The Past as Present - On Essential Agreement

This post is more United Church of Canada than some - but should perhaps allow anyone to think about the relationship we have to the thinking of the past...

In explanation - when one is ordained into ministry in the United Church, we make a promise, backed up by people who have examined us, that we are in essential agreement with the recorded faith position of the church.

In our case that is taken to be the four positions we have taken: The 20 Articles of Faith (1925), The Statement of Faith (1940), the New Creed (1968) and the Song of Faith (2006)

It is interesting that if you take the last and read it - our faith is very poetic, very accessible, and very much based on the idea of human development towards the good. It seems, tilted, towards a modern way of thinking.

If you start the other way around and read the 1925 version is it like the King James Bible - jarring in its use of words we no longer use in phrases we no longer use. The tilt in this case is towards the power of God. God did things, in fact, everything, and we respond.

But like it or not, if you sit down and read carefully the "words" of all of these positions, carefully trying to weed out the poetic voice, they are, to quote the church, in essential agreement with each other.

You, as an average reader, would not want to do that, trust me. But in fact, the 20 articles are a bit repetitive, and thus with each version it gets shorter.... but almost nothing changes.

in 1940 We added the idea that God made us to be in "loving" relationship - not just relationship, while we admitted that Jesus, though God, also lived the perfect human life.

in 1968 we added the tag line, "to live with respect in Creation" which was pretty much the first time we officially suggested the idea of respect, or relationship with the created world around us.

and in 2006 God became less the old man in the sky, adjectives like Mother were added. The other major thing that I can see is that it says Jesus was put to death by the people... in other words, we are to blame. Where before it was stated as being more part of God's original plan.

But when we say essential agreement we are basically saying this:

We believe there is one God, who somehow exists in three: Creator, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Who is active in the world and in the heart of people. Who gives us free choice to turn away from the path, but who has planned out the path. Adam and Eve sinned and all of us have that kernel of sin within us, but God calls us and redeems us. Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, came to earth and taught us how to be more faithful before being executed. By being executed as an innocent Jesus paid off our debt and saved us. Believe that and try hard to allow the Holy Spirit to work within you and you will be judged good after death and live forever with God, if not, you will be cast out.

Now, as you can imagine, there is more. It defines ministry, and church, and right action, and so much more... but "essential agreement" does not boil down to the nitty gritty, it boils down to the core of what is being said. Which is as above. Yes, yes, I know if you are a theologian you are going to say I did not express some stuff well enough, or deep enough, ok, it is more complicated than that, I agree.

NOW

In the United Church we have come under scrutiny of late because the fact is, clergy have, for some time, defined essentially pretty loosely.

I believe there is good and bad - so if you want to define it with personalities, ok. Let's call "Good" "God" 

(I made that up - but you get the point - do you, essentially agree with the above... there is a lot of wiggle room.)

It is being argued that the wiggle room did not include the modern post-theistic, radical progressive views that are held by many on one side of our church. And to be honest, I think they have a point. The reworking of those 20 articles over the last 100 years never touched the core belief. We have to admit that the United Church, for all of its social justice and left leaning history has stayed true to what it said it believed in 1925. We just say it in modern ways.

Which leads to a big problem.

And here is how I see the problem. The problem is that the faith statement of the United Church is bound to an antique way of understanding science, sociology, psychology and culture.

It is not the church that has moved - it is the world that has moved.

And somewhere along the way we forgot to write into our faith the belief that everything changes. In fact, we wrote the opposite - saying that things like God, the church, Jesus... are forever the same. Unchanging, immutable, etc.

But... no.  Galileo famously came up hard against the church when he claimed the Earth rotated around the Sun and not vice versa. They put him in jail and let him rot as a heretic. To be honest, the church did not care about celestial mechanics at all. Whether it is a circle or an ellipse, that meteors might seem to disappear and come back... who cares. What matters is that God is from Earth and therefore Earth is the centre of everything. That is what Galileo denied.

And we know he was right.

And because, eventually (in reality it took 350 years and the church only admitted he was right in 1992) we came to see that he was right, societal understanding changed. God was up/out there and not on earth. But we were still the favourites.

The reason people do not come to church these days, I think, has a lot to do with how far we have moved in our cultural understanding such that being in essential agreement with those 20 articles seems somehow wrong.

In basic ways, why would God only save the Jews? Why would the Messiah only come and save the western world? How do Buddha and Mohammed fit in? What "plan" are we talking about? The world certainly does not seem to be getting better and better every year? What do you mean prayers are answered? Most of us suffer greatly despite asking for help repeatedly... And on and on we could go.

You see, even the Bible, which is a record of peoples thoughts about God over 1000 years or so, portrays God as being so radically different at different times, that a lot of people assume the God of the Old Testament was a whole other person.

So when Jesus taught, he taught a radically different way of seeing holiness and humanity than that which had come before.... Which makes me wonder.... if someone comes along now... are they not also going to radically alter the way we see holiness and humanity?

Was it not the pharisees and the sadduccees, those we now consider the enemies of truth, but who were at the time, the church, who tried to stop Jesus from saying new and heretical things?

Maybe, just maybe, the essential agreement we should be adhering to is agreement to the statement:

WE CANNOT SEEM TO GET HOW TO BE GOOD - WE NEED TO KEEP TRYING NEW WAYS TO EXPLAIN IT 

So Was Marx Right?

It is Holy Week.

A very traditional high holy time where we focus on one or two ideas which force us to equate Jesus with God and, perhaps, limit our understanding to a black and white reality.

To wit, Jesus died for our sins. Or. Jesus rose again to conquer death.

Somewhere along the way, we added layers of dimension which broaden the script somewhat: Death, Suffering, Rebirth. Although psycho-emotionally deeper they still maintain the black and white naivete of people who believe they are bad and believe some external force can save them.

It is this jarring juxtaposition to our understanding of mental and emotional health that really forces me to dig deep in order to do justice to the festival while failing to accept the premise.

Have any of you ever read the poem Bio: Black Baptist/Bastard by George Elliot Clarke?

It is from a book of poems exploring racial identity within Black Canadian - and specifically, Nova Scotian culture... But I am fascinated by the imagery of church that it evokes and essentially blames for the predicament of self-hatred... I present it here in its entirety for your perusal:

 History fell upon us like the lash.

(I am not rash.) Black Baptists wept out prayers—

Passion—to hector tar into nectar,

To harvest undeniable honey,

But our scorched eyes were stooped by white faces,

We sank, stupefied by white capital,

Eating grained self-hatred in our churches,

Gulping Welch's grape juice, bile, and venom,

While chalked Jesus carped at us like a cop,

His sneered face crapping, "God damn your black ass."

Slavery was dead, wasn't it? But blood

Crusted on our rusty-tasting sermons,

A taint of blood for saint-plush lips. We could

Not look at the Adantic and not cry,

"Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" We knew

The terror of evacuated faith.

The stars had fallen cold where they were stalled—

For no one had believed—loved—for aeons.

The air swerves cold with such calamity.

I chronicle a cold, pockmarked epoch,

Map a county where trains gnaw their way home,

Blackened mummies pitch, gutted by gypsum,

Frail Baptists fall, their crotches worm-eaten,

Debris escalates when black ice sleets in.

I come from Windsor Plains, wine-stained poet,

Choosing not to imbibe William Williams'

Rain in the galvanized pail by the well.

Well, as a child, I spread blackstrap on bread

Between bitter dollops of the Bible.

I had to. I was guilty. I had spied

My sun-skinned mother's glaring skin. (I eyed,

Self-condemned, her shimmering, mixed-race breasts.)

Enough snow has fallen without license.

A Putsch arrests my heart. My life's naked.

Listen closely. I am trying to cry.

That's my condemned blood on the page.

Now - I do not mean to appropriate this poem - it is clearly about Black identity and the way self-hatred is ingrained... But what I do want to point out is that the poet himself feels the church, specifically his black Baptist church with a chalk white Jesus has been complicit in this understanding of self as less than.

Is it not at least worth a second of our consideration that this experience is also part of what has driven the masses from our halls? What if we viewed Easter through this lens?

It was Augustine, not Jesus, who claimed we were so evil that only the sacrifice of the blood of a God would save us. He made that up echoing Jewish traditions of sacrifice and scapegoat he probably never really understood in order to appease his own self-hatred for his lust, adultery, and an illegitimate child. (okay, I am being simplistic and harsh - but it is true)

Years later Marx would famously quip that the church was the opiate of the people - that we used it to feel better about our sorry state knowing we would be rewarded in heaven. What Marx also believed but we do not remember is that the church was complicit in the creation of the said sorry state. 

When we declare people sinful - and then offer a way of salvation - are we not just using the system to perpetuate elitism and classism? 

Perhaps. 

But these are the things we don't preach from the pulpit. These are the things that we don't ponder out loud.

It makes one wonder if we are not the enemy to all that Jesus was trying to accomplish. We are a part of the powers of imperialism - whether capitalistic or monarchist - that enslave the children of God through self-hatred.

Why are we not asking if this is not at least a part of why people are falling away - they no longer see "Good News" in what we say because they are capable of seeing the historic and cultural significance in a way they were not before the information age.

So - back to Holy Week. It is not death as atonement followed by universal salvation through defeat of death and rebirth - that is a cultural layer added by the imperialistic church.

For Jesus I think it was political rebellion followed by execution, leading to a new movement.

Jesus wanted us to stop being led by status, by riches, by grasping - and instead to be led by love and compassion. And he was willing to die for his beleif that if we accomplished this, it would be heaven on earth.

I think if presented this way - more people could get behind Easter.