I heard myself describing an image of God from the 13 thcentury mystic Meister Eckhart.Įckhart talked about imagining the MYSTERY of the Divine as if the Divine were boiling. It was right there in the audio recording that I was summarizing. I had our pub-night conversation summarized and was working my way through MORNING BREW when it hit me. I figured I might at least get things organized so that each event next week I could pick up I had left off. I began by trying to organize my notes from this week’s events. There were papers strewn all over the place. So, I gave up and decided to clean up my office. I have never really seen the value of this story for those of us who live in the 21 stcentury. But I just couldn’t seem to see the point of this story. I am interested in learning how to love the way Jesus the Human One, loved.įor days I’ve been searching this text trying to find something to show me what it is the anonymous gospel-storyteller that we call John might be able to tell us about who and what Jesus was, is, and can be. So, I’m not much interested in learning how to live the way a supernatural being might live. Humans haven’t figured out how to do that yet, so I’m pretty sure that this story has to be about more than raising a rotting corpse because if Jesus isn’t fully human, then Jesus doesn’t really have anything to say to us. Not even the best that medical science has to offer can raise someone who has been rotting in their tomb for three days. The Church is on life-support and simply doesn’t have time for old and tired arguments about whether or not Jesus was some sort of supernatural entity who can literally raise people from the dead. Wrapping our 21 stcentury minds around a first century story that casts Jesus as a miracle worker is not going to be easy. But if a progressive approach to scripture is a way forward for Christianity, then we progressives are going to have to deal with challenging stories about Jesus. I will confess that when I discovered that the story about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is the assigned gospel text for this All Saints’ Sunday, I began to fixate upon an image of Jesus that is portrayed in the shortest sentence in the New Testament: “Jesus wept.” and I felt like weeping myself! I mean, what is a progressive preacher supposed to do with a story about raising the dead back to life on a day like All Saints Sunday? The temptation to avoid this text altogether was almost irresistible. From conversations about life’s big questions at our pub-nights, to explorations of the intersection of science and faith for our Morning Brew conversations, to exploring new images about the Nature of the Divine in our Adult Education classes, I’ve spent most of this week steeped in progressive Christian theology. WOW these have been busy days around here! My head is spinning from all the stuff that we have been doing.
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