Against the franchise

Deuteronomy 12:1-12
2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1

Here are two extremely non-ecumenical passages. In the Old Testament one, God commands the Israelites to “demolish completely all the places where the nations who you are about to dispossess served their gods…Break down their altars, smash their pillars, burn their sacred poles with fire, and hew down the idols of their gods, and thus blot out their name from their places.” Paul tells the Corinthians not to be “mismatched with unbelievers. For what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness.”

The first passage reminds me of the Taliban destroying the Buddhist shrine in Bamiyan. These monumental statues were carved into a sandstone cliff in the 6^th Century A.D. in March 2001. It was an outrageous act, and one of the things that made me shed no tears at seeing them expelled from power, not that more reason was needed than the government’s role in abetting the attacks of Sept. 11.

All religions claim an exclusive franchise, and most go through periods where their sense of priority becomes active hostility to the others, in its most extreme form inspiring violence. I’m afraid I can’t accept that. I do not want to dissociate from non-Christians. I don’t believe the prayers of others are not heard. I know so many people outside the church, and they give me so much. It’s beyond counting. And Christianity has a lot of work to do to get its house in order.

In my view, the proper approach to other religions (and non-religion, less bureaucratic or informal spiritual practice, diehard secularism, atheism) is to learn from them, and help them pursue grace on their terms. If Buddhists are trying to preserve statues, help them. Don’t be afraid to participate in non-Christian ceremonies. I had the great good fortune to attend the Maha Shivaratri observances this year at Sri Ganesha Temple. When the priest brought the oil lamp out of the shrine, I did not back away. He did not ask about my beliefs. I accepted the blessing—without understanding it I admit. I don’t think the Bible in any way condones this. I’ll chalk it up to historical growth of the church, differences in conditions that emerge as the church becomes powerful and dominant, not the small tribe of people trekking through the desert or meeting in the shadows of the Roman Empire. I acknowledge I could be on thin ice, but it’s the only way I can do this.

Surly Jesus

Luke 17:1-10

Much of the time in the Gospels, Jesus is not a very encouraging or pleasant fellow. Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew really got this quality. In it, Jesus is difficult and even petulant. And it’s not just when he’s tossing money-changers from the temple. Even after his great triumphs, his miracles, it seems like he often retreats, withdraws from people. This passage in Luke is just one of many where he doesn’t offer much consolation. The apostles say “increase our faith,” help us out here, and he just responds if you had one iota of faith you’d be a regular Luke Skywalker, moving stuff around by the Force. “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”

In the final section offers no congratulations for faithfulness. "Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, 'Come here at once and take your place at the table'? Would you not rather say to him, 'Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink'? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, 'We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'"

Although it’s a bit harsh, this is a kind of grace you do encounter in everyday life. Someone helps you out, and they say, “I’m just doing my job,” and it’s not false modesty, but a true sense that the person is simply doing what they are supposed to do, that anything less would be unacceptable. In that person’s eyes, all they’ve done is avoided screwing up. Help you solve a computer problem, give you a tow when your car breaks down, get some documentation faxed where you need it. It is reassuring when you see that convergence between someone’s role and beneficent actions. Goodness done not for the sake of congratulation.

But the other thing about this passage is that it has one of those jarring references to slavery that come up from time to time. The concept today signifies to a situation that absolutely must be corrected. When the word appears, you want the condition of slavery to be the focus of the passage and its overthrow the intention. Not spoken of as a natural state of affairs. Of course, Jesus is speaking in Biblical times, but wasn’t slavery wrong then as it is now? Can we permit ourselves a historical moral relativism on this matter, any more than we can on rape or genocide? And Jesus kind of rubs it in—“worthless slaves.” He asks people to excoriate themselves.

I think if you give credence to these words, acknowledge the words chosen and what they mean, they are hard to swallow. Slavery may be only a metaphor for a condition of spiritual dependence, with no justification in the human world. Still, why is it not permissible for us hold each other as chattel, but OK for God to do so? Is it because no human is righteous enough to deserve that right, but if by chance someone were to reach that state it would be a different matter. While it is impossible for a human to overcome sin to the extent that this question would be in play, is the idea that God wants us to move towards the state of slaveholder?

Jesus’ life gives me a break from this line of inquiry. Jesus of course made no attempt to lord it over us. He rejected Satan’s urging to use the power he had. So I guess I’m OK, but I don’t think we can get too comfortable with these slave/slaveholder references. It is important to let them shock a bit.

Before time

Proverbs 8: 22-31
John 1:1-18

These are two passages that go to a time before creation, into a cosmic timelessness. The passage from Proverbs describes some being who is a witness to God’s creation.

^“The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”

You have to dial back a couple of verses to identify the speaker: Wisdom. Not sure where that fits into our cosmology. Is this another word for the spirit or the child of God? Is it male or female? Maybe it’s Sophia.

These lines from John are one of the passages that flow most nicely in the Revised Standard Version, which tends to cut a little short of poetry. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Nice short phrases piling on top of each other. Sounds pretty good in German too: “Im Anfang war das Wort, und das Wort war bei Gott, und Gott war das Wort.” Listen to the subtle sense difference caused by the word order in the last clause: the Word was God, or God was the Word. It’s not an exactly equivalent substitution.

The next phrase takes it out of created time: “He was in the beginning with God.” The German is “Dasselbe war im Anfang bei Gott.” If I understand this correctly, dasselbe is a neutral word, something like “the same.” So this entity, the Word, both was God, and was there with God. Is the Word also Wisdom?

“All things came into being through him [dasselbe again in German], and without him [yes, dasselbe] not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

And then we are introduced to John the Baptist, who testifies to the light.

OK, so the Word, which like Wisdom exists with God before anything has been created, converts into Light over these few lines. It seems like we are very close to Gnosticism here, with divine Wisdom and divine Light leading us into the created world of historical time, or watching and witnessing.

These passages are a comfort to geeks. John is the great champion of the power of language to create the very world. The ultimate creative power of the divine word echoes in the efforts of writers and people who deal in words. And these lines in Proverbs describe Wisdom largely as an observer. The previous lines do identify Wisdom’s active roles in providing advice, guiding kings and rulers, serving as the source of wealth and honor, and Wisdom is the “master worker.” But part of Wisdom’s role is to watch, just watch. It seems like Merton had similar ideas about the role of the contemplative. Put them together (which isn’t exactly right, since this bit of John is in the daily lectionary and Proverbs is from the Sunday readings), and you’ve got a celebration of observing, thinking, and putting things into words.

A note: if I had proper qualifications to be doing what I’m doing here, I would be able to read Greek and could get to the bottom of things like the gender of the words in John. But I don’t and I can’t, so I do what I can. One thing is to triangulate from a couple of translations. But truth be told, I treat the German Bible as a sort of Ur text. Because its roots are with Luther himself, it feels closer to the founders of the faith. But even more so, because an important part of my identity as a Christian comes from a German-speaking family line, the German makes me feel like I am going back to some sort of personal source, but one that is also foreign and distant, that I have to struggle with to understand. The secret, but not too secret, language of faith-parents.

Live coals and glowing lights

Isaiah 6:1-8

Today is the Eve of Trinity Sunday, so there are extra readings, including this one from Isaiah. Trinity Sunday is one of the wonkier named Sundays, in that it commemorates a theological idea and not an event in the Bible or church history. I guess it’s there to remind us of this concept, which is not necessarily high on the minds of a practicing Christian and probably one that creates low level confusion. You have one God with three forms. The father, son, and spirit, the creator God, Christ the redeemer, and the Holy Spirit that sanctifies people and flows through and among them. It is most decidedly not a three God pantheon, but then there’s all this talk of God sending His Son, and that sounds like two beings.

The father-son-holy ghost formulation is of course gender specific language that is part of what makes it hard for people I care about to get interested in Christianity. The Presbyterian Church issued a study last year that argued for opening up the language we use for talking about the Trinity. Makes sense to me. Of course, this comes as the Presbyterian Church tries to not to talk about homosexuality, so this study came across in part as poking the more conservative folks without getting back into the debate on gays again. “Hey, you won’t let us ordain gay people, but we’re going to start referring to God as a girl.”

To me the gender issues in the Trinity aren’t that hard. God the Creator, this God is well past gender. Infinite and beyond human categories. We can talk about it as the Father, but I see no reason not to refer to the Mother also. The Bible refers to God as He, which is about what you would expect, but I don’t really see why we need to limit ourselves to those gender terms in our own talking about the Christian God. When God decided to become incarnate, God had to choose a gender form, so we ended up with male Jesus. Again, given historical context, it’s not surprising the choice was male. I’m not sure Jesus’ maleness matters that much. Jesus is an action, the action of divine incarnation, sacrifice, and human redemption. And then there’s the Holy Ghost, and I don’t think anyone worries about gender there.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I’m radically unqualified to get into this. What I needed to talk about was this wild stuff from Isaiah. The writer describes a dream (“In the year King Uzziah died”—don’t we all do stuff like that to remember the date for events as the years go by) in which he goes before the Lord in a kind of audience, but he is worried that he is unclean and should not be seeing the Lord. So one of the attendants takes care of things:

“Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said ‘Now this has touched your lips your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.”

It’s a strong image, an angel touching Isaiah’s mouth with a red hot coal. And it reminded me of the imagery in a Björk song, “Crabcraft” on Vespertine:

“I have a recurrent dream
Every time I lose my voice.
I swallow little glowing lights
My mother and son baked for me.
During the nights
I do trapeze work
Until they lie in sky
Right above my bed.”

(Apologies on the words and line breaks. This is how I transcribed it from the recording.}

I think the similarity in images is pretty obvious, and both are accounts of dreams/visions. It made me think about what kind of text the Bible is if you see it as similar to a songwriter like Björk. Like a lot of great songwriters and poets, her words (and music and stage craft) depend on a strong intuitive drive that allows her to fetch unlikely images and ideas and put them together. Even when she doesn’t set up a lyric as a dream, it may have dream-like qualities—image condensation as well as surrealistic free association. You may try to puzzle out the meanings of these images, but ultimately there’s no definitive reading, lots of hermeneutic loose ends, and part of what you need to do is just take the image in and accept it, let it operate on your consciousness in unanticipated ways. Just accept the pleasure of the words and images.

With the vivid imagery in the Bible, there is more pressure to interpret it to within an inch of its life. The Bible is God speaking to us, so the assumption is that we must push ourselves to understand the message God is delivering in each passage, each sentence. But think about Björk. Why would God not also speak to us with the tools of poetry, through indirection and rich pools of meaning made possible by ambiguity.

I’m not trying to claim that one can find Christian themes in Björk. I don’t see that she is inclined that way or particularly needs it. What she offers is a different way to experience the rich and exceedingly complex text that is the essence of our religion. Rather than always try to explain the words, allow ourselves to let them linger in our mouths and exist as flavors and textures, and not always be in such a rush to find the message. Enjoy the oddness of the language where it occurs.

If it were just about other people

Psalm 36:1-12
Psalm 32:1-11

I’m still stuck on yesterday, although if I moved to today’s readings I would get the Ten Commandments—that’s pretty important—another fascinating bit of 2nd Corinthians, and Psalm 130, “Out of the depths I cry to you,” a beautiful psalm, in Latin De profundis clamavit and a great text for Renaissance music.

There are several points where the psalms neatly sum up the psychology of evil people. 130 contains one of those passages that feels closely observed in a Scott Peck sort of way. “Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in their hearts; there is no fear of God before their eyes. For they flatter themselves in their own eyes that their iniquity cannot be found out and hated. The words of their mouths are mischief and deceit; they have ceased to act wisely and do good. They plot mischief while on their beds; they are set on a way that is not good; they do not reject evil.”

There it is, the arrogance of those who wreak havoc on the world, who take advantage of the weak. They believe that no one sees the evil they do, their corrupt motives. Maybe they once tried to do what was good but at some point figured out that was for suckers. You think “this is them exactly.” And “them” is not just an abstraction. You can think of the people who exhibit these behaviors. George Bush and Ralph Reed, Jeff Skilling. The person who stabbed my good boss in the back. You’ll have your own list (although I’m pretty confident about mine).

Some of the passages continue to lament the free pass these people get, holding out for eventual judgment, others like Psalm 36 turn right away to God’s love and all it holds out.

Unfortunately, the satisfaction of seeing evil called out doesn’t hold up too long, because as much as you know who qualifies as evil, there’s no way it’s that simple. The Bible never is. As a category, “the wicked” includes you. It just works that way. The harsh light of this observation cuts into your own soul. It doesn’t mean I have to approve of Ralph Reed, but that gets deferred to another realm, another day.

The Psalms rock back and forth, between God’s wrath and love, so wait for it and you get some relief from the harsh judgment of first four lines of Psalm 36. Try the evening Psalm for June 1, Psalm 32: “Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgression to the Lord’, and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

I want to take this past a simplistic, ritualistic process of acknowledging sin and asking for forgiveness. These passages do several things. They describe the capacity of people for deeply flawed behavior, and the ways it is seductive and easy to fall into. They also force you to acknowledge the fraternity you have with someone engaged in evil behavior. “Mon semblable, mon frère” as Baudelaire put it. Once you do that, you have to realize that want you do can matter—in a negative way. You see how the bad actor is having a negative impact on the world. Guess what. So do you. To get past this state of affairs, to move to some sort of life as humans together that is not infinitely painful and mutually destructive requires people to get out of themselves somehow. They have to see a bigger picture. God, religion, they do this. I think other things can do it.

As a closing, my favorite line in Psalm 130: “you save human and animals alike, O Lord.” My 3 dogs are waiting for their last walk of the night. The Lord must feel affection for them. Or for the phoebe nesting on the light fixture in our carport, the baby bunny that’s taken up residence in our blackberry bramble, or the skunks that come around at night. There aren’t so many passages in the Bible that offer encouragement to those of us who feel a deep kinship with the rest of the natural world. S. Francis was borderline heretical. I’ll take what I can get.

Infinite creation

Psalm 36:1-12
Deuteronomy 4:32-40
2 Corinthians 3:7-18
Luke 16:1-9
Psalm 80:1-19

I think I’ll look at parts of this over a couple of days. As always, there are connecting threads between the passages, but sometimes I’m just more interested in the fragments, even in a single line. That might be picking and choosing, but I’d prefer to think it’s just one of the ways the Bible presents itself.

The lines from Paul’s letter talk about how Moses covered his face when we was still glowing after speaking with Jehovah (Ex. 34), and then how the new covenant allows for the face-to-face encounter. “but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…”

David and Sarah Dark (two friends in Nashville--she's a songwriter and singer, he's the author of several useful books including Everyday Apocalypse) use the phrase “Unveiled Faces” as the name for one of their discussion boards , the one for general “how’s things going sharing.” I’ve never asked David or Sarah about who designed what on the website. A fellow named James Stewart has done a lot. At any rate, the use of the phrase in this context strikes me as an idea I would expect from David, that the mirror in which we see the glory of the Lord are the faces of those people closest to us. It’s a neat, elegant formulation—designed in God’s image, both you and the person you talk to, so when you see the other in those terms you also see your inheritance of divine design.

The passage has a couple of several subtleties. It is still a reflection—a mirror yes, but a mirror can be distorting, even dark. Not quite there to face-to-face. And the mirroring of glory in unveiled faces is not a single event or state, but an ongoing process that feeds on itself to pass to new degrees. This adds sense to the community interpretation (and earlier passages in the letter indicate it is very much concerned with the practical business of community). As the community adds depth of affiliation and mutual understanding, the divinity it reveals increases. Or the divinity itself increases. Is it a matter of what is seen, or of what exists?

This passage describes the believers being transformed into the same image. Interesting to think about this in light of recent discussion in the Republican debate about evolution. Sam Brownback published an editorial in the Times trying to explain why he said he didn’t believe in evolution. He doesn’t clarify much of anything, but he does rely on the formulation that people were formed in God’s image, and as long as the scientists don’t try to dispute that we’re cool. I don’t think the theory of evolution has an opinion about God’s image one way or the other, so I guess Brownback’s saying he didn’t mean it when we raised his hand to indicate he didn’t believe in evolution.

But this passage from Paul makes the business of people and God’s image more fluid, more progressive—more evolutionary. People develop—evolve?—towards higher degrees of being in God’s image. And they do this after receiving the Word, not at the time of creation. So people before the New Covenant were not so much in God’s image, not like those in Paul’s formulation. If people are developing forwards after Christ, in the community of belief, could there not have been similar progression occurring in the direction back into time. It seems to me that we are free to see creation in God’s image as a movement towards this state. And it is a movement that does not finish. Creation is an ongoing process, not just something that occurred in 6 days. And if it is ongoing from the point where the narrative of the Bible picks up, why would it not have been ongoing before that, an infinite regression of creation fitting an infinite creator.

Life in the City

Psalm 15:1-5
Deuteronomy 4:25-31
2 Corinthians 1:23-2:11
Luke 15:1-2, 11-32
Psalm 48:1-14

Today’s passages are about being-together, something like a discussion of polis. This is a quality that is more spatial than simply social or familial. The morning Psalm asks “O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill?” The evening Psalm praises God in His city, and ends with references to this city’s features. “Walk about Zion, go all around it, count its towers, consider well its ramparts; go through its citadels…”

The other passages introduce absence from the city. The OT reading from Deuteronomy tells the Hebrews that “The Lord will scatter you among the peoples” and in the Gospel we get the Prodigal Son, who squanders all he has in a distant country and then gets stranded there.

It’s easy to assume these are just metaphors and that God’s city is a figure of speech. But why this metaphor and not another? Just to add variety? Don’t the qualities of the image count for something? Otherwise they are just words. A degree of literalness gets you someplace richer. Familial relationships occur in space, by being together to each other, the intern notwithstanding. So does the relationship with God. And a city, polis, isn’t just a place. It is a web of interdependent beings and forces, the thrust of physical structures, the churning of climate, and the ways people help and harm, entertain and disturb each other. God exists in such a web of relationships between physical, natural, and human being. Recently I read an article in The Believer by Jenny Price, a nature writer talking about how Los Angeles is the perfect place to write about nature because it is a place where humanity and nature constantly encounter each other, and where all of the impacts of humans in nature reveal themselves when you look for them These are the kinds of organic relationships that define the city, not just the buildings dropped on the street grid.

Paul’s letter touches on the nature of relatedness in a community. It’s one of those almost chatty letter covering early church family business. I decided not to come to your house—we’d just get on each other’s nerves, and what could would that do—I still love you, but you’re driving me nuts.” This is a family going through a little thing. The key point in the passage is “Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive.” If they are going to become a community, the polis, at the end of the day the participants will have to figure out a way to share experiences and decisions, to get to the same place on important things. I’m reading Danielle Allen’s book The World of Prometheus, on punishment in Athenian society. An essential aspect of Athenian democracy was the ability, in certain kinds of cases, to convert the isolated anger of the individual into a collective anger shared by the city and expressed in city-regulated actions of judgment and punishment.

In a passage like this one from Paul, the Bible offers us a glimpse of polis, of humans living, in the Christian view with God, with each other, in society, in space, in time.