The great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.

…I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences. It is this last I find so often lacking. Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces—and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, from The Message [emphasis mine]

A Christian is distinguished by his radical esteem for the Incarnation

A Christian is not distinguished by his political views, or moral decisions, or habitual conduct, or personal piety, or, least of all, by his churchly activities. A Christian is distinguished by his radical esteem for the Incarnation - to use the traditional jargon - by his reverence for the life of God in the whole of Creation, even and, in a sense, especially, Creation in the travail of sin.

The characteristic place to find a Christian is among his very enemies.

The first place to look for Christ is in Hell.

— William Stringfellow, from A Private and Public Faith

"Leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of His family..."

Chris Green writes about the communion of the saints and Jesus not just loving us but liking us. It’s all wonderful stuff and worth a read, but his last quote, from the late Russian human rights activist Alexei Navalny, is timely and worth quoting in full:

You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old, or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself. My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.

Amen.

Marilynne Robinson on Community and Absence

Posting this quote from Marilynne Robinson here just so I have it at hand for later use:

To speak in the terms that are familiar to us all, there was a moment in which Jesus, as a man, a physical presence, left that supper at Emmaus. His leave-taking was a profound event for which the supper itself was precursor. Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, which Jesus promised and has epitomized, is, at a human scale, a great reality for all of us in the course of ordinary life.

I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community. I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.

In full context, she’s talking about community with fictional characters and authors here, but this rings so true to me in a world full of online communities.

I'm not claiming any special prescience, but...

I was cleaning up old blog posts here and found this that I wrote back in 2012:

I think it may take the American evangelical church another decade or so to really realize how closely intertwined they are with the Republican party, but my prayer is that the realization hits sooner rather than later. What compounds the issue is that our view of American exceptionalism makes us prideful enough that we are resistant to learn from our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world on the topic.

Little did I expect that, a decade later, the evangelical church would, see it, realize it, and embrace it. God help us.

Supernatural love, found within human love

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.

A little poetry for Monday night

I’ve done a lot of reading so far this year. Tonight I started My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman. I’m not too far in but the writing (prose, punctuated with poetry) is dense and profound.

In the opening chapter he drops this little poem that resounds with truth in my ears. I leave it here for you as a gift.

Into the instant’s bliss never came one soul
Whose soul was not possessed by Christ,
Even in the eons Christ was not.

And still: some who cry the name of Christ
Live more remote from love
Than some who cry to a void they cannot name.

– ‘After Dante’, Christian Wiman

Chris E. W. Green on the Beatitudes and Power

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.

Chris E. W. Green on Christians as a temple for the sake of the world

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.

Chris E. W. Green on Vocation

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.