The
first congregation I served as a priest
was Christ Church, Macon, Georgia.
In
the mid-19th century, the rector, Mr. Reese,
was of the Protestant persuasion;
until
he spent a sabbatical studying with Anglo-Catholic Bishop Onterdonk.
When
Mr. Reese returned to Macon, he put candles on the altar.
The
uproar was -- well -- uproarious.
In
the end, Mr. Reese and half the congregation
left Christ Church and set up shop
as St. Paul’s across town.
The
plot line is too familiar to be of interest,
except for the endnote.
By
the time I got to Macon in 1990,
Christ Church had become the high
church in town,
and St. Paul’s was rigidly
Anglo-Presbyterian.
We
were playing that same uproar game
in 1555 with the
Oxford Martyrs.
But
it didn’t start there and it hasn’t
ended yet.
Recently,
the battle lines have not been
high versus low as often as left
versus right.
But
it’s the same game.
We
heat the pot up to a level 4 or 5 conflict boil.
Level
4, in Alban Institute categories, means someone has to leave.
Level
5 means after they leave we track them down and kill them.
So
we ratchet up the emotionality.
Then
someone stomps out of the room
in a melodramatic imitation of Martin Luther,
as if their stomping proves their integrity.
And
the other side says “good riddance.”
I
say this as a hard truth, but I swear I speak it in love.
I
challenge anyone to seriously read the Epistle to the Philippians
or 1st Corinthians,
either one, but Philippians is more explicit.
Read
Philippians and explain to me how this mutual intolerance
for each other accords with
Apostolic Christian Faith.
“I
appeal to you,” Paul said, “make my joy complete
by being of a single mind, one in
love. . . .
Let
your behavior be free of murmuring and complaining. . . .
I
urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to come
to an
agreement in the Lord.
And
I ask Syzygus to really be a partner and help them. . . . .
Have
the same mind in you that was in Christ Jesus . . . .
who humbled himself to become servant of all.”
In
Galatians, Paul lists partisan spirit as a work of the flesh,
which corresponds to Ego or concupiscence,
which
in Augustine equates with original sin.
From
Paul’s and Augustine’s perspective
our dogmatic convictions look like
pretexts
for the assertion of our own egocentric
wills.
Our
certainty that we are right justifies
our aggression against our brothers
and sisters in Christ.
High
and low, left and right are all equally susceptible
to that partisan spirit.
This
Fall my own seminary is self-destructing
as students are caught in the
crossfire of mutual power plays.
Each
side appears confident of its own righteousness.
Today,
with God’s help, they may find a way forward.
We
prepare for General Convention by drawing battle lines
over who gets power over what little
piece of turf.
The
inveterate obstacle to our becoming the Body of Christ
is the power of sin to skew our view
of the very nature of Truth itself.
We
arrogantly and irreverently act as if Truth is something we can grasp,
and use as a weapon to assert our wills over
someone else.
The
poetry of Jorge Luis Borges, however, celebrates the way
Ideas bounce against each other
striking sparks
In the darkness.
To
Borges, no idea in itself captures truth.
Truth
is the spark struck when ideas collide.
More
accurately, ideas are at best partial truths.
But
when we strike them against each other like subatomic particles
in a nuclear reactor,
the collision emits a light, the
light of Christ..
For
example, Rebecca Goldstein’s clever book, Plato
At The Googleplex,
convinces me that Plato and Socrates
were not Platonists.
They
did not intend the things they said
to add up to a comprehensive system.
They
were striking ideas against each other like flint and steel.
This
axiomatic Epistemology 101 runs
from Augustine and Dionysius the Aereopagite
to Marin
Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.
Once
we clear on this, all sorts of things fall into place.
Ideas are linguistic constructs that contain
only partial truths,
but the interplay of ideas sheds a
larger light.
That’s
why the Hebrew Scriptures
do not present a sustained religious
teaching
but rather, as Walter Brueggemann
says,
they are an ongoing argument between
conflicting
visions of God and human life.
That’s
why Jesus didn’t come out and say,
in some direct, comprehensible way,
“This is how it is” –
but rather spoke
in zinger stories that leave us
scratching our heads.
Jesus
didn’t give us mind-closing final answers because
the Body of Christ is “a learning community.”
We
learn from the interplay of multiple viewpoints,
not from monotonous group-think conformity
Look
at the disciples Jesus assembled
-- Zealot
rebels and Roman collaborator tax collectors,
sinners and Pharisaic moralists, mystics
and fishermen,
Greeks,
Galileans, Judeans, and Canaanites.
It
was an assembly of the mismatched and wrongheaded,
all of whom
called him” Rabboni,” “Teacher,”
not because
he told them how it was
but because he made them think fresh thoughts,
‘ and see the world through new eyes.
Jesus
challenged dogmas with his parables,
so they
killed him;
much
as Athens killed Socrates
for asking
too many questions.
We
need the cross, the stake, and the vial of hemlock
to prevent
at any cost
the
interplay of ideas that might light the world up.
The
concupiscent partisan spirit that drove Catholics and Protestants
to torture and kill each other in centuries past
is desperately anxious to keep the subatomic particles
segregated in their own safe silos,
lest they collide and emit the disturbing light of truth.
You
see, friends, the easy harmony of like-mindedness
does not challenge our egos.
The
easy harmony of like-mindedness will not sanctify us.
When
St. John of the Cross said,
“God has so ordained that we are
sanctified
through the frail instrumentality of
each other,”
he meant we are sanctified by
learning to love
those who are the most
disturbingly different
from ourselves.
We
need each other.
We
need each other for the sake of our own sanctification.
We
need each other in order to be the Body of Christ.
I
confess I did not always like my seminary class.
Truly
most of us did not want to be there.
Most
of us wanted to be at a different seminary
that was more pure from the
perspective
of a particular faction of the
Church.
The
liberals wanted to be at EDS.
The
conservatives wanted to be at Trinity, etc.
But
their bishops had not let them.
So
there we were – thrown up against each other in my class.
My
own bias, as an ex-Southern Baptist, was against fundamentalism.
Sure
enough there was a died-in-the-wool fundamentalist in my class.
Her
presence made me very uncomfortable
and I don’t think she was any
happier to have me around.
We
did a lot of small group work in those days.
And
sure enough, God so ordained that she was
in every single one of my small
groups for three years.
By
the end of the third year, we understood each other
a little better and liked each other
a great deal.
Jesus
said the kingdom of heaven is like a big net
that catches all kinds of fish.
I
suppose the angels may sort us out some day.
But
not now. And it will never – never, ever -- be our job
to do the sorting,
either by driving someone out or stomping out ourselves.
Our
calling is just to be all kinds of fish,
caught up together in the net of
grace,
all of us
good, all of us bad,
all of us
essential to one another.
Amen.
