Joe Heller’s editorial cartoon for Shrove Tuesday.
Archive for February 12, 2013
The Church: body and bride
The Church is holy and sinful, spotless and tainted. The Church is the bride of Christ, who washed her in cleansing water and took her to himself “with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless” (Ephesians 5:26-27). The Church too is a group of sinful, confused, anguished people constantly tempted by the powers of lust and greed and always entangled in rivalry and competition.
When we say that the Church is a body, we refer not only to the holy and faultless body made Christ-like through baptism and Eucharist but also to the broken bodies of all the people who are its members. Only when we keep both these ways of thinking and speaking together can we live in the Church as true followers of Jesus.
–Henri J.M. Nouwen, Bread for the Journey.
Life and death at the extremes of faith
Pastor Randy “Mack” Wolford
photo by Lauren Pond for The Washington Post
A while back, when GraceisEverywhere was only a tickle in my brain, I came across an article in The Washington Post about a snake-handling pastor. It’s a good, thoughtful article that doesn’t try to sensationalize or ridicule its subject, and, as I often do, I filed it away in memory. Six months later I read that the pastor in that article, Randy “Mack” Wolford, had been bitten during the outdoor service he’d been planning and died an agonizing death. As the photographer noted, Wolford was “a victim of his unwavering faith, but also a testament to it.”
It can be easy to dismiss the people who occupy the extremes of Christian faith. To think they’re crazy. To shake our heads and say, “I can’t go there.” But a more interesting and complicated question to my mind, is not why are these Christians so different, but how are we alike? What part of the Christian message is so important to someone that they would handle snakes? How do they see God? Why do they adopt this practice and not any one of the many other available options? What do they believe about God that makes this possible, desirable?
People like Mack Wolford believe that God is powerful–that He makes promises and keeps them. I suspect that a lot of you reading this would agree. I also sense that people in Pastor Wolford’s tradition believe that we can compel God to do things when we act on His promises. I’m not so sure it works that way. But how different is this approach from what Elijah was doing with the prophets of Baal in I Kings 18?. Are we ready to condemn Elijah for his audacity? Are we ready to say that tests of faith never come from God? Should we never remind God of his part in our covenantal relationship–never make demands of the Almighty?
Perhaps we need to ask these sorts of questions from time to time, so we don’t grow too comfortable in our own practices and forget how strange most of them are to anyone who is not a believer. Perhaps we should ask ourselves, “What do I believe about God that makes me do what I do?” Are the extremes of faith so far from where I stand?
——
In addition to the two articles already mentioned, I commend to your attention “Why I watched a snake-handling pastor die for his faith” by the Post photographer who stayed until the end.
Worthy of praise
Free from every bond
On Sunday morning a young member of our congregation ended his struggle with illness. On Sunday evening we gathered at the church to say The Litany at the Time of Death (Book of Common Prayer, p.462).
It is an extraordinary thing to speak these words on the day of someone’s passing–when shock and grief are all you know, and daily life has not yet massaged the pain into something manageable. For me, it was the ritual that allowed me to do the thing that I could not do of my own volition, but needed most to do. As a congregation, it was a first painful step forward, hand in hand.
Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world;
In the Name of God the Father Almighty who created you;
In the Name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you;
In the Name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you.
May your rest be this day in peace,
and your dwelling place in the Paradise of God.
Grace in the DMZ
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords which effectively ended U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. The war in Vietnam and the pictures in Life magazine were both a huge part of my childhood, so Larry Burrows’ photos are some of the images I most associate with that time.
I can’t post the photo here due to copyright restrictions, but take a look at the 7th picture in this series: American Marines receive the sacrament of Communion during a lull in the fighting near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
Acts of compassion and rituals of grace in the midst of terrifying violence. God with us in our suffering.
Sister Rose of Sundance
I’ve been thinking a lot about movies lately, and this morning a friend pointed me to an article about Sister Rose of the Daughters of St. Paul, a movie critic and blogger. In the New York Times story, “Acting as a Mediator at the Crossroads of Faith and Film,” writer Samuel G. Freedman notes,
Sister Rose was serving not as a sentry protecting religious belief from cinematic product, but rather as a mediator helping to explain one to the other. As such, she embodies a departure both from the religious temptation to police popular culture, in the manner of the Roman Catholic Church’s now-defunct Legion of Decency, and the effort in fundamentalist circles to create a parallel universe of theologically safe movies, television and music.
“To paraphrase a Gospel passage, Christ came into the world to redeem the culture, not to condemn it,” Sister Rose, 61, said in an interview here. “It’s a negotiation. You don’t give everything a free pass. Something has to come out of your convictions and values. But what matters isn’t what the movie contains, but what it means.”
The world is such a messy place, and the road to Wisdom is a long one. Like Peter in Joppa, it can be so difficult to know what to eat, how to respond to what appears before us. (I always hear him asking God, “Is this a trick question?”) How can we learn to truly prefer and choose what is good? Sister Rose is one of the people engaging that question. Another example of the “sorting” John Milton talks about in Aeropagitica when he says, “what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil?”
Conversion
But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he journeyed he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” And he said, “Who are you, Lord?” And he said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one.
Acts 9:1-7
Conversione di San Paolo by Caravaggio, 1601, Cerasi Chapel of the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome.
Soon I will be done
“No more weepin’ and a wailin’…
Soon I will be done with the troubles of this world…I’m going home to live with God.”
An informal version of an African-American spiritual.
(Ignore the few seconds of wind noise at 30 seconds in.)
Category: Spirituals /
Saints as sinners: a double feature
Most of the fiction that comes into my brain any more comes through the movies. Today I propose a double-feature: two movies worth seeing where the protagonist isn’t so good you can’t identify with him, and not so bad you wouldn’t want to.
Flawed saints are the flip side to the honorable thief and the prostitute with the heart of gold, but let’s be honest, pointing out feet of clay is not much of a trick. These films succeed because they recognize the tangled complexity of goodness in a human being. Robert Duvall is beyond amazing in The Apostle (when he yells at God, you believe God is listening), and Jack Black will surprise you in Bernie–though East Texas is really the star of the film.
