As I look back with the perfect vision of hindsight, even now, it seems that things are unfolding as they should though I often had no idea how they were related at the time. My education has brought me to this place in my spiritual journey even as my spiritual formation has affected my education choices. I can wish that my journey was more original but I cannot say that I would change anything.
It seems too cliché to start a personal essay with, “I was born.” But it is true none the less that my spiritual journey has been powerfully affected by the fact that I was born at all. As part of the first generation to grow up knowing that babies did not have to be born, I was powerfully reminded that “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” wasn’t about my soul, it was about my breathing. In my youth, the struggle for my soul was not between apathy and faith but between the moral certitudes of Southern Baptist and Catholic grandmothers.
I always went to church as a child. The God of my earliest memories lives in snow encrusted edifices lit by flickering candles. Gradually, He morphed into the revival tent God of simple truths, rousing songs and playdough. Eventually, He became a damning God of Revelation.
By the time I reached college, I had reached the end of my patience with the shaming God of my youth. One of those grandmothers had died, the other had lost interest, and my pastor had no answer but prayer. I took a Bible as Literature class and became furious that for so many years I had been expected to understand God’s Word in a vacuum. Convinced that the Church had no answers for the metaphysical questions of Truth or Beauty, I changed my major – to philosophy. It was through the philosophy department that I met my first spiritual mentor. Dr. Betty listened to my complaints, encouraged my questions and never presumed that his answers might be the only answers. The result was not a crisis of faith but a crisis of existence. It was through this drastic repositioning of myself in the cosmos that I was able to let go of the God of my youth and be receptive to adult faith.
The defining characteristic of life is that it only stops once. Eventually I got off the couch, got married, had kids and finished my philosophy degree. I did not go back to church and became quite indifferent to Christians. Unlike many families, I was not the instigator of our return to Church. My husband, who had never lost his faith so much as stopped watering it, needed to share his faith with our children and needed to find his own way back to God. I went along. I cried a lot. I was amazed to discover that the lessons of charity and community that I heard as a child had a place in the adult church.
It was at this church that I met my second faith mentor. Katherine was in the ordination process when I met her although I did not know it at the time. At 30 years old, a supposed inheritor of the womens movement, I had never met a woman who was a faith leader. I knew many women with power in the church, but that power was always resource power, a withholding or negative means of expression. As I watched Katherine’s ordination into the priesthood of the Episcopal Church, began to see that women could hold and share the positive, authoritative power of God’s love.
As I have answered God’s call, and not the altar call of belief, but the baptismal call to action, I have watched the Spirit expose hidden gifts that others have seen but I have not. In my mothering circle, I have been the one called in for miscarriages and broken relationships. I have many times been the first to receive good news of jobs, births and weddings. I have often been an arbitrator of moral dilemmas, the one to sound out the answer the question, “What should I do?” I have had to flip my self-perception head over heels. No longer am I a shy person who vomits at the mere thought of public speaking, but a preacher. No longer am I the only one home when things need hearing, I am available for that very need.
I have come to see how important it is for ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Indeed, my perverse fear is that I may be extraordinary, and then how will I get anything done? It isn’t the martyrs or even the apostles who have impressed me with their abilities to preserve or testify the gospel of Christ, but the women who opened their homes, with or without permission, and formed the first communities. It isn’t the movers and shakers of theological debate that motivate my growth, it is the people who can listen to gossip and still see Christ in both the speaker and subject. I want to be one of those people.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Tradition - Old School
2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5
Proper 27 Yr C BCP
It’s a funny thing-tradition. If you were to listen only to the news or only read the online journals of prominent Epsicopalians, you would think that our little corner of the Christian Church had managed to corner the market not only on pure Orthodox faith but the front row seats to the Apocalypse as well.
In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So, the gospel today talks about the tradition of marriage and the resurrection and there are all sorts of views on marriage in our church and indeed, in the whole world vying to be the last word on tradition and I’ll get to that, but I found that spending some time with Paul and learning what he thought of tradition was actually more useful than choosing sides and picking out Pauline text to back me up.
Because here is the thing – Paul was a crazy traditionalist.
We are all actually a lot more like Paul than Peter. Paul did not know Jesus personified – he only knew Christ crucified and resurrected. In fact, our experience of Jesus is larger than Paul’s because he didn’t have the gospels. Paul didn’t even have Paul – he was truly living on the cutting edge of faith. So why was he going on about tradition? Edges seem like the sort of place where tradition would lose its authority.
Well, because Paul was Paul. He had a conversion experience on the way to Damascus; he didn’t get a concussion resulting in amnesia. Paul didn’t become someone else, he became Paul – renewed. In the same way, our baptism is our own conversion experience and no matter how sanctified the water is – it doesn’t drown out our past or give us amnesia about who we are, instead it allows us to see the same world but with renewed and indeed sanctified vision.
A lot of people didn’t get what Paul was doing – obviously, or he wouldn’t have had to keep writing letters saying, do what I said, already! One way of seeing what Paul was doing is to think of him as a tentmaker. Paul was tying knots in the fabric of Christianity but he wasn’t making thread. Tradition was the warp of his weaving. It was the thread that stabilized the newly formed cloth. Because remember, Paul really took to heart the idea that the Christ fulfilled the prophecy. It had to connect with the old if it was to fulfill it, but it didn’t have to be the same thing. One might say that for Paul, tradition had to be sanctified by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And what the heck does that mean anyway. Well, it probably means I spend too much time reading theology books and need to get some more fresh air. But what it really means is that tradition, also known as “that’s the way we’ve always done it” only matters, only works, if it sets the thing it is about aside for the glory of God because Jesus died and was resurrected. So, I suspect that who Paul was writing to had a lot to do with what particular traditions needed to be maintained, to get people to stop paying attention to the small stuff, and to start paying attention to the huge amazing and astounding fact that Jesus was resurrected. It isn’t like this happened all the time. God really isn’t in the habit. Even today, we don’t bury Aunt Muriel and go back in three days to make sure she didn’t get resurrected or anything.
And that brings me to the gospel. Paul and Jesus were in complete accord on this. The resurrection makes talking about tradition sort of meaningless. Jesus spent a lot of his ministry telling and showing people how he was coming to fulfill the law and then showing us all how much we had mucked up the intention of the law with our traditions about it.
One of my favorite, oh, call him an anti-apologist curmudgeon, is GK Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy he says that "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”
So, in giving the vote to the dead, we have to remember that the dead not only can be dead wrong, but they are certainly entitled to change their mind now that they have come face to face with the glory of God. And don’t forget about the legion of dead who are there because some living person honored tradition over life itself. I suspect that the dead actually have a pretty radically different view of things now that they are not longer afraid of death. So let’s not assume how they would vote at all.
Instead, lets consider that Jesus is trying to tell the Saducees that the traditions of the living, like marriage, matter to the living, but that the priorities of the resurrected are all but incomprehensible to us. This is especially true if we spend too much time hanging onto traditions that aren’t working anymore. That way being – to keep us focused on the amazing astounding stupefying fact that Jesus was resurrected.
If we, as Christians, truly believe that we live in a now and not yet state of resurrection ourselves. If we as Christians truly believe that we are the hands and feet of Christ, then we are the tools of the resurrection. It is our duty, then, to make sure that all Christians(past present and future) live lives focused on the amazement of resurrection, of being a wholly new creature, set aside for God’s own joy. That is our mission, that is our story of salvation. Freedom from fear; fear of death, fear of being stranded at the altar, fear of being married to seven brothers.
Traditions are useful only in that they free us from our fears. Traditions are useful only if they liberate us to see God as clearly as possible, and the clearest we will ever see the Glory of God is to believe as literally as we can, the resurrection of the Christ. Because when we can really believe that, we can really believe that our sins are forgiven and we can really get on with the important stuff – which is liberating others from their fears and letting everyone see the face of God shining into the world.
All things come of thee, oh Lord
And of thine own, have we given thee.
I pray each of us goes into the world this day, a shining beacon of God who lights us all from the inside. And I pray each of us trust in our faith with the strength of our tradition, which is of Jesus Crucified and Christ Resurrected. Amen.
Proper 27 Yr C BCP
It’s a funny thing-tradition. If you were to listen only to the news or only read the online journals of prominent Epsicopalians, you would think that our little corner of the Christian Church had managed to corner the market not only on pure Orthodox faith but the front row seats to the Apocalypse as well.
In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So, the gospel today talks about the tradition of marriage and the resurrection and there are all sorts of views on marriage in our church and indeed, in the whole world vying to be the last word on tradition and I’ll get to that, but I found that spending some time with Paul and learning what he thought of tradition was actually more useful than choosing sides and picking out Pauline text to back me up.
Because here is the thing – Paul was a crazy traditionalist.
We are all actually a lot more like Paul than Peter. Paul did not know Jesus personified – he only knew Christ crucified and resurrected. In fact, our experience of Jesus is larger than Paul’s because he didn’t have the gospels. Paul didn’t even have Paul – he was truly living on the cutting edge of faith. So why was he going on about tradition? Edges seem like the sort of place where tradition would lose its authority.
Well, because Paul was Paul. He had a conversion experience on the way to Damascus; he didn’t get a concussion resulting in amnesia. Paul didn’t become someone else, he became Paul – renewed. In the same way, our baptism is our own conversion experience and no matter how sanctified the water is – it doesn’t drown out our past or give us amnesia about who we are, instead it allows us to see the same world but with renewed and indeed sanctified vision.
A lot of people didn’t get what Paul was doing – obviously, or he wouldn’t have had to keep writing letters saying, do what I said, already! One way of seeing what Paul was doing is to think of him as a tentmaker. Paul was tying knots in the fabric of Christianity but he wasn’t making thread. Tradition was the warp of his weaving. It was the thread that stabilized the newly formed cloth. Because remember, Paul really took to heart the idea that the Christ fulfilled the prophecy. It had to connect with the old if it was to fulfill it, but it didn’t have to be the same thing. One might say that for Paul, tradition had to be sanctified by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And what the heck does that mean anyway. Well, it probably means I spend too much time reading theology books and need to get some more fresh air. But what it really means is that tradition, also known as “that’s the way we’ve always done it” only matters, only works, if it sets the thing it is about aside for the glory of God because Jesus died and was resurrected. So, I suspect that who Paul was writing to had a lot to do with what particular traditions needed to be maintained, to get people to stop paying attention to the small stuff, and to start paying attention to the huge amazing and astounding fact that Jesus was resurrected. It isn’t like this happened all the time. God really isn’t in the habit. Even today, we don’t bury Aunt Muriel and go back in three days to make sure she didn’t get resurrected or anything.
And that brings me to the gospel. Paul and Jesus were in complete accord on this. The resurrection makes talking about tradition sort of meaningless. Jesus spent a lot of his ministry telling and showing people how he was coming to fulfill the law and then showing us all how much we had mucked up the intention of the law with our traditions about it.
One of my favorite, oh, call him an anti-apologist curmudgeon, is GK Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy he says that "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”
So, in giving the vote to the dead, we have to remember that the dead not only can be dead wrong, but they are certainly entitled to change their mind now that they have come face to face with the glory of God. And don’t forget about the legion of dead who are there because some living person honored tradition over life itself. I suspect that the dead actually have a pretty radically different view of things now that they are not longer afraid of death. So let’s not assume how they would vote at all.
Instead, lets consider that Jesus is trying to tell the Saducees that the traditions of the living, like marriage, matter to the living, but that the priorities of the resurrected are all but incomprehensible to us. This is especially true if we spend too much time hanging onto traditions that aren’t working anymore. That way being – to keep us focused on the amazing astounding stupefying fact that Jesus was resurrected.
If we, as Christians, truly believe that we live in a now and not yet state of resurrection ourselves. If we as Christians truly believe that we are the hands and feet of Christ, then we are the tools of the resurrection. It is our duty, then, to make sure that all Christians(past present and future) live lives focused on the amazement of resurrection, of being a wholly new creature, set aside for God’s own joy. That is our mission, that is our story of salvation. Freedom from fear; fear of death, fear of being stranded at the altar, fear of being married to seven brothers.
Traditions are useful only in that they free us from our fears. Traditions are useful only if they liberate us to see God as clearly as possible, and the clearest we will ever see the Glory of God is to believe as literally as we can, the resurrection of the Christ. Because when we can really believe that, we can really believe that our sins are forgiven and we can really get on with the important stuff – which is liberating others from their fears and letting everyone see the face of God shining into the world.
All things come of thee, oh Lord
And of thine own, have we given thee.
I pray each of us goes into the world this day, a shining beacon of God who lights us all from the inside. And I pray each of us trust in our faith with the strength of our tradition, which is of Jesus Crucified and Christ Resurrected. Amen.
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