Clouds and Gutters

By Rev. James Winsor

This is a magazine about “higher things”. But don’t get the wrong idea. This is not about having your head in the clouds or your mind in the gutter. Higher things are very familiar with both clouds and gutters, which are often in the same time and place.

Now if I’m losing you, don’t worry. When it comes to higher things, a person has to be lost before they can be found. As you’re found and found again, you come to see that higher things are found in lowly places.

Sometimes you get the idea that you have to choose between clouds and gutters—between some sort of fake spiritual high or a life that wades through the sludge of our idiotic times. If you ask the students at the local Bible study, you might get the feeling that the only way out of the grime is through a sort of cloudy Christianity where you give your heart to Jesus (not sure why He’d want that!) in exchange for a permanent smiley face tattoo.

When it comes down to it, sometimes you just don’t feel comfortable in your own skin. It gets you into trouble and you wish you could just drop it off at some sort of spiritual dry cleaner and pick it up on Monday morning. Maybe without it your soul could ascend to the heights of glory God must have had in mind way back when.

The singer Alanis Morrisette, herself, is not comfortable in her own skin. “If I am famous then maybe I’ll feel good in this skin.” And to a suicidal friend, “You were uncomfortable in your own skin.” Alanis has apparently come back from India without her skin. She is now a “womyn” and is comfortable doing “the big kiss thing” with “Carrie” (Sarah Jessica Parker) on HBO’s Sex in the City. When you decide you’re God or Goddess, your skin doesn’t matter much anymore. She was probably better off when one hand was in her pocket and the other was smoking a cigarette.

A very impressive singer, lyricist, and musician, Alanis, if she ever became a Christian, could provide us with a higher fiber, higheroctane, honest, realistic, maybe even Lutheran version of female Christian Rock. In fact, I think we’d get higher things.

You see, Christianity doesn’t handle “The Great Divide” between the gutter and the clouds by sending us off to India to lose our skin, take on a glossy-eyed serenity, and find our inner divine self. Nor does it keep us stuck in the gutter of rage and self-pity. There is another way—death and resurrection. Not just for your soul, but for the whole you. It happened in baptism. In Colossians 3, St. Paul tells us “You died.” He’s talking about what happened in baptism. When Paul says, “You died,” he is passing along Good News. Baptism hooked you up to Jesus’ death and resurrection from the grave, His ascent to heaven, and His session (being seated, enthroned) at the Father’s right hand. You died. You arose. You ascended. You are seated at the Father’s right hand (see Ephesians 2:6). It’s a done deal. Now, of course, we’re not good at seeing this. You don’t feel particularly enthroned in glory when some jerk decides to ruin your reputation or swipe your girlfriend. You don’t feel too dead to sin when all you can think about is wearing or removing such and such an outfit. You don’t feel too risen from the dead when you’re home sick with a cold and can hardly rise out of bed.

But it’s history. Jesus really hung around on the planet as one of us. He really died, rose, ascended, and sits at the Father’s right hand ruling everything for the sake of the church. And you’re with Him as He does that. This is not all a bunch of positive self-talk or spiritual hyperventilation. This higher life is not found or lived in the clouds in some transcendent ethereal plane of consciousness. Church is not a religious rave party and the sacramental life is not about “rolling.” No. It happened on a real wooden cross with real nails and thorns. Real guilt from the real world. Real death. Real abandonment from the Father. You were there. Baptism time-warped you into His death. It happened out of a real tomb with strips of linen. Mary clutched real ankles. Thomas, after the others before him, was invited to touch real marks on real skin. Jesus ate real fish and bread in their presence. You were there. Baptism makes you a time traveler who shows up in the tomb and out of it on Easter morning. His body ascended through the clouds, the body He got in Mary’s womb, the body He got from our race, the body He hooked up to yours in baptism. That real body ascended to God as God. You were there. You’re still there.

Baptism is the window in the heavens that grabbed you in time and sucked you into eternity. But baptism is a gutter thing, a clean gutter, but still a gutter. A gutter is a place for water to flow. Clean water cleans you even if in a gutter. These higher things happen in that gutter. Alanis can’t picture God in the gutter. She asks, “If I jump in this fountain, will I be forgiven?” God says, “Yes!” She says to her suicidal friend, “If we were our bodies...I’d be joining you.” God responds, “You are your body. Join her. Jump into the fountain. It’ll be the death of you. Just what you need.”

These higher things come in other lowly places too. Bread. Wine. A pastor’s pardoning voice. Skin. Jesus was comfortable in His skin, so he kept it and still has it. So comfortable that He offers it to you in bread, a very lowly thing containing the highest of the higher things. God’s body given to your body. He’s even comfortable in your skin!

And then there’s that lowly thing called absolution. It too contains the higher things of forgiveness, life with God, salvation. Alanis complains, “I confessed my darkest deeds to envious men,” whom she has noted are loveless priests. She attended a Roman Catholic school where absolution wasn’t absolution. It wasn’t forgiveness free and clear. You had to remember and confess it all. You had to say your penance, sort of a spiritual make-up session. It didn’t work too well. She was missing Christ and His cross.

But even in India, she’s still waiting for absolution, waiting to lose the burden of guilt, self-hatred, and bitterness. She appears to be mocking some local deity when she sings, “How soon will I be holy? How much will this cost, guru? How much longer ‘til you completely absolve me?”

If you won’t let God step into the gutter, that’s where you’ll always be stuck. Try as hard as you want; you can’t make it to the clouds and stay there. The grime goes with you even if you get partway there. No, God will have to come to the gutter. And He has, in Mary’s womb, on the cross, and in the here and now whenever a man speaks His forgiveness “in the stead and by His command.” Now this all means you can be at ease with God, with heaven, and be at ease with your neighbor, with earth. God is doing His higher things through the lowly things of the church and through your everyday calling. You, yourself, have become a higher thing with a higher purpose. When you serve a Big Mac, God feeds His creatures. When you catch a friend’s tears, God’s shoulder gets wet. Higher things like that are happening through lowly things like you, like me. Alanis complains about picky parents, whomshe quotes this way, “We’ll love you just the way you are if you’re perfect.” God says, “I do love you just the way you are, and by the way, in Christ you are perfect.” Welcome to Higher Things!

The Rev. James Winsor is Pastor at Risen Christ Lutheran Church, Arvada, CO