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.