SIMPLE OR COMPLICATED? IT’S ALL IN THE PERSPECTIVE
The Revd Deacon Polly M. Bowen
An upcoming clergy meeting with our Anglican counterparts in
It all seemed so simple when I was a child, when I thought there was only the Episcopal Church, and we all believed the same things. In the Episcopal Sunday School of the fifties we learned about people like Augustine of Canterbury and Anselm and Cuthbert, and Aiden of Lindisfarne, and we thought they were all Episcopalians! We learned about apostles and prophets, and we thought they were Episcopalians, too! It was an embarrassment of riches, and we didn’t know we had to share it with all of Christendom! Now, I did know that something else was going on, because my Grandma would never let me go to catechism class with Barbara Peterson, and Barbara’s mother would never let her come to my Sunday School, either. But Barbara didn’t even know who Hilda of Whitby was, so I guessed that whatever was happening, it couldn’t be too important.
And then I began to grow up. And I noticed that there were lots of other churches, but all the ones I saw looked pretty much the same. They all talked about Jesus and they all had good projects, and they were all doing the best they could. Except they fought with each other – politely, of course, but fighting nevertheless. I wondered about that a lot, and I finally decided they were like the Israelites in the desert – remember? They fought Moses and they fought God and they fought each other, and they got their priorities all mixed up – they began to care more about cucumbers and melons than they cared about the Promised Land!
Now, that meant something to me. Because by this time I had figured out that there were some still some prophets around – some of them even Episcopalians! But the trouble was, you couldn’t always tell who they were, so you listened to the ones who made you feel good instead of the ones who shook your tree, and you ended up being concerned with all the wrong things.
But don’t you see, prophets are always the people nobody wants to listen to. They’re notorious tree-shakers. Prophecy is a risky, lonely business.
Jesus took that risk, and he found out it’s not even a game where you have home field advantage. The people in his own town got mad at him; they didn’t want to hear about poor people and prisoners. But he told them anyway, and he went on telling anybody who would listen, all the way to the cross. And then his followers told people, and the message hasn’t changed in twenty-one centuries, and prophets still thunder at us that God loves the people the rest of us would rather avoid.
Well, prophets hardly ever thunder now. We’ve got it down to a nice, polite whisper. We kill them more kindly, too. Today you can kill a prophet with a flick of the wrist, because by the grace of modern technology he lives in a box in the living room. It’s a lot easier to watch old re-runs and pretend that the poor could all be like the Waltons, if only they really wanted to.
Of course, every time you turn that dial you run the risk of being confronted by those people – poor people, people with AIDS, hungry folks. I saw a story about a border-town where an American company built a factory. And the people came in droves to work there for a pittance. They built a shantytown – tar-paper shacks where they lived with the flies and the heat and the lack of plumbing. And the women washed their clothes and drew their drinking water, and the little children played in the river teeming with raw sewage. And the children got sick and died, and you could almost hear the voice of God saying, “Let my people go.”
God got a four-minute segment to say it.
And the box in my living room showed me a proud old man living in a cardboard box, and bony little bodies covered with flies, and I turned away in confusion. There are hard questions here, and I don’t know the answers. Politics and economics aren’t my fields, but common sense tells me there are mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, homes to build, sick people to care for, and outcasts to be affirmed and loved.
They taught me a lot of bits and pieces in seminary – important things about justice and peace and inclusivity - and we still talk about those things at clergy meetings. But I don’t know how to fit MY bits and pieces together with other people’s bits and pieces – to mix theology with PSYchology and SOciology and E-cology and BIology and all those other “ologies” to find the solution to the problems.
And so the temptation for me is to throw up my hands and do nothing, because the problems are too big and I don’t understand them and even the experts can’t agree on what to do and what can one person do anyway?
And that’s wrong. Because Christianity calls us to live with ambiguity and do what we can – alone if we have to, but together is better. Christianity calls us to stay connected – connected to God and connected to each other.
But it also calls us to be unsettled – to listen and learn and seek out new ways of looking at old problems. One time I heard William Sloan Coffin say that his theological home is a tent, so he can pack up and move when he learns something new, always being careful to pick up his important stuff and bring it along. I like that image – God’s people on the move. Our father was a wandering Aramean and we need to guard against being too settled.
That was the message of the prophets, the message of Jesus, and it’s still the message. Wake up! You’re too settled, too comfortable, too sure you’re right. Your vision is too small. God loves the poor and the oppressed and the outcast. Now get together and do something!
This is much more Deacon’s Page than I had planned to write. So here’s the synopsis of what I’m trying to say:
First, listen to the prophets – the prophets in scripture and the prophets in your midst. They’re telling you that you are your brothers’ keeper. God is at work, and he needs us to work together.
Second, it’s ok to have disagreements if you don’t let them get in the way of Christian action. Trying to prove one religion (or one viewpoint) is superior to another is like two people trying to prove whose skin fits the best. So be it. But if we look closely into our traditions we find a common core of experience which moves us beyond cultic forms, dogmatic teachings, legal practices and even in-house squabbling to Holiness – a Holiness that is One and that is capable of healing human brokenness.
And there is much brokenness to be healed: Your sister lives in a tarpaper shack and your brother in a cardboard box. Your mother and your father and your children die of disease and starvation in faraway lands and go to sleep hungry in your own land.
And yet the world is being renewed, and we as the disciples of Jesus are called to respond to God’s will for renewal. We are called to be healers and ambassadors – to heal the paralytic within and beyond, and to pass on the Good News of Jesus Christ.
And the third thing I would have you remember is this: Stay connected, but don’t get too settled. Listen – look – learn – grow. Don’t let your love for cucumbers and melons keep you away from the banquet. Build your spiritual home in a tent, because we are all pilgrims, and we are journeying home together.
The EFM material says it this way: All human words about God are only echoes of the Eternal Word. It’s God who makes himself known by the inner testimony of the Spirit, and to hear him is to dwell in the presence of the Holy where arguments and contentions melt away, and we are no longer strangers, but friends.
It’s still very simple, isn’t it?
