An Exhortation Best Ignored

More than once in my ministry, I have taken communion in churches where, by virtue of my not being a member, I was not supposed to. I knew what I was doing, experienced no remorse over doing it, and whenever another occasion presented itself, I went and did it again. And now that my "sin" is out in the open, in order not to get barred from the chancel rail by the Reverends who may come across its exposure, the next time I may even show up in disguise.

What this dare-ya-to-knock-the-chip-off-my-shoulder rhetoric is all about is a recently released "Exhortation" of Pope Benedict XVI laying down, yet again, "non-negotiable" positions on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, and divorce that reasonable people have been negotiating for quite some time now and that American Catholics have been ignoring for just as long. In the midst of all the other prescriptions, a requirement of celibacy for priests was re-imposed by fiat, in spite of the fact that hardly anybody worth reading even tries to make a case for priests being single anymore, and the fact that there are married priests all over the place now. (You just have to make sure that you get married before you make public your sense of being called to the priesthood.)

Especially grating to First Amendment types like me is the Holy Father's reference to the "grave" responsibility of Catholic politicians and legislators to bind themselves to "a properly formed conscience" in getting the kind of laws passed and enforced over which Vatican officials can salivate. To my chagrin, a lot of non-Catholic Christian conservatives have been lining up with this Medieval view of church and state for sometime. Their only substantive disagreement with Rome is over who decides whose conscience is "properly formed" and whose is not.

What especially jerked my chain about this latest broadside from the Vatican are the crocodile tears wetting its pages about "the painful situation" of remarried Catholics. His Holiness solemnly declares that these unfortunates suffer only because of the sinful state in which they are living. For the remarried Catholics I have counseled over the years, the source of their pain is decidedly not their sinning; they do not in fact seriously believe that they are living in sin, nor do I. The real source of their pain is the demeaning words of their leader, barring them even from receiving Communion, the central sacrament of the Christian tradition. And now we get to the point of my earlier confession.

His Eminence appears to have forgotten somewhere along his path of elevation just whose table it is that we are talking about here, and whose church it is that embraces all of us in love, no matter how many in it jockey for the right to determine all on their own who will and will not be permitted to partake of its sacred substances. None of us --- single, married, divorced, celebate, straight, gay, remarried, shacking up, giving up --- is "worthy" to come to Communion. But God continues to honor his promise to be with us whenever and wherever his table is set, and nothing can be a more egregious perversion of his good news than allowing someone no less sinful than we are to block anyone else's access to him there.

Benedict XVI's exhortation is just the kind of weighty tome that has been sinking the credibility of his church's hierarchy for decades now, and that will continue to foster mischief, meanness, and malignity in peoples' lives for even more decades to come. All three are involved in the one approved way for remarried Catholics to extricate themselves from their "painful situation," basically by coming up with enough money to buy themselves annulments. I see little difference in this way of getting right with God and the church from the way of indulgences, which latter disgraces both.

For Catholics without the resources to buy an annulment of a first marriage, and without the dishonesty it takes to declare many a first marriage a nullity, I recommend a time-honored way of vetoing unjustifiable prohibitions, with one's feet. This is a seditious recommendation, of course, but sedition is not always a bad thing. (Remember the Boston Tea Party?) The next time you think about it, just slip into the pew of a parish the next neighborhood north or south, and receive quietly and gratefully at the hands of an unknown priest the body and blood of the One whose knowledge of you and your situation is the only kind that finally counts.

Dry Bones, Dead Faith

It is easy to get the sillies over the recent "revelation" that Jesus' bones have been collecting dust for 2,000 years in an ossuary while Christians the world over have been celebrating his resurrection and his ascension into heaven. Shame on you, James Cameron, for raining on our Easter parades. From the standpoint of building an audience for your documentary on all this, your sense of timing is impeccable. But from the standpoint of faith, it is just plain tacky.

Some people, of course, are going to work up a big case of the worries over this archeological "discovery," from the misguided belief that it somehow calls Jesus' resurrection into question. I can't wait to see how they will go about (and forgive the pun) covering all of this up again. The next breaking news story might even be about the sudden vanishing of the Shroud of Turin. If it happens, then mark my words: it will have been stolen to prevent a DNA match to the skeletal remains attributed to the Nazarene.

Other people will merely call upon their orthodoxy to protect them from sweating the possibility that Jesus was not raised bodily from the dead. Their argument will go something like this: the church teaches that Jesus took his body with him to heaven; therefore, we can be sure that the bones in that ossuary belong to somebody other than him. Hopefully, the Cameron documentary will be long forgotten --- it already has been by reputable archeologists --- before some of our fellow Christians embarrass us yet again with this screwy logic of determining facts on the basis of dogma.

The idea that there has been a lost tomb of Jesus somewhere in Jerusalem fits nicely with other commercially viable ideas now floating around. It is on a par with the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalen deftly combined co-habitation with saving the world from sin, and the idea that the pitter patter of their childrens' little feet were wonderful to come home to after a long day of miracle-working and fending off insults.

To get a little more serious, but not a whole lot: I have long wondered whether the earliest Christians helped their cause much by relying on the tradition of an empty tomb to support their proclamation about God's raising Jesus from the dead. Certainly they had to confront head-on an ugly rumor that the disciples stole Jesus' body, and they did it well by explaining that the real reason why it was in fact missing was that God took it back. Frankly, though, I wish they had soft-pedaled this whole issue. Saying a lot about it stirred up even more speculation about the body, and new searches for its tomb by folks who never trusted that Jesus' women-friends knew perfectly well where the original one was.

But enough already. Here we are in Lent, and the last thing we need is more kidding around on my part, and more pretentious posturing on The Discovery Channel's. The real question here is not whether Easter faith could be undermined by the discovery of earthly remains that are unquestionably those of Jesus and like the remains of every other dead person on the earth. The real question is what it has always been for faith: with what kind of body was Jesus raised? (And with which we will be raised as well.) If you believe that Jesus got out of this world with his this-worldly body intact, then your faith may indeed be in trouble. Not, of course, because of the recent vapid documentary, but because you have unwisely chosen to anchor it by the wrong apostolic tradition.

The more helpful one is the tradition of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances. According to St. Paul, after Jesus entombment over 500 people claimed to have seen him, and not just an empty tomb. What I especially like about this tradition is that it deliberately pushes our images of the body with which Jesus was raised into the realm of the uncanny, the hallucinogenic, and the downright spooky. He takes nourishment, lets wounds be touched, and yet goes through walls and vanishes before peoples' very eyes in a heartbeat. That's some kind of body. It was the kind of body that forced the early church to acknowledge that whatever body we will someday have in the Kingdom of God, it will not be a "flesh and blood" body at all. In truth, leaving his earthly body behind was the only thing Jesus could have done under the circumstances. I doubt that re-entering the Godhead as its second member could have been accomplished at all if he had had to take it with him.