Bishops' Blog

Decisiveness

We were living in Toronto when our son Sam was in kindergarten. Members of his class, when one had a birthday, would invite one another to the party, about which there developed a certain amount of competition. One parent would have pet gerbils and rabbits for the kids to touch. The next would take it up to a company that provided a kind of petting zoo with a talking parrot and a python. Finally the escalation reached the top step: Sam was invited to a party that offered a pet tiger! the concerned parents were reassured that he was old, hence a bit tired, and blind - once arrived I further learned that he had just been fed.  None of the was super reassuring, but we didn’t want our son to be the only one excluded from the experience. I was the one who would accompany him, and, upon arriving at the home, decided on my strategy: I positioned myself discreetly behind Sam, so that when his chance to pet the tiger came, and the animal got grumpy in spite of the recent feeding, or couldn’t see well enough to distinguish Sam’s arm, I could jump between, snatch up the child, and avert disaster.  (Since my son now lives and works in New Orleans, you can deduce that we all lived happily through that peril).

 Why tell such a story? Because it is a kind of metaphor for how the Bible thinks about Gentiles, who are all the peoples of the earth, all of us and our forebears, unless we are Jewish. In other words, ‘Gentile’ is how the Bible speaks of all of us as we now are, first of all created by God, second broken and fallen, third yearning to get back, to find something just beyond of ordinary human grasp, but fourth of all, often looking for that ineffable something in all the wrong places.  Take for example, king Nebuchadnezzar, especially as the prophet Daniel presents him to us. He is the hard conquering emperor, burning the city and exiling its leaders in chains. But he is also fascinated by the holy man Daniel, listening to his words and even singing his praises, between moments of bile. Finally he comes to madness, one minute, recovery the next. He is all of us, only in technicolor and a big screen.  Nebuchadnezzar was an historical figure of long ago, but he is also everyman or woman, prior to the workings of grace on us, with fits of divine longing and all-to-human rage, each of us a living breathing creature of approach and avoidance of the Creator. We are like that tiger, worse for the wear since our primordial decline, friendly, but don’t get your hand in the way of the dish.

 This morning I want to listen to the readings with the Biblical idea of the Gentile on mind. The reading from Amos condemns the Israelite for treating his or her fellow child of the covenant unjustly. It is as if he were saying ‘you belong to the Lord, but how different does your life look than that of the Gentiles living ‘without God in the world,’ as Paul put it? You profess to live under God’s mercy, but your attitude to your neighbor resembles the pagan mindset from the days of your ancestors! You have a new story, a different story, and your life ought to reflect it.

    ‘Judgment starts with the household of God’, says St. Peter, and this is borne out in our epistle reading from first Timothy, where more latitude, more charity, is shown to the outsider, to the non-Christian neighbor. The Romans were a periodically violent and corrupt empire with loathing for the Christians. Yet Paul insists that the Church pray for its pagan overlords, first because they preserve order, secondly because the primary will of God is that all his creatures be saved (this is therefore an important sentence in the Church’s reflection about other religions). Thirdly it is because the Church hopes to live in peace. But that peace is for more than its own safety, it is in order to be a herald of the Gospel in their midst. Everything starts and ends there, with the opportunity to be that herald. 

That calling as herald turns our faces forward to what lies ahead, at the horizon, to the kingdom of God, to the last which will resemble the first. It reminds us what we were made for, to respond in love and praise to God, from east the west and from north to south. The hope of the nations is the hope of the whole earth, that of worship rising from every point of the compass. The Gentiles together represent the whole earth, and it is from ‘every family, language, people, and nation’ that praise is to rise, a great harmony and symphony, which is what their plurality and diversity are for.  We are a Gentile many in order, finally, that we might in doxology be one. From Amos humility, from David hope, and from Paul charity. We like some tired, irritable, but noble old tiger, we Gentiles are often our old unredeemed selves. We are to honor our unbelieving neighbors from the old life, even as we, in worship, imagine how we will one day converge in harmony.

This brings us to Gospel, extolling as it does fraudulent dealings- what was Jesus thinking? The steward, in trouble, quickly comes up with a scheme to ingratiate himself with his clients. Is it shocking? Of course. Why? To wake you and me out of our sloth! When he says ‘disregard the torah and don’t bury dad’, he means ‘follow me above all else.’ Shocked? Figure out what he is writing in bold letters?

 The answer is decisiveness. It is easy to worry about many things- one is needful. It is easy to be preoccupied about buying a cow- but you have been invited to a great fiesta! It is easy to be overwhelmed by ‘what shall we eat and what shall we wear?’ the news of the kingdom comes first, so that the others may be added. Decisiveness. That is what the unjust steward did. In the moment of need and danger, he acted. He reached for the lifeline before him!

 Jesus is saying that you and I, Gentiles, need to wake up to what the New Testament calls the ‘kairos,’ the now of salvation in the Gospel. We should leave aside other things, in themselves valuable, to put at the center the news of God’s act on behalf of you and me in Jesus. Being decisive doesn’t mean we save ourselves- God had to take the initiative in Jesus, who accomplishes for us freedom and release. He does this in his death and resurrection, and these become present and real in his proclaimed Word.

In Hebrews we hear ‘now is the acceptable hour. Let’s finish where we began. We Gentiles were waiting for the moment for which we were created, restoration with our Creator. We are Gentiles living in the hour after the wall has been broken down, when we are brought from the outer courtyard into the sanctuary. That is what this place, the table of the Lord, and the hour, the Lord’s Day. Decisive doesn’t save us, but today Jesus is calling you and me to hear and respond to the Word that does. Decisive because what we, like that unjust steward, are responding to is a treasure in a field, a seat at the banquet I so thoroughly don’t deserve- offered that, decisive is what we must do. Amen.

Experience Revisited

     In the new science of the right and left brain, the former hemisphere is preoccupied with the big picture, surveying the vista from an altitude. I want to offer, from such a vantage point, a common observation about modern and post-modern thought. It is one that is prominent in the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, namely that the intellectual movement called ‘romanticism’ is a key factor in understand how the modern viewpoint. In counter-poise to rising rationalism, born of science, came a renewed emphasis on feeling, and in reaction of individualism a reclaiming of the corporate.  Romanticism in art, philosophy, and politics was reminder that the irrational, the affective, and the social are important, though overlooked. Now the ways this worked itself out have been different. On the more conservative side, people came to admire the Middle Ages as the age of faith and chivalry- think Sir Walter Scott. But others rediscovered feeling in bohemianism or in what they saw as the exotic- think Lord Byron or Paul Gauguin. It is not hard to see how, in the 19^th century this led, for example in Anglo-Catholic liturgy on the one hand, or in a kind of liberal theology which translated doctrines into states of feeling. These influences remain with us, though we should be quick to respond that truth still matters, and thinking about and defending the faith are abidingly important.

   Let’s be clear- philosophy and culture are not the same thing as theology; the latter has to do with the particular claims of the Gospel. But trends of thought touch all of these; they become the air everyone is certain period breaks. We are always, in any era, struggling to express the Gospel in its uniqueness in terms people can understand, and not to allow the ‘winds of doctrine’ (Ephesians 4) to distort and redefine the Christian hope. When it comes to the modern turn to feeling, there have been two contrasting dangers. Some have equated it with the primordial urges of ‘blood and soil’, of irrational allegiance to nation and even race. This led in terrible directions in the last century, and we must guard against in our own as well. On the other hand experience may become endlessly diverse, each defining one’s own, so that religion becomes solipsistic. At the end of the day the Word of God in its givenness is the antidote to each.

   Let us take one last step. In reaction to this tendency for truth to devolve into ‘different strokes for different folks,’ without much of an external criterion, into the void has rushed- power. Words are instrumental, and what matters is power. In the political realm there are versions of this on the left and right, which are mirror images of one another. (This devolution into the ‘will to power’ is often associated with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and the descent toward him with a Catholic philosopher named Alisdair MacIntyre). 

   As Christians we need to practice and advocate the balanced Christian life, the ‘reason for the hope in us’ (I Peter 3) yoked to affective prayer, corporate liturgy, service in the world, and a practice of contrition and reconciliation. These represent the whole of the person, though the evangelical may feel it more in a sermon on grace and the cross, the Anglo-Catholic more in the awe of corporate Eucharistic worship. 

    This imperative has come to my mind as we look forward to the next RADVO Conference, for which we thank the Church of the Incarnation. One of its speakers, Simeon Zahl of Cambridge University (whose theologian father Paul is a friend), has breathed new life into the debate about experience in theology. He seeks a way to use the term distinctively consistent with the ‘grammar’ of the Christian life. For example, he begins his treatment with the New Testament questions of distinguishing true and false spirits, and of assessing charismatic phenomena- you can see how these questions abide with us.  It is a question worth asking and I am looking forward to hearing how he goes at this question (and any other he has for us).