To hell with symbols

I want to talk about Christian symbols and money. We can learn a lot about baptism, for example - or communion - from economics...

Money, as we know, is an elaborate metaphor. It stands in for work really done, goods actually owned, serious promises made and kept. It isn't valuable on its own (for proof, look no further than the 100 trillion dollar hyper-inflated note circulating in Uganda a few years ago). It's just a symbol - a stand-in. But: try transferring a few simple zeros from your friend's online bank account to your own and see if the outcome is as "virtual" as the action. Or telling a car salesman, as you're driving a new Lexus out of his lot without paying, "I've worked every day this year without any sick leave. So long!" But he and the cops that will come to manhandle you in a very non-metaphorical way, don't care. They want to see the ritualistic passing of paper from hand to hand.

Because everyone in the world agrees to take money seriously it isn't just a symbol.

And neither should our symbols be.

Recently, I read this startling passage from a letter by Flannery O'Connor on a friend's blog:

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner...well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most portable person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.

I'm a lifelong protestant. Transubstantiation seems like animism or the occult to me. But this "to hell with it" disturbs something deeper in me than my theology of the Lord's supper. It disturbs a longing for my faith to come out from inside me and into my life - my spiritual life, where I see and hear and touch things. Where the physical world isn't just a shadow of something I can't experience.
Our symbols, by becoming only symbols, have been drained of their power. They're illustrative gestures queuing up behind all the other endlessly reiterated motions; taking their turn after the fifth chorus of the eighth song before being dismissed again to the back of the queue.
Symbols, only symbols, can be dismissed. And spectated. I can sit and watch a baptism and enjoy the spiritual allegory or the emotional excitement of the occasion or the minister getting accidentally pulled into the water. Then I can go home. Nothing has been required of me. After all, it wasn't real. It was an esoteric gesture of obedience with no here-and-now implications for anyone. Just a picture - as in going to the pictures.

Oddly, we don't treat marriage this way. Nothing literal happens at a wedding but it changes everyone's lives.

And money: more serious than marriage. More serious even than death. It doesn't just change lives it dictates them.
Why can't we take our Christ-instituted rituals that seriously? Why don't they stand in for (redemptive) work really done? (Heavenly) possessions actually owned? Serious (missional) promises made and kept?

John Calvin, in a time of intense debate about the physical and spiritual properties of the sacraments, wrote,

Believers ought always to live by this rule: whenever they see symbols appointed by the Lord, to think and be convinced that the truth of the thing signified is surely present there. For why should the Lord put in your hand the symbol of his body, unless it was to assure you that you really participate in it? And if it is true that a visible sign is given to us to seal the gift of an invisible thing, when we have received the symbol of the body, let us rest assured that the body itself is also given to us.

When will our symbols move us to participate in the body of Christ? How will they allow us to take hold of it - not in our imaginations but in our lives? Otherwise, yes, to hell with them.