Why Sexuality Matters

My Dialogue with Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body: An assertion on why purity is important.

Just recently I’ve been thinking a lot about sexuality, purity and wholeness. In recent dialouges with with fellow students, professors friends and colleagues it has come to my attention that while I have a basic idea of what I believe about sexuality and the body, I’ve not spent much time developing or writing on it much, and this was surprising to me considering how sacred my theology of the body has become. So today i wanted to spend some time in thought about my person, your person and why sexuality matters.

So, first of all, what is the body? Here i’m gonna lay out an assertion of the human person according to what I believe the scriptures are telling us and several interrelated theories on being. From there we’ll talk about being and practical theology and finally conclude with the importance of sexuality to human identity, and ultimately why sexuality matters.

For a long time I’ve been disturbed by the question of what happens at marriage that inherently changes something, how is it that before a ring almost everything is off limits and then by a simple token everything is ok? What difference can a ritual make in ontologically shifting something from one place to another? Is marriage really that important in uniting two persons into one flesh, or is it a formality with pretty metaphors?

So, to answer my own question about marriage and the ontology of such a union, it is my belief that what has happened is in our conception of being when we lost the idea of being in communion we took a shift from the idea of communion as a necessary element of being. To be a person is to be a being-in-relationship, and therefore to necessitate a constant dialogue between an internal and external self-hood.

Sartre shows us in his Being and Nothingness that in reality man is never being in itself as for example a rock is. A rock simply is, but we as people lack being-in-itself because being-in-itself lacks consciousness. We are being for itself and thus lack definite being and are forced to create our being out of nothingness. And as foray into dimension theory and the propositions of time purported by H.G. Wells, if anything lacks duration it cannot be said to exist. Humans therefore are not and cannot be static being or inherently and diametrically dualistic beings, for change affects people in time and therefore their being is dynamic in that when viewed in 4 dimensions height, length, depth, and duration being is never in itself, but in relation to time, space, objects and other objects of being to discern and develop our own being.

This dynamic selfhood is the consciousness that we have of ourselves being aware of things outside ourselves and our idea of the perceptions with which we interact with the world. This, not even this is static since our perceptions change, ideas develop, and over time this self matures, corrupts, decays, grows, evolves, becomes more self aware, less self aware, directed, misdirected and always interactive. The self as relates to other objects in both time and space, in memory, and perception outside the internal perception of what we believe to be ourselves. Sartre helps us do away away with Kant’s dualism of noumena and phenomena, showing us that there is no ungraspable appearance behind things but rather only things in themselves as they appear.

 

The external self constitutes the internal self because that self is projected onto the external world and receives its selfhood back from the dialogue between the projection and reception of meaning. The internal self is not an objective reality but exists as interpreted through our perception of self that emerges through interaction with those things that we have relationality with in the world outside our physical bodies. In Sartre’s idea the for-itself of being makes of the world a blank canvas onto which it projects its being, and in marriage, to get back to the topic at hand, there is a mutual imprint of being which allows both giving and reception of being through mutual imprintedness.

Hopefully I have done some justice to what I believe Sartre is saying.

Marriage is the mystery by which human being becomes truly alive, it is sacramental, holy, and relational. The thing that changes is not the world, but our perception of self, from the myself which we are so involved in in our day to the ourself which is become myself. Therefore as we search for being in the world, the world reaches us through the eyes of another such that as we explore out for ourselves, the meaning of ourselves is presented to us in another. The other becomes the I and vice versa such that the other person is a mirror of ourselves as we explore identity through the perceptions and reflections brought out in the living interlocution of being. So that when we are called to love one another, as we do in marriage, we find our self consciousness should be caught up in neighbor consciousness. The I and Thou becomes the We that is You and the You that is the mirror of myself. 

So how does all this preliminary dialogue take us back to the matter of sexuality?

Let’s begin with an assertion by the brilliant and moving theology of the body by Pope John Paul II:

 

It seems that the second narrative of creation has assigned to man “from the beginning” the function of the one who, above all, receives the gift (cf. especially Gn 2:23). “From the beginning” the woman is entrusted to his eyes, to his consciousness, to his sensitivity, to his heart. On the other hand, he must, in a way, ensure the same process of the exchange of the gift, the mutual interpenetration of giving and receiving as a gift. Precisely through its reciprocity, it creates a real communion of persons.

 

Giving and receiving is perichoretic, it is interpenetrational and dynamic between the two persons of the union making it sacred. The being of two persons becomes completely mysterious in that they become not absorbed in one another, nor annihilated in the other, but having substance in the other each person is a mirror to which the other looks for that penetrating substantiality. The giving is within both parties and the reception is within both parties. The man in the garden received the woman and looked upon her, being given over to him not in the sense of her reduction to object but in the sense of his embrace of her, his reception of her is in itself a giving. In her being received she is also receiving.

 

The man is enriched not only through her, who gives him her own person and femininity, but also through the gift of himself. The man’s giving of himself, in response to that of the woman, enriches himself. It manifests the specific essence of his masculinity which, through the reality of the body and of sex, reaches the deep recesses of the “possession of self.”…At the same time he is received as a gift by the woman, in the revelation of the interior spiritual essence of his masculinity, together with the whole truth of his body and sex. Accepted in this way, he is enriched through this acceptance and welcoming of the gift of his own masculinity. Subsequently, this acceptance, in which the man finds himself again through the sincere gift of himself, becomes in him the source of a new and deeper enrichment of the woman. The exchange is mutual. In it the reciprocal effects of the sincere gift and of the finding oneself again are revealed and grow.

 

It is in giving oneself to the other that the other becomes the mirror through which the self truly develops. The union of marriage sanctifies ontologically what already occurs naturally, and in their giving to each other, they are enriched. Marriage is an invitation to love one’s neighbor, to care for one another and to stand for one another.

So, in short what’s all this talk mean to me? I’ll tell you.

This body is sacred, it is baptized into the already resurrected body of Christ, my person is intimately connected with Christ, through the eucharist, and through the Spirit of life which animated Christ back to life and raised him from the dead. This body has been marked and sealed as a sacrament of the eschaton. Therefore when considering the integrity of the body, it is necessary that I should consider my person an extension of the literal body of Christ which is sacred.

Therefore as a sacramental entity this body and the bodies of my fellow humans are sacred, bearing in them the image of God, the image of Christ. Unity before marriage is not about merely disregarding a tradition, it is a violation of the spirit which animates us all, who is within us and gives us life. It is a violation of being reflecting onto another and being reflected on in such a way that the mirror formed in mutual union is never expunged and the connection is formed, because it has to do not strictly with an unimportant ritual but with the notion and condition of being itself is adultery an inadequate resolution.

To quote liberally someone, I believe it was C.S. Lewis, who said that the person who lusts does not love too much it is that the person loves too little to truly love at all.

In short, those are my thoughts for today. I hope that someone wanted to hear that. I know I’m not done with this topic, but thanks for tuning in.

Also, I realize i didn’t follow my basic outline at the start, sorry for those of you who expected better. whatever.

eli

Resurrection and Beauty

Do you ever just stop and wonder at the beauty of the world? Catching if even for a moment a glimpse of something truly beautiful? Do you ever just get the feeling that somehow things are going to work out alright? This is not to paint a wondrously idealist picture of reality, but sometimes, standing in the light of the sunset, I can look over my shoulder, and feel a sense of comfort, like everything that was created will be put in place. I can hold my girlfriend’s hand and appreciate the heavens, knowing that something beyond her, or me is coming. Standing there in the sunset, I can catch a glimpse of the eschaton, enveloping my heart.

That feeling, that endless comfort tinged with longing, I would argue, is the resurrection. Today, I sit at rest, and know that the world is being set to rights and I am an irreducible part of the reconciliation of all things, because God made it that way. That sense of beauty, of wonder, I feel to be the knowledge within me about the coming goal of the universe. Just like if you’ve lived in the south, or anywhere where it rains a lot, you can feel a shift coming. I think that beauty does the same thing. We can feel the grace of God in His creation, and can feel a need to develop the beauty that we have a sense of.

God created us and began the work of creation in us, and will carry on our createdness, until its completion. There are brief moments, when we stop and pause and think “I think the universe is good.” Or “Is everything really ok underneath it all?” Resurrection says that these glimpses of the beauty and rightness of things is what we’re really really waiting for.

Resurrection is the belief that while we are wanderers in the current age, traveling across endless landscapes of deserts. We are faced with things that are sometimes dark, leaving us weary and hopeless we take step after step in seemingly aimless direction at times. Resurrection answers that wandering with the belief that we are steadily approaching something new on the horizon, a new city, a new mode of bodily existence ,a new beauty which awaits us as we travel. Resurrection answers the desperation of our hope with a solemn assurance about our longing, no we are not yet perfect, no the world is not yet perfect, but it shall be. The God Man sit bodily upon the throne of grace, steering the world from the hearts of his saints, claiming from within creation a place for himself that will spread into all things.

This is the resurrection of our God, this world is loved and has been rescued, and will not be abandoned. I see something so beautiful that I want to approach it steadily. No matter how long the night gets, even if at the end of the journey my faith is fragile and weak, in the light of the resurrection I can find strength, by looking to it, i have hope.

The “progress” I’m talking about is personal, not political. It will not be found in the deification of leaders, or have an answer in politics. It is when the I and thou relationship between human and God adopts a face, the thou becomes the “You” becomes the “Jesus” as a person and not an idea. The approach is not just to declare the Lordship of God, nor merely his love. But when we look to that Great Savior, we see resurrection, beauty, life, and from those flourish all other things, that is when we have a taste of home upon our lips, and a prayer in our hearts.

“Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done, On Earth as it is in Heaven” is the cry of this beating heart, and as I pause today to think, I remember the way in which that kingdom first reached me. In the arms of my mother, tenderly holding me and overflowing with divine love, she embraced me, and in those arms was a sacrament, a symbol of the love of God, conveying grace to the little child, who would grow up and turn away, only to be forgiven time and again. Parenting is a sacrament. As I close this thought, I would like to reiterate that God loves this world, and refuses to leave it, as we can see in the love we share, in the people we love, in the less fortunate we care for.

Resurrection, is about surprises, and I know that what awaits at the end of those glimpses is more surprising, more shocking and more beautiful than even I can imagine.

Thanks for Tuning in,

To My Mother

In honor of the up and coming Mother’s Day 2008, I would like to write a special thank you to my own mother, a woman of faith whose life illuminates my own. I am grateful for the love evidenced in her life, and the beauty of her person, and since I am far, I keep you near in my heart. I feel as if your love and dedication to being a good mother has helped form me into the man I continue developing into. I dedicate this page to you, and honor you.

In honor of a wonderful woman, within whose love everything has place to become itself, as in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, mother, you cultivate and nurture into life even those things which are dead. Your love gives place for all things to flourish, may you continue to live such a wonderful expression of the sacred heart of Our Lord.

Blessed are you mother, from whom love flows in abundance,

Blessed are you woman, giver of life, expression of Our Lady unto Christ,

Blessed are you mother, from which I drew my life,

I honor the life I have been given as a sacrifice unto Our Lord,

May you live Forever in His Presence

May you be honored greatly for your unseen, unknown works,

Blessed are you, Woman of God, for your heart is bountiful in mercy

Thank you for your forgiveness,

Thank you for your endless love

Such as only a mother can give

May you be Blessed, not only today, but forever

Such as is the will of the Triune Lord

In the Name of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit

Amen.

Dogma and the Imagination: Architecture

What is faith? Faith is that by which we are called to live out in awareness of something at times beyond immediate perception.

We live in a beautiful world, a world of wonder and amazement, you can feel it in the waves. It echoes in the wind, passes through the mountain peaks and into the valleys, fills the earth with life and green fields endless beauty on every side. We live in a world of color and inspiration, a world of music and sound and light, and warmth. We live in a world full of God’s glory. We can feel it at times, looking at the sunset, listening to the world around us at peace and rest. We find ourselves being in it, captured by it, alive through it, and reacting to it.

We live in a world full of chaos and greed. Full of vicious cycles of violence, where reason out strips beauty or ethics, where efficiency is king. We live in a world full of money, and slavery. Bloodshed is on every hand and the taste of blood on every lip. All are responsible. Nature is a competition and war zone for survival. Predators hunt prey daily and all nature itself knows is violence, terror. Politics rage around our heads as nations fling themselves at other nations and the threat of nuclear war shows us how much our own state of mind is fallen in the world today. We live in a world where people kill people for pocket change, where disaster lurks around the corner, and chaos is on our breath. We have bullet shaped teeth a penchant for violence, oppression in our every step, our institutions enslave us, we enslave others, and no one is free. We are a fallen world. Our planet decays under our cities, our strip mines destroy landscapes and our landfills hide our disasters.

The world is hideous. The world is beautiful.

Both of the above statements are true.

So what do we do about it? What are you and I supposed to do about a world that’s out of whack and thirsty for violence? It takes a move beyond the cursory glance into the news to do something about it. We live in a society where everything needs a microwaved, ready packed, do-it-yourself-in-seconds, prepackaged answer. But you cannot do that with life’s big issues. It takes moving out beyond the 30second attention span and into a meaningful reflection on what it means to be in the world.

So, what is the answer to our problem? I believe it is The Creative Imagination.

Art has the ability to bring with it presence, to create presence between the observer and the object being viewed. I think we can all agree that when we find a truly beautiful piece of art, we move beyond our everyday into something peaceful, serene, soothing, and tranquil. This does not mean all art is this way, but at the same time we can find those works that inspire us with their great beauty. Now, art is not just a frivolous and empty experience that makes us feel good about ourselves for a few moments. I believe that art is an integral part of humanity, and subsequently of Christianity. Why? Because through art, we experience the presence of something beyond ourselves, it takes us to a reality outside ourselves where we can admire our world with the beauty that it has. Furthermore, as a creation of beauty it glorifies the Creator God, who is the Triune Lord that we confess.

It would seem to me that art is going to play a central role in God’s reconciliation of all things. Because art is a means by which we can create beauty, observe the world, and celebrate what we see. This is not the only type of art though, nor does it need to be. While it is beautiful to paint a natural setting, there are other beauties, shapes, and forms, colors, shadows. Art can also show us darkness, the horrors of things past, nightmares from the minds of others, sadism, and death. But this is not the way art has been done before. Where modernity would seek to tell us to move along and be functional, rational and effiecient about the world, we must say ‘No.’ Where modernity would tell us that art is purely political, purely forms or minimalism, we cannot agree.

Art teaches us to stop, to breathe, to appreciate. It inspires us to see the world through different eyes, through another mind, through another perspective, through another heart. Art is not an aside to the Christian gospel, nor does it stem from scant and scattered verses about the arts in the Bible, rather it is integral to God’s plan to set things to rights within the created order. Art is the creation of repose, maybe secondarily, but how many of you have ever painted or taken a picture and found a rest and peace in that moment? The arts inspire us, bless us and heal us, they are a reminder of a world beyond modernity, beyond efficiency and offices.

Not just art alone though, because art can be done by anyone with talent. What it takes is Creative Imagination, inspired by the Creator.

The imagination is not a frivolous empty place where imaginary things hide in our closets and scare our children, the imagination is an active participant in the nature of human being. The imagination is an integral locus of what it means to be human. The imagination needs freedom to express itself and create beauty in our lives, without it we lose a pillar of our existence. The modernist pursuit of function actually served to our detriment, because the buildings of the era, like the thought of the era homogenize and reduce, alienate and divide. This is not supposed to be, created spaces should cultivate relationships and human interaction rather than divide people and separate them. The Creative Imagination can create these spaces.

For an assertion on the nature of Imagination, I briefly turn to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose work and reflection on the imagination serve a great good in society, and whose voice and contemplation point to something higher than himself. For Coleridge, the Imagination mediates between a world of real objects and a real presence, an “I am,” if you will. But the imagination does not create reality, it creates poetry. It creates a willed experience of the real. It is consciously willed creative control of the potentials within something that characterizes and signifies what the imagination is to Coleridge. It is a conscious mediation between the real world and something other, through the exercise of creative control that allows the mind to create something new and beautiful between the real world and the mind perceiving it.

As Christians, we should call for architecture that speaks meaning, and as Christians in architecture, spaces need to be functional but should also capture relationality between people and the space, should inspire imagination and create a place of reflection and interaction. We need to exercise willed creative control of a space in order to properly imagine all that space could be. Art is not divorced from life but is part of it, creating the environments we live in, and the places we have our interactions. If In Him we live and move and have our being, should not the spaces where that living moving and being reflect the glorious splendor of the creator and inspire something within us?

Have you ever considered what the architecture of our age says about us? We have no open spaces, we have symmetrical monstrosities that make us feel crowded in and insignificant. Our architecture worships our intellect and the feats of humanity’s vertical achievement, but reduce horizontal space to a trivial necessity in order to go higher and higher. I’m not an architect, not a philosopher of architecture, but we cannot let industry create our world, so that there is “a coca-cola advertisement in every village” [1] and a megalithic apartment complex every three blocks. This is not they things should be, buildings have voices, and symmetrical anonymous, identical, faceless buildings impose conformity and oppression. An age that promised enlightened thinking has stripped us of our freedom, an age that sought to create the ultimate humans has alienated their individuality, and stripped them of their power.

Have you as an architect or building design engineer considered that function is important but buildings can be used to point to something greater? To God Himself? Not as an empty sort of homogenization of architecture into cathedrals or religious buildings everywhere, but each space as its own voice and way of expressing the glory of God. Each space should be cultivated to the full extent of what it can be in itself, not as a universal style of distinction, but within each space a maximization of space, utility and relationality creates the Christian vision of what architecture means to us. Colin Gunton claims that one of the chief failures of modernity is the lack of reconciliation between universality and particularity. What this means for architecture is simple, either our buildings all look the same or they are disjointed and fragmented spaces juxtaposed over each other in a struggle for supremacy. What culture, what architecture needs is unified diversity.

Postmodernism is attempting to restore to particularity those things which belong to it, such as individual significance and importance, however, we cannot allow postmodernity to flatten our sense of space, place and being so that all things are equally valid. When all things are equally leveled out, they are all equally reduced into identical categories, none can be more beautiful, more special, or even individual anymore, and thus they all become boring. It’s like school uniforms, even in the uniformity of everything, it’s the people with the accessories that stand out.

Art and its mediation of presence to us through a created reality draws out the beauty within our own imaginations and inspires us to do something more with ourselves than merely be functional. Functionality is death if it is all that we do. We cannot possibly attempt to have any meaning beyond our bank statements and credit history if we do not actively engage in something beyond functionality. What is the purpose of life?

Certainly it is not to edify and construct institutions at the expense of our identity, to be functional at the expense of ourselves. It is something above and beyond that, and mediating between the horrors of the world and what can be done requires imagination. It requires the creation of beauty in the world, yes in art galleries and on sidewalks and in the streets, on the highways, and byways, in the villages and towns, among the lower classes as well as the socially privileged. The horrors and evil in the world requires us to actively engage the world with imagination, to take control of the situation and create beauty where there was none. Not in the sense of buildings alone, or paintings and inanimate objects, rather the imagination should be used in every aspect of life, actively engaging the world and discovering ways to beautify and cultivate a richer experience from things for the individual as well as the community.
At the core of the imagination is not an arbitrary idea, nor an idealism that is fragile, for Christians the core of the imagination should be the dogmas that inspire us, for the sake of active engagement in the world while not being of the world. The Christian Imagination, that creative force of the will that resides within us and inspires us should look to God’s affirmations of what it means to be in the world for guidance. Christ came to redeem, restore and reconcile all things to himself. He will someday reconcile and redeem all things, and it has already begun in his disciples, the Church, this is a core dogma of our faith. What this means for our artistic merit is that we are called to reconcile all things to God actively, by the Holy Spirit and the active imagination we can participate in. Not that this should reduce art to paintings of Jesus and the disciples, or make everything about looking religious, but really, it’s a celebration not just of spiritual things but the entire creation. Everything has the potential to be beautiful, or redeemed into beauty.

Recently reading an article by N.T. Wright, he mentioned a sculpture of the tree of life, made entirely out of decommissioned weapons.[2]

The world is good, and was created to be so. In acknowledging this we don’t need a specific apologetic for aesthetics, other than ‘for the glory of God.’ We can celebrate the goodness we already see within the world. We have the right to glorify God who created the beauty we do see. We have an imagination that can envision the way things should be, and point us to that reality.

The horrors of the world are real, but in the midst of them we can find peace in the One who is already Lord, and who will continue to bring reconciliation to all things by His Spirit. Christianity is calling…and is asking us to imagine what the world, redeemed and filled with God’s love looks like, and to do our part in making that happen, to create beauty that reflects the glory of God in what we do, the space we live in, the places and ways we exist.

Practically, we can say this: At the center of all the ugliness in the world is a sacrifice that calls us to change the way we think about things. There is for us a man on a cross, who shows us where God has entered into our pain, our suffering our emotional state, and said “enough.” There is a man who has entered into the heart of where the world feels pain, and he is calling us to go there too.

Imagination is not about feeling peppy, but rather is an active engagement in thinking creatively about reconciliation. The Christian Imagination calls us to enter into that same place where the world feels pain, and actively imagine what the love of God looks like there and to set about the task of expressing and ushering in that love, be it in architecture, music, art, sculpture, painting, reflection, philosophy, theology, conversation, ecology, and everything else.

History After the Gospel

Perspectives on Suffering and the Gospel in Reality

The Spirit of God lives within us. How often do we hear that, among my Charismatic friends that entails, speaking in tongues and miracles, but do we really consider the idea? There is a wholly other triune person, living within our very being, having its essence in and alongside with our essence. Developing us in relation to Himself. The power of the Spirit is something you will hear about in just about any Charismatic church, about how God empowers us with a force we must release in order to make it effective. But that reduces and subjects the role of the Spirit to an impersonal power that indwells us, not a triune person that has the power and thus grants it to us from within. The Spirit of God is not just impersonal power that we must release, and I feel as if this is not treated fairly in circles I have been in.

We do not ask the Spirit to guide us from within except as the function of a voice, not as a whole person unto himself that is simultaneously without and within us. To be with God is to be in communion with God by the Spirit. We must interact with the person of the Spirit to be with God. The Eucharist points excellently to the indwelling nature of Christ within us. As we ingest the bread and the wine, the body and blood we experience grace, and such grace is experienced from within. Why is this? Because in the same manner the Spirit which is a person and not a force as bread and wine represent the actual Christ, conveys grace to us. The Eucharist is a symbol of our reception of Christ and the Spirit, by which we know the communion we need necessarily shapes and makes our being.

Thus our identity is again, a relation, between ourselves and the Spirit which while both remain separate from each other are joined to each other, as when in marriage the wife and husband to not become a single entity of being with both sex organs and a single consciousness but rather find the fullness of identity in relation to the other, so we too must find our being in relation to God. We do not become one with God because human marriage is the greatest analogy of that which should happen to us, we should be joined in intimate communion, aware of our being that participates in the being of another, but at the same time we are fully ourselves. The modern agenda of individual liberation form everything that is other in pursuit of authentic identity has only succeeded to remove itself from authentic identity. Identity, in every human relation is found in terms of the other.

What about mystics, and people trapped in desert places by themselves, are they less of people? Yes, and no. Yes they do not have the relationality that others in and amongst people. Thus they lack a vital element of humanness. But no, because there is still something other when we are all alone. There is the ever enduring and personal presence of the Spirit who is everywhere, and with everything, but there is also the world. The world is something other, and in terms of it also we come to know ourselves. We are always in the presence of something other, though whether we choose to engage it or not is our choice.

Relating to the other can bring us hope. In terms of the real spirit which lives with us it can bring us great comfort and hope to know the other. Finding ourselves comfortable in relations cam bring us great personal hope at the constant realization that we are not alone. But there are times when we are distraught and fraught with peril and despair at the sight of reality, but this is when we need to find hope and can find hope. Our hope is in Christ, and in his person, as the one who brings us hope.

We need hope, it is necessary to our existence. As Christians, we should hold to a personal revelation and expectation of the hope that we await to reveal itself. We need a personal expectation of the gospel that dwells among us. The gospel needs to have a personal and real presence in our lives and beings. Without such a life we are empty and have no hope at all. the gospel and its message need to dwell among us. a realization of the impending redemption of all things should live in our minds and have a real presence in our lives and actions.

The gospel is among us, its presence is known in our lives by the hope that we carry within ourselves. The gospel is not abstract ideals but is known as a personal and living reality. THe gospel must have its presence among us necessarily, because it like us is in the world but not of the world, influencing the world. We cannot forget the power of the good news of the kingdom of God that dwells among us as more than just the fact that we can now go to church and fit in with “the people of the pews.” Really, The power of the gospel is that it has personal power and relevance to every believer the world around.

In the midst of our suffering, we can look back on history and see that something has happened in history which has been done in our behalf. The New Testament writers witnessed something powerful and unique in the person of Jesus beyond just teachings or a god way of living. They saw something personally significant in his resurrection that allowed them to know that Jesus was with them in their lives.

The gospel is still among us today, in our hearts, as a reality beyond just intellectual or even intuitive assent. It is a reality, a powerful reality that carries presence, beyond just the words and ideas around which we shape our language about the gospel. The gospel’s purpose is to be among the people as a kerygmatic reality, to be among the people in proclamative presence. As we approach the valleys of our lives and find ourselves in them, we can acknowledge that we are not alone, that our hope is not in ourselves or in history, not in politics, not in emotional good feelings, not in self help, not in personal eternity after this life, but in the cosmic reconciliation of all things including but not limited to ourselves, our hope is in the true and living God. Our hope is found in the presence of the one who has declared from the beginning that we shall be saved. Our hope lies in the reality of a good and beneficial God who has personal redemption in mind for each of us.

Our hope is not idealism, we do not tell ourselves that the world is getting better and better without any alis, nor do we tell ourselves that it is so damned that it only serves to be destroyed. Our hope is that the God we see revealed in the person of Jesus Christ is among us, and living within and through us to indwell the world with His presence and Spirit. The gospel, is among us, it is in the air, in the words we speak, in our breath, in the grass and the trees, whispers of it can be heard in the mountains, and in the valleys, in the fire and in the water, in the trees. Creation knows something is coming, we know something is coming, yet is already among us beginning to change things within us, beginning to usher us into a new reality.

Our hope is not that Jesus would come back and take us out of the world,but that we would be kept in the world but kept from evil. We await not the destruction at the end of the age, but the redemption that is already breaking forth in each of our lives to appear suddenly and like a forest breaking through a city and transforming it, so to see the new heavens and new earth break forth out of this present reality and change, not only the world, but everything. The gospel is among us, it lives in our fingertips, in our emotions, in our suffering, in our triumphs.

The message of the gospel is not words alone but that which indwells the words and gives them life, that which lives among us in power and might, the very Spirit of the Living God. The spirit lives within us, we have a wholly transcendent Other, fully within ourselves as Christians. We have a completely different being not just upon us, but within us, working out the same resurrection that was worked out in Christ. This is the gospel in our midst: That the Spirit that omnipresently inhabits all things, even the very depths of Sheol as the psalmist says, is within us working through us and an actual presence for our lives. The gospel is a reality, the cross which is its center is our center.

As we face discouragement and labors, trials and temptations let us remember that something real and true happened to us because of Jesus Christ, and that because of this something true that has happened in history so too our history has a purpose. Divine history did not culminate in the incarnation, there is purpose to this life, even after the ascension of Jesus. History still has a purpose because we will be transformed at the last, and all those things which have been used in labor unto God will be tested. Everything we have set to use will be appropriated by the kingdom, and redelivered into our hands so that we can work out in the new heavens and earth the will of God as a present reality with those faculties, members and parts of ourselves that have been dedicated unto righteousness.

God’s will is to appropriate all that we can offer, and fill it with his presence as wine fills a chalice. The wine is not the chalice, nor does the wine become the chalice, rather creation is built to house God’s presence among his creatures and to be filled with his love, but still individual from and separate from.

Hope then takes this form, we know that the world we live in was created as “very good” and while fallen continues to have purpose, and that purpose is to be redeemed unto God through the gospel which has a real and active presence not merely as language or proclamation but as a reality unto itself made so by the Spirit.

History after the incarnation matters because God is going to use everything that has been put into his trust to extend his kingdom over all the earth. Our talents and “members” will be transformed and enhanced. Our talents will be renewed,a nd life itself will be completely different, yet altogether, not just a spiritual detachment but a grounding in this world, which needs the redempton that in Christ, we too can offer it.

Thus we can conclude that while we acknowledge and not blindly or arbitrarily the suffering that plagues the world, we look to God to be the solution to those problems, we must face the horrors of reality as we see them. There are those who today are raped, tortured, sold into slavery and killed, today in the world, parents kill children and children kill teachers, elders, each other as well. Violence takes place over inches and miles of land, children step on land mines, people lose limbs in combat, and female children are tossed aside into the garbage. These are realities that we do not ignore, push aside or turn away from.

You must hold yourself in front of them until it hurts, until your heart breaks with sorrow, until you cannot remember yourself anymore and all that exists is the suffering of humanity. You must feel every beating upon the skin of a scared and tormented housewife, every beating at the hands of a drunken father, every betrayal for the sake of material gain, every ounce of blood shed in the name of ideas. But once you have reached that place, it is not yours to remain there. To feel these things is to know the heart of God, but knowing alone is not ours. Once there, if we remain we will be overcome by distress and despair, and fall into a vulgar pessimism about life and God. When really our purpose is to realize these things are not culpable to God though we should wrestle with the reality of an omnipotent God allowing such suffering.

To know God is to wrestle with Him, and to ask the hard questions, not without reverence, but also not without really pressing to know why. We must be as Abraham and Moses, and ask the Father, why things are not getting better. We must be as Jesus and pray to the Father that the kingdom would come. We must live in awareness of the Spirit among us and in us and thus beg the hard questions of God. The problem of evil is no less complicated now than when it was first indicated by the first human thought that there was a real evil in the world. To truly know God is to beg the difficult questions and honestly expect an answer, not just passively submit mindlessly. To know God requires reverence, and honor that is due among friends, but does not require us to mindlessly accept things we do not understand.

To know God, is also to know grace, in the face of things we cannot comprehend, and then to accept in loving kindness that things are still being revealed to us in measures. To know God is to be gracious unto Him, as unto a lover. God is a reality, not a joke, not something we consent to, not an abstract person, but a person as real as your or I, as real as the lover in our marriage bed, as real as the children you have, as real as the friends you truly know from heart to heart.

God is not an empty idea, but a person, as we are people, this is known in Jesus Christ. God is Jesus, and therefore God has personhood. We cannot live with abstracts anymore, neither could the New Testament writers. They did not say Jesus represented God, they prayed to Him as God. God is personal, not impersonal, present in reality by the Spirit, and immanently concerned for us all.

We need to remember that grace is real. That the forgiveness of sins is not a divine joke, and that the reconciliation of all things is not going to turn out to be the greatest practical joke in all history. Rather, we need to remember that grace that is extended to us by the Lord, and remember that we are all called to inherit such a grace. We are all made to be filled with God’s presence and to hope in the eventual and impending reconciliation of all things. We are not hopeless idealists, but realistically concerned with God’s action in the world as a reconciler, eagerly urging on the redemption which has begun in us the people of God, and will break forth suddenly to redeem all things.

I hope this has made some sense somewhere, and that in reading these words something has come alive within you.