A community of sharing

There are a couple words for church in the New Testament. When Paul writes to the “church of Such-and-Such”, the word is ekklesia, which literally translates to English as “assembly”. It’s just some folks who get together and follow the Way of Jesus, which was pretty radical back in the day. The other word the New Testament uses is koinonia, which is more like communion than organized church. The much cited apostolic community in Acts 2, the one where everyone shares their stuff so that everyone has enough, is described as a koinonia. Otherwise stated, the essence of koinonia is sharing.

I like to think that at South Loop Campus Ministry we are developing koinonia.

See, at SLCM, we originally intended to only minister to college students, but when homeless folks showed up to our Sunday night community meal, based on a Christian ethic of love, we couldn’t just turn them away. However, very quickly, homeless people outnumbered students on Sunday nights, and I know that I started having doubts about continuing to serve them. This is a campus ministry, for crying out loud!

           

  But then I starting getting glimpses of koinonia breaking through our well laid plans. As we kept handing

That's a lot of agua. Photo credit Giacomo Luca.

out sandwiches to homeless people on the street after dinner, a couple of homeless people, Ashley and Tony, started guiding us. That meant that we didn’t have to keep wandering around aimlessly hoping that we would happen upon some folks under Lower Wacker Drive. In another instance, during one particularly chaotic night when we already had a skeleton crew to set up, one of our student leaders stepped up to keep everyone (mainly over 30 homeless people) occupied and calm. Another student leader realized that all the leftover dining dollars from students’ meal plans could be used to purchase drinks and snacks for SLCM. Giacomo raised $5,000 in just two weeks. Another time we arrived at Grace Place with supplies for dinner, and we were surprised by a group of homeless folks already preparing dinner for the group. Sometimes the Holy Spirit just moves, and I sure as hell want to move with her.

There are more challenges for South Loop Campus Ministry, both now and in the future. It continues to be difficult to reach out to students at a university where religion is an unwritten taboo. I know that we haven’t figured out the ideal balance of working with homeless folks and with students. However, what we’ve started at SLCM was without a doubt inspired and resourced by the Spirit of God. I am sure that God does give us enough to live abundantly here in the world, but it is up us to share what God gives us. At SLCM, our essence is sharing. As we work through the quieter months of summer, we have the opportunity to figure out better ways to share not only material stuff, like sandwiches, bottled water, and socks, but also our empathy and love. That’s a koinonia worth developing.

Coming to dinner--scars and all

This sermon was given at First Trinity Lutheran Church on April 21, 2013. Really. I preach this way.

Let’s get one thing straight right now: I’m not going to talk about sheep today. Yeah, I know we sang Psalm 23 and the lectionary Gospel reading is about sheep and there is even a picture of a sheep on the cover of the bulletin, but really, I won’t talk about sheep today. Unless it’s about lamb chops or mutton stew because what I really talk about is food.

This resurrection appearance story in Luke spoke to me in a way that the sheep passages didn’t. Maybe it’s because I sang the “I Just Wanna Be Sheep Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba” just one time too many. Maybe it’s because I spent just a little too much time next to livestock as I was growing up in central PA, and I just don’t want to be like those dumb animals that I kept prodding with a wooden stick.

But food…that’s something else. Maybe a story about food speaks more clearly to me because I spent a weekend in Washington, D.C. talking about food justice. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so many Sunday evenings in the last six months making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for homeless folks. Maybe I’m just hungry right now.

Whatever the reason why this passage in Luke speaks to me right now, it does seem like the resurrected Jesus likes to eat. Verse 36 of this passage begins with the remaining disciples talking with each other about—you guessed it—a meal. That meal was with two other guys who were walking towards some town called Emmaus, and the resurrected Jesus snuck his way into dinner with them by explaining all of the Hebrew scriptures concerning himself. I think a lot of my Jewish friends would think that that conversation would be rather short, but it was enough to get these two walkin’ dudes to invite Jesus to dinner. Apparently dying and coming back to life doesn’t help Jesus’ table manners because he disappears just as the three of them are about to eat. I guess it’s better than dining and dashing.

So then these two walkin’ dudes rush over to the disciples and tell their story, and just as they’re arguing about whether Jesus had picked up the matzo or the foccaccia loaf, Jesus appears again. At this point I would think that the walkin’ dudes are pretty sure that phantom Jesus has decided to haunt them for the rest of their miserable existence, perpetually correcting their understanding of the prophet Isaiah and then preventing them from chowing down. But luckily Jesus puts them totally at ease by saying “Peace be with you”. That works every time, right?

Jesus convinces everybody in the room that it’s really him and not just the most annoyingly know-it-all phantom ever (so those walkin’ dudes can breathe easy). And then he eats some fish. Resurrection Jesus sure does know how to crash a dinner party, but that’s okay because he explains the Hebrew scriptures again. Sorry, walkin’ dudes, you’ve seen this part before.

But I’m going to try to release this image of Jesus as a know-it-all seminarian in search of free food, though that’s admittedly not easy for me. I am really struck at how resurrection Jesus keeps eating with people. I remember in my Bible studies as a teenager that we used to try to figure out the significance of that eating, that it has serious Christological implications about the dual nature of Jesus Christ. Or that’s what teenage me would have said if I had taken systematic theology instead of joyriding through the Pennsylvania mountains. But forget dual nature-whatever for now because even more than a free meal Resurrection Jesus is still really concerned that the disciples learn some really important things about, yes, his own identity—that’s the Christological part—and how to act with each other. Especially when eating.

Easter brunch at First Trinity Lutheran Church. No jacket
required.

Recently I’ve learned that there are rules for dinner behavior, assuming you’re not eating pizza over the sink or something. Part of that comes from watching a lot of Downton Abbey, which is this BBC television series about English high society in the early 20^th century and their many varieties of spoons, but even more comes from eating with my girlfriend Kacie. See, Kacie was super active in 4-H in Tennessee, and much to my surprise, she didn’t only raise sheep for the county fair (sheep!). No, Kacie also learned to dine finely—that is, with more class than I ever learned in my years in the Boy Scouts. We’re talking which fork goes in which hand, what to do with the napkin when it’s blocking the eating area of your plate, and how not to send a Tweet from your smart phone while someone important is speaking.

Yeah, there are rules for eating with other people, and while I can respect a lot of those as they show respect for the folks around you, I don’t see Jesus following a lot of those rules in this passage. In fact, I really only see Jesus following one rule here—be authentic when you’re sharing a meal. Jesus doesn’t dress up to impress here. On the other hand he has one of the classic guy conversations in all guy-dom: check out my scars. Now maybe that’s cool porch talk, but I think conversation about scars usually doesn’t occur at the dinner table. Yes, Jesus is soothing the disciples, especially those poor walkin’ dudes, but I have to think that he is teaching by example. Jesus recognizes that everybody in that room is traumatized at that moment, especially himself, and he draws that out as soon as he appears.

Then Jesus eats a meal and, as always happens after a communal meal, he shares a story: “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to proclaimed to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” Sounds vaguely like the Great Commission in the closing words of the Gospel of Matthew, huh? It’s not quite an explanation of the trauma that just occurred, but it does orient how Jesus’ listeners will respond to their trauma. Bad stuff happens in the world, but good stuff also happens, and now we need to tell everybody to change to world based on those experiences.

See, this week has been awfully traumatic for a lot of people. Bookended by a terrorist bombing and a violent manhunt for the perpetrators, with a giant factory explosion and local flooding here in Chicago, folks have seen some trauma this week. Maybe we feel scared and want to withdraw from a scary world. Or maybe we want to go out and fight the bad guys. Maybe we do actually feel a little like, well, sheep in need of a shepherd. Whatever your reaction has been to this week’s events, let’s recognize that we have experienced trauma, and let’s recognize that trauma before we take a bite at the dinner table.

Something I love about this church is that First Trinity has a weekly dinner table that is really open to everyone. And I am continually impressed at how people are willing to be authentic as they approach that table. However, this week let’s especially recognize that we are a mixed body, as Luther said, and we are a traumatized body. If you would like to work through some of that trauma, please come to the table. The church is also blessed with some wonderful deacons who truly care about caring for people who serve the church as deacons. These folks are committed to helping people in this mixed, traumatized body work through our trauma. Please seek them out if you’d like some space to continue to work through that trauma.

            

Now finally in closing, let’s remember that we still have to go out after the meal. We have a lot of repentance and forgiveness and world-changing to do when we get up from the table. The punch-line is that we will never be as holy and ready to go out as maybe we feel we need to be to this work. We need to do it anyway. Whether you feel like a lost sheep(!), a haunted walkin’ dude, or just somebody in need of some food, this is a good starting place. So please come, be filled, and then go, still your scars, because that’s what Jesus did, too.

Resurrection Work

Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

-          Luke 23: 42-43

[Note: This reflection was part of First Lutheran Church of the Trinity's Good Friday service that featured 7 different speakers who gave reflection on the last seven words of Christ.]

I’m not much of one for pie-in-the-sky theology. I mean, why would God make the varying hues of a summer sunrise over Lake Michigan or the smell of lilac blossoms or the laughter of best friends—why do all that stuff if the world is only supposed to be a holding pattern for the next one?

These words of the crucified Jesus kinda strike me as promised pie-in-the-sky. It seems like final absolution that degrades all the life that was lived beforehand. Of course, in the midst of crucifixion, maybe all victims want is to forget this tortured life. After all, the thief to whom Jesus was speaking was not only slowly dehydrating and collapsing his internal organs; he seemed to be considering his entire wretched existence. Please, Lord, just get me the hell out of this cold, nasty, brutish, and short life!

Then again, Jesus was suffering the same things that the condemned people to his right and left were suffering. That’s not paternalistic absolution; that’s the ultimate solidarity. Jesus was literally speaking on the thieves’ level. Jesus had spent his life among poor, militarily occupied and terrified people. Jesus was just as naked and humiliated as the other two.

That puts Jesus’ words in a different light, and 1^st century people didn't understand “paradise” the same way we do today anyway. As a pharisaic Jew, Jesus thought of paradise not as an eternal escape, the ultimate vacation get-away, but it was a place for divinely justified people to wait for the earthly resurrection. The kind of resurrection Jesus meant was the kind that the prophet Isaiah talked about: eating the fruit of one’s own labor rather than working as wage-slaves; living in safe, dry lodging instead of under bridges when they've been evicted; raising kids that can learn about all the beauty of life rather than being shoved about for the benefit of corrupt politicians.

And Jesus told this thief at his side that they will be together today in this place. That phrase seems to me like Jesus was inviting this condemned guy to come home to meet his folks. But, no, it’s even more than that. This convict simply asked Jesus to “remember” him in that resurrection-world—because obviously he won’t be there—but I think Jesus takes it even further. I think Jesus, by telling the criminal that he’d be with him, is saying that this criminal will also be part of the resurrection-work that brings the resurrection-world.

Instead of an immigrant doing day-laborer work in the yard, the immigrant is building Solomon’s temple. Instead of a homeless person dragging oozing, blistered feet to Catholic Charities, they are directing the Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family. Instead of the hardened gang-banger selling dope in the park, he coaches Little League teams for neighborhood kids.

When we pray for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven, what kind of kingdom do we pray for? Is it a balcony view of all those sinners’ suffering like Tertullian talked about, or is it taking up the cross for the resurrection-world?

So tonight let us grief for a world that locks up teenagers for an ounce of weed, but then let’s get to the resurrection-work of being with me. Being with you. Being with your neighbor. Being with Jesus.

In paradise.

And we’ll be together today.

Want an example of resurrection work? Check out CeaseFire Chicago, the nonprofit
organization that was featured in the documentary The Interrupters. 

Ministry on the 14th floor

Up on the 14^th floor of the Wabash Building, conversation was meandering just as conversation often does. We were a small group—three of us total—looking at the passage in the Gospel of John where Mary anoints Jesus’ feet. We talked about the different characters in the story, what it means to honor both devotion to Christ and sincere care for the poor, and what a funny word “nard” is. There were some long, somewhat awkward silences as we considered different images in the Gospel, and other times we rambled and waxed poetic. It was a good Bible study.

Then a couple students stopped by us and asked about our shopping cart. For the past two weeks Pastor Tom and I had brought a shopping cart with us to Roosevelt University to collect socks to hand out at our Sunday night community meals with homeless people. We hung out in the caf with our cart and “socks for the homeless!” posters, and students mostly gave us strange looks. Staff tended to be more positive about the impromptu sock drive.

Photo taken by Pastor Tom Gaulke, the campus minister for
South Loop Campus Ministry. And, yes, that's me in the hat.

And then, surprise! We got a couple dozen socks as we finished Bible study on the 14^th floor.

One pair of students had met us as we waited for the elevator on the 2^nd floor, and they returned to give us socks. Another pair of students saw our cart as we talked about the Himalayan origins of nard, and they too came back with socks. It felt like progress.

That’s when Roosevelt University security stepped in. See, the 14^th floor separates the classroom part of the Wabash Building from the student residence section which includes the 15^th floor to the 32^nd floor. The 14^th floor has two separate elevator banks: one set that goes down and another set that goes up. The 14^th floor is a transition space from public to private, and so it is also a natural meeting space.  Or at least it is a natural meeting space as long you follow the proper protocols through the university administration.

Oops.

The security guards on the 14^th floor asked if we had gotten prior permission to ask students for socks. We responded that we had been collecting socks on the second floor, but we had brought the cart with us for the Bible study with Roosevelt students on the 14^th floor. Oh, and we usually work with an RA to book rooms, we quickly added. The guards told us that without prior permission, a sock drive is solicitation and is strictly forbidden. At least it is on the 14^th floor, they didn’t add.

My natural inclination is to follow instructions and respect authority. I suppose that comes from my  upbringing in rural central Pennsylvania and all those years as a Boy Scout. That day on the 14^th floor was no different—we packed up and left down the elevator with our sock cart. One of the students asked why we hadn’t stood up to the guards. We were collecting socks for homeless people, for crying out loud.

One of my favorite teachings of Jesus comes from the Mission Discourse of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus tells his disciples to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16) in the midst of trouble. In my experience in community organizing, that means know when to back down (strategically, of course). Especially when I’m on the 14^th floor.

I've found that ministry with South Loop Campus Ministry is a very 14^th floor kind of ministry. With our “accidental” ministry with the homeless folks of the neighborhood and our outreach to the “anti-sectarian” folks of Roosevelt, we’re a bit on the edge. What we do makes people occasionally uncomfortable, and going back down the metaphorical elevator would ease the tension. However, being present on the 14^th floor with our sock cart does open up that transitional space into a meeting space. It stretches us, molds us, makes us available for meeting each other, as well as meeting with our God.

Even though Bible study and our sock cart may move to another floor, I think our ministry needs to stay on the 14^th floor. On the 14^th floor, where community, action, leadership, and faith all meet.

Opening Doors: Cultural Exchange as Christian Mission

For more information about United Methodist
mission, check out the General Board of Global Ministries.

The following post was adapted from my Interpreting the Gospels final paper from December, 2012. The inspiration for the exegesis of Matthew was reflection on the stated mission of the United Methodist Church as found in the 2008 Book of Discipline: "The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Local churches provide the most significant arena through which disciple-making occurs."

The Gospel of Matthew gives a sketch of how powerful intercultural exchange through a mission context can be. Matthew portrays Jesus as the Jewish messiah who fulfills the Jewish scriptures, and the Matthean Jesus talks clearly about the mission of his disciples. There are two passages in Matthew where Jesus commissions his disciples: 10:5-42 and 28:18-20.[1] The important thing to note for this discussion is that Jesus directs the mission to different groups in each commissioning.

The first is called the “Mission Discourse” by New Testament scholars and is quite explicit in the narrowness of its target. In fact, Jesus begins instructing the disciples with a prohibition: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans” (10:5). Jesus instead directs the disciples to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (v. 6). From this instruction the reader can assume that all of Jesus’ previous instructions, from the opening proclamation to repent (4:17) through the famed Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7), are addressed to Jews. Jesus seems to be firmly positioning himself as a Jewish reformer concerned almost exclusively to Jews. We will discuss the exceptions to this rule and their implications to Christian mission later.

The second commissioning is commonly called “The Great Commission”, and as it ends the Gospel, it broadens the scope of discipleship to all nations. The resurrected Jesus tells his eleven remaining disciples to teach the new disciples “to obey everything that I have commanded you” (28:20), which seems to include even those commands that were part of the narrow Mission Discourse. Assuming that the later Great Commission supersedes the exclusivity of the Mission Discourse, then Jesus is including the same people that he had earlier excluded from his reform movement. The mission has apparently changed.

The major part of the commission that changed is the attitude toward outsiders. If one sees Jesus of Nazareth as a rabbi intent on reforming and purifying Judaism, then his attitude towards outsiders seems consistent, even if it is intolerant of the cultural Other. The one interaction with a Gentile prior to the Mission Discourse is with a centurion who asks healing for his ill servant (8:5-13). Curiously, Jesus responds very positively, offering to go and cure the centurion’s servant, which would violate the later prohibition to ministry with Gentiles. However, we know from other stories in the New Testament that centurions were not always excluded from the company of Jews. The prime example is the Lukan account of Cornelius, in whose house Peter has the vision regarding the new cleanliness of earlier ritually unclean foods (Acts 10:1-7). With this in mind, then Jesus may be following the tradition of Jews honoring righteous Gentiles. Considering the centurion’s military authority, this Gentile is certainly not what could be considered the marginalized of society.[2]

In contrast, Jesus acts very differently when a Canaanite woman begs Jesus to exorcise a demon from her daughter (15:21-28). While the woman is crying out, Jesus ignores her. He does not respond until Jesus’ disciples ask him to deal with the woman so that they do not have to. Whereas the politically connected centurion received an offer for a house visit, the Canaanite woman is forced to shout after the disciples who seem to be intent on keeping Jesus’ command to stay separate from the Gentile woman. In fact, Jesus responds to the disciples by repeating the exclusionary tactic from the Mission Discourse (v. 24). The Canaanite woman seizes the moment and goes directly to Jesus, to which Jesus responds by essentially calling her and her race “dogs”, a common racial pejorative in the Jewish tradition. However, the Canaanite woman seems to know Jewish traditions quite well, too, and she answers that “even the dogs get the scraps from the master’s table” (v. 27). This may reference the rabbinic tradition of honoring dogs by throwing scraps to dogs for not growling at the Israelites during the 10^th plague of the Exodus (Ex. 11:7).[3] No matter what the Canaanite woman may be referencing, she impresses Jesus enough that he changes his mind, and he praises her faith in a way similar to the centurion.

Beyond Jesus’ treatment of the two Gentiles, there are two other important differences between the centurion and the Canaanite woman. First, whereas the centurion’s origins are never mentioned, the Matthean author is very clear about the woman’s ethnicity. She is Canaanite, one of the races that the Israelites were commanded to exterminate from the face of the Earth during the conquest of Canaan found in the book of Joshua. Though the historical difference between Canaanites and Jews is probably minuscule at most, the cultural differences lead to palpable racial tension. Second, unlike the centurion, she is a woman. While it would be fallacious to label 1^st century Judaism as blanket misogynist, Jesus, on the other hand, seems to treat her in a quite misogynist way. This makes the interaction with the Canaanite woman all the more extraordinary in the Gospel of Matthew, and it sheds light on the change in missional attitudes from the Mission Discourse to the Great Commission.

Whereas Jesus’ interaction with the centurion apparently does not change any of his ethnocentric attitudes (hence the narrowness of the Mission Discourse), the exchange with the Canaanite woman seems to have had a radicalization effect on Jesus. Shortly after the exchange there is a discernible shift in Jesus’ ministry. Before the interaction with the Canaanite woman, Jesus had only been leading a reform movement of Judaism in Palestine. Afterwards Jesus begins taking a more messianic role. Jesus draws out Peter’s messianic declaration (16:13-20), starts to speak of his death and resurrection (16:21-28), and is transfigured (chapter 17). The interaction with a man of authority, a bit like Jesus himself, allowed Jesus to remain narrow in his scope. The interaction with a woman of a different ethnicity, who was quite different than Jesus, forces Jesus to repent of his ethnocentrism.

This transformation of Jesus, whom Christians call the Messiah, through his exchange with his cultural Other has important implications for discipleship both in the 1^st century Mediterranean world and today. From the Great Commission, Christians understand Christian mission to be global, and the words that end the Gospel of Matthew are commonly used to commission missionaries for their service. However, what missionaries and missiologists often miss is that the global nature of Christian mission is a product of cultural exchange between different peoples. Too often mission occurs from an imperialist motivation to impose 1^st World values on majority-world peoples, serving only the interests of the already powerful in the missionizing group and the missionized (i.e. colonial) group. Colonial action is often hidden in missionary action, and the wolves often earnestly believe that they are the sheep they are impersonating. This model of mission is uni-directional, where the missionary assumes that he knows right and must provide for the missionized community.[4]

True mission, however, is not uni-directional; instead it is mutual. This is evident in the exchange between Jesus and the Canaanite woman. Jesus and his disciples do not even recognize the exchange as mission work until the cultural Other breaks through their dominant culture assumptions. When that breakthrough occurs, Jesus opens up and fulfills his own unrealized missional purpose. While Jesus assumes that he must remain within his stated mission (i.e. the lost sheep of the house of Israel), the Canaanite woman is the truly active mission agent in the story. This phenomenon is akin to the church group who returns from a mission trip and reports that while they expected to bless others through their service (and material resources), they were surprised that they received the greater blessing. While the experience is powerful and important for the spiritual development of the missionizing group, how weary the missionized group must get as they have to repeat the process again and again!

It is important to note that the cultural exchange that takes place between Jesus and the Canaanite woman is not in an exotic, far-away destination which is often the center of short-term mission trips. Jesus and his disciples are in “the district of Tyre and Sidon”, which was the district next door to their native Galilee. The importance of the mission experience was not the exotic location but the relationship with the cultural Other that Jesus and the disciples encountered. Likewise, while Mission Central sends flood buckets to inundated areas of the country and mosquito nets to Africa, the truly transformative experiences will likely occur much closer to home. Only by mutual exchange can transformative discipleship play out.

The first line of the Unite Methodist Church’s mission statement is what often gets the prime space in newsletters and websites, but the second part of the statement is just as important: “Local churches provide the most significant arena through which disciple-making occurs”.[5] While the disciple-making process in the local parish can be a transformational process toward greater personal and social holiness, it can be an oppressive and alienating process. If the new disciples receive instruction like that in the Mission Discourse, then many neighbors will be left to the margins and the homogenization process of the church only accelerates. However, if local churches engage in mutual mission work with cultural Others, then the disciple-making process moves toward the salvific project that Jesus of Nazareth embarked on after his exchange with his own cultural Other. The goal of disciple-making is an opening up of the individual disciple and the discipling community, which is a process that can truly transform the world.

---

[1] All biblical references use the New Revised Standard Version translation.

[2] Kayama, Hisao. “The Cornelius Story in the Japanese Cultural Context”. Voices from the Margins: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, 129-141. Edited by R.S. Sugirtharajah. New York: Orbis. 2006.

[3] Ken Stone. “The Exodus and Other Pentateuchal Stories”. Class lecture at Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL, Sept. 26, 2012.

[4] Soares-Prabhu, George M. “Two Mission Commands: An Interpretation of Matthew 28:16-20 in Light of a Buddhist Text”. Voices from the Margins: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, 331-346. Edited by R.S. Sugirtharajah. New York: Orbis. 2006

[5] The Book of Disciple of the United Methodist Church—2008, 87. Edited by Judith E. Smith. Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House, 2008

L’audace d’espére

“I just don’t know what else I can do.”

After an evening of eating with people who live on the streets of Chicago and then giving bagged lunches to people who were escaping the January cold in Union Station, the students had reached a point that good people always reach eventually. It’s not quite compassion fatigue, but it’s not far away from that either. Just by walking from Grace Place, an Episcopal church in Chicago’s South Loop, to Union Station—about a mile—we had gotten a taste of the winter outside. What good is a bagged lunch in the face of freezing in the streets?

Preparing to deliver bagged lunched with South Loop
Campus Ministry. (Photo by Kacie Greer)

The question came up in our debriefing session in Union Station just before the students boarded their train to return to the suburbs. I didn’t have enough time to delve into root causes and how through grass-roots organizing and advocacy for smart public policy we can address them. It was a shame, too, because that same day I had been part of a public meeting with S.O.U.L. that 1,000 people attended where we addressed public transportation, abandoned properties, and state and federal budget crises. Just imagine the homeless shelters, health care, and public jobs that we could fund if we had a more progressive tax code! That’s what else we can do!

The thought stayed with me when I saw Les Misérables with my girlfriend in a Naperville theater. Victor Hugo’s story that the movie is based on touches a lot of themes—justice, mercy, idealism, courtly love—and between the tears that Tom Hooper’s rendition provoked, I kept thinking about what runs the entirety of a story that covers 20 years. Hugo seems to say that among the Platonic ideals, there are few permanents. Not beauty; the beautiful Fantine dies and is buried in a public grave. Not justice; the principled Javert throws himself into the Seine because he can’t face a world where a fugitive can be free. Not idealistic revolution; the barricades are broken and all the revolutionaries are killed. The one constant seems to be,well, death.

However, somehow the protagonist Valjean continues to help everyone around him. He knows about mass incarceration, lack of health care, and the exploitation of low-wage workers, yet he only joins the June revolutionaries to get close to the man whom his adopted daughter loves. Of all the characters in Les Misérables, why does Valjean survive?

Then it occurred to me. I had just finished an intensive J-term class about prophetic proclamation that was taught by the famed Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Until that class, the only sermons I had heard from Rev. Wright were the ones that the mass media had cut up and edited to make him look like a Black nationalist demagogue. In fact, Rev. Wright turned out to be one of the great voices for reconciliation with whom I have ever come into contact. One the sermons that the news media didn’t show the public back in 2008 was titled “The Audacity to Hope”, which Barack Obama would later borrow for his best-selling book.

In this sermon, Rev. Wright waxes philosophic about a painting where a young woman is playing a harp while the world below is similar to the one Victor Hugo described a century prior. Full of injustice and pain, how can a person still find room for hope? And that is the great existential movement of Christianity—the movement from the conviction of personal and social sin to the liberation of grace. However, the movement does not end with the recognition of salvation by grace. The pilgrim’s progress continues in the guise of love, the kind of love that drives Valjean to the Parisian barricades and sewers. It is the all-sacrificing love of a parent for a child, what the Gospel writers called ἀγάπη, or “agape”.

Friends, that is what I propose drives us to help other people despite the seeming futility of the endeavor. We continue to do acts of mercy and organize for social justice, but it is only because of the love movement afforded us by divine grace. We do indeed have the audacity to hope, or perhaps as spoken by the kindly bishop who saves Valjean from prison labor, “l’audace d’espére”.

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.