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Christian Wiman, from his book My Bright Abyss:

It is not some meditative communion with God that I crave. What one wants during extreme crisis is not connection with God, but connection with people; not supernatural love, but human love. No, that is not quite right. What one craves is supernatural love, but one finds it only within human love.

This is why I am, such as I am, a Christian, because I can feel God only through physical existence, can feel his love only in the love of other people. I believe in grace and chance, at the same time. I believe in absolute truth and absolute contingency, at the same time. And I believe that Christ is the seam soldering together these wholes that our half vision — and our entire clock-bound, logic-locked way of life — shapes as polarities.

> My Bright Abyss, p. 164

Beautiful, and it resonates for me with the stuff I was reading from Chris Green a couple weeks ago — that the world experiences God’s love through us in the way God makes space for them in our lives.

I’m still only in chapter 2 of Sanctifying Interpretation, but this is too good to not share. Green takes a look at the Beatitudes and how Jesus embodies them. Then, he says, the Beatitudes show themselves to be concerned with power, though not perhaps in the way you’d think:

We can say that true power - the power of the Spirit of holiness (Rom. 1.4) - is first and foremost the power of unanxious and reconciling presence, a power brought to bear on behalf of those who suffer in isolation, those forgotten or ignored by the powers-that-be, whose only hope is ‘another body that comes and stands beside and in the midst… and will not move’. As our lives are made in even the smallest ways to be like Christ’s, we become noticeably less anxious, less needy, less defensive, and increasingly determined for others to be treated with the dignity that is theirs as God’s delight.

Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 39

If there’s something the church today needs to learn, this may be exactly it: to be less anxious, less needy, less defensive, and more for others. What a word.

Green continues, drawing on Stanley Hauerwas:

To this end, the church must be ‘a body of people who have learned the skills of presence’, skills that are developed only in a community ‘pledged not to fear the stranger’, where the practice of being present with those in suffering ‘has become the marrow of their habits’…

Sometimes the Spirit limns [colors, like a highlighter] our actions so that they body forth the power of Christ’s compassion and wisdom in ways that we and others can sense. But whether we or they can sense it or not, our confidence in God leads us to say that he is always everywhere at work doing good. So, by being there, but showing up and staying put, we ‘present our bodies as a living sacrifice’ (Rom. 12.1-2), which, when all is said and done, is probably the only way that truly overcomes evil with good (Rom. 12.21). Thus, that is the sacrifice with which God is pleased.

We often wrongly imagine sacrifice not as a gift but as forfeiture, not as self-giving but as self-destruction. Christ, however, reveals that God hates whatever destroys us, just as surely as he hates whatever we might do that destroys others. And, as the last sacrifice, his priestly ministry is the apocalyptic bringing-to-bear of the Great Commandment, which is why his sacrifice is the end of all sacrifice. Christ makes of himself a sacrifices, and so all sacrifices, if they are true to themselves must be what his was: a free and freeing gift of reconciliation and healing and blessing.

Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 40

I have felt both sides of this at times - the feeling that “showing up and staying put” is a sacrifice that is sometimes too much, to the point of my own detriment. Green says, though, that God wants us to stay put in ways that are reconciling, healing, and blessing to ourselves as well as those we are serving.

Following up from yesterday’s post, here’s Chris Green again from chapter 2 of Sanctifying Interpretation. In understanding our Christian vocation, Green says, we need to see our role as not against the world, but for the world. (Emphasis mine in the quote below.)

Often, when we are talking about the church as called out from the world, we imply a contrast between the humanity of believers and the humanity of non-believers. Truth be told, Scripture itself often seems to speak this way. For example, Ephesians 2 contrasts ‘the children of wrath’ - those who are ‘dead’ in sin, ‘following the course of the world’, dominated by the ‘passions of the flesh’ (Eph 2.1-3) - with the ‘one new humanity’, which is created in Christ’s body as the ‘household of God’ (Eph. 2.15, 19). If we are not careful, then, we leave the impression that the saints have a different humanity ‘in Christ’ than does the rest of the world ‘in Adam’.

But such a reading misses the point. The line of thought in Ephesians 2 does not end with the contrast between the family of God and the children of disobedience. Instead, Paul goes on to insist that this ‘one new humanity’ constituted in and as Christ’s body ‘is joined together and grows into a holy temple… a dwelling place for God’ (Eph. 2.21-22). What is this temple if not a holy ‘place’ set aside for the world to meet with its God and for God to act on the world? The church, participating in the renewed humanity created in Christ as a priestly people, opens a space in the midst of the world so that heaven and earth, the new creation and the old, can touch. We are made by the Spirit the temple for the sake of others, so they can encounter Christ in the room he has made for them in our lives.

–Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 31

That last sentence is a feast! It’s not a new teaching, or anything contradictory to things I’ve been taught before, but that particular color on it: that others would “encounter Christ” when they encounter me. Wowza.

I’m just digging in to Chris E. W. Green’s Sanctifying Interpretation, and while it’s a book I picked up because it was going to address Scriptural interpretation, I’m only two chapters in and blown away by his thoughts on human vocation. I’ve got several bits I’d like to share, but I’ll spread them out over several posts.

From Chapter 1, Green encourages us that the Christian vocation shouldn’t be distinguished too strongly from the human vocation:

I believe that a call to collaborate with God rests upon all of us just because we exist as the creatures we are. We are all of us as human beings made to mediate God’s holiness to the rest of creation, to work the works of God, to do what Jesus did, to be who Jesus is. To be human is to be burdened with this vocation. And in many ways - small and large, conscious and unconscious, intentional and inadvertent - all of us are more or less faithfully and lovingly in fact fulfilling our calling, although always only in part. In Christ, the Spirit places us under that burden, strengthening us for the bearing of it…


Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 20

I love this thought that humans, even unknowingly, are frequently ‘faithfully and lovingly’ fulfilling the calling as humans to bring healing and reconciliation.

Green goes on to talk about the purpose of Christian vocation as something clarified or revealed from within the human vocation (emphasis mine in the quote below):

Our broadest vocation is not so much given to us at our baptism as we are at last truly given to it. Baptized into Christ, we are awakened to and sanctioned for the vocation we always already were meant to bear. Our narrower vocation - the work we are called to do as members of Christ’s body (e.g. bishop, pastor, or deacon; evangelist intercession, or teacher) - comes to us in our call to believe or is imparted to us in the event of ordination, but always with a view to the fulfillment of the natural human call. Within such an account, those outside the church are recognized to have the same broad vocation we do. For now, however, we find ourselves called out from them, but only because we have been singled out by God to share in the work of making room for them. We take on the ecclesial vocation always only on behalf of others - never instead of them, much less against them. We are the called out ones whose lives are dedicated entirely to collaboration with God’s work for those who have yet to hear or submit to the call. The elect are always elected for the sake of the non-elect. The church is a remnant of the world, gathered from the world to be both a temple and a kingdom of priests for the world’s sake.


Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 21

This is such a wonderful perspective. Would that the church saw their vocation, their service to God, never instead of others or against others, but always for the sake of others. The picture of the church as a temple and priests to bring God’s presence and message to the world, and the world to God’s presence and message, is one I’ll be chewing on for a while.