Heresy/Apostasy

Gospel reading: John 14.15-21
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I got a new bicycle in January. And in March I got my first flat.

Three of us were riding along the river trail near Murray Park. I was (not surprisingly) in the back, using the other two riders as a much needed windbreak. This meant that my front wheel was only a few inches from the bike in front of me. So I had barely enough time to get the "Oh" out (which was to be followed by an expletive) before I hit the pothole that appeared suddenly in my path.

The deep thud of a pothole rim at 25 mph is a particularly unsettling sound for a guy on a new bike. My front tire went quickly flat, as the force of the blow was enough to turn my handlebars downward about 30 degrees.

I think that's what heresy is like.

Here's what I mean. Sometimes words like heresy or apostasy or orthodoxy are used as though the truths they refer to are simply engraved verbatim into the universe on a cellular level. We speak of them as if they can be assessed and verified in the abstract. We equate eternal truth with stable truth. Reliable truth. Unchanging truth.

But the most helpful conceptions of heresy always include motion, in my opinion. They're not so much a declaration about the nature of the universe as a shout to the rider behind us, "Watch out! I really did a number on my front rim in that pothole."

Just in case the Walters pothole theory of heresy is taught in seminaries someday, I'll try to elaborate a bit. Sitting in the grass next to the bike path with a limp tire and a bent rim, that pothole didn't strike me as a matter of personal opinion. It wasn't just that I had personally experienced the world as a pothole. I hit something hard. And if there had been another rider behind me, and if I had spent that crucial split second apologizing and qualifying my experience of the flattening of a tire that seemed to be related to a void in the path, but that of course all paths are legitimate...well, you get the point. Now the only help I'd have to offer is a pump and a patch.

At the same time, when a warning is shouted from someone further down the path we have to decide what to do. She might have veered left to miss it, while I need to lean right. And of course the information is helpful only to the folks traveling this path. Hearing that there is an even bigger, and more dangerous hole in on a bike path in Tulsa isn't particularly relevant to me.

The reason the pothole theory is helpful to me is that it takes place and motion into account. Christian concerns with heresy have usually had to do with incarnation - keeping Jesus both a full expression of God's presence and a living, breathing human being. Sometimes we've imagined a Jesus so ethereal that it's hard to imagine his life having much to do with the likes of ours. Followers of Jesus have hit that pothole and sent warning. In fact, we've been reading from the Gospel of John in church, a gospel the church was a little suspicious of because Jesus can seem so otherworldly.

At other times we've been so bent on describing Jesus as a regular guy that people might rightly wonder why in the world people still bother with this Christian religion. I mean, as much as we love that wise and witty barista at the coffee shop, would it make sense to make the fuss we do over Jesus on a Sunday morning for him with our best silver and silk? Would you put her in a stained glass window? Followers have his this pothole too.

But incarnation still happens on the go. Life is charging on and religion is a great long conversation about the presence of God in our world. So maybe pothole theory doesn't mean watching suspiciously for heresy in all its usual haunts - sermons, prayers, offhand comments at coffee hour. Maybe it means listening. Listening to something like the chanted psalms on a Sunday morning not as watertight reservoirs of eternal truth. But as shouts of warning or blessing or comfort from people on the path ahead of us.

We always have to figure out what shouts from their lives might have to do with ours. But they are so much easier to listen to when I realize they weren't trying to cull me and my strange ideas out of this tradition. They were trying to keep me from ending up alone on the side of the road, wondering how long it will take to walk home with my bike on my shoulder and what's left of a wheel in my hand.

Gospel reading: John 14.1-14
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I think you can judge a book by its cover. Or at least I begin judging a book when I see its cover, starting with the title. A favorite title of mine is What Are People For? It's right up there with The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.

What Are People For? is by Wendell Berry. And his is an appropriate name to drop a few days from Earth Day. He's a draft horse farmer in Kentucky as well as a poet, novelist, and essayist. And when he considers ecological concerns he's less likely to obsess over policy details than he is to reflect upon the web of relationships that are human culture and how we are formed by our choices within it. Environmental problems are always an ultimate matter of culture and character for Wendell Berry.

OK, that was a two paragraph digression. But the title of Berry's book catches my attention because it asks a question that seems obvious, but sounds strange. Even though you are one, have you ever wondered what people are for?

We could ask a similar question about the Bible. What is it for? Like people, we might be too close to the subject to see it, or to wonder about its purpose. But what we think something's for has a lot to do with what it ends up meaning to us. The assumptions we bring with us have a lot to do with what we get out of any encounter.

Some people have thought that the Bible was a reservoir of perfect and eternal truths, any of which might be plucked out of its pages and dropped into our lives unscathed and to our benefit.

Here's one example of the problem of such a hermeneutic (a 10 cent word that has to do with methods of drawing meaning from something) recounted in Garry Wills's book What Jesus Meant. It's a letter of unknown origin perhaps to a radio talk show host.

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's law. I have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

Lev. 25:44 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you clarify?

I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 10:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

Lev. 20:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

As you can see, interpretation is a subtler art than cutting and pasting. I think Kathleen Norris is onto something in returning to the notion that scriptures were meant to be read in community and out loud.

An aural event always happens at a particular moment in time. Before long the vibrations that make for sound settle down and the words are gone. So we're reminded that whatever scripture is, its truth always reaches us at a particular moment in time. And our assumptions and experiences will always play a part in that encounter.

Postmodern literary theorists will emphasize the way each reader invests a text with meaning. Whatever the original author intended will never be retrieved perfectly in tact from the text. This is true whether the reading is private or public, silent or aloud. But somehow the public reading of scripture embodies its living presence in our lives. Scripture is always spoken into a new moment. Who knows just what I'll hear today. And only God knows what you might hear tomorrow.

So maybe we're meant to let go of the What is scripture for? question at least enough to let this holy book speak something new and unexpected into the forever changing circumstances of our lives. Maybe the answer to What is scripture for? is as deceptively simple as the question: it's for hearing.

Preaching

Gospel reading: John 10:1-10
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Some of you know that I've spent more of my life as a carpenter than I have as a priest. The career change was pretty stark for me. I went from wearing a tattered Carhart canvas jacket to wearing a cassock and surplice at work.

It's hard to imagine two careers with job descriptions that differ more than priest and carpenter. But I think preaching has been the bridge between the two for me.

My sermons begin as written documents, and I don't stray from my text beyond a sentence here or there to clarify a connection or make reference to something that has happened between printing and delivery. And that document satisfies that part of myself that needs to see a made thing result from my labor. But it's a pleasure that's not complete until it's shared.

The first carpenter I worked for was a very literate guy named James Fish. I joined his framing crew in a small town outside Tacoma. After I had moved back to Arkansas, he moved to Eastern Washington and began building traditional timber frame houses. These are the old post and beam structures that last for centuries, their great timbers joined by elegantly carved joints drawn together with oak pegs.

I once received a letter from James written entirely on a fir shaving like the one curling from the plane in the picture at the top. A timber framer needs first rate planes, and he needs to keep those planes tuned. So the message of James's missive was very much in (not just on) the medium. The shaving thin enough so as to be translucent, and it was at least two feet long.

His letter was sheer gloat. And I loved it. Because I knew of the labor it came from.

Sermons are like that for me. There is something very solitary about their making. But in making them, and then in delivering them, I find some of my most intense connections to the lives of the congregation that is forming me as a preacher and as a human being. It's in searching for that intersection between the stories of scripture and our stories that I lose myself in a task I love, but also realize that somehow the whole of that task is wonderfully contained within the life of a people who say their prayers at Capitol and Scott Sunday after Sunday.

The longer I'm here the more clearly I feel like I think James did. He spent hours honing the edge of his planes. Many more hours perfecting his technique. And when he watched that lovely, delicate sliver curl from his work, it pleased him. And he sent it to me, thinking, "Scott will get a kick out of this."

A sermon is like one of those slivers. To most people one may look like a curiosity at best, something to be swept up with the rest of what falls to the floor in a workshop. But because it has emerged from shared things - our scriptures, our stories, our lives - I know Christ Church will get it, or at least get some kind of kick out of it. Even when my thoughts fail to coalesce and when I stumble in their delivery, somehow, over time, Christ Church gets it. Christ Church is getting me. Because Christ Church is getting into me.

Good and Evil

Gospel reading: Luke 24:13-35
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)


I must be preoccupied with music lately. Last week it was John Fahey. This week: Yonder Mountain String Band.

Faith

Gospel reading: John 20.19-31
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I'm captivated by John Fahey's The Legend of Blind Joe Death. It's a record by this strange but legendary guitar player. His albums don't include vocals or accompaniment. Just John and his guitar.

His style is unmistakable. He plays like he's grasping the instrument by it's throat. His music sounds like something the calloused hands of a morose stonemason plucks angrily from the shuddering steel strings of his guitar. (OK, that's a bit much.) If you think acoustic music is all sweetness and light, you haven't heard John Fahey.

Last week the kids and I drove to North Carolina and back. (This is why I didn't manage to blog in case you happened to miss this weekly whatever.) And I realized on the drive that I only time I really listen to Blind Joe Death is late at night on road trips. And I always listen to the whole thing. I never get a hankering for say, "Sligo River Blues" or his dark rendition of "In Christ There is No East or West" by themselves. It's all or nothing.

The album has a rather odd format. Fahey plays nine songs. Then he plays them again. Then he plays three more songs. After each listening I feel like I've managed to be present to the whole of some process that only unfolds over a long, long time. I'm never quite sure whether the process has taken place in me or out there in what I've heard. There's a haunting familiarity when the tunes come around again, and I can't quite say just how they and I have been changed. But they...I...we...surely have.

When Kathleen Norris writes about faith being more like a verb, I think of John Fahey. At least this week I do. Listening to an album can be a simple thumbs up or thumbs down proposition. Have you ever listened to The Legend of Blind Joe Death? is a simple yes or no question. And too often we speak of faith in much the same way. As if it's something we get or do at a certain point in time.

But maybe faith is more like an immersion in something. Maybe it's a way of seeing or a kind of awareness that we slip into and out of. A way of being that grows only slowly, perhaps, over time.

Thomas's encounter with the risen Christ can seem to imply faith as a settled fact happening in an instant. But reading the story again we see that Thomas is given an experience both strange enough and concrete enough to open up the future for God knows what. The evidence he is given only confirms that all bets are off when it comes to what God might do next.

And so it is with us, I think. We tend to think of faith in terms of how much or how intensely we can manage to believe a particular set of (usually unbelievable) facts. But maybe faith is never belief in a something settled, never a possession, but rather, something strange and wonderful that possesses us. Something that seems to unfold slowly, over time. But something whose force we find ourselves unexpectedly present to.

I don't read the Bible like I listen to John Fahey. It's longer. And reading while driving late at night is a bad idea. But I wonder if I'd get something more from that strange book if I could. I wonder if I would really get its sense that faith is something that comes to be in great waves and surges and trickles over time. And maybe the experience would register somewhere within my self that faith is not a way of being that we achieve once for all, but that we step into or stumble into and maybe get wonderfully lost within.