Rituals

I seem to be going through a “criticize the church” phase at the moment. My last posting was an attempt to explain (probably to myself) how I feel about one part of the churches activity, and this is a repeat performance. It has been part of my attitude for a while now and maybe I should try writing it out.

The church seems to operate in “catch up mode”. All of the ceremonial, the ritual of the church happens after the event, none of it is designed to actually cause something to happen. It is a celebration of what has already taken place, rather than an instigator of events. Perhaps there is a place for a party, but are they really essential? What do they actually achieve? Let me at least try to explain.

When a candidate for the ministry is ordained, they are asked a number of questions. While the details will vary between denominations, the general points remain the same. “Do you believe that you are called by God to this office?”, “Do you accept the bible as the word of God?”, “Do you accept the doctrine of this church as in conformity with the scriptures?”, “Do you agree to carry out the duties of your office with due diligence?” Now the office of minister is not one to be undertaken lightly or without due regard for the consequences of that act. A minister of the “Word and the Sacraments” has a very heavy burden to carry, one which will affect him deeply for the rest of his life. Not only the minister but also the partner and nobody can volunteer for such a position without answering these questions for himself, long before the point of an ordination service is reached. So the service of ordination is simply covering old ground, it neither reveals nor teaches anything new.

And when our minister is ordained into his congregation, somebody, sooner or later, will want their baby christened. Again, this does not happen on the spur of the moment, such action can only be taken after the minister is satisfied that the parents know what is involved. The child, being born into a church family, has already been accepted by the members of the church as part of their community of faith, the offer of salvation by grace through faith has already been made, and the parents have decided that their child will be brought up in the knowledge and fear of the Lord. So the baptismal service offers nothing new.

When that child has reached an age of accountability, they may well decide that they want to accept for themselves the load of being an active Christian, or at least find out more about what is involved. So they will annoy our poor overworked minister to arrange confirmation/profession of faith/baptismal/membership classes, depending on the denomination. The decision to accept or reject the standards taught is made during the course of those classes. Salvation is not dependant on a public acknowledgement, but on a decision taken previously. So again I ask “what does the service of conformation actually achieve?”

Having survived the confirmation experience, our young child has now grown up to the point where they have developed an interest in the opposite sex. So they decide that they have met the person God wants for them as a partner. If they at all sincere about practicing their beliefs, they have already sought divine guidance to find this person, they have already asked a blessing on the relationship, they have determined to be true and faithful to each other. In other words, they have already asked themselves and God all the questions they are again asked during the course of the wedding service. What, apart from the legal issues involved, does the marriage ritual actually confer on the couple?

Our baby, having been baptized, confirmed, married and had their own children baptized, is now quite old, feeble and infirm and suffers the final ritual of death. The service in the church emphasizes the good points of the deceased, ignores the bad ones and commits the soul to God’s care. Then everybody goes off to the cemetery and the body is committed to the earth. Is the body any more committed because someone has spoken over it? Is the corpse less dead because of the stories that were told in the church? Does the rest of the church community offer any more sympathy, support or understanding because of the services?

I accept my minister as having been ordained even though I may not have seen it happen. He is a good minister because of who he is, the sort of person he became before his ordination. The service has had very little, if any, input into that.

I accept my friends in the congregation as they are, people like me struggling to come to terms with the reality of living a christian life. I have no knowledge of their baptism, I wasn’t there and it is only an assumption on my part that they are indeed baptized. The same can be said for any confirmation, it may or may not have taken place, I have no direct knowledge of this, but I accept them as they are. I have never attended a wedding of my congregation friends, I assume they had one, but the only basis for that assumption is tradition.

These stages in the lives of my church friends are lived out, these people behave like committed and forgiven Christians, and they act like people seriously in love with each other and with Christ.

Why, then, do we have these rituals? What is the point of having the trouble and expense? Why go to all that bother? Is it anything more than an excuse for a party?

Who created who?

I was talking to a friend the other day about their attitude to alcohol. They are total abstainers and I am not. The conversation was quite friendly and there was no rancour involved, but it made me think. Not about my attitude to alcohol, but about the difficulty of determining the status of any action. I wonder now if we can say that any activity is, of itself, either good or evil.
Consider the question posed above. Should we, or should we not, drink? My friend and his family have considered the matter carefully and have arrived at their decision to abstain. I have considered the matter equally carefully and decided to enjoy a drink sometimes. I do not attempt to persuade my friend to change his mind, nor does he think that my decision is wrong. He is as correct in his decision as I am in mine, but this leaves us with a paradox. The same question was considered by each of us and we arrived at two different answers, both of which are right. His “No” decision is just as right as my “Yes” verdict.

The difference is not in the question, we each considered the same question. What, then, is the reason for the difference and how can both decisions be right? The only variation is in the situation that the question applies to. We each made the decision according to our own situation. My friend and I are different people and neither of us wanted or tried to make a decision for the other. This leads me to consider if the same parameters apply to other questions. Can we say that any action is either right or wrong when seen in isolation?

Most people consider murder to be definitely wrong and I must agree that the majority of such acts are committed for personal gain in one form or another. But the motives for murder can vary widely. Perhaps a robbery goes wrong; perhaps the perpetrator is in danger of being apprehended for another offence, perhaps the victim is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I can envisage a set of different circumstances which challenge the traditional view. Murder is defined as the taken of another person’s life without lawful reason. Defense personnel kill the enemy that is the reason they are in a combat zone, they are acting on the instructions of their government. An executioner is obeying the ruling of a court, no matter what our opinion of capital punishment is, the executioner is carrying out the decision of a legally appointed court and he cannot be charged with murder.

Just after WW1, a group of ex USA Air force pilots were making a living barnstorming. One of the stunts went very wrong and the plane crashed, splitting open the fuel tank and trapping the pilot in the wreckage. The fuel caught fire and his mates were unable to free the pilot who cried out in terror “Don’t let me fry”. One of his friends, who had served in the same unit with him, took a bit of timber lying on the ground and beat his friend to death with it. The first blow killed him. Now the USA had not declared war on the victim, nor had he been sentenced to death by any court, so legally speaking, it was murder. But was it really? Incidentally, that incident formed the basis for one of the scenes in the film. “The Great Waldo Pepper”.

If murder is wrong, then self murder is also contrary to God’s laws and there are many who hold that belief. What is suicide? It occurs when a person either takes or fails to take action or actions which result in their own death. The victim can perhaps take poison or may fail to get off the tracks when the train comes through. Captain Oates was an officer in the British Navy who was well experienced in exploration and he was part of an expedition to reach the North Pole. Having achieved their object, they set out on the return journey and were caught in a blizzard of such intensity that they had to camp where they were for quite some time. The camped for so long that they did not have enough supplies to cover the return journey to base camp. Captain Oates said to his friends “I am going out for a moment, don’t wait for me” This was the usual way of announcing that a call of nature was being answered. He went out, lay down in the ice and froze to death so that his friends would have sufficient supplies to reach the base. There once was a man who enjoyed a supper with his friends. During the course of this supper he told one of them to go out and betray him. The host, after the meal, led the friends to a place where he knew he would be met by his enemies. The enemies did, indeed, meet him there and attacked him and so his friends attempted to repulse the attack. But the leader told them not to fight and told them that he could, if he wanted, call up an army to defend him. So the host was arrested and executed.

Both of these incidents come within the definition of suicide, they took and failed to take, actions which resulted directly in their deaths. Yet Captain Oates was hailed as a hero and the host of the meal is our salvation. Why are these actions not seen as suicide and condemned as wrong? The thing that sets them apart is the motive, the reason for the action. They are called as self sacrifice, yet, by definition, they are suicide.

The Israelites had their ten commandments, a set of fairly simple, basic regulations designed to make life easier for them. Yet the leaders of these people expanded this half page of foolscap into documents, folders and folios of definitions and supplementary rulings, covering every aspect of life and activity. The actual laws themselves paled into insignificance under the sheer weight of the additional material which eventually assumed an importance greater than the laws they were meant to explain.

Jesus had quite a bit to say about this. The opening paragraph of Matthew 12 is a case in point. Jesus pointed out to the critics that the spirit of the law is far more important than the letter, and He was strongly condemned those who enforced the law at the expense of other people. The second paragraph says the same thing with regard to healing a man’s withered hand. This is re iterated in Mark 2 and 3 and again in Luke 6. It was the legalistic attitude of the Temple leaders that allowed the money changers to conduct their business. By a strict observance of the letter of the law, the coffers of the priests were swelled at the expense of the people. But according to the priests, it was all quite correct and above board. They managed to legitimize their actions under the law by using their own definitions of what was meant and ignoring the spirit and the intent of the law. To quote Mark 2:27 “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”

It is my opinion that a lot of the current argument about what is or is not allowed by the scriptures falls under the same sort of heading. We, today, are so concerned about what is permissible, we are so strong in our comments on things such as the abortion debate or Sunday working that we have forgotten that there are actual real people involved in these issues. We have created a world where the law rules supreme, observance of the rules is paramount to our worship. It is said in Genesis 1:26 that God created man in His own image, yet we have turned that around and are in danger of creating god in our image, a god who rules by the letter of the law without regard for the people who the law is meant to serve. We have re created the very thing that Jesus came to destroy.

This worship of the letter of the law has blinded us to the real issues involved. It is my belief that there can be no "one universally correct answer" to moral dilemmas, rather that each question should be decided on its own merits, according to the circumstances of the people involved and that people should not have to suffer as a result of the vey laws which God gave us for our benefit.