Jesus said, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already blazing.” —Luke 12:49
Richard Rohr’s faith is strengthened by acknowledging that everything changes:
The inner process of change and growth is fundamental to everything, even our bodies. Having undergone several surgeries, cancer, and a heart attack, I’ve been consoled by the way my body takes care of itself over time. In religion, however, many people prefer magical, external, one-time transactions instead of this universal pattern of growth and healing—which always includes loss and renewal. This is the way that life perpetuates itself in ever-new forms: through various changes that can feel like death. This pattern disappoints and scares most of us, even many clergy who think death and resurrection is just a doctrinal statement about Jesus.
Religions tend to idealize and protect the status quo or the supposedly wonderful past, yet what we now recognize is how they often focus on protecting their own power and privilege. God does not need our protecting. We often worship old things as substitutes for eternal things. Jesus strongly rejects this love of the past and one’s private perfection, and he cleverly quotes Isaiah (29:13) to do it: “In vain do they worship me, teaching merely human precepts as if they were doctrines” (Matthew 15:9). Some Christians seem to think that God really is “back there,” in the good ol’ days of old-time religion when God was really God, and everybody was happy and pure. As if that time ever existed! This leaves the present moment empty and hopeless—not to speak of the future.
God keeps creating things from the inside out, so they are forever yearning, developing, growing, and changing for the good. This is the fire God has cast upon the Earth, the generative force implanted in all living things, which grow both from within—because they are programmed for it—and from without—by taking in sun, food, and water. Picture YHWH breathing into the soil that became Adam (Genesis 2:7). That is the eternal pattern. God is still breathing into soil every moment! [1]
There is not a single discipline studied today that does not recognize change, development, growth, and some kind of evolving phenomenon: psychology, cultural anthropology, history, physical sciences, philosophy, social studies, art, drama, music, on and on. But in theology’s search for the Real Absolute, it made one fatal mistake. It imagined a static “unmoved mover,” as Aristotelian philosophy called it, a solid substance sitting above somewhere.
To fight transformative and evolutionary thinking is, for me, to fight the very core concept of faith. I have no certain knowledge of where this life might be fully or finally heading, but I can see what has already been revealed with great clarity—that life and knowledge always build on themselves, are cumulative, and are always moving outward toward ever-greater connection and discovery. There is no stopping this and no returning to a static notion of reality. [2]
Authentic Experience and Transformation
Father Richard names transformation as the fruit of an authentic spiritual path:
For much of my life, I’ve been trying to facilitate transformation—conversion, change of consciousness, change of mind. The transformed mind lets us see how we process reality. It allows us to step back from our own personal processor so we can be more honest about what is really happening. Transformation isn’t merely a change of morals, group affiliation, or belief system—although it might lead to that—but a change at the very heart of the way we receive and pass on each moment. Do we use the moment to strengthen our own ego position, or do we use the moment to enter into a much broader seeing and connecting?
Authentic God experience always leads toward service, toward the depths, the margins, toward people suffering or considered outsiders. Little by little we allow our politics, economics, classism, sexism, racism, homophobia, and all superiority games to lose their former rationale. Our motivation foundationally changes from security, status, and control to generosity, humility, and cooperation. [1]
Activist Jonathon Wilson-Hartgrove tells how his transformed Christian faith led him to work for racial justice:
Twenty years ago, Jesus interrupted my racial blindness….
I was both born into an economy built on race-based slavery and baptized in a church that broke fellowship with sisters and brothers who said God was opposed to slavery. White supremacy isn’t something I chose, but I have to own it. It is my inheritance. In this, I am not alone.…
By God’s grace, I was invited into a [Black] church that offers a real alternative to the patterns and practices of this death-dealing system. My life in that beloved community has ushered me into a moral movement that not only offers the possibility of a better politic but also connects me to beloved community beyond my own faith tradition—a confluence of streams that make up that great river Revelation [22:1–2] images as the chief corridor in the polis[city] that is to come, right here on earth as it is in heaven….
The only gospel that can be good news to me is the one that has the power to touch me down on the inside and heal the hidden wound that rends my soul. Reconstructing the gospel can never only be about the individual. This is why so many noble efforts at reconciliation fail. They pretend that broken people with the best of motives can simply opt out of hundreds of years of history through individual choices and relationships. Such relationships are necessarily dishonest, both because they ignore the real material conditions that weigh on people’s lives and because they offer a false sense of relief from white guilt, which keeps people like me from facing the hidden wound of our whiteness.…
For white people who have learned to think of themselves as naturally in control, the rare experience of vulnerability introduces the possibility of the essential soul work that might lead to conversion. [2]
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| A Long Way Off |
 The most shocking part of Jesus’ parable, at least for his original audience, was undoubtedly the father’s reaction when he saw his son. “While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” Given the magnitude of the son’s disrespect and disregard for his father, most would have expected a very different response. In fact, it would have been acceptable and even required, for the son to be stoned to death for dishonoring his father.This is when we must recall why Jesus told the story to begin with. Jesus used this parable to explain why he welcomed and embraced sinners. The story is meant to reveal the heart of God, therefore the father in the parable does not act as one would expect a first-century Jewish patriarch to behave. Instead, Jesus used the father in the story to illustrate the character of our heavenly Father.To understand the link between the father in the story and God we must remember two things. First, the father in the story allowed his rebellious younger son to have his inheritance, leave his home, and squander it on sinful self-indulgence. No respectable man in Jesus’ audience would have permitted that, but God is not bound by our cultural expectations. He gives us the freedom to choose our path—even if it leads to self-destruction. Likewise, Jesus invited many to follow him, but he also allowed many to walk away. Second, no respectable Jewish man would publicly embarrass himself by running to embrace a rebellious child. The father’s love in Jesus’ story, however, far outweighed his anger or even his honor. This is what so many of us, like Jesus’ original audience, fail to recognize about God. We think he is driven by anger, or holiness, or the need to magnify his own reputation. While there is some truth in each of these, Jesus wants us to see that overwhelming and filling all of these aspects of God’s character is his love. While you were still a long way off, it was not God’s anger that led him to embrace you. While you were still a long way off, it was not Jesus’ desire for honor that led him to accept a humiliating death for your sins. Above all else, it was his love. And if you are still a long way off, remember that it is God’s love, not his anger, that you will receive when you return. DAILY SCRIPTURE LUKE 15:11-24 EPHESIANS 2:17-21 ROMANS 5:10-11 WEEKLY PRAYER From John of Damascus (676 – 749) Master and Lord, Jesus Christ our God, you alone have authority to forgive my sins, whether committed knowingly or in ignorance, and make me worthy to receive without condemnation your divine, glorious, pure and life-giving mysteries, not for my punishment, but for my purification and sanctification, now and in your future kingdom. For you, Christ our God, are compassionate and love humanity, and to you we give glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit now and forever and ever. Amen. |
