Wednesday 8 January 2009

We continue with Robert Bertram on "confessing as martyria."

While the term "martyrdom" should not be taken here to connote, as it often does in popular usage, an exaggerated, self-pitying sense of persecution, neither should it lose the connotation of extreme - yes,ultimate - jeopardy. Emil Fackenheim, marveling at the difiant faith of the Holocaust martyrs, calls them "witnesses go God and man even if abandoned by God and man." That, also, for Christian confessors, suggests what their ultimate jeopardy is: witnessing to a God who to all appearances is abandoning them, exactly because of the way they are obliged to witness to him.

I find it interesting that martyrs are very often those people who witness to a reality that is more broad than what the present systems are willing to accept. It makes me ask, are martyrs ever ones who come from the empowered group within an organization, religious body, or country?!? There may be some...but I only hear of those who attempt to witness to something other than what has become the official rules of the house. When the institution claims to have the defining word about our God - no other word is able to stand with those claims. But I would suggest that if the Word of the institution and community is the Word of God as Jesus, incarnate, then the whole community needs to be aware that a witness to the Word may not always come from the official channels. Rather, there are always people who hear the Word anew and that hearing may draw into question the manner in which the system has defined itself. So, for example, what was once taught as being wrong according to the way the Word was defined by the systems of the church are found to be nothing that has to do with the Gospel. Rather, biases, interpretations, fears, tradition, and community preferences become some of the building blocks of the church's positions. That is not always bad. But when the life of some of the saints is cut short on the basis of these positions and the Gospel is short changed, a time for "witnessing" may come into being by those who cannot live by anything short of the Gospel - alone.

Connection: A daily discipline to help all of us stay within view of the Reign of God is to simply be willing to ask if this or that action is truly a witness of grace upon grace as in the Good News of Jesus, Christ. If it is not...then what we may not be living within the realm of that grace. Daily questions keep us focused.

Within the Reign of your grace, O God, we begin to see that which is necessary and those actions and things that are not. When you give us that vision, all things are seen anew and life beyond our expectations begins to blossom. We thank you, O God. Amen.