Messy Incarnation: Meditations on Christ in Process

Messy Incarnation

Meditations on Christ in Process

Bruce Epperly

Energion Publications

Gonzalez, Florida

2022

Copyright 2020 Bruce Epperly

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.comThe NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

ISBN: 978-1-63199-822-5

eISBN: 978-1-63199-823-2

Library of Congress Control Number:

Energion Publications

PO Box 841

Gonzalez, FL 32560

https://energion.com

pubs@energion.com

Table of Contents

Prologue: Wonder And Worry 3

2 Advent: A Way Where There Is No Way 15

3 Christmas: Messy Incarnation 29

4 Epiphany: Christ Unleashed 45

5 Lent: Full Humanity 57

6 Holy Week: Healing Through Suffering 73

7 Easter: Love Wins 93

8 Pentecost: Unfettered Spirit 105

9 Creation Season: For God so Loved the World 115

10 The Realm of Christ: The Only Power That Matters 121

11 The Word Goes Forth: The Emerging Kindom of Jesus 127

With gratitude to my teachers – Richard Keady, Marie Fox, John Cobb, David Griffin, and Bernard Loomer – who made process theology come alive for me and the congregations and institutions where I have shared the good news of process theology as professor, pastor, and chaplain – Central Michigan University, Georgetown University, Wesley Theological Seminary, Lancaster Theological Seminary, Christian Theological Seminary, Claremont School of Theology and South Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Centerville, Massachusetts. I am grateful to my companions in the Messy Incarnation: Jesus in the Twenty-first Century class, held on zoom through South Congregational Church during a time of pandemic, July to September 2020, and involving participants from across the country. Ubuntu, I am because of you.

Prologue

Wonder And Worry

In 1975, my first year as a theology student at Claremont Graduate School in California, John Cobb’s Christ in a Pluralistic Age was published. Cobb’s book transformed my theological vision and way of life. To a fledging process theologian, Cobb in person and in print articulated a living Christology in which the creative spirit of Christ could be found in art, everyday life, science, the world’s faith traditions, architecture, and the non-human world. All-embracing in impact and inspiration, Christ is the source of creative transformation in the movements of ecology, literature, liberation, and political protest as well as in the worship and theological traditions of the church. As a result of Cobb’s insights, I came to believe that the Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth transforms societies as well as spirits when we embrace its embodied presence in our personal and corporate lives.

Cobb’s Christological reflections have stood the test of time. Cobb anticipated many of the changes we are currently facing in society and congregational life. If anything, over the past five decades, social and spiritual change has accelerated. Change has become the norm in spirituality, theology, society, and politics. Though many want to hold onto the past, the old order in politics, demographics, and religion is passing and an uncertain and fragile new order is emerging. Institutional Christianity has been pushed to the margins with the fastest-growing North American spiritual movements occurring among those who describe themselves as none of the above and spiritual but not religious.

The face of North American Christianity is global and multicultural, not just European. Once religious transformation moved at a glacial pace, but now the polar ice caps of tradition are collapsing at breakneck speed and old certainties regarding doctrine, authority, and truth are being swept away like the sands of my familiar Cape Cod beaches.

Seismic shifts in culture occur with increasing rapidity and the unthinkable has become normal in North American religion and politics: those who once claimed to be the moral and doctrinal police and defenders of orthodoxy now march in lockstep with political leaders known for their infidelity, dishonesty, bullying, racism, and pandering to dictators and racists. Those who once claimed an inside track on doctrinal and biblical absolutes are now promoting moral relativism and alternate facts to achieve political and cultural goals. Conservative Christians are among the most ardent purveyors of easily-refuted conspiracy theories. Fearful of losing their place in society, many conservative Christians have cultivated a crusade, and ironically also a victim, mentality assuming God is on their side and that those who hold contrasting viewpoints threaten their marriages, ability to practice their religion, and, frankly, in many cases, their white privilege. In their conflation of religion and public policy, politics has supplanted faith in God as their ultimate concern. Many self-proclaimed orthodox Christians appear to have sold their souls for a Supreme Court justice, the repeal of Roe versus Wade, and the maintenance of the old order of white heterosexual privilege.

The growing culture wars and social changes were only exacerbated during the 2020 pandemic election year, when the USA political leadership was unable to respond with either effectiveness or empathy to the Coronavirus pandemic or the Black Lives Matter protests. Christians became leaders in denying medical science along with climate change and promulgating unfounded conspiracy theories. Wearing masks and practicing safe distancing became a matter of politics and faith perspective rather than prudence and compassion. Claiming the right of their congregations to do what they please without governmental restrictions, the question what would Jesus do? was supplanted by don’t tread on me as Christian zealots risked their neighbors’ wellbeing for the convenience of not wearing a mask, worshipping in enclosed spaces, and going to tightly packed campaign rallies. This crisis of faith has been brewing since the emergence of the Moral Majority in the 1970s and will continue its reactive quest for political control in the face of growing ethnic, racial, and spiritual pluralism. We can expect more of this in the future as the old religious order, now under siege by social and religious change, will fight to the death to maintain its white Christian privilege. Following the election, many conservative Christian leaders and their followers seemed more intent to preach the gospel of a rigged election than proclaim the life-changing faith of Jesus Christ. Despite a new presidential administration in the United States, we will continue to deal with issues of racism, incivility, environmental destruction, and the quest among conservative Christians to turn back the clock to a time when minorities and non-Christians knew their place and protest was an anomaly.

To persons beyond the silos of Christendom, the compassionate and welcoming Jesus, whose circle of love embraced humanity in its wondrous diversity and whose prophetic critiques focused on the machinations of the wealthy, powerful, and religiously orthodox, has been eclipsed by scorched earth politics, the condemnation of opponents as evil, heretical, and unpatriotic, alignments with oligarchs and billionaires, and silencing prophets of planetary wellbeing. Christianity’s complicity with racism, homophobia, climate denial, and economic injustice has been starkly revealed in the deaths of George Floyd and others, scapegoating of the LGBTQ community, and the response to America’s original sins of racism and First Nations genocide on theological as well as party lines.

If Christendom isn’t already dead, the most prominent cheerleaders of orthodoxy are killing it as a spiritual option for millennials and emerging generations who view Christianity as anti-science, anti-LGBTQ, anti-environment, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-racial equality, and now anti-fact, anti-medicine, anti-science, and anti-safety. Christianity has already lost traction among baby boomers for whom the New York Times and Starbucks are perceived as more spiritually edifying than Sunday morning worship. In the eyes of millions of North Americans, the Christian exceptionalism touted by conservative Christianity and the racism reflected in hate crimes and the incarceration of toddlers are fabricated from the same ideological cloth. The most vocal politically conservative Christians have found their contemporary Constantine and defenders of the true faith in authoritarian politicians, whose most draconian policies are identified with Christian orthodoxy and whose words, even prevarications, are honored as if they come from the Second Person of the Trinity. When John Shelby Spong asserted that Christianity must change or die, he had no idea that the greatest threat to Jesus’ message would not be outmoded theological positions but the polarizing rhetoric of those who claim to be most theologically orthodox. Yet, Spong’s insights still ring true: bad theology, grounded in authoritarian images of God and doctrine absolutism, leads to dangerous economic, governmental, environmental, and public policy. The orthodox Christian response to the pandemic – often characterized by risky behavior and science denial - has further accelerated suspicion of Christianity among millennials and younger persons as well as their college-educated elders.

While the decidedly unchristian marriage of religion, sexuality, race, guns, and politics has made headline news, those of us who claim to represent the progressive wing of Christianity have been pushed further and further to the margins. Apart from the brief attention given to the Poor Peoples Campaign, over the past decade and during this era of protest and pandemic, progressive Christianity has been virtually unnoticed by the media and overlooked by young adults, both of which fix their attention and animus on the vitriolic rantings and hypocrisy of televangelists and Bible-toting politicians and assume that because we share the label Christian, we are cut from the same ideological and political fabric. Only occasionally does our message of an inclusive, earth and science-affirming, prophetic and socially just Christianity receive attention from journalists and politicians.

In times of social and cultural crisis, we need to reclaim the way of Jesus the Christ, the first-century Jewish healer, and savior, whose revelation embraces, inspires, and affirms every life-supporting cultural and wisdom tradition. Despite the rise, and likely fall, of twenty-first-century Constantinian Christianity and its TrumpChurch, there is a glimmer of hope that Jesus’ radically inclusive and transformational message can be recovered and that the margins of progressive theology and spirituality become the frontiers of adventurous faith. Inspired by Jesus rather than Caesar, the spiritual desert may bloom again, and progressive Christianity may burst forth with a vital, life-changing, open-spirited, and life-transforming personal and planetary message. The heart of this message will be a renewed emphasis on Jesus as healer, prophet, earth lover, and spiritual companion and our role as Jesus’ companions in fostering these earth and person-affirming values.

When Crisis becomes Opportunity

For many of us who have dedicated our lives to theological and congregational leadership, the survival of the progressive movement in Christianity, like the survival of the planet as we know it, is in doubt. To survive, Christianity, even our own progressive visions of faith, must die to self-interest and binary thinking and awaken to world loyalty. Ironically, our survival as a viable movement means letting go of security and opening to creativity. We must be open to creative transformation in the interplay of God’s call and our response. This is especially true in our time of pluralism, protest, and pandemic in which deep down we know that things will never ever be the same again for the institutions we cherish and upon whose fidelity we depend.

Openness to the way of Jesus, which joins treasuring the past and moving forward toward God’s future, involves holding our worry about the future in contrast with wonder at this amazing universe and beautiful planet and the calling that has been placed before us to claim our role as God’s companions in healing the earth. Gratitude, grace, and glory for the wonders of God’s love embodied in earth, sky, and sea, and creation in its amazing diversity will inspire and undergird our doctrinal message and prophetic politics.

It’s all about time, that is, the concrete moment in history, and immersing ourselves in the messiness and uncertainty of our time and discovering that our time is the right time, the Kairos moment when we align ourselves with Jesus’ vision of Shalom and transformation. The progressive faith of the future will not hold onto the past but take chances on God’s visions for the future. Then, again, isn’t this the message of Jesus – those who lose their lives will find them, and those who try to hold onto their lives and place in the social order will lose them? Isn’t this the message of the prophets who called the wealthy to economic sacrifice so they can once again experience God’s vision for their lives?

It may come as a surprise but most of the Bible was written in times of crisis when the future of the tribe, community, nation, or movement was in doubt!

Our survival as a progressive movement is intimately related to the larger issue of planetary survival and for this, we need a miracle. Not a supernatural act of a sleeping and apathetic deity awakened by our prayers, but the miracle of creative transformation that comes when we claim our identity as Jesus’ companions