Occupy Church?

The “Occupy Wall Street” protests have captured my imagination, and probably not for the reasons you might suspect.  There is a lot to be said for the collective indignance being articulated by the Occupiers in relation to earnings and wealth disparity.  On a side note, for all the voices that speak of their expectations to the contrary, they are revealing that “Gen Y” does possess a moral center.  It may not be your moral center, but they are making moral arguments against the current economic construct.  Now, there is also something to be said for the oddness of much of the protest, and many of the protestors.  Another strike against the Occupiers is their difficulty in succinctly articulating either all that they’re for, or even all they’re against.  They seem to represent a pretty diverse group of interests who seem to share in common a frustration with a financial system they see as constructed by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful.  Well, they seem to share that frustration, and a collective interest in horizontal as opposed to hierarchical organization.  This is actually what interests me most, particularly in relation to the church.

I’m intrigued because the occupiers are embodying a means of organizing I’ve been fascinated by for years, particularly in regards to how it relates to the church.  I was introduced to this idea of a horizontal organization of church by Tom Sine’s Mustard Seed Versus McWorld, and Neil Cole’s Organic Church: Growing FaithWhere Life Happens.  Both suggest a radical rethinking of how we organize church, creating smaller community structures, less dependent on brick and mortar facilities, and allowing for greater spontaneity and liquidity in movement.  In different ways they argue that hierarchical structures have the strong potential to slow the church’s work as those involved commit considerable amounts of time to both the organization and the facilities associated with the organization.  I have to say their ideas held and continue to hold my imagination.  As much as I love church as I’ve known it, and as much as I love being a part of the organization and the family atmosphere of the organization, it has always seemed rather unwieldy to me.  The trouble is I’ve had a hard time imagining what an alternative would look like.  I even tried to find ways to take these ideas from the page to the real world; from the construction of an intentional community to alternative liturgies and ecclesial structures, without much success.  Enter the “Occupy Wall Street” folks and their experiment in “horizontal democracy.”

This is what seems to me to be at the heart of their protests, and the one thing shared in common, a commitment to shy away from hierarchy.  You can see this in their decision making process, attempting to decide by group consensus as opposed to majority vote.  Granted it takes longer and less gets “done”, but by doing so they embody the alternative to that which is the root of their indignance, the power of the few over the many.  I appreciate this commitment to live this philosophy given my interest in the idea of Incarnation.  Given the importance of Incarnation to Christianity, this should get our attention.  Their message in reality is their action.  Because of this the value of this protest thus far, at least as I see it, isn’t in their propositions, but in their actions.  I pray that some day the same can be said of me.

Dry Bones, Illuminated Manuscripts, and Visual Hermeneutics

“Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” So I prophesied as I had been commanded. – From Ezekiel 37

I suspect there’s a good chance you have not heard of the St. John’s Bible.  It is the first hand written, illuminated Bible to be produced since the invention of the printing press in the 16^th century, around 500 years ago.  It is also the first hand written copy of the Bible ever produced in English.  I learned about it as part of a gathering I attended where the focus was (surprise, surprise) theology and the arts.  I have to say the book is stunning in its craftsmanship, and imagination.  If you have time, please click on the link above and explore the Bible.  You can actually turn through the Bible’s pages on their website.  The illuminations are stunning aesthetically, and do an amazing job of opening up the text it illuminates to a type of visual hermeneutic.  At any rate as part of a seminar I attended in relation to this Bible, I participated in a community Lectio Divina, which is a Benedictine meditative practice of reading and praying through scripture.  It’s typically done alone, but the director of the St. John Bible Project, Tim Ternes, led us through a modified arrangement of the practice where a portion of a text would be read, and those in the seminar would speak out phrases, words, or groups of words from the text.  It became something of an open, communal, improv-like, free form scriptural poetry reading.  Our text for this exercise was Ezekiel 37.1-14, The Valley of the Dry Bones.  As a group we drew a lot more out of the text than I have ever personally gotten out of, or seen in the text before.  There’s one concept in particular that stuck out to me that I’d like to share here; not the main point of the text, but something the text and the production of the Bible had in common, the importance of human agency in materially and dramatically rendering God’s heart and desires visible to a world bound to their physical senses.

The text itself is a dynamic drama born out of the imagination of God and shared with Ezekiel.  Ezekiel of course then shared it with those around him, and it was recorded in writing for the benefit of posterity.  What interests me is what the vision reveals about that which God holds dear, and the part God expects Ezekiel to play in this drama of disclosure. 

As the vision unfolds to Ezekiel, God reveals a deep love for the Hebrew people, and a desire that they live and experience the type of full life associated with living in the awareness that they are loved absolutely and unconditionally.  Ideally, the product of this awareness is trust and hope.  At the end of the vision God indicates to Ezekiel that the entire purpose of the vision was that the Hebrews would, “know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.”  This action is entirely God’s initiative, unmerited and on their behalf.  God essentially flings open the metaphorical Divine ribs and reveals a heart beating with a madly overabundant, uncontainable love for these people.  God allows Ezekiel and by extension us to see the Divine insides so to speak, and we are left with the knowledge of the security and thus comfort of God’s love.  Look closer though.  How is it that we get to “see” this?  How is this made visible?  We can’t see feelings.  We can only see actions.  So who is acting here?  Ezekiel.

In the vision Ezekiel is commanded to prophecy to the bones.  God doesn’t resurrect the bones directly, but employs Ezekiel as a mediator.  In doing so, God reveals God’s love through Ezekiel’s obedient actions.  There is a similarity here to Moses’ experience at the Red Sea.  In Exodus 14 God tells Moses to lift up his hands to both part the seas and return them to “normal.”  In both instances the text records that Moses lifted his hands, and then God parted the waters, and then returned them.  God didn’t act until Moses did.  God didn’t return flesh and life to the bones in the vision until Ezekiel prophesied to them. 

God has left us and the Church of our times with many a command as well, revealed through prophets, the teachings of Jesus and the letters of the New Testament. God I believe still wants to reveal the Divine heart that beats with a madly overabundant, uncontainable love for all the peoples of the Earth.  But God it seems limits the initiation of the revelation of that love to the text of Bible (which at its core is a result of obedient human action) and acts of those on the stage of the world.  Our job as those trusting in that Divine love is to use our agency, our choices, and our gifts to participate with God in revealing that love to others through our words, yes, but even more so through our actions as they relate to our attempts to obey, and dramatically live out the commands God has shared in scripture.  In doing so, we also become something of a “visual hermeneutic” ourselves, in a manner similar to that of the illuminations in the St. John Bible.  In the same way that calligrapher and artist Donald Jackson, and the creators of that Bible used their agency, choices and gifts to produce an object that creates the opportunity of Divine encounter, so our lives lived in loving actions of obedience to God can create that opportunity as well.  Notice I said earlier it seems that God limits the “initiation” of the revelation of God’s love to our obedient action.  Once we act it seems God steps in and does what only God can do, bring life where there was death, and hope where the was despair.  That seems like a pretty good deal to me, and one I want to be a part of. 

(The picture is from the Exodus 20 illumination in the St. John's Bible)