Lament and Hope at Year's End

It has been over two hundred years since Pastor John Fawcett wrote his winsome poem, “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds.” One source of the poem’s inspiration was his parishioners’ outpouring of grief as they faced losing him to a prestigious and better paying appointment. The other was his own grief, as well as his wife’s, confronting them at every turn in their preparations to move. By the time the couple stood ready to leave, they were wholly overcome. So, instead of forging ahead, they unpacked their wagon and stayed put --- for the next fifty years.

What made it impossible for the Fawcetts to abandon their congregation is captured eloquently at several places in this much beloved hymn. Between its members, Fawcett wrote, often “flows the sympathizing tear,” from pouring out prayers ardently before God, from sharing fears, hopes, comforts and cares intimately, from sustaining each another in their mutual sorrows and burdens, and from feeling as one in their common aims as Christians.

Today, when Christians “asunder part,” the “inward pain” they feel is often less the pain of grief and more the pain of anger. Why? Because instead of being “joined in heart,” they are increasingly rent by self-serving and woefully incomplete understandings of their church’s faith and mission. If members of these warring factions “hope to meet again” at all, they do so for the delight of hurling still more ill-conceived certitudes at each another, in the service more of jihad than of koinonia. If you doubt this, you cannot have been following the current “discussions” in our churches about gays and lesbians, stem cell research, maintaining peace and security, late term abortions, relations with Israel, the authority of the Bible, and the finality of Christian revelation

The current rationalization for this misguided delight is the otherwise high sounding principle that unity in the church must never be purchased by sacrificing integrity of belief. In the solemn pronouncements of this tenet, it matters little whether by “integrity of belief” is meant, at one extreme, conforming to the tenets of a particular faith tradition (e.g. Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Mormon), or at the other, following only the dictates of individual conscience in matters of faith. From either extreme, holding fast to a false dichotomy between the integrity and the unity of belief, between sound doctrine and principled scepticism, can only undermine Jesus’ hope that all of his followers would become “perfectly one.” (John 17:23

Happily, there are still many congregations like the Fawcetts’ all across Christendom. But Christendom itself looks less like that heart-joined community at Wainsgate and more like Matthew Arnold’s “darkling plain swept with confusing alarms of struggle and flight.” When Arnold wrote Dover Beach, most likely in 1851, he was mired in melancholy over a lost faith that he characterized as withdrawing from the human spirit just as powerfully as the tide recedes from the shoreline. However, his poem contains images that arouse not only a poignant sense of sadness, but also an anxious sense of unwanted combat: the darkling plain is also one on which “ignorant armies clash by night.”

Given the successes of the Christian mission in so many parts of the world in this present generation, successes that are likely to continue, there is precious little illumination still to be found in bemoaning, as Matthew Arnold did, the “long, withdrawing roar”of a credible faith. But we should not dismiss so easily the image of Christian believers as hostile combatants struggling against one another in a smotheringly dense darkness. For it is indeed like being buffeted by “the night wind, down the vast edges drear” to have the struggle to be made better by God’s grace shouted down by fellow believers for whom finding out where in the darkness we are “at” or “where we are coming from” has long since given way to telling us where we should be at and where we should be going, and daring us to make their day more spiritual by getting into mind to mind combat with them.

Despite all the theological controversies that rage across Christendom today, it is still possible for inquirers and believers alike to experience the life of faith in vital fellowships of kindred souls who share an inclusive vision of the depth and breadth of God’s power, grace, and love. Multitudes of congregations accomplish it all the time. But the “night wind” still howls, and armies of the over-believing and the overly sceptical continue to clash in seemingly willful ignorance of each other’s significance to the very One whom our faith also posits as the one, true guide of all

In the darkness and all the howling winds, though, there still shines a light that can never be put out. One early Christian tradition spoke of it fondly as a star hovering over a manger. Another equated the light with the manger’s occupant. Of all things! The blessed ties that bind us all are --- a baby’s arms. This is something really worth getting up in arms about.

Constitutionally Correct Praying

The summer following my first year in seminary, I had the privilege of serving my home church as youth director. My first day on the job, the senior pastor asked me to represent him at the City Council meeting that very afternoon, and offer the opening prayer. When I walked into the Council Chambers, the members (most of whom belonged to our congregation) greeted me both respectfully and affectionately. So, I gave them a rousing prayer on working together as an expression of gratitude to God, and returned to my seat full of myself for the contribution I had just made to the tone of the deliberations which were to follow. In spite of my contagious spirituality, however, our guys started right in on each other and hollered their way through the rest of the meeting, with enthusiasm and without shame.

If we add to this little story countless others about government meetings moving along swimmingly without the benefit of any prayers, we just might begin to wonder about the efficacy of civic prayers at all. And we might begin to question whether it is any longer worth the effort to overcome the problems of making prayer even possible in such settings. Years ago, the United States Supreme Court determined (at least, according to prevailing interpretation) that only generic prayers in governmental meetings are acceptable. More recently, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to the effect that public prayers couched in the language of specific religious traditions are flat-out unconstitutional. These are huge hurdles to overcome.

And yet, a number of local councils across the country seem undaunted in the face of them, as they cavalierly deny that Christian majorities have any obligation to accept the renderings of secular courts at all. Prayers “in Jesus’ name” are still bouncing off the walls of their meeting rooms. My guess is that at least some of these representatives’ constituencies will start taking a second look at this hard-headedness when Christians in their communities are no longer in the majority. Hopefully, they will wise up even sooner.

It is no wonder that many people now argue that it would be best for religious believers to get out of the business of praying at government meetings, period. On the face of it, there is something to be said for taking this view. Religious leaders are justifiably uncomfortable having to censor their own prayers in order that nobody gets upset at their mention of Jesus, or Amithaba, or Allah, or Whomever. And civic leaders are justifiably frustrated over having to provide opportunities for every religious tradition to contribute a prayer publically at some time or another, or having to ensure that every public prayer somehow turns out to be non-sectarian.

The American Civil Liberties Union is on record as saying that accomodating all religious traditions at meetings of governmental bodies is tantamount to abandoning the First Amendments’s articulation of a neutral stance toward religion. Further, the ACLU argues, going this route leads inevitably to discrimination against some religious traditions by leaving them out, however inadvertantly; there are simply too many of them to account for easily. However, the Rutherford Institute, a legal advocacy group for religion in society, looks at both issues differently. To the Institute, the First Amendment also prohibits actions that inhibit the free expression of religious beliefs. And the organization sees no problems with clergy from a variety of faiths being recognized by governmental bodies to offer prayers expressive of their respective traditions.

That organizations like the ACLU and the Rutherford Institute have become so involved in an issue like prayers at city council meetings should say to us that the easiest way out of the current controversies may not in fact be the best way at all. I continue to harbor doubts that being prayed over will make officials govern us any better. But our right to ask that they do just this, and to use prayer as a way of imploring divine assistance for them as they strive to do it, is something about which I have no doubt whatever, and neither does the Rutherford Institute. But the ACLU is less naïve than the Institute is about the many difficulties and dangers we must face as we express this right in ways respectful of everyone’s convictions of conscience. The Institute needs to be more forthcoming about this, even as it continues to remind us that these are the difficulties and dangers that accompany every form of honest religious expression in a pluralistic society, difficulties and dangers that every American should gladly and gratefully acknowledge.