This year has been a season of finding ways to understand forgiveness. The dissolution of my marriage was final last month, the month previous to that my mother died, ending the possibility of a reconciliation after an estrangement stretching back to my sophomore year of high school. Some friendships have been severely tested, my own understanding of ordination and my career, including ordination, always on the edge of dashing away into a world where I don’t have to be angry with church people or institutions or myself for failing them. Forgiveness… moving forward into a future with hope, knowing that putting pieces together and healing the world is an act of courage and sometimes bold naivete. One foot in front of the other, perhaps, with blinders on.
In the midst of this, a few weeks ago, I attended a gathering of emergent church people, a talk given by Doug Pagitt. Something he said has stuck with me. He said that there is a breed of people a friend of his calls “vampire Christians.” They’re the ones who seem to want Jesus for his blood and not much else. Now, my first reaction to this statement was, “Oh, yeah… them.” As though I’m not at all related, that I don’t have something I’m primarily interested in Jesus for, too. I can get pretty far saying this (insert appropriate liberal snideness), since after all I’ve got a pretty solid argument against atonement theories that focus on Jesus’ death without caring too much about either his incredible living or the transformational resurrection. I can talk my way around that crucifixion till your head spins. Theological. Political. Cultural. Whatever fancy-pants avoiding-the-issue sorts of arguments you want, I got’em.
The problem is, at heart, I’ve got to deal with the fact that really, I’m in the same boat as a vampire Christian. Hell, I’m holding the same paddle. Because what I really want from Jesus, what I have needed, in fact, is forgiveness. What I’m saying is, they may want Jesus for his blood, those vampire Christians, but this year I pretty much have been wanting him for his empty tomb and not much else. The great Jesus-do-over. Which is wrong, too.
Now, I haven’t been asking for the kind of forgive-and-forget toxic silliness that we so carefully teach children. No. The kind of forgiveness I’ve been looking for is filled with consequence, and learning, and a sense of deep peace and hope that despite what’s been broken or damaged or hurt, I can’t fix it because after all that’s above my pay grade, there’s only one power in the world strong enough to mend what’s not right here. The kind of forgiveness that has God stroking my face and telling me it’s not really okay, but that’s not the point because lessons are learned and the world is different because of them and in fact it’s going to be better, fuller, more significantly joyous because it’s about dimension, not simplicity and God’s working despite my impression that it’s up to me. Which is great, I’m sure. I’ve done some serious thinking about this, lots of praying, too much crying, and I think this is an okay kind of forgiveness to desperately want. ButI’m not saying forgiveness isn’t a wonderful thing to want.
I’m not even saying that seeking it and growing it in the world isn’t a noble venture. I’m saying, it’s not the whole picture. I recently heard someone say that if you boiled down the three Abrahamic religions into one word, Judaism = family, Islam = prayer, and Christianity = forgiveness. I don’t think any Jew, Muslim, or Christian would be totally happy with that assessment, no matter how wonderful those three things are. ‘Cause we can’t just want Jesus (or God, for that matter) for one thing, especially when that one thing is just for ourselves. It’s either the whole picture or we’re just vampire Christians, there for the part that makes us feel good and fed and ironically limiting ourselves from growing because of it. We’ve got to be willing to say, yes… Jesus’ life, the fact of him, says something about us and the world, about me and how I live. Yes, Jesus’ death does, too, on a cross, at the hands of religious authorities and the government, because of the brokenheartedness inherent in this humanity. Yes, the resurrection is central to how I am because I believe that somehow, through some mystery, God’s managed to overcome death with love and transformed the most horrible horrors into the possibility of hope. All three, together, are the story. Maybe I can get out of this by saying that, for me, they’re all about forgiveness. They’re certainly all about redemption. And that might be enough.
How are you a vampire Christian?
This morning after the dawn Ash Wednesday service, I looked around and saw this small group of people with whom I’d worshipped… I attended a local Episcopal church rather than my own because my schedule today doesn’t allow for going to an evening service, and honestly, I needed the heavy purple ritual, incense and dark wood, the early morning crispness, and the sense of being out of place. So, Lenten ashes and Eucharist in a new community. One of the things that I love about church is that, after years of finding myself drawn there and yet feeling entirely foreign to it, I am now at peace with the fact that actually no one feels totally comfortable anywhere. And we’re all just sort of wandering around hoping for a moment that makes sense and is beautiful and feels whole, is connected to something. So, I looked around and saw all of these strangers, people from my neighborhood who I had never met before, and seeing the dark smear of ashes on their foreheads, felt a surprising sense of home. The rector, a sweet-voiced woman who reminded me of someone I can’t quite place, talked about ashes and bread. The ashes remind us that we are human, she said. They tell us who we are. That we’re breakable. That we’re fragile. That we’re not God. But on Ash Wednesday, you can’t revel in the ashes. Rolling around in them, rending your garments, confessing your sin, these are all necessary and important, essential to recognizing yourself and your place in the human family. But it can not end there, even at the beginning of the Lenten season. The sharing of the Great Banquet in community with God and other people must follow. Crucifixion is meaningless without resurrection. Knowing who you are as a human being is nothing if you don’t know who God is. The bread and wine (and yes, I can say “wine” today, because it really was), they are evidence of who God is, has been, and will be. Knowing we’re broken doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if we don’t have hope for healing. This Lent, this forty days in the wilderness, it’s an opportunity for recognition… of our own failings, the things we do and leave undone… but I can’t forget that it leads somewhere, and that place is the other side of pain. God will show us the path through the desert, and guide us along it. When we fall down, it will be with God’s grace holding our elbows and lifting us up, pointing us back in the right direction. Because we’re humans, and not God, and that’s grace. You don’t have to do it alone, and it doesn’t have to look perfect. Even tomorrow, when the ashes have washed away, I’ll still be fragile. God will help me remember that, and remind me that God loves fragility because it allows space for God’s strength and gives me a reason to continue to search for home.
***This is the third of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled 
