+Z’ev

Today’s assigned readings:
Isaiah 55:3-9, Colossians 3:1-17, John 14:6-14

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
Colossians 3:12-13

I have a conversation every once in a while where I use the line, “Christianity is the most co-dependent religion.” I realised this back when I was last writing such Bible meditations as these: over and over again our religion commands us to put responsibility for wrong on ourselves. The Sermon on the Mount starts us there: if you are offering something and remember that someone else has something against you - go be reconciled to them. Imagine: denying yourself communion until everyone loved you. Not until you were at peace everyone, but until everyone was at peace with you! Imagine the conservatives Anglicans refusing to take communion until their gay brothers and sisters forgave them. Imagine gay Anglicans refusing to take communion until their conservative brothers and sisters forgave them.

I can’t imagine it, to be honest: for I think both sides tend to be happy just saying “to Hell with ye!” (Not always, thank God, but sometimes.)

Paul asks us in another place to let those weaker in faith lead the stronger. Don’t do it at all unless everyone can do it. I wish the Episcopal Church would have waited on the weaker bretheren in the ordination of Women and Gays, but now I wish both sides could follow St Paul and “Bear with one another”.

Bearing with one another is not something we see in much of Christian history, to be honest: from Paul’s congregations up to Nicea (where Santa Claus punched out Arius); from 1054 when the Pope and the Patriarch had a pissing contest up until last year when the Patriarch of Moscow had a pissing contest with the Patriarch of Istanbul and up until the very last minute when various Anglican bishops with and without Jurisdiction are filing lawsuits against each other. We’d much rather have a public fist fight than “forgive each other just as the Lord has forgiven”.

As I was contemplating these readings a connexion came to me. For the Jews, “Jewishness” is an ethnicity. There are very few things you can do and be declared “not a Jew”. It’s not a religion, per se (as the YouTube Rebbe points out). One doesn’t “confess the faith of the Jews”. Rather one becomes a member of the tribe. It is, as Anne Rice wrote in Interview with a Vampire (albeit on another topic), a “body conversion”. One becomes a Jew - in a sense, one gets new DNA. In our better moments as Americans we model this perfectly: one becomes an American. There is no credo beyond accepting the others who are also Americans.

No matter what one does as a Jew, one is still a Jew: the genetics don’t change. One can be a lapsed, non-observant Jew. One can be a secular Jew. One can be an heretical Jew. One can be an apostate Jew. But, no matter what one’s religious status, one is still of the Jewish People. But this can not be true of Christianity.

In creating Christianity, the Apostles were founding something entirely new: a religion without a people. Old tensions had to be done away with: You can not transcend the systems, politics and races of this world when you are trapped thinking in those terms. As Paul writes, “In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free.” He is pushing us beyond our human, ethnic, religious and political divisions towards a new concept: a “peoplehood” based on a religion rather than the other way around. The early Church had to develop exclusionary doctrines in order to be a people without borders. And, in order for Christians to just get along together the Church had to lay down some strong rules about our shared social life. But the first of those rules is not judging others for breaking those same rules.

In other words: we should be acting as if we have created a new race of beings here. This is what the Apostle means in calling Jesus “The New Adam.” We are the children of “The New Adam” and we have totally new DNA. The worse we can do is lapse or be apostate. It’s between God and “the other”.

One of the cool things I was told prior to converting to Orthodox Christianity was that - in the area of the “Food Disciplines” - “we all do it together.” Everyone abstains from meat, eggs, fish, oil, wine and dairy on every Wednesday and Friday as well as during Lent, Advent and a couple of other places during the year. Roughly speaking, about half the year all Orthodox are vegans who don’t drink. The cool thing is that we all do it together. This is one of the things that makes us Orthodox. Doing it together binds us all together.

Of course, that only lasts until you get on the internet and discover the disagreements over what can and can not be eaten, what does “oil” and “wine” mean, when does the fasting start (Sunset or Midnight)? What calendar should we use (Gregorian or Julian)? What should laity be responsible for? And then, of course, there are those who don’t even use these rules as their own. Most of certain jurisdictions don’t even fast any more. The entire Western Rite has a different fasting rule.

Most Americans, finding out that things are different than advertised, seem to retreat into an adopted Ethnicity. As if “real” Orthodoxy is Russian or Greek or Serbian or whatever. Most of the American converts I know, however, stay away from the actual Ethnic types - because that’s where the liberals are! The Americans become more Antiochian Orthodox than the Arabs, more Greek Orthodox than the Greeks, more Russian than the Russians. In other words they treat their new found ethnicity as a sort of “Jewish People” and try to have a body conversion. This gets typified in the conversation that follows the question, “Can Americans (or Westerners) really be Orthodox?” For a while my answer was “no” and I tried really hard to be someone other than the person God graced me with being.

Another cool thing I was told was that “we all believe the same thing”. No, sorry. I won’t even begin to unload that. (Mostly because what we all believe is rather nebulous.) In other words we failed to create this pseudo-race of our own. But Paul and Jesus insist that the things that make us a people are exactly not the rules that we follow or the things we believe. Rather it is our willingness to “bear with one another” or, to put up with each other.

I put up with my family because I have to - no matter who gets drunk at Thanksgiving or who brings yet another trashy (new) husband to Christmas dinner. But I’ll walk right out of my church if I don’t like the sermon preached last Sunday or the colour of candles that were chosen for the Advent Wreath.

One is stuck being a Jew no matter how one fails to live up to the rules, customs or regulations, but those people ordained women, so they can’t be Christian any more.

Yup, we done good in this whole bear with one onother thing.

Much love,

Huw