Grounding Forgivness

Two weeks ago I wrote from Paul Tillich's claim via Diana Butler Bass that God is the "ground of our being." We should understand who God is from being "down here" and not depend singly on the understanding the God is from some lofty refined perch we imagine heaven to be.

The graphic above gets at one important aspect of that place we share with God "down here."  This is moving from Tillich's perspective and wondering closer to the points Diana Butler Bass makes in her recent work "Grounded."  For sure she shares the sense that God is with us down here but she wants to and digs further to get at those traits of faith that last.

One of the ways she envisions our moving forward is to look honestly at our roots.  To tell the truth about our families and our heritage and to stay close to the hard parts, to read between the lines and to remember that God is with us still.

She tells the story of President Obama's family tree as he learned it:

"he heard a genealogy recited by his granny: 'first there was Miwiru . . . Miwiru sired Sigona, sigoma sired Owiny.'  The lineage was accompanied by stories, mostly of betrayal and abandonment, that revealed to the young man a new understanding of his life:

'I felt the circle finally close. I realized who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation . . . '"

Most of us don't need to hear it to know that we have a story or more of "betrayal and abandonment" somewhere in our family's unfolding.  If we read between the lines or mind the gaps those moments can be acknowledged, not so much as disqualifications or sins deserving punishment but as markers of the down here to which God must "descend" to be with us.

It's humbling.  And it's hard.  Hard to understand when those family stories include our being betrayed or abandoned or abused.  Hard to understand when our memories stunt us and reprise the pain and hurt.

It will not do simply to prevent an emotional response to this grounding/humbling.  Human existence is what it is.  It is ours to understand and choose what's next so that we are not stuck in humiliation but finally standing with God.

Part of how we move out of the brokenness is to acknowledge that we are not static placeholders but living beings.  We grow!  We ask for forgiveness and we forgive. We hope, knowing that it will not be pride in our own efforts that saves us but a humble trusting on God as the "ground of our being."

A Braided Trajectory

There are several currents moving in, around and through our lives as the people of the Church of the Advent in Madison, GA in the year 2017.  Think spiritual, political, regional, financial, historical, personal, physical, communal, tribal and on and on.

We're like a rope with multi-colored strands woven regularly and irregularly so that sometimes there's a pattern of texture and color and sometimes the pattern is lost causing the rope to bulge or stretch and some colors to be lost behind one or two.  Still a rope but less reliable for sure.

Most of us live with an intuitive sense of this pattern and balance.  Some of us can and do focus particularly on a subset of strands.  Some look ahead, others look back and compare now and then.

No matter our individual emphases or interests we share this braided-ness with each other.  Part of that sharing is how we contribute to the patterns and balance.  Another part is how we interrupt or misdirect the weaving.

Thanks be to God we are a community, a koinonia, shareholders.  We are not without the means or resources to contribute on each other's behalf toward a balanced and beautiful weaving.  That shareholding goes by many names: Pastoral Care Committee, Pledging, ROTA, DOK, Vestry, Altar Guild, Choir and on and on.

Some of who we are is colored and sized by the world outside our walls, by the world before and after worship and by the world we remember and visit that isn't directly related to Advent.  Think families, work, news.  There are others.

Each one of us can learn to manage that effect and still bring to our shared lives a balance of dark and light, weak and strong, broken and unbroken strands. That's one of the marvels of this braided trajectory, that it is made of all kinds and conditions of strands.

So . . . bring it!  Join this incredibly intricate and strong and varied and developing religion.  The word means tied back to God.  Join us! Make your contribution! Look to support each other by regularity and by a trusting attention to the surprises and gifts of irregularity and new strands.

As summer moves around us say a prayer and ask God to help you to see your part in this movement in, around and through our lives as the people of the Church of the Advent in Madison GA in the year 2017.

Down to Earth

Our just-passed-days of Easter celebration, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday observances have been wonderful in helping us to focus on the hard work of the "early church" in making sense of the news -- called good -- that the one who died and was raised was who and what God had in mind all along.

Sunday after Sunday we heard stories of those first believers struggling with the new information as it bumped into or even contradicted what they had spent years expecting differently.

Another lesson in the Sunday lectionary has been the "high theological" one of showing God-with-us but with us in raising us from the dead, and with us now in a spiritually gifted fellowship of love, proclamation and sharing.

Much of our study has been drawn to lofty titles and theological distinctions that take our risen Lord through ascension to a heavenly throne to be transcendent and to rule over all.

But there is another place or level through which we can understand God as with us.  The mid-20th century German Paul Tillich said it this way,

“We must abandon the external height images in which the theistic God has historically been perceived and replace them with internal depth images of a deity who is not apart from us, but who is the very core and ground of all that is.”

Tillich is opposed to the loftiness and is particularly cautious that we will leave a part of our own lives out of that formulation of "God with us" if our picture misses also understanding the continuing presence of God as the "ground of our being."

Thank goodness we took our time -- at least a Sunday -- to consider the nature of God as three-in-one and saw in our examination the presence of God down here as much as up there.  The story of a God who creates, redeems and sustains us and is with us "down here" is a constant refrain of scripture:

• God is with us down here, fashioning a "mudling" to become human by the breath of God,
• and down here with Moses and the pilgrim masses wandering for a generation to find the waiting promise of a homeland,
• and down here with Jeremiah in a cistern inciting a renewal of faith to sustain soon-to-be exiles,
• and down here in a den of lions with Daniel to change the mind of Darius, 
• and down here with Jesus in weeping for his dead friend Lazarus, 
• and down here in His suffering to death on the cross and to repose in the tomb, 
• and down here with Paul blinded and convalescing to be healed by help of one of those he sought to persecute.   

It behooves us then to think of our lives of faith as called into a groundedness as much as any lofted holiness or above-it-all purity.  We needn't reject our recent learning about God as Trinity or of Jesus as died AND raised AND ascended.  All of that is true.  But because we are still here traversing Morgan County's fields and pathways we include the understanding that God is with us down here, indeed is the very ground of our being.  

Extra-Ordinary Time

This Sunday,  June 11 is set aside to give us a chance to focus on a description of God that emerges for us out of biblical narrative, the life of the early Church and most especially out of the story of the life, death, resurrection, ascension of Jesus, including the event of last Sunday's celebration, Pentecost.  The emergent description is the Trinity.

In the earliest usage we learned to say Father, Son and Holy Spirit and in various contemporary attempts Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier or my favorite -- ancient but modern -- Lover, Beloved, Love.  Lots of questions preceded the ones that are answered by our trinitarian titles.  Lots of questions remain but in these days we have come to a fairly comfortable acceptance by way of admitting that most of what we hope to know about God has lots of mystery with it.

Given that most seminarians are instructed to avoid preaching on this Sunday, its safe to say that there is a certain avoidance of this trinitarian "mystery."  Sadly, this is by the very ones who should be delving, digging, embracing this particular theological necessity.  I'll get to why we need to but for now dig into this mystery with me a little.

Remember how I described how necessary are each of those moments we've observed in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.  The mystery of the Trinity is a similar necessity.

To begin we can't leave God simply as ONE (think the monotheism of Hebrew scripture) while at the same time claiming that God was incarnate by way of a fully-present-for-us divinity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. One at least must account for the conversation that Jesus has with God in prayer, especially like those moments from the gospel of John read on Good Shepherd Sunday.  What was first a christological question persists and joins our trinitarian investigation.  We have to get at some description that accounts for that relationship shared with God and Jesus.   Jesus uses Father and Son language while praying.

As we follow the story into and beyond Pentecost we have another relationship for which to account.  It is that one that continues between us and God the Father now accompanied by the post-Ascension Son sitting in authority with Him.  The Holy Spirit is how we understand ourselves as believers still to be in relationship with God, who has already redefined the divine human relationship for us.

However you are comfortable with describing the manner in which a divine relationship proceeds towards you, you can count on God to see to the proceeding.  When Jesus says "I am the way, . . . " he knows that way starts with God coming to us first.

God is always "towards" us, from before creation and that same relationship with all creation has always been of the Holy Spirit.  Think of the winds hovering over the waters, God breathing into the nostrils of the first human, how the Red sea was blown back for the children of Israel to escape the Egyptians, the army mustered into being in the Valley of Dry Bones, and the dove descending as Jesus comes up from the waters of his baptism by John.

That's why I appreciate and use the description of Lover, Beloved, Love.  For sure it speaks of how we have historically read Jesus in prayer -- from the cross as well -- though maybe not so much of how we read Paul in particular.  And that is why we dig.  We are drawn into the mystery and cannot stop, because of love.