Man Lives By Bread And Every Word Out of the Mouth of the Living God

This seems to be an odd first post, but I'm founding a new blog. I have a blog in which I will talk about my life, but I also want a blog to talk about deep (and not so deep) theology every once in a while in the context of happenings in the Anglican blogosphere (and my own life).

Today, I heard a sermon at church on the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Rhetorically, it was not the most spectacular sermon, but it measured up in a variety of other ways. In it, the preacher expressed the doubt that Jesus really turned five loaves into two fish into enough for five thousand or more to eat. Perhaps, she said, folks all had brought a little to eat, just for themselves. Then, Jesus' suggestion to the disciples that they find food and the spectacle act of blessing encouraged people to share what they had among themselves. She encouraged us to think about sharing what we had with the 850 million people worldwide in a variety of concerted efforts. Many people are in need of food. Through this story, Jesus calls us to feed them.

Then, after I came home from all of my church doings, I read Randall Foster's sermon for today. I definitely encourage you to read it. Randall is an old friend of mine, though we will stand on different sides of the Thames, the Diet of Worms, or whatever on that day that I hope shall never come. But I sincerely hope that on the Day of the Lord, we will be running through the gates of the New Jerusalem, singing Gloria (Glory!) and trying to beat one another to the sight of the ineffable glory of the Triune God.

Randall's message was that the American public is starving spiritually and being fed bad Jesus, a wandering Jewish holy man but not the Son of God capable of freeing us from sin and eternal death. In the stunning cadences ( I can hear his delivery, but you can't if you don't know him.) that I remember, he encouraged the community of St. Vincent, the cathedral church of the Diocese of Fort Worth, to share the Jesus that can feed and heal them deeply with some spiritually hungry person they know.

My immediate thought after reading this sermon was, "Randall preaches one great evangelical sermon." But then I thought. The preacher today likewise was evangelizing. Just because she suggested that Christ did not in some sense provide heavenly manna to the Five Thousand, she did not necessarily have to be taken completely seriously. Nor was she necessarily feeding us bad Jesus by suggesting that he didn't need to be a magician, a disturber of the natural order, to be the Son of God. Some might say that Christ tapped into the deep grammar of nature or sped up time as C.S. Lewis would have it. Whatever. Folks were fed because Jesus asked for food from both man and God. Wait...you may have missed that.

First, Jesus asked, and he received a little from man. Then he looked up to heaven. And all were fed.

There has been much talk on the Anglican blogosphere about the gospel of transformation vs. the gospel of social justice. Is one or the other authentic? The Anglican Scotist found himself in some trouble when he asked whether the emphasis on personal salvation through the transformation of the Gospel he saw in the more evangelical wing of the Church to the exclusion of social justice wasn't based on liberal individualism rather than the teaching of Jesus and the Fathers. Some of the flack the Scotist took was based on his Twigboy language. If you don't watch King of the Hill, please insert whatever person makes you think, "I don't understand this guy because he has had more formal education than I have. Too much in fact for his own good. Why can't he talk like a normal person?" So many did not understand him and called him a heretic. Poor Scotist.

The gist of what the Scotist is saying (I think) is found in the story of the Good Samaritan. Now honestly, I think we all might feel better about ourselves if the story was called the Good Jew. A Samaritan is taken by thieves on the road and left within an inch of his life. The Priest passes by and says, "Unclean, unclean." The Levite passes by and says, "This man is dead, I think. I'll come back later. There's a widow in need of food in Bethany." A Jew of Judah, perfectly ordinary in all ways, comes by. He does triage, takes him to an inn, pays for his stay etc. The point of the story, of course, would be that one helps someone in abject misery, even if they're Samaritan.

The Scotis made me see that the injured man being a Jew and the good guy being the Samaritan is the key point. The question Jesus is asked you recall is, "Who then is my neighbor?" What Jesus says is admirable is to see your neighbor as someone in another civic community, even if one who oppresses you. What makes this story palatable to the ancients and to the moderns is that the poor Jew is on the edge of life right in front of the Samaritan. Who wouldn't help such a one? Jesus' audience would have recognized an obstacle to the progress of righteousness in the Kingdom of God, an illusion of distance between Samaritan and Jew.

What the Scotist recognizes is that these illusions of distance permeate the liberal individualism that underlies American consumer culture. My salvation is personal. My car is personal. My house is personal, except when I renovate it to make it more sellable to another who will personalize it. I will be good in a personal sense. I will be decent to every human being I encounter personally. I will do nothing about institutional racism as long as I recognize the dignity of people of other races I know. I will feed the hungry in my town, but I refuse to change my buying habits to make sure folks in Guatemala eat. That would subvert free trade. How immoral! We go through much of our life limiting our moral universe to everyday experience in the most compartmentalized and simplified way. Jesus lived in a time when economic transactions were slightly more local and politics, too. He could tell a simpler story. Nowadays, our neighbor might seem like a village destroyed by a storm because a butterfly flapped its wings. Jesus then would tell us we are the butterflies.

This is what the progressive wing of the Church tells the Church and the world. Like the transformative Gospel of Jesus, not everyone wants to hear this Good News. We're all responsible for another that deeply. Randall Foster, in the context of the transformative gospel, thinks of himself as a middle-aged man in suburban Texas. How can he feed the world with the Son of God? I, sitting in reluctantly urban California, experienced the same discomfort. I'd love to bring people Jesus, but I'm not ready to change my shopping habits or consider how unworthy a child of privilege I am. I am ready to see myself as a horrible transgressor against God in very traditional ways, but I can't see how I am cultivating theological vices through the impersonal way I order my existence in civil society.

Yes, impersonal. Liberal individualism makes our personhood the only valid personhood. Everyone else is like the kings of the earth on the Day of the Lord (according to Bacon's New Atlantis , I think) "at a great distance."

OK. I was about to sum up. But I'll pause. What about homosexuality? It seems very liberal individualistic, perhaps? In the worst case, sexual orientation becomes so important that it wrecks all social institutions. We hear, "God made me that way, no matter what it says in the Bible." In Aramaic, there's a great word for fool, "Gabba." Jesus suggests anyone who says it is liable for homicide. He's speaking in the cosmic sense. On His Day, he'll be very displeased with those who do not repent of that word and the feelings that produce it. The LGBTQ community has a similar word they call straights, "breeders." Christopher of "Bending the Rule" recently talked about the sinfulness of that usage. Whatever God thinks about homosexuality, the essentials of being gay repudiate liberal individualism. Because liberal individualism may make everyone else impersonal, but it is strongly oriented to the reproduction of the person. In the discourse of western civilization, reproduction is so suffused with meaning that I often require smelling salts after saying it. Just kidding.

What I mean is this. We are all conscious of our own mortality. Nature drives us to reproduce. Liberal individualism says, "I'm great. I'm the best. My needs are paramount." The telos of that attitude in the face of death is clear. I must have children. They must be in my own image. And if their physical characteristics are acceptably like mine, I will order their lives to either reproduce mine or perfect mine.

But wait? Didn't this happen in feudal times? No. Otherwise, there would not have been so much fosterage. Moreover, the transition from aristocratic to bourgeois culture required allegiances to community standards and the reputation of a family to be converted into economic goods for personal use. Millionaire A's money can buy reputation. The aristocrat must suffer much to regain his, once lost.

But if you're gay, you have been thrown out of the gene pool by nature. Why else would you want to do "unnatural things" naturally? (I'm straight. Forgive my tone.) If you actually express your nature by not reproducing, either chastely or otherwise, you are not participating in the end of liberal individualism. You are free to do other things. Perhaps, you could work on improving adherence to mutually beneficial community standards? And then teach us how? In other words, LGTBQ folks have less of a stake in liberal individualism than straights. Both can experience the selfishness of decadent pleasures. But only one orientation is so vulnerable to the temptation toward secular and personal immortality.


But this aside now is ended. I will emphasize in this blog again and again that Christians look to the time when God is all in all. Augustine liked to end many parts of City of God with this. The great hope is that this universe, as wonderful as God as made it, will be perfected and we will experience the fullness of its perfection in God united with the communion of saints. Thus, the Church in looking to that end (which scared Nietzsche, who understood Christian hope better than any anti-Christian of human flesh) must not ignore or imitate the things of the world, the objects and institutions of man. Instead, we must seek to perfect it through Christ. Randall is right. Folks in America (and other places) need good Jesus. They need to join the cosmic battle against evil and corruptibility. They need to be cleansed of their manifold wickednesses. They also need to provide some loaves and fishes to some other folks.

When the Scotist talks about the dangers of personalizing salvation, I am greatly challenged. I still have this image of God waving me into a personal playground, where I might see some folks I know from time to time. But instead, the salvation I should seek is that one in which I am in a city at unity with itself. How can I gain admission to such a city without seeking good relationships with the citizens of that city? Any of the fellow inhabitants of this planet might be among them. How can I say that the Gospel is not about social justice when I challenge the unity of that city by being insufficiently reflective about the actions in the earthly city that impersonalize me but still incarnate me to hands, ears, noses, minds, and hearts that I want to meet once more at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb? My hope, of course, is in the Son of God. But I still need to bring him my loaves and my fish, so that all are satisfied.

Until further controversies in the Anglican blogosphere arise, the Holy Brothers wish you the peace and unity of the New Jerusalem, and ask that you will seek to do Her good.