Fr. Tony’s Letter to the
Trinitarians
February 2020
School for Love
What is the Church? Is it a select gathering of the elect, the
righteous, the saints, and rejecting the unregenerate and wicked, as the
Puritans taught? Is it a visible institution
established by God in heaven, made manifest here on earth, embracing a wide
range of people at different places on their spiritual journeys and subject to
its disciplines, as the orthodox and catholic teach? Or is it a three-fold combination of
superimposed communities: the juridical visible institution with righteous and
wicked, the invisible congregation of the redeemed, and the mixed state of both
and everything in between, that the Anglican divines like John Jewell and
Richard Hooker taught?
Jesus once told a parable about this: the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43): “It’s a mixed field out there, with good plants and weeds indistinguishable until late in their growth cycles. Don’t be quick to weed out the bad. You’ll end up killing the good plants too! Let them grow together. It will sort itself out at harvest.”
The tale ends with a promise that
the weeds will be gathered together and burned.
This may lead us to think, “We may not be able to weed as we’d like now,
but in the end, God will burn them all up!”
This is about as small-minded as thinking that St. Paul was being
serious and not belly-laughingly ironic when he said we should do kindness to
our enemies because by so doing “we heap burning coals on their head” (Rom.
12:20). It misses the main point of how the story ends: joy at the harvest
(rather than smug self-satisfaction that one’s enemies got their just
deserts.)
In this, as in so many other parables, Jesus is taking apart our preconceptions, reworking our definitions, deconstructing our world-view. The weeds here are noxious, but indistinguishable from the good wheat. Our rules for identifying weeds and wheat may be flawed. We run too much risk of confusing them.
We know who fits in and who doesn’t. We set up boundaries for our little gardens. We set up categories and demarcations that label some as unwelcomed weeds. In our community, we are afraid of those we call “transients.” In our state, at one point we had a law against free people of color residing here. In our nation, we have borders, and try, with varying degrees of success, to keep outsiders out. In church, we divide people into categories: saints or sinners, orthodox or heretics, conservatives or liberals. We Episcopalians have a besetting sin of snootiness, so while we may not talk much about saints and sinners, we label those with good taste or bad, contributors or ‘the needy,’ those who value ‘traditional and beautiful worship’ or those who ‘prefer the latest cheap fad.’
We are tribal creatures, always wanting labels and markers: Outsiders or insiders. Citizens or illegals. Saints or sinners. Wheat or Weeds.
But Jesus says: your definitions are flawed. Your boundaries are wrong. You don’t know the garden or the plants well enough. Let it be. Let them grow together. Don’t try to sort this out, let God sort it out.
Look at Jesus’ words. “Judge not so you yourself won’t be
judged.” “Be perfectly compassionate like
your Papa in heaven, who gives the blessing of rain and sunshine both on the
good and the wicked.” “Be salt for this
world.” “A truly wicked person who goes
to God in sorrow is healed by his prayers.
The so-called righteous person who prays but only feels superior to
others will never find that prayers help at all.”
Jesus didn’t weed out Judas. He never rejected him, but loved him to the end. He didn’t weed out Peter, as conflicted, impetuous, and changeable as he was. He counseled against violent resistance of the Roman Imperium and its religious establishment toadies in Judea, yet remained so constantly engaged that in the end the Roman authorities finally felt they had to kill him as a political rebel.
When we see evil or malice in front of
us, we go into fight or flight mode. In the Church, we often try to prettify
flight as “finding a better match” or “not having time” for a person. We prettify fight by making it all beneath
the surface: love the sinner hate the
sin, appear to try to respect boundaries even as we wage decades-long
skirmishes of passive aggression and subtle undermining. It’s still fight or flight, regardless of how
it’s tarted up.
But Jesus’ advice is peaceful
engagement, strategic inaction. Jesus
teaches us, “Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.” Wish well
for those who spitefully use you (Matt. 5:44). Let God decide. Be a light, not a judge.
We all have deep-seated emotional
triggers that can really set us off and make us want to go running and demand
that that weed be plucked and thrust into the fire. But even the most sterling “righteous” anger
in most of us is mixed with self-interest and fear. Think about it carefully.
In this messed up world, why is it that only some bad things cause us to
lose our serenity and calm?
What is the Church? I believe it is the same thing that St.
Augustine said that Marriage was: a
school for love.
Grace and Peace.
--Fr. Tony+
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