1Cor5v7-8 - hygienic iconoclasm
Texting One Corinthians
“..Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth..” 1Cor5v7-8
🦠 Leaven - see this micro-organism-as-metaphor taken for a walk here.
👻 Apprehend the Invisible. Leaven should be a persistent metaphor in our consciousness ~ and I think Covid helps us with this. Society is totally subject to powerful unseen forces. Civilisation is shaken to its core by unseen biology and by the responding unseen powers exercised by tacit regulation and tertiary consequences of prejudicial policy-making and the historic hangover of social injustice. So too in our everyday life, we define an atmosphere in the space between us. Struck by Nadia Eghbal’s vignette of the inadvertent viral bloom of data and noise into the space-between:
👾 Realistic Social Design. We curate the terms and affordances of our life together. We-as-we are a vessel and many types of vessel are possible. That in-between space, the moral commons, the civic interstice, the social contract, the terms of our togethering - we are the makers and the maintainers. How do you govern this “lump”? What are the rules? (see Nathan Schneider’s Community Rule templating a kit of parts) If 41 is a vessel, how do we cleanse it? If the PJs find old leaven between them, where should it go? Where am I feeding the leaven? Where am I letting it grow? How do I signal that I want to purge the leaven? How do we do this together? What needs to go? What invisible corruption persists in my life?
⏩ Be Urgent. That is, be serious and be frequent, be earnest and often. “Cleanse out.” Imperative. Do it. Do it now. Then, “celebrate..” Imperative. Do it. Do it now. Our rhythms of life together could be thus cleanse+celebrate. As a verse for 41’s Monday night: clean the slate, clean the house, celebrate one another, celebrate our common life in Christ, bake bread then break bread.
🧹 Sweep. A constant re-formation, iterating via a retrospective sweep and a protospective filling, an iconoclastic wipe-down and a build-back-better. The process of cleaning the slate is far from automatic. Far. It is easily left undone. For years. A church without a forum for cleaning the slate trudges on formulaically, accruing bitterness and resentment, imperceptibly cultivating a weird funk of stale decay.
📣 Call out. Cleanse out, call out, and make yourself available for being so called-out to be so cleansed-out. A mechanism for confession should be an hygienic hygiene factor in one’s theory of church. How fast could church move if it knew better what was a stake? Would it? How much more serious might we be if we believed we-as-we were responsible for the consequences of the pollution we passively permitted in our midst? What license might we give our leadership to call out corruption if we thought this mattered?
🤢 Redeem Disgust. Disgust is part of our biology which has had an evolutionary advantage, and it is a psychological predisposition that is not uniformly distributed amongst people, and is not necessarily provoked by the same things. The disgust impulse should help protect the common good from corruption. Clearly there is everywhere a mis-direction of disgust in violent prejudice and the enshrinement of unjust privilege, but an unboundaried permissive laissez-faire alternative is naive to the reality that there are threats to life which an appropriate conservatism should defend against. What is good-disgust for the church? What sort of language would redeem disgust and utilise the sensitivities of the sensitive to offer a canary’s warning in our coalmine existence? What tempers disgust? How do a diversity of disgust sensitivities coexist in community? How can we-as-we move towards an eased lockdown in unity? [Jonathan Haidt; Yuck Factor]
🧼 Start Fresh. If you tolerate this, then your children will be next (ref MSP on Spanish Civil War). The role of precedent in the moral life of a community has been a substantial influence at 41 - an effort to be intentional about what ‘new’ is permitted, and how it establishes itself as the culture. An apprehension that yeast exists, that yeast multiplies, that there is a cost to remedying that accrual of pollution.. should lead to a seriousness about what risks we take, what we permit, and the ways we maintain a consciousness of the old-as-leaven. Periodic cleansing of the old, reviewing of the culture, shining a light on what we’re taking for granted.. Paul needs to say “cleanse out..” Because the default is not to, because the status quo is simpler, and there is a cost to changing. How would church look if we signed up to constant reform, constant 360 reviews, constant iteration, through regular formal inventory and cleansing? How would the church look different if at every scale of its existence it was primarily concerned to create accountability, and to implement reform towards a grace-enabled purity?
✝️ Use Christ. Fallible and corrupt individuals living together long term is possible because there is an outlet for our moral effluent. We do not inhabit a closed universe of a festering fetid fishtank, there is more-than, there is an Other, there is help from the outside, we are not alone, we are not being toward a slow death only, we have experienced reverse entropy. Sinning-and-starting-over is plausible because we have a viable scape goat. We no longer need to kick the cat in moral transference. We no longer need to layer on cosmetics to cover our moral shame. We no longer need to use the planet as our moral trash heap. We can be cleansed to cleanse, we can start over, there is an away that we can send our sin to.