Deep Root
/Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior.
- from this Sunday’s Collect
Did you grow up in a church tradition that talked about Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? I absolutely did not. I grew up in a liberal Massachusetts Mainline Protestant church where the minister would never dream of using such doctrinal language. In my Sunday school, I was read stories out of picture books about how to be a good person, sometimes using Jesus - meek and mild - as a good example of what it looks like to be nice. Our church went straight from singing praises on Palm Sunday to celebrating Easter - with no Holy Week in between. It was all pretty optimistic and loose, and “Doctrine” was not a word I’d even heard until adulthood.
I had a colleague that grew up in a conservative, fundamentalist church that couldn’t have been more different than mine. She had to memorize Bible verses every week, and the passages about sin and punishment were prominent on the list. She learned a whole lot about the battles of the Old Testament, could list all the books of the Bible in order by memory, and had been haunted by nightmares based on the apocalyptic visions of Ezekiel and Revelation. Her church taught her that if she did not go up to the front of the church to publicly proclaim the exact words, “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,” she would surely go to hell.
Somehow we both ended up in the Episcopal church, and we admitted it had been a stretch at first, for each of us in our own way. She often found herself struggling with the mystery that Episcopalians are always talking about. Having grown up in a church that always asserted clear answers, she was pretty uncomfortable with our Anglican love of dancing with questions. “Just tell me what to believe!” she’d find herself saying.
I felt the opposite way. Faced with a traditional collect like the one for this Sunday, my reserved, New England self felt it distasteful to use the kind of words one might hear in a Holy Roller church (a phrase picked up from my mother). I was used to churches that used palatable, contemporary language to express their theology. These traditional, doctrinal words felt very confining to me at first. “Don’t tell me what to believe!” I’d protest.
The thing we both realized, though - is that Christ is who Christ is, whatever our language, whatever our perceptions, whatever our understandings or misunderstandings, whatever our traditions. Christ simply is the great I AM. Christ is way more than words can describe.
And so we settle. We settle on our traditions, our theology, our liturgy. We find the pleasant boundary lines that God is calling us to settle into and we choose to take the leap of faith and just go with it. We practice rediscovering what those traditional ancient words mean every day. We claim the doctrines as our own, not as we thought they were handed to us, but as we are claiming them in 2020. And yet, we treasure how these traditional words and doctrines mystically connect us to people centuries ago.
Through reading the desert fathers and mothers, or the church patriarchs and matriarchs or the medieval mystics or the reformation theologians or the enlightenment scholars, we discover that every Christian has wrestled with our common story - a story that names us- and claims us - in a very deep and personal place. A place far deeper than sound bytes, deeper than opinions or politics or our own perceptions, deeper than we can fathom.
So over time we adopt as our own, layer by layer, the doctrine passed down for generations. It draws from a very deep root, and is a faith that we certainly did not invent ourselves. But having inherited it from a great cloud of witnesses, it has the power to mysteriously draw together a young woman, wounded by the judgement of a strict church, and another woman, who had been wandering aimlessly in a landscape that seemed a mile wide and an inch deep, and somehow brings them together as sisters in Christ.
Our words in the Episcopal church are ancient, but our doctrine is never set in stone. We are a both/and church where many find a nourishing and life giving home with Christ as their Lord and Savior.
