+Z’ev

Commemoration of the Martyr William Laud

Today’s assigned readings:
Jeremiah 23:1-8, Colossians 2:8-23, John 10:7-17

Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.
Jeremiah 23:2-4

It is my sense that this passage, in order to be fully understood, must be seen in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person: Myself as Shepherd, You as Shepherd, Them as Shepherds. Paul makes us responsible for each other, each the other’s faith, each for the other’;other’s participation and salvation in the Body of Christ. Thus each of us are shepherds for the other, no matter what Jeremiah might have intended or what other ways it can be read.

As a Bible Teacher, a blogger and as a preacher, I have to be accountable for the ways in which I might cause to stumble those who hear or read my words. I pray my words would not lead someone astray or scatter the flock… But I’ve experienced that ability writing from both conservative and liberal sides of the aisle. It is, mostly, that double experience that makes me certain both sides are needed, that both sides are equally Christian (or that neither side is). And so that brings me to shepherds in the second person.

My recent experience of spiritual abuse as led me to wonder how one can speak out without causing scandal. One priest suggested I write the bishop of my former pastor, but I can’t figure out how to do that without getting caught in the middle again. You - the second person - shepherd… (Not “you” as in my readers) can do things that would cause the sheep to scatter.

I see the same sort of thing in the current Roman Catholic issue with paedophilia: it is important to find and stop the perpetrators. But how can you do that in a way that does not cause scandal among the faithful, among other Christians and before the eyes of the world?

In the third person - them - shepherds are even harder to pin down. Among the possible traditional readings, the readers of the Hebrew Scriptures might understand “shepherds” to indicate those whole rule the countries where Jews sojourn during their long Diaspora. And so this prophecy might be seen as directed against the (mostly Christian) nations and peoples who persecuted the Jews over the last 2,000 years. Christians might be very wise to take that upon themselves. We have traditionally seen Jews among us as “Them” and “the Other” rather than as our Guests or, following Jeremiah, the Lord’s Sheep for whose care we are responsible.

Today’s commemoration of William Laud ties this all together, I think: for the religious debates which led to his martyrdom at the hands of Protestant extremists and iconoclasts were also political debates in his day. But his every turn seemed to be wrong for politics and extremism had besieged the church then - as now. We are no better off today: At the Iowa Caucuses, as I blogged last week, Pastor Huckabee’s cheerleader, Rebecca Sweethood, lets you know what she, at least, thinks of you in this prayer for the Pastor:

We pray that you would lift Mike Huckabee up, Lord… Lord we pray that he would not be ashamed to be known as a pastor. And that is exactly what the leader of a Nation should be, Lord, one who is is a shepherd over sheep, God…

When I pointed out that we’re electing a president, not a pastor one of my readers took me to task for reasons unclear: he seems to imagine that because I don’t want my political leader to be a religious authority I am, therefore, rejecting all religious authority at all.

Another way to look at this is the political siege caused by issues of Human Sexuality. It’s OK for African Clergy to have more than one wife (provided they were married before they converted). This is defended as a cultural position and not one of morality. But Americans are accused of abandoning the faith because they elected a openly Gay man. Or, conversely, the scandal caused by that election did, in fact, shatter an otherwise shaky communion.

As people of faith, how do we shepherd - ourselves, our loved ones and our guests? And how do we shepherd in such a way as not to scatter the flock?

Much love,

Huw

Today’s assigned readings:

AM: Jeremiah 11:18-23, Matthew 10:16-22
PM: Isaiah 65:17-25, Hebrews 12:12-24

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
Hebrews 12:22-24

There is much discussion about who wrote this Epistle. Recently it came up on a blog I frequent where the writer asserted that no one says this was written by Paul. I replied that the Orthodox Church still liturgically introduces this text as “The Epistle of the Holy Apostle Paul to the Hebrews” so certainly some ultra-conservative folks do hold that position. I was intrigued by the Wiki Article noting that one possible theory is that Pricilla wrote the text.

Authorship aside, most folks read in Hebrews a very strong condemnation of Judaism. In a different read, my favourite theory (which I picked up reading Messianic Jewish commentary) is that Hebrews was written after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The purpose of it was to answer the question, “What now?” That question was being asked by people who, though followers of Messiah, still followed some Jewish Customs for there were, by birth, Jewish. Once the Temple was destroyed, they were, in effect, left without a connexion to God. Hebrews argues, in effect, that there is no need for the Temple because Messiah has replaced it. The question of what now was also being asked by other, more traditional Jews. Other answers were circulating among them by epistle as well - the one that was settled on: go to Synagogue, keep praying. Apart from the Messianic content of Hebrews, the Christian response is the same: keep praying.

All of the readings today are about persevering - be that in the face of persecution (as in the Matthew text) or in the face of major set backs (as in Jeremiah and Hebrews). The choice is to quit or just to continue, trusting in God to provide the strength to go on.

It is appropriate that Hebrews should be a reading today, on the feast of James, the Brother of Jesus (as he is also identified by Josephus). James the Just, as he was called, was honoured by many in Jerusalem, Messianic, Pharisee or Zealot, for his righteousness. “Just” is the same word in Hebrew as Righteous - Tzedek. Righteousness (as in “Right with God”) and Justice (as in Social Justice) are the same things in Hebrew. There is no “Social Gospel” that does not come with righteousness. Likewise the reverse. Today’s reading from Isaiah presents us with a Just World, built by God, and thus James brings us to a discussion of linking the Gospel ideas of Tzedek.

Christians tend to approach the idea of “righteousness” and “justice” as two different entities. We tend to imagine, using a much-later-than-Paul and very Protestant theology that “righteousness” is something to do with Jesus. If Justice enters into the picture at all, it’s got nothing to do with being “right with God”. We tend to imagine that religion is an assent to a list of doctrines (be that the Nicene Creed or just the Sinners Prayer). But James the Just shows us otherwise - especially in his Epistle (which is not part of the daily office readings, but I’m going to cheat):

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. (1:27) So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead… For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead. (2:17, 26) And Paul, himself, tells us to work out our own salvation in fear and trembling. (Philippians 2:12) So also John tells us to love the one next to us, whom we can see, that we might love God whom we can not see.

To be right is to be just and likewise the reverse, else neither is real. As we act in faith by building that better world this is God building that better world, acting in the physical realm.

The verses I quoted from Hebrews - which contrast and compare the Assembly of Israel at Sinai with the Eucharistic Assembly of the Church - are important in this act of Tzedek. Notice that it refers to the “assembly of the firstborn”. The word rendered “assembly” there is Ekklesia, meaning “the assembly, the synagogue, the church.” The same Greek word is used in the LXX as a word for Israel, “the Assembly of YHVH”, translating the Biblical Hebrew word, Kohal. I think - but I’m not sure - that we get the modern Hebrew word “Kehillah”, meaning “community”, from the same root.

The Assembly (Ekklesia), gathered around the Eucharistic Table has, for two millennia, been called the New Jerusalem and the Heavenly City and other such eschatological titles. From this centre of God’s hospitality (Hebrews places God and Jesus both in the Assembly) we move out into the world, spreading the Kingdom of God, “enlarging the feast”, making Justice and Righteousness present.

Sitting with my friend, Donald, in a coffee shop in Richmond, VA, I admitted to him that, having gone so deep into Orthodoxy and been beat up (spiritually) I wondered why I was even bothering to keep looking. He said it was because I had a faithful heart, a comment that made me blush at the time. Later I had a dream where there were spears pointed at my heart and I knew (in the context of the dream) that I was about to be killed for my faith. I found myself, in the dream, wondering if the spears would hurt. That lasted only a moment, it seemed, until I was rescued (strangely, by a friend who is Muslim). I link these two events - one in time and the other in dream time - together because of the metaphoric heart that figures in each. And it is the metaphoric heart, far more than the head, I think, that figures in “adult faith”.

It is the heart, the soul, that senses injustice in the world - even when the head sees the cool logic of it all. It is the heart that cries out with grief and anger at the oppression of others - even when the head tries to turn away. It is the heart that is grieved in the face of great sin or that rejoices in even the slightest good. Not as mere sentiment, but as recognition of the truth or falsehood s These are the things that can guide us, I think, away from simple doctrinal assent to faith.

Maybe…

Much love,

Huw

Today’s assigned readings:
Jeremiah 44:1-14, 1 Corinthians 15:30-41, Matthew 11:16-24

Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”
1 Corinthians 15:33

It’s Monday. I’m having a day off. I’m going to be lax.

How do you mesh St Paul’s oft-quoted-with-no-context-by-conservative-Christians one line quip with Jesus’ eating with tax collectors and sinners?

Post your answers below.

Much love,

Huw

Today’s assigned readings:

Jeremiah 29:1,4-14, Acts 16:6-15, Luke 10:1-12,17-20

Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
Jeremiah 29:12-14

Often, at the Rehab center where I work, there are clients who describe themselves as Christian. When I was Eastern Orthodox this posed a problem. It was a more-real problem when one of my coworkers was my priest. The problem is that hyper-pious or uber-frum Orthodox, while we are graciously willing to allow that God might be working in someone’s life, even outside of Orthodoxy, we’re quite certain that their practices are loopy at best, heretical mostly if not totally wrong. So we’d sit there, listening to debates about the rapture, etc… and just quietly role our eyes.

I need to be clear that this is no different from the way I act now: a woman was offering up a fundamentalist rant about how it never rained from (a literal 6 day) Creation until the flood. The earth had never seen rains until that time. I and a reasonably liberal Roman Catholic just looked at each other and quietly rolled our eyes.

I’m working on the not-judging part. I know.

From time to time we also get people in with mild forms of Dissociative Identity Disorder - colloquially called “split personalities” and our chart notes begin to reflect this reality as the same client may be addressed by three or four names in the process of one eight-hour shift.

And one time in three years of work (which is pretty amazing, given where I live) we had a client who was a snake handler. I say this is pretty amazing because these mountains where I live are where that tradition comes from. And this client was also a prophet.

And as I worked with this client, it became clear that I was experiencing no serious difference between the Prophet’s world view, and the clients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). There were only one difference worth noting: The voices in the prophet’s head were called “God” and “Satan” where as the voices in the head of the Clients with DID had names like “Tom” or “Sandy” or “Vern”. To be certain, sometimes a client might become “Sandy” for a week or so, where as a prophet only seemed to hear God once or twice a day. But some persons with DID can slip in and out of their “Alters” as quickly as I can change a shirt.

And I began to wonder why we treated the Prophet any different from the clients with DID. The answer was clearly: simply because the Prophet was describing the experience in religious terms. If the clients with DID had ever said, “Well St Francis just said to me…” or “I’m going to channel Krishna now…” we’d have had a totally different experience.

All of these people - the priest and the addicts - had a more-firm faith than I in their world view: they were (and are) more certain than I about who God is and where God is and what God is about. But, and you can guess this from the way I lump them all together - I don’t want to be any of them. In addiction treatment, we even assume, partly, that in some cases that totality of blank-and-white thinking was what brought them to addiction in the first place. (It becomes easier to see the world in one’s own Black-and-White philosophy if one has “medicated” so as to make the real world seem a little more like putty in one’s hands.)

So what is an Adult Faith?

I started to realise last week I didn’t have one. But I think I need to know what it is, first. It’s not, I think, simply swallowing, hook line and sinker, an ancient world view which, if carried too far, leaves us with a stationary, flat Middle Earth - about 6,000 years old - with an Over Heaven and an Underworld. It leaves us with split personalities and addictive patterns of behaviour. This is not an Adult Faith - although it sometimes comes off as one. Really: it’s a childish faith held over into adulthood, just as “Split personalities” may start off as “imaginary friends.”

…[W]hen you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me…

What does it mean to call upon God, to search for God, to seek for God with all our heart? How do we get beyond our childish ideas of black and white, a god that fixes everything, a god that really is rather like a fascist Santa Claus, and find the God who really is?

While all three Abrahamic religions make a claim about scripture, they also make a claim about an “Oral Tradition” as well - Judaism has its “Oral Torah”, Christianity has “the Faith once delivered to the saints” and Islam has its Hadith, oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of Prophet Muhammad. Each of these religions has, also, a literal-fundamentalist movement that tries to stick to the text-of-scripture-only, but all of these are generally recognised as at-best fringe movements and at worst, heresies.

One way to view these traditions is as isolated points of departure in the past. Some devout ultra-Orthodox Jews claim that the “Oral Torah” was given to Moses at the same time as the written text. But the reality is that Jews in the day of Jesus were able to eat Cheese Burgers. The prohibition against eating meat and dairy together, at the same time, is relatively late evolution of the written text in Leviticus, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”

Many Orthodox Christians act as if Jesus, himself (or at least his brother, James) dictated the text of the Divine Liturgy, when, in fact, earliest liturgies were nearly verbatim, the simple Jewish prayers over bread and wine recited at every Sabbath. Today’s Divine Liturgy in the Orthodox Church, in fact, is a relatively late evolution: most recent modifications date from the 1930s and 40s, and were dictated by the Ecumenical Patriarch exactly so the Greek Orthodox in Europe and the US could have 1-hour services on Sunday like their Protestant and Catholic neighbours. The Russian service, on the other hand, has evolved the other way: what else is there to do in the midst of a long Russian winter besides standing in Church?

In his sermon for Yom Kippur this year, Rabbi Menachem Creditor said:

All words are human. We recite every Pesach that God’s outstretched arm brought us out of Egypt. Since it is a core Jewish belief that God has neither hands nor arms, such a description is an expression of God’s power – a metaphor – and not a conception of God in physical form. Metaphor is rampant in the Torah. God has a heart. God is pleased. God gets angry. The literal Hebrew idiom for God’s anger is that “God’s nose flared.” But these are metaphors, analogies to our human experience. God is always more than our language can contain, even biblical language. Words are human constructions, meant to convey meaning. But every word, and every human method of communication, is burdened by multiple meanings and by the limitations of the speaker. To say that God’s Will is contained in a text is to limit God’s Will. And to restrict God to words is to create an idol, perhaps no different than the Golden Calf.

Human beings gave God’s Self-revelation form. God’s Presence in revelation is not the question. The subjectivity of the words that result from this holy encounter is. What is the relationship between God’s Truth and the words of the Torah? And what command might be connected to this subjective human formula?

I took my first class in Theology during my first undergraduate year at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I entered with a faith in God’s Word as recorded in the Five Books of Moses. The new ideas and approaches to Torah I learned in with Rabbi Neil Gillman’s class shattered my faith, and left me deeply confused and doubtful.

This was my question: “If the Torah isn’t God’s Word, then what of the tradition I follow which is based upon the words of the Torah? “ The things that had made sense to me because they were based on God’s Will now had no foundation. If our entire tradition is human interpretation how is it Ultimately True?

It’s not.

And, for me, this is the beginning of faith.

Transfer the Rabbi’s words to our tradition only changing one word - “God’s Presence in revelation is not the question. The subjectivity of the words that result from this holy encounter is. What is the relationship between God’s Truth and the words of the tradition? And what command might be connected to this subjective human formula?” The Rabbi’s ultimate question stands: “If our entire tradition is human interpretation how is it Ultimately True?” As does the Rabbi’s answer: “It’s not.”

The Orthodox Traditions (Christian or Jewish) are part of an an-going dialogue, a searching in and reaching deep and pulling out of the faith. It’s a continual process of searching for God. Adult faith is open to that process. In today’s sermon at St Mary’s here in Asheville, Fr Brent made it clear that Catholic Christianity is not repeating the forms of an antique past, but rather a continual making-present of the Gospel. The Catholic Faith is not idolising ancient forms (pretending that what we did, in 1200 was what we always did and should always do). That’s a childish faith, a museum piece as quaint as Victorian decorations on a Christmas tree. It’s the beginning of the multiple personality disorder: finding God in the far distant past and forcing him to say the same things, over and over instead of letting him grow, learn and change.

With Rabbi Creditor, an adult faith affirms that “To say that God’s Will is contained in a text is to limit God’s Will. And to restrict God to words is to create an idol, perhaps no different than the Golden Calf.”

An adult faith must be participating in the conversation, participating in the search.

Much love,

Huw

Commemoration of Henry Martyn

Today’s assigned readings:
Jeremiah 38:14-28, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Matthew 11:1-6

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
1 Corinthians 15:3-5

Paul brings us once again to the place where the rubber hits the road in the “speaking God” religion we have here.

In most cases - 99 44/100% - none of us will ever have a dove sitting on our shoulders. We’re left with “someone told me this…” and a game of telephone begins. Yes, some of this is weeded out by virtue of writing the text down, but in most cases the text comes after years - or generations - of Telephone have already been played. The Gospels come with their own built in commentaries, neither dominical nor apostolic. The Tanakh comes with the multiple Isaiah documents, the JEPD documents, the Redactors and Editors. Even some of the letters of Paul may only be his agents summing up other Pauline Material. The entire Biblical corpus comes, then, with fragmentary evidence, political corruption (in Alexandria, Byzantium, Yavne/Jamnia and among the Masorites) and ultimately, translations and their attendant politics - Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Elizabethan English, Modern English, Politically Correct English. It’s one HUGE, pardon the phrase, orgy of telephone.

Like wise our ecclesial communities if we are honest.

Paul says, speaking through two millennia of telephone wires, “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received”. What are we to make of this?

More importantly, do we need to make anything of it? I think the answer to that question is yes. Anyone who claims to follow the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (in any way) needs to justify to herself how it is she follows. An adult faith, I think, is not one that is just a sponge, absorbing and repeating what it hears. An adult in the community - even if he has become a sponge - must be able to say why he is what he is. To be an active participant in the discussion - and not just a sponge or, if you will, a religious zombie - one has to engage the brain fully. To float on Ezekiel’s river after 4000 years - and not just play telephone again - one needs the head and the heart fully involved.

This is where I am right now. It’s painful to realise that, over the last 43 years, I’ve not developed an adult faith. I have rarely engaged. I have, at turns, been a sponge because it was easier that way or else I’ve been a rebel… mostly when my non-sponge brain woke up and rejected the last several loads of horse-droppings. One problem with being a sponge was, to a large degree, some part of my brain was also awake at the same time yelling, “NO!!!!!”. Inside of me there was an adult human being dying to get out.

But that human was gay - as I could tell you from my decades in ECUSA. So I knew I couldn’t let that person out and still be Orthodox. But so much of my life, so much of my theology, so much of my living out the Gospel was clearly based on first-person experience. If the person (the one who had had the experiences) was wrong, fundamentally flawed, ontologically broken, “objectively disordered” then the experience that person has of the divine is also mistaken.

The traditional, Eastern Orthodox understanding of this process is usually described thus: we do exactly what our forefathers did because doing that saved them therefore it will save us. The image is of Jesus walking and leaving footprints. Each successive Christian comes along and tries to walk the same path, placing their feet in exactly the same places as Jesus. The problem arises when you look at history: nearly nothing in the Orthodox world can be recognised as “the same steps Jesus walked”. Likewise nothing in the Roman or Protestant worlds. Every ecclesial community makes changes, grows, shapes the faith as it is passed on.

So one day I woke up again… yelled “NO” at the top of my lungs and discovered that the reason I was taken in in the first place was because I didn’t have anything to replace it with.

So how do we get an adult faith?

Shabbat Shalom!

Huw