Gospel reading: Matthew 24.36-44
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)
Righteous is a good case study for the way meaning accumulates in a word over time. As a child I used to enjoy saying a word over and over again until the meaning drained from it completely. The sounds of the word became as strange and arbitrary as those of another language. I'm not sure why it pleased me to unlearn a word for a moment. But it did.
There is a scene in a William Faulkner novel (As I Lay Dying, I think) in which a character talks about a similar experience with a name. As I recall, he imagined himself gradually filling or taking the shape of his name. And his name was sort of a formless void until he did.
The sheer repetition of speaking the word 'self' before the word 'righteous' may have worked in much the same way in our lives. Words take on meaning for us as we speak them. They conjure up emotions and images for us based on what went on in us and around us when the word was spoken in our past. Somewhere along the way 'righteous' got buried in the phrase 'self righteous' and became associated in our minds only with prigs...and worse.
But much of Kathleen Norris's project in Amazing Grace was to reclaim a language or a vocabulary. Reclaim might not be the best word, actually. Reimagine might be better.
My first real carpentry job was as an apprentice on a framing crew in Eatonville, Washington. And James, my boss, was a former surfer from southern California. (Before you let the word 'surfer' conjure up too many associations you should know that he worked on a doctorate at UCLA for a time and read a lot of Tolstoy.) But on the job site 'righteous' was usually preceded not by 'self' but by 'totally', as in "The fit of that hip rafter was totally righteous".
This was helpful to my relationship to the word, even if the phrase was rarely spoken without a little affectation and irony. Righteousness gradually became associated with what's good and lovely in the world again.
Righteousness is so essential to biblical faith that I hope we can speak some goodness back into the word. I hope there is a way we can want to be righteous again. Maybe I'll need to type "I want to be righteous" 100 times in a blog before the word is fully redeemed for me. But shouldn't we want to be righteous? In fact, shouldn't our Christian faith be about formation as righteous people?
I wonder sometimes if my own embarrassment with the notion hasn't arisen with the persistent association of 'self' with 'righteous'. The same thing can happen with 'goodness'. Say 'do-gooder' or 'goody two shoes' enough and we'll be free of that word's uncomfortable challenges to our lives as well.
But the truth is we do want to be righteous. We want to be people who live justly. People who treat the vulnerable ones in our world with the love and respect that our scriptures and our faith demands. We want to be people whose aim is true. If we didn't, why in the world would we be reading this line in this blog together?
I believe that God is making us righteous. Little by little, our lives can accumulate meaning just like the words we use. It doesn't happen all at once. But over time, perhaps as we "continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers" (in the prayer book's words) we are changed. Our lives take on a new meaning and a new direction gradually as we learn together, eat together, and pray together. Maybe even as we blog together.
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(ramblings on theological things)
About Me
- Scott Walters
- Rector, Christ Episcopal Church, Little Rock, AR
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3 comments:
Thinking about righteousness for me is really scary. I know I'm not righteous, or what I would think of as righteous. I am a selfish, self centered, person, driven by a hundred forms of fear. I guess that's why the concept of Grace, in connection with righteousness, appeals to me so much.
Someone told me that humility is about being "right sized." Maybe that means that my selfishness, and self centeredness, my fear and falling short, is not unusual. Maybe that is the human condition. And maybe Grace makes me just one among many, trying to find my way home. So, "self" righteousness for me is the wrong belief that somehow, by myself, I can become righetous. I can't. But with God's help, I can join the human race, neither worse nor better than anyone else, equally in need of God's Grace.
I like this. I always have to mentally look away while reciting the verse in Psalm 23 that says "He leads us in the paths of righteousness." Putting "for His name's sake" at the end of it doesn't take away the feeling that I'm really saying something like "He leads us in the paths of smugness...."
Maybe this will help me reclaim some of the OT I've been avoiding because of all the references to righteousness.
I never thought about this problem with words before. But it's true. We have somehow taken some words that represent good things and turned them into anti's or, as the dictionery defines anti, "of the same kind but situated opposite, exerting energy in the opposite direction. In fact, I've heard the word Anti Christ recently associated with all the bad in the world.
Fortunately, I don't think some anti Christ has anything to do with the bad in the world. We have complete control over all that just like we do the actions we put to words.
It's hard to stop thinking about all the bad things going on in the world and maybe that's why we put our "word" energies in the wrong directions.
I think, though, we will have to stop being sceptical or, maybe start being "anti sckeptical" of those who are righteous so God can accomplish his/her goal.
Christ Church is already on it's way. It's the one place I know that God is already working and where actions are speaking louder than words; Even on Blogs.
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