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.

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.