Chinglican Christianity: Infallibility Is Political

Tags

Alastair Sterne, authority, Catholic, church, Douglas Todd, inerrancy, infallibility, politics, private sphere, public, St. Peter's Fireside

Stuff circulates when you’re having a good time. Over the last day or so, my Chinglican response to St. Peter’s Fireside’s ten-part response to Douglas Todd’s 10-point primer on ‘Liberal Christianity’ has circulated back to its author, Mike Chase. He has graciously responded in a comment in the previous post. I have not yet had time to respond – apologies to Mike, as I do plan to get back. Douglas Todd has also now read my post – I should apologize to him also for not realizing that he was being ‘coy’ about whether he himself was a ‘liberal Christian.’ Fair points all around.

And yet, as the Gospel song says, ‘This great caravan keeps on rolling along.’ And so, without disappointment, St. Peter’s Fireside’s lead pastor Alastair Sterne has now issued his response to Todd on the ‘Bible as history and metaphor.’ Here are Todd’s words:

We take the Bible seriously, but not literally.” That’s a phrase heard often among liberal Christians. They follow Bible scholars like Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and David Lull in viewing the Bible as a mix of history, myth, metaphor and poetry. They have long supported independent, critical study of the Bible. They recognize scripture was written by God-inspired humans, limited by time and context. Liberal Christians accept the Bible may include mistakes.

Sterne also seems to have read my post. Attempting a nuanced treatment of biblical scholarship, Sterne insists (along with Chase in a comment on yesterday’s post) that when he argues for ‘biblical infallibility,’ he is arguing a ‘truly Catholic and classical position,’ not the sort of narrow Anglo-American ‘evangelicalism’ that Chase outlines in his comment through what’s known as the Bebbington Quadrilateral, i.e. historian David Bebbington’s four-part definition of ‘evangelicalism’ as encompassing ‘biblicism, activism, conversionism, and crucicentrism’ (if you like polygons, wait till I tell you about the Larsen Pentagon from The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology). Citing church fathers like St. Clement of Rome and St. Augustine, Sterne argues over against a view of Scripture as only history and metaphor that the Bible must be treated as revelation. This means, he contends, that Scripture isn’t limited by historical context and isn’t subject to the whims of the reader; it stands over its readers and judges them, and it ultimately finds its culmination in the Word made flesh.

In many ways, I appreciate what Sterne is doing here. I’m glad, for example, that he and his colleagues now seem to be dealing more seriously with the implication that they’ve used the word ‘classical,’ not ‘evangelical.’ As one commenter I read somewhere said, ‘I wish Seattle were this theologically alive. But it’s intent on being cool.’ In many ways, I agree with this backhanded compliment to Vancouver, which has a public sphere that is not stupid. It’s the public sphere that is forcing St. Peter’s Fireside to clarify why they are using ‘classical’ instead of ‘evangelical,’ for changing a word without altering a theology raises more suspicious eyebrows than it calms fears in a putatively post-Christian Pacific Northwest. As our Catholic friends would say, it is right and just.

But, frankly, I’m still not entirely satisfied that Sterne has fully sussed out the term ‘classical’ by pairing it with biblical infallibility. That’s because using the word ‘infallible’ and then claiming an unbroken classical Christian heritage still doesn’t speak to how politically contested ‘infallibility’ is. That’s because whenever the word ‘infallible’ is used in ‘classical’ Christianity, we’re talking about politics.

 

It shouldn’t be shocking for anyone who has hung out in Christian churches of whatever variety to hear that the church is a political institution. As St. Augustine describes it, this is because there’s a city of God to be built, a polis premised on love instead of power, which means, as Stanley Hauerwas puts it, that the church is itself a politics. This, of course, has long had local expressions going back to the beginning of the Christian movement (back when we were still called ‘the Way’!), with local assemblies of Christians gathering in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, etc., and the way that these assemblies — these ekklesiai, from which we get the word church — saw themselves relating to each other was through their overseers — their episkopoi, from which we get the word bishop. As the bishops across the different churches were in communion with each other, these churches were catholic, that is, all the local expressions saw themselves as united in the universal practice of what it means to be God’s people in Jesus Christ.

It’s from the church catholic that we get the canon of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. That’s because of the many things that these assemblies did in their gatherings (e.g. eat bread and drink wine together, greet each other with holy kisses, baptizing people, singing spiritual songs, etc.), one of the parts of their liturgy — i.e. the collective work of the people in worship — was to hear the ‘apostles’ teaching,’ i.e. the teaching of Jesus’ immediate followers, who reinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures in light of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection (see why Jewish-Christian relations is both tense and an imperative for continued conversation?). Eventually, these apostolic interpretations of the Scriptures (and frankly, how the whole world worked) in light of Jesus were written down, say, in the letters of Paul and Peter and John, the Gospels, the Apocalypse, etc. and read alongside the Hebrew Scriptures. While the Hebrew Scriptures pretty much had a set canon (they were usually reading from the Greek Septuagint), each of the local churches tended to have their own lists of which letters and books constituted the apostles’ teaching. One book, for example, that made it on some of the lists but not others was called The Shepherd of Hermas, which, if you ever get around to reading, is pretty trippy stuff .Eventually, the church catholic decided pretty much by consensus that it was probably a good idea to have a standardized list. According to most accounts, that was because there was this heretic Marcion going around denying that the Hebrew Scriptures had anything to do with the life of the church while cutting out parts of the apostles’ teaching to fit his own agenda, which tended to be all this body-hating, hyper-spiritual crazy elitist crap.

In any case, my point is: from this process of canonization — and I’ve simplified a few things here and there — you could technically make Sterne’s argument that the biblical canon is infallible for the Christian church. After all, Jesus speaks to the church through the Word in Scripture, which is what Sterne is insisting.

But in some ways, that’s an incomplete argument. That’s because you could also technically make the case that classical Christians believe that what’s actually infallible is the church.

In fact, speaking of the breadth of the church catholic and classical Christianity, what I’m saying might only sound radical to evangelical Protestants, because this other group of classical Christians — Roman Catholics — have pretty much been thinking this all along. You could say that this is how the whole idea of ‘papal infallibility’ came about. Sure, I’m about to oversimplify and not mention, like, the fraudulent Donation of Constantine, Pope Gregory VII’s ramblings, and the crazy politics of the Vatican I vote on infallibility. But the idea that the pope could speak infallibly ex cathedra (on his seat on the Chair of St. Peter) was because the pope — the Bishop of Rome — presides over the church that, as Pope Francis says, has long ‘presided in charity over the churches’ to maintain that sort of catholic unity that I described earlier. Actually, you could say that the real schism that the Catholics are concerned about — the one with the Orthodox — is pretty much about how the church gets to be infallible: is it through the bishop of Rome or through the collegiality of the patriarchs? Some work has been done on this question (see The Ravenna Document), and it’s particularly interesting to see how Scripture is framed by these questions of church power:

15. Authority within the Church is founded upon the Word of God, present and alive in the community of the disciples. Scripture is the revealed Word of God, as the Church, through the Holy Spirit present and active within it, has discerned it in the living Tradition received from the Apostles. At the heart of this Tradition is the Eucharist (cfr. 1 Cor 10, 16-17; 11, 23-26). The authority of Scripture derives from the fact that it is the Word of God which, read in the Church and by the Church, transmits the Gospel of salvation. Through Scripture, Christ addresses the assembled community and the heart of each believer. The Church, through the Holy Spirit present within it, authentically interprets Scripture, responding to the needs of times and places. The constant custom of the Councils to enthrone the Gospels in the midst of the assembly both attests the presence of Christ in his Word, which is the necessary point of reference for all their discussions and decisions, and at the same time affirms the authority of the Church to interpret this Word of God.

See what’s going on there? Scripture is revelation, yes, but its place is in the assembled people of God, addressing the Church while being interpreted by the Church as Christ speaking.

In short, questions about infallibility are really about church politics.

The same goes for Protestant Christians, then, which is what Sterne is. You would think that when the Protestant Reformers insisted that the Bible alone is sufficient for salvation, that settled the question completely. The trouble, though, as Brad Gregory points out in his ambitious Unintended Reformation, is that Scripture didn’t stop getting interpreted — it started getting interpreted in lots of different ways. Moreover, the rising modern states saw how useful this was in asserting their authority over against the church, and in political wranglings that saw this, that, and the other Protestant or Catholic (depending on the state) getting burned at the stake or getting their head chopped off, much of the authority of the church in interpreting Scripture wasn’t transferred so much to the individual, but to the state!

Talk about politics.

In an effort not to read the sixteenth century into contemporary times, though, it’s safe to say that the politics of biblical infallibility — or as it has been recently called, inerrancy — hasn’t gone away. In a fascinating account of the unlikely alliances that could be shared between indigenous sovereignty movements and the Christian Right, Andrea Smith recounts the politics of biblical inerrancy vis-a-vis questions of gender. Smith’s point is that what passes for, ‘The Bible is true,’ is often an attempt to create and maintain a specific political vision based on an interpretation of the Bible. This makes sense also in light of the recent removals of evangelical faculty who don’t subscribe to a ‘Bible is inerrant to every word and punctuation mark,’ like Peter Enns and Doug Green – again, there’s a social vision at stake for certain evangelical seminaries where the inerrancy of the Bible is caught up with building private domains.

But you see, that’s the point. What we have there is another transfer of authority vis-a-vis the interpretation of Scripture — from the church catholic to the state, and from the state to the private sphere. And that’s a bit of an ironic point. While many complain that conservative Christians are trespassing the secular boundary line between private religion and public politics, what I’m saying is that the politics of biblical inerrancy goes hand-in-hand with the privatization of religion.

Charles Taylor would think that’s pretty trippy.

Back to the main point. The point is that for all of Sterne’s attempts to address my concerns about the usage of ‘classical,’ I still am not quite sure that they can speak for all ‘classical’ orthodox Christians because — unless one wants to claim that only Roman Catholics or only evangelical Protestants are ‘classical Christians’ — I’m still not sure I know what this monolithic ‘classical Christian’ is. Indeed, to make the claim that a Christian is ‘classical’ as opposed to ‘liberal’ is political — and arguably unnecessary. As for Todd’s point that opposes liberal critical readings of Scripture to the politics of infallibility, one wonders, given the actual transfers of authority since the Reformation, whether the conservative Christians he opposes are themselves in fact ironic liberals. After all, for all the ‘independent critical study’ of the Bible that Todd claims that liberal Christians do, the move toward inerrancy politics in the private sphere is about as independent and critical as one can get. As a matter of fact, there’s a new provocative book out by a secular New Testament scholar, James Crossley, that observes that all the scholars Todd discussed (John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and David Lull) and all the evangelical scholars they seem to oppose are all really doing the same thing. As Crossley argues, they’re all contextualized by what’s called an age of neoliberalism, that is, an age where the private markets are given more authority to govern than the state, producing a lifestyle that requires an Anglo-American empire to subjugate and colonize dissidents in other parts of the world in order to maintain their economic foothold. Whether one agrees or not with Crossley’s anti-imperial politics is besides the point – the point is that when I say that there are more similarities than differences between putatively liberal and conservative Christians in approaches to the Bible, I’m not making stuff up.

The real question for a classical Christian, then, isn’t whether the Bible is infallible, per se. It’s: how does the authority of the church catholic work, especially in an age of privatized politics? As a hint for further exploration (probably again during this ten-part series), the late Swiss theologian Karl Barth may be helpful here. Like Sterne, Barth had a strong theology of revelation, one that he went to town on liberal German scholars with beginning in his commentary on The Epistle to the Romans. For Barth, the Word of God causes what he calls a krisis for the powers that be, exposing them as they act like gods to be No-Gods — which, by the way, came to be a great theology with which to oppose the Third Reich. But in Romans, Barth doesn’t play the politics of biblical inerrancy (which is why he was later disliked by American fundamentalists and evangelicals). For Barth, the Word of God is definitively revealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the political Word that God speaks to defy the powers that crucified him. As I hinted at earlier, the power of the resurrection may well be how the apostles started in the first place to produce their teaching based on the Hebrew Scriptures about Jesus.

Bottom line is: in discussing the infallibility of the Bible, both Todd and Sterne have opened a political Pandora’s Box. My hope is that they haven’t gotten more than they bargained for.

Now that the categories of ‘liberal’ and ‘classical’ are adequately confused, we now look forward to St. Peter’s Fireside’s third post on the person of Jesus.

Why Rob Ford needs our prayers, not our condemnation

Tags

1 Timothy, Christian, cocaine, crack, drugs, leaders, mayor, politicians, politics, pray, pray for kings and all those in authority, prayer, Rob Ford, rulers, toronto

As Rob Ford’s life falls apart so dramatically on the world stage, I cannot help but feel sorry for the man. That doesn’t mean I approve of either his politics or his personal life, but it does mean I recognize him to be a fellow child of God—broken and sinful, like me, like all of us. May God give him strength to meet his personal challenges, and may Christ the Saviour of sinners be present unto him, offering the mercy and forgiveness he needs.

Let us remember St. Paul’s admonition to Timothy, that prayers should be made for “all people, for kings and all those in high positions.” And this isn’t just a prayer for our sakes—“that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way”—though it is for that too. St. Paul’s words continue: “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” What God asks of us is not merely that we pray for our leaders to lead us well; we must also remember His individual desire for each of them—namely, that they would find salvation in His Son—and for this too we must pray. (1 Timothy 2:1-4)

———————

Organizational Chaos and Original Sin

Tags

Christian, church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Education, organization, organizational theory, pastoral theology, politics, René Girard, secular, social relations, social science, social theory, sociality, Theology

I preached yesterday on the Sunday Gospel lectionary text, Luke 10:1-11, 16-20.  The passage concerns Jesus’ sending of the seventy-two into the various towns into which he intended to go.  While seeming to give them power to heal and exorcise, Jesus in fact sends them in total, vulnerable weakness, completely dependent on the mercy of the hospitality of the towns as they preach, ‘The kingdom of God has come near.’ At these towns (especially as Gerhard Lohfink has so perceptively pointed out), the seventy-two start in each town what comes to be known as the ekklesia, a healed and exorcised people assembled in the name of Jesus, gatherings that eventually became known as ‘the church.’ Because these gatherings bear witness to the fraudulent mode of existence prescribed by Satan that is premised on the taking of one’s own sovereignty in the knowledge of good and evil, the church’s formation in weakness, vulnerability, humility, and charity is itself an exorcism of Satan from the world. This ‘crisis’ of the powers, as theologian Karl Barth would have it, is in turn confirmed by the death of Jesus at the hands of the powers and in his vindication when he rises from the dead and offers his risen life in the sacraments to the church for the life of the world.

After I preached, a very perceptive leader in the congregation asked: why is it that most organizations in which I work, including churches, are plagued with power struggles? Not only was he affirming my exegesis, but he was also resonating with the experiences of ministry failure that I shared, in which I had illegitimately taken power in some ministry contexts, resulting in a series of debacles for my life and work. These (dy)catastrophes took place within Chinese Canadian evangelical churches, similar contexts from which my brother in Christ had also emerged. In other words, though he is older than me, we share similar backgrounds.

I answered along the lines of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, original sin, and how contemporary churches may have forgotten our ontological constitution by charitable communion. But I did not feel that my spur-of-the-moment answer was very satisfying, so I’d like to write a more sustained answer in the hope of being able to spur more conversation. This is largely because I feel that we may have been talking past each other, for my initial response was: ‘This question gets very close to the heart of what we call original sin.’ The Christian brother who had asked this question furrowed his brow; as it seemed to me, he was wondering whether this answer were a cop-out.  I’m sure that my later connection to Bonhoeffer may have also gotten lost in translation.

And thus, because I was very dissatisfied with my own answer, here’s another try:

The answer to this question really does get to the heart of what we call original sin. The trouble is, especially within the Chinese evangelical churches from which we emerge, the question of original sin is indeed a bit of a cop-out. For some strange reason that is worth further theological and historical reflection, we often read original sin in a similar way as American Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. For Niebuhr, a good look at what’s called our theological anthropology, that is, the way we exist before God as human beings, is also constituted by original sin. This means that we have to know that we are deeply flawed and that we can’t help our flaws. This conviction led Niebuhr to argue that in Christian ethics, we should only seek proximate justice, that is, that you can’t ever expect to be perfect or to have a perfect organization. So don’t try. Instead of being idealistic, we should instead be realistic, showing people grace when we see their flaws and expecting that every organization will just have to be imperfect. This, in a nutshell, is a view of Christian ethics that Niebuhr called Christian realism.

This in turn is why this brother in Christ furrowed his brow.  As soon as I brought up original sin, he was thinking that I was completely copping out of his question.  You’re an idealist, he heard. Be more realistic. We all have original sin. Get real.

The trouble is, Niebuhr is not my starting point for understanding original sin.

Instead, my take-off point for ‘original sin’ is heavily influenced by the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Of course, there are lots of traps by simply invoking the name ‘Bonhoeffer.’ For one thing, most of my evangelical brothers and sisters only know Bonhoeffer because he joined a plot to kill Hitler, got caught, and then was martyred way too young in life.

It’s nice that this is what Bonhoeffer is known for, but that says nothing about Bonhoeffer’s theology. Of course, lots of people have various takes on Bonhoeffer’s theology. For the evangelicals who have read Bonhoeffer, most enjoy his book Discipleship, which calls people to cast off ‘cheap grace’ in favour of a ‘costly grace’ that calls Christians to radical practices in Jesus Christ, and his short work Life Together, which makes a strong case for Christian community. In turn, most liberal theologians are fascinated by Bonhoeffer’s tantalizing description of ‘religionless Christianity’ in Letters and Papers from Prison, where Bonhoeffer hints that because Christ should be thought of as ‘the Man for Others,’ the church also exists for the sake of ‘others,’ which in turn means that the church should cast off its ritualistic trappings and actually engage the world in service. In this vein, liberal theologian Harvey Cox most famously argued that the church should be ‘the vanguard of secularization’ in his book The Secular City.

As theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas points out, both of these readings miss the point that Bonhoeffer’s major theological statement came from his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio: a theological study of the sociology of the church. Bonhoeffer was attempting to deal with three things in this dissertation: social theory, sociology, and a sociology of the church. What he argues is that the sanctorum communio–the communion of saints–is a mode of social relations in which people are called out of their secular social relations which are focused on themselves and into the I-and-Thou of real human interaction. As Bonhoeffer contends, the church thus becomes quite literally Christ in the world, especially if Christ is understood as the one who perfectly lived his life for the ‘other’ in radically humble service. Bonhoeffer later develops these points in Creation and Fall, Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison where he argues that this self-giving service and love for the other becomes distorted whenever we try to appropriate for ourselves the knowledge of good and evil. This is sin because it re-orients us from the way that we were made–for a sociality based on love and service toward the other–toward a distorted mode of social relations, a sociality where we try to control and dominate the other based on our ideological vision of what is good and evil.

That’s what I mean by original sin, and it has devastating consequences for social relations, especially within organizations. But unlike Niebuhr’s reading of original sin, this is not the way that it’s supposed to be at an existential level. This appropriation of power is actually a distortion of our real ontological reality. As theologian James Alison puts it in his treatment of original sin, The Joy of Being Wrong, it’s really a mistake to think that there’s something ontological about sin. Instead, it’s really a distortion of how social relations should be conceived, but it’s such a serious distortion that it requires a conversion to be able to see social relations rightly. Alison draws from another theorist, René Girard, to make his point. Girard says that if you observe the myths and stories we tell ourselves and the rituals that we practice, they are often about what he calls mimetic rivalry, that is, they presuppose that our desire as human beings is always shaped by the other, wanting always what we see other people wanting. This cycle of envy breeds tension in our social relations, until we have to release that tension by scapegoating someone arbitrarily. This is often called an original murder that is at the heart of most civilizational founding myths: someone kills someone else, releasing social tension, and a whole society is founded in honour of that murder and ritualized in religious myths and liturgies. In Girard’s book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard argues that the Christian Gospel story exposes this whole cycle of mimetic rivalry when Jesus is scapegoated and then resurrected, throwing the whole system into crisis and marking societies influenced by Christianity by a concern for victims and scapegoats instead of premising social creation on scapegoating and victimizing someone. Jesus is thus a point of conversion: he draws us into true social relations founded on care for victims and away from the original sin of scapegoating our rivals.

What this all means is that if we see organizational infighting and rivalry, we are looking at original sin, not in the sense that we have sin but can’t escape it as a mark of our existential being, but in the sense that we are still living within the one distorted mode of social relations that we know and have not yet been converted. Unfortunately, the sorry state of many organizations that my brother in Christ pointed out is in fact due to this sort of theology becoming a sort of minority report in churches and Christian organizations. Instead of looking at the level of this sort of theological anthropology and then practicing prayer as a way of living within Christ’s mode of social relations, many churches and organizations that I’ve encountered are much more interested in importing secular organizational theory, leadership solutions, and ways to form community without critically interrogating what existential mode of social relations on which those theories are based. This was the stuff that I was given when I was in ministry–how to be a good leader, how to build a great growing church, how to use your members’ talents and spiritual gifts to build up the church, how to organize the church so that the machine runs efficiently, etc.  I wonder how much of this stuff is in turn premised on what Bonhoeffer and Girard would call original sin.

In turn, I think this is precisely why theological education is an absolute necessity for contemporary church leaders. On the surface, the stuff on leadership and organizational theory looks great and appears so easily importable into the church. But if my brother in Christ is right in his observations, he has seen many churches and organizations crumble as a result. This is because most people within churches and organizations are simply incapable of evaluating theological sociology and anthropology. They have no idea that there are different modes of social relations and that the Christian church is really premised on a radically alternative sense of what social relations are. In turn, this might mean that seminaries need to be training pastors and church leaders to read the social sciences as theology, to be able to understand social relations theologically, and this in turn might train their discernment into how the congregations that they pastor should be ordered. Moreover, this calls for a great deal more spiritual formation in Christian practice, where prayer needs to be re-oriented from asking God to give us power to get our agendas done toward coming into the I-and-Thou of Christian social relations where we exist in self-giving service toward God, neighbour, and enemy.

So there’s a more drawn out answer. I hope that helps, and I hope to engage in further conversation on this very perceptive observation.

Joy: a defiant sermon

Tags

Advent, Aurora, Barack Obama, eschatology, Gaudete Sunday, hospitality, ideology, John the Baptist, joy, Luke, Newtown, Newtown Connecticut, politics, Pontius Pilate, public safety, Roman occupation, Sandy Hook

[I did not preach today, and I do not envy those who must. However, in solidarity with those who mourn and those who must preach despite their mourning, this is what I might have said. I was also very affected by the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber’s sermon on the Aurora shootings. God, come to my assistance; Lord, make haste to help me.]

(Readings are taken from the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C: Zeph. 3.14-18a; Is. 12; Phil. 4.4-7; Lk. 3.10-18)

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Third Sunday of Advent is, as my wife likes to say, the day to light the pink candle. It is not without reason that this Sunday is called Gaudete Sunday, a Sunday when the readings, the music, the church decorations, and even the pink candle are supposed to be gaudy. It’s supposed to be a party, a day of joy. And thus, our first reading in Zephaniah 3, like our responsorial psalm from Isaiah 12, calls on the daughter of Zion to rejoice, for the Lord has saved her from her enemies; in our epistle from Philippians 4, St. Paul tells the church at Philippi to rejoice—‘and I will say it again, rejoice!’

If only we could.

Can we indeed say that the Lord has been the saviour from our enemies when 26 people, 20 of them children, are gunned down mercilessly in an elementary school in a Connecticut town? Can we rejoice with St. Paul when, in a completely unrelated incident, 23 kids are stabbed in a school in China? Are we even allowed to light the pink candle and be gaudy when we have endured our nineteenth such shooting spree in America in five years, countless such murders in China, and untold accounts of violence worldwide?

Compounding our grief is the way that these horrors have immediately been politicized. Barack Obama may have responded more as a parent than as a president, wiping away tears from his eyes as he read his statement on the Connecticut shootings, but already, our civil discourse from the left is screaming for gun control, from the right is raging for concealed carry firearms, and from the cynical is wondering how anyone in good conscience could manipulate grief on this level for politics. Our theological discourse is no better.  We have heard from the theologians and pastors who have no words or answers for our innumerable questions, and we have heard from those who have an answer that God in his sovereign will did not stop the bloodshed.  We want to celebrate the heroes—already, our Facebook and Twitter feeds are flooded by stories of teachers and the principal who sacrificed their lives for their students, and we do call them ‘heroes,’ except when we do, our voices choke with grief and we cannot actually say it, reframe the situation, and think positive about what hope we must have for humanity now.

No.  We are not joyful. We are not even pretending to be. We have had enough.

We preachers have been told that the task of preaching after such tragedy is difficult, if not impossible.  We are told that the congregation wants us to be empathetic, to simply understand, to keep our mouths shut.  Yet we are preachers, we are also told, and so we must say something.  Whether our theology is that we are shepherds over a flock, fellow pilgrims in the midst of the people of God, or somewhere in the middle of that continuum, the fact remains that, as much as it seems that no one wants any of us to say anything, our liturgy requires that we speak.

But what do we say—indeed, what can we say?—especially in the midst of such senseless violence on Gaudete Sunday?

The Gospel tells us that the crowds asked John the Baptizer, ‘What shall we do?’  The crowds asked John the Baptizer what they should do.  We are told that the crowds consisted of a motley crew of people, tax collectors and Roman soldiers in tow.  The crowds, we are told, are not innocent of violence, passive victims of Roman occupation with its culture of violence. The crowds, as implied from last week’s Gospel earlier in Luke 3, know very well the level of violence it takes to maintain Roman colonization in Palestine.  Pontius Pilate was known to violently repress, if not pre-empt, any sign of Jewish identity politics.  And this was just an example: we haven’t talked about the political intrigue at multiple levels of the colonial government managed by the Herods and the Temple rulers.  The violence then was as senseless as the violence now. And yet, with collaborators with these regimes of violence like tax collectors and Roman soldiers in the crowds, the crowds, it is implied, are very much collaborators with regimes of terror, empires of murderous liberation, cultures of death that fetishize weaponry for the recreation of bloodlust.

John is the voice crying out in the wilderness.  Like us, John had to preach, even in the midst of a senseless culture of violence.  Attuned to the injustice of the senseless violence they have experienced as well as their own complex complicity in it, the crowds ask John: ‘What shall we do?’

What does John tell them to do?

Does John give the socially and politically conservative answer, that what is simply needed is a conversion of the individual heart, that weapons control is useless because the central problem of personal repentance has not been solved?

Does John give the concerned parental response, that the private sphere is under threat from such violence, that public safety will soon be a myth if such violence continues, and that for the sake of our children, we must enact some policy to make sure this never happens again?

Does John give the ‘I have no words to say’ sermon, a reflection on mystery in the midst of grief, that God weeps with the wretched of the earth but really has nothing better to do than to cry with you as you are terrorized?

No.  None of the above.

In the midst of such colonization, terror, and violence, John’s answer is a call to radical hospitality. If you have two coats, he says, give one to your neighbour. If you have food and your neighbour doesn’t, share it. If you are a tax collector, don’t collect extra tips. If you are a soldier, you are not to use brute force, extortion, and the secrecy of lies to get your way.

John’s call to action is cryptic. It is as if in the midst of the senseless violence in both first-century Palestine and the twenty-first century globalized world, John is calling us to a defiant hospitality.  In the midst of violence, the Church defies the common sense of private security that we need to batten down the hatches and arm ourselves for safety.  No, John says, we open our doors wider.

John the Baptizer is saying what our other readings for Gaudete Sunday are saying.  Rejoice, St. Paul says, again I say it, rejoice, because hope against hope, sending your petitions with thanksgiving to God, the peace of Christ that surpasses all understanding and defies the common sense of anxiety in the midst of this crooked and perverse generation will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.  Rejoice, the prophets Zephaniah and Isaiah say, for God is our savior from our enemies, he has removed our judgment, he sings over us now as songs are sung at festivals.  Rejoice.  Be hospitable.  Open wide your gates, daughter of Zion.

These acts of joy run counter to our feelings of horror, despair, anger, and rage at the events of violence that we have so viscerally experienced this week.  Our common sense tells us that we should be taking up arms for private security.  Our righteous anger should move us to call on the state to save us from our ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ ways.  Our emotional sensitivities know that any display of joy will be viewed as insensitive and that any mention of gaudiness should be regarded as distasteful.

How can we be so stupid?

Because, John goes on, someone is coming, mightier than he is, bringing a baptism by fire and the Holy Spirit.  Someone is coming, the thongs of whose sandals he is unworthy to untie, to actually do some justice, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to actually set the world right.

He is coming, John says, but as we look forward to his return, he isn’t back yet.  So yes, we should grieve at this present darkness. Let your voices choke as you remember Connecticut, as you think of China, as you contemplate the imperial cultures of death that have the world in its grip. Yes, we should have no words to say to explain the horror.  Yes, do be angry, rage at the senselessness. But as the people of God, in our sorrow and in our anger, in our disbelief at the level of injustice that has been perpetrated this week, in the activism for justice that will no doubt rightfully ensue from this, we also defy the common sense that calls us to take up arms and protect ourselves.  No, hope against hope, we declare with our actions that this is indeed a time to act, but with the radical acts of hospitality, to let our rejoicing not be empty words, but shocking deeds of expansive welcome to the stranger, solidarity with the hungry and the naked, and renunciation of the ways of extortion and greed.

Today is the Third Sunday of Advent.  Jesus is coming, winnowing fork in hand, to sort out the wheat from the chaff.  We grieve with the grieving, mourn with the mourning, are in solidarity with those who cry out against the senseless violence of this week, are stopped silent in our attempts to give simple answers about just what happened.  And yet with tears in our eyes, choking in our voices, and anger to the depths of our bowels, we rejoice defiantly by flinging open our hearts and our doors to welcome the stranger and love our neighbour. We do this because the one who holds the winnowing fork in his hand came to live and die as one of us. He stretched out his arms upon the cross, a victim of the very senseless brutality and injustice against which we rage today.  His disciples, once the followers of the same John the Baptizer who had proclaimed this radical hospitality, locked themselves in an upper room for personal security, fleeing, hiding, defending themselves against the unjust, horrible violence that took their Lord’s life.  And yet, hope against hope, defiant against all common sense, confounding all sense of reality, in a story that will strike us in our grief as the stupidest wishful thinking imaginable if only it didn’t happen, Jesus walked through those locked doors into that room and said to them, ‘It is I.  Do not be afraid.’

Cry out with joy and gladness, then, for among you is the great and Holy One of Israel, Jesus Christ who has died, is risen, and will come again. Lift up your hearts; let us give thanks to the Lord our God; let us share in the joy of the Triune God; let us love our neighbours with the expansive love of Jesus Christ who comes to us even now in our grief, in our horror, in our confusion, and in our anger, and says to us—indeed, hope against hope, he calls us by name and says, ‘It is I. I have risen. Do not be afraid.’

O God, we pray then, we have heard with our ears, our ancestors have told us, what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old; you with your own hand drove out the nations, but them you planted; you afflicted the peoples, but them you set free.  Yet you have rejected us and abased us, and have not gone out with our armies.  You have made us like sheep for slaughter, and have scattered us among the nations.  Because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter.  Rouse yourself!  Why do you sleep, O Lord?  Awake, do not cast us off forever!  Why do you hide your face?  Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?  For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help. Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love. I believe; help thou my unbelief. O Lord, in you have I trusted; let me never be confounded.

Amen.

Democracy

Tags

ballot, death, dust, Poetry, politics, queen of Sheba, resurrection, Solomon, vote

Given how annoyed I have been with all the voting stuff going on – and I am merely loving my neighbor as myself insofar as I am equally annoyed when stuff like that happens in Canada – I thought I should offer a Christian reflection on the occasion. I suppose I can see why people get frustrated when they try to talk to me about politics – the dithering probably gets annoying…

Democracy

Not indubitable debt to reason,

But fear is why we fly, as free,

From belief in the risen dead.

 

We are based in us

Inconvenienced if some corpse claws

Back up to say,

“Before you were,

And all your progress,

All your glory

All your sin –

Before you were,

And your progress –

There were people somewhere somehow living

Somehow somewhere living lacking

Knowledge of self-pity due.”

 

Yes, and to say,

“Progress could quit in a flash

Here today and

Tomorrow the sparkmist

Vain

Snuffed.”

 

Truth from the mouth

Of the Queen of the South:

“You unburied but one part of Solomon’s treasure –

Try and say which.”

 

But oh for a thousand tongues to sing

Exactly what we want them to sing

And then stay silent

In Death;

Dust will not judge –

Or will it?

 

Dread dust (the beginning of wit),

Shaken from Apostolic feet

In tomb-grounded townhouse and hovel high;

“Dust we are

And to dust we return,

And dust will inherit the earth,

And judge,” say saints.

 

Dust is the doomsmark

When death passes over,

Bewhispers a cross

Not sequestered in square

On a ballot.