+Z’ev

Today’s assigned readings:
Genesis 15:1-11,17-21, Hebrews 9:1-14, John 5:1-18

For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our F60 conscience from dead works to worship the living God!
Hebrews 9:13-14

This idea that God had to sacrifice his own son to himself is only one way to understand the work of Jesus that has been used in the Church. It is not the primary understanding currently used in the Orthodox Church nor in other places. An exaggeration of this view, with a lot of blood imagery, is very common in conservative Protestant and Roman theology, however. But to focus on only one aspect - as opposed to all others - is to risk a distortion. It makes all of Christianity to look as spooky as today’s reading from Genesis.

I highly recommend these lectures from Kallistos Ware, an Orthodox Bishop from the UK. The are on the website for Holy Cross Parish, located in Baltimore, MD.

On March 24 2005, His Grace Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokletia gave three lectures at the Annunciation Cathedral in Baltimore, MD, as part of their Lenten Retreat and Centennial celebration. His topic was on the Cross of Christ, and characteristically his lectures were both pastoral and academic. Included in the mp3 downloads below is Q&A following each lecture.

Lecture I: The Cross as a Redeeming Sacrifice
Lecture II: The Cross as Suffering Love
Lecture III: The Meaning of Forgiveness

Many recent converts to Orthodoxy (myself included for a time) tend to imagine that another aspect (called “Christus Victor“) is The Only Way To Go, I think it needs to be seen as part of a spectrum of understanding - as Bp Kallistos seems to indicate.

Much love,

Huw

Commemoration of Thomas Aquinas

Today’s assigned readings:
Genesis 14:1-24, Hebrews 8:1-13, John 4:43-54

And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. He blessed him and said, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!”
Genesis 14:18-20a

One possible translation of “Melchizedek” is “My Righteous King”. Another is that “Sedek is my King”. And, finally, the entire phrase, “King Melchizedek of Salem” could be rendered as “The King, the Righteous King of Salem” or even “My King, the Just King of Salem.”

But the curious phrase is “God Most High” a translation of “El Elyon” which has nothing to do with Abram’s God - understood by later readers to be “YHVH”. The King of Salem is bringing out the blessings of a pagan deity.

And Abram is accepting them: and making an offering to him!

Ah… we like politics. Could this be a Pro-Jerusalem retelling of some kind of kingly foundation myth?

For your meditation, here are the Wiki Articles on:
El Elyon
Melchizedek

Much love,

Huw

Today’s assigned readings:
Genesis 13:2-18, Galatians 2:1-10, Mark 7:31-37

They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do.
Galatians 2:10

Galatians is nearly universally acknowledged as authentically Pauline. One of the reasons is here, in this passage, where Paul mis-remembers (or purposefully spins in a different direction) the council in Jerusalem. Where, of course, the council didn’t just say “take care of the poor” but, in fact, ask few a few things - care for the poor not being among them - “that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication…”

Of course, it’s equally possible that Paul has it right in Galatians and that the Book of Acts records something that didn’t happen or mis-remembers it or spins it for the author’s own ends.

At least as far as my experience in Orthodoxy goes, “things sacrificed to idols” is still a bug-a-boo for most, but blood - long an issue among Jews - is not at all on the radar. In five years in Orthodoxy, I heard a lot about things sacrificed to idols. This was all over the spectrum: ranging from the Orthodox Cooking Group where one woman worried that seeing the “K” (Kosher) label on her hot dogs meant that evil Jews had prayed over her meat and didn’t that count as idols? To the Bishop who told me to accept the fruit etc at my rather heathen college, where most things were, in fact, offered to idols on a regular basis. Bishop Seraphim told me to “trace a cross over it and just eat with thanksgiving.” But even given all that, Blood Sausage was on the menu at Pascha.

I point this out to indicate that as early as 50 AD, the game of politics and telephone was already changing the message: the carrying of tradition is based on personal preference. And it is, really, only now in the days of the internet, when we have the ability to check up on each other (Anglicans in Africa worrying about Anglicans in America) or report on each other (Media in American blabbing things to the World) that issues of conformity really matter at all.

Ironically, such change is also a mark of authenticity: scholars imagine a forger would be meticulous in trying to keep all things in a textual forgery identical. Differences of opinion mean humans are involved in community.

St Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary, is on the liberal end of the (admittedly very narrow) Orthodox theological spectrum. At an annual teaching event 3 or 4 years ago, Frederica Matthewes Green a respected writer and newsperson both in and outside of Orthodoxy, greeted the students with “I’m so glad to have found the Church that never changes!” The response, according to a friend who was in the room, was a lot of eye rolling.

When we (Christians) are being Dysfunctional, we pretend nothing has ever changed. We do this despite an historical record of change set out before us. And when we are called to the carpet about it, we can go into denial. Compare this to the attitude expressed (in an admittedly minority opinion) on this question as I recently blogged over on my main site:

I believe in my heart that the Five Books of Moses and the Prophets are from G‑d. When it comes to the Talmud, however, I am beginning to believe it was made up over the centuries to control the Jewish believer with all its added laws. The rabbis add scores of laws to each of the 613 commandment and you end up having to obey all kinds of things that were never part of Judasim when it all started.

The Chabbadniks provide and amazing answer, one that clarifies my fascination with the Jewish approach to religion - even when I look at following God in the way of Jesus.

That is why what we do is called Judaism–and not “Scripturalism” or “Torahism” (there was such a movement, called Karaism). Judaism believes in the Jews, meaning, in the Torah that is revealed through the Jewish People.

Here’s why that Chabad post is so important:

When I read the question - which was posted as “The Question of the Week”, I was 100% sure I new the answer. The standard Orthodox (and ultra-Orthodox) response to questions about the Oral Torah is “God Gave the Oral Torah to Moses at the same time as the written one.” Most flavours of Orthodox Judaism takes the same tack as Eastern and Roman (etc) Christianities: the Oral Tradition is an inspired part of the religion handed down to us by the Founder (Jesus or Moses, as the case may be). Yes, there are exceptions and not all parties accept these claims.

But it was a great (as in enjoyable, wonderful, awesome) surprise to see such a conservative group as Chabad say what most religion geeks imagine to be true: that “We the people” came up with the these things. It was also rather wonderful to read that, in fact, this was what God had intended.

The Maharal of Prague provided another parable.20 He likens our situation to a man who moves into a home built by a master architect. The man finds all in place, in exquisite design and order. Yet, in one place, it seems a door is missing. There is a lintel, there are doorposts, even hinges in place. Within is a room that needs to be shut off from the rest of the house. So the man fashions a door, in accordance with every other door in the house, to match the fittings of the open doorway.

So, too, says the Maharal, when the story of Esther occurred and the rabbis established the festival of Purim; when merchants began to trade on the Shabbat and the rabbis established the laws of muktzah; when Jewish society became primarily mercantile and the rabbis established the pruzbul. And in our day, as we deal in medical halachah and supervision of the food industry—at each step along the way, we find the lintel, the doorposts and the hinges awaiting our finishing touches.

And whose door are we placing? Not our own, says the Maharal, but that of the Master Architect. For all is His design, only that He has provided us the privilege of being His partner in completing His world.

This was precisely Moses’ intent: That Torah should come from within, not from without, from below, not from above. He recognized that, even though he had not been Divinely instructed so, this was the true intent. It’s just that you can’t direct a populist revolution from above, so it had to come from Moses himself.

This is, I think, what many mean when they say “living tradition”. A living tradition grows and changes as needed by the culture and times. And it happens at the hands of the *people* in the tradition. The “keep four sets of dishes” and no cheeseburgers rules weren’t handed down from Mt Sinai. The “no meat dairy, fish, eggs, wine or olive oil” fast wasn’t whispered by Jesus to St Andrew for future reference and God didn’t reveal Sunday as the new Sabbath. We made it up: it’s the action of our lives in response to God. Of course it lives and grows.

But should one turn around and say that exact thing, many hyper-pious Orthodox (of any religion) take exception.

But next step after that is to realise that very very little isn’t Oral Tradition and subject to interpretation.

We live in a society where it is possible to point at each others differences in minute detail instead of focusing on the one commonality we all have: building a relationship with each other in the wake of the God we claim to follow. Our differences have been with us from the beginning. (Abram and Lot split up in today’s reading, one prefers the City the other the Country.)

God was with us before that.

Much love,

Huw

Commemoration of the Ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi

Today’s assigned readings:
Genesis 11:1-9, Hebrews 6:13-20, John 4:1-15

And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”
Genesis 11:6-7

Liturgically, this is usually paired with the image of the tongues of fire at Pentecost. On the one the “curse” of languages resulted in the division of everyone. In the other the gift of tongues resulted in the ability to spread the Gospel in a unified manner.

Anyone familiar with the current Anglican Wars would question the whole gift of tongues as unity. It seems that the North and South are split, largely, over the issues of Race and Sex (as between gay and straight, African/Hispanics and White folks). The unifying gift of Language and the Book of Common Prayer holds none of this together. Someone has noticed (and I just tried to find a set of blog posts from last week - and failed) that, in fact, on the internet, the Anglicans get along much better than they seem to do “in real life”. Conservatives and liberals, traditionalists and progressives can, usually, socialise well together.

And today is the anniversary of the Ordination of Li Tim-Oi to the priesthood: but not everyone will be commemorating it.

I was living in Hoboken, NJ, when I first got connected to the internet. This was about 1990 or, perhaps, the winter of early 1991. I had a computer and I asked Mom and Dad for a new-fangled thing called a Modem. Back in those days the easy way to get one was to buy a Prodigy sign-up package. The computer was in the back room of my second-floor apartment: which was actually an add-on, sort of an expanded closet that had been built on the room of the first floor. It was under-insulated and tended to creak if the wind blew too hard. I remember sitting in that room in the chill of a North East winter, during one day when the weather had closed work: and I chatted with my first online-contact. And later, on Prodigy, I discovered other Episcopalians. Since I worked at the Episcopal Church Center, attended a parish in Greenwich Village and socialised all with a lot of folks from the Diocese of New York, these folks online were quite a shock!

They spent most of their time complaining about the people I hung out with.

A few of them were asking questions to which I knew the answers. But some of them were asking questions that needed to be referred to the people at work. So I printed out a bunch of the questions and handed them around the Episcopal Church Center.

And promptly caused a crisis: because one party, named Odessa, knew the people about whom she was complaining. When they got her name off the emails, she reported “There’s a spy from the Church Center on Prodigy!!!!!”

C’est moi.

Later, on the Episcopal Church’s Quest network - a part of Ecunet - we found that conservatives and liberals could debate loudly and longly. Then there was the infamous Northern Ireland Incident.

Back in the Day, when I was a political activist (and my name was Bill Bailey) my favorite issue was the British Government in the north of Ireland. As might be expected I was involved in several American organizations that could be seen as offering support for the Irish Cause - but I was never a member of the one group in the US known to offer financial support (and suspected of other sorts of support) to the IRA.

I also hosted a news list, at the suggestion of a member of the Hierarchy of my church (Desmond Tutu’s press secretary), that distributed about 70 stories a day clipped from the various newspapers in Ireland (north and south) and the UK. This list was run on the Ecunet service. This was distributed to about 7 (or maybe members of the Anglican Communion, Two Heirarchs, myself, and four others. Despite the small grouping - and the high-ranking support - the list became the subject of an international row as Robin Eames, the Archbishop of Armagh in the Church of Ireland accused me - through his press secretary, Elizabeth Harries - of supporting the IRA and using church resources to do so. Somehow, Jim Rosenthal, Press Officer in the Anglican Communion office, got involved in the whole thing.

For a couple of days in June and July of 1994, I was dealing with phone calls from Ireland and England and wherever else, faxes from press offices and official denials. And, evidently, Liz Harries even contacted the British Security forces because, seemingly, I knew too much about a certain incident - widely reported in the American Press, but hushed up in Northern Ireland.

In the end, the Archbishop of Armagh was informed, by Ecunet, of the good old American Freedom of the Press and politely put in his place by the owners of that service. But not without a lot of help from the British and Irish Press who took the opportunity to whollop the Archbishop in the belly with his own croizer. I spent a couple of days in all the papers in Belfast and a staff member from the NYC Comptroller’s Office told me that I could have had all the free drinks I wanted on either side of the peace wall in Belfast.

Now, 15 years later, everyone knows that what you say online is, nearly instantly, known everywhere. (When I became Orthodox, someone contacted Odessa and told her. I understand her reply was “We used to call him Bill Bailey.”) When an Anglican in Texas tries to denounce the liberals, all he has to do it send an email. When the Anglicans in New Hampshire try to fully include queers in the life of the Church, servers light up all over the world. When Anglicans in Africa try to set up their own Global Communion, they depend on the net to say just about everything they want to say in public.

If God had wanted to destroy human communication in Babel, he would have done better to have given them the Internet: It seems we have a problem when we get too close.

I discovered the same thing in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In the technologically backward areas of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, where the OC was strongest, the Church had developed a set of local customs based around a common tradition. One did certain things in Africa that one did not do in Russia. And vice versa. But no one seemed to care - we were all Orthodox together.

But then came the Internet. Suddenly it became possible for an Arab Orthodox Priest in Jerusalem to look at what an Arab parish in San Francisco was doing on Sunday. And it became just as easy for them to denounce each other. The internet revealed that Orthodox claims about “always the same everywhere” were simply not true. And Orthodoxy is fragmented now - like Anglicans and Romans - into “Continuing” churches and “World Orthodoxy”.

And today is the commemoration of the Ordination of Li Tim-Oi.

Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained a priest by Bp. Ronald Hall of Hong Kong in 1944, primarily because of difficulties occasioned by the Japanese occupation of China. A storm of protest after the war forced her to refrain from exercising her role as a priest. Towards the end of her life, she emigrated to Canada where she was able to resume her priestly duties.

When a priest could no longer travel from Japanese-occupied territory to preside for her at the eucharist, for three years Tim-Oi was licensed to do so as a deacon. Bishop R O Hall of Hong Kong then asked her to meet him in Free China, where on 25 January 1944 he ordained her “a priest in the Church of God”. He knew that this was as momentous a step as when the Apostle Peter baptised the Gentile Cornelius. As Peter recognised that God had already given Cornelius the Baptismal gift of the Spirit, so Bishop Hall was merely confirming that God had already given Tim-Oi the gift of priestly minstry, but he resisted the temptation to rename her Cornelia.

To defuse controversy, in 1946 Tim-Oi surrendered her priest’s licence, but not her Holy Orders, the knowledge of which carried her through Maoist persecution.

It was the destruction of communications prior to the war that allowed her to be Ordained - and, in fact, required that she be so. It was the restoration of the lines of communication that caused the storm of controversy. People from around the world were able to stick their noses in where, previously, they had been unable to stick them.

Improved communication without love is just as bad as no communication at all: a smaller world where people fight more is worse than a larger world at peace.

One of the common stories, told wherever I am in the Church, is of the guest list at the Heavenly Banquet. The general idea of the story is the most surprising thing will be finding out who else is there. It’s most often told in the Third Person: they will be surprised to find out that those others will be there too. Romans will be surprised to find Protestants, Southern Baptists will be surprised to find anyone else at all. Based on the experience of the internet, I think most of us will be surprised to find anyone else at all.

Much Love,

Huw

Commemoration of Phillips Brooks

Today’s assigned readings:
Genesis 9:18-29, Hebrews 6:1-12, John 3:22-36

The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks about earthly things. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, yet no one accepts his testimony. Whoever has accepted his testimony has certified this, that God is true. He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but must endure God’s wrath.
John 3:31-36

Who says this? Is this intended to be attributed to John the Baptist (as some hold) or is this the author of the Gospel speaking? Is this a recording of a Catechetical commentary on some sayings, as some hold; or some other commentary from the Johannine community? Or, to allow for the most traditional reading, is this the Holy Spirit dictating some important theology into John’s pen?

How do we weave our personal midrash into this text if we can not be sure what the text was?

The Wiki article on the Gospel documents a whole series of differences between John and the other three Gospels. What do these differences mean? Why are they there? What differences were there between this community or this author and the sources of the other texts? (As an aside, some read the Gospel of John to be the most anti-Semitic, and others see it as the least.)

Do we need - at all! - to know what this text was or is the most important reality what it is to us now?

I spent the early part of this morning (from about 5AM until sunrise prayers) packing. I’ve got a week or so left to pack. I’m ok. This AM I tackled the prayer area in the living room. It’s changed a lot in recent years, but one thing that hasn’t changed is in the top left corner: I had a stash of Blessed Bread (antidoron) that I had collected from my days at Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco. In some ways I treated these as “relics” of my priest there - Fr Victor died a couple of spring times ago. But they were, really, blessed bread: just that. Nothing more. Yes, Fr V had touched them. But I can’t say much else. What had really happened is that I forgot to eat them in the week time after I received them (5 years ago) and now, they were simply white rocks of baked flour. I’d checked several times: they never moulded. Today, even, I nibbled one, it tasted stale, yes, but, apart from the crunchiness, nothing was wrong. Well, except for the fact that I should have 5 year old bread in my house.

I took them outside and now (9Am as I write) I’m watching the squirrels and birds duke it out.

I may shortly decide that I can do the same thing to the Pascha Egg that Fr J demanded we keep instead of break a couple of Easters ago.

What are these stale blessed items? They are unusable now. Piety has made them into useless dead things.

At St Gregory of Nyssa Church, following the service of the word, we would all dance (in a very organised line step) from our seats near the preacher up to the open space around the Table. As we went we sang a hymn and kept our hands on the shoulder in front of us: right, left, right, back; right, left, right, back; right, left, right, back. Far from being some kind of conga line, the visual effect was one of a mass of people swaying forward. In my memories of the experience I am reminded mostly of what the Israelites must have looked like crossing the Sea in awe and fear - everyone hold hand so as not to get lost! And sing! “Mi Kamocha Adonai? Me Kamocha b’Elim!” Who is like you YHVH? Who is like you among the gods?

When we got to the Table (the other side of the sea) there, like on Sinai, we wove again our covenant with each other, with the Holy One, with life itself. It was the same thing over again, but it was also something very new, something that would last until the next time we danced. In our dance we wove God into ourselves: the pattern was always the same, but it changed as often as our clothes, our lives.

In the Orthodox Church I experienced a few *very* good preachers - most especially my priest, the late Victor Sokolov (Memory Eternal!). I learned from them - just as much from the liberal sort of preachers I reference on a more regular basis - that it’s not the text that is important. Rather it is the Presence of God, active in our lives that matters. The text is an opening for that Presence, but it is not the Presence itself. The various patristic, ecclesial, critical and homiletic commentaries are also openings for that Presence. But they are not the Presence itself.

We learned in those sermons that we must, every time, dance again in the text. It’s meaningless otherwise, a dead bit of bread that is no longer holy, but only stale and useless for all but the birds and squirrels.

I think it’s important to see the Biblical Text not as some kind of finished product or fait accompli but rather as an open invitation to take our stories and dance them into the Gospel. And, of course, as we do that the Gospel dances into our lives.

But it changes.

“whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but must endure God’s wrath”

Is this still part of our dance? Or, is this a comment from Jesus-following Jews woven into their dance in the same way that non-Jesus following Jews wove this into their liturgy:

And for slanderers [sectarians] let there be no hope, and may all the evil in an instant be destroyed and all Thy enemies be cut down swiftly; and the evil ones uproot and break and destroy and humble soon in out days. Blessed art You, LORD, who breaks down ememies and humbles sinners.

How do we weave today, when we feel a newer connexion? Or do we? What is the dance we use?

Much love,

Huw