Blood

Gospel reading: John 1.1-18
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

As blood has gained in entertainment value in our culture, it has lost some of its religious significance.
- from Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris

I've never been a fan of gory movies. But several - quite tame by today's standards - come to mind that I found worth the discomfort. Fargo and Fight Club are two. And then there's Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Interestingly enough, the first and last of these are comedies. (Yes, Fargo is a comedy.) And comic violence seems like the surest proof of the truth of the quote at the top of this blog.

But most comedy arises from crossing some kind of boundary, I think. And when a knight loses a limb in a campy movie, and an conspicuously fake stream of blood squirts from his shoulder, we laugh (or I did, at least) when he says "It's just a flesh wound. I've had worse."

The comedy depends on an incongruity. We laugh not in spite of the fact, but because blood is frightening. When an ordinary injury involved bleeding, my brother would scream...well...bloody murder in our elementary school days. "Blood!" he would yell. But Mom didn't call the paramedics. She'd respond with a kleenex and a band-aid, more for their calming effect on Kirk than to stanch the flow of blood. We might have learned to be less hysterical, but we know where his shock came from.

What I wonder is whether the entertainment value of blood really has impacted its religious significance negatively. In some ways I think that for blood to have an entertainment value it has to stir us religiously. It has to maintain its connection to the fragile mystery of life.

I'm not one to campaign for more gratuitous violence in our entertainment. There are lots of ways that our obsession with violence damages us. But I'm not so concerned about its negative impact on our religion. And, in fact, I wonder whether our ongoing fascination with blood suggests that the Christian belief in Incarnation is as relevant as ever.

Dark comedy and religion both depend on a deep and ancient connection between the mystery of life and the blood that pulses through our veins. How is it that all of the wonderful imaginings of the human mind, all the accomplishments of the human body, even all the connections among people through the mystery of human emotions, how is it that all these depend on the circulation of this fluid in our bodies?

Incarnation - and Christmas is the season of the Incarnation - Incarnation is about holding two mysteries together. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" said St. John. Somehow that Word was truly divine. And somehow that Word really dwelt in flesh.

And I think this mystery has fascinated so many people for so long partly because we each embody a similar mystery. Blood is common to all kinds of living things. But we still believe that people are holy. That human life is sacred. We're made of the ordinary stuff of the earth. And a single person embodies more mystery than the rest of the world can unravel in a lifetime.

This isn't the same mystery as the Incarnation of the Christ. But it rhymes with it, so to speak. As we keep ourselves grounded in our humanity, we're more likely to see our kinship with all kinds of other people and open ourselves to the mystery and wonder of their lives. And it just could be that an ordinary but holy substance like blood still holds the power to keep us all incarnate. To remind us that we really are creatures of the earth. And we really are God's holy creation.

Sometimes this is scary. Sometimes this is funny. But it is a truth that is a dependable source of grace, keeping us connected to our God and to one another at the same time. Kathleen Norris sums it up well at the end of her chapter:

Blood includes us in the Incarnation-not so crazy, after all, but an ancient thing, and wise. The rhythm of life that we carry in our veins is not only for us, but for others, as Christ's Incarnation was for the sake of all.

God

Gospel reading: Matthew 11.2-11
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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."