Sunday, May 10, 2015

Piety Priority

Mitchell, Brody, Shannon, and Shelby,

Hey, I don't deny that there's something very good about church.  It's communion with God's people, and God is love, specifically a communal love, seeing as He is a Trinity.

But anyway, I encountered one of those picture memes that only has words on it, so you wonder why it's a picture instead of merely text, and it said this:
Last night I...Got Drunkin the Spirit
Got Highon Jesus
And Dancedbefore the Lord
What's your church like?
So basically, God is a drug.  A glorious drug, mind you, but a drug nonetheless.  Or maybe what struck me the wrong way was the emphasis on doing.  Or maybe it's the rhetorical quip at the end that basically says "If you don't worship like this, then you aren't as Christian as me (or at all), and there's something wrong with you."  I don't know who wrote this, but I saw some stranger share this and he said:
"My church, yep!  'The most dangerous place in the world is on the front seat of a dead church.'"
Wait, what?  Whaaaa?  Since when was it dangerous do honor God in a simple, modest way?  And since when was a very particular type of worship instituted by Jesus?  Why are we to look down with contempt on churches that don't make rock concerts out of their services?

A little more dismayed, as I was looking through these Christian images on Pinterest, I noticed that this wasn't an isolated piece of bad attitude.  Right next to this was another image of a middle-aged man clenching a microphone in one hand and, in the other, his empty fist, and it said:
"Life is too short, Heaven is too sweet, and hell is too hot for you to be playing with stuff that will make you lose your HOLY GHOST!" - Aaron Bounds
This is posted on a page that's basically dedicated to looking like a particular kind of Christian.  And I won't be a coward and leave this anonymous and inoffensive; I have the guts to single out Pentecostals for having this attitude and making pages like this.  Sometimes it's merely a cultural thing and a matter of pure preference, but I remember one Pentecostal church I visited believed that it was mandated by the Bible (because of something said in Psalms) that Christians must convene in churches with radical worship.  This is way too common within the Pentecostal culture.  This criticism is universal, however, and I will get exasperated with any church that swears someone will lose God if they're not zealous enough, or if they aren't radical enough, or if in any way their particular form of worship doesn't match their particular standard.

Otherwise, come one.  Look at this one:
You have to live PAST the shout!
That's true!  You do!  Except truisms like this don't actually communicate the truth when they're being received in the spirit of piety priority.  When you prioritize piety, you hear this, and your attempts to live past the shout, to truly live in the Spirit, essentially results in shouting even more and more, and if you take a good step back at it and listen with a bit of perspective, you'll realize that it's nothing more than noise.  The more earnestly you worship, the more radically you try to live past the shout by shouting more, the less you become truly humble before God and the more you become merely...loud.

Pentecostalism, I will give you a break, though, because now I'm turning my attention to my homeboys in the Catholic church, starting with the Reformers.

Come on, CRC blokes!  You know you're really Catholic!  Sola scriptura my sweet butt!  Why do you treat baptism like a sacrament?  Why do you use the same creeds?  Why are pastoral duties delegated exclusively to men?  Why are your serves so similar to Catholicism instead of, say, some random other world religion?  You may think you're different, but good grief, have you walked outside Christendom and seen just how different you are liturgically from other world religions?  Scripture alone isn't going to make you that similar to Catholics.  It's not inevitable that all Christian churches are going to look a certain way, and the Reformed and Catholic liturgies have more in common than merely the "basic Christian stuff."  I mean, I've been to a Greek Orthodox church a couple of times now and you have no idea how different they are!  You go to that, and suddenly the similarities between Catholic liturgies and traditions and Reformed liturgies and traditions is much closer than previously imagined.

So the whole "we don't do tradition" thing sort of falls flat.  Even though always I flinch when a Protestant pastor pridefully says "in the Reformed tradition," at least he's acknowledging that there is a tradition, and that by extension it's basically a tradition taken from Catholics, just, you know...reformed.

Now moving on to the old-school Catholics.  Now, before I get started, I know from first-hand experience that Catholicism isn't a homogeneous group.  I've talked with very well-educated Catholics who believe that God must logically know whether or not you would choose His salvation or not, and others who take a more Armenian point of view, just to list one example.  Yet, where the church speaks on the highest level, she has definitively spoken.

So there are these things known as the Precepts of the Church.  Depending on how you count them, there are five or seven of them.  One of them is contributing to the church's needs, and another is confessing before a priest your sins at least once a year.  The first on that's listed, though, is that a Catholic must attend mass every Sunday and on every holy day of obligation.

This is where things get tricky.  Jesus said that whatever the apostles, and Peter in particular, bound up on Earth, so would it also be bound up in Heaven.  Supposedly this means that if the church writes down a new precept, then it's considered part of the eternal Law of God.  So it's not just the Catholic Church that commands it, God commands it.  Supposedly.

When I looked these up, I discovered on a couple of the first Catholic websites say, without flinching, that this was a mortal sin.  Which means that you'll lose salvation because you didn't go to church.

Now, they make exceptions.  If a mother can't because she's taking care of a child, it's okay.  If you're sick and can't go, it's okay.  If for any reason you can't go, then you're okay.  You're not sinfully forsaking the assembly.  It's just a problem when you won't go and, if the Catholics speaking online truly represent the the Catholic church on this, then I'm going to Hell.

I have a problem, because I slept in this morning.  Yes, I could have woke up, but I didn't want to.  A couple of hours went by, and I missed my opportunity.  This week, I'm not a Christian.  However, I will become Christian next week when I visit mass again.  Or maybe I can be Christian right now if I feel guilty enough for that sin and promise God that, if the nearby parish had a late night mass, I would surely visit it.

Someone told me that I must not have really sinned because Jesus probably wanted me to have my sleep.  Maybe.  Yet, I'm going to take ownership of this and say that, yes, sleeping in instead of going to church was a little bit disrespectful.  There is an element of sinfulness in that, I suppose.

Regardless, there is no way that this is a mortal sin.  Pentecostals worship noise, and Catholics evidently worship consistency, and in both cases what ends up happening is that they make a piety priority.  What is the most important emphasis that we as the church must have?  Piety.  It's what makes us Christian.

Now, calling out Catholicism like this hits close to home.  I consider myself Catholic, so it's hard to do this.  She often perplexes me when she says things like this, since other past statements make me wonder how seriously I should take them, and if I understand the whole picture.

For example, Catholicism teaches that a righteous Muslim is, in a way, following Christ and will go to Heaven.  Not everybody has to explicitly confess that Jesus is Christ, and sincerity is enough.  In other words, God has mercy on those who don't know any better.  Yet, does that mean that for people like me, who do know better and who are familiar with, say, these precepts of the church, are going to Hell for not being good enough Catholics?  Is there a clause within Catholicism that clears all this up and shows that this really isn't as all-bad as it sounds?  Do these experts misrepresent Catholicism, and does the official Catechism mention these precepts as nothing more than a mere recommendation that's desired but not really necessary, that these are church laws but not necessarily God's Law?

My mother sometimes doesn't make it to church.  She's exhausted.  She doesn't have the spiritual energy to summon the willpower that we all know human beings are capable of.  She just doesn't make it.  Then the other day, she's telling me how uncomfortable she feels that someone who knows her keeps track of how often she visits church and how often she doesn't.  She's a Catholic, by the way, and she's called this attitude out at being un-Christian.

There are many, many other Catholics how would rather not have this attitude.  Maybe Catholics are better than their lawmakers?  I dunno.  Like I said, it isn't an entirely homogeneous group, and I have been friends with a well-educated Catholic who said that I wasn't going to Heaven because my way of understanding the Eucharist as the literal body and blood of Christ didn't match up word for word with age-old Catholic semantics but, nevertheless, he commended me on attending mass regularly as though it were an essential step in my salvation.

But for Christ's sake, when did following a bunch of rules have anything to do with salvation?  And if we recognize the failure in that, we create a ton of rules for how to be better than mere rule-followers.

It seems that if you're obsessed with tradition, you create a piety priority.  It also seems that if you want to break tradition, you still create a piety priority, because you basically create an institutionalized definition for what spontaneity is supposed to look like and then follow that.  But then that spontaneity isn't really that spontaneous, now isn't it?  And is spontaneous always going to look the same in a world of diverse people?  And is spontaneity always a sign of joy and sincerity, can it com from something else that has nothing to do with the Spirit?

Whatever the case, it seems like everyone's obsessed with worshiping Him the "proper" way, the way that He would have wanted.  That's what all those Goddamn piety is all about.

Now I wonder: what is piety, anyway?  Because it's listed as a gift of the Holy Spirit, and that part of the Bible isn't going away.  What is piety?  Tempting as it may be to resort to a dictionary, I'm going to resist the urge.  The way I understand it, piety is the expression of our faith...somehow.  It's some sort of outward sign.  Which basically means that one of the gifts of the Spirit is the fruits of the Spirit.  That's still too vague, though, and it doesn't help me.  Maybe "Piety is faith put into practice?"  Eh...I wouldn't have a clue.

Evidently, though, piety can be a good thing.  Whatever it is.  Personally, I'd just never make it a priority.

Sincerely,
John Hooyer

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