This is a special edition to the Feminist Theology blog,originally written for and posted on my personal blog, but crossposted here at the suggestion of Janine, who wrote her reflection on the Baptism of Jesus before the violent events in Tucson unfolded.
I didn't preach today but I did go to church. I went wondering what words of comfort or wisdom I would hear to help me understand the violence, anger, and insanity, that fed the shootings in Tucson on Saturday. I know this shooting feels particularly personal to me because I lived there for a time and I have been to several events with Congresswoman Giffords. I hold her in high regard. When I heard the news yesterday I was stunned and profoundly saddened.
Having lived there, I know first-hand the propensity toward anger, prejudice, and violence that exists. Alarmingly, these have been increasing over the last few years,particularly in that region of Southern Arizona. It was disturbingly high and chronic in the small community I lived in south of Tucson. While it's true that members of the congregation carried concealed weapons which were always a concern, there were more pronounced issues to contend with. These included chronic, unresolved anger,a pronounced sense of entitlement, a high tolerance for inappropriate acting-out without consequences, and a higher than average level of depression and substance abuse. All of these were further fueled by systemic prejudice and fear.
On this Sunday morning when we gathered to celebrate the feast day of the baptism of Jesus, what sense could we make of the violence yesterday? Eighteen shot, six dead including a Judge and a nine year old girl, and a loved Congresswoman in critical condition, shot point blank in the head.
We didn't baptize anyone in the church I went to today, nor did we renew our baptismal vows, nor did the preacher talk about the meaning of baptism. It was a fine sermon., for another time. It just was not what I needed to hear on this day, the day after that tragedy.
Perhaps, if we had taken some time reflect on the Baptismal Rite, I may have found a bit of what I was hoping for, some understanding, some hope, some accountability?
Yes, accountability.
I know a young man shot these people...but we will fail to learn from this if we minimize this to him and his apparent “mental instability.”
We are a people who have gone astray. We are a people who have forgotten how to live in kindness. We are a people who have forgotten what it means to sin.
Then the Celebrant asks the following questions of the candidates who
can speak for themselves, and of the parents and godparents who speak
on behalf of the infants and younger children.
Question Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?
Answer I renounce them.
Question Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?
Answer I renounce them.
Question Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?
Answer I renounce them.
Question Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior?
Answer I do.
Question Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love?
Answer I do.
Question Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?
Answer I do.
Do we really understand what we are saying here? What sin is? What evil is? Do we even really believe that there are such things as sin and evil? Or do we think the Church made them up just to make us feel ashamed and submissive?
As a society we tend to relegate sin to a set of cultural bound moral behaviors. This complicates and minimizes sin because these cultural bound moral behavior(s) deemed "sinful" change over time. Take divorce and remarriage, for example. The Church has enforced the idea that marriage is forever, regardless of how unhealthy a marriage is. The Church has said that divorce is a sin and remarriage is also a sin. In some churches today divorced and remarried people cannot receive Holy Communion.
Sometimes a marriage needs to end because the marriage is causing brokenness and harm. Sometimes marriages need to be worked on, for each party to examine the brokenness and work for reparation and reconciliation and forgiveness. Sometimes we just have to live our marriage vows, to love faithfully through good times and tough times, to work toward wholeness of self and other, instead behaving in ways that cause further brokenness.
The thing is, sin is about behavior - any behavior that causes harm to another and produces broken relationships with God, self, and other human beings. Looked at this way, as broken relationship, we can redirect our efforts from reducing sin to something it is not and toward what sin is.
I tend to define sin as any behavior that causes brokenness between God, self, and others. By this I mean anything that causes me to become broken with God, or broken with myself, or broken with others. Evil is the root that causes that brokenness. Evil is the force that tempts us. Evil is the power that draws us and pulls at us, distorting how we think and see, fooling us into self-deception, encouraging us to act upon self-deprecation, or grandiosity, arrogance, entitlement, and or violence. Evil is real and so is sin. Just look at how broken our world is. How lost we have become. How even basic civility has been pushed aside, how we have lost the ability to assume the best in others.
As a Christian I believe that we humans have souls. It's even possible that there is a “communal soul,” of sorts, that forms in congregations, in communities, in countries. The soul, individually and corporately, responds to how we nourish it and care for it, or neglect it. If we feed the soul with care and compassion we will show care and compassion to others. If we feed the soul with anger and mean-spirited words, we will become angry and mean spirited people. Yes, words matter.
Perhaps that is why the baptismal rite has the entire community listen to those taking these vows and then asks the community to respond with their support:
Celebrant Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?
People We will.
We are all responsible. We all need to renounce evil and embrace compassion, renounce sin, and embrace love, renounce fear and embrace trust, renounce anger and embrace hope. We need the redemption that can only come from turning away from behaviors that cause brokenness in the world, with God/self/others, and turning toward reconciliation. We cannot fool ourselves into thinking this is something we can do on our own - but we can do it with God's help.
In the Episcopal Church the baptismal covenant reminds us of this:
Celebrant Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the
prayers?
People I will, with God’s help.
Celebrant Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
People I will, with God’s help.
Celebrant Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
People I will, with God’s help.
Celebrant Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
People I will, with God’s help.
Celebrant Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
People I will, with God’s help.
So, here is what I wanted to hear: we are all accountable for the sins and evils of the world we live, including the violence yesterday. We are accountable by things we have done and things we have not done. We are accountable by participating, in any way, in acts that have caused brokeness instead of acts that seek wholeness. We all need to turn and return to God, to seek absolution and reconciliation, and to move forward - with God's help - to live as God would have us live.
And, perhaps, with that, turning to God and with God's help living as God would have us, we will find hope for our souls.
Crossposted on SeekingAuthenticVoice
Showing posts with label Baptism of Jesus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baptism of Jesus. Show all posts
Monday, January 10, 2011
Saturday, January 8, 2011
First Sunday after Epiphany: Baptism of Jesus
A reflection on the Propers for the First Sunday after the Epiphany, the Baptism of Jesus: Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:13-17 by Janine Goodwin, M.A., M.S. Ed.
“See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.”
These new things were strange to the people who first heard them. If we set aside the familiarity of the readings, they are still strange to us now. These passages are not new in the sense that we have never heard of them, but they are most likely new in the sense that they still challenge us to look outside our preconceptions and ask what uncomfortable changes we may need to make if we want to follow Jesus. They remind me of a remark made by G. K. Chesterton, a man with whom I disagree on more points than I have time to discuss, but with whom I must agree on this point: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and not been tried.”
Speaking in a world full of rulers jostling for territory and wealth, Isaiah shows us not a ruler who will conquer all the other rulers, but a servant more concerned with justice than with power, one who will not exercise force but who will not rest until the necessary work is complete.
Jesus goes outside the religious and political power structure of his time to accept a cleansing that is not for ritual purity, as was the custom, but is a commitment to act righteously and a preparation for a coming judgment; he takes this strange bath at the hands of a ragged outsider who lives in the wilderness and makes strange prophecies.
The passage from Acts is the conclusion of a story in which Peter experiences a strange and repulsive dream and a stranger event in waking life, both of them pointing to the need for the young church to give up its ideas about what customs are acceptable and what are, welcome people from very different cultures, and find a way to include them. Instead of forcing people to change in order to be included, the early church finds itself called to change in order to accept the people the Holy Spirit sends to them.
In these scriptures, God is indeed doing new things, and as usual, is not doing the new things most of us may want. We tend to imagine new things that will make our lives easy, secure, and contented and give us positive change without requiring loss or sacrifice, or we become nostalgic about a past that we see as simpler and better than the present. In both these cases, we are looking for a time when everyone will be happy, safe, and healthy and there are no looming disasters or worrisome uncertainties, forgetting that no such time has ever existed anywhere. Total security in this life is a fantasy that can only be maintained by putting a lot of energy into denial about the past and magical thinking about the future, and our consumer culture is more than ready to use that fantasy to sell us things that are supposed to fix everything and give us trouble-free, uniformly positive change while reminding us of how tasty Grandma’s cookies were. We can’t, however, follow that fantasy without tuning out the messages of today's readings.
Prophets like Isaiah are not just noble souls who give us words to live by (or to read sonorously in beautiful places and then forget); they are also radicals who were spurned and often killed by the power structures of their times. No one knew whether the prophets of their times are true or false, which leaves us with the dreadful responsibility of discernment and the lifelong task of becoming people who can discern responsibly and honestly, because not every person who sounds strange to us is a prophet, but a true prophet is always going to sound strange. The people making prophetic utterances right now may be fakes or faddists. They may be mentally unstable, and they could still be right even if they are; I have long suspected that our culture’s fear of people with mental illness and other mental disabilities is largely due to the fact that such people often have the ability to see uncomfortable truths and speak them far too clearly for anyone’s comfort. True prophets, the ones speak audacious things out of a deeper sanity that challenges the prevailing insanities of a given culture, make enormous demands on us if we take them seriously. Prophets are very dangerous people; the true ones are more dangerous to our security and our self-satisfaction than the false ones.
Jesus, in today’s Gospel, does the one thing that Jesus does consistently: he defies expectation. He practices his faith by going to a wild prophet and accepting a strange rite. He risks being seen as wrong. God’s voice names him as a beloved son, and sets him on the road to a ministry of healing, prophecy, and teaching that will lead to crucifixion because his words frighten both his own people and the empire that conquered them. He goes to John, an outsider who has taken a traditional ritual in a new direction, a step that would cause some present-day churches to dismiss him as a heretic and others to begin a long and careful process of study before they would consider joining in the changes the wild man is making down by the river. John is also a prophet who calls for repentance and talks of a coming kingdom and a judgment, a prophet who will be imprisoned because he confronts a local ruler about his personal ethics and killed because of a family squabble. John is not a safe person to know. Neither is Jesus.
Peter’s radiantly beautiful statement of faith comes between two struggles; his struggle with God and himself over what parts of his faith tradition are unchangeable and which ones must be changed, and his struggle with the church over the same issue once he is comes to believe what he is hearing and seeing. He is convinced, he brings the prophetic word to his companions in faith, and he faces condemnation, argument, and the real risk of exclusion should the wider church refuse what he brings to them.
These are difficult stories if we want comfort and continuity. They are calls to responsibility even if we want to make changes in our own lives and in the life of the world. The kind of change and repentance the prophets and Jesus call for are not easy; they require painful honesty, hard work, and sacrifice. They will lead to opposition. On the private level, people trying to make positive changes in their own lives frequently encounter opposition from those close to them when the change becomes apparent and challenges the comfort level of others. People trying to make a difference at larger levels are met with even more opposition and frequently hear that change is impossible—as though the choices we make or fail to make were not changing the world around us at every moment. It is hard to step forth in faith and trust God to lead us through change. It may seem easier to cling to what we have, yet what we cling to may also be lost.
This is the good news for feminist theology, for those working for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church, for all who believe that the churches can and will survive in a shifting world: that God is indeed telling us that new things are possible, that the outsider and the prophet are friends of Jesus, that institutions can be open to looking at tradition differently, respecting it and seeing what more needs to be done. We need humility, reason, respect for tradition, and clear thinking; we need to make responsible choices and be ready to face opposition. We need most of all to trust that we will be led into truth, to pray, and to listen for the voice of the One who calls us in prophecy, in dream, and in daily life.
“See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.”
These new things were strange to the people who first heard them. If we set aside the familiarity of the readings, they are still strange to us now. These passages are not new in the sense that we have never heard of them, but they are most likely new in the sense that they still challenge us to look outside our preconceptions and ask what uncomfortable changes we may need to make if we want to follow Jesus. They remind me of a remark made by G. K. Chesterton, a man with whom I disagree on more points than I have time to discuss, but with whom I must agree on this point: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and not been tried.”
Speaking in a world full of rulers jostling for territory and wealth, Isaiah shows us not a ruler who will conquer all the other rulers, but a servant more concerned with justice than with power, one who will not exercise force but who will not rest until the necessary work is complete.
Jesus goes outside the religious and political power structure of his time to accept a cleansing that is not for ritual purity, as was the custom, but is a commitment to act righteously and a preparation for a coming judgment; he takes this strange bath at the hands of a ragged outsider who lives in the wilderness and makes strange prophecies.
The passage from Acts is the conclusion of a story in which Peter experiences a strange and repulsive dream and a stranger event in waking life, both of them pointing to the need for the young church to give up its ideas about what customs are acceptable and what are, welcome people from very different cultures, and find a way to include them. Instead of forcing people to change in order to be included, the early church finds itself called to change in order to accept the people the Holy Spirit sends to them.
In these scriptures, God is indeed doing new things, and as usual, is not doing the new things most of us may want. We tend to imagine new things that will make our lives easy, secure, and contented and give us positive change without requiring loss or sacrifice, or we become nostalgic about a past that we see as simpler and better than the present. In both these cases, we are looking for a time when everyone will be happy, safe, and healthy and there are no looming disasters or worrisome uncertainties, forgetting that no such time has ever existed anywhere. Total security in this life is a fantasy that can only be maintained by putting a lot of energy into denial about the past and magical thinking about the future, and our consumer culture is more than ready to use that fantasy to sell us things that are supposed to fix everything and give us trouble-free, uniformly positive change while reminding us of how tasty Grandma’s cookies were. We can’t, however, follow that fantasy without tuning out the messages of today's readings.
Prophets like Isaiah are not just noble souls who give us words to live by (or to read sonorously in beautiful places and then forget); they are also radicals who were spurned and often killed by the power structures of their times. No one knew whether the prophets of their times are true or false, which leaves us with the dreadful responsibility of discernment and the lifelong task of becoming people who can discern responsibly and honestly, because not every person who sounds strange to us is a prophet, but a true prophet is always going to sound strange. The people making prophetic utterances right now may be fakes or faddists. They may be mentally unstable, and they could still be right even if they are; I have long suspected that our culture’s fear of people with mental illness and other mental disabilities is largely due to the fact that such people often have the ability to see uncomfortable truths and speak them far too clearly for anyone’s comfort. True prophets, the ones speak audacious things out of a deeper sanity that challenges the prevailing insanities of a given culture, make enormous demands on us if we take them seriously. Prophets are very dangerous people; the true ones are more dangerous to our security and our self-satisfaction than the false ones.
Jesus, in today’s Gospel, does the one thing that Jesus does consistently: he defies expectation. He practices his faith by going to a wild prophet and accepting a strange rite. He risks being seen as wrong. God’s voice names him as a beloved son, and sets him on the road to a ministry of healing, prophecy, and teaching that will lead to crucifixion because his words frighten both his own people and the empire that conquered them. He goes to John, an outsider who has taken a traditional ritual in a new direction, a step that would cause some present-day churches to dismiss him as a heretic and others to begin a long and careful process of study before they would consider joining in the changes the wild man is making down by the river. John is also a prophet who calls for repentance and talks of a coming kingdom and a judgment, a prophet who will be imprisoned because he confronts a local ruler about his personal ethics and killed because of a family squabble. John is not a safe person to know. Neither is Jesus.
Peter’s radiantly beautiful statement of faith comes between two struggles; his struggle with God and himself over what parts of his faith tradition are unchangeable and which ones must be changed, and his struggle with the church over the same issue once he is comes to believe what he is hearing and seeing. He is convinced, he brings the prophetic word to his companions in faith, and he faces condemnation, argument, and the real risk of exclusion should the wider church refuse what he brings to them.
These are difficult stories if we want comfort and continuity. They are calls to responsibility even if we want to make changes in our own lives and in the life of the world. The kind of change and repentance the prophets and Jesus call for are not easy; they require painful honesty, hard work, and sacrifice. They will lead to opposition. On the private level, people trying to make positive changes in their own lives frequently encounter opposition from those close to them when the change becomes apparent and challenges the comfort level of others. People trying to make a difference at larger levels are met with even more opposition and frequently hear that change is impossible—as though the choices we make or fail to make were not changing the world around us at every moment. It is hard to step forth in faith and trust God to lead us through change. It may seem easier to cling to what we have, yet what we cling to may also be lost.
This is the good news for feminist theology, for those working for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church, for all who believe that the churches can and will survive in a shifting world: that God is indeed telling us that new things are possible, that the outsider and the prophet are friends of Jesus, that institutions can be open to looking at tradition differently, respecting it and seeing what more needs to be done. We need humility, reason, respect for tradition, and clear thinking; we need to make responsible choices and be ready to face opposition. We need most of all to trust that we will be led into truth, to pray, and to listen for the voice of the One who calls us in prophecy, in dream, and in daily life.
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