Light of Christ

Sept 16 / March 9

Dear Gary,

I’ve arrived at what I believe is Laubach’s longest letter yet, the March 9 entry he calls Boundless Joy, Broken Loose. Here he sets forth his objectives for spiritual growth: 1. I must pursue this voyage of discovery in quest of God's will. I must experiment with intercessory prayer. I must confront these Moros with divine love. 

His approach grows out of his conviction that “I do not have to wait until some future time for the glorious hour. I need not sing, “Oh that will be glory for me -” and wait for any grave. This hour can be heaven. 

I concluded, All right. I can embrace at least part of this. I can pursue a discovery of God’s will. I can experiment with intercessory prayer. (I must post a disclaimer here. I do not pray, or if I do it is infrequent. I am introverted to the core and avoid conversations with others, even God. My door mat should read, “Go Away.” You may think this strange for someone whose life work has been the pastorate, but I survived.) With the last goal, confronting the Moros with divine love, I have little connection. I am totally ignorant of the Moros.

Laubach, perhaps through his familiarity with modern science, conceives of God’s actions with humanity as experiments, trying to see what can be accomplished by dealing with individuals. “For do you not see that God is trying experiments with human lives. That is why there are so many of them. He has one billion seven hundred million experiments going on around the world at this moment. And His question is, “How far will this man and that woman allow me to carry this hour?”

 Laubach doesn’t shy from the possibilities. Nor is he one to avoid superlatives. He prays, “God, how wonderful dost Thou wish this hour alone with Thee to be? Any hour for any body can be as rich as God! Fill my mind with Thy mind to the last crevice. Catch me up in Thine arms and make this hour as terribly glorious as any human being ever lived, if Thou wilt.” And I thought, Why not? If he and God can experiment, then so can I. And church begins in 45 minutes. What better hour to open myself to a deeper understanding of God’s will? I even wrote out a list of people for intercessory prayer so I wouldn’t have to extemporize that part of it. 

And so it was during this so-called ‘experiment’ that my pastor blind-sided me. The message was founded on the values of our congregation, specifically the presence of Jesus. Her argument, and I suppose every sermon is intended to be a persuasive argument, is that Jesus (or God or the Spirit, but she ignored the theological confusion introduced by the Trinity) is always with us, and that the Light of Christ is present in every person, waiting to be discovered and used for good. 

Long ago I rejected the physical picture in Genesis of a flat earth with a domelike structure above it to hold back the waters.  What I’ve continued to firmly embrace is the spatial reality of God existing outside myself, refusing to “enter” me (or my heart) until I voiced an invitation, or professed Jesus as my Lord and Savior, or confessed my sins, or was baptized by immersion - a litany of restrictions posed by different churches I’ve attended. These hurdles had to be cleared with the deepest possible sincerity. No equivocating. No doubting. At that point of success Jesus’ presence would be assured at least in the short term. 

Difficulty arises if one doesn’t believe in eternal security, also known as "once saved, always saved.” From this perspective a Christian cannot fall from grace and be consigned to hell. Such an issue is the playground of Arminianism, which asserts that a fall from grace is possible. I only mention this in passing.But here, from my pastor, comes the disruptive teaching that the light of Christ is present in every person. What one’s response should be to that presence I’m not certain, but it certainly circumvents the church’s insistence that it alone holds the keys to the kingdom. My suspicion is growing that Laubach is a Quaker.