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Repetition and A Non-Liturgical Liturgy
03/14/09 18:48 , Categories: Uncategorized In Mark 2:1-12, a passage we are all very familiar with, a paralyzed man is lowered down through a roof, interrupting Jesus' evening lecture. This disruption is pretty surprising in itself - these men dig through a roof! Jesus' response to this unexpected intrusion is equally surprising. As a lame person the paralytic would have been on the outskirts of the religious community, seen as unclean and ritually unfit to participate in the activities of the people of God because of perceived sins (the thought was he was lame he either suffered because of a sin he committed or a sin his parents committed). His friends, whoever they were, were so determined to have this gentleman have a face-to-face meeting with Jesus that they dug a whole in someone's roof in order to do this.
Jesus is equally surprising in that he takes this intrusion of an outsider to put the kingdom of God in full display. Rather than doing the simple thing and heal the paralytic, he first offers him forgiveness. This was an act only God could perform and a proclamation that would bring the paralytic back into the God's people. This is, in my reading of the text, the main problem for the Scribes (who are caught up protecting their institutions and prejudices), it is what creates the charge of blasphemy:
“Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”” (Mark 2:6-7 NRSV).
But to press the issue, Jesus goes ahead and heals the man as well. Then instead of having him stay for the rest of the evening chat Jesus sends him home (elsewhere I've likened this to a kind of missionary sending). Jesus took this lame man who had destroyed someone's roof, forgave his sin and offered him a new life by healing him. It's interesting also to see that there is nowhere mentioned anything about a particular "gospel" message being preached to the paralytic - the good news was this reconstitutions of this man's spiritual and physical well-being in a way that he could now be truly apart of the people of God.
Follow up:
No wonder Mark writes that the people, "were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”'
The Church's Ironic Gesture
I'd like to go back to, and emphasize, the role of the paralytic's friends. They are in my estimation playing the role of the church in the story. In other words, they sought to remove the obstacles in this man's way and bring him to Jesus. They weren't sure how Jesus would respond, or what he'd do to him, would he heal the man, turn him away, or be irritated at the interruption, etc.? But they took their chance, even to the point of doing something that from our point of view is pretty absurd. I mean how many of you would like to have someone dig a hole in your roof and low a man down into your dinner party, bible study, evening lecture with the latest and greatest philosophy teacher, etc.?
Often the church allows objects and positions to become the object of our belief. We can see that pastors, liturgy, certain styles of worship music, traditions, can take the place of belief for us. For instance, we don't have to believe, where belief means actually living out a changed reality, because the pastor believes for us. God for the church can easily become an intellectual crutch for us, someone who we don't really encounter in a way that our everyday living and doing is changed.
In modernity, God becomes intellectualized, privatized, so that what we do in our day to day life doesn't need to effect what we think about and believe. We go to church believing while we are there, that is we believe intellectually, but when we leave we are “practical atheists.” We don’t live the rest of the week like we really believe. Our faith is intellectualized to the point that we can critique social practice while engaging in that social practices. One example of this are those influenced by the "green movement" (which I support) who are critical of big cars, but who drive just as much or more in their smaller efficient vehicles than those with the gas guzzlers. Instead of asking, why own a car at all? Or why do I drive so much?Or how do I drastically cut down on my consumption?They intellectualize their passion for sustainability so that they don’t have to really believe in a way that would change their practice.
This is what theologian Peter Rollins calls the "ironic gesture of the church." That is we often intellectually believe but our gestures or practices betray a lack of faith and transformation. This happens when the church becomes a kind of fixation for our belief. An example of what I am talking about is money. We know money isn’t magical but we go on living as though we believe that it is. Our fixation on money “prevents us from experiencing the true reality of our social situation.” Church can work this way when it allows us to continue in our horrific jobs, abusive relationships, unethical corruptions, serve in immoral institutions, etc. while still "believing" (just not enough to change things). So in order to really encounter God in a way that our practice is changed we need to remove whatever obstacles stand in its way.
And this is what the paralytics and his friends embodied. In the Gospel account the walls of the hose separated those on the inside, the officially religious (the scribes) and the common people (the regular folks just looking for answers from Jesus) from those counted as outside God's family. Interestingly, there was no ironic gesture from these outsiders, their mission to dig up the roof of this house was a physical representation of belief that came prior to the intellectualization of that belief. In other words, the paralytic and his buddies acted as if they had faith before they had any good (rational or intellectual) reason to actually have that faith. This more radical faith became the centerpiece in an illustration of what the kingdom of God really looks like.
The Repetition of Early Friends' Non-Liturgy
How do we deal with this "ironic gesture" of the church? I am holding up these people in our story as folks who dug up the physical obstacles that stood in the way of this man finding Jesus. They are the first century equivalent of Quakers, who in their time "deconstructed" the rituals, and other obstacles that kept the outsiders out and the insider safe and cozy inside their walls. This is why some have suggested that Quakers are against "forms," and therefore this should be our stance for all time. This position argues that forms stand in between us and God, they take the place of believing for us. And so we get rid of pastors, we get rid of singing, we get rid of studying the bible - shoot some of us just get rid of the bible altogether - we also get rid of communion, baptism, you name it let's toss it. The idea is that anything mediated keeps us from God. The problem with this is that in removing all this stuff that supposedly stands in the way of belief, belief really has, in many cases, ceased to exist. And that is why I think this "non-form" reading of Quakerism is far too simplistic a view to hold, it is not revolutionary enough.
What Quakers were against wasn't forms but rather things that became objects and ultimately obstacles for our belief. Anything that takes the place of or "prevents us from experiencing the true reality" of our social situation or the reality of the kingdom of God was to be questioned by the church. Two assumptions play into this reading, first in every generation we have to ask this question again, "what is preventing us from experiencing the reality of our social situation, from the reality of the kingdom of God?" It's not enough to simply duplicate a black and white copy of everything the first generation of Friends did - that requires no faith and betrays yet again a faith fixated on something else. But neither can we simply dismiss their keen insights either. As Pink Dandelion has argued silence itself has become a form, a fixation, that can lead to disbelief but neither can we get rid of this because we know that rituals, pastors, etc. can also become obstacles to faith.
That is why I want to suggest that what we need to do today is have enough faith to ask the much harder question: what has become our fixations in our churches today? This means that silence itself is to be questioned, but not just silence, it also means pastors, their roles and their preaching, this means our church buildings, this means our political allegiances, our demographics, our geographical locations, the things we drive, the things we eat, the clothes we where, the people we allow into our churches, our ethical positions, you name it, it all becomes subject to this question. What it means is that everything needs to be questioned again in light of Jesus' proclamation that the kingdom of God is unexpected, intrusive and while it may express in forms but refuses to be domesticated. In other words what we need is a non-liturgical liturgy, a constant repetition of the equivalent of what early friends did in their context performed within our context. Then maybe we will be able to dig up roofs so that a new thing can be witnessed and people will say, “We have never seen anything like this!”
19 comments
i have to ask myself, how can we redefine "form" and make flexible ever changing containers for our ever changing faith? perhaps it wasn't form itself that folks feared but the inability of those forms to mutate to gods will. something more plastic might be necessary.
lastly i'm feeling pretty convicted about the "ironic gesture" of the church. especially in terms of what we do with our own intellectual capitol… how are we using your abilities for better kingdom living?
Do you see this supporting a kind of "repetitive non-liturgy" or something else?
I completely agree with you statement:
"i have to ask myself, how can we redefine "form" and make flexible ever changing containers for our ever changing faith? perhaps it wasn't form itself that folks feared but the inability of those forms to mutate to gods will. something more plastic might be necessary."
Ultimately, what I'm trying to suggest is that "liturgy" (forms and rituals) be localized to particular times and context and never once-and-for all. So in this sense it's not liturgy because it changes according to location, etc. Yet it is repetitive in the sense that the container is still there, flexible but not broken. So in the same way the early Quakers tossed a lot of stuff they say as not "mutating to God's will" as you put it, in or time those things that early Friends did may themselves need to be re-organized etc. And for us to ask this question: "what has become an obstacle to faith" repeats the same question early Friends did but allows for different answers. Maybe today instead of silence to ride us of obstacles, where silence has become an obstacle to faith we now need "noise," interference, etc.
We need to strive for unity not uniFORMity.
We need to be transFORMED and not conFORMED.
etc.
I think that Friends need to learn and teach the WORD and neither rely on "God's word? (Bible)" nor to reject how others, even hundreds and thousands of years ago, have expressed their understanding of the Word.
It has been difficult to forget or minimize the truth in a comment in the history of Kansas YM when a letter was sent regarding the influx of non-Friends Christians into Friends Meetings in the 1870-1880 period. It was easier to give them what they wanted, including "hireling ministry" than to teach them to be Friends.
It is very difficult to be a 24/7 follower of Christ, the Light and Word!!!!! However I believe that the legacy of Friends is just that. It is even more difficult to actually live in that Spirit, than teach. The only way I can see my own life as having much "value" is to live as if "Christ has come to teach his people himself."
Where you said, "It was easier to give them what they wanted, including "hireling ministry" than to teach them to be Friends." The "hireling ministry" was created to help teach people to be Friends because there was such a vast influx of new Friends that Quakers could no longer handle it. And secondly, I'd argue, this is especially helpful in a post-christendom society, where we no longer assume the culture as Christian. No leadership, pastoral or otherwise, discipline people into the body of believers only works when you can assume a common language and starting point - we no longer have that in the West.
The "quote" was not my quote but from the Kansas Friends at that time.
My father was a Friends minister and I fully appreciated his ministry.
He shared with me two of his guidelines:
He never "worked" on Sunday, but shared with others in worship.
His goal was to work himself out of a job by helping each member to be a Friends "minister."
May you find a fruitful ministry among Camas Friends.
Perhaps another contemporary cultural project would be to find within us some compassion for the Pharisees.
It would perhaps be a bigger stretch to sympathize with the Sadduccees, who I understand to have been the collaborators with the Roman occupation forces; but they had their own goals of preserving their religion, and at least sometimes kept more autonomy in that realm than most Roman territories did.
Such a project could complement or be held in tension with the way the Gospels were in fact written, which does show the priests and scribes as antagonists to Jesus. Even as we try to understand who the real Pharisees were, we can still see the "priests and scribes" in the Gospels as a stand-in for all the powers that be that fail to live up to the Light they have been given.
I agree with you that there ought to be more empathetic reading of all the characters within the Scriptures, even if in the end we don't come out on their side or in favor of their viewpoints. This could be particularly helpful if we are attempting to identify those who might be in their position today, we know they are still around. And further it might keep us from being cheap in our attacks on bible characters.
I will defend my own position in this particular text which is rooted in Ched Myer's scholarship who argues that Mark 2:1-12 is a classic example of Jesus challenging the "symbolic order" that the Scribes sought to keep in place, largely because they benefited from this maintenance both in political and economic ways. In this sense, I am arguing that those in power who wish to protect their positions of power (the symbolic order) and benefit from that power at the expense of others represent an unwillingness to bend to the "new event" of God. This would "conFORMity" as Tom pointed out above.
Now certainly I don't think their intentions were necessarily bad (I actually make (brief) mention of this in my sermon text of which this is derived http://gatheringinlight.com/2009/02/10/digging-up-the-roof-the-kingdom-moment-and-the-paralytic-in-mark-21-12/), there's little evidence at least from this passage to suggest they had bad intentions, and I do think a lot of us desire the same kinds of things for their tradition: we don't want heretics leading people astray (thus the charge of blasphemy), and we need people who are well-informed, as they were, and passionate about their own beliefs and pursuits (I'm tempted to use them as a positive example of the word "fundamentalist" but will refrain because I think in this case it will send mixed messages). So in other words, I think their response is in many ways quite expected and how many of us might respond to Jesus.
Still the point I am making above may be a bit of a sidestep to this issue because I am suggesting there are those, whatever name we give them, who are so committed to their "forms" or anti-forms that this itself becomes a fixation for belief and is closed to what God might actually be doing in that time and space.
Thank you for making the point that we need to look beyond the answers of the early Quakers to the concerns that prompted them. For me, this may well be the point of "convergence."
I was struck by the way you speak about the necessity of belief, and condemn things that might stand as obstacles to belief.
As I understand Quakerism, what is central is not belief, but attentiveness to the living Christ and obedience to his directives.
As I understand it, Quakerism began among people whose preachers were already touting belief. But they turned away from those pastors because they found that belief, without the experience and instruction of the living Christ, was not enough to satisfy their hearts and consciences.
@Marshall - I agree with you. I am using belief in a sense that it couldn't be "touted" but lived and experienced, here's where I tried to challenge the understanding that belief=equals something intellectual rather than something lived,
"For instance, we don't have to believe, where belief means actually living out a changed reality, because the pastor believes for us. God for the church can easily become an intellectual crutch for us, someone who we don't really encounter in a way that our everyday living and doing is changed."
I'm not sure of this, but it seems to me that some of the standard forms of Quaker worship are still radical and daring to all those outside of the Quaker tradition. I'm speaking as someone who was raised in a secular household. From the perspective of someone brought up in the Quaker tradition certain practices may seem to need questioning, but from the perspective of those outside the tradition and seeking for a place of communal worship that very practice may be exactly what attracts.
Best,
Jim
They were responding to an environment where forms were often used in a way that definitely did not honor Christ. They sought to remove all distractions of forms in order to open themselves to a radical listening to Christ. This is all good, and the experiment proved itself in real spiritual power being evident among them.
But their arguments universalized their own experience inappropriately IMHO. They argued that using physical symbols (they loved symbolic language and the contradiction implicit in that compared to their view of physical symbols never seem to have dawned on them) was necessarily a rejection of the spiritual reality they were supposed to represent (well some argued this while some others were not so totally condemning).
This view seems rather clearly to be mistaken, when taken as a universal. Clearly in Christian history some of those who seem to have been most in the spirit of Christ found the rituals to which Friends objected to be very meaningful.
Furthermore an honest look at the gospeals shows a Jesus who was not opposed to form and ritual, but to empty form and ritual where the heart was not turned to God. The very fact of the Incarnation shows the meaning of the physical in the spiritual life.
So Friends shouldn't be fixated on particular practices or avoiding particular practices. They shouldn't say to God "I'll follow you as long as it includes X (historical Quaker practices)" or "I'll follow you as long as it doesn not include Y (the bread and the cup, or anything else Quakers have not traditionally practiced)."
Friends should be looking for how today in their setting they can be faithful in following Jesus, which was the root of what early Quakers sought to do.
As far as paid staff, they should neither rigidly oppose any use of such or simply adopt particular forms, like the Protestant pastoral model. Both of those errors are very common among Friends today.
They should be seeking as faith communities to discern how to be faithful, and if that involves releasing someone to serve, fine, and if not, fine. If it does they should be discerning what the role of a paid staff person should be in their community, sensitive to not displacing the proper role of other members of the congregation. There shouldn't be a model held up, but they should regularly discern what is appropriate. It might or might not involve special preparation for vocal ministry.
"Furthermore an honest look at the gospeals shows a Jesus who was not opposed to form and ritual, but to empty form and ritual where the heart was not turned to God. The very fact of the Incarnation shows the meaning of the physical in the spiritual life.
So Friends shouldn't be fixated on particular practices or avoiding particular practices. They shouldn't say to God "I'll follow you as long as it includes X (historical Quaker practices)" or "I'll follow you as long as it doesn not include Y (the bread and the cup, or anything else Quakers have not traditionally practiced)."
Friends should be looking for how today in their setting they can be faithful in following Jesus, which was the root of what early Quakers sought to do."
yes, yes, yes. Thanks for adding this.
I think the thing I want to hang onto is the critique, the deconstruction, of these particular forms and/or assumptions that may be standing in our way. Which is what I'm hearing you say as well.
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