Breathing Room: the Legacy of Marcus Borg

Last updated on: April 29, 2015 at 7:38 pm by Guest Contributor

Breathing Room: the Legacy of Marcus Borg 2015-04-29T19:38:49-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Listen, I don’t have a wildly inspiring story about the time I met Marcus Borg, or how one of his books saved me, precisely, from abandoning the church altogether. I did hear him speak once. From the FRONT ROW. And he was gracious, and engaging, and challenging, and yes, inspiring. But I never met him in person. The internet will be full of those stories today—testimony from those who knew him well, or met him briefly at a critical time in their life of faith, and were transformed by both his work and his way of being. I won’t try to tell that story.

But here’s what I can tell: Marcus Borg was the leading edge of Progressive Christianity, before we ever even had words like Progressive Christianity. Today, at the sad news of his death, many of us are mindful that he gave us the lexicon for this journey.

Some members of our fearless worship team spent some time last Sunday cleaning out that dreaded corner of the church known as “The Worship Closet.” (shivers). If your church has such an area—and I promise you, it does—you know the horrors of going through years of stuff and junk and things. You are not just sifting through dust (and possible bat/mouse leavings), you are literally moving through the church’s history. Seasons of change; loss and heartbreak, hope and growth, all wrapped up with old paraments, drippy purple candles, maybe some unidentified scraps of fabric. They were certainly beautiful, once. Everything in that corner was certainly useful, meaningful, lifegiving. Once.

What Marcus Borg did with his life was the systematic, sometimes tedious, but ultimately crucial work: of going through the Church’s closet. But whereas my church has about 12 years’ worth of stuff piled in that corner, he had to go through the detritus of a couple millennia. He shook the dust off of the Church’s most deeply held beliefs, drug them out into the light of day, and was not afraid to say… Where did this come from? Who gave it to us? Is it true, and does it matter?

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