Читать книгу Radical Welcome - Stephanie Spellers - Страница 24

That invitation reveals another face of God. The Holy and Immortal One could choose to act without us, could choose to be the watchmaker who sets creation in motion and then walks away. But the very nature of God is to be in relationship, first within the Godhead, then with all of creation, and even with each of us, making us the very children and partners of God.

According to orthodox theology, the Trinitarian God is a God in perichoresis, or an eternal, continual dance, with Godself. The Creator is in union with the Redeemer who is in union with the Sustainer who is in union with the Creator—at all times and in all places. That relational quality propels God into creation, where God yearns for relationship with us all and draws us beyond our barriers and into relationship with each other.

In Scripture we see this God going forth, claiming Abraham and his descendants and establishing a covenant relationship with them.⁴ That promise sustains the Israelites during their forty-year sojourn in the wilderness, and the Deuteronomist reminds them of the relationship when despair threatens. “It is the Lord who goes before you. God will be with you; God will not fail you or forsake you. Do not be afraid or be dismayed” (Deuteronomy 31:8). However dire the circumstances, however stacked the deck may be against them, they can always cling to the faithful promise of the One who speaks to them and has claimed them as beloved children.

Through the incarnation, God takes that intimate relationship another radical step forward. This time, God comes not only to dwell by our side but to share everything about our condition, surrendering the privilege of heavenly consort to take up a dwelling place within humanity. Some of the most beautiful poetry in the Bible is reserved to describe this wondrous moment, when “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only who came from the Creator, full of grace and truth” ( John 1:14). Upon joining us, Jesus extends himself to humanity, yearning to know and be known, to have us join him in the divine union he has shared with his Abba God from the beginning of time:

Abide in me as I abide in you. ... As my Abba has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Abba’s commandments and abide in that love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. (John 15:4, 9–11)

Listen closely and you will detect echoes of perichoresis, the eternal, interweaving dance between the three persons of the Trinity. The Son abides in us and we in die Son, who also abides in his Abba and thus allows us to abide with his Abba as well. The dance of embrace, mutual embrace, never ends. Through Christ, the relational God has grasped us, and we are inextricably bound up in the joy of the divine life.

Nearly two thousand years later, healer, teacher, social critic, and mystic Henri Nouwen summed up the mystery, power and call of the incarnation in these words:

Jesus, in whom the fullness of God dwells, has become our home. By making his home in us, he allows us to make our home in him. By entering into the intimacy of our innermost sell he offers us the opportunity to enter into his own intimacy with God. By choosing us as his preferred dwelling place he invites us to choose him as our preferred dwelling place. That is the mystery of the incarnation.⁵

This is our God: a God who chose us as a preferred dwelling place and waits longingly for us to choose to dwell within God and align our lives with God’s own will. This is our God: a God who yearns for relationship with us, risks everything for relationship with us, and finally dies to be in relationship with us. If we ever wondered or doubted God’s yearning for relationship with us, the incarnation proves God’s desire with humbling clarity.

Grace is too good to believe. The world wants to exclude certain people, say they shouldn’t be allowed inside. The church says, No one is excluded. We’re radically open. God keeps getting bigger, and we have to expand with God.

HOWARD ANDERSON, FORMER RECTOR, ST. PAUL’S-DULUTH

Such incarnational theology is one of the hallmarks of the Anglican Way. The Church of England’s first systematic theologian, Richard Hooker, boldly proclaimed that something of God is present in all life, and that via the incarnation we are indeed “partakers” in the divine life. “All other things that are of God have God in them and he them in himself likewise. . . . All things therefore are partakers of God, they are his offspring, his influence is in them.”⁶ For Hooker, this means we are at once held by God and the ones who hold God. The Almighty God has chosen to be in union with us, taking on created nature and in the process joining us to God’s own life.

More than that, Hooker believed God has chosen to be vulnerable to us, chosen to need us, and even to impart a spark of the divine nature to us. “Sith God hath deified our nature (by the union confirmed through the incarnation), ... we cannot now conceive how God should without man either exercise divine power, or receive the glory of divine praise”⁷ God has established a radically mutual relationship with humanity, and based on those terms we are God’s partners, the ones on whom God depends. Those are the radical implications of the incarnation, and they reveal the profoundly relational being of God.

God invites us to share in that nature, not only by some pure, mystical connection to God in Christ, but through our flesh, blood and spirit relationships with one another. At times, the church has conveniently interpreted this call as one to uniformity. If anything, what Christ came to offer, and died making possible, was union:

[H]e is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross. (Ephesians 2:14–16)

God rejoices when we move beyond ourselves, beyond our hostility and ignorance and suspicion, past our “dividing walls” and into relationship with one another, signifying to the world that we are one reconciled body, the body of Christ. In this, we reflect the mutual relationship and union that is the very nature of Godself.