Whensoever I take my journey into Spain, I will come to you.
—Romans 15:24
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the disappointment faced by individuals and communities when reckoning with unrealized dreams. Inspired by the apostle Paul’s imprisonment, King calls for radical hope and determination:
What, then, is the answer? The answer lies in our willing acceptance of unwanted and unfortunate circumstances even as we still cling to a radiant hope…. This is not the grim, bitter acceptance of the fatalist but the achievement found in Jeremiah’s words, “This is a grief, and I must bear it” [Jeremiah 10:19].
You must honestly confront your shattered dream. To follow the escapist method of attempting to put the disappointment out of your mind will lead to a psychologically injurious repression. Place your failure at the forefront of your mind and stare daringly at it. Ask yourself, “How may I transform this liability into an asset? How may I, confined in some narrow Roman cell and unable to reach life’s Spain, transmute this dungeon of shame into a haven of redemptive suffering?” Almost anything that happens to us may be woven into the purposes of God. It may lengthen our cords of sympathy. It may break our self-centered pride. The cross, which was willed by wicked men, was woven by God into the tapestry of world redemption.
Many of the world’s most influential personalities have exchanged their thorns for crowns. Charles Darwin, suffering from a recurrent physical illness; Robert Louis Stevenson, plagued with tuberculosis; and Hellen Keller, inflicted with blindness and deafness, responded not with bitterness or fatalism, but rather by the exercise of a dynamic will transformed negative circumstances into positive assets.…
How familiar is the experience of longing for Spain and settling for a Roman prison, and how less familiar the transforming of the broken remains of a disappointed expectation into opportunities to serve God’s purpose! Yet powerful living always involves such victories over one’s own soul and one’s situation.
King’s hope is tied to God’s faithfulness and the transforming power of nonviolence:
We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but still we are confined in an oppressive prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities. Must we … resign ourselves to oppression? Of course not, for this blasphemously attributes to God that which is of the devil. To cooperate passively with an unjust system makes the oppressed as evil as the oppressor. Our most fruitful course is to stand firm with courageous determination, move forward nonviolently amid obstacles and setbacks, accept disappointments, and cling to hope. Our determined refusal not to be stopped will eventually open the door to fulfillment.…
Some of us, of course, will die without having received the realization of freedom, but we must continue to sail on our charted course. We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. Only in this way shall we live without the fatigue of bitterness and the drain of resentment.
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John Chaffee 5 For Friday
1.
“We are utterly helpless to be anything other than infinitely loved by God.”
- Dr. Jim Finley, Former Monk and Psychotherapist
Utterly helpless. I love that. The truth of that statement is so obvious to me, and it sparks joy within me to allow that truth to hold me.
Now, just for fun…
Let’s flip the statement and see how the comparison hits us.
“We can make God infinitely revile us.”
Yikes.
In the words of an old seminary professor, Dr. Timothy Wengert, “That ain’t no Gospel.”
I’ll stick with an interpretation of Christianity more in line with Jim Finley’s interpretation.
2.
“We’re going to have to let truth scream louder to our souls than the lies that have infected us.”
- Beth Moore, Anglican Preacher and Author
Beth is one of those people who seem to flip the right tables, ruffle the right feathers, and challenge the conventional status quo. Somehow, she navigates doing it all in a more winsome way than I ever could be. I have not engaged with her work as much as I could have by now, but everything I have come across seems spot-on.
3.
“The call to follow the crucified Messiah was, in the long run much more effective in changing the unjust political, economic, and familial structures than direct exhortations to revolutionize them would ever have been.
For an allegiance to the crucified Messiah— indeed, worship of a crucified God-is an eminently political act that subverts a politics of dominion at its very core.”
- Miroslav Volf in “Soft Difference”
No comment. This quote is dang good on its own.
4.
“God does nothing as a judge that he wouldn’t do as a father. And I will accept nothing in the description of God that I would find
abhorrent in a man.”
- George MacDonald, Scottish Preacher
I was attending a small group meeting this past week, and this quote popped into my mind during our conversation. The group is full of lovely people, and we were talking about the idea of God as a Loving Father.
Unsurprisingly, it is difficult for us to conceptualize God as a Loving Father. Most of our models or archetypes for God are that of a Retributive Judge, Divine Debt Collector, or some Cosmic Mafia Don who demands fealty. In response to this, MacDonald would likely say that many people consider themselves Christians and yet have pagan theologies or views of God.
All this reminds me of Jesus’ words, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11)
5.
“In souls, there is no illness caused by evilness [ἀπὸ κακίας] that is impossible to cure [ἀδύνατον θεραπευθῆναι] for God the Logos, who is superior to all.”
- Origen, Early Church Father
Over the years, there were names I was told to beware of: Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Karl Barth, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Walter Brueggemann, and others. Each of these people was considered movers and shakers, who were somehow revered and reviled at the same time.
Surprisingly, it was during seminary that I was told about these figures and yet we never studied them closely. Not that I think I was given a poor education, but I have come to see that some gaps needed to be filled on my own time.
The more I engage with church history for myself and take up responsibility for reading the original sources, the more I wonder if we have lost the plot of Christianity in the West. And yes, Origen is one of the more controversial since he was called a heretic long after he passed away (and likely a result of people misunderstanding his followers), but his writings and his systematic theology seem to make more sense of more of the New Testament than I expected.
Case in point, God is more able to heal than sin is able to destroy.
