Inquisition

Gospel reading: Matthew 7.21-29
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

With a new Indiana Jones movie just released, I'm reflecting on power differentials. I haven't seen the show. But I have a good idea of what to expect: constantly shifting power differentials.

I'm pretty sure there will be chases in tight quarters - crypts or caves or maybe even spaceships I hear. And Indy will be at the weak end of a power differential. Whether it's a giant boulder or a ball of flames that's barreling towards him, his only hope will be to get out of the way. And if we've paid full price for a ticket, he'd better have to crawl through something wet or writhing or sticky or creeping or preferably all of the above to get free.

But the film's most satisfying moments will be when our hero reverses a power differential between people - namely between Dr. Jones and one of the villains du jour. We love it when a band of evildoers with scimitars or revolvers find themselves on the wrong end of Indy's whip.

Each Indiana Jones movie reminds us that power differentials are thrilling, and that we really wouldn't want a world free of them even if such a thing were imaginable. Life is a constant exchange of power. The physicists and the psychologists and the comic book writers all agree that this is so.

But there is a problem with the world as we know it, power being distributed as it is. And the problem isn't that the bad guys have power too. The problem, Kathleen Norris says, is that inquisition is a lurking possibility in every conversation, increasing as the differential in power grows.

She puts it this way: "Inquisition...is an attutude of mind, a type of questioning that resists true conversation, which like the word 'conversation,' at its root means to turn, or to turn around. The inquisitor has answers in hand and does not wish to change them." With her definition, inquisition becomes a present reality and temptation for the likes of me, and not limited to the infamous persecutions by Christians in the middle ages.

Because there is an almost primal (or perhaps a literally primal) satisfaction in reversing or relishing in a power differential, inquisition is a possibility in every conversation. You know an inquisition is being held when your response holds no sway in a conversation. The questioner wants to know nothing more than what side you're on. This is the interpersonal equivalent of that giant boulder rolling in one direction through the cave, crushing everything in its path. Indy knows quite well that his opinion or pushback won't matter a whit. So he gets out of the way. Ever been in a conversation or relationship like that?

The most famous chapter in The Brothers Karamazov is called The Grand Inquisitor. Ivan, one of the novel's main characters, tells a story or a parable perhaps about an appearance of Christ in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor recognizes Christ immediately by the miracles he performs. And tells him, "Thou must not meddle for the time, at least."

The Inquisitor's job is to try people for heresy. And he tells Christ himself that he "mayest not take from men the freedom which Thou didst exalt when Thou wast on earth." Faith depends on freedom. And any miracles would smother the freedom to disbelieve. So Christ himself must be stopped, in the Inquisitor's eyes.

A power differential. And the penetrating question (Dostoevsky himself is said not to have resolved the questions this chapter raises) of the parable has to do with how much of God's absolute power God withholds in order for us to be free. That's a big, old, unanswerable question. But if such difference matters in our relationship to God, how much more must it matter in our relationships with one another.

Of course the differences can't be eliminated and we wouldn't want them to be. (There would be no more Indiana Jones movies.) But what we do with the power we have, even in a single conversation matters. In our exchanges do we hold out the possibility that we might be changed by a response? Or is our opinion something of a fireball raging through a crypt? You can throw your pail of damp ideas back at it, but the impact will be negligible.

In our gospel Sunday Jesus said that not everyone who calls him "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven, even though they did "deeds of power" in his name. Only those who hear his words and act on them will enter. This is a troubling passage, but isn't it about our freedom and the exercise of power? We can appropriate our power - even religious or spiritual power - in life giving or in abusive ways. We've got some freedom. And whether we chose inquisition or conversation is up to us.

I guess the appeal of Indiana Jones depends on our desire that a proper give and take be returned to the exchange of power in our world. And the good news is that our work is really the same as that of Indiana Jones. We have to figure out how to put the power we have - whether whip, mind, or tongue - to bring things back into balance. And to do this we have to always put ourselves forward, open to the possibility that we will be changed, knowing that the last thing our world needs right now is another inquisitor.

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.