ONCE ONLY

War was in the air. It was the leadup to the First Gulf War. Armies were poised to invade Kuwait, and the news was alarming for many of us. What would happen? Would it spread? Would war come to us? At that point in 1991, we were blessedly innocent of the prospects of full-scale war, and people were worried. I wondered what to do all week leading up to Sunday. At last, on Saturday, I decided to do something I almost never did: tear up the sermon I had written and write a new one.

On Sunday morning, I preached Psalm 46, “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” When I had finished preaching the sermon, I announced whatever final song was in the liturgy, a song we had carefully picked to go with the sermon that I had trashed the day before. But when I announced it, our principal organist Kathy Prince, sitting at the organ console, stopped me mid-sentence, “Clay,” she said for everyone to hear, “it’s the wrong song.” It was. At her prompting and with her powerful accompaniment, we sang the Arthur Sullivan setting of Psalm 46, “God is Our Refuge and Our Strength.” We sang our fears and doubts and faith and hope. It was as if the ordinary water of the liturgy had suddenly turned to wine. 

Worship should always be thus. The next week in our worship meetings, we discussed what had happened, tempted as we always were at such times when worship struck fire to see if we could discover in the ashes the secret, so we could do it again, so that we could do it every time. It never worked. Some things are, must be, once only, as Denise Levertov has it in a poem by the same name.

                        Once, Only

All which, because it was

            flame and song and granted us

joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit,

turns out to have been what it was

that once, only; every invitation

did not begin

     a series. . .

This is something that the television industry has yet to learn, what with everything these days turned into a series. Some things are once, only. It is in the once that these events live. A few weeks ago when I reviewed Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, a movie about Leonard Bernstein, I wanted to make this point. I wanted to say that one of the things that the movie misses is a sense of event. When near the end the movie takes us to Ely Cathedral, Bernstein directing the Mahler Resurrection symphony (the Mahler 2^nd) with Cooper standing in for Bernstein—and not doing well, I thought—it should have paused as the notes died away to allow us to be there, to see Bernstein elevated on the applause of the crowd, to see the power he took from such performances, the triumph of it, the moment in which he and the music and the musicians and the vast chorus and the crowd itself were lifted by the Mahler’s music into a kind of secular transcendence.

But, no, the movie did not pause. Instead, Cooper as Bernstein runs off the stage to kiss his estranged wife, Felicia Montealegre (played by Carey Mulligan), and she says to him that he has only love in his heart (after she had earlier said that he had only hate in his heart), something she knows is not true. The moment turns into mush.

Are there other applications for this principle, the principle that some things are once, only? I’ve been thinking about the confessions. We know the confessions as those documents that used to live at the back of denominational hymnals in the day when congregations still sang from hymnals. But before the confessions were documents in the hymnal, too often used to club dissenters over the head, they were statements in a moment of controversy, a moment when the part of the church to which the hymnal belongs decided to go in one direction rather than another. Why are they in the. back of the hymnal when other documents produced the church over its long history are not? In part, because these documents at those moments struck fire. They said what needed to be said at that moment. Or, so it seemed.

In this sense the confessions are more like the Declaration of Independence than like the Constitution of the United States. The Declaration is rhetorical. It has no force of law. It set a direction, and when we pay attention to it, it still sets a direction for the nation. It tells our story or, rather, the story we wish to tell: that all people are created equal, that all are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that tyrants cannot be forever tolerated. It was written in the blaze of a moment, and that moment has not entirely faded away. At least, so we hope. When Lincoln addressed the crowd gathered at Gettysburg at one of the lowest times for the nation, he did not reach back for the Constitution but for the Declaration of Independence.

Like the Declaration, the confessions originated in defining moments for the movement of which many of us are still a part. If you are, like me, part of a Reformation church, this is our history. The documents give voice to our longings and theological aspirations. They tell a story, a story that those of us who are of such churches still own. 

Of course, the story has to be restated, grasped anew. It has to be told not just in terms of the 16th century but in terms of the 21st century. What is this story? Fundamentally, it’s a story of freedom. We have been invited freely into a relationship with the one who created us and died for us. “What is your only comfort in life and death?” the Catechism asks. And we respond, “That I belong—body and soul, in life and death—to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.” This is the ecclesiastical equivalent of saying, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It’s declaration of belonging. It’s a declaration of independence. 

When we grasp the confessions in this way, we grasp not just the text of the confessions but the history of which they are a part. To fully grasp the Belgic Confession, say, is to grasp the danger and the hope in which the words were written. These documents are defined by the moment in which they were produced, often in haste, often with little eye to the future, but because what they say had to be said at that moment. In that sense, they were, are, once, only.

And when we grasp them now, we detect in them still the reverberations of the moment in which they were produced. We honor this history as our history. It’s for this reason that in my denomination we should include at the back of the hymnal the Barmen Declaration of 1934 and the Belhar Confession of 1986. To include these documents is to own the struggle to keep the faith in the face of the fires of Naziism and in the face of the predations of apartheid. These documents reverberate with a history closer to home. 

Where the confessions truly live, the documents and the history come together. In owning the one, we own the other. We go back to them to find again the spark that ignited the movement of which we are still a part. But this does not work if the confessions are turned from Declaration to Constitution. In that case, the confessions, produced in the hot moment of controversy, become law of a sort, and they were never written to be law. Or, if they were, as in the case of the Canons, it’s as law that they are least persuasive. 

When the documents are taken as law, they show their age. The cracks begin to appear. We ask: was this part too hastily written? Was that part too much the product of the herd thinking of the time? Was the mass really a “cursed idolatry?” Were the Anabaptists as contemptible as they are portrayed in the Confession? And what do we do with that “all men” in the Declaration of Independence? What do we do with it when in fact that’s exactly what Jefferson meant: men and men only? And when he didn’t really mean “all men” but only those of his own race and his own culture? When we try to take these documents as law we see the limitations of their perspective, of their grasp of the world.

The Reformation documents are full of the 16^th century. How could they be otherwise? How such biblical themes as chosenness, covenant, and atonement are construed is framed by 16^th century concerns and concepts. To give these documents the quasi-status of scripture, as they sometimes are, honors the letter but not the spirit of these documents.

So perhaps it’s time to honor the confessions for what they are: statements of faith and hope in times of struggle. And in doing so, to realize that the moment in which they were produced was once, only. In that moment, these documents struck fire. They guide and instruct for the moment in which we find ourselves now. Their moment is not our moment. We are called in this moment, just as the Reformers were called in theirs, to grasp the truth of the faith as clearly as we can. We honor the confessions best by doing just that: struggling in our time against all that would destroy the gospel as they did in theirs. For our time is once, only.

Clay