Check out this short excerpt:
“God” is not God’s name | The Theological Wanderings of a Street Pastor.
God language can tie people into knots, of course. In part, that is because “God” is not God’s name. Referring to the highest power we can imagine, “God” is our name for that which is greater than all yet present in each…
It reminds me of my own post about the divine name, but is much more succinct.
There, squirming in such a comfortable chair, made to feel prickly by the moment and its intensity and not the leather or the cushion, it is not my ass, but my brain that is jittery.
As a priest, interviews are a whole different beast.
This moment, as I recall was the most agonizing for what it did to my weak mind and strong heart. Crippled by conviction. Angered by intention. And my adversary doesn’t cut the imposing figure. I have nearly a foot on her and easily outweigh her by 100 pounds. But it is her logic, her sharpness, that carves me up and serves me in seconds.
She takes my resume, my writings, and she picks out words that clearly hint at my theological leanings. Words like “prophetic” and “transformation” reveal to her what container to place me in. And she swiftly dispatches with my protests, as she closes the lid, having so easily stuffed my body into so small a box.
My arguments are weak. I am unprepared. My need to defend my convictions atrophied from lack of use.
Then the humiliation turns, and I realize she isn’t intending to eviscerate me, but open me. Reveal me. Perhaps to her curious brain as a sort of dissection. Perhaps more so to the room itself, that the true me might by psychically revealed, disembodied, so that the two of us might examine my theology, my practice, my very faith.
I recall the sudden rush of joy as the truth of her new line of questioning becomes clear: I will leave here changed.
It seemed simple enough, a question about confirmation preparation, I think. She asks, not so much the specifics of what I do, but the character and expectation. I am riding high from the discerning process for confirmation in Western Michigan and was convinced that we needed more training and conviction around the sacrament.
Then she asks
“What about baptism?”
She pauses.
“If the Spirit brings someone in to be baptized, I say we baptize them on the spot.”
My heart rescued my poor brain, as she introduced a fidelity to the very nature of the sacraments lost to most of our teaching. An idea of Spirit-led discernment and consistency, that I didn’t recognize in my own sacramental theology. In turning from confirmation to baptism, she exposed my own flawed understanding and hypocrisy.
She injected me with a dangerous idea. And it spread through me.
What if we are less controlling of the sacraments and more spontaneous? What if our expectations for “preparation” matched our belief in the Holy Spirit? And what if we treated each of the sacraments (and sacramental rites) as if they were not human controlled, but Spirit-led?
What if we stopped being gatekeepers and started being gateopeners?
It is what my generous heart has longed for the whole time.
[This is the third of three posts about the sacraments. Click the links to read the first about the sacraments and the second about their messy history.]
If you recall, a sacrament is the “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.” Or the physical means by which we receive the spiritual grace of GOD. The sacraments, particularly Baptism and Eucharist, are our most common ways of receiving that grace. Lest we believe they are so neat and tidy, we covered six questions we persistently have about the sacraments, which reveals wide disagreements about their intention and nature. Now, let’s explore what it means to choose how we understand the sacraments. I’ll speak specifically to Baptism.
In the early church, baptism was practiced with two very different, though related ideas: that it was a transformation of a person and that it was the means by which one enters the Christian community. In those early years, this made a great deal of sense, as nearly all the early converts were adults and their participation in community could be stalled until they had been properly prepared. Soon after this, however, churches began to receive entire families, causing the people to decide whether or not to baptize children and infants. Many did and many didn’t. This decision brought with it problems for those two primary purposes:
The very foundation of baptism is shaken. Excuses for preferred methods are made (and still made) to defend why or why not infants should be included. However, in baptizing infants in the first place, we have opened the door to a new way of understanding community that doesn’t allow, in many cases for that early understanding of the sacrament to stand. What becomes particularly plain for us is that one of these understandings is easier to maintain in this way than the other. We can speak for very young children, but we can’t train them as if they were adults. And if we believe they are members in baptism, then restricting them or denying them Eucharist is sacramentally inconsistent.
Generation after generation has redefined the very nature of baptism, and particularly how it is used and for whom. It appears that much of the way we have redefined baptism have been based first on practical understanding followed by a theological defense. Remember that with the changing of who gets baptized (not just adults, but children, and infants in particular), the training of the new Christian is the piece that gets moved and altered. We have shifted much of that burden to the sacramental act of confirmation.
I am moved by the idea that we may need to make a conscience decision about sacraments based on making either a principal of practical consideration or theological witness of primary order. Not that we act without consideration to either, but that we recognize that our decisions must be either grounded in theology and practical application must be discovered or that they are decided for practical purposes and theological defenses are constructed.
As it is, the temptation to backtrack to the ancient traditions or to maintain mideival constructs is so strong, that we must consider our core traditions with fidelity or appropriate understanding.
My gut tells me that I rather have an imperfect sacrament born out of outstanding theological work than a great sacrament with a flimsy theological basis. What do you think?
[This is the second of three posts about the sacraments. The first was yesterday's: “What is a Sacrament?”.]
As we explored yesterday, our Sacraments, primarily Holy Eucharist and Holy Baptism, are a physical and spiritual means of receiving grace. Today, we’ll have a small taste of the messiness around the living out of the Sacraments. There is no way I could sum up two thousand years of conflict in 500 words or fewer without scrubbing out big parts of the story. So, rather than go chronologically, I’ll name several significant issues for what they reveal to us.
1) How many sacraments?
Depending on who you talk to, there are either seven or two. Or perhaps 2+5. We have inherited from our ancestors two sacraments that are scriptural and attributed to Jesus: Eucharist and Baptism. We have also inherited five more that grew out of the tradition: confirmation, ordination, matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction.
2) Are some more important?
If we believe that all sacraments are of equal value, we have to treat them as equals. If we recognize that only Eucharist and Baptism are “authorized” by Jesus, does this mean that the others are “lesser”? And by extension, unnecessary?
3) What happens in…
The Eucharist—Perhaps the most famous conflict in the church is the one over what we think happens in the Eucharist. As I discussed yesterday, we are torn between the ideas that the host actually becomes Jesus or that Jesus is merely symbolically remembered. Many Christians have sought a different interpretation that rejects that binary question, arguing that something changes that allows the bread to be bread and something new.
Baptism—Are we dunked in the water as adults to reject a sinful past or are we sprinkled with water as infants to protect us from evil? The character of baptism is about transformation and the rejection of evil. It has also historically been an entrance rite to the church, proving one’s commitment and participation in the community. Since the Patristic age, these purposes have not run in unison and caused great conflict as we have chosen one purpose over the other.
4) Who is in charge of the sacraments?
This question gets into what we call ecclesiology, or the study of the church, and is often a conversation about authority. The historical matrix we have for these discussions is about distribution of power in the church, either to a priestly class or to the laity. This has meant that our understanding of who gets a say in the sacraments is based on how hierarchical one’s church is. For Catholics, this means the line goes all the way up to the pope. For many Protestants, the line goes straight into the individual participant that may be given authority by the worship community. For many of us, we live in a both/and structure with ordained authority figures as gatekeepers who attempt to inhabit a grass-roots theology of collaboration.
5) What if the gatekeeper sucks at it?
As persistent as these other questions have been for the church, perhaps none is as damaging as this one. In the early days, there was a group called the Donatists. Their focus was on purity and they began to reject the sacraments from those who were not doctrinally pure enough. In other words, they refused taking communion from people who didn’t believe “right” (as in their way). Even though this is one of the named heresies condemned by the worldwide church, you don’t have to look very hard to find Donatists in our midst.
6) Must we keep the gates?
This is most timely of these questions, as we rediscover the roots of our sacraments and question how best to embody them in our world. Questions about restrictions to the sacraments are causing great conversation (and conflict) in many parts of the church. In many ways, this is the outgrowth of the church’s historic response to question 5, which is to say that the sacrament is a sacrament by grace—not the magic powers of the individual. This shifts the power from the gatekeeper to the Holy Spirit (where it perhaps always was) and changes some of our expectations. In the Book of Common Prayer, it gives instruction for the priest to deny the sacraments to anyone we suspect is an unrepentant sinner, meaning it is actually my obligation to keep the gate. But is that itself theologically consistent?
How we wrestle with these questions does a great deal to inform our theology. Perhaps more important is that we recognize the need to wrestle with them.
Tomorrow, we’ll explore how we choose our theology about the sacraments, and what this does to our practice.
What are your favorite theological fights? Are they over sacraments? How do you deal with some of the messiness in the sacraments?
Over the next three days, I’ll briefly explore the nature of our sacraments. Starting with what we actually mean by the word.
According to the Book of Common Prayer (pp. 857-8):
The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.
Many of us can recite the first half of that definition: the part about their being an “outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace”. But when we call something a sacrament, what are we really saying? Primarily that this (to whatever we are referring) is the observable part of something bigger. Like the water in baptism or the thin wafer many of us use for Communion. That these are something physical and observable, that direct us to something more than that.
Perhaps more difficult is the second half: that these are “sure and certain means” of receiving grace. Most challenging, I think, based on the way we think and behave, is that we are able to receive grace through physical means or that our “sacramental” habits possess in them the very grace “given by Christ”. Like Calvin, we might see that thin wafer, as just a wafer. We also need not adopt an understanding that is hard for our post-Enlightenment brains to comprehend: namely that the thin wafer that tastes like Styrofoam is somehow magically turned into a person’s flesh who has been dead for 2000 years. But we are being invited into a mystery in which that wafer becomes more than a wafer.
We may have to get what is meant by grace:
Grace is God’s favor towards us, unearned and undeserved; by grace God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.
For us, then, the sacrament is a hint at the world beyond this one and are something we do together. They also exist as a means by which we can know and sense that GOD-given grace. It is no wonder, then, that the sacraments involve a physical nature: water on the skin, food and drink in the mouth, oil on the forehead, hands on the head and shoulders. Sacraments are intended to be experienced in our bodies, not merely our minds.
This, then, is the story of sense and understanding, of feeling and thinking. The sacraments can’t be confined to one way of comprehension.
Tomorrow we’ll explore some of the messy history of sacraments.
In the meantime, what is your experience with the sacraments? How do they feel? What do you think? And how have they worked?
On Sunday, it was pointed out that I have great enthusiasm for the Story. That talking about Jesus and what is going on here gets me going. It does. Part of it has to do with learning it, and that I keep learning it. Part of it has to do with my own experience. And part of it has to do with this little idea that there is more here than I was told.
Of my lifelong friends, I have a good portion that are practicing Christians. But nowhere near a majority. More of my friends don’t go to church than do. Here’s one big reason: we have trouble answering the simple, but central question of our faith: why did Jesus die? Because for most of us, myself included, the phrase “for my sins” doesn’t cut it.
This Holy Week, as we walk toward Jerusalem with Jesus, today overturning the tables, tomorrow teaching at the Temple, and so on, let us wrestle with that simple question. Wrestling with the challenge of what Jesus is showing us in public outbursts and quiet moments with His friends. May we wrestle with what is going on in the Story, and what is going on here, in our lives. That we may come to a deeper, more troubling truth about Jesus than we were taught in Sunday School and in countless “feelgood” sermons. That, like Jesus, we are walking to our deaths.
And like Jesus, death isn’t the end.
A few years ago, Rose and I were visiting some friends for dinner. After the plates had been cleared and we were finishing our dessert, my friend said “I’m starting to believe that I don’t need a Jesus to have existed to believe in a Christ.”
The look on his wife’s face shocked me much more than his statement. They had long ago moved away from their conservative, reformed childhood background. But for her, he had crossed a bridge too far.
I had given up on the primacy of historicity years before. Hearing him speculate, not on Jesus precisely, but on the matter of his faith in Jesus was like music to my ears. And being inclined toward radical theology, I am much more prone to be interested in the dance of experience and of actuality than I am of requiring my belief be predicated on certainty.
In the Jesus event, we deal with two sets of time: the historical time in which a human named Jesus walked the earth and the time before and since in which the Word of GOD was a present and active participant in the GOD event.
That’s why I don’t buy that GOD is a father that kills his son. Jesus isn’t a pawn. GOD isn’t an accountant with a checkbook that needs to be balanced. And I certainly don’t buy that GOD is all powerful enough to create such an intricate and delicate world, only to come up with the dumbest possible problem requiring an even dumber solution.
In fact, I don’t buy the atonement at all. Well, not the way we usually deal with it, anyway.
Ask the average person about the nature of GOD and you get a variety of personal responses.
Ask them about the power of GOD and you start to get different answers.
Those answers start to deal, not with people, or the relationship between GOD and the people, but with metaphysical moments described in Scripture.
Moments like Creation, the Deluge, and the Exodus.
Moments like miraculous births, the healings, and the exorcisms.
But when we start talking about Jesus, and specifically the purpose of the cross, we leave belief, reason, history, Scripture, and even metaphysics and enter into the realm of cosmic speculation. I love theology as much as the next guy. Actually probably way more. But there is a reason there has been so little consistency and uniformity of belief about this one theological concept. It is different. Much less certainty and much more speculation. Much less Scripture and much more theological writings. Much less Hebrew tradition and much more Greek philosophy.
And lastly, there is one Scriptural reason I don’t buy any of the visions of atonement: Abraham didn’t kill Isaac.
In the historical Jesus, we have the pursuit of the most likely and accurate information about the actuality of Jesus as possible.
There is a certain fear, even among those that are into the historical Jesus that it will uncover something bad. Something scary. Perhaps that we’ll find Jesus’s bones, therefore disproving his bodily resurrection. Or perhaps we’ll discover that The DaVinci Code was true and that Jesus actually did have sex. (The horror!) More likely it is that when we parse Scripture, we find some of our favorite bits may not have happened. And we are left to deal with the idea that their power comes in the form of a story, rather than a history. Like confusing Lincoln for its source material.
There is another truth, however. That in reading Borg & Crossan’s The Last Week, we get an image of a revolutionary Jesus, executed by the state for insurrection. That Jesus was an historical man that was necessarily killed, not to fulfill a godly quota, or by a humanity corrupted by sin, but by a human empire that was bent on humiliating and decimating its enemies. Parading them nakedly against their religious laws like prisoners at Abu Ghraib. If you follow the historical Jesus movement to its logical conclusion, we can find that Jesus wasn’t killed for or by GOD or to do anything for our sins. He was killed because he preached good news about a GOD that wants us to love as GOD loves, rather than kill as empires do. Just looking at our last century, we have plenty of proof that today’s Romes kill today’s Jesuses.
But that doesn’t change a thing about what Jesus was doing or is doing.
That is why the incarnation is so valuable. It isn’t some modernist proof so that enlightenment thinkers and the new atheists can suddenly go “Oh! I get it now!” but acts as a small leap. Not only for us, but for GOD. A leap from a history of a people that long ago tried to distance themselves from GOD. Yet GOD persisted, to the point of sharing in a human experience and was changed by it.
In this way, the cross, and the meaning of the crucifixion are the remnants of a human age in which we neither feared GOD, nor loved GOD, for we could not believe that GOD is with us.
We can leave the cross in the ground, for it is not the symbol of GOD’s way, but the rejection of the human way. It is not a divine symbol of retribution, or the symbol of GOD’s power, but the mocking of Empire’s power. The physicality of the symbol is clearly a totem. And yet we’ve allowed it to be twisted into a Roman desire for power, infusing this potent symbol of rejection with the very agency that produced the original torture device. Making the cross today the very symbol of Constantine’s empire.
And even in the midst of this confusion brought by the power of our Romes, the presence of the incarnate Word, in a one-time event and in the persistent event that spans two thousand years still breaks through. Jesus is here. Jesus is among us. In us. Incarnate. Still.
Here in Memphis, I’ve joined together with many Christians to celebrate Phyllis Tickle at the Emergence Christianity conference (hash tag #EC13). We’re hearing presentations from Mrs. Tickle about the subject of the book of the same name (Emergence Christianity) and responses from dozens of people involved in emergence. I’m loving it!
There is plenty to say, and I may do so after I get home. But what I am really getting the sense of, more than ever before, is that this thing she is describing is not just a thing and not just a moment, but a movement. A group of people conversant in emergence got together yesterday to discuss whether or not those participating in the emergence conversation are in fact part of a movement and apparently they agreed. Today, listening to Phyllis talk about where we’ve been as church and where we are going, it really felt like I was part of a movement. Not that I got in on the ground floor, mind you. The people who got together at the first Emergent Gathering can make that claim. But it did feel as if something is starting now and that something is ours in this moment and that we are part of something big that is moving beneath our feet.
I hope to explain it more, but for now, I’ll end with this: I love church. Not necessarily my church, because that makes an idol of the local. And not necessarily The Episcopal Church, because that makes an idol of the tribe. But I love feeling that the church has a future and more importantly, that we in the church will be doing big things.
Reading Genesis again for our Bible study, I have found this nuance with regards to how the writers use the concept of marriage quite interesting: having sex with someone makes you married.
To unpack what this means, we ought to step back from our 21st Century “culture war” arguments about what marriage means or who gets to be in it.
We also should step back from everything else in scripture that speaks to “biblical marriage”. This handy graphic that went around Facebook can help with that.
found somewhere on Facebook
We need to strip ourselves down to see what this reveals about our faith. Two reasons:
In other words, this is the first word on marriage in the Bible in the literal, historical, and metaphorical sense. Our understanding hinges upon these first moments.
There are many married couples in the scripture before Isaac and Rebekah, but they are the first to “get married” within the context of the text. And what does it say?
Then Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent. He took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death. (24:67)
Aside from the creepy oedipal part, the text tells us that in “taking” her, Rebekah becomes his wife.
The same thing happens with his son Jacob.
Jacob works seven years for the hand of Rachel, but Rachel’s dad deceives him:
Then Jacob said to Laban, ‘Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my time is completed.’ So Laban gathered together all the people of the place, and made a feast. But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob; and he went in to her. (29:21-23)
Boys, those are probably not the words you should use with your future father-in-law: “Give me my wife that I may go in to her”. No dad wants to think about that. Ever.
then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel as a wife. So Jacob went in to Rachel also (29:28b and 30a)
Then, when Rachel couldn’t have children, she did this:
So she gave him her maid Bilhah as a wife; and Jacob went in to her. (30:4)
Jacob Encountering Rachel with her Father’s Herds (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Of course, the whole sordid affair keeps going. You should really read more about it. But the consistent theme here is that two people are promised, they hook up, and are considered married. No big wedding. No betrothal or engagement rings (though Jacob and Rachel were engaged for 7 years before they were hitched). No mothers-of-the-brides or bridezillas. No pieces of paper. No churches or courthouses.
This is entirely consistent and at the same time entirely alien to our current understanding of marriage. Most importantly, I think it reveals the weakness in our current understanding.
We treat marriage as a contractual binding of two people. This has some benefits, but many more limitations. We see couples as gathering their friends and families to make a promise to stick together. A failure to live up to that promise represents a moral failure. Contracts, when entered into by two consenting adults (not unlike the one Jacob makes with Laban) have parameters and limitations. We can determine who can enter into that contract. We can stipulate the limitations of the contract. We can define what each participant’s role is in the contract. The entire thing can be litigated. And the contract may be broken or nullified for a variety of reasons.
We also treat marriage as the ritualistic participation in a maturation process in which marriage constitutes an inevitable milestone. In this way, we cast life as exhibiting a common script for people that can be matched identically based on personal maturation. We go to school, get jobs, get married, have kids, raise those kids, retire from work, then die. This script, while amusingly quaint, leads us to pairing off, not as a sign of mutual discernment, but as finding a teammate with which we may fulfill the base requirements of adulthood. Naturally, this script is conservative and has a false sheen of “traditional” to it.
If what makes two people married is not a wedding, but sex, then we have another thing to think about. Our conservative friends, in this way, are right in encouraging abstinence, but not for the reasons they normally give. It is not about saving it for marriage, but because you are, in that moment, marrying someone. And you might not want to be with that person forever. In a certain way, whomever we partner with after becomes a participant in adultery.
Here, then, enters the example of Jacob’s four wives, which further sets up our confusion when we try to arrange this understanding back into a legal framework.
What if, instead, we hear in this, Jesus’s much later definition of marriage: unifying as one flesh? What if we define marriage not according to the contract entered into, but in the physical and emotional binding of two people into a single human: in which one pleasure and one pain resides? As in the true unity of two persons is made manifest in every conceivable way.
Perhaps then, marriage is best understood without any official binding, whether before a government or within a church, but in the spiritual unification made one flesh by GOD. Then the church’s place is not to see itself as the agent that binds two people, with all that gatekeeping power that goes with that. It’s place is to affirm and bless what is indeed already taking place: the very expression of GOD’s love in human form.
As I prepare this week’s Eating Scripture, I read this piece on this week’s gospel by David R. Henson:
Just Marriage: Jesus, Divorce and the Vulnerable.
Do yourself a favor and read it.
