"What shall we do that the people's perception of God not be so much less than God himself? Make something more of our preaching. Allow the preaching itself a human--and then a divine--wholeness: that the whole of the preacher be presently active in proclamation, the whole of the hearer invited to attend, and God will be seen as God of the Whole." (Preaching, by Walter Wangerin, Jr.)
July 2005. I'd come to a place where I was subconsciously convinced that I was above most temptations. I'd read authors speak of getting "behind the temptations of Christ," and that sounded all abstract and hardly an issue to concern me. I would learn differently.
July 19, 2005
The Bride vision and the swelling, swirling bubbles on the gown she wore. I'm thinking of these lately. I've been reading about them, too. "The righteous acts of the saints" is how Saint John describes them in the book of Revelation. As I saw them, each "bubble" flashed different colors. Was it maybe that each swirl of color was a different person on that particular "wheel" or bubble of righteousness? I know each life is designed to be part of God's handiwork, a different part of the story of righteousness overall. I wonder if God the Father constructs the bubbles--the delineation of each righteous bubble, but might God the Spirit orchestrate the colors that swirl across them. And all this to adorn the one who will "wed" God the Son? Fanciful thoughts, but anyway the picture is beautiful because it shows how a timeless being could be "active" without being time-locked. Each life is intended to be a re-expression of spiritual truth about Him, i.e. formed "in His image."
When the age of the Bride "making herself ready" is finished, I wonder how we will go about expressing His image then? How will we be "in His image" after the wedding feast of the Lamb?
One particular life right now leads my thinking on these things. His life is an easy-to-realize microcosm of that "in His image" quality, easy to see because of its very comprehensiveness. Born as if one abandoned, impoverished, taken in by others and raised in a tiny, out-of-the way borough, this person nevertheless grew to become a man of means, a man of influence on multiple continents, a man of wealth. In many ways, his life represents the full breadth-- the range from end to end--that all men are intended to walk as the point of their existence. God draws Man, woos him from the depths of death and degradation--the tragedy of Man's nature from his very birth--to the royal wealth of joint-heirship with Christ. Prophets speak of that range: from orphans left to die in their birth-blood,taken up by the very hand of God to a place of mansions. Here prophecy is replete with language of crowns and of glory, talk that is so different from the talk revolving around Man's infancy. And this one life has that full "story" attached to it. The entire gamut built into his days. Only one way is it incomplete. He does not have the "story" of that far-reaching change playing itself out yet in the arena of love. He should work for completeness there--though it may not be romantic love, it should be some sort of love--as an act of reverence to God. If he does not see the "realization of unbelievable potential in all Mankind" as his prophetic life script, then his striving will equal empty vanity, no matter what his level of worldly success. I speak of its resonance beyond this world.
This life was the first one that God allowed me to see with its glory shining full-bright.
C.S. Lewis describes human lives this way: as repositories of glory beyond our wildest imaginings most of the time.
As he puts it in his sermon, The Weight of Glory:
It may be possible
for each to think too much of his ownpotential glory hereafter; it is hardly
possible for him to think too often or too
deeply about that of his neighbour. The
load, or weight, or burden of my
neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on
my back, a load so heavy that only
humility can carry it, and the backs of the
proud will be broken. It is a serious thing
to live in a society of possible gods and
goddesses, to remember that the dullest
and most uninteresting person you talk to
may one day be a creature which, if you
saw it now, you would be strongly tempted
to worship, or else a horror and a
corruption such as you now meet, if at all,only in a nightmare. All day long we are,
in some degree, helping each other to one
or other of these destinations. It is in the
light of these overwhelming possibilities, it
is with the awe and the circumspection
proper to them, that we should conduct all
our dealings with one another, all
friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no
ordinary people. You have
never talked to a mere mortal......
Next to the Blessed Sacrament
itself, your neighbour is the holiest objectpresented to your senses. If he is your
Christian neighbour he is holy in almost
the same way, for in him also Christ
vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified,
Glory Himself, is truly hidden.At the time, I had no idea what this glory laid bare to my spirit's eye would do to me. That temptation to worship C.S. Lewis mentions: it is very real. I fell prey to it. One life. I was allowed to see one life this way--this eternal scripting of His-image glory running its course of expression over time in one life, and I was knocked flat on my back by it. I was not the only one to suffer as I wrestled with comprehension, with soberness, with a willingness to hold loosely what was never meant to be clutched. I still find those days difficult to describe, but they taught me important lessons: I was not above the temptation to idolize, merely above the temptation to idolize the inglorious. I was not above trying to cram things eternal into the parameters of a single day. Finally, I was not to elevate various expressions of Glory Retold to the same level as the Glory Original. To ask even extra-ordinary people to carry such a burden is terribly unfair.
So I learned the humility and the seriousness of which Lewis spoke with regards to the "capital N" Nobility of Man.
Since then, I've seen others in this glorified way, but I have been safe in the seeing. And not only have I seen individuals; I've seen groups, whole congregations even. They, too, swirl on bubbles first delineated through the stories told in Hebrew scripture. The Bible-people are the prototypes, but the stories never end. They never stop being re-told. Now I see them safely, for that original temptation has never returned--and that mainly because God carefully chose the person who would be the first for me to really "see." He was kindly sovereign though specifically stern with me through that time, chastening me in an area that could have carried great risk, but instead opened great vision. I remain attentive now. I no longer "presume" I am above reproach, and in many areas.
So there you have it: my wholeness.
Now I see a bit of what is behind Christ's abstract temptations: I see the easy draw of short-cuts to things eternal. I see unholy invitations, unholy in that they beg you to grasp at things that can only be held (in this age) by the hands of faith, no matter how strongly--how realistically--those after-time things resonate into the march of days.
Ultimately, I am grateful for learning what I now know about that weight of glory as it spills into our world.
And I hope to be able to bear its continual display, as long as mankind is able to offer it.
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