c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ A friend loaned me a book called”Blur,”about living and working in the”connected economy.”It helps me understand the clash of world-views going on in Washington and in the tortured world of religion.

The authors, Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer, point to vehicles such as e-mail, e-commerce on the Internet and vast computer networks, which make it possible for people to do productive work from anywhere they choose to live. They talk about rapid change, the shortening of product life-cycles, new relationships between seller and buyer.

They talk about”Intangibles”and what I think they mean as the final collapse of the hierarchical world-views of modern Western thought.

Language fails me, but that’s part of”blur.”One doesn’t need to define and categorize. I don’t think they mean fuzzy thinking, but life and work happening on multiple levels simultaneously, in an ever-changing swirl of people, initiatives and responses. I hear overtones of Chaos Theory.

Even more, I hear the raging invective from battlefields like Washington and the local ministerium where fundamentalism and post-modernism wage holy war.

Life, until very recently, was rooted in place, in familiar patterns and in broadly accepted hierarchies. Jesus’ countrymen, for example, had homes where families had lived for generations, occupations passed from father to son, men and women had carefully delimited roles, and people lived by rules that had evolved over time.

Western thought would build a church that also was grounded in place (“the bishop’s see”), in familiar patterns (liturgy, ritual) and in hierarchy (orders of ministry, working partnerships with crown, academy and wealth).

To Western European thinkers, reality was like a clock: one could take it apart, understand the components, manage and repair them.

Many want to keep that world-view alive and its custodians in charge. Enforce the rules, say the fundamentalists who have seized the party of Lincoln, or else the entire enterprise will collapse.

Unpunished rule-flouting and relativistic thinking at the top will corrode every level. They are utterly mystified that most Americans lower in the hierarchy don’t feel the least tarnished by goings-on at the throne.

Our modern Puritans portray the gospel as allowing no room for compromise. But Jesus wasn’t like that at all.

Jesus was like a cloud, which moves across the sky, changing shape and flow, capable of being seen but not of being defined or controlled. He talked in parables and stories, rather than definitions and structure. He didn’t offer rules or even show much respect for historic rules.

Jesus walked around the countryside, pushing through the traditional boundaries separating genders, races and classes. People asked him for his”product,”and he talked in terms of”service.”People asked him for vertical structure, and he formed a circle. People turned to him for power, and he walked faster in the direction of sacrifice.

At no point did Jesus show any interest in forming an institution grounded in rules; instead, he formed a community grounded in love, a constantly changing assembly of people whose lives were being rearranged. He lived by intuition, not by standards and verification. We spend years vetting candidates for ministry, to do the work of managing a property-owning institution; Jesus spent days calling Simon and Andrew to the work of saving souls.

Modern Christians, like lawyers debating basketball salaries, spend hours in tense committee meetings deciding which pastor to hire or distilling God’s revelation into forgettable”mission statements.”The endless wrangle in Washington sounds more and more like a church council where no one will back down. Religious leaders spend more time designing buildings than Jesus spent in his entire ministry.

Jesus embraced surprise and change; we fight back. Jesus ventured and adapted; we cling to expectations long after they have proved mistaken. Jesus forgave; we blame and punish. Jesus healed; we state the rules more forcefully.

Our modern Puritans sift through Jesus’ words looking for the hard-and-fast rules that will help them avoid the ambiguities of situational ethics, the aggravating particularities of real life, the hard work of seeing one’s own life as soil for the Gospel. But Jesus wasn’t a law-giver, and our efforts to make him one merely express our fear of error and our addiction to control.

DEA END RNS