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Holy Week resources and reflections

Lent Devotional #4 – Seeing with the Heart

It’s easy to bash the Pharisees in the gospel of John, but we do so at our peril. One writer notes, “For the Pharisees, protecting the identity of the Jewish people in the midst of a hostile world was an overwhelming priority. To continue to be ‘God’s people’ meant that they had to use every tool they had to remain distinctive, to resist the temptation to assimilate into the dominant culture.” [1]

Since Sabbath observance was a distinguishing mark, the Pharisees’ debate with Jesus on this issue signals much larger questions: How do we “see” what is important and what is not? How do we define our true identity?  How do we know what is sin, and “what is pleasing to the Lord?” (Ephesians 5:10). These central questions of identity facing the post-Temple Hellenistic-Jews (both Pharisees and Christians!) are revisited in every period of globalization and its concomitant social and religious upheaval – including ours.

The gospel’s story of controversy around the blind man is a pattern for how these questions are often worked out. The blind man is the object about which religious authorities argue and neighbors gossip, much as we objectify “sinners” and “victims” today as a problem to be managed.  Thus the battle between two persons or groups revolves around a third party, and sometimes the third party even gets roped in as a surrogate for one of them. Ancient Greek plays and John’s gospel demonstrate this pattern masterfully. Unfortunately, so does the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) today.

After so many General Assemblies at which we pitted homosexuality as the surrogate for our divisions, I had frankly given up hoping for resolution. But this fall’s election made it painfully clear to me that this division is not just a denominational issue, but a national debate about our core identity, both as citizens of the US, and as citizens of the household of God.

They are not dissimilar identity questions. “We are having an identity crisis,” saysSamuel Huntington. Iin his provocative book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” he says that we’ve lost touch with who we are as Americans. What used to define us is disappearing. Huntington argues that the majority shared a common ancestry (British); religion (Protestant); and language. The loss of our WASP-ness has left only one “identity driver” to unite us: our values, which Huntington warns is a fragile basis for national identity.  “People are not likely to find in political principles the deep emotional content and meaning provided by kith and kin, blood and belonging, culture and nationality.”[2] 

It’s no wonder our political debates are so heated. If America’s identity rests on ideology alone, then our differences threaten an already fragile sense of security. Now, none of us is in a hurry to return to the so-called “good old days” of WASPs in the boardroom, Chinese on the road gangs, and blacks in the fields. But I have to agree with Huntington’s diagnosis: we’re deeply conflicted about who we are.

Our mainline churches are having the same identity crisis. Huntington says, “The soul of a church … does not exist solely … in its theological dogma, but in its rituals, hymns, practices, moral commandments and prohibitions, liturgy, prophets, saints, gods, and devils.”[3] But like America in general, the mainline church lost its common culture. We are no longer united by common ancestry –Presbyterians of Scottish, English, or Dutch descent; Lutherans of German and Scandinavian origin. We no longer know our history; a sizeable number of new members have never been Presbyterians before. Nor can we always recognize our denomination when we see it.  Once you could walk into any Lutheran or Methodist or Presbyterian Church in the country and you know you’d find your denomination’s hymnal, follow your denomination’s order of worship, recite your denomination’s creed, and have your children taught the denomination’s curriculum. Now you’ll find more similarities in evangelical praise services or traditional liturgies across denominations than you will find in churches within denominations. We have lost nearly all the identifying markers that used to unite us.

Is it any wonder that mainline denominations are going through painful spasms? If our identity rests on beliefs alone — without a common language, a common style, a common hymnal, a common culture — then all our eggs rest in one theological basket. Our ideological differences – which used to be tolerable – now feel cataclysmic. That’s why the debates at every recent General Assembly have been so heated: every deliberation, every paper, every vote reflects our larger question of identity.

That’s the diagnosis. So what’s the cure? Huntington gets it wrong when he tries to recreate our common culture. Not only is it impossible; we run the risk of the Pharisees, who chose preservation over the chance that God might do something new: “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”  Rather, we must seek diligently to “see” – that is, to “live as children of light” … to find “all that is good and right and true” … to “find out what is pleasing to the Lord.”

This is a much harder task than returning to “the good old days,” because God knows that not everything new is godly. “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness,” Ephesians warns us, but sometimes the light seems so dim that we cannot always tell the difference. Yet is this so different than the blind man’s experience or the reality of Christians in any time of discernment and change? Clarity comes neither easily nor quickly. The blind man may see with his eyes right away, but it takes him some time before he sees with his heart … and so it is with us. The very nature of our questions must change from the questions of identity of sinners — “Is this the man born blind?”  “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” – to the only question that ultimately matters: the question of the identity of our Savior.  “Who is he? Tell me, sir, that I may believe in him.” 

 

CHRISTINE CHAKOIAN is pastor of Community Church in Clarendon Hills, Ill.


[1]Karen Chakoian, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Granville, Ohio, from a sermon preached 8/22/04.

[2] Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 339.

[3] Huntington, 339.

 

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