Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.  Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

One visits the dentist to have work done on one’s teeth.  One visits the grocery store to obtain comestibles.  One visits the police station to report a crime or suspicion of one.  One visits a church to see and hear stories about God, to sing and hear music which lifts one from the mundane to the ethereal, and to see and hear arrangements of color and form which draw one through to the ecstasy of beauty.

One looks for orange juice in the refrigerator, not in the toilet.  One looks for nails in the shop, not in bottles of water.  One looks for the sayings of Plutarch in a book or on website, not in the muzzle of 155mm howitzer.  One looks for the demos at a political rally, not in a church, and for the logos in a church, not at a political rally.

Yet, walk into a church today, almost any one of them, and one sees and hears much demos and little or no logos.  And clergy and church councils grousing about dwindling attendance at worship and parish functions.  What one sees and hears, more or less exclusively, in a church today is socialist sentimentality or sloganeering, which means, claptrap.

Grandeur?  No.  Mystery?  No.  Drama?  No.

Just aggressive messianic collectivism.

Over, and over, and over, just like Wasserfolter.

Surely, one thinks, this is not the church.  And indeed it is not.  The church, as Calvin observed, is where The Word is rightly preached and The Sacraments duly administered.  A church is a power of God, not a place or a thing.  And if not a power of God, not a church.

The Word is by turns fascinating and terrifying.  The Sacraments are by turns soothing and galling.  This is life.  Work, Ecstasy, and Tragedy share the same APC traveling across the land of the living . . .  and usually into and through a fight or three.

If attendance at worship and parish functions flags, there is one, simple cause: The Word is not rightly preached and The Sacraments are not duly administered.  And whose fault would that be?  It would be the fault of the lead decision makers: the clergy, the scholars, and the lawyers.

Nothing outside the church can harm the church.  Make life tough, yes, but not harm.  Religion is abased — when it is abased — from within, not from without.  The churches’ titular leaders diminish attendance, not external enemies or forces, whose number, by the way, is legion but whose power is not.

The Word is The Gospel.  The Gospel is the Good News, or more literally, Good Spell, where Spell is Middle-English for Story.  The Word is The Story of Sublime Goodness in the person of Jesus the Christ.

So, to rightly preach The Word is to accurately — and completely — tell the stories, the narratives if you will, about Jesus the Christ which are preserved for posterity in The Bible, both Testaments.

What is so important about these particular stories?  Why is it important to tell them accurately and completely?  Why is it important to tell them as given in the Canon and not per whim or fad?  And can one rightly preach The Word, tell the stories accurately and completely, without one’s self belonging to them by way of believing, treasuring, identifying with them, from inside the Circle of Faith?

Bultmann and disciples claimed that preaching (Greek kerygma) The Word — telling the stories, as from a pulpit — is the central Christian act.  The preaching (kerygma) itself mattered, not so much the stories preached.  The power of Christianity is in the preaching of The Word rather than the Gospel stories which are The Word.  Announcement of The Good News of Jesus the Christ matters more than the stories containing and announcing it.

Bultmann’s assertion here is subtle and seductive.  His students once amended his pulpit bible so that when he rose to open and preach from it, it contained only one word: KERYGMA.  Bultmann put Bultmann ahead of his Master.

The Power of Christianity is the array of stories about Jesus the Christ — Jesus of Nazareth and God — which comprise the Old and New Testaments.  Where those are rightly preached — meaning faithfully told, from inside the Circle of Faith — there is The Church and there believers will gather because The Word is sweet and, like a lion, safe to itself on account of its nature, its ability to defend and prosper itself.

Like Jesuits after Wlodimir Ledóchowski, Bultmann and his disciples went nominalist, which is to say, to the epistemological left.  The reification of reality is more real than the reality reified and in fact, as functional epistemology, supersedes reality as sole point of interest.  They argued, in effect, that reality is what is preached, whatever is preached.  So, change what you preach and reality changes in concert with it.  Reality is the preaching (kerygma) and nothing besides the preaching.

To paraphrase Benito Mussolini:
All within the kerygma, nothing outside the kerygma, nothing against the kerygma.

Unsurprisingly, not long after Bultmann pushed preaching per se outside the Circle of Faith and onto its own self-referential authority (logical error named tautology), German biblical scholars decreed that their famous search for the historical Jesus found no hard evidence for it save a few sayings of murky provenance.  The rest?  Kerygma generated by early Christians.  Public relations spin by Paul and others, including whoever compiled (Synoptic Gospels) or wrote (Fourth Gospel) The Gospels, The Word.

The stories, not the preaching of them, are The Power of God.  The stories must be communicated, preached, told.  But The Power of the Word is the sweetness inside the stories, not the preaching of them.  Their internal sweetness is The Power of the stories to attract an auditor Godward.  And The Power makes its way in the world, on its own terms, not depending on a scholar’s or preacher’s rising in a pulpit to preach it.

Anyone want to argue that God depends on clergy to reach His own?

Moreover, the sweetness of the stories is trans-historical.  And they never were meant to attract huge followings, although they can do that and do in times and climes . . . when rightly preached.

The Bible stories describe man’s deepest interior movements, the existential dynamics of his core being and also of providential history.  They are not prescriptive.  They are not rules of conduct, although they imply such.  Much less are they laws or ideals, although they imply some of those as well.  And for damn sure nothing in the Bible is a government (= compelled by penal authority, mandated at the muzzle of a gun) program.  And whatever rules, laws, or ideals Bible stories are said to imply — and these will change with circumstances — they themselves are not prescriptions for anything whatsoever.

Bible stories are dramas reaching into and illuminating the abyss and the apex of human yearning and history . . . and everything in-between.  Since human yearning and history are constant from generation to generation, place to place, and time to time, Bible stories are trans-historical.  Their power neither increases nor diminishes in concert with the flux and flumes of creaturely activity.  And they are meant for who they are meant for.  Many are destined not to hear them even when they hear them, not to taste their sweetness, not to be cooled and lightened by their breezes and discoveries.

Now, what consequence have stories comprising the Good News of Jesus the Christ?  They remove burdens, they loose shackles, they infuse freedom.  All internal, from which loosing external restraints gradually follows.

And what comprises duly administering The Sacraments?  There are two primary Sacraments: Baptism and Communion, of which Baptism is the prius.  Next in order of importance, if more Sacraments are adduced from the Bible, is Penance.  And others can follow, meaning, they can be adduced from The Bible.  The full number (Seven) of possible Sacraments is recognized and practiced only by the Roman Catholic Church.  I treat of the three mentioned here: Baptism, Communion, and Penance.

The Sacraments are duly administered when they are enacted with the appropriate biblical language inside the Circle of Faith.  By appropriate biblical language is meant Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek originals, the Latin Vulgate by St. Jerome, translating from those three original languages, and translations to vernacular languages which are faithful to the semantics of those three originals and Latin Vulgate.

The Power of phrases used in The Sacraments is their evocation of the sweetness of the dramas in their original Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin Vulgate.  In other words, The Power of the phrases is their fidelity in telling the stories in which the phrases occur in The Bible.  One wants to hear stories at universal existential-historical sonorities they were delivered to set aquiver.  One does not want to hear the stories in modern terms, modern ideology of one sort or another.  That kind of story — aka government/academic/media narrative, propaganda — is already ubiquitous and absolutely bumptious.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer made a discovery that many made before and since, and it merits highlighting.  The Sacrament of Penance is the royal road to God.  It has peculiar characteristics.  Its prius is contrition, deep and permanent.  It is the only Sacrament not requiring a second party for enactment.  This means, it is the only Sacrament not involving mediation of its object, God.  Penance is the only Sacrament enacted directly with God, without human mediation.

When the contrition is sincere and deep, that itself is granted, by God, as the Penance for whatever sin the contrition remarked and mourned.  This makes Penance uniquely powerful.  Even dacoits in genuine contrition earn Penance and freedom.  That was Bonhoeffer’s discovery, and many others’ besides.

The most important things in life always are within our current powers to accomplish.
Go, therefore, as St. Paul commends, from strength to strength.

The power of direct communication with God which is the Sacrament of Penance St. Augustine referenced in saying a believer should die a penitent.  That power gives martyrs courage.  It gives a hopeless one clarity.  It restores faith and builds strength in doubters.  It may even penetrate an arrogant’s hardness of heart . . . aided usually by some terrific physical jolt.

The locus classicus of contrition and penance in The Bible is Psalm 51:1-17.

Play this fugue and the furniture will fill.  Adorn with these colors and the coffers will fill.  Offer these tastes and the tables will fill.

Money is never an issue.  Fidelity is always the issue.

Finally, a brief word on words.

Tillich expounds copiously on the difference between signs and symbols.  The former point to something.  The latter not only point to something, they also participate in the being and the existence — being and existence are not the same realities — of that very something to which they point.

A stop sign is a sign.  A national flag is a symbol.  Tillich’s discussion addresses this critical epistemological distinction and is accurate so far as it goes.

Ultimately, however, a word is the reality it represents in sound and lexicography.  Any word.  There are no signs, only symbols.  This is the deep meaning of the Third Commandment: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.  Every word is Logos, God, divine.

Any use of language, words, is epic and universal conflict (Heraclitus, Cynics).  This is unavoidable.  It is natural dialectics.  Also it is necessary for universe to operate at all.  At no time should words be bandied, treated as trivialities.  Each of them is sacred, to include oaths, imprecations, obscenities, and profanities.  By virtue of being a word, each is divine . . . and the same divine.

Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God

Update 1: Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin: Speak truth to sin [homosexuality].  It IS sin.  Say so to its face.

News article here.  Meanwhile, Vatican schedules pro-homosexuality meeting.  Meanwhile, Diocese of Milwaukee schedules retreats for ‘gay priests, brothers’ and ‘lesbian sisters’.  Charming.  This and its motivating indignity, abortion, empty pews of denominations and congregations who accept them.  The womb cries out and the churches shrivel instead of engorging, as they are commissioned to be doing.

Update 2: My essays on The Church and the churches are here.

Update 3: Abortion at the Core of Both Left and Right

Update 4: In 1965 Life Magazine Showed That Life Begins At Conception

Update 5: How Far Should Churches Go to Appeal to Men?

Most successful way to appeal to both men and women: Male only church leadership.

Men love to belong to male dominated organizations.  On the other hand, women love to belong to male dominated organizations.  Don’t believe me?  Have you ever thought it was odd that women always want to belong to men’s business organizations, men’s career fields, men’s social clubs, men’s athletic clubs, etc., but men avoid women’s organizations.

I once attended a large and rapidly growing conservative Lutheran congregation which had a male-only leadership.  I was astounded by two things.  First, board and congregational meetings were more calm, to the point and productive than any church meetings I have ever been to.  In three years, I never heard someone said, “Well, I feel . . .”  Second, it had the strongest bunch of women I have ever known in any church I’ve ever attended.  Having men in visible, public leadership roles and the women in deeply influential, behind the scenes roles worked very well for that congregation.

I suspect the church’s acquiescence to feminism in the sixties and seventies badly damaged it.  As men fled the church, the church did not become larger.  It did not even get more women members because as the men left, the women follow them out the door.  The more women want to be in charge, the more men leave.  The more men leave, the more the women leave because an organization is only valuable to them if there are lots of men in it.  It’s deeply ironic, isn’t it?

Update 6: Bishop nixes Nicene Creed at Epiphany Mass to avoid offending unbelievers

Update 7: The Babylon Bee: Episcopalians Confused By Strange Book Trump Brought To Church

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA