Quote - Incarnation

We are invited to trust, to trust this one human being with our pain and suffering, our dreams and hopes. Only when trust has been established can there be a joining to his flesh, a sharing in his mission and ministry, and a participating in his life. For those who would follow him, this is indeed entrance into the saving action of the triune God in Jesus. In order for salvation to be made real, those who would follow Jesus must trust fallen human flesh, flesh fully human, weak and vulnerable. There is no way around it -- both with Jesus himself, and with his company of disciples -- there is a priority of trust. And what will bind them together as a community of believers and as those sent into a world will be this same trust.

Willie James Jennings

"He Became Truly Human": Incarnation, Emancipation, and Authentic Identity

The Christian Mystery of Physical Resurrection - Newsweek.com

The Christian Mystery of Physical Resurrection - Newsweek.com

Even in biblical times, resurrection deniers who hoped for an afterlife took an alternative route. This is what scholars call "the immortality of the soul." Embraced by Plato and popular today especially among progressive believers (Reform Jews and liberal Protestants, for example) and people who call themselves "spiritual but not religious," the immortality of the soul is easier to swallow than resurrection. After death, the soul—unique and indestructible—ascends to heaven to be with God while the corpse, the locus of our senses and all our low human desires, stays behind to rot. This more reasonable view, perhaps, has a serious defect: a disembodied soul attaching itself to God in heaven offers no more comfort or inspiration than an escaped balloon. Consolation was not the goal of Plato's afterlife. Without sight or hearing, taste or touch, a soul in heaven can no more enjoy the "green, green pastures" of the Muslim paradise, or the God light of Dante's cantos, than it can play a Bach cello suite or hit a home run. Rationalistic visions of heaven fail to satisfy.

Another popular way out of the Easter conundrum—"I want to believe in heaven but can't get my head around the revivification of human flesh"—is to imagine "resurrection" as a metaphor for something else: an inexplicable event, a new kind of life, the birth of the Christian community on earth, the renewal of a people, an individual's spiritual rebirth, a bodiless ascension to God. Progressives frequently fall back on resurrection-as-metaphor, for it allows them to celebrate Easter while also expressing a reasonable agnosticism. They quote that great theological cop-out: "We cannot know what God has in store for us."

The intellectual flabbiness of this approach causes agonies for such orthodox Christians as N. T. Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham, England. "People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor," he once told my editor Jon Meacham and me in an interview for this magazine. "In other words, [Jesus] went to heaven, whatever that means. And they've never realized that the word 'resurrection' simply didn't mean that. If people [in the first century] had wanted to say that he died and went to heaven, they had perfectly good ways of saying that." The whole point of the Christian story is that the Resurrection really happened, Wright insists. The disciples rolled back the rock on the third day, and Jesus' body was gone. This insistence on the veracity of resurrection is no less sure in Judaism, where the Orthodox pray thrice a day to a God "who causes the dead to come to life," or in Islam. "I swear by the day of resurrection!" proclaims the Quran. "Yes, Indeed!"

And so, the paradox. Resurrection may be unbelievable, but belief in a traditional heaven requires it. I think often of Jon D. Levenson, a Jewish scholar at Harvard Divinity School who hopes to bring the idea of resurrection back to mainstream Judaism, where it has been lost in practice for generations. I visited him one cold November afternoon because, as a literal-minded skeptic, I wanted him to explain to me how it works. How does God put bodies—burned in fire or pulverized in war—back together again? Levenson looked at me, eyes twinkling, and said, "It's no use to ask, 'If I had a lab at MIT, how would I try to resurrect a body?' The belief in resurrection is more radical. It's a supernatural event. It's a special act of grace or of kindness on God's part."

Sighs

"Let my sighs and the manifold desolations of the earth move you..."
Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

So I'm teaching a Bible study for the campus ministry that I'm part of. I'm trying to paint a picture of the Big Story of the Bible. The whole broad historical outline. A lot of times in church and wherever, we hear Bible stories as episodic, isolated incidents that have little to do with each other. They have a neat little moral at the end. Sometimes there's recurring characters, like "Moses and the burning bush" and then "Moses and the parting of the Red Sea" but of what these events have to do with each other in the life of Moses and how Moses relates to the experience of the Jewish people and then what that experience has to do with God, little is said.

One of the themes that recurs in the Bible is the idea of God as deliverer. The Israelites are sold into slavery, God delivers them through Moses. People are oppressed, God sends the Judges, or prophets, or whomever. The whole human race is killing itself, God sends Jesus. You get the picture.

Crap happens and God is there for us. To some people that may sound like a bad joke. "What about natural disasters like the tsunami in India, or hurricane Katrina? What about the Holocaust? Where was God then?" My only honest answer is I don't know. All I have is God's promise, and the knowledge that He hasn't let me down before. But I'm just one person in the world. How do I know He hasn't let someone else down?

My roommate, John, has kind of a unique nickname. We call him "Katrina John". He only moved here six months ago, from New Orleans. Do the math and figure out why we call him that. Recently he told me the story of how he came here after the hurricane, how at one point he thought his grandparents had been killed, how his family was split up, and he didn't know what happened to everyone. He told me how they made their way to family here, and how they didn't know if they'd have enough gas to make it from place to place. Later told me how he wants to be a minister, and serve God with his life.

It doesn't make any sense, sometimes, the way people of faith keep giving God the benefit of the doubt, the way we keep waiting for Him to come through. Maybe it's that we know something other people don't. Maybe we're stupid and foolish. Or maybe we just like the big Guy so much we're always willing to give Him another shot. I don't really know, sometimes.

There's a beautiful and poignant passage at the end of Habakkuk, a book of what Christians call the Old Testament, and which I am trying to call the Hebrew Scriptures. Habakkuk was a prophet, a man whose job in life it was to speak God's word. His people are being invaded by enemies, and he must try to comfort them. But he can't, really. He talks about how the bad guys, the oppressors, will eventually get theirs. But that's just his prediction. In the end, all he can say is this:

Even though the fig trees have no blossoms, and there are no grapes on the vine; even though the olive crop fails, and the fields lie empty and barren; even though the flocks die in the fields, and the cattle barns are empty, yet I will rejoice in the Lord! I will be joyful in the God of my salvation. The Sovereign Lord is my strength.
Habakkuk 3:17-19

Like I said, it doesn't make sense. And rarely do I have that kind of faith. Rarely do I have that kind of trust in God. Rarely do I even have the wisdom to see that my olive crop is failing. My field do lie empty and barren. My life bears far too little fruit, and yet I should be rejoicing in the Lord. Instead I treat Him like the nerdy friend I am trying to get rid of. Lame.