Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Proper 17 (22)- Year B
Are doctrines things that enter into people but cannot defile?
Are doctrines things that come out of people that do defile?
"In vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines." (vs 7 NRSV)
"They just use me as a cover for teaching whatever suits their fancy." (vs 7 The Message)
As we look at the history of doctrines and their partialities (needing to be readjusted the next time around), it is tempting to discount the doctrinal impetus as evil. Sometimes it is. But there is a constant need for wrestling with significance and meaning in life, identifying how far we have come, claiming particular insights. There is a tension between doctrine that is transparent (a helpful lens to identify the presence of G*D) and opaque (an assertion that holds real life experience at bay). To arrive at transparent doctrine it must be held lightly and applied to self. When doctrine becomes opaque it derives from a particular political point or the result of a process wherein "time makes ancient truth uncouth" and is used against others.
We have a variety of ways to institute and use doctrine. How might worship be a needed antidote to unhelpful doctrine?
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Rick (Reader)
What seems to me to be an important message for us is the one given by what Jesus does, that is to question doctrine, to hold it up against the underlaying principles implied in the giving of the law, to compare doctrine to intent and practice to examine if it is help-full or harm-full to faith and life. When doctrine hinders faith then it must change, or be enlightened by what faith-full people are doing, it must be responsive to the world, yet constant in its searching for connection to God.
Here in lies the basis for progressive doctrine and practice, it can change, because it must change. Jesus acknowledges what no conservative will acknowledge, the old ways didn't work.
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Wesley (Blogger)
Not only do the old ways not work, but the current ways fall short as well. Read any news-paper/news-magazine, watch or listen to any news-broadcast - G*D's presence has not yet dwelt fully among us. We need a larger perspective and specific changes.
Rick, and others, this important issue of dealing with doctrine and practice that can change is one that needs more than a theoretical construct. Are there some stories you can tell, that's not my forte, about that going on these days. Is this in the realm of sexuality (read an interesting report of the latest WOW conference [URL MISSING] by the Institute for Religion and Democracy, an organization that actively works against any progressive movement), environment, economy, community relationships, health, education, personal choices? How do we see this working in specific situations and thus put flesh on the concept?
Sometimes stories can say more in a few words that a textbook can in many chapters. Sometimes the story needs to go on for a bit to build the background needed for a new way of traveling. If your writing is longer than this system will allow send it to me (wwhite@wisconsinumc.org) and I'll see it gets snuck in the backdoor of the dialogue software we are using, past the automatic limit.
In this regard I was struck by an image in the August 23 Christian Century that likened the election of Bishop Robinson to the cutting of a Gordian knot in the frozen debate regarding the church and same-gender orientation. How might we help cut through other such knotty issues?
PS - for a mathematical/topological approach to the Gordian knot issue you can browse here.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/august2003.html
When we speak, ideas are to flower. Our tongue is the overflow of a goodly heart, spreading blessings wherever it is.
Our participation in a word of truth will reveal the image of all creation in our living as the first fruit of such a word that ends in the affirmation, "It is good!"
Meekness will be both the prepared soil and the resulting harvest of this creative word, implanted soul-word. So we are called to be not a hearer that forgets, but a speaker that acts their word. As such we move into an unbounded religion that takes seriously and joyously a word to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and keep steadfastly on with this task, no matter what.
- - -
so many fine words
have come my way
no changes of life
but plenty of compliments
to keep on with this pattern
is to keep change from happening
obviously I have gone awry
focused on words and not hearts
and so my hypocrisy shines
as I glory in fine words
while mourning a lack of effect
is but vanity vanity
let us hear again
insides are to be joined with outsides
until fine words diminish
and heart deeds flourish
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html
All or nothing at all! Digital life is a 1 or a 0 and ne'er the twain shall meet. Make a misstep with one rule and you've obliterated them all; there is no slippery-slope here, it's on the cliff or falling to death.
This ancient and still contemporary rule continues to bedevil and defile us to the point of suicide. Who among us can stand? [ - unless, of course, we have resources sufficient to access the "get out of jail free" mechanisms that can reboot us back to some previous set-point, return us to some honorary virginity.]
One of the sections left out, to shorten this reading and keep it uni-focal, is about the way in which our intentions get in the way of our intention. Let's start with an intention to live well. One of the rules for the well-being is my context, my social ecology, is care for parents (literal and figurative) who have gone before, weaken, die, and lead us to prepare for our own work of the day, weakness and death. It is all to easy to claim the resources we would use to care for them as resources we could and should spend on ourselves (forgetting the Russian Nesting Doll image of the generations). This shift from intention to intentions exemplifies a bringing a defilement out of our hearts. It takes no apparent external input to trigger this response.
A question we are left with is whether there is a way around evil intentions.
Here are three conversations with Vivian Paley that give very helpful insights regarding life's larger intention.
The first is a little tricky to get to. First go to episode 27 of This American Life, Cruelty of Children. Click on "Full Episode" and when it has loaded, move the timeline along to minute 46:55. I think you will find the work it takes to get here worth your while as you listen to Vivian talk about the trigger for her book, You Can't Say You Can't Play.
The second link is about cheating. Vivian talks with Susan Stamburg.
Thirdly, Vivian is on the Diane Rehm Show talking about her book The Kindness of Children.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html
Our primary experience is not repeatable and yet we institute traditions to keep it going, even if in a secondary way. Eventually our tradition becomes our primary experience and we are frozen into our explanation, not our experience.
Every generation needs to wrestle with this phenomena of locating experience rather than carrying it with us as preparation for a next experience.
In the time of American Empire we are facing this as we exhaust an old experience of finding a sense of freedom in a new configuration of community. Our traditions of such have led us to a time confusion and an attempt to find a new configuration of community in an extreme freedom for the individual where each person is responsible for their own outcome.
A review of communal karma would be helpful but we have so indoctrinated ourselves and left my thinking outside of your critique and vice versa that we have no way to evaluate expected consequences and appropriate risk.
Freedom, individual, community are all excellent words and holders of deep vision. Left to their own devices, outside of relationship, they are no longer nourishing, but each defiles the other. As each becomes filled with too much of itself we find their various extremes unbalanced and unbalancing.
Out of tradition comes frozen experience. Out of freedom comes fascism. Out of individuals comes narcissism. Out of community comes tribalism.
May Pentecost revive your appreciation of communal karma and from your experience of resurrection come the basis re-experiencing primary experience in all its raw wind and fire.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/08/pentecost-14-year-b-mark-71-8-14-15-21.html