Outward Journey / Inward Journey

This via catholicanarchy:

Yes, happy 4th of July! According to the calendar of the Church, July 4th’s real significance is that it is the feast day of St. Elizabeth of Portugal (1271-1336), a patron Saint of peacemakers.

The sad fact, however, is that if you were to attend Mass on this day, the chances of your priest mentioning this feast are slim to none. Instead, you are likely to participate in a Eucharist which has been transformed into a syncretistic ritual of american civil religion. Thank God that, despite the sectarian tendencies of the american Church, the transnational Church calls us Catholics to be a peculiar people who mark time differently than the rest of the world, and the rest of our nation.

St. Elizabeth, pray for us, that we american Catholics may truly take our place in the one, transnational Body of Christ that resists the dismemberment caused by our tendency to cling to national allegiances. And on the day that the rest of the united states celebrates its foundational myth of violence and the sacrifices of soldiering which parody the Cross, let us be ever more formed by the words of Jesus in the Gospel reading for July 4th: “Go and learn the meaning of the words, I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

You know, you’d think that we Reformed folk would be somewhat innoculated from the nationalism-as-religion bug, what with our emphasis on God’s sovereignty, which makes American booyahism look like a sickly imitation of the real thing.  And yet, I saw last night that the (nominally RCA-affiliated) Chrystal Cathedral’s ‘Hour of Power’ program (don’t get me started on so-called ‘television churches’ — that’s a whole ‘nother post) is advertising that ‘the world’s largest indoor American flag’ being raised in their ’sanctuary’ during a ‘worship service’.  This makes me wonder what, exactly, is being worshipped.  How sad that people are being misled by the great civil religion lie.  St. Elizabeth, pray for us!

The Romanist collect for today:

Father of peace and love, you gave St. Elizabeth the gift of reconciling enemies. By the help of her prayers give us the courage to work for peace among men, that we may be called the sons of God. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Amen!

Another community course, taught by the same person who led the ‘Goddess pilgrimage’:

What would happen [...] if we esteemed her even half as much as our forebearers did?

I will venture an answer: we would be breaking covenant with the One True God shown to us in Jesus Christ?

I’ll wash your mouth out with soap,
get rid of all the dirty false-god names,
not so much as a whisper of those names again.
(from Hosea, Ch. 2, The Message).

That it may be so, Lord!

Again, click on the thumbnail for the full image.

A pilgrimage to the Holy Land?  Maybe to the heartlands of the Reformation?  No, that would be far too orthodox.  From the United Theological Seminary, an apparently Christian seminary affiliated with the UCC: a ‘Pilgrimage to the Lands of the Goddess’, an event open to the community.  From the Spring 2008 issue of Lumen, the catalogue of community programs, your CUE donations hard at work (click for full-sized image):

Awhile ago, my seminary friend Luke and I had a conversation on this blog, and he implied that I was overly concerned with the opinions of dead white guys. I chose to discontinue the discussion because I was becoming needlessly cranky with it, but I have been mulling over the matter since. It came up again in my in-care meeting, when I talked about our fascination with novelty — a trend I think the Church has aquired from American culture. Look at Cleveland’s slogans on behalf of the UCC: ‘Our faith is over 2000 years old; our thinking is not.’ ‘Cutting edge theology.’ Ad nauseum. No thanks. I was given a hard time at that in-care meeting, and I can’t help but wonder if I would have had an easier ride if I had read less Antony the Great and more queer theology dreck. This thought gives me heartburn.

I am unrepentant. I think the best way of knowing where the church is today is to read the dead people. Incidently, they’re not all men. Or ‘white’, whatever that means in pre-modern contexts. What I am not advocating is that we adopt an uncritical, neophobic position when we read the Fathers, the Reformers, and others. What I do advocate is that we pay careful attention to them, their writings and teachings, their liturgies, and their lives. I have long thought that if a Martian visited the typical American Protestant church today, she might think that we believe God plopped us in the middle of the 20th century with no historical context whatsoever. We need to recover our sense of the historical, one, holy, catholic Church established by Jesus Christ, over which he is Lord and King, and which Protestants are a part of. The church is not a country club, nor is it a Political Action Committee, nor a social service agency, nor the amen corner for American triumphalist nationalism. It is the sacred community of believers to which Christ gave his grace-imparting sacraments. The more we recover and pay attention to the Fathers, the Reformers, and others, the more we can recover the Church as catholic and the Church as the mission through which God acts to reconcile all things to Himself.

Delivered at First Congregational United Church of Christ of Bloomer, Wisconsin on Sunday, the First of October, 2006.

Principal lectionary text: Mark 9:38-50.

If you recall last week’s lectionary passage from the Gospel according to Saint Mark, we found the twelve disciples arguing among themselves about which one of them was the greatest.  Jesus sat them down and put an end to their speculation by saying that ‘whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all’.

This morning’s subsequent passage is hardly more flattering to the disciples.  I won’t re-read the entire passage but I’ll read the first few verses, those I’m going to be preaching about this morning.

John said to [Jesus], ‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us’.  But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.  Whoever is not against us is for us.  For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.’

Neither of these passages from the Gospel of Mark portray the twelve disciples in a very good light, and both remind us that the twelve disciples, most of whom became fathers of the early church. were very fallible humans themselves.  In them we can perhaps find unpleasant reflections of ourselves.  In last week’s passage, they were falling victim to the temptation of individual pride.  This week we find them in collective pride.  I can’t help but feel that John is performing the role of a busybody or a talebearer, informing Jesus of what he perceives to be the wrongs of others.  ‘Rabbi, rabbi, there’s someone out there performing miracles in Your name.  But we thought since we were Your favorites we should be the only ones to do that.’

We can imagine maybe that the disciples didn’t have a full grasp of the gravity of what was going on.  The age in which Jesus was living was a heady period of history; the relationships between the Jews and their Roman overlords were complex with some sections of the Jewish community supporting the Romans and others participating a low-level revolt that would culminate with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem some years after Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension.

The period in which Jesus lived was a period of transition for the Jewish faith, and scholars of religion today believe that there were many traveling rabbis teaching many different doctrines, and many claimed to be the Messiah.

The disciples had already recognized Jesus as the Messiah by the time the events described in our passage occurred, but it’s likely that they merely thought of him as a very wise rabbi, not the Son of God, God incarnate.  He occasionally said cryptic things like in last week’s passage, ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again’.  Of course, we’ve had a look at the end of the story, we know the Good Friday and Easter story, so these things make sense to us, but to the disciples it would have made very little sense at all.

So from the point of view of the disciples, if Jesus was in their minds only a very wise teacher, it made perfect sense to complain if someone else aside from one of them was acting in Jesus’ name: after all, he was their wise teacher, and how dare some imposter come doing something which only they should rightly do?

Incidentally, John Wesley and other biblical commentators speculate, I think with a good chance of being accurate, that the unnamed man casting out spirits was one of the followers of someone who should be to us, with the gift of hindsight, not quite so alien or threatening.  Wesley thought that the man was probably a follower of John the Baptist, a group which  believed in Jesus but were not his among his disciples or followers.

Christ rebukes John, and reminds both him and us that Jesus’ ministry wasn’t only for a small group in the
Galilee two thousand years ago.  He reminds us that His ministry is universal.  There are some verses in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians that I think are relevant to the message here.  Paul writes in Chapter One, Verses Fifteen through Eighteen:

It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill.  The latter do so out of love, knowing that I [Paul] am put here for the defense of the gospel.  The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains.  But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.

We know of course that Paul had rivals in the church, and that he felt that the motivations of some of them were impure as they preached the Gospel.

Did you know that the biggest megachurch in America, one in Houston, Texas, has more than thirty-thousand members, and that one megachurch in the Chicago area has three ‘satellite campuses’ where people can ‘worship’ while watching screens of the service broadcasted from a central location?  Personally, I suspect church leaders who use the same ‘business’ model as WalMart or multimillionaire televangelists who peddle influence in one of our country’s political parties; I believe they might have ulterior interests.  However Paul asks a rhetorical question: ‘but what does it matter?  The important thing is that in every way, whether from true motives or false, Christ is preached.’

From these two passages we find that the Christian ministry, the need to extend the Gospel to as many people as possible trumps our concern for intra-church politics and conflicts.  Christ’s rebuke to John is also a rebuke to the Christian church today, a church which all too often finds itself hindered by divisions and recriminations.  The important thing is that Christ is preached.

We’re all called to ministry, each and every one of us – the Christian religion is not one that leaves its work to a priestly few.  The New Testament calls the church the ‘body of Christ’ and every member is called to be a part.  Just like in the human body, different parts have different functions – my foot doesn’t do the same things as my hand, likewise different Christians have different vocations to serve the whole church.

How often do we fall into the same trap that the disciples did – denigrating and casting doubt on the works of others because deep down we envy them?  Christ’s response was candid, and He is willing to assume the best of those who are not hostile to the Gospel message.  ‘Whoever is not against us is for us.’  Echoing Paul, Jesus implies that the important thing is that the works be done, and He goes a step further.  ‘For no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me’.  Christian ministry, which we are all supposed to be engaged in, is by its very nature transformative, even if we don’t approach it with the right intentions.

If we’re cajoled into greater involvement in the life of the congregation, the community, in helping to spread the Gospel to those who are unfamiliar with it, in making the world a better place to live in, it changes our perspective on our faith.  The works that we do with others affect our inner life, and we become in the process better Christians, more conforming to the image of Christ whom we are to emulate.

Our scripture lesson this morning then both calls us into thoughtful ministry and involvement in Christ’s name, and decries vanity, selfishness, and envy that lead to divisions and conflicts.  When we see others of other denominations, political convictions, ethnic backgrounds, or nationalities carrying out good deeds for Jesus’ sake, we ought to praise God and ask that our hearts too might be changed as we go about our Christian work.

Let’s take a moment to pray.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for the work of the whole Christian church.  I ask that you bless the work of this congregation in bringing the message of your love to the community, and that our hearts and spirits be transformed as we strive to be faithful bearers of the image of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  In His name we pray.  AMEN.