Bargains in the Rummage Sale

It was about 2,500 years ago that the Word of God inspired the prophet to speak the words of vindication that we hear in today's reading from Isaiah. It had been in 586 BC that the Babylonians had burned down Jerusalem, burned down that Temple that King David’s son Solomon had built some 500 years earlier. But in 538, the Persian King Cyrus conquered Babylon, and allowed all the peoples conquered by the Babylonians, including the Jews, to return to their homelands. It was actually during that exile that they took the many scriptures they had collected of their history and edited them into what we Christians call today the Old Testament. When the Jewish people returned to Jerusalem, there was no longer a king, for there was only one King in the Persian Empire. Their authority was not a king, but the Torah, the five books of the Law of Moses.

About 500 years later, John began his Gospel with the stunning declaration that the Word of God, which was God, had become a human being, with skin, muscle, bones, a brain. Matthew, Mark and Luke had declared Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed King of Israel. He had come to fulfill God’s promise to the people of Israel to be God’s holy nation, a kingdom of priests who would bring all people to the one God, so that all the people of the earth would share in the blessings of Abraham and Sarah. But it is John who most clearly declared something that would force those who followed Jesus to rethink their conception of God, not just as one supreme reality, but as a Logos — not just a “word,” but a “saying,” or better yet, “conversation,” so that, “In the beginning was the Conversation,” of three persons whose total love for each other made them one being, “who was God.”

Are you seeing a pattern here? Every 500 years or so, there seems to be an upheaval at least in the Judeo/Christian world.  The late bishop Mark Dyer called it a rummage sale. Questions thought to have been answered for all time are asked again, as the old answers no longer seem adequate to the changing circumstances of the world. In some cases, new answers emerge, along with new buildings (metaphorical) after the rummage sale. In other cases, old answers are reaffirmed, and old buildings are renovated in response to the neighborhood changing around them.

And this pattern did not cease around 33 AD. Five hundred years later, the Roman Empire in the West had just died. Europe was in chaos. Muhammad would be born in 570. And by his death in 632, the Middle East would be transformed by his message of just one God, the God of Abraham, and one last prophet, to whose interpretation of that one God, submission would be required. In Europe, Pope Gregory the Great was reorganizing the Church to infiltrate the pagan peoples of Europe and bring them into the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

Five hundred years after that, the Catholic Church of the Latin-speaking West and the Orthodox Church of the Greek-speaking East could not agree whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father only, or the Father and the Son. In 1054, the Pope excommunicated all Orthodox Christians. The Patriarch of Constantinople responded in kind, and thus we had the Great Schism. In this time, the Europe we know took shape as a collection of kingdoms under the spiritual and political authority of the Pope.

Five hundred years later, Martin Luther published his 95 theses. Christians who had been scandalized 100 years earlier by the spectacle of three popes competing with each other were asking hard questions about the authority of the Church. What we got was the Protestant Reformation and the slogan sola Scriptura, Scriptura sola: Only Scripture and Scripture only. And as the printing press made the scriptures more available, and more people learned to read, other forms of knowledge exploded, and concepts like democracy and individualism became conceivable.

Well here we are, five hundred years later. Never has the human race been so connected, our knowledge so vast; and yet in so much turmoil and with so many questions being asked, all boiling down to that same one that was asked 500 years ago, and 500 years before that, and so on: Where is the authority? The late Phyllis Tickle, for many years the Religion Editor of Publisher’s Weekly, had an idea of what is happening in this latest rummage sale. She called this time The Great Emergence.* For centuries, authority has been seen as something imposed from the top down, whether it be Bible, Bishop, or Bureaucrat. What may be happening, Tickle thought, is that the answers to our questions will not be imposed by a higher power, but are emerging from the bottom up, emerging from the conversations that are taking place face to face, in small groups, on the World Wide Web. It is all one huge worldwide conversation that we are part of.

As in the past, old answers will be reasserted and efforts made to reimpose them. New answers will emerge. Among the more flexible, some old answers will be revised and reaffirmed. New institutions will arise; old institutions will be re-formed. In my social media, I describe myself as an Episcopal priest with one foot in the 2nd century and the other in the 21st. I really think that applies to The Episcopal Church: Catholic in our worship and structure, yet reformed in our insistence on “the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament [being] the Word of God, and to contain all things for salvation” (though note that’s not the same as saying all things in Holy Scripture are necessary for salvation).

Do you know the beatitude Jesus meant to say? Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. I have found that blessed flexibility most in The Episcopal Church: Catholic, reformed and reforming, yet still Catholic, as Saint Paul wrote; willing to test new things emerging in the Spirit, but holding fast to those which remain good. I think we’ll do pretty good in the rummage sale, singing the same hymn we sang at the introit that the Church has sung for the better part of two millennia, written by a Roman Christian who died in 410 — the year the so-called Eternal City was sacked — but who had the faith to sing: Christ! to thee with God the Father, / And O Holy Ghost, to thee, / Hymn and chant and high thanksgiving / And unwearied praises be, / Honor, glory, and dominion, / And eternal victory — Evermore and evermore.

 The Rev. David Kendrick

1st Sunday after Christmas Day

December 28th, 2014

Reference

*Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence, Baker Books, 2008