That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: Theology (Page 33 of 94)

Foundations in the Forest – From the Daily Office Lectionary

August 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Foundations in the Forest . . . .

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Tuesday in the week of Proper 15, Year 1 (Pentecost 12, 2015)

Psalm 122:1-2 ~ I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord.” Now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.

When our choir, acolytes, liturgical assistants, and clergy gather for prayer just before the opening procession of Sunday worship, I will often use a prayer which begins with a paraphrase of these verses. As I do so, in my mind’s eye I see the forest going by the bus window as we drove from Jericho up to Jerusalem in the summer of 2014. My first and so far only trip to the land of the Holy One.

The forest is non-native, mostly European pines and Australian eucalyptus. It is a young forest with only several decades, not centuries, of growth. There is little, if any, undergrowth and peering through the trees when can see unnaturally regular formations of stone. These are the ruins and foundations of Palestinian villages emptied and bull-dozed into nothingness during the ethnic cleansing of Israel during the Jewish State’s “war of independence” in 1948. I am told that there are families in the refugee camps who still possess deeds from the Ottoman Turks testifying to their ownership of homes in these now-nonexistent towns, who still hold on the keys of front doors which can no longer be found let alone opened.

We made the journey up to Jerusalem a couple of times on that trip but we never stopped along the way to actually walk into that forest, to step into those village foundations, to experience that history and that obliteration of history. So now I am reading the history of Palestine and Israel from 1880 onward by a number of authors; I am reading classic Zionists, post-Zionists, neo-Zionists, anti-Zionists; I am reading both Muslim and Christian Palestinians, Palestinian refugees, and Palestinian citizens of modern Israel. I will never comprehend the breadth and depth of Middle Eastern and Holy Land history, not even of the short 130 or so years of Zionism and its effect on the Land.

But I am coming to appreciate two things. First, how tragic and sorrowful is this psalm which ought to be a cry of joy: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: ‘May they prosper who love you.'” (v. 6) There are so many of several faiths who love Jerusalem yet none can prosper in the absence of a shared vision of “the peace of Jerusalem” for which we all pray. Second, how woefully inadequate is my own education and, by extension, that of all! This morning I read some newspaper articles, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor apropos of the nuclear arms deal negotiated with Iran; several viewpoints were expressed and as I read each one I thought, “Yes, but do you know?” or “Have you considered the comments of [some other writer]?” or “No! That’s simply not true!”

We each focus our vision on a few facts; we cannot, or perhaps we choose not to, see them all. As a result, we do not see a full and complete picture. As an old saying has it, we cannot see for the forest for the trees. But we must see the forest, for in amongst its trees are the foundations of the future, the solution that must be built. “Peace [will never] be within your walls [nor] quietness within your towers” (v. 7) until we do so.

Figs & Forgiveness – From the Daily Office Lectionary

August 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Figs and Forgiveness . . . .

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Monday in the week of Proper 15, Year 1 (Pentecost 12, 2015)

Mark 11:12-14 ~ On the following day, when they came from Bethany, [Jesus] was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.

A day or two later (after Jesus has overturned tables in the Temple and driven out the money-changers), he and his band will pass by this tree again. The disciples will notice that it is withered to the root and comment on that fact. Jesus will instruct them about the power of prayer using the famous example of a mountain tossed into the sea. Mark’s use of the withered fig tree story is as a demonstration of power, both Jesus’ power and our own potential, which is all fine and good. Nonetheless, I have always been curious about the story.

It may be that the story is an embodied metaphor, that it happened in another way, that the author of Mark hasn’t really understood it, and that Mark has therefore tried to make sense of it by using it at this point in his narrative. Rabbinic commentary has long used the fig tree as a metaphor for the Torah, noting that the crop of figs do not ripen uniformly so that one most go back to the tree many times to harvest its fruit; the Torah is said to be like that, yielding fruit each time we return to study the scriptures. Perhaps Jesus blasted the fig tree as a way to demonstrate the fruitlessness of Torah as it had come to be used by the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and others. Perhaps there was more conversation apropros of the withering which had been lost to communal memory by the time Mark put pen to parchment, recording the action but not its contemporary explanation, adding words about prayer from another conversation. Perhaps . . . .

However that may be, the story as Mark relates it, wrapping it around the “cleansing of the Temple,” reveals a very human Jesus, one given to anger and frustration – righteous anger in the case of the Temple money-changers and livestock salesmen, petulance in the case of the fig tree. When challenged about the result of his fit of pique, he avoids the question, turning it aside with a “Well, you could do it, too, if you just have enough faith.”

I really don’t think Mark intended to portray an angry, frustrated Jesus, but that’s how I read the text . . . and I’m thankful that the story is here, told in this way. Mark’s Jesus is a human being to whom I can relate. I completely understand and I can fully relate the frustrations, the annoyance, and the pique apparent in this story, and even the larger, more justified anger Jesus expresses in the Temple. What I always have a hard time comprehending is Jesus ability a few days later to forgive those who execute him, but the two episodes are intimately connected and, therefor, give me hope. If Jesus is like me in the former, then maybe I can be like Jesus in the latter.

I can learn a lot about scripture, theology, and religious history if the story is one of an embodied metaphor, the fig tree as Torah. I can learn a lot more about me and about God Incarnate if the story is one about Jesus, human, frustrated, and annoyed, who can later offer the ultimate in forgiveness.

A Theology of Rape – From the Daily Office Lectionary

August 15, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Saturday in the week of Proper 14, Year 1 (Pentecost 11, 2015)

2 Samuel 16:22 ~ So they pitched a tent for Absalom upon the roof; and Absalom went in to his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel.

I’m having a hard time with Scripture today … I have notes for a sermon for tomorrow, so I’ll be able to mumble my way through some sort of ad libbed homily … but tomorrow’s lessons are not cause of the problem. The cause was this lesson in today’s Daily Office Lectionary in which Absalom attempts to wrest the kingdom of Israel from his father David. Absalom takes control of Jerusalem and then, on the advice of Ahithophel, whose counsel is extolled “as if one consulted the oracle of God,” this happens: to demonstrate his control of the city and his contempt for his father, Absalom’s men “pitched a tent for Absalom upon the roof; and Absalom went in to his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel.” ~ “Go in to” is a biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse. In other words, Absalom, on the advice of one whose counsel is considered to be like that of God, publicly raped his father’s concubines as part of a military conquest.

This is a week in which many of us have been disgusted by the NY Times report on ISIS’s “theology of rape,” by the Jihadists’ use of women as property, as sex slaves, as rewards for their followers, by their calling rape an act of prayer! So these verses really leapt out at me!

Absalom is not a hero of the Bible. Eventually, his rebellion is put down and he is killed. Nonetheless, this lesson portrays his act with callous nonchalance and praises the man who advised it. I’m disgusted. A theology of rape is not so distant. I’m having a hard time with Scripture today.

Barzillai the Gileadite – From the Daily Office Lectionary

August 14, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Friday in the week of Proper 14, Year 1 (Pentecost 11, 2015)

2 Samuel 19:37 ~ [Barzillai the Gileadite said to David,] “Please let your servant return, so that I may die in my own town, near the graves of my father and my mother.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about retirement recently; I suppose that’s something that happens when you hit the mid-60s in age. Where to settle to enjoy what once were called “the golden years”? One doesn’t really hear that term much any more, does one? Are they no longer considered golden, these years of decline when one is supposed to spend time with one’s grandchildren, puttering in a garden or messing about in a workshop or taking classes at an adult learning center? Is it because, as in the days of Barzillai the Gileadite (who was 80 years old, by the way), we no longer have the time or wherewithal to do those things, because we (like Barzillai) must work until we die because pensions have disappeared in financial crises and medical cost increases have outpaced inflation and despite promises to the contrary our homes have not turned out to be the always-increasing-in-value investments they were supposed to be?

Ah, well . . . . whatever. Where to settle in these remaining years, whatever they may hold, is still an issue. As a society we have long ago abandoned any pretense of a hope of dying “in our own towns, near the graves of our fathers and our mothers.” We have become too mobile for that; in fact, our parents became to mobile for that; in the case of my family, my grandparents became to mobile for that. When I look at my options, my choices of place where I might be buried near the graves of grandparents, parents, or siblings . . . I could chose among seven cities and ten cemeteries!

A contemporary commentator on the American scene whose observations make sense to me is John Howard Kunstler. In his book Too Much Magic, Kuntsler writes:

“Yet another problem with suburbia-related to its unworthiness of affection – was its horrifying mutability. Suburbs changed so dramatically from one year to the next that adults came home to find the places where they grew up unrecognizable, and almost always for the worse, often because some beloved patch of woods or other vestige of original landscape had finally yielded to the bulldozers. Life is precarious enough and there are some things in this world which people need to feel a sense of permanence. Familial love and a place called home probably top the list, and we became a whole nation of souls whose home places were lost or mutilated beyond recognition. This sad condition, so common now, has surely worked even to the detriment of family relations, so that we’ve succeeded in undermining the two elements most crucial to healthy functioning personalities: place and family.” (Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation, Atlantic Monthly Press: 2012, pp. 35-36)

A sense of permanence, a spirituality of place, a place called home, “near the graves of my father and my mother” . . . a mobile society constantly changing its location, both by moving and by altering the landscape, does not have these things and cannot really understand Barzillai the Gileadite and his reluctance to accompany David to Jerusalem. As I approach Barzillai’s age, however, I get a glimmer of understanding and an appreciation of what we are missing.

The Jews of Asia, Watts, & Monoliths — From the Daily Office Lectionary

August 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Thursday in the week of Proper 14, Year 1 (Pentecost 11, 2015)

Acts 21:27 ~ When the seven days were almost completed, the Jews from Asia, who had seen [Paul] in the temple, stirred up the whole crowd.

When I was a kid growing up in Las Vegas I knew there were some people called “the Jews.” That is about all I knew about that particular group of people. My family knew a couple of Jewish families; my dad was friends with Sammy Davis, Jr., who was a black Jew and I knew that that was somehow really different. But I didn’t know anything about different sorts of Jews; they were all one group in my childish understanding.

When I went away to boarding school, I met and befriended a young Jewish man who introduced me to the American varieties of Judaism: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstruction. His family went to a Reform synagogue and, he told, were Sephardim by ancestry, thus introducing me to the difference between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. In my senior year, my English class read Leon Uris’ recently published novel “Exodus” and these differences took on more meaning, and the concept of the Sabra was introduced to my understanding.

In college, I read Martin Buber and learned of the Hasidim and the ultra-Orthodox; I also took a course about the founding of Israel and learned about the Mizrahim (Jews from eastern Arabic, Persian Gulf countries), the Maghrebim (Jews from North Africa), and the Falasha (black Jews from Ethiopia).

So when I read the words “the Jews from Asia” in today’s Acts reading, I wondered which of these modern divisions of Judaism and ethnic Jewry (if any) they might have represented. That I am currently reading a new text on the history of Israel probably encouraged that.

And then I wondered how many modern American Christian readers of the Acts lesson appreciated the existence of such divisions. We are so prone to monolithic thinking. I know from Bible study conversations over the past 30 years of ministry, that when we read the words “the Jews” in the Christian Scripture we Christians tend to create in our minds a united block of co-religionists who rejected and then opposed the teachings of Jesus and his disciples.

We do the same when someone says, “The early church ….” Again, in our minds we create this mythical monolithic united religion which even a short course in Christian history will demolish.

We do the same when someone says, “The Muslims ….” Monolithic thinking, even in the face of news reports reminding us that there are differences between Sunnis and Shi’ites, between Arab Muslims and Iranian Muslims, between radical Iraqi jidahists and moderate American imams.

We whites do it at the mention of “African Americans” and blacks do it at the mention of whites. We know better but, initially, as if it’s part of some human hard-wired programming that we must constantly over-write, we do it anyway.

“The Jews of Asia” stirred up a riot in the Temple precincts on flimsy and false premise that Paul had taken a Gentile, Trophimus the Ephesian, into the Temple. The police were called; Paul was arrested; the riot was put down. As I listened to the radio news this morning, I was informed that today is the fiftieth anniversary of the Watts riots, a civil disturbance with perhaps more justification, and certainly more damage, than the Biblical riot.

I was not quite a high school freshman living in another part of the Los Angeles metroplex in August of 1965. That was back when I still thought of “the Jews” as a singular, monolithic group; I thought of black Americans the same way. I remember the riots. I remember “our” fear of “them.” God help us, not much seems to have changed in fifty years! In all honesty, not much has changed in two thousand years. That hard-wired pre-programmed initial response of monolithic thinking, both about “us” and about “them,” whoever the “us” is and whoever the “them” is, is still with us, still a part of us, still in control of us.

When I was in seminary, I had a dormitory neighbor named Elizabeth, a doctoral student from Australia. I had the privilege of hearing her preach a children’s sermon one day on the parable of the lost sheep. She gathered the community’s children around her and asked them if they knew how God counts people. They all said “No,” of course, and she proceeded to point directly at each child saying, “One … one … one … one …” Her point for the children was that each one of us can be a lost sheep and that in God’s eyes each one of us is “number one,” the most important, the one God will take all the time necessary to search for and find.

As I think about our reading today and “the Jews from Asia” and the Watts riots, I remember Elizabeth’s children’s sermon and draw another inference: for God there are no monolithic groups, there are only individuals gathered into a flock. It is one of Jesus’ many lessons for us to learn, remember, re-learn, and remember again as we constantly over-write that programming; there is no “us” and there is no “them.” There are no monoliths!

Mindfulness – From the Daily Office Lectionary

August 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Wednesday in the week of Proper 14, Year 1 (Pentecost 11, 2015)

Mark 10:25 ~ [Jesus said,] “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

I grew up with people (primarily my Methodist Sunday School teacher grandfather) telling me that this verse is about getting into heaven. Wrong! It’s taken me a lot of years to shake that teaching, but shake it one must, because it’s just plain wrong!

The first thing to notice about this statement is that the verbs (both of them “is”) are present tense. This is not a statement about the future, either a future in this life or a future after death. It’s not about the future; it’s about the present. It’s about now. “It IS easier … someone who IS rich …” Here and now.

The second thing to notice about this statement is that it never mentions heaven, paradise, afterlife, or whatever. Jesus does talk about getting into “the kingdom of God” but that’s not the way Jesus talks about life after death (something he actually doesn’t talk much about). “Kingdom of God” is the way Jesus talks about the life we are meant to be living now, about the reign of God in our lives as we live them in the current moment. Elsewhere (in other gospels) he uses the term “kingdom of heaven” or “eternal life” to mean the same thing.

When we see and accept those two things, then, we are left with a statement about the present, but what does it mean? As I pondered this throughout the day (which is why I’m so late in the day posting this meditation), I came to the realization that this is a statement about what today would be called “mindfulness.” To be mindful is to be quiet, alert, aware, undistracted; to be mindful is to notice that which usually escapes notice. Those who are “rich” live in a world of distractions, a world of objects which clamor for their attention, a world of possessions which cloud one’s attention.

In that world, one cannot “enter,” that is notice and be mindful of, the kingdom of God. When Jesus made this observation, Peter asked, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus answer, again, is in the present tense: “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.” Salvation, the kingdom of God, is not a future thing; it is for the here and now. Mindfulness is the key to entering into it.

Forgiveness and Consequences – From the Daily Office Lectionary

August 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Tuesday in the week of Proper 14, Year 1 (Pentecost 11, 2015)

Psalm 99:8 ~ “O Lord our God, you answered them indeed; you were a God who forgave them, yet punished them for their evil deeds.”

Each time I recite Psalm 99 from the Book of Common Prayer I find myself caught up short by this verse, by its ordering of forgiveness and punishment. One would, I think, expect something like, “You were a God who punished them, yet forgave them.” Perhaps it’s the choice of conjunction that is troublesome: “yet” seems to imply future action, punishment coming after forgiveness. An Orthodox Jewish translation of the Psalm offers a slightly different (although more ambiguous) understanding: “Thou answeredst them, Hashem Eloheinu; Thou wast El (G-d) that forgavest them, though Thou tookest vengeance of their misdeeds.” “Though” (which is also used in the Authorized Version translation) could mean either ordering of forgiveness and vengeance.

In any event, the verse catches my attention and leads me to consider whether forgiveness negates the possibility of punishment or, more broadly speaking, of consequences. I know from my own experience as a child that it does not. My parents might have forgiven me some offense, but the result of my offense, forgiveness notwithstanding, might still be a restriction of privileges in the future. More than once I can remember my mother or father saying something like, “You remember what happened last time” even though they had forgiven my infraction “last time.”

So is such forgiveness really forgiveness? Whatever happened to “forgive and forget”?

What happened was that it never ever existed! No one (and our verse suggests even God) ever forgave and forgot, nor should anyone. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu who was intimately involved with the reconciliation process that helped bring a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa is quoted as saying, “Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering –remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you don’t want to repeat what happened.”

The psalm reminds us that even though God is a God who forgives, but that God is also a God who remembers, a God in whose kingdom there are consequences. Yes, forgiving but remembering, forgiving yet allowing there to be consequences is forgiveness. It’s the only kind there really is.

Stay Salty, My Friends – From the Daily Office Lectionary

August 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Monday in the week of Proper 14, Year 1 (Pentecost 11, 2015)

Mark 9:50a ~ Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?

The Bible is full of metaphors which can be lost on modern American Christians, and this is one of them. We buy our salt (sodium chloride) in neat blue boxes from the supermarket; it’s purified, though it may be mixed with a small amount of an additive to make it run smoothly and flow freely. It may have a bit of granulated sugar added to it because pure salt is too salty for modern tastes! And it may have iodine added to it as a protection against goiter and other iodine deficiency issues; sea salt naturally contained iodine, but highly processed and refined salt does not.

This modern “pure” salt is incredibly stable and does not lose its saltiness. But salt which is mined from deposits such as one might have found in First Century Palestine is not pure. It is an amalgam of sodium chloride with other salts and minerals. If this mixture becomes wet, the sodium chloride can dissolve and leech away. The remaining substance looks the same but the salty flavor is lost and it cannot be brought back.

Followers of Jesus are called to be salty and, like that First Century salt, people are amalgams; we are not pure in any way. And we certainly can lose our “saltiness” as the dampness of life dilutes and leeches it away. What is the “saltiness” that we are meant to retain? What is the human “saltiness” that Jesus is concerned cannot be restored? I’m intrigued that one definition of “salty” is “down-to-earth” whereas the words of Jesus are so often taken to be spiritual and lofty. I’m amused that another is “coarse” in the sense of colorful, spicy, racy, risqué, naughty, vulgar, or even rude, whereas today’s Christians make a show of eschewing such behavior or language.

Time and time again the Gospels remind us that Jesus was a down-to-earth sort of guy. He want to dinner parties and wedding receptions and had a good time. He told jokes, most of which we don’t get because we’ve lost the cultural references (like the impure salt metaphor). He was condemned by the religious people for associating with sinners and was publically criticized as a “winebibber,” the quaint King James English term for “drunkard.” This all suggests to me that the “saltiness” that Jesus here speaks of is not some lofty, holy preservative of morality; it’s that down-to-earth naughtiness that makes life fun. It might be what the French call “joie de vivre.”

There’s a series of advertisements for a brand of beer in which the corporate spokesman, described in the ads as “the world’s most interesting man,” advises consumers, “Stay thirsty, my friends.” I think Jesus is even more interesting that the beer man and, in this gospel story, I see him looking into the camera, thinking of the parties and weddings he has attended and of the sinners he has befriended, saying, “Stay salty, my friends.” And he doesn’t mean “holy!”

God’s Sense of Humor – From the Daily Office Lectionary

August 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Friday in the week of Proper 13, Year 1 (Pentecost 10, 2015)

Acts 19:32 ~ Meanwhile, some were shouting one thing, some another; for the assembly was in confusion, and most of them did not know why they had come together.

I will only say that if ever there was evidence of God’s sense of humor, it is the coincidence of a reading with this verse in it and the aftermath of last night’s event at Quicken Loans Arena (“the Q”) in Cleveland, Ohio. (My wife insists that there are no “coincidences,” only “God-incidences.” This morning I will agree with her and, again, suggest evidence of Divine humor.)

A Weed in Your Garden? – From the Daily Office Lectionary

August 6, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Thursday in the week of Proper 13, Year 1 (Pentecost 10, 2015)

Acts 19:18-19 ~ Many of those who became believers confessed and disclosed their practices. A number of those who practiced magic collected their books and burned them publicly; when the value of these books was calculated, it was found to come to fifty thousand silver coins.

The author of Acts obviously approves of the burning of “fifty thousand silver coins” worth of books. I cringe. In this brief passage, I hear the precursor not only of the burning of banned books throughout European and North American Christian history, I hear the stirrings of the destruction of Buddhist antiquities by the Taliban and of ancient Assyrian sculptures by ISIS. I hear the early rumblings of the gathering storms of religious purity, suppression of differing viewpoints, and the murder of those who are different.

Some years ago, I was teaching an adult education class at a church in another diocese at the time of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church held in Phoenix, Arizona (July 1991). As part of the opening ceremonies of that convention, a group of Native American “smudgers” had blessed the worship space in a ritual that involves the burning of aromatic herbs and the offering of the smoke; the smudgers who participated were active members of the Episcopal Church. A participant in my adult ed class was outraged; she likened the event to one purposefully planting a noxious weed into a garden, condemning the Native American tradition as “pagan” and “satanic.” (I should note that the congregation where the course was offered was an Anglo-Catholic parish which made abundant use of incense, so I don’t think the herbal smoke, in and of itself, was the issue for this class member.)

I wondered then and I wonder now how she feels about Christmas trees, Advent wreaths, Easter eggs, and the various other pre-Christian and “pagan” practices the church has incorporated into its ritual and popular practices. (Smudging has become rather a common, though not widespread, practice in the Episcopal Church, by the way. It was incorporated into the investiture ceremony of the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in 2006, and her successor as Bishop of Nevada, the Rt. Rev. Dan Edwards welcomed smudgers at his consecration; in both cases, the smudgers were active members of Nevada Native American congregations.)

We have much to learn from the rituals, ceremonies, and ritual practices of others. To the extent they are not diametrically opposed to the truths of our faith, they can enrich our spirituality. The Roman Catholic theologian Raimon Panikkar (who is of both Spanish and [east] Indian ancestry) once suggested that if Christ is the fulfillment of earlier scripture then, as the Hebrew Scriptures are read in churches in the west, perhaps the Vedas or other ancient texts should be read in the churches of India and the east. Of his own personal pilgrimage to India he wrote, “I left Europe as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian.” For such sentiments, Panikkar was expelled from the Opus Dei community and disciplined by the Vatican. I, however, find them intriguing.

My student’s outrage and Panikkar’s ecclesiastical discipline are both direct descendants of the book burning recorded in Acts. I wonder what was lost when those “fifty thousand silver coins” worth of books were burned.

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