The One Who Writes with Fire

It came in a moment of reflection.  It was a brief meditation over a concept, or rather, a meditation over the interplay between two ways of conceptualizing the divine.

On the one hand, the concept--often troubling--of God as a consuming fire.  Generally, we do not want to be burned.  Burning is bad.  Burning hurts, a bunch if it's you encountering a hot pan, rather more so if you're Servetus after a particularly contentious Presbytery meeting.   Despite all the emo-Jesus Christian Contemporary Music that tries to make it seem romantic, fire-language still feels more than a little bit too reminiscent of Tomas de Toquemada.

Plus, there's a strong negative theology of burning.  Burning is what happens to bad people.  Lakes of fire!  Hot coals!  Sinners get the weeping and gnashing, plus, did we mention you'll be on fire?

Mysticism, of course, has always embraced the divine fire.  It is that light that is kindled in us.  It is the light that awaits, and that we will embrace as it consumes us.

This is the mystic vision, in both Christianity and every other human religion.  It's what Jesus brought and lived out, and what Paul affirmed and spread.

But America is not a very mystic place, and the idea that we will be subsumed into anything annoys us.  That'll destroy our individuality, we grump.  America has always been fiercely self-oriented, but now, it's reached a fever pitch.  Our consumer culture needs us to be distinct and separate and conveniently trackable, more than any culture in human history.

Consumed by the Numinous?  Really?  How will Netflix know our preferences in heaven if it can't pigeonhole our demographic profile?  Think what being indistinctly suffused into the nature of the Holy would do to Amazon Divines business model!  And the Google AfterLifeAds?  They'd be completely random!

The horror.

To my reflections on this idea came another image of the divine, that of God as Author.  I like this image, for reasons that are very slightly transparent.  Yeah, I like to write.  So sure, I see God as an author.  And yes, there's a wee bit of projection involved.  I get that.  But I'm aware of the limits, and aware that it's metaphor.

It just happens to be an excellent metaphor.  The very best.  Ahem.

God is the storyteller, the one who spins out the narratives of our existence and of time and space.  He tells not just our story, but ourselves, writing us into being.  He has authorship over us, and authority, and yet allows us to participate in the telling of the tale, like a master DM spinning out an elegantly complex D&D campaign for a circle of dear friends.

Two different images.  There's the One who Writes.  And the One who Burns.

When I was a little child, those would have been very different metaphors.

But what struck me, in my reflection, was that "burning" and "writing" are now interchangeable words.  They have become synonyms, in this digital age.  Burning is how we write, how we set data into a physical medium.

The two wove up in a reflection, of a God who writes us out with fire, burning the truth of our life into creation.

All this before my second cup of coffee.  What a productive morning.

But We're Up To The Third Coming

There was a lovely little driblet of Jesus data served up by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life yesterday. Funny how these things always come out during Holy Week. Drawing from an exhaustive survey of American Christians done back in 2006, the report gives us a picture of what self-professed Jesus followers do and do not believe about the second coming.

As always, I find myself either 1) in the minority or 2) just not on the map at all. The study shows that of American Christians, 79% believe in the return of Jesus, although once you get to asking how and when and why, things get a bit murkier. 21% don't believe in the Second Coming, don't know, or just don't care.

I guess I'm in some variant of the latter category. Though this is not particularly orthodox of me, I can say it without reservation: anticipation of the bodily return of Jesus of Nazareth is not a central part of my faith. If it happens, fine. But it's not the focus.

I tend to feel this most strongly around Easter. As I read through and pray over the story of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection, I tend to become more and more annoyed with the folks whose faith seems to revolve entirely around hollering about his physical return in the mothership. Though Jesus in the Gospels teaches mostly about 1) the immanence of the Kingdom and 2) his interwoven relationship with God, somehow most of Christendom has made itself theologically indistinguishable from pre-Jesus Judean messianic belief. This seems to render all the things that went on in Christ's previous appearance almost irrelevant. Or, to be frank, his appearances.

Jesus comes the first time. He teaches us everything we need to know to live as God wants us to live. Then, he shows us the depth of God's presence in Him by embodying that life right up to and including a particularly unpleasant death. That's...well...isn't that the First Coming?

After that, we hear that even that death can't stand against His grace, and His disciples witness that He returns from death. "Resurrection" means "again-rising," so if you're doing it again, that means you're not doing it for the first time. If we're being fair about it, isn't that technically the Second Coming?

And then we hear that the Spirit that filled him poured out upon his disciples, and that through that Spirit he was present in them and they were all made part of Him. Unless the Holy Spirit is somehow not actually fully God, doesn't this count too? As a Progressive Pentecostal, I'd say this one is much more important than we generally make it out to be. Not only that, but it would take us up to arrival number three, which is still in process.

And yet still we're waiting around, pointlessly dithering about when and where and who and how. I mean, gracious, how many times does Jesus have to show up before we get it?