Paying Our Own Penalties

WE HAVE NOW, with our usual prolonged ostentatious vigor, completed our celebration of the advent of the Christ child, and have no recourse but to intrepidly slog on, through a mire of trumped up twitter tweets, long dark days of dirty snow, insipid Facebook posts, and border wall disputes, towards the even holier season of Lent and Easter, as we accompany the Son of Man and God through early adulthood, back from India and the eighteen lost years, to his ultimate premature death at the hands of the petty and the vicious, meaning ourselves, guilty by association. Our solace is that we can do all this while awaiting and appreciating the approach of spring, which these days arrives in mid winter. For that, we thank capitalism. Nobody who knew Joshua ben Joseph considered him to be a God, or anything other than a friend and damned good teacher (the God part came later), except maybe John (the unknown author who claimed to be John), who was, we must confess, a bit overly zealous in promoting his mentor's virtues. Nobody who ever wrote anything about Jesus ever met him, or even came close. We think he existed, but can't prove it, and therefore can't be sure. Hence, our faith. On Facebook I waded through the great swamp, through proclamations of intent to become a new woman, and to never let people with bad attitudes quench my cigar, as Brecht said, proud overstatements that this momma is one bad ass babe who aint gonna take nothin' from nobody no more and evidently wants the world to know it and inexplicably thinks the world might care - and found my seventh grade teacher from 1967-68. Back then he was mid twenties, and we all loved him, and learned from him to love our state's ambivalent history. Now, he's past eighty, and still a devout Episcopalian. His posts are thought provoking and wise, and make no promises to kick anyone's ass who gets in the way of this bad ass momma, so I read them. In response to one concerning something having to do with redemption through Christ, I responded that to me it seems incongruous at best, and pathological at worst, that a compassionate and loving God would require the torturous death of a beautiful person to achieve salvation for sinners. Then I braced myself, and returned briefly to the mad mommas, newly empowering themselves with cliches, thinking this a good place to hide in the virtual age from my doubtless vengeful seventh grade teacher. His response shocked, amazed, and gladdened me. "I also reject penal substitutionary theology", was the gist of it, "and my take is that Christ brought love into the world, offered it as salvation, and demonstrated that love is achieved only at a heavy price, then, and now." This, from an Episcopalian. I'll never know whether he eats wafers and drinks wine ritualistically - one might think not, although how he avoids it is hard to imagine - because I'll never ask. I'll let the fundamentalists and Pentacostals deal with that issue, and with their hypocrisy at excommunicating my seventh grade teacher from the faith for bad doctrine. There are questions one simply fears too greatly to ask one's teachers, either fifty years ago, or now. I am content to be grateful that he is still here in the veil of tears, teaching me something new, just like he did way back when.