When Saul was confronted by Jesus on the road to Damascus, Jesus did not say, “Saul, why are you persecuting my followers?” He did not say, “Saul, why are you persecuting the people under my command?” He said, “Saul, why do you persecute Me?”
When someone hits us, we say, “Don’t hit me!” We don’t say, “Do not hit the arm under my command.” We feel hit; we feel pain. We do not sense ourselves as separate from our bodies.
When we persecute the Body of Christ, we persecute Christ. When we tear down the Body of Christ, we do this to Christ as well. He has chosen to be united with His church, to be the Head of the Body.
I’m a preacher’s kid. I’ve seen the dark underbelly of the church. I have the battle scars to prove that we as Christians shoot our wounded. I’ve fired more than a few rounds myself. I have good reason to be wary of fellow Christians, to be reluctant to fully commit myself to a local expression of the Body of Christ. My problem is not with Jesus; it’s with some of His followers.
Or so I tell myself.
The sad truth is that I do not love the Body of Christ as I should. And there is only one possible explanation for this coldness in my heart. It is because I do not have enough love for the Head. God forgive me.
May I love Jesus more. May I love all of Him, with all of my heart, mind, soul, strength. May I love Him passionately and zealously. May I love Him with a broken and contrite heart. May I love Him in purity and holiness. And then I will love His Body as I should.
My understanding of ecclesiology has gone through a number of changes in these past 20 years. But these words I wrote back then still challenge and convict me.
While visiting a Lutheran church yesterday, and feeling far more connected to historic Christianity than I do in my Baptist church, it struck me that perhaps modern evangelicalism is inherently at risk of following every fad and wind of doctrine by our very rejection of centuries of Protestant tradition, creeds, liturgy, and means of worship. We have set ourselves up to be our own interpreters of Scripture, to seek after “freshness” and “relevance”, and to look with disdain at what is timeless. It is as if we need to be consantly reinventing the wheel in how we “do church”.
And, frankly, it strikes me as more than a bit arrogant.
How thankful I am to have been in church services where I have had the privilege of praying the same prayers, reciting the same creeds, and singing the same hymns as other believers the world over… for centuries. It is both humbling and glorious to experience this deeper connection to the Body of Christ. How different from the attitude within much of modern evanglicalism that criticizes liturgy as being “stale” and “rote”, that scorns anything from a previous generation, and that wants desperately to be “cutting edge”.
A lot has happened in those two decades. A lot. My faith journey has taken twists and turns I never could have predicted. I was both surprised and amused to re-read this recently, and felt like telling my younger self: WOW, Rebecca. You made some good points but you didn’t go far enough.
For most of my life I rejected the historic church without even realizing what it was that I was rejecting. Then I came to my senses, decided to look back in history, and traced my theological lineage and beliefs back to my understanding of the Reformation, as if true Christianity got lost quickly after the Resurrection or didn’t exist until Calvin came along and set us all straight. (Only I didn’t really follow Calvin’s teachings but what they had morphed into over the years, stripped of all that would offend our modern Protestant sensibilities.) Then, long story, I left that theological camp and went back to the Baptist world. All seemed wonderful until stuff happened and I got hurt and disgruntled.
So I read a hatchet job of church history, and I found some other disgruntled people to hang out with, and I tried to redefine “Church” to my own liking. I never could quite buy into the idea that two people hanging out at Starbucks, if one of them said something “Christiany”, was what the Bible meant by a “sacred assembly”, but I was almost that far gone.
Along the way, life got messy for awhile, really messy and ugly. Eventually God and I got on much better speaking terms than we had ever been, and I started getting this sense that He was way, way, way more immense and powerful and wonderful than I could ever imagine.
And somehow I realized that He deserved worship that seemed more reverent, sacred, and transcendent than sitting around with a coffee cup — or even than singing along during something that looked and sounded like a secular rock concert with christianized lyrics. It seemed like we should offer Him more than merely what is modern, fleeting, and trendy. Why imitate rock concerts rather than read about how God asked to be worshipped?
So I read about Old Testament worship, and I read the book of Revelation, and I felt like what I’d been doing and thinking was so wrong.
There’s more to my story than that, much much more. But I had to come to grips with the fact that, by ignoring history and tradition, I had basically set myself up as the arbitrator of truth. It was so horribly arrogant of me to think that I and those who agreed with my novel and innovative ideas were right — and 2000 years of far more learned scholars were wrong.
I had put myself out of Catholic tradition, to be sure, but I had also put myself out of Protestant tradition. I was a law unto myself. I was doing what was right in my own eyes.
But instead of crushing me like a bug or whipping sense into my head, God wooed and pursued me with truth, beauty, and goodness. And then He graciously placed in me a hunger for Jesus unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.
This convoluted faith journey has taken a a lot of years… a lot of struggle. I’m stubborn at times, and prideful — and prone to wander — and it took immense love (divine and human) to bring me to the point of admitting that maybe I was wrong after all, and the Church was right.
So on Sundays I join with the Saints and Angels in worship, and our worship brings together themes and words from Old Testament through Revelation, and it involves my body and all my senses (as is befitting worship of the Trinity, one member Who became incarnate). It’s truth, beauty and goodness. It feels like a window to Heaven, like we are joining the worship around the Throne. It’s timeless.
But my life is not just transformed on Sundays, nor just the days that I am able to attend Divine Liturgy (or Mass at the local Roman Catholic parish). The Church is so much more than a gathering of people; it’s even more than its Sacraments — I’ve stumbled into a treasure trove of teaching, wisdom, practical help, inspiration, prayer, and much much more. As the book of Hebrews says, I’m “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses” — and now that I’m finally refusing to ignore them and all that they have contributed to Christendom — my walk with Jesus has been transformed. It’s so much more real. It’s tangible and incarnatonal… and yet transcendent.
Jesus’ words, “Lo I am with you always”, have become so much more alive, so much more real, so much more powerful, that I can taste them.
Some years ago, a preacher from Texas rocked my world with a series of lessons that — although I argued with him vehemently at first — ultimately ushered me into what we dubbed my “fall TO grace”. I’d been trapped in quite some legalistic system and lifestyle, a lot of it my own creation.
He kept cautioning me that the goal was not merely freedom FROM but freedom TO. I was thinking about this recently. St. Paul, of course, had things to say about freedom not being about falling into the trap of licentiousness. But for years, free as I was from that former legalism, I knew I was missing something.
I kept musing… “freedom TO…” what? I really think Byzantine Catholicism/Christianity has the answer in the whole concept of theosis and the idea of becoming most fully human when we become who God created us to be. From the outside looking in, someone might think I’m trapped in some system of church attendance and going through all sorts of motions and having to confess to a priest — and there are people in my life who simply don’t get it when I try to explain how healing and freeing all of this is. I don’t HAVE to, I GET to — and until I began living it myself, I never would have believed it either.
Funny thing. I spent my early 60’s painfully burying lifelong hopes and dreams. Believe it or not, I’d looked forward to and imagined this season of my life since I was a little kid, down to some incredible detail. (What can I say? I was a weird kid.) It was a devastating series of blows, a sort of death upon death, to realize that none of that would ever happen. I felt like I was emerging from the ashes of almost everything that mattered to me.
This side of all that death, and while still grieving the deaths of my parents, I can honestly say that some of those dreams are being reborn, even better than I could have possibly imagined.
Sometimes I find myself, in the midst of reflection or prayer, telling God, “This all seems too good to be true… but it is.” A lot of those moments come during the Divine Liturgy or during some other prayers of the Church. My “little life” — which to anyone else probably looks mundane and boring and restricted — has become such a path of freedom and joy and fulfillment, even when it’s rocky and difficult.
Why? Because I’m being healed. Because the Sacrament of Confession/Reconciliation is so powerful that it did, in one fell swoop, what years of hard work with a really good therapist couldn’t even do. It healed parts of me that I didn’t even know needed healing. That would be enough, but there’s more. Because I don’t have to try to reinvent the wheel or come up with my own version of Christianity but can glean from 2,000 years of wisdom from the Church. Frankly, I’m not that smart or learned, so I need people a lot wiser — and especially further along in holiness. Because prayer really does form belief and, ultimately, forms our very way of living. Because I’m being freed from myself and TO an intimacy with the Triune God that I never thought possible.
Because God wooed me and pursued me. Me, despite everything! And I’ve started finally saying yes instead of running away.
Understatement of the year: I am not a theologian. So this will not even be an attempt at a theological treatise but merely a narrative account of one aspect of my own faith journey.
Back when I was being a youthful rebellious doofus, I occasionally spouted some half-baked nonsense at my father. One of those silly things was that it supposedly didn’t matter so much what we believed about Jesus, but just that we believed in Him. Apparently the Bible and the early church councils disagreed with me. As my father wryly chuckled about “no new heresies under the sun”, I had to concede that, if I believed in objective truth, I couldn’t just make up my own ideas about Jesus.
If we are truly Christians, what we believe about Jesus Christ is essential.
Fast forward a number of years. I was no longer a youthful rebel, and not quite as much of a doofus. But I was confused about some sermon I’d heard, so I asked my father about it.
“That sounds an awful lot like the heresy of modalism,” my father said. He went on to explain how the early Church had dealt with that heresy (as well as others) by clarifying what Christianity holds to be true about the Trinity. [A quick aside: my Baptist pastor father explained that all of Christianity, with rare exception, affirms at least the first four Ecumenical Councils. Of course there are also many individuals who consider themselves to be Christian but hold doctrines counter to historic Christianity.]
Fast forward more years, all the way to 2020, when I was being catechized by my Byzantine Catholic priest. I was growing a little bit impatient that he kept emphasizing what I viewed as ultra-basic stuff about the Trinity. Suddenly it dawned on me: had I learned nothing in my years as a Christian about the importance of these doctrines? Isn’t this “basic stuff” the very foundation of our faith and practice?
Even the way I form my hand in making the sign of the Cross is a theological lesson and reminder.
One of many things I appreciate about our liturgy is that it is so explicitly Trinitarian. How we pray and worship truly does help form and reinforce our beliefs, which is why I find the depth of meaning in our prayers, symbols, and traditions to be so rich, so beautiful, and so powerful.
In 2020, Byzantine Catholicism was new to me, but the basic historical doctrines of Christianity weren’t. For example, one of my former pastors from yesteryear (a learned Reformed pastor) often emphasized the dual natures of Christ, and taught why it was so important to our faith — to our very salvation — that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, and that His divine and human natures cannot be separated. So, when I was learning about Catholicism, the hypostatic union was a familiar concept but, at the same time, it was not one that I’d given much thought.
And then I encountered the word “Theotokos”.
I was only slightly less uncomfortable with the idea of Mary being called the “God-bearer” as I was with her being called the “Mother of God”. Of course I knew that no one was claiming that she was the mother of the Trinity, or that she existed before all else. And I’d always believed that Jesus is God, as well as always believing in the virgin birth. So why was I squirming in my seat? Was I secretly an adoptionist, believing that Jesus did not receive His divine nature until later, perhaps at His baptism? Did the doctrine of the hypostatic union have to mean that Mary bore God in her womb?
One of the smartest people that I know almost gave me an out during a discussion of abortion. She presented a brilliant and Biblical case, from a Jewish perspective, for life beginning with one’s first breath and ending with one’s last. Only, as compelling and thorough as her argument was, I couldn’t agree. [Luke 1:39-44 obviously was more significant to me than to her.]
Years before that, a pro-abortion pastor had refused to say whether the fetus I was carrying was an actual person or not. I didn’t think he was saying anything about me as a mother — I was upset that he dared call into question the humanity of the child in my womb.
So I had to admit that my issue with the concept of the “Theotokos” wasn’t really about Mary after all. It came down to the very basics of Christianity. I wasn’t foolish or arrogant enough to claim that I knew better than the most learned and godly Christians throughout history, so I had no choice but to face what it was that was making me so uncomfortable. Did I really believe that the great, glorious, and almighty God, Creator of the universe, took on human form, not just that of a man but of a child, even of an infant?Did I really believe that He chose to identify so completelywith us, with our human condition, that He — our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, fully man and fully God — began His earthly life as humbly as we do?
What can I say? It boggles my puny little mind.
Jesus was human in the womb of Mary. He was also God in the womb of Mary. She didn’t just carry a human being in her womb; she carried the second Person of the Trinity — God incarnate. In other words, I needed to stop squirming about the word “Theotokos”. Either that, or admit that I didn’t really believe what I claimed to believe about Jesus and about the Trinity.
Ah, I ruefully had to admit to myself. This is why my priest keeps going over these “basics”. And Daddy was right — what I believe about Jesus is important!
Prone to wander... 