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Watched the Carlton Pearson movie 'Come Sunday' last night. Interesting story although the film itself was quite dry. If I didn't have an interest in the material I would've checked out early and went right online to get the story.

Without giving away the ending, the choice he ultimately made and the 'trauma' he experienced, the voice of God, was not new. New to him maybe and, considering his position and prominence, a threat to the world in which he lived, but the subject matter, the controversy, was not new. Perhaps in the time in which we live it is in a different context as is all history but the 'shocking' conclusion he drew was not new in the annals of church history.

It is our lack of awareness of this history that is so detrimental to so many, especially those in leadership, who 'feel' as if somehow they are special, have a special relationship with the Creator, and this far too often leads not to humility but to a heightened sense of self and celebrity follows.

The beauty of being human, and the beauty of church history, is that none of us know for certain. This is not the relativistic believe what you want but an understanding that while there is a 'core' of the faith there is a point at which we cannot be absolutely 100% certain that the expression of faith or our understanding of it is right.

Using, weakly, the speed of light as a metaphor:

Starting with the Bible and the history of the Church's interpretation and/or understanding of the same as 'X' and our collective body of believers as 'Y' there comes a point where we start to splinter. Jesus is more or less the '0' point where X and Y meet and the attempt to explain, understand and live out after '0' unfolds along the curve.

Diversity, critical mass, enters the picture as the 'X' gets larger and at some point there is not enough energy, mental power, to make the leap to the speed of light. The speed of light, i.e. faith, exists but to cross the threshold requires us to accept faith as the datum and the rest of our pursuit is trying to understand the 'how' of that datum.

But the point is this: we have choices. I am moving away from the punitive understanding of the atonement and gravitating toward the more Eastern Orthodox emphasis of which atonement, and substitution, is wrapped up in a larger perspective and is not a 'pharmaceutical' approach to the faith.

Those who hold such a few can, and do, judge EO as wrong, heretical even, as the EO do to Protestants. There are divisions, obviously, within Protestantism as we well as within EO itself (the churches in Africa, for example). But there is no one body who can say 'this is wrong' and bring all into the fold.

The closest we have as I see it is Catholicism and the hierarchical structure from the Pope down. It is institutional. But we still have choices. I don't have to be Catholic. Or even as a Catholic, I would assume, there are various options within the Church which don't require fully leaving or being considered as having left the faith.

Something like that...

On a personal note...

While I theologize all day long, preoccupied as my mind is with this stuff, my personal life is a wreck. Don't get me wrong, comparatively I've got it pretty good so this may sound like whining (and it is probably a sign of being ungrateful) but it is my reality.

Choices made years ago - literally - are still impacting in a very real way our lives today. Drowning in debt. Ok, maybe not drowning, but debt enough that home repairs are a luxury and we are in the hoping (as in 'the house doesn't cave in') to be able to afford to do so in the future.

School loans looming larger than the amount owed on our home.

Retirement? What is that?

Grandchildren's education?

While we are sustaining that is what it is: we are sustaining and in that regard have it good.

So while this theology is a pursuit of truth whether it is wrestling with to overcome lack of belief or if it is trying to find a voice for that which I believe my hope is that while this pursuit is happening it is impact, in a greater way, the reality in which I live.

This is where hope comes in, not in the sense of a 'future heaven' (which, by and large, is a cartoon version of the Biblical witness for most) where all our problems will be gone but in the sense of a get out of self and do for others mode, allowing the cares of this world, self-created or other, to be secondary on our minds, to cease worrying and to allow our heavenly Father to provide these things for us as He does for the birds of the field.

Sounds great, right? 

And if in my head I am finding peace, am I finding peace in my heart? Or have I, as has been my historical record, safeguarded my heart with an intellectual block, protecting rather than surrendering it?

Heresy

Pretty much...

Giving Voice to The Word

Sometimes revelation comes in subtle ways as if what I've been digesting is slowly burrowing its way through the muck and it finally finds Me there. At that point I realize that what I'm after is allowing the Word that has been planted there to be free and find expression.

That can be in the form of kindness, compassion, a hug or even just a smile.

But my struggle is giving Voice to that Word. It longs to be free. This is why we quote Scripture. It expresses what we wish to say in a fashion much better than we can ever formulate. From the outside, however, it may not mean the same thing as when we speak the Word it is packed with experience, with spiritual struggles, with our relationship with the text. For us there is a context and when we use that verse, that passage, that term, we are packing it full of meaning.

The flip side of that is the struggle to understand and then, once tasting of that understanding, we seek to give expression to what we've found and, ultimately, to get it out not only for our understanding but to share with others what we've found.

"Our food, whether fish or bread or any other kind of nourishment, is changed into human blood, into the person who consumes it. But in this case quite the opposite happens. The bread of life Himself changes the person who feeds on Him, transforms him and assimilates him to Himself." Cabasilas, The Life of Christ, 597.

These words hit home and tapped into that which I feel I am missing. Church, lately, feels like showtime and while enjoyable it is not enough. Something has been missing. It is not the church's fault. It is my hunger and it is my duty to seek out how to fill this hunger with real food so that when I do attend church I am not coming to get but, having already gotten, to give back, to share.

The other thing that hit me while reading this text is that Christ bore all things human unto Himself, we too are to do the same. We are to absorb, to carry one another, and to bring it into ourselves to lay it before Him Who is in us to transform it as He Himself transformed what he assumed. 

The madness continues...

At church Sunday and the message is proclaimed early:

"God has a Son Who He sent to Earth 2000 years ago to die on a criminal's cross for sinners like you and me to give us the opportunity to have right standing with a holy and just God whose holiness and whose righteousness demanded punishment to your sin and mine but through His Son Jesus dying on that cross he became sin for us and died not only for us but as us but made it possible for us to have peace with God."

While I cannot necessarily argue that this is wrong, as such, I can state that it is this emphasis, distortion even, that so troubles me. This is the message proclaimed in the non-denominational word, that truncated 'essence' of what the Church as a whole established in its formative years of the 4th and 5th century.

'But...' one may argue. That was the emperor's doing and not really what Jesus was saying. What was He saying? We, in the 20th century, think we know better because we have the Bible and the Holy Spirit. So too did the early Church.

'But...' one may argue. The lay congregation was not able to read and so the 'educated' elite interpreted in a fashion in which they hoarded power, eliminated women from the mix and got into bed with the political powers that be.

While that is certainly part of the story, is it that much different than today? After all, the 'revival' mentality of the Church today, at least in America, is roughly the same age as the time frame in which the early creeds were established. Are we not headed down the same path? Are not 'denominations' formed out of the non-denominations among us? How else do we explain the plethora of different churches competing for one another, cannibalizing each other over the minutiae of the very same fetters of tradition and doctrinal debate from which they claim to be free?

And, I would imagine, it is this mess, this 'truncated' explanation of the Gospel, that troubles unbelievers and falls on deaf ears or leads to further rebellion. Not because they are sinners and don't get it but because it does little to explain how this is Good News other than it taps into the guilt and shame and gives us an apparent out, an easy fix to assuage those feelings.

But it is not enough. At least for me.