Wounding God

The Asian-Americans who have endured hate crimes during our current pandemic brought me back to this post from the week following Holy Week of 2016, March 30, 2016. This year, 2021, I read The Temple of God’s Wounds earlier in Lent, so in need was I of its spiritual insights and spiritual sanctuary. The friend in recovery mentioned in this post still struggles, and we alongside him, after multiple programs before and after a year incarcerated. 

Something burning in my heart is demanding the oxygen of expression. 

Regular readers of this blog know I am not persuaded by one line of thinking about the crucifixion: I don’t believe God demanded the death of Jesus to forgive our sins. Of the Passion narrative, I’ve written that the crucifixion was our idea, while the resurrection was God’s idea, however we understand resurrection. 

Yet I do believe the story of the crucifixion reminds us that we wound God. 

I know that’s not an original thought—many theologians, contemplatives, writers, and preachers have written about this. But it’s being brought home to me in several ways that culminated this past Holy Week as I read again The Temple of God’s Wounds. 

Monday night of that week I attended the fourth and final class on the themes of the Confession of Belhar, which the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. is in the process of welcoming into its Book of Confessions. It was adopted during the days of apartheid in South Africa by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church resisting the government’s separation of the races. 

Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary offered it online, but I attended its meetings in person at the Martin Luther King Center near our home in Atlanta because I wanted to engage in the conversation directly. I thought this would be a way to hear concerns that current movements such as Black Lives Matter raise, but in a context of shared faith. As an aside, I felt very welcomed as a gay man. 

The class was small, about 70% African American and 30% Anglo-European, though the final Monday I was the only white person attending. 

Long before the course I had concluded that there is no way white people will ever understand the experience of black people in American society. The brutalization of slavery and the degradation of racism and segregation that followed (and still follows) cannot be erased, no matter how forgiving African Americans may be and no matter how transformed Anglo-European Americans may become. 

During one class session, we listened to the tape of the families of those murdered in the Charleston church offering forgiveness to their vicious and racist assailant, and I noticed that alongside “I forgive you” were cries of pain and anguish and grief at their loss, calls for repentance of the perpetrator and an expectation of justice for the victims so that “hate doesn’t win,” something the media largely left out in its eagerness to report their forgiveness. 

Their mercy was transforming for South Carolina, bringing down the confederate flag, while affecting broader American sensibilities as well. 

But, as one woman pointed out to me after class, “There was a lot of anger in black communities for how easily they forgave” that young man. Yet hearing their forgiveness while holding him accountable suggested they were not offering cheap grace. 

In class I told the story of participating in a “dog and pony” show at four venues around the state of Iowa for UCC pastors as their denomination was changing its positions on LGBT issues some years ago. One pastor had asked, “Where’s the repentance?” At first we thought he was expecting repentance from LGBT folk, but what he meant was, where was the church’s repentance for its mistreatment of LGBT people? 

I suggested to the class that maybe the church needed something like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission where wrongs could be named—the wounding of all kinds of folk because of race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Ultimately this is how we wound God. 

By the next session of the course I had learned that several presbyteries have passed “A Healing Overture for the Admission of, and Apology for Harms Done to the LGBTQ/Q Members of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Family and Friends.” Hallelujah! 

When I’ve written on this blog about the need of being forgiving in the spiritual life, I’ve sometimes received friendly pushback from those who have been abused or work with the abused. It’s been pointed out to me that forgiveness in certain circumstances may not always be possible, even may not be a healthy choice.  

In “Forgiveness: The Last Step,” Marie Fortune writes in the context of family violence, “Once justice has been accomplished, even in a limited way, forgiveness becomes a viable opportunity. Prior to justice, forgiveness is an empty exercise.” She points out that Jesus said, “If another sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive.” [See Luke 17:3-4 NRSV.] 

That suggests at least four steps toward reconciliation: confrontation, confession, repentance (as in metanoia, an “about face”), followed by forgiveness. Only when justice is served, she writes, is “a victim of violence and abuse…freed to forgive.” 

On Maundy Thursday last week, Wade and I were part of a support community for a friend in a recovery program. After an afternoon meeting with our friend, a counselor, and a dinner out, that evening we attended what was essentially an Al-Anon meeting for support communities of others in recovery. Emotions ran high, as they must have when Jesus shared his last meal with his disciples: communion and hope, but also shared grief and feelings of betrayal, denial, abandonment. 

Some could tell stories in which the recoveries of their loved one held; others told stories of multiple heartbreaking attempts; many acknowledged that they too were powerless over what addictions were doing to their loved ones. I was deeply moved by the love and commitment in that room. I awoke Good Friday morning with involuntary tears streaming from my eyes thinking of them. 

The Twelve Steps are all about truth-telling, another requirement of justice. And the eighth and ninth steps are about making “a list of all persons we had harmed” and making “amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” 

I had thought that I should find some service to attend the evening of Good Friday, when a close friend told us that the day was the 20^th anniversary of the death of his beloved partner to AIDS. So he came over and we ordered Chinese take-out. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend Good Friday. And I better understood his flash of anger about the Reagans when Hillary Clinton misstated after Nancy’s funeral that they had been instrumental in the “national conversation” about AIDS. 

A blog reader once pointed out to me that Jesus did not forgive those who betrayed, denied, abandoned, tortured, and crucified him, but rather, asked God to forgive them. That makes sense, for only God could administer the justice required for mercy. Could that be how Jesus’ sacrifice came to be understood as expiation for our sins? 

It is a sacred challenge to administer justice without vengeance. Jesus calls us to go the extra mile beyond retribution (“an eye for an eye”) and love our enemies. But real love holds the beloved accountable. 

The biblical witness is of a God of justice and mercy. Both are required for transformation. But scapegoating is never just, even if it is Jesus as the sacrificial lamb. Justice requires truth-telling, changing our ways, and making amends (penance).  Only then, to paraphrase Psalm 23, can “mercy and justice follow us all the days of our lives, and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” 

 

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

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely to the “Chris Glaser Archive” through the Tribute Gift section of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. 

Personal gifts may be made safely by clicking here.  Thank you!

Jesus as the New Adam

Michelangelo's Naked Christ

I offered this post on May 3, 2017.

Jesus as the new Adam is a trope familiar to Christianity since Paul’s letters to the Romans and Corinthians. It has come to be reinterpreted by others, and perhaps what I present here has already been imagined, as anyone reading this blog knows my knowledge is limited. But I want to offer what meaning came to me as I grappled with the notion of Jesus “dying for my sins” during this recent Holy Week. 

I have flat out written on this blog that the God who is worthy of my devotion would never require the death of any kind of scapegoat as a stand-in for me taking responsibility for my own sins. 

But I have also written that the sacrificial love represented in the story of the cross mythologically conveys the absolute and eternal depths of God’s compassion. Many theologians have focused on the concept of God dying on the cross rather than “his only son,” taking the onus of a demanding, bloodthirsty God off the table. And anyone who has had a terrible sin to forgive of another knows the suffering such compassion entails. 

Longtime readers may remember that one of my Holy Week practices is to read one chapter each day of a short book, The Temple of God’s Wounds, in which the narrator visits a mythological monastery at a turning point in his life. I’ve written that I overlook his transactional understanding of atonement to contemplate other, deeper spiritual wisdom contained therein. 

This time I focused on how difficult it is for him (and  for me) to face that which is absolutely holy. I understand better the “mysterium tremendum,” the “terrible” face of God or, as the OED adds in its definition, of existence itself. 

During our last visit shortly before his death, an elderly dedicated churchman surprised me by his sudden tears and seemingly non-sequitur confession, saying something like, “I hope dear old Mother Church can forgive me for any embarrassment I’ve caused her.” I don’t think this was prompted solely by his having been a closeted gay man. 

Age may make us aware how far we have fallen short, not only of the glory of God, but of the glory of being a child of God, because I found during Holy Week that, along with the writer of The Temple of God’s Wounds, I felt such a need for forgiveness! Now, I know, as an introvert, that even the good I may do can embarrass me; but I’ve done plenty of things I’d prefer not to have in my eulogy! 

I have a depiction, acquired in Egypt, of a Pharaoh being weighed on scales opposite a feather. The tradition was that if the Pharaoh’s heart was heavier than a feather, he could not enter eternity.  Few if any of us could pass such a test! 

I have been reading The Islamic Jesus by Mustafa Akyol. A reader and contributor to my blog had asked me if there was a book I was eager to have in my library. Having just read a review of this book, that’s what I asked for. What’s remarkable to me is that the Qur’an, while not supporting Jesus’ divinity, reveres him as a prophet, like Moses and Muhammad. The writer suggests that this was the view of the Jerusalem church and its Jewish Christians led by James and represented in Christian scriptures by the epistle of James, which does not refer to the divinity of Jesus and famously includes, “Faith without works is dead.” This contrasts with other Christian emphases on mere belief, and specifically belief in Jesus’ divinity and substitutionary atonement. 

Thus I realized that progressive Christians have that in common with the early Jewish Christians, not to mention Muslims and Jews. We may or may not hold to Jesus’ divinity, and consider that doing justice and practicing charity and showing mercy are what the Lord (i.e. God) requires of us. 

For me as a progressive Christian, Jesus is the “new Adam”—not the innocent and perfect and beautiful (and initially sexless) Ken and Barbie doll of Adam and Eve; rather the tried and tested, unappealing and vulnerable and wounded one, acquainted with sorrows and grief, the bearer of the sins and injustices of the world—political, religious, and personal. Treasonous and blasphemous, betrayable and deniable, because compassion was all he held dear. 

Thus he knows the trouble I’ve seen, the trouble I’ve gotten into, and the trouble I’ve caused, not just personally but throughout the world. He is the real human being that Adam and Eve could not even imagine in their innocence and privilege. They were rough drafts, prototypes, not as fully human. 

So when Jesus prays, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” it seems genuine, true, and possible. 

 

Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely to the “Chris Glaser Archive” through the Tribute Gift section of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. 

Personal gifts may be made safely by clicking here.  Thank you!

God and the Emperor

Congressman John Lewis quote and mug shot on our street.

This is a guest post from our pastor, the Rev. Jenelle Holmes, from her sermon of October 18, 2020 to Ormewood Church over Zoom. Used by permission.

Then the Pharisees plotted to entrap Jesus in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, [asking] “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”  (See full text, Matthew 25:15-22, NRSV.)

As we inch closer to the election, any scripture that mentions anything political is bound to hit harder. This particular story about Jesus has been used as a political defense throughout history. It’s been used to defend a separation of church and state: give to the emperor, king, or president what is theirs and to God what is God’s. It’s been used to bolster the defense of high taxation when people start to grumble. It’s been used to support the argument that Christians must submit to the powers of government, just like they submit to the powers of God.

As you can tell—it is truly a very useful story for people in power.

However, before you use this passage in these ways you need to know exactly what was going on between the Herodians, the Pharisees, and Jesus.

This story in the book of Matthew happens in the dead center of Holy Week. Jesus has entered Jerusalem triumphantly on a donkey, thrown out the money changers, and offered some radical teachings that challenge those in power. All of this is leading up to the Friday of Jesus’ crucifixion. In the meantime, the religious leaders are closing in on Jesus.

And the identity of the different leaders play a really important role in understanding Jesus’ words. The Pharisees must be really desperate to get rid of Jesus because they are partnering with the Herodians, their enemies. The Pharisees are religious rule followers. They want to do their religion correctly. The Herodians, on the other hand, are the region’s ruling people for the Roman empire and have been known to make Jewish rule-following tough.

Case in point: the Jewish folks do not want to own, use, or touch the denarius coin used for the tax to Caesar. This coin not only has a graven image on it (a religious no-no), it also reads “Caesar is the son of God.” Well, the tax that the Herodians collect is exactly one denarius--so the Jewish folks HAVE to touch them.

And now the ambush. After a little false flattery the Pharisees ask Jesus a trick question: Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?

Trick question. First, revisit what you now know about the denarius. If Jesus says yes, we should pay the tax, the Jews would feel betrayed by Jesus. They would claim Jesus is siding with the empire that forces them to break their religious laws. But if Jesus says that Jews should not pay the tax because of religious reasons, he is a traitor to the empire and in very deep trouble with the Herodians.

It’s a trick question. The answers of yes or no will land him in hot water either way.

But Jesus musters a rather clever response: Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Now, to the non-Jewish listener, this is a decent and satisfactory answer. The emperor gets his money and the people get their God. The Herodians most likely see this as a compromise between the state and the church, a binary of sorts that suits them just fine.

But, to the first-century Jewish listener, especially a Pharisee, there would have been no binary in this answer. Jesus answered this question in just as tricky a way as it was asked. Jesus’ final statement is “to God the things that are God’s.” Do you know what the Bible says are “God’s things?” ALL OF IT.

In fact, Psalm 24, which was used at the entrance to the temple, starts like this: The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it. No Pharisee would have missed Jesus’ meaning when he says we should “Give to God the things that are God’s.” All things are God’s--even that denarius.

So while the Herodians see a nice division of labor in Jesus’ response, so too do the Pharisees see his play on words and cannot condemn him.

All things are God’s things.

And for us in 2020 this offers some insight and perhaps comfort.

In a political time like ours, where it’s easy to see people dividing up their lives based on power and political party, it is all the more important to remember that all that we have and all that we are, are ultimately to live in and grow out of the love of God. There is no binary where Christians get to divide some of our priorities to the state and some to God. That type of quarantine does not exist.

As my friend Rev. Dr. Richard Floyd says, “we only give to Caesar what can be done as a faithful service to God.” We only give to our government, to our communities, what can be done as a faithful service to God. God is our first loyalty and our first calling. In what is perhaps our most momentous and divisive election in the history of our nation, we as Christians are called to only give to Caesar what can be done as a faithful service to God. There is no part of our lives that can be lived outside of the scope of God’s reign. All things are God’s things.

And while saying that all things are God’s things is an exhortation to live a certain way, it is also a declaration of comfort. It is a declaration that God’s love knows no bounds. The Heidelberg Catechism proclaimed this comfort long ago: What is your only comfort in life and death? That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.

When you feel pulled in different directions, disappointed in the loyalties of others or maybe even yourself, when you are exhausted by all the graven images being tossed around, know that in the end you can rest in the comfort that your life belongs to God. The loyalties on earth cannot tear you apart, you are made whole and wholly made by and for God.

 

Copyright © 2020 by Rev. Jenelle Holmes. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author, venue (Ormewood Church, Atlanta) and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

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Escape to Holy Week

This year I couldn’t wait till Holy Week to escape for my annual visit to The Temple of God’s Wounds. This pilgrimage of the imagination was given me in 1988 by a retired fraternal worker in the Church of North India who spent his last days in Southern California, where I lived. He went to the mission field because, being gay, he could not serve the Presbyterian Church in this country.

Several weeks ago I couldn’t wait any longer for the respite, the sanctuary, the clarity and the renewal of purpose depicted by the pseudonymous “Bishop of Bombay.” Personal challenges and political “disturbances in The Force” demanded less a solution than a resolution to keep on keeping on. As a gift pillow I purchased for my sister earlier that week during Ormewood Park’s Makers Festival declares, “Nevertheless, She Persisted.”

The day after I began my visit to the temple “somewhere in the West” I learned during a routine doctor visit that my blood pressure was high, despite a mostly healthy diet and daily vigorous exercise. He said that, given the troubles of the last two years, most of his patients were experiencing ailments that could be the result of stress and anxiety. He said only a handful of his clients described things as “good.” He advised I pay more attention to the spiritual and the relaxing aspects of life, advice I am only too happy to follow. A subsequent test monitoring my blood pressure for 24 hours showed excellent results, thanks be to God! 

The narrator of the temple story meditates on seven portraits related to the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This may seem a demanding “escape”—after all, it’s not like going to the beach—but it is an opportunity for finding meaning and purpose in a world that appears less in touch with meaning and high purpose. “Lord, have mercy…” became a prayer one morning for all I pray for, including myself. I view the phrase less as a confession than as a spiritual Amber Alert.

The painting on a particular day of my reading depicts a worker astride Jesus stretched on the cross on the ground “driving home the nail which pierced the two feet.”

The poise of the hammering figure suggested the rhythm of long practice, and the impersonality of habitual craftsmanship. … How unconcerned it looked; how callously intent upon its task. As the hammer was a tool in his hands, so was this man a tool to those whose minds had conceived, and whose lips had ordered, this outrage.

Once distance or time could soften for me the impact of the hammer on that nail. … Now my mind could not refuse the knowledge that the same plots and betrayals and denials and shifts and stratagems and mockeries and brutalities are as common now as then. …

Such acts did not belong only to other times and places, and other races. By unmistakable instances it had been brought home to me that my own folk were equally guilty. I was left without hope of righteousness or justice, of gentleness or generosity in the world. … Every crime against the helpless and innocent was an added blow upon that nail. My own folk were striking many such blows…

Eventually the narrator realizes, “I knew with complete conviction that as my own folk had proved to be so was I myself.” What drags me/us down is the awareness that we are caught in a system and are a part of the system that is “callously intent upon its task.”

What especially struck me in this scene was not the banality of evil, but how mechanical evil had become. Not only was the figure wielding the hammer, but he too was a tool wielded by political and religious “powers that be.”

In a strange juxtaposition, during the same week that I revisited The Temple of God’s Wounds, I was reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I’ve seen multiple productions of this story but can’t remember ever reading the book. It’s about a beautiful young man who is willing to give up his soul if a painting of him could take on his sins as well as the effects of aging so he might remain young and handsome.

Perhaps we’ve done something similar to Jesus. We’ve placed on him “every crime against the helpless and innocent” so that we can be saved, delivered from responsibility for our own agency in that enterprise.

I had been reading Jesus’ words as part of my Lenten spiritual practice, what my sister laughingly referred to as my “red letter” Jesus when I told her, referring to those Bibles which highlighted Jesus’ words in red font. Though his words comfort and console at first, I found I stumbled when it came to his woeful words about pious religious people and then, the apocalyptic judgment on us all in the end times. That was when I escaped to my Holy Week practice revisiting the temple of God’s wounds.

My Lenten “aha” was that Jesus’ gospel/good news was “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” not John 3:16, which Martin Luther called the gospel in miniature. In his time and our own, Jesus’ gospel is far more necessary.

I grieve with all who mourn the devastating fire that burned Notre Dame Cathedral of Paris this Holy Week. It sent me back to Joseph Campbell's understanding of the vital spiritual power of such sanctuaries, and I will probably reflect on that in two weeks.

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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.  The Temple of God’s Wounds first published by The Morehouse-Gorham Co. (NY) in 1951, British edition published in 1953 by S.P.C.K. (London), all rights reserved.

"I Am with You"

Our backyard tree coming to life.

“I am with you.” God-with-us. Where two or three are gathered. Always.

This is my “aha” of Holy Week. Not original, but deeply felt. I lost myself in these thoughts and feelings that came to me this morning of Good Friday, on the eve of Passover. The stories of both these observances are meant to assure us that God is with us.

God has heard the people cry. Whatever your cry, God has heard it. God is with you. Always.

That’s really all I have to say. But you know me, I want to tell you how I got there.

I almost did not follow my usual Holy Week practice of reading Will Quinlan’s The Temple of God’s Wounds, a chapter per day. I’ve written before of its mystical power for me, though I am not in sync with all its tenets.

This year I coupled these daily readings with the passages of crucifixion and resurrection in the four Gospels. Each day I read a crucifixion text in chronological order of its writing: Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. On the days that followed I read the resurrection texts in the opposite order: John, Luke, Matthew, and Mark.

What I didn’t realize is that I unconsciously followed the pattern of The Temple of God’s Wounds. The narrator is instructed to view six paintings, one per day. The first three have to do with the crucifixion, the last three have to do with the resurrection.

On this reading, I once again profoundly embraced the narrator’s need for confession. As regular readers of this blog know, I am not too keen on sin, as it has, in my view, been over-emphasized in Christian tradition, plus many of the things labelled sin do not match my experience of what sin really is. That does not mean I am not aware of how I have failed in my human relationships, my relationship with earth and its creatures, and my relationship with God.

On this reading, I also recognized the narrator’s longing not only for transformation, but for an experience of transcendence that left him, in Charles Wesley’s words, “lost in wonder, love, and praise.” That came for me with the remembrance that the whole of the biblical witness testifies to God’s steadfast presence. God has not left us alone.

The incarnation is less important to me as a doctrine than as an experience that God has somehow joined us in Jesus’ passion and compassion, offering a life refreshed rather than defeated by wilderness and suffering and death.

The differences in how Jesus’ story is told among the Gospels allow our own differences. We don’t have to subscribe to every “jot and tittle” of those stories to “get” the meaning, the inspiration, of the story that God is with us.

And, as I review the first draft of this post, I realize I overlooked two other “texts” or better, “contexts” that enhanced and influenced my “aha” about God’s presence: my body mending after a severe cold and our yard and the ravine beyond coming to life after winter. These “gospels” speak even to those who do not know Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

“I am with you.” God has heard our cry. God-with-us. Where two or three are gathered. Always.

On this 50^th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr: “Keep the Dream Alive!”

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Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description. Or mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, payable to UFMCC and designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

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

A Prayer for Holy Week

Michael Christman illustration for Coming Out to God.

You washed our feet, Jesus.

At first we objected,

but you made it clear that to be part of you

we need first to receive your gifts

and serve others the same way.

You gave us bread and wine, Jesus.

We took it for granted,

not realizing what it meant to you,

how it meant flesh and blood,

unity with you and with one another

and salvation for the world.

You said we would betray and deny you, Jesus.

“Not me!” we each cried,

but we all did

in our own way,

leaving you to face your destiny alone.

You asked us to pray with you, Jesus.

We fell asleep

and missed sharing your anguish,

not being compassionate to the Compassionate;

then they took you from us.

You continue to love us, Jesus.

We object, we take it for granted,

we betray and deny you,

and sleep

instead of pray.

Forgive us, Jesus,

for we know not what we do.

From Coming Out to God (Day 52) by Chris Glaser, 1991, Westminster John Knox Press.

Coming Out to God: Prayers for Lesbians and Gay Men, Their Families and Friends was dedicated to those I knew who were living with or had lived with HIV/AIDS and became especially popular in the HIV/AIDS community. A friend who was an artist, who subsequently succumbed to AIDS, provided the cover design and the interior illustrations for the book. I love that his name was “Christ-man”: Michael Christman.

A related reading for Easter: Resurrection Today, Part Two

Your donations are my ministry’s only means of support:

http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description. Or mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, payable to UFMCC and designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

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

Beside Still Waters

This week marks the seventh anniversary of beginning this weekly blog!

 “Be unconstructively in the presence of the sacred.”

Try this on for Lent, the forty day period leading to Holy Week, which begins today, Ash Wednesday:

“Be unconstructively in the presence of the sacred.”

How long has it been since you allowed your Good Shepherd to give you rest in green pastures beside still waters, restoring your soul? The “still waters” of the 23^rd Psalm are waters gentle enough to drink from to safely quench our thirst; the Hebrew means “waters of rest.”

To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.

O my God, in you I trust.

Nothing compares to a contemplative retreat in a monastic setting, surrounded by fellow pilgrims and an authentic monastic community. Trying to capture that ethos once more, I read again the reflections I wrote after a men’s contemplative retreat at St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Alabama, and a Hildegard of Bingen retreat at Sacred Heart Monastery, also in Cullman.

The respective experiences elevated not only my spirit but my prose, and I’m certain this post will pale in comparison—both to the experience and to the poetry required to capture the rhythms of words, songs, and silence of a monastic community.

O Lord, open thou my lips.

And my mouth shall show forth thy praise.

Especially welcomed to join the sisters in the chancel area of the church at Sacred Heart, and given their gentle guidance in saying the offices that punctuate their day, helped us taste the pleasure and the power of reciting psalms and prayers together. We thus stepped carefully into a stream of a centuries-old tradition.

As I wrote in one of my papers, the contemplative retreat unveiled again for me how the multitude feeds the boy with the modest lunch, the reverse of the boy whose peasant’s lunch fed the multitude through the blessing of Jesus. I felt surrounded and nourished by “so great a cloud of witnesses.”

When we are listening, God speaks to us in a myriad of ways, and God was echoing all over the place at both monasteries and their grounds. Silence, scripture, songs, lectio divina, the Daily Office, readings, prayers, homilies, teachings, and conversations offered me voices from the past (memories, tradition, spiritual guides) as well as from the present (fellow pilgrims, colleagues, fellowship). Even the silence was deafening. And outside, the sounds, smells, sights, breezes, warmth of day, coolness of evening of the natural setting completed the feel of God’s embrace.

The afternoon that began our 24 hours of silence midway through the contemplative retreat, I spent much longer in the sanctuary of the church than I imagined I would. I pleasured in the profound silence. I started constructing my final paper in my mind, but then reminded myself that this was not what the silence was for.

The silence was simply to be unconstructively in the presence of the sacred. To be “useless.” To welcome the “schola” (“free time”) of “scholar.”

That silence unveiled a second kind of silence for me, the need for Sabbath, a time of no work, no activity, no planning, only recreating, allowing myself to be re-created and refreshed and renewed, hopefully in God’s presence. Since that experience, I’ve given myself some slack in my ever-present need for accomplishment, turning off my laptop to avoid work and the internet from time to time, relaxing my workouts and runs, reading more for fun than I’ve done in the past.

Peace! Be still!

Be still and know that I am God.

Come, join us beside the still waters of the Sacred Heart Monastery April 30-May 4, 2018. I will be co-leading a contemplative retreat with Debra Weir, Beside Still Waters, to which you are welcome. For more information, click on the title or copy and paste into your browser: 
https://app.certain.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x2611000212a

For previous posts to read for Lent, click on or copy into your browser:
https://chrisglaser.blogspot.com/search?q=lent  (Scroll down for multiple posts. At the end of the collection you will find a couple of posts included simply because they used the word "lent"!)

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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.  

Jesus, A New Adam

Jesus as the new Adam is a trope familiar to Christianity since Paul’s letters to the Romans and Corinthians. It has come to be reinterpreted by others, and perhaps what I present here has already been imagined, as anyone reading this blog knows my knowledge is limited. But I want to offer what meaning came to me as I grappled with the notion of Jesus “dying for my sins” during this recent Holy Week.

I have flat out written on this blog that the God who is worthy of my devotion would never require the death of any kind of scapegoat as a stand-in for me taking responsibility for my own sins.

But I have also written that the sacrificial love represented in the story of the cross mythologically conveys the absolute and eternal depths of God’s compassion. Many theologians have focused on the concept of God dying on the cross rather than “his only son,” taking the onus of a demanding, bloodthirsty God off the table. And anyone who has had a terrible sin to forgive of another knows the suffering such compassion entails.

Longtime readers may remember that one of my Holy Week practices is to read one chapter each day of a short book, The Temple of God’s Wounds, in which the narrator visits a mythological monastery at a turning point in his life. I’ve written that I overlook his transactional understanding of atonement to contemplate other, deeper spiritual wisdom contained therein.

This time I focused on how difficult it is for him (and  for me) to face that which is absolutely holy. I understand better the “mysterium tremendum,” the “terrible” face of God or, as the OED adds in its definition, of existence itself.

During our last visit shortly before his death, an elderly dedicated churchman and beloved professor surprised me by his sudden tears and seemingly non-sequitur confession, saying something like, “I hope dear old Mother Church can forgive me for any embarrassment I’ve caused her.” I don’t think this was prompted solely by his having been a closeted gay man.

Age may make us aware how far we have fallen short, not only of the glory of God, but of the glory of being a child of God, because I found during Holy Week that, along with the writer of The Temple of God’s Wounds,  I felt such a need for forgiveness! Now, I know, as an introvert, that even the good I may do can embarrass me; but I’ve done plenty of things I’d prefer not to have in my eulogy!

I have a depiction, acquired in Egypt, of a Pharaoh being weighed on scales opposite a feather. The tradition was that if the Pharaoh’s heart was heavier than a feather, he could not enter eternity.  Few if any of us could pass such a test!

I have been reading The Islamic Jesus by Mustafa Akyol. A reader and contributor to my blog had asked me if there was a book I was eager to have in my library. Having just read a review of this book, that’s what I asked for. What’s remarkable to me is that the Qur’an, while not supporting Jesus’ divinity, reveres him as a prophet, like Moses and Muhammad. The writer suggests that this was the view of the Jerusalem church and its Jewish Christians led by James, and represented in Christian scriptures by the epistle of James, which does not refer to the divinity of Jesus and famously includes, “Faith without works is dead.” This contrasts with other Christian emphases on mere belief, and specifically belief in Jesus’ divinity and substitutionary atonement.

Thus I realized that progressive Christians have that in common with the early Jewish Christians, not to mention Muslims and Jews. We may or may not hold to Jesus’ divinity, and consider that doing justice and practicing charity and showing mercy are what the Lord (i.e. God) requires of us.

For me as a progressive Christian, Jesus is the “new Adam”—not the innocent and perfect and beautiful (and initially sexless) Ken and Barbie doll of Adam and Eve; rather the tried and tested, unappealing and vulnerable and wounded one, acquainted with sorrows and grief, the bearer of the sins and injustices of the world—political, religious, and personal. Treasonous and blasphemous, betrayable and deniable, because compassion was all he held dear.

Thus he knows the trouble I’ve seen, the trouble I’ve gotten into, and the trouble I’ve caused, not just personally but throughout the world. He is the real human being that Adam and Eve could not even imagine in their innocence and privilege. They were rough drafts, prototypes, not as fully human.

So when Jesus prays, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” it seems genuine, true, and possible.

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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Futuring

Jesus' agony in the garden may be seen 

in the twisted trees of Gethsemane.

I once witnessed someone become distressed when it was suggested that Jesus might have been able to tell his disciples on which side of the boat to cast their nets because he could see a school of fish from his vantage point on the shore. For that person, it “destroyed” the miracle.

And a 7^th grade teacher at my fundamentalist school got very upset when my oral book report included a character’s thought that the food with which Jesus fed the multitude might have been food that the crowds had brought but kept hidden lest they be expected to share. For her, it became less of a “miracle.”

That Jesus had the common sense of a fisherman to look for a dark patch near the surface of the water and the prescience to know his followers would share what food they had are, to me, examples of “futuring,” having knowledge of what is to come. And such abilities are often associated with contemplation, serious thought about the nature of things, as well as practical application of ancient and modern wisdom.

Some of you will be relieved to know that this may be my last reference to Teilhard de Chardin’s The Future of Man, which I’ve been reading during morning prayer. This has not been my only source of meditation, as I am usually reading several books during any given period. But it has both lifted me up and caused a “downcast spirit within me” as I’ve considered his optimistic view in the light of so much distressing news in this and other countries.

But as a Jesuit and a paleontologist, he shares the long view of human history. He sees the future in terms of our evolutionary past, that what took millions of years to evolve may still have millions of years to mature and further evolve. That he could do so in the midst and aftermath of two world wars suggests we may share his faith in the future in our own difficult times.

In a sense, he too sees the fertile “dark patch in the water” that Jesus saw, and has the prescience to know we already hold the resources to address our common human concerns, just as Jesus had by providing food to eat and food for thought to a multitude.

Which brings us back to Jesus, our exemplary contemplative, whose time in the wilderness and whose prayers in lonely places gave him perspective and hope. He could see a realm beyond religion and Israel and Rome, a “kingdom not of this world” yet “in the world” and “among us” when healing and reconciliation occur, where mercy and grace are experienced, and as compassion informs our every choice, political and spiritual.

He saw those who needed “catching” for this new world (“the harvest is plentiful, but the harvesters are few”), and knew offering his own “loaves and fishes” would prompt others to share ours. He warned of trials and tribulations to come, foreseeing his own martyrdom and that of his followers, while promising to be with us through the ages.

One could say that his “last supper” with his loved ones served also as the “first supper” of the world to be, as he offered meaning to what was to come this holy week and the means by which to hold the community together afterward, by remembering through shared bread and wine, rituals and words. A recent social science study reveals that shared ritual increases trust even among strangers.

These six Wednesdays I have offered memes of contemplative prayer and of contemplative life. I consider myself a “contemplative-wannabe,” wanting to incorporate these practices into my life more and more: remembering, solitude, unceasing prayer, holding myself “in quiet and silence,” spiritually struggling like the psalmists, recognizing the sacred everywhere and in everyone and in everything, treating life as a pilgrimage, and anticipating the possible.

Many progressive Christians hope to do the same: we realize that without a strong spiritual center we can neither transform ourselves nor the church nor the world.

Like other “contemplative-wannabe” writers, I take comfort in John of the Ladder, a seventh century ascetic of forty years, who wrote: 

If some are still dominated by their former bad habits, and yet can teach by mere words, let them teach…For perhaps, being put to shame by their own words, they will eventually begin to practice what they teach. 

Previous posts in this contemplative series:

Remember the Gift – The role of memory in contemplation

“Peace! Be Still!” – The prayer of the Desert Mothers and Fathers

Rage to Ecstasy: Praying the Psalms – Monastic use of the psalms

Altars in the World – Contemplative vision of the sacred everywhere and in everyone

Pilgrim’s Progress – Pilgrimage as an aid to contemplation

The next two Wednesdays: “Resurrection Today: Parts One and Two”

To support this blog ministry: 

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Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description. 

Or mail 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 © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

What Right-Wing Talk Radio Would Make of Jesus

Okay, listeners. Today we’re going to take on the myths surrounding this Jesus who has come to our fair city of Jerusalem to cause trouble. He’s ghetto trash that has fooled a bunch of illiterate peasants and bleeding heart liberals into thinking everyone deserves to be fed and healed and welcome in the temple.

What are his credentials? Does he have a degree? NO! Does he have a doctorate? NO! Does he come from a good family? NO! Rumor has it that he is the bastard son of an unwed millennial teen—born in a barn, no less.

Apparently his family headed south to Egypt, but migrated north again to Nazareth—that’s why we need that wall on our southern border, to keep out such refugees. And how do we know for certain he was even born in this country, anyway? Maybe he’s an Arab—after all, he came “out of the land of Egypt.”

He doesn’t come from the priestly class, and he prides himself on having no home and no financial stability. His followers smell of sheep and fish, fields and laundry—one of ‘em was a Roman collaborator, a tax collector for our overgrown government.  He declares we should turn the other cheek and walk the extra mile when it comes to those of the opposing political party—I say, hell no. They’ll get no hearings from this quarter!

He’s supported by feminazis—y’know, women who think they have as many rights as men, deserve equal pay and control over their own bodies, but are weak in the knees when it comes to orphans, widows, eunuchs, and the poor who only take from our society and contribute nothing.

He defended that adulterous woman, remember. And what’s going on between him and that unnamed “beloved disciple”? More than one woman has been seen anointing his body, kissing his feet, washing them with tears and even drying them with their hair! Now that’s twisted! And what’s with his deep love for Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha? Can we say “poly-a-mor-y”?!

Sunday he charged into Jerusalem, appropriately on an ass [braying sound effects], causing a riot as people cheered him on, tearing branches off our trees to lay before his feet, crying “Blessed is one who comes in the name of the Lord.” They act like he can do no wrong, even walk on water!

What crap! I’ve never heard such B.S. in my life. They acted like he was a king, God’s chosen one! The decent people of our city held back, so I challenge them, do something about this maniac before it’s too late, and he incites a revolution that brings Caesar’s armies down on us, let alone give power to those who have never worked a day in their lives.

Then he attacks the business owners in the temple, overturning their tables, claiming they are exploiting and profiting off worshipers, declaring the temple is to be a “house of prayer for all peoples”—wherever did he get that notion? Are we to let just anybody in there? He acts as if one of our great prophets said that, like Isaiah, but I can’t find it anywhere in my Bible. Next he’ll be bringing in the lepers, the lame, the unclean, and—God forbid—Gentiles. Makes me want to puke!

This, after all, is our holy week of Passover, not a time to get political. Our founding fathers liberated us from Egypt, to be sure, but that doesn’t give Jesus and his followers the right to make a scene. I’d say bribe one of his minions to betray him, and let’s hoist him up on the nearest tree. Then we’ll see if he is truly sent by God.

I’m not a religious man, but mark my words, neither is Jesus. He’s blasphemed everything that a true patriot knows to be holy, from the temple to the Sabbath to our religious and political systems.

He preaches compassion, but shows no mercy toward the rich, the privileged, the powerful, the job-creators. He tells us we must be “born again” as if our births did not confer privilege; that we must sell our possessions and give to the poor—folks, this is communism, plain and simple. He says the meek shall inherit the earth—I say, over my dead body. They’ll have to pry my possessions out of my cold, dead hands!

Once he’s dead, we’ve got to seal up his tomb lest his disciples steal the body and launch yet another hoax on us, as if his words will resonate forever in the scheme of things. Let me tell you, a few years from now, people won’t even remember his name!

Blogger’s note: I almost didn’t post this, because it’s not uplifting; but then I thought, Jesus didn’t have a very good week either.

A reading for this week of Lent:

“Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit.”

A reading for Maundy Thursday:

In the Company of Birds

Readings for Good Friday:

Where Is God?

“Faggot” Jesus

Readings for Easter:

What God Did for Love

Resurrecting Jesus

Whose Resurrection Was It, Anyway?

How Did Jesus Let Go of His Cross?

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