What's at stake?

Our Sunday Morning Adult Forum has just begun a two-week discussion of the "apostle" Paul. Suggested reading is Borg and Crossan's The First Paul. The title implies that there is more than one "Paul." In fact they posit at least three Pauls -- The Paul of Acts, the authentic Paul and a post-Pauline Paul some of whose writings they classify as anti-Pauline.

The Borg-Crossan duo has been read a lot around our parish. Our Advent study was a series of conversations about their book The First Christmas. Reaction was mixed and widely variant. Some were appalled at the suggestion that not every event in the narratives of Matthew and Luke happened exactly as described. It was too painful to consider that the sky might not literally have filled with angels or that "following a star" is a nonsensical navigational feat. Some found the book to be almost "mean" in analytically draining the life out of our cherished Christmas stories and images. But others found the book to be liberating, freeing, an invitation to a deeper, more mature faith. It was in hope of the latter that I led a conversation about the book.

The conversation about Paul will probably not produce negative reactions like the Christmas book did -- because I don't imagine the stories about Paul and the authenticity of his letters reside as deeply in the heart as a donkey, a manger, shepherds and angels do. But my goal will be the same: to provide for serious inquirers an intellectually honest and non-superstitious way to relate to our sacred texts.

I have been asked if I was for "throwing out the Bible," when nothing could be further from the truth. I am a devoted student of the Bible, finding in its pages a depth and breadth and height of inspiration, consolation, challenge and guidance found no where else in such magnificent concentration.

But why stir things up? What's at stake?

In that regard I always think of Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts in the following dialogue:

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things.""I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Carroll was, after all, a clergyman and might just have know what it meant to encounter those who insisted on believing impossible things.

What's at stake, as I understand it, is my vocation to foster mature faith and to help Christ's ambassadors in the world to fulfill their calling.

The rigid insistence on biblical literalism is a stumbling block to those who might otherwise be engaged by the Christian faith. Guarding the door, as I imagine it, are stories that are incredible to contemporary women and men. And their incredibility is an obstacle. It is also an obstacle to the faith development of those already inside the door.

No one insists that in order to have the best experience of a production of Shakespeare's Tempest one has to believe the events it displays actually happened. Or, to make the point more clearly, no one need ask if Beethoven's Ninth Symphony of Mozart's 40th are "true." To ask such a question is a category mistake. Closer to the point, it is absolutely insignificant whether or not there was ever a landowner who paid all his workers the same wage no matter how long they had labored. The historicity of the tale is not the point and is, in fact, an utter distraction from it.

I want to move beyond any argument about historicity to what the stories (or musical compositions) mean, what they have to teach, what emotional, psychological and even aesthetic effect they have on their hearers.

What's at stake is passing on to generations to come a lively faith with the power to change lives and engender hope. What's at stake is our cultivating a relationship with the Word that is not impeded or obscured by "the words."

But how are we to tell the difference between story and "fact." I would advise using the same ability one uses in reading a newspaper to tell the news from the cartoons, the want ads and the movie reviews.

I don't ask anyone to believe impossible things. Just to believe in the power of love as it is found in experience and illumined on the printed page -- or musical score.

A Dinosaur in the Museum

The talk in my circle of colleagues and friends is about "the emerging church." All agree THAT it is, but no one knows WHAT it is, at least what it is in much detail.

Right now it seems to me we are learning what this emerging church is not. It is not like the church of the 1950's that was a pillar of mainstream American culture. If there is any religious force that is mainstream in American culture today it is a strange hybrid of fundamentalism, nostalgia and superstition that is largely anti-intellectual, conservative in the narrow sense of "conserving" ideas and understandings that are actually quite recent. The religious rhetoric that commands most of the airwaves is a far cry from Jesus's message of grace and the dignity of every human being.

The emerging church is not that -- nor is it like the Church that emerged way back when the Roman emperor Constantine combined Christianity and the Roman Empire. Church and state were blended, but the two elements, American culture and Christianity, have begun to break apart like oil and vinegar in a cruet that has sat so long that the always uneasy emulsion has begun to separate. The emerging church will be something other than the marriage of religion and the prevailing culture. Once again, it appears, Christianity is consciously becoming a counter-cultural movement.

But I am deeply committed to "classical Anglicanism," from the creeds to the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer. Along with the Scriptures, the writing that most speaks to my soul is the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Eliot, Auden and others who give voice to the depth and beauty of the Spiritual Journey walked in the Anglican way. I do not want the leave these things behind.

But I wonder. Am I merely clinging to an older way of thinking and praying and living? Does it really matter that the liturgy begun on Maundy Thursday doesn't really end until the Easter Vigil? Is that just a quaint museum piece and am I dinosaur?

Maybe so. Either way, here is one of my favorite museum exhibits, a bit from John Donne's poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

Never has an image been more apt. Two lovers, though far apart, are not separated, but like pure gold that can be stretched almost infinitely with out breaking, are still connected to each other no matter the distance. Wow. (Notice the cadence of the last line, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM -- like the jeweler's hammer tapping a piece of gold into ever thinner leaf.) Such writing!

And another, from one of Donne's Holy Sonnets:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I can't imagine the soul's longing to be swept up, overwhelmed, ravished by God finding any greater expression.

Are they baby or bathwater? Am I a dinosaur in a museum? A creature from a different time, who is surrounding himself with relics only? Where is the balance?

"These fragments have I shored up against my ruin." -- T. S. Eliot