Introduction to the Episcopal Church
Session
20:
I
make an assumption of us at St. Mary's Episcopal Church; I assume that
we have not felt called nor have we chosen to be an expression of faith in the
intellectual, social, cultural, technological mode of the Amish. We choose not to fear our modern world and
insulate ourselves in a lifestyle to keep the post-modern world from
interacting with our daily patterns of life.
Yes, the abundance of modern knowledge and information threatens to
dissolve the distinction of the words of our Bible, Prayer Book and Christian
tradition. The words of our distinct
tradition may seem to be failing to make a recognizable difference among all of
the other branding with words that we receive in our information age. If one trusts the recent polls that reveal
that the majority of American Roman Catholic lay people are at odds with their
church leaders about current social issues, it is an indication that they do
not want an “ecclesiastical” isolation or insulation from our modern world. In our world women are empowered by acknowledgment
of their inherent being and ability, the world is facing a population problem
and there is a growing honesty about the deep orientations of people that
cannot be ostracized or called inherently sinful while professing equal love
and justice for all.
We
in the church have been caught flat-footed with the changes in the world and
have too often just responded with church jargon of the past and perhaps
believe that church jargon will just make us magically more engaged with the
post-modern world or encourage post-modern people to enter a time-warp
compartment on Sunday where we can pretend that the post-modern world never
happened because we with our Scriptures and traditions can live in liturgical
isolation even as our full participation in the informational age betrays such
an isolation.
As a
priest, I want for us to be able to speak our Gospel, our good news of how we
can profess the meaningful and useful relationship with Christ in our
lives. We begin by understanding our
post-modern situation.
To
understand the postmodernism that envelops our culture we need to understand “word.” In John’s Gospel poetic metaphor Jesus is
called the Word of God that created all things.
One might also say that word still creates all things today in the sense
of meaningful interaction with other people and our environment. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying, “My
words are spirit and they are life.”
Words are invisible and they inhabit our invisible insides and we
exchange our lives most intimately with each other through our words because
words get processed in some mysterious perhaps electrical event in the
brain. And with our words the actions of
our body get animated into the deeds we execute. Words are spirit or mysteriously processed
inside of us and they become flesh in our actions. This understanding of John’s Gospel might be
called a postmodern understanding of it.
In
postmodernism, one can understand that all experience is mediated through our
use of word. When I say a certain object
is a tree. Endless follow up question
can be asked. Which tree? This
tree? What do you mean by this? The one that I am pointing to now? What does “pointing to the one” mean? Yes, we assume a tree is there by the habit
of our cultural training, but in interacting with the tree we end up assuming
an endless chain of synonyms for the human experience of tree. Fortunately most of our pragmatic use of
items in our world is governed by a naïve realism of general cultural agreement
on what words mean. But In a real sense even
when we grasp a certain tree with our hands we are expressing a colossal universe
of our word culture. This kind of verbal
“play” seems silly when referring to things that we can see and touch but it
becomes more evident when we try to speak about meaningful things that cannot
be seen or touched, like God, love, joy and truth. Suddenly it seems as though we can share more
precise language about a tree that we can see than about God or love or “the
church” all of which we cannot “see.”
When words begin to refer to things that cannot be seen or touched or
heard then there is the lack of precision in agreement and that can make
practical human agreement problematic.
However, the lack of precision in agreement should not discount the
profound significance in meaning of words about what cannot be seen.
In
looking at the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures one can find a collection of
words that came to be created by a profound idea so profound that the people
who discovered it confessed that it had come from the horizon of human
experience. And what was this profound
idea that generated the production of the one of great written wonders of the
ancient world? It was the understanding
of the profound notion of unity to be an organizing principle of the
universe. It is stated in the famous
confession of Judaism: “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One.” The revolutionary idea/revelation that was
going to bring into being a new way of understanding how to be human in this
world was this revolutionary belief in One God, a God whose greatness could not
be fully comprehended. The only humble
thing to do was to admit that God’s name was unpronounceable. What I would like
for us to understand as we look at the Hebrew Scriptures is that they were
compiled by wisdom scribes who were perhaps dumb-founded by all that their
people had survived and so they were inspired to write out as much detail of
their corporate memory of why they had survived. Because if they could write the mystery in
words of their survival, they might leave those words as a gift to continue the
survival and blessing of people who word read them and form their own worship
identity from these word. The words of
the Hebrew Scriptures are spirit and they are life; they have and do
mysteriously interact on the invisible place inside where word meaning occurs.
And
so the scribes collected and collated the memory of how their people were
formed and related to the revelation that “The Lord your God is One.” And what one finds in these writings is that
they are honest with human messiness.
They are honest with the struggle of people to understand the revelation
and who live when there was the availability of a Smorgasbord variety of other
deities to challenge their loyalty to the One God.
We will
be looking at how the corporate memories came to writing in the Scriptures
around this great idea, this great revelation, the change that came from a
horizon of human experience and revolutionized a people, peoples and the world.
Exercise:
Take
an object and say the word for it. And
then see how long you can create a string of other words that equal what you
have just said. Do you see how words referring
to other words could be endless even when you are talking about “this tree”
right here. You might Google the word “God”
or “Love” and you would not have enough time in your life to explore all of the
different words for these “meaningful” invisible realities. How can something be meaningful but invisible? What does that tell you about being human and
words and using words about words that are supposed to refer to
experience? If you can appreciate the “above”
you understand why in the midst of differences, it is practical to have an
authority like the king of old who would say a yard equals the length of his
arm, “end of discussion.” So there are
practical reasons to have methods of “authority” for promoting orderly
community interaction. The question
today is whether allowing too much authority to reside in a monarch or pope is
the most adequate way to live in our postmodern world. How do you think authority works in practical
ways in the Episcopal Church?
Father
Phil
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