Unexpected Grace
2 Pentecost, 10 June 2007
Unexpected Grace
Many years ago, I was having a conversation with a clergyman I admire very much, and in the course of that conversation he mentioned someone we both knew and said, “and, he actually still believes in the physical resurrection of Jesus!” And I remember thinking to myself somewhat sheepishly, “Well, I still believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus.”
Now, it's not that having a personal relationship with Jesus is unimportant to this person I was talking to, it's very important. He was, and is, a man of great faith whose prayer life is at the very center of his well-being. But his faith is not dependent on whether or not Jesus was actually physically resurrected from dead. He believes in a resurrection but sees it more as metaphor than actual fact.
If I was to mention that conversation with this person today, I'd be very surprised if he even remembered it. But it had a profound impact on me because out of my admiration for him, it caused me to revisit my own views about the resurrection. Was I holding on to them because they were precious part of my upbringing? Certainly a big part of learning about Jesus when I was a little girl included hearing about the stories of his resurrection and his appearances to the disciples afterwards. They were and are stories I hold very dear.
Or was it something I truly believed in, more than a precious memory, but rather something I held as core to my Christian beliefs?
And so I decided to examine the issue and in the end, as a result of study, prayer, talking with others, and just plain thinking about it, I arrived at the latter conclusion but was changed nonetheless. I do believe in the actual resurrection—the story is just too compelling to explain it as something simply symbolic. But I can't claim any certainty about what that must have looked like, or what it was that people saw or didn't see when they said they had seen Jesus.
Canon Jack Lindquist hit on this point in his own unique way at a forum he gave in the last year, in which he talked about Jesus' resurrection appearance in Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ, and how after enduring just horrible, awful, bloody torture, Jesus then appears to his disciples not only in solid, human form, but looking like a model for a shampoo commercial.
Well, maybe he did, or maybe he didn't, but obviously that is not the key point. What is the key point is that Jesus overcame death in a way that had never happened before and as a result, all of our lives have been changed forever.
I realized that in a funny way, this man's view and my own were not all that different, we just got there in different ways, and that in the end that was perhaps one of the more important lessons that I learned.
That conversation with this person came back to me last week after I read portion of Luke's Gospel assigned for today. We are told that Jesus is on the road with his disciples after having just healed the centurion's slave. While in Nain, he comes across a woman whose son has apparently just died. Most likely her situation is very desperate. She is a widow, now without a son, and probably has no one to care for her or means to support herself. Chances are she will end up a beggar on the streets. Feeling great compassion, Jesus brings her son back to life.
It is sort of a strange and wonderful story, but what are we to do with it? Do we read it literally, metaphorically or perhaps in some another way that will not only tell us about Jesus, but the life of faith as well?
These questions, and questions like them, point out part of the challenge of being a Christian in today's postmodern world. Cherished beliefs about faith are now often challenged on many fronts, including several books that have come out in the last couple of years such as San Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation and most recently, Christopher Hitchens book, God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything both of which have made their way to the New York Times bestsellers list and hold the view that religion is responsible for much of what is wrong in the world.
Now, books such as these (in my view) are at one end of the spectrum between unquestioned belief and no belief at all, and as such, could be seen as extreme. But nonetheless, they present interesting challenges to those of us who do believe in God and see our faith as not only something that brings meaning to our own lives, but also can serve as a healing and reconciling force in the world.
But rather than see them and other challenges to our faith as a threat, it is perhaps more advantageous to look at the opportunities they present us, to once again determine and affirm what is truly essential to salvation in the fullest sense. And one way to do that, is to examine or revisit our ways or methods for dealing with the types of questions or issues that might be raised from stories such as the one we just heard from Luke's Gospel today.
Marcus Borg, in his book Jesus, Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, talks about two basic competing paradigms of Christianity at work in America today. He writes:
The first is belief-centered; it emphasizes the importance of
of holding Christian beliefs about Jesus, God and the Bible. The
second is way-centered; it emphasizes that Christianity is about
following Jesus on a path, a path of transformation. The first
emphasizes the literal meaning of Christian language, including
the Bible; the second emphasizes the more-than-literal meaning
of Christian language . (Emphasis in original)
This second paradigm doesn't dismiss the importance of belief but also takes into account what we have learned from the sciences, the study of culture, history, anthropology, and importantly, the study of religion and advances in archaeology. It allows us to look at the scriptures with fresh eyes, which is at times disconcerting but also rather freeing. It calls for us to look beyond the “facts” of the story to find the truth that it is seeking to reveal.
And by the power of the Holy Spirit, the results can sometimes take our breath away.
When we look at the story of Jesus and the widow, through this way-centered paradigm, the facts as presented in Luke's Gospel, are that Jesus, out of pity for the widow, brought her son back to life. She did not ask him to do so, he just did it.
The truth that emerges from the story is that God's grace, healing and desire to resurrect all our lives, are freely offered, even when we don't ask for them, or even know to ask. There is no criterion we have to meet, no litmus test of holiness, proper belief, or correct way of praying that must happen first.
And not even death can defeat or keep us from God's overwhelming compassion and love for all of us.
And that truth does not in any way diminish the story of the widow and her son, it just compels us to reach beyond the words on the page and find where they are taking us on the path with Jesus today.
It is a path that doesn't guarantee easy answers and from time to time compels us to revisit cherished beliefs. But it also provides us with a gift far more wonderful than any we could have ever asked for. And that is the opportunity for new life, to rise up to what is now before us, and go forward blessed and redeemed.
The Rev. Canon Allisyn Thomas
10 June 2007