God the Universalist

After church this past Sunday I was approached by a parishioner who said that what I had just preached sounded a lot like universalism, the notion that all people will receive God's salvation no matter what religious affiliation. My answer was that God is indeed a universalist. How could we in good conscience worship a God who would exclude anyone from God's grace and favor. This is an old argument of course, one that has persevered over the centuries. Indeed the colonial Christian evangelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries held as their guiding principle the idea that unless one accepted Jesus Christ as their savior they would be consumed by the fires of hell, hence their zealous urgency to make Christ known to the world. Some crafty theologians softened this idea by proposing that lost souls would have yet another chance to accept Jesus after death, the so-called doctrine of universal explicit opportunity.....what!?

There is ample warrant in scripture that God is indeed a universalist. In Genesis God chooses Israel as God's beloved so that Israel would be a light to all people; Israel a people as catalyst for the world's transformation and restoration. In the Gospel of John we are told that Jesus is the way, but many Christians have interpreted this passage as exclusionary, that unless one believes in Jesus one will not be saved. This is a decidedly modern idea pervasive in our hierarchical culture. The point in John is that for salvation ...(salvation a social, economic and political term...salvation in the ancient mind is akin to "well-being") For salvation to take hold in our world one must practice the way of Christ, and from practice comes belief and trust of this way we are to live.

The point to be made here is that salvation is not about the individual. Salvation is for the world God loves; we the people of faith a part of this glorious process of salvation, not an end but a process, the world still in its becoming, the coming perfection taking root as we speak. No one is saved until all are saved. We must not believe in Jesus as an end unto itself, rather we must believe in the way of Jesus as a way of life. In practicing this manner of living we become the catalysts for change; we become the leaven of goodness which will continue God's project of restoration; we artisans in the very process of creation itself. Wherever the brokenness of the world is being mended there Christ is. Indeed at the heart of the world's great religions is the claim that God's (by any name) goodness is manifested in acts of mercy, compassion, love and sacrifice....would that we all practiced such a faith....and in God's time we, and we means all people of every race and nation and every faith.... will.

Of Death and Beauty

"Death is the mother of beauty" insists Wallace Stevens. I write this as Katharine's father is near death. Things do not seem all that beautiful to me right now. I'm remembering his life, how courtly, how hard he worked, his grand sense of humor, his devotion to his wife, his penchant for things nautical. Fare forward traveler. I remember our nurse telling us when we were young that it is painful to enter this world and it is painful to leave it. She knew a lot about pain, suffering and death. She grew up a daughter of a sharecropper, never had much. Her parents died when she was a teenager. Two of her children died in childbirth. And yet she was always singing about God's goodness, about God loving her as a mother loves her daughter. There was something beyond my horizon that she saw.



Perhaps it is the presence of beauty that enables us to cope with the slings and arrows of life.... suffering an artful contrast whereby we may recognize the beauty of life when we see it... this beauty just near that permeates the created order; but I think it goes deeper than that. Death itself has a beauty...the old passing away always giving way to the new. Death the ultimate symbol of the transience of life, that life is process. If we were to behold the transient as natural in the created order...perhaps there we will apprehend the eternal...For transience is the truth of the matter...and where there is truth there is beauty...Life and death one process...a process of becoming....Our souls and bodies forever becoming within this glorious universe we call the new Eden...an Eden in which easeful death has her rightful place as a part of a larger and profound order.



In death life is changed not ended, we say in our Burial rite....indeed that is literally true. At every death just as with every birth, the universe takes a turn towards its perfection still in the becoming...we all implicated in this grand becoming...our births, our deaths gloriously reveling in God's imaginative handiwork of creating and recreating.....and yes there is pain....and yes there is joy, there living in a mysterious harmony....so these matters of birth and death are the harmonic lines in the same song...a song that moves the spheres of the universe entire....Death the gentle mother making way for new life....a sacred process of transformation, humming with mystery, engendering the consummation of heaven and earth. We shouldn't be afraid.

Of Knowledge and Practice

I was a pre-med student until my first Chemistry test. In fact, my first two years of college were a struggle for me. The transdisciplinary academic requirements for a liberal arts education were demanding (I stole a C in Discreet Math, aptly named I thought) , and I was homesick. But I survived and finally upon entering my junior year I could declare my major; English it would be; so I then fell in love with the richness of the college experience and the world of knowledge: the prose of Melville, Joyce and Faulkner; the poetry of the Romantics; of Hardy, Yeats, Eliot and Auden, and Stevens and Frost and Dickinson, and..... We would stay up late at night and argue with all due passion why Ireland arguably produced the three greatest literary artists of the twentieth century; Yeats for poetry, Joyce for prose, and Shaw for theater. We were awash with all this knowledge, our passions for the world and the world's beauty called into life....And then they made me graduate...and sent me out into the real world wherein no one much cared about the last six lines of The Waste Land, or the meaning of the Sea Eagle in Moby Dick.

And then some twenty five years later a mysterious thing happened. I entered seminary and found again the thrill of learning. New Knowledge in a new discipline. Knowledge/ology....(Logos may be translated: spoken knowledge). Theology (God Knowledge); Christology (Christ knowledge); Ontology (knowledge of being); Eschatology (knowledge of end times) Soteriology (knowledge of salvation) The passionate conversations with class mates come round again after so many years, all of us awash again in the richness of learning about the faith: Its history, its sacramental and interpretive witness. And then they made me graduate and sent me out again.

In all of this I have learned a few things: That to apprehend the truth and beauty of our world and of our faith, one must do the hard work of enlightening one's mind; a meaningful spiritual life does not come easy. It is not free. It comes over time. It comes through impassioned discipline and the desire to know; and more importantly that precious knowledge must be put into practice, and the great mystery is that we find in enlightened practice a far more profound knowledge there waiting for us like an old friend from home. To practice the faith is to get first hand knowledge of who God is. To know God is to practice God...Enlightenment for the good of the whole. God, Godself, enlightened compassion inspired and enfleshed for the world God made; God, enlightened sacrifice for the creation entire; we, God's people, enlightened to bear mercy and compassion; we God's people enlightened to bear kindness and justice and peace to a world that darkens before our eyes. It is the practice of the faith in the dark corners of our world that engenders the knowledge of the faith; to practice God is to know God... new knowledge that will again empower our practice....a palindromic truth of the Faith.....Knowledge for the world's sake set loose begetting new knowledge....It is the way and practice of salvation itself; and it is now high time to begin... again.

Of Dry Bones and New Life

I was perusing my seminary's new web site and came across an archive of student sermons that were preached in Christ Chapel there. One sermon written by a classmate of mine was a reflection on the familiar passage in Ezekiel concerning the dry bones. You remember the passage: God speaks to the prophet, who finds himself in a desolate valley of dry bones, and asks him if these bones can live again. The prophet replies to God, "O Lord you know!" But God in great therapeutic fashion requires that this mere mortal answer for himself this mysterious question.

If we are paying attention we see that much of our world finds itself in the valley of dry bones: Homelessness; plagues of preventable diseases in the two-thirds world; hunger and thirst; the dis-empowerment of women; inadequate educational opportunities; inadequate access to health care; governmental corruption; unfair taxation; racism; unchecked violence; wars and rumors of war. We are up to our knees in dry bones, and God asks us, "O mortals, can these bones yet live?" And now it is for us to prophesy to these bones. It is for us as the people of God to breathe upon the dry bones; to breathe life into the deathly hurt of our world.

When confronted with the choice between Eden and the valley of dry bones, let us choose the bones, for it is in the desolate valleys of our world where we will find our true calling. In our raising to new life the dead of our world we will find our own true life, our own true selves. This is what resurrection is; not an otherworldly supernatural event, but a way of life for us in this world that God loves; we the very means, the very breath of God's love. In every act of sacrifice for our sister; in every act of sacrifice for our brother, the dry bones rattle and take on flesh and sinew, take on breath, and stand with dignity. Let us choose the valley of the dry bones, for there we will meet a certain hope; there we will meet the Christ; there we will meet our God; and there we will meet ourselves, fully human and fully divine.