God - talk

Gospel reading: Matthew 6.24-34
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

The very culture whose vernacular oozes with 'God-talk' may have also produced such language's best corrective. Maybe the correction had to be an inside job.

We in the South live in what Flannery O'Connor said is not a Christ-centered culture, but a Christ-haunted culture. And I suspect that this haunting presence has a great deal to do with the stark and sometimes startling language of Southern Gothic fiction.

Yesterday I finished a novel by a writer who pushes the envelope of even this strange genre. Wolf Whistle is Lewis Nordan's fictional meditation on the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, a murder that affected Nordan deeply as a boy growing up in a rural Mississippi town not far away. And a murder that would galvanize a nascent civil rights movement as well.

As he describes the murder of Bobo, the Till character in the novel, Nordan is at his gruesome best. His is language of swampy decay, of flesh, blood, and bones. And his language is also otherworldly, as the lost eye of the murdered boy watches the aftermath of his killing from the mysterious perspective of the dead. Its sight isn't limited to things nearby as that of living eyes must be. It watches the killer even after he's driven off into what's left of his sad life.

Nordan tells the fantastic, impossible story without flinching, without apology for mingling the supernatural and the horribly concrete. He owes debts to the likes of Flannery O'Connor and Faulkner, of course, but also to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the "magical realists". Like the magical realists, Nordan's language stays firmly rooted in the grisly reality of life on earth even when time and physics no longer hold their usual sway over things.

The language of Southern Gothic fiction strikes me as a perfect undoing of the 'God-talk' that Kathleen Norris critiques. God-talk is a coded vagueness detached from earthbound existence. It is a "spiritualized jargon that does not ground itself in the five senses." Such language should be anathema to a religion with incarnation at its core.

The best language in both Christianity and Southern literature refuses to be satisfied with vagueness in the face of mystery. They both display that whatever else there is to this life, whatever there is beyond or beneath this life, we encounter it in the particular, not in the abstract.

In Sunday's gospel Jesus said, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." These are as famous as religious words get. But somehow they're still not "God-talk". At least not to my ears. They still manage to cut through an abstraction like worry and direct me to lilies I've known. Lilies of the non-spinning, non-toiling variety. And somehow it's there among the flowers that I catch a better glimpse of the fist clenched in the bottom of my belly and what it might take and mean to be free of it.

To my mind "Consider the lilies" is everything that "Let go and let God" is not. Jesus directed our attention back to the world. To birds and flowers and kings like Solomon. To grass and ovens and clothing. He seems to be telling us that we'll find a way through the mysteries of this life among such things. So he doesn't say, "Let go." He says, "Consider the lilies."

Of course the best religious language doesn't consider only sparrows and lilies. It takes us face to face with Emmet Till as well. But this is a blessing in the end. Because whatever grace is, we need to know that it shows up in lives like ours. That it shows up in a world of bright useless flowers and sad useless deaths as well.

Language that's anything less just isn't worth our breath.

Orthodoxy

Gospel reading: John 20.19-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

There is only one, short paper from seminary that I've considered trying to expand into a book one day. It was titled "Housing the Meeting," and in it I considered the relationship between our worship and the buildings that we worship within.

But my interest wasn't in the differences between Gothic and Byzantine or modern strip mall architecture. I was coming at the subject as a house-builder. And I've long been curious about the notion that the walls we bump into and the furniture we step around each day all participate in making us who we are. In the paper I even speculated about an ancient and universal mystery: Why do people always gather in the kitchen at parties?

My hunch - about the kitchen phenomenon - is this: We are instinctively drawn to space set aside for a purpose. The signs of human intention decorate every kitchen. Appliances and utensils remind us of the ritual preparation of meals that takes place there day after day, year after year. And we are at home. Conversation happens more naturally among all this evidence that a house isn't just shelter.

And there in the kitchen we might realize that a house isn't just an expression of who we are. The way we move through our houses and the work we do within them are forever making us who we are.

For instance, the impact on who I am - in several ways, including the physical - won't be insignificant if my house is best arranged for unwrapping a Whopper in my La-Z-Boy in front of a large plasma TV rather than preparing a meal from scratch in my kitchen.

What does that have to do with orthodoxy? Quite a bit, I think.

As Kathleen Norris suggests, we tend to think of orthodoxy in terms of static truths or right doctrinal positions. We tend to speak and hear the language of the creeds as though they were simply collections of established facts. But for most of Christian history orthodoxy concerned right worship more than right belief. Orthodoxy wasn't primarily about holding the right set of ideas in one's head. It was about joining a larger Christian response to God with our whole selves.

Now, back to the kitchen. What if our attraction to the kitchen has something to do with the fact that we don't really learn about one another through the simple exchange of words? We're formed in the work we do, in the space we inhabit, in the way we move through our days. We know we'll get a broader picture of what makes each other tick if we catch a glimpse of working life.

There is something just as true about the life of faith. Our words matter deeply. But the Anglican tradition insists that our theology - our words about God - are best taken in through liturgy. The words are tied to gestures and postures, sights and smells. They are spoken near furniture and fixtures - like fonts and altars and crosses and candles - that bear part of their meaning.

A life altering attraction to the historic Christian faith, to orthodox Christian worship, is about more than a longing for right information about God. Orthodoxy is about more than words. It's a way of moving as much as a way of thinking.

Deciding to make orthodox worship a part of one's life is like stepping into a house. The walls are sturdy enough to move us here rather than there. The arrangement and appointments of the rooms will entice us and appeal to us for different reasons at different moments in our lives. But the consistent fact is that we'll be changed along the way by the movements we make.

Who knows if I'll ever get around to trying to write that book. But I do plan to stay orthodox. I do plan to continue living within the liturgy of the historic church, making the movements and using the words of this living and ancient Christian tradition.

You might say that I'm drawn to the nave of Christ Church like a dinner guest to the kitchen.

Creeds

Gospel reading: John 17.1-11
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I wish I had your happiness
And you had a do-wacka-do,
Wacka do, wacka-do, wacka-do.
- Roger Miller

Physically my friend Al was an odd combination of soft and lanky. His was a body perfectly unfit for athletic activity, but just right for flailing about to the boom-chicka rhythm of Do-Wacka-Do. He danced like one of those wooden figures sold at craft fairs that are made to move by bouncing on a flexible board. Their hinged limbs splay forward and backward, free of the limits ordinary knees and elbows impose.

I suppose this is an odd beginning for a blog about a "concise, formal, and authorized statement of important points of Christian doctrine." But it just seems like if I don't compare the Nicene Creed to Do-Wacka-Do no one will.

When we consider the creeds we usually talk about the way they limit or refine our speech about God. To be Christian is partly to take up a particular religious vocabulary. But when we stop there we forget that words aren't ends in themselves. They are only useful insofar as they stir up something in us that moves in the direction of truth.

So to do the work they were meant to do in our lives, creeds have to have a certain amount of do-wacka-do, if you will. The words themselves need to set something off in us whether we know quite what they mean or not. It's not enough that they've been authorized.

Kathleen Norris says she loves using the Nicene Creed in church because "no one can pretend to know exactly what it is they're saying: 'God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.'" Which may be the 4th century religious equivalent to do-wacka-do. We don't know entirely what they mean, but they set off something in us that is true about God. Or they set something off in us towards what is true about God.

And our proof for this is primarily that we've seen these words set off something in Christians across the centuries towards the truth about God. We see goodness at work in the lives of people we love and trust. And maybe we're humble enough or desperate enough to see what this language might set off in us.

Kathleen Norris says it gives her "great pleasure to hear a church full of respectable people suddenly start to talk like William Blake. Only the true literalists are left out, refusing to play the game." Her pleasure must be just as great when we read the strange things Jesus says about glorification as we did on Sunday.

But we need not be left out. Playing this game isn't about using the creeds as fine sieves through which all truth about God must be strained. Their primary use is not keeping out wrong ideas about God, but planting fruitful ones that have been borne out in so many other lives over time.

I don't really expect the Christ Church congregation to go flailing about at the Creed this Sunday, like Al would to Do-Wacka-Do. But maybe something like this is what happens to us slowly over time as we say the creeds together. Limited and nonsensical as our meager words might be, they do bring something of the truth of God into our selves in a way that changes us - changes not just the way we think, but the way we live, and move, and have our being.