Courageous Imagination: Not the Way We’ve Always Done It
I’ve always been curious about some of our English idioms or figures of speech. One of those is ‘sacred cows.’ ‘We don’t dare touch this sacred cow.’ ‘Let’s not make a sacred cow out of this or that tradition’ and so on. A sacred cow is a firmly held belief that is rarely questioned, something considered immune from criticism or opposition. It is a tenet or conviction or practice that is often held on to, even in the face of contradictory evidence. You don’t mess with sacred cows. It’s just the way we have always done things. This being almost Valentine’s Day, which in itself is a kind of Sacred Cow, I think back to when Rachel and I got married. You find out when you get married, and come from different family systems, that you have certain Sacred Cows, ways things were done in your own family of origin, that must obviously be the only way to do things, the correct way. Well, one of those for us was around what you do with the sheets at the end of the bed. There was no question in my mind that you never tuck in the sheets – you need that freedom for your feet to move, for them to get air, for you to wriggle around, get comfortable and be able to sleep. So I promptly un-tucked the carefully tucked in sheets that Rachel, in her own wisdom and from her own family system, knew was the right way to do sheets. How you do this was a sacred cow for both of us, but in exactly opposite ways. Now, if you are wise, and early in a burgeoning relationship, you quickly learn the art of compromise, and now I could not imagine putting my feet into a bed without that comfort of tucked in sheets to hold them in. Yes, people can change… but it is hard! There were a bunch of sacred cows like that, the ways we each had always done things, that we needed to sort out when we got married, and I am sure that we have ‘blessed’ our own children with sacred cows they will need to re-examine and sort through themselves as they make their way in the world. I shared this up in the Gathering Room on Tuesday with the women knotting Comforters and knitting, and it hit a chord. For some it was also the tucked or un-tucked sheets – that continues to be an issue, but then we got into whether you go to bed at the same time as a spouse or not – another Family System Sacred Cow Rachel and I had to sort out, or whether Sunday church clothes were still worn for Sunday lunch or not, or which side of the banana to peel from, or whether you dry the insides of your toes or not after a shower. Now you know why we pastors like going up to that group – for the wisdom and the humour!
Sacred Cow is a bit of a funny term. The phrase began in the mid to late 1800’s in some American newspapers – picking up this Hindu reverence for cows in India – you don’t touch or harm these cows – and it got culturally translated into this phrase for any tradition or practice that was beyond censure – that becomes almost an idol that can’t be touched. Some connect it in their minds as well to the Golden Calf made by Aaron and the people in Exodus when Moses was off too long in the mountains. As a good object lesson, I brought in 2 sacred cow images this morning (get out cow trophies). That right Larry, Zoom in on these! These idols, these trophies, have been displayed for my whole life in my parent’s home – on their bookshelves. Why you ask? Well way back in 1959, when my Dad was a young farmer man in Rosemary, Southern Alberta, he was the Grand Champion of both the Calf Show and the Steer competition for the 4H club and received these trophies. This must somehow have had lasting importance to him, identity forming stuff, and even with never returning to anything close to farming and living in the biggest city in Canada, these remained. But I guess you hang on to Sacred Cows, they are hard to let go of.
Whether as individuals or families or groups of people, or organizations and institutions like the church, we all have them, our Sacred Cows, our untouchables, our ways of doing things the way we have always done them that are very hard to challenge or change. It is natural. It sometimes causes problems and prevents growth or new life or openness to change. We are usually blind to our sacred cows. They are not always rational. They work within the subconscious, buried deep within our histories. You notice them or recognize them when someone else pokes at them, does things differently, or outright challenges them. We know they are there when we find ourselves getting anxious and defensive or downright angry. You start to shake up someone’s sacred cows, and you are going to get a reaction, you are going to stir up trouble – you are going to get kicked. I wonder if this is partly what is going on with the Trucker Convoy protest in Ottawa, at the border, and across the country. There is certainly lots of anger on all sides. There are certain pre-understandings, sacred cows around what freedom means or rights or safety or the role of government, or what it means to be Canadian, or what is worthy of protest and how to go about it or how to respond to protesters. These have all been poked and challenged and bring out our worst reactions. It can become larger than life, exaggerated, amplified. Social media doesn’t help. I wonder how much lives under the surface, in the non-rational subconscious –in that realm of sacred cows? Once you start to view things a certain ways, it is hard to fathom another way – our blinders get turned on, we become reactive and defensive and angry, we stop being about to enter into healthy conversation or disagree and still respect the other. What will it take to bring people to more open conversation and listening back and forth, to get to that level underneath, to get to some sort of resolution?
To our Biblical story today. One way of looking at the life and story of Jesus in the gospels, is as someone who kept challenging the Sacred Cows of his day and of the current religious establishment. We see this in the story of the Cleansing of the Temple. We heard the version this morning from John 2. Unlike the Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke, that share so much common content, gospel writer John places this story at the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus. So we usually hear this story in Lent, as part of the lead up to the passion of Good Friday, as the by now well known rabbi and prophet who had just entered Jerusalem to Hosannas turns his anger and message to the Temple, and as ‘the last straw that leads to Jesus’ arrest, torture, and execution,’ as the chief priests and scribes looked for a way to kill him. (Brian McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration, Convergent, 2016, p.26) By placing it at the very beginning, John instead is ‘setting the stage for everything that will follow.’ (Ibid). All Jesus has done so far is call some disciples to follow him, and turned water into wine at a wedding. Jesus starts his whole ministry by challenging the goings on in the Temple, the major central institution of Jewish religious life. It was Passover in Jerusalem. Jesus basically comes in as an unknown and you will notice that instead of plots to kill him after overturning the tables, he gets questions about the signs he might show them. He speaks almost in riddles about destroying the Temple and raising it up in 3 days. He plays around with the Sacred Cow of the very Temple. He goes on from here into the Judean countryside, into his life of ministry with this as a foundation, with a statement that the very underpinnings of religious life as it is known, its sacred cows, are up for examination and transformation.
I am intrigued by the analysis of this story by Brian McLaren, in his book ‘The Great Spiritual Migration – How the World’s Largest Religious is Seeking a Better way to Be Christian. In the book he is commenting on the growing and needed shift in Christianity from being all about a system of beliefs to a way of life. It is a spiritual migration. Churches have traditionally emphasised right belief – sign on to the dotted line about the beliefs, confessions, truths, list of propositions, and dogmas that make you a true Christian. If you believe correctly you are in; if not, you are out. McClaren shares some of his own story as a pastor of becoming disillusioned with teaching this version of faith, this doctrine, this right belief, but not experiencing it as life giving or even believable to him anymore. Something was wrong with his faith. During a retreat a blunt thought emerged for him: ‘My faith is a system of beliefs, and it’s not working. The system is crumbling. I can’t save it. It’s over… Afterall, what is my faith apart from my concepts about God, Jesus, and life after death?’ It was a friend at the retreat who pointed him not to the beliefs but to the stories of our faith. This began a new journey for him. Later a rabbi friend commented that ‘you Christians never made much sense to me as a Jew. We don’t read stories in the Bible looking for beliefs. We read them for meaning… We aren’t looking for timeless, abstract statements about reality. We’re looking for meaning to guide us in the predicaments of life, to help us know who we are, why we’re here, where we’re going, to help us be better people, so we can heal the world. And we never let one interpretation end the conversation. We see our sacred stories as bottomless wells of meaning.’ (Ibid, p.25)
McLaren turns from this to the story in John of Jesus cleansing the Temple. Jesus is upset by the corruption in the Temple and the high cost of animal blood. He drives out the sellers and the money changers who are making the Temple into a marketplace. Traditional interpretation would say that if these merchants and money changers would not have been so greedy and taken advantage of the poor and been fair, Jesus would not have been so angry. He was rightly concerned for the poor and marginalized. But McClaren argues, if that were the only case, why did he not stop with the cattle and sheep, the sacrificial animals of the rich, but he goes on in even greater detail about the doves, which were the cheap option for the poor – and Jesus chases them out too. Jesus challenged the sacred cows, the sacred sheep and the sacred doves. McClaren writes ‘Perhaps it is the whole belief system associated with sacrifice, the long-held belief that God was angry and needs to be appeased with blood. Perhaps Jesus is overturning that belief system right alone with the cashier’s tables, right along with the whole religious system build upon it… Seen in this light, Jesus is making a revolutionary proposal: the Temple could crumble. It could pass away, and its collapse wouldn’t be the end of the world… something better would rise from the rubble. A system of extravagant and generous grace, open to all people… a more human, loving , embodied way of relating to God, self, one another and all creation.’ (Ibid, p.27) Reflecting on the blindness of his own sacred cows, McClaren continues ‘I could no more imagine my Christianity surviving a collapse of my belief system than Jesus’ contemporaries could have imagined their religion surviving the collapse of their Temple. John’s Temple protest story tells the truth: even if the worst imaginable thing happens, even if our traditional religious architecture crumbles – physically and conceptually – even then God can raise something beautiful from the rubble… The end is not the end. It is actually the doorway to a new beginning.’ (Ibid, p.28-29) It is this new beginning, this doorway that Jesus expands and reveals and shares in the life of ministry that follows this Temple protest. Jesus shows us a new way to be.
I found this interpretation and this whole story of Jesus and the Temple fascinating and life-giving, especially in relation to our current worship theme of Courageous Imagination. We are taking several Sundays to examine the very nature of church and where we are going as SJMC. One of the tasks for us within this, is to try to examine our own sacred cows, our traditions, practices and ways of always doing things that might just be hindering us. This is hard of course, because as we said, much of this is sub conscious and lies underneath the surface. We can be blind to it. So much of what we do is also good and life-giving and things we hold dear. Maybe some things are both. I found an interesting web article on churches and our Sacred Cows. (https://churchanswers.com/blog/15-common-sacred-cows-churches/) It was a bit tongue in cheek, but after an informal social media poll, it listed 15 common Sacred Cows in church, facets of church life that ‘are given undue (and sometimes unbiblical) respect to the point they cannot be changed.’ Among them are the order of worship, music and worship style, what attire to wear to church, the organ (in some settings), the building, pews, committees, what table cloth to use for communion, speaking about politics, and the previous pastor. If we did a poll here, we might come up with our own list. What would outsiders, especially outsiders to faith, find strange if they observed our SJMC community? What would we get defensive about or even angry if challenged by someone on why we do it this way? Would it be something about our worship, our music, how we structure ourselves, our churchy language, our family systems and Mennonite-ness? Would there dare be questions about how we eat together, our community life, the kinds of friendship we have and who feels in or out, or of our images of God, how we interpret Scripture or of our most sacred rituals or rights of passage?
I do wonder if the pandemic has made us stop and ask some of these questions by default. We have had to change many of the ways we do things – from worship to community life to pastoral care to how we give our offerings. It has shaken things up. Have some things crumbled during the pandemic that might be hard to revive and replicate moving forward, and is that good or bad or to be determined? What is a part of our Temple that needs destroyed and raised back up? I wonder about our worship – which out of necessity now has so many video and recorded aspects and most people watching from home. Does that impede or enhance worship of God? I worry about the participatory nature of worship – that sense of common community when we worship and sing together in the same room and everyone has their part. Does the very nature of worship change when we are only watching, taking it in from our screens? Has that become too comfortable? Or is that the very thing that has sustained us, that has allowed so many people to submit videos, and that has spread our worship life well beyond our own congregation to the many people watching, and is a key to the future? I worry about our families, children and youth – who have had to endure and navigate such shifts in things like school, daycare, sports and clubs and home life. Parenting has been tough. Family life has been tough. There has maybe been less room for church. Is there a generation during the pandemic that has not been here much and will feel much less connected to our church community and its patterns and routines moving forward? You get out of the habit of church. And yet, in terms of physically gathering, especially for outdoor events as we will see in Chip’s Youth Ministry Report, these are the SJMC people who have probably been together the most and done the most creative events and gatherings. I worry about our personal and communal relationships. We have not been eating together, having potlucks, being in each other’s homes, having the kinds of conversations that happened so naturally before. Have our circles become smaller? Will we be comfortable again in each other’s personal space? Have the political divides of this time also divided us? Or have there been new connections made that have a new sense of depth because we have to be so intentional when we do want to meet? Have the face to face on Zoom deepened our vulnerability and level of trust in relationships? I have loved what has happened in our Sunday evening sharing of life stories through music. Is this just what was needed for us to prioritize what is really important within our relationships?
Perhaps my worry is my own hanging on to some sacred cows and familiar ways of doing church. Remember – God can bring new life out of the rubble. This may just be the doorway to a new beginning. We will have to choose what to start up again, and what might be forever lost, or done in a different way, and that might be okay. We can hold our sacred cows a little lighter. Maybe a better way to ask the question, is in the positive direction – What are the bottomless wells of meaning for us? What will guide us through the predicaments of life? When we look to the stories of Scripture and the stories of our lives, what forms of church will be life giving and will fill our spiritual wells to the very bottom? What will help us meet God? Where will we stand in the presence of God and be inspired to share God’s love and live towards God’s kingdom of justice and peace and love for all? The forms may keep changing, but the meaning making, the passion, the call of God on our lives remains.
The way we’ve always done it is not so set or inflexible as we may have once thought. Our sacred cows have been shaken up and have the potential for renewed life. As we sang – ‘Faith begins by letting go, giving up what had seemed sure, taking risks and pressing on, though the way feels less secure: pilgrimage both right and old, trusting all our life to God.’ (VT 585 – Faith Begins by Letting Go). It will take courage and it will take Imagination. We’ve come this far by faith, and it is faith that will lead us on, trusting in God. Amen.