Liberal Christian Commentary

The Prime Directive: Proper 9, Year B

2009-07-01T09:17:00.002-05:00

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10; Ezekiel 2:1-5; Psalm 48; Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

In this Sunday’s reading, David solidifies his rule over all of the land of Israel “from Dan to Beersheba.” He succeeds, where Joshua failed, in eliminating the Jebusites, who had maintained their ownership of Mount Zion from antiquity, and establishes his capital there: “Jerusalem,” the “City of David.” In the normalcy of Christian assumptions, this “fact” is hardly necessary. Jesus’s credential as a descendent of the great king has been well established. The selection from Mark, in which Jesus’s disciples are sent out in faith with no provision for food or comfort, and Paul’s words carved from the chopped-up second letter to the Corinthians, comprise a clear message: Have faith, believe in the story, and don’t be surprised when you run into opposition in your own home community. The greater the opposition and suffering, the stronger you will be in the struggle.

In the portion the Elves have assigned from Ezekiel, God tells the prophet to stand up (so he will realize he is not dreaming) and listen. God is sending Ezekiel to the people of Israel because they have rebelled against God, they have broken the Covenant, and have refused to act with Justice. But we don’t know that if all we read are the first five verses of Chapter 2. When those verses are read alongside Mark’s story about how the prophet is respected everywhere except in his own land, the ugly head of anti-Semitism rises again, bolstered by the expectation of persecution and suffering because the people to whom believers are sent refuse to accept Jesus as Lord.

If we take the readings without regard for each individual context (which is what the Elves seem to intend), and take them as a group, without regard for any particular historical order (which the Elves also seem to intend) the “Prime Directive” (with apologies to Gene Roddenberry) is obvious: Evangelize, convert, repent, and be saved. For post-modern, post-Christian exiles, however, the“Prime Directive” might be closer to the one governing the original Star Fleet Command:

"As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes the introduction of superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation."

These commentaries have maintained a clear distinction between “Covenant” with a kenotic god, “whose presence is justice and life, but whose absence is injustice and death” and Empire. “Empire” in this context means the seemingly inevitable consequence of civilization’s evolution into unjust systems of organization. “Justice” under Empire is retribution, payback, revenge. “Justice” under Covenant is distributive justice-compassion. Empire is a greed-world, based on individual fortune. Covenant is a share-world, based on collective, radical fairness. The Prime Directive in Empire: Piety, War, Victory (Winner Take All). The Prime Directive in Covenant: Non-violent Distributive Justice-Compassion, Peace. The story of humanity, reflected in the sacred stories of the Judeo-Christian heritage, is the struggle between the two.

David, now King of all Israel, has persisted through multiple years and unread chapters in maintaining Covenant. He knew since old Samuel first sought him out that he had found favor with Israel’s God; yet he refused to violate his covenant with King Saul, even though he accepted the allegiance of Saul’s son Jonathan. Saul was God’s anointed king, and David honored that fact and maintained that covenant, even when Saul did not – as illustrated by Saul’s annulment of David’s politically arranged marriage to Saul’s daughter Michal. He continued to honor the kingship of Saul after Saul’s death. On at least three occasions, David was approached by political and/or military leaders hoping to win his favor by assassinating the remainder of Saul’s family, or by killing off Saul’s supporters. Instead of rewarding these people, David killed them all. Perhaps David knew them to be untrustworthy opportunists; perhaps he was still maintaining the honor of God’s now-dead but nevertheless anointed King. The stories are not clear. What is clear is David’s ruthless justice in keeping the letter of his Covenant with God – David’s Prime Directive – and God’s continuing favor upon him.

Left out of the lectionary reading is 2 Samuel 5:11-14: “King Hiram of Tyre sent messengers to David, along with cedar trees, and carpenters and masons who built David a house. David then perceived that the Lord had established him king over Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for the sake of his people Israel.” King Hiram of Tyre was a powerful political ally. The cedars he sent from Lebanon were sacred trees, used for the building of temples and palaces. David proceeded to fill his palace with “more concubines and wives; and more sons and daughters were born to David.” Among them was, of course, Solomon. The evidence of David’s Covenant with God’s justice could not be stronger. Nor could the sword’s edge be keener where David now walks between the worlds of Covenant and Empire.

We don’t read enough of 2 Corinthians to realize the huge irony of Paul’s so-called “fool’s speech.” The Elves have plucked words that seem to support the pious posturing of a despised minority, whom God deliberately weakens. In order “to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me . . . Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’” A scene from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol comes to mind. Under the spell of the Second Spirit, Scrooge visits Bob Crachit’s family, preparing for Christmas Dinner. Bob arrives from church services with Tiny Tim on his shoulder. Bob says, “. . . Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” In the context of Dickens’ artistry, this sentiment is pointedly charming. When it is understood to reflect cherry-picked Paul, it is dangerous piety.

Paul’s “Fool’s speech” is hyperbole and polemic and sarcasm, not to be taken at face value. In 2 Corinthians 11:16, Paul really warms to the task: “I repeat, let no one think that I am a fool; but if you do, then accept me as a fool, so that I too may boast a little. . . . since many boast according to human standards, I will also boast. For you gladly put up with fools, being wise yourselves! For you put up with it when someone makes slaves of you or preys upon you, or takes advantage of you . . . To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that!” 11:17-21. He continues, interrupting himself frequently to remind the hearers of his letter that he is a fool and a madman. Finally, in 11:30-33, he goes over the top, comparing himself to a Roman commander who wins a corona muralis (a “battlement gold crown”) for being the first over the wall to take a city. Paul boasts that “I got . . . the corona ex-muralis for . . . being first over the wall in the opposite direction.” Crossan and Reed, In Search of Paul, p. 337.

Then he gets serious. “. . . nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord,” Paul writes. That is a crucial verse to be left out of the assigned reading. He is warning the listeners to watch out for more hyperbole. Except this time, he is talking about himself and his own visionary experience. He “was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf, I will not boast except of my weaknesses.” Watch out! Paul continues: “But if I wish to boast I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it [from speaking the truth?] so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the character of the revelations.” Then he talks about the “thorn in the flesh” planted there by God to keep him from being “too elated.”

What’s going on here? Not what we were taught in Sunday School, Tiny Tim notwithstanding. Paul’s Prime Directive is, sign onto the program begun by the risen Christ now. Don’t waste your time trying to accommodate the fools who surround you with oppression and injustice.

Mark’s Jesus was unable to perform a single miracle among his hometown contemporaries, and “was always shocked at their lack of trust” (Five Gospels translation). The way Mark frames the story, it seems as though Jesus gave the 12 disciples authority over unclean spirits and sent them out in pairs because of his own inability to effect much change himself at home. The Prime Directive from Jesus is to trust the kingdom of God. Jesus’s followers must have had some inkling of what that meant, even though Mark maintains that they generally missed the point. The Jesus Seminar scholars suggest that the version of rules for the road found in the earlier Q collection was even more radical in its trust of the realm of God and its inhabitants than Mark indicates. Q’s Jesus (and Matthew, who used both Q and Mark) says to take no staff and wear no sandals. In a country occupied by a hostile foreign power where vandals and highway robbers were endemic, this is a clear choice for non-violence and a radical abandonment of self-interest. Mark may have been forced to acknowledge some degree of personal security was necessary, given the time of war that he and his community were caught in.

But shoes or no shoes, staff or no staff (as in protective walking stick, not entourage), the followers of Jesus have the authority – the mandate – the Prime Directive – to exorcise the demons of social and imperial injustice. When we realize the Covenant offered by a kenotic god, and accept the assignment to work for justice-compassion and peace instead of the easy piety and supposed power of Empire, then we can go out into the world and speak with the exiles. If they listen, well and good. If not, we shake the dust from our feet and move on. In an era when humanity has the potential to destroy all forms of life on the Planet “atomically, biologically, chemically, demographically, ecologically,” there is no time for argument.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Death, Grief, Hope, Belief: Proper 8, Year B

2009-06-24T13:59:00.001-05:00

2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27; Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2:23-24; Lamentations 3:23-33; Psalm 130; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43

We can only hope that the “emerging church” heralded by Phyllis Tickle and Brian MacLaren will find the integrity to stop the doctrinal proof-texting in the Revised Common Lectionary, and start taking the Bible seriously. Otherwise, John Shelby Spong’s prophecy of death for an anachronistic belief system will be the only meaningful option. “Post-Christian” will indeed be the name for the 3rd Millennium, and the grief will be short-lived. A remnant may cling to its doctrine, but unless these foundational writings are studied, treated fairly, and “re-mythologized” (if possible) for a post-modern, skeptical people, they and their truth will be lost.

The time-honored method of Biblical discernment is with eyes closed, the Bible open, and placing one’s finger randomly onto the page. It seems that the developers of the Revised Common Lectionary have used an analogous process, divorcing the recommended scripture passages from their contexts. The resulting general theme for Proper 8 of Year B is death, grief, hope, and belief. The death of Saul and Jonathan triggers deep grief in David, the only heir left standing after the Philistines and the Amalekites have done their worst. The brief passages from Lamentations and the Wisdom of Solomon offer hope, as do the Psalms. Belief in the faithfulness of God is also reflected in those readings, trumped, of course, in the end by the miraculous healing power of Jesus the Christ, who triumphs over death itself. Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians have nothing to do with death or grief, contributing further to the total befuddlement of most Christians (clergy as well as lay) as to what to do with this “appalling apostle.” “Hope” does come into the picture, however, but only if the listeners are told that he is organizing what might be considered to be the first-ever Pledge Week fund-raising project on behalf of the church in Jerusalem. Paul urges the Corinthians to “show the proof of your love and of our reason for boasting about you” (2 Cor. 8:24) by giving generously to Titus when he arrives.

But even if we look at the contexts for the stories found in 2 Samuel and Mark, and the historical matrix for Lamentations and the Wisdom of Solomon, none of it would seem to belong in the same liturgy.

The first point of confusion (or misreading) comes with the portion cherry-picked from the saga of Saul, Jonathan, David, and the fledgling Israelite monarchy. Last week, David killed Goliath and received Jonathan’s birth-right. Jonathan’s pledge of loyalty clearly illustrated that God had withdrawn his favor from Saul and transferred it to David. Christians, impatient to cut to the chase regarding the Davidic lineage claimed for Jesus as the Messiah, may find the palace intrigue and wars in the rest of 1 Samuel irrelevant. But they explain the depth of the relationship between David and Jonathan, and the depth of the shift in fortune as Saul slays his thousands, but David his ten-thousands. Without the whole story, we don’t get the full import of David’s continuing insistence on loyalty to Saul as God’s anointed king. Significantly, but left out of Proper 8, Jonathan and his brothers are killed by the Philistines, but Saul is forced to fall on his own sword to avoid humiliation. An enterprising resident-alien Amalekite apparently robs the corpse of the crown and armband, and the stage is set for 2 Samuel and the reign of King David.

If we do not know that Saul died by his own hand, David’s action in killing the Amalekite looks like capricious murder for the sole purpose of avenging the death of God’s anointed king. Nor do we entertain the possibility that Jonathan’s death at the hands of the Philistines could have been the consequence of Jonathan’s conflicted relationships with both his father, the anointed King, and the usurper to whom Jonathan abdicated his royal identity. These political and personal threads weave a tapestry that has hung on the walls of humanity from time immemorial. The question is whether (and when) humanity can reach the point where the tapestry can be unravelled and rewoven.

The alternative readings from Wisdom of Solomon and Lamentations appear to fit nicely with David’s “Song of the Bow,” composed to express his profound grief over the death of his soul-friend Jonathan, and “the shield of Saul, anointed with oil no more.” But again, context is everything. Lamentations comes from the first exile of the Jewish people to Babylon in the 6th Century, B.C.E., long after the historical period of the reign of David. The Wisdom of Solomon comes possibly from the 30s, B.C.E., after the Romans had overthrown the Greek rule of Alexandria, Egypt. The Hellenistic Jewish community in Alexandria was in some serious danger of persecution if not destruction.

Unfortunately, the Elves emphasize individual verses from each to serve a pious Christian agenda. With words seemingly intended to comfort the bereaved, the quotation lifted from its context in mid-sentence from the Wisdom of Solomon assures that “because God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. . . . the dominion of Hades is not on earth, for righteousness is immortal.” But the writer is actually concerned with wisdom and justice as the hallmarks of an immortal soul. “For God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with Wisdom. She [Wisdom-Sophia] is more beautiful than the sun . . . against Wisdom, evil does not prevail” (7:24-30). This is indeed comfort to people caught up in a war that threatens their existence, but the purpose was not to address the kind of personal loss expressed in David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan.

The selection from Lamentations also begins in mid-sentence: “they are new every morning: great is your faithfulness.” Who is new every morning? Whose faithfulness is great? “The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him,” sings the writer. “. . . Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.” If we back up to verse 19, we may realize that the writer is homeless – exiled and abandoned. The poem is a prayer to God for restoration, not for preparing to assume the mantle of sacred monarchy after the death of a beloved friend.

The point here is not to beat the Elves at their own game with nit-picking objections. But if there is some common thread that will pull all these disparate patches into one meaningful quilt, it must be found while maintaining the integrity of each piece.

The 5th Chapter of Mark contains three stories of deliverance. The first, which we read in Year C from the Gospel of Luke, is the story of the man possessed by a demon named “Legion.” After the demon is dispatched into the unclean pigs, which then run into the sea and are drowned, the man wants to come with Jesus. But Jesus tells him to go home and tell his story of liberation to his own people.

Mark follows the demoniac with two healings. The first is the raising from the dead of the daughter of a “synagogue official.” That story is interrupted by the second story about a woman in a seemingly permanent state of uncleanness because of a “flow of blood” that has lasted 12 years. After she is healed by surreptitiously touching Jesus’s robe, Jesus goes on to tell the supposedly dead child of a possible collaborator with Rome to get up. The possibilities for metaphors about 1st Century resistance to unclean Roman rule fairly leap off the page. These are not miracle stories about medical cures, demon possession, and the mis-use of livestock. They are parables about subverting political and spiritual oppression; they show how trust in God’s reality transforms one’s oppressed life under imperial (Roman) occupation into freedom and justice.

The overarching theme has to do with holding the center through the most profound personal, political, social, and religious change. The warrior David, a legend from antiquity, is on the threshold of realizing his own God-ordained destiny. The writer of Lamentations mourns the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile to Babylon of the 6th Century, B.C.E.. In the mid-30s, B.C.E., a highly educated, Hellenistic Jew laments the usurpation of Greek culture in Alexandria by the Roman occupation: “Do not invite death by the error of your life, or bring on destruction by the works of your hands,” he cautions – invoking the “kindly spirit” of Wisdom-Sophia (Wisdom of Solomon 1:6, 12). Righteousness – living in accordance with God’s justice-compassion – is what is immortal and will ultimately prevail. The writer of the Gospel of Mark, looking at the second and final annihilation of the center of Jewish religion, tells a story of liberation from injustice. Through it all, behind it all, upholding it all, is trust in God’s reality.

And what is “God’s reality” in a post-modern, post-Christian, non-theistic, secular world? “God’s reality” has not changed. The profound reality at the source of life in the Universe continues to be a radical grace. The only caveat is that the beings who inhabit the Universe are subject to a few simple rules. Among those is the one that says that if one particular entity outgrows its ability to sustain itself, it disappears. The rule applies to all life-forms from viruses (biological or electronic) to super-novas, and includes humans.

Woven throughout the timeless legend of the shepherd-warrior-king David is an argument about how best to govern human society. The people want security. They also do not want responsibility for anyone other than themselves and their immediate families. A monarchy would seem to be the perfect solution – especially a monarchy ordained and anointed by God and God’s prophets. But as the story shows, the monarch and his or her regime are on a sword’s edge between justice-compassion and injustice – between Empire and Covenant. All too often the normalcy of civilization pushes the best of human systems into oppression.

But unlike what we know of the rest of life in the Universe, humanity has the ability to choose. The collaborator who asked for Jesus’s help made a choice. The woman who touched Jesus’s robe made a choice. Mark’s Jesus himself made a choice when he continued to offer life to the collaborator’s child, even though the situation looked hopeless. These are all vignettes of God’s reality – God’s radical grace. But they require a conscious, deliberate choice to step outside the bounds of political and social and personal normalcy. When we make that choice, we run the risk of loss, exile, imprisonment, suffering, and death.

The Elves left out two crucial verses from the selection in Lamentations that speak directly to the timeless consequences of choosing to participate in the struggle for distributive justice-compassion: “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; [God’s] mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is [God’s] faithfulness.”

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How To Sleep Through the Storm: Proper 7, Year B

2009-06-17T13:44:00.001-05:00

1 Samuel 17-18:16; Job 38:1-11; Psalm 9:9-20; Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32; Psalm 133; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41

For the next six to eight weeks the Elves have given Christians the opportunity to study the life and legend of ancient Israel’s archetypal Warrior King David. It is a fabulous tale, full of palace intrigue, romance, betrayal, vindication, triumph, sin, salvation, promise, sex, lies, and magic. There is even a hint of homosexual love, commitment, and dedication in the story of the Covenant relationship between David and King Saul’s son Jonathan. What a love story: the “ruddy and handsome” young shepherd boy and the prince who “loved him as his own soul.”

Along with this foundational Jewish epic, the first stories to be written into a narrative about Jesus continue in the gospel of Mark. Those early Christian stories are supplemented later with selections from John’s Gospel, but the two accounts continue, side-by-side, throughout the summer. This might appear to encourage some kind of comparison, or hint at the doctrinal possibility that the Christian Messiah ultimately superceded the power and importance of the ancient King. But such an agenda is neither useful nor sustainable. Instead, the theme that does run throughout both of these mythic sources is the conflict between an imperial dynasty justified by violence, and a society governed by non-violent, distributive justice-compassion. Both are human attempts at social organization; both claim empowerment by God; both run the risk of collaboration or alignment with unjust systems.

Unfortunately, the Elves (as usual) pick and choose which portions of each of the stories will be emphasized. As a result, their meaning, importance, and relevance are too easily assumed. Mark’s story about Jesus “rebuking the wind and the waves” so that a “great squall” dies away is most often considered another miracle story. “Who can this fellow be?” the terrified disciples ask each other, “that even the wind and the sea obey him?” The irony is that with this comment, Jesus’s clueless followers still don’t get what Jesus is trying to teach them. Mark’s Jesus could not be more clear: “Why are you so cowardly?” he asks – perhaps with some irritation. “You still don’t trust, do you?”

But watch out. Christians traditionally have added or assumed that Jesus is implying the disciples don’t trust him. But that’s not what he says. Look at the way Mark sets the scene: Jesus is teaching beside the sea, or Lake Galilee. “Later in the day, when evening had come, he says to them, ‘Let’s go across to the other side.’” Any fisherman worth his salt should have known that even though the Lake was subject to sudden storms, in the evening, there is often (if not always) a calm as the sun sets. How many recreational sailors on the Chesapeake Bay (or any large body of water) have had to either use their onboard engines, or be towed back to Annapolis once the sun approaches the horizon and the wind dies? So Jesus falls asleep on some cushions in the stern of the boat, and a sudden squall materializes. Why should those supposedly seasoned sailors panic? Surely that squall would have died out as quickly as it came up? In Mark’s view, Jesus’s followers not only do not understand what Jesus was trying to teach them. They don’t even trust their own experience of God’s natural world.

The reading from Job is obviously supposed to tie in with Mark’s anecdote about Jesus stopping the storm. After all, Jesus is the Son of God, according to conventional theology, so would have a special kinship to the power that “shut in the sea with doors . . . and said, ‘Thus far shall you come and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped.” But the gospel writer is pointing beyond convention, as is the poet who created the voice of God for the answer to Job. Job insists on his own righteousness. He has done nothing wrong under God’s law – but still loses everything he has. At the end, Job does not conclude that he is some kind of sinner after all. Job sees that God’s character as revealed in God’s creation is of a level of radical fairness that stuns Job into silence. “Look at Behemoth, which I made just as I made you,” God says. “. . . [T]he mountains yield food for it, where all the wild animals play. . . . The lotus trees cover it for shade; . . . Even if the river is turbulent, it is not frightened; it is confident though Jordan rushes against its mouth.” The same is true of Leviathan, God says. The greatest of land and sea creatures were made by me, just as you were made by me. So why don’t you trust in my power to take the same care of you as I do of them? Job realizes that “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know . . . therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:1-6). These are not the words of someone who is sorry for some petty sin. Job’s life has been transformed by the revelation that Job gets the same protection from God as the mightiest of creatures in all of God’s realm.

David likewise, in the part we are not assigned to read, but should have been, knows God’s power and trusts in God’s care. The story of David and Goliath is not about conventional 21st Century “justice,” where the little guy trumps the corporation. The clue is found when the inexperienced adolescent warrior wannabe says, “The Lord who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will save me from the hand of this Philistine.” Then David declines all of Saul’s armor, and goes out with his sling and his shepherd’s bag and his five smooth stones from the wadi. (Mark’s description of how Jesus sent his disciples out to do the work with nothing but a staff, sandals, and one shirt would seem to fit here, but the Elves have paired that story with David’s anointing as King over all Israel, and the establishment of his capital at Jerusalem. We will sort that out later with Proper 9.)

When Goliath taunts him and curses him, David says, “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand . . . so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not save by sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s . . . .” Samuel 17:31-47 (emphasis added). In the midst of all the mayhem and bloodshed, the legend insists that God’s salvation – or liberation, or deliverance – does not come through imperial violence. The trick, as always, is to trust in God’s radical power and God’s radical justice.

In the next cherry-picked portion of the story, after David brought the head of Goliath to Saul, the king’s own son made a Covenant with David. In an extraordinary abdication of succession to royal power, Jonathan gives David all the trappings of his own royalty: his robe, his armor, and “even his sword and his bow and his belt.” Jonathan has abdicated his position as successor to the throne of Israel, and has abandoned the loyalty he owed his father because of a love that bound his soul to God’s champion. But it is an ambiguous message. Is the Covenant between them a political one that will lead David into imperial corruption? What will be the consequences of Jonathan’s disloyalty to his own heritage?

Finally, the Apostle Paul – whose letters predated Mark’s Gospel – says “now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!” He is telling the Corinthians to sign onto Jesus’s program – Jesus’s way – aligning with God’s realm, and working with the risen Christ to restore God’s radical distributive justice-compassion to human society, now, not later; in this life, not the next life. He quotes Isaiah 49, in which the prophet sings about the return from exile. Paul is reminding the Corinthians that the Christian message is also one about return from exile; but this time the exile is to empire – in Paul’s time, the Roman empire; in our time, the normalcy of civilization that keeps humanity enslaved in unjust systems. The return from exile is not to a physical “promised land”; the return is to the radical fairness of the realm of God, which is not what humanity normally considers to be power and justice. “We are treated as imposters, and yet are true; . . . as having nothing, and yet possessing everything,” Paul says.

Paul’s ecstatic litany of trials and tribulations reminded the Corinthians and reminds us that the return to radical fairness is never easy. His quotation from Isaiah 49:8 echoes young David’s experience, which the followers of Mark’s Jesus failed to understand: “At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.” This is about trusting the Covenant with God’s realm, not the empire corrupted by the normalcy of human civilization. God’s character is revealed in God’s own creation, and humanity is part of that creation. “Why are you afraid?” Mark’s Jesus asks. “Don’t you trust God’s way?”

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Seeds: Proper 6, Year B

2009-06-10T12:34:00.001-05:00

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Ezekiel 17:22-24; Psalm 20; Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15; 2 Corinthians 5:6-17; Mark 4:26-34

Unfortunately, Christian supercessionism continues apace for the unwary, as we rejoin Mark on the road with Jesus. Following the interpretation of the Parable of the Sower, Mark’s Jesus tells two more parables dealing with the subject of seedtime and harvest. The second is the beloved Parable of the Mustardseed. This “biggest of all garden plants” is paired with the two verses snipped out of the prophet Ezekiel, in which God plants a great Cedar as a representation of the promised restoration of the great King David’s royal line. Samuel reminds us that the anointing of King David was the precursor to the anointing of Jesus as the Christ, and the only words that make sense from poor cherry-picked Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians are, “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” Throw in a couple of jokes, and the sermon is done by mid-week. The Worship Leader is free to attend the Saturday night banquet at the district/ association/conference annual meeting.

Paul’s second letter (or collection of letters) to the Corinthians is the only authentic portion of Paul’s work to be considered in what remains of Year B. The problem is that the Elves carefully select portions from what may well be fragments of several different letters from Paul to his problem children in 1st Century Corinth. Associating these snippets of fragments with Mark’s Gospel, and somehow making a retro-active connection to ancient Jewish scripture that includes the Psalms, Wisdom literature, and the Prophets is mind-boggling. It is also grossly unfair to Paul’s witness to the nature of the Christ, and our continuing opportunity to choose to participate in somehow bringing about God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion.

Nevertheless, in the portion we are to consider, the bottom line is that no one now is regarded from the usual point of view. All those who sign onto the program are transformed beings, living in the realm of God. Because, Paul says, here and everywhere else, if the Christ is the risen, anointed one prophesied by the writer of Daniel, then all the rest of those who participated in God’s justice-compassion in the past and who continue to participate here and now are also transformed, and the Kingdom of God is established. No need to wait around for a second coming.

One of the major themes (if not the primary theme) in the Gospel of Mark is secret or obscured knowledge, especially of the identity of Jesus as the Son of Man (described in Daniel 7:13-14) sent to bring about the non-violent establishment of the kingdom of God. Because the Revised Common Lectionary is not set up to consider the Gospels (or any other part of the Bible) in their own contexts, much is missed. For example, tucked into the series of parables Mark’s Jesus tells is the aphorism: “Since when is the lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket or under the bed? It’s put on the lampstand, isn’t it?” Mark then clarifies Jesus’s words by adding, “After all, there is nothing hidden except to be brought to light, nor anything secreted away that won’t be exposed.” Then Mark warns his community that the same standard they apply to others will be the standard applied to them. He follows that with a non-sequitur from Jesus that perhaps provides a hint that what Jesus’s followers expected would happen when the Kingdom of God is finally reinstated is not how things will actually pan out: “In fact, to those who have, more will be given, and from those who don’t have, even what they do have will be taken away!” The Parables that surround or bracket these sayings are about the nature of the kingdom of God.

The Elves have decided that Matthew’s setting of the Parable of the Mustard Seed is definitive, so Mark’s placement of it is never included in any part of the 3-year cycle of lectionary readings. In Mark’s presentation, first, the kingdom of God is like the Sower who sows the seed on all sorts of ground. Mark provides an explanation, then inserts the aphorisms about how everything that is secret will come to light, and how the measure you give will be the measure you get. Next, the kingdom of God is like the sower who sows, and the seed germinates and sprouts with no further assistance from the sower. The sower isn’t needed again until it is time for the harvest. Finally, Mark’s Jesus compares God’s Kingdom with the mustard seed. It is the smallest of seeds, but when it is sown on the ground it becomes the biggest weed in the garden, so big that the birds make nests in it!

Traditionally, these metaphors have been interpreted to be about faith, or belief, in the story that Jesus died to save people from personal sin. Seed that is sown upon fertile ground, where people are willing to believe the story, takes root and grows. Then the harvest is taken in, and the saved go to heaven. All it takes is faith that is as tiny as a mustard seed, and the sinner is saved from hell for all eternity. But this interpretation – as always – eliminates the power humanity has to transform the quality of life on Planet Earth.

It is impossible to know what the original circumstances were when Jesus first told the parables; it is highly unlikely he associated those parables with his observations about the hidden lamp and to have and have not. But taken in sequence, each of Mark’s parables about the sowers and the seeds builds on the one before it. The aphorisms in the midst of these parables serve as hints to their meaning for Mark’s oppressed, exiled community. Mark seems to be using them to explain that Jesus was the Son of Man, as prophesied in Daniel, come to usher in the Kingdom of God, and usher out the Empire of Rome. All will be made clear, Mark says, and nothing will look like what we expect. It will be a non-violent shift in paradigm, not a violent revolution. The Kingdom of God – or God’s Rule – goes on all around us, whether we notice it or not, whether we participate in it or not. But the consequences of not participating are clear: “to those who have, more will be given, and from those who don’t have, even what they do have will be taken away.” If we follow the same unjust standards that the Empire follows, the same will be done to us “and then some!”

The Jesus Seminar scholars suggest that the Parable of the Mustard Seed may have been told by Jesus as a parody of Ezekiel’s poem about the mighty cedar of Lebanon. Ezekiel warned that the ancient king Zedekiah had abandoned the Covenant with God, and would die in exile in Babylon. But God promised to plant a great Cedar on the highest mountain as a sign of God’s renewed Covenant and the coming restoration of the Davidic house of Israel. If Jesus did tell the parable as a parody of the well-known prophecy, his followers would have gotten the joke, and so would Mark’s exiled community in Ephesus. It had nothing to do with supplanting Judaism with Christianity, as tradition would have us assume, and everything to do with the subversion of the Empire of Rome.

Here is the scene:

Jesus and some of his companions are hiking over to Capernaum to visit Peter’s mother. Perhaps they are lamenting the days when it was still possible to catch enough fish from the Lake for your family’s needs, plus a bit more to sell in the market. Now, with the new city of Tiberias and the restrictions on access to the Lake, even the more well-off in the village are beginning to feel the economic effects.

Jesus is sympathetic. “But,” he says, “Remember old Zedekiah? Instead of keeping God’s Covenant, when the king of Babylon came to Jerusalem, Zedekiah made a deal. Then, instead of keeping the deal, Zedekiah called in reinforcements from Egypt. God wasn’t about to allow any more of this. In fact, Ezekiel tells us that God decreed that because Zedekiah had broken covenant with both God and the Babylonians, he would die in Babylon.”

“He got what he deserved,” says Peter.

“It’s the same way now,” Jesus continues. “Under God’s rule, to those who have more will be given, and from those who don’t have even what they do have will be taken away!”

This stops the group in its tracks. “What?”

“That’s the way it works under Roman rule!”

“That’s the way it works when you abandon God’s Covenant,” Jesus retorts. “If anyone here has two good ears, use them!”

Jesus’s cousin Barabbas pokes Judas in the ribs with his elbow. “Hey Jesus! Maybe it’s time to take matters into your own hands. God’s supposed to bring back King David. He promised. Ezekiel said as a sign of that promise, God took a sprig from the top of a cedar and planted it on the top of Mount Zion. So what about it? When do we start the war?”

“That’s what Ezekiel said,” Jesus responds. “But here’s what I say: Look at this barley field. It’s practically overrun with mustard.”

“That steward needs to get the workers out there at the New Moon. Pull that stuff up by the roots,” Bartholomew says.

Jesus goes on: “God’s Kingdom is like the mustard seed.”

Barrabas and Judas shrug at each other. Here he goes again . . .

Jesus ignores them. “Mustard is the most noxious weed imaginable, right? When it grows up it takes over the entire field; it is nearly impossible to eradicate, and the next thing you know it has grown so big that all the birds of the sky can nest in its shade.”

Peter and Andrew start laughing. Barabbas and Judas roll their eyes and drop back to continue their own conversation.

The story is empowering, emboldening, uplifting, encouraging, hopeful, subversive, and ultimately triumphant.

While the motives of the Elves may be suspicious, given the traditional, doctrinal emphasis on sin, salvation from hell, and the afterlife, including the story of Samuel’s anointing of David as the King to replace the disastrous regime of Saul does fit in with the interpretation these readings have received in this essay. For the full argument, please read the commentary from the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A . In Year A, the story is paired with John’s story of the healing of the man born blind (John 9:1-41). Like Year B, the Elves left out the context that led to the need for God to replace King Saul. Basically, Saul had caused God himself to regret ever having selected him to be king in the first place. Saul (like Zedekiah in Year B’s pairing) had broken the Covenant with God in a way that God could not overlook:

“Breaking Covenant with God brings war, famine, disease, death, economic, political, personal disaster. Instead of acting from radical abandonment of self-interest (love), which brings the restoration of God’s rule, where the lion and the lamb lie down in distributive, balanced, justice and peace, civilizations are normally built through victory, whether military, economic, political, or personal, and only after such victory are justice and peace discussed. Justice in normal civilization is retribution: an eye for an eye. In Samuel’s bloody, graphic demonstration, Saul’s imperialism, which he chose for himself, is ransomed life-for-life. God himself regrets ever choosing Saul as the people’s king, and Samuel’s personal grief is profound. The only recourse for God is to overturn convention and choose a lowly shepherd, the youngest of eight sons – David is not even the magical number seven.”

In both contexts, the Elves have illustrated that when God acts to restore God’s justice, it is not through the normally expected violence. The Jewish people may have longed for a Warrior-King, who would bring retribution and the restoration of honor. What they got was a shepherd. Instead of the great Cedar of Lebanon, planted by God on the Mountain in anticipation of a Warrior Liberator, Jesus says, the Kingdom of God proliferates among us like mustard weed among the barley.

“The righteous flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. . . . In old age they still produce fruit; they are always green and full of sap . . .”

BLOG ARCHIVE

The Best-Kept Secret: Trinity Sunday, Year B

2009-06-03T09:33:00.001-05:00

Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

Due to the vagaries of basing Easter on the timing of the Full Moon, The Elves have decreed that Propers 4 and 5 will not be considered this year (2009). So in this particular “year of Mark,” with two Sundays eliminated from Epiphany, and two Sundays eliminated after Pentecost, half of Chapter 2, all of Chapter 3, and half of Chapter 4 have been skipped. From the point of view of tradition and orthodoxy, the doctrine of the Trinity must be established and preserved. The “Holy Spirit” descending in tongues of fire at Pentecost may be honored as equal with the Father and the Son, but the integrity of Mark’s story of Jesus on his way from Galilee to Jerusalem is compromised.

One might argue that skipping parts of Mark in favor of honoring the Holy Spirit is hardly a problem to believing Christians. We all know the stories. What we don’t know is how to listen to the Spirit, which will either save us from the “evil one” (largely a mainline and Catholic teaching) or cause us to be “born again” (a prerequisite for salvation from Hell in Pentecostal evangelicalism). What we are missing in those skipped chapters are the controversies and the healings, – Jesus’s “street cred” – that Mark uses to establish the authenticity of this “Son of Man,” sent by God to set things right. Jesus’s authority and inclusiveness are in sharp contrast with the exclusivity and control of ecclesiastical authority. The conflict – then and now – is between restoration of the non-violent justice-compassion in Covenant with God’s rule and the normalcy of the Empire’s violent, unjust systems.

By misunderstanding and mistranslating, the Church has made the Christian religion into a magical belief system instead of a sustainable way of life. The writer of Mark’s Gospel got it right in the 1st Century, and continues to be right in the 21st Century. The would-be followers of Jesus missed the point then, and continue to miss the point now. What it means that Jesus was “the Son of Adam” (Five Gospels translation) is still a well-kept secret.

Much of the quotation attributed to Jesus in John’s story about his conversation with the pharisee Nicodemus is disputed by scholars – and not just Jesus Seminar scholars. “It should be recalled that quotation marks do not appear in the original Greek manuscripts of any of the gospels; most punctuation marks have been provided by modern editors and translators” (The Five Gospels, p. 409). Jesus’s speech probably actually ends at verse 13. The rest is commentary. However, this should not be regarded as a negation or refutation of Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus. Instead, as commentary on the meaning of who Jesus was, those beloved words in 3:16-17 take on even more power. Instead of a pronouncement by Jesus about himself, those words become a testimony to the profound experience of the people in John’s community. In the face of opposition from the prevailing orthodox culture around him, the writer of the Gospel of John stands up and lobs his grenade: “This is how God loved the world:” he begins, “God gave up an only son, so that every one who believes in him will not be lost but have real life.” Then he begins to heat up: “After all [“Indeed!” is stronger in the NRSV, but we’re going with the JS Scholars] God sent this son into the world not to condemn the world but to rescue the world through him.” Finally – although the Elves don’t want us to go this far (19-21) – the writer’s bomb explodes: “This is the verdict: Light came into the world but people loved darkness instead of light. Their actions were evil, weren’t they? All those who do evil things hate the light and don’t come into the light – otherwise their deeds wold be exposed. But those who do what is true come into the light so the nature of their deeds will become evident: their deeds belong to God.”

This interpretation begs the question, what’s going on with Nicodemus, who felt he had to come to Jesus in the dark of night in order to ask his question? By the time John gets done with him, the pharisee is pretty well discredited, whether the words are attributed to Jesus or not. Nicodemus seems to be deliberately dense regarding Jesus’s description of what it means to be reborn. He seems not to get the double meaning of the Jewish word, ruach. And Jesus’s mocking question is devastating: “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?”

This story is a set-up for a continuing polemic between the writer of John’s Gospel and the demoralized Jewish exiles in second-century Syria. Rome had destroyed the Temple and changed the Jewish religion forever. In the midst of that, along came the followers of Jesus’s Way, wanting to overturn Torah. This was not an esoteric debate about the nature of the Godhead. Both sides were in a struggle for survival, and as anthropologists and historians and psychologists tell us, when humans are struggling for survival, Truth is often the first casualty.

The Elves have combined the Call of Isaiah with John’s story about Jesus and Nicodemus. Presumably we are to imagine that Isaiah’s call was consummated by the Spirit, as one of the seraphs in his vision touched a burning coal to his lips and declared “your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Isaiah then had the courage to volunteer to go wherever he was sent, perhaps in the same way the Spirit moves, which Nicodemus was unable (or unwilling) to understand. But as usual when lifting Bible verses out of context, a valuable and pertinent point (even the Truth) is missed. After Isaiah says, “Here am I; send me!” The seraph – a messenger from God – tells Isaiah, “Go and say to this people, ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand. Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.’” Isaiah wants to know how long this will go on? The seraph says, “Until cities lie waste . . . and the land is utterly desolate . . . even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like . . . [an] oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump.”

Mark’s Jesus cites the seraph’s words to Isaiah in 4:11-12 (which we never read in the Lectionary selections from any year). In Mark’s vignette, Jesus is interpreting the parable of the Sower (4:3-8) for his hapless followers who – like Nicodemus – miss the point. However, Mark’s point is that Jesus’s followers (and the Jewish Christians in Mark’s diaspora community) have been given the secret of God’s rule. Those outside of Jesus’s group have not. Mark’s Jesus then proceeds to explain the Parable of the Sower as referring to people who hear Jesus’s message, but do not follow it. They become “fruitless,” like the fig tree out of season, which Mark uses later on as a symbol for a temple leadership who collaborated with the injustice of Roman occupation (Mark 11:12-21). But if we consider the original Parable of the Sower in Mark 4:3-8 without the interpretation Mark gave it, we may see that it is a parable about what happens in the struggle to restore God’s rule of distributive justice-compassion. The Sower casts his seed, and some of it falls on hard rocky ground. That seed may germinate, but the sun soon burns it off; some of it falls among weeds that overwhelm the plant; some seed falls on fertile soil and produces a bountiful harvest.

Like Mark’s later parable, “[t]he portion of Paul’s letter plucked out of context . . . is . . . about Covenant. Whenever we join Jesus in the relationship with God that is so close as to be the same as a father, we are then children of God, and heirs of God. What do we inherit? Rather than one strip of real estate in the Middle East, the heirs of God, brothers and sisters of the Christ, inherit the Realm/Kingdom of God, where distributive justice rules. The caveat is that we “suffer” with Jesus” (blog.7.20.08). In other words, as the writer of John’s Gospel expected Nicodemus to understand, the spirit of the Christ is like the wind. It blows where it will, and no one knows where it comes from or upon whom it will descend. When we participate with the spirit of Christ in restoring/reclaiming God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, Paul is saying, “Suffering” is what happens when we attempt to live in radical abandonment of self-interest and fail. Mark’s Jesus is also pointing out that, like the seed that falls on good soil or poor soil or hostile soil, sometimes what happens is that even if by extraordinary commitment we succeed in achieving that radical abandonment of self-interest, the systems of retribution inherent in empire intervene.

The readings for Trinity Sunday are about much more than the exclusive gift of the Holy Spirit being the third part of some three-headed god. The imagery here gets clouded with metaphors from other traditions: for example, the Celts’ Brigid (or Bride) with her sacred triple aspect as healer, poet, and metal worker; or the domain of the Moon Goddess Diana as Maiden, Mother, Crone; or the somewhat disturbing image of the Greek Hydra with 9 heads (a multiple of the sacred 3), killed by Hercules in one of his 12 challenges (another multiple of 3 with Christian import). Rather than attempting to prove the supremacy of the Christian triune god by selective proof-texting, 21st Century, post-modern, exiles would be better served by allowing these writings to maintain their integrity.

Paul rhapsodizes on [Romans 8:18-25]: “. . . for the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; . . . that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. . .” This is not about believers going to heaven in the next life. It is about partners actualizing the promise of God’s rule in this life. The “children of God” are not some superior race. They are whoever joins the program – Christian or non-Christian; people “of the book” or not. Has this happened yet? No. “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” The Elves cut Paul off here in mid-argument . . . [blog.7.20.08]

“Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says, “we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony.” The words from the writer of John’s Jesus apply to the Church today, and not to those who decline to believe the story, or dismiss as irrelevant the intellectual theological exercise about the structure of the Godhead. It is far easier to continue to create and support unjust systems than it is to usher in the kingdom of God.

The fig tree cannot give fruit out of season; the leaders of the Temple are collaborating with the oppressors; the eyes and ears of the people are closed. Still the call is there for those who can hear it and have the courage to respond. The Holy Spirit is the seed that is left in the ground after the tree has been uprooted and burned. That same spirit falls on all varieties of ground, and takes root where it can. That same spirit rides on the wind and blows where it will, and no one knows where it comes from or where it will go next.

The best kept secret is the identity of the body of Christ.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Are you in? Pentecost, Year B

2009-05-27T10:43:00.001-05:00

Acts 2:1-21; Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 104:24-34, 35b; Romans 8:22-27; John 15:26-27; John 16:4b-15

The Lectionary readings developed by the “Church Fathers” over the centuries for the time between Easter and Pentecost have attempted to steer us in three orthodox directions: First, to “belief” in the story that Jesus came back from the dead in order to “save sinners” from hell in the next life; Second, to the illegitimacy of the Jewish religion because of the ascendance of Jesus as the Messiah and the inevitable anti-Semitism associated with Jesus’s death; Third, the supremacy and exclusivity of Christianity over and above all other forms of spiritual practice. These commentaries have attempted to show an alternative to orthodoxy, based on those same readings.

Luke’s “Acts of the Apostles” must be understood not as the history of the early Christian movement, but as founding Christian myth. Luke (as well as the other Gospel writers) had his own unique agenda. But his point of view was Gentile Greek, not diaspora Jew. He was much more interested in Paul’s message to Gentiles outside of Jerusalem than Peter’s message to the remnant left behind in the ruins of the Temple. As a result, the Jewish theology that shaped Paul’s leadership and Mark’s, Matthew’s and John’s gospels was watered down, misunderstood, and ultimately forgotten. As Christians we celebrate Pentecost as the birthday of the Church without realizing that the underlying message is the supercession of the liberation of the Hebrew people and the law of Moses by Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. The reasons for this misappropriation of Jesus’s message include political necessity, human ego, and – probably most important – the mistranslation of pre-modern Greek.

Shall we then jettison the parts we don’t like? Or re-open the Canon? To lift the Apostle Paul’s words out of the many contexts in which they appeared, “by all means, NO!” The Gospels (including John) and Luke’s block-buster sequel to his story of Jesus’s life all contain valuable clues to both the historical Jesus’s message, and to the history of the early organization of the followers of Jesus’s Way. In order to look at the New Testament like that, however, Christians have to be willing to give up two millennia of “gospel truth.” Despite John Shelby Spong’s assertion that Christianity must either change or die, the tradition that follows the “gospel truth” is showing no signs of doing either one.

The readings for Pentecost from Acts and the Psalms are read in all three years of the Revised Common Lectionary. What changes are the Old Testament reading and the selections from Paul’s letters and the Gospel of John. Year B uses the very popular vision recorded by the prophet Ezekiel about the valley of the dry bones. This vision is used in all three years, and twice in years A and B. It’s a great vision, with lots of possibility for metaphor and fun (“dem bones dem bones dem-a dry bones! Now hear the word of the Lawd!”) Instead of dramatizing the tongues of fire on the heads of the Apostles or learning the parts of the human skeleton, let’s look carefully at what the Elves cherry-picked from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and John’s Gospel.

The portion cherry-picked from Paul’s letter to the Romans seems to be in agreement with the concept of apocalyptic eschatology. Paul writes that the entire creation is fallen into sin, and is under the rule of Satan, but “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Paul seems to be saying that any day now, God will intervene and adopt and redeem us and the entire universe from sin and death. But Paul was a devout Pharisee, a leader in his Jewish community, and a persuasive theologian. The Jews believed that God would act to return God’s distributive justice to the world. The vision of Daniel (Daniel 7) says this would happen non-violently with the coming of the Son of Man, and the arrival of the Kingdom of God on Earth. The Pharisees believed that part of that process meant that those martyrs who had given their lives for justice would be resurrected from the dead so that they too could participate in the establishment of the eternal rule of God.

When Paul writes to the Romans about “the future glory about to be revealed to us” he is talking about the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God as described in Daniel’s vision. Jesus, Paul says, was the first of the martyrs to be raised into the presence of God: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor. 15:20). Earlier in Romans 8:9-11, left out of the reading, Paul writes, “But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” In other words, if the Spirit of Christ is in you, you have life because of your participation in justice-compassion (righteousness). In today’s portion, Paul writes, “we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit” wait for adoption by God, and the redemption (buying back) of our bodies from death. “We wait for it with patience.”

This is not about going to heaven after we die if we’re good. It is also not about waiting in some half-way place for Jesus to come yet again. Jesus was here. Jesus died in the service of distributive justice-compassion, showing us how to live in Covenant, not bound in the corporate sin of unjust systems. If we also live in that same service in Covenant with God’s rule, we establish the kingdom. God’s Kingdom will come. As soon as we sign onto the program.

Paul’s ecstatic conclusion to his argument is also left out: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to [God’s] purpose. For those whom he knew before (the martyrs) he also predestined (or declared) to be conformed to (made like) the image of his Son, in order that the Son (Jesus) would be the firstborn within a large family.” Many are the martyrs . . . all the Saints . . . who were declared justified in their work for bringing about God’s imperial rule, not the normal injustice of civilizations. “And those whom he justified he also glorified.” That means, in Paul’s theology, if we take up the work of distributive justice-compassion, God will take us into [God’s] presence, just like God did Jesus and all the rest of the martyrs.

John’s gospel was written perhaps as much as 75 years after Paul laid out his Christology for the gentiles outside of Judea. We cannot know whether John had access to Paul’s letters. But we do know that Paul’s interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’s teachings, death, and resurrection was widely circulated, and that people wrote their own interpretations using Paul’s name. John was writing for a particular Jewish community that was in serious difficulties among the membership. (It is possible that community was in Ephesus -- part of the Jewish diaspora -- so it is not beyond imagination that the writer of John's Gospel was familiar with Paul's letters.) John’s group felt like aliens or outcasts because of their conviction that Jesus had been the Messiah. So when John’s Jesus engages in the long discourses setting out who he was and what his teachings meant, we can be certain that these were arguments created by the writer in response to opposition in his Jewish community. These discourses were not engaged in by Jesus himself.

That does not mean they have nothing to say to 21st Century exiles from Christian orthodoxy. Keeping Paul’s theology firmly in mind, even though this exercise may be consciously anachronistic, we can read meaning back into John’s three-part homily on sin, righteousness, and judgment. John’s Jesus says that when the Holy Spirit (the Advocate) comes, “he will prove the world wrong about sin . . . because [people] do not believe [I was the Messiah]; righteousness because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; and judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.”

We are wrong about sin because we do not believe in Jesus. To “believe in” someone used to mean having confidence in someone’s integrity. If we “believe in” the integrity of Jesus’s teaching, if we accept that his word is truth, we know that “sin” is the consequence of ignoring or declining to participate in God’s Covenant: the Great Work of justice-compassion. But “belief in” Jesus is traditionally defined as believing as fact the story that Jesus came back from the dead in order to “save” us from hell in the next life. “Sin” then becomes defined by the easy piety of Empire (family values, justice as pay-back and revenge, “my country right or wrong”). John’s point may be that if “sin” is nothing more than the failure to comply with the easy piety of Empire, then we do not believe in Jesus.

We are wrong about righteousness because, John’s Jesus says, “I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer.” In order to make sense of this phrase, we have to understand what Paul was talking about as a Jewish leader and theologian. According to Paul, Jesus was the first of all the martyrs to justice to be raised from the realm of the dead, where there is no God, to the realm of God, where life is eternal. To be raised with the Christ, in Paul’s theology, reverses the process described in Daniel 7. But until that moment happens,“righteousness” means living under God’s rule of justice-compassion, not complying with the rules of Empire, which was responsible for Jesus’s death.

We are wrong about judgment because “the ruler of this world has been condemned.” The powers of evil have been defeated. The Emperor has no clothes. In other words, as John reports the story in Chapter 8, no one who participates in unjust systems can throw the first stone. As the Unforgiving Slave learned to his chagrin, (Matthew 18:23-34) in God’s kingdom, where distributive justice-compassion holds sway, everyone is accountable to their own integrity. When God’s grace (free gift: Paul’s Charis) is compromised the consequences are disastrous. But judgment as punishment plays no role.

As Paul and the writer of John proclaim, the restoration of God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion has begun. Are you in?

BLOG ARCHIVE

Commitment or Belief? Part VI: Ascension vs. Presence (7th Sunday in Eastertide)

2009-05-20T10:35:00.004-05:00

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

Acts 1:1-11; Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; Psalm 1;
Ephesians 1:15-23; 1 John 5:9-13; Luke 24:44-53; John 17:6-19

The Easter season now approaches the dénouement, when at Pentecost the Holy Spirit will confer upon the surviving members of Jesus’s entourage the full range of Jesus’s spiritual powers to heal, raise the dead, walk through walls, and forgive sins. Luke cannily refers Theophilus to his earlier Gospel (surely a late 1st-century blockbuster), and the Elves obligingly include that portion in the readings for Ascension Sunday.

The Feast of the Ascension occurs 40 days after Easter, and falls on the Thursday after the 6th Sunday. That leaves 9 days to prepare to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is a prime time for baptisms, confirmations, ordinations, and confessions of faith – all threshold events for accepting, renewing, and committing to the Christian faith. For Christian spiritual practice, this season holds tremendous potential for personal and corporate spiritual transformation. Instead, we are too easily distracted by the idea that Jesus’s resurrection was a physical, bodily overthrow of the natural order, and that everyone who believes Jesus came back from the dead will live forever in some paradise in the sky. Worship planners have a choice whether to concentrate on Luke’s ascension story or finish the study of the Gospel of John and the first encyclical by an early Christian leader writing under the same name. For 21st Century Christian exiles, the second choice might make the most sense, but considering the two sets of readings together allows for a contrast between the improbability of belief based on the ascension legend, and the usefulness of a debate about what Jesus’s resurrection means.

Skeptics would throw out both resurrection and ascension as equally irrelevant to post-modern minds. But “resurrection” as transformation from the entrenched, normalized injustice of human life to an inclusive, non-violent, radical fairness is a far more meaningful metaphor than one that has us gaping stupidly at the sky, wondering if Jesus has made it to Betelgeuse yet, and what are we supposed to do in the interim? – which is very close to the description of the scene in the reading from Acts for the Feast of the Ascension. The reading for the 7th Sunday in Easter returns the early church (and us) to practical matters. What shall we do about replacing Judas? How shall we maintain our community in the face of the greatest loss we could possibly have sustained? Perhaps it is time for confirming new members, installing new leadership, recommitting ourselves to the great work of justice-compassion.

Mark’s Gospel – the earliest written form of the story – left us with an empty tomb and terrified followers, who were told by an angel that they would meet Jesus again (for the first time?) in Galilee. Matthew and John concentrated on the commissioning of the followers into Jesus’s work by the risen Christ, who then apparently disappeared forever. Luke seems to have found it necessary to have Jesus come back to explain everything, promise the gift of the Holy Spirit, and then – in the tradition of the prophet Elijah – be bodily taken up into the sky while his followers watched. Luke’s continuing saga resolves Mark’s abrupt and incomplete ending and gives a very satisfying clue as to just how the disciples began the process of carrying out Matthew’s great commission.

In the reading for Ascension Day, the apostles (formerly “disciples”) ask Jesus “Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Meaning – in the hope of the Davidic Messiah King – will Israel now be liberated from Roman rule and be restored to its former position as a politically autonomous country? Jesus says cryptically that “it is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” So, no one knows when any particular historical period will begin or end. But Jesus promises that the Apostles will receive power, and will be “my witnesses . . . to the ends of the earth.” Jesus then takes off in the general direction of Antares, and two of Luke’s favorite supernatural beings appear to start the argument about whether Jesus’s second coming was the resurrection, or whether there is another apocalyptic appearance yet to be seen.

Luke then begins explaining who the Apostles were, and how they replaced the traitor Judas with Matthias. The stage is now set for the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the birth of the Christian Church. It is important to realize that, as Richard I. Pervo points out in The Mystery of Acts, the Book of Acts is not an accurate history of early Christianity. While it does supply us with a powerful and useful myth of origins, that myth came with a price. Pervo says, “Acts propounds the legitimacy of Christianity as a largely gentile religion and as the valid heir to the promises God made to Israel . . . The Roman government is not the target of the book, [nor are] traditional Jews, who would regard . . . its claims as highly preposterous. Luke’s [task] was not simply that God’s fulfillment of the ancient promises led to the inclusion of gentiles. Many Jews would have agreed with this ideal, at least at one time . . . . His task was to demonstrate that gentile Christianity was the legitimate inheritor of those old promises, and not just any form of gentile Christianity, but the fruit of the Pauline mission, which is to say, Christians who rejected Torah, the essence of Judaism” (p. 10).

For 21st century, post-modern Christian exiles reclaiming Luke’s tour de force of magic, mystery, and power may not be useful as history. But it may be helpful as foundation myth. The Holy Spirit may represent the “Presence” of the Christ. But that Presence is not a warrior-king (see Psalm 1 and Ephesians). That Presence – that “Holy Spirit” – that followers of Jesus experience is the resurrected, reincarnated witness to the truth that Jesus taught.

The portion chosen for Ascension Day from the letter to the Ephesians seems at first to be a perfectly appropriate blessing to bestow upon the renewed community. “[May you find within yourselves] a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know [who Jesus was], so that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us . . . .”

The letter was written in the name of the Apostle Paul, not by Paul himself. The theology begins to be problematic at about verse 20. The great work of justice-compassion on God’s earth is not what matters to this writer. Instead, in this interpretation, God put his power to work in raising Jesus from the dead and seated him at God’s right hand. By the time we get to verse 22, the writer has made Jesus the head of the Church – which the real Paul never suggested. We also quickly get bogged down in ecclesiastical mysticism: “God raised [Jesus] from the dead and seated him at [God’s] right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and above every name that is named . . . and he has put all things under [Jesus’s] feet.” This is domination, not partnership, Empire, not Covenant.

There is another prayer in the collective list of readings for the end of the Easter season. In the Gospel of John, carefully cherry-picked for the last Sunday before the great collective epiphany of the Christian Pentecost, we have Jesus’s prayer for his disciples. In this prayer for the unity and safety of the band of people he is leaving behind is the testimony of that writer about who Jesus was. In the portion left out of the lectionary reading, John’s Jesus reminds God that God has given Jesus “authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom [God had] given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know [God].” The argument that John’s Jesus presents in his prayer is echoed in the later first letter (encyclical) of John from Ephesus. “. . . for this is the testimony of God that he has testified to his Son. Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts . . . And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” John’s Jesus makes it clear that it was God who sent him; that it is God’s Word – Jesus himself – who consecrates his followers and sends them into the world to bear witness to the fact that whoever has seen Jesus has seen God. Likewise, whoever believes the disciples when they tell who Jesus was will also experience eternal life because they will also know God.

For John’s early 2nd Century community, neither they nor Jesus were part of the hostile world that surrounded them. No more is the Way Jesus taught part of the often violent and dangerous world of the 21st Century. John’s metaphors of light and darkness still can illustrate the opportunity to know God and God’s rule by knowing how Jesus lived and taught and died. Jesus’s prayer for the protection and consecration of his followers extends to all who accept the invitation to follow him.

The Book of Acts is not an accurate history of early Christianity, but it is a fair representation of the intensity of the struggle to participate in Covenant rather than enabling Empire. Like those first Jewish-Christians, we would rather stand around staring at the sky hoping for intervention from outer space than be present in our world, doing the transformational work ourselves.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Commitment or Belief? Part V: Victory over Covenant – 6th Sunday of Eastertide

2009-05-13T11:47:00.003-05:00

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

“And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”

If ever there was a call to arms, it is these words, lifted out of the context of the early second Century Christian community for whom the 1st Letter of John was written. The Elves stop short of having us consider the writer’s powerful trinity of Spirit, Blood, and Water, which together provide testimony that cannot be refuted. Jesus was baptized (water), confirmed by the Holy Spirit itself, and then sacrificed (blood) in order to prove that he was the Son of God. “Whoever has the Son has life,” claims the preacher. “Whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” Belief in the resurrection of Jesus conquers the world and assures eternal life for believers. Nonbelievers are out of luck. Psalm 98 concurs: “O sing to the Lord a new song, for . . . his right hand and his holy arm have gotten him victory.” That same Spirit is so much in evidence at the end of Peter’s speech in Caesarea that he can’t withhold baptism from uncircumcised gentiles who apparently spontaneously began speaking in tongues and praising God. With the conclusion of John’s great metaphor of the vine, Jesus’s message is that his followers are to love one another. In the context of the rest of the readings, anyone who is not a follower is not part of the love.

The message is no longer about Covenant – the commitment to non-violent, distributive justice-compassion and peace. The message is Piety (belief) War (violence), and Victory: the Church as Empire.

Is this the “good news” that Christians want to announce in the Third Millennium of the Common Era?

These readings cannot be taken wholesale from the 1st and 2nd centuries into the 21st. All of them are part of the debate in the mid-second century that began to crystallize exactly what it meant to be a Christian and to live in Christian community. In fact, these readings are only a fraction of the material that was part of that debate. Nearly all of the writings of the Gnostics were kept out of what became the official canon of the new Church. Elaine Pagels has raised the question what would Christianity be like today if the Gospel of Thomas had been kept in and the Gospel of John kept out? What would Christianity – and indeed the Western World – be like today if the Gnostic point of view had been allowed to remain part of the discussion? What about other points of view that we have no clue about because the writings or the oral traditions were lost or burned at the stake?

In a sense such questions are pointless. The history of the faith is what it is. But that does not mean that ideas or beliefs or theologies from the past are equally valid today. The proof – the testimony – as the writer of John’s Encyclical said, comes through the Spirit. For that leader of a Christian community in Ephesus (which turns out to have been a hotbed of early Christianity) the litmus test of the Spirit was belief in the story of Jesus’s resurrection as saving sinners for eternal life. For 21st Century Christian exiles the litmus test for the Spirit of truth and scriptural relevancy must be distributive justice and sustainable life on Planet Earth.

In his brief study titled The Mystery of Acts, Richard I. Pervo points out that the Book of Acts cannot stand as an accurate history of early Christianity. But it does supply us with a powerful and useful myth of origins. Without Acts, Pervo says, we have nothing. I wonder if the reason might be that any other possibility was thoroughly quashed? But Acts is what we have to work with.

The Elves have decreed that never in the entire three-year course of the lectionary do we read about Peter and Cornelius in Caesarea. (Acts 10:1-33). Instead, the Elves concentrate on the portion that summarizes the story of Jesus’s baptism, life, death, and resurrection in Peter’s speech to the Gentiles at the end. Apparently Peter’s vision about the array of wildlife God has decreed he can kill and eat with impunity is only for youth in confirmation classes, where it is always carefully removed from its context. Luke has spun a 1st Century sci-fi fantasy, full of magic, visions, weird coincidences, and the power of the Holy Spirit. All of these elements combine to arrange things so that the story of Jesus will be accepted “even by Gentiles” – as Peter’s companions were astounded to discover.

Perhaps Luke created all those visions and voices to show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the story of Jesus is not just for Jews. Luke’s story opens the possibility of participating in Jesus’s Way to everyone, no matter who they are, what they eat, or what signs they may carve into (or off of) their bodies. Contrary to the direction the rest of the readings would have us go, the message is inclusive, not exclusive.

The writer of John’s Gospel is very clear about who is inside and who is outside the beloved community. In 14:23-24, John’s Jesus spells it out: “those who love me will heed what I tell them . . . those who don’t love me won’t follow my instructions.” In today’s portion, John’s Jesus boils all of his instructions down to one: “Love one another just as I loved you.” Then he gets specific about what love means: “No one can love to a greater extent than to give up life for friends.” Here is the radical abandonment of self-interest that points back to the historical Jesus, although Jesus himself took the admonition to its ultimatum: “Love your enemies.”

Nevertheless, John’s Jesus is still in the midst of his metaphor about being the trunk of the grapevine, to which his followers are firmly attached, thanks to some careful pruning and cultivating by God. Jesus says, “You didn’t choose me; I chose you. And I delegated you to go out and produce fruit. And your fruit will last because my Father will provide you with whatever you request in my name.” This magical language reflects Luke’s fantastic illustrations in Acts of how the Spirit works to bring the possibility of participation in the Way to everyone.

But the active verb in Jesus’s declaration is “delegated.” In John Dominic Crossan’s words, that delegation is the reason why John the Baptist’s program died with him. “The Baptizer had a monopoly,” Crossan says, “Jesus had a franchise.” Everyone who signs onto Jesus’s program is equally equipped to participate in Covenant: the non-violent justice-compassion of the realm of God. Mark’s Jesus sent the followers out with no bag, no staff, no money – a clear demonstration of the expectation of acceptance by others, and non-violence toward the world they would encounter. John’s Jesus says that God will provide whatever we request in the service of that participation. Perhaps that was a reassurance to Jewish Christians in John’s much later, less-than-friendly community that they had nothing to fear when doing God’s work.

“God’s work” is not the work of Church as Empire, conquering the world in the name of Jesus, saving souls from Hell in the next life while contributing to the Hell of injustice in this life. A parable that appears only in Matthew’s Gospel speaks to this point:

A master decides to settle accounts, and discovers his head Slave – let’s call him a Steward – owes him a huge amount of money. But instead of selling the Steward to recover the money, or throwing him into jail until he can repay it, the Master forgives the debt. The Steward then goes out and shakes down one of his fellow slaves who owes him a fraction of the amount the Master has just forgiven him for. Needless to say, the slave’s friends are outraged, and report this to the Master. When the Master hears about this, he throws the Steward into jail until he can repay the debt in full.

Matthew 18:23-34 (based on The Five Gospels translation).

In God’s realm, justice is radically distributive. As Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, bread for the day is provided, and rain falls on every being who needs it, whether they participate in just systems or not. But that state of grace cannot be compromised without undesirable consequences.

Unlike the lilies and grasses of the fields, or the animals and birds, humanity can choose whether or not to participate in creating a world of non-violent, distributive justice-compassion and peace. During this Easter season of revisiting and renewing the faith, the body of Christ must choose Covenant over Empire. That is the only Victory that brings peace.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Commitment or Belief? Part IV: In Vino, Veritas – Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year B

2009-05-06T10:21:00.003-05:00

Acts 8:26-40; Psalm 22:25-31; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

Introduction to the Series

Believing they have thoroughly trounced the old religion, the Elves now turn to proving that the new religion will be known “to the ends of the earth.”

Jesus is Lord in Christian minds, so when the writer of Psalm 22 says that “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord,” the assumption is that all the ends of the earth shall turn to Jesus for salvation from sin. Sure enough the strange story of the Apostle Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch illustrates and confirms the Psalm’s cherry-picked message. For Luke’s Greek and Roman listeners, “Ethiopia” was the exotic, foreign land at the ends of the earth. The Eunuch was an important official, who had come to Jerusalem to explore the Jewish religion, but ended up being converted to the new Way. Magic and mystery abound as Philip materializes suddenly among the Eunuch’s entourage, just when the Eunuch becomes puzzled over the meaning of Isaiah’s poetry about the suffering servant, Israel. Philip explains that Jesus is the suffering servant, and the Eunuch insists on being baptized. When they come up from the baptismal waters, Philip disappears into thin air. Meanwhile, the writer of John’s Gospel has completely appropriated the metaphor of the grapevine from representing the people of Israel to representing Jesus. John’s Jesus calls himself “the authentic vine,” in the Jesus Seminar translation (The Five Gospels, p. 453), and “my Father [God] does the cultivating.” The people of Israel are cut off. Finally, the 1st encyclical of John declares that God is Love, and because of that love, sent his Son Jesus as an “atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

From the point of view of conventional piety, the Psalm, the story from Acts, and Jesus’s discourse about the vine are all about purification and repentance. The point is unmistakable: Repent (be sorry for) all the bad things you have done and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior. God loved you so much that he was willing to sacrifice his own son to make up for all the evil things you have done. Because of Jesus’s death and resurrection, you are now saved from Hell for all time. John’s Jesus declares, “If you stay attached to me [like the canes of the grapevine are attached to the trunk] and my words lodge in you, ask whatever you want and it will happen to you.” Pray for the parking space in front of the grocery store. Pray for a winning lottery ticket. Pray to get the job that will save your mortgage payment. Pray that your Mother will not die from ovarian cancer. Pray that your son will not wreck his motorcycle. Pray for whatever you want in Jesus’s name, and you will get it. New shoes, money in the bank, revenge. This is not transformational, distributive justice-compassion. This is self-centered superstition in the immortal spirit of Walt Disney: “Bibbity bobbity boo!” It is part and parcel with the powers and principalities of Empire: Piety, War, Victory – and uneasy, uncertain, insecure “peace.”

All is not lost, however. From the point of view of a 21st Century Covenant Christianity, four themes are woven throughout these readings: sacrifice as atonement; judgment as consequence; inclusive love, and justice. But before we get to the 21st century, the point of view of the 1st and 2nd century communities that produced these readings must be acknowledged. We cannot know precisely what these stories meant to Luke, the writer of the gospel of John, and the writer of the 1st encyclical attributed to a leader named John. We cannot know how these stories about Philip and Jesus were received by the communities for whom they were written. What we can do is follow the metaphor and prune away the extraneous twigs that obscure the message we know Jesus actually intended to convey: radical abandonment of self-interest, radical inclusiveness, and deliverance from injustice in this life.

Sacrifice

Barrels of ink have been expended by scholars, preachers, bloggers, and other writers in the attempt to separate the idea of sacrifice as atonement from sacrifice as substitution. “God” did not sacrifice Jesus as means of making restitution or payment for sin, nor as a substitution for sinners who deserve to die. Somehow that idea gets resuscitated every year along with the body and blood of Jesus. Let’s take one of those pruned branches from the vine, make a sharp stick out of it, and pound it through the heart of that heresy. “Atonement” does not mean “restitution.” The old Sunday School convention of dividing the word into three syllables actually clarifies the meaning: “At-one-ment” or “reconciliation.” Ritual sacrifice in ancient times served the purpose of reconciling people with one another, with their leaders, and with their gods. That Jesus’s death came to represent a reconciliation between humanity and divinity, or between the realm of distributive justice-compassion and the normalcy of human civilization, we owe to the brilliant talent of the Apostle Paul. Over 1,000 years later, St. Anselm thoroughly misunderstood Paul’s Pharisaic Judaism, and Western civilization is still paying the price.

Judgment

In the Scholar’s Version (The Five Gospels, p. 453) John’s Jesus spends a lot of time explaining the metaphor of the grapevine, and how in order for the vine to produce good useful grapes, the extraneous branches must be pruned back to allow for new or more abundant growth. The branches that do not bear fruit are thrown into the fire. That metaphor likely resonated with late 1st Century and early 2nd Century vineyard owners and workers. It may make sense to gardeners and orchard managers in the 21st Century. But pruning plants to encourage better growth, and burning the old cut-off branches that no longer produce has nothing to do with punishing sin (or eliminating Judaism), and everything to do with participation with God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion. John’s Jesus says, “. . . a cane can’t bear fruit in and of itself if it is detached from the trunk. I am the trunk, you are the canes. Those who stay attached to me – and I to them – produce a lot of fruit.” In other words, listen to what I have taught about how to live life in God’s realm. If you don’t, you won’t be able to participate.

That does not mean we will not be allowed to participate. We have the right and the ability to choose whether or not to participate in Covenant with the distributive justice that is the natural order of the physical Universe. As soon as we stop participating, the balance is disrupted. If I invest my money in Peabody Coal, and the mountain top is removed, the coal slurry is dumped into the stream, and my groundwater is compromised, the fact that I subsequently die from liver cancer is not punishment. That is the consequence of not participating in the Covenant.

Inclusive love

Probably the earliest form of enlightenment that occurred in my life was when as a child I learned the nursery school song: “Praise him, praise him, all ye little children; God is Love, God is Love.” At some point very early on I experienced a revelation when I turned the words around and got a taste of personal non-theism: “Love is God.” The excerpt from the first letter of John says it all: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” No one is excluded. The preacher says later, “Those who say ‘I love God’ and hate their brothers or sisters are liars.” Nothing could be more clear.

Justice

The concept that grounds the questions that have defined these commentaries is the distinction of the nature of justice as retributive or distributive. Justice in the Empire is retributive justice: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; revenge; payback; punishment. Justice in God’s Realm is distributive: radical fairness, radical abandonment of self-interest; a radical entitlement to redeeming grace.

Distributive justice is also covenantal, which implies a mutuality in relationship. John’s Jesus makes this point when he says, “I loved you in the same way the Father loved me. Live in my love. If you observe my instructions, you will live in my love, just as I have observed my Father’s instructions and live in his love.” When the covenant is broken, there are consequences. “Those who don’t remain attached to me are thrown away like dead canes; they are collected, tossed into the fire, and burned. If you stay attached to me and my words lodge in you, ask whatever you want and it will happen to you.” This is not punishment and reward. This is the ultimate outcome of maintaining a sustainable life in the realm of distributive justice-compassion. Will I get whatever I want? If all I want is the same abundant life that the lilies of the field and the birds of the air have, then yes. If I want to be master of the Universe, no.

Psalm 22 is a plea for deliverance from suffering and hostility. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Here is the truth about getting everything we want. The psalmist points out that God has not been listening. His ancestors trusted God, and God delivered them. What am I? he sobs, chopped liver? A Worm? “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.” The whole Psalm is a cry for deliverance from injustice in this life. Halfway through the Psalm we learn that the petitioner has indeed achieved that deliverance, and he promises “in the midst of the congregation” that he will praise God. Everyone – all the ends of the earth – can participate with this same God and “proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.” And what has God done? God has accepted our participation in restoring distributive justice-compassion to human life. Now “the poor shall eat and be satisfied.” John’s Jesus reminds us that the integrity of creation consists of this: the great quantity of fruit that is produced whenever anyone joins the program.

In vino, veritas.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Commitment or Belief? Part III: Fair Use. 4th Sunday in Eastertide, Year B

2009-04-29T11:47:00.001-05:00

Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

Introduction to the series

In all three years of the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), the Fourth Sunday of Easter focuses on Jesus as the Good Shepherd. The 23rd Psalm is read, along with portions of John 10. In Year A, the selection is 10:1-10; in Year B, the middle part is used (10:11-18). The nasty comments attributed to “the Jews” in verses 19-21 are skipped, and then in Year C, John’s Jesus again refers to himself as the shepherd who knows and is known by his own sheep.

When any portion of the Bible is pulled out of its context, the meaning is distorted and ultimately lost. Christian worship leaders must be clear that John’s Gospel is not in and of itself anti-Semitic. That description is an anachronism – an interpretation that has been read back into the writing since it was first circulated outside the early 2nd Century Jewish community for which it was written. The community may have been thrown out of its local synagogue because of their insistence that Jesus was the long-looked-for Messiah. Needless to say, the writer would have had some pointed words about the ones who rejected the whole idea. Over time, however, the disagreement between members of a community has been escalated to hatred for an entire population. The reason the “Jews,” do not believe is because, according to John’s Jesus, they “do not belong to my sheep.” In the penultimate dogmatic assertion (in both the King James and the New Revised Standard Version), John’s Jesus says, “The Father [God] and I are one.” Clearly, if Jesus is God, and the Jews do not belong to Jesus, they do not belong to God either.

The problem – as always with the RCL – is that portions of John’s Gospel are routinely associated with other carefully selected portions from Acts, the Psalms, and New Testament letters that all too often add up to evidence against “the Jews” as Christ killers, sinners, and rejects from God’s protection.

In Acts 4:5-12, the aftermath of Peter’s healing of a lame beggar continues, and Peter uses the occasion to fulminate against the Jews. Luke – who created the stories found in Acts – leaves no doubt exactly who is to blame for Jesus’s death, and exactly who continues to disbelieve in the healing power of Jesus’s name: “the people, the priests, the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees. . . their rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in Jerusalem with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family.” This time Peter answers the challenge by reminding the assembled Council that “this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified.” He then does his own cherry-picking and anachronistic interpretation from Psalm 118: “the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.” The overthrow of the original people of God by the people of Christ is clear.

The first encyclical to Christian communities outside of Jerusalem attributed to a leader named John is not on its face anti-Semitic. However, read along with the Acts passage, who comes to mind when unwary listeners hear, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” Or who could doubt the veracity of God’s new commandment: “that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he (Jesus) has commanded us.” So much for the Law brought down from Mt. Sinai by Moses. “All who obey his [God’s/Jesus’s] commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us: by the Spirit that he has given us.”

The 23rd Psalm has no chance of retaining its original meaning after we hear John’s Jesus say, “I am the good shepherd.” Judaism – its history, tradition, and status as God’s own people – has been obliterated.

If the purpose of this recommended series of readings is to “prove” who Jesus was, the Elves have spectacularly failed to do so. We can be certain that Jesus actually did say, “Love your enemies.” He also may well have said, “Pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). But when the readings for Eastertide are colored by the fierce confrontation between Peter and the Jewish Temple authorities (as interpreted by an early 2nd Century Greek voice), there is neither love nor reconciling prayer in evidence in any of these readings for anyone other than those who “believe” the story. Not only have the original writers’ works been divorced from their contexts. Along with that unfair use lie nearly 2,000 years of libel against the Jewish people. Indeed, because Jesus was a Jew, the libel is against Jesus himself

21st Century exiles from orthodoxy should consider the Psalm, the Gospel, and the Letter in the context of what we know Jesus’s actual message was. Jesus’s participation with people was radically inclusive. Throughout all the Gospels, Jesus is constantly criticized and harassed for eating with “tax collectors and sinners.” His followers included marginalized women, disempowered men, and impoverished families; recovered demoniacs, and people suffering from diseases and physical disabilities that left them beyond hope; desperate revolutionaries, and collaborators with the very systems that oppressed them all. Jesus pointed always away from himself and toward the discovery within and among his followers of the true Kingdom of God: a realm where distributive justice-compassion holds sway. His life and death were unmistakable illustrations of a radical abandonment of self-interest.

That radical abandonment of self interest and the accompanying necessary radical inclusiveness is actually reflected in John’s Gospel. John’s Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd. I know my sheep and my sheep know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father: So I give my life for my sheep. . . . This is the reason my Father loves me: I am giving up my life so I can take it back again. No one can take it away from me; I give it up freely. It’s my right to give it up, my right to take it back again. I have been charged with this responsibility by my Father” (The Five Gospels translation, p. 434).

The NRSV uses the word “power” instead of “right.” And claiming that right is indeed empowering. We have the right and the power to join the great work of justice-compassion or not. No one can compel us one way or the other. This power is both a birthright and a responsibility. Paradoxically, as Jesus’s life and death taught, to freely give up one’s life means to claim it irrevocably as one’s own.

The first encyclical from a Christian leader called “John” was a call to new subscribers to Jesus’s Way to join the great work. “We know love by this: that [Jesus] laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

Finally, we return to our Jewish roots for the closing hymn that assures everyone that when the radical abandonment of self-interest in the service of distributive justice leads anyone into the valley of death, there is nothing to fear. The table is set, the cup is poured out, we are chosen, anointed, and ordained.

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Commitment or Belief? Part II: Sin and Salvation

2009-04-22T14:32:00.001-05:00

Introduction to the Series

Third Sunday of Easter, Year B
Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48

The anti-Semitism in these readings cannot be glossed over by insisting that anti-Semitism was not the original intent of the story-teller who wrote Luke/Acts. His intent to replace Judaism with the new belief in the resurrected Messiah “beginning in Jerusalem” is clear. Whether that intent was malicious may be debatable. What is not debatable is that the institutional Church took the anti-Jewish path almost from the beginning. Post-modern, post-Holocaust Christians do not read anti-Semitism into these selections for the 3rd Sunday in Eastertide. It is there for anyone to see. After Peter and John heal a man “lame from birth” with merely a look into his eyes, the people who had seen this were not surprisingly fascinated and astonished at the miracle. But when Peter sees their reaction, he essentially says, “What you Jesus-killers lookin’ at? If you want any relief from what’s comin’ you better change your ways so God will send Jesus to save you from Hell.”

As with last week’s Psalm, in the context of the Lectionary readings, Psalm 4 is easily corrupted. “How long, you people, shall my honor suffer shame?” We may ask, Which people? Whose honor? The Psalm goes on: “But know that the Lord has set apart the faithful for himself.” Christians proclaim that Jesus is Lord. The faithful – the believers in the story – have been set apart for him. The portion plucked from 1 John 3:2 confirms the inevitable conclusion: “Beloved we are God’s children now.” The subtext is, “the Jews are not.”

The readings end with Luke 24:36b-48. Here the context of the Gospel story is after the appearance to Cleopas (and perhaps his wife) on the Emmaus Road. In Luke’s version, Jesus materializes among “the eleven and their companions” [24:33b] and says, “Peace be with you!” They think they are seeing a ghost. But any hint that these appearance stories were either ghost stories or normal mystical experiences was anathema to the fledgling Christian movement of the early-to-mid 2nd Century – which is when Luke likely wrote his two-part series. So Luke’s Jesus invites them to look, touch, feel, and see that “a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Then he demands food and eats a piece of broiled fish “in their presence.” What more confirmation would be needed of the factual truth that Jesus came back to life after being seriously dead for three days? “You are witnesses of these things,” Luke declares.

For 21st Century Christian exiles, who prefer to treat the resurrection of Jesus as metaphor, there are perhaps three themes that emerge from the readings for this day. The first two themes are found in Luke and Acts: (1) repentance and forgiveness of sins are to be proclaimed in Jesus’s name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:47). (2) “Repent therefore and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out” (Acts 3:19). The third theme may be understood as a kind of corollary to the first two: “Everyone who does what is right is righteous” (1 John 3:7).

What is missing from most discussions about “sin and salvation” is justice. If “justice” is retributive – getting even, payback, punishment – then “sin” is easily understood to be breaking the rules. “Salvation” then means avoiding punishment, being “saved” from the consequences of breaking the rules. The ultimate rules, of course, are “God’s rules.” To get right with God and one’s community, “repentance” – turning away from the bad and turning back to the good – is required.

At first these themes read like standard-issue imperial piety. So long as the people are concerned with being nice, exercising the “option” for preferential treatment of the poor, and following the rules, there is no threat to imperial systems that institutionalize injustice. All is well, victory is assured, peace is at hand. But did any of the Gospel writers have Jesus say “follow the rules”? Did Jesus give up his life so that people would be nice to each other, or claim tax deductions for donations to Habitat for Humanity?

So long as Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection are confined to the context wherein sin and salvation are experienced as retributive cause and effect, the radicality of God’s distributive justice-compassion will continue to be missed. We will persist in reliance upon supernatural intervention instead of living in conscious partnership with a kenotic god whose presence is justice and life but whose absence is injustice and death. Covenant relationship with the inherent radical fairness of the Universe will be beyond our reach. The normalcy of imperial theological violence (piety, war, victory) will continue to hold sway.

And what of Psalm 4, so badly misinterpreted in the context of the Elves’ insistence on dogma in these days after Easter? This Psalm is attributed to the great king David. It was apparently intended for use as part of a liturgy – perhaps a liturgy of prayer for deliverance from enemies who have been attacking the Psalmist. He calls on God (his “Lord”), as though God were indeed a ruler that needs to be reminded of past boons granted. But then the focus shifts to the listeners or other participants in the liturgy. The Psalmist demands, “how long will you love vain words and seek after lies?” He reminds the people that God keeps those who are faithful, and hears when the Psalmist calls. The listeners are advised to think about this, and to offer sacrifices that will put them in right relationship with God. The singer acknowledges that there are many who demand to see some evidence from God that God will indeed deliver them from their enemies. But the Psalmist is certain that his Lord will do precisely that, and he will be able to sleep in peace because God alone keeps him safe.

This Psalm talks about daily dangers encountered by any ancient monarch; it also might be construed to be a call to God to save the singer from injustice. “How long . . . shall my honor suffer shame?” he asks. This is where the Psalm may be applicable, both to 1st or 2nd-Century Christians surrounded by hostile Romans, worried about maintaining control over people who have strong ideas about where their loyalty lies; and Jews, unhappy with folks appropriating and then redefining their ancient traditions. For 21st Century exiles, caught up in the struggle for distributive justice and peace, the Psalm reminds us that the nature of the Universe is grace and peace for those who walk in those ways. Even in hard times, those who are in partnership with the Great Work of distributive justice-compassion find joy: “You have put gladness in my heart more than when their grain and wine abound,” sings the liturgist.

Behind the certainty about forgiveness of sins in Luke/Acts is the Apostle Paul’s profound realization of the meaning of grace. Paul was a devout Pharisaic Jew, well-versed in the Psalms, and the writings of the prophets from which the distributive justice of God pours out for all who do God’s justice. Paul took the concept to the next level. Everyone who participates is liberated from the unjust systems of Empire, whether we live or die. Nothing can separate us from the love of God as experienced in the life and teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus. “Everyone who does what is right is righteous,” preaches the writer of the first encyclical letter of John. He could have said, “Everyone who does what is just is justified; everyone who does the work of justice-compassion is a child of God.”

Consensus is building among Jesus Seminar scholars that all four of the gospels are blueprints for a radical transformation of the way society should work. Whether they are birth stories, miracle stories, death stories, or resurrection stories, all of the gospels are illustrations – parables, as Marcus Borg puts it – of how to subvert the normalcy of civilization. Even good ol’ Luke, the ultimate collaborator with the powers that be, calls for repentance and forgiveness to be proclaimed from the City the Romans destroyed, to all nations under the Roman Emperor, in the name of the one the Romans crucified.

What a cosmic joke. Under cover of a preposterous story of bodily returning to life after death, “their sound is gone out unto all lands and their words unto the end of the world.” Romans 10:18. We don’t need to claim to have seen the dead man walking in order to strike terror into the hearts of oppressors. Love your enemies; radically abandon self-interest; sign onto the great work of restoring God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion: That is what raises the dead.

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Commitment or Belief? Part I: No Doubt (Second Sunday of Easter, Year B)

2009-04-14T11:25:00.002-05:00

Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31

Introduction to Eastertide Commentaries

The Revised Common Lectionary readings for the Sundays of Eastertide establish the new Christian religion as the replacement for the old Jewish tradition. Easter has replaced Passover as the definitive action that God has taken in the world. In place of liberation from injustice, as commemorated in the former Passover celebration, God’s action in physically raising Jesus from the dead has delivered from death those who believe the story. At the end of the 50 days following the original Passover, God bestowed the great gift of the Law upon the Jewish people (Pentecost). At the end of 50 days following Easter (the new Passover) Jesus has ascended into heaven and the Holy Spirit has been bestowed upon believers as the replacement for Jewish law (the Christian Pentecost).

The next six Sundays comprise a study of the 1st Letter of John nearly in its entirety. Along with 1 John, the Elves concentrate on the Gospel of John with the exception of the third Sunday, when Luke’s Gospel is used – perhaps because a confirmation of Jesus’s appearance to all the disciples was deemed necessary. Supporting these readings are specific short vignettes from the Acts of the Apostles, and – as a reminder perhaps of the supercession of Jewish tradition – a Psalm is offered.

These comments are not meant to negate the importance of the Christian message. Rather, the purpose is three-fold: 1) to blast away at the layers of rubble that have obscured that message almost from the beginning; 2) to shine a light into the darkness of anti-Semitism that has cloaked Christianity with a hatred and hubris that had no place in Jesus’s original teachings and is even more inappropriate now; and 3) to discern whether there is meaning in these writings that matters to post-modern, 21st Century exiles from Christian orthodoxy.

No Doubt: Second Sunday in Eastertide

Like good ol’ Thomas the Twin, the skeptical, scientific world of the 21st Century demands more than declarations or assertions if something is to be accepted as truth.

Among the fights engaged in among early Christians was whether Jesus’s resurrection was spiritual and metaphorical or physical and literal. In order to distinguish themselves from the Greeks, who believed that the soul lived on while the body did not, and from the Jews, who were in their own heated theological debate about the raising of the dead from Sheol to God’s realm, by the end of the First Century, Christian leadership had declared that Jesus had physically and graphically died, and had physically returned to life. This religious tour de force at once flies in the face of reason (for 1st Century as well as 21st Century minds); defies popular philosophical debates; and provides boundless hope for humanity, as the greatest fear is defeated and immortality is within its grasp. “Oh Death Where is thy sting?” Handel’s Messiah.

This strategy required eye witnesses, however, which were difficult to find until the Gospels were written in the names of Jesus’s disciples. By the time the first Gospel was written down only 30 or 40 years had passed since Jesus’s death, so the idea was not too far-fetched. Unfortunately, as we have seen, Mark’s original gospel ends with Mary and the women running away from the empty tomb, and telling no one what they had discovered. There is no appearance story. The “Longer Ending of Mark” was not tacked on until at least a Century later. By the time the Gospels of Matthew, Luke/Acts, and John were written in the 90s to mid-Second Century, the chances of the authors actually being the original disciples of Jesus were slim to none.

Scholarship is not in agreement about when the first letter of “John” may have been written. Burton L. Mack proposes that this and similar “letters” were included in the early canon for two reasons. One way to keep some administrative order among the various Christian communities was through “encyclical” letters, which were written by the leadership (“bishops”). Writing in the name of one of the original disciples assured its acceptance by second-century Christian groups. The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (HarperCollins, 1993, pp. 230ff). The reason for this particular encyclical may have been a controversy between the writer’s community and Gnostics or other skeptics. “John” declares “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands . . . we declare to you . . . so that you also may have fellowship with us.” The Elves obligingly pair this reading with the well-known story of “doubting Thomas,” which is found only in the gospel of John. The implication that the Gospel and letter writers were the same “beloved disciple” of Jesus has been convincing to uninformed minds from the 2nd century onward.

John’s Gospel story of Jesus’s appearance to the disciples after a couple of them had met him on the road to Emmaus is actually a masterpiece of political spin. The character “Thomas” may have been a stand-in for Gnostics who scoffed at the whole notion of a physical resuscitation of a corpse. Conveniently, he was not in attendance the first time Jesus appeared to “the twelve.” He receives his own personal graphic demonstration, which would remove any doubt that might still linger in the minds of skeptics as to the physical reality of Jesus’s death and resurrection. But then John’s Jesus says that those who believe without proof are the ones who are “blessed.” That “blessing,” according to the Jesus Seminar scholars, is the ability to “have insight, to perceive the reality behind appearances” The Five Gospels, p. 467. With a brilliant sleight of hand, the writer of John’s Gospel fulfills the demand by the early church leadership for acceptance of the physical reality of Jesus’s resurrection, and at the same time neatly reduces it to secondary importance. One might suspect that if the Gospel had not been written in John’s name, it may not have been included in the canon. Elaine Pagels has wondered what Christianity would have looked like if it had been based on the Gospel of Thomas: a purported eye-witness, discredited by the writer of John’s Gospel (another purported eye-witness), who won the lottery.

The question for today is, “so what?” Is there any meaning or significance to these readings for 21st Century exiles – and to others who might be attracted to Jesus’s particular invitation to participate in the “kingdom of God”?

The framework for these commentaries has been the following:

1) What is the nature of God? Violent or non-violent?
2) What is the nature of Jesus’ message? Inclusive or exclusive?
3) What is faith? Literal belief, or commitment to the great work of justice-compassion?
4) What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice?

These questions address what might be seen as apocalyptic times for humanity on Planet Earth. The 21st Century – much like the First Century – finds human social structures embroiled in political, social, spiritual, and theological issues that demand serious consideration of the answers to those questions. For this Easter Season in Year B the focus is on questions 3 and 4: Does the Christian faith depend upon the suspension of disbelief in the resuscitation of a corpse, or upon commitment to the great work of distributive justice-compassion, for which Christians proclaim Jesus gave his life? Is the Christian faith concerned with salvation from hell in the next life, or liberation from injustice in this life?

The Gospel of John is the Gospel of metaphor. Very little of what the writer reports can be traced back to the historical Jesus. Certainly the magical appearances and disappearances of Jesus through locked doors cannot be taken as serious factual happening by anyone. The writer of the gospel himself makes that clear, as I have argued. However, that does not rob the message of its meaning. In 20:22, John’s Jesus says, “Here’s some Holy Spirit. Take it. If you forgive anyone their sins, they are forgiven; if you do not release them from their sins, they are not released.” Jesus has offered the power to forgive sins to anyone who chooses to join his program – or, to use traditional words, to anyone who accepts the way of the cross and follows him. For 21st Century citizens of a global society, that means we have the power to choose whether to act with compassion and forgiveness, or with judgment and revenge. As these commentaries have consistently pointed out, compassion and forgiveness are what constitutes the Covenant with a nonviolent, kenotic god. Judgment and revenge constitute the theology of Empire. Which will 3rd Millennium Christians choose?

The words from the first encyclical letter of John for this day are some of the most beloved of the Christian tradition: “. . . God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. . . if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another . . . if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” These words are an affirmation of non-violent Covenant over the siren song of Empire’s violent retributive systems, and we have the power to forgive and rescue whomever gets caught up in those systems.

For an illustration of the fellowship of those who choose to “walk in the light,” the Elves have cherry-picked from Luke’s second block-buster novel, The Acts of the Apostles. “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common” 4:32-35. Luke proposes the radical possibility of a world based on fairness instead of greed, and the psalmist agrees. “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard . . . the dew of Hermon [the highest mountain], which falls on the mountains of Zion.”

Those pesky Jews seem to have gotten the point all along.

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Power in the Blood: Easter Sunday Year B

2009-04-09T10:28:00.002-05:00

Acts 10:34-43; Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 118:14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Mark 16:1-8

Orthodox Christian liturgy begins every Easter Day with Peter’s speech, recounting the story of God’s action in the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of the savior, Jesus Christ, beginning with John the Baptist. The story of God’s liberation of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt has been superceded. Psalm 118 has been edited to remove references to the house of Aaron, appropriating the celebration of Israel’s deliverance from enemies to the declaration of the deliverance of the risen Christ from death. Worse, “the stone that the builders rejected” has become metaphor for the Messiah that Jews declined to accept. That stone has become the “chief cornerstone” for the new religion, not the symbol for the humble servant who seeks entrance into God’s Temple.

For Christians who follow the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B’s readings for Easter cherry-pick the words of Isaiah – the great prophet of the exiled Jewish people – to proclaim the great feast on the mountain, celebrating “the Lord for whom we have waited.” That “Lord,” we are to understand, is not the liberating God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That “Lord” is Jesus. Paul’s argument with the community in Corinth has also been taken out of its context in order to serve the dogma that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” Careless readers might think that means Jesus was predestined by God to die as retribution for our wrongdoing, as foreseen by ancient prophecy.

Perhaps because it is Year B – “the Year of Mark” – the Elves offer the bizarre original ending of Mark’s Gospel. Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s mother, and Salome encounter a young man in a white robe perched inside Jesus’s borrowed tomb. He says, “Don’t be scared. Jesus was raised and isn’t here. Go tell Rocky and the others that he will meet everybody back in Galilee.” The terrified women bolt out of there as fast as possible and “they didn’t breathe a word of it to anyone . . .” Mark’s obsession with secrecy seems counterproductive. Inquiring minds might want to know how anybody ever found out about it. But, we have John 20:1-18, which is read every year, to counteract any ambiguity.

The story of Jesus’s life and death and resurrection has been used to prove that God loves us, even when we don’t love ourselves. God forgives us because Jesus took the punishment we deserved. We are guilty from the beginning of causing Jesus’s crucifixion. But because God loved the world enough to crucify his own son instead of us, we are forgiven, and accepted into heaven in the next life. We feel humbled, yet confident, secure in the certainty of our own individual salvation from sin and death.

The story of Jesus’s death and resurrection carries far more power than that.

Start with the Apostle Paul, whose message is lost if all we pay attention to is the snippet we are allowed to consider on this day. Paul’s message is founded on four principles: 1) sin lives in the law; 2) Christ crucified; 3) Christ resurrected; and 4) grace.

When Paul talks about “sin,” he’s not talking about petty trespass. The “sin that lies dead apart from the law” (Romans 7:8b) is much deeper than individual wrongdoing. Paul is talking about what Crossan and Borg call “the normalcy of civilization.” Whenever and wherever humanity organizes itself into a civilization, rules and regulations are developed. The result is personal, social, and political systems that by their very nature lead to injustice. That is the sin that arises from the law. When Paul talks about “Christ crucified,” – or in this specific case, “Christ died for our sins” – he is talking about Jesus’s willingness to give up his life for the principles he taught. Those principles are radical fairness, radical inclusiveness, and the radical abandonment of self-interest.

When Paul talks about “Christ resurrected” – or in the snippet for today, “he was raised on the third day” – he is talking about transformation. This transformation begins when the individual takes on the work begun by Jesus of restoring God’s justice to the world – although, Paul says, “it was not I but the grace of God that is with me.” 1 Cor. 15:10b. This “grace” is the free gift of the presence of God without requirement. “There is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28. By the grace of God, then, in partnership with anyone willing to sign onto the work, the world itself is transformed. God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion – the “kingdom of God” – is established, here, now.

The Jews were not the first nor the only people to realize that their survival depends on justice. The argument for millennia has been whether justice that supports life is retributive (payback) or distributive (fairness); the theology of Empire (piety, war, victory) versus the theology of Covenant (non-violence, justice-compassion, peace). Retributive justice systems are the hallmark of imperial power. But along with retributive justice come other social systems. We are born into the normalcy of civilizations that develop means of controlling individual behavior ostensibly for the common good, but which instead set traps and create victims: the poor, the elderly, the sick, the outsider, the marginalized, the disenfranchised for whatever reason. Under such conditions, most humans are happy to give up their freedom to any regime that promises salvation, whether it is liberation from injustice in this life, or deliverance from hell in the next. As many victims of these systems have learned, revenge is not enough to restore wholeness.

Neither the ancient world nor the globalized society of the post-modern 21st Century has truly grasped the meaning of “love your enemies” – or, in the language developed throughout these commentaries: Kenosis – “the radical abandonment of self-interest.” The practice of kenotic love is embodied most clearly for Christians in Jesus, yet is perhaps not so rare as we might think: The Amish Community’s response to the massacre of its children; the refusal of the Christian Peacemaker Teams to testify against their captors in Iraq; the Berrigan brothers and the Plowshares actions against the Viet Nam War; Freedom Riders; Dorothy Day; the Union movement of the 1930s; the witnesses who stood against Senator Joseph McCarthy; the French Resistance; Elizabeth Cady Staunton; Nat Turner. . . The Cloud of Witnesses that signed onto Jesus’s Way is huge, mostly anonymous, and not exclusive to Christians.

The Easter season is permeated with ancient symbolism that still raises the short hairs on the back of our necks. It is neither through accident nor God’s intervention that the story of Jesus’s execution and resurrection became entwined with the Jewish Passover story of God’s action in the liberation of the Jewish people. The blood of the lambs was smeared around the doorways of the Hebrew people so that God’s Angel of Death would passover those places and descend on the houses of the oppressors. In John’s Gospel, Jesus was executed at the same time that the Passover lambs were being slaughtered. Blood poured out on ancient altars as an offering was a symbol of profound reconciliation between the failure of human systems, and the perfection of God’s realm of justice-compassion. G.F. Handel – a Jew – combined that archetype with words from Revelation 5:12: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and has redeemed us to God by his blood, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.” Messiah, Chorus 50a.

There is still power in the blood. The power lies in the willingness to give up the well-being assured by imperial systems and act to overturn them. Jesus died doing that. So did Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Raoul Wallenberg. The blood of others will also be required before the kingdom is accomplished. That is not a prophecy of violent end-times that can only be escaped by those who believe in the Rapture. It is acknowledgment of the kind of commitment and risk that results in Isaiah’s Banquet on the Mountain.

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Journey’s End: Palm/Passion Sunday, Year B

2009-04-02T10:45:00.002-05:00

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Mark 11:1-11; Mark 14:1-15:47

“Whenever possible, the whole passion narrative should be read.” Revised Common Lectionary (Abingdon Press, 1992) p. 45.

Unfortunately, because of the structure of the Christian liturgical year, the meaning of Mark’s metaphor of Jesus’s journey from baptism in Galilee to death in Jerusalem has been lost. Instead, the Elves have had us skipping through the weeks since Epiphany picking a healing here, an exorcism there, emphasizing the Christian belief that Jesus knew in advance he would die to save people from sin, and would rise again to take his place on the right hand of God. From the last Sunday in Lent through seven weeks of Easter to Christian Pentecost, the orthodox detour from Jesus’s Way continues through Luke and John. We will not get back to it until the end of May.

Traditional church services begin Palm/Passion Sunday with the re-enactment of Jesus’s procession into Jerusalem. Usually it is described as “triumphant,” claiming Jesus’s coming “victory” over death and the powers of evil. By the end of the normal liturgy, however, the “triumph” is forgotten, and the sorrow and guilt begins. Or rather, it is hinted at. We already know there is a happy ending, so why dwell on the negative? With luck, the weather will be warm and spring-like. We can go directly from fighting over who gets the biggest palm frond to fighting over who has the biggest chocolate rabbit without worrying very much about what happened in the meantime.

Because we have ignored the progression of Jesus’s journey, we have missed the controversies over fasting, what is proper behavior on the Sabbath, and the charge of consortium with the Devil; the parables describing the kingdom of God (the Sower, the Lamp, the Mustard Seed); the death of John the Baptist; feeding the five thousand; miracles such as walking on water; healings that restore hearing and at least two instances of restoring sight to the blind; and encounters with rich young rulers who also do not get the point.

We have arrived at the Jerusalem parade with no clue that it was a public demonstration of the difference between God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, and the Roman Empire – the parousia of the Emperor’s representative, Pontius Pilate, on the other side of town. We then by-pass Jesus’s protest in the Temple, the parable of the greedy tenants, the question about paying taxes, the coming apocalypse, and the lessons of the fig tree.

Without that background, we cannot possibly know which parade we will find ourselves participating in – the domination procession (Empire), or the collective justice procession (Covenant) (see, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week (Harper SanFrancisco, 2006)). Given the normalcy of civilization, and the inevitability of unjust systems, the only way to know for sure that we are in the collective justice procession (if that is where we want to be) is to consciously choose it. Only then will we begin to understand why Mark’s story of Jesus’s last Passover begins and ends with Mary Magdalene.

The whole point of Mark’s Gospel for 21st Century Christians is that the Christian life is a journey with Jesus along a path that leads to God’s kingdom – God’s realm – God’s imperial establishment of God’s reign – the paradigm shift from domination and injustice to partnership in distributive justice-compassion. It’s not about petty trespass, it’s about justice. It’s not about some devil that will take you to Hell if you don’t believe that Jesus rose from a grave alive after three days. The whole myth is about liberation from injustice.

Mary Magdalene was the only one who realized that if Jesus kept on as he had been, he would be arrested, tortured, and murdered by the Romans and their local collaborators: the priests, the money changers, the merchants, and others who sold out – like Judas Iscariot. Jesus was demonstrating against the collaboration of Temple leadership with Roman overseers; suggesting that Cesar owns only what his name is printed on, not the entire world; preaching that the time was near when the paradigm shift would occur and God’s radical, distributive justice-compassion would be re-established.

For those Exiles from Christian orthodoxy, or anyone who wishes to pledge participation in that continuing struggle, the following Tenebrae Eucharist may be offered either at the close of the Passion Sunday service, or at the Maundy Thursday vigil.

Tenebrae Eucharist

One: On the last night with his disciples, as they lounged at their dinner, Jesus decided to try one last time to make them really understand what he was doing, and what it really meant to follow him.

Another: He picked up a loaf of bread, and spoke into the hubbub of their conversation: Listen! – he said – This bread is like God’s justice in this world. Then he tore the loaf into two pieces. This is God’s justice in the hands of the Romans and the Temple authorities who collaborate with them. Believe me, one of you is going to turn me in to them soon. If not tonight, then as soon as the Passover is finished. Whenever you eat together after this night, remember that, and remember me.

One: Then Jesus picked up the jug of wine.

Another: This wine is also like the Kingdom of God – it is the blood of the paschal lamb, painted on the lintels and doorposts of our people as a sign that they belong to God and not to Pharaoh’s Empire. But now the collaborators have made this wine into a corruption – a libation poured out in honor of the Empire of Rome. – a repudiation of God’s protection and deliverance.

One: And he poured the wine into a cup and held it up to them.

Another: He said, “Let the one who has chosen this cup take his possessions and do what he must.” And he dumped the contents into a bowl for disposal.

One: Several of the company began to leave quietly, and he let them go. Then he poured a second cup of wine and said, “But this cup that I drink is a new cup. It is a libation of my blood poured out for justice for all those who chose to share it. Drink it. All of you who are willing to commit to establish God’s justice-compassion, and remember.

Another: He passed the cup to them, and they passed it among themselves as a pledge. And while they were doing this, one of the women – perhaps it was Mary of Magdala – the one who Jesus loved – left the room and returned with a tiny jar of essential oil of lavender. And she came up to Jesus’ couch and said, “You will die for what you have done this week – perhaps tonight – and I know I will never have the chance to prepare your body for burial. If they take you, there will be nothing left.”

One: Then she broke open the vial and anointed his face and hands. And he took it from her and went to the one next to him and said, “She has done what she could. She has prepared my body for death. Do the same for one another in remembrance of her.” And he anointed that one, and that one went to the next until all in the company had been so ordained.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Who Needs Melchizedek? 5th Sunday in Lent, Year B

2009-03-25T14:22:00.001-05:00

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-12; Psalm 119:9-16; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

This is the final week in the Elves’ review of Orthodox Christian belief leading to Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and the celebration of Easter. Jesus’s last public dialogue in John’s Gospel is confirmed, or explained, in the portion plucked from the anonymous letter to the “Hebrews.” John’s Jesus says, “Whoever serves me must follow me, for wherever I am, my servant must be there also . . . if I’m elevated from the earth, I’ll take everyone with me.” Whoever wrote the letter to the “Hebrew” community in Rome says, “he [Jesus] became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him . . .” This leader’s interpretation of Jesus’s death and resurrection is that Jesus did not claim the power and the glory of high-priesthood. That was bestowed upon him by God himself – just like it was bestowed upon Melchizedek.

Both the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Hebrews are products of the leadership of communities in the late 1st to early 2nd Centuries who were struggling with the developing legend surrounding the death of Jesus. John’s community may have been more involved with the separation from Judaism of followers of the emerging Christian way. Depending on the timing of the Gospel, John’s community may also have been dealing with a double whammy: not only were they separating from traditional Judaism; traditional Judaism was also redefining itself without the stabilizing influence of the Temple in Jerusalem. The recipients of the letter to the Hebrews were more likely to have been dealing with persecution on the part of Romans of the emerging Christian religion.

The subject matter in the letter to the Hebrews might seem to be similar to the situation Jeremiah was writing about: Both were addressed to communities on the edge of exile, who were in danger of unraveling and giving up on God’s rule (Jews in destroyed 6th Century b.c.e. Jerusalem), or the promise of Jesus’s return (persecuted Christians in 1st Century Rome). The similarities end there. The writer of Hebrews was enamored with the legend of the mysterious high priest Melchizidek, who (so far as scholars have been able to discover) had no parents, and never died. His only claim to legitimacy appears to be that he was not from the lineage of Aaron – who constructed the golden calf, thereby being the first to break God’s Covenant with Moses. Once more, anti-Semitism appears like a faint watermark behind the printed words.

It seems a mighty stretch of imagination to pick an obscure reference from Genesis 14:18 and Psalm 110:4 upon which to hang an argument about the divinity of Jesus as the Christ. But of such is orthodoxy often made. We will get to do it again in October for Proper 24.

The only scripture worth taking seriously in this group of readings is Jeremiah 31:31-34: “The New Covenant.” Of course the prophet Jeremiah, left behind in Jerusalem while most of the Jewish population was exiled to Babylon in the 6th Century b.c.e., was not talking about Jesus – who was born 600 or so years later. He was talking about a new Covenant with God that would be honored by faithfulness to God’s justice on the part of the people. The “new covenant” would not depend on Temple worship, but on individual response to God’s law. “I will put my law within them,” Jeremiah reports, “and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

Jeremiah was not worried about orthodox rules for worship. Nor was he talking about some god-like priest-king who came from nowhere and lives forever as high priest to an amalgamation of the Canaanite deity El Elyon and Yahweh (“the order of Melchizedek”). Jeremiah was trying to assure that Judaism would survive. That could only happen if each individual person were to take on the responsibility to act in accordance with God’s law. The Psalm Jeremiah would sing is Psalm 119: “I treasure the word in my heart, so that I may not sin against you. . . . I delight in the way of your decrees as much as in all riches. . . . I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.”

Jeremiah’s situation may have been similar to Third Millennium Christianity, which John Shelby Spong suggests will have to either change or die. Should exiles from Christian Orthodoxy reclaim the myth of a dying-rising god for a post-modern world? Or does sustainable life on 21st Century Planet Earth depend more on teasing out the story of Jesus’s life and teachings from two millennia of misquotation and misinterpretation?

From inside his own Jewish tradition, Jesus taught that the law of the Universe (God’s law) is distributive justice-compassion. God’s law (the rules of the universal order) shows no partiality. The rain falls on the just and the unjust. The sun shines, the winds blow, the earth turns. Because human consciousness can choose to live outside the realm of distributive justice-compassion, Jesus also taught a radical abandonment of self-interest (“Love your enemies.”) Instead of unjust systems bringing war, famine, disease, and death (Empire), humans can choose non-violence, justice-compassion, and peace (Covenant). The downside, as Jews and Gentiles alike have learned through experience, is that choosing Covenant often gets people killed.

John’s Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Some Christians have interpreted this to mean not only salvation from hell in the next life, but indifference to injustice in this life. “I know I’m going to heaven because I believe in Jesus,” a co-worker once told me. “Why should I care what happens to anyone else?” I submit that this is the kind of Christian who long ago abandoned Jesus to his fate. As the writer of Matthew’s gospel suggests in his apocalyptic description of the final judgment, the ones who will inherit the kingdom of God are the ones who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, extend hospitality to the stranger, visit prisoners – in short, those who abandon their own self-interest in the service of justice-compassion. These are the ones who accompany Jesus on his final walk to crucifixion and death. These are the ones in whom and with whom Jesus rises into incarnation.

Luke’s version of the saying does not include allusions to “life in this world” versus “eternal life.” Luke’s Jesus says, “Whoever tries to hang on to life will forfeit it, but whoever forfeits life will preserve it.” When the Orthodox Christian interpretive gloss is removed, the conundrum that contains the truth is revealed. In the context of Jesus’s life and death, and prophetic Jewish tradition, in the service of distributive justice-compassion, whoever hangs onto life under the rules of Empire will end up selling out to the systems of injustice. King Saul comes to mind. Even the great King David learned that lesson the hard way. So did Judas. But whoever gives up the safety of imperial control lives already in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion.

Jeremiah’s task was to convince the people that what mattered to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was justice. Under Jeremiah’s “new covenant,” wherever they happened to be, and under whatever conditions, if the people lived in accordance with God’s justice, God would restore them to the land, and with it, the Temple. For post-modern, 21st Century exiles from Christian orthodoxy, whenever anyone radically abandons self-interest in the service of distributive justice-compassion, the “new covenant” is established; a kenotic spirit rules; God’s kingdom has come.

There is no need for a “high priest on the order of Melchizedek."

BLOG ARCHIVE

Why Does it Have to Be Snakes? 4th Sunday in Lent

2009-03-19T10:16:00.002-05:00

Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

Unlike others, this commentary will make no attempt to place into a historical context the readings selected for this 4th Sunday in Lent. The political, social, spiritual, and economic history of most of the Western World has been defined by the belief articulated in the literal application of John’s Gospel to personal and social piety. If Christianity is to survive with any relevance to post-modern, 21st Century realities, the theology of condemnation and substitutionary atonement has to be scrapped. Not only is the future of Christianity at stake. This theology threatens the further evolution of human consciousness, and life as humanity has known it thus far on Planet Earth.

John Shelby Spong points out in Liberating the Gospels (Harper Collins, 1996) that “the definitive work on John has not yet been written” (p. 180). A great deal is known about when the Gospel was written (ca 100-125 C.E.), and scholars have reached some degree of consensus on where it was written (Ephesus). But for whom it was written, and why are still mysteries. What is clear to Spong and to discerning Christians, however, is that “in history the literalized words of the Johannine text joined forces with the Greek thinking fathers of the Western Church to produce a theological system that is as foreign to our day as anything I can imagine. Yet that system is still called Christian orthodoxy. There is a vast difference between the truth of one’s experience of God and the literalness of the truth of the words that one uses to articulate that experience” (p. 178, emphasis mine). This latter point is perhaps the only reason to keep the Fourth Gospel in the canon. Whether the Gospel speaks to 21st Century exiles from Christian orthodoxy remains to be seen.

The passages from the Gospel of John are some of the most beloved and well-known. John 3:16 is ubiquitous: It is found on tee shirts, bumper stickers, email signatures, billboards – wherever there is free space. The message is, if you want to be saved from eternal hell-fire, you have to believe that God caused Jesus to be crucified, then raised him bodily from the dead. John’s Jesus does back off a bit when he says that “God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned . . .”

Anti-Semitism and Christian exclusiveness loom behind these words. If Jesus’s message was inclusive, not exclusive, and if salvation means liberation from injustice in this life, not smug sectarian assurance of avoiding Hell in the next life, then the theology put into Jesus’s mouth by the writer of John’s Gospel is invalid. In an article discussing his recently published book, Michael Cook suggests that “. . . the New Testament’s anti-Judaism should be no longer germane, since Christianity today has no need to defend its existence. Honesty requires Christians to acknowledge that sections of their sacred scriptures generate anti-Jewish bias. However, Christians today should declare that bias invalid because it is obsolete: its only relevance is to circumstances of the distant past.” “Jews and ‘Gospel Dynamics’: Why advice by ancient sages is no longer sage advice,” The 4th R. Vol. 22, No. 2, March-April 2009, p. 14.

Another result from literal belief in these words is that in the minds of many (if not most) people, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear – from intrusive government actions such as electronic surveillance (“security” cameras), wiretaps, drug screening, and the knock on the door at 2 a.m. This attitude comes straight from John 19-21: “. . . people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. . . . But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” Collectively, post-modern humanity seems to have learned little if anything from the Holocaust of the 1930s or the various suppressions of free thought, from the Stalinist Soviet Union to Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the attacks on civil liberties perpetrated by the Bush-Cheney administration during the years following September 11, 2001.

This rationalization for imperial injustice is the opposite to what the historical Jesus actually taught, and the real Apostle Paul tried to explain.

By the time the pseudonymous letter to the Ephesians was written, the Apostle Paul was long gone – along with his passionate opposition to Empire – whether Roman, Greek, or ecclesiastic. “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient,” preaches pseudo-Paul. Instead of the very corporeal tyranny of unjust systems, people are directed to blame malevolent “spirits” for their “disobedience.” The writer is trying to convince those who were skeptical about messianic claims that all we have to do is believe that we are eternally alive together with Christ. But the real Paul did not say that God requires “belief” in the story in order to earn the “grace” that saves us. Paul proposed that anyone who joins with Christ in the great work of distributive justice-compassion participates in the realm of God. “Belief” has nothing to do with it.

Also missing is the parousia, contrasting the coming transformation of the world into the Realm of God (Covenant) with the occupying armies of victorious Rome (Empire). According to the writer of Ephesians, Jesus has already raised up all believers: “by grace you have been saved – and raised up with him in the heavenly places . . . .” Pious belief in doing good has replaced the struggle for justice-compassion. When the writer of Ephesians says in the Apostle Paul’s name that we are created for good works, “which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life,” it is the same as reducing the liberating message of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to volunteering in a soup kitchen.

But what is perhaps most bizarre for 21st Century, post-modern, Christian exiles, perhaps desperate for something relevant to life as we now know it, is the emphasis the Elves place on the story of Moses putting a bronze serpent up on a pole so that the people could look at it and be healed of poisonous snakebite. This image is referred to three times in Year B, whenever John 3:1-17 is suggested as the gospel reading: Lent 4, Trinity Sunday, and again September 24, for those who celebrate Holy Cross (the reference is repeated in all three years).

Maybe the reason is to underline the fact that Jesus was crucified, and therefore seriously dead – assuming that Jesus was among those rounded up and killed in a mass action on the part of the Romans. If the writer of John’s Gospel used the story to prove “salvation history,” that everything in the Jewish scriptures leads to the salvation of the world through the resurrection of Jesus, then Moses’s action is a foreshadowing of God’s action. Dogmatically, if Jesus was seriously dead, and then was raised from the dead – came back not as a ghost, but as flesh-and blood – then that image of a resuscitated corpse can serve to supercede the primitive healing accomplished by Moses in the wilderness, on the eve of the conquest of Canaan. Now, instead of a snake, believers can look at a crucifix and be healed; our prayers will be answered; we will not go to hell (perish– like those primitive Jews), but will go to heaven (eternal life).

This is nothing more than ignorant, sympathetic magic that uses human existentialist terror for political manipulation.

The Elves have us on a pre-ordained journey through Lent to Holy Week. We began with Baptism, then revisited the concept of Covenant. Last week we considered the impossibility – the craziness – of the idea that a Messiah could be a victim of evil. Now we are supposed to begin to realize the inevitability of God’s plan for saving the earth from that very evil that crucified God’s Messiah. Next week, we encounter the “new covenant” that replaces forever God’s original covenant with the Jewish people.

These commentaries have attempted to reclaim – or reimagine – this journey through Christian orthodoxy:

Lent 1: When baptism is believed to be “prefigured by the flood” in order to save believers “as a pledge to God” to live by society’s normal rules, the radical abandonment of self- interest in the service of distributive justice-compassion is washed away, along with Mark’s quiz.

Lent 2: Mark’s early Christian language now begins to make sense. The keepers of God’s Covenant must take up their own cross and follow Jesus into the clear and present danger. Those who try to save their own lives by collaborating with the unjust systems of Empire will lose. True, speaking truth to Empire’s violence can get you killed. Nevertheless, those who lose their lives in the struggle for justice are the ultimate winners. We just have to trust the Covenant on that one.

Lent 3: God’s wisdom is revealed through God’s kenotic, radically self-denying spirit, which was embodied in Jesus. When Jesus died, that same spirit was then extended to those who can accept it. This is craziness to people caught up in the normalcy of social hierarchy and control. It is liberation to those who are able to discern that it is spiritual truth. They (we) “have the mind of Christ.”

The question for this week is whether it is even possible to reimagine the metaphor presented for our consideration. Does it have to be snakes?

BLOG ARCHIVE

Repent! It’s the Law! 3d Sunday in Lent

2009-03-12T12:43:00.002-05:00

Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

The “orthodox” interpretation of these readings is as follows: There is still great reward in keeping the Ten Commandments. But St. Paul reminds us that Christ is the power and wisdom of God for those of us who are saved, and is “foolishness to those who are perishing.” The world did not know God through wisdom, Paul says, but through Christ crucified. God decided to save those who believe in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. This is a “stumbling block to Jews.” As confirmation, during the “Passover of the Jews,” John’s Jesus cleanses the Temple. When “the Jews” object, and demand a sign that he has the authority to do this, Jesus says, “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up.” “The Jews” then take Jesus’s words literally. How is it possible to re-build a temple that has taken 46 years to construct? But, the narrator says, Jesus was talking about his own body. “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered . . . and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken” – unlike “the Jews.”

The readings from Paul’s first extant letter to the Corinthians and from the Gospel of John refer to “the Jews” six times. By the end of the “reading of the word” in most Christian churches, the people have heard that “the Jews” are foolish sinners, who corrupt God’s Temple, break God’s law, and refuse to accept that Jesus is the Messiah they have been praying for since King David wrote the Psalms.

This is an opportunity for preachers of the Gospel to put their seminary training into practice. Otherwise blatant anti-Semitism is unavoidable, even (perhaps especially) in mainline Protestant churches. It is a chance to further the process of moving the Church off its long detour from the Way that Jesus died teaching. To use a word popular for this time in the Christian year, “Repent!” It rhymes with “Lent.”

Start with the story in John’s Gospel. The Gospel of John was written sometime either very late in the First Century, or within the first 25 years of the Second Century. Burton L. Mack, in The Lost Gospel, suggests that John’s Gospel only made it into the Canon because second-third Century organizers of the new Christian movement thought it was actually written by a disciple – perhaps “the one Jesus loved.” Aspects of John’s Gospel are almost too close to the old gnostic heresy, and if it had not been attributed to “John,” it would likely have gone the route of the Gospel of Thomas, and perhaps not have been found for nearly 2,000 years. As Elaine Pagels has also pointed out, Christian theology would have been very different without it.

The story of Jesus driving the money changers out of the Temple first was told by Mark, and later by Matthew and Luke, as part of Jesus’s last week, perhaps on Monday of what became “holy week.” But the Gospel of John works this story into a visit by Jesus to Jerusalem during a Passover celebration that is not Jesus’s last week. Instead, the incident follows the story of Jesus’s first miracle – the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine.

John is the only gospel writer that puts Jesus’s purported quote about rebuilding the temple on Jesus’s lips. The writer uses these words to reinforce the metaphor of Jesus’s body, resurrected after three days. The Jesus Seminar scholars point out that the quotation was attributed to Jesus in a fragment from the Sayings Gospel of Thomas. That the saying was circulating among the various fledgling Christian communities is evident, but whether the saying refers to the actual destruction of the Temple in the late 60s, or to the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, is impossible to discern. Mark’s story uses it in the context of Jesus’s trial before the high priest (Mark 14:58), when he is accused of blasphemy. Later these same supposed words are thrown back at Jesus by his tormentors on Golgotha (Mark 15:29). The writer of Matthew’s gospel does the same (Matthew 26:61; 27:40). Luke does not use this quote until his opus magnus, “The Acts of the Apostles,” which scholarly consensus is dating well into the second Century. In Luke’s story, it is the “false witnesses” against Stephen who accuse Stephen of having said that “Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses handed on to us” (Acts 6:14).

John’s community was apparently in the midst of controversy. The writer continually points out that the Jewish temple leadership (scribes, pharisees) rejected the idea that Jesus was the Messiah. John’s Jesus starts his ministry in Galilee – Capernaum, Cana – then he goes down to Jerusalem for a Passover celebration. After that, he makes his way back to Galilee, where he hangs out for some time. Then comes the fateful decision (Chapter 7) to secretly return to Judea, where he hangs out near Jerusalem for the remainder of the story. When the Judeans demand to know what miracle Jesus can show them to justify throwing the money changers out of the Temple, John’s Jesus retorts, “Destroy this Temple, and I’ll resurrect it in three days.”

John’s community may have been post-Temple Jewish exiles, possibly living in what is now modern-day Turkey, and removed from the historical Roman sacking of Jerusalem by 40 to 60 years. They believed that Jesus was the Messiah. Because of that belief – and insistence on its truth – they may have been under some pressure to leave the synagogue they belonged to. Given those circumstances, Jesus’s words are a defiant challenge to the leadership who refuse to believe who he was. It is possible – given usual human behavior – that they blamed the destruction of the Temple on Jewish collaborators. Whether they did or not, there is a fine double meaning in Jesus’s words reclaimed by John: “I will not only rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem [which you destroyed] within three days, I will come back in the flesh to condemn you after you have killed me.”

These are fighting words. They are not the words of non-violent, distributive justice, which were preached by the original Jesus. Taken out of their probable context, they have been and continue to be dangerous. It is time to repent.

The portion from 1st Corinthians is apparently pivotal to Christian orthodoxy because it is required reading in all three years, twice in years B and C and three times in year A: Holy Cross (all three years; September 14); Lent 3 (year B); Tuesday of Holy Week (all three years); and 4 Epiphany (year A). Despite the Elves’ best efforts, these commentaries have managed to avoid it until now for three reasons: 1) the unpredictability of Easter, resulting in the elimination of 5 of the possible 8 Sundays in Epiphany, Year A; 2) confining discussion of specific days in Easter Week to Year C’s exploration of kenosis; and 3) concentration on Sundays, rather than other special days such as Holy Cross, Thanksgiving, and All Saints.

Now that the Elves have at last prevailed, what can be done with Paul’s first argument after the cordial greetings in 1:1-10? To start with, Paul’s opening salvo needs to be studied in its whole context, from 1:10 through 2:17. (The Elves have us studying 1:10-17 on 3 Epiphany in Year A, and 2:1-12 on 5 Epiphany, Year A, which was an “Easter orphan” in these commentaries. We never finish chapter 2.) Next, two points made by Crossan and Reed in In Search of Paul need to be kept in mind. First, Paul’s theology sets the realm/kingdom of God in opposition to the empire of Rome. Second, Paul’s theology contrasts the self-serving normalcy of civilized life with the radical denial of self-interest (kenosis) of those who are committed to the great work of restoring God’s distributive justice-compassion. When these two points are understood, anti-Semitism disappears, along with Christian spiritual exclusivity and Christian political hegemony.

So, Paul is blasting his friends in Corinth for fighting about which baptism carries the most weight. Paul says he wishes he hadn’t baptized anyone, because Christ did not send him to baptize people but to proclaim the power of the cross of Christ. That power, says Paul, makes no sense to those who are “perishing” by living according to the unjust systems of Roman imperial society. But those who get the point of the crucifixion of Jesus are liberated from injustice, and empowered to join and continue the work. Paul calls for the Corinthians to consider who they were when they joined the group. “Not many of you” were powerful or of noble birth – which implies that some indeed were. But those who are of high rank or social status don’t get to brag about that, and claim power over others in the community. “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord,” Paul says.

21st Century church leaders must repudiate the emphasis on Paul’s phrase, “we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Clearly, this phrase has been used in the service of anti-Semitism from the beginning of the organized Christian Church. Further, “Gentiles” has often meant non-Christians other than Jews who do not believe the Christian myth. Both interpretations have been and continue to be anachronisms because the phrase has been lifted out of its context. Paul goes on to say that “to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ [is] the power of God and the wisdom of God.” In other words, to those who agree to participate in the restoration of God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, regardless of who they may be, the crucified Christ symbolizes the power and the wisdom of God’s kenotic action in the world.

Because Paul was a devout Jew, and a Pharisee, he uses Jewish theology to powerful effect. One aspect of Jewish theological tradition is the concept of the Wisdom of God. Wisdom is personified as the feminine spirit who was with God from the beginning, who pitched her tents among the people, who calls from the heights beside the way. When Paul says that “Christ [is] the power and the wisdom of God,” he is drawing on ancient and revered Jewish tradition. In 1 Corinthians 2:8, he says “Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom . . . But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.” “Lay aside immaturity,” Wisdom says, “and live and walk in the way of insight” (Proverbs 9:6; see, especially, Proverbs 8).

God’s wisdom is revealed through God’s kenotic, radically self-denying spirit, which was embodied in Jesus. When Jesus died, that same spirit was then extended to those who can accept it. This is craziness to people caught up in the normalcy of social hierarchy and control. It is liberation to those who are able to discern that it is spiritual truth. They (we) “have the mind of Christ.”

BLOG ARCHIVE

Same Old Covenant: Second Sunday in Lent, Year B

2009-03-04T14:43:00.002-05:00

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:23-31; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38; OR Mark 9:2-9

Marching lock-step with Orthodoxy through Lent is nearly impossible to avoid. Once again, the Elves present us with supercessionism as a fait accompli. Abram and his wife Sarah are promised a never-ending Covenant with God. The end of Psalm 22 praises God for deliverance from suffering, humiliation, even death. It is no accident this Psalm was chosen for reading early on in Lent. The opening words are traditionally believed to have been among the last words Jesus gasped out as he died. Because “Jesus is Lord,” according to doctrine, the Psalmist can only mean Jesus in the closing verse: “Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying he has done it.” “He,” being interpreted to mean the risen Christ, has “done it” – has returned from death to save us from hell.

An orthodox reading of Paul’s opus magnus to the Romans confirms that God’s promise to Abraham has been fulfilled (meaning, renegotiated and replaced) by belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Finally, Mark’s Jesus breaks his rule about secrecy and openly tells his followers what will happen to him. He will “suffer a great deal, be rejected . . . be killed, and after three days rise.” When Peter objects to this, Jesus accuses Peter of being in league with Satan because “you’re not thinking in God’s terms, but in human terms.” He then goes on to tell them what he expects his followers to do to avoid being shamed (rejected) by Jesus in the afterlife. Alternatively, the Elves offer a second chance to deal with the “transfiguration,” in case we missed it two weeks ago. (See Paul’s Resurrection Theology from Year C .)

Perhaps over the next nine months of reading Mark’s Gospel, the writer’s full intent will become clear. He wrote it the way he wrote it for his own reasons. For now, let’s take a sampling of where Mark actually is in the story. This exercise is risky because it will not be in depth. Whenever a work is summarized by picking off what appear to be highlights (such as the beginnings of paragraphs), some crucial points can be missed. We also run the risk of anachronism: 21st Century assumptions overlaid upon 1st Century words. But, the Elves have been doing it for years. For argument, here we go:

After the five controversies, Mark’s story continues with the crowds that surrounded Jesus, and the demons (“unclean spirits”) who continued to identify him as “son of God.” Jesus persisted in warning them not to tell. He went up on the mountain and summoned “those he wanted” and sent them out to speak and to “have authority to drive out demons.” Then we have the “beelzebul controversey.” If Jesus could drive out demons, maybe he was a demon himself? This is followed quickly by Jesus making clear that “Whoever does God’s will, that’s my brother and sister and mother.” Next, Mark begins to tell his series of Jesus’s parables, which allows him to make the point that “no prophet is respected in his own home town.” After that, comes the miracle of feeding several thousand people with only a few fish and some bread, followed by the failure of Jesus’s companions to “get it.” After a couple more miraculous healings, we arrive at the point the Elves cherry-picked for the second Sunday in Lent. Jesus takes stock: “Who do you say that I am?” After which he abandons his attempts to keep his identity secret, and when Peter objects, he delivers his famous reprimand, which is so much more dramatic in King James English: “Get thee behind me, Satan!”

As Mark laid out his story, we are now at the half-way point. But the Elves are not interested in how the story is told, or what the context may have been that produced the tradition about Jesus that Mark was writing down after 30 years of mostly oral transmission. Most important of all, none of the sayings in Chapter 8 attributed to Jesus by the writer can be traced back to the historical Jesus. Mark made it all up, even – or especially – the part about “Those who want to come after me should deny themselves, pick up their cross, and follow me.” This is a non-sequitur, unless you already know what happened, or if you have followed Mark’s logic from the beginning.

We leave Mark now except for Palm Sunday and Easter. Unless we pick up on the hint in 3:35 – summarized above -- we won’t know for sure if Mark’s Jesus was talking about Covenant with God’s Realm of distributive justice-compassion until we return to the story at the end of May.

The time has come to once again review the Four Questions for the Apocalypse, which are the underlying framework for these commentaries:

1) What is the nature of God? Violent or non-violent?
2) What is the nature of Jesus’ message? Inclusive or exclusive?
3) What is faith? Literal belief, or commitment to the great work of distributive justice-compassion?
4) What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice?

The usual answers of doctrinal Christianity are Violent, Exclusive, Literal Belief, and Salvation from Hell, which brings us the theology of Empire: Piety, War, Victory, Peace. In these commentaries, however, the answers are Non-violent, Inclusive, Trust, and Liberation, which brings us Covenant: participation with the incarnate Christ in the ongoing work (struggle) for distributive justice-compassion. God's Covenant with the people of God began (in Jewish foundation myth) with Noah, expanded with Abraham, and was confirmed with Moses. The struggle has continued throughout the story of the Jewish people. The Covenant was not overthrown, invalidated, or renegotiated by the resurrection of Jesus. Instead, if 21st Century Christianity can accept a different paradigm, the Covenant was and is kept whenever anyone signs on to the program.

The Elves use Romans 4:13-25 both in Year A and the second Sunday in Lent in Year B. The purpose is to bolster the dogma that God’s promise to Abraham that his descendants would inherit the world depends on “faith.” The Church has interpreted “faith” to mean “belief” that a particular series of events is factually true. But “faith” in the context of Abraham’s Covenant means “trust” that God will keep God’s part of the bargain. That confusion over the meaning of words is bad enough. What’s worse is the easy anti-Semitism that comes with the usual idea that “the law” means “Jewish law.” Liberal Christians have insisted that “the law” means “Roman law,” but that does not go far enough to disentangle Paul’s theological argument. As I said in the Commentary for Proper 5, Year A:

Behind all of Paul’s circling language lies the conviction that the law – the normalcy of civilization – leads inevitably to injustice because the law requires retribution – payback. There is no grace (free gift) under the law. The law does not offer radical fairness. Under the law there must be winners and losers. But those are justified who trust in God’s direct action in the world to establish God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, both through the life and sacrificial death of Jesus and participation with Jesus in that same program. Their trust is credited back to them as justice itself. Throughout his letter, Paul makes it clear that the promise of God to establish that kingdom preempts human law.

That is the Covenant, sealed with God’s War-Bow, permanently planted in the Sky after every rain. God has done God’s part. God’s violence, God’s punishment, is over and done.

For 21st Century Christian exiles this journey through Lent is only worth doing if we realize that keeping God’s Covenant still demands blood sacrifice on the part of humanity. Unlike God’s realm, human civilization normally results in violence: retributive justice, payback, the seductive theology of piety, war, victory. Abraham’s identifying mark of circumcision is no longer necessary, but not because Jesus was crucified to pay for the petty sins of believers (piety). What identifies the keepers of God’s Covenant is non-violent resistance to the normalcy of Empire. For 21st Century participants, stuck in prisons, oppressed by political, social, and economic systems, the eloquent poetry of Psalm 22 lends courage in the struggle for non-violent distributive justice. At the end, after the suppression and injustice have taken their toll, the psalmist proclaims God’s deliverance. “He has done it.” God has kept God’s part of the bargain.

Mark’s early Christian language now begins to make sense. The keepers of God’s Covenant must take up their own cross and follow Jesus into the clear and present danger. Those who try to save their own lives by collaborating with the unjust systems of Empire will lose. True, speaking truth to Empire’s violence can get you killed. Nevertheless, those who lose their lives in the struggle for justice are the ultimate winners. We just have to trust the Covenant on that one.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Baptism Redux: First Sunday in Lent

2009-02-26T12:03:00.002-05:00

Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

The season of Lent in Year B progresses from Purification to Promise to Wisdom to Salvation to the New Covenant. This is not a bad journey to take on the metaphoric road from Galilee to Jerusalem in the five weeks leading to Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter – the heart of the Christian religion. Through the common lectionary readings, doctrinal Christianity illustrates the evolution of a life devoted to faith in Christ Jesus. But for reasons that are neither readily apparent nor explained, the Elves abandon the journey laid out by the writer of Mark’s Gospel except for specifically chosen verses from the middle and end. We will not get back on Mark’s path until two weeks after Pentecost.

The detour might seem to be justified, given the constraints of the Christian liturgical year. The time from Epiphany to Easter can vary by several weeks, depending upon when the first Sunday after the First Full Moon after the Spring Equinox appears. Counting the requisite 40 days back from that, Lent can begin as early as mid-February and as late as mid-March. Mark’s comparatively leisurely stroll through Jesus’s miracles, teachings, and parables on his way to death and resurrection just can’t be dealt with in five weekly sermons. The other gospels are also abandoned for the season in their respective years. Perhaps this is because it is far more important for doctrinal reasons to present the theological and scriptural arguments about the Christian claim that Jesus is indeed the Messiah long looked-for by the Jewish people.

Before we begin our laps around the track that lead to Easter Sunday, a yellow caution flag must be raised: Beware of anti-Semitism that is easily missed in the race to the finish line.

To avoid supercessionism and maintain the logic of the argument for Jesus’s messiahship, the readings for this First Sunday in Lent should start with 1 Peter. Even though the letter is not a liturgy for baptism, that is the subject emphasized by the Elves. The writer of 1 Peter says that the story of Noah’s Ark and the great flood in Genesis “prefigures” the idea that baptism is the ritual that saves believers now that Jesus has been “made alive in the spirit.” “Eight persons were saved through water,” claims the writer, and baptism now “saves you . . . as an appeal to God” because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Sure enough, in the reading from Genesis God says, “never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood . . . I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” To solidify the point, we revisit Mark’s vignette of Jesus’s baptism and God’s declaration that “you are my favored son.”

Immediately afterwards, Mark says, “the sprit drives [Jesus] out into the wilderness, where he remained for forty days, being put to the test by Satan. While he was living there among the wild animals, the heavenly messengers looked after him.” The “temptation of Jesus” is apparently not nearly as important to Mark and Mark’s community as it was to Matthew and Luke and their later Jewish and gentile Christian communities. The “test” proposed by Mark amounts to a pop-quiz in comparison to the other two gospel writers.

Both Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13 embellish Mark’s story by adding that Jesus was called by the spirit to be “tempted by the devil,” and that he “fasted 40 days and 40 nights, and afterwards he was famished.” The second “controversy” presented in Mark after the forgiveness of the paralytic’s sins is the question about fasting (2:18-20). This controversy is skipped altogether in Years A and C (Matthew 9:15a, Luke 5:34); and is only listed for the 8th Sunday in Epiphany for Year B. Because the number of Sundays occurring in Epiphany is totally dependent on when the Moon triggers the beginning of Lent, the idea that Jesus’s followers did not fast can be easily overlooked in the midst of the Church’s demand for fasting and “repentance” during that time.

In consecutive years of readings for the first Sunday in Lent the stories in both Matthew and Luke emphasize Jesus’s temptation after extended fasting. Perhaps that is the reason the Elves chose to repeat the sacrament of Baptism on the first Sunday in Lent in the Year of Mark. But baptism for 1 Lent has a much different focus from the first Sunday in Epiphany. In the context of Epiphany, the “Baptism of the Lord” is about consecration, initiation, and empowerment for Jesus’s work. The readings for the First Sunday in Lent suggest that Baptism is about cleansing the consciousness so that God will accept us, since, according to the 1st Letter attributed to Peter, “Christ also suffered and died for sins once for all . . . in order to bring you to God.”

We have a theological conundrum here. Did Jesus need to be cleansed in order to be acceptable to God? This question is asked and answered only in Matthew (3:13-15). In the Year of Mark, it is easily glossed over by nimble sermonizing given the doctrinal progression of the readings from Genesis to Mark to 1 Peter. The question does not occur to the writer of Luke-Acts. In the Year of Luke (Year C), the Elves simply pair Luke’s version of Jesus’s baptism with the laying-on-of hands by the Apostle Peter and John in Samaria (Luke 3:21-22; Acts 8:14-17). Unfortunately for unwary preachers using the Gospel of Luke, the implication is that simple Baptism – even in the name of Jesus – was not enough to bring down the Holy Spirit upon the sinners in Samaria.

When Doctrinal Christianity treats the Gospels as “history remembered,” the differences among the stories told by Mark, Matthew, and Luke are trivial. However, the gospels are not “history remembered.” They were written for specific communities of people during vastly different times in the first and second centuries of the Common Era. The only “history” is the “history” of the development of early Christianity. The writer of Mark tosses off Jesus’s baptism and spiritual trial in the wilderness as introductory events, with the purpose of establishing Jesus’s credentials among traumatized Jews, cut off from the familiar rules governing daily life and Temple worship. Mark is far more interested in the miracles, and in convincing his exiled community of the legitimacy of Jesus’s new Way. Matthew, writing some 20 years later to an established group of Jewish Christians (possibly in Palestine), is much more concerned with explaining why Jesus needed to be baptized by John. Luke – the gentile Greek – 40 to 60 years after Mark – finds it all irrelevant.

Mark is far more interested in Jesus’s authority to exorcise demons, forgive sins, and heal people. The Elves seem to agree. After a nod to a prayer for protection (Psalm 25), Baptism is the first order of business before beginning the 40-day Lenten fast, just as Baptism was the first order of business after the “Visit of the Wise Men” at Epiphany.

The problem is that when the readings are considered as a coherent group (which the Elves imply), God’s original Covenant pledged to the survivors of the Great Flood is replaced with salvation as redemption paid by the risen Christ. Once again, foundational myth, sacred to the Jewish religion, is overthrown and misused to show Christian supremacy. But actually, if historic scholarship is correct, the writer of 1st Peter was unknowingly also corrupting Jesus’s message. Instead of encouraging the Christian communities in radical rejection of the unjust systems of Empire, this writer insists that people comply. The following excerpts are from the series for the Easter Season, Year A, which studies 1 Peter for seven Sundays:

The people in this particular late 1st Century Christian community . . . were very likely under some pressure to conform to the society around them. The letter acknowledges that they may have to suffer “various trials,” but their faith (belief) in the promise of heaven gives them the strength to resist. What do they resist? . . . they are not resisting the injustice of empire. Quite the opposite: “For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. . . . As servants of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil. Honor everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God. Honor the emperor.” 1st Peter 2:13-17.

Worse,

1st Peter implies that if we allow [unjust systems] to not only exist, but to proliferate, “if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval.” 1st Peter repudiates Isaiah’s suffering servant, negates the meaning of Jesus’s own death, and cheapens the courage of self-less martyrs to justice in all times and circumstances.

When baptism is believed to be “prefigured by the flood” in order to save believers “as a pledge to God” to live by society’s normal rules, the radical abandonment of self- interest in the service of distributive justice-compassion is washed away, along with Mark’s quiz.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Which is Easier? 7th Sunday in Epiphany (Proper 2), Year B

2009-02-17T12:18:00.002-05:00

Isaiah 43:18-25; Psalm 41; 2 Corinthians 1:18-22; Mark 2:1-12

Because “The Transfiguration” has been dealt with in other years, I will claim the prerogative offered by the Elves and stick with the readings for the 7th Sunday in Epiphany (Proper 2) instead. The immediately apparent theme, from the Psalm to Isaiah, to Mark, and Paul’s second extant letter to the Corinthians, is “forgiveness of sin.” Paul’s ecstatic words from his somewhat lengthy prelude to the rest of the letter lend themselves to a sermon title that is sure to get people into the visitor’s parking space on Sunday morning: “God’s Promise is a YEEEESSSS!!” The problem lies in the usual expectation of what “God’s Promise” is.

The Elves have laid out a study of Mark’s Gospel that does take things in sequence, providing there are nine Sundays between Epiphany and the celebration of the Transfiguration. Except for one digression into John on the second Sunday, and skipping over the temptation of Jesus (1:12-13), the integrity of Mark’s revelation of who Mark’s 1st Century community thought Jesus was is honored. We will pick up the temptation (along with a repeat of the baptism) on the first Sunday in Lent.

For now, look at the outline of what Mark has done so far (including the portions we won’t read because our calendar for 2009 does not allow for the extra two Sundays in Epiphany).

Mark starts with the messenger – the harbinger – the advance man – John, who shouts, “Clear the path, the Lord is coming.” He is either shouting in the wilderness (the usual interpretation) or he is saying that the pathway should be cleared through the wilderness. It makes sense that the pathway through the wilderness should be cleared, because Mark’s community was highly likely to be wandering (spiritually, if not physically) in a wilderness of exile from sacked Jerusalem. Then, within nine verses, Jesus appears and is baptized by John, and voluntarily enters the wilderness, where he is “put to the test by Satan.” More on that next week. For now, Jesus has taken up the condition of Mark’s community, which was surely severely tested as they tried to figure out how to keep God’s Covenant in a strange land. Once Jesus passes the test, he takes up John’s call: “The time is up: God’s imperial rule is closing in. Change your ways, and put your trust in the good news” (The Five Gospels translation).

Immediately, he walks along by the Sea of Galilee, and calls the fishermen, Simon, Andrew, and James, to forget about fishing for food and follow him, on the Way, out of the Wilderness, and into God’s Kingdom. With dizzying speed, Jesus starts casting out demons and healing the worst outcasts of society. But, Mark says, even though the spirits recognized him, Jesus insisted that his identity be kept secret.

At this point, Mark begins five stories about how Jesus was already getting into trouble with local Jewish authorities. The dusty cloud of anti-Semitism threatens to obscure the Way if 21st Century preachers, bible study leaders, and listeners are not careful. The first controversy is the authority of anyone other than God to forgive sins; the second is eating and socializing with sinners and collaborators; the third is fasting (or not fasting) as a spiritual practice; the fourth and fifth are about what is appropriate activity for the Sabbath. Is it kosher to harvest grain on the Sabbath? Is it “lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill”? Here the plot thickens: “]T]he Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.”

This is a block-buster novel. Somebody has divided it up into convenient short-takes, just the right length for the morning commute. Today’s portion is, “Who can forgive sins?”

Marks’ story about the paralytic whose friends tore up the roof and lowered him down right in front of Jesus so he could be healed may be the next favorite children’s tale after Jonah and the Whale. It’s perfect for generating discussions about what houses looked like in Biblical Palestine. As a literal-minded child, however, I always wondered how the man managed to get out of the crowded house once Jesus told him to “take up his bed and walk.” I thought his friends would have to pull him back up through the roof. Another pesky detail is, if his friends were tearing up the roof, wouldn’t that make the people below, inside the house, a little upset with all the clay and dust raining down on them? And if the people inside went outside to escape the debris, wouldn’t that sort of obviate the need to come through the roof in the first place?

Do we see the problems with literal, factual readings of this story? What’s really going on here?

Oblivious Mark goes on. “When Jesus noticed their trust” – like, hello, the roof is being destroyed – “he says to the paralytic, ‘Child, your sins are forgiven.’” Thereafter, the quarrel with “some of the scholars sitting there” becomes not the miracle of a lame man walking, but who has the authority to forgive sins. For post-modern, educated, scientifically sophisticated people, this is a non-sequitur. We long ago stopped assuming that illness is punishment from God for sin. It doesn’t even work as a metaphor. Yet here we are, in the first years of the 3rd Millennium of the Common Era, pairing this story with Psalm 41 and Isaiah 43. The supposed parallels in imagery in Psalm 41with Mark’s Gospel have been long recognized. The note in the HarperCollins Study Bible refers the reader to Psalm 41:4 “[f]or the correlation of healing with being forgiven” (p. 1920). Another interesting reference for folks looking for proof-texts is the Psalmist’s fear that his enemies “think. . . . that I will not rise again from where I lie.”

In the portion of Second Isaiah cherry-picked to go along with Mark’s story, God says “[Even though] you have not brought me your sheep for burnt offerings, or honored me with your sacrifices . . . I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” But what is 2nd Isaiah really talking about? Once again, we are referred to a prophetic sermon from a powerful leader in the exiled community of ancient Israel. Backing up from verse 18, where The Elves would have us begin, we find that God “your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel . . . will send to Babylon and break down all the bars, and the shouting of the Chaldeans will be turned to lamentation.” The prophet reminds the people that God liberated them from Egypt, and will liberate them from Babylon. Unfortunately verses 18-21 have been appropriated into the imagery used to describe both the coming of John the Baptist, and Jesus. “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert . . . to give drink to my chosen people . . . so that they might declare my praise.” The Elves cut off after verse 25. If we continue, the history of the Jewish people is once more reviewed: “Your first ancestor sinned, and your interpreters transgressed against me. Therefore I profaned the princes of the sanctuary, I delivered Jacob to utter destruction and Israel to reviling.”

The group that found refuge in Antioch after the destruction of the Temple may well have resonated with this imagery, and taken comfort in God’s promise to Isaiah’s exiled community. Perhaps with Isaiah as background, the writer of Mark proposed to his community that the authority to forgive sins arises from Jesus, the “son of Adam.” According to the Jesus Seminar scholars, “the early church was in the process of claiming for itself the right to forgive sins, and so would have been inclined to claim that its authorization came directly from Jesus as the messianic figure” (The Five Gospels, p. 44). So Mark’s story may have been another step in the process of surviving as Jewish people, cut off from Temple worship and the leadership of the “scribes and Pharisees.” The Jesus Seminar commentator suggests that it is possible that Mark’s narrative comment “so that you may realize that the Son of Adam has authority to forgive sins” might have been attributed to Jesus. If so, the implication is that the authority to forgive sins is extended to all humans, as “Sons of Adam.” This is a minority point of view. However, it does raise the possibility of a radically new understanding of the relationship between God and God’s people, as proclaimed by the prophet.

Let’s pursue this minority view for the sake of argument.

Christian doctrine, of course, says that “God’s promise” referred to in the Elves’ selection from 2nd Corinthians means “God’s promise of forgiveness of sins.” We are supposed to piously add in our minds, “through Jesus Christ our Lord who died to save us.” Paul wrote the words about how every one of God’s promises is a “yes,” but what he is actually talking about is the possibility that the people reading his letter might think he – Paul – has gone back on his word by first promising to visit on his round-trip to Macedonia, then not showing up, and writing yet another letter instead. Later (1:23-24) Paul writes, “I call on God as witness against me: it was to spare you that I did not come again to Corinth.” Paul practically strangles himself in his own language apologizing to the Corinthians for not coming, and explaining why.

If the Elves had not mis-read Paul’s lengthy introduction to his second letter to the Corinthians, they might have cherry-picked 2:5-11 (which, by the way, is never read by followers of the RCL). That portion refers specifically to forgiveness of someone in the community who had caused some kind of major “pain,” not just to Paul, but – because to Paul – everyone. Paul points out that the community not only has the ability to forgive, but the duty. Paul says, “you should forgive and console him so that he may not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow . . . I wrote for this reason: to test you and to know whether you are obedient in everything” – including, presumably, forgiveness and reconciliation within the body of Christ. “Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. What I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ.” Just in case anyone still doesn’t think that forgiveness is wise, possible, or required, Paul says, “we do this so that we may not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.”

In 21st Century, non-mystical language, we reconcile among ourselves in the community of Christ so that we will not be diverted from the path of distributive justice-compassion by the siren song of society’s demand for retribution, payback, getting even. Forgiveness of sin means reconciliation with God’s Realm of distributive justice-compassion Reconciliation is required. Otherwise the community is destroyed and the work is compromised.

“So which is easier?” asks Jesus, “To say ‘your sins are forgiven?’ or ‘take up your bed and walk?’”

BLOG ARCHIVE

99 and 44/100% Pure: 6th Sunday in Epiphany, Year B

2009-02-12T12:17:00.002-05:00

2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45

The obvious overall theme for this 6th Sunday after Epiphany in Year B is “healing”; and not just feeling better, or getting over something, but recovery from major illness and even deliverance from the threat of death.

In the apparent rush to prove the divinity of Jesus in the short time between Christmas and Lent, the Elves skim the surface of what looks like a tranquil lake. Like Elisha, they seem to be implying, Jesus cures a feared and hated outcast of a feared and hated disease. Paul’s cherry-picked metaphor about winning the prize confirms the lesson: “Athletes. . . receive a perishable wreath,” Paul writes, “but we [will receive] an imperishable one.” Further, Paul says, “I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified” (emphasis added). Purity, achieved by ritual cleansing and then verified through ritualized, sacrificial, redemptive gifts is the implied deeper meaning. Ultimately, of course, Jesus is the purest sacrifice that reconciles unclean sinners who repent (as in regret) their ways. Even though, according to Mark, Jesus was forced out of the villages and into the countryside by the stories told about him [after Jesus specifically told them not to tell], we know he was saved in the end – as we will be if we just believe. The Psalmist praises God for these miracles: “O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.”

Whenever the theme is that easy to determine, you can bet it’s not what’s really going on. Before diving into that apparently tranquil lake, we might be wise to be sure there are no undercurrents or dangers hidden in the weeds at the bottom.

The story told by Mark is not factual. It describes who the people in Mark’s community thought Jesus was. Mark was laying the groundwork for the ultimate realization that comes at the end of the novel: Jesus was the Messiah. The problem is that 21st Century Christians already know the ending. But imagine hearing it in successive readings in a clandestine synagogue or private home. (The readings would likely not have been broken into the segments the Revised Common Lectionary does. Dividing Mark’s first episodes of healing into three or four snippets makes little liturgical or literary sense.)

First Century Jerusalem has been recently sacked, the Temple destroyed, and the people have been dispersed. Jews, including the few among them who had come to accept that Jesus was the longed-for Messiah, are once again exiled, and in fear for their lives. Secrecy about who Jesus was would have been paramount, not “because of the Jews,” but because of the Roman policy that anyone – Jew or gentile – who did not acknowledge Cesar as Lord was under a death sentence. That Jesus demanded no one say anything about him would have been seen as normal, not some kind of trick to determine who is in or out, “saved” or condemned, nor to demonstrate that God wanted Jesus’s true identity to be known so that God’s plan for him could be carried out.

Mark’s Jesus does offer proof that he – like Elisha – has the legitimate power to perform miraculous healings. He sends the now-cleansed leper to the priest for examination, and suggests strongly that he bring whatever offering Moses commanded as evidence of the cure. See Leviticus 14:2-32. The ritual for cleansing leprosy and the subsequent ritual of offering demanded of the former leper is so detailed and precise that any priest should wonder how the person was cleansed in the first place. Keeping the messianic secret would have been impossible. Sure enough, Mark says, “after [the leper] went out, he started telling everyone and spreading the story so that Jesus could no longer enter a city openly, but had to stay out in the countryside.” Exiles hearing this might well identify with the necessity of keeping their activities covert.

For reasons known only to them, the Elves’ favorite Old Testament “healing” story is the one about the gentile Naaman who bathed in the Jordan and was cured of leprosy. This story is recommended reading not only in this current year B, but twice in Year C. In Proper 9 of Year C the story is paired with Luke 10:1-11, and in Proper 23 it is paired with Luke 17:11-19. In no instance is the entire story read. If it were, it would not be used (or mis-used) for some dogmatic purpose, such as the apparent desire to show that Jesus was even more powerful than the prophet Elisha. Jesus heals with a command. Elisha relies on seven rounds of “baptism” in the River Jordan. Perhaps this is also a swipe at John the Baptist? Who knows? Christians of all varieties have been reading their own anachronistic significance into these readings for two thousand years.

The story of the healing of Naaman has nothing to do with Mark’s story about Jesus’s healing of lepers. Naaman is a gentile, the commander of the army of the king of Aram (enemy of the Israelites), who owns a Hebrew slave girl. She tells him that among her people is a great prophet (Elisha) who can cure his leprosy. The king promptly sends a letter requesting Elisha’s help (presumably so his messenger won’t be killed as soon as he gets to the Israelites’ camp), and the usual oxen, gold, clothing, food, etc. as peace offerings. Elisha says, don’t be stupid. Send him to me. Naaman arrives, but Elisha won’t come out to receive him. (He does have leprosy, after all.) Instead he sends out word that Naaman should go bathe in the Jordan River seven times. Naaman gets annoyed and stomps off. His servant says, don’t be an idiot. Go take a bath (or seven). Naaman relents and follows the instructions, and ALLA KAZAAM!. He is healed.

The next part of the story is off-limits for Year B, according to the Elves (2 Kings 5:15-19). Naaman is so grateful for the healing that he offers gifts to Elisha. Elisha won’t accept them. Naaman compromises by taking back with him a load of earth so he will always have a piece of the land of Israel and, by association, Israel’s God, with him. He asks that the Lord pardon him when he has to bow down to the Aramic god Rimmon. Elisha says, “go in peace.”

As I wrote in my commentary from Proper 9 of Year C, these passages have been used for too long to reinforce conventional piety and morality. The radicality of God may be more clear in the story about the healing of Naaman than it is in Mark’s story, as diced up in the Revised Common Lectionary. Mark’s Jesus is establishing the legitimacy of his new “Way,” for Jews in diaspora. The Old Testament foundational myth teaches that faith is not belief about God. Faith is trust in God’s word. Both stories are primary, foundational myths. Both are equally valid for reasons that are not so clear as Christians have been led to believe..

But that’s still not the end of the story. What we never read in any of the three years of the lectionary is the subsequent betrayal of trust on the part of Elisha’s servant Gehazi (2 Kings 5:19b-27). When Elisha declines to accept the gentile Naaman’s gifts in exchange for his miraculous healing, Gehazi is scandalized. “As the Lord lives, I will run after him and get something out of him,” he says. When he catches up with Naaman, he makes up a story about unexpected guests that need silver and clothing. Naaman not only complies with Elisha’s supposed request, he doubles the amount asked for. The outsider Naaman is generous to a fault. The insider Gehazi is corrupted and therefore cursed by Elisha with the very same leprosy Naaman was cured of.

If (and it is a big IF) Naaman’s story has any relevance to Mark’s story, it is not in the healing, but in the debate about how to serve God in a strange land. Gehazi may have been properly scandalized that the gentile Naaman was not required to comply with the rules for purification – as Mark’s Jesus demanded. But instead of standing on principle, and turning the gifts over to Elisha, Gehazi keeps them for himself. Gehazi has completely corrupted the elaborate rituals for reinstating the one who had become unable to participate in Temple worship. Mark’s community may well have found themselves in that very dilemma.

The point of the rituals is reconciliation, not retribution. Mark’s Jesus would have agreed. As I wrote for Proper 23, Year C, the profound truth in the story in 2 Kings and confirmed by Luke (17:11-19) is that the hated alien turns out to be the one who trusts in Covenant, non-violent justice-compassion, and peace with the exiled God. First Century Jewish/Christian exiles may well have identified with these themes. They certainly would have known the whole story.

Twenty-first Century exiles from Christianity as it has been defined since the 4th Century might want to consider that hidden in the weeds at the bottom of the Elves’ peaceful lake are Christian hegemony, supercessionism, misappropriation of Jewish sacred writings, and corruption of Paul’s message to the Corinthians. “Purity” misses the “Mark” by 0.56%.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Covenant and Exile: 5th Sunday in Epiphany

2009-02-04T13:46:00.002-05:00

Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-11, 20c; 1 Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-39

According to the Revised Common Lectionary regarding the relationship of gospel and first reading, “From the First Sunday of Advent to Trinity Sunday of each year, the Old Testament reading is closely related to the gospel reading for the day. From the first Sunday after Trinity Sunday to Christ the King, provision has been made for two patterns of reading. . . (a) a pattern . . . in which the Old Testament and gospel readings are closely related . . . (b) a pattern of semi-continuous Old Testament readings . . . . For all these Sundays . . . churches and denominations may determine which of these patterns better serves their needs . . . the use of the two patterns should not be mixed.”

These commentaries have routinely disagreed with both the description of the patterns and the caveat about not mixing the two (see highlights for Propers in both years C and A). The readings for the seasons, of course, offer no “alternative” pattern readings. In addition, with the exception of the first Sunday after Epiphany, Year B seems to offer no particular relationship among the selections for the season from the Old Testament and the New Testament. The lament that the readings seem to have been cobbled together by drunken Elves may find some justification. The United Church of Christ’s “Electronic Library” suggests the theme for the 5th Sunday is “source of strength.” That may indeed be broad enough to do the job. Unfortunately that “source of strength” theme also can be applied to the entire Bible.

Why this portion of Paul’s at times scathing letter to the Corinthians was paired with the story of Mark’s Jesus’s first healing is not clear – especially if Paul’s emphasis is on participation with the post-Easter Jesus as Christ in restoring God’s distributive justice-compassion. But that is a 21st Century interpretation, based on a more accurate understanding of 1st Century life under the Roman Empire along with extensive (and controversial) scholarship about the historical, pre-Easter Jesus. Such an association might make sense given the much later (2nd - 4th Century) appropriation of Jesus’s message to an emphasis on salvation in the next life, based perhaps on the stories of supernatural miracles – like those in the reading from Mark’s Gospel. If the people were encouraged to believe (or better, suspend disbelief) in supernatural miracles, then Paul’s impassioned rhetoric about being willing to die for such a gospel could be used to keep imperial systems of injustice firmly in place.

The portion selected from Isaiah 40 certainly does lift up the God of Israel as a source of strength: “He gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless . . . but those who wait for the Lord . . . shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” These are some of the phrases from Isaiah most beloved by Christians because they have been used as a reminder of Covenant as promise, and that Jesus is the fulfillment of that promise. But who was the prophet that wrote those words, and why did he (presumably “he”) write them? What was the nature of the promise? Salvation from hell in the next life, or deliverance from injustice in this life?

Likewise the portions selected from Psalm 147: Praise for God’s care for Jerusalem. Is this Psalm to be taken as a further pious reference to the Messiah, who “gathers the outcasts of Israel . . heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds”? The note in the Harper Collins Study Bible points out that “[m]otifs and themes from other psalms, Job, and Isaiah 40-66 appear throughout the psalm” (p. 934). Perhaps this is why the Elves selected this particular Psalm for today.

The question is, what is really going on? As usual in these commentaries, the first answer is “Covenant.” The second answer is “Exile.”

The writer of Mark’s Gospel likely witnessed the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. With the Temple gone, Judaism – exiled again – changed profoundly, and the Jesus movement that got its start within Judaism developed its own spiritual identity. John Shelby Spong suggests the Gospel may have been written to replace the traditional Jewish readings that marked the Jewish liturgical year. Liberating the Gospels (HarperCollins, 1996). That seasonal rhythm has been long lost to Christian practice. The creator of the gospel of Mark, writing for a traumatized community cut off at the roots, would rather take us on a faith journey that reveals and confirms the identity of the Messiah at the end. But with the fore-shortened Christian liturgical year, Mark’s Gospel has to be broken up. The Christian year begins with Advent and birth stories that Mark did not include. There is not enough time between the Christmas season and the beginning of Lent to get the full metaphor of Mark’s Jesus on the road from Nazareth to Jerusalem.

To give the Elves their due, the prophet who wrote the second part of Isaiah – which includes Isaiah 40 – was writing from exile in Babylon. Much like the leader of the Markan community, his job was to hold the exile community together in its faithfulness to God’s Covenant. But Christians need to be careful. When the Prophet asks, “Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God?” he is not talking about Mark’s Jesus who counsels those demons he casts out not to say who he is. The writer of Isaiah’s poetry is not talking about the apostle Paul “disregarding” his right to monetary support from the Christian community in Corinth.

The Old Testament and New Testament readings must not be considered as “cause and effect,” or “prophecy and fulfillment.” Doing so robs both the Psalm and the prophecy of their relevance and power.

As devout Jews, it is highly likely that Paul (and probably the Markan liturgist) knew very well the meaning of the poetry in Isaiah and the psalms. Indeed where else could they have found the strength and courage to live and organize communities in the belly of the Roman beast and in the face of apocalyptic destruction? Paul deliberately declined to participate in those systems that he readily saw merely entrenched the injustice inherent in Roman imperial society. As a result, he got into huge trouble with the Corinthians. But to Paul, saving one soul was more important. “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.” Save from what? Hell in the next life? Or Injustice in this life? Conventional Christian piety since the 4th Century has answered “next life.” But Paul in the First Century was talking about this life – so immediately, so immanently, that marriage, money, position, favor, food, clothing, shelter meant nothing to him. Instead, what mattered above all was participation with the Christ in ushering in the Kingdom of God – i.e., restoring God’s rule of distributive justice-compassion.

Twenty years after the death of Paul, the writer of Mark’s Gospel was perhaps desperate to keep the community focused on living in the interim exile until Jesus would come again – as promised – at any moment – to meet them in Galilee. Jesus’s power was manifest, according to Mark – who (fortunately for the Elves a millennium or two later) wasted no time in cutting to the chase. But Mark is into secrets. His answer to the question, “why did people not recognize Jesus as God’s anointed one” is “because Jesus told people not to tell.” It is a Messianic secret, invented by Mark for his own story-telling reasons; “it has no basis in Jesus’s life or thought”(The Five Gospels, p. 43). Mark’s insistence on “secrecy,” and on the failure of Jesus’s followers to realize who he was until after his death, underscores the importance of “faith” – or better -- “trust” in the power of God’s imperial rule over Roman imperial rule.

Mark’s Jesus was not satisfied to stay in one place, whether Nazareth or Capernaum. “Let’s go somewhere else, to the neighboring villages, so I can speak there too, since that’s what I came for,” Mark’s Jesus says, “So he went all around Galilee speaking in their synagogues and driving out demons.” In Mark’s world, the demons all knew who Jesus was. Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah – he told the demons not to speak.

Likewise Paul refuses to accept credit from the Corinthians, and does not “boast” for his own sake or to get a reward/payback/kickback from his “patron.” Justice is not about payback. Justice is about radical sharing among radically inclusive equals. In the portion conveniently left out by the Elves in all three years of readings (1 Cor. 9:8-10), Paul writes: “Do I say this on human authority? Does not the law also say the same? For it is written in the law of Moses, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.’ Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Or does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was indeed written for our sake, for whoever plows should plow in hope and whoever threshes should thresh in hope of a share in the crop.”

Mark portrayed Jesus as an itinerant exorcist and faith healer: a “spirit person” and “mediator of the sacred,” in Marcus Borg’s words. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (HarperSan Francisco, 1994) pp. 31 ff. The point that Borg makes throughout his studies on the historical Jesus is, whether you believe the stories are literally, factually true or not, what do they mean? Twenty-first century, post-modern, post-Christian, jaded skeptics are not about to believe that Mark’s miracle stories are literally, factually, true.

The story about the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law has been discussed, reimagined, midrashed, metaphorised, and generally worked over for hundreds of years. I submit it is a story of Covenant. The story illustrates how the realm of God – distributive justice-compassion – broke through into ordinary lives because of what Jesus did.

Paul’s point is that the realm of God breaks through whenever anyone joins the program.

BLOG ARCHIVE

“Shut up and Get out!” 4th Sunday in Epiphany

2009-01-28T13:23:00.002-05:00

Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 111; 1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28

The Elves further solidify Christian dogma with this continuing series of “epiphanies” – “revelations” of the god Jesus.

God tells Moses that a prophet like Moses will be raised up from the midst of the people, and the people will be held accountable for obeying the prophet’s words. Christians are to understand that Jesus, of course, is that prophet, and believers are held accountable for the strength of their belief. Sure enough, the Psalm declares God’s Covenant established forever because God sent “redemption” – the Savior Christ – to the people. But these references to the foundation myth of Judaism in both the passage from Deuteronomy and Psalm 111 do not point to Jesus as the sole fulfillment of God’s Covenant with the people. There were and are many prophets whose job it has been to inspire, beg, and bully the people into complying with God’s rules for living in distributive justice-compassion. As the Psalm says, through it all, God has kept God’s part of the bargain. The rain continues to fall on the just and the unjust – global warming notwithstanding. The people, however, continue to opt out. We prefer to fight over who owns the land and its resources – never mind Psalm 24.

The Elves in Year B have focused on Chapters 6 through 9 of Paul’s first known letter to the community in Corinth, blithely choosing particular passages to bolster or confirm what is thought to be “traditional” Christian belief. Paul’s declaration to the community in Corinth that it is a “sin against Christ” to cause someone with a weak faith to be “destroyed” because of a silly argument over who eats meat looks like pious over-kill to tolerant, 21st Century mainline Christians. Paul’s point and the significance of Jesus’s life and teachings for both 1st and 21st Century Christians have been compromised.

John Dominic Crossan (and other Biblical scholars) propose that Paul wrote to the Christian community in Corinth at least five times, visited at least twice, and sent emissaries on one or two additional occasions. It seems the Corinthians were (or had) major problems with Paul’s version of Christianity. The problems were not about relative “weakness” or “strength” of particular members’ belief in the factuality of Paul’s story, nor compliance with Jewish dietary laws or rites of passage such as circumcision. The problems were perhaps two-fold: First, to understand the radicality of Jesus’s message as kenosis – the radical abandonment of self-interest at every level, and in every circumstance of life – personal, social, familial, political, global. Second (at least) was to understand Jesus’s definition of the realm of God as radical fairness – distributive justice-compassion, not retributive payback and mutual exchange of favors.

In his discussion of Paul’s letters and trips to Corinth (In Search of Paul, Chapter 6) Crossan asks, “How, indeed, could one live personal or communal kenosis without the empowerment of a kenotic Christ and a kenotic God?” p. 334. When we speak of kenotic God and kenotic Christ, Crossan and I are using mystic language and metaphor. The kenotic God is present wherever there is justice and life, and is absent wherever there is injustice and death. Such metaphor flies in the face of theistic concepts of a personal, omnipresent, omniscient Being outside of ourselves and superior to the natural world. The old theological meaning of kenosis is the willingness of divinity to empty itself of divinity and take on the humanity of Jesus. The new meaning is the willingness of humanity to let go of civilization’s definition of what is necessary for abundant life. Crossan continues that from the point of view of civilization’s definition, “Paul’s vision is quite simply inhuman, impossible, idiotic, and absurd.” That Roman society (wherever Paul traveled) found the message to be difficult if not impossible is no more surprising than that 21st Century, post-modern, post-Christian society finds the message to be difficult if not impossible to understand and to live. “But what is at stake is very clear. A kenotic community begets equality, a patronal community begets inequality; kenosis begets cooperation; patronage begets competition” (p. 334). The kenotic Christ is embodied in Christian community.

At this point in Chapter 8, Paul is arguing with those Corinthians in the Christian community who still thought that their ritual animal sacrifices to the gods held power. Paul is finally acknowledging that if people are convinced that their well-being depends upon participating in the sacrificial rites, who are Christians to object? “Food will not bring us close to God,” Paul says. But his point is that the kenotic Christian community, knows that there is no longer any need to participate in ritual sacrifices whose purpose was to reconcile relationships among the strata of Roman patronage society, from the Gods to the Emperor, to the aristocracy, to the shop keepers, to the servants, and the slaves.

Jesus’s death eliminated the need for any of that. Before God, in the fellowship of Jesus (the body of Christ) there is no male nor female, no slave or free, but all are one, and share equally on a level playing field. So, Paul is telling the Corinthians, if your friend still insists on participating in the sacrifices, for the love of Jesus, don’t you go along with it. Perhaps she is beginning to waver in her commitment to the normalcy of Roman customs. Even though you know that eating meat sacrificed to idols is meaningless, the moment you do so – perhaps as a favor to her, or to prove how ineffective the sacrifice is – you support the legitimacy of the inequality, oppression, slavery, and ignorance that perpetuates Roman imperial theology: piety, war, victory.

This is not pious posturing about vegetarianism, or leading naive or morally weak people into sin. Paul is saying that to participate in Christian community means not participating in unjust systems. For 21st Century people who still want to make the attempt to be followers, not worshipers of Jesus, that means operating outside the usual parameters. It might mean refusing to pay income taxes. It might mean getting arrested in the attempts to close the so-called “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia. It might mean performing marriages for GLBT partners in defiance of church and state laws. It might mean putting your body in the way of injustice in any number of circumstances from quitting your job at the grocery store where Unions are prohibited, to running for the local school board enmeshed in creationism, to divorcing your spouse in order to protect your children. It might mean allowing someone on life support to die. It might mean allowing a convicted murderer to live.

Mark’s gospel puts the crowning touch on the Elves’ sequence. Finally, a mere 21 verses into his story, the impatient writer can relate the first miracle – which is casting out a “demon.” Not a healing, not a teaching, an exorcism. Unlike the Jewish religious experts, Jesus had the authority to exorcise an “unclean spirit.” The operative word for the Elves and for us is “authority.” After 2,000 years of mis-appropriation, debate, schism, heresies, crusades, holocausts, claims, and repudiations, Jesus’s life and teachings continue to speak with authority. In “Driven by the Holy Spirit. Interview by John Malkin.” Sojourners Magazine, February 2009 (Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 45), Jesuit John Dear tells the story of testifying in defense of Philip Berrigan at Berrigan’s Plowshares trial in 1994:

We were facing 20 years in prison for two federal charges — destruction of government property and conspiracy to commit a felony crime. Each carries 10 years. . . .[T]he prosecutor . . . started shouting at me after I testified about Phil: “Who drove you that day to the Seymour Johnson Air Force base?” I refused to name anybody, saying, “I take responsibility for my own actions.” The judge started yelling; he ordered the jury out and said, “If you don’t answer this, you will get two more years in prison because of contempt of court. I’m ordering that in a minute unless you answer.” I said, “Okay. I’ll answer.” They were all shocked. They bring back the jury, and the prosecutor yells at me, “Tell us under oath who drove the car.” I said, “Well, thank you for pushing me to the truth of our action. The truth is that we were driven to the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base by the Holy Spirit.” The judge started yelling and hammering his gavel, and the prosecutor was yelling. He orders me out, strikes the testimony from the record, and dismisses the court for the day. It was a great moment. It was like the Acts of the Apostles. I have never recovered since.

Perhaps unfortunately, Jesus as exorcist no longer helps to sell the tough message : twenty-two years in prison for refusing to support what amounts to eating meat sacrificed to idols. The people were amazed, and asked themselves, “What is this? A new teaching – with authority!”

Jesus needed no special prayers or magic words to get the victim to stop participating in his own oppression. The Holy Spirit did it. “Shut up and get out!” is all he had to say.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Call to Covenant II: Rapture or Responsibility? Third Sunday in Epiphany, Year B

2009-01-22T11:34:00.003-05:00

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:5-12; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

The collection of fragments the Elves pulled from the Old Testament prophetic tradition, the Psalms, Paul’s first letter to the non-Jewish Christians in Corinth, and the gospel of Mark is cherry-picked proof-texting at its worst. That such an exercise serves to solidify the dogma that has defined Christianity for 17 centuries is no excuse. Repent for your sins – especially sexual ones – forget about family values like love and fidelity, because the end is near. Taken at face value (and how else have these readings been taken?), this teaching leads directly to the conviction that personal, individual salvation from hell in the next life is all that matters. Collective distributive justice-compassion and peace in this life is futile because the Rapture will happen at any moment.

What is a liberal Christian to do with these readings, short of pitching them into the circular file?

Start with the story of “Jonah and the Whale.” The Elves never consider the entire tale, which is usually assigned to primary Sunday School lessons. The idea that “The Lord provided a large fish [whale] to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” is too outrageous for even the most literal-minded adult to accept. It has to be a fun story for children. So we concentrate on the “moral” found at the end: chapter 3: 1-5 and verse 10 during Epiphany Year B, and 3:10-4:11 in Year A “When God saw. . . how [the people of Nineveh] turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it.” All is well if we repent for our sins.

The Elves imply that the Jonah story is a direct parallel with the portion selected from Mark’s gospel. After John the Baptist was arrested, the writer says Jesus took up the Baptist’s proclamation that “the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Mark’s Jesus even says, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” Just like God “provided” the fish that ate Jonah, James and John promptly abandon their fishing nets and become the first disciples.

Finally, poor misunderstood Paul reassures the cherry-pickers that “if you marry you do not sin, and if a virgin marries, she does not sin.” Well, that’s good news. But then Paul seems to be saying that because the Rapture is going to happen any moment, “let even those who have wives be as though they had none [rampant partner-sharing?], and those who mourn as though they were not mourning [denial?], and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing [?], and those who buy as though they had no possessions [unregulated 21st Century financial shenanigans come to mind], and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it” because “the present form of this world is passing away.”

The “Rapture” is a very convenient metaphor. It absolves us from all responsibility for corporate life while assuring us that our own individual lives are saved for all eternity simply because we believe that Jesus is bodily coming again to judge the living and the dead. Those who refuse to believe that are doomed, and (since the Reformation) we are not required to exert ourselves to try to convince them otherwise. Justice, whether retributive or distributive, is not relevant. Peace does not matter. Poverty is the fault of the poor.

Perhaps if believers in “the Rapture” were also prophetically involved with saving souls by recruiting folks into the great work of restoring God’s realm of radical fairness on this earth in this time, they would be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

Some level of apocalyptic thinking is probably hard-wired into human minds, given the brevity and uncertainty of most human life. We only have three or four score and ten years to make a difference on the Planet, and the first score (or more) is usually taken up with learning that fact and dealing with the accompanying ramifications. The last ten or so is spent realizing that tending our own garden (as Voltaire put it) is really the best way to make a difference. That leaves a middle third in which to be President of the United States, to write the pivotal novel of the Century, or figure out how to stave off the seemingly inevitable meltdown of the Antarctic ice cap.

As the so-called “culture wars” surrounding the separation of church and state have heated up in the past 25 years, the strategy for fundamentalist Christians has been to claim that free speech trumps the prohibition of the establishment of a religion in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The result is that whenever anyone piously claims Jesus as his/her own personal savior and lord, license is granted to defy the separation of church and state. When Rev. Rick Warren closed his inaugural invocation for the Obama presidency “in the name of the one who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jesus, Jesus [using the Spanish pronunciation],” he was daring anyone to object to this “universal” even “inclusive” syntax. When he then proceeded to the proprietary words of the Christian “Jesus prayer,” he crossed the line into defiance. His use of “free speech” established Warren’s version of Christianity as the official religion – at least until Rev. Lowery put things back into perspective.

Whether in city council meetings, school board meetings, or on the most public and secular occasions, “Arrest me!” this behavior demands. “I’ll pray in the schools, I’ll post the Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn, and I’ll invoke the name of Jesus wherever and whenever I please, and regardless of what anyone else holds as sacred” – because nothing else is sacred outside the Christian religion. Not life, not liberty, and especially not justice.

What a convenient belief for Empire to foster among the disenfranchised masses, who might otherwise demand fair treatment, health care, education, and a chance to better themselves. Karl Marx was absolutely right: Religion is the opium of the people.

But what is really going on in these readings for the third Sunday in Epiphany?

What is going on is that “Paul, like Jesus before him, did not simply proclaim the imminent end of evil, injustice, and violence here below upon this earth. They proclaimed it had already begun (first surprise!) and that believers were called to participate cooperatively with God (second surprise!) in what was now a process in human time and not just a flash of divine light (third surprise!).” In Search of Paul, p. 176. Whatever Jesus, Paul, and everyone else has said about the length of time involved, they all are and have been profoundly wrong. Jesus was here once, and has not yet reappeared. Given what we now know about the nature of life on Planet Earth, Jesus is highly unlikely to come again as his original, recognizable self, and most certainly not in a single, cataclysmic instant. For a thorough discussion of “parousia” – for that is what is referred to in 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 – please see the series of commentaries at http://www.gaiarising.org/Year%20A.parousia.html. Meanwhile, Crossan and Reed point out, “the first and fundamental challenge [Jesus and Paul] offer to Christian faith is this: “Do you believe the process of making the world a just place has begun and what are you doing about joining the program?”

As pointed out in the commentary for Year A, Proper 20, “Radical abandonment of self-interest brings justice and life – the presence of God. The joke – which Jonah resented, Jesus knew, and Paul realized – is that the Covenant includes everybody and anybody who is willing to sign on. Jonah only went to Ninevah after his journey into death in the belly of the fish. But Jonah didn’t die – he held onto his pious convention like a three-year-old. He would rather hold his breath until he turns blue than acknowledge that God cares more about saving 120,000 sinners from injustice than one recalcitrant, self-righteous prophet.”

It seems that whoever wrote Mark wanted to get to the bottom line as soon as possible. There is no birth story. Jesus’s ministry overwhelms the Baptist’s ministry within the first 13 verses, and the disciples are called almost as an afterthought as Mark plunges into telling about Jesus’s real work of healing and miracle. Six chapters later (which the Elves don’t allow us to consider until Proper 9 – sometime in the summer), “the twelve” are simply called together and sent out as Jesus’s emissaries.

We are confronted once again with the reality of “Covenant” with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus, Paul, and 21st Century post-modern Christians. Jonah didn’t get it, but the animals in sackcloth clearly did. The work of distributive justice-compassion is an ongoing struggle that we are called to join, but must choose. The writer of Mark’s gospel can’t wait to tell us what that work is. Paul approaches apoplexy trying to explain to the clueless Corinthians that conventional life is meaningless without the radical abandonment of self-interest that puts us directly into participation with God’s great work, and mystic sweet communion with the spiritual body of Christ.

What are we waiting for? Why stand around gawking up at the sky? Work, for the night is coming. There is no more time to lose.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Call and Covenant: 2nd Sunday in Epiphany, Year B

2009-01-15T11:29:00.002-05:00

1 Samuel 3:1-20; Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51

The New Testament readings for this 2nd Sunday in the season of Epiphany reflect the process whereby the early Christian movement defined itself. But as put together by the Elves, the theme seems to be divided between the mysteries of prophetic Call (Samuel in the Old Testament, Philip and Nathaniel in the New) and judgment.

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is shredded once again. His impassioned polemic about the essential difference between Christian community and Roman imperial culture is removed from its powerful context and reduced to pious self-righteousness about petty sexual sin. Worse is the subtext of anti-Semitism that lurks behind the words the writer of John’s Gospel gives to Jesus. When he meets Nathaniel, John’s Jesus says, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit”; and “you will see the heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” John’s Gospel is not history remembered. It is a post-Easter work, drenched in mysticism, whose purpose likely was to express the mystical meaning of the Christ – the Anointed One – for early-to-mid-Second Century followers of The Way. Jesus declares the follower Nathaniel is not deceitful – unlike Jacob (“Israel”), who cheated his twin brother out of his inheritance. This Christ whom Nathaniel has recognized as the Son of God has replaced “Israel” on the ladder that connects heaven and earth. This sentiment may have been proper for a Second Century group, finding its way among the political, religious, and cultural pitfalls at the end of the Roman Empire. It is not appropriate for post-Christian, 21st Century, global political, social, and scientific realities.

“The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” These words invite us into the realm of Saga – foundational story; defining myth. They also describe our post-modern world, which rejects the power of myth to inform the meaning of current conditions. We think that myth belongs inside books or movies for children. The story of Samuel continues with the mystical and defining “rule of three.” When Samuel disturbed Eli’s sleep for the third time, the old priest realized that God must be speaking to the child. Sure enough, Samuel delivered a message from God to Eli that confirmed the end of his family as servants of the temple. Soon “all Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba knew that Samuel was a trustworthy prophet of the Lord. The Lord continued to appear at Shiloh . . . and the word of Samuel came to all Israel.”

Earlier in the story of Samuel (2:25), old Eli tries to get his corrupt sons to realize that if they don’t repent and return to God’s rule, they will be on their own. Eli says, “If one person sins against another, someone can intercede for the sinner with the Lord; but if someone sins against the Lord, who can make intercession?” Christians could of course answer, “Jesus the Christ makes intercession for us.” But that no longer makes sense to a non-theistic Christian exile who is a follower, not a worshiper of Jesus. It makes no sense on several levels – not the least of which is the absence of integrity. “Cheap grace” spans the compass of sin from white lies confessed and expiated with three “hail Marys” to prayers for forgiveness in advance for the killing to be done on the battlefield.

Who speaks the word of the prophet today? Who has the authority, and from whence does that authority come? This is the question for post-modern, myth-deprived people in search of spiritual integrity. In 1964, folk artists Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle wrote that “The words of the prophet are written on the subway walls and tenement halls” that merely echo the sounds of silence. If the prophet was speaking, no one was listening. In a normal human reaction to guilt, the words of the prophets are often taken out of their context and highlighted for repudiation by the forces of normal civilization, which resent being called to account for injustice. Eli’s point is valid even in a 21st Century world where Jesus is seriously dead. We are on our own outside of the rule of God’s Covenant. The Covenant is for non-violence, justice-compassion, and peace. It is made not with a personal entity, but with the interactive web of existence, human and non-human. This Covenant is perhaps deeper and more demanding than the old one with a God perceived as outside of ourselves, who eventually decided to rescue us through substitutionary atonement.

Meanwhile, back in Corinth, is anything the Elves cherry-picked relevant? On the surface, obviously not. Removed from the context of Paul’s life and relationship with the pagan/Christian community in Corinth in the belly of the beast of Roman Empire, Paul’s demand to glorify God through the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit makes no sense at all. But a brief quote from In Search of Paul by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed (p. 283) may shed some light on 1st Corinthians 6:18-20: “What is striking, of course, is the rather stunning physicality of that ‘members of Christ’ argument. Christians are not only united in the Spirit of Christ; they are united in the Body of Christ. And that bodily unity not only has negative implications for [Roman temple] prostitution; it has positive implications for all the rest of a Christian’s bodily life. It also had profound implications for Paul in Roman chains at Ephesus not just for Christ, but in Christ.” These are mystical concepts, which cannot be grasped other than as metaphor, to be lived as metaphor. Not everyone is able to live the metaphor, as Jesus did – placing his body in the way of the injustice of Empire. But to the extent that we can, we speak and act with authority. To “glorify God in your body” has little to do with sex, and much to do with speaking truth to power, regardless of the consequences that the body may be subject to.

Of course there are a large number of people in our post-modern global village that take myths as factual history, and who insist that the Virgin can be seen in a shadow on a building, or that the return of the 12th Imam is imminent, or that the survival of the State of Israel is crucial for the ultimate establishment of the Kingdom of God. These are the kinds of false prophets who have led us into the precarious condition in which we now have the ability to destroy the Planet (in Crossan’s words) atomically, biologically, chemically, demographically, environmentally, “and we’re only up to ‘e.’”

That false prophets speak from the theology of Empire should be obvious: Piety, war, and victory are opposite values to distributive justice-compassion, non-violence, and peace. “Piety” insists on devotion to particular community norms such as attending church, posting the Ten Commandments in public places, opposing abortion while denying birth control, subjecting criminals of all ages and circumstances to the death penalty, celibacy outside marriage (defined exclusively as between “a man and a woman”), and “love the sinner, hate the sin,” which institutionalizes homophobia. “War” is violence, and violence is any action (spoken or physical, written or proclaimed) that violates the integrity of the web of co-existence on Planet Earth. So in addition to government-sanctioned wars, police brutality, and Catch-22 regulations, violence includes denying education to women, restricting immigration, predatory and fraudulent monetary and business practices, systemic injustice such as U.S. “health care,” ignoring the scientific evidence for global warming, clear-cutting the rain forests, and mountaintop removal mining techniques. “Victory” includes not only military and political hegemony and its accompanying repression, but “victory” is also “justice” defined as retribution/payback, and domination of everything perceived to be weaker, smaller, or of less value than the dominator. Such a theology never leads to peace.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Beowulf, Star Wars are all block-buster hits, whether of literature or film, premodern or post-modern. Perhaps the reason is that they speak to something that responds, even in the sophisticated, jaded, 21st Century. The ancient Psalm still speaks a truth if we allow ourselves to encounter the myth: “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? . . . I come to the end – I am still with you.” The Psalmist realized that he was both in God and of God – God is both immanent and transcendent. In post-modern terms, God is the matrix of life, and we cannot survive outside it. To be within that matrix is to be aligned with Covenant, non-violence, justice-compassion and peace. From that place we speak with authority, as God spoke to Samuel, and “the word of Samuel came to all Israel.” Wholeness calls us to wholeness, and we abandon our own self-interest to participate in the work.

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