Love the sin hate the sinner?

In my context growing up (and quite possibly in yours as well) we were taught that to be a loving Christian meant three things: love everybody as if they were your neighbor, recognize that everybody is a sinner, and hate the sin that they commit.  We were taught that when we do this, we are acting like God, who loves us while hating our sin.

There is something about this that has deeply bothered me, but I've never really been able to helpfully articulate why it is that it bothers me as much as it does.  I want to talk, first a bit about what seemed to have been at risk, and then see what other ways there are of articulating it that safeguard what needs to be safeguarded while hopefully opening us up to a more holistic approach.

When I was taught, "everybody is a sinner" what seemed to have been at stake were two things: the need to put human language around the fact that sin happens (well, lots and lots of sin happens), and almost to create a reason for redemption.  If we are perfect, why send the savior?  But that doesn't make an awful lot of sense really, because then the coming of Christ into the world to die and rise again is very nearly predicated off of the fact that I can mess up.  One only needs remember the example of a father who knows that his presence with his children will help them become full adults.  They may be naughty children in addition to being only half formed -- but it is a bit absurd to imagine that their nautyness is the only reason their father would be their father.  At the very least, if that were the only reason, he'd be a jolly awful father.

As far as putting language around the fact that a terrible lot of sin happens, and even that a large amount of sin is done by those I know, and even by me, I don't think it is necessary,  either from Scripture or experience to say that we are therefore sinners.  As far as Scripture goes, God said after creating both man and woman, "behold, it is good."  How can something that God created as good become bad through it's own actions?  Very often in the textual witness in Scripture we see humans sinning and God coming in and rescuing those who repent and punishing those who don't.  We language that says "all have fallen short of the glory of God" (which, I mean, is somewhat obvious really -- we aren't God!) but I don't for a minute think that means we are sinners.  We sin all the time, terribly, and beyond our ability to control really.  We are also sinned against all the time, in very very terrible ways.  But are we therefore evil?

In a sense I think it is a bit too simplistic to say we are sinners, to say that we are evil.  It sort of short circuits the whole redemptive drama.  If we are totally depraved, then our destruction is justified, and our redemption is easy.  By contrast, if we are still complex, if we are good, who do evil, then our recovery becomes a bit harder.  For we have to deal not only with our sin and weakness, but with our guilt and shame about that sin and weakness as well.

And for me anyway, this is where the rub is.  We were taught to "hate the sin" -- and we were taught that God also hates sin, so we are being like God when we love sinners and hate sin.  One question that was never asked though (at least in my context -- it may have been asked in your context) was, "what does it do to a person to teach them to hate part of what they do?"

When we are taught to hate at least a part of what we do, we are essentially splitting our own selves into that which is "ok" and that which is "terrible."  We suppress as much as possible that about us which we hate, and focus as much as possible on that which think is "ok".  But wait a minute here.  hold the phone.  press the pause button.

What else is sin if not this very splitting?  Sin is that which splits; divides, takes what is whole and good and makes it separate and divided.  Sin divides humanity from God, from nature.  Sin isolates one human from another human.  But sin also separates us from ourselves.  I don't see how this doctrine, "love the sinner, hate the sin" doesn't in fact encourage and actually end up aiding this splitting tendency of sin in a way that ends up  enacting the splitting of the self.

Very often it seems that the path to wholeness and healing of the soul is only through accepting all the fragmented parts that comprise us.  This path of acceptance is a path of open humility, because it forces us really to accept that we are just like everyone around us.  This acceptance isn't a reluctant sort of grinding the teeth while admitting our weaknesses.  Rather, it is a fully robust and open eyed statement, "I sin."  It is not a, "I sin, and I hate my sin."

I think that once we have come to a place where we can accept ourselves completely as we are, then and only then can we begin to heal.  God never heals only a part of us.  Rather, He insists upon healing all of us.  Very often we can spend many long years coming to terms with all of the parts of our soul we have been hiding from our own view.  Instead of further burying these parts, and cultivating hatred towards them, shall we not accept that we ourselves are not completely us without them?  Only then, at that point, can we be healed.  If the leper hated his disease to the point of denying its very existence, would he ever have cried out to Jesus to be healed?  Or, would he have been healed, but been like the nine lepers who went on their way and didn't respond by coming back and giving thanks?

In conclusion to this much to long blog post, I think the thing we were taught, "love the sinner but hate the sin" is not only merely inaccurate, but capable of cultivating attitudes in the heart that making healing difficult.  It fails to take into account that in us which is still good even though we do regularly sin, therefore misplacing the emphasis of Christ's redemption off of renewal and on to sin removal.  It also teaches us to necessarily hate the weak parts of us that continue to make us sin.  When we learn to hate ourselves, we buy into the damage of sin by furthering the isolation that it naturally already causes.  We learn to face God (if at all) with tremendous shame and guilt, instead of humility and hope.

The Encounter with God

The encounter with God is perhaps one of the greatest and most beautiful of all paradoxes.  It is an experience utterly outside of our control.  It is an experience that restores our hearts from isolation.  It is an experience that turns our many words about God into hymns of awe to God.

These three: the control we have over things in our life, the loneliness of our hearts and the transition from word to song (which is also a transition from description to love, from assessment to praise, and from doubt to worship) also contain for us guidelines that assure that we are in fact experiencing an encounter with God, and not something of our own making.  I take it as self evident that God created us in such a way as to make the path to him recognizable in our own construction as humans.  We shall consider them in order.

As we make the transition from child to adult, our own self begins to wonderfully emerge.  We learn to recognize our voice in addition the cacophony of voices in the cosmos, and to learn to love, and to fear, to recognize hope, and to live in uncertainty.  We approach whatever it is we view the divine to be with all the needs and expectations born from the creation and exercise of our voice in the world.  Carried on by this our unique expectation, we often refer to prayer as the fulfillment of precisely our own expectation.  Consciously or unconsciously, we discover a certain need to control the outcome of our religious experiences so that our needs are meet, our fears are relieved, our anxiety sated  and our hopes strengthened.  

But the encounter with God is something totally different.  For in God we find our true selves.  We find ourselves as He intends us to be.  We find not our voice, so much as the purpose for which our voice exists. We find also that all the fears we had built up around what makes this world a livable place and what makes it a non-livable place become stripped away.  This stripping away of our fears feels like a stripping away of our identities, of our very voices -- for we are so used to hearing this fear in our voice that we don't know any other way to talk.  Yet it is a gift.  In the encounter with God we find that our own voices are given to us, and we find why we are given voices in the first place.

The encounter with God is an experience that restores our hearts from isolation. We may imagine ourselves with Mary at the tomb as she saw the Gardner call her by name and hear our own name spoken as well from His lips.  We neither expected this nor created this.  Like her, we may be grieving the death of all we had looked to in life for hope.  Even the death of everything that we thought God Himself is (or, was, to us).  We think it proper to hold in our hearts this particular grief of being unable to find God (or, more precisely, of having been able to find Him but now knowing that He is finally unable to be found by us.)  We weep that we are truly and utterly alone.  We weep the sweet fellowship we had, and compare it to the bitter stillness of having no ability to pierce the veil that now separates our souls from their creator.  Our voice is a lonely voice in the world, and that is precisely our fault.

If we, we who cannot create, would forgive one who had wronged us, how much more shall the mere mention of our name by the Risen One who is love Incarnate restore us?  How much more shall He sheer us of our grief?  How much more shall He burst the walls of our isolation from Him with love?  How much more shall He, by proclaiming our name, proclaim His Name as Lord -- Lord even of us as we run from Him?  How much more shall He remove the shame of our running, and, as He did with Jonah, cause in us the ice of our isolation to melt in the fire of His embrace?

The Encounter with God turns our words about God into songs (or hymns) to God.  Precisely as those who have been broken into, as those who now no longer either seek to control or to run, we worship.  Our words about God no longer take the form of those who describe God as beyond themselves and then stop.  We don't use dead words to describe a distant and therefore transcendent God.  Rather, we revel with delight (as a bride and groom rejoice in each other's embrace on their wedding night) because the distance turns out not to be spacial but causal.  He is not distant in the sense that Seattle and Boston are, but distant in the sense that fire and the heat it produces, or a lamp and the light it produces.  

To be encountered by God is to find ourselves who once had been dead to be enkindled.  His love burns in us, causing our voice to lose the fear that was unique to itself, causing our hearts to be filled with hope that we did not create, causing our isolation to disappear as something barely even able to be recalled.  The Encounter with God is the receiving of a life that is both uniquely ours (indeed, we were created for it) and also the very participation in the life of God.  

We can rest assured that we ourselves did not create this encounter, precisely because we couldn't have.  We may, to be sure, succeed in creating a certain degree of forgiveness, of love, of peace, of reconciliation with our neighbor, and if we are truly great people, even with our enemy.  But who can create life?  Who can erase his or her own fears in such a way as to say of their darkness (as the Psalmist said of God) that, "even your darkness is light?"  Who can, once he or she has become isolated in their own self, redeem themselves by their own will?  Who can succeed in living into the fullness of a life that they cannot imagine?  Who among us can uplift them-self into a life utterly beyond their own imagination but, nonetheless, for which they were created all along?

A Short Reflection on the Language of Theology, People, and Scripture

Talking about God is kind of a strange thing.  I sense that it is something we all want to do -- even something we all really rather must do.  It is something that, until we do it, we don't know ourselves.  To talk about God is to describe not only our upper limit (that which we most definitely are not) but also that without which we will never be at peace.  We were created with such a desire to be at peace and in union with God, that to not talk about him at all is a kind of terrible travesty against our very beings.

Each of us therefore has something that must be said about God.  This word we have is one with the fact that we are alive.  This word that we have is also already a word that is given in response to the Word of God that has already gone out into the world.  Christ, the Word of the Father, speaks the Word of God in our hearts.  Our response is beautiful, unique, and full of a life that is more than we are.

We have all of creation that we can see and touch and hear.  Yet we realize that God is not creation.  We have our people in our lives that we love, yet we realize that God is more than the people in our lives that we love.  All of us are, I think, searching for words to describe this Word of the Father that calls us to Himself.  When we find our word, our response, our talking of the Father, we will have also found ourselves.  We will feel complete and whole because we have described and loved as much as is possible for us the God who calls us out of ourselves into Himself where we are at peace.

We have been given Scripture as a cannon of texts that all describe God in very different ways.  We can know that words about the Word of the Father are closest to being really descriptive of God when they conform to the words in Scripture.  In fact, we must use these words and live inside of them.

But how do we do that?  For just as it is obvious that God does is not creation, and that God is not the people we love, God is also not Scripture.  Scripture describes God using human emotions, and as being good, powerful, creator, and as one and three.  Yet, this only increases our wonder.  For just as God is more than creation, more than other people, more than ourselves, so God must be more than human emotions.  God must be more than good, more than powerful, more than creator, more than one and more than three.  Indeed, he is above all, but must be more than what we mean when we apply the words "above all" to anything we know.

Yet, God must be close, personal, able to be found because He has indeed found us and placed within us the desire to speak our word in response to His Word.  But, this closeness is closer than anything else that we typically use the word closeness for.  How do we live inside the words of Scripture and allow them to draw us up into God?

This aspect that we recognize of God, in which God is more than every word that can be used to describe God is helpful.  For it does not lead (as some wrongly suppose) into a nothingness.  We do not say, "well, since God is obviously good and more than good, and powerful and more than powerful, and loving and more than loving, my words of good, powerful, and loving are actually without meaning when applied to God."

When we attach this "more than" aspect of God to God's infinity, it certainly leads us to conclude that we can't really actually describe God at all.  The temptation is to say that we are finite, he is infinite, therefore, he is "more than" everything we can use to describe Him.  But this is unhelpful.  We would run the risk of just making God an infinite version of us, not some actually different from us.

Another way of viewing the "more than" language about God is to attach to it the meaning of "source."  God is more than good because God is the source of good.  God is more than love because God is the source of love.  God is more than creation because God is the source of creation.  God is more than people because God is the source of people.

Just as a fire is different from the heat it produces, just as a tree is different then the shade it produces, just as  a flashlight is different from the sight it enables, so God is different then creation.  God is more than creation because God is the source of all that is.

So what?  Why does it matter to me that God is the source of all that is?  Well, it means that when I try to respond to His Word, and talk about God within the words in Scripture I now have a way of so responding.
Rather than being led into speechlessness by the utter beyond-ness of God, I can be led into praise by the utter source-ness of God.  Since all that is is from God, I can and should praise Him as the source of all, even myself.

Mystery, Polemic, and Truth

I want to take a bit of time to think about how these three things relate with each other.  In one of my classes somewhere, it was said by someone, "the closer something is to being true, the less it needs to be argued for."  The assumption here seems to be that when we actually descend to the level of polemic, of arguing for or against a particular something, we are only arguing for a part of that which is true.  To turn that assumption around, and look at it from another angle, we can sort of view things on a spectrum.  One one side of the spectrum are many many many words, and not a lot of truth.  On the other side of the spectrum, one has few words, or complete silence and a good deal of truth.  The thought is that as one observes the movement from many words to few words, one also observes a corresponding movement in the amount of truth that is being referred to by those words.

What does that mean though, and how does it apply to reconciliation?  Well, to answer that question, let's briefly explore the words Mystery and Truth.

Hans urs von Balthasar describes Truth as a relationship between the thing or person doing the knowing, and  thing or person being known.  He says that when such a relationship exists, there are two markers that make it's existence obvious.  One of the markers is an increase in knowledge.  The other marker is an increase in mystery.  If both of these markers are there, than the relationship is said to be a "true" relationship, "truth" is said to be "taking place" inside of that relationship, the knowledge about the person or thing that is gained is "true".

These two things -- knowledge and mystery -- increase together.  Yet, they are opposite.  How can this be?  How does it even begin to make sense to say that if I am beginning to know something in a way that is true, then I also begin to precisely not know that very object?  I think it is because the way we approach anything -- a person, a subject, an idea, a different culture -- is done in such a way that we use much more than our minds.

My mind (and yours) has the ability to link similar things with similar things and separate non similar things from non similar things.  That is what our minds do... they combine and separate.  And, in as much as we do this about a thing, our knowledge of it increases.  We know more what is it similar to, and we know more what it is dissimilar to.

But that is not all, is it?  The more we do this knowing about a thing, the more we realize that there is always an aspect about it that is already beyond any similarities between the thing and our context that we can determine.  We also realize that there is also always an aspect about it that is already beyond any dissimilarities between the thing and our context.  We find that the things which we know are partially knowable, and partially beyond our ability to know them.  Thus mystery and knowledge increase together.

Who would argue against this?  Who would say that the subject they know most about is not also the subject that is most mysterious to them?  Who would say that the one they love and know the best of all is not also the most full of mystery?  Who would say that the one thing in life about which they can rightfully be considered an expert, is not also the one thing in life that continues to contain the most mystery for them?

And so when both of these increase together, knowledge and mystery, we say that that increase is truth.  Truth has taken place, it has happened.   If knowledge increases with no mystery, whatever is known is not known in a true way.  Similarly, if mystery increases and no knowledge accompanies it, then the mystery has not been known in a true way.

To sum up, we can now start to see a distance emerge between arguing for something and describing the knowledge and mystery of a thing.  Polemic may actually be beneficial, but it is not able to accomplish (on its own) the very thing it claims to be able to achieve.

All of what we have just said is very true of things within this world.  It describes in limited fashion how it is (to my mind anyway) that we come to know things in a way that is true.  How much more when we attempt to approach divine revelation?

Does Belief equal Salvation? (Part 2)

In our last post I hinted that I had an approach to viewing salvation that offered a greater chance at reconciliation than a model that sets up a one to one relationship between belief and salvation.  As I pointed out in that post, possibly one of the inherent dangers lurking within the Protestant ethos is precisely this relationship.  For if my belief (in either a story or a person) is my salvation (even if that belief is brought to pass through a gift of grace from God) than that which informs my belief is utterly central.  In fact, I must know with certainty that the thing informing my belief is inspired, without error, and free from corruption.  If I encounter one who has a different source, or interprets that source differently than I do (thus resulting in a different belief) than it is my duty as a human and a Christian to change their interpretation so that their belief is correct, and, consequently, the surety of their salvation can be achieved.  Sadly, that duty will be and has been met with equally strong determination not to be fundamentally altered.  I am, of course, talking about attempts at reconciliation within the Protestant Communities.  Reconciliation becomes another word for compromise instead of the very center of the faith.  The resulting disunity should be as unsurprising as it is tragic.

By contrast, and in a way of offering a possibly different way of understanding salvation, let me introduce a new word.  The new word is anagogy.  In Greek, it means, "uplifting".  It refers to the action wrought upon our persons when we encounter Christ.  We find ourselves uplifted into sharing His life.  It is made possible because of the prior decent of Christ -- the beautiful hymn in Philippians 2 captures this eloquently.  It isn't an exaggeration to say that the early Fathers of the Church, both in the East and in the West thought that the central core of the gospel is the very present uplifting of our whole person into the life of God.  The central concept here is a two fold action, not a story.  We tell stories about actions, not the other way around.  We declare this story to be true, not because we assert belief at it, but because the action which the story is relating is, in some sense, taking place still inside of us.

Let me explain that last sentence.  If salvation is the relatively passive act of being uplifted into the life of God, then how do we partake (participate, really) in our own salvation?  Well, certainly believing that the action is taking place (and so being able to also believe the story, and the person) plays a role, but only a secondary role.  The really central thing is to do things that nourish the life of God in us.  We would almost wish that there were actions that could be done that were neither only human (for that would be a sort of magic -- a manipulation of the Divine) nor only divine (for then how can I partake?) but dual -- actions whose causative agent is both God and Human and whose result is the real increase of the life of God in us.

That was a long sentence!  Nonetheless, we do find that such an action exists.  We call an action which has as it's subject both God and Human and has as its object the uplifting of the soul into God a sacrament.  And so baptism, the real substantive entry into the life of Christ on earth is a Sacrament.  Similarly, the Eucharist is the means by which the life of God is nourished in us.  Both of these great sacramental (dual subject) actions are possible because of what Christ did.  Scripture is the story that we tell (and, really, that God tells) about this action.  And we should expect this as well.  We should expect that the story told about an action done by both Human and God is told by Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and John, and by God Himself.

Again, we are not surprised when we go back into the quote from John 6 in our last entry to discover that the this belief on the one he has sent (vs 29) is belief that takes place after an action.  What is the action which makes possible the belief?  What is the action which the story tells?  It is simple.  Christ declares His Flesh to be the bread of life and says, "If anyone eats of this bread he shall not die."  He then beautifully and expressly says, "Truly truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.  For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.  Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.  As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me.  This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died.  Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever."

This is surely a great mystery.  Indeed, it is the great mystery.  Living in Christ is something into which we are uplifted by God -- but, in such a way to that we also are able to partake, to truly participate.  I suggest that this anagogic uplifting of our persons into this life in Christ is salvation.  Of course we naturally also believe it to be true.  But I think the belief is secondary, a result of an action that already is something we have partaken in.

What implications does this have for reconciliation?  Well, it takes some of the emphasis off of the text that informs our belief and how we respond to that text by placing the emphasis on the sacramental action instead.  In fact, it implies that I don't have to have everything worked out in my mind before hand, in order to be saved.  Presumably, there is even room for one's belief to be somewhat wrong!  The important thing is not that our ideas about "what is going on" are correct, rather, the important thing is that we come to partake in the uplifting of our persons into the life of God by eating Him.  Seen in this light, if you and I disagree about what we believe, and we both are baptized and are eating Him, then our Christian duty becomes one of living together, with our very real disagreements, in Christ.  We don't have to agree (as in the former model) in order to believe correctly and so be saved.

Reconciliation can once again become the center of the gospel, not merely another word for a compromise that, by virtue of it's concessions waters down belief until it is no longer salvific.

Joshua Hicks

Today would have been the birthday of a man by the name of Joshua Hicks.  Taking some space out to write a memorial of him is appropriate for this blog for several reasons: he was without doubt the best friend I've ever had, he fought hard during his 27 years for reconciliation, and he understood what it meant to have a body that didn't make life easy.  We called him Jack.  I never actually knew why, except that Lewis was called Jack, and other people called him other nicknames too, like Jicks.

Jack and I formed a friendship that quickly became very strong early on in our Seminary experience.  We were both training to be Anglican Priests, we both loved a good gang movie (I can't count how many times we watched Boon Dog Saints or The Departed), and we both loved to cook.  By "loved to cook" I don't mean that we both enjoyed it, unless we could find something better to do.  I mean, we begged the world for opportunities to cook for it, inviting friends over, making up parties just for the pure joy of cooking for them. We'd cook simple stuff, good party food -- stuff that goes well with too much beer, too many Dark and Stormy's, and just a few Gin and Tonic's.  (Ok, a lot of Gin and Tonic).  ;)

Those were the good times.  How many countless living rooms, how many countless movies, and drinks, and food -- always the food -- always the good, well loved, dearly cooked, and exuberantly served food.  And then, when much of the food had been eaten, and the movie turned off, and the first few rounds of drinks were in the books for the night, Jack would get his guitar.  He'd serenade the ladies -- all of them -- and make the men wish they knew how to play.  He'd make us all join him singing, and then, just when we were all a little lost because we couldn't remember the words, he'd strum a little, look around like he was lost too, then, "1, 2, 3, 4...!" and off he was again.

We ate till our stomachs would pop, (and made sure our friends did too) we drank till we probably shouldn't have, we laughed till it felt like our very souls would tear asunder under the joy of it all.  We were also there for each other when life wasn't pretty.  Each of us has very dark shadows in the spaces of our heart that we don't visit very often.  Jack was one of the only men I've ever known who was brave enough to face his shadows and try as best he might to deal with them.

Part of the this internal struggle in his own soul gave him a pure love for other people.  He knew darkness and loss, confusion, and sorrow.  When he saw any of these in another human being, he would love that person with a matchless energy.  When anything -- anything at all that was even remotely good -- took place in the life of another, his joy knew no bounds.  Something deep inside his soul would take over, as it were, and he'd just simply start rejoicing with you.  He had the gift of making you more excited about your own good news after he left then before you told him!

Jack fought for reconciliation.  He worked with Not for Sale (an organization that tries to raise awareness about present day slavery in Mass and the rest of the US.)  He sang many of us right through our own darkness and our own sorrow and our own conflict.  Many who have had the great pleasure of knowing Jack would characterize him with the word, "freedom."  When I was in my period of darkness, and the void where God should have been was utterly silent, Jack said to me, "if you have a choice between not being yourself and sinning, sin!  You can always repent later."  Jack was real.  His love was real.

Jack also had a body that didn't make living an easy thing.  He had an anaphylactic allergic response to four food groups: Dairy, Eggs, Peanuts, and Soy.  I share his allergy to dairy.  So, while I haven't walked a road that is as limited as his was, I am intimately familiar with what it means to have an allergy that will literally kill you within minutes of having the wrong thing.

For you, (if you are fortunate enough to not have any allergies) food is linked (both theologically and experimentally with nourishment.)  To be fair, there are varying degrees of nourishment, (an apple does more for you than McDonalds) but it is nourishment, nonetheless.  For Jack (and I) food is linked both with nourishment and with death.

You really have to want to live.  I don't just mean you have to not want to die.  Not wanting to die isn't strong enough to carry a person through depression.  You have to literally want to live.  Imagine what life would be like if you literally had the chance, every four hrs, (or whenever you got hungry) to die.  Or rather, if you had the burden, every four hrs of avoiding death, once again.  If you are extremely clever, and extremely sober, and extremely lucky, you'll live -- until you are hungry again.

I think this is why we loved cooking for others.  There was (and still is, for me) something incredibly pleasant -- almost intoxicating, really -- about cooking for others.  Sifting through a world filled with life and death, and picking the good things out and making something good and full of life for others is a true joy.  Seeing the delight on their face is a deep reward.

In fact, for both of us, now that I reflect back upon it, 5 months almost to the day of his passing, serving food to someone else was a way of reconciling the world with our bodies.  We couldn't necessarily eat what we cooked.  But you could, and we made that happen.  We would die if we ate what we created, but it brings life to you, and joy to you, and health to you.  And that, in and of itself is worth drinking about, and signing about, and laughing about.   And, in that moment of joy, the fact that we couldn't eat all of the food on the table was transcended by the conquest of love -- our demon that haunted our waking hours was defeated when we cooked for you.

So, on behalf of Jack, and all people out there with allergies who like to cook, thank you.  Thank you for letting us cook for you.  Thank you for letting us rejoice with you, thank you for so intimately being part of our lives, even though you don't know it.

Non Theological Reconciliation

Reconciliation is a big word.  Reconciliation is (among other things) a gift.  To be reconciled with someone means to give the gift of trust exactly where you have very good reason not to give it.  Reconciliation is also not a first step.  You can't short circuit the process of grieving through the pain caused by evil.  You can't short circuit the real loss and the real anger.  If you do, than what you arrive at isn't actually reconciliation -- it is a fairy tale land in which we pretend to be at peace.

Our faith claims to offer reconciliation.  More than that though, our faith claims to actually be reconciliation.  The whole drama recounted in the Scriptures, continued in the life of the church today, and (we hope) completed in the bodily resurrection of all is itself a story of reconciliation.  The drams is a story of humanity being reconciled with God, of humanity being reconciled again with creation, of humanity being reconciled with each other, and of personal reconciliation -- a healing of the internal divide that sin causes in each of us.

This reconciliation, we profess, happens in and through the work of Christ.  Somehow his incarnation, life, crucifixion, descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension make possible all of this reconciliation.

Unfortunately for us, while everything I have just said is true, it doesn't make things any clearer.  What we usually end up doing (in Seminary anyway) is arguing about just how this reconciliation happens.  We have a tendency to say that if you are arguing wrongly, you don't believe rightly.  And, if you don't believe rightly, you may not be reconciled.  It is easy enough to clarify the different ways of arguing -- and for the most part they fall under denominational differences -- although here yet again some would argue that they don't.

What interests me here (and this really is the point of my post today) is trying to find ways of getting at reconciliation without doing so using any of the theology we argue about.  I'm certainly not trying to collapse the very real differences of opinion we have on how reconciliation is achieved through God in Christ.  But I think there is much more to our very real lack of reconciliation with each other.

I also think that not all reconciliation has, first of all, to do with our relationship with God.  I know that that is a fairly controversial thing to say, and is probably even wrong.  But bear with me.  It needs to be said.  We Christians need to hear that there is so much more to what makes us people than our relationship or status of reconciliation with God.  We are more than our beliefs about God, we are more than our spoken message (to non Christians!), we are more than our effort to follow Christ.  

I'll close this with this slightly tangential story.  Luther (those of you who know me know that Luther isn't my favorite theologian... hopefully me using him can be seen as an act of good faith.)  When he finally got it -- when his reading of Romans made the story of man's reconciliation with God make sense for him at a very visceral gut level, do you know what he did?  He went outside and planted a tree.  He created new life.  Can we do that?  I like to think that if we do do that, it will aid us in our journey towards reconciliation.

Talking about Eucharist

C.S. Lewis, in his book, Mere Christianity, begs us to imagine that we are living (for the sake of argument) in a post apocalyptic world in the future.  Pick your favorite conspiracy, and imagine that WWIII has happened.  Now, 2 hundred years later, humanity is trying to survive on a largely ruined planet.  This imaginary culture doesn’t have access to the technological expertise that we possess.  They are what we would refer to as “hunter-gatherers” – the destruction of the world as we know it was so total that all their time is taken up in mere survival. Yet, for whatever reason, they recognize that in our culture, technology was highly valued.  So they use words like internet, computer, database, texting, cell phone, Facebook, and Tablet, but don’t actually understand how these words fit together.  These words have no context in their culture at all.

Lewis brings us on this exercise to make the argument that one can draw an analogy between this future culture and our culture – instead of technology though it is the moral virtues that don’t have traction for us.  We use words like justice, temperance, courage, humility, etc but we don’t have the cultural context anymore for how these words fit together. 

I would like to take this analogy and apply it in a different direction.  We use words every Sunday to refer to the Eucharist – sacrifice, oblation, sacrament, ritual, Priest, rites, etc – yet we are almost entirely lacking the cultural context for how these words fit together.  Despite this reality, we recognize (like the imaginary society from the future) that these words once contained great importance and meaning for the society that gave us these words.  In fact, we also remember (through our Scriptural texts) that Christ himself asked us to do this in memory of Him – so we do this – and try as often as we do to remember Him at least in our hearts.

Yet, the situation is slightly more complicated than I have just let on.  For, not only do we remember that these words mean something quite possibly very important, we remember that whatever the trauma was that caused our culture(s) to be so utterly different from the culture(s) in which these words made sense was linked in some important way to precisely a fight over these words!  So the words are not only somewhat nonsensical to most of us, but also very loaded.  They carry with them all the embattled tension of a theological battle with massive social and cultural upheaval that was fought now over 400 years ago. 

We may not be able to tell what these words mean anymore, but we can tell what side of the old battle we are on.  So if someone uses some combination of the words in a way that doesn’t sound similar to how we are used to hearing them, we can know that they are not “one of us.”  All I need to do to illustrate my point is to articulate a few different combinations of these terms.  Someone who says, “The Eucharist is the Sacrifice of the Mass” is clearly referring to something different then someone who says, “The Eucharist is a remembering of the oblation of Christ” or again, “the Eucharist is primarily a communal experience in which our eating a meal together reminds us of Christ.”

As soon as you heard any of those statements I’m guessing you either felt more at ease, or more alarm – yet were unable to say exactly what the phrases meant!  Proof of Lewis’s point, I guess.  That we live in a world that is so dynamically different from the world in which either these words had currency or these phrases were coined is relatively beyond the need for proof.  What we do about that is quite a different story. 

That brings me to the crux of the article – what do we do with the Eucharist now that we are living in a different world?  I am trained as a church historian.  That’s what I do.  I study the way it was.  I find my work fascinating for many reasons – none the least of which is the sometimes utter incongruity between how (as best we can tell, anyway) things were viewed during a particular age, and how we use those concepts today.  Religion and the development of religious rites is perhaps the most shocking of all in precisely this regard. 

Most things change quite dramatically given enough years.  It is very rare to have, say, the same political organization in the same geographical space for more than about 600 years.  It is also very rare to have the same language spoken in the same geographical location for more than about 600 years.  There are exceptions, of course.  But generally, the norm is change. 

Religious rites, by contrast (here I’m using the phrase, “religious rites” to refer to a particular practice done in one particular way by a particular religion) change even slower than political forms of government or language even language.  Since I’m not a historian of Islamic or Eastern religious practices I won’t attempt to draw examples there.  However, one can show that (as an  example) the particular way in which someone was baptized in, say, 3^rd century Ravenna is surprisingly similar to how someone was baptized in 14^th century Ravenna… even though (to use our examples) the language they spoke changed, and the political structures changed.  This general rule applies all across the board – the more sacred a particular practice is believed to be, the less it will change even though everything else around it changes with some regular frequency.

So where are we?  Well, we are in a culture that doesn’t understand the phrases and terminology used to describe what was perhaps the single most important religious rite of the culture that preceded it.  We are 400-500 years away from whatever it was that caused this tremendous cultural upheaval.

I think there are two things we must keep in mind.  

1.)  We will absolutely never be able to rewind the clock and either understand these terms as they were understood by these people or describe them in a necessarily similar format.  I think we have to come to terms with the finality of that loss.  Any attempt to go back (say, to the Medieval or even the Patristic or late Classical period) and resurrect these particular thought worlds regarding the Eucharist is finally a failed attempt.  

2.) The value though that they placed in the Eucharist we can appreciate.  We should not ignore this.  In fact, we must not ignore this.  Simply because 1 is true, doesn’t mean that we can therefore ignore the central importance of the Eucharist in our own religious practices. 

So what?  Why is it important to say everything we’ve just said?  Well, for starters, it helps to remember that the Eucharist is perhaps centrally important to the faith.  It also helps to remember that the battles that were fought over what the Eucharist means lie at the heart of much of what it means today to either be Baptist, or Assembly of God, or Presbyterian, or Anglican, or Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox.  In other words, our current divisions resulted in a large part out of the massive social and cultural upheaval that caused the loss in translation that Lewis’ analogy helps us understand.

But there is more than that, isn’t there?  Much of what we take away from this article depends on how we reconcile points 1 and 2 above.  Can we (without collapsing 1) actually justify 2?  That is the crux of the matter.  How do we appropriate the centrality – both in how we think about God and in how we structure our time together in worship on Sunday – of the Eucharist in the 21^st century?  How can we learn from the past in a way that doesn’t re-enter into those old battles which are fought with terms that no longer fit into a cohesive whole?

First Post!

This blog is a space for me to think through the tremendously complex intersections of personal existence, church life, and responsible living in America in the 21st century.  I am (and have been for sometime) a student studying in Boston for the Anglican Priesthood.  In fact, I've been studying for so long now, I think it will be a bit strange to experience life -- not as a student, but as a professional minister.  I ask myself, what will that look like?  I think one of the things it looks like is for me to engage with the world I live in through the written word.

I like to write, and there are a lot of things that deeply bother me.  The more I read, and the more I intentionally listen to you (my readers, those who are in the various communities that I live in, those who are from communities I used to live in but now don't, and those who are strangers to me) the more I realize that a lot of what bothers me also bothers you.  

I named this blog "Reconciled Bodies" because I think the phrase holds a lot of room for exploration.  We use the word "body" to refer to many aspects of our experience of living the life we have.  We also wrap much of our identity around how we perceive our bodies, and how others perceive them.  Our sexuality, our race, our own personal history of growing up and discovering that we live in a very large world with very real sorrows and very real joys, our expectations for the future and our memories of the past are all deeply wrapped up in our bodies.  

Yet, the word body also can refer to more than one person as well.  A "body of people" refers to a "group" of people who all share in some common interest or desire or goal or belief or assumption.  The great religious bodies of our world and the great political bodies both claim our allegiance and involvement in different ways.  Part of being a responsible human being is choosing how we are involved in these bodies.  Using our resources, our time, and our energy in a way that nourishes our own body while also providing for the well being of the body of others in a way that increases the common good is central to our very humanity.  

Our bodies are also in conflict.  Statistically, many of us have experienced very terrible atrocities and violations to our own bodies -- and we bear the emotional and psychological wounds and memories.  Many of the larger, corporate bodies that we belong to are also in conflict.  Each of these larger bodies also has a history -- a shared memory of past wounds, triumphs, and expectations for the future.  

The Christian Church(s) centrally make the claim that the wounds we each bear in all of our several bodies can be healed in the Body of Christ.  Yet each of them (individually) bears its own permanent markers of separation from everyone else.  There are really just two questions that I think all the reasonable topics within this blog fit into.  Everything else that can be said can be phrased inside of these two questions.

1. How does healing (reconciliation) in the Body of Christ work?
2. What does that healing look like for me and the bodies that I am a part of?

There are some relatively obvious things that can be excluded right off the bat.  For starters, we can say that reconciliation doesn't mean pretending that we aren't, in fact, different.  When we gloss over our differences in the name of unity we practically end up in a fairy tale.  We end up in a world that we all know doesn't actually exist.  Additionally, we may say that reconciliation also doesn't mean insisting that my viewpoint is, in fact, the one that God shares.  We can and should bring God into the journey of reconciling our bodies, but if the result of having brought God in further increases our distance than perhaps we need to rework many of our fundamental assumptions.  Lastly, (and this one is perhaps not so obvious) reconciliation isn't the same thing as suppression, but it may involve denial.  Suppression involves the coercive use of power to achieve peace.  Denial involves the voluntary suspension of self in order to hear the other.  

We may say that in order to reconcile our bodies, and to do so within the Body of Christ, we must listen.  That is, of course, a very ironic thing to have in the first post on a blog of all things, but bear with me.  My hope is that if you are still reading, if you decide to engage with my blog, perhaps we share a few things in common.  Like you, I am deeply curious about how this reconciliation of our bodies takes place.  Like you, I am stumbling towards a deeper appreciation for and understanding of my role in this reconciliation.  Like you, I am grieved by the horror of a world torn by violence.  Like you, I bear within me (against all odds) the hope that reconciliation is possible.