Spiritual Hiccups - Getting It Right

This Sunday in worship, we will celebrate Christ the King, and we will also ordain and install elders and deacons to lead the ministry, mission, and spiritual life of our congregation.  As we do so, they will respond to a number of "constitutional questions," including one that asks, "Do you promise to further the peace, unity, and purity of the church?"

Over the years I have had prospective elders or deacons express concern about some of the other questions they will answer.  But I've never heard anyone express any reservations about this question.  Who wouldn't want the church to be more peaceful, unified, and pure?  Who wouldn't want a congregation to look less like the broken world we live in and more like the community God calls us to be?

But in practice, this question may be the most difficult one to live into.  This difficulty arises because seeking peace often sacrifices purity, seeking purity often throws out unity, and so on.

In today's reading from Ezra, the focus is very much on purity.  Ezra has condemned Israel for marrying foreign wives, for incurring guilt before God by marrying those whose religious practices are "abominations" and so polluting the purity of the faith.  Ezra has the commandments on his side as he chastises the people, leading them to "send away all these wives and their children."  In a day when women were totally dependent on men for protection and provision, this may well have been a death sentence to many of these mothers and children.  But in the name of purity...

Interestingly, the Old Testament contains another book where one of these foreign wives is lifted up as a paragon of virtue and faith.  Ruth, who like Ezra has a short biblical book named for her, is a foreign wife who is celebrated and who is great-grandmother to King David.  Even more interesting, some scholars think the book of Ruth was written in the same period when Ezra was encouraging the sending away of such women.

We people of faith often worry a great deal about getting the rules correct.  My own denomination's decades long wrangling over whether or not to ordain gays and lesbians is a good case in point.  For people on both sides, this issue became the purity line in the sand, a line of such importance that it justified sacrificing peace and unity.

I sometimes wonder about my denomination's (and my own) desire to read Scripture carefully in order to construct a clear theology that covers all the bases.  Don't get me wrong, I do think that deducing some sort of theology is necessary and even unavoidable.  All people have some sort of theology, some notion of what God is like and what difference that makes for their lives.  But it seems to me that any biblical theology has to leave room for a fair amount of ambiguity and tension.  "Getting it right" cannot become the god we serve.  Even Jesus, speaking in today's gospel reading, tells Peter that he does not owe the temple tax, that he is free of its requirement.  Yet he also tells Peter to procure the coin for the tax and pay it, "so that we do not give offense to them."

It very often seems to me that the Presbyterian passion for theology tends to squeeze out the Spirit. We prefer clear conclusions and guidelines, well crafted order, over the wind of the Spirit "that blows where it chooses."

And so I really like that ordination question which insists that getting it right means furthering "the peace, unity, and purity of the church."  Not one of them, but all of them.  Seems that getting it right often means balancing somewhat contradictory calls and living faithfully within that tension and ambiguity. 

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