Difficult passage.

I did the readings at church this morning. Both lessons were difficult: the Old Testament lesson was about the exclusiveness of Israel as God's chosen, and the New Testament reading was about a husband's and wife's duty to one another. This was the second week in a row that the pastor (a visiting priest covering the regular rector's vacation) mentioned the fact that these difficult and often controversial readings are placed in the liturgical calendar in the middle of August, when everyone is on vacation and can "miss" them.

He then went on to preach about the need to analyze and contemplate what these difficult passages mean to modern Christians. These are lessons that have been interpreted literally and used to maintain the legitimacy of reactionary or conservative power structures, particularly sexist, patriarchal hierarchies. However, the story of Christ is certainly not about maintaining the status quo. Thus, there is an obvious contradiction here. One explanation, the reverend said, was that the revolutionary rhetoric of early Christians was tempered by language in the epistles to demonstrate that Christians were not threatening to turn the world upside down. Another approach he suggested to these lessons is to alter the assumptions about the very language used, and to see the imagery of the writings more broadly. The point is, the sermon challenged us to think carefully and contemplatively about the lessons.

This addresses a problem I have from both ends of Christianity. On the one hand, as a (nominal, at least) Christian, I do get frustrated with people who assume that all Christians are creationists who hate science. On the other hand, I often want to put as much distance as I can between myself and fundamentalists who see all questioning of scripture as heresy. Faith is not the negation of inquiry, it is the starting point for it. I got interested in the Church because of the intellectual discipline and philosophical examination that are an integral part of it. I do not think that we are obliged by our faith to accept the conclusions that earlier observers came to regarding the interpretation of scripture, the nature of God, or the questions of how we get along with one another. The observance of faith, that is the practice of religion, does not give us answers to life's problems, it gives us an approach to use in figuring things out for ourselves.