Order, Disorder, and Reorder

John meets Richard, meets H____, meets Francis and Leo

John’s angelic guide in the Revelation notes that the “witness of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy,” and whether one understands the possessive to be subjective or objective (the translations are divided), the meaning is clear: that our best prophetic witness against of idolatry—the disordering of the idolatrous order, as Fr. Rohr says—emerges from our memories of Jesus’s own teaching and ministry, and from our faithful witness to him.

Such remembering and reiterating—what liturgists call anamnesis—is a different order or category of recollection than we were doing in our Worship Committee (see last week’s post, “You Don’t Need Wings to Fly”), and offers a more telling and compelling critique of both the congregational and institutional nostalgia we tend to see in difficult times. But if there is a fatal flaw in the several instances of informal or formal nostalgia we have witnessed, it is that nostalgia does not reach back either far or deeply enough to provide a way ahead.

For some people in the church (and in the world), “the way it used to be” (whether the picture is accurate or not) was not that long ago but provides a convenient critique to emerging forms and of music and even dress. The foils are mostly stylistic in nature—though there is some baby in that bath. The traditionalist critics decried Vatican II’s adoption of the “vernacular” in the Mass as a signifier for a deeper problem—a lapse in theological severity and certitude, as well as a colloquializing of the Holy.

With a similar impulse, my frenemy H____stood in a congregational meeting to say that if the young women in our church would quit wearing their “yogi pants” to worship, and if they dressed their children for church the way his mother dressed him when he was a boy, and if the children were made to sit still for the sermon as he had been, and if we sang four, count ‘em, four old hymns from the old hymnal, and if the preacher preached from the Ten Commandments, our congregation would be vibrant and vital again.

In just a few few words H____ reached to “yesterday” as a remedy for now and the future. What I said to H____ I would also have said to the selectively fundamentalist Methodists who took their self-righteous leave from the United church—you reached back, just not far enough (as an aside, Fr. Rohr argues that most prophets don “countercultural clothing,” and while “yogi pants” are not counter-cultural extra mura ecclesias (outside the walls of the church), they are to many mainline congregations...as are praise bands).

Elsewhere, the patriarchal defenders of a dying evangelicalism lament and judge what they consider the wild vines of egalitarianism and inclusion. When someone asked John MacArthur what he thought about women pastors, he maintained he didn’t have to think about it; all he had to do was open the Bible. His point: that the women had to stay silent in the churches and if they want to learn anything, they needed to ask their husbands at home. He cited some of Paul’s words in I Corinthians 14.

This is the same Bible, of course, from which Peter, on Pentecost, quotes from the prophecy of Joel; that has women inform the men of the Resurrection, and, despite Mr. MacAurther and others’ misreading of it, I Corinthians 14:33b-36. The prohibition about women speaking is what Paul’s opponents are saying, much as in 7:1. To the chagrin of patriarchalists everywhere, he shuts down the argument. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8ncOf82ZJ0).

My own modest take: what MacArthur calls wild vines are what Jesus called branches.

Be that as it may, the point is that when style meets substance, “the way it used to be” may set a self-justifying and self-righteous limit on the ways the Spirit can do new things among us.

Is it just me, or does that kind of thing smell like blasphemy? Or at least like Ephesus.

The jury is still out on the current state of the papacy. The ascent of Pope Leo XIV has been hailed by more traditional Roman Catholics since the white smoke appeared. His taking-up residence again in the papal palace, for instance, returns dignity to the office that had been lost in Francis’ habitations. Leo has implicitly encouraged the faithful to dust off their Latin, too.

Many of Leo’s supporters believe that the more colloquial and populist aspects of Francis’ pontificate in fact relaxed the doctrinal standards and magisterial practices of the church.

Whether Leo turns out to be more like Benedict or Francis—or, as it were, his “own” pope—for the moment he appears, in style and substance, to be like the wise householder in Jesus’ logion: who for the sake of the Kingdom brings out of the storehouse what is old and what is new.

Prophetic critique of the prevailing “order” is always appropriate, of course. But true prophets look ahead, not behind. They draw on the past, assuredly, but not as a place of flight or refuge. Neither are external signifiers the stuff of real engagement or change. They may harken to the time when everything seemed righteous (at least to some) but those impressions are illusions and fearful ones at that. As Fr. Rohr puts it, “When our ‘sure things’ fall apart, the (true) prophets show how they were built on illusion and power to begin with, and not finally real” (The Tears of Things, 59).

MAGA may foster in us an urge to MCGA, but the way to that particular future is not short-arming our reach to take hold of and celebrate an idealized idolatry.

The “disorder” of these days, prompted by the shedding of the unworkable carapace of former expressions of faith and worship, is indeed painful—and nostalgia may be the signifier that we are barely surviving our latest bad fall.

But as the prophetic poet Rumi offered,

Sorrows are the rags of old clothes

and jackets that serve to cover,

and then are taken off.

That undressing,

and the beautiful

naked body underneath,

is the sweetness that comes after grief.

If we can move forward as well as backwards in our flight from our current pain, we will eventually find our way to a place of newly unhindered apostolicity, where we are no longer children, no longer bound, but more nearly grown up into the full measure of Christ.