WHO’S FOLLOWING?
Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt
FBC, October 4, 2009
Readings: Mark 9:38-50, Rumi, “The Guest House”
Like many adolescents, I spent the early part of my teenage years caught up in hopeless infatuations with the boys that my female peers had deemed “really, really cute.” Most of these infatuations were one-sided and resulted in the predictable behaviors that accompany them: lots of hearts drawn on every surface imaginable with our initials inside the hearts, breathless diary entries about every small, adorable detail we had noticed in the “cute boy,” daydreams that came with kisses and confessions of mutual adoration. Much to my astonishment, one of these infatuations actually blossomed into a real relationship, giving me my first experience of teenage romance—and my first Romeo and Juliet experience of discovering that my parents strenuously objected to the romance because of the irrevocable differences in our family and the boy’s family: we were staunch Southern Baptists; his family was Roman Catholic. And while Southern Baptists are known for their seemingly endless objections to all sorts of groups and people and practices and religious affiliations, nothing, nothing elicits their blistering condemnation more than all things Catholic. Catholics worship Mary, grant greater authority to the Pope than to God, practice idolatry, and are so superstitious as to believe that the communion wafers magically turn into Jesus when the priest waves his hands over them.
So my parents immediately took issue with my teenage romance on the grounds that I should not be spending time listening to the likely heretical pronouncements that a Catholic boy would be making (as though 13-year-olds in small Texas towns sit around discussing the intricacies of religious doctrine. Right.) I argued with my parents, resisted their efforts and the efforts of my boyfriend’s parents, who were equally scandalized that their son was consorting with a Baptist, dared to proclaim my doubts of the truth of Baptist teaching about Catholicism, and threw myself ever more passionately into our romance, until it went the way of most first youthful romances and we broke up, not over religious differences but because we lusted after others.
But the experience stayed with me as an introduction to the issue that Mark’s gospel opens up in today’s scripture reading, namely how churches respond to someone who is “not following us,” that is, someone who clearly lives faithfully but does not believe and practice the same way we do. How does a spiritual community determine its boundaries, decide who is “in” and who is “out,” walk the line between being inclusive and having a clear identity that sets it apart from other spiritual communities? And in case any of you are already tempted to reply to these questions with some sort of disclaimer about how our own welcoming and affirming congregation, with its embrace of soul freedom and the expectation that each person determines his/her own faith perspective, never needs to wrestle with such questions because we never encounter the problem of fretting about who is following us—let me disabuse you right now of that easy conclusion. Not a week goes by that I do not hear dismay about someone in the congregation who is not following us, not doing things the way we do things here (whatever that might be). Ours is a congregation of deep divisions, divisions between long-time members and folks newer to the church, between traditional and nontraditional ways of believing and worshipping and practicing, between understandings of authority and decision-making processes, between socioeconomic standings, between folks holding a torch for George Williamson and folks who never knew George, between those who are comfortable with an institutional church and those who want to reinvent the whole understanding of church, between political liberals and political conservatives, between free spenders and endowment protectors, between people who do not feel they have truly been to church unless they hear scripture and prayer and God-talk and those who would prefer that church go easy on scripture and God-talk and range into other spiritual venues. We struggle continually with these challenges, despite our desire to see ourselves as embracing all kinds of folks, precisely because we aspire to be a church that draws a circle large enough to include everyone. So the concern voiced in Mark about what to do with someone who is not following, not acting and believing the way someone else thinks they should in order to be considered part of the group—that concern is very much alive in this church now, today.
UCC pastor and church consultant Anthony Robinson, in a book entitled What’s Theology Got to Do With It?, discusses questions of following in terms of how groups in general, and churches in particular, decide who is in the group and who is not. Drawing on set theory, Robinson envisions three different church models: the first (and the most like our congregation here) he describes as an open model pictured as a set of random dots scattered on a page. Everyone one is welcome and there are no requirements for being part of the group; people come and go freely, move about freely, interact freely; the wonderful sense of freedom is what people in such a church tend to value most. The down side of such an open organization is that it can be difficult to get a sense of what is most important for the church (besides that freedom), and working together on a project, moving toward a goal, can be impossible—except when the goal is maintaining some sort of opposition to a perceived threat or injustice. This is church as a collection of individuals, each with his/her own values, agenda, and faith perspective.
In contrast to the open model Robinson then describes the closed model of church, pictured as a thick dark line surrounding a set of dots. This church has clear boundaries and pays careful attention to those boundaries, ensuring that only the right people are allowed inside. Getting into the church is difficult, but once inside, one can be sure of enjoying the company of like-minded persons. This church enjoys clarity of identity and purpose, at the expense of questioning or diverging from the stated purpose. The open church luxuriates in freedom, while the closed church allows little freedom; the open church struggles, usually in vain, to move together, while the closed church marches in step always.
Robinson then proposes a third model that brings together the best qualities of each kind of church while avoiding some of the pitfalls. Pictured as a circle with a dashed boundary, he sees this church as offering freedom to move about, to come and go through the permeable boundary, but also gathering together inside the circle with a sense of identity and purpose. Such a church becomes less concerned, Robinson believes, with who is in and who is out, and more concerned with direction. Referring to it as a “centered set,” Robinson says “the congregation’s task is not so much to police the boundaries as it is to define and articulate its center” (pp. 34-35).
In the dialogue set out in Mark, Jesus shifts focus in a similar fashion. John’s concern about someone “not following us” is a boundary question, and Jesus reframes the matter in terms of the center: “whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40. Curious, is it not, how often that phrase gets turned around, coming out as “whoever is not for us is against us’? Those are two very different meanings: “whoever is not for us is against us” is concerned with tight boundaries and separating those who are the right kind of people from those who are not the right kind of people; “whoever it not against us is for us” instead draws the circle ever wider to encompass more in the group and allows for a variety of persons inside the circle, asking only that they support the group purpose in whatever way they can. Jesus continues reframing the issue as he stresses the importance of what the behavior looks like, rather than any particular credentials a person carries: offering a cup of water with Christian love is the only credential that matters.
Roger Martin, dean of a Toronto business school, in a book entitled The Opposable Mind, suggests that our minds would do well to follow the model set for us by our thumbs and develop the capacity for what he calls “opposable thinking.” As Martin notes, opposable thinking, like our opposable thumbs, would enable us to better deal with complexity, to be more patient in discernment, and to solve problems that currently seem insoluble because of our tendency to approach them with oppositional, not opposable, thinking. Opposable thinking is, like our thumbs, capable of coming at a subject from different, angles; oppositional thinking, the style of thinking that we are much more comfortable with, defines itself over against another and can only approach a subject from one direction. To put it theologically, we know how to employ prophetic witness, offering critiques and opposition to what we view as wrong in the world and in others. We are against violence, we are against greed, we are against injustice; we are not that kind of Baptist, we are not exclusive, we are not fundamentalist. This is oppositional thinking, and it is necessary, part of our calling as faithful Christians. We define ourselves in terms of what we stand against, But there comes a time to shift from prophecy to reconciliation, from being against to gathering together, from separating to integrating—and that work requires us to think with opposable, not oppositional, skills. It means paying more attention to those who are with us, and less attention to those who are against us; it means talking less about what we do not believe in and more about what we affirm; it means being slower to point out how we disagree with another’s view, and quicker to register all that we hold in common; it means finding other moods, other emotions, besides indignation, it means spending less time arguing and more time acting.
If you have been following the varied strands of the current national debate on reforming our health care system, you know that our culture is deeply immersed right now in oppositional thinking and acting. Those who shout the loudest, who can muster the most extreme arguments, are the ones who receive the most attention, while those who might be able to offer an opposable approach, to draw together diverse strands from multiple viewpoints, can be hard, if not impossible, to find. While I do see churches trying to bring a measure of compassion into the discussion, even there oppositional strategies triumph: religious people passionately denounce special interests and profit-making, then become much less impassioned, or even silent, in offering solutions that could draw opposing camps together. Until righteous indignation loses its appeal, we may not see much evidence of compromise or transformation in our politics, in our churches, in our homes, in ourselves.
Theologian H. Richard Niebuhr once observed that “we tend to be right in what we affirm, and wrong in what we deny.” Perhaps we can begin shifting our energies from oppositional to opposable thinking by learning to affirm more and criticize less—not an easy shift to make in a tradition long committed to prophetic witness. To begin that shift, I might suggest something very simple, drawing upon spiritual practices that recommend physical movements as a concrete way of changing patterns of thinking and feeling. Remember the “one way” gesture that conservative churches seized on as a means of emphasizing their lock on the only road to God and to heaven? While progressive Christians have not literally responded with another such gesture, our resistance has too often mirrored the “one way” tactic in being similarly rejecting of those different from us, those who did not share our political and theological preferences.
Suppose instead we came up with our own gesture, a gesture that both symbolized what we stand for and a gesture that would remind us of the need to shift out of oppositional modes and into opposable modes? Suppose we set aside “one way” and substituted the circle that only becomes possible because of our opposable thumbs, the circle that symbolizes inclusion and a hope for wholeness? Try it now; try it the next time you feel yourself drawn into a debate with someone you absolutely disagree with; try it when you see events in our church, in the neighborhood, on the national scene, unfolding in a direction you cannot support. May our hearts and minds, like our thumbs, evolve to become opposable—and soon.
