Do as I do, not as I say

I note this week an on-line Vanity Fair article by Christopher Hitchens where he faces the reality a solider killed in Iraq was inspired to fight by what he wrote. When the Gospel is read on Sunday in Church, it's my custom to genuflect at my head, lips and heart. It's become mere habit. In light of the Hitchens piece, and recent continued studies of theologian Karl Barth, the act's taken on renewed meaning.

Who has more of a right to speak, and who would we respect more, than consequential victims, like that soldier? I'm always interested to read the words or listen to the music of those who've experienced grief or those about to die. I thought McCartney might have emparted something deeper after the death of Linda. Warren Zevon's album, the Wind, produced as he died of terminal cancer, had its moments. I've just purchased Etheridge's new post-breast cancer record. When I worked at Hospice, I listened for the profound from those about to die; I discovered greater and more astonishing profundity from surviving children when we spent weekends in group therapy at grief and loss camp.

My starting point on Barth was that while it's greatly pleasurable to read such brilliant theology, and derive theological insights of searing intellectual significance, it would be troubling if this man, who'd been courageously dismissed from his professorial post in 1935, in Germany, for standing up to the Nazi's cn the supremacy of Jesus Christ, never was affected either before, during or after, by the persecution unto genocide occuring around him.

Theologically, I now understand how that may be possible. Barth see's the people of the covenant, ancient Israel, as the chosen elect, there to reveal God's plans for humanity, not only for themselves, but through them, to all the nations of the world. Since he also see's the Church, after Jesus, as the subseqeuent elect, for the same purpose, it follows, in his view, that Israel was subsumed into the Church, since they both hold the one ultimate purpose. That doesn't leave room for a separate destiny for the original elect who may indeed still hold a distinct purpose from the Church: the idea that the Old and the New hold dual covenantal destinies.

I examined the Barth-authored "Theological Declartion of Barmen," composed in 1934, the primary confessional statement of the anti-Nazi German Church. Indeed, while the statement boldly professes the supremacy of Jesus Christ, there is not a single word in reference to persection of non-Christians.

Like a shining yet tarnished nugget in a gold mine, I did discover his mea culpa, written many years later, "I have long since regarded it as a fault on my part that I did not make this question a decsive issue, at least publicly in the church conflict (e.g., in the two Barmen declarations I drafted in 1934). A text in which I might have done so would not, of course, have been acceptable to the mindset of even the "confessors" of that time, whether in the Reformed or the general synod. But this does not excuse the fact that since my interests were elsewhere I did not at least formally put up a fight on the matter."

Is a statement that his 'interests were elsewhere,' in the midst of horrific persecution, sufficient on behalf of a man who possessed great public influence? Can a Christian like Barth have acted otherwise if his otherworldy theology worked against the necessary worldly public political action?

In a belated response to the Holocaust, the Catholic Church, in the person of Pope Paul VI, addresses the merits of other religions in relation to Christianity. The jury is still out on whether Nostra Aetate is adequate to that task, for like Barth, the document can be discerned between the lines as maintaining one universal theological solution that negates the destinies of all other sects. If, in the end, the religion you profess is delineated as exclusive in its claims, how can it ever be otherwise? Yet, I am determined to continue to explore that critical nexus point in the instinctivly optimistic belief and hope this is somehow possible.

I've been preparing Adult Sunday School materials for a class on the Prophets. One thing is a constant: while God employs Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian agressors, amongst others, as His hammers to rain theological blows upon His elect, He always leaves a remnant, upon whom He anoints His consistently ultimately disappointed hopes to create a renewed people. As with secular movements, I reject any direct political application of that concept outside of the theological world due to the misery produced and real victims claimed.

Yet, then, let's still look prophetically at today's schism in the Episcopal Church from God's vantage point as if He was in control at every stage:

1) God ensures Gene Robinson is elected causing opponents great dismay;
2) God ensures Bishop Katharine is elected thereby further hardening hearts;
3) God sends Englishmen and Africans, some invited, some not, to lay siege;
4) God creates Episcopal remnants, such as my parish; this is His purpose.

(Isn't it always that those who go around saying "God is in control," who are the most manipulative control freaks?) - anyway, what would God's purpose be for His remnant, my parish, now we've established it, at least, as one of His purposes, in either an interim or permanent way? Perhaps, like the surviving children of grief and loss at Hospice camp, the greater wisdom inevitably comes from the remnant of a once unified community family, just as God always promised to preserved a remainder, as a light to the world, in the time of the Prophets.

Prophetically speaking, we are (a) required to attend to Temple practice (will regular attendance on Sundays suffice?); (b) exhibit ethical business practices - don't swindle, take care of the widow, the orphan, etc.; (c) through our particular existence as a remnant, be a light unto the world in a universal way. Since we are here, it has to be in God's plan, that we are significant - and this, in its circular logic, is very Barthian, since we are only discerning Scripture, not to create history on earth, on human terms, but as practicing stewards of what we best discerned as God's instructions on how to live.

This merely 'being,' isn't natural to my activist inclination. Neither patience, nor reconciliation, are as attractive as achieving the justice of full inclusion within our Church now. Something has to translate into political action if human lives, as well as eternal souls, are at stake, as they are, in our struggle. This much we can learn from Barth's story.

On the other hand, I've referred to the legacy of tactics on this blog before - our parish remnant is incapable of being anything but extraordinarily kind and desirous of re-establishing the old community of friends as it once was; is that what God intends for us, in lieu of, or alongside achieving justice?

Barth made his bones on the famous post-World War I framed commentary he wrote on Romans. There, in 11:22, Paul writes, "Note then the kindness and the severity of God; severity toward those who have fallen, but God's kindness toward you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off."

Kindess is what naturally distinguishes our parish - discovering the balance point between exhibiting kindness and achieving justice is where I inevitably return to, again and again, no matter what I do, no matter what I write here. I don't believe anyone will fight and die after reading this blog; I don't believe, either, anyone else will be killed. It will not be necessary, twenty years later, to write a mea culpa for anything written here. This may be, more than anything, separates those who struggle for the justice of inclusion versus those who wage war against it.

The atheist Hitchens faced up to his own arrogance with a genteel humility to be admired. I profess to believe in God as a member of an exclusive religion - there must be a place carved out within this sect where humility is enshrined as a great gift that counteracts individual and corporate compulsions toward superiority and dominance. This is the shining city on the hill visible in the distance through the mist. It's the road upon which we'll continue to travel.