October 19, 2006
Molecules
The late Bennett Sims, one-time bishop of Atlanta, reported a strange thing in his book on servant leadership. And that is that the quantum theorists are certain that there is a caring pulse of energy that animates and interconnects all the entities in the cosmos.
It’s not unlike Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, outraging his time when he said that the “molecules make love.” This, of course, got his books banned as a consequence. [The notion of “making love” — who or what does it with whom and how — never seems then or now to sit all that well with book-banning orthodoxers.]
In Jesus’ time, it was common knowledge and experience that the created order in all its facets always knew and recognized in its own way who and what was present amongst it. The daemons, the bread and fishes, the storms, the winds and waves, the human maladies, the fig trees, Satan itself in the wilderness, all across the universe were well onto the profound bend in cosmic history that happened when the Word became flesh.
No wonder Jesus could say on that first Palm Sunday that if the crowds turned silent, the very stones, themselves, the seemingly most inert and mute of all creation, would burst forth in adulation. Maybe it’s what we now call atomic energy, but by whatever name, it remains Benedicite, omnia opera Domini — “O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord.”
If the events we regularly celebrate around our holy tables tell us nothing more, they remind us over and over again how inseparable we are one from the other and even from the very stones along the way. Those stones may seem inert, they may seem to have no freedom at all, but when it comes to efficiency and presence and endurance and dependability — and even to praise, might we allow — we can learn a thing or two.
When James and John cozied up to Jesus and asked for a place in the catbird seat midst all this created order, they got a job description that should bring all of us to our feet. Leadership, you bet, said Jesus. But servant leadership, my hearties, “For the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” [Mk 10.45].
Christian “faith” is not always the same, if anywhere near or ever the same, as the Christian “Faith.” To confuse the two is one of the more profound blunders of Christian churches. For the one is deeply subjective and freighted with risk and humility. It has no place nor need for crippling circumscriptions like “orthodoxy.” The other is often so uncongenially certain and too often filled with pride. It is often in blind allegiance to orthodoxy, an obsession that has always compromised the church as, indeed, it does so in these very times.
Christian faith — that kind with the small “f” — always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space in which day by day we are all involved, stumbling, trying to appear as if we have good sense. The truth that Christianity claims to be true is ultimately to be found, if it is to be found at all, not in the Bible or the Church or Theology — the best they can do is point to the Truth — but is to be found in our own stories, yours and mine and our neighbors.
It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to stay in constant touch with what is going on in your own life’s story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others’ lives, for to say that faith is not some institutional doctrine is not to say that it is not corporate or communal. If God is present anywhere, it is in our stories. If God is not present there, then we might as well forget the whole thing.
Our Baptismal Covenant literally turns on our answer to that same question that stands at its center. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” That is where we find the stories, that is where we find faith.
And that is where we find what Jesus means by true greatness when he says, He who is greatest among you shall be your servant. I hope it is not lost on us in today’s gospel accounting that Jesus chose the religious establishment and its frequent fixation with puffery with which to contrast his words about servanthood.
From the religious standpoint, servanthood tends to mean a lofty ideal, all right for the Scout movement and isolated from the so-called real world of win/lose. From such secular perspective, servanthood is often seen only as “servitude,” a condition imposed on women and racially different groups by male-dominant cultures or self-imposed by both men and women out of fear of their own power.
The kind of servanthood Jesus seems to imply is neither of these. Rather is it the way of fulfilling the human longing for peace and the planet’s need for preservation as the theater of all life. It is the kind of leadership that is needed to make the world safe. It is always a two-way exchange, never as subjugating dominance and never as a unilateral and preemptive arrogance.
It not only influences, but is also open to influence. It acknowledges and respects the freedom of another and seeks to enhance that other’s capacity to make a difference. It is a paradox — for it gains by giving.
Just as God could say for us to listen to Jesus, his son in whom he is well pleased, thus could he show us what he means by being human. So might we hope Jesus can say of the church as what he means by a community of servanthood, leading others into creativity, productivity, and, best of all, bonding people into communities of caring. We can have no greater ministry to the society and to the world in which we are
called.
And furthermore, my loverlies, we must never be too sure about what all those molecules are up to, not only here and in you and me, but in the farthest reaches of the Milky Way — and beyond.
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Note to: Frederick Buechner and to Bennett Sims, thanks for the better parts of this preachment on faith and story and servanthood.