Scripture-less

During my time at Duke I’ve had various conversations concerning numerous points of conflict within the Church. It seems an almost daily occurrence. Looking back at these talks I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. In all but one we never once consulted Scripture. I remember only one talk, concerning the ordination of women, where my conversant proposed to actually read some Scripture concerning the topic at hand. In all other conversations, ranging from the Eucharist to the Virginity of Mary, from homosexuality to universalism, Scripture remained eerily absent from our words.

Why is this? Why does a community founded on the Word of God so often forget that foundation? What happens in our mind, what gives us the freedom to run away with our thoughts, only occasionally glancing back to the Word that gave us the language with which we play? We toss around words such as ‘Trinity,’ ‘salvation,’ and ‘Incarnation’ as if they were always in our mind, waiting for our intellects to make use of their mysterious implications. In doing so we not only reject the presence of Scripture, we also reject the extensive and costly tradition of the Church. Wars came and went over the same arguments we banter about during lunch or in our leisure. Initially, I ascribed the absence of Scripture to two things.

I know for me, I just assume I know it already. (Wow, that felt horrible to even write). I do not mean this in a conclusive way, but I easily lapse into this assumption that because I spent my last twenty-odd years hearing the same verses in churches and classrooms and devotions that I’ve heard all there is to hear. This thought vanishes entirely whenever I read Scripture, because it is new and fresh and convicting every time I pick up the pages. Nevertheless, I am slow to pick them up.

Another reason I suspected we avoided Scripture is the simple fear that we would find it disagreeable. How miserable is our arrogance here in North America? The illusion of egalitarian existence has each person convinced of their own autonomous authority. As a result, authority has vanished within society. From parents to teachers to pastors, anything and everything we hear must first and foremost must suit our tastes before we will accept it. We must approve of our authority figures. To some extent this is needed for the simple purposes of accountability and protecting against the corruptive seductions of power. But to subject all manner of authority to our own leanings or tendencies is not only foolish, it could be damning. This lack of authority has found its way into how we even read Scripture, because now we believe Scripture must agree with us before we will agree with it.

I suspected both of these reasons as being responsible (though not exclusive)for why we are so hesitant to read Scripture amidst our disagreements. Yet now I believe there may be a third reason. We simply do not believe for that which we argue. The topics we so hotly contest are not always matters of truth or falsehood; they are matters of pride. Our opinions do not affect truth; we are either right or we are wrong. Any dialogue that occurs must always commit itself to the pursuit of truth and not to the preservation of our ideas. Unfortunately, I feel as if these conversations have decayed into the habit of debate. We come to enjoy the dialectic, especially when we can present our cases succinctly and with conviction. We have become skilled rhetoricians. As such, for what need have we of Scripture? We are our own authority.

Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

My wife found out today that her grandmother passed away at four o’clock this morning. So here I sit, studying and training to become a pastor, a figure who we look to for answers, for guidance, for reason, for purpose, and sometimes just for help, and I’ve realized in less than twelve hours that I have no answers, no guidance, no reasons, and no hope to give to others. I’m just a man. I can’t see past the horizon and heaven doesn’t avail itself to me in my dreams. Of course, my friends will tell me no one expects this of me. My one day parishioners will not chase me from the church when I cannot divine next week’s weather or tell them what God expects from each of them. But I feel the need to push back against my friends for just a moment. Those parishioners may not expect me to have the answers or to fix the world, but when their world comes crashing down around them they will come to me, and they will weep, and they may not ask me for the answers because they cannot dare not hope, but their eyes will beg me to fix this.

I’ve seen pain in other’s lives my whole life. I watched my Dad lose his dad; I watched my Mom lose hers. I saw a child die from cancer when I was seventeen. I’ve seen poverty and illness in the mountains of Guatemala. I watched a mother fall to sleep with her daughter on a cardboard pad in Mexico. I held my friend when his dad died of a heart attack. And I hold my wife now when she cries just because she misses her grandmother. Is this the role of pastor? To weep for the world yet sit powerless to change it? Can I do nothing?

I know people will read this and shake their heads, go tsk, tsk and utter such wisdom as, “He doesn’t realize it’s not about him; it’s about Christ, and all answers are found in Christ. Only God can change the world.” And they would be right. But I guess I feel as if the world isn’t looking for answers. It seems sometimes that the world has given up on answers. For so long we in the Church have been screaming all the right answers at all the people we knew needed to hear them, only to realize these people weren’t looking for answers at all. Too much pain clouds the senses, dims the spiritual sensibilities, and makes you want to not believe in God, for that would mean God allows the pain. So to reject pain one rejects God. But one cannot reject the pain. It lingers on, becoming dull in time only to sharpen again when tragedy comes back to us. With all this, hope seems distant, where death is the only way out. We lose everything, the bad with the good, and fall to sleep in this world only to wake in another.

In pain, however, is the answer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who plotted against the Nazi’s during World War II, wrote this while awaiting his execution in a Nazi prison: “God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to a cross…and in that way, God can be with us and help us…Only a suffering God can help.” Our God suffers with us. To be omniscient, to intimately know everything, is to suffer. So in all illnesses, natural disasters, deaths, broken hearts, lost jobs, imprisonments, poverty, and pain, God knows the suffering of His people. God suffers with us; if God did not, then there would exist an experience that God did not know, and God would no longer be omniscient. If God did not suffer, God would no longer be God. Perhaps in this truth lies what it is to pastor, to suffer with one’s people. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” In addition, we cannot weep for those we do not love. From love follows the mourning. From mourning follows the blessing. Let us then love one another, for this is from God.

Another Poem

Coming Home

Sweet breath of sunset and shadows starved,
Sing for me a moment and remember her.
Sigh for me and show me her hues and lost
Colors, like so much gold in the sand.

Walk and let your legs grow weary with mine
Along the passages of the earth; pass along
With this, my memory, and tell me where
She's wandered into the pale.

Hold me in this stillness, this breathless
Place, where warmth fades into frost
And I reach for her hand before I
Realize she's gone and silence laughs at me.

Tell me where heaven went, where God
Promised He'd wait for me, before
Hell came to me in the form of
What she once was, but now, no more.

Can you remember her laugh? Can you
Remember how to forget? Teach me
To forget the day's hours so dreams
May haunt this holiness.

It was a Tuesday, and flowers in your hair
Told me Spring would come, but now
The colors melt into tears and run down
The memories of where I loved you.

Can we wait? The sun comes
For me, but my eyes will
No longer open, for the moon's
Run away with our dawn.

The branches crack the sky
Above me, fingers reaching
To heavens I forget
As snow blinds the light.

There is no one here.
She's gone for now.
Come back tomorrow,
And bring her to us.

I gasp and close my
Pain against false
Hope and reach
Once more.

Then shadows
Fade into
Sun rises;
I see.

Glancing
Back
Towards
My love,

As she
Reaches
Back
For me.

Augustine and My 'Not-Goodness'

Not long ago I came across a section in St. Augustine’s Confessions that discussed the nature of the human will. During his time the Platonic notions of willing the good represented the rational opposite of the irrational desires to will the not good, or the evil. Augustine, never one to settle with a simple answer to a complex problem, began thinking on what leads a person to will what is evil. Did an outside force influence the weak minds of humanity? Can one blame the spiritual realm for the sins of the material realm? Regardless of why one sins, Augustine accepted the thought that one still must will what is evil for there to be evil.

That is until Augustine began paying attention to his own thought life. Because of his past, largely spent womanizing and enraptured with lustful struggles, Augustine would experience bouts of lust, where thoughts from his past assaulted his mind. As these thoughts came, Augustine recognized that he did not will these thoughts to come. They arose without his will and afflicted him without his desire for them to do so. Nevertheless, they were his own thoughts, coming from no other source than his own fallen past. From this he concluded that something inherent in human nature naturally tended toward the evil. The matter of sin was not a simple problem of irrational desires.

What does this mean for our own lives? Augustine’s thoughts on this issue later developed into his concepts of original sin and inherent depravity, ideas still with us today almost two thousand years later. Secular society would have us believe that we are really good, even if it is deep down. Some churches would likely argue the same on our behalf. Despite what Fox News and CNN would have us believe, the world is largely populated by good people. The evils of the world are results from radical extremes on the fringes. With these radical images of evil from mainstream media and twenty-four hour news coverage, however, America has fallen into a pit of comparative morality.

I certainly cannot nor will not try to speak for the hearts of almost three hundred million North Americans, but are we a good people? Forget the news, forget the murders and atrocities, rapists and shootings. Are we good when no one is looking? At midnight, in the early morning, in our cars, in our minds, in our thoughts, in our secret desires, in our darkest secrets, are you and am I, a good person? My gut instinct, my knee-jerk response, is a deafening, “No.” I am not a good person. Without even attempting to explain the theological framework for what is good in the first place, namely God, I know I am not good. And for Augustine, whatever is not good, is evil. Therefore, I am evil. That’s not exactly a word we toss around lightly, I know. Evil is reserved for the ‘crazies,’ the demons, and anybody else besides us.

Augustine is not concerned about those others; he is concerned about himself and what God knows about him. If anyone knows our secrets, it is God. Therefore we have the cry of the tax collector, tearing our clothes and begging forgiveness while the Pharisees thank God they are not like us and those others, those ‘evil’ people. I am not good. Therefore, I am evil. Only in the recognition of that evil, however, can one repent. This is Gospel. God cannot forgive the unrepentant; it is illogical. If we are a people certain of our own righteousness, we will not receive the righteousness of Christ. To speak of the Gospel any other way makes the Gift of salvation just one more bauble for the well behaved brat on Christmas morning.

The Body and Blood...All Over the Floor

With my increasing interest in the Anglican tradition I’ve been blessed to experience the Eucharist in a variety of settings. A few weeks ago, during Morning Prayer in the Div. School’s chapel, we celebrated the Feast Day for St. Michael the Archangel (also known as Michaelmas). The priest blessed the Cup of our Lord then smoothly turned and offered it to her assistant right before the chalice lurched and a couple ounces of wine splashed across the floor. Now less than a year ago this would have meant very little to me. Perhaps I would have felt pity or shame on behalf of those administering the sacrament, or God forbid even found it funny. This particular morning of September 29, however, I did not laugh.

The blood-red wine made scattered streaks across the cool, Duke-furnished stone of our Goodson Chapel. The robes of the priest and of her attendant bore similar stains, as if dropped from some gaping wound. My eyes widened as the drink poured out in front of us all, gathered round the altar of God’s grace. Even as the smell of fermented grapes reached my nose I already knew that I was not looking at wine poured over so much brick. My breath stopped, my head felt light, and if I could remember correctly I would wager I even experienced a bit of a cold sweat. “The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” The words of the priest came down on me; the wine had been hastily cleaned and no longer marred the clean stone, but the robes still bore the stains.

We try to keep it neat; the wine rests peacefully in a glistening chalice and the bread sits silently on so many plates upon the altar. We call it the Blood and the Body, we treat them both with reverence, we experience something during their consumption, and then we go on with our lives as if we never came close to the Crucifixion. But when that wine splashed across the floor, I felt like I was finally seeing the Blood of our Savior. The same Blood that was not kept in aesthetic cups or in the bellies of well-fed Americans, but torn from the body of our redeemer with whips, thorns, fists, and rods. It flowed along the ground of the governor’s palace, marked a trail up the Via Dolorosa, before flowing over a spear and mingling with water as it fell over a Roman soldier who became the first to experience the Cup of our Salvation.

Now what in me, a Baptist boy who always thought of the Lord’s Supper as anything but the literal Body and Blood, came to witness the Eucharist as something much more significant to the life of the Church? I’ve spent a lot of time on that question, and to be quite honest…I have no clue. I think that is the point. I am not supposed to know; in an age where mysteries only exist on the History Channel and the only unknowns are what we forget to look up on Wikipedia, God refuses to be completely known. In fact, it is an impossibility to know God. This too does not sit well for a well trained Baptist who learned early on about how one can know God through the Incarnation, through Jesus Christ. Yet while I believe God knows me and I know God, there remains an eternity to discover the rest of the God I know. So in the meantime, I shall sit quietly in my pew and wonder how the Blood of a Crucified God still grips me
as we faithfully consume loaves of wheat bread and $10 bottles of wine for the remembrance of our Lord. Such things are the mystery. Such mystery is the Gospel.