Fr Mark Schultz
Dear Friend,
In our Office Reading from Acts today, one of Paul’s accusers, a lawyer named Tertullus, describes Paul with some choice language: he’s pestilent, an agitator, a heretic (the phrase “sect of the Nazarenes” has been translated elsewhere as “heresy of the Nazoreans”), a profaner…. Paul, of course, doesn’t quite agree and resists Tertullus’ characterization of his ministry (and person!), at least in part because Paul understands himself as having far more in common with Tertullus than Tertullus likely thinks possible: Paul understands himself as very much a part of the socio-religious context from which Tertullus is leveling his accusations, and likely believes, on some level, that he’s being so maligned because he’s been completely misunderstood.
In our day, in our world, I want to suggest to you, Beloved Friend, that if we were to live according to the Way as Paul lived according to the Way…we, too, might earn this sort of disdain and have these sorts of titles (pestilent, agitator, heretic, profaner) thrown at us. And not at all because we’ve been misunderstood.
Now…context is everything. So is perspective. Being a general nuisance, rabble-rouser, heretic and given to profanations of any sort isn’t exactly worth all that much. Sure, we live in an age when: “trolling” other people for fun online or otherwise is a common (and deplorable) practice that is now entrenched in our social fabric; you can rouse a crowd to violence with any lie or conspiracy theory you like; heresy has a kind of rebelliously alluring appeal to it; and profaning anything worth anything is easy. In so many ways, our world, our contemporary way of relating to God, each other, ourselves, and the rest of creation, is itself pestilent, agitated, heretical and profane!
In the face of such a world… constantly, consistently, insistently, ecstatically, joyfully proclaiming the Good News of God’s love in Jesus Christ is going to look pestilently annoying. In a world in which the status quo is complicity (one way or another) with violence, injustice, divisiveness, scarcity and strife, organizing folks, empowering them to also make the proclamation of the Gospel not only with their lips but with their lives, rousing folks to faith, hope and love, making a public stand for justice and for peace…that’s going to look like rocking the boat, like agitation. Proclaiming the Way of a Love that is sacrificial, other-oriented, abundant, boundary-crossing, concerned for who’s voice is being silenced, for who is being left out or underserved or on the margins, concerned for lifting up the poor and casting down the proud…that’s going to look like all kinds of heresy. And pulling down idols of self and selfishness, undermining the unholy commonplaces of rage, death, scape-goating and violence by which the world (and us in it, as part of the world) understands itself and constructs a familiar and unquestioned grammar of the social-sacred out of the suffering or oppression of others…that’s going to look like profanity to folks who have a vested interest in that suffering and oppression. And that we’re called to love and minister to those who might want nothing more to do with us than be given the opportunity to slander, defame, malign, injure, or wound us on account of the Name of Love, the Name of Jesus that we proclaim and that the Spirit has printed in quick fire on our hearts…well, that’ll seem like madness or folly to many. But what else can we do? This is precisely how we’re called: to be, by grace, living signs of a new creation God is even now bringing into being through Jesus’ own Body, the Church.
Beloved, how might we, today, live into this calling? To insist on joy, to inspire to faith, hope, love, to stand with the wounded, to topple idols? Let us seek the grace to commit, like Paul, to follow the Way that is Jesus Christ!
Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+