The Prime Directive: Proper 9, Year B

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.

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

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

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?”

BLOG ARCHIVE

Seeds: Proper 6, Year B

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

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

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)

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.

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