Eat the Damn Apple!

My tolerance for Churchianity continues to wane. My church, I fear, has become an institution more concerned with its own continued existence rather than follow the mission that bore its creation. Centuries of order, rules, and standards set to most effieciently do God's work have been perverted into a cumbersome system that has lost its way. Rules are to be obeyed, even when unjust, over the extraordinary circumstances that the call of the Holy Spirit calls just. The words of Jesus the Son are lost in the cacophony of theological psychobabble of the "church leaders". What is simple is made complex. What was straightforward in the Gospels is bent and twisted to accomodate the wills of men over the ages. Just War. Love with conditions. Exclusivity in God's Kingdom. Fractured denomiations out of communion when all of them bless the bread and wine in God's name. How is it we humans can make such work out of something practically given to us?

God has given us an apple to spiritually nourish us, and instead of eating it we investigate it for worms, guess it's size, its species, even run DNA tests so we can determine what tree the apple came from. And while we meet and confer in commitee and "take it all in", that apple rots before our very eyes.

Why can't we just eat the damn apple?!

After attending a Vestry meeting today we talked about meeting with our bishop. This is something I dread because I can't think of anything he can do or say that will make me feel much differently about him. Some think I hate him, yet I don't. I just see him as another person. His position as bishop doesn't mean anything to the Baptist in me. Just another fancy title. I fear the problem is that he sees his title as important. That somehow in the grand cosmic scale of things this makes what he says and believes more important in an antiquated patriarchal way. Not that there aren't great spiritual leaders in the world. He just isn't one of them. Anymore, this bishops seems more to represent the CEO of subsidiary nonprofit than the role of a Shepherd for God. Maybe it's because that in this day and age his position is spread so thin that it takes a bishop 2-3 years to visit each church in their diocese, that their jobs are less and less to be shepherds than it is to shuffle paperwork, make "clerical" decisions for the doicese and the other type of day-to-day operations you'd expect more from a business than a church.
I haven't had the chance yet to sit with him face to face, so I don't know if I'm angry with him or with the system in which he is so ingrained.

Some on the vestry told me I should learn to live with it, that this is the way things are. I can't help but believe that we should never be satisfied with how they are and should demand change in the direction towards God. While we squabble on who can and cannot bless the bread and wine, who can and cannot become bishops, or the injustice and twisted theology of Churchianity, I, as R+ once put, fell my inner prophet.

That led me to turn to Isaiah, one of the big prophets. I wanted to read what he was saying. I started at the beginning, and this passage just seems to resonate with me right now.

Isaiah 1 (from The Message//Remix)

11"Why this frenzy of sacrifices?"

GOD's asking.

"Don't you think I've had my fill of burnt sacrifices,

rams and plump grain-fed calves?

Don't you think I've had my fill

of blood from bulls, lambs, and goats?

12When you come before me,

who ever gave you the idea of acting like this,

Running here and there, doing this and that--

all this sheer commotion in the place provided for worship?

13"Quit your worship charades.

I can't stand your trivial religious games:

Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings--

meetings, meetings, meetings--I can't stand one more!

14Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them!

You've worn me out!

I'm sick of your religion, religion, religion,

while you go right on sinning.

15When you put on your next prayer-performance,

I'll be looking the other way.

No matter how long or loud or often you pray,

I'll not be listening.

And do you know why? Because you've been tearing

people to pieces, and your hands are bloody.

Are we just going through the motions of playing 'church'? Saying the right words at the right times like that somehow makes a difference? Perpetuating an institution for the sake of perpetuating the institution? More concerned about the houses men built than for God's house until we can't tell which is which? While I can see the institution's shortcomings, what about my own? At least those I can control. Still, I want my church to become something better. Likewise, I hope that I will become better myself, because I'd be a liar if I said I'm not the same.

I think I need to take another bite of that apple.