Repenting our inner heretic: modernist and Pelagian edition

So I was reading a talk given by one of my favorite Scripture scholars, Walter Brueggeman, who specializes in Old Testament prophets and their role in preaching the word of God to the kings and priests and people. In a video talk to the Sojourners “Summit for Change” last month, he spoke about church and state and what terrible bedfellows they are, and he started all the way back with Solomon and the narrative created by the kings of Israel, and how the prophetic tradition peppers the “official” narrative with a counter narrative. The whole thing is wonderful, and can be found by clicking here.

But there was one paragraph that really struck me, one that I think has some validity in our church and in our time, and with all the rancor and arguing in the public square about whether this is a “Christian” country, and who gets to use the name “Christian,” I thought that his insight was worth spreading around a little bit for consideration. Brueggeman says:

If you take the phrase “prophetic imagination,” the imagination part of that is that the prophets are able to imagine the world other than the way that is in front of them. The word prophetic alludes to the reality of God. And what the prophets believe deeply is that God is a lively character, and a real agent who acts in the world, who causes endings and who causes new beginnings. And that's worth thinking about, because that is not ordinary thinking among us — that God is a lively agent and a real character. 

If you consider most conservative evangelicals, they do not believe that God is a lively character and a real agent, because they've got God all packaged up into sustained systematic explanations. And if you consider most theological progressives they don't believe that God is a real character and a lively agent, either, because they really believe that God has no hands but our hands.

When I read that the first time, I thought to myself, “ouch,” because I recognize the truth of what he’s saying. Obviously, his use of "most" is up for interpretation, and maybe you don't consider yourself part of that group, but I definitely think that I do, in some sense. Modern faith is not immune to scientific inquiry. We know, or assume we know, the difference between faith and magic. We know that the sun doesn’t rise and doesn’t set, but that we’re on a ball that spins every twenty-four hours and sometimes it faces the sun and sometimes it doesn’t. We’ve gotten comfortable with science, at least most of us in mainline churches have. We believe that the truth of faith and the facts of science are compatible, that truth, at its core, is one, and that answers that elude us are not God playing a game with us, but that we’re evolving, learning as we go. And faith is not only concerned with things unseen. It’s that we take for granted that not everything that is is part of the quantifiable universe. There are realities that are unverifiable by science. But verifiable and unverifiable realities are aspects of Truth (with a capital T), and there is more to reality and truth than facts and what can be proven.

So when it comes to faith, the temptation might be for us, following Brueggeman's groupings, either to leave God out of the equation because we believe that money, conflict, and power move history forward, generally through institutions of church and state (or both), or we believe that what is possible for good is entirely up to us, doing what we can in a community working to build a more just world. In neither case do we make a big enough place for God, who, in fact, is the prime mover, is the Reality underneath all reality, the “lively agent” in Brueggeman’s phrase, who has a distinctly different purpose in mind for the world than any of us do, a purpose that Jesus calls “the kingdom,” or the “reign of God.”

So all I want to say here is that among the many places we hope to assert divine activity in this world in our liturgy, one that stands out every week is the penitential litany that we call the Kyrie Eleison (or Lord, have mercy.) Of course, the entire liturgy asserts God’s primacy, but as a primacy not of force but one that empties itself into world through Jesus and then through the Holy Spirit. From creation to the end, God is where the loving, creative, exuberant action is, and it keeps manifesting itself in the unfolding cosmos. But we find ourselves in this world in a tough place: things are bad, and don’t seem to be getting better. Right at the beginning of the liturgy, we acknowledge that. We say we’ve made a mess of things, and frankly, we haven’t got a clue about how to fix it, except to keep coming back here on Sunday, doing what we’ve been told to do in memory of Jesus, and then trying to live it out day by day in the streets. At the beginning of Mass, we just say it: Lord, this is your world. You, not the president, not the bank, not the arms salesmen, not the UN, not the church, You are the Lord. We need you to be that for us. That’s what “have mercy” means: you have it, we don’t have it. Please, give it to us.

James Alison tries to get us inside of God's agency, which, if anything, he finds even more radically luminous and active than Brueggeman does, emphasizing that in fact we perceive everything wrongly until we surrender to God's invitation to relax into be loved by the Forgiving Victim, Jesus. He uses the image of a planet that is, unknown to its happy and complacent inhabitants, tipping toward the maw of a black hole. They notice in the distance of space at first a small star, but one which is growing larger and larger in their sky. At first, their ordered existence is thrown into chaos as they fear the approach of this rapidly moving star. But gradually they begin to notice that it is they, their planet, that is moving toward the new star, drawn there by a new gravity, and thus away from the black hole which they had not noticed was pulling them toward destruction. Alison summarizes his metaphor a few paragraphs later:

When we talk about what Jesus came to do, did and is doing in our midst, we are talking about what comes upon us as an alteration of the axis of Creation rather than as a resolution of a moral problem. Our being brought close into the life of God by Jesus living out being a forgiving victim in our midst has this as its effect: that we perceive simultaneously where we used to be heading, into an ever-shrinking world run by revenge, envy and death; and where we are instead finding ourselves drawn: into being forgiven, forgiving, and thus being opened up into true, insider knowledge of creation as it unfolds dynamically....

So, in fact, in our case, being forgiven is prior to being created.

Alison, James. Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults (p. 493-4). DOERS Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition. 

So in addition to being a prayer of praise (“You are mighty God and prince of peace”), the Kyrie is an act of faith and surrender. We keep choosing false gods. We keep choosing pretender-lords. Or worse, we think somehow we have replaced God as the movers of history. Jesus thinks of it as a partnership. God won’t do it without us, we can’t do it without God. When we sing “Lord, have mercy” or “Kyrie eleison,” let’s try to hold that thought in our hearts, and make an act of faith with it, something like, “I’m listening, Lord; I’m trying to live up to the example of Christ in my world. But it's overwhelming sometimes. Everything seems to be moving the wrong way. But you’re the vine, I’m just a branch. Give me, give all of us, what we need to be able to live and bear fruit to bring a harvest of nourishment, justice, and peace to the world.”