A friend sent me this quotation. Someone else wrote it to him. “I was a Roman Catholic boy. I married a Presbyterian/Baptist girl who tried to be a Roman Catholic, but the vaccination didn’t take. Right now I don’t know what I am. Doctrine, rigidity, superstitions have gotten in my way.” This is what I want to preach on this morning, because I have heard something like that many times. It is the main reason people turn away from religion — doctrine, rigidity, and superstitions.
First, a story to frame what I want to say. I saw a gem of a movie last week — “Higher Ground.” It starts with the protagonist, Corinne, as a nine-year-old girl in church. The pastor is conducting class, at the end of which he asks the children to close their eyes and raise their hand if they want to invite Jesus into their heart. Corinne does.
The film jumps ahead to when Corinne is a teen. That raised hand has long gone. She gets involved with Ethan, a rocker, gets pregnant, and they marry. They live a hectic, hand to mouth life in a band of would-be rock stars on the road. At one point, when a fight breaks out on their bus, the bus veers over the side of the road and plunges into a river. The band members escape out the back door as the bus is sinking. But what about the baby, who had been sleeping in a cooler? Corinne and Ethan dive back into the bus and frantically start opening coolers that are floating around. They do find the baby and get her out to dry land.
We jump ahead. Now Corinne and Ethan have joined a rigid, but heart-felt church. Its structure and boundaries are exactly what they need. They have found stability through a literal understanding of the Bible, and it brings them genuine happiness. In their house church gatherings they sing together and study the Bible under Pastor Bud; and this brings them into a close community where they blossom. They go on like this for years.
Another jump. Corinne has begun to question the restrictions of their faith. For instance, women are not allowed to instruct a man about matters of religion. The elders allow or disallow the women’s style of dress. Questioning is frowned upon. Ethan has no problem with their faith, which may account for why Corinne finds herself drawing away from him as well as the fellowship. Finally Corinne can no longer stand the limitations of their faith. Ethan and their three children will stay, so her decision to leave both Ethan and the church costs her a lot. In her last time together with the house church — people she still cares about — she speaks from her heart about why she is leaving. She does not blame them, or find fault with them in any way. She just cannot live that way any longer.
What will her next move be? We were given an intimation. During the period of her growing dissatisfaction, we saw her visit a liturgical church. It was empty at the time, but we saw her stand there gazing in wonder at stained glass windows, an altar with vestments, a communion rail, a pulpit, a baptismal font, an organ. The film invites us to draw our own conclusions.
As I interpreted the film, it wants to tell us that life, when we really live it, is a spiritual journey. Like molting creatures we are meant to shed the skins of our faith as they become too constricting. A given set of beliefs and practices stand us in very good stead for one season of our life. By that I mean they give us a solid base from which we can grow to a new level. Then we become stable at that new level, and reap the joy that stability brings. In time, though, inevitably, stability turns to stagnation. It is time to move on, and to the joy that brings.
This is where the church comes in. How does it see itself? Is it like a club that guarantees salvation to its members as long as they recite the doctrines, follow the rules and pay their dues? Or, very different, does it see itself as a resource for the spiritual life, which is the journey into mystery? Too often churches present themselves in the former guise. The emphasis is all on stability and harmony. Teaching and preaching spell out what lies on this side of the horizon, so to speak, rarely if ever encouraging us to look beyond, to explore the mystery, to move on.
If Corinne moved on to — let me call it a ‘resource’ church — she would be in a place that never tried to stunt her growth or waylay her on her journey. Its resources, whether of Word or Sacrament, would be there to support her during her seasons of stability and to sustain her during her seasons of journeying. She could move on, in other words, yet stay in place. A paradoxical kind of rooted freedom.
Now let’s think about the two readings — two stories. The one from Exodus is told as if it were history. Not so. No one knows the true facts of the Israelites’ journey across the wilderness; but over the years masters of the spiritual life used that journey to shape helpful stories. We could call them koans or parables. We could call them challenges to discover a hidden truth in life’s events. The beauty of a story lies in its ability to contain a wealth of meanings. Here, for instance, when the people are hungry, they think God hasn’t noticed, or has led them to this impasse with evil intent, or that God has abandoned them. The story says, NO! God is in your very midst. Open your eyes. See what God has provided. It isn’t history, it is a teaching for us and for all generations, one we can turn to in a wilderness of loss or grief or failure, or betrayal, feeling helpless to help ourselves.
This is exactly why Jesus told stories. Here he cast God as an unjust landowner, or at least that is how we see him. He paid those who worked one hour the same as he paid those who worked twelve hours. Again we have a story from which we can tease out a wealth of meanings. The one that lies just below the surface for me is that most of us identify with the 12-hour laborers, not the one-hour laborers. If we went through life feeling like a one-hour laborer, think how different our lives would be! How different our attitude toward God and our fellow creatures. Come to think of it, that might be the next stage of my journey — to practice thinking of myself as a one-hour laborer.
Let me come back to where we started. If our church dictated how we should understand these stories, that would hobble us. We might actually appreciate it for a while, because when it comes to exploring the meaning of the stories and symbols and sacraments of our faith, the church has a depth and breadth of understanding that far exceeds our own. But to dictate? The church cannot know where we are in our journey, and if it really wants to help us it needs to acknowledge that, and freely offer us every help and resource it can to move on. To do otherwise turns many people away from religion. Worse, it may leave them ignorant of the spiritual journey itself, with all the joy and vitality to be found on the way. Simone Weil, another spiritual master, who greatly influenced theologians in the last century, said this: whenever you are forced to choose between Jesus and truth, choose truth; for you will find in the end that it leads you back to him. I would just add this: back to Jesus, yes, but never to the end of the journey, for we can always be drawn one step nearer to God.
Tags: "higher Ground", doctrine, rigidity, spiritual journey, superstition
