (which was often) we joked that we’d turn on Oral Roberts and lay hands on our set and pray for its healing.

Kathryn Kuhlman was another Christian faith healer who made the rounds of public venues like the Shrine auditorium in Los Angeles. People would line up by the hundreds in a wide variety of cities to see her, hear her, and seek her healing touch.

Stan explained that he had attended some of her gatherings, once with a skeptical friend with a brain tumor. Kuhlman would call out her healings from the stage, and she pointed to Stan’s friend, who was unknown to her, and said “accept your healing of cancer.” She came back to him several times as she called out other miracles in the house, insisting that the resistant friend accept this healing.

Kuhlman always urged people to get medical confirmation of their healings, and though Stan’s friend was not convinced, he returned to his doctors at UCLA, who found the tumor had disappeared.

Stan himself had once been touched by Kathryn Kuhlman, and the next thing he knew he was on the floor of the stage area. He said he didn’t know what hit him, but he felt as light as a feather and sublime peace, then he was on the floor, being helped up by her “body guards,” who were there to make sure other people’s bodies were not injured when they fell.

During a particularly hot August he took me to see her myself. I had been to the Shrine for concerts, and knew it to be poorly ventilated at the time, with inadequate air conditioning. I was very warm as we awaited her to come on stage, singing gospel songs to the musical stylings of her pianist Dino, a kind of evangelical Liberace. 

Despite the heat, when Kuhlman finally entered the hall, I suddenly felt cool as a cucumber. Maybe they had switched on the AC, but the effect was so immediate that it left me amazed. She proceeded to give a terrible “sermon,” and then began calling out miracles.

Days later, Stan and I went to a Mexican restaurant managed by the father of a child who had reportedly been healed by her. When we expressed interest, he and his wife sat down in the booth with us, and recounted the story in detail, then treated us to appetizers and margaritas.

At the time I thought, though she didn’t have the gift of preaching, she may indeed have had the gift of healing.

All of this is to say, I do have an open mind about such things.

A friend who is a physician once told me that he liked to spend time with his patients, talking about their lives. He discovered that 80% of the time, what they came in to see him about actually reflected what they were going through emotionally or spiritually. Just paying attention to what was going on in their lives enormously aided whatever medical treatments he might offer.

Though many ailments may be dismissed as “psychosomatic,” I don’t believe that that makes someone’s illness and its healing any less real—at least, to the patient.

In Jesus’ day, illness was often associated with “demons” and “unclean spirits,” thus could be cast out. The power of suggestion that one can be so easily relieved undoubtedly worked to the advantage of the many healers of Jesus’ time. Maybe Jesus had spiritual insight into this phenomenon when he pointed out to some of those healed in his presence that it was their faith that made them well.

I heard Norman Cousins speak during a conference at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles about research he and others were doing at UCLA on the many chemicals the brain emits, some of which foster healing, since he himself was restored after a life-threatening illness.

All this is to say that what we might consider a miracle may someday be explainable without resorting to other than “natural” means. To me, that makes the original event no less miraculous.

When my father died of cancer, my mother thought that her prayers had not been effective, that somehow she had failed. This is a liability of “magical thinking.” I tried to assure her, perhaps unconvincingly, that her prayers had made her a better caregiver to the love of her life. Today I would add that knowing of her loving prayers gave him comfort and whatever healing is possible as one suffers and dies.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers believed that prayer was the place, not of changing God’s mind, but of our own transformation.

Stan Schobert’s faith later saw him through many challenges, including recovery from a serious cocaine addiction, and finally, his death from AIDS. When I last caught up with him by chance at a coffee shop in the Castro, he was the happiest he had ever been, despite his struggle with HIV.

Ultimately, whatever healing Jesus offers now comes through his teachings, the Spirit, and our own tender, loving touch.

A reading for Epiphany (today): Summer Christmas

A reading for Orthodox Christmas (tomorrow): Meanings of Christmas

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Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of a first edition of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Forgiveness and Neighborliness

I will be leading a FREE virtual Advent retreat online beginning Nov. 22 entitled, “Nativity Stories.” All are welcome!

I recite the Lord’s Prayer daily, and often the most challenging phrase for me is the second part of “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

Though I’ve received everything I have from a generous and gracious God, it’s hard to let go of grudges and wrongs and the feeling that others owe me something or that somehow I have unfairly missed out.

Or if I pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” I think about how often I impinge on God’s territory by profaning the sacred, by judging or pre-judging others, by invading the space of one of God’s creatures, by polluting God’s property: earth, water, and air; or by playing God—a role which, in all modesty, I play rather well. 

To the poor who followed Jesus, “forgive us our debts,” must’ve sounded pretty good. It sounds pretty good to us today, weighed down as we are with loans, credit cards, church pledges, expectations from elderly parents or children of any age or our beloved pets, not to mention Comcast bills.

To the sinners who followed Jesus, “forgive us our trespasses” or “sins” must’ve sounded pretty good. It also sounds pretty good to us today, burdened by moral failings, hurt we’ve inflicted on those we love most, toes we’ve stepped on or boundaries we’ve crossed, injustice we’ve ignored.

Thank God, there’s a lot of forgiveness in the Bible, and, according to Old Testament professor Walter Brueggemann, longtime oracle of Columbia Theological Seminary, forgiveness may involve money, land, power, politics, morality, and religious pretensions.

Religious scruples are what the late-converted apostle Paul often addressed. Paul when he was Saul was a Torah fundamentalist who followed every jot and tittle of the Law of Moses, not simply the Ten Commandments on which it’s based, but all the interpretations, applications, court rulings, and explications of Mosaic Law.

As we know from our own Christian tradition, no one can claim the moral high ground better than a self-righteous legalist, traditionalist, or fundamentalist. As an aside, Brueggemann also points out that no one can claim the moral high ground better than a self-righteous liberal, progressive, non-literalist such as myself. All of us tend to equate God’s views with our own, what Brueggemann calls “the cunning little secret of certitude.”

And that’s the tension in the early church—legalists wanting other Christians to follow the Laws of Moses, including dietary restrictions and Sabbath observance, and others who experience freedom in Christ as to such spiritual beliefs and practices. Paul comes down on the side of freedom in Christ, but urges all Christians to respect and regard one another’s positions. Paul is truly a recovered fundamentalist, but doesn’t twist others’ arms to come to 12-step meetings of Legalists Anonymous.

“Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?” Paul rhetorically questions the Romans, and then observes, “It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.”

Christians have entered into a covenant with Jesus and with one another that requires the interweaving of our lives, beliefs, and practices. Every strand is needed to create the fabric of our spiritual community, one that hopefully reflects Jesus’ meaning for our neighborhood and for the world.

Discussing the Ten Commandments in his book of essays, The Covenanted Self, Brueggemann affirms that the first three commandments about Yahweh give rise to the other seven, which all have to do with living in community, being good neighbors, and loving the neighbor as oneself.

In awe of God, we are called to, in a sense, privilege the neighbor to be truly neighborly and faithful to God. We are to consider their needs, their beliefs, their practices above our own needs, beliefs, and practices. It’s like what is said about marriage, each partner must give 150%. 50% doesn’t cut it, not even 100%. But if we strive to give 150% we are more likely to make a marriage or a spiritual community work.

That requires forgiveness—forgiving that the other is not all we expected, forgiving mistakes and ignorance and insensitivity, forgiving wrongs and inabilities and limitations. And forgiving ourselves these things as well. We are not perfect people. We are forgiven people.

Our model is Jesus, of whom our Christian tradition says that he emptied himself to be a servant. Jesus emptied himself into the neighbor, Brueggemann asserts, and urges us to “imagine that neighborliness is more important than good economics or good politics or good morality or good orthodoxy.” While accepting that challenge, I would add that truly good economics, politics, morality, or orthodoxy must be based in neighborliness.

In Living Buddha, Living Christ, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a woman who invoked the name of the Buddha hundreds of times a day for ten years, but “was still filled with anger and irritation.” Noticing this over the years, a neighbor knocked on her door and called to her. Annoyed, she struck her meditation bell hard to make it clear she was chanting. The neighbor called again and again, and finally the woman shouted, “Can’t you see I’m invoking the name of the Buddha? Why are you bothering me now?”

The neighbor responded, “I only called your name twelve times, and look at how angry you have become. Imagine how angry the Buddha must be after you have been calling his name for ten years!”

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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.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

To Be or Not to Be

For Hamlet, as for many young people, “that is the question.” In my sixties, I experience it more as a simple declaratory sentence.

I am more passionate than ever. But the often conflicting and tumultuous passions of my youth had an either-or, sometimes judgmental edge to them, rather than a both-and, welcoming quality. Choices had to be made. Nothing was worse than fence-sitting or being middle of the road, or, in the case of the church of Laodicea in Revelation, being lukewarm.

Older, presenting to church audiences a progressive understanding of sexuality, gender, and also spirituality as broad spectrums of identity and experience, I sometimes pointed to my slacks, saying, “I wish we had the same tolerance for ambiguity that my dry cleaner has. Every time I get these pants back, the crease line is in a different place.”

The lines are always changing. Boundaries too. And our places along those spectrums, lines, and boundaries. As an old hymn about God’s commonwealth declares: 

New occasions teach new duties,

Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still and onward,

Who would keep abreast of truth.

Many of us had our Christianity questioned by those who wouldn’t let go of their certainties: There is “One Way”: to read the Bible, to follow Jesus, to be saved. There is one Christian lifestyle. You can’t be Christian and (fill in the blank: gay, agnostic, divorced, use contraceptives, etc.). 

Orthodoxy literally means “straight or right opinion,” and I like to joke that I can’t even think straight. My “fundamentals” of faith would be very different from those who claim a fundamentalist identity. So too my understanding of “evangelical.” I think Jesus would differ from them as well.

We often feel pressure to make choices that conform to those of peers, parents, partners, or preachers. We may question our very lives: “To be or not to be?”

We have “not been” most of eternity. Best to make the best of being now.  In the words of poet Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

Related posts:

Has Been

A Personal Axis Mundi

Spiritual Yearnings

“All Theology Is a Kind of Birthday”

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Click here to discover how you may support this ministry. Thank you!

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

Perfection

“Be perfect as your God in heaven is perfect.”

Easy for Jesus to say! But as a fundamentalist Christian kid, I believed this was my goal. It made perfect sense to me. Except there was one area of my life in which I would never be “perfect”: I had these feelings for other boys, not just of attraction, but of love. And such tender feelings had no place between boys in the 1950s.

A recent study verifies “the best little boy in the world” syndrome among gay men, according to a New York Times op-ed. To make up for our “deficit,” we had to be the best somewhere else—in studies, sports, stage, spirituality, social action, or service, to name a few that alliterate nicely.

Long before I learned that the term translated “perfect” actually suggests “complete” as in “mature,” I had exchanged my childish goal of perfection for a spiritually mature goal of integrity, to the benefit of my spiritual, mental, and physical health and well-being.

Integrity itself is a lofty goal, of course. And it is a lifelong process. Perfection has the feeling of having arrived, being complete in and of oneself. But integrating your beliefs, thoughts, feelings, experiences, speech, and actions is a daily process that is never completed. I like to say that, in the spiritual life, there is no “finish line.”

It was not until later that I paid adequate attention to the alternate version of Matthew’s “be perfect as your God in heaven is perfect.” I don’t know how I overlooked Luke’s version, “Be merciful as God is merciful” or, in another translation, “Be compassionate just as God is compassionate.”

That to me would have been an attainable goal even as a kid. Needing compassion myself for my “flaw,” I readily offered compassion to others. Even adults felt encouraged to share with me their most deeply felt feelings. I had a good ear. Intuitively, I was Henri Nouwen’s “wounded healer.” That’s one of the reasons why I felt called to ministry.

Listening to—at first, dozens, and by now, thousands of—people gave my call to ministry a prophetic edge. I just wanted to be a pastor, but now, I had a mission. Or, better said, a passion. Nouwen liked to parse words, and pointed out that “compassion” literally means “suffering (passion) with (com).”

At first my passion was largely expressed in the movements for Civil Rights, Peace, and LGBT inclusion and equality. But it was always felt for ALL those excluded and diminished by the church and culture, those made to feel that they were not “perfect,” but who nonetheless struggled for integrity, and struggled to be compassionate. I imagine most readers of this blog know that experience.

I believe that’s what progressive Christianity does in its finer moments: gathers outsiders as “a mother hen gathers her brood under her wing,” just as Jesus wished.

Related posts:

“Colored on TV!”

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Wounded Healers

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

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"A Trust beyond Betrayal"

Readers, happy second anniversary! This weekly blog began on February 16, 2011. Below today’s post I’ve listed the “top ten” posts, those most visited since “Progressive Christian Reflections” began. Contributions to this ministry are welcome. Thank you!

The presentation I refer to in this post is now available on YouTube (18 minutes).

A campus is often a fearful place to speak. I am more likely to be challenged for my religious views than for my sexual orientation. But early in the 20^th century, Martha Berry founded a Christian school for enterprising rural boys in northwest Georgia that has blossomed into a co-ed college that welcomes religious values. Invited to speak by Berry College as a gay Christian to (as it turned out) 160 students and members of the faculty and administration, I feared that conservative and fundamentalist students might play “gotcha” with scripture or outright condemn me.

Instead, I was asked questions by those truly seeking answers, those who actually listened and tried to understand my point of view, even when they disagreed. During the reception that followed, the conversation continued, and one young man asked me to elaborate on something I had said toward the end of my presentation: “As is often true in the spiritual life, along the way I have let go of things and beliefs and practices I no longer need to have faith in God, that can even get in the way of complete trust in God.” And I explained that’s why I embrace progressive Christianity, letting go of incomplete and confining images of God—why the second of the Ten Commandments forbids such images. I concluded, “I like to say that the less one believes, the more faith is required.”

This last sentence had puzzled the student, and I tried to explain this phenomenon further, but unsatisfactorily, in my own judgment.

In preparation for teaching a weekend Spiritual Formation course on the Christian writer Henri Nouwen at Columbia Theological Seminary, I am re-reading the three books I’ve assigned to the class. One is Can You Drink the Cup?, a distillation of the spiritual life written in Henri’s final year of life. Reflecting on the crucifixion, when Jesus felt most abandoned, Henri writes, “Jesus still had a spiritual bond with the one he called Abba. He possessed a trust beyond betrayal, a surrender beyond despair, a love beyond all fears.”

This would have been a fine example to illustrate my point “that the less one believes, the more faith is required.” Stripped of his believing disciples and adoring multitudes and even religious certainty, betrayed and denied and offered up to death by his own, tried and judged and tortured by the religious and political establishment, accused of blasphemy and treason and arrogance, and finally lifted up on a cross of shame, suffering, and death, Jesus “possessed a trust beyond betrayal” in his spiritual intimacy with God.

Progressive Christians have voluntarily followed Jesus’ sacrificial model, letting go of the trappings of religious certainty—the so-called “fundamentals,” including biblical inerrancy, as well as restrictive orthodoxy and religious exceptionalism—to nakedly trust in God as our spiritual hope and in Jesus as our spiritual guide as we quest for truth and justice, kindness and inclusiveness.

Lent, which begins today, Ash Wednesday, is a good time to let go of all hindrances to “a trust beyond betrayal,” whether doubts or sins or untenable beliefs.

May I suggest reading posts from this blog (using the archive in the right rail of the blog site) as a possible daily exercise for this season of preparation for Holy Week?

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.

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