Jesus as Grace Fulfilled

I've been writing about how Jesus gives us insight into the direction of God's grace; that all of grace is from God and towards God's creation.  All that comes from God -- even those "corrective" moments when it feels like God is raising a voice of anger at us -- is grace.

Please let's not limit God to only having "nice" as a manner.  But let's also not limit our appreciation for God such that we continue to portray what we deem as bad for us or as punishment of us from some attribute of God absent that same grace that comes in the person of Jesus.

The prophets wrote often about God's wrath.  But it is our reading that misses grace and not God's actions.  Wrath without grace is not even the kind of spiritual maturity we hope for ourselves.  We must be careful when we think that God acts differently -- some times with grace, some times without -- towards us.  In the same way that parents strive for the same heart no matter the concern their children present.  Isn't there a smidgen of grace when we take away the iPhone, the car keys, the weekend plans?

It takes spiritual maturity to insure grace in our lives of parenting, collegiality and cooperative efforts.  But grace does not boast and is too often unrecognized as companion to correction, rejection.  Grace also will not coerce its way into our human interactions.  Without a commitment to grace -- which looks mostly like love -- our responses to challenge and disappointment sink into petty retribution and revenge.

In order for grace to be embodied in our actions we must commit to it, trust it, hunger for it, share it.  All of these and more are how God comes to us in the person of Jesus.  In every way grace comes but especially as the incarnate one we can see God's commitment.  It is not easy but it is God's commitment that Jesus' cries from the cross help us to see.

We may not recognize it but our freedom to choose is the result of God's grace in how we are entrusted and un-coerced in love.  God's hunger, God's desire is love and when and wherever that love goes unnoticed or is dismissed God's heart cries.  Whether in tears or gift God's grace is abundant.  Like seeds in the parable of the sower broadcast beyond the intended garden furrows and fences onto all sorts and conditions of soil and sun, read "life."

It is in the person of Jesus that all these ways that God is graceful find human embodiment.  The good news is that Jesus was just a fully human as divine.  Just as much us as God.  His uniqueness is our uniqueness.  His perfected, ours yet to be.  But we are each uniquely and all together graced and capable of committing to it, trusting it, hungering for it, sharing it.

Walking with Jesus

Walking with Jesus is a part of my dream life.  More than once I've roused from sleep in a mix of shame thinking I'm not good enough to be here and joy in amazement I was so lucky.  Just once I was afraid I was dead.

One time Jesus joined me on a long run.  I don't remember worrying about his robes encumbering him.  I do remember that it was a field of perfectly mown grass under our feet; mine in Asics Tigers, his in sandals.  Ah, those were the days/dreams.

Part of my thinking these days about the image of Jesus, the role model, the metaphor, the revelation is that we need God to be proximate.  Our theology always pushes God away toward omniscience, omnipotence, absoluteness, transcendence, eternality.  Jesus brings God closer.  Especially as we understand Jesus being the Word of God Incarnate.  Nothing shows us who God is better than Jesus.

So I'm musing again.  I'd be dreaming if I weren't awake.  I'm singing the old hymn, "O Master let me walk with thee."  Here are the words:

 O Master, let me walk with Thee

in lowly paths of service free;

tell me Thy secret; help me bear

the strain of toil, the fret of care.

 Help me the slow of heart to move

by some clear, winning word of love;

teach me the wayward feet to stay,

and guide them in the homeward way.

 Teach me Thy patience, still with Thee

in closer, dearer company,

in work that keeps faith sweet and strong,

in trust that triumphs over wrong.

 In hope that sends a shining ray

far down the future's broad'ning way;

in peace that only Thou canst give,

with Thee, O Master, let me live.

The Jesus we walk with is the best lens to see who God is.  Thanks be to God it's a dream coming true.

Jesus Towards Us

One of the descriptions of grace I remember hearing was from The Rev. Dr. James Carpenter of General Seminary.  When he said "God towards us" he surely said more but I got myself stuck on that and stopped following his train of thought that day.

I knew Jim because he had retired to Augusta, GA when I was serving as Associate Rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd.  He was a gift to my time there. The light of his whimsy and imagination sparkled.  The heat of his ethical gaze was constant.  The demand for excellence in witness to and with a diverse creation was non-stop. 

I count it as one of the many graces from God that I received during my service in the CSRA, years ago.  Working with Rector Robert Fain and staff.  Living in our neighborhood of young med students and pharma reps on Bransford "off the brick" with Cindy, David and MC.  Clericus, Standing Committee, and summers at Honey Creek were some of the other graces given then. 

I've remembered Dr. Carpenter's definition from then because it is now how I understand who Jesus is for me.  He is a grace of God's, not just to me but to all time and space and thus to me, too.  It's what gets St. Paul to write in his letter to the Colossians:

. . . of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing--so among yourselves, from the day you heard and understood the grace of God in truth,  as you learned it . . .  (Col. 1:5b-7a, RSV)

Certainly there was grace on our creation whatever the extent to which sin has broken, removed or altered its original effect.  But it's not so much how much of our "original blessing" remains. What matters to me now is that that same grace of creation continues from God.  Otherwise there'd be little or no "bearing fruit and growing" "in the whole world" of which the church in Colossae is just a part. 

In short, God is always "towards us." There is always grace from God.  And that ultimate grace that was the Gospel's focus, Jesus who died and was raised is also "always."  Jesus is always "God towards us."

So . . . what, who, how is Jesus to you, now?  How do you recognize and receive God's always being towards us?  Are you willing to explore or question the ways in which "God towards us" is localized, embodied, incarnated in Jesus, not just 2000 years ago but now?  How does your appreciation of Jesus help you receive God's always being towards us?

Lots of questions, one Jesus, one God, always towards us.

Jesus as Role Model

From the beginning, Jesus’s ministry modeled the interplay between prophetic utterance, public theology, and intense spiritual renewal.*

Someone I love sent me a link to a youtube video.  The video was a patchwork of clips of evangelicalistic preachers, pop psychologists, and journalistic senationalists.  

I don't they were trying to enrage me or trigger some extreme response.  I think they were looking for a way to make sense without more absolutistic flailing and Facebook-ish anger.  They were seeking advice.  They were seeking peace. 

It is a constant now in ways I've not seen before.  How do we make sense, how do we make a way, how do we live in THIS world?

I've been writing about how Jesus is presented in scripture and how we can relate to his abiding presence in the 21st century.  Jesus as Invitation, Resting in Jesus, Jesus as Jewish mystic, social prophet, as wisdom teacher and more. 

It's important to understand that each of these views takes the risk of fragmenting the whole that in its fullness is beyond our understanding.  The language of our creeds avoids this parceling out of the fully divine - fully human reality that it claims from God in Jesus, the Christ.  

I think is is intentional.  It helps.  Otherwise, with more than "conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary" we'd be claiming to know more of how God did what God did than we can know.  Going beyond this core belief is the slippery slope of most early church heresies.  

So it appealed to me when I read the quote above.  Jesus modeled the interplay -- and I added in my mind -- between all our fragments of him.  His modeling was just as much in a world clamoring for absolutistic righteousness as is ours.  

We will always be the ones who break it down, who pick apart, who clamor and cry for final answers, for absolutes we cannot hold, much less hold against each other.  

Our following will be part prophetic utterance, part public theology, and part intense spiritual renewal and more.  It will not do for us to deny or avoid the interplay.  

Because ours is the hard work of following the one who died and was raised.  

*Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, second edition (Fortress Press: 2017), 9-10.