From: Take This Bread (p97)
25 April 2007 - 8 אייר 5767 by Huw
I ate the bread.
Conversion isn’t, after all, a moment: It’s a process, and it keeps happening, with cycles of acceptance and resistance, epiphany and doubt. As I struggled with bread and wine and belief over the following year at St Gregory’s, it stayed hard. I began to understand why so many people chose to be “born-again” and follow strict rules that would tell them what to do, once and for all. It was tempting to reply on a formula - “accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and saviour,” for example - that became itself a form of idolatry and kept you from experiencing God in your flesh, in the complicated flesh of others. It was tempting to proclaim yourself “saved” and go back to sleep.
The faith I was finding was jagged and more difficult. It wasn’t about abstract theological debates: Does God exist? Are sin and salvation predestined? Or even about political/ideological ones” Is capital punishment a sin? Is there a scriptural foundation for accepting homosexuality?
It was about action. Taste and see, the Bible said, and I did. I was tasting a connection between communion and food - between my burgeoning religion and my real life. My first, questioning year at church ended with a question whose urgency would propel me into work I’ve never imagined: Now that you’ve taken the bread, what are you going to do?
- by Sara Miles ©2007
Could it not be both?
It is common in this culture to blame rules for all wrong, and to have personal revelations of freedom that conveniently free one from the need to observe them or to struggle with why the Church might have developed them or why Scripture insists on certain points.. In this culture, we have too often made doubt the hallmark of a “true” Christian and certainty the hallmark of a “hypocrite” or a “legalist.”
Antinomianism is no better a solution than legalism. Orthodox economia is the recognition that rules are necessary for a sound and disciplined Christian life but that exceptions to the rule exist and need to be worked with. However, it is not the individual who decides whether he/she is that exception to the rule. Otherwise, it becomes a self-interested and, often, warped process that does not lead to the type of Christian righteousness that we seek.