Are You Confusing The Traditions of Men with the Will of God
Jesus berated the Pharisees for confusing the traditions of men with the Will of God. We can make up a bunch of man made rules that are over the top and that bind us, and take us totally out of the will of God. The Pharisees for example used to try to catch Jesus in Sabbath- breaking (on the 7th day you shall rest) when he was healing people on the sabbath- You would pull a donkey or a mule out of the well on the Sabbath if he fell in, how much more shouldn't I heal a sick person pulling them out of their metaphoric well-he retorted. Healing doesn't break the Sabbath- it's the man made perversion of a sound teaching that does that. Jesus wasn't selling carpentry goods or carving wood on the Sabbath- he was healing people.
The Pharisees confused the man made institutional constructs that bound them with the will of God all the time to inflate their importance which took them completely outside the will of God. This really angered the Lord. This is largely why Jesus came exactly when he did. The fact that the Levite and the Priest walked on the other side of the street (in the parable Jesus himself told) when they saw a man lying robbed, beaten, lying in the ditch wasn't just because they were afraid he was dangerous, it was because if he was dead it was ritually unclean to touch him. Everyone hearing that would have understood that the priest and levite who ignored him did so to remain ritually pure. So it took the Samaritan half breed to go over, lift him half unconscious onto his donkey and take him to shelter. That Samaritan was a metaphor for Jesus himself who came to show the hypocricy of the man made rules that directed people away from the will of God and in fact caused them to not serve God with their whole heart, mind, soul and strength. Jesus is trying to tell the priests and levites something here- don't elevate your man made laws about touching the dead to a point where you don't help someone because you are afraid to find out if you touched a dead person-thus leaving him for dead. That misunderstands what true purity is about.
Similarly, while it is good to ritually cleanse your hands for washing-something ceremonially done and still done at the Sabbath, Jesus taught that it is not what goes into a mouth that makes one unclean, it is what comes out of the mouth- out of the mouth comes what originated in the heart. What you put in your mouth just goes into you and out. What issues from a man's mouth comes from his heart- it is that which makes him clean or unclean. So people should be more concerned with slander,malicious speech, cursing people, hatred and hardness of heart than handwashing. Life and death comes from the Word.
You can't pour new wine into old wine skins. They will break. The old wine skins held the old wine and by the time new wine is poured into them they are rotten and unsuitable for them. Jesus is the living water. He brings daily his new blood shed for your sins. You can't pour it into old wine skins- it will break. The Pope is talking a lot about "The New Humanity." You can't create the New Humanity if you are bound by the old institutional thinking and man made shackles binding you that have nothing to do with the will of God. You are then just pouring new wine all over the floor. This might be a bit of a metaphor for the prohibition on spilling seed onto the floor for he who has ears to hear it.
When a sound teaching is added to, even by an Iota, and surpassed, over the top it becomes not only out of balance, but flatly perverted. It is cautioned severely not to add even an Iota to scripture. It is like a soufle immediately flattened because someone opened the oven door prematurely, or like a cake burned because someone turned the heat to 500 rather than 375. It destroys what was it was intended to be.
Mandatory priestly celibacy is just such an example. It is based on a sound teaching that if you leave your father, mother, wife, brother, etc. to follow Jesus your reward will be great, but that does not impose a mandatory leaving of the father, mother, brother or wife who is also following Jesus-that is oxymoronic. That teaching presupposes that the people one left were not following Jesus so it was impossible to follow him and hang with the old crowd-even when they are your relatives (it has nothing to do with all the family who are in the same boat with Jesus at the helm and there are multiple instances of brothers together following the Lord, --James, the brother of John, etc.-it would be absurd to suggest James had to leave John when John also was following the Lord).
It is sound teaching that some will make themselves eunichs for the Kingdom, but it does not impose a mandatory castration on the entire Priesthood- that is oxymoronic (this is also flatly contradictory to the rules in scripture regarding marriage concerning the priesthood and the New Testament mandate that all Bishops and Deacons be the husband of one-not many, not none, but one, wife.).
It is sound teaching that Saint Paul urged that it was better that some be single as he was, but that does not mean that all Saints are called to be as Paul wished he was- that is oxymoronic. Peter in fact was not called to be as Saint Paul was. Paul himself takes pains to state that this is not the Lord talking but him stating a personal preference.
It creates more than an imbalance, it creates a boldly unholy perversion. It is just scripturally unsupportable and deviates from God's intent. It creates something other than what it was made to be. It's burned cake. And this makes God angry. This is in fact exactly how to turn living stones, the church of the body of Christ into white washed tombs full of old men's bones.
Scripture is like the owner's manual to your car. If you read it wrong and replace orange juice for unleaded, your engine will crash and burn. It is a recipe book for maximum wholeness, health and joy; if you always replace baking soda for baking powder instead of getting a cake you get flattened pancake, and you never realize what a full real cake is supposed to look like. It is clear that God wants us to follow his recipe and not wing it making substitute ingredients just to get something that fits in what we already built or serve something we think we want to see-or because we refuse to clean out the refrigerator to make more shelf space for real cake. There is real full cake in the world. And it is good. When you say, lets leave the One Wife thing out of the priesthood recipe for everyone, it's like a pound cake made without eggs. It's not a cake. It's a puddle of flour. We can get used to it- and think that is all there is-but there is supposed to be more than latkes and gnishes in the priesthood. The Priesthood is supposed to have latkes, gnishes, croissants, brioche, strawberry pound cake, two tiered German chocolate cake and huge full joyous wedding cake. Priests living as hermits, priests living in monestaries and Priests living in a diocese parish residence should have different charisms and do have different requirements to fully fulfill their vocations.
That isn't to say that some cakes aren't ever supposed to be made without eggs- at times of the season only unleavened bread is suitable and you can't make Matzo with yeast. But that is Matzo not cake. John the Baptist could not have been married and do what he was called to do, neither could Elijiah. Paul could not have been married and be the witness he was and do what he had to do traveling, being shipwrecked, flogged to near death multiple times, thrown in jail, teaming up with tentmakers and living in exile without subjecting his wife to abject hell and so his choice was compassionate. That was Paul. Great missionaries like Francis Xavier could not perhaps feel like they could pick up and leave everything, traveling to an unknown land like India, or Japan if they felt they had to support a wife and family -unless she was a missionary wife-so the choice there looks practical. And now there are wives who would not need supporting but would add financially to the mix.
This has to be a freely chosen choice not a mandate package of bundled vows. God is calling many more men (and women) who want to be Priests and religious than are called to vow to celibacy. There are many more people gifted to be priests than are gifted with celibacy- these are two separate distinct gifts of the Spirit, and it misunderstands the gifting of the Spirit to conflate them all together or assume that because someone is gifted with one that God wants all of them for them or has given the gifts of all of them to the same people all the time. It's a biblically absurd statement. When all of them are forced on them, it is eventually uncomfortable and it shows. The church is not obeying Christ when it turns these people away or snuffs their light out. The body of Christ needs them for how they are gifted- and God is calling them. The church would be far richer for them. Scripture says, some are gifted with teaching, some prophesy, some talking in other tongues, etc. It does not assume if someone can speak prophetic utterance that they can teach, or that someone who can talk in other tongues can preach or that someone who can preach is a gifted celibate for all seasons. It is a misreading of scripture and the Spirit to conflate all the gifts for all the priesthood and over-assume this and adds more than an Iota to what is written. As a "discipline" celibacy (non-marriage) has to be a choice that should not be packaged as a mandatory discipline to express all the other gifts of the Spirit. That quenches the Spirit- because some people know that they are called to marriage and procreation.
The church should never force the Sophie's choice between preaching for the Lord and administering his holy sacraments and taking a forced vow killing off one's humanity as a precondition to its unscriptural definition of holiness because Jesus never did. That is not how Jesus defined holiness for everyone. He died so you would live. It is clear scriptural error, and the church should correct itself.
Note that the vow of "poverty" is easily suspended for "secular" priests (as opposed to those who live in orders like Dominicans, Franciscans, Benedictines, etc.) so the triumvirate vow package of "poverty, chastity/celibacy and obedience" is modified already to suit personal needs. And yet the church has elevated the vow of non-marriage into immutable sacrosanct precondition to priesthood- an elevation in importance that should be examined as approaching an unholy idolotry.
A Marriage option would obviously lead to far greater holiness of the Priesthood than what is collectively experienced now. It is not holy to do as some priests honestly do and take lovers on the secret side, bed them (of either gender)or each other in secret ways without commitment or community support, favoring people who are willing to engage in such illicit seruptitious activity of this kind over more integrous honorable people in a misguided search for wholeness (looking for love in all the wrong places as it were). It's not good for the priests and not good for the church and it is not good for the world. It undermines trust in the priesthood and thus the church.
One only has to look at the statistics of the people who have left the Priesthood in America to marry (over 20,000 in the last twenty-five years), the numbers of paid off sex claims, and the financial health of the church in America to see that the old wine skins are rotting and the stench is foul.
A sweet young woman wants to be a New Nun. One of the traditions of men is that God can't use you if you still have debt. That isn't going to stop a friend of mine from hearing God's call and will for her life. A society formed to help people who have debt get rid of it so that they can enter religious life. Her name is Krystyn Schmerbeck and she is being assisted by the Laboure Society (after one of my favorite Saints Katherine Laboure)- see "current aspirants" listed at http://www.labouresociety.org/.
Her name is listed on the site- so you can help her follow God's call. Please contribute to assist her vocation.
Thank God for all such organizations that weave the fabric of new wine skins toward the
New Humanity to change the face of the earth. God knows it needs it.
No comments:
Post a Comment