Excerpts from Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation on Spiritual Theology by Eugene H. Peterson (Eerdmans) $25.00

The ban on inventing new Jesus stories and sayings was not, as some suggested, repressive. Its effect was to release the imagination for doing what is proper to it, namely, joining Mary the mother of Jesus in pondering Jesus in our hearts (Luke 2:19, 51), meditating our own selves into the presence of Jesus as presented by the Gospel writers, or meditating other settings in which Jesus is met and either crucified again or believed in again by us. And we have been doing it ever since in sermons and Bible studies, in stories and poems, in pilgrimage and silence, in hymns and prayers, in acts of obedience and service in Jesus’ name.

It is essential that we honor this reticence on the part of the Gospel writers. Spirituality is not improved by fantasies. The Christian life is not a field in which to indulge pious dreams.

By accepting Jesus as the final and definitive revelation of God, the Christian church makes it impossible for us to make up our own customized variations of the spiritual life and get away with it, not that we don’t try. We can’t get around him or away from him: Jesus in the incarnation of God, God among and with us…Jesus saves us from wasting our lives in pursuit of cheap thrills and trivializing diversions. Jesus enables us to take seriously who we are and where we are without being seduced by the intimidating lies and illusions that fill the air, so that we needn’t be someone else or somewhere else. Jesus keeps our feet on the ground, attentive to children, in conversations with ordinary people, sharing meals with friends and strangers, listening to the wind, observing the wildflowers, touching the sick and wounded, praying simply and unselfconsciously. Jesus insists that we deal with God right here and now, in the place we find ourselves and with the people we are with. Jesus is God here and now. (pp 33-34.)

For Biblical people, God is not an idea for philosophers to discuss or a force for priests to manipulate. God is not a part of creation that can be studied and observed and managed. God is person---a person to be worship or defied, believed or rejected, loved or hated, in time and place. That is why the biblical revelation is so profuse with names and dates, places and events. God meets us in the ordinary and extraordinary occurrences that make up the stuff of our daily lives. It never seemed to have occurred to our biblical ancestors that they could deal better with God by escaping from history, “getting away from it all” as we say. History is the medium in which God works salvation, just as paint and canvas is the medium in which Rembrandt made works of art. We cannot get closer to God by distancing ourselves from the mess of history.

But most of us have a difficult time understanding history with God as the major and definitive presence. We have grown up getting our sense of history from so-called historians, scholars, and journalists for whom God is not germane or present in what they study and write. We are thoroughly trained by our schools, daily newspapers, and telecasts to read history solely in terms of politics and economics, human interest and environmental conditions, military operations and diplomatic intrigue. If we have a mind for it, we can go ahead and fit God in somewhere or other. But the biblical writers do it the other way around; they fit us into the history in which God is the primary reality.

This is a difficult mindset for us to acquire, but if we are to understand ourselves truly and live appropriately in the history in which we find ourselves, we must acquire it. Otherwise we will fall prey to dodges and denials that incapacitate us for actively participating in the actual world in which God is present and at work.

Reading and praying our way through these history-saturated pages of Scripture, we gradually get it: This is what it means to be a woman, a man---mostly It means dealing with God, God using the authenticating reality of our daily experience as the stuff for working out his purposes of salvation in us and the world. We immerse ourselves in the Scripture narratives and realize that God is the commanding and accompanying presence that provides both plot and texture to every sentence… (pp 139-140.)

“Salvation” is the single word that most succinctly characterizes this play of Jesus in history. If the phrase had not long ago been reduced to a cliché, “Jesus saves” would serve admirably as an adequate summary for what our Scriptures have to say on the subject. But bumper stickers and graffiti have isolated the phrase so completely from the story to which it is the punchline that all the meaning has been drained out of the worlds. We need to recover the salvation story if the salvation words are to mean anything. Salvation is not a one-night stand. It cannot be isolated from the thick texture of history; it is all-encompassing, pulling everything that has happened and happens, and every person named and unnamed, into relationship with the work of God in history… (pp 147-148.)

The great weakness of North American spirituality is that it is all about us: fulfilling our potential, getting in on the blessings of God, expanding our influence, finding our gifts, getting a handles on principles by which we can get an edge over the competition. And the more there is of us, the less there is of God.

It is true that sooner or later in this life we are invited or commanded to do something. But in that doing we never become the subject of the Christian life, nor do we perform the action of the Christian life. What we are invited or commanded into is what I want to call prepositional-participation. The prepositions that join us to God and his action in us and in the world---the with, the in, the for---are very important, but they are essentially a matter of the ways and means of being in on, of participating in, what God is doing.

These ways and means are the second thing basic to the Christian life and also counter to most things North American. Ways and means must be appropriate to the ends they serve. We cannot participate in t God’s work but then insist on doing it our own way. We cannot participate in building God’s Kingdom but then use the devil’s methods and tools. Christ is the way as well as the truth and the life. When we don’t do it his way, we mess up truth and we miss out on the life. (pp. 335-336.)

May 2005