The Resurrection and the Struggle

The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’ The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket, because he struck Jacob on the hip socket at the thigh muscle.

-          Gen. 32:22-32

Resurrection happens when you least expect it, where you’re least likely to look, to the person you’re most likely to ignore.

Like when everybody’s gone away, and the sun is setting on the banks of the River Jabbok, to that exile, that wanderer, that trickster, that heel of a person we know as Jacob. Really—that’s what his means.

Jacob isn’t somebody I want to like. He was never the once and future quarterback of the championship football team; that’s his brother Esau. Jacob gets what he wants through trickery, through withholding food to the hungry, through dressing up as someone else and fooling an old, blind man. And then when his sins catch up with him, he runs away.

Jacob’s trickster nature follows him in exile. He manages to seduce Rachel, Laban’s daughter, but then somehow ends up marrying both of Laban’s daughters. And then he has sex with not only both of them, but also several of his maids. That’s not even why Laban eventually evicts Jacob. That happens because Jacob has been tampering with his father-in-law’s herds of cattle. And then Jacob runs away again.

That’s when Jacob gets word that his estranged brother, whose last words directed to Jacob were “I’m gonna kill him first chance I get!”, is looking for him. With 400 other guys whom Jacob assumes want nothing more than to take turns hitting something.

And what does Jacob do? He sends all of his family to the other side of the River Jabbok where Esau and his bloodthirsty band of brass knuckles are waiting for him. Like I said—I don’t want to like Jacob.

Maybe I don’t want to like Jacob because his story reminds me of my own character defects. Jacob’s story reminds me of all the times that I have struggled—struggled with my own identity and purpose, struggled with my relationships with other people, and struggled with God.

So where is the resurrection in this story? Well, let’s have a look at Jacob when the sun comes up. Jacob is visibly limping. He answers to a new name. And he confronts the demons of his past with the confidence of someone who has experienced true, life-altering blessing.

Jacob had experienced resurrection, resurrection through struggling with God.

Funerals are another place where we don’t expect resurrection.  Loved ones gather to share in their grief and their loss, to give their last good-byes to a corpse that is as empty as a deflated balloon.

And yet we often call funerals services of death and resurrection. We often refer to John chapter 11 where Jesus declares that he is the resurrection and the life. And then we pray “Requiem aerternum dona eis Domine”—“Grant them eternal rest, Lord our God.”

But rest isn’t the intention of resurrection. The purpose of resurrection is life, yes, even life abundant! And what is life but struggle—struggle with the world, struggle with all the wicked and wonderful people that inhabit it, struggle with God, great God Almighty, Dominus Deus Sabaoth!

God is the resurrection and the life. God is the resurrection and the struggle.

The struggle! Yes, sisters and brothers, God is the struggle, or as our Spanish-speaking sisters and brothers call it, la lucha. I’ve heard my Spanish-speaking sisters and brother talk a lot about la lucha since I decided to join them in solidarity with la lucha. “¡Viva la lucha!” they shout at rallies, and I’ve gotta tell you, sisters and brothers, Anglos like me should listen to them. White folks like me should listen to our sisters and brother from the global South because they know an awful lot about la lucha and resurrection.

My Metodistas de BsAs

I learned about la lucha and resurrection when I had the blessing to study in Argentina while I was an undergrad. I’m tempted to say that it was another one of those unlikely times and places where resurrection occurred. Some young people in the little Methodist church in downtown Buenos Aires graciously accepted me into their clique, and then began educating me in the ways of the la lucha. My friends invited me to march with them in the Veinti-cuatro de Marzo parade, that is the twenty-fourth of March, which marks the anniversary of the last coup-d’état in that country. See, during the military dictatorship that began on March 24, 1976, some 50,000 political dissidents were “disappeared”, many of them young people who were learning to struggle, to be in la lucha, against injustice.

The day ended with a concert by León Gieco, the Bob Dylan figure of Argentina, at the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada—the Naval Mechanics School—which had served as a center for detention, torture, and execution during the dictatorship. Shortly before the concert began, a branch of the Peronista party, which had been viciously persecuted during the dictatorship, began a rally to remember their fallen comrades. I can still see the flags, banners, and posters lifted high into the air. I can still feel the exuberant bodies of the crowd around me. I can still hear their chants of liberation. The leader would read a name of a disappeared person, and the crowd would shout back, “¡Presente!” As León Gieco sang his most famous song, Solo le Pido a Dios—I Only Ask God—and everyone sang with him, I could feel resurrection around me. And la lucha—the struggle—continued.

A classmate of mine at seminary, Tito, had some thoughts about resurrection during our first semester of classes together. While we were struggling with the concepts of early Christian theology, Tito shared that resurrection was very important for him and his comrades in Latin America, particularly in El Salvador where he had served the victims of the civil war there. He said that resurrection was important because no right-wing death squad, even when armed with best weapons the American government could sell them, could stop a revolution based on resurrection. Such resurrection-minded revolutionaries could cry out like St. Paul, “O death, Where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” La lucha—the struggle—continues and you, O Death, can’t stop it. You, O Death, can’t beat it. You, O Death, are overcome by the power of the resurrection and the struggle!

Dear friends, witness the power of the God of resurrection! Let the power of resurrection blow apart all of your expectations! Let the power of resurrection touch you and change you forever! Let us say yes to the God of the resurrection! Let us say yes to the God of life! Let us say yes to the God of the struggle! ¡Que viva la lucha! ¡Amén!

[Sermon was preached at First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple on April 23, 2014.]

Crack open a can of worms

I recall the first time that I sat through a presentation on the origins of the Pentateuch. As a first year university student from a conservative, evangelical upbringing, my attitude was very incredulous. After all, what do J, P, E, and D sources have to do with my Methodist faith? I did not begin considering the historical context of biblical literature until the next year with my first in-depth Bible study and an introduction to the historical critical method. I soon found that once the lid is off of the metaphorical can of theological worms, the squirmy annelids do not return to their enclosed home. In fact, the theological worms bore new holes in unexpected places, and, in a surprising twist for a former conservative evangelical, they make the theological soil even more fertile.

It is in this fertile, theological worm-infested soil that the myths that parallel the Hebrew Bible stories are scattered. The process is indeed as messy as it sounds, but the revelation that the writers of the Hebrew Bible may have borrowed from religious stories from neighboring peoples does not have the shaking effect that I experienced as a sophomore undergraduate. I already was familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish, but I must admit that I was surprised by the sheer number of myths, histories, and documents from the ancient Near East that are awfully similar to my favorite Bible stories. In the face of this religious milieu, I have tried to imagine what a perpetually occupied or conquered people might do in order to keep their people’s identity alive for posterity. I hope that it would not include molding a golden calf, but I can see how a priest or elder would borrow a popular myth and spice it to their people’s taste.

Sargon of Agade, yet another dude who
needed to learn to swim at an early age
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargon_of_Akkad

A good example of this could be the story of Sargon of Agade. Sargon was a famous king of a great city-state who as an infant was plucked from a river by a royal attendant, raised in the royal courts, and then achieved great, miraculous exploits that cast a long shadow on the descendants of the ancient city-state. It roughly parallels the narrative of Moses, one of the most important figures in the Hebrew Bible. The story also precedes the biblical narrative by well over a thousand years, which is certainly enough time for an entirely different culture to acquire and add certain details to the life narrative of a great patriarch. The familiarity of the story adds authority to the Israelites’ traditions, and the J-source writers did not have to worry about intellectual property hounds on their tail. It makes perfect sense to me that the writers of the Hebrew Bible took details from other neighboring people’s myths to create their own traditions.

However, it is not easy to remove myself from 21^st century, Western ears and inhabit the space of a priest in 6^th century BCE Palestine. Christian and Jews alike regard the Pentateuch as the Mosaic Law, and the Torah lays the groundwork for the ancient ethics that multiple empires later used for their own societal laws. Needless to say, the stakes are quite high. Even so, whereas religion and state are separate in Western democracies, this is simply not the case for the civilizations of antiquity. Mythologies were a way of understanding the world, including the place of civil authorities, which students even find in the “right of kings” argument as late as 17^th century European monarchs.

In that way the Mosaic Law is not so unique in grounding its ethics and mandates in a covenant between a deity and ruler of the people. The beginning of the Code of Hammurabi is replete with honors from Babylonian gods that protect the empire and guarantee its prosperity. Hammurabi clearly wanted to show that his laws were not simply whims of a tyrant, though it seems likely that he could have ruled that way if he wanted. The king grounded his rule in religious imagery that is found throughout Babylonian mythology of Marduk, who is present in the Enuma Elish stories as well. The Israelites did not have a monarch until well after the establishment of the Law, but Moses did act as de facto leader of the Israelites during the Exodus. Ascending the mountain of God to receive the laws of the chosen people is not so unlike invoking the national god in unveiling a new system of imperial laws.

The individual laws of the Torah were at times also surprisingly similar, but nations today also borrow laws from constitutions that existed beforehand. For example, Hammurabi ordered that slaves be freed after three years, and the Sabbath laws of the Torah make many references to the fair treatment of slaves. Of course the Torah’s laws are to a whole different degree of justice than Hammurabi’s laws were, and considering that the priestly writers were in Hammurabi’s descendants’ empire while writing their notes, perhaps that makes sense. An oppressed people would naturally be more concerned about freedom for the captives, and they would likely have a vested interest in showing how much further their laws of justice go than the laws of their captors. Rather than lessening the power of the Mosaic Law, the context strengthens the claim that the Hebrew Bible is special in a way that other codes contemporary with it were not.

This is all to say that I personally am quite comfortable with the documentary hypothesis and that the Hebrew Bible is likely a conglomeration of ancient influences, many of which came from non-Israelite cultures. The debate enters an entirely different phase if I am to facilitate the same discussion within a local congregational context. As my conservative evangelical upbringing attests, many congregations do not teach the historical critical method. Many people base their faith in texts that they confidently assure each other have divine origins, namely that of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I would not be so quick to point out that the stories about the patriarchs are very similar to patriarchs of other ancient Near East civilizations, and that is not only because I want to keep a pastoral assignment.

I recognize that it took me years to come to grips with how my favorite Bible stories had a historical, cultural, and indeed even a political context. While the goal of a full-time student is to learn many new and exciting concepts that shake up prior conceptions, parishioners are often part of faith communities for very different reasons. It is like a community garden: most people participate in the community garden for fellowship and to get fresh produce. I am not sure that most community gardeners would want to know the fine art of bonsai, and the sort of pruning that is part of bonsai is not generally healthy for a bell pepper plant. There is a time and place for such teaching, but the pastor should be careful in introducing concepts like non-traditional origins of holy scriptures.

However, I do think that teaching the story of the creation of the Hebrew Bible (and the New Testament for that matter) can be quite communally edifying. In the same way that Americans celebrate the creation of the Constitution, people who claim the Pentateuch as holy scripture should also celebrate the creation of the Torah. That it survived at all is an incredible testament to favorable circumstances that could be viewed as the very hand of Providence. The writing process is also a testament of how different religions gave rise to an amazing prophetic tradition that has an afterlife that continues today. As a pastor, I would like to celebrate the diverse origins of the Hebrew Bible instead of hide them.

Various faith traditions claim that God is still speaking in the world today, including several Christian denominations. In my own Methodist tradition, I understand that scripture is only one-quarter of the revelation of God. Just as the writers of the Hebrew Bible used their creative and rational faculties to draw from millennia of ancient Near East mythology, increasingly Christians today draw from a variety of religious traditions to understand the world around them. This is the exciting, relatively new realm of postmodern interpretation, whether post-colonial, womanist, or some other tradition. In deconstructing metanarratives about the origins of holy scriptures, I become free to engage in the same creative processes that my spiritual ancestors did thousands of years ago. It is a can of theological worms worth opening.