Tricked by Grace

This was my 200^th post, published on December 10, 2014. I recently read that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Merry Christmas!

A few weeks ago I was reading one of Southern writer Flannery O’Connor’s last short stories, entitled “Revelation,” published posthumously in her collection All That Rises Must Converge. She takes the book’s title from Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings as both a scientist and a mystic she greatly admired.

The story is written from the perspective of an older woman who finds herself in a doctor’s waiting room, looking from person to person, engaging in small talk. Her judgmentalism is in high gear as she silently evaluates their appearance, their interactions and lack thereof, as well as sharing aloud the foibles of people in general with another woman. I was especially put off by her frequent use of the “n-word.”  In that brief story I saw the unabbreviated word more often than I have seen it in recent decades.

Needless to say, I too was frothing with judgment (of the protagonist) as the story came to a surprising twist. Without giving the story away, something happens that upsets her certainty about things, and later, watching the sun set, she has an unsettling vision of what was to come: all the people she routinely judged marching nonetheless toward heaven, “battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.” The story continues:

And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

I cried with recognition. I was her. Flannery O’Connor tricked me, even as grace tricks us all. We think we will be saved by our many words—prayers, sermons, posts—or our many deeds—charitable, political, religious. But it’s grace that really saves us.

In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.

  

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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. 

Jesus Did Not Come to Save You

Our pastor and neighbor and her daughter doing chalk artwork

on Saturday in support of the protests. (Our house is in upper left corner.)

Jesus did not come to save you, nor to make you prosper. Jesus came to save the world and help it prosper. Of course that includes you, but not exclusively.

The morning I write this, these thoughts came to mind after hearing a discussion on NPR of an evangelical pastor about personal salvation and individual prosperity followed by reading a New York Times column by David Brooks about reparations best going to communities rather than individuals. All of this in the context of the pandemic and the racial divide.

I grew up as the kind of Baptist that emphasized personal salvation. I had no idea that there were other kinds of Baptist and other kinds of Christian that emphasized the salvation of our world, our environment and our communities. To my knowledge, at the time there was no “prosperity gospel,” though The Power of Positive Thinking of Norman Vincent Peale came close, influencing President Trump’s father and apparently himself.

In high school, I remember being moved by John Hersey’s novel A Single Pebble that offered a different perspective, that of Asian religions and cultures, featuring the greater importance of the collective, of the community, over individual concerns.

And then I became a Presbyterian my first year of college and learned for the first time that salvation was not my personal escape clause from hell but sought the redemption of a fallen world. “God's got the whole world in God’s hands,” we had sung as evangelical fundamentalist children, though with male pronouns. “Jesus is coming” was not seen as a joyous occasion of transformation but as a threat to nonbelievers and Christian “backsliders.” The cosmic Christ would end the world.

Only through a Spiritual Formation course at Columbia Seminary a few years ago did I fully “get” that the whole Bible is about God coming to be with us, first “tabernacling” with the Hebrews, becoming Emmanuel (“God-with-us”) for Christians, and, in Revelation, not destroying the world but making his/her/their home with us, renewing and refreshing heaven and earth.

And the story of the Incarnation is that Jesus did not “come” from anywhere else, but was, in the psalmist’s words, “knit together in a mother’s womb, fearfully and wonderfully made” as we all are. The gospel he proclaimed was of a commonwealth already in our midst, even within us, if we only shared a divine vision, empathy, and desire for us to heal one another and our world.

The story of the Bible is that God has been with us all along. And in all of us. “Red and yellow, black and white—all are precious in his sight,” we sang in Sunday school. And, I have come to believe, in all of us regardless of religious perspective.

Mere personal survival was Jesus’ first temptation (“turn these stones into bread”) and is ours as well. Through his ministry and his teachings Jesus transforms personal survival to personal sacrifice, encouraging all to offer our lives to others for the sake of and in the realization of the commonwealth of God. That’s how the bread and wine of mere survival become the body and blood of full communion with the world. We are called to be, in the apostle Paul’s words, “living sacrifices.”

That’s how God loves us, how God saves us, how God lives in us—unless we mess it up.

Recent posts that offer hope during our pandemic:

We Are All First Responders

Being a Good Host to Children

Two of many posts that address our racial divisions:

Black Lives Matter

“I Can’t Breathe!” (last week’s post)

You may support this blog by clicking here. Please scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

The Empty Closet

Jerusalem passageway, 1981 -crg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Christmas

The thought behind last week’s post, “Hevel Happens,” was confirmed by our delivery system sending it to subscribers a day late! Sorry!

I thought of writing this and posting around Christmas, but I am so overcome with something like a convert’s zeal that I can’t wait till then, even though each year summer’s end has the lowest ebb in terms of blog visitors who are not subscribers.  Earlier this season, for example, we enjoyed over 4000 monthly visitors but are now shy of 3000.  So I invite you to share this link/post with as many people as possible!

What excites me is yet another chapter in William P. Brown’s Sacred Sense: Discovering the Wonder of God’s Word and World: “Incarnational Wonder,” based on Gospel writer John’s prologue, the first eighteen verses of chapter one. See last week’s post on a different chapter.

What I “got” from it goes a bit beyond Brown’s actual elucidation of this text, though not beyond its implications. I suddenly understood that the “mystery” of Christmas (though of course mystery by its very definition can never be understood, only “wondered” at) is that early Christians finally “got” that God was in the world, in earth, in its creatures and in its matter, and in us—our very DNA.

And this is a tenet that we skeptical, doubting, deconstructionist, demythologizing, progressive Christians may affirm without reservation, I believe. 

“In the beginning was the word [logos].” … Typically translated “Word,” logos comes from Greek Stoic philosophy and refers to the structuring principle of the universe that makes all life possible. … Call it God’s Grand Unifying Principle (aka GUP). But Logos in John is more than a formal abstraction, more than a grand unified theory of everything as pursued by physicists (aka GUT). No, the Logos is embodied. 

The reason I write that my “ah-hah” may go a little beyond Brown’s interpretation is that I believe that, instead of this being the moment at which God entered the cosmos, entered the earth, inhabited “dirt”—that rather, this was the moment when we realized God’s essence or organizing principle or divine life was always incarnated in creation. That may be Brown’s intent as well.

I’ve written in an earlier post that the mystic Hildegard of Bingen believed that the Incarnation was not a result of “The Fall” or sin, but was intended by God from the beginning of Creation.

Physicists and theologians are engaged in similar tasks, discerning and discovering the “structuring principle of the universe that makes all life possible.” Scientists might say theologians are relying on “supernatural” phenomena or beliefs, when the Incarnation might mean there is nothing supernatural about God—that God is as “natural” and integral to the cosmos as we are.

Does that discount a “personal” God? It surely discounts a tribal, nationalistic, or parochial deity, but reveals a deity to be found in our very DNA, our skin, flesh, blood, eggs, sperm, tears, and bones—what could be more personal than that? And that we would attribute to that deity our highest values—love, compassion, justice, equality, shalom, and good stewardship—such as equal distribution of the world’s goods, care for “the least of these,” and respect for our environment—to name a few of those values, touches our deepest felt needs and lifts us to our highest aspirations, and it could be said, those of God.

Process theology posits a God that includes the cosmos, making in effect everything we can see, touch, hear, smell, and taste God’s “body.” Thus God is the ultimate altruist, sharing divine life sacrificially and universally, exemplified in Jesus of Nazareth’s living and dying for others, inviting his followers do the same. That is the path to resurrection, to new life, to new possibilities, to re-creation. Later in the book, Brown explains in his chapter, “Consummated Wonder,” that Revelation is about the earth’s renewal, not rapture, through God’s indwelling presence.

Brown notes that John affirms the darkness cannot overcome the light that is the life of the world and uses “a surprising word for God’s full-bodied embrace of creaturely existence, [that] has little to do with limitation: ‘fullness’ or pleroma in Greek (1:16). It is from God’s outward-extending abundance, from God’s pleroma that God becomes enfleshed. Divine pleroma is like an aroma that fills a room, like the costly ointment Mary used to anoint Jesus’ feet… Or like God’s glory, which ‘filled the tabernacle’…”

These thoughts should make for us the merriest of Christmases!

Related posts:

A Theory of Everything

A Single Unified Force

The Universe in Your Soul

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Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Tricked by Grace (My 200th Post!)

This is my 200^th post on this blog, created in 2011 to encourage and enhance the spirituality of progressive Christians. Thanks to 500 subscribers and an additional 3000 monthly visitors from all over the world! And thanks to Metropolitan Community Churches for including it among the denomination’s Emerging Ministries in 2012.

Please consider a gift to support this ministry today, either as an individual or a congregation. Your tax-deductible contributions are its only source of funding. Thanks to this year’s donors of nearly $1200 to date!

A few weeks ago I was reading one of Southern writer Flannery O’Connor’s last short stories, entitled “Revelation,” published posthumously in her collection All That Rises Must Converge. She takes the book’s title from Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings as both a scientist and a mystic she greatly admired.

The story is written from the perspective of an older woman who finds herself in a doctor’s waiting room, looking from person to person, engaging in small talk. Her judgmentalism is in high gear as she silently evaluates their appearance, their interactions and lack thereof, as well as sharing aloud the foibles of people in general with another woman. I was especially put off by her frequent use of the “n-word.”  In that brief story I saw the unabbreviated word more often than I have seen it in recent decades.

Needless to say, I too was frothing with judgment (of the protagonist) as the story came to a surprising twist. Without giving the story away, something happens that upsets her certainty about things, and later, watching the sun set, she has an unsettling vision of what was to come: all the people she routinely judged marching nonetheless toward heaven, “battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.” The story continues: 

And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. 

I cried with recognition. I was her. Flannery O’Connor tricked me, even as grace tricks us all. We think we will be saved by our many words—prayers, sermons, posts—or our many deeds—charitable, political, religious. But it’s grace that really saves us. 

In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++ 

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Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.