God

Gospel reading: Matthew 11.2-11
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I guess my favorite version of "The Arkansas Traveler" is on Michelle Shocked's album of the same name. It just nudges out Jerry Garcia and Dave Grisman's rendition. Both include the traditional spoken exchanges between a farmer and a traveling stranger after every verse.

Jimmy Driftwood's ancient strained voice speaks for the farmer in Michelle Shocked's recording. The conversations are backwoodsy groaners for the most part. For instance, when asked why he doesn't fix his roof, Jimmy Driftwood says, "Well, stranger. When it's rainin' it's too wet to work. And when it's dry my roof's as good as any man's roof."

Or he's asked if he knows the way to Little Rock and responds, "Well, stranger, you can't get there from here."

When we tell someone that you "can't get there from here" we usually mean that it's a lot of trouble to get "there". But in theology we mean it quite literally sometimes.

Immanence and transcendence are big, old, heavy, theological terms. And sometimes they are used generally to distinguish between closeness and distance. If you experience God as immanent, God is close to you. A transcendent God is beyond us, far away we might say.

The trouble with using these terms this way is that both describe God as staying put either right here or out there. But this is a false choice and the term 'transcendence' itself should be enough to correct this misperception. To transcend something is not to be beyond it. It is to move beyond it.

I really like the way theologian Kathryn Tanner (expanding some of Karl Barth's thoughts) describes this. Here's a gross oversimplification of what she says. The Incarnation is a paradox, because to be human means we're not God. But God is transcendent. Which means that perhaps God can be fully present in Jesus. God can 'transcend' categories that we can't.

To return to our Arkansas traveler, from our perspective you really can't get to Little Rock (divinity) from here. But God can get here from there.

Now we may have reached a level of confusion never achieved before in this blog. And I'm pretty accomplished at muddying things that were once perfectly clear. Just ask my wife, Ardelle. (My wife of fourteen years as of today, I might add.)

But let me take some of the pressure off. All of this philosophical gymnastics is meant to remind us that we can't quite wrap our minds around the mystery of God. But God comes near to us anyway.

As Kathleen Norris put it to open this chapter, "I take refuge in God's transcendence, continually giving thanks that God's ways are not my own." This sounds strange. We can understand being thankful for how much sense someone else makes to us. But even in human relationships, mystery is just as important as knowledge.

I've been married to Ardelle for 14 years. No one has ever known me like she does. And I've never known anyone the way I know her. But as much as what's known, it's the mystery of what is yet to be discovered in her that excites me about what the next 14 years might hold. And the next. And the next.

This is the wonderful mystery of all meaningful relationships. We're partly amazed that someone understands us a little or has experienced something like we have. But the suspicion that we have so much more to discover in this other person is what carries us on into the future.

As we move through Advent toward Christmas we celebrate a great mystery. We don't know how to get to God. But somehow God gets to us. We can't quite wrap our minds around this. But we've seen just enough of God's presence in our lives and in the lives of others to be enticed.

Maybe the old farmer is right and we can't get there from here. But in ways we'll never quite comprehend God can and does get here from there. That's transcendence. We get just enough of the mystery of God to be drawn into a relationship forever.

Conversion: The Stories

Gospel reading: Matthew 3.1-12
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"...She also needed conversion in another sense, a long, slow dialogue with the scriptures to enlarge her as a person."

-Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

My spiritual director in seminary was a remarkable man named Roger Ferlo. Before going to seminary himself he taught Shakespeare and Dante. And I think his long, slow dialogue with literature had a great deal to do with his affection for scripture. (Some of you have read his lovely book, Sensing God: Reading Scripture With All Our Senses.)

I met with him after chapel one day where we had just read one of the stranger passages from Revelation. One with beasts and swords and blood. My early encounters with Revelation were pretty harsh. And I think I had replaced the sheer terror certain passages once inspired with a mild embarrassment. Among more broad minded Christians it was acceptable to roll one's eyes at John of Patmos, or Paul, or even the bewildering character of Yahweh in the Old Testament - as thought they were all some offensive relative we feel compelled to distance ourselves from and apologize for.

We met in Roger's office. And as I sat down, he eased into a chair opposite mine and said, "What were those people going through?"

It took me a few moments to realize what he was referring to. I had evicted the images from Revelation almost immediately from my imagination. They were still expanding in Roger's. Knowing that all stories emerge from real lives he wondered what must have been going on in the lives of the community that produced a book like Revelation. What were they suffering to write of such things? Where do such terrible and glorious imaginings come from?

I think that Roger's lovely openness and trust of the scriptures must be the fruit of that long, slow dialogue Kathleen Norris speaks of. And in Roger I can see clearly how a person is enlarged in the process.

In some ways our relationship with scripture is not so different from other human relationships. We learn how to take things from people over time. What once offended us about an old friend we now take with a grain of salt. Or when someone we love and trust lashes out at us, we don't wonder suddenly if we were wrong about them all along. We don't wonder whether this person is really a monster who's pulled the wool over our eyes. We wonder what else is going on. We wonder what's wrong. We wonder how they've been hurt.

Before our relationship 'enlarges', while we're still feeling things out we don't know quite what to make of the strange gestures, the blunt way of speaking, or the saccharine sweetness of this new acquaintance. With an old friend whatever is said, no matter how offensive or bizarre, is just one more phrase in a long, slow dialogue. Old trusts aren't so fragile.

A simple comment by someone I trust changed my experience of scripture forever, I think. The strange parts of the Bible don't frighten me so much anymore. And I no longer want to purge the Bible of its strangeness. It's often the strangeness that entices me now.

So when I read from the last chapter of the Bible's last book - yes, dear old Revelation - among images of a city with gates like pearls and walls of jasper and gold and precious gems, among all this wonder I read, "These words are trustworthy and true." And in spite of myself, in spite of my incomprehension, in spite of my too small imagination, I somehow respond, "Amen."

Righteous

Gospel reading: Matthew 24.36-44
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Righteous is a good case study for the way meaning accumulates in a word over time. As a child I used to enjoy saying a word over and over again until the meaning drained from it completely. The sounds of the word became as strange and arbitrary as those of another language. I'm not sure why it pleased me to unlearn a word for a moment. But it did.

There is a scene in a William Faulkner novel (As I Lay Dying, I think) in which a character talks about a similar experience with a name. As I recall, he imagined himself gradually filling or taking the shape of his name. And his name was sort of a formless void until he did.

The sheer repetition of speaking the word 'self' before the word 'righteous' may have worked in much the same way in our lives. Words take on meaning for us as we speak them. They conjure up emotions and images for us based on what went on in us and around us when the word was spoken in our past. Somewhere along the way 'righteous' got buried in the phrase 'self righteous' and became associated in our minds only with prigs...and worse.

But much of Kathleen Norris's project in Amazing Grace was to reclaim a language or a vocabulary. Reclaim might not be the best word, actually. Reimagine might be better.

My first real carpentry job was as an apprentice on a framing crew in Eatonville, Washington. And James, my boss, was a former surfer from southern California. (Before you let the word 'surfer' conjure up too many associations you should know that he worked on a doctorate at UCLA for a time and read a lot of Tolstoy.) But on the job site 'righteous' was usually preceded not by 'self' but by 'totally', as in "The fit of that hip rafter was totally righteous".

This was helpful to my relationship to the word, even if the phrase was rarely spoken without a little affectation and irony. Righteousness gradually became associated with what's good and lovely in the world again.

Righteousness is so essential to biblical faith that I hope we can speak some goodness back into the word. I hope there is a way we can want to be righteous again. Maybe I'll need to type "I want to be righteous" 100 times in a blog before the word is fully redeemed for me. But shouldn't we want to be righteous? In fact, shouldn't our Christian faith be about formation as righteous people?

I wonder sometimes if my own embarrassment with the notion hasn't arisen with the persistent association of 'self' with 'righteous'. The same thing can happen with 'goodness'. Say 'do-gooder' or 'goody two shoes' enough and we'll be free of that word's uncomfortable challenges to our lives as well.

But the truth is we do want to be righteous. We want to be people who live justly. People who treat the vulnerable ones in our world with the love and respect that our scriptures and our faith demands. We want to be people whose aim is true. If we didn't, why in the world would we be reading this line in this blog together?

I believe that God is making us righteous. Little by little, our lives can accumulate meaning just like the words we use. It doesn't happen all at once. But over time, perhaps as we "continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers" (in the prayer book's words) we are changed. Our lives take on a new meaning and a new direction gradually as we learn together, eat together, and pray together. Maybe even as we blog together.