Last night, they went to a Christmas party, Roz and Ted. And he came home complaining of eating too many bourbon balls, who should eat none with the medications he is taking. Then he woke up this morning feeling "less than well." What he meant by that only he knows entirely, but one hopes not as unwell as he looked, who always looks in his movements a bit dozy anyway. Part of what he meant, however, was that he couldn't go to church; he didn't want to be running out in the middle of it.
Roz said she would take me if I really wanted to go, but I said that was okay. I did not say that I didn't want to go with her. But there are enough distractions - the service itself provides enough distractions - without her blowing silent raspberries, not to mention the heavy sighs she tries to muffle. Because there's too much dress-up for her, she says, the copes and capes and the chasubles and the chwhatever else they are called the priest dresses in; there's too much dress-up in the language, too, she says: the ill-doings that God prefers we his people not to walk in. That kind of stuff - a dozen words for the one, sin.
There was time, then, before the Arsenal v. Brighton & Hove Albion match, to read the passages for the Third Sunday in Advent. Which are these: Isaiah 64:1-4, 8;11; I Thessalonians 5:16-24; and John 1:6-8, 19-28. The Psalm is 126.
Among other things, the letter says this: "Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the word of the prophets, but test everything." Which could be interpreted as: "Do not quench the Spirit or the prophets, but test them both." According to what, however? This is Paul, so the answer is not "the teachings of Jesus," about which he knows absolutely nothing. Is it then "the teachings of Paul"?
This is the earliest of the letters. Still, Paul has been out there teaching for a while, the Paul that will say, "If anyone teaches you anything I haven't taught you, don't believe it." "I am that sure of it, what I have taught you. (You will note that I have not disguised anything in parables.)"
Clearly, I don't have to go to church to listen to someone wiggle around and preach what she wanted to all along. (The lectionary is no proof against that, whatever its proud claims.) I can lull myself to theological sleep by preaching my own sweet Jesus, teller of tales, enumerator of the beatitudes, healer of the sick, the one that touched the lepers and defied the leaders and the Law. The one that said that - and proved that - love is more important than law and, more especially, than the interpreters of the law. Who, like the poor preacher, and like me, will decide what they want it to mean. And that will be that, because no one escapes the Beast of Certainty.
Except Arsenal, which can be brilliantly certain but only until it is time to strike.
12/17/23
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