Scott’s Column: Stating the Faith, Part 1

I feel that the lectionary in the last few months has afforded some opportunity for me to return to some of my core theological ideas, to emphasize them one more time.  I also thought I might use some of these newsletter columns to restate the faith as I see it.  Over my two decades in the United Church of Christ, I have fallen in love with our statement of faith and will use it here to structure my thoughts.

We believe in you, O God, Eternal Spirit, God of our Savior Jesus Christ and our God, and to your deeds we testify: You call the worlds into being, create persons in your own image, and set before each one the ways of life and death. You seek in holy love to save all people from aimlessness and sin. You judge people and nations by your righteous will declared through prophets and apostles.

What abundant life we enjoy because of the Living God! Our Source and Ground, empowering us, and calling us to our best selves, a full life of glory and love.  As St. Irenaeus proclaimed, “The glory of God is a humanity fully alive,” and the Reformed tradition has long taught that the chief end of humanity is “to glorify God and enjoy God forever.”  We are invited to fullness, enjoyment, and flourishing.  As Mary Oliver asks us, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Theologian Mary Grey writes, “the very inexhaustibility of [the divine] mystery admits the possibility of new imagery, new naming, fresh and startling experiences of the divine.”  Elizabeth Johnson teaches us that the Living God is an ineffable mystery beyond all telling, for which no expression can be taken literally, therefore, we must give to God many names.

This wisdom teaches us to pay attention–to ourselves, to the world, to other people–for God is present, speaking to us in the rich diversity of all that surrounds us.  This wisdom also reminds us to be both curious and humble, as we listen to many voices.  For our own perspective is but one in the rich pizzazz of creation.

God’s relational life overflows into creation, with whom God is open, changing, responsive, and intimate. What God desires for all creation is an ecstatic fellowship, participating in the ecstatic fellowship that is God.  God desires that we become co-creators with God, in lives of adventure and beauty.

God suffers.  And is present with us in our suffering.  This becomes a source of our hope.

Even in the darkest moments of my life, I have felt the presence of God’s love and encouragement. For me hope has always overcome despair. I long for others to experience that hope, love, and faith. Fortunately, I have been called to ministry, which gives me the chance to encourage others in their journeys.

In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Savior, you have come to us and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death and reconciling the world to yourself.

All creation is filled with the Divine and is capable of actualizing that potential. Christ is a power available for all, so that we might be transformed. Jesus revealed what we can become.

Incarnation is the bodily assumption of all living things and their entire story into the divine story. Christon Yannaras writes that personhood is revealed in the incarnation, and it is revealed to be “a possibility of erotic self-transcendence and loving communion.”  Gerard Loughlin develops a similar idea in his teaching that Jesus’ resurrected body is “deterritorialized” with the outcome that “He has become the flesh of every foreign body, the touch of every stranger; the glory of an alien encounter . . . then every other body is set free, since Christ has become our common humanity.”

Or as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins declared:

the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

Jesus’ flesh had a particular Jewish identity and history and wasn’t just some vaguely universal human body.  That particularity, as an oppressed outsider dying in solidarity with all victims of injustice, makes our reconciliation and union possible. Through Jesus Christ, all people are welcomed into covenant, making no racial or gendered distinctions.

Salvation is our participation in the divine giving.  J. Kameron Carter writes, “God in Christ is the impoverished slave. As such, God enters into the hurts of those who suffer so that from the inside those hurts, being fully identified with them to the point of communicating his divinity through them, he heals them. It is the poor slave, one might say, who is closest to God and so reveals God.”

We are invited to imitate Jesus’ wisdom and follow his example, so that we might live freely. We become more fully human as we give and receive in mutual love modeled on Christ.  For Patrick Cheng, “Jesus Christ is like the address or final destination that we enter into a GPS system that helps us find our way back to God after we have lost our way.”  The Christ event is God’s renewal of creation, open to all of us.  Jesus reveals how we can actualize the possibilities already a part of our personhood.

Sergius Bulgakov declares: “To be a human being and therefore to belong to Christ’s humanity is the sole basis for resurrection. .  . All human beings will be resurrected without exception.”  The Savior’s death has freed us all.

Let us then “practice resurrection” as poet Wendell Berry advises. “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.”  “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”

So, we are an Easter people.  And as such, we are the eternal beginners. With every moment in time, there are an indefinite number of possible futures. And so we can hope, no matter what catastrophes have occurred. And in that hope, we rise again.

Or, as Gerard Manley Hopkins sang,

Let him easter in us,
be a dayspring to the dimness of us,
be a crimson-cresseted east,

Part 2 next week.