An energy not its own
Friday, April 9, 2021 at 11:34AM 
This might be a way forward for the church. The first quote is from the NYTs on gun control. He has an insight about marketing. The second is from All Saints, Margaret Street. He has an idea about the nature of Christian community.
It takes a fundamental truth, a deep empathy for the people you were trying to reach and a discipline and focus on reinforcing the truth with everything you do and say. -Dan Gross, was the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence from 2012 to 2017 it is a cofounder of the Center for Gun Rights and Responsibility
We see the kind of community enjoyed by the first Christians delineated in Sunday’s first reading, from Acts. They supported one another by praying and worshiping together, and by looking out for each other. Above all they did it by welcoming those with whom they disagreed to fellowship at the one Eucharist: the story of Thomas is a parable of that. Our ministry to one another consists not so much in doing things for one another, as in travelling together. -Michael Bowie, Assistant Priest, All Saints Margaret Street
The church is always absorbed by its culture. Always. We allow the prevailing patterns of thought to become our patterns of thought. At the moment that includes allowing our political views to define faith. For evangelicals it has taken them into an alliance with the former President and a collection of racists. For Episcopalians the alliance is with the woke and CRT. Each aligning with those in the culture they feel most comfortable with, sort of. It’s hard to deal with because those involved refuse to see and acknowledge it.
Both cults are selective about facts, truth and reality. Both participate in “cancelling” voices that they disagree with. Both seek purity. Both have little empathy for the “other.” Both think that salvation is in their own hands.
Just to be clear. I don't exclude myself from this. Since first coming to an owned faith at 18 years, I have understood that God is a Democrat with slightly socialist leanings.
The well-being of both the society and the church depends upon our ability and willingness to take a stance that values respectful engagement with people with views that differ from our own, a wiliness to change our mind when faced with new and valid information, and an acceptance of human limitation and our own blind spots ("Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal”). Our political life is about managing as best we can with an imperfect world not about creating utopia. God brings us to the Holy City; we don’t build the kingdom; we do get to live in it.
Michelle Heyne's father, Paul Heyne, was a noted thinker in ethics and economics. He believed in “the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals." A liberal society depends on “the free discussion of values." John Macquarrie shared some of the same phrasing as he considered the end of all our striving, "The end, we have seen reason to believe, would be a commonwealth of free, responsible beings united in love."
As always, the truth of absorption is compensated for by a greater truth. It’s a truth of humility. I like how Charles Williams and Howard Thurman put it --
The Church (it was early decided) was not an organization of sinless men but of sinful, not a union of adepts but of less than neophytes, not illuminati but of those that sat in darkness. Nevertheless, it carried within it an energy not its own, and it knew what it believed about that energy. -Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven
As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind – A deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes clear. It moves directly to the core of our being. -Howard Thurman, “How good it is to center down.”
And how is it that we get to understand something of "that energy?" To hear "a deeper note?" That is where spiritual practice and disciple come in. It is the shaping power of the Daily Office that has us daily engaging the scriptures and prayers of the church. It is the shaping of humble hearts and minds by the weekly practice of laying our life upon the altar and receiving it back blessed even though broken. It is by the grace that comes from living within a community that shares in the life of God.
rag+
Related resource
Resist the Lure of Theological Politics
Reader Comments (4)
Bob+ wrote: "Both cults are selective about facts, truth and reality. Both participate in “cancelling” voices that they disagree with. Both seek purity. Both have little empathy for the “other.” Both think that salvation is in their own hands." Yes. We find it much easier to see such confirmation bias in the "other side." Those on the other side are the ones who are blind, never us. This leads not only to little empathy for the other, as Bob+ writes, it also drains us of the humility we must have to walk by faith. We think we need to watch God's back and cover God's flank from all those others who don't have our purity. This results in a functional atheism where we give lip service to God's providence while behaving as if God is not present. Thanks for this Bob+.
I love the gospel for 2 Easter that Michael Bowie cites. I'll talk about that tomorrow in my sermon.
"Thomas wasn't there when the other disciples experienced the appearance of Jesus risen and triumphant on Easter Day. They came to him with unbridled excitement, telling him "We have seen the Lord." But Thomas had not shared their experience. He knew what he had seen, and the happy words of the others sounded shallow next to the real physicality of the death of Jesus that he had witnessed. Unless he could see something of equal reality and power, his grief could not be allayed. How could someone else's happy words erase the horror he had lived through? He is Grieving Thomas; Hurting Thomas; Haunted Thomas.
"Now, give credit to the other disciples. They did not say to Thomas, you just don't believe enough. They did not exclude him from their fellowship, alienate, screen, avoid, or ostracize him even though he did not share the faith that now energized them. He was part of the fellowship; he remained in the fellowship.
"And good for Thomas. He stayed with them, even though he was different. Even though he didn't experience life as the others did any more, he received enough acceptance from them to stay. Although he was probably uncomfortable, he stayed with his friends. They made him welcome enough that one week later, the next Sunday, he was still there, and Jesus honored Thomas with a special resurrection appearance. That day for him, everything changed.
"If you want to, you might call him Grieving Thomas, because on that day when he had a vision of Jesus, it healed his grief. None of the facts had changed. Jesus had still been crucified; the wounds were still there. But all the meaning had changed. Jesus' resurrection transcended the pain, evil, and death that Thomas had witnessed, and now everything was gloriously healed. Thomas grieved no more."
(not from sermon) Lots of us are grieving right now. Our legislature in Arkansas has just expressed their grief about the frightening cultural changes they've experienced. They passed a bunch of laws about our transgender neighbors. Me, a fairly typical liberal Episcopalian -- I'm grieving how threatened I feel by the Arkansas legislature and others who are so angry that Trump's election got stolen.
I am still convinced that we are all God's beloved children. I'm trying to hang in there with those who haven't experienced what I have and to stay in communion with them long enough for the wounded Christ to appear to us all. I mostly do that with email conversations with people who've corrected my misthinking in my regular newspaper column. I regret that I find I have very little person-to-person contact with those who have not seem the same Lord that I have.
PS -- I LOVED the Dan Gross column this week in the NY Times. It's a keeper.
I came across this today -- Sigmund Freud’s offered a warning, not in celebration “If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defence.”
Many people today have adopted Stephen Colbert’s satirical standard of truth, which over a decade ago, he called “truthiness.” He defined “truthiness” as “something that sounds true to me so it must be.” This is the logical result of a post-modern paradigm proclaiming truth as whatever someone believes strongly enough. If they believe it, then it must be true, right? For example, just because some people believe human-caused climate change is a hoax doesn’t mean it is. The overwhelming scientific evidence says climate change is real and we’re already seeing its disastrous effects. It just doesn’t “feel true” to them, so they discount its validity. But truth can’t be so mutable and pliable that it can be bent to our desire. Truth exists beyond our confirmation biases, beyond our unacknowledged racial or gender prejudices. The danger imbedded in our present cultural ethos around truth lies in people coming to accept such skewed beliefs as normative. But where will such a stance toward truth leave us if one person’s truth is another person’s hoax or lie?
Nietzsche, in his philosophy, argued that there really are no facts. There are simply different interpretations about what’s true. Such a stance in the end renders all claims to objectivity or human commonality as wrong-headed, even destructive. This Nietzschean conclusion reduces everything to the power one group can wield against another group to force their idea of truth upon the other. After all, facts are what you make them and truth is relative, right? I hope we understand that there’s no future to our common life if Nietzsche wins the day. And he’s winning right now.
St. Paul, however, reminds us of a “more excellent way.” In Corinth, Paul faced a church faction that declared “all things are lawful.” They insisted no one could tell them they couldn’t eat food sacrificed to idols because Jesus had freed them from the Old Covenant’s law. Paul agreed they were no longer made righteous through the law, but he also reminded them that while all things were lawful, “not all things were helpful,” “not all things build up,” particularly for the less privileged in the church. Buying food sacrificed to idols in the Corinthian marketplace assured the purchasers they were getting the finest cut of meat. Thus, it was expensive and only the economically privileged could afford to do so. The less privileged didn’t have that “freedom.” So to the privileged Paul said: “Of course you’re free to do so, but just don’t. Show some self-restraint for the sake of others.”
St. Paul’s counsel is just as important today. Rather than demand our rights insisting no one can take them from us, we should think first of our less privileged neighbors behind us. This will require of us the virtues of forbearance and humility otherwise the baser human instincts will easily hijack our hearts (and we’ll only be concerned about our loss of power, ergo Nietzsche wins).
Scott