Inviting Jesus

Thanks for going with me last week through the difficult news of Dick and Jim and Martha's lives coming to an end.  Our prayers continue for those whom they loved and those who mourn.  Grief is how we send love to those we've lost.  Let's keep sending love.

If you would please add Coy Wallace Carson to your prayers.  He was Papa to my David Wallace Brown and Mary Carson Brown.  Their mom Cindy was with him as his long descent into dementia and physical failing ended while he was sleeping.  Sending more love.

Part of how we can still have love to send is because of how Jesus continues to abide with us.  I characterized our wanting to "rest in Jesus" as kin to making Sabbath.  The rest we take away from the world's troubles is a good place to meet the one who goes before us to death and was raised.   We can trust him to be present.

But we must be cautious about how we allow our expectation of his being with us and protecting a place of sabbath rest and sanctuary for us to develop.  Simply, he wants to be invited and our presumption may not be the best way to call him over the threshold.

Maybe if we think about the character of the one we are inviting it'll help us to ask him in.  In a sermon delivered to Calvary Episcopal in 1999 during Lent Marcus Borg suggested 3 ways to see Jesus at the door.

First is to think of Jesus as a "Jewish mystic, as one who knew God, who knew the Sacred, who knew the Spirit. He was one for whom the Spirit of God was an experiential reality."

Secondly, Borg saw "the historical Jesus as a wisdom teacher of a way or a path,  the road less traveled, the narrow way, a subversive way to an alternative wisdom."

Thirdly Borg saw Jesus as "a social prophet, a radical critic of the domination system in the Jewish homeland in His day. Indeed, it was His passion as a social prophet that counts for Him getting killed.
To put that three-fold summary into three phases, there was to Jesus first, a spirit dimension, secondly, a wisdom dimension, and thirdly, a justice dimension."

These may not be the Jesus you have in heart and mind when you are seeking rest from grief, stress or struggle.  But these pictures of Borg's can inform how we move back into the world from our sabbath sanctuaries, from our grieving.

From Jesus the mystic we can return with a renewed sense of wonder and marvel at how the world continues to hold places and times for joy and celebration.  From Jesus the wisdom teacher we can expect new learning and new truths as we move forward.  With Jesus the social prophet we can be encouraged to find and fashion a better world for others and ourselves.

In each instance God in Christ waits on our invitation.  Ready to grieve, to wonder, to learn, to grow, and to strive again . . . with us.