Derek helpfully opens up another conversation that is all the buzz in Episcopal circles—at least among liturgy geeks. The question is Confirmation. A movement is afoot to eliminate this rite as part of our 1979 process toward recovery of Holy Baptism as our ground. The claim is that it is a sacramental rite or Sacrament in search of a theology. I fear that like CWOB, to do this will cause our Anglican kin to pause and wonder about us regarding sacramental matters. In other words, it raises questions of catholicity.
The issue is that in the Western Church(es), a portion of the oil rites, due to distance, where overtime stretched from the water rite as dioceses became larger and bishops could only make such trips on occasion, sometimes once a in lifetime or even not at all. In know this is hard for us to imagine today, but remember that St. Augustine's own cathedral as we can reconstruct it was likely parish-sized. Connection to the bishop was not so far away. That changed. Both water and oil are part of a whole intended to signify our being made a member of Jesus Christ through Christ’s own Body, the Church, and deepened in this life and identity by the power of the Holy Spirit that continues with receiving Holy Communion. For the Roman and North African rites, those that most influence us, there are two oil rites, a pre-baptismal exorcistic anointing and a post-baptismal anointing [yes, I mixed these up in my comment’s at Derek’s blog]. For the Romans, the post-baptismal oil rites had two anointings. It is this second post-baptismal anointing that moved due to episcopal distance and sometimes lost a connection to Holy Baptism, becoming Holy Confirmation. Other rites had not a pre-baptismal anointing or only had one post-baptismal anointing. I might add, however, that Christmation was not always administered by the bishop, in the East, but could be and is today administered by parish priests as permitted by the bishop. And today, in the Roman tradition, a priest administers confirmation as so permitted as well, especially for adults. For example, I was baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church by my parish priest. So making too much of the necessity of episcopal hands and thumbs directly will not serve the claim of Bodily connections that the bishop signifies.
I do not see a reason why we cannot restore the connection between water and oil in one of two ways, either by placing Holy Confirmation with Holy Baptism as is done with adults being initiated and as the Eastern Churches do to this day for adults and babes alike, OR by restoring the connections theologically. I think both are worth much more consideration, and are less likely to severe catholic connections that are suggested to my mind by eliminating the rite altogether.
The former is a relatively easy fix, given we now commune babes, and the emphasis on understanding has been placed in a careful lifetime learning approach rather than on a moment with the caveat that understanding is always limited when it comes to the Mysteries.
I want to linger on the theological alternative that is in keeping with a recovery of our baptismal emphasis and that is rooted in centuries of Anglican practice and concern for formation. Just as Confession/Reconciliation is grounded in our baptism, as a moment of returning to our grounding in Christ and Christ’s Body, it does not seem a great stretch to suggest that Confirmation is a maturing of our baptism, as a moment of personal owning for oneself by profession of faith and of being strengthened in the life of Christ and Christ’s Body by hands of the one among us that signify our being bound with the whole and oil that signifies quickening of the Spirit in us for a life of service in the Community and for the world. Why is this not worthy? It is much of our present practice, and it has a sacramental practicality about it that is every bit as much valid as theology as the treatises and tombs we have on Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.
This is not so very different from current practice where some catechesis and making the faith one’s own is hopefully to occur and where the confirmand is prepared to take up responsibility in the Community.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
CWOB: Asking the Wrong Questions
For all looking for a current state of the question on the development of some of what I discuss below, I recommend The Origin of Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons by Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson.
The question of receiving Holy Communion without being baptized (CWOB) as rubric, that is as constituent of who we are as Episcopalians continues to vex us. Up front, I have to say that I find this practice gravely theologically deficient as a practice. The claim that there is an exclusivity otherwise, is I think, specious because all may be baptized, and indeed, we are commanded to go to all peoples and invite and do so, that among every people we would find some living out of God's Life for the life of the whole. I think we continue to ask the wrong questions by focusing on theologically upending CWOB.
So, I want to reframe the question, necessary in a changed contextual reality--post-Christendom. The question is about Holy Baptism. What is our practice of invitation?
Baptism has been greatly recovered as the ever-ground out of which we participate (and grow) in the Life of God—“indissoluble” "bond" as our Prayer Book notes. One of the great unspoken influences on our Prayer Book renewal is F.D. Maurice. He shifted Anglican thinking muchly, drawing upon Luther among others to move us beyond an event understanding of this Sacrament. Moment by moment, day by day, we return to our baptism, God’s adopting us as children in the community as our lasting identity. Baptism is not a mere one-time event as F.D. Maurice reminds us, it is our proper existence before God and once done is not back there but right now. Nothing can separate us from this bond God does for us as pure gift. Our nourishment and deepening in this baptismal existence is by Holy Communion. To jump the shark, so to speak, and make CWOB as policy, leaves the unbaptized person guessing about her or his adoption, about her or his lasting identity. The desire for Christ as the invitation to communion, as is the CWOB rubric, is a desire, best constructed, that is not solidified once-for-all not by us, but by God through the community. No words, no mark, no cleansing and rebirth by water has touched, soaked, wrapped, slaked, drowned the person. The classic Western Invocation (In the Name of the Father, and + of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit) could mean little, where to the received, it means adoption irrevocably, not matter what, including what is always true, that we are sinners and need God. Repentance is return to our baptismal existence. The official practice of CWOB, it could be claimed, is a form of a docetic sacramentality (an oxymoron, I know) because it denies the need for matter, for created things mediating, in our being adopted. It suggests that sin has not wreaked havoc on us, fragmenting us, and leading us to live lives as if we are not God's human creatures.
It is not that such a one, an unbaptized person, is not beloved of God. On the contrary, as Maurice reminds us, Jesus came to his own. In so doing, Maurice draws together the intimate connection of creation and redemption. Yes, Jesus came to his own—the Hebrew people particularly, but as is the case in Scripture, particularity always stands for the whole, so ultimately to all of humanity, and indeed the whole of creation. Nevertheless, we knew him not. It is we humans, as the Orthodox remind us, that have stepped outside the dance, and require the attention if all of creation is to experience healing, renewal, salvation. Being sinners, our receiving of being God’s own requires particular attention. This attention is Holy Baptism. God’s work on our behalf by water with Word and Spirit that we indeed receive and be indissolubly children, where children is a living out of this Life and growing more fully therefrom living for one another, general society, and all creatures. This is the human creature freed, again, drawing together our creation and our redemption—for the latter is who we are intended to be in the former.
So, before we begin to reframe the question, however, we need to dispel some historical truisms that may be getting in the way of our revisioning the practice of Holy Baptism in a post-Christendom Episcopal Church.
1) Catechesis—While mid-Twentieth Century historical research placed great weight on Apostolic Tradition and its recommendation of a three-year catechumenate, the document is now in question. The provenance of that document was once considered to be Roman. It is now likely to be read as of mostly Egyptian origin. The generalizing of its instructions to all of Fourth Century Christianity is now greatly questioned in light of a variety of practices and theologies within the orthodox range. After all, it is notable that Tertullian, of North African provenance, recommended a one-year approach. And we all know the famed passage from Acts and the Ethiopian Eunuch. The notion that somehow folks must have oodles of formation before being baptized is only one of several perfectly catholic notions. It may serve in some contexts and moments. I do not think it may best serve our own.
2) Pre-Baptismal Preparation—Coupled with a hard-and-fast thumb at Apostolic Tradition, our 1979 revision assumes that Triduum was to a tee the high feast for Christians that was later lost and that Lent contains and derives from a pre-baptismal preparation that includes the reception of the penitents. We now know that the Triddum, while on the Roman books may not have received as much attention always and everywhere in the Western Church(es) in practice. What is on the books cannot be assumed to be what was actually done. Indeed, most books carry on what was once done well past their use. We see hints of this (sadly) in the example of Rite I in our own time. Moreover, while in some places, Lent developed at least partially from a pre-baptismal, penitents receiving origin, it also developed as much from a post-baptismal Epiphany. Epiphany too has historically been a day for baptism (by the way, any Sunday is, and even any day as necessary). The baptismal theology that flows out of Epiphany is not one of penitence, but of deepening in the mind of Christ, that is, the light of Christ as adopted children. This after approach is very similar to St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s catechetical mystagogical approach. The Mysteries are unfolded in the undergoing and in follow up to having undergone them.
3) Terminology—Open Communion is the invitation of all who are baptized to receive Holy Communion. Communion Before Baptism occurs when unofficially or officially an unbaptized person receives and there is the hope that any receiving by a non-baptized person will lead to follow up to draw the person to receive God’s indissoluble embrace. CWOB is official policy of communing the unbaptized, and what I think actually happens in most cases of so-called Communion Before Baptism because we’re too shy to boldly proclaim the Good News and invite others in.
4) Inclusivity—Our Church denies no one the possibility of Holy Baptism. Inclusivity is a red herring, drawing on a simplistic read of certain Gospel stories of meals that conflates Holy Communion with these. I am reminded of the rabbinic story of God searching the earth for a people to take up the covenant and commandments. Only the Hebrews are willing to be chosen. Being chosen is not about being privileged, it is about precisely the opposite, about being called to serve. What is missing from conversations about inclusivity is that adoption, our being grafted into Christ, carries with it that same weight as the Covenant God has with our Jewish kin. Do invite without any sort of explanation of what the person is getting into seems dishonest. The invitation is to be included in God’s work in Christ Jesus, and that is no soft thing.
I’m accustomed to end my sermons by pointing to the Altar-Table in word and gesture, reminding folks of our life as receivers, our life as God’s in Christ. Perhaps it is time instead to point to the Font?
One possible solution for us to truly consider is to have regular invitation to Holy Baptism in Sunday liturgy. Folks have heard the Word proclaimed. They have heard the News expounded upon in Sermon—or so we hope, with the hard call this entails. Instead of these or similar words for invitation to Holy Communion as I have seen them in CWOB settings, “All who desire to draw near to Christ are welcome to receive communion,” why not use these words instead to lead folks to the Font? “All who are not yet baptized and who desire to receive Christ are welcome to come forward to be baptized.” And from there to the Altar-Table in a beautiful drawing together of the Sacraments as new-old catechetical approaches do. And instead of emphasizing pre-baptimal preparation, why not overlap this with or do instead post-baptismal teaching and mystagogy? At least then we maintain a catholic approach, if one different from the one we have emphasized in the last century.
The question of receiving Holy Communion without being baptized (CWOB) as rubric, that is as constituent of who we are as Episcopalians continues to vex us. Up front, I have to say that I find this practice gravely theologically deficient as a practice. The claim that there is an exclusivity otherwise, is I think, specious because all may be baptized, and indeed, we are commanded to go to all peoples and invite and do so, that among every people we would find some living out of God's Life for the life of the whole. I think we continue to ask the wrong questions by focusing on theologically upending CWOB.
So, I want to reframe the question, necessary in a changed contextual reality--post-Christendom. The question is about Holy Baptism. What is our practice of invitation?
Baptism has been greatly recovered as the ever-ground out of which we participate (and grow) in the Life of God—“indissoluble” "bond" as our Prayer Book notes. One of the great unspoken influences on our Prayer Book renewal is F.D. Maurice. He shifted Anglican thinking muchly, drawing upon Luther among others to move us beyond an event understanding of this Sacrament. Moment by moment, day by day, we return to our baptism, God’s adopting us as children in the community as our lasting identity. Baptism is not a mere one-time event as F.D. Maurice reminds us, it is our proper existence before God and once done is not back there but right now. Nothing can separate us from this bond God does for us as pure gift. Our nourishment and deepening in this baptismal existence is by Holy Communion. To jump the shark, so to speak, and make CWOB as policy, leaves the unbaptized person guessing about her or his adoption, about her or his lasting identity. The desire for Christ as the invitation to communion, as is the CWOB rubric, is a desire, best constructed, that is not solidified once-for-all not by us, but by God through the community. No words, no mark, no cleansing and rebirth by water has touched, soaked, wrapped, slaked, drowned the person. The classic Western Invocation (In the Name of the Father, and + of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit) could mean little, where to the received, it means adoption irrevocably, not matter what, including what is always true, that we are sinners and need God. Repentance is return to our baptismal existence. The official practice of CWOB, it could be claimed, is a form of a docetic sacramentality (an oxymoron, I know) because it denies the need for matter, for created things mediating, in our being adopted. It suggests that sin has not wreaked havoc on us, fragmenting us, and leading us to live lives as if we are not God's human creatures.
It is not that such a one, an unbaptized person, is not beloved of God. On the contrary, as Maurice reminds us, Jesus came to his own. In so doing, Maurice draws together the intimate connection of creation and redemption. Yes, Jesus came to his own—the Hebrew people particularly, but as is the case in Scripture, particularity always stands for the whole, so ultimately to all of humanity, and indeed the whole of creation. Nevertheless, we knew him not. It is we humans, as the Orthodox remind us, that have stepped outside the dance, and require the attention if all of creation is to experience healing, renewal, salvation. Being sinners, our receiving of being God’s own requires particular attention. This attention is Holy Baptism. God’s work on our behalf by water with Word and Spirit that we indeed receive and be indissolubly children, where children is a living out of this Life and growing more fully therefrom living for one another, general society, and all creatures. This is the human creature freed, again, drawing together our creation and our redemption—for the latter is who we are intended to be in the former.
So, before we begin to reframe the question, however, we need to dispel some historical truisms that may be getting in the way of our revisioning the practice of Holy Baptism in a post-Christendom Episcopal Church.
1) Catechesis—While mid-Twentieth Century historical research placed great weight on Apostolic Tradition and its recommendation of a three-year catechumenate, the document is now in question. The provenance of that document was once considered to be Roman. It is now likely to be read as of mostly Egyptian origin. The generalizing of its instructions to all of Fourth Century Christianity is now greatly questioned in light of a variety of practices and theologies within the orthodox range. After all, it is notable that Tertullian, of North African provenance, recommended a one-year approach. And we all know the famed passage from Acts and the Ethiopian Eunuch. The notion that somehow folks must have oodles of formation before being baptized is only one of several perfectly catholic notions. It may serve in some contexts and moments. I do not think it may best serve our own.
2) Pre-Baptismal Preparation—Coupled with a hard-and-fast thumb at Apostolic Tradition, our 1979 revision assumes that Triduum was to a tee the high feast for Christians that was later lost and that Lent contains and derives from a pre-baptismal preparation that includes the reception of the penitents. We now know that the Triddum, while on the Roman books may not have received as much attention always and everywhere in the Western Church(es) in practice. What is on the books cannot be assumed to be what was actually done. Indeed, most books carry on what was once done well past their use. We see hints of this (sadly) in the example of Rite I in our own time. Moreover, while in some places, Lent developed at least partially from a pre-baptismal, penitents receiving origin, it also developed as much from a post-baptismal Epiphany. Epiphany too has historically been a day for baptism (by the way, any Sunday is, and even any day as necessary). The baptismal theology that flows out of Epiphany is not one of penitence, but of deepening in the mind of Christ, that is, the light of Christ as adopted children. This after approach is very similar to St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s catechetical mystagogical approach. The Mysteries are unfolded in the undergoing and in follow up to having undergone them.
3) Terminology—Open Communion is the invitation of all who are baptized to receive Holy Communion. Communion Before Baptism occurs when unofficially or officially an unbaptized person receives and there is the hope that any receiving by a non-baptized person will lead to follow up to draw the person to receive God’s indissoluble embrace. CWOB is official policy of communing the unbaptized, and what I think actually happens in most cases of so-called Communion Before Baptism because we’re too shy to boldly proclaim the Good News and invite others in.
4) Inclusivity—Our Church denies no one the possibility of Holy Baptism. Inclusivity is a red herring, drawing on a simplistic read of certain Gospel stories of meals that conflates Holy Communion with these. I am reminded of the rabbinic story of God searching the earth for a people to take up the covenant and commandments. Only the Hebrews are willing to be chosen. Being chosen is not about being privileged, it is about precisely the opposite, about being called to serve. What is missing from conversations about inclusivity is that adoption, our being grafted into Christ, carries with it that same weight as the Covenant God has with our Jewish kin. Do invite without any sort of explanation of what the person is getting into seems dishonest. The invitation is to be included in God’s work in Christ Jesus, and that is no soft thing.
I’m accustomed to end my sermons by pointing to the Altar-Table in word and gesture, reminding folks of our life as receivers, our life as God’s in Christ. Perhaps it is time instead to point to the Font?
One possible solution for us to truly consider is to have regular invitation to Holy Baptism in Sunday liturgy. Folks have heard the Word proclaimed. They have heard the News expounded upon in Sermon—or so we hope, with the hard call this entails. Instead of these or similar words for invitation to Holy Communion as I have seen them in CWOB settings, “All who desire to draw near to Christ are welcome to receive communion,” why not use these words instead to lead folks to the Font? “All who are not yet baptized and who desire to receive Christ are welcome to come forward to be baptized.” And from there to the Altar-Table in a beautiful drawing together of the Sacraments as new-old catechetical approaches do. And instead of emphasizing pre-baptimal preparation, why not overlap this with or do instead post-baptismal teaching and mystagogy? At least then we maintain a catholic approach, if one different from the one we have emphasized in the last century.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Complicating Liturgy: Problematizing Community, Evangelism, and Mission in post-Christendom
“If we don’t, we’re not.”
In words to this effect, an interviewee coming out of the Mass tells anthropologist, Victor Turner, why it is she must go to Mass. Her words capture to my mind the essence of why we Christians are gathered together Sunday after Sunday.
Yet, lately, I have read a spate of suggestions that unless we do it differently, we will be not. And by differently, those doing the suggesting mean complete overhauls. We must undo everything we have done before.
Complete breaks with languages and idioms of our past. Rite I must go. [And even Rite II.] Good-by Schmuecke Dich. [Bach be gone, too.]
And with these breaks we must countenance complete rejection of the liturgically-formed pieties that have fed generations to go forth and serve a world in need. Including the pieties of many currently living. We are asked to dismiss generations with all of their own greatnesses and failures, compassions and sins, just like us in all of our own ambiguities and complexities.
This either/or approach to liturgy sets my teeth on edge because it is quite distinct from a tradition, like the Anglican tradition, or I would suggest, the Lutheran tradition, that has tended to incorporate insights, expand options, and build bridges between liturgically-formed pieties past and present as we go along. This antagonistic thinking is at odds with a canonical approach to liturgy in the same vein Luke Timothy Johnson uses when discussing Holy Writ, an approach that makes us stronger because we have many resources upon which and whom to draw from across many, many centuries. New languages and idioms and theological insights will indeed find their way into our praying—alongside that which and those who have gone before. And after sifting. But they will not pit themselves over and against that which has fed ancestors in faith or current sisters and brothers, but seek development in which ancestors and kin too might recognize themselves if but in glimpses and in which they too would recognize the Jesus who came to them as he does to us and turns us from ourselves.
Recently, Dr Derek Olsen offered a cogent, to my mind, initial answer in a conversation on what it is that we Episcopalians should and should not bring up for negotiation in these changing times. Derek noted that we cannot negotiate giving up our common prayer with the theological commitments as expressed in the 1979 Prayer Book. Another responder suggested that, on the contrary, the Prayer Book must be the first thing negotiated—and fast. And if we do so, young people will show up “in droves.”
[As an aside, to be fair, the languages and idioms of the Prayer Book may no longer be in a language understanded for all comers. Nevertheless, finding languages and idioms that do communicate and maintain the scriptural allusions, inherited resonances, and creedal commitments of those we currently have is delicate if we are not to lose the gains of our current prayers--both in Rite I and Rite II. Finding such languages and idioms is careful work if what we shall have in a “Rite III” is to be heard as development consonant with Rites I and II in keys that communicate the Incarnation in his fullness as he is for us here and now AND as he has been for those gone before us. ]
So, droves. Let me be honest. I don’t buy it. The fact is that there are many other, often more interesting, things most younger people (sometimes, including myself) would rather do on their Sunday mornings no matter how revised, with it, or expressive of current spiritual longings our prayers might become. In fact, I am willing to wager that many of the unending debates about language we Christians are currently engaged in are lost on many who don’t currently go to Church or who have never gone to Church. That isn’t to say these debates aren’t important, but it is to say that making these changes won’t make us less sinners and more saints, less irrelevant and more appealing. That work largely lies in community, evangelism, and mission.
What gets me is the suggestion that we make all of these changes, and if we do so, people will come in droves. This is only verifiable if we make all of the changes and risk losing everything that has made us who we are to-date. Are we willing to take that risk? I’m not. The liturgies that we have in our Prayer Book are the stuff of many hundreds of years of people in ongoing encounter with Jesus Christ by the Spirit to the Father and the simultaneous theological and Christological reflection that goes with these encounters. This simultaneous encounter/reflection being what Rahner termed an ever “mediated immediacy” in which the prayers shape the encounter and the encounter shapes the prayers.
What also gets me about this suggestion is that when we get to brass tacks, many of those telling us we must change everything about ourselves don’t seem to have a common understanding of what that would be. Some say chant. Others say not. Some say Lord. And others say not. And so on. In the mean time, I have worshipped in many Episcopal parishes, and the breadth of variety that touches all of these suggestions is to be found with varying levels of numbers and vibrancy (and numbers are no guarantee of vibrancy). No single formula seems to do the trick if numbers is the measure.
And then yesterday, I read a piece in The Lutheran in which the author claims that unless we change everything about ourselves as insiders, we will keep others away and die of irrelevance.
In a rather overly general and swift dismissal of the pieties that feed many to go forth and serve through their life, work, and loves, the piece suggests that folks must give up what makes them who they are using the insider/outsider trope to guilt us into changing everything. This sort of thinking is a set up for a new round of liturgical warfare in congregations. And that will serve no one.
Like those who suggest changes in language and idiom will solve everything, with due respect, I think the bishop who wrote the piece mistakes liturgy for the hard work of community, evangelism, and mission.
Liturgy, particularly, Holy Communion or the Divine Service, is meant to feed those who are already Christians, and Christians of this or that particular stripe. And before anyone reminds me that liturgy is embedded, yes, I am quite aware that liturgy as actually done in any given context is contextual and cultural in communicating our Risen Lord. I expect to find that cultures have been and are being taken up in liturgies to this task. But inculturation does not mean we will not continue to recognize one another and what we’re doing even across cultural expressions and variations.
And what is this we're doing? Receiving and responding to Jesus Christ who comes to us as word and bread.
Just as our Orthodox kin are masters at inculturation while maintaining shared liturgical commitments across a wide range of peoples, I hardly think it wise to suggest we lose recognize-ability. And who, by the way, are growing in the U.S. without changing a thing? The Orthodox. [And yes, I know that that growth has a complicated story.]
The end result of all of this is that we are in danger of making relevance the wag that tells the god. And then who shall we be?
Now, we are living into post-Christendom. This is neither necessarily the greatest thing to ever happen to us as Churches, nor is it the worst. It is different.
One mistake we often make is to compare post-Christendom with pre-Christendom or Christendom.
Post-Christendom is not pre-Christendom. We who are living into post-Christendom realities are not on the whole prone to sporadic persecutions. On the whole, society is indifferent to us at best and carries a low level hostility toward us at worst.
Unlike Christendom, we are finding ourselves increasingly irrelevant and marginalized and vulnerable. And this taste of low grade marginalization, however, does carry resonances with pre-Christendom. This taste is an opportunity. Yet, who knows now what finally will differentiate post-Christendom from Christendom?
But, let me make a bold claim about our current liturgical expectations: The expectation that liturgy can and must carry the weight of community, evangelism, and mission is itself a hangover from Christendom. Why do I say this? Because only in societies in which Christianity has been dominant and thoroughly a part would we suggest that liturgy should be the most central or primary or initial encounter the unchurched have with us.
Folks in the pre-Christendom era did not join up with the Way because of liturgy. In fact, depending on their locale, they might not have been permitted to join us in God’s Service at all because they might be spies on the look out for trouble-making Christ-followers.
As historian and theologian, Robert Wilken, once noted, Christianity spread because we were the great redistribution society at a time when mystery religions of similar ilk and style disconnected rite and right. Our deacons, like St. Lawrence of Rome, were a hit because they distributed the goods brought to the service to those who were poor and in need, radically undercutting a society that, like our own, reduced most human beings to resource and use and numbers and disposability.
What makes us distinct is that unlike these early ancestors, folks do walk in off the street and join us from time to time. The question I have for us is not how did we change our liturgy to bring them in, but how does who we are at prayer reflect who we are we being with one another, who we are in sharing the Reason for our worship in the rest of our lives, and raising a stink and sharing daily bread in the middle of a society willing to use up and spit out the masses?
How is it we are being actively irrelevant, nay a thorn in the side, to a culture that measures relevance by use, resource, numbers, and disposability?
In words to this effect, an interviewee coming out of the Mass tells anthropologist, Victor Turner, why it is she must go to Mass. Her words capture to my mind the essence of why we Christians are gathered together Sunday after Sunday.
Yet, lately, I have read a spate of suggestions that unless we do it differently, we will be not. And by differently, those doing the suggesting mean complete overhauls. We must undo everything we have done before.
Complete breaks with languages and idioms of our past. Rite I must go. [And even Rite II.] Good-by Schmuecke Dich. [Bach be gone, too.]
And with these breaks we must countenance complete rejection of the liturgically-formed pieties that have fed generations to go forth and serve a world in need. Including the pieties of many currently living. We are asked to dismiss generations with all of their own greatnesses and failures, compassions and sins, just like us in all of our own ambiguities and complexities.
This either/or approach to liturgy sets my teeth on edge because it is quite distinct from a tradition, like the Anglican tradition, or I would suggest, the Lutheran tradition, that has tended to incorporate insights, expand options, and build bridges between liturgically-formed pieties past and present as we go along. This antagonistic thinking is at odds with a canonical approach to liturgy in the same vein Luke Timothy Johnson uses when discussing Holy Writ, an approach that makes us stronger because we have many resources upon which and whom to draw from across many, many centuries. New languages and idioms and theological insights will indeed find their way into our praying—alongside that which and those who have gone before. And after sifting. But they will not pit themselves over and against that which has fed ancestors in faith or current sisters and brothers, but seek development in which ancestors and kin too might recognize themselves if but in glimpses and in which they too would recognize the Jesus who came to them as he does to us and turns us from ourselves.
Recently, Dr Derek Olsen offered a cogent, to my mind, initial answer in a conversation on what it is that we Episcopalians should and should not bring up for negotiation in these changing times. Derek noted that we cannot negotiate giving up our common prayer with the theological commitments as expressed in the 1979 Prayer Book. Another responder suggested that, on the contrary, the Prayer Book must be the first thing negotiated—and fast. And if we do so, young people will show up “in droves.”
[As an aside, to be fair, the languages and idioms of the Prayer Book may no longer be in a language understanded for all comers. Nevertheless, finding languages and idioms that do communicate and maintain the scriptural allusions, inherited resonances, and creedal commitments of those we currently have is delicate if we are not to lose the gains of our current prayers--both in Rite I and Rite II. Finding such languages and idioms is careful work if what we shall have in a “Rite III” is to be heard as development consonant with Rites I and II in keys that communicate the Incarnation in his fullness as he is for us here and now AND as he has been for those gone before us. ]
So, droves. Let me be honest. I don’t buy it. The fact is that there are many other, often more interesting, things most younger people (sometimes, including myself) would rather do on their Sunday mornings no matter how revised, with it, or expressive of current spiritual longings our prayers might become. In fact, I am willing to wager that many of the unending debates about language we Christians are currently engaged in are lost on many who don’t currently go to Church or who have never gone to Church. That isn’t to say these debates aren’t important, but it is to say that making these changes won’t make us less sinners and more saints, less irrelevant and more appealing. That work largely lies in community, evangelism, and mission.
What gets me is the suggestion that we make all of these changes, and if we do so, people will come in droves. This is only verifiable if we make all of the changes and risk losing everything that has made us who we are to-date. Are we willing to take that risk? I’m not. The liturgies that we have in our Prayer Book are the stuff of many hundreds of years of people in ongoing encounter with Jesus Christ by the Spirit to the Father and the simultaneous theological and Christological reflection that goes with these encounters. This simultaneous encounter/reflection being what Rahner termed an ever “mediated immediacy” in which the prayers shape the encounter and the encounter shapes the prayers.
What also gets me about this suggestion is that when we get to brass tacks, many of those telling us we must change everything about ourselves don’t seem to have a common understanding of what that would be. Some say chant. Others say not. Some say Lord. And others say not. And so on. In the mean time, I have worshipped in many Episcopal parishes, and the breadth of variety that touches all of these suggestions is to be found with varying levels of numbers and vibrancy (and numbers are no guarantee of vibrancy). No single formula seems to do the trick if numbers is the measure.
And then yesterday, I read a piece in The Lutheran in which the author claims that unless we change everything about ourselves as insiders, we will keep others away and die of irrelevance.
In a rather overly general and swift dismissal of the pieties that feed many to go forth and serve through their life, work, and loves, the piece suggests that folks must give up what makes them who they are using the insider/outsider trope to guilt us into changing everything. This sort of thinking is a set up for a new round of liturgical warfare in congregations. And that will serve no one.
Like those who suggest changes in language and idiom will solve everything, with due respect, I think the bishop who wrote the piece mistakes liturgy for the hard work of community, evangelism, and mission.
Liturgy, particularly, Holy Communion or the Divine Service, is meant to feed those who are already Christians, and Christians of this or that particular stripe. And before anyone reminds me that liturgy is embedded, yes, I am quite aware that liturgy as actually done in any given context is contextual and cultural in communicating our Risen Lord. I expect to find that cultures have been and are being taken up in liturgies to this task. But inculturation does not mean we will not continue to recognize one another and what we’re doing even across cultural expressions and variations.
And what is this we're doing? Receiving and responding to Jesus Christ who comes to us as word and bread.
Just as our Orthodox kin are masters at inculturation while maintaining shared liturgical commitments across a wide range of peoples, I hardly think it wise to suggest we lose recognize-ability. And who, by the way, are growing in the U.S. without changing a thing? The Orthodox. [And yes, I know that that growth has a complicated story.]
The end result of all of this is that we are in danger of making relevance the wag that tells the god. And then who shall we be?
Now, we are living into post-Christendom. This is neither necessarily the greatest thing to ever happen to us as Churches, nor is it the worst. It is different.
One mistake we often make is to compare post-Christendom with pre-Christendom or Christendom.
Post-Christendom is not pre-Christendom. We who are living into post-Christendom realities are not on the whole prone to sporadic persecutions. On the whole, society is indifferent to us at best and carries a low level hostility toward us at worst.
Unlike Christendom, we are finding ourselves increasingly irrelevant and marginalized and vulnerable. And this taste of low grade marginalization, however, does carry resonances with pre-Christendom. This taste is an opportunity. Yet, who knows now what finally will differentiate post-Christendom from Christendom?
But, let me make a bold claim about our current liturgical expectations: The expectation that liturgy can and must carry the weight of community, evangelism, and mission is itself a hangover from Christendom. Why do I say this? Because only in societies in which Christianity has been dominant and thoroughly a part would we suggest that liturgy should be the most central or primary or initial encounter the unchurched have with us.
Folks in the pre-Christendom era did not join up with the Way because of liturgy. In fact, depending on their locale, they might not have been permitted to join us in God’s Service at all because they might be spies on the look out for trouble-making Christ-followers.
As historian and theologian, Robert Wilken, once noted, Christianity spread because we were the great redistribution society at a time when mystery religions of similar ilk and style disconnected rite and right. Our deacons, like St. Lawrence of Rome, were a hit because they distributed the goods brought to the service to those who were poor and in need, radically undercutting a society that, like our own, reduced most human beings to resource and use and numbers and disposability.
What makes us distinct is that unlike these early ancestors, folks do walk in off the street and join us from time to time. The question I have for us is not how did we change our liturgy to bring them in, but how does who we are at prayer reflect who we are we being with one another, who we are in sharing the Reason for our worship in the rest of our lives, and raising a stink and sharing daily bread in the middle of a society willing to use up and spit out the masses?
How is it we are being actively irrelevant, nay a thorn in the side, to a culture that measures relevance by use, resource, numbers, and disposability?
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Recovering the Commons, Part III: Occupying Advent
“And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”
In my previous posts published at The Episcopal Café here and here I began teasing out a concern for economy that does not have many takers in our American two-party increasingly unregulated market system. This concern veers both left and right, being concerned for both the personal-local and the social-global. It cannot easily be classified as either Republican or Democrat—indeed, radically criticizes the sycophantic, greedy corporatism of both parties. It cannot readily be classified as capitalist or socialist, noting that each expression has tended to turn over an ever-increasing authority to the state or the state in collusion with transnational corporations to the detriment of freedom that is not merely individual and individualistic, but rather personal-communal-ecological/cosmic and that touches not just on political rights but on economic rights, and indeed, on the rights of our fellow creatures and creation.
Benedictine, Roman, and Anglican Catholics of other times, giants really, such as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, J.R.R. Tolkein, Dorothy L. Sayers, C.S. Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, F.D. Maurice, Samuel Taylor Coleridge were involved in similar searches, often quite Biblical in their vision, drawing on the positive aspects of Medieval and monastic existence, as well as insights of capitalism and communism to propose third ways that honor the legitimate value in our past scrubbed of romantic notions because lest we forget serfdom actually carried the day for most in other times, that takes care to note what is positive in both markets and the social, and in our time, I dare add ecological.
Their search was deeply rooted in the Incarnation, Holy Communion, the Body of Christ (the Church), and Creation. Almost without fail, a radical and Biblical Christocentric-Trinitarianism pervades their thoughts. And rightly so. A Christian concern for the economies of earth will orient itself to and within the Economy of God as the centering Relationship.
As a poet and theologian who views the world through the lens of radical and Biblical Christocentric-Trinitarianism, I cannot help but follow the lead of my High Church ancestors in faith as I look at the current economic situation, a situation I will dare say is in this moment at odds with the Economy, the Household, of God revealed in Christ Jesus.
Knowingly and unknowingly, the Occupy movement brings this into the open. As Christians, we ignore this to the detriment of our vocation as witnesses to God's Word.
I have read a lot of criticisms of the Occupy movement. Some are more valid than others. Reading between the lines, most of these criticisms tell me that many of us have not yet experienced the full horror of what our current economy can mete out upon us if we fall behind, fall between the cracks, or fall out of the net all together. Indeed, I sit writing this from a heated office, drinking a cup of hot coffee with milk.
Whatever else the Occupy Movement may be, this movement brings into the open and into sharp relief, the brokenness of our economy, an economy that is the expression of how we relate to one another personally-communally-ecologically/cosmically, an economy that commodifies everything and everyone and everybeing:
Resource. Mine. Self. Me. Hoard. Produce. Consume. Job.
This brokenness is not new. Riding CalTrain past US 101 many years ago on my way to my field placement at Stanford, I remember observing the tent cities hidden away beneath the overpasses. But things were good then. For many of us. It was the last years of the Clinton Era. So many didn’t have to pay attention.
Many did not notice where Jesus was at work, where Jesus dwelled, where Jesus was crying out, pitching himself still among those our own worldliness would rather enough forget and doom to the underside and death.
Most of us will not remember or perhaps even know about Hoovervilles. But the Reaganvillages, Clintoncamps, Bushburgs I and II, and Obamavilles have been with and are all about us.
Now that the middle classes and the educated classes themselves are under threat,
Occupy forces us to reevaluate our own dance with worldliness;
Occupy pushes brokenness into the social center, the common ground of the various public plazas, circles, squares, and parks;
We can no longer avoid our mess and complicitness and vulnerability and fragility;
We have to confess that we interdepend on one another and the whole of creation.
Meandmine stepped too near the ledge and fell off on Wall Street. Most of us went along for the ride, participating in ways great and small, failing to notice who was getting bilked and who we’d left behind. The bandages of the past, labor movements and government safety nets and the like, may not be able to put Meandmine back together again.
Even amidst what may be problematic about Occupy, including hints of utopianism, the tents sitting in the midst of us bring a word to us of what has gone ignored for a very long time. And, indeed, as Christians we are called upon to interpret in that word what the Word is saying to us by these bodies pitching their tents among us.
For, as one of us, a creature of earth, God choses to home with us in the Incarnation. God does so because God loves and desires to be with us and all the creatures throughout the far flung cosmos.
God comes to us not as an alien invader, but as One coming to and being with God’s own creation, a creation radically off-kilter, alientated, because we human beings have a tendency to turn everything to our self-interest alone, eschewing the call to be tillers and caregivers and wild-respecters and most of all, reverenters, venerators.
Precisely as one of us, Jesus Christ, God cannot in loving us, help but also enter the depths of this tendency. God liberates us for the good, “by means of Himself,” to quote St. Irenaeus.
And God brings into being a Body who is called to witness to wherever the Word is at work in general society, though hidden, unknown, forgotten, despised, even amidst all of the worldliness—especially our own.
We call this God’s Economy.
So, let’s turn things to God’s Economy, God’s Relating to us, for a moment, a relating that is very much concerned with the beings and being of earth. Indeed, this is unavoidable because we Christians proclaim the Incarnation, Emmanuel, Jesus. In him, precisely because he was conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to play on William Porcher DuBose, every being and all of the cosmos is encompassed potentially, that is, with the promise and hope of the Consummation when God shall be All In All. A promise we receive really in Holy Baptism, not for ourselves, but that as in the Gospel according to St. Mark, we would go forth and proclaim and witness to the Gospel to every kind, to every creature.
God makes home with us, as one of us, a creature of clay, and freely gives to us, sharing with us God’s goodness and bounty and health, just as it was in the beginning when God began to create:
Gift. Share. Us. Work. Create. Forgiveness. Together. Joy.
These are the language of God’s Economy precisely emerging through and with and by the Incarnate One, Jesus Christ, who is the fullness of God’s vision for us as human beings with one another—not just the Church, but all of general societies.
While the media portray the dangers of disease and unruliness of Occupy encampments, what goes uncommented upon is a relational criticism of the status quo, of the unruliness of those who crashed the system and left the rest of us to carry the burden for generations to come, of a growing disparity between the extremely wealthy and the growing poor, of the degradation of earth, of the disease of greed, exploitation, and domination that touches us all.
What I have not heard about in our media is that precisely in Occupy encampments, those who have been without easy access to services, sometimes for years, can find a meal, a bed, a clinic without stigma.
What of the free library at OWS providing reading for those who can no longer accessed our many closing libraries?
I won’t romanticize Occupy, for that is the danger of flitting with utopianism, and I will nevertheless suggest this movement is a strong criticism of the wealthiest nation on earth in our exploits here and abroad. And it is a criticism framed not largely as a series of demands, though they do exist contrary to media claims, but as a collection of tents, a community of bodies.
I do not have easy solutions to the problems of our broken economy, an economy steeped in the vices of self-interest alone.
Perhaps sitting with the brokenness and being with one another is the one thing most needful, learning to:
Gift. Share. Us. Work. Create. Forgiveness. Together. Joy.
This sociality on the level of human beings correlates to God's Economy in refraining from more than need as each requires in her or his body and for sharing of her or his gifts, skills, and talents; being a self-for-with-by-others to accomplish life together, being-in-doing; spacious time; and most of all, being present to one another in our brokenness rather than escaping.
I do,suggest that as we move into Advent, that a season of examination, confession, preparation, refraining, and witness to God’s Economy is appropriate for we who profess Jesus Christ as the One Who Causes To Be, as the One Who Saves—that is, as Lord.
How will you, how will we be occupying Advent?
How will you, how will we Gift, Share, Us, Work, Create, Forgiveness, Together, Joy?
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Continuing the Conversation: Grace
Lee, bls, and myself continue the conversation on sin and grace. I note,
bls makes a good point. Perfection-seeking often reinforces addictive behaviors. It is also crippling to the overly scrupulous like myself. The two can go hand in hand. To be able to admit our limitations is healthy and mature Christian spirituality. The saint is one who accepts without self-loathing that she or he is sinner, and paradoxically grace flows from and through that acceptance. And that for some of us, that involves a felt and experienced break with the past. For some of us, it involves a revision of inhabiting a loved universe not as we might wish it but as it is. I think that much of the sharper divisions on matters of sin and grace exist for at least two reasons: 1) particular theologians of great weight experienced sin and grace for and in themselves in particular ways–spiritualities, and write these into their theological musings–it’s unavoidable, 2) others are shaped by these spiritualities as they are enacted in prayer and imbibed in study. This leaves us always in conversation with others’ spiritualities that do or don’t give us full sense of our own experiences of sin and grace. For those who have experienced the surprise of grace in the midst of addiction or perfectionism, those who seek a way or rule of life may come across as reinforcing the very trouble grace is freeing them from. For those who experience the slow steadiness of grace, such folks may seem to be asking for dispensation from a shared way of putting on Christ. As someone who navigates both of these, I want to avoid legalism because it will crush grace, and at the same time not lose a sense of shared discipleship. At the heart of the genius of Anglicanism is a common rule that is meant to lean us encounter the surprise of grace–Common Prayer (see Countryman’s work on Anglicanism and poetry).
I would posit that accepting our dependence on or trust in God (sound familiar) is the cornerstone that leads us into a vision of our shared coinherence as human beings and interdependence on one another and the entire creation. Dependence on our part paradoxically if slowly renews freedom because as Kathryn Tanner reminds us God is not in opposition to our createdness, but releases our createdness to be more itself, including admission of limitations and shortcomings. I would use Luther’s positive insight re: we don’t want to be creatures as the heart of Sin to reframe the famed theosis phrase, “God became human being so that human beings could become divine” to mean precisely not an upwards movement, as in ladder spirituality, but a groundward movement, where admission of and acceptance of dependence on God is the foundation. Divinity or our partaking of divine nature or participation as well as ways of life together are reframed not primarily as moral requirements, but shared ways that support our being more human–more honest with ourselves and others, more able to admit failure and sin, more responsible for ourselves, more generous to others, more caring of creation, etc. In this way, God became human being, so that human beings might be free, more ourselves, human. That is to say, that “divinity” on our “side” of the experience does not look more ethereal, but more earthy.
bls makes a good point. Perfection-seeking often reinforces addictive behaviors. It is also crippling to the overly scrupulous like myself. The two can go hand in hand. To be able to admit our limitations is healthy and mature Christian spirituality. The saint is one who accepts without self-loathing that she or he is sinner, and paradoxically grace flows from and through that acceptance. And that for some of us, that involves a felt and experienced break with the past. For some of us, it involves a revision of inhabiting a loved universe not as we might wish it but as it is. I think that much of the sharper divisions on matters of sin and grace exist for at least two reasons: 1) particular theologians of great weight experienced sin and grace for and in themselves in particular ways–spiritualities, and write these into their theological musings–it’s unavoidable, 2) others are shaped by these spiritualities as they are enacted in prayer and imbibed in study. This leaves us always in conversation with others’ spiritualities that do or don’t give us full sense of our own experiences of sin and grace. For those who have experienced the surprise of grace in the midst of addiction or perfectionism, those who seek a way or rule of life may come across as reinforcing the very trouble grace is freeing them from. For those who experience the slow steadiness of grace, such folks may seem to be asking for dispensation from a shared way of putting on Christ. As someone who navigates both of these, I want to avoid legalism because it will crush grace, and at the same time not lose a sense of shared discipleship. At the heart of the genius of Anglicanism is a common rule that is meant to lean us encounter the surprise of grace–Common Prayer (see Countryman’s work on Anglicanism and poetry).
I would posit that accepting our dependence on or trust in God (sound familiar) is the cornerstone that leads us into a vision of our shared coinherence as human beings and interdependence on one another and the entire creation. Dependence on our part paradoxically if slowly renews freedom because as Kathryn Tanner reminds us God is not in opposition to our createdness, but releases our createdness to be more itself, including admission of limitations and shortcomings. I would use Luther’s positive insight re: we don’t want to be creatures as the heart of Sin to reframe the famed theosis phrase, “God became human being so that human beings could become divine” to mean precisely not an upwards movement, as in ladder spirituality, but a groundward movement, where admission of and acceptance of dependence on God is the foundation. Divinity or our partaking of divine nature or participation as well as ways of life together are reframed not primarily as moral requirements, but shared ways that support our being more human–more honest with ourselves and others, more able to admit failure and sin, more responsible for ourselves, more generous to others, more caring of creation, etc. In this way, God became human being, so that human beings might be free, more ourselves, human. That is to say, that “divinity” on our “side” of the experience does not look more ethereal, but more earthy.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
A Call for an Ascetical Advent Movement
Lee offered us a post on Pelagius that reminded me that that age-old debate is as complicated as that of Theodore of Mopsuestia—and both may have been unfairly condemned. History gives us space to reassess. We would do well to remember to separate out Pelagius' teachings from what Augustine said Pelagius taught from Pelagianism, just as we would do well to separate out Theodore from Nestorianism. We would also do well to note that what we do know of Pelagius’ teaching in his own words is not very different from that of Orthodox, that is, Eastern Patristic writings on these matters. Now, setting aside that debate for a minute.
Lee’s post reminded me that what is missing from many modern appropriations and reappropriations of Celtic Christianities is a way of life together rooted in a participatory Christocentric Trinitarianism. And of course, that at least something of these Christianities lives on in the Christian expressions of the Isles we have today, and I would argue, especially Anglicanism at our best. And definitely so in the music and poetry and art of the Celtic peoples.
Like the Hebrews, these Christianities value a way of life together lived in response to the creating-liberating God—think Torah. And like the Hebrews, these Christianities do not shy from a world enchanted—yes, animals do speak if we pause to listen; yes, angels grace us if we prepare our hearts with hospitality; yes, Mother Mary and all the Saints and all who have gone before us in faith are not far away but present if we pray; and yes, evil beings walk about looking to destroy flesh beings.
Last year I was a guest lecturer on Indigenous theologies for a course taught by Dr Moses Penumaka, “Theology from the Margins.” My lecture covered a lot, and emphasized those things we call a way of life as intended to keep the people living out of grace and in harmony, what Christians have called asceticism, even as we live in hope when All Shall Be In All and lions shall lie down with lambs—by the way, I take that hope literally. At the close of the conversational lecture, I asked for feedback. A young woman who is a Coptic Christian raised her hand and said, “For the first time in any course at the GTU I feel that someone has understood my tradition, that our ascetical ways exist precisely that we might live out of grace and in harmony with one another and all of creation.”
A Rule of Life in Community and ascetical theology are not primarily about earning or gaining heaven. Rather they are about living out of and in response to Heaven, for Heaven is among us though often unnamed, unknown, forgotten, and even despised. Christian ascetical theologies worth their salt assume Emmanuel, God-With-Us, Jesus Christ at work in the life of not just the Church or general society (i.e., what we often call “the world” which is distinct from worldly), but all of the cosmos creating, redeeming, healing, sustaining, sanctifying. That is, grace is assumed present and active and abounding and ground for our existence at all and for our living good. Human beings living out of this grace, however, is not assumed as evident. We call this the Fall or stepping outside the dance, and it is not merely a back there occurrence, but existential, something in which we personally participate. The Fall touches on us all. Yet grace abounds all the more. By Baptism we receive and participate in Christ, and in Christ by the Spirit, in the Life of the Triune God.
A graced world—a God-With-Us world, nevertheless upended by Sin (and if you don’t think so, read a newspaper) requires shared patterned gospel response on the part of a people called to live in and out of the Harmony of this One, Jesus Christ. This approach assumes the Body as a Community of and within the Head in a way that much Protestant theology rejects, claiming a once-for-all salvation in Christ that often suggests this means that grace need not meet Sin still in our own living out of this once-for-allness. In contrasts, AM Allchin notes that High Church and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans have a participatory soteriology. I might add, that perhaps despite himself the Cranmer of the Prayer Book also does so. Just read Cranmer’s 1549 Eucharistic Prayer. In my writings past, not aware of Allchin’s work on this matter at the time, I called it a gift soteriology. What this means is not that we save ourselves, or that salvation has not been given once-for-all, but rather in Christ we receive this Life as pure gift and participate in and live out of the Life of this One who is our salvation, our healing, our reharmonization as a leavening society and as a people of and friends of the earth, that is, the whole of creation and every creature.
What shall be our shared patterned gospel response together is the question?
Sin is like a hydra. Cut off a head and new ones appear. Which is to say that our response and life is contextual to how it is Sin is operative in me, among us, destroying all creatures.
And so our responses will draw on the wisdom of the Elders of every age, for it is in wisdom that is, a sort of means testing over the long haul, that we learn ways that live Christ.
And “our” is paramount. And where Protestantism runs into trouble. There can be no shared rule of life, for “how dare you tell me what to do,” and where then, a participatory soteriological ascetical theology breaks down. For such a theology is necessarily communal in the One Lord Jesus Christ. What then is lost is means testing over the long haul, for after all we learn new things AND we encounter Sin in changed form, requiring adjustments to our way of life together. Hooker does this similarly be means testing natural law with a common law approach. And what is lost is a shared way of living together that is not about earning salvation but living out of salvation not just pro me or pro nobis but pro mundis.
And in our time poverty and ecological devastation cannot be ignored as how Sin is at work among us. So too, then, must be our shared patterned gospel response.
Which gets us to criticisms lobbed at those who appropriate portions of Celtic Christian spiritualities in a middle class comfortable way. Now, parts of the Celtic traditions run in the familial traditions in my veins. An abiding sense of the aliveness of creation, for example, in which rocks and hills and mountains are not inert but mineral creations of Love meant too to have a name. Rocks sing. I believe this. Or that a raven may speak a word. Yes, I believe this, too. In fact, it is because of God’s Other Book as proclamation of God’s goodness that I as a gay man did not lose my faith when treated harshly by the Church. And so, my own faith cannot divorce the Incarnation from the Creation.
What goes lacking in middle class appropriations is a participatory Christocentric Trinitarianism (read Celtic prayers and you will be struck by their Christ-Trinity focus) and a shared ascetical outlook that is meant to call us to and hold us in harmony, and has extremists, who mind us to our own living and remind us of our utter dependence on God and interdependence on one another and all of creation. Extremists, or elders, however, while always reminding the community to itself should not be confused with the bulk of participants, who nevertheless, lived an outlook based in a prayerful way of life. And hence, we have been bequeathed numerous prayers and prayer-poems and runes of precisely this sort that are common praying.
Which gets me to Advent. Martinmas is coming Nov. 11, marking a time when the season we now know as Advent began not merely as a time of expectant joy for the Nativity, but as a time of expectant preparation for Lord of History to bring all to completion in the Consummation. Advent, like Lent, is a time to reassess our ways, ask about our ways, and wonder if we have any in response to the Incarnation, Jesus Christ. Penitential has become a dirty word not to be applied to Advent. It has also been associated with being anti-body. But penitential is really another way of saying, being off the way, reassessing, turning away from, repenting, and turning to the way again when it is removed from any sense of self-hatred and flesh-hatred. On the contrary, lack of penitence, a failure of ascesis may itself show a hatred of the self, the body, all flesh, and society if our aim is to live out of grace and in harmony, that is, peace, Shalom, holiness with all of life. For example, food is good. But overindulging... Eating animals treated like product... Being comfortable with others not eating... These dishonor and mar bodiliness, both ours, others', and the whole of creation.
So, how are we living out of Christ’s ways as our community has determined this shared pattern of gospel response?
Am I praying daily? Or not? Are we?
What are my buying habits? My habits of heart-mind related to a society based on production and consumption? Ours?
How am I eating in such a way to reverence creatures and creation? Or not? And We?
How am I restraining my own wants so that others’ needs might be filled? And we?
…
Lee’s post reminded me that what is missing from many modern appropriations and reappropriations of Celtic Christianities is a way of life together rooted in a participatory Christocentric Trinitarianism. And of course, that at least something of these Christianities lives on in the Christian expressions of the Isles we have today, and I would argue, especially Anglicanism at our best. And definitely so in the music and poetry and art of the Celtic peoples.
Like the Hebrews, these Christianities value a way of life together lived in response to the creating-liberating God—think Torah. And like the Hebrews, these Christianities do not shy from a world enchanted—yes, animals do speak if we pause to listen; yes, angels grace us if we prepare our hearts with hospitality; yes, Mother Mary and all the Saints and all who have gone before us in faith are not far away but present if we pray; and yes, evil beings walk about looking to destroy flesh beings.
Last year I was a guest lecturer on Indigenous theologies for a course taught by Dr Moses Penumaka, “Theology from the Margins.” My lecture covered a lot, and emphasized those things we call a way of life as intended to keep the people living out of grace and in harmony, what Christians have called asceticism, even as we live in hope when All Shall Be In All and lions shall lie down with lambs—by the way, I take that hope literally. At the close of the conversational lecture, I asked for feedback. A young woman who is a Coptic Christian raised her hand and said, “For the first time in any course at the GTU I feel that someone has understood my tradition, that our ascetical ways exist precisely that we might live out of grace and in harmony with one another and all of creation.”
A Rule of Life in Community and ascetical theology are not primarily about earning or gaining heaven. Rather they are about living out of and in response to Heaven, for Heaven is among us though often unnamed, unknown, forgotten, and even despised. Christian ascetical theologies worth their salt assume Emmanuel, God-With-Us, Jesus Christ at work in the life of not just the Church or general society (i.e., what we often call “the world” which is distinct from worldly), but all of the cosmos creating, redeeming, healing, sustaining, sanctifying. That is, grace is assumed present and active and abounding and ground for our existence at all and for our living good. Human beings living out of this grace, however, is not assumed as evident. We call this the Fall or stepping outside the dance, and it is not merely a back there occurrence, but existential, something in which we personally participate. The Fall touches on us all. Yet grace abounds all the more. By Baptism we receive and participate in Christ, and in Christ by the Spirit, in the Life of the Triune God.
A graced world—a God-With-Us world, nevertheless upended by Sin (and if you don’t think so, read a newspaper) requires shared patterned gospel response on the part of a people called to live in and out of the Harmony of this One, Jesus Christ. This approach assumes the Body as a Community of and within the Head in a way that much Protestant theology rejects, claiming a once-for-all salvation in Christ that often suggests this means that grace need not meet Sin still in our own living out of this once-for-allness. In contrasts, AM Allchin notes that High Church and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans have a participatory soteriology. I might add, that perhaps despite himself the Cranmer of the Prayer Book also does so. Just read Cranmer’s 1549 Eucharistic Prayer. In my writings past, not aware of Allchin’s work on this matter at the time, I called it a gift soteriology. What this means is not that we save ourselves, or that salvation has not been given once-for-all, but rather in Christ we receive this Life as pure gift and participate in and live out of the Life of this One who is our salvation, our healing, our reharmonization as a leavening society and as a people of and friends of the earth, that is, the whole of creation and every creature.
What shall be our shared patterned gospel response together is the question?
Sin is like a hydra. Cut off a head and new ones appear. Which is to say that our response and life is contextual to how it is Sin is operative in me, among us, destroying all creatures.
And so our responses will draw on the wisdom of the Elders of every age, for it is in wisdom that is, a sort of means testing over the long haul, that we learn ways that live Christ.
And “our” is paramount. And where Protestantism runs into trouble. There can be no shared rule of life, for “how dare you tell me what to do,” and where then, a participatory soteriological ascetical theology breaks down. For such a theology is necessarily communal in the One Lord Jesus Christ. What then is lost is means testing over the long haul, for after all we learn new things AND we encounter Sin in changed form, requiring adjustments to our way of life together. Hooker does this similarly be means testing natural law with a common law approach. And what is lost is a shared way of living together that is not about earning salvation but living out of salvation not just pro me or pro nobis but pro mundis.
And in our time poverty and ecological devastation cannot be ignored as how Sin is at work among us. So too, then, must be our shared patterned gospel response.
Which gets us to criticisms lobbed at those who appropriate portions of Celtic Christian spiritualities in a middle class comfortable way. Now, parts of the Celtic traditions run in the familial traditions in my veins. An abiding sense of the aliveness of creation, for example, in which rocks and hills and mountains are not inert but mineral creations of Love meant too to have a name. Rocks sing. I believe this. Or that a raven may speak a word. Yes, I believe this, too. In fact, it is because of God’s Other Book as proclamation of God’s goodness that I as a gay man did not lose my faith when treated harshly by the Church. And so, my own faith cannot divorce the Incarnation from the Creation.
What goes lacking in middle class appropriations is a participatory Christocentric Trinitarianism (read Celtic prayers and you will be struck by their Christ-Trinity focus) and a shared ascetical outlook that is meant to call us to and hold us in harmony, and has extremists, who mind us to our own living and remind us of our utter dependence on God and interdependence on one another and all of creation. Extremists, or elders, however, while always reminding the community to itself should not be confused with the bulk of participants, who nevertheless, lived an outlook based in a prayerful way of life. And hence, we have been bequeathed numerous prayers and prayer-poems and runes of precisely this sort that are common praying.
Which gets me to Advent. Martinmas is coming Nov. 11, marking a time when the season we now know as Advent began not merely as a time of expectant joy for the Nativity, but as a time of expectant preparation for Lord of History to bring all to completion in the Consummation. Advent, like Lent, is a time to reassess our ways, ask about our ways, and wonder if we have any in response to the Incarnation, Jesus Christ. Penitential has become a dirty word not to be applied to Advent. It has also been associated with being anti-body. But penitential is really another way of saying, being off the way, reassessing, turning away from, repenting, and turning to the way again when it is removed from any sense of self-hatred and flesh-hatred. On the contrary, lack of penitence, a failure of ascesis may itself show a hatred of the self, the body, all flesh, and society if our aim is to live out of grace and in harmony, that is, peace, Shalom, holiness with all of life. For example, food is good. But overindulging... Eating animals treated like product... Being comfortable with others not eating... These dishonor and mar bodiliness, both ours, others', and the whole of creation.
So, how are we living out of Christ’s ways as our community has determined this shared pattern of gospel response?
Am I praying daily? Or not? Are we?
What are my buying habits? My habits of heart-mind related to a society based on production and consumption? Ours?
How am I eating in such a way to reverence creatures and creation? Or not? And We?
How am I restraining my own wants so that others’ needs might be filled? And we?
…
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Death, death on a cross...
In the Name of the Father, and of + the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
A few days ago Troy Davis was executed in the state of Georgia. I do not claim to know his innocence or guilt. I do know that a great deal of uncertainty surrounded his case. And conservatively speaking such uncertainty should have been enough to grant Troy clemency. And I do know that in these United States men of color inordinately bear the brunt of incarceration and the death penalty. That under conditions of a racist society, the death penalty cannot be but a racist act, an act of desecration.
I know we do not like to speak of encountering God in our white-washed Churches, but as the news announced his execution and broadcast pictures of him, for a moment, a flash, I saw pictures of Troy Davis, and his spectacled face was the face of Christ. And I wept.
Yesterday, Wangari Maathai died. She had championed the planting of nearly 30 million trees to restore her Kenyan homeland. Many women joined Wangari in her work, and planting trees came to also highlight the plight and dignity of women in her country. Wangari did all of this in the face of early scorn and even government opposition. Late did she receive the Nobel prize for her work. In “Redwood Cathedral,” a poem dedicated to her life’s work, the poet tells of an encounter with the Living God among the Redwood forests of Northern California:
I enter the house of your praise
without thought of worship
stumps and needles cense
the heated air in late day
you still even my heart
at columns holding the sky
I touch my lips to rot.
I dip my fingers in decay
forgetting pious decorum
a salamander red-tailed
lingers in the last warm rays
you turn me again to dust
by pillars of silence keeping
I walk your dwelling place.(1)
I know we do not like to speak of encountering God in our sanitized Churches, but in the poet’s telling of smelling sweet decay and kissing rot and delight in a lone salamander, I am awed by a sense of God’s walking among us just as God does in the Garden in Genesis. I do not claim many such encounters for myself. But I do know that in these United States of late capitalism, creatures great and small bear the brunt of our insatiable use that now threatens all life. That under such conditions, to hug a tree destined for mansion-building is laughable, if not heresy.
“Because of the Incarnation, I reverence all remaining manner.” St. John of Damascus wrote these striking words in defense of icons during the struggles over iconoclasm in the Sixth Century. For many of us today, his words may seem outrageous if not outright heretical or even pagan.
Yet, at the heart of the controversy over icons rests this question, Is matter, created existence, made for and to show forth God? That is, in questioning the implications of the Incarnation, the icon, the Incarnation himself is at stake. Is matter, created existence, made to bear, to birth God? And finally, Do we dare hope in the Incarnation fully leavened in every creatures and all of creation, when in all transparency and fullness, God shall be all in all? Do we see? Dare we act as if?(2)
Let me reframe St. John’s maxim for the iconoclasms of our time, among them racism and sexism and ecological devastation: Because God became one of us, human, clay, creature, flesh, matter, Jesus Christ, I reverence every creature and all of creation. I will be so bold to say that in matters of racism and sexism and ecological devastation, the Incarnation is at stake for you and me and us. In the words of 19th Century Anglican theologian, F.D. Maurice, “the Incarnation may be set aside in acts as well as words.”
Maybe it’s easier for us to imagine matter showing forth God in proclamations written on gold leaf backgrounds in vibrant egg tempura strokes of cinnabar and cobalt? And perhaps it’s easier for us to believe that a mother tender and mild, holding an infant, ancient of face and robed in dazzling array, reveals matter bearing forth God? Though perhaps the controversy on Facebook last year over censoring pictures of women breastfeeding suggests otherwise?
Yet to gaze upon the doxa, the glory, the beauty of the Nativity, the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Sending of the Spirit without paying attention to the Crucifixion is to finally miss the Person Whom they proclaim: The Word became flesh and dwelled among us all the way.
No, the Incarnation hymn we heard proclaimed from Philippians this morning is itself an icon written with strokes of iron on parchment and meant to be proclaimed as song. Just as with every icon of the Incarnation, this hymn brings us to encounter with a Living Person, God become Human, Jesus Christ. For hear, we encounter the God who so identifies with us as flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, that in Christ Jesus, God willingly experiences humiliation, enters abandonment, and risks annihilation for you, for me, for us.
Make no mistake, this Incarnational hymn at the heart of St. Paul’s letter to the Church at Philippi contains within it the Personal, that is Christological, seeds of social, cultural, and I dare say, economic and ecological, reorientation and reordering, starting not with general society out there, but with we who sing and hear the hymn, Christ’s own Body.
So, just as we would gaze closely at an icon written in paint, let us listen attentively to a few stanzas of this hymn. Hear and meet again, God’s own Self-Word given to us:
Though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
This God enters fully into the midst of us as one of us. And God does so not in glorious array and imperial might on clouds of thunder and lightning, but in the words of St. Martin Luther, “There in a stable, without man or maid, lay the Creator of the world.” This Jesus, God’s own Self-Word does not grasp at his divinity, but having identified himself with us as one of us in the flesh, he gives over his Person fully to us. Jesus does not hold back entering into the fullness of human life and experience. And the fullness of God is found as a newborn infant crying in a cave adored by those considered of low or no estate, shepherds, sheep, oxen, donkeys, and chickens.
Oh, the innkeeper had done his best. The inn was full. Full of a questionable crowd, raucous on beer and wine, some women without any other means to support themselves than prostitution, some men thieves and murders taking refuge for the night from the very roads they made unsafe. So a place of quiet and relative safety seemed a gift. Yet, here in the midst of these, a child is born. And for a few moments of calm, at least, the Human One nurses as cattle bend their knee and donkeys bray loud rejoicing and sages sneak in with gifts of kings and angels sing out glorious Peace. But already the Cross looms as Herod slaughters the innocent.
No, this God does not ignore the vicious realities of human existence, of Herodian monstrosities and Caesarly usurpations and the banal, everyday cruelty toward one another and the use of creation for profit and gain. This Jesus is born into particularity, smack dab in the midst of that viciousness, as a slave among a people who have known slavery and live under to the boot of a new Pharaoh, Caesar Augustus. Not a servant as some translations give us. Servant, after all, sounds so genteel and civilized doesn’t it? No, God who is perfect Love, and therefore, perfectly free, comes among us as one without freedom, a slave. A slave, one who unlike the sons into today’s gospel proclamation, is sent out into the vineyards without a choice to break his back in hard labor in scorching heat. A slave, a class deemed of no account in the societies of Jesus’ day, a class deemed without personhood, a class worthy only of supporting the scaffolding of an exploitative economy through daily burdensome labor, and often, through physical, verbal, and sexual abuse at the whim of those who claimed ownership over their lives.
And in the words of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, “by means of Himself,” by means of his very Person, as one in the flesh, as one bound in chains, Jesus binds Godself to us precisely where the most wretched inhumanity to inhumanity shows itself. Indeed, precisely as one whose very treatment and station or lack thereof is representative of humanity gone awry, a humanity of siblings turned against God and one another and all of creation, God becomes one of us. And it is this One enslaved that the hymn dares name human, person. Do you hear a social revolution?
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death
—even death on a cross.
This God enters fully into the midst of us as one of us, holding back not at all, not fleeing from being body and blood, but experiences himself the most terrible death of torturous suffocation at the hands of the state with only vinegar for comfort and dogs and vultures for company as his body begins to rot alive! Here on a tree, without friend or family, hangs dead the Creator of the world.
The fullness of God is found in this One condemned alongside thieves and murderers, as one of us. Precisely here, surrounded by thieves and highway robbers, this Jesus, muscled by hard labor and long walking, now broken and beaten, of late age at 33, hangs from a cross, an instrument of torture and death for criminals. And it is this One hanged that the hymn dares name human, person. Do you hear a social revolution?
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Christ Jesus is Lord,
to the Glory of God the Father.
Do we imagine still, even now, after all of that, flame orange angels and gold foil? Of triumph and might? To encounter in this hymn God Crucified in the flesh spoils our quick reverie and flight from this life and engagement with all that desecrates.
Again at this Table we shall receive this Lord Jesus in his Body given for you and me and us and his Blood shed for you and me and us. This Jesus, true to the Incarnation, does not run off to the far heavens to bask in the unapproachable light of Godself adulation. But, true to Love’s self-identification with all creatures, by means of his humanity, bends a knee to every creature and speaks a name. Above every name is a Name who surprisingly bends his knee to us.
This Lord Jesus freely shares the dignity of his Person and Name with you, and with you, and with me, with us, and with every creature and the whole of creation. Above every name is a Name who surprisingly confesses us. In Prof Carol Jacobson’s paradoxical completion of St. John Damascene’s words, “Because of the Incarnation, God reverences all remaining matter,” you and you and me and us and every creature and the whole of creation. Amen.
__________
(1) Christopher Evans, “Redwood Cathedral,” Unpublished manuscript.
(2) This emphasis on the Consummation is characteristic of Anglican theology and is reflected in Anglican ascetical theology that we act as if the Consummation were already. Dr. Carol Jacobson in her explorations of eschatology also notes that we are called to act in the subjunctive, as if.
A few days ago Troy Davis was executed in the state of Georgia. I do not claim to know his innocence or guilt. I do know that a great deal of uncertainty surrounded his case. And conservatively speaking such uncertainty should have been enough to grant Troy clemency. And I do know that in these United States men of color inordinately bear the brunt of incarceration and the death penalty. That under conditions of a racist society, the death penalty cannot be but a racist act, an act of desecration.
I know we do not like to speak of encountering God in our white-washed Churches, but as the news announced his execution and broadcast pictures of him, for a moment, a flash, I saw pictures of Troy Davis, and his spectacled face was the face of Christ. And I wept.
Yesterday, Wangari Maathai died. She had championed the planting of nearly 30 million trees to restore her Kenyan homeland. Many women joined Wangari in her work, and planting trees came to also highlight the plight and dignity of women in her country. Wangari did all of this in the face of early scorn and even government opposition. Late did she receive the Nobel prize for her work. In “Redwood Cathedral,” a poem dedicated to her life’s work, the poet tells of an encounter with the Living God among the Redwood forests of Northern California:
I enter the house of your praise
without thought of worship
stumps and needles cense
the heated air in late day
you still even my heart
at columns holding the sky
I touch my lips to rot.
I dip my fingers in decay
forgetting pious decorum
a salamander red-tailed
lingers in the last warm rays
you turn me again to dust
by pillars of silence keeping
I walk your dwelling place.(1)
I know we do not like to speak of encountering God in our sanitized Churches, but in the poet’s telling of smelling sweet decay and kissing rot and delight in a lone salamander, I am awed by a sense of God’s walking among us just as God does in the Garden in Genesis. I do not claim many such encounters for myself. But I do know that in these United States of late capitalism, creatures great and small bear the brunt of our insatiable use that now threatens all life. That under such conditions, to hug a tree destined for mansion-building is laughable, if not heresy.
“Because of the Incarnation, I reverence all remaining manner.” St. John of Damascus wrote these striking words in defense of icons during the struggles over iconoclasm in the Sixth Century. For many of us today, his words may seem outrageous if not outright heretical or even pagan.
Yet, at the heart of the controversy over icons rests this question, Is matter, created existence, made for and to show forth God? That is, in questioning the implications of the Incarnation, the icon, the Incarnation himself is at stake. Is matter, created existence, made to bear, to birth God? And finally, Do we dare hope in the Incarnation fully leavened in every creatures and all of creation, when in all transparency and fullness, God shall be all in all? Do we see? Dare we act as if?(2)
Let me reframe St. John’s maxim for the iconoclasms of our time, among them racism and sexism and ecological devastation: Because God became one of us, human, clay, creature, flesh, matter, Jesus Christ, I reverence every creature and all of creation. I will be so bold to say that in matters of racism and sexism and ecological devastation, the Incarnation is at stake for you and me and us. In the words of 19th Century Anglican theologian, F.D. Maurice, “the Incarnation may be set aside in acts as well as words.”
Maybe it’s easier for us to imagine matter showing forth God in proclamations written on gold leaf backgrounds in vibrant egg tempura strokes of cinnabar and cobalt? And perhaps it’s easier for us to believe that a mother tender and mild, holding an infant, ancient of face and robed in dazzling array, reveals matter bearing forth God? Though perhaps the controversy on Facebook last year over censoring pictures of women breastfeeding suggests otherwise?
Yet to gaze upon the doxa, the glory, the beauty of the Nativity, the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Sending of the Spirit without paying attention to the Crucifixion is to finally miss the Person Whom they proclaim: The Word became flesh and dwelled among us all the way.
No, the Incarnation hymn we heard proclaimed from Philippians this morning is itself an icon written with strokes of iron on parchment and meant to be proclaimed as song. Just as with every icon of the Incarnation, this hymn brings us to encounter with a Living Person, God become Human, Jesus Christ. For hear, we encounter the God who so identifies with us as flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, that in Christ Jesus, God willingly experiences humiliation, enters abandonment, and risks annihilation for you, for me, for us.
Make no mistake, this Incarnational hymn at the heart of St. Paul’s letter to the Church at Philippi contains within it the Personal, that is Christological, seeds of social, cultural, and I dare say, economic and ecological, reorientation and reordering, starting not with general society out there, but with we who sing and hear the hymn, Christ’s own Body.
So, just as we would gaze closely at an icon written in paint, let us listen attentively to a few stanzas of this hymn. Hear and meet again, God’s own Self-Word given to us:
Though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
This God enters fully into the midst of us as one of us. And God does so not in glorious array and imperial might on clouds of thunder and lightning, but in the words of St. Martin Luther, “There in a stable, without man or maid, lay the Creator of the world.” This Jesus, God’s own Self-Word does not grasp at his divinity, but having identified himself with us as one of us in the flesh, he gives over his Person fully to us. Jesus does not hold back entering into the fullness of human life and experience. And the fullness of God is found as a newborn infant crying in a cave adored by those considered of low or no estate, shepherds, sheep, oxen, donkeys, and chickens.
Oh, the innkeeper had done his best. The inn was full. Full of a questionable crowd, raucous on beer and wine, some women without any other means to support themselves than prostitution, some men thieves and murders taking refuge for the night from the very roads they made unsafe. So a place of quiet and relative safety seemed a gift. Yet, here in the midst of these, a child is born. And for a few moments of calm, at least, the Human One nurses as cattle bend their knee and donkeys bray loud rejoicing and sages sneak in with gifts of kings and angels sing out glorious Peace. But already the Cross looms as Herod slaughters the innocent.
No, this God does not ignore the vicious realities of human existence, of Herodian monstrosities and Caesarly usurpations and the banal, everyday cruelty toward one another and the use of creation for profit and gain. This Jesus is born into particularity, smack dab in the midst of that viciousness, as a slave among a people who have known slavery and live under to the boot of a new Pharaoh, Caesar Augustus. Not a servant as some translations give us. Servant, after all, sounds so genteel and civilized doesn’t it? No, God who is perfect Love, and therefore, perfectly free, comes among us as one without freedom, a slave. A slave, one who unlike the sons into today’s gospel proclamation, is sent out into the vineyards without a choice to break his back in hard labor in scorching heat. A slave, a class deemed of no account in the societies of Jesus’ day, a class deemed without personhood, a class worthy only of supporting the scaffolding of an exploitative economy through daily burdensome labor, and often, through physical, verbal, and sexual abuse at the whim of those who claimed ownership over their lives.
And in the words of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, “by means of Himself,” by means of his very Person, as one in the flesh, as one bound in chains, Jesus binds Godself to us precisely where the most wretched inhumanity to inhumanity shows itself. Indeed, precisely as one whose very treatment and station or lack thereof is representative of humanity gone awry, a humanity of siblings turned against God and one another and all of creation, God becomes one of us. And it is this One enslaved that the hymn dares name human, person. Do you hear a social revolution?
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death
—even death on a cross.
This God enters fully into the midst of us as one of us, holding back not at all, not fleeing from being body and blood, but experiences himself the most terrible death of torturous suffocation at the hands of the state with only vinegar for comfort and dogs and vultures for company as his body begins to rot alive! Here on a tree, without friend or family, hangs dead the Creator of the world.
The fullness of God is found in this One condemned alongside thieves and murderers, as one of us. Precisely here, surrounded by thieves and highway robbers, this Jesus, muscled by hard labor and long walking, now broken and beaten, of late age at 33, hangs from a cross, an instrument of torture and death for criminals. And it is this One hanged that the hymn dares name human, person. Do you hear a social revolution?
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Christ Jesus is Lord,
to the Glory of God the Father.
Do we imagine still, even now, after all of that, flame orange angels and gold foil? Of triumph and might? To encounter in this hymn God Crucified in the flesh spoils our quick reverie and flight from this life and engagement with all that desecrates.
Again at this Table we shall receive this Lord Jesus in his Body given for you and me and us and his Blood shed for you and me and us. This Jesus, true to the Incarnation, does not run off to the far heavens to bask in the unapproachable light of Godself adulation. But, true to Love’s self-identification with all creatures, by means of his humanity, bends a knee to every creature and speaks a name. Above every name is a Name who surprisingly bends his knee to us.
This Lord Jesus freely shares the dignity of his Person and Name with you, and with you, and with me, with us, and with every creature and the whole of creation. Above every name is a Name who surprisingly confesses us. In Prof Carol Jacobson’s paradoxical completion of St. John Damascene’s words, “Because of the Incarnation, God reverences all remaining matter,” you and you and me and us and every creature and the whole of creation. Amen.
__________
(1) Christopher Evans, “Redwood Cathedral,” Unpublished manuscript.
(2) This emphasis on the Consummation is characteristic of Anglican theology and is reflected in Anglican ascetical theology that we act as if the Consummation were already. Dr. Carol Jacobson in her explorations of eschatology also notes that we are called to act in the subjunctive, as if.
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