Seraphim's Struggles on the Way

I have been pondering this question and it has been weighing heavily on my spirit, in my heart and mind...I have some thoughts that I would like to share, that I have discovered, come to believe, that I got from a book called "The Mystery of Christ and why we don't get it...." by Fr. Robert Capon......thoughts are largely mine though. Hope that they help.

Grace. The Good News should be about grace, because the Good News is that the only Begotten Son of God became incarnate, lived and died the death I was due, and the life he lived along with his perfect death is now credited to me. That with Jesus in John we can say:

"This is the work of God,
that you believe on Him
whom He has sent. " (John 6:29)

But we usually only extend that grace on the first Sunday, when we applaud the Sinner who comes with the prayer of the Tax Collector in his pocket, but expect him, once he becomes a Christian, to be able to live and pray like the Pharisee in the parable by the next week...

This goes along with the tendency now to suppose that the way to train clergy to be good pastors and/or pastoral counselors is to give them some professional competence in what are usually called the 'helping' professions -- to make them trained psychologists, or knowledgeable hospital visitors, or family-system adepts, or twelve-step experts. I have no objection to such professionalization in and of itself, but I do think that in the rust to become professionals in fields that un-ordained persons are perfectly capable of handing, the clergy can and do often loose site of their principal competence as counselors -- of their calling to be authentic and authoritative proclaimers of the Gospel, the Good News of God in Christ!

Ordained persons are not commissioned to do certain things for the church that the rest of the church cannot or does not do. Rather, they are ordained as sacraments (best word I could use, sorry to go high church) or as signs to the church of what the whole church is commissioned to do -- namely, bear the apostolic witness to Jesus' death and resurrection. When you go into the pulpit on Easter Day, for example, you should not go as an expert on the scientific or theological possibilities of the resurrection. If you do your job correctly, you do not stand up there and tell the congregation that you have studied the subject and have come up with this, or that conclusion about it. Instead you arrive in the pulpit as the latest in a long line of runners, and you tell them very simply, but very authoritatively, "Peter saw him risen...(pant, pant, pant).... and he told me to tell you." Do you see? When you preach the Good News, you are first of all an apostle, not a theologian or any other king of learned person. (apostle means, primarily not just one of the 12, but someone who is Sent..)

But even then The Good News of what God has done for the world in Jesus, is the exact opposite of what most people, including a lot of preachers, think it is. They think it's some kind of religious recipe for getting their act together -- for solving their problems or straightening up their lives so that God will approve of them and they can approve of themselves. Above all, they think it's about getting rid of the problems of evil and guilt -- about doing something to avoid being judged, whether by God, or by others, or by themselves. But the Gospel isn't anything like that. That's all perfectly intelligible stuff the world has been capable of telling itself --and of driving itself nuts with because none of it is really possible. It's all BAD NEWS not Gospel. Religious recipes seldom get anybody's act together -- and they never get it to the point where it can't be messed up in some new way. Problems that get solved are just replaced with new ones that may never get solved. Approval depends on the approver, not on anything the approvee does: if the approver's standards are high enough, approval never comes. And as far as evil is concerned, whatever it is that God has done in Jesus, he certainly hasn't taken evil out of circulation.

Furthermore, on the face of the Gospel it seems that God isn't the least bit interested in any of that intelligible but pointless stuff. Instead he waltzes into the world and makes the weird announcement that he's simply dropped the whole business. He says he's come not to judge but to save. He says not that he's going to deal with guilt but that because of what he's done, there just isn't any guilt left. He says you can't deal with evil by resisting it, only be forgiving it. He says, in other words, that the whole of the world's habitual way of operating in those departments is upside down. And he says that in Jesus he's made a whole new right-side-up world -- and that that's the only real world, the only one that can be a lasting, happy place.

Our problem of course, is that we're so used to standing on our head, that when he shows up, we think he's the one who's upside down. If the Gospel is proclaimed correctly, therefore, it's always going to sound nuts to us. As a matter of fact, it will always sound wrong, immoral, and threatening to all the values we know and love even though they're killing us. We want a recipe for righteousness and sanctification, not to be told if we believe in Jesus it is done. Not that according to God, even as I struggle with the left over flesh nature, according to him, I'm already seated in the Heavenly Places with Christ.

That and that alone should be the taproot of what it is to be a good evangelist and or pastor. That and that alone should be the reason that anyone is ordained. So that you can proclaim, Christ has died, Christ is Risen, and Christ will come again!

Another way would be to look at the Gospel as Jesus is the Ticket Master at a Stadium called Heaven, and all we have to do is get the ticket from Jesus and then we can go inside and join the party.... but what is most often presented is that Jesus runs the light company, and has paid the initial installment, but now we are on the monthly plan, complete with access fees (lots of good deeds) to be paid before you can tap into his power, and the threat of a cutoff in service if you didn't keep up the monthly payments with righteous acts.

Again, I know this is alot, but it was really quite a freeing conclusion to come to...and the book ("The Mystery of Christ and why we don't get it...." by Fr. Robert Capon.) is very good....and if there is any truth in this post, it is probably just me regurgitating Fr. Capon.

Peace on your Journey.

LOVE4THEWORD