The Scandal I Cannot Escape
Reflections on II Peter 1: 1-2
Rough Draft & Ideas
Please comment as you wish, suggest ideas, etc.
Martin Luther framed it a question of "faith verses works". I've concluded that while there is a truth inside this contrast it is not my battle. James dictum remains. “Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds" (James 2:18b).
It is clear that Augustine had never watched Star Trek. He was not privy to a perfect world that just a bit of rational, scientific, and enlightened education snd social engineering could muster. It's certainly not Palagius's fault if those pesky Romulans or Ferengi or Klingons or Domminion kept forcing the Federation into Red Alerts, followed by an array of photon torpedos and lazer weapons to maintain a fragile peace. K, so maybe it's a good thing they both lived in the 4th and 5th centuries (300s and 400s). Messing with the Borg would have made their resistance to one another futile, for sure.
The American Holiness and Revivalist tradition in which I grew up appeared at first glance far removed from the hopeful humanist model of Star Trek. Yet first glances can mislead, for inside my Wesleyan tradition was the rising optimism of Pelagius human freedom on grace filled Armenian1 steroids.
Coming of age in the middle to late 1900s with slavery legally removed, the Industrial Revolution under way, political reform movements in women's rights and open government, and growing calls for temperance, American social revivalism dared to believe in the coming eschatological dawn of the Christian 20th century.
I'm reminded of an episodic wrap up conversation between Bones, Captain Kirk and Spoc following their first hand experience on a planet with a somewhat parallel history. They had beamed themselves into a religious and pacifist resistance community against a Roman style, 20th century Nazi like dictatorship. 2, Admiring the morally developed political ideas of these devout followers still rooted in worship of the sun as God, Nyota UhIra, as Coms Officer, broke in. “I’m afraid you have it all wrong, Mr. Spock, all of you. I’ve been monitoring some of their old style radio waves. The empire spokesman trying to ridicule their religion. But he couldn’t. Don’t you understand? It’s not the sun up in the sky. It’s the Son of God.”To which Kirk responds, “Caesar and Christ. They had them both. And the Word is spreading only now.” Bones offers up his typical moralism. "A philosophy of total love and total brotherhood.” 2a
What tamed the historically American revivalism into a more tepid 20th century Calvinistic gospel of individual salvation whose eschatology focused upon a raptured escape from the two world wars, Great Depression, Vietnam, climate change, social and moral chaos? It was, ofcourse, the problem of the Borg; 3 that Augustinian shadow of our fallen nature that clung around our good intentions as shame and guilt built up, following multiplied altar trips in attempts at fixing the seeming unfixable.
What had been a grand vision of the church and earth awash in Christ's love was reduced to the fears of adults and children that the Borg were everywhere, around us (Communists even in government and Hollywood and the Church) and in us (that bad boy Adam in rebellion against God). The fear of Soviet Russia, nuclear war, the devil (Borg) made this little boy try to reduce my own inner war with my human heart into a Palagian attempt to willfully feel what I was suppose to feel and do what I was suppose to do.
Perfectionism is a heavy weight for a pre-adolescent to carry, before one can distinguish between healthy sexual longing verses lust centric and hyper-sexualized desire to possess another as pleasure. Looking back upon my earliest addictive sensual patterns nurtured in cycles of self-stimulation or PG-13 pics, shame, sadness, altar trips, promises to not feel or increase the feelings at least, focuses on scripture or mission, hard work or play, avoidance of the feelings or triggers, eventual release from guilt; until.... next time; which might be days or months or years.
I finally see that much of my religious experiences, though genuine, were actually negative reinforcers; distorting both faith and my own sense of being human. Like a trans child or adolescent who feel 'out of phase' with their body, I have felt out of phase with the church's expectations on one side and the perceived damned world of humanity beyond the church, simultaneously. The problem wasn't simply the church, or the world, or belief systems, or the promise of the glory, or being human, or the very real broken spaces in relationships, or my own mis-perceptions, or all of these. Rather, it is my inability and at times lack of desire to relax into my humanity aware of the pitfalls--graced as one surrounded by angels, humans, the church, cultural icons (like Star Trek) and God--in communal, frighteningly wonderful, spiritual, mystical and human presence.
Stated differently, the problem is not Augustine or the deep, even tender awareness, that we who are human are deeply broken; systemically and personally so. Rather it is the attempt to believe and live "perfection" apart from the only actual source of the goodness and charisms (glory) we seek.
In vision, Plagius was not wrong back in the day, just as so much of Star Trek universe is not wrong in modernity. 4 We are created to feel, be human in all its vulnerable majesty. Nor was Augustine wrong for pointing out what ought to be obvious. Our glory, our majesty is derived, reflected, participatory; just as it was for Jesus, the human-Devine Son of the Father. “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began" (John 17:3-5 NIV).
What I have needed God has given, though I've not seen the half of it clearly. Still, from within II Peter 1: 3-11 & John 1: 1-24 and God helping, I will lean into three
God's Glory
“His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.”
II Peter 1: 3
1. In Christ all the human brokenness, the mental and spiritual wounds that flow from our first human parents to each of us are covered, atoned, forgiven; not for me alone but all humanity.
God's Essential Promise
2. This kindly heart of God in the gracious entanglement of love extends to each/all of us and our own chosen sins, provisionally. God need only our grace assisted human response to be born anew into God's Kingdom, even now filling the earth.
Becoming Human: Making Real our Ability to fully Reflect The Father Son and Spirit
The charisms or gifts of The Spirit in Faith, goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, mutual affection, love.allow us an ever increasing ability to inter act with and know The Father.
The invitation to be fully human, at its best, joins these two ancient voices of the Church--freedom to mirror God's creative, intelligent, almost frightening discovery of the cosmos united in the reverence that confesses our creaturly vulnerabilities, including our tendency to eat the apple, knowing good through the taste of evil. The ability to live confessionally with Augustine is rooted--not by claiming the Tree of Life as a right of humanity--but in the self-giving sacrificial love of the human Jesus, Divinely rooting us in a restored garden. In Christ's Cosmic garden there emerges in us the awareness of salvation that includes a heart purified in its affections and filled with God's restorative love.
Herein lies my own deepest need of a continual thorough washing away of my inordinate sensual hunger for sexual touch. Like a reoccurring nightmare, lust holds on; no longer the immediate threat, certainly not the drugged medicating longings of a soul adrift, hiding, alone and full of shame. Thank God that addictive space, a living, lonely, nightmare is at last dead.
In its place is has come a relaxed and gracious open space between my family and myself. My first draft of this blog began on the 870th day of living soberly, including a subtle yet real ability to briefly hug my wife or slide my arm around her shoulder, being responded to in the language of her body leaning in. Laughter comes easily; even sarcasm about my betrayal is occasionally allowed inside a knowing smile.
Along side is a renewed sense of joy in Christ's church, living sadly apart from my family as I attend my own church in Renton. Still I'm surrounded by older community of friends who respect my honest confessional presence, laugh with me, listen with interest to my theological insight, giving and receiving friendship as though I never failed God, my family and God's church--yet knowing I have.
Yet the scandal remains, inevitably. This side of "the renewal all things" there is no turning history back to well before day 1, when the downward slide first reawakened, following my pastoral ministry--ever so subtly, slowly, intermittently until gathering mass like a snowball running downhill. It comes in a thousand losses, hints, silent unspoken gaps. A grandchildren asking, "Pappa, will you ever be un-fired?" Honestly, it is as it should be for The Creator at the center of all is moral, God's holiness penetrating all.
The worst part of this new life of thorns is the depth of damage to my own human spirit, my heart and imagination. The blood of Christ cleanses thoroughly in a relational sense, but the actual, deep, contrite repentance seems a task incomplete. God's gift of Pelagian human freedom and Augustinian confessional openness are present, each a deepening and expanding gift of grace; The communal love of The Father-Son-Spirit. It will reach a kind of fullness I have no doubt, but only in the unforced rhythms of grace. I am content.
Day 1,006 has begun.
Blessings! Terry
Q, I wouldn't. Indeed it is the daily felt awareness of the cost of my sin that keeps me sober.
With Augustine can only acknowledge the truth, live obediently within the hope
2 Medium Blog by Lydia Purple, "When Star Trek Original Series Got Biblical" https://medium.com/@purplelydia1614/that-time-when-star-trek-the-original-series-got-biblical-e7a5c913e89
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