March 26, 2005
Easter
Easter 2005
A little girl in a small town along the Texas Gulf Coast attended the Church of Christ Vacation Bible School. She won the graduation day award for memorizing the most Bible verses. The story made the front page of the local weekly, not because of the award, but because she was an Episcopalian.
That was decades ago, but the trend seems to be picking up finally. I don’t remember there ever being so much biblical proof-texting in the Episcopal Church as of late and certainly never so much Bible reading in public as in an Easter vigil like this.
Karl Barth was one of the most outstanding theologians of our time. He wrote a whole system of thought called “Dogmatics in Outline” that made for long and ponderous reading and kept seminarians up all night. His work was carefully, almost tediously anchored in scripture.
I tell you about that, so that I can tell you about this:
Barth was once challenged in an interview to sum up his monstrous theological system in one brief sentence. He thought for a moment, then he said, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
One could not find a better mantra for these times than that simple song from our childhood. With orthodoxy’s bell, book, and candle being claimed and cast about like some ecclesiastical loose cannon, it takes truly penetrating prayer to keep oneself reassured and centered in the knowledge that Jesus loves us. I find those brief words especially reassuring.
When Peter realized that Jesus was the Christ, that he was more ironic than heroic, that this meant him to be no majestic ruler, but instead, a suffering servant, he denied him on the spot. But Peter goes on in the gospel stories to become an emblem of us, a bumbling everyman and everywoman who gets everything just a little bit wrong. His most powerful witness becomes as someone who lives with Jesus and grows to maturity the hard way, the way we do, by making mistakes, some of them grievous, and learning from them all the while (Mk 8.27-38).
Though he became the Rock on which Jesus founded his church, Peter’s most profound gift to us is not an institution. It is his own journey in faith, a journey whose outlines we can trace in these ancient stories. The institution grew as institutions grow, a tangle of divine gift and human frailty, so intertwined throughout its history that one will probably never be separable from the other until the whole mess finally enters the kingdom of God.
Who, then, is this Jesus whom Peter finally discovered, not what do others say about him, not just what did Peter say about him, but what do you and I say about him? When we affirm our baptismal covenant and claim him as a companion on the way, we must gradually peel away the crusty layers of dogma in which time and the institution has enveloped and, indeed, embalmed him.
We begin with the realization that the gospels do not say in any simplistic way that Jesus is God. Jesus is portrayed as praying to God. He is not talking to himself. Jesus died. It is inconceivable to say that God can die. God did not get crucified. But when the disciples looked at the cross, they saw in it the self-giving and ultimate love of God. Jesus revealed God, pointed to God, and enabled people to see God when they looked at him. Jesus was the complete image of what God means by human being.
The great pain and fear which cripples the church is only worsened when we are confronted with judgmental doctrinal statements and biblical proof-texts. Who we are and our continued search for the answer to that question cannot be answered by creeds, but only by love, by the kind of love in the Jesus of the gospels.
Our leaders who talk so carelessly about orthodoxy, about Anglican “mainstream” and “orthodoxy,” must learn that there are real and grounded pastoral issues at stake here, not hypothetical ones. When Jesus said the Sabbath was made for us, not we for the Sabbath, he was not laying down some liturgical fact, he was making a profoundly pastoral claim about how much we are loved and how much we need to be loved, a love that can only be given, not earned by whether or not we are right.
When we look around us, we see that the faith communities who have such a committed pastoral life with their members will always be more secure and prouder to confess their identity with no need to hide behind black crepe, no need to be all signpost and no destination.
Some of our leaders unilaterally identify with schismatic movements with seeming disregard for the moral disarray and confusion that ensues. For unlike heresy which is entirely about belief, schism is about love and can risk creating before our very eyes a loveless church for whom orthodoxy means everything, a church obsessed with cloning itself and its leaders, rather than a church committed to loving God and neighbors at whatever the cost. If I should ever have to choose — and I hope I never must — I should choose without question an uncertain church that is loving over a loveless church that is blinded by its own certainty and need for self-preservation.
Such a loving community is the true disciple of evangelism, not one where there is a rigid demand for right-thinking, but where there is unqualified love and acceptance and a nourishing environment of justice and peace.
Thanks be to God. Thanks be to all those who have worked so hard to make such communities happen. Pray fervently that God will sustain those who only now begin to discover the price they have to pay for their candor, for standing up for the Good News, and pray that they may know deeply how God loves them Then let us “rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for so persecuted they the prophets who were before us.”
Somehow, I’m mindful of the movie, “Field of Dreams.” When we offer such a church, when we live such a church, they will come. And when they do, someone might just ask, “Is this heaven?” Then we can say, “No, it is only St Whosit.”