Stalemate
Sixth Sunday After Epiphany
I have come to the conclusion that we are at a stalemate. Now, your mind may be jumping to all sorts of binaries in the world, but I’m thinking about the divide between the Church and the world. No matter how you conceptualize that binary, Scripture is clear that there is a difference and that the difference matters. The Church and the world are oriented toward different ends and are interested in steering the other side toward their own agendas.
But that steering, that’s the stalemate I’m thinking of. Whether we are talking about ontological proofs of God’s existence, evolutionary biological proofs against the creation narratives of Genesis, the plausibility of Christ’s resurrection, social scientific accounts for religious phenomena, we all can marshal evidence in support of our beliefs. Nobody has yet provided the definitive evidence in support of theism or atheism.
This was what modernity was supposed to. Science and empirical rationalism would provide all the necessary explanations for existence and causation. God would fade into irrelevance as people gradually awakened to the reality that He is unnecessary. The Church in the era of modernity took the bait and attempted to “play the game” on the world’s terms. The Church attempted better arguments for the existence of God, for the existence of miracles, for the life of Christ. We would convince the world of the necessity of Christ through our arguments.
Several decades into postmodernity, however, we can see that this has not happened, not on either side. Since the Church was never supposed to play by the world’s rules, we have at best arrived at a stalemate. More realistically, we, the Church, are licking our wounds and regrouping, turning again to the Scriptures to understand not only our identity as the Church, but the rules of our engagement with the world.
When the Church turned its attention to tighter arguments for the existence of God it allowed itself to bifurcate the cognitive life of the apologist from the worshipping life of the community. An obsession with “grace alone” arguments within a guilt/innocence framework neglected the Bible’s emphasis on Christ’s reign as king and our relationship to that king as one of the “obedience of faith.” This is not to suggest that we ought never to think rightly about God or to never think within philosophical frameworks (it is unavoidable, in fact). Rather, just as in ancient traditions of rhetoric, where the character of the speaker was intertwined with his/her argument, the Church must always keep in mind its own character.
The writers of our lectionary passages in Deuteronomy and Matthew understood that the shape of our witness is the shape of our communities and vice versa. Proper relationship with God required a proper relationship with one another and when those two dimensions are aligned then the world will take notice.
In the case of Israel, they were to be a beacon to the world, drawing all the nations to Israel to marvel at their God, who makes perfect laws. When they failed to do so, they were ejected out of the land of their inheritance for they lost sight of the purpose of that inheritance. In the case of the Church, they were to be a beacon to the world, going out into all the world where it all belongs to the Lord and none of it belongs to us.
There is a remarkable passage in the ancient letter to Diognetus: “And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.”
The nations noticed these peculiar people within their lands and it was the particularity that marked them as different. It was the witness of their ethical communities that was the greatest testimony to Christ.
So we are indeed at a stalemate with the world at large with regards to our arguments for the existence of God and the plausibility of the resurrection. We believe in Christ so we find the proper arguments. They do not believe in Christ and so they find their proper arguments. Let us instead stop playing by the rules of the world and instead focus on the shape of our communities, where Christ’s otherwise insane commands against hatred, lust, marriage, and oaths become possible. Let us be a Church that demonstrates the gospel through our restored relationship with God through our restored relationships with one another. There can be no argument against it.
Fasting From Privilege: Thoughts and Prayers are Not Enough
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
In both Isaiah’s immediate history and ours, God’s people ordained and blessed an oppressive and extractive government/economy and the Israelites, like us, lived in the ugly results: an unjust society that divides people, accruing significant excess to some and increasingly preventing many others from meeting their basic needs for shelter, food, and clothing.
Israelite society didn’t stratify until they chose to inaugurate a monarchy. Economic injustice increased under Solomon, when the government introduced a tax structure and conscripted labor that accrued benefit to a few at the expense of many. Read more
Reflections for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany/Presentation of the Lord
Allegiance or Admiration?
Third Sunday After Epiphany
I am generally protected by my choice of media from the glamour and gossip side of the news. I don’t consume all that much of it and what news I read and hear is limited, mostly, to the websites of the established newspapers or the carefully worded renderings of NPR. But on occasion a story that is clearly the domain of the grocery store magazine rack makes its way even to the most serious news outlets. Such has been the case with “Megxit,” the leaving behind of the British royal family by Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle.
There is just something about royalty that worm its way through even the most disciplined journalistic standard. Perhaps it comes from our childhoods where all the best stories are replete with kingdoms and palaces. There just aren’t that many fairy tails, ancient or modern, about the deliberations of democracy.
Perhaps our curiosity about formally recognized royals is also born from the truth that we are all in fact kings and queens of a kind, with power over a realm all our own. As the philosopher and spiritual teacher Dallas Willard has put it, “Every last one of us has a ‘kingdom’–or a ‘queendom,’ or a ‘government’–a realm that is uniquely our own, where our choice determines what happens.”
Mere Prayer
Second Sunday After Epiphany/Winter Ordinary Time
Winter Ordinary Time (or the Season of Epiphany as some traditions have it) is a good time to pause, following the great feast of Christmas, and the celebrations of Epiphany and Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan. We have a few weeks to consider the implications of God becoming one of us, and to make that part of our Christian life together. Today’s scriptures help us to begin Winter Ordinary Time. Read more
Tania Runyan, “Angel at the Nativity”–Lectionary Poem for Epiphany 1A
With the dawn of a new church year, The Englewood Review of Books is curating a weekly series of classic and contemporary poems that resonate with the themes of the lectionary readings. Here is one of the poems for this coming Sunday (Epiphany Week 1– More poems for this Sunday can be found here)
Angel at the Nativity
Tania Runyan
(to accompany the lectionary reading: Psalm 29)
(Editor’s note: With the nativity fresh in our lectionary memories,
this poem is a fitting link between that and the Psalm for this week. )
Oh, God, I am heavy
with glory. My head thunders
from singing in the hills.
This night will come once.
Enough bright lights.
Enough shouting
at the shepherds in the fields.
Let me slip into the stable
and crouch among
the rooting swine.
Let me close my eyes
and feel the child’s breath,
this wind that blows
through the mountains and stars,
lifting my weary wings.
Published here with the permission of the poet.
(c) Tania Runyan, 2010.
Published by FutureCycle Press, Lexington, Kentucky, 2010.
Tania Runyan grew up in southern California, where she studied creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She went on to receive an MFA from Bowling Green State University and an MA in Secondary Education from Roosevelt University. After working in educational publishing and teaching high school English, she began her own tutoring business and now works with students on reading, writing and college admissions testing and applications. She is also an editor for Every Day Poems and the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky (Cascade Poiema Series), A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007.
Links for the First Sunday after Epiphany/Baptism of the Lord
Nine Miles from Jerusalem
Christmas 2/Epiphany
This Sunday our church will read scriptures of Epiphany, celebrating the visitation of the magi to Jesus. Although no manger scene would be complete without these exotic strangers from afar, Matthew says that they showed up some time after the birth of Jesus, and found Joseph’s little family in a house at Bethlehem. Read more
Inhabiting a Politics of Faithfulness
First Sunday after Christmas Day
Christmas Eve, we huddled up in a back parking lot in Houston’s east downtown warehouse district, our congregation pushed out into the night by a blown transformer in the space we rent an hour before the service. As we made a semi-circle lit up by headlights and the Christ candle, a child lay belly down on the asphalt, coloring in his coloring book as if it were any other Sunday morning. We sang through all the carols in our bulletins as a makeshift liturgy, while a hundred yards or so away was a large homeless encampment under an I-10 overpass. We said our closing prayer over the rumble of a large freight train before sending folks to their homes.