REL331 essay 2

Instructor Reading Guide

Donald finds a spiritual director, Jeff, for Sara. Note that Jeff is a Presbyterian (162). These

Episcopalians at St. Gregory’s are very open-minded folk.

And what is she to do about the attacks of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq? For 9/11 she opens St.

Gregory’s. For the invasion of Iraq she plans a liturgy, and finds herself bereft of certainties.

“Becoming a believer seemed to be giving me less interest in maintaining a set of rigid beliefs –

about God and about politics” (160). She tries to center of Paul’s “faith working through love”

[Galatians 5:6] (161).

She’s asked to give sermons. At St. Gregory’s the sermons emphasized “critical scholarship and

personal experience.” Donald said that the idea was “to meet God in the wildness and immediacy

of life,” not in “correct” doctrinal formula and “telling one another how to look at life” (176).

This is not a very common affair. Critical scholarship undermines the common literal

interpretation of the Bible, and personal experience and reliance on the guidance of the Spirit can

seem flaky to churches with a strong liturgical practice like they have at St. Gregory’s. What do

you think of this? Do your church’s sermons combine both critical scholarship and personal

testimony – without “telling one another how to look at life”?

Sara observes that if the New Testament stories were correct, Jesus was “singularly uninterested

in church” (178). Not your usual Christian notion. Does she mean to say that worship is

unimportant?

She is asked by an acquaintance to perform a marriage ceremony (183).

She meets Paul Fromberg who shares Rick and Donald’s belief in “radical hospitality.” Bishop

Swing had mentioned to her “the crazy hospitality, the open extravagance of the Last Supper”

(189).

The Nicene Creed was not a part of St. Gregory’s service. Paul says: “It’s basically a toxic

document set up to standardize belief and overturn heresies and draw a sharp line between us and

them” (191).

While delivering food at the Potrero Hill projects, she reflects: “This was God’s holy hill: the

Hill…. God lived in Ruth’s hands” (196). Is this part of what she means by Jesus’ being

“singularly uninterested in church” (178).

The food pantry volunteers wanted church. “Not the kind where you sit obediently and listen to

someone tell you how to behave but the kind where you discover responsibility, purpose,

meaning” (214). Sara’s impressed with the resilience of people, and “in breaking bread with my

people, and hearing their stories, I was learning … something about God: You can’t hope to see

God without opening yourself to all God’s creation” (217).

St. Gregory’s holds regular “feasts of friends,” potlucks modeled on early eucharists (218). What

do you think of this? Doesn’t it seem indecorous, and not the proper sort of ambience for being

close to God?

Jesus’ own practice, by the way, was to eat meals with people, and the practice of the first

Christians was to actually have a meal in which Jesus was remembered and communion was

celebrated.

Paul volunteers to cook on Fridays for the pantry volunteers, and they discuss religion while

cooking. The usual denominations depend on the idea that their own sect has the “secret code….

That was idolatry …; magical thinking, pagan religion…. God was not manageable.” Paul says,

“The message of Jesus is the only sure cure for religion” (221).

Sara finds her faith in “the wild conceit that a helpless, low-caste baby could be God. That ugly,

contaminated, and unimportant people embodied holiness.” She reflects that the kingdom was

primarily about an afterlife, “but I believed it was this world, just as my parents had, in their

secular way, insisted so long ago” (222).

Are you comfortable with this view? You might keep in mind that the Hebrew Scriptures are

very much focused on how to live life – this is what the Covenant and Torah are all about. For a

Jew like Jesus, God’s “kingdom” or “Ruling” meant primarily that lives could be lived

differently – as in feeding the hungry, forgiving, and loving one’s enemies. In the early

Christians’ faith in the Resurrection, this new living extended also into eternity. They believed

that Jesus’ Resurrection vindicated his – and their -- vision of living in the Kingdom.

Sara finds a new dimension of faith in healing. She holds Michael who faces an operation for

stomach cancer (230-231).

She had begun to believe more in resurrection as something mysterious and about “the eternity

available in a fully lived instant” (231).

(Surely Sara is right to be skeptical of too-easy descriptions of eternal life? “Resurrection” even

in traditional teaching is a mystery and one needs to guard against “dumbing it down.” It’s not a

matter of scientific knowledge or technological manipulation. It is “immeasurable” in that sense.

But so are God, creation, and the human spirit. Christian faith is mysterious from the very

beginning.)

Sara and Martha decide to get married. Notice that it is Katie (ca. 15 years old) who insists on

this (232). And later at St. Gregory’s Donald and the other priests and others bless the marriage

in an irregular rite (234). Then the marriages are annulled, but “what had happened at St.

Gregory’s was outside both the law and the Law.” Their marriage became a metaphor for the

“the difficult and vital imperative to love others”(235).

Interesting issues here, to be sure. Can gay people marry? Is the government the proper entity to

decide this, and not the couple themselves? That is, the government can’t decide a religion for

you, but it can decide a certain kind of partner or number of partners? You can see other

questions here also: Mormons and Muslims. Clearly, such things as rules about child marriage

are not controversial, but these other rules – about adults -- seem to require a little more

justification than they are usually given, especially in the light of American belief in freedom of

religion and conscience.

In addition to believing that the pantry being itself is eucharistic, Sara finds herself being asked

by a little girl, Sasha, to apply to her baptismal water, the water “God puts on you to make you

safe.” For Sara, it hadn’t made her safe. It was a sign “the unavoidable reality of the cross at the

heart of the Christian faith” (236). Lynn gives a blessing to Sasha, and Sara “saw something

flowing between them: the child, crucified, anointing Lynn with the power of her crucifixion,

and Lynn, receiving it, anointing Sasha” (237). Lawrence is overwhelmed when he hears the

story.

Sara reflects that people “often wanted more … sacraments, more rites, more prayer and healing

and blessing” than the church was willing to give” (240) She thinks thinks further that “real

Christians” could be “total outsiders and still perform rites that evoked the Gospel messages of

healing, new life, shared food, shared grief, shared peace” (241).

What do you think? Can you perform such rites? You should recall again that Jesus and his

companions weren’t priests; they were lay people. The “authorized” people were those at the

Temple in Jerusalem, and you know how that story went. Peter, Paul, and Jesus’ brother James

were all executed. Isn’t there something radical, disturbing, and “unauthorized” about the Jesus

movement? Maybe “being a human being” is something that in itself is “unauthorized”?

$200,000? The heart of it all is “the experience of being bread” (246). Derek, the very formal

and controlled lawyer, asks her to write a prayer for him (247).

Extending the pantry? A difficult question. Notice their resorting to the Quaker practice of a

“clearness committee” (248-249).

“You can’t be a Christian by yourself… I was going to be changed, too, and lose my private

church” (256).

“The Cost of Faith” is the title of chap. 24. Before her, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a top Lutheran

theologian, executed by the Nazis, had written of The Cost of Discipleship (1937) which attacked

the notion of “cheap grace,” the idea that faith doesn’t cost anything. Here she has serious

conflicts with here wife Martha and daughter Katie. And important realization is that that she

was not purer than anyone else (262). Are you purer than other people?

“The unavoidably political Gospel of incarnation and murder” (265).

“Learning from experience instead of memorizing a formula forced me to pay attention. Doing

the Gospel rather than just quoting it was the best way I could find out what God was up to”

(265). This is almost a throwaway line, but it links learning from experience, paying attention,

and action – and contrasts this with following formulae. What do you think? Could your life use

a little more “paying attention”? And what would you do once you saw something important –

black Americans being denied education with whites, for instance? And what would happen to

you and your family if you decided to do something about it? Rocks through your window?

Threats? Attacks?

Paul had admonished the Galatians that in Christ “there is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no

longer slave nor free, there is no longer male and female” (Gal. 3:39). You can see the political

implications, I’m sure: there couldn’t be Nazi laws about Jews, American laws about blacks or

Indians, or the usual laws restricting women. All this visionary dreaming is very much “outside

the box” of the culture of Paul’s day. Admittedly, Sara is a dreamer (and very much an actor, of

course, as Jesus and Paul), but does that necessarily mean she’s wrong?

The point of church is not getting people to go to church but “to feed them, so they can go out

and, you know, be Jesus” (265).

Sara used to live with Millie, her lover then, and Millie’s son Jay, and now Millie was dying.

Sara followed Episcopal rules about only priests presiding at the eucharist (267), but as Millie

got sicker, Sara needed extra strength. Then something happened as Sara prayed over the toast

for Millie’s pills and broke it. “Oh, my God, it’s real” (272).

“Christianity wasn’t an argument …, a thesis. It was a mystery that I was finally willing to

swallow” (274).

Her spiritual director, Jeff, says, “We don’t understand the eucharist, or that bread and wine live

within us, so we ritualize the things that hold the mystery” (276).

Sara finally comes out to her atheist mother as they share a meal of lamb, bread, and wine. It

wasn’t an official eucharist, but “it was real communion” (278).

She imagines “life, everlasting.” All her family and friends are there. “We’re eating together.

The door opens. It is never over” (280).