The Road to the Presbyterian Future Goes Through Iona.

The other day someone asked in a meeting, "Does the PCUSA have a future?"  I impulsively responded that the road to any Presbyterian future "goes through Iona."  It sounded good, but later I had to wonder what I could have meant by that.

I have visited Iona three times.  This small island off the west coast of Scotland serves as a place of informal pilgrimage for me.  It takes two ferries and two buses to get there from Glasgow, usually with an overnight stay in Oban (where you can enjoy excellent Scotch right from the distillery).  

St. Columba established an important monastery on Iona in the 7th century CE from which monks ventured out to evangelize the native peoples of what is now Scotland.  Since Presbyterianism arose there first (albeit almost a thousand years later), many of us consider the place an essential element of our spiritual heritage.  The monastery lay in ruins when a Church of Scotland pastor named George MacLeod organized its rebuilding in the mid-20th century.  After burning out from his exhausting ministry with poor and working people in Glasgow, MacLeod took a trip to the Holy Land.  He found his soul rejuvenated by a mystical experience he had while attending the Orthodox Divine Liturgy in Jerusalem, on Pascha (Easter).  

MacLeod's contact with the mystical roots of Christianity drives him to the ruined old monastery on Iona.  His rebuilding of the monastery expresses a resistance to the dominant culture which forced it into decay and dereliction.  That neglect symbolizes Modernity's systematic trashing of all spiritual traditions, including those grounding Christianity, a demolition felt as well in the ruined lives of people in the coal-choked inner city.  MacLeod's reconstruction opened the way to a deep wisdom and compassion that had largely been forsaken.     

My conviction that the road to any meaningful future for the PCUSA goes through Iona means first driving our roots deeper into the Christian tradition of spirituality and mission, to tap nutrients we turned off long ago.  Should we choose to listen, Iona remains a voice for Presbyterians (and by extension to all old-line Protestants).  Iona opens a series of "portals" through which we may gain energy to equip and feed us for the next phase of our own denominational peregrination.  I interpret Iona less as a delightful, tranquil, and spiritually powerful physical place, and more as a vibrant, multi-faceted metaphor to talk about getting ourselves outfitted with the resources we need to propel us forward.

The Ruins.

MacLeod found on the island a pile of disconnected stones with a few walls still standing here and there.  That's what Modernity did to the old abbey, and British monasticism generally, starting with the demolition work of King Henry VIII.  As such it represents the whole Western church at this end of Modernity: the result of a 500-year acid-bath in Modern culture.  Will Presbyterianism -- and old-line Protestantism generally -- continue on its trajectory towards oblivion, and eventually appear as nothing more than a barely remembered, inaccessible, disintegrated shell, and historical relic?

MacLeod reminds me of the vision of another saint, Francis of Assisi, who had a dream about a ruined church.  Taking it literally, he began to repair the physical church of San Damiano, near his home.  His work became a metaphor for the spiritual renewal he would bring to the larger Church.  In the same way, the reconstruction of this abbey on Iona may symbolize the renewal of the Church in our own time.  Iona stands for a recovery of the reintegration of worship and prayer with the movement for justice and peace, where we experience the Spirit's wildness and bedrock, woven together with tradition and community, 

This focus on Iona does not mean embarking upon some romantic/sentimental project of "going back" to a supposedly better time. The abbey is not an archaeological dig but a living church, serving a time very different from earlier centuries.  We need rather to feed our sense of mission and ministry from a longer, deeper, and richer tradition.  We need to learn from witnesses who lived prior to 1517, and even since then but in other communities.  Iona then does not appear to us as just a physical or temporal place but also a principle of confluence/convergence, a path out of Modernity, a long disused conduit through which living waters may now flow again.

The "Celtic revival" of our own period can easily sink into a nostalgic escapism.  We could imagine Iona as a Celtic Church Theme Park, where we lose ourselves in reverie for a lost, ancient form of Christianity.  Celtic Christianity may easily become a convenient blank slate on which we may project what we will.  Too much of the vast and exploding literature about Celtic Christianity merely appeals to this gauzy fantasy.  As it happens, the actual sources we do have tend not to support the somewhat hippie vision of Iona.  They show, for one thing, a place where monks practiced an asceticism far beyond the comfort-level of the upper middle-class Westerners who rhapsodize the most about Celtic this and Celtic that.  Iona was also solidly grounded in Orthodox Christianity, even if it happened to evolve outside of Rome's orbit for a while.  

Passing through the portals of Iona means a willingness to see ourselves transformed by a decidedly pre-Modern faith environment.  If our approach to Iona merely reflects our personal aesthetic preferences we will not enter its portals.  They harden into mirrors.

The Modern Age did immeasurable harm to Christianity.  Yet the faith persisted, often as a ruin, frequently inhabited by marginalized and excluded peoples.  One example of this we see in the compilation by a civil servant named Alexander Carmichael of the prayers of the common people living in the Western Isles.  These he collected and published as the Carmina Gadelica, or "Prayers of the Gaels."

They show a deep faith informing and reflected in everyday life and mundane activities of simple, poor working people.  The people's prayer demonstrates a deep awareness of God's Trinitarian Presence in creation.  Indeed, their life was saturated by prayer, which made them particularly attentive to God everywhere.

From this we learn to look for the places even in the ravages of our own time where faith persists.  Even if it seems rather simple and naive to us, God seems to revel in such honesty and trust.  I have seen this kind of devotion in people I have served.  Part of me cringes at the nearly superstitious and quite unsophisticated nature of ordinary people's spirituality.  But I always had to admit that such simplicity had a purity of heart that loved Jesus often more effectively than my over-educated, jaded, critical, superior approach.

Iona gives us access to venerable streams of Christianity... but there remains a filter, for the Reformation did happen, not just as an aberration or detour, but a worthy and necessary movement turning the Church back to the Word: Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture.  Tragically, the Reformation managed to cut off the flow of the deeper tradition, leaving Protestants to scrounge around in the squalid dregs of Modernity for nourishment.  We replaced devotion to the Word of God with an obsession with the Bible alone, a dry dead-end leaving us divided, malnourished, and controlled by academics and managers, not saints.  And finally we caved in to Modernity which infused and permeated our whole movement, corrupting it fatally.

I will talk about Iona in terms of "portals."  These appear as metaphorical windows, gateways to Iona's prior states.  We receive energy and insight from each one that may enrich and inform our own mission today.  We don't have to repeat what these people of the past did, indeed, we can't; but resonating with their energy we may find ways to do something akin to what they did in our own wildly different context.

  

The First Portal.

The first portal of Iona opens us to the spirituality of the medieval Roman Catholic Church and the Benedictine Order.  These monastics lived and prayed on the island for about 500 years.

In the 6th century, St. Benedict instituted a Rule for monastics centering on the values of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  Like Jesus standing up against Satan in the wilderness, monks had to renounce of all kinds of self-gratification and self-reliance, to live instead according to the Word and Spirit of God in community.  They had to go against the values and goals of their society, finding themselves called instead to trust in God together in mutual aid.

They gathered seven times a day for worship, and chanted in Latin the entire Psalter at least once a week, shared the Eucharist daily, provided for themselves, welcomed strangers, and served the local population.

Modernity has fed people a very twisted view of Medieval life and spirituality.  In reality, they had more together than we give them credit for.  We remain indebted to people like Matthew Fox for bringing into our consciousness the work and writings of Medieval mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Meister Eckhart, people almost completely ignored even during my own seminary education, only 45 years ago.    

From this portal we learn the value of community, simplicity, self-denial, devotion to the Word, and prayer.  To follow Jesus will always involve renouncing wealth, attention, and power.    

The Second Portal.

This second portal of Iona connects us to the days of St. Columba, St. Adomnan, and others, monks who arguably "saved civilization" during the Dark Ages.  They copied and preserved manuscripts, including magnificent illuminated Bibles and Gospel Books.  They probably wrote the famous Book of Kells on the island.

The so-called Celtic Church cultivated a monastery-centric Christianity.  Abbots and Abbesses seem to have exercised more authority than the ceremonial official bishops.  Monasteries took a generally circular shape, enclosing in an earthen berm individual huts for monks, along with a church and other communal buildings.  They often and regularly worshiped out of doors.

These Christians invariably followed the Orthodox faith articulated at Nicaea and the other ecumenical councils.  They worshiped according to a version of the Gallican Rite, developed in what is now France.  They never lost or even questioned their loyalty to Rome and its Bishop, the Pope, even though Rome had retreated into an extended period of internal reorganization at this time.  When Rome got its act back together, the Celtic Church, after some intense negotiation, fell into line.  They were never anything but Catholic.

This portal opens us to the spirituality and theology of the Eastern Church, which are very often different from many of the standard approaches of the West.  They have a much less problematic and harsh understanding of Original Sin and the Atonement, for instance, as well as a deeper appreciation for beauty and tradition.    

The monks on Iona inherited their asceticism from their forebears in the Egyptian desert, and sometimes accomplished almost unbelievable feats of physical stress, like spending a night standing with arms outstretched like a cross in a cold river while reciting aloud the entire Psalter from memory.  Rather than mere punishment of the flesh, we could see in this kind of practice a desire for raw, direct, sensory experience of creation.  Asceticism shows a desire to feel truly and fully alive, grateful and joyful amid the holy elements of planet Earth.   

And Iona sent missionaries by sea to the lands that became Scotland and England, as well as to the European continent.  At that time, the Roman Empire had recently collapsed, and pagan migrants from the east flooded across the Rhine and Danube rivers into Western Europe and settled there.  The old Roman Christians had not the resources to respond to this challenging cultural and demographic shift.  So monks from Iona and other Irish monasteries established communities among the people and gradually helped to bring the continent to Christian faith.

From this we learn the importance again of community gathering in cherished places in accordance with tradition, and being sent out in mission and witness.  They cultivate art and preserve learning of all kinds. The Celtic monks teach us that Christianity is an adventure, an exploration of the limits of our souls, minds, bodies, and world.

The Third Portal.

The next portal delivers us to the even less distinct realm of the Druids and even earlier shamanic practitioners who held the island as holy even before the landing of St. Columba and his dozen monks.  We have little reliable information about pre-Christian Irish spirituality.  But the Church might learn how the Christian missionaries saw themselves as fulfilling, not destroying and replacing, the prior faith of the people.  There were almost no martyrs in the Irish mission; the people seem to have gradually understood this new faith from the east to be in continuity with and inclusive of what they believed before.  In effect they said to the indigenous faith, "Yes... and...."

Similar stories come to us from the Orthodox mission to the Indigenous peoples in Alaska in the 18th and 19th centuries.  The people grew organically into Christianity rather than having it violently imposed upon them.  The mission also sided with the ordinary people against Russian business and military interests.  In other words, they showed an approach rather different from the imperialist/colonialist character of most Western missionary activity among indigenous peoples.

The Celtic mission in Europe appears to have behaved similarly, establishing small communities among the pagan tribes and simply living the gospel in an exemplary and attractive fashion.  Eventually they earned the trust of their neighbors and gained converts.  (Of course, in those days if you could convert the local chief or king you were golden.)  Gods and goddesses were sometimes conflated with saints, like Brigid.  The Christians adopted the basic calendar of their predecessors, including some holidays, reimagined versions of which made it into general observance in western Christianity, like All Saints' (Samhain) and Candlemas (Imbolc).        

One lesson here is to respect and build on what a culture gives, drawing out the best to preserve, improve, and extend, realizing that God left no culture without God's Presence.  Neither was God absent even from Modernity, which obviously has many positive things to offer us going forward.  

A second lesson appreciates the earth-centeredness of the pre-Christian faiths.  Like the Magi from the east who visited the infant Christ, they paid deep attention to nature in stars, sea, seasons, weather, plants and animals, and even supernatural beings.  The Christians also understood the "thin places" among them where the curtain between the living and the dead were more porous.  All creation was charged with God's grandeur and in some sense alive and enchanted.  Life is inherently sacramental.          

The Fourth Portal.

Finally, geologists suggest that Iona is one of the oldest pieces of exposed rock on the planet.  St. Columba did not know this when he prophetically referred to the island as the first land God created.  The fourth portal has us step onto the very rock that emerged from the primordial ocean.  The earth herself caused this up-thrust of ancient stone into the sunlight and air.  Eons before this, "the old eternal rocks" on which monks would build the Abbey hunkered and groaned miles below the surface.  So even the bedrock changes and moves.  So the Creator made this planet alive and active, always in motion, always becoming.         

From this we learn that change is a given, different things happen according to different times and schedules; the balance between continuity and transformation must be maintained.  We see an impermanence even in the most stable bedrock.  And everything is not only alive, but charged with the Word and Spirit of the Creator. 

+++

I wonder if the light that comes to us now through the portals of Iona may illuminate the Church as it lurches forward into what looks increasingly like a dark time.  Do we, surveying the smoking wreckage of Modernity on a distressed planet and with dysfunctional economic and political institutions, find ourselves at a juncture similar to the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West?  Need we to call our circle to gather as on a holy island apart, where the Word and Spirit of the living God may equip us in forming an alternative polity, a community of trust and love, witnessing to the Kingdom embodied and proclaimed by Jesus Christ?

This light energizes in us a commitment to both spirituality and social justice, tradition and contemporary context, mind and body, doctrine and practice, action and contemplation, and an embrace of the network of interwoven communities, cultural and natural, in which God finds us and we find ourselves and each other.  

+++++++

 

Getting the Story Right... Or Wrong.

In the New York Times over the weekend, Nicholas Kristof interviewed Elaine Pagels, who has apparently written another book.  Here's the whole article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/opinion/virgin-birth-jesus.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1KTT0T7uiI_mhJ7s2SmX2BWYnurSAkssDQOfMU--Ed-oyu4UZqHUezXJk_aem_7HgqKv-lCqc4RTQJZz574g

Christians hold the story of Jesus' mother giving birth to him without having sex with a man as essential.  You cannot accurately call yourself a Christian if you clam up for part of the definitive Creeds.  The problem has always centered on how we believe it, what believing it means, and what we do with this belief.  

On the one hand, Empire has always twisted the Virgin Birth story in ways that perpetuate imperial power.  Medieval theologians decided it was all about Mary's "purity" because they learned from St. Augustine that sex was evil.  This of course saddled real women with impossible standards -- virgin and mother -- and served to keep them subservient and subject to guilt-trips for centuries.  Modern theologians like Pagels attack the doctrine mainly because, in reaction to that Medieval view, they have judged it as non-historical and contrary to what we know of gynecology, therefore untrue.  In searching for the "truth" they assumed that some man impregnated Mary.  They dismiss the Virgin Birth story as concocted mainly to imitate other mythic and political miraculous births.  

Kristof insists Pagels talk about how her book points "to ancient evidence that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier, possibly by rape."  

First of all, that's not our story.  I have zero patience with people who need to contradict the Christian story.  As if everything needs to happen in order to gratify our needs and preferences.  So if I don't like some aspect of a story, I should feel free to adapt it to something more satisfying to me.  When we do this to our own personal memories, we call it delusion or lying to ourself.  When we do it to someone else's story, it is slander.

Perhaps Pagels dredges up this "Mary was raped" lie because she feels it has the underscores Mary's situation as an oppressed woman.  It supposedly shows God bringing good out of evil.  While this interpretation may theologically redeem the slander, Empire can easily utilize it like an opiate, excusing its own evil.  "Too bad this happened to you, but think of our new baby!"  

If we want to hear what the story means when not whitewashed by Empire, coming from the mouth of an actual oppressed woman, we might listen to abolitionist and former slave, Sojourner Truth.  In 1851, she stated that Christ came "from God and a woman.  Man had nothing to do with him."  In other words, the Virgin Birth separates Jesus from patriarchy.  It prevents any man from claiming to have brought him into the world.  Completely cut off from a male line, he has no inheritance, his bloodline comes through King David and Abraham by adoption.  According to the alternative exhumed by Pagels, the Empire, represented by a soldier, may claim parental rights over God.  Jesus isn't even fully Jewish, anymore, but half something else.  It makes Jesus white.  Now the Empire owns him.  The DNA would show it.

That's good news for Empires, at any rate.  Our own version of Empire, Modernity, has very effectively exercised paternity over God by basically reducing Jesus Christ to a harmless mascot while using his image as a cynical spiritual warrant for its regime of eco-cide, vivisection, exploitation, and domination.  Modernity sired a "historical Jesus," different from the One in the gospels, who only says and does what Modernity decides measures up to its criteria for "truth."  Just as Rome used the cross as a warning of what will happen to resisters, the effect of Pagels' story is to remind women on behalf of Empire: "your body, my choice."  "You will bring into the world what we make you bring into the world."    

It does not surprise me that Pagels has so much enthusiasm for this.  Her entire career has been an aggressive affirmation and articulation of the hold that Empire -- that is, Modernity -- has over Jesus Christ.  For her, the categories, methodologies, mentality, demands, and assumptions of Modernity determine who Jesus is.  Modernity thus  "liberates" Jesus from his own family, the community of his disciples, the Church.    

In the article she seems to try to move away from historicity and understand the stories more as stories, "They are not written simply as history; often they speak in metaphor.  We can take them seriously without taking everything literally," she says.  "I left Christianity behind," she relates, after having experienced one of its more toxic aberrations in particular church.  But compelled by "something powerful" she went back, "asking questions.  How were these stories written?  How do they affect us so powerfully?  They speak to a deep human longing for a sense of transcendence and spiritual experience.  For we can respond to the same story in more than one way.  As a historian, I question the literal truth of the virgin birth story.  But I still love the midnight service on Christmas Eve, where the story is gloriously told and sung as miracle."  So she balances her welding the machete of scientific method with a  saccharine sentimentality.  

I get the impression she believes these stories are mainly entertainment, spectacle, written for what kind of feelings they produce.  They can't possibly be about God; it always has to be about what we want and what we feel.  Such is the Modern view of everything.  It's all about us, me.   

Uh, no.  I realize that Pagels merely reflects the confusion, chaos, and compromise  that hobbles churches this time of year.  But these invented reimaginings of the story tell us nothing about Jesus, God, the world, or us.  They only push the empty, novel, desperate ideas of the inventors.  They are certainly not worth a trip to church to hear about.

I'm sorry Pagels had a bad experience in some church somewhere.  It does not justify her for poisoning our stories with such malicious nonsense.  I say, let the stories shine in the radical, deeply subversive, highly transformational glory they have without her redactions.  Pagels appears to be too thoroughly indoctrinated into the ideology of our own Empire to see that.

+++++++              

Cardiology and Ecclesiology.

I've had three cardiologists, not counting the one who put a stent in my Right Coronary Artery (whom I barely remember because I was kind of out of it).  I now visit my current cardiologist regularly, but thankfully now infrequently.  Generally, I do whatever they say to do.  I take whatever medications they say to take.  I eat and avoid eating according to their instructions (more or less).  Indeed, a good percentage of my daily behavior revolves around this advice.  I trust my cardiologist to set me on the right path to avoid another Myocardial Infarction ("heart attack") and thus stay physically functioning within acceptable parameters on this planet.

I do not "do my own research" beyond what I need to know to ask the right questions.  I most certainly do not dismiss my cardiologist's advice or orders as the biased product of some corrupt elite, and follow instead my own theories, feelings, and desires.  

(A friend of mine did this.  He had a heart attack and bypass surgery, and followed his cardiologist's advice for years, until he attended a seminar with a Dr. Atkins where he got the idea that it wasn't about the cholesterol at all, but carbohydrates.  So he changed his behavior back to regular fried bacon and eggs, but no bread....  Soon thereafter he had such a massive Myocardial Infarction that he was dead before he hit the ground.)

These days I hear a lot about people who reject this or that orthodoxy as hopelessly corrupted by the agenda of the "elite," with no purpose other than to keep them in control and increasing in wealth at our expense.  Experts, science, peer review, fact checking, scholarship, indeed anyone who went to college or got an advanced degree in anything all fall under suspicion as fatally tainted by "wokeness," a word they use to lie about some arbitrary philosophy which expresses the elite's power.

This perspective has always lurked in the Church, especially in Protestantism, but I notice it becoming more prominent today.  Protestantism inherently contains a "do your own research" strain that thinks of faith as a private relationship between God and each individual, and any person's interpretation of the Bible is as legitimate as any other.  Some now consider having gone to seminary a handicap for ministers, especially if this hifalutin knowledge tells people what they don't want to hear.  We have had people relying on charismatic influencers rather than accredited and ordained pastors for decades now.

We don't just see this on the populist right, but it infuses the thinking of "Progressives" as well.  Consider this quote, attributed to liberal icon Barbara Brown Taylor: "What if the church invited people to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe?"  She goes on to basically say that the church's job consists of blessing people for what they are already doing in the world.  Thing is, if my cardiologists had that approach to their work I'd be dead.  I can't think of anything more horrifying than that my cardiologist would pay much attention to "what I already know" about my heart, which is next to nothing.  Why would I waste my time listening to people "tell what they already know of God" based, no doubt, on their own research or experience?  A lot of people are "already doing in the world" perfectly awful things for which we should most certainly not bless them.

In my experience, Presbyterians have such a deficient ecclesiology that it gets easily overwhelmed by influences from a culture dominated by the values, practices, and structures of Modernity.  We reflexively despise authority, suspect "religion," and devalue the gathering of believers, as if these were unconscionable restraints and restrictions on our individual freedom to do as we please.  They get in the way of one's "personal relationship with Jesus," a contagion we contracted from Evangelical influencers.  

We have forgotten the purpose of the Church.  Therefore, unless we just abandon it altogether (as much of the West is doing), we have to dream up some reason for its existence that makes sense to us.  It seems like the Church only becomes intelligible to Modernity as a social club, an educational institution, a cadre of activists, an ethnic enclave, a community center, a place to receive spiritual comfort or moral advice, or a nostalgic anachronism.  Some of these activities may relate to the Church's actual identity as Christ's Body, but all of them are derivative and secondary.  

The Church is where people, through worship and mission, discipleship and repentance, participate in the means of grace -- the Word, Sacraments, and prayer -- and so come into obedience and conformity with Jesus Christ and acquire the Holy Spirit.  

The Church therefore has a specific task requiring particular tools, expertise, practices, stories, and rituals.  It teaches a lifestyle.  It has this in common with cardiology -- and frankly any institution (another bad word) that has a purpose, from a bowling league to a Spanish class to a dance troupe to a string quartet.    

(One town I heard about had a group called the Quilting Club.  Originally, they  actually made quilts, discussed quilting technique, shared fabrics, and distributed quilts to needy families.  But over time, the subsequent generations became less interested in quilts.  They didn't have the time and the specialized knowledge was lost.  But they were still friends.  So the Quilting Club morphed into a group of women who met monthly for lunch.  Maybe they raised money to buy quilts to distribute at Christmas, but they really didn't have any interest in actual quilting.  They considered it quaint and quirky, a kind of secret among themselves, that they retained the name.  If you showed up and actually wanted to learn quilting, they wouldn't even know to whom to refer you.  In other words, a rock band calling itself "The Cardiologists" is unlikely to help me lower my blood pressure.  So a group calling itself a Christian church should be able to provide guidance and support for a journey of spiritual transformation, but don't necessarily count on it.)  

The thing about cardiology is that its practitioners share a common expertise and practice.  Though you might get some differences in personality, style, and approach around the edges, the basics of reading an EKG, making diagnoses, and prescribing medications are going to be largely the same whether I go to one in New Jersey or Germany, no matter what medical school they attended, or what book they read last week.  I can trust that they're not going to tell me that something they got off the internet or heard on a podcast means that now my heart would be cool with my smoking, drinking more alcohol, consuming mass quantities of fat and salt, and sitting on the couch watching TV all day.  

I trust the same things of a shamanic healer or a practitioner of ayurvedic or Chinese medicine, a Chiropractor or a yoga instructor.  I expect them to know their stuff and honestly give me their insights and advice from within that tradition and community of knowledge.  I expect them to have expertise.      

What if people came to church with expectations like I have when I go to the cardiologist?  What if we could assume the Pastor of a Christian church to have  competence to teach someone the Way of Jesus in continuity and partnership with his followers of every age?  Jesus commands his disciples to make disciples, to teach people to follow him by taking on specific attitudes and behaviors.  If someone asks me a question about following Jesus' Way, I should be able to give them a straight answer based on my tradition, community, and experience.

I depend on my cardiologist to answer my questions.  I expect them to have some expertise and information that I do not have because I haven't had their training or their experience dealing with people in my situation.  I tire of the idea that we in the Church can't do anything more than just join people in their questions.   We're pretending like the subject matter at church doesn't really mean anything in particular or specific, that it's just a bunch of answerless questions we struggle with together to find our own personal answers.  Uh, no.  I go to my cardiologist with questions... but I want to go home with answers, and a plan of action.  People need to know we in the Church have ana answer to their questions and his Name is Jesus.  We have a diagnosis and we have prescribed remedies.  We need to say, "This is how we follow Jesus, we do this and this and this and this.  

(Like when a minister said to me they "struggle" with the words of the Baptismal Formula.  I, a presbytery Stated Clerk, replied, "Struggle all you want.  But when you do a Baptism, you need to use the words."  Not because the Book of Order says so, which it does.  But because Jesus says so, and the entire 2000 year tradition of Christianity says so.  It's not a matter of interpretation or innovation.  It's not something open to our questions.  It's a matter of simple obedience.  If we can't do what he says in this obvious and easy case, how will we do what he says when it is difficult, challenging, and ambiguous?)

Yes, I realized of course that the Bible has many different perspectives and approaches.  But my job as a Pastor, except in Bible study, is not to say, "Well, Paul says this, but maybe that wasn't really Paul, and Leviticus says this, but Isaiah says something different, and then Jesus says this in Mark but this in John, so basically take your pick and do what feels right to you."  The community and tradition have determined boundaries of interpretation.  These are not impermeable or unchanging, but they do give us guidance.  The deeper the tradition goes, the more we should respect it.  Ultimately, Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture has priority.  A community of disciples should have clearly articulated standards and preferred interpretations, based on the texts and on the shared experience of what works.  

And humility means that, unlike cardiology, it remains possible that our presentation of the Way of Jesus will not work for everyone.  In the end, the soul is not a physical organ like the heart.  It is not as subject to the rules of chemistry and physics.  Someone may simply do better on another path.  In this case we let people continue their search elsewhere; we do not try and adjust or adapt our path to the point of threatening its basic coherence and integrity, in order to accommodate them.  Zen teachers don't become Southern Baptists because that's what people who show up prefer.

(It reminds me of a book by Thomas Merton: The Waters of Siloe in which he recounts the history of the Cistercian Order.  The Cistercians' practice includes establishing monasteries in different places, starting with a few monks.  If the place thrives, they praise and thank God.  But if it does not thrive, they eventually decide to close up shop and move on to somewhere else.  (Jesus teaches something like this in Matthew 10:14.)  They do not try to adapt the practices that are constitutive to the Cistercian way by changing them to suit what will better attract adherents in specific locales.  (Jesus also makes this point in Mark 4:1-20.  The sower doesn't change the seed to suit the different kinds of soil.  It thrives or it doesn't.)  

Basically, I hope for a Church that knows what it's doing and does it with confidence, and humility.  But does it, and has the integrity to share it with and teach it to those who ask.

+++++++