Cow or Calf

Acts 7:1-8:1a

The Bible isn’t always a treasure house of great rhetoric. Sure, there’s the Beatitudes, but there’s also a bunch of speeches that the Bible just insists had a tremendous impact on the listeners, but they don’t read like much of anything in English translation.

The story of St. Stephen and his martyrdom revolves around a long speech he gives to the high priest who confronts him with accusations of blasphemy. What follows is a run-on thumbnail retelling of nearly the whole Old Testament, sort of like 10-minute Shakespeare, leading up to some key points where the people show themselves to be “a stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears…forever opposing the Holy Spirit.” The result of Stephen’s oratorical efforts? The crowd stones him. Generally considered a bad outcome from an attempt at persuasion. But I guess Socrates had the same problem.

A lot of Stephen’s speech recounts the history of the Jews: Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses bringing them out of Israel. All of this leads to exhibit A in the charge of stiff-neckedness, that whole golden calf thing.

Well, I’ve been thinking of the Golden Calf ever since my world was enriched recently by something I learned about in Iowa: The Butter Cow. Dear readers, I probably have no need to explain the Butter Cow to you, but in case there are some of you who suffer from the same level of ignorance in which I wallow, the Butter Cow is a feature of the Iowa State Fair. Since 1911, a sculptor has created a life-sized dairy cow out of layers of butter applied to wood, metal, and mesh frame. Carving the cow is the responsibility of a single artist who performs this feat each year until the time to retire and hand over the reins. This artist also carves another figure or maybe more—Elvis one year, Tiger Woods, the Last Supper, Brandon Routh as Superman (the actor is from Iowa). The State Fair is on only its 4^th butter sculptor.

The Butter Cow strikes me as one of those things everyone would have heard of, and my ignorance of it makes me question what cave I’ve been living in (I’ve been watching Letters from Iwo Jima on DVD this evening, so I’ve also got caves on the mind).

But here’s the question:

Charming Midwestern tradition?

Or rejection of the covenant with God?

Judas

Luke 21:37-22:13

“Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was one of the twelve; he went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers of the temple police about how he might betray him to them. They were greatly pleased and agreed to give him money. So he consented and began to look for an opportunity to betray him to them when no crowd was present.”

Recently the National Geographjc Society released the Gospel of Judas, and Elaine Pagels and Karen King have published a book on it. The upshot is to reposition Judas as a figure who collaborated with Jesus to realize the prophecies. Jesus asked Judas to play his role leading to the Passion, and Judas did nothing but obey.

I find the interest in rehabilitating Judas quite strange. The Bible doesn’t need anything added to it, not the Gospel of Judas, not the Book of Mormon. It is what it is, and its rich content needs to be addressed. Once upon a time the content of the Bible was up for grabs, but that was a long time ago, and now part of being Christian is having this well-defined set of stories and poetry to work with as a holy text. The text is complicated and multifarious enough, it needs nothing else to give us plenty to do.

The Gospel of Judas offers an alternative way to understand Judas, and of course some people would say it says something about who he really was. I think we need to understand Judas within the narrative form that we encounter him. It’s like adding a sequel to Moby Dick for new insights on Ahab. You can do that, but then you’re dealing with a completely different book and narrative.

The point that Judas was necessary to realizing Jesus’ appointed role in the creation is plainly there in the Gospels. No need to add texts. The story of Judas brings us back to the question of the relationship of an all-powerful God to both evil and good. God needs Judas to betray to Jesus, and in fact appoints him to do this. Does this make Judas a good and faithful servant? What is evil, really? It is clearly something we encounter and experience as humans, but it’s not as clear what it looks like to a merciful God. And what is goodness? Again, it is something we experience when we receive a kindness or witness an act of grace. But in our prayers we acknowledge that it is only by the God’s grace that our good acts are in fact good in ultimate terms.

Do we live in Apocalytic times?

1 Samuel 4:1b-11
Acts 4:32-5:11
Luke 21:20-28

This a trifecta of violence and warfare. We start with the Israelites battling with the Philistines quite unsuccessfully, then have a couple dropping dead when Peter calls them out on cheating the collective, and Jesus in one of his apocalyptic moments.

The passage from Samuel tells the story of a battle in which the Israelites bring out the ark as their secret weapon, but the Philistines figure they just need to stand up and fight. Which they do, and they capture the ark of the covenant and kill Eli’s two sons Hophni and Phinehas. Of course their victory is short-lived—having the ark around creates all sorts of disease and death in their city. So they give the ark back after 7 months.

The story is really about Eli’s failure to protect things and letting his sons run amok. The Lord sets him back, as the Lord is wont to do.

In Acts, after again explanatory that the earliest church held everything in common (champions of collectivism might point to this as a prescription for Christian life, and as much as I’d like them to be true, it never seemed that way to me—it reads more like a practical solution developed at that time), the story describes how Ananias and Sapphira sell a piece of property but lie about the price so they can hold some back for themselves. Peter knows about it (God told him, or Peter checked comparables), confronts Ananias, points out that he has lied to God. Ananias points out that he has lied to God, and Ananias falls straight out and dies. 3 hours later his wife Sapphira shows up, Peter puts her through the same routine and she dies. Rough justice, if you assume Peter “zapped” them. Or an indicator of the terrible burden you take on by deceiving yourself into thinking you can deceive God.

Finally, Jesus prophesizes the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Coming. “These are the days of vengeance,,,Woe to those who are nursing infants in those days.” Earlier in the chapter he started this tale of end times: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.” Earthquakes, famines, plagues, portents and signs from heaven.

As Jesus describes it, those end times are near. This generation, i.e., the one he’s talking to. But he obviously didn’t mean quite that, unless you look at the last 2,000 years of human history as an extended time of days of vengeance, with every successive outrage and holocaust part of the same. You can definitely make this case.

You can also make the case we’ve been given a pretty wonderful world to live in, and one in which we even see glimmers of humans getting their act together. We understand genocide is wrong (not clear anyone much in the 18th or 19th century saw anything wrong say in wiping out Native Americans so my ancestors could take over their land). We cure some diseases. Life spans lengthen (some places, some times, some groups). Women get treated more like full participants in human society. And so on.

We live in fairly apocalyptic times. I think the next 5 years are going to be telling. I think we’re going to get an idea of what global warming is going to do. It may be hard to get away from things like this passage in Luke. My little litany of positive advances may seem more and more ridiculous. There is some attraction in living in a world of imminent violence—defeat by the Philistines, getting struck dead, and those grand battles of ignorant armies on the darkling plain. It's all so dramatic.

Maybe there’s a couple of things to take from this. First, as the horrors and disasters of the world seem to crowd in, maybe words like Jesus’ account of the Second Coming in fact caution us against embracing the pessimism about the world that goes along with it. This Second Coming exists on some other plane, spiritual or metaphorical, and you can’t count on the end of things. No, you count on them continuing and behave accordingly. And the people of God will suffer setbacks, but you have to keep reading to the end.

I let these pasages lead to this question: do we live in Apocalyptic times? That leads to the idea that we always live under the shadow of the Apocalypse, each successive generation. It's there, a place we slip into during our lives, but one we have to pull ourselves out of as well. In Biblical and religious terms, it is by remembering the other parts of the book and the story. The Psalms of forgiveness and plentitude.

Council of the Holy Ones

Psalm 89:1-18
Psalm 97:1-12

From yesterday, Psalm 89

⁶For who in the skies can be compared to the LORD?

Who among the heavenly beings is like the LORD,

⁷a God feared in the council of the holy ones,

great and awesome above all that are around him?

From today, Psalm 97

¹The LORD is king! Let the earth rejoice;

let the many coastlands be glad!

²Clouds and thick darkness are all around him;

righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.

³Fire goes before him,

and consumes his adversaries on every side.

⁴His lightnings light up the world;

the earth sees and trembles.

⁵The mountains melt like wax before the LORD,

before the Lord of all the earth.

⁶The heavens proclaim his righteousness;

and all the peoples behold his glory.

⁷All worshipers of images are put to shame,

those who make their boast in worthless idols;

all gods bow down before him.

OK, here’s a question or two: who are the “heavenly beings?” What about this council of the holy ones. Angels? I suppose. But really, Christianity doesn’t have a pantheon of deities. 3 in 1. That’s the deal. There are these messengers, but they don’t have a role in creating or ruling the world. What does this council rule on? Maybe they just hang out and nod their heads. More like a choir.

You also run across references like this one in Psalm 97. Gods bow down. Who are these Gods if there is one God? If other Gods are just delusions of those in darkness, then they aren’t out there bowing down before God. They don’t exist.

One fascinating thing about the Bible is watching God’s position consolidate. In the Old Testament there are hints that God has competitors. That there are other Gods floating around vying for human fealty. The Bible makes the case, through songs and stories, that God is greater than these. But not always that God is the only one. God is clearly the one creator, and it’s not clear what is the status of these others. In some cases you can assume they are presented as delusions of the local people. But at times actions and qualities are attributed to these other entities.

As the Bible progresses, and certainly by the time of the New Testament, the other gods fade away, and God has the stage alone. It is a question of accepting God or not. Little (maybe none) credence or attention is given to Zeus or Jupiter by Jesus and the Apostles. The battle is completely over the souls of people.

In an ecumenical world, where one honors the religious practices of other people, the question of multiple Gods comes back. The Middle Eastern religions are easy enough to resolve—Jehovah, God, Allah, all ways of engaging with the same singular creator God. But what about all those Hindu deities? Or the Goddess in Wicca. The traditional approach is to say only one way to salvation, believe in the triune God, or fall into damnation. But I know I don’t believe that. People of good conscience who are devotees of Siva or Ganesha, I don’t think they will suffer for it. I have to think that as Allah is a way of addressing the God revealed to the Jews, these other deities are ways of getting at the same thing that we pursue through devotion to Jesus. Christianity might be better or a more direct path, but a truly ecumenical view (not a hypocritical, fingers crossed behind the back ecumenicalism) says it’s OK, we’re pulling in the same direction.

If you go back to the Old Testament, where there are all those other gods, and it is clear they are entities beyond people’s creations, and God is the creator of all things, then God is their creator. They serve some purpose in God’s world. Maybe they are foils or tests. “Let’s see if they fall for this.” But maybe they are alternate methods.

Today is Solstice. In Wicca and many other religions, this is an important day. For people of European descent, most of our ancestors marked the points in the solar calendar. There is real benefit to celebrating Solstice and the other points. It makes you aware of the physical world, the interdependencies of people, animals, plants, and things. It demands humility. You’re just part of it. Don’t get too much in the way of attitudes. I’ve long felt that if we have to have a civic religion – we don’t, but some people are working on getting us one – we would be a lot better off promoting Wicca. It can focus people on good, concrete stuff. Dirt, plants, light, rain, heat. Christianity seems to lead people astray very easily. “I’ve got an idea—let’s have a Crusade.” That kind of thing. Of course the idea of putting religion (or set of practices if you will) in such a place of authority is radioactive to Wiccans. They would have no part in it. Good for them.

Final unrelated thought. The description of God in Psalm 97 sounds foreboding. Mountains melting, lightning, earthquakes. Why should Earth rejoice, the coastlands be glad. The bridge for me is in the middle: clouds and thick darkness are all around him. On the one hand that sounds like special effects from Raiders of the Lost Ark. But I think of the way clouds envelope the landscape in Seattle and Vancouver in the Fall and Winter. That’s lovely and calming for me. Somewhere there’s a bridge between the power to destroy and the power to sustain. The Psalms are poetry, and poetry works by jamming things together, forming more meaning by the associations of proximity, not necessarily relying on linear explanation.

Render

Luke 20:19-26
Psalm 102:1-28

The scribes and priests are still trying to trip Jesus up. The plan is to get him to spout treason against the Roman government, then hand him over (a scheme that eventually more or less works). In addition to solving the problem of their authority in the Jewish community, it gives them a chance to show the occupying power that yes, they do cooperate with the efforts to bring order to the streets.

"Teacher, we know that you are right in what you say and teach, and you show deference to no one, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" But he perceived their craftiness and said to them, "Show me a denarius. Whose head and whose title does it bear?" They said, "The emperor’s." He said to them, "Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s."

They were expecting sedition from Jesus, but instead got accommodation. The line “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” becomes a template for Christian conformity. Obey society’s laws in your public affairs, obey the church’s teachings in private. It allows for a separation of religion and politics, each in control of its own space, cooperating vigorously to keep order all the way across the system. The business of religion in this case is not revolution. The best it can do is offer some comfort where the government seems to let people down, but it should do so without complaining.

Another interpretation of this would be that sending the denarius back to Caesar is done without enthusiasm. The Christian cooperates only as much as required. Stay under the radar, don’t give them an excuse to throw you in jail, and lead your radical life in the space left over as you stay within those lines. After all, this is one of Jesus’ clever parries with the Pharisees, designed to leave them with empty hands, the catch sliding out and straight back into the river.

But explain this to me. What exactly is Caesar’s, beyond this coin with his picture? Caesar did not create the world and the people and animals in it. If Caesar’s laws harm God’s children, is Caesar staying within the lines of his domain, or is he interfering with God’s? Jesus’ rhetorical ruse may be even more clever than it looks on the surface. One can give the coin to the Emperor, but in the end it doesn’t matter because it all comes back to God.

I then end up asking whether I wouldn’t rather maintain a bright line between the church and public policy, politics, all that. Human nature is such that you want your preachers (or elders, deacons, choir directors, etc.) in the game, but wish the other guys would stay out of it. I can’t stand it when Two River Baptist Church runs a crypto-Republican rally, but I’m very proud that Rev. Stacy Rector leads the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing. In the end I have to make an argument based on the substance of the activity, not the form. Some Christians are active in politics and public affairs in destructive and self-aggrandizing ways. I have to make that case. It’s harder than saying “preachers out.”

The evening Psalm 102 has one of my favorite images, the little owl in verses 6-7:

⁶I am like an owl of the wilderness,

like a little owl of the waste places.

⁷I lie awake;

I am like a lonely bird on the housetop.

⁸All day long my enemies taunt me;

those who deride me use my name for a curse.

⁹For I eat ashes like bread,

and mingle tears with my drink,

¹⁰because of your indignation and anger;

for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside.

This little guy might be the same kind of owl: Athene noctua, called the Little Owl, common in the Middle East.

Sister Jezebel

1 Kings 21:1-21a

If I had encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible, I would miss out on the pleasure of stumbling across the reference for some later cultural icon. At my current level of ignorance, I get the surprise of saying “oh that’s where this phrase or name comes from.” Sunday’s daily lectionary included most of the story of Ahab from 1^st Kings. Melville practically rewrote the Old Testament in Moby Dick. It’s not clearly there’s anything other than Biblical references in the novel.

To recap, Ahab was a king in Israel (when the kingship of Israel and Judah were split) who decided he wanted a vineyard owned by a guy named Naboth. He offers a sale or trade, but Naboth ain’t interested. Ahab pouts, so his wife Jezebel decides she’ll get him the vineyard – after all, he rules Israel, so why shouldn’t he have it. And she’s probably sick of seeing him mope around the house. If he won’t take care of the situation she’ll do it for him. So she writes letters in Ahab’s name sends them to “the elders and the nobles who lived with Naboth in his city.” As Ahab, she tells them to find some thugs to accuse Naboth of something, anything, then take him out and stone him to death. The elders and nobles do this, Naboth is stoned to death, Jezebel gets news of this and sends Ahab off to get his vineyard. But the Lord gets in touch with Elijah, tells him to tell Ahab “Thus says the Lord: In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood.” Furthermore, Elijah tells Ahab that he (it seems Elijah speaks of his power here) will “consume you, and will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel.”

Here’s a story of greed driving someone to bring down their house, the obsession of Melville’s whaling captain. But let’s not forget Jezebel, who is the villain here, like Eve in the garden (or Lady MacBeth). It’s one of those evil women, women as temptress passages that make it difficult to reconcile Christianity with the kind of relations between sexes people of good faith want to have in this day and age. Social progress is real (to update and reverse the Louvin Brothers), and we can’t accept the casting of men and women suggested by this passage.

The lectionary demurely cuts off the passage here. The rest of the chapter doesn’t exactly help much (1 Kings 21:21b-29:

“and I will make your house like the house of Jeroboam son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha son of Ahijah, because you have provoked me to anger and have caused Israel to sin. Also concerning Jezebel the Lod said, ‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the bounds of Jezreel.’ [Jezreel is where Naboth had his vineyard] Anyone belonging to Ahab who dies in the city the dogs shall eat; and anyone of his who dies in the open country the birds of the air shall eat.’

(Indeed, there was no one like Ahab, who sold himself to do what was evil in the sight of the Lord, urged on by his wife Jezebel. He acted most abominably in going after idols, as the Amorites had done, whom the Lord drove out before the Israelites.)

When Ahab heard those words, he tore his clothes and put sackcloth over his bare flesh; he fasted, lay in the sackcloth, and went about dejectedly. Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite: ‘Have you seen how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he has humbled himself before me, I will not bring the disaster in his days; but in his son’s days I will bring the disaster on his house.’”

First of all, the passage circles back to Jezebel and gives this bloody account of the end awaiting her. It’s pretty graphic, and makes it impossible to ignore the fact that the passage blames Jezebel. It’s no wonder the designers of the lectionary decided to cut off where they did. What preacher in his or her right mind wants to preach on the dogs eating Jezebel in Jezreel.

The next paragraph, in parentheses in the NRSV, at first seems to make the point again, although it puts Jezebel in a purely abetting role. Ahab sold himself. He acted abominably.

Why the Lectionary leaves out the last paragraph is harder to understand. In that, Ahab makes amends. He can’t get off the hook entirely—causing the death of another person for the reason of personal gain is clearly out of bounds. But even in the face of such an abomination, God finds room for mercy.

What are the options in interpretation here? One is to say women are a bad influence, better keep them under tight surveillance. That has certainly been the fashion in many times and places. The other is to argue that gender doesn’t matter, the point here is that someone wants something, and lets the people close to them engage in abominable behavior on their behalf. A view on the sad state of fallen humanity. But glossing over the gender misses the fact that this scenario comes up at least one other really significant time, and the roles are never reversed.

That leads to the next option, to say this reflects the social realities of the time. It’s about what a person does with their power, and what those close to power do to curry favor with power. In this society, that sort of public power was only held by men. When Hilary Clinton takes over the White House, Bill Clinton will play the Jezebel role.

I can’t quite get to any of these positions. I think you have to accept the sexism embedded in the book, in this book of ultimate importance. But there is clearly a need to move the faith to a position past that kind of sexism. I think it occurs through some sort of dialectic process in which the reality of such texts is acknowledged, but is met with an antithesis rooted in the contemporary experience of Christian communities of good faith that leads to a practice of Christianity that reflects the capacity of the human family to progress, even within the limits of historical time between Christ’s resurrection and return. We cannot make paradise no more than we can build a tower to heaven, but we can be better in our stewardship of creation and our acts of love to our neighbors (that would be everyone).

Add-on. In addition to what I picture when I hear the name Jezebel—Bette Davis, fere’s another image of Jezebel, by a late 19^th/early 20^th century painter named Byam Shaw. The picture here is of a vain woman, but you really don’t get that from the passage in Kings. Her motives are to snap her husband out of it—maybe as a matter of convenience, maybe a reflected sense of the household’s dignity, but she could just be trying to do her duty in misguided way. But these names have a capacity to take on a life of their own after they are lifted from the Bible.

Habits of Mind

2 Corinthians 11:16-21a
Luke 20:1-19

The New Testament is filled with people trying to get the best of each other in argument. Paul’s letters are filled with extended metaphors/arguments. In 2 Corinthians (this is from a few days ago, there is this long riff in which Paul casts himself as a fool and weak, and then argues from that position about the authority of his words:

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. What I am saying in regard to this boastful confidence, I am saying not with the Lord's authority, but as a fool; 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, or puts on airs, or gives you a slap in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that!

Paul’s sentences twist and turn, and you have to slow down to see the point.

Jesus also engages in verbal sparring throughout. Sometimes it takes the form of quizzing the Apostles, or performing a miracle followed by instructions like “tell no one” or “let’s get out of here.” He also constantly argues with authorities (up to the very end in front of Herod):

One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and telling the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came with the elders and said to him, "Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority?" He answered them, "I will also ask you a question, and you tell me: Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?" They discussed it with one another, saying, "If we say, 'From heaven,' he will say, 'Why did you not believe him?' But if we say, 'Of human origin,' all the people will stone us; for they are convinced that John was a prophet." So they answered that they did not know where it came from. Then Jesus said to them, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things."

Here you can see the priests, scribes, and elders trying to catch him up, then Jesus parries the question with a question that puts them on the defensive. They perform an evasive manoeuvre, he responds in kind, ending in a draw, but in this chess game the priests lose from a draw. They had wanted to catch Jesus out, but ended up with nothing solid, and Jesus of course knew everything he needed to know about them.

And he follows with a parable, about a man with a vineyard leased to tenants who kills his slaves and son when they go to collect rent. “What will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” The priests realize this is a barely veiled reference to them.

With accounts like this at the heart of the faith, Scholasticism and its progeny is no surprise. The faith conditions habit of mind that will take pleasure in logic and argument. Obviously many people have argued that these habits of mind started with the characteristics of this religion, spread into other realms, and led to the predominance of the West for the last several centuries.

The West may be losing that power now – only a blind person would look around and say the West leads the world by direct control or by assimilating other peoples into Western cultural practices. To me, it is much more the case that other cultures have adopted what they like from the West and are working with it in distinctly different directions, whether it is the Chinese version of capitalism or the way radical Islamic movements use modern communications methods to promote their cause.

One possible factor in this weakening of the West’s strength is the fact that some parts of the West, notably the U.S., are leaving the West. And I’m not talking about immigrants. I’m talking about native born people who increasingly abandon the cultural traditions and notions of progress and reason in favor a deracinated post-modern Americanism that devalues the intellectual practices that have, for better or worse, marked the West. A big part of this, in the U.S., is traced to a church that turns its back on the value of reason and argument embedded in the primary stories and texts of the faith in favor of calls to emotion only and to the simplest possible reading of complicated texts. The personal experience of Jesus and the Bible reduced to slogans, with study of the text itself and theology something done as an afterthought, left to others, or even rejected. Much American Protestantism has long reflected a non-metropolitan distrust of academic learning. It’s a healthy antidote to taking it too seriously, but when it so dominates that all interest and respect for reason is lost, that’s a problem. It also violates the historical memory of our country’s development, in which even with the crudeness of the early white settlements, people carried books with them. The light of the culture went with the people.

I’m afraid George Bush sums it up pretty well. Went to Yale, but didn’t bother trying to learn anything there, because learning is for chumps. Knew everything he needed to know, with a notorious lack of curiosity, even about critical issues he faces as a leader. Religion can reinforce such proclivities, or it can counteract them.