Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

David Bentley Hart via Kenneth Tanner

Courage shielded her brother until the rescuers arrived.

This is from David Hart’s moving argument for the gospel’s God, The Doors of the Sea (2005). Read it when you are ready for something beautiful to take hold of your heart forever.

“In the New York Times this morning...there appeared a report from Sri Lanka recounting, in part, the story of a large man of enormous physical strength who was unable to prevent four of his five children from perishing in the tsunami, and who—as he recited the names of his lost children to the reporter, in descending order of age, ending with the name of his four-year-old son—was utterly overwhelmed by his own weeping. Only a moral cretin at that moment would have attempted to soothe his anguish by assuring him that his children had died as a result of God’s eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels, and that in fact, their deaths had mysteriously served God’s purposes in history, and that all of this was completely necessary for God to accomplish his ultimate design in having created the world. Most of us would have the good sense to be ashamed to speak such words; we would recognize that they would offer no...credible comfort...

“And this should tell us something. For if we would think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them; because what would still our tongues would be the knowledge (which we would possess at the time, though we might forget it later) that such sentiments would amount not only to an indiscretion or words spoken out of season, but to a vile stupidity and a lie told principally for our own comfort, by which we would try to excuse ourselves for believing in an omnipotent and benevolent God. In the process, moreover, we would be attempting to deny that man a knowledge central to the gospel: the knowledge of the evil of death, its intrinsic falsity, its unjust dominion over the world, its ultimate nullity; the knowledge that God is not pleased or nourished by our deaths, that he is not the secret architect of evil, that he is the conqueror of hell, that he has condemned all these things by the power of the cross; the knowledge that God is life and light and infinite love...

“[W]e Christian are not obliged (and perhaps are not even allowed) to look upon the devastation of that day—to look upon the entire littoral rim of the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal and upper Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children—and to attempt to console ourselves or others with vacuous cant about the ultimate meaning or purpose residing in all that misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation. Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces—whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance—that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. ...

“...the world remains divided between two kingdoms, where light and darkness, life and death grow up together and await the harvest. In such a world, our portion is charity, and our sustenance is faith, and so it will be until the end of days. As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of his enemy... . [W]e are able to rejoice that...God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, ‘Behold, I make all things new.'"

The World's True Story Told Well - Kenneth Tanner

Icon: Copyright Oleksandr Antoniuk - UPB to KT

When we tell the story of the world well, it is converting, not condemning. The world’s true story gives life.

And we cannot tell the world’s story well—we cannot tell our story well—if we do not tell God’s story well.

After all, God’s story is our story, and our story is God’s story—in Jesus Christ, in whom all things—humanity among them—are brought to perfection.

So it is vital to tell the story of the human God as well as we can because it is the story of Jesus that makes sense of God, humanity, and existence.

The person of Jesus is the great lantern that lights our path on the way to dying as he dies so that we might be human as God is human, to live as he lives, from age to age.

When the story of Jesus is told poorly or badly—on occasion, diabolically—we call that heresy.

Heresy harms humans because it distorts our portrait of God’s character and darkens our understanding of ourselves as humans because we are all made in the image of God.

The first thing to say about heresy is that it is an expensive word. It should almost never be used.

We know this because no one has an infinite grip on the mysteries of God and the world. The best Christian teachers confess they only get glimpses of the glory of God.

We also know this because history shows that the word has been employed egregiously. One of the first Christians, arguably the best reader of our Scriptures, and one of our wisest pastors, was condemned by the church as a heretic: Origen of Alexandria.

There is such a thing as heresy. It is a choice to ignore the story that the Creeds tell, the consensus story that emerges from storytelling and sacraments down the centuries, and across languages and cultures, the story of our best hymns and icons, a story that has always had good teachers and wonderful actors, a story that is still told and enacted well today.

The best way to avoid heresy is to immerse oneself in the great conversation about Jesus that has gone on in the church since Pentecost and in Israel since Abraham and Moses, to enter the spaces of prayer and adoration of Jesus across the body of Christ that the Spirit is bringing into all truth.

Be cautious and sparing with the word heresy, even as our Lord pardons our misunderstandings and failures. Christ is all and in all, and he will perfect everything that concerns us and the world. His life and death, resurrection, and ascension bring the world’s story to a very good end.

Icon: Oleksandr Antoniuk

Christmas Is What God Does - Fr. Kenneth Tanner

Icon by by Ivanka Demchuk UBP

The story of the world—the story we just heard read in the church as our gospel for Christmas, the world’s true story from which all true stories are told—happened in a world exactly like our world.

It was as is ours a world of emperors and governors, of trade routes and ships, of armies and (less deadly) missiles, of wheat, wine, and oil, of palaces and hovels, of well-appointed houses and simple shacks, of swords and spears, of pubs and caves and lean-tos, of banquets and famines, of night, stars, cold, and sheep...same world.

A person that humans allowed to be important, Augustus, with a big made-up title—“Caesar” (if that sounds ancient, try ones we make up like czar, prime minister, führer, or president [persons who are here today and gone tomorrow, whose power is illusory—it’s not ultimately real and it doesn’t last])—wanted a head count of his conquered masses. And everyone had to go out of their way to appease the bully.

The government order causes hardship for a lot of people. The most trouble (as in our present pandemic moment) is visited on the poor who are made to travel long distances on meager resources to the place of their birth for the census because that’s what Caesar’s order dictates.

The world’s truest story is the story of one such family, a pregnant mother, and her rough-handed carpenter fiancé, who could find no room, out in all of that cold and all of that dark, for the God she bore and the God he protected.

They had both in their own ways made room for God. Mary had said yes to the divine invitation to bear God in her womb. Joseph had heeded the Angel and shielded Mary, his betrothed, had loved her as he had been loved.

They had made room for God but the world had no room for them or for God—you see, it’s the same world as our world—even though she was pregnant and in labor. But such is God’s way in this world, homeless and with no place to lay his head.

The first Christians tell us that the couple found space with the animals in a cave among shit and straw. And then she gave birth like all mothers do: it was painful, and there was blood and sweat and serum, and cords to cut, and a cry from the human God split their ears and their silent night.

The Church is Everywhere (Even In Churches) - Fr. Kenneth Tanner

It is true that the church is universal and so everywhere, enveloping all creation. The church does not have borders or rails or walls.

I had a friend whose church was the massive entourage of workers that accompanied the global tours of a rock group. Marriages. Baptisms. Loitering. Listening. Word. Presence. Communion. He was their shepherd.

He was grateful for a friend who called his flock a church. He told me so.

My wisest friends in the Eastern churches tell me we can never say where the church is not, only where it is.

Lately, it’s become fashionable to say that the church is not in buildings with pews and altars and pulpits. And I understand the inexcusable beliefs and the practices, abuses, and harms that lead to such convictions.

I still see the church in unusual and unexpected places, like AA meetings and bars, and I celebrate its presence everywhere two or more are drawn by the human God.

And, God forgive me, I still see the church in its institutions. The Spirit of God is not limited by our judgments against one another or our experiences or our bad theology.

The Spirit falls and moves in places we judge as dead or broken or irredeemable.

Humility teaches us to love every gathering of God’s people for God loves them.

This is not a counsel to settle for anything less that the goodness and mercy, the beauty and justice, of Jesus Christ.

We welcome the fire of his restorative works that will eventually make of us gods, beginning with our own house, but we do not say where the church is not.

You might be a Christian nationalist if... by Kenneth Tanner

You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that one nation on earth has a special vocation to be a Christian nation as an example or sign for all other nations.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that God founded your nation as a superior nation among the nations to uniquely enact his will in the earth.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe the founding documents of your nation reflect the teachings of Scripture accurately, that God was involved in their creation as in the creation of Scripture, that the writers of those documents were primarily interested in expressing Christian principles, and that, like Scripture, they are timeless. [With my regards to Jim Eisenbraun]

You might be a Christian nationalist if your church removes the national flag of the nation in which it is located, and that removal makes you anxious or angry, or if its services fail to offer a venue for displays of national patriotism, and that absence disturbs or alarms you.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you have a low tolerance for an honest assessment of your country’s national sins, or when pastors do the difficult, necessary work of identifying those sins (for sin is personal, familial, and tribal) you refuse their humble discernments.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you’ve never questioned your nation’s offensive or defensive military operations or if you are tempted to trust in your nation’s temporal powers rather than God for salvation from enemies.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that God cares about the survival of your nation’s particular political order or “way of life” or economic status rather than the persons and living things within its borders, its language and culture, its natural treasures.

You might be a Christian nationalist if the prospect of your nation’s end unmoors your trust in providence.

You might be a Christian nationalist if the orienting realities of your life or your family’s life are not the apostles’ teaching, a table of bread and wine, fellowship with the poor, and the prayers but your partisan loyalties, and the so-called thought leaders of that loyalty.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you do not recognize that the gospel is pan-national, encompassing all peoples everywhere, all cultures, all languages, where all armaments become gardening tools, where the peace won by the weakness of the human God on the cross reigns.

“Clothed and in his right mind” — Kenneth Tanner

Folks have in recent centuries struggled with the supernatural moments in the gospels, but seeing the things I have seen it puzzles me that some still stumble over manifestations of the demonic in the stories the gospels tell.

One could try to blame this recent disbelief on relative affluence and ease but having been a pastor for seventeen years in one of the stablest suburbs in America I can testify first-hand that darkness doesn't discriminate. There is as much spiritual mayhem here as anywhere, as much bewildering evil now as then.

One of the reasons the gospels have the kind of power they do for so many is that they do not shrink from reality. They tell it like it is. They are not in denial about the corners into which we humans have painted ourselves.

And this story of a demon-addled man by a rural lakeshore, and of the trauma his affliction has imposed on his family and the community, makes as much sense in their time as it does in ours.

The demons don't want to be sent back to "the Abyss,” whatever the hell that is, and one wonders what "the Abyss” must be like because they had rather inhabit a herd of pigs than go back there. The pigs, for all their piggish existence, are yet part of the creation God made good

One recalls that our oceans have a depth called "the Abyss,” which is pitch black, where strange luminous creatures eat each other. And it was Stephen Hawking who described the entrance to a black hole, the "event horizon,” as a place where one might hang a sign with the words of Dante: "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." It seems "the Abyss" is something rather worse still.

The Oxford shootings felt like entering a place like that, and you and I have had other moments of confronting real darkness.

Once when I was sitting in a room on the phone with a young woman tormented by an eating disorder, who had been committed for last resort care, it felt like a deep chill invaded the room, a resistance to the light I was trying to speak into her heart and mind.

l'Il admit it frightened me but I kept speaking words of life and eventually whatever felt it owned this young woman dissipated, and in the weeks and months to come she eventually found liberty and wholeness.

The legions' words are the first ones we read in the account (Luke 8:26-39) but they are spoken in desperate *reply* to Jesus's command that they depart from the man they control.

I imagine Jesus spoke the command in the "still small voice," the one Elijah heard in the cave on Sinai, the whisper that wasn't in the wind, earthquake, or fire-quiet, authentic words of a love that does not boast and yet cannot be resisted by darkness.

And after the stampede and the cliff and the drownings and the rumors of the pig herders and the townsfolk's curiosity and the running to see what trouble Jesus had made for them, there was simply the man made well: sitting at the feet of his rabbi, “clothed and in his right mind."

And for a just one brilliant moment everyone was silenced by the holiness of it all.

"clothed and in his right mind."

I know when I read those words that this story is true and that it's the truest story one can tell, not just of this man's life but of humanity. And this is why we who sit at his feet are no longer afraid. Nothing is going to stop love from clothing us all in himself and giving us all the mind of God.

When We Welcome the Child - Kenneth Tanner

Among earth’s biological species humans are the least instinctually equipped to survive. It takes much more than a decade to give a child a fighting chance.

The nascent humans and human children of our species are the most vulnerable on our planet without the constant unconditional care and regard of parents, communities, and nations. And God chose to become a nascent human! Ponder that.

Yet in a desire for power we “weaponized” these little humans, to win seats, control outcomes, and force what can only be acquired by the heart and welcomed freely: the immeasurable, timeless gift of the child.

The majority of these little ones are future women and the children of the marginalized: persons of color and the poor, who in their poverty and ethnicity bless societies with the very presence of God.

In the parade of memes and sound bites on all sides it’s the child that’s missing and the child that’s exploited for our narcissistic cultural conflicts, as are the children at our southern border, bloodied in the war-torn apartment complexes of Europe and the Middle East, hungry to learn in America’s inner-city schools, the neglected and hopeless of our fentanyl wastelands.

Yes, women are exploited and abused and left to fend for themselves, bearing the greatest burden of human existence without complaint and with grace, and their bodies are sacred, owing of a far deeper reverence than either American extreme seems capable of imagining.

But it’s not just the bodies of women that are at stake; it’s also the bodies of the smallest of our species, the faces of the poorest, which as our wisdom teaches are one body with us, and with us comprising one human body in Jesus Christ.

Reverencing the bodies of humans—women and children—means treasuring them in our laws and in our hearts by advocating for their priority and providing for their natural flourishing.

One cannot enforce this vision of “all for one and one for all” interdependence. It’s costly and depends on the “let it be to me” of every human.

Yet what a gift awaits! When we welcome the refugee child, the abused child, the unwanted child, the unexpected child, and women, we welcome God.

Kenneth Tanner - Speaking Wisely of the Cross

Speaking wisely of the cross. 

The cross means no one else has to die for the

world to be made right again.

Not one more person has to die to balance a

scale, to ensure that we have enough of

whatever it is, to satisfy vengeance, to make

my life more convenient, to improve the quality

of another person's existence, or please add

any of our deadly rationales. They all belong in

Gehenna.

We will die and some will be killed, but

Christians, as people who believe the death of

Christ is the only death that can make the

world right again-trust that when God dies for

the world he loves as a human that death itself

dies-we ought to be be the people who say to

the spirit of Cain in all the ways that spirit

arises in us, "No more!"

Image: Peter Howson, Harrowing of Hell

exhibition, detail, 1999.

BEHOLD: Beyond “So what?” & “What now?” - Kenneth Tanner

The leaves of this Japanese maple in our front drive are not “useful” to me but I love beholding them.

In the church we are in the habit of asking, “What difference does this make for me on Monday morning?” or “How can I make use of this in my day-to-day life?”

We need to interrogate this disposition and these questions. All may not be well in the spaces where these questions emerge.

The contemplation of God and of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ is good for you and for the world. It does not need to lead to anything “practical.” Loitering with the person of Jesus is beneficial all by itself.

To behold Jesus, to hear his words, and attend to his actions in the gospels are enough.

Yes, taking a walk or riding a bike is good for your health but if you are only walking or riding a bike to aid your well-being, if you’re not enjoying these acts of being in and of themselves, you are missing out on the best part.

Trust leaders who invite you simply to ponder the Word made flesh, who beckon you to contemplate God and humanity by and in Jesus Christ without a to-do list.

No applications. No “what nows?”

What you can learn from good teachers is that God is present and at work in you, in the creation, and in your circumstances (that’s a very good thing); that God is the active agent in the world’s salvation; and that your gracious participation in his words and acts begins with dwelling with him in stillness of heart and mind.

Sometimes we need to trust that the sheer meditation on God that John (and the other gospel witnesses) grant us is enough; there does not have to be a “So what?” or a “What now?”

Just ponder the mystery. 

The shoulders of some Christians are weighted down with expectations and tasks that preachers put on them 52 weekends a year, year in and year out, when we end sermons with “this is what *you* need to go do” rather than “see what God has done” and “see what God is doing.”

There can be an unhealthy fixation on “results” that we need to recognize and address, in this and in many areas of our lives. The church is not a factory. People are not widgets. 

“Is this useful?” or “what difference does it make? *can* deny the legitimacy of wasting time in the wondrous contemplation of God and humanity that the person of Jesus affords us.

Nothing could be more relative to life and how to live it than contemplation of the person who is both God and human.

Slow down. Ponder. God is at work in you and in the world around you. God promises to make of you and the world what only he can make.

Tree of Liberty or Tree of Life - Kenneth Tanner

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants.” —Thomas Jefferson (who venerated ‘nature and nature’s god’)

Thomas Jefferson

The Tree of Life does not require the blood of the martyrs and is not refreshed by their blood nor by the blood of tyrants.

The martyrs don’t die to accomplish anything—their deaths are not ‘useful’—nor because God needs their sacrifice—God desires the death of no one, desires not our sacrifices—nor because God is glorified in their deaths; no, the martyrs die because violence is the currency of the powers of this world. Violence is what the powers trust.

Instead, God converts the lives of the martyrs to his kind of life, which is never-ending love, and which never seeks vengeance, or to prove itself, or to take anything or anyone by force (on this side of death or in the life that is beyond the power of death).

“The desire of God for humans is the same desire God has for himself” (Chris Green) so that when God commands us not to kill this is an expression of his own way of being, a way of being he desires for us.

That the death of a martyr works some kind of good for God or the world, or worse, as one Christian theologian and pastor teaches, because God wills all that occurs in the world God is the sender of the person who blows up the church building, is the logic of terrorism not of the Christian faith.

We do not worship “nature or nature’s god,” as the pagans did, for nature is truly fallen. We venerate the God whose uncreated light shines in the face of Jesus Christ.

Why I Don't Use the Language of "Christian Universalism" - Kenneth Tanner

I don’t use the language of “Christian universalism” because it’s too often associated with a false interpretation of reality, one that is absent repentance, theosis, and transfiguration.

We don’t enter the world that’s coming to this world without consent to the love that God is, by participating in the new humanity that God is in Jesus Christ, which is entirely a matter of grace but will not happen apart from our acceptance of the gift and our willing allegiance to the Giver, who leaves the human clothed in glory and in her or his right mind.

I believe it is the desire of God that all of his creatures come to exist as he exists, beyond the evil of death, which has been converted now as an entrance to life by the humanity of God in Jesus Christ, the One who has filled death, the grave, and hell with himself, and escaped them by embodied resurrection.

I believe that when “every knee bows” and “every tongue confesses” that that event will be an act of genuine freedom in all persons, a submission to the love that God forever is, to the beauty of the weakness of God on the cross, which is stronger than all the enemies of humanity, even the last enemy of humanity in the God we know as Jesus Christ—namely, death—and greater than any power which we can see (or ever will see) in nature or the cosmos.

Given humanity’s bold contempt to do and to say what is not a participation in the love that God forever is, our tendency to do and say what is opposed to our created goodness as persons made in God’s image (what the Scriptures call the “mystery of iniquity”), I do not know *when* or *how* this will happen in all persons but I trust that it will somehow happen in the end.

My friend Brad Jersak calls this “ultimate reconciliation.”

I trust that God gets what God wants and that what God sets out to do—to rescue his creation from futility, to arrest his image-bearers from a fall into non-existence—eventually somehow happens. Paul and John apparently do, too, if the New Testament witness is right.

It’s clear enough to me—though I don’t know what I don’t know—that this repentant transfiguration involves embracing the fire that is the love of God, a consuming fire that we can trust because the character of God revealed in Jesus Christ is a love that wounds us only to heal that which is not of love in us so that we can truly welcome judgment.

We can fall into the hands of God because those hands know how to remove the tares from our virtues and the wheat from our vices and leave us only the persons God intends for us to be with him in eternity.

Like the fire in the burning bush on Sinai, the love of God blazes but does not destroy. This judgment leaves us alive and forever changed.

The Good and Beautiful Shepherd - Kenneth Tanner

Middle Eastern shepherds in the time of the Bible did NOT break the legs of sheep and carry them on their shoulders to keep them from running away again, or “hold them close to their heart” or whatever myth you heard growing up.

 

It’s terribly impractical, for one thing. Sheep can weigh up to 75 pounds. It’s a tremendous hindrance to properly caring for the whole flock. It can also permanently disable the sheep.

 

Imagine having a number of immobilized or broken sheep in a flock. What a mess that would be.

The rod of the shepherd was used to defend the flock from predators, not beat the sheep. And the hooked staff was used to rescue them. The sheep trusted these tools and the shepherd who carried them.

 

They were not afraid of the shepherd and heeded his voice because he led them to green pastures and beside still waters and never mistreated them.

 

There is a midrash from about a thousand years ago: a sheep wondered away from Moses and his flock. Moses searches and finds the sheep drinking from a stream and says, “Oh...so sorry...I did not know you were thirsty.” God responds to Moses’ mercy and entrusts him with the people of Israel.

One of the rabbis commenting on this midrash writes:

 

“Moses realized that the kid did not run away from the flock out of malice or wickedness—it was merely thirsty. … Only a shepherd who hastens not to judge the runaway kid, who is sensitive to the causes of its desertion, can mercifully lift it into his arms and bring it back home.”

 

How often are we misunderstanding folks when they leave the fold? It would help, I think, if we were sensitive to the causes rather than censorious.

A Prayer for Gratitude and Trust Amid a Pandemic - Kenneth Tanner

 I have wrestled with the lack of gratitude and trust I’ve witnessed in Christians during the pandemic. I decided to write a prayer to confess these lacks in myself and reorient my heart to these virtues under God.

Father:

We are grateful for science and for humans who understand the intricacies of your microscopic creation, as order and disorder are present where our eyes cannot see. We confess we are reliant on the wisdom of others.

We trust that scientists and doctors and government leaders are acting by their best but limited lights in their attempts to bring healing.

We do not trust in human wisdom and ingenuity but in your Son’s love for us in laying down the divine life he shares with you and the Spirit so that, by ourselves dying with the Son for the world you love, we might also have abundant life.

We are grateful for leaders in the past administration that developed a vaccine to defeat this pathogen that destroys your image bearers—our family, friends, and neighbors—in record time. 

We trust the virologists and manufacturers of the vaccine intend to bring health and not harm to the human family, even as we admit this is only their best effort, their incomplete wisdom, guided where it is true by your hand, in the face of three million dead and many more disabled, slain by something they and we do not as yet fully comprehend.

We do not place our ultimate trust in their vaccines but we do trust your providence. We ask you to further enlighten us in our great need for you.

Make us participants in your healing energies. Grant us greater wisdom in our care for others and ourselves.

Where we are perplexed, bring clarity. Where we are divided, bring concord. Where we are certain, remind us that our vision is partial and opaque.

We do not place our ultimate trust in these vaccines; we trust in your Son’s body and blood which makes us participants in his divine life, a life that cannot be touched by death.

We are grateful for leaders in the present administration who have distributed these vaccines to our elderly and most vulnerable citizens with unprecedented speed.

We pray that those who are most susceptible to the virus continue to be our human priority, not only for our citizens but for the citizens of the world.

Let us not forget the privilege (or not?) of our wealth (for who knows what the right path is in the face of what we do not entirely understand?) that we might be as expeditious in loving the poor and the stranger and the prisoner as ourselves.

You are glorified in us and in our human efforts. You draw humans into your saving work.

We do not trust in our capacities and efficiencies and intelligence but in the divine  weakness displayed for all in your Son’s saving cross, his vulnerability of self-surrender, on which all the energy and healing and beauty and goodness in the cosmos is founded.

Cause us to reject the arrogance that we know what is best in this moment for ourselves, our neighbors, and the nations.

Give us patience with those who, sharing our human limitations, see alternative paths to victory over this disease and the deprivations it has brought—directly by death and disability, and indirectly by our fumbling, imperfect responses to it.

We are grateful we were made to slow down and ponder in stillness what human life and community are for, and to be thankful for the simple things like face-to-face presence, holding hands, sharing food and wine, and embracing one another without fear.

We trust that you are restoring our connection with one another, our ability to be present to each other in suffering, death and burial, and in the ecstatic joy of birthdays, marriage feasts, and commencements.

We who are called by your Son’s name, by the name of Jesus Christ, have not always in this pandemic sounded like the people of thanksgiving, or the people of trust. Forgive us. We have lead the world in cynicism and ingratitude.

Help us to enter your Son’s gratitude for this good world, the thankfulness that was and is his as our human brother, walking with us our common path of suffering.

Help us to enter his unfailing trust in you, our Father, a conviction that you have all of us in our life and in our death by the Spirit and that death is not the end of anyone but resurrection.

Help us be ever mindful of those whose risky and tireless labor in laboratories, hospitals, warehouses, and stores, on farms, plants, and highways, and at sea and in the air, have served the living and the dead with their minds, hearts, backs, and hands. They are participants in your selfless love.

Help us amid our arguments, distractions, impatience, and scapegoating to see in this long, dark season the folly of weaponizing pathogens. May we realize these experiments as fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and repent, so we do not eventually eat our collective death.

Above all help us to hear your Son’s words, words spoken also by all the holy angels in the many appearances of heaven to earth: “Do not be afraid!” May your perfect love cast out fear, and rebuke those who peddle it for profit, manipulate it for control, and misapply it for “power.”

All of this we pray to you, Father, with your co-eternal Son, Jesus Christ, in the power of your all-holy Spirit. Amen.

"I believe in the forgiveness of sin" - Kenneth Tanner

At the intersection of pop empowerment and “concentered-in-self” spirituality we boldly set this sign:

I believe in the forgiveness of sins.

This is a bedrock Christian trust. The sentence has more than one meaning. It first affirms that God forgives humanity and forgives humanity without conditions, before we ask or repent. God forgives as we beat, mock, torture, and kill God. Forgiveness begins with a God who forgives.

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. This also means we trust that sins can in fact be forgiven—really forgiven—because God forgives. This basic trust is now almost countercultural. We congratulate ourselves on withholding forgiveness, clinging to our injuries, even after persons have “paid their debt.” The forgiveness that begins with God lacks nothing and accomplishes its healing ends.

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. This also means we trust that when we forgive our enemy, our neighbor, our spouse, child, or friend, by participating in the apriori forgiveness of God for humanity, we are healed and grow in our likeness to God in whose image we are made. The forgiveness that begins with God divinizes humanity as we practice the pardon of God.

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. This finally means we trust that we, too, are forgiven. This might be the hardest reality to accept: that we are forgiven by God before we were born; that there is nothing we can do or not do to change our pardon by God. The forgiveness that begins with God ends in our acceptance of forgiveness.

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. It might by now be clear that we believe in the forgiveness of sins because the human God says from the cross “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

This is also the one who taught us to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” (Not that God’s forgiveness follows ours, or only arrives for us or others after we forgive, but that we also forgive in imitation of the Father.)

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. The cross is where Christ sits enthroned. The cross is the “now” of the world’s judgment and all judgment is given to the Son. Jesus Christ does not, after his death, appear to his disciples to give eleven men the power to withhold a forgiveness he freely extends to all at the cross.

The risen Christ simply means ‘if you, my disciples, do not tell them that *I* have forgiven them, and if you do not forgive them yourself from the heart, they may not realize they’re already forgiven.’

I see a lot of entitlement around forgiveness; that we are allowed to withhold forgiveness, remain offended, forgive if we want...or not.

Not forgiving—and forgiving is a process—only harms the one who does not forgive. It often means nothing to the offender until they are truly aware of their offense.

I get that some leaders have used what Christians trust about forgiveness to enable and sustain abusive behavior and structures, to manipulate those they are called to serve.

Abuse of something doesn’t negate its goodness but it can make its goodness difficult to practice.

Abusive leaders sow terrific destruction when they abuse what Christians trust about forgiveness but this must be forgiven, too, and we cannot let their abuse cancel what we trust.

Pastoral Direction

Here’s a pastoral direction I give folks who desire to forgive but cannot:

If you are waiting to forgive someone in your own capacity yield instead to the forgiveness of Christ, which is yours by baptism.

Paul tells us that we are baptized into the death of Jesus. Paul says he is crucified with Christ.

Paul's identification with Jesus is that intimate, that vivid, that real.

He experiences a genuine participation in the cross because he is drowned by water and the Spirit in the sacrificial love that God is. So are you.

Our capacity to forgive is limited but the human capacity of Jesus Christ as God is without measure and it is this divine and human forgiveness that we join when we forgive others in the power of the Spirit.

Human forgiveness fails. The divine-human forgiveness of Jesus is inexhaustible.

Here's a practice to align your soul with this divine and human forgiveness that we see in Jesus Christ...pray something like this prayer:

"Lord Jesus, I cannot forgive and love [       ] in my own strength. In my weakness, I cannot pardon the pain and injury they have caused me. But you dwell in me, and I am on the cross with you, as Paul says, and from that cross I pray with you, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' Lord Christ, may I see [        ] with your eyes, may I see them as you see them as you hang from the tree for the sins of the whole world; may your heart and thoughts for [       ] be mine. As with you in pain I breathe in, may I exhale forgiveness by your Spirit. Amen."

This is not an incantation or a mantra; it is not a way of bypassing, minimizing, or denying your wounds.

It may not bring reconciliation with the one who has offended or still offends. Reconnection with an abuser may be pre-mature, impossible, or unwise for a myriad of reasons.

But as your understanding of who you are in Jesus Christ grows by this practice, you will find your mind and heart yielding to the forgiveness of God.

“Behold, mother, I make all things new” —Kenneth Tanner

 

Image by Denys Tymchyshyn UBP

Seventeen years ago a film premiered during Lent. The film is about these holy days we are entering, this sacred week that remakes the world.

There’s a scene in the film of Jesus falling flat on his face into a dusty road: surrounded by crowds, a crown of thorns on his head, the heavy timber he is carrying comes down hard on his back.

He falls at the intersection of an alleyway, where we see his mother collapsed against a wall in anguish as she waits in horror to glimpse her son, Jesus, passing by.

When Jesus hits the ground just yards from her, Mary flashes back to a moment when as a child Jesus stumbled and hurt himself. In the memory, Jesus runs to her in pain and she takes him into her arms of comfort.

"If you find yourself in hell, a preacher will come" - Kenneth Tanner

If you find yourself in hell, a victim of natural disaster, drowned by your own ruined heart and participation in evil, do not be afraid or lose hope; a preacher is going to come, and the preacher is the crucified and risen creator, who is patient and who loves the world.

This preacher remembers his covenant with every living thing on earth; he remembers mercy, not our sins.

Unlike the ancient gods, whose malevolence or indifference must be appeased for favors, this preacher enters our world of tsunamis and wars and plagues as one of us to endure the waves and the violence and the pestilence, to suffer hunger and thirst and trials.

This preacher drowns with the disobedient outside the ark, with the chariot armies of the Egyptians, with the lost tribes of Israel, and with us.

He does not want to be the only righteous human while the rest of us, his unrighteous brothers and sisters, go under. His baptism is our baptism.

Our common ancestors failed to keep a fast but this preacher keeps his. Our ancestors grasped for equality with God but this preacher embraces human limitations. And because he does these human things as God, the one human nature we all share is granted his permanence by grace.

His record of resistance to evil is now the story of our life as a gift. His victory in wilderness temptation is our victory.

And what does this preacher preach?

The time is here. The kingdom has arrived. Repent. Believe this gospel (even if it all seems too damn good to be true). It’s trustworthy. We can venture everything on Jesus Christ, our human brother, with us in all of our prisons, hells to which he holds the keys.

Lectionary preaching used to be a chore. Now it is quite literally life to me.

Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9, 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15


Image: Ivanka Demchuk, “Crossing the Red Sea”

Transfiguration & the Defeat of Death - Kenneth Tanner

The transfiguration is a revelation of the defeat of death. Elementary observations about the event are often overlooked or unspoken.

On the mountain Moses and Elijah, dead to history, are very much alive and once again embodied. They are speaking with Jesus. This is not telepathy. Human speech requires tongues and tongues require bodies.

The disciples are witnessing not cleverly devised mythology (2 Peter 1:16), bits and pieces of the Israel story artfully arranged to reinforce pious sentiment, but a palpable experience of the resurrection amidst our death-drunk reality.

Resurrection is just outside our ken, just beyond our ability to perceive it, and yet we see here on the mountain that it is nevertheless everywhere, and near us, and greater than death.

Transfiguration shows us that resurrection is the end of all things, not death.

On the holy mountain the law and the prophets are in a conversation with their embodied human perfection, Jesus Christ, and their talk is about sacrificial love, about the “Passover” this One would “accomplish” at Jerusalem.

For a fleeting moment of “eternal now” the disciples witness the glory of what Eastern Christians call the “uncreated light” that is waiting to be unveiled everywhere and in every ordinary thing in creation, the light of resurrection.

This uncreated light reveals not the color, shape, size, and texture of a thing or a person as natural light does—this is not the direct or reflected light that causes photosynthesis or moon shadow.

No, this light discloses the goodness, beauty, and verity instilled in the tree or the tiger or the orchid or the human by God.

This unique illumination, unavailable apart from self-sacrificial love, is made possible by the profound humility of our incarnate God.

The suffering of God in the human flesh of Jesus is what fills the universe with a divine light that’s more radiant than all stars.

The universe is called out of nothing and sustained in movement and life by the triune God who gives all of himself for this cosmos they as One make, and this selflessness is what in the end illuminates everything that exists with supernatural radiance...from the inside out.

When by grace we participate in the triune selflessness by the Spirit, we inherit the permanence that God is by nature; we become one with the Father who by the Son said “Let light shine out of the darkness.”

This is the light that shines from the face of Moses; that envelopes the chariots of fire that carry Elijah beyond the sight of Elisha; that radiates in the cloud that descends on Tabor.

Our Father has “made this light shine in our hearts so that we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ, his Son” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

And from this human and divine face, shining like the sun in full strength, everything in creation will in the end be transfigured by light, a consuming fire which reveals the true essence of all things, and redeems further still beyond all original goodness, heals from every participation in evil, elevates to participation in the divine nature.

The Transfiguration shows us that love is a conversation, a conversation that brings Elijah down from heaven and raises up Moses from the ground, a conversation that brings heaven and earth together in the resurrection.

This conversation invites us (like Peter, with all our misunderstandings, sins, and frailties) into the eternal discussion that is the divine life shared between the Father, Son, and Spirit.

And what is the conversation that Love speaks? What are Moses and Elijah talking about with Jesus?

Love talks always and everywhere about the cross, about the suffering of God in the flesh of Jesus that makes us heirs with the One who has the words of life, words about “a sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel” (John 6:68; Hebrews 12:24).

Moses, Elijah, and Jesus are talking about the cross because “where there are no graves there are no resurrections” (Nietzsche).

Graveyards and tombstones are all that we now know but here is a sacred conversation that tells us that death dies; that death is trampled down by death.

“To preach the word of the cross seems like sheer nonsense to those who are on their way to destruction, but to us who are on our way to salvation, it is the mighty power of God *released within us*” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

This word of the cross is a far superior, more life-granting conversation than the one that takes place on social media, on broadcast news programs, and on talk radio—a far more fruitful conversation than our present one, driven by political partisans, corporate commissars, and conspiracy daydreamers.

The glory on this mountain is in speaking well of the cross, telling of a suffering pain that heals and does not destroy God or humanity, because Love is stronger than death.

Once again, in case we cannot yet hear the song of creation: the Transfiguration reveals a divine conversation, the conversation about self-sacrificial love that the triune God forever is.

A light-radiant cloud descends on Tabor, the same cloud that descends on Sinai when God signs his law on stone tablets, the pillar of cloud that follows and defends the children of Israel in the wilderness.

The self-same cloud that fills the temple when the musicians play and sing praise to the God who is good, whose mercy endures forever and ever.

When later Isaiah envisions the Lord ascended on a throne (and this God’s only throne is a cross), as the six-wingéd seraph fill the air with their thrice-sung “holies,” like the train of his billowing robe, the interior of the temple is filled with this cloud.

This cloud is the Spirit.

And here on Tabor, from deep in the light-radiant cloud, comes the voice of the Father, “This is my Son, marked by my love; listen to him.”

Moses and Elijah fade from view, and heeding the Father’s voice, we now only read their Scriptures in light of this human who is God, we only see Jesus on the pages of Scripture.

‪The Scriptures are veiled for those who don’t begin their experience and witness of God with Mary’s son, with the one who the people of God rejected for a criminal, the one who dines with sinners, who touches the unclean, the one who never kills or destroys, this transfigured one who instead raises the dead and rebuilds the world.

Jesus is the human God intends from the beginning and therefore he is the truest self of every human, not our ancestor Adam.

Pride is not your truest self, humility is what you were made to embody; hate is not the essence of your person, love is what you forever are.

You were made to incarnate the divine disposition that Jesus reveals, one of service to every creature in this grand and beautiful cosmos he loves more than his own life.

This moment on the mountain reveals the truth about every person and that truth is that the sacred life of Jesus is now the measure and the meaning of human nature.

Transfiguration folds time, brings disparate events together, for this is not just a real moment between Moses, Elijah and Jesus, and between the disciples and the triune Love; it’s not just this actual historic moment on Tabor where a resurrected humanity communes with the divine life. 

This moment also reveals the encounter with Moses and the triune Love on Sinai, and later on Sinai, Elijah’s encounter with the one God, who is not present in the earthquake or the fire or the mighty wind but in a still small voice. 

This moment on Tabor participates also in the moment where John encounters this still small voice as the figure walking amid the seven-branched Menorah in the opening of the Apocalypse.

Here at the outset of Revelation the description of Jesus is nothing but a composite of all the descriptions of the Transfiguration in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

This One, transfigured by the uncreated light of heaven, this revelation in human flesh of the conversation that the triune God is, lays his right hand on John—and in Matthew’s account on Peter, James, and John—and on everyone in this room, and on every human who has ever lived or ever will live, and this is what Jesus Christ says: “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one; I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Revelation‬ ‭1:17-18‬).

Transfiguration & the Defeat of Death - Kenneth Tanner

 

The transfiguration is a revelation of the defeat of death. Elementary observations about the event are often overlooked or unspoken.

On the mountain Moses and Elijah, dead to history, are very much alive and once again embodied. They are speaking with Jesus. This is not telepathy. Human speech requires tongues and tongues require bodies.

The disciples are witnessing not cleverly devised mythology (2 Peter 1:16), bits and pieces of the Israel story artfully arranged to reinforce pious sentiment, but a palpable experience of the resurrection amidst our death-drunk reality.

Resurrection is just outside our ken, just beyond our ability to perceive it, and yet we see here on the mountain that it is nevertheless everywhere, and near us, and greater than death.

Transfiguration shows us that resurrection is the end of all things, not death.

On the holy mountain the law and the prophets are in a conversation with their embodied human perfection, Jesus Christ, and their talk is about sacrificial love, about the “Passover” this One would “accomplish” at Jerusalem.

For a fleeting moment of “eternal now” the disciples witness the glory of what Eastern Christians call the “uncreated light” that is waiting to be unveiled everywhere and in every ordinary thing in creation, the light of resurrection.

This uncreated light reveals not the color, shape, size, and texture of a thing or a person as natural light does—this is not the direct or reflected light that causes photosynthesis or moon shadow.

No, this light discloses the goodness, beauty, and verity instilled in the tree or the tiger or the orchid or the human by God.

This unique illumination, unavailable apart from self-sacrificial love, is made possible by the profound humility of our incarnate God.

The suffering of God in the human flesh of Jesus is what fills the universe with a divine light that’s more radiant than all stars.

The universe is called out of nothing and sustained in movement and life by the triune God who gives all of himself for this cosmos they as One make, and this selflessness is what in the end illuminates everything that exists with supernatural radiance...from the inside out.

When by grace we participate in the triune selflessness by the Spirit, we inherit the permanence that God is by nature; we become one with the Father who by the Son said “Let light shine out of the darkness.”

This is the light that shines from the face of Moses; that envelopes the chariots of fire that carry Elijah beyond the sight of Elisha; that radiates in the cloud that descends on Tabor.

Our Father has “made this light shine in our hearts so that we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ, his Son” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

And from this human and divine face, shining like the sun in full strength, everything in creation will in the end be transfigured by light, a consuming fire which reveals the true essence of all things, and redeems further still beyond all original goodness, heals from every participation in evil, elevates to participation in the divine nature.

The Transfiguration shows us that love is a conversation, a conversation that brings Elijah down from heaven and raises up Moses from the ground, a conversation that brings heaven and earth together in the resurrection.

This conversation invites us (like Peter, with all our misunderstandings, sins, and frailties) into the eternal discussion that is the divine life shared between the Father, Son, and Spirit.

And what is the conversation that Love speaks? What are Moses and Elijah talking about with Jesus?

Love talks always and everywhere about the cross, about the suffering of God in the flesh of Jesus that makes us heirs with the One who has the words of life, words about “a sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel” (John 6:68; Hebrews 12:24).

Moses, Elijah, and Jesus are talking about the cross because “where there are no graves there are no resurrections” (Nietzsche).

Graveyards and tombstones are all that we now know but here is a sacred conversation that tells us that death dies; that death is trampled down by death.

“To preach the word of the cross seems like sheer nonsense to those who are on their way to destruction, but to us who are on our way to salvation, it is the mighty power of God *released within us*” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

This word of the cross is a far superior, more life-granting conversation than the one that takes place on social media, on broadcast news programs, and on talk radio—a far more fruitful conversation than our present one, driven by political partisans, corporate commissars, and conspiracy daydreamers.

The glory on this mountain is in speaking well of the cross, telling of a suffering pain that heals and does not destroy God or humanity, because Love is stronger than death.

Once again, in case we cannot yet hear the song of creation: the Transfiguration reveals a divine conversation, the conversation about self-sacrificial love that the triune God forever is.

A light-radiant cloud descends on Tabor, the same cloud that descends on Sinai when God signs his law on stone tablets, the pillar of cloud that follows and defends the children of Israel in the wilderness.

The self-same cloud that fills the temple when the musicians play and sing praise to the God who is good, who’s mercy endures forever and ever.

When later Isaiah envisions the Lord ascended on a throne (and this God’s only throne is a cross), as the six-wingéd seraph fill the air with their thrice-sung “holies,” like the train of his billowing robe, the interior of the temple is filled with this cloud.

This cloud is the Spirit.

And here on Tabor, from deep in the light-radiant cloud, comes the voice of the Father, “This is my Son, marked by my love; listen to him.”

Moses and Elijah fade from view, and heeding the Father’s voice, we now only read their Scriptures in light of this human who is God, we only see Jesus on the pages of Scripture.

‪The Scriptures are veiled for those who don’t begin their experience and witness of God with Mary’s son, with the one who the people of God rejected for a criminal, the one who dines with sinners, who touches the unclean, the one who never kills or destroys, this transfigured one who instead raises the dead and rebuilds the world.

Jesus is the human God intends from the beginning and therefore he is the truest self of every human, not our ancestor Adam.

Pride is not your truest self, humility is what you were made to embody; hate is not the essence of your person, love is what you forever are.

You were made to incarnate the divine disposition that Jesus reveals, one of service to every creature in this grand and beautiful cosmos he loves more than his own life.

This moment on the mountain reveals the truth about every person and that truth is that the sacred life of Jesus is now the measure and the meaning of human nature.

Transfiguration folds time, brings disparate events together, for this is not just a real moment between Moses, Elijah and Jesus, and between the disciples and the triune Love; it’s not just this actual historic moment on Tabor where a resurrected humanity communes with the divine life. 

This moment also reveals the encounter with Moses and the triune Love on Sinai, and later on Sinai, Elijah’s encounter with the one God, who is not present in the earthquake or the fire or the mighty wind but in a still small voice. 

This moment on Tabor participates also in the moment where John encounters this still small voice as the figure walking amid the seven-branched Menorah in the opening of the Apocalypse.

Here at the outset of Revelation the description of Jesus is nothing but a composite of all the descriptions of the Transfiguration in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

This One, transfigured by the uncreated light of heaven, this revelation in human flesh of the conversation that the triune God is, lays his right hand on John—and in Matthew’s account on Peter, James, and John—and on everyone in this room, and on every human who has ever lived or ever will live, and this is what Jesus Christ says: “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one; I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Revelation‬ ‭1:17-18‬).

The Vicarious Church - Fr Kenneth Tanner

A set of four tweet-length meditations on the vicarious nature of the church as she is described in Acts 2:42:

The Sacraments are where we as the body of Christ continue to give our collective life for the life of the world. By them we die with the human God and by them we are raised with him from death, and with us also the human family and the cosmos he loves without measure and fathom.

The Prayers are where we as the body of Christ intercede for the life of God’s beloved world. Here we join the God who prays in lonely places, whose prayers are not just words but sweat, blood, and tears. We pray for those who have no one to pray for them or no inkling to pray.

The church’s Preaching is where we as the body of Christ tell the authentic story of the world before the world is ready to listen. Our speech is good news to the poor, sets captives free, gives sight to the blind, delivers the oppressed, and makes a promise of great joy for all.

As the body of Christ in the world we invite all into his household to sit at one table. His door is never shut. Pilgrims to the Father’s place, with us prodigals, are sat down by Love, adorned with a ring and a robe, and Love says, “I’m so glad you’re here. How can I serve you?”

*The last image is inspired by George Herbert’s “Love III.”

Loitering with Jesus - Kenneth Tanner

Loitering with Jesus

The leaves of this Japanese maple in our front-drive are not “useful” to me but I love beholding them.

In the church we are in the habit of asking, “What difference does this make for me on Monday morning?” or “How can I make use of this in my day-to-day life?”

The contemplation of God and of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ is good for you and for the world. It does not need to lead to anything “practical.” Loitering with the person of Jesus is beneficial all by itself.

To behold Jesus, to hear his words, and attend to his actions in the gospels are enough.

Yes, taking a walk or riding a bike is good for your health but if you are only walking or riding a bike to aid your well-being, if you’re not enjoying these acts of being in and of themselves, you are missing out on the best part.

Trust leaders who invite you simply to ponder the Word made flesh, who beckon you to contemplate God and humanity by and in Jesus Christ without a to-do list. No applications.

What you can learn from such teachers is that God is present and at work in you, in the creation, and in your circumstances (that’s a very good thing); that God is the active agent in the world’s salvation; and that your gracious participation in his words and acts begins with dwelling in and with him in stillness of heart and mind.

Sometimes we need to trust that the sheer meditation on God that John (and the other gospel witnesses) grant us is enough; that there does not have to be a “So what?” or a “What now?”

Just ponder the mystery.

There can be an unhealthy fixation on utility that we need to recognize and address, in this and in many areas of our lives.

“Is this useful or instrumental” *can* deny the legitimacy of wasting time in the wondrous contemplation of God and humanity that the person of Jesus affords us.

Nothing could be more relevant to life and how to live it than contemplation of the person who is both God and human.