web analytics
Archive - reflections RSS Feed

life: unmasked — space Jesus and remedial personhood

May 17, 2012 in reflections with 1 Comment

Today, I share a post about life: unmasked, a blog meme started by my sensational friend, Joy.

—

Today, we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord; today, I confront some of the stupidest words in Scripture.

Jesus has just ascended in front of the assembled disciples up into the heavens and “a cloud received Him out of their sight.” (Acts 1:9) Following, two men dressed in white–presumably angels–ask the people staring at the sky why they are, in fact, looking at the sky: “Why do you stand looking into the sky?”

This seems a strikingly dumb question, even if it is a rhetorical setup for the verses that follow. You can try and massage the passage into being about paying attention to the work the Spirit is accomplishing around us, but that doesn’t get you off the hook for having to explain well exactly what has just happened–lest you end up with the tried and true assumption of elementary church children who believe that God lives in the sky and that Jesus was the first astronaut.

The possibility of Space Jesus is why the disciples are staring into the sky, dear angelic brethren, because the only other person this has happened to is Elijah, and his was a lot more dramatic, though he didn’t die and resurrect beforehand. The disciples are staring because what has just happened is still a bit hard to understand. Jesus raised from the dead, walked through walls and atop water, and, to top it all, can now effectively fly. Also, He didn’t just keep flying into the stratosphere, but was received by a cloud, folded into the fabric of the very cosmos, present and yet not present. He doesn’t fly as much as He passes through this side to the other, Heaven side.

So they’re staring, because this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense visually.

The angels follow their insultingly obvious question with the response, “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven.”

Super.

When?

Because we’re two millennia after the fact and the fabric of time has yet to unfold itself to reveal the risen Christ by sight.

Of course, we walk by faith. Of course, the Spirit has been sent to give us power and to guide us. Of course, all of these things are true.

But, you see, on Monday, I unpacked a life. I came home from University and all those people I gave shreds of my soul to and I unpacked a life. I’m trying this living without these people thing, without these people in the same way, and I wonder if I’m not also standing somewhere in myself, staring at a certain kind of sky, wondering when they’re going to come back.

It’s different, importantly different, in that these people are not Jesus and geographic distance is different from Presence, but in a kind of way it is the same.

Because I saw and see Jesus by them, when I find I’m unable to hear.

I don’t much know how to be a person right now. At least, not a very good one. (Not morally, mind you, but essentially. And you think I’m kidding, but I may have had a friend date last night that quickly evolved into a determination that the both of us would learn to become people–whatever that means!–by the time the summer ends and I have to go to graduate school an ocean and half-a-country away.)

A few people have asked me, here and there, why I seem a little sad lately. It’s because I’m looking into the sky; something strange has just happened. Miracles of friendships have suddenly been pulled away, even though I knew they would have to be, like the disciples knew Jesus would have to go but they fought it the whole way. Right now, when people ask why the small lines of a frown, I feel I want to recoil as I recoil in the same way as angels asking why the disciples stare into heaven.

Because I know there shall be a return, but we can wait a long time for that sort of thing.

Some of us don’t get it until that other side.

I’m with the disciples on this one. I think if I feel this way about my everyday loves, a love for the Creator would make me stare into that sky, too.

I’m still staring, I think. I don’t want to hear the angels. I’m afraid of having to respond.

“Then they returned to Jerusalem …”

Just a bit longer here, please. Just a bit.

And this, friends, is but a bit of life unmasked.

—

It is my joy, with Joy, to share here words that expose life honestly, openly, and messily. Some days my posts for this meme are about this chaos of being, other days I manage a bit more gentle words.Would you join us in sharing the vulnerable times, the unordered times, the unkempt rooms? 

 Life: Unmasked

Christ, have mercy

May 16, 2012 in reflections with 3 Comments

A little scrap of a thought today …

It’s late evening a few days before graduation. Antonia and I have been on a whirlwind goodbye tour at the Elite surrounded by friends for nearly four hours. What starts as a joke becomes quickly the most brilliant idea we’ve ever had, which may be the atmosphere talking, and we go see The Hunger Games at the latest showing, leaving the theater close to one in the morning.

(Someday, I’ll write about that movie and the book series, but not today.)

On our way driving back to campus, we merge onto the highway and see a guy driving a pickup without its lights on, his cellphone in hand illuminating the cabin. It’s raining. He’s speeding. The whole thing is like a parody of itself, the commercials about safe driving unfolding before us.

We let him pass because it seems the wisest thing. Antonia and I start talking about what you do with books and movies that completely write God out of the story. We’re in the thick of it, about to get on the major section of highway, when the guy in the pickup further down the road spins out of control and up onto the side of the highway, then back over four lanes of slippery wet pavement.

“Christ have mercy. Christ have mercy. Christ have mercy.” I breathe it over and over again as I slow my own car. They are the first words out of my mouth. Words I learned from the liturgy. Prayer I learned from the liturgy. I raise my hand in the sign of peace, which you point toward those sitting too far away from you in church during the passing of the peace, the welcome, and I send peace toward the spinning car while I subconsciously ready myself to pull over and dial 911.

But there are ordinary miracles. The man gets control of his pickup. He sits stunned on the far left shoulder of the highway, hazards on, and then come his lights. The cars around us have slowed and no one, save for being rattled, has been hurt. After a moment, the driver of the pickup puts it into gear and lurches on into the night. We follow his lead and go about our way.

“Thanks be to God.”

It’s a few days later, on my way home from University. I’m on the highway when everything suddenly comes to a halt. I’ve kept a safe distance from the car in front of me, but the person behind me doesn’t look like they have, so when I have to slam the breaks I let the words fly, “S—! S—! S—! S—! S—! S—! S—! S—!”

Everything was fine. The car behind me stopped in time and, except for a few seconds of inconvenience, there was no harm done.

How did I go from Christ have mercy to S—! so quickly? I suppose this is why, beyond the big and obvious things, we pray Christ, have mercy. Because my vagabond heart is still learning to trust enough that He’ll hear my prayer for myself as much as He will for others. That I pray for His mercy for the big, big sins, as much as I pray it over the moments of insecure and untrusting profanity chains.

There’s grace for the road. Some days I know it better than others. Mercy.

woven faith, today at prodigal

March 21, 2012 in reflections with 0 Comments

Today, I’m sharing brief vignettes of my spiritual autobiography over at Prodigal.

Conversion

I don’t remember it. There is a lot of pressure put on Evangelicals to identify that particular moment in time in which you knew you were a sinner and Jesus waltzed into your heart. But I don’t know when it happened. It happened; it happened at a specific moment in time, but if you ask me to identify the exact moment, I’m at a loss.

The first time was in a shopping cart at Target when I was three and I told my mother I wanted to know Jesus. There were a few more times after that, late nights with my parents, and I can remember more than once kneeling beside my bed and saying what was likely a very broken rendition of the Sinner’s Prayer hoping that it would take.

Which one of those counted? I’m not sure. Not everyone comes to Faith later in life with the dramatic fanfare of the Apostle Paul. Some of us grew up praying Christ as Lord and, one of those times, Christ as Lord was acceptance, was the gift of the Holy Spirit, was the grafting into this ridiculous, loud family we call the Body of Christ. What I know is that it happened, that I have the assurance of things hoped for, that at some point a toddler said just enough, longed for it in just the right way, that God saw into that heart and whispered into it Life.

Join me for the rest of this journey, today at Prodigal?

rend your heart, not your garment: today at deeper story

February 27, 2012 in reflections with 2 Comments

Today, I’m sharing over at Deeper Story.

Everything about it felt wrong. We filed into the nave, passing by the stained glass saints keeping vigil over this generation, living in another century only inches from where they watch. We were a small group: the one like a brother, the one who makes me laugh wildly, the one who spills grace with each word. It was not they who were wrong, but I.

Me, with all these past months of the silence of God, with the living in the shadow of the joy, the other side of the grace. I felt wrong; I felt out of place; I felt the exhaustion of not hearing.

Because I used to hear. I used to feel. I used to walk in the midst of Him, or rather, knew I walked in that space.

And rend your heart and not your garments.

Is it possible to do Lent wrong?

I was giving up Facebook. I felt no motivation to do anything else. Last year, I had heard the Lord speak clearly, and I gave up meat altogether except for feast days and, more significantly, abstained from the Eucharist. I had grown, deep and full, through such mortification, such discipline.

But this year, this year felt trite. Giving up Facebook isn’t much of a sacrifice, isn’t much a good that’s left to then return to in rejoicing once the fast is completed. Yet I had not heard otherwise. I had not heard, it seemed, at all. Giving up Facebook only seemed right. But that was all. It seemed right. It didn’t seem much like I had heard.

And I thought that perhaps, if the ashes were made on my forehead, if I took that sign to myself, then perhaps I would hear Him again, feel His presence burn into the sign of the cross made upon my face.

Continue with me on this journey, over at Deeper Story?

if only political apathy were a spiritual gift

January 10, 2012 in reflections with 30 Comments

I almost promise that this is the only post I shall write about the 2012 election. If I end up writing on this again, something very, very serious will have had to happen.

If NPR is to be believed, today was the New Hampshire primary. That I know this, that I am inclined to be aware of it, is thanks to a steady process of societal edification my parents began in me at a very young age. I was carted from museum to evening news with Peter Jennings in an impressive transition of seamless design, such that by the time I was in high school, I drove to school each morning listening to Carl Castle and Michele Norris. For all four years, I was a debate kid and knew more about national and international policy than I did about Laguna Beach or the Real Housewives of anything. (My introduction to the latter came in college.)

And I did well. I won trophies. I was told I was the kind of person who could run for things.

In my first year of college I majored in Political Science and was placed in a junior-level course in my first semester, in which I also proved to do quite well. I had turned eighteen the year before, so I was registered and ready to cast my vote, informed by many years of political conversations at home and careful study in school. I followed the 2008 election closely, I evaluated the candidates with care, and when it came down to the decision of who the next leader of the free world would be—

I didn’t vote.

I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

It’s nearly four years later and, as I said, if NPR is to be believed, we’ve entered that season again when people emerge from luxuriously polished offices of mahogany to tells us why they are capable of leading us into the dawn of the next age and the age to come.

And I really can’t bring myself to care.

Politically, I’m complicated.

I’m pro-life on both spectrums: I believe that personhood comes with the fertilization of an egg, but I also believe that the nature of the Incarnation is such that bodies were made known to us to be hallowed things and the act of capital punishment does not honor that.

I’m against war, but I understand when defense must be carried out, when the safety of the majority has to be weighed against the rights of the one, and where questions of the hope for one must be held against the quality of life of the more.

I believe homosexuality is a sin–by the way, all have sinned, I sin, sin does not throw the person out with the bathwater, sin is a sin is a sin–but I don’t believe the State has a right to legislate marriage, which is a sacrament, given by God through the Church, and that marriage doesn’t need the blessing of governmental authority to be made true. Civil unions, on the other hand, are the legal affairs of the State.

And the issues go on infinitely.

For I do not base my political identity on absolutes that cannot be moved or changed. I base them in the midst of an everyday life that I pray listens more to the wisdom of the God who is unchanging as opposed to the wisdom of the crowd that is.

As much as we like to say that God is the unchanging God then quickly spin that into a confirmation that absolutes exist, we should be careful to know what absolutes we’re willing to claim as being so set in stone.

For my part, I have a hard time with the political realm. I see its ideal, but I also see just how far we are from it. How many candidates have now claimed to have the authority and word of God on their side, who are now knocked out of the race? How many have told us how they will respond absolutely, without equivocation, given a large swatch of issues?

I want a candidate whose response to an issue is to confess that his or her first action would be to pray.

I want a candidate whose response to an argument he or she loses to be, “I’ve changed my mind,” without that being a sign of weakness. For it is strength to be able to weigh arguments and reach a better conclusion.

I want a candidate who is a Christian. Yes, one in the pew every Sunday. Yes, one who finds value in the Scripture. Yes, one who believes in the unchanging and eternal God in the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. (And not the addition of a “prophet” who brought “further revelation,” as is pertinent to the current election cycle.)

For I am tired of bastardized forms of Gospel masquerading as light for the sake of political agenda. It would be nice, for once, if the god who shows up so often in politics were a god who looked like the God of the Scripture.

In the Gospels, there is a little joke around the scene in which Jesus is asked if tribute should be paid to Caesar. He asks whose face is on the money of the city. They reply that it is Caesar’s face and he says in turn to give to Caesar what’s his. The joke is in that what was also on that coin around Caesar’s head was an inscription that claimed him, as emperor of Rome, to be the son of god.

The Son of God says to the son of god: take what’s yours, because yours is coming.

So this next election cycle, I confess to you, I am not inclined to vote. But I will, because I pray sometimes foolishly for the wisdom to cast a ballot for someone who will do the least damage.

I am not the kid in America who thinks the government failed him, or the 99% angry because of my hunger.

I am a child of the Creator who is tired of watching his Daddy trotted out like a sideshow every four years, like a court jester for cheap tricks and a common whoring.

When the candidates become Christians, I’ll be excited to vote. Until then, you’ll find me in the midst of the community I am in, the community of those women who have had abortions and those men who support the death penalty and my gay friends, all of whom don’t understand why I disagree with their choices but love them all the same and who I don’t understand love me just as much. Among them you can find me, building community, serving others, caring more for the Kingdom that Christ brought into our midst than this tiny little kingdom we set up and got confused with the true City on a Hill.

America shall pass away like fire. All nations shall. The Psalms tells us the nations are nothing in the gaze of God.

Maybe if all of us cared more about this Kingdom here and now and less about this other kingdom, politics in this country would look quite a bit different.

We have our Saviour, friends, and His throne was realized on a cross, not in a mahogany office.

But, perhaps I’m just wishing my political apathy were a spiritual gift.

Don’t worry, I’m still praying about this one, too.

 

Page 1 of 2512345»1020...Last »