“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:4-7).
Always one of my favorite passages, this one took on even more meaning for me five years ago when my oldest brother chose it for his funeral – and asked me to preach. That someone would want it at his funeral says a lot about the strength and joy and perseverance of faith of that person. The same can be said about St. Paul, who wrote it while he was in prison. His letter to the Philippians not only reveals his abiding love for them, but also how much Jesus Christ had transformed him from a man breathing threats and murder to someone who lived and breathed the love of Christ.
How different John the Baptist seems! “”You brood of vipers!” was his greeting to those who came out to see him. “Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” Trembling, people came up and asked what they should do to avoid the terror he predicts. His responses are all economic: share what you have, don’t cheat, don’t blackmail, don’t shake people down. Be content with your wages. And if you think my message is hard, there’s one coming with an even harder message. He’ll baptize you with fire, not water, and if you end up being chaff, the fire will be unquenchable (“asbestos” in Greek). This is called “proclaiming good news to the people.” Hah! If that’s good news, who wants any part of it? For the cold and hungry and cheated it’s great news, but what about everyone else? Are they chaff?
Recently a new clergy study group formed to look at the weekly lectionary readings. It’s a good mix of Lutherans and Methodists with a couple of others (UCC and me). I think denominations exist because of the many ways in which humans experience God. Some people live more in their heads, favoring intellectual analysis. Some are practical, wanting applications to everyday life. Some are experiential. Anglicanism, having a big tent (or at least trying to), can encompass all of these. I did notice that when I went on a bit about the incredible and overflowing joy that flows out of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, no one said “Yes, yes!” but merely observed that it was a good text to create joy in a community.
So there you have three approaches: the peace of God that surpasses all understanding, a brood of vipers, or a useful text. Which do you choose? Only one speaks to my heart, and that is the first. I will take John’s “asbestos,” but attach it to another word: unquenchable joy. That is what faith in Jesus Christ brings, a faith well known to St. Paul and to my brother, Dick. Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.
Advent 2: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Third Song of Isaiah (Canticle 9 in the BCP); Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18.
Monday, December 7, 2009
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7 comments:
Of course, I choose joy, too. Joy is the desired outcome of faith -- of which Prof. John D. spoke in every one of his classes at SWTS.
And, if you're not singing Purcell's anthem right now, I'd sure wonder why. ;)
But haven't you hit, Fr. Horn, on one huge dilemma in Christianity? How do we respond to the words in the Old and New Testaments? How do we know which to embrace (all of them?), which to ignore (any of them?), which to use for living our lives, which to contextualize out of our lives? I know about our three-legged stool metaphor, and I know that our response must involve both prayerful consideration and the application of our own intelligence--but seriously, aren't there some days when that seems, well, dangerous? Or scary? I heard a sermon at a Baptist church where our son was playing cello yesterday and the minister's point--in his homily entitled "Jesus, the Prince of Peace"--was that there will never be, can never be, peace on earth, until the second coming. And I just finished reading Bonhoeffer's chapter called "Women," which isn't about women, but is fully worthy of the worst of St. Paul. Can we pick and choose from the New Testament? Can we ignore some of Paul's writings? Is the New Testament malleable enough to be all things to all people? And how do we know? If Bonhoeffer is right about what he says about living in community, then almost none of us have sufficient awe for our fellow Christians. And those fellow Christians all interpret the New Testament in different ways--just as your study group members did. Argh!!!!
The Philippians passage was a great favorite of Fr. S. when he was here in our parish. We had scheduled the fine anonymous 16th c. anthem on this text for the day, but are unable to do so this time for reasons that I had better not describe.
But I will be thinking of it this Sunday.
I agree with your thoughts about denominations. And I agree with you, Stacy, that there are many days when it all seems both dangerous and scary. And (with Bonhoeffer), we lack sufficient awe for our sisters and brothers, especially (perhaps) those with whom we disagree on almost every point.
Ach, Cassi, so that anthem isn't from Henry P? (Or as N once experienced, playing Purcell in a wedding, seeing it listed like this in the bulletin: Henry Purce II.)
Raisin was right. This entry generated several comments.
Stacy, the tension is there because there is tension within the Bible. For example, Colossians 3/Ephesians 5, on which Bonhoeffer bases his comments on women, is in tension with Galatians 3:28. Some explain this by saying that the latter is really Paul speaking and the former is not, or that Paul is speaking from a cultural perspective and not through faith in Jesus Christ when he makes women subordinate to men. Certainly there are places where culture seems to overwhelm or undermine the new reality Christ brings; those who use a “hermeneutic of suspicion” are quick to interpret the Bible in that way. Yet culture can also overwhelm our own interpretation. To see Luke 3’s introduction of JBap in politicoeconomic terms reflects, I think, our current cultural preoccupations.
So what’s the way out of this? One is to examine our presuppositions about the way things are. Your experiences as a woman in US culture are different from mine as a man, and both of ours are very different from an African villager. So we will hear different things in the Bible. Second, as Christians we believe that Jesus Christ has fulfilled the Hebrew prophecies, so that the old Law (e.g., the dietary rules of Leviticus) is no longer operable. Third, as Anglicans we listen to the weight of tradition (which, admittedly, did not allow the ordination of women for many centuries). And finally, we have to be willing to bear with those tensions in the Bible. If there will not be peace throughout earth until Jesus returns, does that mean that we shouldn’t work for peace now? Of course not. I choose unquenchable joy, but I still believe that faith requires the conversion of life preached by JBap, and that intellectual approaches to Scripture are important. I choose joy because it speaks to my heart, and as an analytical person, I need to listen to that heart to be whole.
Well! So we have a zillion individual Christians with their own unique experiences who can't help but hear the Word in the context of their lives. No wonder we argue and disagree about the meaning of biblical texts. We hunger for peace, but there is none. Maybe the Baptist minister was right. The desire for Christian unity, for divisions to cease, surely cannot be a bad thing for which to hope. On the other hand, Franklin said that those who would trade their liberty for security deserve neither. The security of a Definitive Understanding hints at a kind of intellectual despotism. Perhaps we were given our minds to use them in puzzling out God's words. Perhaps the puzzling is partially what keeps people interested in God. Perhaps the longing for peace is just as human as the need to debate. I've always liked St. Augustine's directive to "love God and do what you want." Deceptively simple, but elegantly tidy!
At the risk of getting into an extended epistemological discussion, how do we know anything except through our individual senses and experiences? We must assume that there is a reality Out There if we are going to function at all. Yet all of our understanding of that reality is necessarily interpretation, an internal processing that begins long before the sensory information even reaches our conscious brain. As Michael Polanyi has shown, even in science the best one can do is make a personal affirmation that something is universally true. Unless others are willing to make that same affirmation of universal truth, science cannot move forward. And if a different truth becomes more widely affirmed, the paradigm shifts – belief in the aether gives way to gas laws.
Our knowledge of God is likewise incomplete and contingent. Yet to refuse to commit to an affirmation of universal truth but only “what is true for me” is what Lesslie Newbigin calls “an evasion of the serious business of living…a tragic loss of nerve…a preliminary symptom of death.” I would say the same is true for those who long for a Definitive Understanding promulgated by any group of humans on earth; they are evading the serious business of living. We disagree about texts because we are less than God, because God is much more that words, and because, as St. Paul says, now we only see in a mirror, dimly. I agree that we were given minds in part to puzzle out God’s words. But there is an established context within which that puzzling takes place, and as a Christian, I believe that the context is one which affirms Jesus Christ as God Incarnate, the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Is this making sense, or are we talking at cross purposes by blogging?
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