_awakening

The Invitation.

In the New Testament, and particularly in Jesus, the most common image for what God is offering us is a banquet. It's not a trophy, not a prize, not a reward later, but a participative and joyous party now. A banquet has everything to do with invitation and acceptance; it is never a command for performance.

From Richard Rohr's Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality, p. 174.

Rohr on Heaven and Hell.

WARNING: Controversial material ahead.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let's move on. I have to say that I've really been enjoying Rohr's book, Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality. It has challenged and pushed me to think deeply on a variety of issues. This morning I sat with my cup of coffee and read the chapter "The Resented Banquet," which I think is one of the best in the best in the book.

The chapter is a discussion on the issue of grace, where he likens the larger narrative of the scriptures as an invitation to banquet with our Creator. [More on this in another post.] In the middle of the chapter, while talking about our mindset of works and performance-based Christianity, he makes a few comments on the nature of heaven and hell that I found fascinating, if not a little provocative...

Instead of images of states of life, they [heaven and hell] became both threats and carrots on a stick. Most religions seem to have similar metaphors symbolizing the ultimate imperatives; it is an important way of saying that our decisions do have  consequences and meaning in eternity...

Unfortunately, we made them into physical places instead of descriptions of states of mind and heart and calls to decision in this world. That is precisely what John Paul II's point. We pushed the whole thing off into the future, and took it out of the now. Inasmuch as we did so, we lost the in-depth transformative power of the Christian religion. Threat and fear is not transformation. It became a souls-saving society for the next world, instead of a healing of the body, soul and society now - and therefore - forever!

All of Jesus' healings, touchings and "salvations" (Luke 7:50; 17:19; 19:9) were clearly now. He never once said, "Be good now, and I will give you a reward later." Show me one prerequisite that Jesus ever has for a single one of his healings. The healing now seems to be an end in itself and has nothing to do with earning it.

For Jesus all rewards are inherent to the action itself, and all punishments are inherent to the action itself, but we largely pushed all rewards and punishments into the future... It is clearly "Now and forever" talk in Jesus, but we made it into "Not now, but perhaps forever if you play the game right."

What you choose now, you will have then. God is giving everyone exactly what they want. Mature religion creates an affinity, a connaturality, a kinship between this world and the next. One is not a testing ground for the next, but a "practicing" and choosing for the next. Christianity is quite simply "practicing for heaven." If you want it later, do it now, and God seems to be saying, "I will give you whatever you want."

You do not transform people by threatening them with hellfire, because then the whole thing is grounded in fear and not love, and heaven is not fear. Remember, how you get there determines where you finally arrive. You cannot prepare to love by practicing fear. Means determines the end: Fear creates hell; love creates heaven. No one will be in heaven who does not want to be there. No one will be in hell who does not want to be there. [pp. 173-4]

Now, before you post a comment in haste, stop and think about the quote. Perhaps you want to give it 24 hours before you comment. Read the quote a few times. Ask yourself some questions. Let the quote ferment a bit...

Being the Covenant.

From yesterday's Advent reading, Isaiah 42.1-7:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
     my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
     he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
     or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
     and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
     he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
     until he has established justice in the earth;
     and the coastlands wait for his teaching.

Thus says God, the LORD,
     who created the heavens and stretched them out,
     who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people upon it
     and spirit to those who walk in it;
I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness,
     I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
     a light to the nations,
     to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
     from the prison those who sit in darkness.

I keep being brought back to the phrase "I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations." I've been pondering how Jesus embodied this kind of calling. How was he a gift from God, a covenant to the people? I've also been thinking about my own life. How am I being "a covenant to the people?"

St. Teresa of Avila.

Mike King offers this thoughtful quote from Teresa of Avila:

Christ has no body now but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on the world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.

Balance.

Yet another gem from Richard Rohr's Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality:

The Bible, in its entirety, finds a fine balance between knowing and not-knowing, between using words and having humility about words, even though the ensuing traditions have not found the same balance.

In the Image.

From Richard Rohr's Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality:

Consider, however, what God is looking for at this point. God isn't looking for servants. God isn't looking for slaves, workers, contestants to play the game or jump through the hoops correctly. God is simply looking for images! God wants images of God to walk around the earth! ("Male and female God created them" it also says in [Genesis] 1:27, which must mean there are two major manifestations of the diving image.)

This is amazing. It's as if God is saying, "All I want are some living icons out there who will communicate who I am, what I'm about and what is happening in God." "You are the ones that I have chosen, that people may know and believe me and understand that it is I" (Isaiah 43:10) Henceforth, all true morality is simply "the imitation of God." Watch what God does, and do the same thing! It is not a "those who do it right get to go to heaven" thing, as much as it is a "those who live like me are in heaven now" thing!

God wants useable instruments who will carry the mystery, the weight of glory, and the burden of sin simultaneously, who can bear the darkness and the light, who can hold the paradox of incarnation - flesh and spirit, human and divine, joy and suffering, at the same time, just as Jesus did. Watch what Jesus does, and do the same thing! That, indeed, is hard.

Then and only then will creation be "good" again.

[HT: Zach for turning me on to this book. It's amazing!]

Universal Instruction Manual?

In a way, understanding the flaws of the Christian sex advice movement helps make plain a problem that many people have with conservative evangelical philosophy in general. Can all the mysteries of sex and marriage really be answered by a two-thousand-year-old book? There is wisdom in the Bible, certainly, but how reliable is it as a universal instruction manual?

 [Daniel Radosh, Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture]

The Hard Work of Faith.

And even if some of the people who come forward have been genuinely moved to confess their sins for the fist time, are they really Christians now? It's one thing to get caught up in the excitement of a wrestling match or rock show or even a traditional sermon, but what happens the next day or the next week? Do they read the Bible, go to church, talk to a pastor? Maybe. But maybe not. The fetishization of the altar call as a single moment of victory seems to obscure the need for the hard work that it must take to bring somebody to a genuinely meaningful faith.

[Daniel Radosh, Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture]

Authority.

A great reminder from Mike Todd:

Why is it that Mother Teresa could stand up before crowds of thousands and simply repeat simple New Testament phrases?

She didn't say anything new: "Jesus loves you," she assured you. "We're sons and daughters of God and we have to love Jesus' poor." Yet people walked out renewed, transformed and converted.

She wasn't a priest. She wasn't well educated. Her authority came from her life-style.

Servanthood is the true basis of authority in the Church, much more than title or ordination.

[Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations]

The Nature of the Gospel.

I've always been a big fan of Lesslie Newbigin's work on the nature of the gospel. John Chandler offers this thought from Newbigin's work, Foolishness to the Greeks. Pure brilliance.

The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made flesh. Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are a part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the ones in which it was originally embodied.

Looks like another book to add to the shelf if you ask me...