A Heart for the Future: Writings on the Christian Hope
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A Heart for the Future: Writings on the Christian Hope
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781725239432 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wipf & Stock Publishers |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 318 |
| File size: | 28 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Robert Boak Slocum is the author, editor, or co-editor of fourteen books, including Fearful Times; Living Faith (ed. with Martyn Percy); The Anglican Imagination; Light in a Burning-Glass: A Systematic Presentation of Austin Farrer's Theology; Seeing&Believing: Reflections for Faith; A Heart for the Future: Writings on the Christian Hope (ed.); and The Theology of William Porcher DuBose: Life, Movement, and Being. He taught theology courses at Marquette University on Christ and culture, explorations in Christian theology, and quests for God. He later served at St. Catharine College in Kentucky as Dean of the School of Arts&Sciences and taught courses in religious studies and applied ethics. He was the President of the Society of Anglican and Lutheran Theologians, and Co-Convenor of the Society for the Study of Anglicanism. He served on the board of the Anglican Theological Review. He was the clergy in charge of congregations in the dioceses of Louisiana, Milwaukee, and Lexington. He was ecumenical officer of the Diocese of Lexington. He currently serves as the Narrative Medicine Program Coordinator at University of Kentucky HealthCare, where he teaches an elective rotation for senior medical students on the narrative basis for patient care and resilient practice. He serves on the Hospital Ethics Committee. He lives in Danville, Kentucky, with his wife, Victoria. He has three grown children, Claire, Rebecca, and Jacob.
Read an Excerpt
A HEART FOR THE FUTURE
WRITINGS ON THE CHRISTIAN HOPE
By ROBERT BOAK SLOCUM
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2004 editor and contributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89869-399-7
CHAPTER 1
A Heart for the Future
Reflections on the Christian Hope
ROBERT BOAK SLOCUM
When we say the Lord's Prayer, we pray for the coming of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven. We celebrate our expectancy for this completion in the liturgical season of Advent. The Prayer Book Catechism concludes with a section dedicated to the Christian hope, which is "to await the coming of Christ in glory, and the completion of God's purpose for the world" (BCP, 861). Austin Farrer warns in the sermon "Always Beginning" that "God has put his infinity in our mind, and if we cannot stretch out for him beyond the little beginnings here allowed us, we must let go of God and loose him wholly." And yet the Christian hope, or eschatology, has been a neglected area in theology and in the life of the church. This neglect can cause the church to be "backward-looking" in its perspectives, more concerned about where we have been than where we are going. Appreciating our destination in terms of the future has everything to say about how we pray, serve, reflect, and decide in the life of the church today. This essay presents a collection of twenty-two reflections — in their own way topical, even propositional — to consider the future we are called to and how we may welcome it today.
Wrath
I remember attending an Advent service in Wisconsin in the 1980s where the congregation sang "Day of wrath! O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophets' warning, Heav'n and earth in ashes burning!" (Hymn 468, The Hymnal 1940). This was not a hopeful prospect, but it may have given expression to the dread of the future that is present in many of us. The good news is that God will treat us better than we would have expected. It seems that Jesus was constantly scandalizing people in this way. The woman taken in the act of adultery is neither condemned nor stoned to death but told by Jesus to go and sin no more (John 8:3–11). Zacchaeus, the swindling tax collector, is invited to share a meal (Luke 19:1–10). Workmen arriving late in the day get the full day's wage (Matt. 20:1–16). The prodigal son returns home not to harsh punishment for his mistakes but to the welcoming embrace of his father's love and forgiveness; they have a party (Luke 15:11–32).
I'm sure these stories caused difficulties for Jesus' hearers and for Christians throughout the ages. Some may say, "It's not fair! That's not what they deserve!" And the critics are right, of course. It's not what "they" deserve. I remember a parishioner of mine who was concerned about the statement in Eucharistic Prayer D (BCP, 374) that Jesus proclaimed "to prisoners, freedom." He figured that if they were in prison, that's where they belonged, and we shouldn't be praying for anything different! Certainly God our maker knows us — our fallibility, our history, our mistakes. But God also knows who and what we can be in terms of sharing the fullness of divine life and the completion of divine love. That gift is waiting for us, available, and it will become an increasingly present reality as we let go of fear and move into the future of God's love. We can trust that we will be treated better than we deserve.
Acorn and Oak
What is our future in Christ? Answering that question will tell us much about our lives of faith today. There's an old saying that an acorn is only understood in terms of the magnificent oak tree that it can become. Its meaning will elude us if we think only in terms of what the acorn is now as we hold it in the palm of a hand. Under the right conditions, it will become an oak tree and nothing else. Nothing less than becoming an oak tree represents a fulfillment of the acorn's potential. That's its end (in Greek, telos).
And nothing less than a full union with God represents a fulfillment of our potential. That's our end. If we try to understand our lives just in terms of who and what we are now, we'll miss what matters most. We can fail to see beyond ourselves. We're meant for the uninterrupted fullness of sharing God's love. Who we are and how we live today as Christians has everything to do with the future we're meant to enjoy. We may call the uninterrupted fullness of sharing God's love "heaven"; we can describe it as the "beatific vision," or think of it in terms of everlasting life in the kingdom and glory of God. But the completion of Christ's life in us must be located in the future. We may be nearer to salvation than we once were (Rom. 13:11b), but we're not "there" yet. We hope for the completion of what is already begun in our lives, our church, our world. But how do we understand it? How do we prepare that ground? How do we seek it and move toward it? Knowing that an acorn is meant to be an oak can inform how we treat it today, if we really want it to become an oak. We plant it in good soil, where it will get enough water and light. And our lives today — our choices, our actions, our silences — can be shaped and guided in light of our true end in divine love.
Destination
In the poem "Limited," the American poet Carl Sandburg provides an image of an express train hurtling across the prairie with fifteen all-steel coaches and a thousand people. He then warns darkly that "[a]ll the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes." Asked his destination, a passenger replies, with unconscious irony, "Omaha." That destination, in itself, will ultimately lead to scrap and ashes. We need and are meant for something more than Omaha (or Miami or Seattle) as our destination. The apostle Paul urges that we are destined by God for salvation in Christ, not for wrath (1 Thess. 5:9). We need to know where we're called to be and where we're headed, because our sense of destination has much to say about our priorities and choices of direction today.
Diogenes Allen considers the end and the last things of human life relative to "East Coker," the second of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Our mortal end is death, the same end faced by our ancestors. Allen calls attention to Eliot's use of the motto attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots, "In my beginning is my end." The dominant theme of the first part of "East Coker" is decay, and the dance of the peasants in this poem is a dance of death. East Coker was Eliot's ancestral village, and "Eliot will become part of the earth, just like his ancestors." But there's another possibility. When the image of God is understood as a principle of our being, Allen urges, "our life has a different end than the earth." The motto of Mary, Queen of Scots, is reversed by Eliot at the conclusion of "East Coker": "In my end is my beginning." Our end is to realize the image of God. We make a new beginning whenever we discern what we are to become, and when we obey Jesus we "reject a life style that leads to death as our ultimate end and find our rightful place in the ultimate order." As we accept the offer of life in God, our true destination is not one of decay, rust, and ashes. There is always a new beginning and hope for us in the fullness of God's love. That is our future and our true destination.
Grief
People suffer. Sooner or later, we all experience significant loss. This may be the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, a missed opportunity, or the end of a relationship. We may find ourselves missing familiar surroundings after a move, or we may wonder what happened when our familiar surroundings have changed around us. Our situation may change rapidly with a threatening diagnosis from the doctor, or a really bad year for investments, or a phone call that tells us about a tragic event. Or we may notice that our most basic capacities and strengths fade with the passing years. We can no longer count on things or possibilities that were once so important. Eventually, we face grief.
St. Paul advises not to be ignorant concerning the dead and not to grieve as those who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13). Significantly, he does not forbid grieving the loss of a loved one, but he urges that Christian grieving take place with a significant perspective. The loss is real, and it hurts. But the loss is not the last word. Christian hope makes a difference. Life and love continue in Christ. Our lives are changed, not taken away in death. Indeed, love never ends (1 Cor. 13:8).
As he neared the end of his life, the controversial Episcopal priest James DeKoven (1831–79) preached a sermon for the last Sunday of the church year on the miraculous feeding of the five thousand. After the feeding, Jesus commands his disciples to gather up the fragments left over of the five barley loaves and the two fish, "that nothing may be lost" (John 6:12). The sermon was titled "Gathering Up the Fragments," and DeKoven reflected that only in God are the broken fragments and shards of our life gathered up and made whole.
DeKoven was well acquainted with disappointment, loss, and brokenness. He had been nominated and elected as bishop of Illinois, but his election was not ratified by the requisite number of diocesan standing committees in the Episcopal Church because of doubts about his theology. And yet at the end of his life, he articulated a theology of hope so that, as the church year ended and Advent approached, he could look forward to the completion of all things in God. DeKoven urged, "the Gospel for the day tells of something still that can be done, even for a wasted life, saying, 'Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.' The fragments of a life, beloved! The broken pieces of a mighty whole — they may be gathered up again."
As we grieve our losses, we are called to remember that all the broken bits of our lives are to be completed in God. We will grieve, but not without hope. As we hear in the psalm (30:5), "weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning." Whatever the darkness of our grief, the joy is ultimately the completion of all our purposes and all our fragments in the future of God's love, who wants nothing to be lost.
The Future in the Present and the Past
Sharing God's love has everything to do with our life today. Knowing God's love isn't just for "heaven" and doesn't require us to "go" somewhere or wait for a special time. God has known us and loved us from the beginning of our existence, as when God "knit me together in my mother's womb" (Ps. 139:12). God has always loved us and our world. Creation was an act of love by God. We are part of that Creation, and our lives are a good gift from a loving God. God's love is part of our past.
Even when humanity sinned and turned away from God, the love of God persisted and was constant to save us. In the times of the Old Covenant, God reached out in love for humanity through law and prophets. Finally, decisively, God's own Son, Jesus, came to humanity for our salvation. Jesus reveals God's love in human terms; his love and ministry are continued in the world by the church, even though the church as a whole and all of us in the church have erred and fallen short of God's glory (Rom. 3:23; see Article XXI of the Articles of Religion, BCP, 872).
Because we have known God's mighty acts of love in the past, we recognize the importance of our history and tradition. In many ways, the past has made us what we are. Because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, we call ourselves Christians. We revere the sacred record of the scriptures and affirm that the scriptures contain all things necessary for salvation (see Article VI of the Articles of Religion, BCP, 868). We can learn much about ourselves and about God as we recall how God was present to the people of Israel; and how Jesus lived and showed the face of God's love in the world; and how the early church took the first dramatic (if at times faltering) steps to continue Jesus' ministry in the power of the Spirit.
Seeds of Hope
For Christians, the best is always yet to come. For "now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known" (1 Cor. 13:12b). The past certainly shapes and forms our identity as Christians today. But our past points beyond itself to the future, so that we must not cease from exploration or give up the journey of faith. The beginnings of faith in the world are dramatically recalled and conveyed to us through scripture and tradition, word and sacrament, memory and practice. But the completion of our faith is not yet realized in us, our church, or our world. We stand between the times, between beginning and completion, between start and resolution of the Christian hope. At this time it would be faithless to deny the beginning, and it would be foolish to claim the realization or end.
For now, we have the "seeds" of who and what we are to be. We have the beginning but not the end. The beginning points us in the way of the end and gives us hope. But the fulfillment of the beginning is not found back there in the past; it is not even found here in the present. The Christian hope faces us squarely into the future, where the completion of God's love for us will be found. That orientation toward the future has everything to do with how we live today, in the present.
Surprise
If the seeds of our past and present in Christ are to be fulfilled in the future, how should we live? What can we do to welcome and receive that future, so we may be the people we're meant to be in the fullness of God's love? If we have begun a journey of faith and not yet "arrived" at our destiny or destination, then clearly we are headed for a place or way or time that will be somehow different from what we now experience. Not altogether different, perhaps, because the love of God we now experience will be the same love we hope to know fully. We can expect consistency of purpose and expression between what we already know of God's love and what the future will be. We can rely on God's integrity. But the expression and the experience promise to be quite different! Openness to the graceful and unexpected ways of divine love is essential for us.
As Christians, we need to be ready for discernment and open to surprise. Participating in God's grace to know our destiny in Christ requires discernment. Not everything will be helpful and certainly not everything will be divine. There will be distractions, seductions, and misunderstandings. We will need to "test the spirits" (1 John 4:1), using the gifts of scripture and tradition to provide our compass as we seek to navigate and explore our new world of faith. But we will also need to take some risks. If we hesitate to venture into unfamiliar territory, we may need to recall that the fullness of God's love is to be encountered in ways beyond our current knowing. Even as we hold on to the rudder of divine gifts from the past, we can look forward into a future of faith and life that will surpass our expectations. God promises us "great and hidden things [we] have not known" (Jer. 33:3). The future of God's love is more than we can put into words. It will surprise us! It may also demand more of us than we can imagine, as we find our heart "battered" by God, whose love is relentless. John Donne prays:
Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend, That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new....
God's surprising future for us may be stunning in its beauty and its challenge, as we find ourselves broken, blown, and battered by love.
Patient Impatience
This expectant outlook makes for a paradoxical stance, a kind of "patient impatience." Having a heart for the future is not "otherworldly," as if to deny the importance of the realities in our world today. On the contrary, through today's realities we venture from the present into the future of God's love. Our present reality includes our needs, limitations, hopes, gifts, and desires. Through all of who we are, God engages us and invites us into the future. Therefore we need to consider our current circumstances and conditions with the utmost care and seriousness. Even as we look for something more, beyond the limits of the present visible reality, we also know that the seeds of God's future are here in the present, and only through the present may we begin to discover what the future will reveal. What we do today shapes and forms who we will be in the future and how God's love may be realized and completed in our lives. Farrer urges that "heaven alone gives final meaning to any earthly hopes" and "we have no way to grasp at heavenly hope, than by pursuing hopeful tasks here below."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A HEART FOR THE FUTURE by ROBERT BOAK SLOCUM. Copyright © 2004 editor and contributors. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Dedication and Acknowledgments ix
1 A Heart for the Future: Reflections on the Christian Hope Robert Boak Slocum 1
2 This Body of Hope Robert M. Cooper 31
3 Parousia and Christian Hope Ralph Del Colle 48
4 Beneath the Edge of Thought: Inner Eschatology and the Burden of Hope Travis Du Priest 59
5 Jesus and Eschatology Reginald H. Fuller 72
6 "I See Your Bridal Chamber Adorned": An Eastern Orthodox Reflection on the Eschaton in Light of the "Pattern" of Divine Worship Hieromonk Alexander Golitzin 82
7 The Eschatological Eucharist Charles Hefling 96
8 The Historic Ought-to-Be and the Spirit of Hope Robert D. Hughes III 109
9 Where Lies the Path of Hope in Everyday Life? Thomas Hughson, S.J. 121
10 What Shall We Do While Waiting for the End? Alan Jones 151
11 "In Times Like These We Need an Anchor": The Quest of a Storm-Tossed Church for a Sure and Certain Hope Harold T. Lewis 172
12 Sorting Out Some Synoptic Scenes: The Destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Coming of Jesus Jeffrey Allen Mackey 183
13 To Build the New City: An Eschatological and Secular Hope Jacqueline Schmitt 193
14 An Augustinian Reflection on the Church and Hope George H. Tavard 207
15 Baptismal living: Steadfast Covenant of Hope Fredrica Harris Thompsett 220
16 The Final Reconciliation: Reflections on a Social Dimension of the Eschatological Transition Miroslav Volf 233
17 The Intolerable Burden of the Past, the Pure Figment of the Present, and the Surpassing Worth of the Future Paul F. M. Zahl 268
18 Heaven as a State of Mind: Peter Abelard's "O quanta qualia" Wanda Zemler-Cizewski 278
19 Heavenly Hope: How the Book of Revelation Sings to My Chronic Pain John D. Zemler 287
Contributors 301