I Can't Say It Better

My title is a confession that there are times when scripture needs direct absorption without the filter or interpretation of a writer or speaker or “official” biblical scholar, let alone a blogger like me. I don’t think readers of this blog will believe I’m shirking my duties if I share directly with you a psalm that has grabbed my attention and contemplation this week as I, like you, cope with the challenges of a pandemic and a charged political atmosphere.

Those who know me directly or through my work will not need me to point out how and to whom I believe the following verses may apply. You know my mind and my heart and my passion and compassion well enough without need of explicit comparisons to current events and public figures. And both those who don’t know me and those who do have their own counsel at hand to find the following verses comforting and encouraging and applicable to our current situation.

Carl Jung’s synchronicity or the Holy Spirit or both would have it that when I turned to my NRSV last week for solace, I found stuck in its pages a slip from a notepad from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital whose very name welcomes the blessings of both faith and science. Saint Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes and is often depicted with a flame around his head, reflecting his presence at Pentecost to receive the Holy Spirit.

As I write this, I glance at Ganesha sitting on the bookshelf beside my desk. Ganesha is the Hindu god of arts and sciences and fresh beginnings, one who removes obstacles (one of the reasons I keep it close to my computer!) and so strikes me as a complement to Saint Jude’s desire to help the hopeless.  

On the side of the slip of paper that bears the logo and name of St. Jude Hospital, I long ago wrote down the lectionary readings for a particular Sunday, but on the back I wrote Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40. So last week I turned to Psalm 37 and ruminated on it during my morning prayers on the days since. I encourage you to read the entire psalm, but here are some of its verses with few and minor inclusive language changes. If the title “Lord” troubles you, feel free to substitute another metaphor, such as “Holy One.”

Do not fret because of the wicked;

  do not be envious of wrongdoers,

for they will soon fade like the grass,

  and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the Lord, and do good;

  so you will live in the land, and enjoy security.

Take delight in the Lord,

  and you will be given the desires of your hearts.

Commit your way to the Lord;

  trust in God, and God will act.

Yahweh will make your vindication shine like the light,

  and the justice of your cause like the noonday.

Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for God;

   do not fret over those who prosper in their way,

   over those who carry out evil devices.

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath.

  Do not fret—it leads only to evil.

For the wicked shall be cut off,

  but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.

The wicked plot against the righteous,

  and gnash their teeth at them;

but the Lord laughs at the wicked,

  knowing that their day is coming.

The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows

  to bring down the poor and needy,

  to kill those who walk uprightly;

their sword shall enter their own heart,

  and their bows shall be broken.

Better is a little that the righteous person has

  than the abundance of many wicked.

The wicked borrow, and do not pay back,

  but the righteous are generous and keep giving.

Though we stumble, we shall not fall headlong,

  for the Lord holds us by the hand.

For the Lord loves justice

  and will not forsake God’s faithful ones.

The salvation of the righteous is from the Lord,

  who is their refuge in time of trouble.

I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

Donations to this blog ministry may be given securely 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 © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Scripture copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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. 

A Wedding and a Funeral in Trump Territory

Wade dancing with the bride.

I call it “Trump territory” rather than “Trump country” because I doubt any state wants to be characterized by how it voted in the last presidential election. Nor do its citizens. And “territory” sounds less permanent than “country,” suggesting things may change. And I am writing this post not to diminish Trump voters in Indiana and Louisiana or even my own state of Georgia, but to recognize we may share more values than pundits might admit.

I am writing this because when Wade and I visited Indiana for his mom’s memorial in September and Louisiana for our friend’s wedding in October, both held in picturesque rural chapels, we seemed to find the same welcoming people we enjoy in our own neighborhood and our own spiritual community here in Atlanta.

Now, we weren’t talking politics in either venue, but how people respond to a married gay male couple could be considered a sort of litmus test of values. And we seemed warmly received in our grief in Indiana and our celebration in Louisiana. What that says to me is that death and marriage are universally held as profound and important enough to, as they say in theater, “suspend our disbelief” in one another’s voting records and ideologies and, as they say in the church, “bear one another’s burdens and share each other’s joys.”

In a May visit to family and friends in California, one of my hosts was one of “those” puzzling Obama-Trump voters, but we had enough to talk about without pushing one another’s buttons over politics. As many of us anticipate family gatherings over Thanksgiving and Christmas, it helps to consider what we share than how we differ. Fox News does not need to share a turkey with MSNBC. If ceasefires can sometimes work in the Middle East, then they might work—if briefly—at our dinner tables.

My reading for both trips to Trump territory was Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. As I read the section on the movement from hostility to hospitality, tears came to my eyes. I was about to offer my morning prayers, but I realized my tears were my prayers.

My tears came from my youthful ideals that seem so unrealistic in our present political divisiveness. My first sermon in my home Presbyterian church as a college student was entitled “Conflict and Unity within the Church.” That congregation was so divided politically that the liberals sat on the left side of the sanctuary and the conservatives on the right! My sermon declared that maybe the church could be one place political sides could come together and have meaningful conversation.

Someone in the church sent a copy of my sermon to a newspaper columnist who wrote about it, doubting the possibility of what he called “an umbrella church.”

Off I went to seminary and bumped into Henri Nouwen, whose spirituality course in which I enrolled my first semester became the book Reaching Out. He said and wrote, “If we expect any salvation, redemption, healing and new life, the first thing we need is an open receptive place where something can happen to us. … To convert hostility into hospitality requires the creation of the friendly empty space where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and invite them to a new relationship.” (p 54)

“An open receptive place” to me is the very definition of sanctuary.

Regular readers know what store I place on the history of how I came by a book. A Roman Catholic priest who has remained a lifelong friend gave me his copy of Reaching Out in the mid-70s. The copy I’ve currently been reading is the one I gave my mother, writing inside the cover, “To Mom, What Henri shared with me I now share with you—with much love, Chris.”

Because it speaks to our current divisiveness, I’ve decided to use Reaching Out as the text for “An Open Receptive Place,” a new course on Henri I’ve been invited to lead for Columbia Seminary’s spiritual formation program September 17-20, 2020.

Life can teach us that although the events of the day are out of our hands, they should never be out of our hearts, that instead of becoming bitter our lives can yield to the wisdom that only from the heart a creative response can come forth.

If any criticism can be made of the sixties, it is not that protest was meaningless but that it was not deep enough, in the sense that it was not rooted in the solitude of the heart. When only our minds and hands work together we quickly become dependent on the results of our actions and tend to give up when they do not materialize. In the solitude of the heart we can truly listen to the pains of the world because there we can recognize them not as strange and unfamiliar pains, but as pains that are indeed our own. There we can see that what is most universal is most personal and that indeed nothing human is strange to us. … It would be paralyzing to proclaim that we, as individuals, are responsible for all human suffering, but it is a liberating message to say that we are called to respond to it. (p 40-41)

Henri then talks about compassion, quoting Thomas Merton alluding to the solitude of the desert of the first Christian contemplatives: “What is my new desert? The name of it is compassion. There is no wilderness so terrible, so beautiful, so arid and so fruitful as the wilderness of compassion. It is the only desert that shall truly flourish like the lily.” (Merton, The Sign of Jonas, p 323.)

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

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

Salvation from Fundamentalism to Universalism

In thanksgiving for the life, ministry, and writings of body theologian James B. Nelson. For posts on this blog that reference his insights, click here and scroll down.

The following is excerpted and adapted from a talk previously given to the Georgia Mountains Unitarian Universalist Church in Dahlonega, Georgia, where I will be speaking at 11 a.m. Nov. 8 on “Grounded Spirituality” and offering a free workshop after the service on “Spiritual Self-Exam.”

Salvation has come to mean something very different for me over my lifetime than it did when the word slipped so easily from the mouths of the fundamentalists around me in the Baptist church and Christian school in which I grew up.

“Salvation” or “being saved” implies that we are in danger, a danger we cannot escape without help. We need a rescuer, a defender, a knight in shining armor, a hero or heroine, a messiah, a god or goddess—or, as in ancient Greek theater, a “deus ex machina,” a god who magically comes on stage via a machine-like apparatus.

We don’t like to admit our vulnerability in sometimes needing a rescuer!

But salvation in both Jewish and Christian meaning also means deliverance, implying a release from oppression, from bondage, from captivity, from injustice, from unrighteousness, from meaninglessness—and here you can add anything we might need deliverance from, such as addiction, greed, poverty, ignorance, prejudice—even wealth and privilege.

Thus the children of Israel were delivered from the hand of Pharaoh in Egypt through the Exodus, the formative story of Judaism. And early Christians were delivered from purity codes and ritual requirements, and more importantly, delivered from sin and death in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the formative story of Christianity.

Regarding either of these stories as myths does not diminish their roles as foundational stories; in fact, it may enhance their use in speaking to the unfathomable mystery of human experience.

But the words translated both “salvation” and “deliverance” have another meaning still, and that is “liberation.” Liberation means we are set free from all that holds us back, keeps us down, interferes with a life filled with meaning, love, and hope, freeing us from oppressive institutions, beliefs, and systems, whether economic, political, or religious.

Thus liberation theology has spoken to so many around the world, from the barrios of Latin America to the pockets of self-determination in totalitarian states across the globe.

As a progressive Christian, as a believer in interfaith and multicultural spiritual wisdom, I can identify with all three of these terms: salvation, deliverance, and liberation.

But what I’ve needed to be saved from, delivered by, and liberated for has changed over the years.

Today I need to be rescued from parochialism, my narrow and often privileged view of the way things are.

I need to be delivered by insights of a wider range of thinkers—those of other faiths, races, conditions, and cultures, as well as scientists, artists, and atheists.

I need to be liberated for new ways of experiencing and understanding the world and our lives and God.

My salvation from fundamentalism (of all kinds, political and religious, conservative and liberal) has led me more and more to a kind of universalism, an ever-expanding realization that we’re all in this together, need one another, and share a collective stake in the salvation of the world.

For those interested in knowing what progressive Muslims think, please visit:

http://www.mecca-institute.org/ or  http://www.mpvusa.org/

Find out how to support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium.

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

The God Who Removes Obstacles

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

Thank you, G. B., for making the first donation to this ministry! Others may do so by clicking on the “donate” link on either my blog or web site or by mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232, designating in the memo are, “For Progressive Christian Reflections.” Readers are the sole support of this ministry. Thank you! –Chris

The night after writing last week’s post about a dream, I had another. This time I found myself in the office of the church I last served, empty of my things save for a few "sacramentals" I had mistakenly left behind. I gathered these few items, but the only one I remembered after awaking was Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god who is known variously as the Remover of Obstacles, the deity (deva in Sanskrit) of intellect, wisdom, and literature. With his gift for ironic humor, my Mormon nephew gave it to me one year for Christmas, and for years it sat atop my computer in hopes it would remove any technological obstacles I might encounter.  Perhaps at some unconscious level I had hoped it might remove obstacles in the church I served.

I like that the “Remover of Obstacles” is also the deity of literature.  As I wrote in my journal for the spiritual formation class I described last week, “Jesus is my liberator. But writing is my salvation.” Not just my writing, of course, but the writing of others as well, from ancient scriptures to contemporary storytellers. Writing may help us transcend obstacles, whether religious, political, historical, cultural, personal, or material. As such, writing may serve as a deeply spiritual medium. Not always, of course. Perhaps not most of the time.

When I served as a reporter and then news editor of a gay newsmagazine, I despaired that I would no longer be involved in spiritual matters as I had when employed by a church or writing my first few books. But what I discovered was that many if not most of the stories we covered were about spiritual warfare: religion attacking LGBT rights in the culture and excluding our spirituality in the church, refusing to welcome and celebrate our membership and ministries and marriages. Again, writing might come to the spiritual rescue.

In the interests of full disclosure, my dream may have been prompted by finally getting around to reading my Yale Div School classmate Barbara Brown Taylor’s memoir, Leaving Church. She adroitly describes the conflicting demands on every pastor, not the least of which is the spiritual warfare among those who follow the Prince of Peace. And almost offhandedly, she offers this bit of spiritual wisdom: “Church is not a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God’s presence in the world.”

Religion becomes a “stopping place”—an obstacle—when it thinks of itself more highly than it ought. That’s one of the things from which Jesus—our own “Remover of Obstacles”—tried to free us.