"Some Things We Should Have Learned by Now"

While not a sermon, this site seemed as good a place as any to post a paper presented to Phi Beta, a group of Methodist clergy that has been meeting in the Philadelphia area for over a century for the presentation and discussion of scholarship that undergirds or aids ministry. 

“Some Things We Should Have Learned by Now”

presented to Phi Beta by Mark Young

November 6, 2014

            A wise woman, Sister Joan Chittister, has noted that

“When structures are in flux but ideas are stable, there is room for error.  When ideas are in flux but structures are stable, there is room for confusion.  But when both ideas and structures are in flux at the same time, error and confusion are of the order of the day.”[1]

She wrote this as part of her reflection on the corporate life of some Benedictine nuns in Erie before, during, and following the Second Vatican Council.  Change, and not mere adjustment, has been, she notes, the hallmark of our age in vast areas of life and while individuals can sometimes forego change or insulate themselves, institutions’ longer lifespans commit them to grappling with change, like it or not.

“The evolutionary nature of institutions assumes a continual process of adjustment.  For an institution to survive, it only makes sense that it must keep abreast of new ideas in the field.  At the same time, simply upgrading a present process is seldom enough to assure the survival of an institution when the whole nature of the undertaking and the world around it changes.”[2]

It is safe to say that in the second decade of the second millennium, both the ideas and structures of Christianity as an institution are in flux precisely because lesser adjustment no longer assures survival, at least within Western culture.  It is one of those moments when the words of John 12:25 (“Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life”) carry a deep resonance.

            Because we stand at the edge of a time when the future may call not simply for revival of the sort that Protestantism has seen so regularly that each wave receives its own name, like a hurricane (“The Pietist Movement”, “The Great Awakening”, “The Second Great Awakening”, “The Azusa Street Revival”, and so on), but for a more thoroughgoing mission to a culturally non-Christian or even non-theistic culture,  it behooves us to consider how earlier examples of attempts to meet missional need have called the Church to alter its own ways,  rather than insist that the evangelized turn their backs on every established aspect of their lives.  Sister Joan holds that particular instance up as a precursor to the ideals she sees expressed in the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, where

“…missionaries are, in the too lately discovered spirit of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, to be more presence than proselytes [sic].  They are to become enculturated and, as quickly as possible, enable the new church to become native.  The purpose of missionary activity is not simply to convert people to a Western form of Catholicism.  It is to allow the culture to flourish in a native church.”[3]

Matteo Ricci’s work was indeed highly successful but because it displayed flux in both ideas and structure he was charged with error and the confusion that came in its wake lasted for generations on three continents.  As the United Methodist Church passes through a time when regional difference threatens schism across and within continents, there is some comfort in recognizing that as nothing peculiar to our own age, but an inevitable byproduct of any attempt at true change.

            Before looking at Ricci’s missionary efforts, which took place in China astraddle the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it would be good to glance at one approach used in the introduction of Christianity into Northern Europe a thousand years earlier.   Setting aside the earlier traditions of Celtic Christianity that had largely been driven out of Britain with the advance of Germanic tribes, the evangelization (or re-evangelization) of Britain under Anglo-Saxon hegemony was carried out at the instigation and under the direction of Rome.  Bede’s Ecclesiastical History [chapter xxx] records that in the year 601 Pope Gregory directed the missionary monk Mellitus how to go about winning over the hearts and minds of the pagans.

“…the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed there.  For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.  And because they are used to slaughter many oxen in sacrifice to devils, some solemnity must be given them in exchange for this, as that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of the holy martyrs whose relics are there deposited, they should build themselves huts of the boughs of trees about those churches which have been turned to that use from being temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, and no more offer animals to the Devil, but kill cattle and glorify God in their feast, and return thanks to the Giver of all things for their abundance, to the end that, whilst some outward gratifications are retained, they may the more easily consent to the inward joys.”[4]

Here, in short, Pope Gregory encourages the maintenance of institutional structure in order to limit flux in the cultural sphere.  This would, he judged, reduce resistance to the transformation of ideas.

            Gregory’s approach was not the only one open to him, and in June of 601, only a month before writing to Mellitus, he had written to King Ethelbert of Kent, a convert to Christianity, advising a harsh suppression of paganism and the destruction of its shrines.  One writer, considering the contradictory papal instructions, posits a reason based on the insufficiency of either alone.

“Perhaps Gregory thought that the most that could be expected of Aethelberht at this stage was that he should bring all his political weight to bear in opposing paganism and promoting Christianity in its place. The letter to Mellitus, on the other hand, seems to imply a recognition that royal opposition to paganism was not enough to defeat it permanently. The theory that the inconsistency between these letters represents a deliberate, two-pronged attack on paganism is naturally attractive, but the danger of a disintegration of the missionary enterprise is clear: Gregory sets Aethelberht to destroy pagan shrines, and very soon afterwards tells Augustine (via Mellitus) to preserve them—a recipe for confusion, if not conflict.”[5]

The two conflicting approaches would reappear during the Chinese Rites Controversy, one championed by the Dominicans and Franciscans, the other by the Jesuits.  The cautionary insight that Pope Gregory the Great himself felt ambivalent about fully backing either policy is telling.  So is the fact that the advice to Mellitus prevailed over the advice to Ethelbert.

How successful was this approach?  Peter Orton observes that

“By minimising the disruption of existing patterns of pagan observance, it was hoped that damaging, open conflict between Christianity and paganism could be avoided, and that the former would absorb and eventually replace the latter. Gregory must have been confident that Christianity would emerge as the dominant strain in this hybridization; but his new policy seems calculated to lead to a syncretistic religion combining Christian and pagan elements.”[6]

Whether or not syncretism truly emerged, the institutional structure of revelry certainly persisted and despite being relabeled or repurposed, the worldly spirit that accompanied the celebrations did not completely evaporate, even given a thousand years to do so.  Francis Beaumont, one of Shakespeare’s collaborators, wrote of the “church ale” festivals that supported the parish churches of Elizabethan England.

“The churches must owe, as we all do know,
For when they be drooping and ready to fall,
By a Whitsun or Church-ale up again they shall go
And owe their repairing to a pot of good ale.”[7]

Puritans tried to eliminate church-ales as a regular part of their reforms.  In Twelfth Night [II. iii.] Shakespeare’s drunken character, Sir Toby Belch, addresses the sanctimonious steward Malvolio, asking, “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”  To use Sr. Joan Chittister’s language, the structure persisted (with adjustments) over time and so apparently did the idea (again with adjustment rather than complete change).  So despite Puritan and later Victorian efforts to suppress the church-ales, to this day pastors often face the suggestion that the church should find money to fix the roof by holding a beef-and-beer. 

            While the continuity of the pagan and the Christian festivities in this case seems a matter of folkways, other examples from across the world display outright syncretism.  A case in point would be the popularity, among Mexican Catholics and their American cousins, of devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe.  The legend is recounted by one web site dedicated to Marian devotion:

“Mesoamerica, the New World, 1521: The capital city of the Aztec empire falls under the Spanish forces. Less than 20 years later, 9 million of the inhabitants of the land, who professed for centuries a polytheistic and human sacrificing religion, are converted to Christianity. What happened in those times that produced such an incredible and historically unprecedented conversion?

In 1531 a ‘Lady from Heaven’ appeared to a humble Native American at Tepeyac, a hill northwest of what is now Mexico City. 

She identified herself as the ever virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the True God for whom we live, of the Creator of all things, Lord of heaven and the earth. 

She made a request for a church to be built on the site, and submitted her wish to the local Bishop. When the Bishop hesitated, and requested her for a sign, the Mother of God obeyed without delay or question to the Church's local Bishop, and sent her native messenger to the top of the hill in mid-December to gather an assortment of roses for the Bishop. 

After complying to the Bishop's request for a sign, She also left for us an image of herself imprinted miraculously on the native's tilma, a poor quality cactus-cloth, which should have deteriorated in 20 years but shows no sign of decay 480 years later and still defies all scientific explanations of its origin.”[8]

What none of this account mentions is that, as is pointed out elsewhere,

“Before the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the hill where Juan Diego had his vision had also been the site of an ancient temple to the Aztec goddess Tonantzin (Our Revered Mother), later leveled to the ground by the Spaniards.”[9]

The subjugated Mexicans, in other words, substituted one Revered Mother for another, one who revealed herself not to the foreign, episcopal potentate but to a representative of the indigenous people, becoming first the unofficial and eventually the official patroness of the native population.  Juan Diego, to whom she appeared, was canonized by John Paul II in 2002.  The Spanish bishop who doubted his visions was not.

            At the end of that same century, an attempt to expand Western Christianity eastward from Europe was made by the newly-organized Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), who were given official sanction by Pope Paul III in 1540 and again in 1550 by Pope Julius III

“to strive especially for the defence and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, by means of public preaching, lectures and any other ministration whatsoever of the Word of God”.[10]

One of the many fronts on which the Jesuit work went on was in Asia.  The foundational document noted that they were especially charged to evangelize and to nurture the faithful “by means of retreats, the education of children and unlettered persons in Christianity”[11] and so it was that one of the order’s early members, an Italian priest named Matteo Ricci, entered China with a mandate to share the gospel and to educate.

            He and his coworkers made a decision that would have wide-reaching consequences and that stands out sharply in comparison to the earlier activity of Mellitus and his European contemporaries.  Rather than beginning by adapting the local culture to their own ways, the Jesuits began by adapting themselves, at least outwardly, to the local culture.

“The Jesuits quickly decided that missionaries must adapt themselves to Chinese customs.  This involved much rapid self-education.  Their first great missionary, the Italian Matteo Ricci, on his arrival in 1582, adopted the dress of a Buddhist monk (bonze), without realizing  that bonzes were despised by the people who mattered.  When his mistake was pointed out, he and his fellow Jesuits began dressing as Confucian scholars, complete with long beards; they were determined to show that their learning was worthy of respect in a culture with a deep reverence for scholarship (an ethos of which naturally they greatly approved). …The Chinese upper class was indeed impressed by the Jesuits’ knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and geography, and the Society gained an honored place at the emperor’s court through its specialist use of these skills, even taking charge of reforming the imperial calendar – but not gaining many converts.”[12]

The Jesuits were off to a slow start but were undeterred.  In one of his letters to a missionary in Ethiopia, Ignatius Loyola had laid out a path that Ricci would follow in China. 

“Without taking away from anything in which they are particularly interested or which they especially value, try to get them to accept the truths of Catholicism. …Although you are ever intent on bringing them to conformity with the Catholic Church, do everything gently, without any violence to souls long accustomed to another way of life.”[13]

The practicality of this approach shows itself in the outcome.  At the end of the seventeenth century the Jesuit presence at the Chinese court established by Ricci put French Jesuits on hand to provide the emperor K’anghsi with quinine when he fell ill with malaria and European mediation when Peter the Great began to expand Russian hegemony into the Chinese sphere.  Partly out of gratitude for these acts,[14] in 1692 an unusual decree of tolerance was issued for Chinese Christians.

“The Europeans are very quiet; they do not excite any disturbances in the provinces, they do no harm to anyone, they commit no crimes, and their doctrine has nothing in common with that of the false sects in the empire, nor has it any tendency to excite sedition . . . We decide therefore that all temples dedicated to the Lord of heaven, in whatever place they may be found, ought to be preserved, and that it may be permitted to all who wish to worship this God to enter these temples, offer him incense, and perform the ceremonies practised according to ancient custom by the Christians. Therefore let no one henceforth offer them any opposition.”[15]

The Jesuit approach had been applied in Japan in the previous century, where Francis Xavier had arrived with his associates in 1549.  Fifty years later there were possibly as many as 300,000 converts.  A native clergy was in formation, drawn especially from the classes of the nobility and samurai.[16]

This stands in stark contrast to events following the arrival in 1593 of the Portuguese Franciscans, carrying the baggage of the confrontational, forced conversions of South America had entered the Asian mission field in a different spirit.  There

“they adopted an aggressively negative attitude toward Japanese culture, which led to a number of them suffering death by crucifixion.  In the early seventeenth century the Tokugawa expelled Europeans from Japan except for one rigorously policed trading post.  They then launched one of the most savage persecutions in Christian history, and their repression of Japanese Christians was not without some military assistance from the Protestant Dutch, who were doing their best to wreck Portuguese power in eastern Asia.”[17]

            What Emperor K’anghsi may not have realized was that the Jesuits whom he honored as peaceable were at that time embroiled in controversy with those Dominican and Franciscan orders who had acted imperiously in Japan.

“When Dominicans and Franciscans arrived in China from the Philippines in the 1630s, they launched bitter attacks on their Jesuit rivals, and raised major matters of missionary policy.  The friars, with a background in America assuming total confrontation with previous religions, violently disagreed with the Jesuits in their attitude to the Chinese way of life, particularly traditional rites in honour of Confucius and the family; they even publicly asserted that deceased emperors were burning in Hell.  …Complaints about the ‘Chinese rites’ were taken as far as Rome itself, and after a long struggle successive popes condemned the rites in 1704 and 1715.” [18]

What is known in the West as the “Chinese Rites Controversy” had begun not long after Ricci’s death and lasted nearly seventy years.  The Jesuits had begun with a respect for Chinese culture that was reflected in a willingness to adapt to its forms. 

“We have let our beards grow and our hair down to our ears, at the same time we have adopted the special dress that the literati wear … of violet silk, and the hem of the robe and collar and the edges are bordered with a band of blue silk a little less than a palm wide.” [19]

They were accused of altering, on that account and others, of surrendering core Christian beliefs in the course of adopting Chinese cultural practices.  Specifically, controversy centered on the Jesuit acceptance of converts’ participation in rituals honoring their ancestors, which the Franciscans and Dominicans held to be unacceptably idolatrous.  Likewise, certain aspects of liturgy had been freely altered in ways that diverged from the European norms that the mendicant orders had forcibly established in the Americas and the Phillipines.  They did not see why the Jesuits had not maintained those standards in China.[20] 

            The waters were further muddied by theological antipathies in the West that were being projected onto China, so that the Chinese Rites Controversy turned into a proxy fight.

“Notoriously, different religious orders had divergent theologies, and none more so than the two ‘intellectual’ orders, the Society of Jesus and the Order of Preachers. Jesuits and Dominicans lined up on opposite sides on the theology of grace, on moral casuistry, and on the Christian response to modern science. By the end of the seventeenth century with French Jesuits and French priests from the Missions Étrangères de Paris arriving in large numbers, the shadow of the Jansenist controversy reached out to China.  China became a sort of surrogate battleground for European ecclesiastical conflicts.”[21]

Nor was the battlefield limited to China.  The principles of enculturation expressed and attacked there were also present in Africa. Philip Jenkins notes:

“From about 1700 too, the Kongolese church now began a long period of decline, which represents one of the greatest wasted opportunities in the story of African Christianity.  Political fragmentation in the Kongo state was partly to blame, but much more significant was the Church’s refusal to approve native liturgies and its reluctance to ordain African clergy.  Nor was the Vatican willing to grant other key concessions to African values, including a married clergy – a model that was accepted elsewhere, in parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  The Chinese Rites debacle, and the cultural rigidity it symbolized, crippled the progress of Catholic missions worldwide for a century.”[22]

The first generation of the eighteenth century saw the official condemnation of the work of the previous hundred years, as witnessed in two competing magisterial decrees.  The first was issued in Rome in 1715.

“Pope Clement XI wishes to make the following facts permanently known to all the people in the world. ...

I. The West calls Deus the creator of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. Since the word Deus does not sound right in the Chinese language, the Westerners in China and Chinese converts to Catholicism have used the term "Heavenly Lord" for many years. From now on such terms as ‘Heaven’ and ‘Shang­ti’ should not be used: Deus should be addressed as the Lord of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. The tablet that bears the Chinese words ‘Reverence for Heaven’ should not be allowed to hang inside a Catholic church and should be immediately taken down if already there.

II. The spring and autumn worship of Confucius, together with the worship of ancestors, is not allowed among Catholic converts. It is not allowed even though the converts appear in the ritual as bystanders, because to be a bystander in this ritual is as pagan as to participate in it actively.

III. Chinese officials and successful candidates in the metropolitan, provincial, or prefectural examinations, if they have been converted to Roman Catholicism, are not allowed to worship in Confucian temples on the first and fifteenth days of each month. The same prohibition is applicable to all the Chinese Catholics who, as officials, have recently arrived at their posts or who, as students, have recently passed the metropolitan, provincial, or prefectural examinations.

IV. No Chinese Catholics are allowed to worship ancestors in their familial temples.

V. Whether at home, in the cemetery, or during the time of a funeral, a Chinese Catholic is not allowed to perform the ritual of ancestor worship. He is not allowed to do so even if he is in company with non-­Christians. Such a ritual is heathen in nature regardless of the circumstances.

Despite the above decisions, I have made it clear that other Chinese customs and traditions that can in no way be interpreted as heathen in nature should be allowed to continue among Chinese converts. The way the Chinese manage their households or govern their country should by no means be interfered with. As to exactly what customs should or should not be allowed to continue, the papal legate in China will make the necessary decisions. In the absence of the papal legate, the responsibility of making such decisions should rest with the head of the China mission and the Bishop of China. In short, customs and traditions that are not contradictory to Roman Catholicism will be allowed, while those that are clearly contradictory to it will not be tolerated under any circumstances.”[23] 

Six years later, in 1721, the same emperor who had issued a glowing edict of toleration for Christianity in China, responded to Clement’s declaration by rescinding his former decision.

“Reading this proclamation, I have concluded that the Westerners are petty indeed. It is impossible to reason with them because they do not understand larger issues as we understand them in China. There is not a single Westerner versed in Chinese works, and their remarks are often incredible and ridiculous. To judge from this proclamation, their religion is no different from other small, bigoted sects of Buddhism or Taoism. I have never seen a document which contains so much nonsense. From now on, Westerners should not be allowed to preach in China, to avoid further trouble.”[24]

The Jesuits remained in China, and eventually were joined by many other Christian missionaries from the West, but the era of their official influence and their honored position was over.

The twentieth century would eventually bring a re-evaluation of the work of Ricci and his Jesuit successors in China.  Both religious authorities and secular historians would see in his work an opportunity for the expansion of Christianity that was torpedoed by matters external to the work itself.  A Chinese student of Chinese history, Caitlyn Lu, observes:

“Ricci was finally vindicated by Pope John XXIII in 1958, when by decree in the encyclical Princeps Pastorum he declared that ‘Matteo Ricci would become the model of missionaries.’  But as historian Arnold Toynbee lamented, ‘Christianity had during Ricci’s time and after the chance to become a true world religion—but rejected it over internal squabbles over semantics and local customs. Never again would history present itself on such favorable terms.’ Had Ricci’s method of accommodation been embraced and supported by Rome, the religious history of China might well have been quite different.”[25]

John Paul II followed up on John XXIII’s encyclical forty-three years later in a speech commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Ricci’s arrival in Beijing, saying,

“I feel deep sadness for these errors and limits of the past, and I regret that in many people these failings may have given the impression of a lack of respect and esteem for the Chinese people on the part of the Catholic Church, making them feel that the Church was motivated by feelings of hostility towards China. For all of this I ask the forgiveness and understanding of those who may have felt hurt in some way by such actions on the part of Christians.”[26]

            While the mainline Protestant churches of the West do not work under the same magisterium as their Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, and while the level of centralized control is not anywhere near as enforceable as it was for the Jesuits working in China, there remains the same possibility that those who engage in outreach toward a culture that is increasingly alienated from both the institutional forms and the ideas of traditional Christianity will be pulled back by those who identify any deviation from the familiar as heretical.  Attempts to recognize the concerns of feminists by the introduction of non-gender-specific language in the 1970s and 1980s were met with dismay and change in the Trinitarian formula was equated with modalism.  Attempts to open leadership to homosexual persons or to recognize their innate value among the laity have been met with accusations of moral laxity, disrespect for scripture, or cultural accommodation.  Alternate forms of liturgy sometimes catch on in niche groups but fail to find support among those enculturated to traditional ways, to whom they do not speak.  Groups meeting for prayer and praise outside familiar times and places are applauded but not copied. Even a conservative writer such as Chris Altrock bewails the limitations that are found when the inclusion of insider language and code-words that signify orthodoxy to the already-converted place walls between the preacher and the potentially Christian.

“It’s one thing to have a passion for evangelistic preaching.  It’s an entirely different thing to preach evangelistically in a way that makes sense to postmoderns who are unfamiliar with the Bible and with Christianity’s worldview.”[27]

            Undoubtedly, the community has a responsibility to evaluate innovative ministries of all sorts to make sure that they are true to the gospel, but it is on the basis of the gospel itself, not the institutions which have supported its propagation, that the evaluation should take place.  From our own tradition, we would ask questions such as what it meant for Susannah Wesley to hold Bible studies in her kitchen, for John Wesley to name Coke and Asbury as superintendents for North America (fully aware of the Greek translation of the word and its English cognate), for Asbury to have supported the work of Richard Allen in establishing a separate denomination for African Methodists, or for Bishop Welch to have altered the elements on the Lord’s Table when he fostered the switch from wine to grape juice.  All of these actions could be seen within the pattern followed by Matteo Ricci and other effective evangelists, to meet the people where they are and to speak to them in their own language, as was done for all humanity when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

---

[1] Sr. Joan Chittister, The Way We Were: A Story of Conversion and Renewal (New York: Orbis Books, 2005) 69.

[2] Ibid., 65.

[3] Ibid., 99.

[4] Found in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bede/history.v.i.xxix.html .

[5] Peter Orton, “Burning Idols, Burning Bridges: Bede, Conversion, and Beowulf”, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 36 (2005), 17.  http://digital.library.leeds.ac.uk/453/1/LSE_2005_pp5-46_Orton_article.pdf

[6] Ibid.

[7] from “Exaltation of Ale”.  The verse is cited in E. Peacock, “Church Ales” in The Archaeological Journal, vol. 40 (London: Royal Archaeological Institute, January 1, 1883), p. 14.

[8] “Our Lady of Guadalupe”, found at http://www.sancta.org/intro.html .

[9] Ronald A. Barnett, “Our Lady of Guadalupe: Tonantzin or the Virgin Mary?”, November 11, 2009. Found at http://www.mexconnect.com/articles/2614-our-lady-of-guadalupe-tonantzin-or-the-virgin-mary .

[10] from the “Formula of Institute of the Society of Jesus”.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2009), 706.

[13] Ignatius of Loyola to John Nunez Barreto in Letters of St. Ignatius of Loyola, translated by William J. Young, SJ (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1959), pp. 384 and 387.  Cited by Kenneth Winston and Mary Jo Bane, “Reflections on the Jesuit Mission to China” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard – Kennedy School Faculty Working Paper Series, February 2010), p. 5.

[14] V. Cronin The Wise Man from the West (Fontana, 1961), pp. 262-274.  Cited at http://www.sspxasia.com/Documents/Catholic_History/For-The-Missions-Of-Asia-6.htm .

[15] S. Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1964), pp. 189-­l90.

[16] MacCulloch, 706-707.

[17] MacCulloch, 707.

[18] Ibid.

[19] James Martin, S.J., The Jesuit Guide to (almost) Everything (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 366.

[20] Paul A. Rule, “The Chinese Rites Controversy: A Long Lasting Controversy in Sino-Western Cultural History” in Pacific Rim Report [No. 32, February 2004] (Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco), 2.  http://www.ricci.usfca.edu/research/pacrimreport/prr32.pdf

[21] Ibid., 4.

[22] Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 33.

[23] China in Transition, 1517­-1911, Dan. J. Li, trans. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1969), pp. 22­24. Cited at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1715chineserites.asp .

This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history.

[24] Ibid., 22.

[25] Caitlin Lu, “Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Mission in China, 1583-1610” in The Concord Review, 2011, p.15. http://www.tcr.org/tcr/essays/EP_TCR_21_3_Sp11_Matteo%20Ricci.pdf

[26] John Paul II, “To the Participants in the International Conference Commemorating the Fourth Centenary of the Arrival in Beijing of Father Matteo Ricci” (October 4, 2001).  Found at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/2001/october/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20011024_matteo-ricci_en.html

                                                           

[27] Chris Altrock, Preaching to Pluralists, (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004), 49.

"What We Shall Become" - November 2, 2014

I John 3:1-3

(All Saints' Sunday)

            The United Methodist Book of Worship suggests that funeral services start with these words:

“Dying, Christ destroyed our death.

Rising, Christ restored our life.

Christ will come again in glory.

As in baptism [this person] put on Christ,

            so in Christ may [this person] be clothed with glory.”

It continues with the words we heard earlier today from the first letter of John [3:2-3]:

“Here and now, dear friends, we are God’s children.

What we shall be has not yet been revealed;

but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him,

            for we shall see him as he is.

Those who have this hope purify themselves as Christ is pure.”

This morning we have celebrated a baptism, and we are holding our yearly remembrance with thanksgiving for those who have gone before us into death.  This scripture is key in connecting the dots for us today, because they are connected in a deep way.

            Both baptisms and memorials are reminders that we are on a journey that moves us forward toward a destination we haven’t seen yet, but that lies somewhere ahead in God’s eternity.  We know where we come from.  We have some idea of where we are.  We trust God for where we will end up.

            Where we come from is that we are part of God’s creation.  God made everything and called it good.  Don’t ever let anybody tell you that Christianity says that people are born sinful.  What we say is that babies are born into a sinful world, and that all human beings who live in this world are connected to one another, which means that we begin to get messed up from the earliest point onward.  We need help from one another and from God to muddle through.

                        “With God’s help we will proclaim the good news

                                    and live according to the example of Christ.

                        We will surround these persons

                                    with a community of love and forgiveness,

                                    that they may grow in their trust of God,

                                    and be found faithful in their service to others.

                        We will pray for them,

                                    that they may be true disciples

who walk in the way that leads to life.”[1]

All human beings are children of God, but baptism brings us from the yard into the house and sets us down at the table, and says, “Here you go.  This is what you need to grow strong.  Mind your manners.  Now, eat up, and then you can have seconds.”

            We need that.  We need it, because we are meant to grow.  Baptism is a beginning, not an endpoint.  It tells us where we are.  We are tangled up in the world’s shortcomings, but they are not what define us.  If we want to know who we are, we don’t see it in ourselves, we see it in Jesus, the one person who lived successfully free of their constraints, free of sin.  That is who we emulate because that is who we also were meant to be.  We were meant to be people who embody God’s love, as he totally and completely embodied it.

“Here and now, dear friends, we are God’s children.

What we shall be has not yet been revealed;

but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him,

            for we shall see him as he is.”

No, we are not there yet.  But that is the direction that we are headed, the direction that God points us, and the place that, by God’s grace, we will go.  So we are expected to do our part, too.

“Those who have this hope purify themselves as Christ is pure.”

            The value in taking time to remember people whose earthly lives have run their course is in recognizing just how much God has done in and through them.  It isn’t that we celebrate people as being perfect or sinless.  It is that we celebrate how much good God does though the ordinary, flawed, sometimes loveable and sometimes aggravating, sometimes beloved and sometimes annoying people that are part of our own ordinary, flawed, loveable, aggravating, beloved, annoying lives.

            The promise of where we are going is summed up in that.  If God can and does build his kingdom on earth through people like us, then we can expect amazing things even of ourselves when we are more fully in God’s presence after death and better able to live by his grace alone.

“Here and now, dear friends, we are God’s children.

What we shall be has not yet been revealed.”

Or, as Paul said,

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see

face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know

fully, even as I have been fully known.”  [I Corinthians 13:12]

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[1] Prayer from “The Baptismal Covenant I” in The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), p. 35.

"Tax Policy" - October 19, 2014

Matthew 22:15-22

“Tax Policy”

October 19, 2014

How do you balance conflicting loyalties?

You are a religious Jew living in a land occupied by a foreign army and are asked to pay taxes that will ultimately support the occupation.  If you don’t pay them, the army may take it out on everyone by force.  What’s worse, the coins that are in circulation picture the emperor as a god, so you who are a part of a people who have been taught to avoid idolatry at all costs and to worship God and God alone are now being asked to carry what is essentially a pagan idol in your pocket to pay those taxes. 

“Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” [Matthew 22:17]

What’s the answer?  When the Pharisees asked Jesus that question, it was because they “plotted to entrap him in what he said.” [Matthew 22:15]  No matter whether he said, “Yes,” or, “No,” he could be made out to be disloyal, whether to his own people or to the ruling authorities or to God. 

Thank goodness none of us ever find ourselves trying to make decisions like that.  None of us ever have to evaluate whether to vote for a political candidate with whom we agree on some things and disagree on others.  None of us ever have to ask how far we can allow latitude for disagreement before we compromise our integrity.

Within the United Methodist Church these days, that’s a big question for clergy, because of the same-sex marriage issue.  Those who believe the time has come to allow it are nonetheless under the operating rules of the Book of Discipline that strictly forbids United Methodist clergy from officiating, and the Book of Discipline can only be altered by General Conference, which meets every four years.  The next session is in Portland in 2016 and is unlikely to make that change.  So they are stuck between loyalties.  Those who oppose it find themselves part of a denomination where they feel that a large proportion of people have forsaken biblical standards and they wonder if, by remaining, they are supporting an organization that they consider to be on the edge of corruption.

How do you balance conflicting loyalties?

Sports teams now regularly hold games and practice on Sundays.  Even if they stay away from Sunday morning, which is not always the case, an away game held across the county or further that starts at 1:00 means that players need to be on the road by 11:00 or so.  (By the way, you will often see an acolyte at our early service wearing a uniform so that they can both go to church and play in a game.  Not every church has an 8:30 service, though.)  The recognition that is offered to athletes in our society at all levels is pervasive, and the desire to belong is very strong in children and adolescents.  Parents want the best for their children, and sports teach them many important lessons.  At the same time that both the kids and the parents recognize the importance of Sunday School and church, if they skip church no one is going to say they cannot be here next week.  If they miss practice or a game, that may very well be it for the season.  The next thing you know, it has been months since we’ve seen them.

How do you balance conflicting loyalties?

Have you ever heard the term “Sandwich Generation”?  It refers to people of a certain age who may be the parents of those kids on the sports teams or who are in school plays or taking tuba lessons or who need extra help with their school work or a ride to Brownies; people who also have older parents who need a ride to the doctor or have to get to the Acme because they just ran out of eggs, milk, and butter yesterday and the forecast is for six inches of snow tonight; people who have been asked to work overtime this evening because that same snow storm may close work tomorrow.

How do you balance conflicting loyalties?

You know that your family needs the support you give them through the wages you earn.  There are taxes to be paid.  There are insurance bills and co-pays.  PECO does not accept payment in chickens and eggs.  So you work long hours to make ends meet, so long that your husband or wife, who is also working hard, has already turned in by the time you get home three or four nights a week.

Jesus’ answer about loyalties was brilliant in the way it threw things back onto the people trying to entrap him. 

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” [Matthew 22:21]

Basically, he’s putting into words what we all know: that there are hard choices to make and that we make them, like it or not; and that they cannot be made without remembering to include God in your calculations.  The Pharisees were asking for one, hard-and-fast rule.  He refused to give that, but insisted instead that people consult their consciences.

That could mean that people of good faith could very well end up on opposite sides of the most difficult questions.  There’s a story about how Rose Kennedy taught her children about voting.  She is said to have told them, “When you enter the voting booth and the curtain closes behind you,” (which is how the machines were designed in those days), “there will be a lot of little levers that you can ignore.  There will be two larger ones, labeled ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’.  If you press the one marked ‘Republican’, God will strike you dead.”  You do know that’s a joke, right?  You do also know, I hope, that you should pray very seriously about every decision that you make as a citizen.

In fact, every major decision should be made with prayer, regardless of whether it’s a public or a private matter.  It’s safe to say that God likes to be consulted on things, and that our own lives turn out better when we take the time to do that.  That is a good principle to observe when the trickiest conflicts come along.  Marilynne Robinson, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her novel Gilead, is someone who is good at lifting up the complexities of life.  She says of herself,

“I find that my praying turns into thinking.  It’s like trying to contain something, and then perhaps it turns into prayer.  It’s almost impossible for me to maintain it as a purely distinct activity.”[1]

That is just as it should be.  Pray with your mind, and think with your prayer.  That is balance, and how to find it.  Then, and only then, will you know the best way to “give to God the things that are God’s.”  [Matthew 22:21]

            Whatever is left over, the emperor may have.

---

[1] Marilynne Robinson, interviewed by Sarah Pulliam Bailey, found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/08/marilynne-robinson-lila_n_5955202.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000051

"Called and Chosen" - October 12, 2014

Matthew 22:1-14

This is one of those parables that leaves me saying, “You have to have been there to get it.”

On the surface, what you have is a deeply disturbing story.  There’s a wedding and the king who is the father of the groom invites guests who don’t come.  Some of them send their regrets even though their excuses are lame.  Others decided it’s their chance to make a political statement and it gets very ugly.

“‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, maltreated them, and killed them.”  [Matthew 22:4-7]

That’s when the king loses his temper.  It’s the end of the road for some of them.  When the smoke clears, he has random people dragged in off the street to the wedding banquet.

So far so good.  It’s an understandable, if extreme, response.

Then the weird part is tacked on.

“When the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless.  Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”  [Matthew 22:11-14]

How is it that someone who hadn’t planned on being there can be blamed for not being dressed for the occasion?

Like I say, you have to have been there.

Last spring, we held an event at Steel City Coffeehouse at the corner of Bridge and Main Sts.  We called it “The Spring Thaw Concert”.  I’ll spare you a lot of the details, but it took a good bit of legwork to pull off.  When the evening of the concert arrived, I got there and found that the staff hadn’t been notified of the nature of the event and had written on the signboard that the place was reserved for a private party.  I had that changed right away.  It was about an hour before the concert.

The musician arrived thirty minutes later.  He had called earlier in the day to let me know that he would be a solo act instead of half of a duo because the bass player’s grandmother in Ireland had died the day before and he was on his way across the Atlantic for the funeral.

Fifteen minutes later, a friend I had invited arrived and stationed himself near the door, against the wall.  Five minutes afterward, two people from church came in.  The soundcheck began.  It was concert time, with three people there.  That’s when the evening switched from a fundraising event to an outreach event.

The bouncer and I went out onto the sidewalk and began to invite people in as they went by.  “Free concert and free refreshments tonight!”  “Got some good music going on.”  “First United Methodist is throwing a concert tonight.”  As it turned out, it was an unusually slow night all along Bridge St. and even Molly Maguire’s was looking empty, but a few people did wander in.  “Free music and free coffee!”

I enjoyed talking to the bouncer, and we did have time to talk.  I also enjoyed talking with some of the people who sat down for awhile.  There was one woman who was there with her son, who was about eleven years old.  She told me she goes to a Mormon church and then pointed to her coffee and whispered, “But I do indulge sometimes.”  The couple who were there from the church shared a pizza that they had brought with a younger couple who had come in.  All of that was fine.

There were some people, however, who just came in for a minute or two, saw that the place was pretty much empty, and went right back out.  I found myself becoming annoyed at them more than anybody else.  What got me was that they just didn’t give the whole thing a chance.

So when I read the parable now, I think I see something that I didn’t see before I found myself in a position similar to the father of the groom.  I see that there’s an incredible sense of frustration that comes along when something really good (and the music was terrific) is placed in front of someone unexpectedly and freely and when you go out on a limb to do that, and then it is turned down.

God offers us human beings a chance to be part of the exciting life of his kingdom.  He offers us a chance to hear its music and enjoy a seat at his own table.  He has gone to a good deal of trouble, and in the person of his Son has endured infinite pain so that the doors are open.  Then we human beings do what?  Yawn?

The wedding clothes that he looks for are not the outward things.  They represent the joy of being there, the surprise of being called to the party, the appreciation of God’s great generosity, the awareness of the amazing grace that saves a wretch like me.  They represent the sort of excited response that we call “discipleship”. 

“As they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’  Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’”  [Luke 9:57-62]

Jesus was not some uncaring person who had no feeling for people’s physical, social, and emotional needs.  Far from it!  He did, however, have the awareness that discipleship includes a sense of urgency and isn’t anything to be brushed off or minimized.

            We are all called into the kingdom, and from there we are chosen for the excitement of discipleship.  So get ready.  John Wesley summed up what might or might not be asked of a disciple when he wrote a prayer that we often use around New Year’s.

“I am no longer my own, but thine.

Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.

Put me to doing, put me to suffering.

Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low for thee.

Let me be full, let me be empty.

Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.”

Again, I say, “Get ready.”

"Other Tenants" - October 5, 2014

Matthew 21:33-46

            Usually, World Communion Sunday means a celebration of the way that faith in Christ is found in all parts of the world.  We have included part of that aspect today.  We have music drawn from different nations.  We have cloths on the altar that represent different parts of the world.  The bread we will use at communion is made up of many types that people around the world see on their table and think of when they pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”  I hope that on the first Sunday of October, 2015 I will be standing right here saying something that simply highlights the variety of ways that the Lord is honored around the globe.  Today, however, because the Body of Christ is one in all the earth, I just will say a brief word about one part of the Body.

            In our day we are seeing, under tragic circumstances, a cataclysmic change in the Middle East.  We are seeing the suffering that is forcing the change and the suffering that the change produces.  Paul said that

“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”  [I Corinthians 12:26]

That is part of what it means for us to be one. 

            Christianity is evaporating in the Middle East.  I hesitate to say anything about that area of the world because almost everything anyone says gets drawn into the vortex of issues that surround the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Iraqi Wars, and the role of the oil companies, and the disputes between the Kurds and Turks, and the arguments between Hamas and Fatah, and the shifting alliances among the Syrians and Egyptians and Lebanese and Saudis and Yemenis and the United Arab Emirates.  It’s the sort of mess where even simple facts are hard to determine because it’s all tainted with bias of one sort or another.  I do think that the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation is a reliable source.  In 2010, one of their reporters wrote, “A century ago, 20% of the population in the region was Christian. Today Christians account for only about 5% and their numbers are still dwindling.”[1]  Since the current terrorism has broken out in Syria and Iraq, thousands upon thousands of people have died or fled.  Not all of them are Christian, but many are, and the exodus of Christians from places where the faith flourished in its earliest days has left the area with a far lower proportion of Christians than at any time since the days of the Roman Empire.

            Let me, however, look back to those days and even earlier.  The Church began on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, and flourished there.  It began to spread quickly.  The apostle Phillip shared the faith with a high official from Ethiopia, who carried it to Africa.  There were at least some disciples in Damascus by the time of Paul’s conversion, somewhere around 40 A.D., give or take a couple of years.  Nevertheless, the bulk of the community remained centered on Jerusalem.  And then, the book of Acts [8:1] tells us,

“a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria.”

Later on it says that people traveled even further afield.

“Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that took place over Stephen travelled as far as Phoenicia, [that means modern Lebanon] Cyprus, and Antioch, [which could refer to a city in Syria or one in Turkey] and they spoke the word to no one except Jews.” [Acts 11:19]

Even with those limitations, precisely because of the persecution, Christianity was on its way to becoming a world religion, no longer connected to a specific place or geography, the way that Judaism still focuses on Jerusalem and the Muslims focus on Mecca.  So, as terrible as it was, God used that time of trouble for good.  What Jesus had spoken of was coming to pass, when he had foreseen the kingdom of God becoming the common citizenship of many nations.

“‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.’” [Matthew 21:33-41]

That didn’t go over well.  It never goes over well when anybody says that your most cherished and deeply-rooted customs are not always going to be “all that and a bag of chips”.

            The story of the world, what we call history, isn’t about any one culture or any one people.  It isn’t even entirely about people at all.  It’s about how God’s grace works itself out in the world, among people and among nations and cultures and languages. 

            The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem with the scary title “That Nature Is a Heracletian Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection”.  The first part of it is about how everything decays and falls apart and the sense of despair makes him think of himself as a ship in a storm, then at the last moment he draws up short and says,

                                                “…Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s-clarion!  Away grief’s gasping, ‘joyless days, dejection.

                        Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, and eternal beam.’  Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm: ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

                        In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

                        Is immortal diamond.”

Tragic events are part of history and part of our lives: tragic events, but not tragedy, because the end of it all lies in God’s hands, not ours, and God has this habit of turning things in directions we little suspect, and always – always – for the good.

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[1] David Willey, “Rome ‘Crisis’ Talks on Middle East Christians” October 10, 2010.  Found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11509256