Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt
FBC, January 27, 2008
Scripture : I Corinthians 1:10-18
You walk out of the supermarket, carrying your bags of groceries, and notice an elderly woman struggling to load her own groceries into her car. How do you know what to do?
You are standing around the copy machine at work with your colleagues, and someone begins complaining about the promotion of an African American co-worker, claiming the promotion was based on ethnic background. How do you know what to do?
You and your spouse learn that you are pregnant with a third child. Income is already stretched to the limit and there are talks of layoffs in your company. Further complicating matters are memories of the difficulties of the previous pregnancies that required bed rest and delivery problems. How do you know what to do?
You see the opportunity for real, significant advancement of your most passionate cause—provided you handle everything properly. Some, including friends and those who share your passion, urge you to be aggressive, confrontational, unrelenting, take-no-prisoners. Others, including friends and family, counsel patience, slow but steady movement, working within the system, building coalitions. All are hurt by the way things are—and change will hurt even more. How do you know what to do?
Your adult sister, your only sibling, younger than you and still single, is critically injured in an automobile accident. You and your parents face the decision of whether to continue life support when prospects for recovery are uncertain. Because your sister was an aspiring artist and a “live in the moment” sort of person, she has neither a living will nor much in the way of health insurance. How do you know what to do?
One hundred and fifty years ago, as Abraham Lincoln pondered whether and when to announce the Emancipation Proclamation, he spoke to an interdenominational clergy gathering:
In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. I am
approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious
people who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. . . . These are
not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am
not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain physical facts of the case,
ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right. The
subject is difficult, and good [people] do not agree.
When good people do not agree; when we do not live in the days of miracles; when we no longer expect to see a revelation from God before us; when all we have are the plain physical facts of the case, yet we need to lead a nation, or lead a cause, or lead a church, or just lead ourselves through another day, what guides us? How do we decide—to go left or right, up or down, more or less, this way or that?
Some decisions are made for us or by us without input from us. The multiple intricate systems in our bodies make countless decisions every moment beyond our level of conscious awareness. Other decisions we make every day do require thought and input from us, but in these decisions the choices are clear and the outcomes predictable: I feel cold, I turn up the thermostat. I want to organize my day: I buy a datebook or palm pilot. I need more money: I increase income or reduce my expenses. These choices involve clear options, logical reasoning, and are the sorts of choices most of us in this culture are adept at making. And they are also choices that do not challenge us, stretch our souls, draw us closer as a community.
For those kinds of choices—choices that challenge and stretch and bind us to one another—those are the choices that force us to move beyond logic into ambiguity and paradox. Those are choices that ask us to do the impossible, to take opposites and somehow reconcile them, to face alternatives like individuality and community, democracy and authority, freedom and discipline, spontaneity and order, generosity and prudence, and somehow, some way, make a balance, a wholeness. When you face these sorts of choices, logic is of little or no help, for logic insists on either/or and does not allow a possibility of both/and. So you face the opposites and need to reconcile them: how do you know what to do?
Back in our first world of childhood, most of us had adults, parents and grandparents, teachers and counselors and pastors, making these hard choices for us, telling us what to do. Sometime during our adolescent years, most of us tossed aside guiding adults in favor of other sources of wisdom: we looked to peers and role models, rock stars and athletes to tell us what to do. And slowly, over time, we began to consult our own hearts, study our own experience, in order to find guidance in moments of ambiguity.
Churches with their accompanying belief systems have also, for many of us, been an important source of moral and ethical guidance. Some churches and belief systems come with creeds and commandments and teaching that point the way through paradox to a clarity of choice that may—but often does not—reconcile those heart-rending opposites. As Lincoln discovered, however, religion can be used to support virtually any opinion. These days we regularly hear that God calls us to an ongoing war against terrorism, or that God calls us to resist the war against terrorism, or that God (when named Allah) supports terrorist activities, or that Allah would never support terrorist activities.
The earliest church had scarcely been formed and begun to function before it found itself mired in conflict and contradictory opinions. Strong personalities with differing perspectives on what it meant to live as followers of Jesus emerged. As Paul characterized it in his letter to the Corinthian church, “You’re all picking sides, going around saying, ‘I’m on Paul’s side,’ or ‘I’m for Apollos,’ or ‘Peter is my man,’ or ‘I’m in the Messiah group.’” (I Corinthians 1:12). Paul seems taken aback by this development, though he should not have been, having already himself been at the center of disagreement over the “true” interpretation of Jesus’ teachings when he sparred with Peter over requirements for Jewish converts to Christianity. Like many religious people before and since, Paul had apparently assumed that all those typical behaviors in human society, behaviors of competition and self-aggrandizement, of egotism and self-righteousness, of tunnel vision that permits no compromise, all would be left at the door once people walked into a church, and a church community would be different, harmonious, perfect and without conflict.
Yet I have never found such a church, and given the multiple issues Paul wrote about in his letters to his churches, he was not finding such churches either. Because “the subject is difficult,” because matters of faith do not easily allow for clarity and unanimity, it always has been, and always will be the case, that where religious practice is concerned, “good [people] do not agree.” The earliest word for church, ekklesia, included as one recognized translation the description, “a contentious bunch”: so it has been, so it will ever be, that whenever two or three are gathered as a church, there will we also find conflict.
But there is conflict, and there is conflict, and a church can be a place for fruitful conflict that reaches a surprising wholeness and reconciliation of opposites, or a place for destructive conflict where factions develop and polarization sets in and compromise proves elusive and everything must be voted on and every vote results in winners and losers. This latter sort of destructive conflict seems to have been what Paul feared was developing in the Corinthian church, as he heard news of sides being taken and positions hardening. Trying to remind his readers of the original reason for gathering a church, he challenges them: “Has the Messiah been chopped up in little pieces so we can each have a relic all our own?” (I Corinthians 1:13), which is to say, nobody, nobody has a corner on the truth. And nobody has any grounds for claiming that his ideas or her programs or his line item in the budget or her way of doing things takes priority, simply because it belongs to a particular person, represents a particular group in the church, promotes a particular theological perspective. What takes priority is the body of Christ, the whole community, the reason for being together. As Paul puts it to church members, “You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common” (I Corinthians 1:10). To have that life in common requires finding ways to pull in those opposites that emerge and reconcile them so that decisions are made from the perspective of the whole rather than from any individual perspective. And doing so will require, on a regular basis, setting aside one’s own viewpoint, one’s pet program, one’s favorite way of functioning. As a mentor of mine once put it, in a church we must be sure that we do not let our principles get in the way of doing the right thing.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there lies a field; I will meet you there” (Rumi). This observation from Rumi, a 13th century Sufi master, points to a place or a perspective beyond the tug and tension of conflicting choices, a possibility for meeting, for reconciliation, that does not require the choosing of sides, a way of finding that life in common that Paul urged churchgoers to cultivate.
Farther over the world’s rim, you find what science cannot locate,
the substrate, that which gives goodness its power for good, and
evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable
caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given.
It is not learned. (Annie Dillard)
Rumi’s field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing becomes, in Annie Dillard’s words, a “substrate,” a “unified field,” Paul’s “life in common,” the symbolic body of Christ, a place or perspective that contains the powers of goodness and evil alike but both held in balance. And this place, this perspective, opens up not in some far-off magical region or through intellectual effort, but right here in our midst, in this community where we stand right now: in “our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.” The hard decisions, the ones that defy logic and stretch our souls, are made with guidance from this unified field, the place and perspective beyond the divisions and oppositions we seem to be stuck in. In that place, we are all bound together; from that place, we make our choices, directed not by anyone’s belief system nor mere human logic, but directed by our “caring for each other, and for our life together here.”
Out of my family or origin, my five brothers and sisters, I am the only one whose spiritual journey has taken a liberal turn. All my siblings, as they started families of their own, joined one or more varieties of conservative churches. From time to time on my visits back to Texas, I have noticed several of my nieces and nephews sporting the “WWJD” bracelets, the shorthand for “What Would Jesus Do?” that is intended to guide them in making wise choices.
But Jesus never provided a set of guidelines, and Paul warned against the mistake of allowing “the powerful action at the center—the message of the cross—[to be] trivialized into mere words.” What Jesus provided was a way of living that unfolds in the context of a community, and he challenges followers to take a journey, to join with him and become part of a community, as though the experience of learning to live in that community would be where the teaching happened, where the wisdom emerged, where the support for hard choices could be found. Jesus sets his message in Rumi’s field, in Annie Dillard’s “life together here,” in Paul’s “life in common.” Ask Jesus what he would do, to articulate what he stands for, and you get the language of journey and joining and community.
My own son has never worn a WWJD bracelet, and likely never will. But as I see him moving on into young adulthood and independence and all the career and social and life choices that begin to come his way, I find myself wishing for him—as I wish for myself—some handy bracelet, some easy reference point, something that would spare him heartache and struggle, make his path easier. I want to reassure him, as I was once reassured, that making the right choice feels good. But I have learned, and he will learn, that sometimes making the right choice feels good—and sometimes the right choice will cause him more pain than he ever imagined.
No, in this church, in a liberal spiritual tradition, we offer no bracelets, no handy reference points, no smooth consolation of good feelings. When a hard decision stands in our path, we have no tidy message, no clear guideline, not even a single interpretation of scripture to quote, to clarify the choice.
Instead, we offer something much deeper, more profound and more powerful than tidy bracelets and Ten Commandments yard signs and literal scripture texts. What we offer is a place to stand, the place we stay with Jesus, a place beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing, a place in community, on a journey, in the midst of complex, inexplicable caring for one another and for our shared lives. It is a place where hard decisions can be sorted through, choices made and lived with, opposites reconciled. It is a place open to everyone, based not on a particular belief or political opinion, but on love. And it is right here, right now, always. Come, and see.
