Heresy / Apostasy

Greetings All,

     Today's "thought" comes from a lady who grew up in the church as a child, and then (in her own words) "set it aside as folly" as she entered her 20's. It wasn't until she reached her mid-thirties the she felt the need to "reclaim it."  It was process that was not always easy, and made her feel (at times) like she was being moved in a direction contrary to that which she would have willed to go -- though always for her good. 

     
     Her name is Kathleen Norris and her book is entitled "Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith."  This selection I share comes from her chapter on Heresy/Apostasy -- things she herself had ventured into.  And having been there, she addresses the topic from the informed place of personal experience.  I found her take on it interesting, and as one who also wandered far from the church for a time, before being drawn back, true to my experience as well. I offer it to others who may have strayed as well. Enjoy.

     "The Christian church has always co-existed with heresy, and with any luck it always will.  Contending with heresy is what helps keep orthodoxy alive.  But good will and sanity are essential, as Christian history is full of evidence that the vigorous rooting out of heretics is a cure worse than the disease.  The times, blessedly few of them considering the church’s two-thousand-year span, when the inquisitorial types have gotten the upper hand have proved irredeemably shameful and sometime horrific.

     If heresy might be seen as slipping toward one extreme or another on a Christian continuum, apostasy is another matter altogether.  The word comes from the Greek for “to revolt,” “to defect,” and signifies a break with the family.  The American Heritage Dictionary defines apostasy as the “abandonment of one’s religious faith, a political party, one’s principles, or a cause.” There is a certain pride inherent in apostasy, which often manifests itself as a remarkable faith in oneself, as in “I alone know what is right for me.”  Teachers, traditions, the family stories, and the beliefs of the common herd are all suspect; suspicion rather than trust is what defines the apostate.  And it defines our age.  The individual stands alone, a church of one, convinced that he or she is free of the tyranny of any creed or dogma.

     But the use of one’s own experience as the measure of the world contains the seed of another kind of tyranny.  The accomplished gadfly Wendy Kaminer, in a perceptive essay entitled “The Latest Fashion in Irrationality,” examines the way in which much contemporary spirituality (which from a Christian frame of reference is apostasy) offers a closed belief system in which “the possibility of error is never considered,” as one’s feelings are always right.  But as Kaminer points out, these trendy belief systems – she is examining some recent best-sellers that address alien abductions, personal angels, and the ability to will oneself into a supernaturally evolved state – usually fail to deal adequately with the evil in this world.  And they encourage a disastrous self-absorption, allowing people to believe that they are part of a spiritual elite.  “Like extremist political movements,” she writes, “they shine with moral vanity.”  If I had to come up with a synonym for apostasy, that would be it:  it is simple vanity.

     But it is my own vanity that I am condemning, my own arrogance, my own apostasy, which surfaces whenever I break away from my community of faith.  It comes when I am so angry, or despairing, or simply exhausted, that I forget that I don’t go to church for myself.  Church is the Christian community, and it exists in order to worship God and to live out the commandment given by Jesus Christ, to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.  The part of this equation that the apostate in me tends to scorn, is that worshipping God means loving my neighbor.  Mark 6:30-34 describes Jesus and his disciples trying to get away from people for a rest, but finding that people follow them, needing a word of encouragement; needing to be tended, fed, and cared for.  A Presbyterian pastor one reminded me, in an inventive take on this gospel passage, that we “go to church for other people.  Because,” he added, “someone may need you there.”  I stopped doodling on my bulletin and began to pay attention, apostate no longer but fully present  “Someone may need you there.”  And I may also need to admit that I need them. 

     Wretched as I am, it may do someone good just to see my face, or share a conversation over coffee before the worship service; wretched as we all are, in the private hells we dwell in, all too often inflicting on those who are closest to us the bitter residue of their flames  Church is a place we can go to stop the madness, because every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are petitioning for forgiveness not only from God but from each other.  Forgive me, Lord, as I forgive.  These are words that a true apostate cannot pray."

     Kathleen is right. In terms of the years of my own "apostasy" I can say, "Yes, it was bred in vanity."  For vanity often produces the need to be novel, and as she says, think that we alone see things as they really are and we alone know what is right for us.  Likewise, apostasy (at least in my case) was the result of a rebellion against what I knew deep down inside to be true; it was not driven by a compulsion to pursue truth. Also, it was fueled by a tendency to embrace one small part of what was true, focus on that one small part as the whole truth, and thereby create a system of thought that was unbalanced or not counterbalanced by other necessary truths, and thus ended up being untrue (heretical).

     J. I. Packer was right when he suggested that: "A half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth."  Heresy usually exists in the unbalanced extremes of limited thinking. It is not the result of seeing more than others see, but refusing to see all there is to see. Truth is comprehensive, but heresy latches on to one small aspect of the truth without considering the complexity and completeness of the full truth that would balance it off.  So, my coming to the faith, after a time of straying (apostasy) was simply coming to see in full (and acknowledge) truths I had selectively chosen to reject. Those who have (like she and I) wandered into the two states of heresy and apostasy will understand what she and I mean -- which is probably more than a few of those who have read this post!

With Prayers for You on the Journey, Pastor Jeff

Simple Church

Greetings to All and Prayers for a Happy New Year!

     As we begin the new year, I thought I would start us off with a call to return to simple.  Simple and uncomplicated ministry.  Ministry as Jesus did it.  Ministry stripped off all the ways we try and make it more complex than it really is. Spirituality that's focused on the important.  Being the Church Jesus wants us to be.

 

This was driven home to me in a book recommended by a close friend: Simple Church, by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger.  It is a straightforward and down to earth appraisal of how ministry should look. How Jesus intended it to look. If you happen to be struggling with the church as it often is, and want to consider it from a refreshing perspective, I would encourage you to pick up this easy to read book. As you go through it I am sure you will likely find yourself saying on many occasions, "Yes, that IS how it should be."   I offer this excerpt as a mere taste of what is in the book. Enjoy.

     "Simple churches have chosen to align themselves with the way God works. They have chosen to partner with the discipleship process revealed in Scripture. They have chosen to structure their churches around a simple process...  We are not claiming a simple church design is easy. There is a big difference between simple and easy.  Simple is basic, uncomplicated, and fundamental. Easy is effortless...  Leading a local church is neither simple nor easy, but the church strategy does not need to be complicated. The ministry design can and should be simple.

     If anyone knows simple it is Jesus. If anyone is a revolutionary, it is Jesus. He is the simple revolutionary. He stepped into a complicated and polluted religious scene. It was cluttered with Sadducees, Pharisees, Herodians, Zealots, and Essenes. He did not play by their rules.  He could not stand their hypocrisy.  He preferred spending time with tax collectors and sinners.  The religious leaders had developed a religious system with 613 laws. They chose that number because that was how many separate letters were in the text containing the 10 Commandments. Then they found 613 commandments in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament). They divided the list into affirmative commands (do this) and negative commands (don't do this).  There were 248 affirmative commands, one for every part of the human body as they understood it. There were 365 negative commands, one for each day of the year. They further divided the list into binding commands and nonbinding commands. Then they spent their days debating whether the divisions were accurate and ranking the commands within each division.

     Enter Jesus. Jesus has the ability to take the complex and make it simple. The prime example is Matthew 22:37-40, where Jesus gives what has become known as the Great Commandment. Here is the scene. Jesus has just stumped the Sadducees. Literally. He silenced them by His wisdom (Matt. 22:34). Next up are the Pharisees. Maybe they can do a better job knocking this revolutionary down. The Pharisees gather for a meeting. They devise a debate strategy. The goal is to humiliate Jesus in front of the crowd. They choose their smartest guy, a lawyer, to take on Jesus. He asks Jesus which is the greatest commandment in the law. Of all the 613 commandments, he is asking Jesus for the greatest. Jesus replied: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the greatest and most important commandment. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend (are summed up in) these two commandments." Think about the significance of that moment. He said all the Law (and He added the Prophets) is summed up in this simple and perfect phrase. He was not lowering the standard of the Law.  He was not abolishing it.  He was capturing all its spirit, all of its essence, in one statement.  He said all of it hangs on this.  He summed up 613 commands in two.  Jesus took the complexity and the advancement of the Law and made it very simple.

     Jesus was a rabbi, a teacher. In the Jewish culture, each rabbi had a "yoke" of teaching. His yoke was his instructions, his content and his message. Many rabbis put yokes of teaching on the people that were impossible and legalistic. These yokes pushed people away from the grace of God and not toward it.  These yokes burned people out and turned people off.  Jesus stepped onto the scene and said to the crowd one day: "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matt. 11:28-30). Jesus said HIS yoke was easy. His teaching was in stark contrast to the religious rabbis of the day. He was not offering a complicated and long set of rules, rituals, and regulations. He was offering grace. He was offering a simple relationship with God. As a simple revolutionary, Jesus was bothered by meaningless and distracting clutter.

     On at least one occasion, Jesus cleansed the temple. Many biblical scholars believe he did this twice during His earthly ministry. Mark 11 gives the account of one of His cleaning projects.  Jesus was enraged by what he observed at the temple. The temple had the appearance of being a place where people would seek God, but this was not the reality. People had lost their focus. Mark describes three areas of clutter that infuriated Jesus.  FIRST, people are buying and selling in the temple... The leaders allowed vendors to set up shop in the temple.  Historians reveal vendors were typically set up outside the temple, but (in Jesus day) the makeshift marketplace is inside the temple. Jesus responded by driving out those who were selling doves.  SECOND, money changers were exchanging foreign currency for the Gentiles. The Gentiles needed Jewish money to buy sacrifices and they were being exploited with a fee for the exchange. Instead of the temple being a house of prayer for all nations (including Gentiles) it was cluttered with people robbing them financially. Jesus reacts by throwing over the tables of the money changers.  THIRD, the temple had become a shortcut for people to pass through the city...  Jesus stopped them.

     His behavior in the temple gives us amazing insight into the heart of God. Jesus is adamantly opposed to anything that gets in the way of people encountering Him. He quoted from Isaiah that day saying, "Is it not written. 'My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations?' But you have made it a den of thieves!"  (Mark 11:17).  Many of our churches have become cluttered. So cluttered that people have a difficult time encountering the simple and powerful message of Christ. So cluttered that many people are busy doing church instead of being the church. What about your church?"

     Just some food for thought as we enter the New Year and hopefully "clean out" and "simplify" our approach to God.  For Jesus wants us to know, "[His] yoke is easy and [His] burden is light."  He designed it that way.  He fought to keep it that way.  May He win the fight to do so in your life and in your church.

     With Prayers for a Year Where We Can Learn to Enjoy the Simplicity and Light Load of Being In Christ, Pastor Jeff