On my book shelf I have, in a clear plastic square box, a dirty baseball. On the baseball appears a date scrawled in ballpoint pen: "4/26/08." On that date, my son, playing for his High School team, hit that ball for his first home-run. I saw this happen; the game took place in Perth Amboy. He gave me the ball.
Thus this particular baseball, otherwise no different from millions of other baseballs, became unique in its connection to a particular event on a particular date at a particular place. It is not the same as an ordinary baseball. And the fact that my son died thirteen years later, makes this particular ball even more significant to me. It makes me sadly reflect on how things might have gone differently.
This mythic power of the particular flows through the sport of baseball. At every MLB game, a person called an "authenticator" sits in the front row. Whenever something happens of any significance, the authenticator takes the object -- usually a ball or a bat -- and marks it, setting it aside, distinguishing it from every other similar object. Thus we can verify that this particular ball was a player's first major league hit, or hundredth home-run, or unassisted triple play.
The Church has from the beginning found the power and significance in particular objects and sites connecting us to Jesus and his followers. We call the objects "relics," and, although it got out of hand for a while, I wonder about the Reformation's wisdom in purging this aspect of the faith altogether. For we do experience special holiness in some places and surrounding some things. The world is not flat but textured. When I visited places like the Holy Land and Iona this became apparent. Special things and places transport and connect us. They transcend and unify time. They ground us in a common life and tradition reassuring us that someone didn't just make up this thing out of their imagination yesterday as an expression of their own ego. It has lasted and will last. It has been prayed and thought over for generations. We can depend on it and participate in that stream ourselves.
We have a faith rooted in the Incarnation. It keeps us from dissolving into a gnostic fog where everything is neutral and meaningless, a blank slate onto which the Empire might impose its preferred meaning by force. God does not remain a mere amorphous idea; God literally becomes flesh and dwells among us (John 1:14) in Jesus Christ. I don't have much regard for attempts to nail down the details of the "historical Jesus;" but the fact that he existed in history as an actual human being remains absolutely essential.
The closest we have to an authentic record of what Jesus said and did appears in the New Testament. The New Testament itself acquires holiness from its unique and authoritative witness to him, as well as from the history of its use by faithful communities for nearly two millennia. The text, even with all its variants (which themselves testify to authenticity) constitutes and shapes the faith of those who follow him in every age, ie. the Church. I would no more advocate changing or fixing, adding to or subtracting from those words than I would intentionally scrub the dirt off my son's baseball, or scribble something else onto it, or relegate it to a garage sale, or substitute a newer, "better" ball for it.
A couple of years ago I attended a worship service at a Presbyterian church on a day when they celebrated the Sacrament of Baptism. When the time for this sacred ritual arrived, with the proud parents standing by, and the minister, holding the baby, begins to enact this ancient ceremony by pouring water on the baby's head three times and reciting the words of the Lord Jesus from Matthew 28, connecting us and this child to Jesus and all his followers of every race, gender, nation, and language, over whom these very words were solemnly recited, century after century... and she didn't. She made up her own words, apparently. I don't even remember them. Does it matter?
Now, I know the arguments. I have heard them all my career. "Don't be so superstitious." "Don't be so literal." "It's not about the words, it's about the faith of the people." "It's not a magical incantation." "Isn't it better if I express myself than repeat some old words no one understands?" "The historical Jesus didn't say those words anyway." "Calling God 'father' props up the patriarchy." "I don't want to be reminded of what a jerk my father was." And so on. All of which sounds very Protestant and Modern, enlightened and progressive, liberated and relevant, forward thinking and trying to appeal to the young.
But instead of connecting this child to Jesus and immersing them in Jesus' life by doing what he says to do, changing the words of this ceremony really makes it all about... the minister. To use a Buddhist image, it focused on the finger and forgot the moon to which the finger supposedly points. The child, rather than getting immersed in the Name of God, rather than sharing in the blessed continuity of a sacred tradition, rather than participating in an act of humility and obedience which embodies and exemplifies a life of trust and faith, simply got dunked in the same ego-centric, DIY, "have it your way," consumer-driven, inauthentic/counterfeit/fake/flat/disenchanted experience that will characterize their existence everywhere else in this world. Instead of Jesus' words, we heard one person's arbitrary preference. When a minister blithely decides to ditch the words of Jesus and substitute "better" words of their own composition, it is an act of egocentricity and control. The minister thus functions as a tool of an Empire that wants more than anything to separate us from the Creator, and coax us to have things our way instead.
In other words, fascism: one person rules and claims authority over others. "We will not do this Jesus' way, we will do it my better way." The authenticity is determined not by the witness to a particular event, not by humble obedience to a transcendent other, or even a venerable tradition, but gets dictated by the one who grabs the authority. Empire imposes its regime, negating the particular, reframing things and places according to however it perceives its needs at the moment. When you replace Jesus' words with your own you affirm that you, not Jesus, are Lord. You claim the authority. Like Caesar. The steadfast lifting up of the authentic and the particular which Empire does not define or control thus becomes an act of resistance against Empire.
If I ever end up leaving the Presbyterian Church it will be because of this kind of thing. Joni Mitchell sang about how we're paving paradise to put up a parking lot, referring exactly to this destruction, so endemic to Modernity, of the authentic for the sake of the... what? Convenient? Profitable? Popular? Useful? Comfortable? Marketable? Gratifying? Ideologically correct? Relevant? "Perfect"? Whatever the Empire decides has value. The same attitude destroys mountains to get at and extract the coal under them. The same attitude inflicts vivisection, euthanasia, slavery, and torture on the living entities. The same attitude says we "destroyed the village in order to save it." It epitomizes the nihilistic entropy of Modernity to reduce everything to what appeals to my desire, my fears, my ego, my quest for money, fame, and power. "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?"
(I hesitate even to add that inventing your own baptismal formula explicitly violates Book of Order W-3.0407 mandating the use of Jesus' words at all baptisms. Because of course in the opinion of some this makes me a heartless and backward-thinking legalistic rules-nazi who just doesn't get what people want today. It reminds me of that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy has to choose from among a table full of cups the authentic one of Jesus. The villain chooses a pretty, gaudy, jewel-encrusted chalice he prefers because it suits his idea of the Son of God... and promptly dissolves into dust. Indy chooses the battered and worn one that looks like it might have been used by a Judean peasant. I hope to always care more about what Jesus wants than what people today want.)
And all this goes as well for the Words of Institution at the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. We have a bit more leeway here because the New Testament has several different versions, but they all share Jesus breaking the bread and saying "This is my Body," and sharing the wine with "This is my blood." This speaking and acting, with the surrounding prayers and the congregational context, sets this particular bread and this particular cup of wine (or juice) apart, changing them and those who share in them into a sacrament of Jesus' living Presence. They become different from ordinary bread, different even from what they started as. Again, the words matter. In conjunction with specific actions, they do the work of authenticating particular objects and lifting them up as mediators of the Creator's grace.
I do not oppose change. In fact, I have always enthusiastically advocated for changes that would free the Church of excrescences, adulterations, and deletions resulting from its centuries of suffocating entanglement with Empire. The Church needs to recover its deepest identity as a witness to and agent of the liberation we find at the core of Scripture, beginning with the Exodus, and finally revealed in Jesus Christ. Hence, we Presbyterians hold to the motto semper reformanda, affirming that the Creator is always reforming the Church according to the Word, Jesus Christ. Change therefore does not mean the arbitrary or random adoption of this or that fad or trend. Still less does it mean expressing our personal preference, or that of some leader. Legitimate change moves us closer to Jesus Christ, it moves us along in our evolution from being dominated by ego, to having our Essence emerge within us. In real change we become not what our ego wants, but what our Creator wants, and has already installed within us.
Change needs to lead us closer to an authentic connection to Jesus, and further away from Empire's agenda of flattening and relativizing the world so as to impose loyalty to itself as the main thing. The hegemony and domination of Empire over us starts with and gets expressed as the hegemony and domination of ego within us. But the rule of the Creator within and among us has to start with this humble wonder and gratitude over the One who becomes flesh to dwell among us, whose living Presence remains mediated through the words of Scripture, and the places and artifacts that are particularly charged, and indeed, all creation.
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