As a progressive Christian, I believe there are many names for God and many ways to a loving God; this article reflects one of those ways. Take from here what works for you. Celebrate life with joy and peace!
Teachers are wonderful! I applaud our teachers! They make such an impact on us. Who are the teachers who made the biggest impact on your life?
Theologian J. Holub tells of a seminary professor that made it to the top of his list. If a student in his professor’s class stubbornly and persistently elevated something to a place of theological prominence, something that the professor thought was theologically inconsequential; it would light his professor’s fuse. He would quite literally launch into a rant.
And if the student persisted in making the point, the professor would stomp around the room bellowing out one specific word: “Adiaphora, adiaphora, It is so much adiaphora!” The students could never quite detect if he was really as upset as he conveyed, or if it was merely staged as a teaching technique.
Well, if it sounds like Greek to you, it’s because it is! Adiaphora means “indifferent things.” In Christianity, it refers to anything not essential to faith; things that are not meant to be core faith matters, but rather, belong out on the periphery of relative importance – if not completely out of view.
The professor would often make a teaching point after his rants. He would remind the class that the beginning (foundation) of wisdom is the ability to discern between what things are adiaphora and what things are of essence.
Essence has to do with the core nature of something – the heart of something – the guts of something. He taught his class that this process of discerning doesn’t end in seminary – it’s a life-long journey.
It’s not always easy to discern whether something should be considered adiaphora or essence.
In Mark’s Gospel, the faith community here, had made something that was adiaphora into essence. In other words, they moved something that belonged far on the perimeter into the center and made it absolute – and it took a prophetic and challenging voice of discernment to sort it out.
Over and over again, Jesus took issue with those in the faith community who had elevated rituals, practices, laws and traditions to a place of essence. He even calls them hypocrites for the shallow and rigid nature of their faith. In being obsessed with ritual, practice, law and tradition, they had gutted the religion of its essence which Jesus called the “commandment of God.”
A few chapters later, in Mark 12, Jesus defines the “commandment of God” as “loving God with all of your heart and loving your neighbor as you love yourself.” For Jesus, that was the essence. To love God is to love neighbor, and to love neighbor is to love God – that is the essence of religion.
It’s amazing how quickly some are willing to abandon that which Jesus identified as essence in order to pronounce judgment and condemnation on others. They run to their Bibles and cherry-pick a verse from here or there, ripping it out of context, to reinforce a prejudice, or hatred, or to justify self-indulgence: all the while gutting Christianity of its essence – and in the process, create a religion that is harsh, unyielding, rigid and unloving.
Tex Sample, Professor Emeritus of Church and Society at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri tells a story of his days of youth in Sunday School in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Tex writes about his fifth grade Sunday School teacher, Mr. Doe, he calls him. He said Mr. Doe was the wealthiest and most influential man in town. Tex says that about once a month Mr. Doe would teach that Black people were inferior, that they were subhuman, that slavery had been right, that it was biblical and that segregation was Divine will and should be defended with their lives. (I find it hard to believe that this teaching was allowed in the church …)
In that same church, says Tex, there was a retired missionary named Miss Hattie Bowie. For 30 years she had been a missionary in Korea. She would invite the kids over to her house and show them things she had from Korea, and she would talk about how wonderful the people in Korea were, even though they were very different from them. She even taught the kids the song “Jesus Loves Me” in Korean, which Tex says he can still sing to this day.
Tex says he never remembers a direct confrontation between Hattie and Mr. Doe, but he says it seemed like every time Mr. Doe would make one of his religiously justified prejudicial points, Miss Bowie would make a counter-point.
Tex says, Mr. Doe’s and Hattie’s religions were very different even though they went by the same label, lived in the same town and attended the same church. Mr. Doe used religion to justify his racism thereby making his prejudice essence. But Hattie made Jesus the essence and, in so doing, sent racism beyond adiaphora – and into oblivion. You go, Hattie!
Franciscan mystic, Richard Rohr said, “God is always bigger than you imagined or expected or even hoped. When you see people going to church becoming smaller, instead of larger, more closed rather than more open in love, you have every reason to question whether the practices or rituals or sermons or sacraments or liturgies are opening them to an authentic experience of Divine love.”
Amen.
