We might as well be Nazarenes

preached on July 4 for Proper 9, Year B

In today's gospel we have a pair of stories in which miracles of healing play a part, but in what seem at first in opposite ways. The first story has Jesus returning to his home town, in which he receives a decidedly cold welcome. To us, accustomed to the modern trappings of celebrity, it is a strange reaction, for what modern place would not lay claim to a miracle worker? Perhaps the strangest statement, though, is this: “he could do no deed of power there.” For those of us who have heard this, every third year, for some time, perhaps it does not jump out at us. And yet, consider the implication: that the second person of the Trinity, God incarnate, to whom we ascribe all power and omnipotence not only because it is so revealed, but because it seems obvious—he is in this place incapable of exercising it.

Except.

The sentence continues, “except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” One's first impulse is to read this as simply illustrating the diminishing of Jesus' power, but there is a message in this little coda. Recall in last week's story, Jesus spoke to the woman with the hemorrhage and said, “daughter, your faith has made you well.” Of course, we cannot be sure, because the gospel does not say so, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that those who came for healing were also made well through faith. But of the rest, “he was amazed at their unbelief.” For surely they had heard tell of the wonders he had done: their words testify to that. And yet the fact that this was the boy they had known, who had grown up on their town, the son of a carpenter, somehow this was enough to “offend” them. And yet, had they heeded scripture, they should not have been so surprised, for in the history of salvation it is recorded over and over that God chose not the high nor the mighty, but the childless to be the father of many, the second over the firstborn, the least over the most. Likewise, the disciples were ordinary men, seemingly picked by Jesus at random. Mary sang, “he hath put down the mighty from their thrones, and hath exalted the humble and meek,” and so then is Jesus himself: God made humble, so that man shall be exalted, indeed, raised to sit at the right hand of the Father. But his former neighbors did not, it seems, remember their scripture.

Instead, familiarity bred contempt, and they raised up for themselves a stumbling block, and out of these blocks, made their town a fortress against the power of the incarnate Word. And note further: from many other stories, we can see that doubt is not necessarily an impediment to the entrance of divine power into our lives; Jesus says that even the smallest seed of faith is enough to call it forth. But contempt is different, and, well, we live in a contemptuous age. You need only to listen how we practice politics to see that. And as many a parable relates, how we treat our fellow humans is how we treat our God.

Now, our second story sees no such impediment; indeed, it turns away from Nazareth and into the rest of Judaea. Here we have the first mission of the apostles, though they are not named as such, and as Jesus sends them out in pairs, we may recall his promise that “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I will be in the midst of them.” And in this first mission, we see the same division between faith and rejection: faith brings forth the power of God through the hands of the disciples, but where they are rejected, the implication is that this rejection is not innocent. The disciples are not to harm those who do not accept the gospel word, but they are to shake off the dust off their feet as a testimony against those who reject it. I am reminded of a story of related by Anthony Bloom, the great Orthodox writer and bishop in Britain. The story is of a very nasty, hateful woman, who unaccountably throws a turnip at a beggar to chase him away. After she dies, so the story goes, she is judged and sent to the flames of hell, but there, she sees the hand of Jesus holding out a turnip, and he says to her, “grab hold of this.” Even the smallest good, it seems, may give faith something to grasp, but conversely, both stories today teach that rejection of the divine touch is also within our grasp.

It is quite tempting to view ourselves in the position of the disciples, going out into the world to spread the word and power of Jesus, when we read the second story. And I would not discourage this reading, for, of course, we are also so commissioned. But here, today as on every Sunday, we are the hearers. And in our familiarity with its message, we might as well be Nazarenes ourselves. And thus the question is set before us, in every act we make: are we ourselves to be bearers of the word, or do we treat it with contempt? The first way is life; the second, to turn away from it. Therefore, choose life, that you may have it abundantly.

Prayer Book Revision Happened, and the Result Was Not Pretty

It was apparent within the first few days of General Convention that revision of some sort was going to be pushed through. And though the bishops balked to a degree, we not only got revision, but we got revision now. First, the permission to use Enriching Our Worship was not only extended, and not only given no end date, but regulation by the ordinary of the diocese was removed. Any rector may now use it and their discretion, without having to consult with their bishop.

On top of that, we were given a revised Rite II, reworded to reduce usage of "Father", "Lord", "kingdom", and of course supressing any use of the male personal pronoun for God. Again, this thing has no expiration date and no regulation by the bishop. And it has the exactly the same issue that both Matthew Olver and I remarked upon in EOW: the avoidance of "Father" makes for a rather lopsided trinity.

It's all the more obvious here given that one has the 1979 rite as a standard against which to measure the changes. The biggest is that the eucharistic prayer proper is no longer addressed to the Father, but to "God" as a whole. This breaks the preface "of the Father" because they changed not a word of that, but since it is said in the context of speaking to the Father in the first place, it is no longer of the Father at all. Now, I do not know why eucharistic prayers are address to the Father, but older examples all are. Thus we have a potentially substantial change sprung on us, with little discussion. Indeed, the hasty nature of this was evident as two changes had to be backpedaled, and Prayer C was taken out of consideration entirely. Never minding my problems with the whole project: I would have objected to the substitution of "reign" for "kingdom", if only because Elizabeth II reigns over the United Kingdom. To me the substitution is too alienating from scripture, a problem which also besets the many suppressions of the word "Lord", which after all means specifically the Name of God.

But then, it seems that I don't get to object, the convenient grounds being that I am male and old enough to be dismissed if I'm not with the program. On one level one cannot object to an all-female committee on Sexual Harassment and Exploitation, but their report has some major problems, not the least of which is that their resolution pushing "expansive" language essentially puts it in opposition to theological consideration. I don't believe their problems are something that can be fixed that way anyway, but they persist in a narrative of theological history that has some serious faults, not to say untruths. For example, they say that "In the 1928 BCP and Hymnal 1940, the generic use of masculine nouns and pronouns to encompass all human beings established a concept of maleness as normative and femaleness as the exception or “other.” Decisions at the 1970 and 1973 General Conventions made clear that such generic use was not actually inclusive: the masculine-gender nouns in the canons were interpreted to exclude women from ordination to the priesthood." I doubt that anyone on the committee was actually there in those years to relate the discussion that ensued on the floor, but it is a very safe bet that nobody relied on the legalism of the wording of the canons, and that they went straight to the traditional arguments from Paul and from the symbolism of representing the person of Christ. And the further reality was that in '74 there were enough men on their side to defy the canons. While one may argue how much the use of the male as the default 3rd person singular pronoun creates a bias, this attempt at mind-reading is flatly unconvincing to me.

Beyond that, the pushback against trying to erase the maleness of Jesus has been strong enough to protect "Son"; moreover, attempts to push "Mother" have largely failed, again perhaps because the theological problems are too severe for a younger generation to swallow. Thus it is conspicuous that we see here, in the end, a rejection of the divine parental in general. And that's a really huge problem, because it is there, after all, that we find the locus of sin. At any rate, as Benjamin Guyer points out, the aim of a purified liturgy is unachievable. The tension between the language of scripture and the language of feminist activism tends to be resolved by abandoning not only the scriptural text, but by substituting the old Enlightenment illusion of a liberalized humanity redeemed through right thinking. And it doesn't matter, it seems to me, how much that thinking turns out to be wrong; it doesn't matter how likely it is that the theories of the present will fail the test of time. The point, after all, of scripture is that we cannot achieve such redemption, not in that way.

But meanwhile, we have a serious problem here: revision has already happened, and even if the 1979 book is not rejected or replaced, it is pretty likely right-thinking rectors and deans will largely suppress its use.

I'll Take the BCP Behind the Curtain, Monty

So the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music is offering us four options for going forward on BCP revision:

• Revise Book of Common Prayer
• Create Book(s) of Alternative Services, and leave the BCP 1979 alone
• More talking, listening, researching, and discerning
• Deepening our relationship with the 1979 BCP

They also offer a "technical fixes" option which could go with any of the other four.

If you've read many of my BCP revision posts, you can guess that I prefer the fourth option: no revision yet. The current book needs some revision, but limited, and revision only. We already, in the form of Enriching Our Worship, have the second option, and it has been a major problem, both in terms of commonality and in what those alternate rites say. New rites (e.g. the trial same-sex blessing rite) have consistently taken precisely what is problematic about EOW as a starting point, and there was a large outcry when revision was announced of people who saw the process as specifically to legitimize if not impose these deviations; I was one of them. So the first option is undesirable, and the second option, legitimizing the current mess, is undesirable.

And more talking? Well, they didn't say "dialogue", which as we all know tends to mean "We know better than you on this topic and we’re going to have a ‘dialogue’ until you see the error of your ways and agree with me at which point our dialogue will be done." But setting the terms of the talking is crucial and problematic. Already we have Matthew S. C. Olver saying "I think it is important to acknowledge at the beginning of this piece that Christians must take seriously the concerns raised by feminist theologians" and "Related to this more experiential concern is the basic Christian theological claim that God is neither a man nor a woman, neither male nor female." OK, well, I do not agree to the second, which is not to say that I disagree, but simply that the issue is debatable. In the first place, if this is going to be "basic" for a Protestant, it has to be attested directly from scripture. And while I am certainly open to be corrected about this, I am not aware of such attestation; the principle appears to arise out of neo-Platonic idealism about God. Furthermore, the problem is not as a rule language concerning the Godhead, but about the three Persons. There the whole thing starts to come apart very quickly when the words "male" and "female" are pinned down, because given current sexuality doctrine there is nothing one can say about the words as genders that affords any objective truth, and without something objective to anchor them on, treating the names as rhetorical figures devolves into meaninglessness.

The bigger issue, however, is the demand to engage feminist theology. I'm plenty happy to engage it, but when I start complaining about its category errors, left and right, things are surely headed off into Dialogue. The tendency in these "dialogues" is to exclude me because I am male, and therefore (if I dissent) a troglodyte who has to be instructed (that is, lectured and then dismissed). It's hugely problematic that the many people who accept women as priests but who have problems with radfem talk about God are largely ignored, and the attitude from the SCLM up to now has been that EOW is the starting point for everything new. EOW is also our local source for the pro omnis error, which they don't mention; but it also represents a step away from Protestant principles.

I suppose there needs to be talking all right, but it needs to be about more fundamental principles than feminism or universalism. The biggest issue is our institutional hypocrisy about theology as a whole. We have creeds, which we stand up and say "on Sundays and Major Feasts", and then our clerics deny that we believe them. We affirm the church's teaching that communion is only for the baptized, and then advertise in all too many parishes that "all are welcome to partake." We promulgate a church position on abortion that has been reaffirmed several times over now, and nobody would dare to teach it on a Sunday. On the one hand, we get subjected to controversial deviations as if there was consensus to do so; on the other, we get subjected to deviations when there is stated consensus that they are deviant and not to be done. Trying to work out a new prayer book in these circumstances is a huge problem because this sort of behavior makes it a bad-faith effort.

that's why I'm in favor of sticking with the last option. I think there is plenty to fix in the current book, but I don't see how we can go about that until, to be really blunt about it, the progressive side starts playing fair.

This Puny Cosmos

So, a week or so after the end of he the new Cosmos series, Trinity Sunday rolled around, and we did Prayer C, with "the vast expanses of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile Earth, our island home." Not one of the BCP's more felicitous texts, but its heart is in the right place. And it is surely most suitable, in its comprehensive story of salvation, for this culminating day of the Easter and Pentecost season.

Those vast expanses, those galaxies and suns, and that fragile Earth all featured prominently in Neil deGrasse Tyson's scientific story. I do not recall Tyson specifically referring to the mediocrity principle, but it buttresses his cosmology. Earth is unimportant, unremarkable; there are held to be uncountable earths populated with innumerable races. There must be: probability dictates it.

But the story of earth is anecdote, not data. We don't know how uncommon earth-like planets are, or how commonly they evolve some form of life, or how often that life evolves toward creatures like unto ourselves. Indeed, more recently the oddness of earth within the solar system has been heightened by suspicion that the formation and existence of our rather-larger-than-typical moon is important to the development of life here. The hope of those who want to believe that there is nothing remarkable about our human existence is that the unimaginably numbers of galaxies and stars within galaxies and planets around stars are sufficient to overcome any conceivable rarity of our situation, but pitting the unimaginable against the inconceivable is on the order of multiplying zero times infinity and expecting to get an answer.

The motivation behind this is Genesis, Chapter One, or rather, a distaste for it. When Stephen Hawking asserts that "the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies," the several value judgements (including Hawking's exaggeration of how common the sun is) are, after all, his judgements. God was not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire, so there is no reason to look for him in the gas giant, the supernova, the galactic core, or the black hole, or in any number of cosmic vastnesses or exotica.

If it offends that the creator of all should have created all but the most infinitesimal portion as mere backdrop to the divine earthly drama, well, that reflects on our aesthetics, not on God. The "pale blue dot" is a question of perspective, but in the end, it is the divine eye that matters.

The Limitations of Being ‘Spiritual but Not Religious’

Rabbi David Wolpe nails the fundamental weakness of the "spiritual but not religious" notion:

Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.

To be spiritual but not religious confines your devotional life to feeling good. If we have learned one thing about human nature, however, it is that people’s internal sense of goodness does not always match their behavior. To know whether your actions are good, a window is a more effective tool than a mirror.

No one expects those without faith to obligate themselves to a religious community. But for one who has an intuition of something greater than ourselves to hold that this is a purely personal truth, that it demands no communal searching and struggle, no organization to realize its potential in this world, straddles the line between narcissistic and solipsistic. If the spirit moves you to goodness, that is wonderful. For too many, though, spirituality is a VIP card allowing them to breeze past all those wretched souls waiting in line or doing the work.

Theology, and the Poverty of the Virgin

This is one of those years when Candlemas, AKA the Feast of the Presentation or of the Purification, falls on a Sunday, and therefore even the run-of-the-mill Episcopal parish observes it (at least if they haven't forgotten what it says on page 16 of the BCP). It's an interesting juxtaposition considering that we are in Year A and therefore (in the RCL) the story of Jesus at the temple also appears in the lectionary, so that we hit most of the first few chapters of Luke (Holy Name/Circumcision being the exception, it being impossible to get any but the most dogged A-Cs to show up to church instead of watching the Tournament of Roses parade on New Years Day).

And it presents an interesting problem for the preacher, who finds Jesus' teaching, as a rule, a much more congenial topic. These early stories demand treatment as theology and not moral advocacy, which seems to be a problem in this church. In that light I would like to commend Tobias Haller's sermon for its investigation of connections which I had forgotten or did not put together before. The presentation, after all, is about the satisfaction of two mosaic commands: first, for the purification of Mary after giving birth, and the second, for the presentation of Jesus, the first-born. And it is about the fulfillment of promises, to Simeon and Anna. One should take a moment to consider that, some few months earlier, the aged Elizabeth had stood among the younger women at this same place (John being Kohanim and therefore not being presented).

The specifics of these rites leads me to another issue. Leviticus specifies, for the purification offerings, a lamb and a dove, but allows a second dove to be substituted for the lamb if the latter cannot be afforded. Mary, it is recorded, offers two doves. This is taken as an implication of poverty, which in my opinion is overstated. Consider the larger context, and never mind that, as far as I know, we don't have a good handle on the price of lambs at the temple. First, Joseph: he's a skilled tradesman, not a laborer or a subsistence farmer or fisherman. By the standards of most eras, this makes him a working man, to be sure, but not poor. Second, Elizabeth: she is a high status wife, having married into the top priestly class. One gathers that both marriages, before March 25th, were unremarkable and didn't strain at class boundaries.

It's significant at this juncture to note that Jesus' teachings about money presuppose a set of class divisions that beings to look modern. We fail to notice that all his talk about salvation as an investment is too familiar, and that merchants and bankers are, in the world of his parables, people of considerable status, and that working stiffs of all sorts also play prominent roles. Joseph and Mary, as the marriage plays out, are not the poor to whom mercy is to be directed; they are at the lower reaches of those of whom mercy is expected. Millais's notorious (at the time) image of Jesus as a child in his father's shop creates a new modern scandal by setting Joseph among the sort of people who in this era might vote Republican— but then again, maybe they would join a union.

The point is that not everything in scripture is about social justice politics. Mary is, in the end, not an unwed mother, and Jesus was not reared in abject poverty. Paul's "bourgeois" directives simply bring home the point that in the early church the good news was not just for the destitute. And that gospel is theological first. The early chapters of Luke, the beginning of John, the early words of Matthew: all of these emphasize how Jesus came into the world as a spiritual act, and they demand a religious response.

Watching with Joseph

This being Year A in the lectionary, Joseph, the father of Our Lord, makes some of his rare appearances in the readings. Joseph is one of the more fugitive figures in scripture, making his first appearance in the first verse of Matthew (as part of the genealogy) and his last at Jesus' visit to the temple at age twelve (which we shall also be privileged to hear this year), where he is not named but may be assumed to be one of the plural parents mentioned. Then he disappears; Mary is seen in several episodes and is present at the crucifixion, but Joseph is never heard from again, and the last references to him are oblique, when Jesus is called "the carpenter's son."

It is thus presumed in the legenda that Joseph died before Jesus' ministry began, and he is typically depicted as an older man. Some tales claim that he was a widower and that therefore James and the other brothers and sisters were from this first marriage, thus making possible the perpetual virginity of Mary. In truth, we do not know: even the Catholic Encyclopedia deems these stories "unreliable". Nor does Joseph feature prominently in the history of saintly devotion, or for that matter much at all. Mary's cult traces back as far as we can trace anything; a true cultus of Joseph is not found until the 1300s, and took another century to really catch on; the day of his observance only dates back to the 10th century.

Traditionally, in the nativity story, we are associated with the shepherds, taken by surprise in the fields. But I have come to think that Jesus' earthly father is a better image for most of us church goers. The nativity is not, after all, a surprise to us; but we are both participants and bystanders. Here is Joseph, who finds out about the blissful event first through rumor and then through a dream; and now here he is towing his far-too-wife down to Bethlehem, and arranging lodging in what space is to be had. And now the holy night arrives, and it is all too likely that he is, at first, reduced to standing in the street (or nursing an anxious beer in the tap room) while a midwife handles the sacred birth. (Saint Bridget's account may be safely set aside as devotional.) Attending the mother and newborn, he must also deal with the surprise visitors from the fields, a duty repeated when the magi make their visit. And then must take the family to Egypt, and thence, finally, back to Nazareth. Presumably also accompanies the mother and child and the various ritual visits to the temple.

And that is all. Simeon receives the promised vision, but Joseph leaves the story when it is quite incomplete. And is it not so with us? Our own stories are writ and each such book closed, but though we pray "maranatha, come Lord," it has become clear over the years that the divine "soon" is in a great fullness of time, which none of those living is perhaps destined to see, for glory or grief, until the day comes when all graves yield and holy judgement, dread in mercy, is worked to its conclusion. We are as often the bystanders, witnesses to grace, as we are the grace-bearers (the charitokos, as it were) or even midwives; and often enough we do not see the end of grace as it is worked out. And yet these are honorable and saintly roles. The cultus of the Holy Family is deserving of our consideration, for Jesus was as much in need of a father as of a mother.

Therefore let us wait with Joseph for the sacred birth, and worship with him the holy child. And let us receive with him the visit of the shepherds, and marvel at the wonder of the incarnation, even if we, like him, sleep before the last glorious morn, laid to rest in the promise and hope of that day's fulfillment.

The Interesting Thing About Religion

Matt Gunter has posted a letter from Evelyn Underhill to Cosmo Lang (then Archbishop of Canterbury) on the subject of the purpose of religion and the need for "greater interiority and cultivation of the personal life of prayer" in the church's clergy. It is a message that is ever more pertinent in today's Episcopal Church, where it seems that matters of public policy come first, and where matters of theology are purely discretionary. There is no hope for the increase of the gospel where its ministers are not interested in what it tells us about God, and where its ministers are not in converse with that God. A priest without a regular rule of prayer is spiritually malnourished, and cannot properly feed his charges; a priest who is not conversant with the theology which is handed down from the fathers, and who does not walk in the path which they have written for her, cannot properly bring her people into the same knowledge. There is nothing wrong with preaching for action, but it is not all there is to preaching, and people can be inspired to action elsewhere. But it is only in the church that people can be brought to know Christ and to live in him, and to do that, those people much be led into religion, that is, the right relationship with the divine.

Cheap Ashes

The image is striking: a priest stands on a station platform, on a street corner, in the square, vested and wearing a cloak or a cope if the weather calls for it. People come up, and a finger is rubbed in ashes and makes the sign, and the words are spoken: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return". And another person, perhaps a passerby, perhaps a churchman whose schedule precludes going to church, is marked with a sooty cross. And perhaps the world is reminded, once more, how it is fallen, and to where it needs to go for redemption.

The Ashes to Go movement, which started in St. Louis with an ecumenical group of churches in 2007, has spread quickly across the Episcopal Church. This year, for instance, found the Bishop of Washington and priests from St. Paul's K Street offering ashes at a DC Metro station; this diocese published a directory of sites, as did others. The notion is appealing in a nation where the church is often enough looked upon as a decorative element or an avocation, and where its message of repentance and redemption is supposed to be cooped up within its adherents, one "spiritual path" among many. But on a chilly Wednesday, its ministers venture into the world, offering repentance to the world, in the sign of a smudge of carbon. And the media have noticed, for this year I see articles from all over on the practice, such as this one from the Dallas Morning News. The International Business Times even included a list of locations in New York, presumably for the convenience of its Catholic readers, an ironic note given that the movement originated out of the observation that Catholics would go to Episcopal churches for ashes but not for communion.

As the practice has grown in popularity, it is inevitable, I suppose, that contrary voices have arisen. And they are voices I respect, so I feel they must at least be addressed. And mostly the criticisms are consonant with one another: Susan Snook writes, for instance, that "Ash Wednesday makes sense only at the beginning of a season that ends with Easter"; the rector of Christ Church Tulsa insists that the practice goes against the very gospel inevitably read on the day, warning against the practicing of one's piety in public. David Creech echoes these comments and talks about how the acts should be fitted within the larger service of contrition and recollection. Another cleric characterizes it as "cheap grace", surely the penultimate denunciation in this Boenhoffer-obsessed church. It is denounced as individualistic, consumerist, vacuous.

All these complaints, I think, are justified. And yet, I am not utterly persuaded. Surely a Christian should, in a Christian community, be joining others in a community act of repentance. But for many of us, this was not possible. I personally was unable to attend any of the services at my church due to the constraints of my schedule; I was fortunate in finding another parish within a short drive of my office that had a noon service, but not everyone has such an option. If hadn't been able to find such a service, I might have sought a priest on a street corner rather than let the day pass unobserved. In any case I must rely upon my own understanding of the spirituality of lenten practice to make it all "work"— and I ran my hand across my forehead before returning to the office.

But I think the more intense focus here, from both sides, is on the unchurched. And here I come upon a number of thoughts, which may or may not be woven into a coherent tapestry. First, on the matter of cheap grace: talk about it is also cheap. Eventually it comes across to me as a cry of despair from clerics frustrated at their unresponsive charges. And while one should not ridicule the professional hazards of another too easily, the fact remains that the seed of grace, at least, is as cheap as can be. One needs only to be baptized, and for many of us, there was no decision of our own needed to make that happen. Yes, the road to final grace leads to and through Calvary, but most of us Americans will never be stood up against a wall for our Lord; mostly we start our paths quietly and without drama, and many saints finish the trek in similar circumstances.

Second: if there is anything this word needs to be taught, it is ashes. The message of American secular culture is that you find a fulfilling job (and it can fulfill simply by getting you lots of money), find someone (anyone, maybe a whole series of someones) to to fulfill your sexual appetites, and throw together some "spiritual" practices to keep your ego properly inflated. People don't want Easter, or rather, they take Easter for granted. They don't think they need grace; some small number think that talk of grace is futile, but the vast majority take grace for granted, putting their faith in a Christo-Hindu-Theosophist-nature-worshipping-pantheist universalist spiritualism whose only expense, perhaps, is the book you have to buy to get your self-affirmations out of. There is no more important task for Judaeo-Christian religion than to teach the world that it is fallen. If the minister goes out to speak this prophecy, to say, "Remember O thou man" and tell them that no amount of self-affirmation will grant the salvation so desperately needed, then this can only be for the better.

Third, it seems to me that the choice here, for most, is not between ashes on the street and ashes in church; it's between ashes and no ashes. And I guess I'm less concerned about the spiritual dangers, in that regard, because I compare that with being left undisturbed in sin. Sure, some people at least will get a smear of char on their forehead which they can sport during the day in a state of spiritual smugness. They can do that in church, too, even if the gospel lesson instructs them otherwise. But perhaps one in twenty, even one in a hundred is disturbed enough to contemplate their mortality and depravity, and to start down the road of repentance to be embraced by the church which alone can heal the ancient wound.

Therefore I come down, tentatively, hopefully, on the side of taking ashes wherever they may be borne. We will not win the whole world this way, but perhaps, we may win one or two.

The Other Advent

On the first Sunday of Advent the church lectionary odometer rolled over, and thus the lessons looked towards the dies irae to come. In the gospel Jesus proclaimed the other side of the kingdom: judgement. Jesus came the first time in a rustic tableau, the angels proclaiming peace; the next time around, the angels will bring, not tidings of joy, but trumpets of doom and bowls of wrath to pour on the world.

The last judgement is where everything in medieval piety is headed, with a stopover in purgatory. We moderns are neither so sanguine nor so terrified about our souls being weighed, but when it comes to others: well, that is a different story. Some sense of fairness recoils at the notion that a virtuous pagan or an innocent newborn might not see salvation, so we recreate God in our image, dethroning the frightening judge of the Apocalypse and replacing him with Super-Saving Jesus, who delivers everyone from the fiery pit. Perhaps there is a hell, they say, but it is surely empty and will ever remain so.

Humanity spent much time in the last century supplanting the devil, constructing hells of our own and superseding the lake of fire with our own ovens and killing fields. From there we proceeded to take the apocalypse into our own hands, so that there was a time when it was held quite plausible, if not inevitable, that the world might be scrubbed clean of humanity in a ball of thermonuclear fire. For now, such wholesale slaughter seems to have been set aside, but the world groans on under a burden of natural disaster, warfare, and wanton violence; it longs for the second coming as for the first, that all may be made well.

But we also must be made well. On Jordan's bank, John cries out that the kingdom is at hand. But what must we do, therefore? He calls out for our repentance! Instead, we trust in our own righteousness, and judge against God that he does not fix the world as our corrupt hearts would see it made whole. And the heart of modern man is, well, lazy. Jesus told us to send the gospel to the whole world, and baptize all whom we could; but we lean back and hope that his mercy towards those who were not reached will take up the slack. We expect our government to do mercy, rather than ourselves, or we rely on magical economic processes to do that. We take our sexual exploits as play rather than the bonds which they are.

Justice awaits us, but so does judgement. Surely we should not hope that grace abounds through our neglect. Divine salvation is at hand, but so is the divine purging which is related at such length in scripture. There are sheep, but there will also be goats; let us not be numbered among the latter.

What Does It Mean to Do Theology?

Like sands through the hourglass, nothing seems so relentless in the Episcopal Church as the continual effort at eroding any kind of notion of doctrine. Thus a discussion of catechesis at the Episcopal Café set off, as anyone might expect, a run of responses deriding the notion of a catechism as being a vehicle of "old-school" "authoritarian[ism]". Well, as usual this immediately abandons any real sense of Episcopal Church history, as everyone knows that we didn't even have a catechism until 1976. And that book actually says this concerning the catechism:

This catechism is primarily intended for use by parish priests, deacons, and lay catechists, to give an outline for instruction. It is a commentary on the creeds, but is not meant to be a complete statement of belief and practice; rather, it is a point of departure for the teacher, and it is cast in the traditional question and answer form for ease of reference.

The second use of this catechism is to provide a brief summary of the Church’s teaching for an inquiring stranger who picks up a Prayer Book.

It may also be used to form a simple service; since the matter is arranged under headings, it is suitable for selective use, and the leader may introduce prayers and hymns as needed.

I submit that there is nothing much authoritarian in this, other than the apparently now antique notion that the Church teaches anything whatsoever. A perusal of what our catechism actually says should reveal nothing that is controversial to those who have set aside the routines of modernist revisionism. Obviously people who value questioning more than answers are going to have a problem with such formulas, but someone who is going to question traditional answers has an obligation to know and understand those answers. A catechism is a pretty easy route to to that understanding, be it memorized or not.

Behind this emphasis on questioning, however, is a more or less utterly false picture of Christian history. Or at least, it stands as an utter rejection of Christianity as a historical religion. The trope is religion as a Journey, in which God has to be sought out; but that's not Christianity as the Church teaches it. Seeking takes us to baptism, and baptism (as the sacrament of incorporation) brings the crucial seeking to an end. Doctrine is part of the map giving direction to this, and one of the Church's roles is to keep this map whole, and to make sure it keeps getting passed on to the next generation.

By contrast, the modernist version seems to be that the church really doesn't know much about God, at least nothing worth listening to; in fact the message seems to be that one can basically assume that everything they say is wrong. A quote from one response: "'[R]evealed' truth [...] is nothing more than a prior consensus opinion of some particular group." This isn't a "healthy skepticism"; it's skepticism of a certain sort elevated to dogma. The modernist catechism, were one to be written, would say that the church is nothing more than a political body, that it has no historical teaching worth passing on, and that the purpose of theology is to mine the tales of scripture so as to best ratify the moral impulses of upper middle class liberals.

My reaction to this is to observe how Christian precepts inherited from the church are central to the moral dogmas of the liberal intelligentsia. It seems to me any reason they can give for rejecting church tradition goes on to provide a ground for rejecting liberal moral teaching; any compelling reason to think that Jesus is of any importance eventually relies on the authority of the church as a witness to the faith. And besides that, the picture they give of church history simply isn't true. It is possible to say the most utterly unsupported things about church history and scripture without the least shame, the product of a restorationism so extreme as to retreat back before any record we have, enabling what comes down to simply making up proto-Christianity as needed. But there are a lot of records, and it's pretty clear working from the materials we have that Nicene orthodoxy wasn't something made up at Constantine's behest.

That orthodoxy may not sit easily in some modern minds, but so what? Surely what is most congenial to the secular, irreligious, or "spiritual" world around us is what we should be most suspicious of. It is those precepts which we who hold ourselves worldly are most inclined to rationalize. And I should add at this point that the neo/paleo-con conservative political religion of a lot of American Protestants is as easily criticized on the same basis.

Moderns don't like Jesus as the Real divine revelation who acts in history to save us, because it's so, well, particular and exclusive. Well, so what? If that's the way things are, then it's up to us to learn to live with it.

Teaching the Church

No passage so symbolizes the impasse of the church today than the British prime minister David Cameron lecturing his own church on their sexual ethics. Of equal note is the context of the speech: a reception at 10 Downing Street for "the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-sexual community" (to quote the Church Times article on the event). OK, so here is where it is at: a man who is a churchman listens to pressure groups, and presumes to pressure the church on their behalf, as though the church has nothing to teach him on that matter.

But then, the church has ceased to speak with one voice on the matter. Anyone who guessed that the CT article is graced with a photograph of the event could also guess that said picture shows perennial episcopal aspirant Jeffrey John, who is transparent as glass about his desire to make whatever diocese he attains dominion over as a power base for dictating approval of people, well, like himself. Church teaching becomes thus something to be captured and made to serve his views. But then, what's the point? The PM has already shown that church teaching is held inferior to, well, whoever it is that taught him. Or maybe it is simply his own urges and calculations which rule him.

There has been a lot of going on about Ross Douthat's doubts on the prospects of liberal Christianity. A lot of the rejoinders don't seem to be able to get past the adolescent observation that the conservative denominations are also on the ropes. But really, considering Cameron's remarks, it's hardly surprising. The various churches are all having a hard time getting people to care, I think for somewhat different reasons. The Catholic Church's problems in the USA, for instance, are plainly derived in part from reaction to the high-profile sex scandals. But the secularists are also getting their wish: it is they who are setting society's agenda, and the churches are, by and large, simply buying into the programs given to them by worldly authorities.

This corrupts the conservatives and liberals differently, because they are in bondage to different secular authorities with different aims. The conservatives are controlled by business interests who are uninterested in theology, and this means that they are free to adhere to basic theological doctrines while at the same time their moral teaching is contaminated with neo- and paleo-con economic and social dogmas. The liberals, however, are enslaved by the academic and social bureaucratic establishment, and these people are notoriously adverse to Christian tradition. The irreligion of the academy produces a derivative irreligion in their ecclesiastical followers, so that the result is that, as Douthat says, "the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism."

There remain centrists, of various political views, who are not beholden to the outside, but they are conspicuously beleaguered. Their faith that scripture- and tradition-based theology is the starting point for moral reasoning and "lifestyle" (as though one works out how to live in the same manner as one works out how to get one's hair cut at the barber or salon) is dismissed as antique. If they represent the best foundation for a church going forward (for they do make an argument for religion above and before their moral teaching), they are also crippled by institutions which abuse their otherwise commendable loyalty. I have tended to have little use for the "emergent" movement, because too many of its proponents (Brian McLaren, I'm looking down the road at you) are object lessons in the corruption of hitherto conservative non-denom evangelicals by the same intellectual forces which ruined mainline theology. But as it stands, the only hope going forward is to break free of existing institutions, and indeed perhaps to see institutionality itself in different terms, because of the obsession with church power which so drives liberal Christianity.

That said, I'm not abandoning the Episcopal Church this week. But right now its claim to my loyalty is based very weakly on being able to find a sufficiently orthodox parish, and nothing else.

Anglicans ARE Doctrinal (but not overly so)

Bryan Owen has called attention to a trope about Episcopalians that I seemed to have missed hearing outright, in this case stated flatly by John Westerhoff in A People Called Episcopalians:

Orthodoxy for us is right worship and not right belief.

Well, hogwash. At least, back in 1976 it was hogwash, and as I am going to insist in some sort of continuity of nature, I'm going to stick by that.

But let's start from the reality that we have four big liturgical submissions to general convention this year, plus changes to remove baptism and confirmation is requirements, plus SCLM's desire to "revise" the hymnal even though it's quite clear that the laity (and especially the young) don't want it changed. Add to that Enriching Our Worship (the prayer book that is not our prayer book) and the common experience these days of going to an Episcopal church service on a Sunday morning and hearing all manner of alterations to the liturgical text, and one ought to conclude that if it is "right worship" that characterizes our orthodoxy, a lot of the people in control cannot agree that the church's designated worship is right. I will return to that thought, but for now, let us just say that "right worship" is not a unifying principle, as it stands.

Let us continue to that worship. Westerhoff claims, on the page following the above declaration, that "if anyone wishes to know what Anglicans believe about issues of faith and life, he or she needs to turn to The Book of Common Prayer and engage in the process of interpreting this document." Let me be blunt: this isn't true in the ECUSA of the present. In the first place, there is all the deviation and change I just mentioned, which testifies to degree to which the 1979 BCP does not reflect current worship. But beyond that, if one follows the various discussions it becomes clear that there are various principles floating around which the prayer book which does not state, and which are the true dogmas determining the trajectory of the church. Thus I would not look to worship nor to liturgical texts to find our beliefs; as a rule I would look first to the social and political organs to which our membership belongs.

But let us look at the actual texts on the presumption that they do have some normative content. Well, as anyone who has every read through the Eucharistic liturgies knows, the following rubric is to be found in both Rite I and in Rite II:

On Sundays and other Major Feasts there follows, all standing

And what follows begins, "We believe". It is, of course, the recitation of the Nicene Creed, so following Westerhoff's principle it could be concluded that Episcopalians are supposed to believe all those doctrinal statements made in the creed. Thus saying that our orthodoxy does not include Right Belief is untrue, even if one only relies upon what the liturgy has us do. And really, if one looks to the gospels the statement is preposterous. What did Jesus teach about worship which only mouthed the words without believing them?

Historically, Anglicans have always held to some doctrines, not that it is possible to avoid doing so anyway. What was distinctive about our approach was our refusal to make every issue a matter of doctrine. The classic example is our approach to Eucharistic theology, in that we have always insisted that it is sacramental and not merely symbolic; but we did not insist on a particular theory beyond the insistence on real presence, unlike the Roman official theory of transsubstantiation. This "not right belief" theory is a plain abuse, and it is used to justify a lot of plainly abusive behavior. C.S. Lewis, who is about as inarguably Anglican as they come, caricatured the modernist Anglican cleric perfectly in The Great Divorce, but his apostate bishop is found in large numbers in the American church, mentally crossing their fingers throughout the liturgy. Bishop Shannon says that we should not persecute "those who are seeking to engage imaginatively with modernity", but perhaps he forgets that Fundamentalism itself came to existence out of that very engagement. Or perhaps he means that "engagement" signifies bowing down to the Spirit of the Age and accepting the precepts of the secular, modernist world uncritically. I insist that this engagement must include pushing back against the dogmas of modernism where they conflict with our core beliefs. So for instance, when someone doubts the doctrine of the Virgin Birth (which we've got there in the Creed, so according to our worship, one is obligated to believe it), proper engagement consists of challenging that doubt, not accepting it uncritically.

I do not think that Bishop Douglas is entirely correct when he says that "the Episcopal Church is not a church that readily thinks in terms of 'doctrine.'" It would be more accurate to say that there is a large segment of its membership, and especially of its clerisy, who readily subjugate theological thinking to secular doctrines. They do not like the notion of theological doctrine, for various reasons, but there are many points which they treat as inarguable, and insofar as these things go in a largely powerless organization, they persecute and marginalize dissenters. Saying that we don't do doctrine is really no more than a tactic in that marginalization, a justification for driving from office those who want to maintain the integrity of the institution. We DO do doctrine; what we don't do is approach its justification with any kind of intellectual integrity. Reasoning about what we do is governed by prejudices and emotions, not by deduction from scripture or our tradition. What we need to do is repent of this, and return to taking seriously the doctrinal statements we make every Sunday morning.