Sunday, July 12, 2015

VIOLENCE, RIGHTEOUSNESS, A BAPTIST, AND THE COMMUNITY OF FAITH -- Or, (Cautionary) Tales (of Terror)

A great feature of my present position is the ability to visit various congregations in the area at worship, since I don’t have regular leadership responsibilities on the weekends. It is always interesting to experience worship in a different setting, often with a liturgical form that is new to me (or a new take on a familiar form), and to sample participating in the life of a “faith community” for a day, or even just an hour.

Today I had the privilege of worshiping with a denominational church of long standing in my area. There’s always great comfort in familiar ritual, even when the language has been somewhat contemporized; and I must say that, as a visitor, the pastor and other worshipers greeted me with real warmth and friendliness. It was a very pleasant experience.

Yet there was also a troubling aspect to it.

The key Scriptures for the day were from Amos and Ephesians, with the Gospel being Mark’s account of the Herod-Herodias episode where the head of John the Baptist is requested by Herodias’ daughter. As the last was being read, I noticed the words I was hearing didn’t track with what was on the page; my first inclination was to wonder whether the reader’s eyes were giving trouble (seriously, that’s what occurred to me), and the gaps were being filled in ad libidem. After the reading, though, in the message the pastor explained that, for the first time, there had been a request (from whom was not said, but one presumes a denominational leader or agency) to alter the language, in order to tone down the violent imagery in the Gospel passage.

I was taken aback a little at this, though perhaps I should not have been. When we no longer believe that we are accountable to the Bible as the word of God, it’s a short step, having opted rather for the spirit of our own times as the controlling authority, materially to change the words and sense of the text when they are not to our liking. A little more deeply, though, I found myself thinking: “The Scripture doesn’t approve of the Baptist’s demise in this way; in fact, we are shown that it is deeply troubling to John’s disciples, as well as to Jesus – who is described as withdrawing for a time. This is portrayed as a great injustice against a true prophet of God. So just who are we protecting here by whitewashing it?”

The pastor went on to talk about both the Gospel and Old Testament readings in the message, beginning with the latter. The point was made that Amos is the least-preached-on of the prophets. (Really? Less than Obadiah?) In fact, it was said that this might be understandable in some other contexts, such as a Methodist church “where the lines of hierarchy are clear” and the way to advancement and a larger church was not to ruffle too many feathers, so that one might be disinclined to preach on the prophets. A very telling look this was, at my own denomination from the outside, reflecting what I hope is a misapprehension of who we are. Actually, I have heard a number of sermons on the prophets over the years. (There is, at least in my view, a tendency to neglect the Old Testament in our pulpits in favor of a rather parochial and theologically distorting relative overwork of the new, which has consequences – but that’s the stuff of another blog post.) Among the sermons and references to the prophets, Amos has figured prominently ... though again, this may reflect more the preaching I grew up on, than a scientific sampling.

Amos, we were told, threatened the high priest if the people’s ways were not changed. “Tales of terror” were told by the prophet – and we know (it was allowed) that some of these came true. The point, if I was tracking correctly, was that one cannot dismiss the justice of God without consequence. Then the move in the message seemed to be away from such judgmental “tales of terror” to speaking instead such words of counsel which someone is able to hear.

Along the way mention was also made of a denominational meeting where the (retiring) leading officer of that body made the point that if their expression of the Church is to survive, the focus must be on a real commitment to righteousness and justice, allowing church politics to fall away. My skepticism about that last part happening notwithstanding, the focus on a sacrificial commitment to righteousness is on target. But I come immediately to: “Whose definition of righteousness? And what is the actual cost – in personal and societal terms – for realizing it, or if we don’t realize it?”

It is easy to use words like “righteousness” and “terror”. I understand the desire to make the church’s gathering a sanctuary from violence, in a world that is full of it. What is troubling, however, is the move to retreat from discussing these things, even to the point of reworking the sacred text to make it less jarring on the senses. The withdrawal from recognizing and confronting evil and violence (one of its children) does not help in the establishment of justice. Nor, for that matter, to a withdrawal from a recognition that there is such a thing as the wrath of God, and that the Divinity executes justice in our temporal realm, but in personal and in historic terms. This isn’t new to me: I’ve experience resistance, sometimes pretty militant, to naming evil for what it is in other settings in the past.

But the systematization of this reluctance, this squeamishness – to call it for what I think it is – does the Church a disservice on two levels. First, it blurs and muddies the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. Scripture is a lens through which God graces us to see the world in a different, clearer way. But like someone whose color vision has become damaged into grays and browns through the development of cataracts, we can lose the ability to see clearly if we (even perhaps voluntarily, in this case) allow the accretion of other things between us and that lens, or in place of the Bible’s perspective. Second, the Church needs to be prepared. The world is a hostile place to the Gospel, as it always has been in the main. Our own society is becoming less and less friendly, as well. If the Church is serious about pursuing justice and righteousness, then we need to hear and understand the cost we may be asked to pay for that pursuit, and stories like that of John the Baptist’s preaching and his consequent demise, and the message of the prophet Amos, become cautionary tales for the faithful. To miscast them as tales of rigid judgment – tales of terror – blurs the picture and fails to equip the saints.

Or are we to believe that the forces of darkness will just roll over if shamed a little bit by a stern talking-to? (A nice critique of a too-tight reliance on the “just give the word that can be heard and accepted by the recipient” method can be found in King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”.)

This morning’s worship had the stateliness and beauty of holy ritual, in a lovely setting with a friendly congregation. And I bless the pastor for the ministry that was offered to me and to all present, including the sharing of Holy Communion. Yet behind the words of the sermon – which was well-crafted and articulate – I detect, even at a wider, general church level – a moral confusion which I think should give us pause, and which fails to use the precious time remaining to get God’s people ready for the storms to come.


Solomons, Maryland
12 July 2015
S.D.G.