Don’t miss this three-part study, “Once, For All: Reconsidering Atonement,” every Thursday evening at 7:30 CDT. You can join us in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church (460 Lake Street, Oak Park; Green Line: Ridgeland) or online at FB Live.

Making Meaning of a Grisly Death

Tim: I trust you had a blessed Easter

Shea: It was a very rich time of sacred reflection, followed by celebration. And you?

Tim: I experienced the same thing. In my reflection, though, I kept my eye on our new series, “Once, For All: Reconsidering Atonement.” Particularly during the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, I was struck with a notion. The grisly death of Jesus—along with the flagrant injustices that enabled his execution—was so traumatic his followers are still struggling to process what really happened over 2000 years later. It’s become a fixation of sorts.

Shea: Trying to make meaning of the cross is Christianity’s greatest obsession. We want all the pieces to fall into place so everything makes sense. But they refuse to go that way. For example, if we sanctify the crucifixion as “God’s redemptive plan,” we sanctify the violence and humiliation Jesus endured as divinely ordained. That doesn’t work.

Tim: No, it doesn’t. There’s also the harrowing moment when Jesus realizes he’s lost touch with God. “Why have you abandoned me?” he cries out. But has God abandoned him? It would seem just when Jesus is most vulnerable God’s presence would be most present—if what we say about God is true.

Shea: Many suggest God turns looks away because the sin Jesus carries is too horrible for God to behold. But that reassigns blame for Jesus’s murder. It’s no longer the corrupt powers of his day who perpetrate this inhumane act. It’s we who bear responsibility. That’s a big leap without much to back it up.

Tim: But there are many scriptures that implicate us in this drama. Paul tells the Romans, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

Shea: The unconditional grace evidenced in Jesus’s submission to death reaches us despite our separation from God. That’s true. But remember Paul sets that idea up with, “God demonstrates God’s own love for us…” He never suggests we’re to blame. That flies in the face of his assertion there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1).

Tim: The cross provides freedom from guilt and shame. Yet we keep trying to turn the particular trauma of Jesus’s death into a universal blame game. God becomes the punisher. Spilled blood and torn flesh turn Jesus into a vicarious victim. Now we get into a very difficult spot where we begin to equate an unjust execution with ancient animal sacrifice rituals—trying to read sacred meaning into a traumatic event metaphorically, never asking if the metaphor works.

Shea: And ignoring the fact that the tradition we draw on—Judaism—expressly forbade human sacrifice, which raises all kinds of warning signs.

Tim: So how do we make meaning of the cross?

Shea: We start where Jesus started, with the Kingdom of God. Jesus dies because his commitment to God’s reign puts him at odds with a corrupt dictatorship. He submits because he knows something that his executioners can’t imagine. The real story happens when he destroys the hold that sin and death has on us all. Yes, the death is horrific. But it’s not the point. The rising is what this story is really about.

Tim: That will preach, my friend! You’ve given us a great start to a very complex subject. I’m really excited to see where these discussions lead us!

Don’t miss this three-part study, “Once, For All: Reconsidering Atonement,” every Thursday evening at 7:30 CDT. You can join us in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church (460 Lake Street, Oak Park; Green Line: Ridgeland) or online at FB Live.

Experiencing “the Other” as Ourselves

Tim: We’re coming to the end of our time with Howard Thurman.

Shea: You’re never really done with him. He sort of gets into your system—

Tim: He’d call it your “consciousness”—

Shea: Yes, he gets right in the middle of how you think about and view your life…

Tim: And long after you’ve put the book down you can hear him in the back of your mind.

Shea: That’s by intention, I think, because Thurman is pretty adamant that spiritual life is lived in community. It’s a collective kind of consciousness that relies on our awareness of each other in order to shape an accurate understanding of how God works in the world.

Tim: In our last sequence of readings—from day 31 on to 40—he keeps returning to a theme: becoming fully human depends on our ability to experience others as fully human. This is particularly important when we encounter folks who don’t resemble us. Zeroing in on their humanity keeps us in touch with our own humanness.

Shea Thurman calls this a “growing edge.”

Tim: And we want to thank him for that, because it’s a powerful reminder that we’re never fully finished, there’s always more…

Shea: Because God is all about more—abundance is God’s M.O. Just when we’re sure we’re at our limit—

Tim:  When it feels like there’s nothing more we can do, there’s nothing left to discover, there’s not another way for God to surprise us—

Shea: Just when we’ve run out, there’s a new growing edge, a new area to explore and learn and find out what God is able to do in us.

Tim: How does scripture describe it? God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we can ask or think according to the power that works in us (Eph. 3:20). We can never run out of growing edges!

Shea: Yet Thurman wants us to understand that being our most human is how we recognize the humanness of those around us. And in that humanity we catch glimpses of the Creator who makes all things possible.

Tim: It’s a powerful idea, especially in the way it holds everything in place: humanity opens us up to God, openness to God alerts us to the humanity in others. I’m so curious about where this conversation is going to go on Thursday night.

Shea: Me too! It’s going to be a great conclusion to what has been a very powerful Lenten series. You don’t want to miss it!

Join us this Thursday as we conclude our Lenten conversation with the help of the great 20^th century pastor, activist, and mystic Howard Thurman. We meet at 7:30pm in the Resource Room of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park or online at FB Live. See you this week!

When the Bubble Bursts

Shea: Our Lenten journey with Howard Thurman takes us into some very interesting territory as Thurman shifts focus to equilibrium and arrives at an illuminating vision of spirituality.

Tim: I’m very curious to see where you’re going with this.

Shea: When I hear people characterize themselves as “spiritual” (often with “but not religious” tagged on), I sense many of them imagine spirituality as a bubble that shields them from life’s complexities. Spirituality is imagined as a retreat rather than an opening to meaningful engagement.

Tim: A lot of Christians turn their faith into a hideaway. Vital practices like prayer and study become escape mechanisms. As the old adage goes, they become so spiritually minded they’re no earthly good.

Shea: I’m convinced Thurman would contest this kind of “spirituality” as not spiritual at all.

Tim: So how would he define spirituality in relationship to everyday living?

Shea: Here’s a little of what he says, “All the negative things are present… But there is something more, there is strength, power… a kind of concomitant overflowing of creative energies” that demand self-honesty.

Tim: He’s talking about balance, learning to take the bitter with the sweet.

Shea: So many folks are devastated when their spiritual bubble bursts… when the hard truths of life intrude on their nirvanas. I’ve seen them fall apart in all kinds of ways. Some question God’s justice: how can God allow this? Others give up on God entirely. Still others become so shaken they give up on life itself.

Tim: Thurman sees balance as a survival skill.

Shea: Slightly paraphrasing, he refers to this as “the ability to bring ourselves, our will, our feelings, our very thoughts and impulses under the synthesizing scrutiny of God.”

Tim: “The synthesizing scrutiny of God”—that’s quite a phrase! What does he mean?

Shea: He’s telling us balanced living isn’t about keeping negativity out; that’s a futile endeavor that he disdains as “flesh.” A genuinely spiritual approach integrates all of life—

Tim: Or, in Thurman’s terms, synthesizes it with God’s help—

Shea: Exactly! All of experience can become useful when we leave the “either/or” concept of balance to embrace an “all of it” approach.

Tim: I love this! It’s a hard idea for us, though, as we’re preconditioned to think in binaries.

Shea: That’s right. And Thurman wants none of that! It turns out that Jesus wasn’t a fan of binaries either!

Tim: We’ll dig into these big ideas in this week’s conversation. It’s going to be exciting!

Join us each Thursday in Lent as we delve more deeply into our spiritual lives with the help of the great 20^th century pastor, activist, and mystic Howard Thurman. We meet each week at 7:30pm in the Resource Room of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park or online at FB Live. See you this week!

Self-Honesty as a Solvent

Tim: As our Lenten conversations with Howard Thurman continue, he keeps returning to prayer.

Shea: In this week’s readings (Days 19-24 in the 40-Day Journey with Howard Thurman) he ties truthfulness to prayer.

Tim: It’s an essential connection, as prayer’s efficacy relies entirely on our honesty.

Shea: We should be honest and real in all we do. But especially when we deal with God, we should go into our prayer times with every intention of being truthful.

Tim: That makes perfect sense. Some would go so far as to suggest self-honesty before God is the default position, since God—being in all and knowing all—is already aware of our needs and weaknesses and desires. That’s what some folks would say.

Shea: Why do I suspect there’s a big “however” coming?

Tim: However, our honesty is neither virtuous nor beneficial to God. That premise turns on an internal contradiction: if God already knows everything about us, why should our candor matter? Self-honesty in prayer doesn’t bless God. It blesses us.

Shea: Thurman says when we pray honestly, we come away with “a sense of being totally understood, completely dealt with, thoroughly experienced, and utterly healed.” We determine how satisfactory our prayer lives are. It’s one of those classic Thurman moments when the reader says, “Of course I know this. It makes perfect sense—so why am I not being 100% honest in my prayer life?”

Tim: There are all kinds of reasons why we hold back in prayer. Some of us are still stuck with this idea that prayer should be approached with exalted language and polite deference. Hard to be candid when you’re trying to write love poetry on the fly! More of us, I think, haven’t learned to be honest with God because we’ve not learned to be honest with ourselves. We don’t want to tell God the truth, because that requires us to admit truths we’d prefer to ignore. I think that’s what Thurman pushes us to overcome, our self-deception.

Shea: That calls us to confess our sins and we’re not cool with that. So much easier to pray for other sinners than to tell God how messed up we are! Yet Thurman gives us an arresting image: he says honest prayer works like solvent that dissolves sin “and the virus begins to be checked in its breeding place.” How can you not love that?

Tim: From there, he summons us to be people of prayer, prayerfully moving through the world, in the self-honesty that comes from prayer, and in the peaceful order that prayerfulness brings.

Shea: Honest prayer settles everything down—our inner selves and our surroundings. The solvent clears up the fogginess and cobwebs that get in our way.

Tim: We’re going to do some honest, prayerful spring-cleaning this week. I’m looking forward to it!

Shea: Amen and ashé! It is so!

Join us each Thursday in Lent as we delve more deeply into our spiritual lives with the help of the great 20^th century pastor, activist, and mystic Howard Thurman. We meet each week at 7:30pm in the Resource Room of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park or online at FB Live. See you this week!

“Lord, Lord, open unto me!” – Howard Thurman

Shea: Too often, I expect to encounter God in larger-than-life experiences.

Tim: Oh yea, those colossal moments where the impossible breaks into our lives. The scriptures are full of them. You know, those earth-wide-flood-ladders-to-heaven-burning-bush-sea-splitting-sun-standing-still type moments.

Shea: Yep. I look for moving mountains or listen for an audible voice to resound from heaven. We read about these fantastical events and expect to encounter God in these types of ways. But I wonder if in doing so we miss the continual ways we are already encountering the divine in daily life? I think we need to recalibrate how we talk and think about this, which can retune our expectations.

Tim: Recalibrating our expectations—say more.

Shea: Gladly. One of the things that I love about Howard Thurman’s work is how he sees the divine in nature and, as a result, in every day encounters—a sunrise, an old oak tree, the mountains standing tall in the distant landscape. These encounters we too often take for granted or dismiss as mundane. They don’t meet our lofty expectations, so we dismiss them as ordinary.

Tim: Perhaps we become too accustomed to the beauty around us? How do we recapture that sense of wonder?

Shea: I think it begins with the seemingly small things we do frequently. Take prayer, for example. For many of us, prayer can become routinized in a way that diminishes the magnitude of the act! Perhaps we think it’s a one-way echo chamber instead of a dynamic conversation that radically reimagines and reshapes life itself. There is no such thing as “ordinary.” Everything is alive with the animating life of God.

Tim: Prayer as a revolutionary act?

Shea: Yes! In prayer, we are opened up. Here, in this postured place, we become aware of God’s presence in us like waves in the sea. The Spirit hovers over those waters and ebbs and flows like the tide. All of a sudden, we become aware that God is always already with us. In search of the divine encounter, what we find is an awakening to the divine reality that we live in dynamic relationship with God. It’s not just communication, but communion.

Tim: Amen. May we repeat the wise mystic’s prayer: “Lord, open unto me!”

Join us each Thursday in Lent as we delve more deeply into our spiritual lives with the help of the great 20^th century pastor, activist, and mystic Howard Thurman. We meet each week at 7:30pm in the Resource Room of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park or online at FB Live. See you this week!

Faith and the Journey Metaphor

Tim: I have something to confess. I’m not a fan of the journey metaphor. Every time I hear people talk about “their journey,” something in me winces.

Shea: Why is that?

Tim: I’m not sure. It’s a very useful construct for contemplating one’s life and spiritual maturity. I get that. But when I hear folks claim, “It’s not the destination, it’s all about the journey,” I feel my head tilting to one side.

Shea: Because…

Tim: Well, it is about the destination; it has to be. Otherwise, it’s not a journey. It’s just wandering. And I think it’s important always to be moving toward something, mostly because I believe faith is inherently aspirational. How did the writer of Hebrews define faith? “The reality of what we hope for, the proof of what we don’t see.”

Shea: Faith compels you to aspire to know and experience and see things beyond your present reality. Howard Thurman points us in that direction with this week’s readings.

Tim: That’s what got me thinking about this. He’s especially eloquent when talks about how slaves of the American South viewed their lives as “a pilgrimage.” Thurman says their spirituals often pointed beyond “the vicissitudes of life” to a “true home of the spirit with God.” When we make it all about “the journey” and lose sight of the destination, I think we get lost.

Shea: So let’s expand on this for a minute. If we think of being Christian as a journey, then we should seek a destination of some kind. Traditionally, that would be the afterlife, correct? Follow Jesus straight up to heaven. But we both know that’s a perilous idea, because some folks mistake that to mean that there’s no point doing anything to improve life here on earth.

Tim: It’s escapist theology, not what Jesus or the Apostles taught. Their intent was radically changing the world—not merely prepping for life beyond the grave. And I don’t think the slave spirituals were only about going to heaven after their hellish existence was over. I believe they knew something we often forget with all our “journey” sentimentality. They knew life with God—a true home of the spirit—was possible in the midst of hell on earth.

Shea: You can feel that in the their lyrics and melodies. They’re going somewhere, but not only in the end, in the great beyond. They’re going somewhere in the here and now.

Tim: Yes! And I think that’s where Thurman directs our attention this week. Being Christian isn’t only about “the journey.” It puts us on the path of becoming something now, something beyond ourselves, something we can’t manage without divine grace and mercy and goodness.

Shea: Amen to that! Which is why the Lenten wilderness is so important. We’re not simply wandering around for the “journey experience.” We’re becoming something.

Tim: That’s the idea. We’ll be exploring this notion of being Christian and becoming this Thursday. I’m looking forward to it.

Shea: I am too!

Join us each Thursday in Lent as we delve more deeply into our spiritual lives with the help of the great 20^th century pastor, activist, and mystic Howard Thurman. We meet each week at 7:30pm in the Resource Room of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park or online at FB Live. See you this week!

Present and Trustworthy

SHEA: We’re starting our new series and we have an amazing conversation partner.

TIM: We sure do! We’ll be spending Lent with the legendary 20^th-century theologian, pastor, activist, and mystic, Howard Thurman. And when you’re in his company, you can expect to see things in fresh, provocative ways.

SHEA: Thurman has had a profound influence on modern Christianity, especially seminarians and pastors—and we’re two of them!

TIM: What makes his prominence especially sweet is how few people who knew him as a young person would have predicted the stature he achieved.

SHEA: He was born in meager circumstances in Florida, but raised by strong parents and grandparents—

TIM: Oh yes. You can’t go too far in his writing or theology without bumping them. They were all deeply committed Christians and magnificent theologians in their own right.

SHEA: Then, as Thurman went on to lead one of the nation’s first interdenominational integrated churches just after World War II and hold positions at Howard and Boston University, the knowledge his parents and grandmother instilled in him became foundational to work.

TIM: He also met and learned from Mahatma Gandhi, which led to his formulation of radical nonviolence as the fulfillment of Jesus’s ideal of God’s kingdom.

SHEA: And he became a major contributor to Martin Luther King Jr.’s message.

TIM: It’s no stretch to say Thurman pastored King. Time after time when he needed strength and clarity Dr. King went back to Dr. Thurman.

SHEA: So why are we embarking on this year’s Lenten journey with Howard Thurman?

TIM: Well, the wisdom and spirituality that we attribute to Thurman is timeless. But it’s especially powerful during periods when we’re drawn to introspective practices. His voice resonates in meditative and reflective moments, when we’re examining our own lives and beliefs. And his message most definitely found its roots in scripture.

SHEA: We’re beginning our desert walk in Jeremiah 17, which (appropriately) paints a picture between those whose lives are barren and those who thrive. Jeremiah sees trust in God as the determining factor.

TIM: Thurman expands on that by describing what we might call the “hereness” of God. He reminds us the active presence of God goes beyond “nearness” or a kind of vague awareness that God is working in the world. For Thurman, to say “God is here” is to confess God is trustworthy and present in every aspect of our lives. This divine “hereness” is the bedrock of our faith.

SHEA: If we’re walking through Lent’s desert with Howard Thurman, we’re going to have the pleasure—and intense challenge—of finding God in unlikely places, at moments when it feels like God is everywhere and other times when it seems like God is nowhere.

TIM: I pray this will be a life-changing Lent for us all.

SHEA: Amen!

Join us each Thursday night in Lent as we travel with Howard Thurman. To make the most of your experience, we recommend picking up 40-Day Journey With Howard Thurman (Augsburg Press, available at amazon and other online book retailers). We meet every Thursday at 7:30pm, in the Resource Room of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park.

Side Effects

Tim: We’ve been talking about Liberation Theology and freedom. Yet I’ve met a lot of folks who don’t associate Christianity with liberty. In fact, they hold the opposite view. For them, the Church—a.k.a. “organized religion”—has been an oppressive force for ill in their lives. How do we resolve that?

Shea: It’s a big problem, because religious oppression takes many forms. That’s why I’m reluctant to lay it at the feet of the Church, the authentic Body of Christ. On the other hand, religion is, has always been, a challenge.

Tim: It’s an important distinction to make. For folks who’ve been shamed or wounded because of dogmatic overreach, religion is discredited as a false front for intolerance. It’s seen as a safe haven for bullies who harm folks unlike themselves.

Tim: For instance?

Shea: Historically, religion has spent too much energy keeping minorities and non-conformists out. The most glaring example is the subjugation of women. It’s hard to conceive that welcoming women into ministry and leadership is a relatively recent phenomenon. In America, racial segregation in worship and faith communities was the norm until the late 20^th century. Now we’re working to reclaim LGBTQ folks who’ve become targets of religious hatred and violence.

Tim: It’s troubling that religion-bred homophobia, misogyny, and racism are still with us. Worse still, they’re not hiding out in musty church basements. Religious oppression operates loudly in the public square with no regard for the damage it causes.

Shea: It ruins lives and perverts the teaching of Jesus to create a country club mentality that rejects outsiders as “not our kind.” And there’s a wrapper around all of it that makes it possible.

Tim: It’s called legalism, a systemic effort to construct exclusionary and oppressive doctrines based on very narrow readings of ancient texts.

Shea: Now you’re in seminary mode! In lay English, please…

Tim: Abusing scripture to oppress and exclude other folks who don’t look, behave, or believe like the dominant group. It’s an age-old strategy: championing rules that keep the powerful on top while those with less or no power struggle. These moves are clearly side effects of organized religion.

Tim: And how does this intersect with Liberation Theology?

Shea: If, as Paul tells the Galatians, we’re set free to be free, we have to keep a close watch on legalism and its side effects. That means we have to really understand what these texts mean and ladder up to. If they don’t get us to freedom, we have to temper our response to them.

Tim: Sometimes it’s as basic as saying, “I don’t believe that,” and moving on. And yet, because I’m a liberation theologian, I also have to question what’s really going on with these texts that get misused. What is the Law’s purpose in our faith tradition?

Shea: That’s the big question this Thursday night! And I’m very eager to tune into the study, because one our great friends, Tyler Tully, will be leading us.

Tim: It’s going to be outstanding!

Join us each Thursday in February as we plug back into freedom with our new series, “Set Free to Be Free: Liberation Theology.” We meet at 7:30pm CST at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park with live-streaming via FB Live.

No Turning Back

Shea: We’re looking at the Exodus this week, the cornerstone of Liberation Theology.

Tim: That’s a great way to describe it, because the story of how God frees the Israelites from Egyptian slavery is foundational to our understanding of freedom. It’s such an epic tale that it can’t be contained in religious thought. The Exodus is emblematic of virtually any account of human beings breaking free from oppression and confinement.

Shea: U.S. history is welded to Exodus—and not without some irony. The first Europeans painted their New World flight from religious persecution as their own Exodus. Early American documents ring with allusions to Moses and fleeing the whip of Pharaoh.

Tim: And this New World was routinely called “the Promised Land.”

Shea: A reference they may have take a little too seriously, since they behaved toward Native American peoples in the same violent, colonizing manner we observe when Israel takes hold of Canaan.

Tim: One of human history’s oldest lessons: the oppressed become the oppressor!

Shea: America was hardly the Promised Land for Africans who were abducted from their villages, shipped like cargo across the sea, and forced into slavery.

Tim: Yet the Exodus becomes their great theme, too, and slave songs crying out for freedom become America’s first great art form. For them, Beulah Land was freedom itself. The geography of the slave wilderness was mapped on the whiplashed backs and broken bodies whose dignity and humanity were denied by a new class of Pharaohs.

Shea: In more recent times, the language of LGBTQ coming out stories and racial justice movements echo with Exodus references.

Tim: Jesus’s ministry and message do the same thing. All you need to do is look at the Hebrew texts he cites to recognize him as the author of Liberation Theology! So what do we do with all of this?

Shea: We lay claim to the truth of scripture. God made all humans to be free and equal. Poverty, degradation, and oppression are the products of human opposition to God’s will. Thus, God upholds the poor, marginalized, and oppressed at the expense of human systems of power.

Tim: Freedom is, and must be, our most cherished value. That’s why, once we’re lifted out of oppression and poverty, we must never turn back. Egypt may look good in the rearview mirror. But it’s nowhere we want to be.

Shea: It’s nowhere anybody wants to be or ever should be. So our commitments to justice and righteousness compel us to live in freedom for freedom. If one of us isn’t free…

Tim: None of us is free. Lots to talk about this week!

Join us each Thursday in February as we plug back into freedom with our series, “Set Free to Be Free: Liberation Theology.” We meet at 7:30pm CST at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park with live-streaming via FB Live.