Epiphany IV (Proper 4)
January 28, 2007
I Corinthians 13: 1 If I have all the eloquence of men or of angels, but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing.
Thanks to the masterful translation of the King James Bible, this particular passage is most often taken as a stand-alone, a magnificent attestation to the paramount place of love in human relations. Its success is almost a freak accident because the Pauline letters gave these eminent men a particularly hard time largely because of the corrupt manuscript texts they had available, so the outcome was more often than not an unintelligible guess as to Paul’s meaning.. Chapter 13 really belongs to the closely knit argument that Paul formulates in Chapters 12 through 14. Its purpose was to establish an alternative hierarchy of knowledge in opposition to the claims put forward by the practitioners of glossolalia. In terms of Paul’s understanding as established in Chs. 12-14 “to love” means “to share” - thus making all other gifts and action attributed to the Spirit worthless unless they lead to the building up of the entire community (1). Love puts the seal on his understanding that without commitment to the common good the Body of Christ becomes a lot of noise and cannot possibly participant in its calling to transform the earth. Nonetheless, it is surely right that Paul’s words have a resonance which connects in other ways with the human spirit (small s). They have become the source for that sense of charity which has so eased the pain of life within the western world. However, to indulge in a bit of world play , it is certainly pertinent to ask how Paul’s understanding of love drives us beyond charity to a more nuanced commitment to the common good.
In a previous sermon, I proposed that we might extend our understanding of the common good as to include the meaning that we are inseparably connected to the world around us and particularly the natural world which is the setting for all human activity. I suggested that we might extend the implication of Baptism to include in its re-birth a sense that we are sending forth “green" children into the world in order to emphasize the commitment which we have as a community to the transformation of the natural world which is essential to life in all its forms.For the remained of my time, I would like to consider two very different contemporary approaches to furthering the common good which arise from two very different visions of the world and human responsibility for its transformation.
In the first of a three part series entitled A Sliver of a Store Front, A Faith on the Rise (2) which began in the New York Times on January 14 David Gonzalez examines a small, store front Pentecostal Church in Manhattan’s Harlem - The Pentecostal Church Ark of Salvation for the New Millennium. While it is difficult to characterize in general terms, a Pentecostal congregation, he notes that this one made up a tiny fraction of the some 800,000 Pentecostals in New York City. 1 in 10 New Yorker is Pentecostal; 1/3 of whom are Hispanics. In turn they add their number to the 40,000,000 Pentecostals world-wide. It is the fastest growing branch of Christianity Its pastor a 50 year old immigrant from the Dominican Republic receives no income from his flock but works making jewelled purses in a local factory. His work is both artistic and highly skilled. The Pentecostal outreach is often but not exclusively to those in society who live at its edge and gives them vital roles within the community and gives great encouragement to women. The Ark does not celebrate poverty and members are told that hard work and frugal living will be rewarded, perhaps not lavishly but adequately. The dress code is decidedly white collar - suits for the me and long skirts for the women Children are encouraged to stay in school and the pastor boasts of several college graduates in the congregation. This refutes, he says the notion that born-again Christians are simple minded. “When you are a professional, people have no idea you can be a Christian,” he says “the Gospel is not just for the poor, God is not just a God of the ignorant.”
This church forbids smoking drinking and dancing and discourages its adherents from wearing flashy clothes. So most of its members distrust and revile the world - “el mundo” - as they call it - still they must leave the church’s embrace to spread the word to anyone, anywhere, anytime. On the other hand while Pentecostals strongly oppose abortion and gay marriage, they have a long history of shunning political involvement. Most politicians are seen as agents of the secular world. The pastor and others at the Ark say they are busy enough with the troubles they see in their own streets and homes, crime, drugs and splintered families. Paradoxically before abortion and gay rights began to dominate the political discourse, Latino Pentecostals in New York invariably supported liberal candidates who reached out as they did to the poor and forgotten.
However, today the Rev Ruben Diaz, one of the first Pentecostals to venture into New York politics, pressures evangelicals with a mix of social spending, liberalism and family values conservatism He is Democratic state senator from the Bronx and warns his party support for gay marriage and abortion rights will alienate his religious constituents. “The evangelical churches will be the Achilles heel of the Democratic Party he says “unless it opens the door to a segment of the population who does not think exactly like them”.
In the third article, A Church’s Challenge: Hold On to its Young, (3) Gonzalez begins by noting that although the growth of Pentecostals is phenomenal, most of its congregations are strangely devoid of their young.. At the Ark , a very careful approach is taken to protect its young people from both the excesses of religion as well as the temptations of the surrounding community. Dr. Pablo Poleschuk, a Pentecostal minister is quoted “The philosophy is to insulate and isolate to preserve them from a toxic environment, but it does not prepare them to face that environment with dignity ...when you try to protect them so much, the end result is the first germ that goes through them, spoils them.”
You get the feeling from the comments of some of the young people quoted elsewhere in the article that even though they try hard to maintain the strict life style of the congregation, they find it nearly impossible to reduce the challenges and possibilities of education, friendship and work by dismissing the secular world. I found it particularly interesting that its leadership should use the term “toxic” to describe its condition. It seems to me that what is so far absent from their consideration is an adequate doctrine of creation and the responsibility that God has given human beings for its maintenance of final transformation.
The other extreme of understanding the secular is represented by a recent article in The Guardian Weekly.(4) Tobias Jones calls them secular fundamentalists and suggests what they want is the eradication of religion and all believers from the face of the earth. While this movement is most vocal in Europe and the UK, represented by such well known figures as Richard Dawkins (5), the recent works of Sam Harris in books such as The End of Faith, Religion, Terror and the Future of Religion and Letter to a Christian Nation represent its presence in North America as well. Because we live in a multi confessional society, these new fundamentalists have fostered the falsehood that wearing a crucifix, or a veil or a turban and carrying a ceremonial knife was deeply offensive to other faiths. They have pretended to be protecting religious sensibilities as a pretext to stripping all religious expression from our society. Examples abound, the British Airways crucifix issue, the hijab issue in France and our own kirpan controversy in the public schools. Lazy intellectuals have been allowed to get away with repeating the nonsense that terrorism and war are the consequences of belief in God. Of course in the absence of a commitment to the common good almost any human belief or action can be perceived as a threat And, this is why the commitment to charity is so significant.
Eventually, however, we have to admit that there is a crucial difference between understanding religion as deeply personal or something ever private. There is a need for believers to take a very public stand to remind the human community that they are obeying or disobeying all sorts of commandments that the state doesn’t see or understand. That they are able to differentiate sin from crime with the resulting moral register being far more nuanced then the state can afford to acknowledge. Of course this means that religion does have a role to play in the public debate about what kind of society we wish to develop and nurture. It also means that there is an alternative to an understanding of secularism that is neither as negative as our Pentecostal friends would assert and it is certainly not as one dimensional as secular fundamentalists find necessary.
The British writer Nick Spenser has claimed that it is not out of the way to suggest that it was Jesus who invented secularism by desacralizing the state. He writes in his book Doing God, “the secular was Christianity’s gift to the world, denoting a public space in which authorities should be respected, but could legitimately challenged and could never accord to themselves absolute or ultimate significance.”(6) Such an understanding puts religion in a unique position. On the one hand it to does not represent in its preaching or doctrine an absolute that replaces the secular, but on the other hand it provides precisely that sense of being that we know as deeply personal yet unconditionally grounded in the natural and social world. At the present moment that ground is under threat in a way which will also make it impossible for us to live the faith we profess. Paul was right - in a paraphrase - amidst the nosie and clamour of human selfishness and creed emerges that charity which is able to make possible a common good.. The knowledge that to save ourselves we must preserve the world of air, light and water that is the source of all life.
1. John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, IN SEARCH OF PAUL, Harper, San Francisco, 2004, p.347
2. What follows is a summary and paraphrase of the article by Gonzales
3. New York Times, January 17, 2007. Again what follows is both a summary and paraphrase.
4. Original article in The Guardian, Saturday, January 6 “Secular Fundamentalists are the new totalitarians.”
5. A scathing review of Dawkins latest book, THE GOD DELUSION, appeared in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF Books, January 11, 2007.pp21ff.
6. Quoted in The Guardian article by Jones.
The Rev. Roger A. Balk, Ph.d.