Category Archives: biblical studies

Looking back on Lent

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This evening is our last Lenten Wednesday service. On Sunday, as you know Palm Sunday begins Holy Week. Next Wednesday at 7:00 pm, if you come you will participate in the ancient service of Tenebrae, a service of readings and Psalms that culminates in darkness. Next Thursday is Maundy Thursday, when we commemorate the Last Supper. Holy Week is the holiest week of the year, and Lent serves as a period of personal and communal preparation for the events that Holy Week remembers.

I don’t know about you, but I am already putting Lent behind me and beginning to focus on Holy Week—for a single important reason, that the staff and clergy of St. James have a great deal to do between now and next week to prepare for all of the services. But as I think about the logistics of Tenebrae, or Maundy Thursday, or Good Friday, as I help to make sure that there will be readers, and servants in worship for all of the services, as I think about the sermons that I will be preaching, I wonder about something else.

Am I spiritually prepared for what is coming? As we look back on the weeks since Ash Wednesday, when we came forward and had ashes put on our foreheads as the priest said, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return;” as we remember the priest’s admonition to a holy Lent, can we look back and say that we have had a holy Lent?

Some of us no doubt have had little trouble following our Lenten disciplines, but if you’re anything like me, these weeks have been filled with responsibilities large and small, all sorts of activities that have occasionally taken my mind and my soul far away from a focus on God.

Even the Collect for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, with its bidding “that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found;” seems to be somewhat retrospective, looking back at the past with less than complete certainty and asking God to give us the focus we need.

Easter will bring a dramatic change. At the Vigil next Saturday evening, we will hear and sing Alleluias for the first time since February. Our celebration of the resurrection will be full of joy and many of us will break their Lenten fast symbolically—I’m still trying to decide what kind of beer to have in the fridge for when I get home next Saturday evening. Joy will dominate throughout the great 50 days of Easter, but I wonder whether we will take the opportunity to look back at what we did and who we became during Lent.

Lent begins on Ash Wednesday with an Invitation to a Holy Lent; it might be appropriate to end it, not with a bang or clang of the bells, but with a look back–an assessment, evaluation, or memorial of a Holy Lent.

Marcus Borg's visit to Furman

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I’ve been familiar with Borg’s work for years. I followed the activity of the Jesus Seminar in the 1980’s and 1990’s and I assigned some of his books over the years to students. We’ve been reading The Last Week as a Lenten Book Study at St. James this year and it has inspired lively discussions.

I’ve also attended lots of scholarly lectures by big names over the years and I was expecting a retread, a boring reread of a lecture given hundreds of times before. But Prof. Borg was different. I had the opportunity to join him and other colleagues for lunch. He was engaging, interested in us, our ideas, and experiences, and shared some of his personal life with us.

He was the same way in the lecture. Indeed he did say little that I hadn’t heard before. What was remarkable was the way he treated us as an audience and a congregation. Beginning and closing with prayer, and sharing his faith and his experiences with us was profoundly moving. It was one of the most memorable evenings of my life.

Tonight I had a follow-up conversation with some Furman students at our Canterbury meeting. I’m not teaching Bible this year, for the first time since the mid-90s, and discussing the historical evidence for the resurrection, and how we might think about the resurrection differently, or metaphorically, as Borg urges, was great fun and challenging.

A “Dead Sea Scroll” in stone

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The New York Times reports on the recent discovery of a text, written in ink, in a stone, found probably near the Dead Sea. Scholars date it to the late first-century BCE, in other words, just a few years before Jesus. It is a messianic text, full of imagery derived from  the biblical books of Zechariah and Daniel. The Times article focuses on one scholar’s reconstruction of the text. It’s a reconstruction because it is not quite clear what the text says at this very crucial point. He offers “In three days you shall live, I Gabriel, command you.” It may be that this is evidence of a belief in a Messiah who will die and be resurrected on the third day.

What’s significant about this is that most New Testament scholars have argued that belief in a Messiah who dies and is raised again is the attempt by Jesus’ followers to make sense of their experience after the crucifixion and resurrection, and that such beliefs did not exist prior to Jesus.

The article is available here. I’m sure there will be much more discussion of this in the media in the near future.

God and Empire

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I was able to attend one of John Dominic Crossan’s presentations at Furman’s Pastors’ School this week. Crossan, a retired New Testament professor at DePaul University, has been at the forefront of New Testament scholarship for many years. He made a name for himself as one of the leaders of the Jesus Seminar and has published many books on the historical Jesus and early Christianity. He was prominently featured on the PBS documentary “From Jesus to Christ” which I often use when teaching Bible.

Given what I took to be his radical approach to the historical Jesus, I was curious to see what he would have to say to an audience of pastors. The presentation I heard was largely taken from his most recent work, God and Empire. His main focus was on the role of violence in human civilization and the way in which the Bible supports and undermines that culture of violence. He contrasted two notions of divine justice in the Bible. One is retributive in which God is understood to punish evildoers. The other is distributive, in which there is a vision of God offering equality to all. One of his tag phrases was “God does not punish, but there are human consequences for our actions.” He used the example of someone sitting down on an interstate highway. If they die, it is not because of God’s punishment, but because of their choice to behave in that fashion.

In the later presentations I’m sure he went on to argue that Jesus’ proclamation was one of distributive justice; that is to say that the Kingdom of God as envisioned by Jesus included all people and treated all equally. He further argued that because Christians view Jesus as the incarnate word of God, his vision ought to be the criterion by which we judge other biblical (and non-biblical) notions of justice. In other words, while there are two understandings of divine justice in the bible, one distributive and one retributive, one non-violent and one violent, because Jesus articulated the former, Christians have the obligation to view that one as authoritative.

It was an interesting, challenging, and humorous presentation. Look for a Discovery Channel documentary featuring him to play at Christmas.

Thinking about our forum on Sunday

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Several entries down, you can find some of my sketchy reflections about sexuality. I encourage, whether or not you plan on attending the forum on Sunday, to think about what I’ve written. In some respects, Luke Timothy Johnson’s Commonweal article makes some of the same arguments, in more developed fashion. For me, trying to think about homosexuality inevitably relates to two other issues: How we approach scripture, and how we make moral decisions. Most people, most of the time, think that moral decisions are simple questions.  There is right and there is wrong, and scripture spells out clearly what is right and what is wrong. But in fact, we don’t do that, in our personal lives or in the church. Take divorce for example. We don’t have a problem with it. We accept divorced and remarried people as full members of our church; we recognize that while it may not be a good thing, sometimes it is the only option. Yet scripture is unequivocally clear that divorce is a bad thing, a sin. Jesus said it, Paul said it. Whoever divorces and remarries commits adultery.

Our experience, as a church, as a culture, and as human beings has taught us that the clear commands of scripture, in this case, are not the last word. Some Christian groups take other scriptural texts much more seriously, and much more literally than we do. For example, the groups who practice, or have practiced community of goods, because that’s what the early church did in Acts. There are groups that expect their members not to serve in the military because Jesus says “Love your enemy” and “Turn the other cheek.” If we come to a different decision than members of those groups, it is not because we take scripture more or less seriously than they. It is because we make different conclusions about morality and ethics than they, that we make a different decision about what it means to follow Jesus Christ.

But it is important, not simply to say, that’s their opinion, or they’re wrong. It’s important to examine how they come to make those decisions. I said in my earlier post that homosexuality is not primarily about the authority of scripture. It is about our cultural values and expectations. Divorce is OK today because we live in a culture that views divorce as acceptable. That wasn’t the case fifty years ago. We don’t think Jesus literally meant that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God, because our culture thinks it’s OK for people to accumulate wealth.

We bring our values to the text, and look in scripture for arguments that will support our values. It is important that as people who want to be faithful to God we recognize the degree to which we read scripture through the lens of our culture. Instead, we need to allow ourselves to be transformed by scripture, rather than transforming scripture to make it of  palatable to our cultural biases. In fact, most of our moral and ethical choices are based not in scripture but in our culture’s values. Indeed, for the most part, we have reduced ethical and moral questions to questions of personal behavior, and above all, sexuality. Those aren’t the priorities of scripture, either of the Old Testament or of the New. But more on that some other time

On the dance of the Trinity

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In my sermon on Trinity Sunday, I mentioned the alternative translation for “master worker” in Proverbs 8. The NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) points out that the early Greek translations had “little child” (apparently translating a slightly different Hebrew word than the one that appears in the standard Hebrew version of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) Most commentators would probably argue that “master worker” is the more likely translation. It occurred to me as I was preaching the second time through, that these alternative translations are another example of what I was trying to get at, the playful, open, uncertain aspect of theology and of faith. Both of those translations are plausible, both lead to significant insights, and there is no reason to assert that one is right, one is wrong.

My favorite theologian, Augustine of Hippo, was quite clear that any interpretation that was linguistically and theologically possible, was valid, so long as it supported his inviolable standard: “love of God and of neighbor.” And he wasn’t even particularly concerned in figuring out what precisely the author might have meant. For Augustine, because scripture, the Word of God, bore witness to Jesus Christ, the Word of God, it is quite likely that God might allow us to interpret scripture in ways that the author might not have intended.

To view our faith as a dance, as play, to delight in it, is to allow it free reign to lead us wherever it might takes. The spirit blows where it chooses, Jesus says in John 3:8. Our response ought to be, to go with the flow.

Leftover thoughts from this morning's sermon

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I struggled more than usual with today’s sermon, in part because I had preached Maundy Thursday on that portion of John 13, and I didn’t want to repeat myself more than usual. In addition, I had a lot going on this week, so I wasn’t able to focus on the texts to the extent I usually do. That led to two thoughts that could have been included in the sermon. In the first place, when I heard the lesson from Acts read at the early service, I knew immediately that I could have made the connection between the diversity of the city about which I was speaking and the diversity in that text, the Gospel being extended to Gentiles (I could also have made another joke about shrimp, because they are among the unclean foods).

But secondly, I realized as I preached that in the back of my mind as I was preparing was the PBS program on Mormonism that aired this week. One of the themes of that program was the idea of celestial marriage and that families exist in eternity. In fact, that idea competes within Mormonism with a strong impulse to create the New Jerusalem. Mormonism began in apocalyptic fervor, eagerly awaiting Jesus’ second coming. That theme was downplayed, even ignored in the program. But what is interesting to me is that in its current form, Mormonism seeks to inscribe the family as an eternal institution. That is a radical departure from the New Testament. Jesus said in reply to the Sadducees “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mt. 22:30), and Paul in I Corinthians expresses a clear preference against marriage.

My point is not that marriage and the family are wrong or un-Christian. Rather, early Christianity saw itself as creating a new kind of community, one based not primarily on kinship, but on connection to Christ and to one another. Given the realities of family life in the world today, we do well to remember that most people do not live in traditional families any more, given the rates of divorce, and changing marriage patterns. That’s partly why I see the image of the city, or indeed an image like the body of Christ to be much more powerful for creating the bonds of community in the church.

More on Thomas and the Resurrection

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As I mentioned in my sermon yesterday, the story of Thomas is one of my favorite gospel stories. There is enough in it for several sermons. One theme on which I have been reflecting for several years is the importance of the body of the Risen Christ bearing the marks of his wounds.

The resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of the dead are both tenets of our faith; we proclaim them every time we recite the creed. But I doubt whether very many people seriously consider the theological significance of the resurrection. It is something to be believed or doubted, but not reflected on systematically. I was surprised during our discussion of the Divine Comedy of Dante this Lent when a parishioner mentioned that she had never thought about the resurrection of the body. Common beliefs tend to emphasize that when we die, our souls live on, but our bodies decompose.

Yet the resurrection of the body has been central to the Christian faith from the very beginning, and it is not just because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. The resurrection matters because it attempts to say something crucial about what we are as human beings–not just disembodied souls, but souls and bodies united. The doctrine of the Incarnation insists that Jesus became human, he didn’t only seem to be human. Likewise, our bodies are integral parts of who we are. That’s why the resurrection matters. It proclaims that our whole selves, body and soul, make us who we are and are redeemed by Christ.

But the bodies that are (or will be) resurrected are very much our bodies. That’s why the marks of the wounds are so important. Jesus was not raised to some ideal state but showed on his resurrected body the suffering he had gone through in life. The Christian tradition has insisted that the same is true of us. Whatever makes us unique as individuals will continue to show forth in our resurrected bodies. There are significant implications to this idea. For many of us, it may be a disappointment, given the dissatisfaction we have with our bodies–our weight, our aging, our baldness. But it might also be of great comfort or great spiritual significance for some people. To see on themselves the marks of their suffering, the marks of their pain, now transfigured and glorified, might include a recognition that such suffering and pain made them who they are.