I'd attended a Greek Orthodox service some years ago with my long time friend. He snuck me into the choir where I had to fake my way through a floating tenor line of liturgical chant, including transliterated Greek stuff, and, I can say with certainty, I've never uttered the words "Lord, have mercy," more in my entire life. Like many mantras, it started off interesting, then got boring, and then started to shoot roots into heart and mind and soul - "Lord, have mercy," "Lord, have mercy," "Lord, have mercy...."
The priest spoke the words of consecration over the bread and the wine and then offered the invitation. I jumped at the chance to receive the sacrament that embodies our chant. But just before it was my turn my friend jumped the line, whisperered to the priest that I had no relation to the Orthodox church, and he quickly withdrew the elements. Instead he reached for anointing oil, touched my forehead, and directed me back to my seat in the choir.
I was confused, angry. I actually cried.
Later I came learn that this priest did not remove the sacrament as an act of judgment. He was reacting to how he'd been trained to understand that passage in I Corinthians 11:27-29, which concludes with this stern warning: "For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself," (NIV). In the Orthodox tradition, as in the Catholic and Episcopalian, to properly recognize the body of the Lord means to accept that, at the time communion is served, that bread and wine actually become the real body and real blood of Christ. He knew I held no such belief, and so his removal of the elements wasn't judgmental, but pastoral. He simply didn't want me to eat or drink judgment on myself.
But the Reformed understanding of the body of the Lord is quite different. We don't focus on the elements of bread and wine, but on the greater body of all those who confess Christ Jesus as Lord throughout the world. To us, the proper understanding of the body of the Lord is one that seeks to reconcile with those other Christians from whom we've been divided, either by family infighting or political agenda or cultural barrier or theological disagreement or social issue. Our table challenges us to look past all those barriers to see, not a communist or a bigot or a radical, but only another person who is also in desperate need of the grace of Jesus Christ.
Reconciliation, then, is key to the right celebration of this sacrament. And I fail to see how separation, especially while throwing words around like "apostate" and "heretical," can ever do honor to the table that calls us, demands of us, a full view of and respect for the whole of the body of the Lord.
To me, it's just not worth the risk, the deep spiritual and theological risk, to leave. The level of discomfort may have risen several degrees, but the table calls us to overcome that and far, far more as we learn to properly discern the body of Christ.
Lord, have mercy.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Friday, November 11, 2011
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
There's nothing like a good moral controversy to pare away assumed values from real ones. The Presbyterian church's hullaballoo over a change in our ordination standards is providing ample tension to provide that clarity.
Long ago I had a very different value system than I do now. My hatred and disgust toward gay people was readily buttressed by traditional church views on homosexuality. No church I ever attended nor any Christian I'd met would condone the thoughts that led me to demonize all gays as hell-bent child molestors, but there wasn't any real challenge to these thoughts, either.
I literally used to think it was a good idea to gather all gays into concentration camps and let them just die off so we wouldn't need to put up with them any more. I would secretly cheer the reports of those who'd go into gay bars and start clubbing them with baseball bats. And the Bible, I believed, backed me up as it condemned homosexuality as an abomination to God and gave witness to the broad destruction of entire cities full of those dreaded homosexuals.
Yet this same Bible, which I have always maintained to be God's powerful and living word, has been pouring words of grace like water over the jagged edges of my hate and wearing them down. At times it came in torrents to tear dislodge my deeply held and staunchly protected Biblical position.
It had to be two decades ago but I can still smell the chapel and feel the warm dim lighting spilling over the image of the Holy One suffering. A man not much younger than me sat in a pew crying. I remembered how just the year before I'd met Jesus in that same pew and was reduced to tears by his undeniable grace, beauty and truth. So I assumed he was having a come-to-Jesus moment and sat beside him to join in the blessing.
That wasn't what was happening there at all.
Steve was dying of AIDS. At fifteen years old he came out to his parents and they kicked him out of the house. Steve drifted south, far past the Hudson Valley and into a the kind of Sodom and Gomorrah community in South Beach where anyone would sleep with anyone. He confessed being part of a lascivious lifestyle where he'd had some 400 partners in six years, and he had no idea when he contracted AIDS or any idea how many he'd given it to. Could the death of some or even all of those men be on his head? He'd come to this Christian weekend retreat to be healed, to be forgiven, to be received back into his parents' home so he wouldn't have to die alone.
Here was one who actually embodied all the ugliness I'd assumed was true of all gays. I should have been physically sick. I should have been spewing merciless raging judgment. But God would not let me give that hatred any voice.
I sat there. With him. Listening. I let him blubber all over my shoulder and wondered if I'd catch his disease but, oddly, I was not afraid. A torrent of grace had cracked the very base of my hate and gave me, of all people, compassion for him. We prayed and I carried him to his cot because he was too weak with grief and guilt to walk. God asked me to play the role of Samaritan to this left-for-dead homosexual when my instinct would have been to whistle for dogs to gnaw on his dying flesh. In the days and years to come I'd realize the unsettling truth that the hatred I'd leaned upon for so long had no ground in the gospel.
So my value started to change. My respect for scripture deepened as I grew to understand it as a story of God's long-suffering grace and love toward a fallen and perpetualy failing people. Rather than hearing the Old Testament as a tale of a jealous God punishing a wayward nation to scare them into obedience, I started to hear it as a story of a gracious God continually restoring an undeserving people to call them his own.
Then, finally, I could see the connection between Christ and these books of Moses and David and Solomon and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos. Jesus did not come to punish and scare us back into a right relationship with God, but to extend God's grace to all of us undeserving people. Straight or gay, we're all undeserving. Straight or gay, God's grace is available through Christ.
Now, back to the current hullaballoo with people leaving churches and churches leaving the denomination. I certainly do understand the tension, and I can also articulate my displeasure with an ordination standard that claims we will be "guided by" instead of "obedient to" holy scripture. If I wanted to, I could focus on that grievous loss and reel off a hundred pages against this clear diminishment of scriptural authority. I could rally a church behind a call to leave a denomination that no longer adheres to the clear meaning of God's word and take them confidently to a more comfortable place. I could find ready metaphor in scripture to smooth the journey - from casting out the immoral brother to rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem to brushing dust off our feet, there is plenty to draw from upon exit.
But I've got two substantial issues with embarking on an exit strategy.
First, I've got to put the new ordination standard into perspective. It is one paragraph in a Book of Order that is in service to our confessional standards, and our confessional standards still maintain a high view of scripture. To leave over this phrase in this paragraph is reversing the priority of these documents.
The church needs those with a conservative view of scripture. We need the tension and abrasion of all our members to keep our coroporate discernment process intact. We need those of conservative leaning to remind us of the importance of the intractable truth of the plain meaning of the text just as much as we need those of liberal leaning to remind us of the importance of textual and historical criticism in our hermeneutic. Without these remaining in fellowship we will fall into the comfortable death of group think.
Second, while exit can be scripturally justified and a more expedient path to alleviate the anxiety of a congregation, it is not my value. I've been more influenced by Paul's continual theme of keeping the church together despite its deep divisions, of honoring and supporting one another despite different cultural contexts, of maintaining a body with a wide variety of parts working toward one goal - the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This is a gospel that makes people whole. A divided church can't give fair witness to that with integrity.
I am thankful for this gut-wrenching time in our church because it is making clear to me the essential need to stay together, develop community, hold deep and honest conversations, and celebrate the faith that calls us to be one body. As the song goes, "We are one in the Spirit/ We are one in the Lord/ And we pray that our unity will one day be restored." Then, Lord let it be, they'll know we are Christians by our love.
Long ago I had a very different value system than I do now. My hatred and disgust toward gay people was readily buttressed by traditional church views on homosexuality. No church I ever attended nor any Christian I'd met would condone the thoughts that led me to demonize all gays as hell-bent child molestors, but there wasn't any real challenge to these thoughts, either.
I literally used to think it was a good idea to gather all gays into concentration camps and let them just die off so we wouldn't need to put up with them any more. I would secretly cheer the reports of those who'd go into gay bars and start clubbing them with baseball bats. And the Bible, I believed, backed me up as it condemned homosexuality as an abomination to God and gave witness to the broad destruction of entire cities full of those dreaded homosexuals.
Yet this same Bible, which I have always maintained to be God's powerful and living word, has been pouring words of grace like water over the jagged edges of my hate and wearing them down. At times it came in torrents to tear dislodge my deeply held and staunchly protected Biblical position.
It had to be two decades ago but I can still smell the chapel and feel the warm dim lighting spilling over the image of the Holy One suffering. A man not much younger than me sat in a pew crying. I remembered how just the year before I'd met Jesus in that same pew and was reduced to tears by his undeniable grace, beauty and truth. So I assumed he was having a come-to-Jesus moment and sat beside him to join in the blessing.
That wasn't what was happening there at all.
Steve was dying of AIDS. At fifteen years old he came out to his parents and they kicked him out of the house. Steve drifted south, far past the Hudson Valley and into a the kind of Sodom and Gomorrah community in South Beach where anyone would sleep with anyone. He confessed being part of a lascivious lifestyle where he'd had some 400 partners in six years, and he had no idea when he contracted AIDS or any idea how many he'd given it to. Could the death of some or even all of those men be on his head? He'd come to this Christian weekend retreat to be healed, to be forgiven, to be received back into his parents' home so he wouldn't have to die alone.
Here was one who actually embodied all the ugliness I'd assumed was true of all gays. I should have been physically sick. I should have been spewing merciless raging judgment. But God would not let me give that hatred any voice.
I sat there. With him. Listening. I let him blubber all over my shoulder and wondered if I'd catch his disease but, oddly, I was not afraid. A torrent of grace had cracked the very base of my hate and gave me, of all people, compassion for him. We prayed and I carried him to his cot because he was too weak with grief and guilt to walk. God asked me to play the role of Samaritan to this left-for-dead homosexual when my instinct would have been to whistle for dogs to gnaw on his dying flesh. In the days and years to come I'd realize the unsettling truth that the hatred I'd leaned upon for so long had no ground in the gospel.
So my value started to change. My respect for scripture deepened as I grew to understand it as a story of God's long-suffering grace and love toward a fallen and perpetualy failing people. Rather than hearing the Old Testament as a tale of a jealous God punishing a wayward nation to scare them into obedience, I started to hear it as a story of a gracious God continually restoring an undeserving people to call them his own.
Then, finally, I could see the connection between Christ and these books of Moses and David and Solomon and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos. Jesus did not come to punish and scare us back into a right relationship with God, but to extend God's grace to all of us undeserving people. Straight or gay, we're all undeserving. Straight or gay, God's grace is available through Christ.
Now, back to the current hullaballoo with people leaving churches and churches leaving the denomination. I certainly do understand the tension, and I can also articulate my displeasure with an ordination standard that claims we will be "guided by" instead of "obedient to" holy scripture. If I wanted to, I could focus on that grievous loss and reel off a hundred pages against this clear diminishment of scriptural authority. I could rally a church behind a call to leave a denomination that no longer adheres to the clear meaning of God's word and take them confidently to a more comfortable place. I could find ready metaphor in scripture to smooth the journey - from casting out the immoral brother to rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem to brushing dust off our feet, there is plenty to draw from upon exit.
But I've got two substantial issues with embarking on an exit strategy.
First, I've got to put the new ordination standard into perspective. It is one paragraph in a Book of Order that is in service to our confessional standards, and our confessional standards still maintain a high view of scripture. To leave over this phrase in this paragraph is reversing the priority of these documents.
The church needs those with a conservative view of scripture. We need the tension and abrasion of all our members to keep our coroporate discernment process intact. We need those of conservative leaning to remind us of the importance of the intractable truth of the plain meaning of the text just as much as we need those of liberal leaning to remind us of the importance of textual and historical criticism in our hermeneutic. Without these remaining in fellowship we will fall into the comfortable death of group think.
Second, while exit can be scripturally justified and a more expedient path to alleviate the anxiety of a congregation, it is not my value. I've been more influenced by Paul's continual theme of keeping the church together despite its deep divisions, of honoring and supporting one another despite different cultural contexts, of maintaining a body with a wide variety of parts working toward one goal - the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This is a gospel that makes people whole. A divided church can't give fair witness to that with integrity.
I am thankful for this gut-wrenching time in our church because it is making clear to me the essential need to stay together, develop community, hold deep and honest conversations, and celebrate the faith that calls us to be one body. As the song goes, "We are one in the Spirit/ We are one in the Lord/ And we pray that our unity will one day be restored." Then, Lord let it be, they'll know we are Christians by our love.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
What's the Problem Here?
With a handful of churches in the pipeline to leave the Presbytery and some twenty or so identifying themselves as disaffected with the denomination, it seems that there's a big problem to solve.
But the problem we've got to solve before we can solve the problem is that no one agrees on what the problem actually is that needs solving.
For example - seventy-five years ago the very first Othodox Presbyterian Church was birthed by folks who walked out the door of the church I currently pastor, Nottingham Presbyterian. It's interesting to listen to folks in both churches tell the story. Nottingham folks think it was about the (then) newly expressed support for the ordination of women in the church, but the OPC folks say that wasn't it at all, but about a change in what they considered an essential tennet of the faith in the Westminster Confession.
The same thing's going on here. Those who are staying in the PC(USA) assume the others are leaving over the issue of ordaining people who are gay. But those who are leaving say that gay ordination is a symptom of a greater illness, namely, that the church is losing its grounding in the authority of scripture. They point to the new language in the ordination standard which reduces the authority of scripture to more of a guideline than a rule, effectively rendering one essential tennet of the reformed faith, sola scriptura, as toothless as a duck and as bendy as Gumby.
We can't solve what we can't define. It's as simple a concept as you'll find in Couple's Counseling 101 - first you've got to agree on what the problem is before setting strategies to take care of it.
Today we're arguing over the argument. The more liberal believers want us to agree to disagree, as if that's a value held by conservatives. But those are uncomfortable words to the conservative believer, because agreeing to disagree means agreeeing that scripture can have a wide range of interpretation, and that means scripture isn't as universally authoritative as a conservative might hope, and you've got to draw the line somewhere. The conservative believers want everyone to reign in that wide-ranging hermenetic and show a little restraint, in part because the leap from "thou shalt not" to "it's okay" feels really academic and tricksy and complicated.
So what might both sides want? In a word - relevance. Both sides want to be relevant. The one wants to be relevant to a culture that increasingly lables the church as homophobic, hateful and bigoted because of its's traditional stance opposing homosexuality. There is a strong desire to remove that significant judgmentalism so the public can once again tune its ear to the church's message of a God who so loves this world. The other side desires relevance, not by compromising standards, but through the power of the truth of God's word in Christ Jesus to transform each individual and culture.
And tucked somewhere in there is a glimmer of light, a thin slice where the Venn diagram of conservative and liberal overlaps a percentage of a fraction of a hair of a degree. Both still want to reach the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Same goal. Different path.
Just don't tell the other side that because the reactionaries already have a hair trigger. One will be quick to accuse the other of presenting a gospel of works righteousness because they demand
the change of a person's sexual identity before being fully incorporated into church life, and reactionaries on the other will quickly fire back that a gospel built on no authority is no gospel at all, but a whisper of half-truths leading to nothing, and then we'll be right back to nowhere.
Further, both believe they are best representing the love of God, but the one is leaning pretty heavily on love as grace and mercy and hospitality, and the other is leaning pretty heavily on love as discipline and obedience and walking down narrow paths and the like.
This reminds me of Emil Brunner's masterful work in The Christian Doctrine of God, and particularly that part where he discusses the Biblical attributes of God and finds what appears to be a massive and irreconcilable incongruity between God who is Love and God who is Holy (The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1949, chapters 14 and 15). In sum, if God is Love, then God can accept and forgive and show grace to anyone at any time. But if God is Holy, then God, who can't abide sin, can also show Divine Wrath to destroy anyone at any time. Love and Wrath are contradictory charateristics that can't co-exist. And we all know that God can't self-contradict because then God would cease to be God. God must be the same yesterday, today, and forever to be truly God.
Now we've got a big old theological problem. It appears that God's own definition of God's self doesn't mesh, and so the entire premise of religion, or belief in a perfect God, is about to collapse into a giant party for atheists everywhere.
Enter Jesus, through whom the full Love of God demonstrated and on whom the full Wrath of God is poured. Because God is Love, God pours the fullness of his wrath for all that is not holy on God's own self, and both the Holiness and Love of God, in their fullness, are preserved and expressed.
In the current debate over which part of the church is best representing God, either through grace extended to all God's people or through the pursuit of holy obedience to God's word, it seems neither side is getting it quite right. The answer, says the wisest bumper sticker ever, is Jesus.
Not missing this point, both sides would co-opt Jesus to be their standard-bearer. The one lifts up Jesus who eats with sinners and condemns the obedience-based self-righteous leaders. The other lifts up Jesus who said he didn't come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them. It's as if there are two different Jesuses to herald. I'm telling you, it's all making my head spin.
Remember that bit about the split that gave birth to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church? There aren't but a handful of folks still alive since that split and they were too young at the time to really know what was going on. Still, the story of why and how and who was hurt has been passed down from generation to generation, essentially perpetuating the division. But just recently Nottingham celebrated her 200th anniversary and sought to acknowledge the work of those institutions that have been integral to her history. The Othodox Presbyterian Church was among them and was honored for their pursuit of theological integrity and their position in the community as a beacon of light and haven of rest. Their pastor shared it with the church, many cried, and healing started.
We may never agree on what splits us. But what binds us is Jesus.
But the problem we've got to solve before we can solve the problem is that no one agrees on what the problem actually is that needs solving.
For example - seventy-five years ago the very first Othodox Presbyterian Church was birthed by folks who walked out the door of the church I currently pastor, Nottingham Presbyterian. It's interesting to listen to folks in both churches tell the story. Nottingham folks think it was about the (then) newly expressed support for the ordination of women in the church, but the OPC folks say that wasn't it at all, but about a change in what they considered an essential tennet of the faith in the Westminster Confession.
The same thing's going on here. Those who are staying in the PC(USA) assume the others are leaving over the issue of ordaining people who are gay. But those who are leaving say that gay ordination is a symptom of a greater illness, namely, that the church is losing its grounding in the authority of scripture. They point to the new language in the ordination standard which reduces the authority of scripture to more of a guideline than a rule, effectively rendering one essential tennet of the reformed faith, sola scriptura, as toothless as a duck and as bendy as Gumby.
We can't solve what we can't define. It's as simple a concept as you'll find in Couple's Counseling 101 - first you've got to agree on what the problem is before setting strategies to take care of it.
Today we're arguing over the argument. The more liberal believers want us to agree to disagree, as if that's a value held by conservatives. But those are uncomfortable words to the conservative believer, because agreeing to disagree means agreeeing that scripture can have a wide range of interpretation, and that means scripture isn't as universally authoritative as a conservative might hope, and you've got to draw the line somewhere. The conservative believers want everyone to reign in that wide-ranging hermenetic and show a little restraint, in part because the leap from "thou shalt not" to "it's okay" feels really academic and tricksy and complicated.
So what might both sides want? In a word - relevance. Both sides want to be relevant. The one wants to be relevant to a culture that increasingly lables the church as homophobic, hateful and bigoted because of its's traditional stance opposing homosexuality. There is a strong desire to remove that significant judgmentalism so the public can once again tune its ear to the church's message of a God who so loves this world. The other side desires relevance, not by compromising standards, but through the power of the truth of God's word in Christ Jesus to transform each individual and culture.
And tucked somewhere in there is a glimmer of light, a thin slice where the Venn diagram of conservative and liberal overlaps a percentage of a fraction of a hair of a degree. Both still want to reach the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Same goal. Different path.
Just don't tell the other side that because the reactionaries already have a hair trigger. One will be quick to accuse the other of presenting a gospel of works righteousness because they demand
the change of a person's sexual identity before being fully incorporated into church life, and reactionaries on the other will quickly fire back that a gospel built on no authority is no gospel at all, but a whisper of half-truths leading to nothing, and then we'll be right back to nowhere.
Further, both believe they are best representing the love of God, but the one is leaning pretty heavily on love as grace and mercy and hospitality, and the other is leaning pretty heavily on love as discipline and obedience and walking down narrow paths and the like.
This reminds me of Emil Brunner's masterful work in The Christian Doctrine of God, and particularly that part where he discusses the Biblical attributes of God and finds what appears to be a massive and irreconcilable incongruity between God who is Love and God who is Holy (The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1949, chapters 14 and 15). In sum, if God is Love, then God can accept and forgive and show grace to anyone at any time. But if God is Holy, then God, who can't abide sin, can also show Divine Wrath to destroy anyone at any time. Love and Wrath are contradictory charateristics that can't co-exist. And we all know that God can't self-contradict because then God would cease to be God. God must be the same yesterday, today, and forever to be truly God.
Now we've got a big old theological problem. It appears that God's own definition of God's self doesn't mesh, and so the entire premise of religion, or belief in a perfect God, is about to collapse into a giant party for atheists everywhere.
Enter Jesus, through whom the full Love of God demonstrated and on whom the full Wrath of God is poured. Because God is Love, God pours the fullness of his wrath for all that is not holy on God's own self, and both the Holiness and Love of God, in their fullness, are preserved and expressed.
In the current debate over which part of the church is best representing God, either through grace extended to all God's people or through the pursuit of holy obedience to God's word, it seems neither side is getting it quite right. The answer, says the wisest bumper sticker ever, is Jesus.
Not missing this point, both sides would co-opt Jesus to be their standard-bearer. The one lifts up Jesus who eats with sinners and condemns the obedience-based self-righteous leaders. The other lifts up Jesus who said he didn't come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them. It's as if there are two different Jesuses to herald. I'm telling you, it's all making my head spin.
Remember that bit about the split that gave birth to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church? There aren't but a handful of folks still alive since that split and they were too young at the time to really know what was going on. Still, the story of why and how and who was hurt has been passed down from generation to generation, essentially perpetuating the division. But just recently Nottingham celebrated her 200th anniversary and sought to acknowledge the work of those institutions that have been integral to her history. The Othodox Presbyterian Church was among them and was honored for their pursuit of theological integrity and their position in the community as a beacon of light and haven of rest. Their pastor shared it with the church, many cried, and healing started.
We may never agree on what splits us. But what binds us is Jesus.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
The High Holy Day of All Retail
The count down to the High Holy Day of All Retail, Black Friday, has begun.
So one of my kids says to me, “Daddy, I want a Kid’s Puffy Furh Real Zhu Zhu Remote Controlled Dolly-Wet-Wet. The pink one.” At least, I think that’s what she said. All I really heard was “Daddy, I want another blow-molded plastic thing with hair and batteries. The pink one.”
How did she decide in her heart of hearts that the one thing that would make her life complete would be possession of a Crazy Wall-Runner Flashmatazz Accessories Sold Separately Batteries Not Included– the pink one? It sure didn’t come from any profound understanding of the connection between her developing sense of self and the longings of her soul. The Disney Channel flashed a commercial in front of her like a wiggly jigger in front of a striped bass and she bit. Hard.
As a parent, I’m failing. Marketers are steering this tender young heart readily and steadily toward whatever will separate me from my money just because they know parents really love to see their kids smile, and smiles are easy to produce with Gizmologicons Packaged With a Million Twisties in Pink.
Somehow those slick sales gurus know how to keep my kids from thinking deeper than three inches. They’ve created the expectation that joy comes from flashy new thingies. And if I ever want to see my kid bound into my arms with gratitude, I’d better hightail it over to the Stuff Mart to feed the mechanism that’s hijacking my kid’s imagination.
But in the end, We the Parents, in order to form a More Perfect Family, will win. We will show them the Failed and Broken Toys whose only friends are Dust and Mite. We will remind them of the fever pitch they made when they believed the hope and joy of all humanity lay with that pink plastic blow mold with hair, and how that hope and joy faded even before the batteries did. We will grab them by the ear (metaphorically) to issue forth proclamations of true gratefulness and profound thanks for the free and priceless Stuff That Matters Most – faith, family and freedom, love and life, and above all, the matchless and boundless grace of our God from whom all blessings flow.
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