HOSEA 2:14-23 -- PSALM 103 -- 2 CORINTHIANS 3:(4-11) 17- 4:2 -- MARK 2:18-22
"Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, stupid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless."
- --Abraham Joshua Heschel
- The Insecurity of Freedom
This twentieth century rabbi sounds very much like the first century Rabbi, Jesus, in modern terms. Jesus, in response to the accusations that he was not following appropriate the religious customs, said things like, "The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them . . . no one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak . . . no one puts new wine into old wineskins . . . one puts new wine into fresh wineskins." The religion of Jesus' day had become irrelevant and oppressive; faith had been replaced by law; faith had become a museum piece rather than a living organism built on compassion and love. Jesus, in the best of prophetic tradition, stood not at the center of organized, institutionalized religion, but, rather he stood at the fringes, calling religion to a place that it would rather not go. To rid themselves of this pesky preacher who was beginning to claim some sort of divine authority, the religious leaders convinced the Romans that he was a threat to the Empire and had him executed.
Are we, the established religious entities of today, in danger of crucifying the Lord, once again? There was a movie version of Nikos Kazanzakis', The Greek Passion, that was called, "Christ Re-Crucified," in which the basis of the story was that we tend to repeat the story. Religion and the religious establishments always tend to encapsulate and hermetically seal the faith in such a way that it has the life squeezed out of it by our attempt to preserve our faith like a lab specimen rather than perpetuate a living, breathing, and ever-changing life form.
In my view, the actions several weeks ago of the Asian and African bishops who consecrated two American priests as bishops, whose drive for power is based on a view of the church as a body which must be freeze-dried in its 19th century garb of exclusivity. Their primary issue appears to be an unwillingness to look honestly at the issues of homosexuality and a desire to close the doors of the church to those who do not conform to their particular literalist view of Scripture. I fear that this stance and others like it are born out of an absence of faith and compassion with little vision of the expanding living fountain that should be the witness of the Body of Christ. There is a reactionary movement in the world-wide Anglican Communion which showed its hand at the last Lambeth Conference and is showing itself now with the consecration of these two priests as bishops which would have the church return to an exclusive, meanspirited religion, rather than be an inclusive compassionate body of faith with Christ at the center of its life calling us to ever expanding circles of love and faith. What contemporary visionaries of a vibrant and ever expanding faith are saying to the church and the world is shocking to some of the religious establishment. We are being called to places we have never been before, we are being called to take a stand for compassion and reconciliation that has not been previously required of us, and we are being challenged to risk change and to be open to God's ongoing and continuous revelation.
Our faith must be a living fountain of compassionate inclusion for all of God's people, a faith which transcends creeds, customs, and habits with which we have become comfortable, and which then moves us into the realm of a courageous reaching out to the outcasts and the marginalized people of God. Those were the people who were the chosen companions of Jesus and the subjects of his healing and his love. Brother Robert Hugh King-Smith, SSF, who will be leading a workshop here the end of March, has said:
"Our God is an including God, a vulnerable God who invites us into relationship. God never engages with less than all that it means for me to be me in my broken- ness and my beauty, thus giving me the freedom to be fully myself. I cannot be fully myself by myself, but only when I stand in a relationship of trust and truth towards another."
Jesus' answer to the Pharisees who interrogated him about his preaching, his teaching, and his failure to follow all the customs of the current religious establishment shocked them. New traditions were being made which did not fit the traditions of the elders, old rules were being broken down because they were no longer helpful nor relevant, and the old wine skins were being replaced by new, fresh, flexible, and pliable skins for the new, fermenting, and expanding wine of the Messianic age where we can stand in a relationship of trust and truth just as we are. One of the many criticisms of Jesus was over the company he kept and the people he called to be his disciples. He sat at table and rubbed elbows with the sinners and the outcasts, the tax collectors and the prostitutes. These were the people who had been excluded from the company of the religious people and were removed from the synagogues, but they were never excluded from the company of Jesus. Do we not have something to learn here? Shouldn't this very central theme of the Gospel say something to the church of today?
This does not mean that we discard everything that we are nor does it mean that what has been of great value to us is no longer meaningful. There is no one who more loves the history, the tradition, and the liturgy and customs of the Episcopal Church than I. But let us be very careful that our love for our own traditions and points of view do not become barriers or stumbling blocks to others. Jesus said that he did not come to destroy the Law, but to fulfill the Law. We should not be about destroying the tradition, but to expand it, open it up, and fulfill it. What is being required of us, I believe, is to extend the boarders, take down the walls, and embrace a world that is in spiritual starvation and at the point of death. The church is being challenged to become less structured and more flexible so it can bravely step out into the world in mission outside of its own walls.
A whole generation of people now exists that is not tied to any denominational loyalty, but still seek God and a deeper spiritual life. In too many cases that I know of, people have been alienated from the church of their past which refused to incorporate them into its life, or worse, drove them from that religious community because they didn't fit or were deemed unworthy. The Gospel requires us to be reconcilers not judges of who is worthy and who is unworthy. Not only do we have a generation of people who have been alienated from the church, we have many who know nothing of the church, do not participate in its life in any way, and from what they have seen of much of Christianity today, they have no great desire to be a part of such an organization. But, that does not mean that we have a generation which does not desire or need God and a deeper spiritual component to their lives.
Jesus' role, and therefore seems to me must be our role, was to bring the reality of the presence of God into the lives of every human being. The incarnation is all about God meeting all humans where they are, sanctifying them, and Jesus was challenging his hearers to understand who he was and to see God in him in a way in which God had never been seen before. This was very threatening. Many people turned away from Jesus because of the stance he was taking. And this kind of talk is no more popular today than it was in his day. The most rigid and exclusive bodies in our society are many of the churches. The amazing and frightening thing is that those churches are often the most full. We think they must be doing something right. Yes, they appeal to people's fears and prejudices, and they require little risk. They also, even with their large numbers, leave many more standing on the outside. We must not let the Episcopal Church stand in the ranks of the exclusive and self-righteous. We have a message of liberation and hope to proclaim to a world enslaved by its own hopelessness.
Where I think we belong is with the marginalized and the outcasts, standing on the edges, calling God's people to a new place of the heart, to a new meeting place with the Holy, and proclaiming an incarnational spirituality that declares the reality and the presence of God in all places and in all people. Until we recognize that it is in all that we find God, we will lose sight of him where we most think we have him all locked up -- safely within the confines of our man-made tabernacles. We are the missionaries of the hope and the love of God. We have the privilege of bringing to the world in which we live, a new and vibrant spirituality.
One theologian wrote:
"To speak of spirituality is to speak of the meeting of eternity with time, of heaven with earth; it is to recover a sense of the holiness of matter, the sacredness of this world of space and time when it is known as the place of God's epiphany. . . . There is a geography of holy places whose beauty has been revealed by lives which have been open to God in such a way as to show that this world is not a system closed upon itself."
- A. M. Allchin
- The World Is a Wedding: Explorations in Christian Spirituality
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