Constructive Faith

Psalm 138
1 Samuel 8:4-20

Sudan and Darfur have been back in the news this past year, though stories of the atrocities there have sometimes been lost in the noise of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conflict between Hamas and Israel. All three conflicts have resulted in war crimes. In particular, the Sudanese conflict involves a re-branded Janjaweed, the Arab militia responsible for genocide in Darfur in the past.

In truth, we might not have paid that much attention to the civil war in Sudan even if we didn’t have the other two conflicts. We have become desensitized when it comes to coups and conflicts in the global south, especially in Africa. The coup d’etat of the week may be funded by Russia, but the face of the rebellion will be some officer in the nation’s military, and often not even a general. It is not at all shocking to hear that the new boss is a colonel, a major, sometimes even a lowly captain.

Today’s scripture reading from First Samuel records a pivotal moment in the history of the varied peoples of Palestine in the early Iron Age. As Christians, we tend to read backwards, seeing these events through the lens of Davidic propaganda and Messianic fulfillment, but I’d like to suggest we’d do better to think of modern coups and conflicts. 

The transformation from a loose confederation into a royal nation-state triggered a brief moment of glory, followed by a long and painful decline. There is a tension that runs through the Bible, the histories and the prophetic texts, that finds its way into the formation of Christian belief, that indeed still exists in our faith tradition and in our secular affairs. But let’s focus on the story and the character of David.

The Israelites were a loose confederation around 1000 B.C.E., a mix of native Canaanites and folks who had escaped slavery in Egypt. The culture was still forming, and was nowhere near the text-based ethical monotheism we’d come to associate with Judaism. There was no Temple, no king, and polytheism was the norm. We can still see this is in scripture, especially psalms that position Yahweh as the chief god in a pantheon of gods.

They were definitely moving toward some innovative beliefs. They rejected god-kings, something all too common in Egypt, Rome, and to Canaan’s east. They saw humans as being made in God’s image, but banned depictions of God as a human. And the reason they had no king is because God was their only proper ruler. Human leaders would rise up as needed, stories told in the Book of Judges, but otherwise they were expected to act as a community of mutuality and accountability.

A new group had settled on the coast in the region that is today called Gaza. The Israelite tribes saw the Philistines as a threat, and they may well have been. Tribal raids and expansion were the norm in any case, so there was always antagonism at the borders. When the people asked for a king, Samuel warned them that there is a cost, a literal cost, to having a king, and Yahweh revealed that their choice of a human king was a rejection of divine rule.

Sunday school flattens the story and hits the kid-friendly highlights, ignoring the sexual violence and the contradictions, for the accounts in 1^st Samuel come from two sources that do not always agree.

The Children’s Bible version lets us know that Saul was chosen as king, but fell out of God’s favor. Samuel then turned to the House of Jesse, anointing the youngest son, David, as the future king. David was present at a battle between the Israelites and the Philistines, though we have two different explanations. He is the only one brave enough to face the Philistine champion, the giant Goliath, who he kills. David then comes of age in Saul’s court, close to the king’s son, Jonathan. When David falls out of favor with Saul, he flees for his life. Saul and three of his sons are killed in combat with the Philistines, and David, who we remember has been chosen by God and anointed by Samuel, becomes king. The end, now let’s talk about David’s son, wise King Solomon.

Except, of course, that isn’t the whole story. The whole story is messy and definitely R-rated. There is a reason biblical scholar Baruch Halpern described David as the first fully realized character in world literature.

Continue reading “Bad King David – 9 June 2024”

In my very first call as a minister, I served as an associate pastor for a church that had more than 900 members on the books, though the reality was a shade lower. There were still kids in church back then, a very different time culturally and economically. A desirable local school system didn’t hurt either, though in that context desirable meant white and economically advantaged, the same kind of urban/suburban split that poisons so many communities. 

One of my tasks as the junior pastor was to teach the confirmands. And in that region, there was a conference-wide confirmation retreat every spring, so the kids and I headed off to church camp for a weekend.

As part of the retreat, the kids had to role play being a pastoral search committee, so they were divided into congregations and given a brief description of their church and community, while the clergy sat through interviews.

I ended up being called by Country Club United Church of Christ, which, for those who know me, is absolutely the last place I’d ever want to serve as Pastor and Teacher. And that isn’t even the point of my story.

As the young teens described their imagined church to me, they explained that the sanctuary was quite lovely, and included a large golden statue of God.

Just to be clear, God, not Jesus.

I had questions. I had concerns.

What did they think God looked like? Were they familiar with this thing called the Ten Commandments? And in particular, did they know which one came in at number two on the list?

It would have made me wonder about the religious education programs in their home churches, but truth be told, I already had a good idea how that went. They had mostly attended Sunday School in programs intended to entertain rather than educate, missing months at a time due to cheerleading or basketball. About half were in the confirmation process against their will, which made things tricky when it was actually time for confirmation.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the kids thought a graven image of God was okay. American Christians worship an idol they call “God” all the time. Not just American Christians, of course, but that is my context, the one I can most confidently address.

So let me just get this out there. God is not a giant old white man in the sky, despite the image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Not in the sky. Not white. Not male. Though definitely old. 

God is also not a book written over the course of a thousand years, give or take a few centuries, and completed two thousand years ago. 

Humans created God in our own image, not the other way around, then wrote it down and declared it to be true, which does not make it true.

Most of those efforts were well-intentioned, humans trying to make meaning out of our fragile and finite existence, though some of our less stellar traits made it into the mix, a good dose of patriarchy and nationalism. So we end up with a Bible that endorses genocide and slavery, where God looks co-dependent and sociopathic. 

Continue reading “2 June 2024: Pride Sunday”

Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

The Protestant Reformation made the faith less transactional and less sacramental, centering covenant in structure, and word in worship. Despite this, the German reformer Martin Luther cautioned against preaching on one particular Sunday, Trinity Sunday, suggesting that there was nothing sensible that a pastor could say. For once, I am taking that advice. Sort of. I’m preaching, just not on the Trinity.. 

Besides, I am agnostic about the Trinity, or more accurately apophatic, believing humans have no business speaking about the ultimate nature of God. At best, we can describe our experiences of the holy. All else is guess work, a pebble of maybe thrown into an ocean of mystery.

Instead, let us think about bodies, given Paul’s hostility toward the flesh and Nicodemus’ confusion when Jesus starts talking about being born again. 

We have all heard the trope that claims we are not bodies that have a soul, but rather are souls temporarily housed in a body. And that may be true. There are certainly enough credible accounts of supernatural weirdness for me to know that I don’t know. 

What we do know is our lived experience as embodied humans, and that can be weird enough. A pregnant mother with influenza in the second trimester means an increased risk that the child will develop schizophrenia as a young adult. Adults who get strep are more likely to become hoarders. Your gut biome, if out of balance, can contribute to depression. Most of us know that a urinary tract infection can have a cognitive impact, never mind more dramatic events like traumatic brain injury or brain tumors. 

It is hard to know how we are who we are when things that are not us can make us someone else. And that doesn’t even take into consideration relativity, the cognitive type rather than the quantum. It does not matter one bit if what “they” believe is lunacy if they believe it is real and operate in the world as if it is real. 

There may be no such thing as government bioengineering using “chemtrails” from aircraft, but that did not stop Tennessee from outlawing them. There are no microchips in Covid-19 vaccinations, but try telling that to those who refused vaccination, risking their own lives and sometimes helping kill others in the process.

And this is just the recursive loop of “I,” of our constant re-creation of self, never mind that the body has a will and a life of its own, is an energy system coded for self-preservation, and ultimately coded for self-destruction as part of the evolutionary process. 

We do not will our hearts to beat, do not manage the process of digestion, and may barely think about it once the meal is done unless it goes wrong. We do not negotiate treaties with the entire nations of bacteria that make us us. We rarely think about breathing, except when we can’t. 

This weekend, “I can’t breathe” has a special resonance, for yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, a body damaged and ultimately destroyed by the slave master’s whip, for the legacy of the lash and the lynching tree are still real in our economic, social, and judicial systems, in the way policing is done in so many urban communities, a paramilitary occupation force at war with civilians.

Continue reading “26 May 2024: Bodies Everywhere”

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Acts 2:1-21

I grew up in a beach town. Among my childhood memories are countless days at the beach. My mom, Arlene, and either or both of the Shirleys would pack some combination of a dozen kids into some combination of vehicles and sometimes just one vehicle packed like a clown car, and head off to the public beaches, where we would eat sandy sandwiches, get stung by jellyfish, and otherwise have a grand old time, even when “Jaws” hit the theaters and made everyone else afraid of the water. In fact, maybe especially then, since the beach was less crowded.

We never lived close enough for me to bike to the beach like a real surf rat, but beach culture was always there. When “Margaritaville” came out in 1977, it went right into high rotation on local radio stations, and I have been a bit of a Jimmy Buffett fan ever since, despite not liking Margaritas. In fact I was never really a full-fledged “Parrothead,” as his most diehard fans were known, for like the Grateful Dead, Phish, and the Dave Matthews Band, loving Jimmy Buffett is almost a religion, traveling from show to show all summer. One thing is for sure, though. I know a lot of his songs, from Come Monday to Cheeseburger In Paradise. Buffett died from cancer last September.

During his long career, Jimmy Buffett collaborated with some of my other favorite artists, including other beach-culture musicians like Jack Johnson and Kenny Chesney. But it was a traditional country music artist that collaborated on the song that provides the title for this morning’s sermon, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” a reminder that the day job may drive you to day drinking.

I always think of this song when we get to Pentecost because I find Peter’s words in our scripture reading both incredibly human and incredibly amusing, the sort of text that makes me believe in the historic core at the heart of the text. 

“They’re not drunk,” Peter proclaims. “It’s only the third hour of the day!,” which is what he actually would have said because 9:00am is not how they told time back then. And all I can think is, you know, “It’s the eleventh hour somewhere!,” though the eleventh hour, too, has taken on a completely different cultural meaning. In any case, the time of day has never stopped a committed drunk.

The disciples, having returned to Jerusalem after hanging out with Jesus in Galilee, must have sounded drunk. I mean, sure there was the language thing. Luke makes a big deal out of the language thing, emphasizing how cosmopolitan Jerusalem was, cataloging as many as fifteen regions represented. But honestly, that isn’t the miracle that impresses me.

It isn’t the resurrection that impresses me. Love won, the grave was emptied, and embodied/not embodied Jesus ate fish, walked through closed doors, and helped his followers understand what had just happened, but then he disappeared again, “touchdown Jesus” ascending. 

They had the Holy Spirit, come down like tongues of flame, but the Holy Spirit was not like some demon possessing a body. They were the bodies, those bumpkin followers. They were the bodies who had the audacity to continue to proclaim an alternative to the brutality of Rome and the greed and corruption of the Sanhedrin, even after their leader had been tortured and killed. Fifty days later, and you know what had changed in the world of Roman-occupied Judea? Zilch, nada, nothing. Nothing, that is, except them.

Call it the Holy Spirit. Sure. But it was more than a little crazy to keep telling people that better was possible, better government, better business, better community, even better selves, because God was better than they had ever imagined. They knew this for a fact, for they had experienced it in a better man who made the broken feel whole.

It was a little crazy to say that good was on the move, and that they, women and men from the sticks, completely un-credentialed in the ways of that ancient time, were the vectors that were taking it viral, to anyone who could hear the good news, regardless of their language or culture. There was room for Nicodemus, an Ethiopian eunuch, a wealthy woman in Corinth.

Continue reading “Five O’Clock Somewhere: 19 May 2024”

Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53

When Jesus was asked who a re-married widow would be married to in the afterlife, he said she wouldn’t, that heaven doesn’t work that way. This is a passage that is mostly ignored, even by the selective literalists of fundamentalism, as we imagine reunions at the Pearly Gates with loved ones and pets of the past. I am agnostic on the matter, my faith being more about living than dying. Dying seems to take care of itself, while living takes considerable effort, at least done well.

Post-mortem marriage is the sort of very practical question that comes up when we try to map our certain existence in this life onto our unknowable existence in the next. It is not unlike the body problem, which comes in two parts. 

The first is the problem of our particular bodies. The theology that developed in certain strands of pre-Rabbinic Judaism and carried over into Christianity was one of bodily resurrection. This is why, for example, certain traditions were resistant to cremation. No body, nor resurrection. There might have been a case for embodied resurrection in the first generation after Jesus, but two thousand years later, countless bodies are simply gone, and if I were to die tomorrow, or even more dramatically if the rapture were to occur and I made the short-list, who would get this particular set of atoms that comprise my body? For surely everything that is in me today has been part of something or someone else, even the microplastics.

The same sort of sticky questions arose right out of the gate for Christianity, the second form of body problem, when the followers of Jesus claimed he had been bodily resurrected. They claimed guards at the tomb so no one could accuse them of stealing the body. The authors of John have Thomas touch the wound where the spear entered the side of Jesus, hastening his death due to the Passover. Jesus eats post-resurrection, and presumably does the things that result from eating. Yet he passes through locked doors, so maybe they weren’t really clear about the story they meant to tell. In fact, Christians fought over the body of Jesus, pre and post resurrection, for centuries after his execution.

If you’ve got a resurrected body, then you have to account for that body, and they couldn’t exactly kill him again. Fortunately, there was precedents of sorts, two prior individuals who did not die. The first is less familiar, a patriarch in the Book of Genesis before the Great Flood named Enoch. Ancient languages are always a little uncertain in translation, but scholars mostly believe the text describes Enoch being taken to heaven alive.

The second immortal is better known, a tale we tell often in worship. The prophet of the Northern Kingdom named Elijah is taken up in a flaming chariot, which just goes to show you can get to heaven by being fabulous and flamey.

The early believers and gospel authors deal with the “beam me up” body of Jesus by doing just that, arms up and ascending like “touchdown” Jesus. Heaven is up, as is traditional, though I am not sure if that is a fixed up located over Jerusalem, an up that encircles the globe but is invisible, or maybe just some quantum slip in time and space. 

Our Christian story is that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father, though we progressives are a difficult lot when it comes to gender, so maybe the left hand of the Mother, and besides, Jesus can’t always be up there because he is so often down here leaving footprints in the sand on some beach or another.

Jesus was real, and his life and ministry improbably changed the world. In my personal theology, the one constructed out of the parts of ancient Christianity worth I find saving, Jesus is historical, a man in a particular context, an occupied land filled with corruption, despair, and violence, but Christ is timeless. Christ is a continuation of Emmanuel, God-with-us, in the way that the gospels say Jesus promises to be with us. Those are soft categories, of course, as God seems to hate being put in boxes.

Continue reading “12 May 2024: APB Wally aka Waldo”

1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17

Coming from the aspirational working class, my cultural tastes are a mix of high brow and low brow, from the Daytona 500 to The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, a contemporary opera super relevant to recent events. Then add in a little generation-straddling, and you never know what you’ll get. 

In movies, however, I am decidedly low-class. I have zero need to see another Meryl Streep melodrama. Give me a good adventure or caper film any day. I probably know almost as many quotes from Gen X films as I do from scripture, from “You’re killing me, Smalls!” to “I don’t think that means what you think that means.” 

But some of my favorite films are filled with memorable lines inappropriate for use in a pulpit, and barely suitable for a pool hall. Almost everything that comes out of John Goodman’s mouth in his role as Walter Sobchak in “The Big Lebowski” is profane. But there is that one G-rated quote relevant to today’s scripture: 

“This isn’t ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.”

And gosh are there rules. Rabbinic Judaism, which formed after the Jewish War in the First Century, claims 613 commandments in the Law of Moses. Then there were the smooth-talkers who interpreted the rules like latter-day contortionists, “smooth talker” a derogatory term in that context.

Both the gospel traditionally attributed to John but certainly not written by John and the first letter claimed to have been written by John but certainly not written by John tell us to obey God’s commandments, which seems good counsel despite the dubious authorship. But what are God’s commands? That list of 613 reasons you are probably a sinner?

Jesus states very clearly that he did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. But his interpretation of the law is far from smooth… it is demanding. When asked to summarize the Law, he said “Love God above all things, and love your neighbor as you love yourself,” which by the way also means you can’t hate yourself. Jesus is then asked “Who is my neighbor?,” leading him to tell the story of the Good Samaritan.

So what is it? The Law of Selflessness and Love? Or the minutia and nit-picking the gospel writers would attribute to the Scribes and Pharisees?

It is a sort-of eternal question. So let me tell you a more contemporary story.

Continue reading “5 May 2024: “Sobchak””

Acts 8:26-40

The United Methodist Church made the news again this week as their General Conference convened in Charlotte, North Carolina. Though a significant number of churches and districts have left the denomination in recent years, somewhere around a quarter of local congregations, they are still fighting over LGBTQI+ clergy and same-sex marriage. I find this frustrating, for while Methodism was never a stop on my particular spiritual journey, there is much to be admired in their theological heritage, never mind all those Wesleyan hymns, which are awesome. For one thing, their understanding of grace is way better than that of our Calvinist tradition, though that is a bit “in the weeds” for our purposes this morning. Besides, we’ve been ordaining LGBTQI+ folx for more than half a century.

So I guess that, given their queasiness about queerness, I should not have been surprised at what I discovered in my Bible commentary on the Acts of the Apostle this week as I was doing my sermon prep. That particular volume in the “Interpretation” series is authored by Methodist theologian and Bishop Will Willimon. I generally like Willimon, but he is off base when he states in his commentary that the Ethiopian eunuch in today’s reading was not necessarily castrated, and therefore not necessarily excluded from the Temple community. He then goes on to blatantly ignore that elephant in the room, going to absurd lengths to interpret the text.

So let’s be really clear, and really in-context. This story is weird and very radical. 

Philip is a sort-of B-league apostle, not one of the inner four, but not among those we forget or that change depending on the gospel you are reading. He is a transfer from the movement surrounding John the Baptizer. He comes from the same town as Peter and Andrew, yet his name is Greek, and he is the one who connects with the Greeks at the door who wish to meet Jesus. We can assume that this conversation, between the Ethiopian court official and Philip, took place in Greek, which was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman empire.

The Ethiopian is a castrated court official, something that was not uncommon in that age and region, especially among royal courts that kept harems. And let’s just park all of the misogyny of harems, because it is obvious enough, and not the point of the story.

Willimon wants us to believe Luke is using the term “eunoxos” to mean court official, but that term, “dynastes,” is also in the passage. In the same way, Willimon wants to conflate “Eithiop” with otherness generally, but again, Luke has chosen all three descriptors. This man is what the text says he is, despite efforts to straight-wash him.

Castrated men were excluded from participation in the religious assembly. Look at Deuteronomy 23:1. We may know that the Book of Deuteronomy is a late and priestly fabrication, not something written by Moses, but Philip, the character within the framework of our story, and Luke, the author of this historical account of the early church, absolutely believed Deuteronomy to be the authentic rule of God. 

Continue reading “28 April 2024: A Very Queer Caravan”

I figured I had been fired, though it was the sort of firing I didn’t particularly mind. The clock was ticking down to the global climate justice teach-in, and for the last two years, I have spent part of that day on a panel at Elmira College. Maybe they were looking for some fresh voices? That was certainly reasonable, and I’m a little busy these days. 

Then, pretty last minute, I got an invitation to be a panelist. Turned out I was right. Professor Stoker had tried to populate the panel with new folx, including indigenous voices, and they had one by one canceled. So he turned to old reliable here, for I may be boring, but I am definitely reliable.

The professor was prepared to speak as well, only if needed, though that looked to be the case. I was there, what passed for Christian representation, and there was a swami from a local Hindu community that was going to connect spiritual vegetarianism with climate action, but the rabbi was late. Thankfully, he finally made it, flustered that he could not find bicycle racks to park his bike at an event on climate change. I thought to point out that there were snow squalls outside, but the man is Canadian after all.

The problem, the reason I had no FOMO (fear of missing out), is not that I have nothing to say about Climate Justice. I would not be this congregation’s pastor and teacher if I did not share your core commitments. The problem is that to get to the theological basis of our climate activism, you have to bulldoze your way past a whole lot of traditional Christian beliefs that we hold loosely if we hold them at all. The question for us is how must we live now, knowing what we know now, having experienced what we have experienced, in the face of holy mystery, and not how to live under ancient and pre-scientific paradigms.

Letting God be God, letting God be at the center of Creation rather than seeing ourselves at the center of Creation, is admittedly pretty radical. And those college kids in the audience, if they thought about Christianity at all, had either experienced it or perceived it in the traditional men-at-the-center blood-of-Jesus form, still dominant if in decline. At best, they might know of liberal do-gooder Christianity, without knowing the “why” behind it.

Why, for example, move beyond traditional Christian understandings of homo sapiens as having dominion over the earth and all of the life upon it, even beyond modern Christian understandings of homo sapiens having stewardship responsibility for the earth and all the life upon it, an improvement but still not all the way there, to the notion that homo sapiens as just one more evolved species and not the center of the known universe? And to do so on a one-time panel and deal with all of the existential angst when we start to ask difficult questions?

For example, I might have shared an anecdote from Barbara J. King’s “Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion.” A chimpanzee, Tina, has been killed by a leopard. Brutus, the group’s alpha male, guards the body for five hours. He only allows one other chimp to approach the corpse, Tina’s little brother. This moves beyond the already controversial notion that animal grieve. This looks a lot like empathy, looks like Brutus understands that Tina’s little brother had a unique relationship with her. Which makes you look at that bacon a little differently and start to wonder if the swami is right after all, and bring on the tofu!

And if that notion, that humans are the god-shaped reason for creation itself, is emptied, then what other theologies fall by the way side? And do the new theologies we construct have the power to give shape and comfort in the haphazard holiness and harm of existence in these finite bodies?

Continue reading “21 April 2024: Climate Justice Sunday”

Luke 24:36-48

1 John 3:1-7

As most of you know, I am pretty firmly committed to letting God be God, beyond our human constructions of the holy, the well-intended but rickety little shacks we want to house mystery. Thinking of God along human lines of being, as rooted in time and space with will and agency like ours, can be useful, as long as we don’t confuse the limits of our own imagination with limits on God.

To that end, I routinely try to shift language, freeing God from embodied gender and socially-constructed notions of gender. On occasion, I even reverse tradition, using female pronouns or neutral pronouns. In other words, I am the MAGA-Christians’ worst nightmare, and quite proud of it.

So you may ask yourself why our reading from the first letter attributed to John was full of “He” and “Him.” And this is where we get a little nerdy, but only a little, because this text is one of the few places in scripture where we do not know the antecedents to the pronouns. The correct question in First John is “He who?” The author writes about God, then seems to shift to writing about Jesus, but there is no proper noun to signal that shift. Some and probably all of the he/him references are Jesus, and we have no reason to doubt that Jesus was biologically and socially male in that ancient patriarchal context, as much fun as it might to be to imagine otherwise, so I am hesitant to start messing with the pronouns in this passage.

The other interesting thing about this passage is that it says “we will be like him,” which leads me to believe they hadn’t gotten to a particularly high Christology yet, since the Jesus we get to after they hammered out orthodoxy, and hammered one another in the process, was barely human at all, making it incredibly hard for us to imagine that we might become like him. I have a hard enough time becoming like me, or at least the me I want to be.

“He who?” is not the only question for First John, because we might also fairly ask “We who?” And for that, I’m going to suggest we turn to the gospel reading, which comes from Luke, but is echoed in the “Great Commission” found in Matthew. That version is a command to baptize and make disciples of all nations. Luke’s version has Jesus describing his role as Messiah, commanding “that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

And this is where I land. We honestly don’t know how Jesus felt about non-Jews. A pre-rabbinic Judaism existed throughout the empire, from Babylon to Rome, and people not ethnically descended from the Israelites could be found around synagogues. 

As I recently shared with you, Jesus taught and healed in a multi-cultural context. But the social movement that gathered around Jesus took uniquely Jewish forms. Did he, the rabbi executed on Golgotha, anticipate a movement made up primarily of non-Jews? For that matter, did he really anticipate any movement at all? He proclaimed the right rule of God as an in-breaking heavenly kingdom, and early Christians held on to this idea that some sort of divine intervention in creation was immanent. And either it arrived in the form of a new way of thinking about God and living in the world, or it didn’t happen at all, because the anti-Christ did not show up in 33 C.E., and wasn’t born in 1946 either, despite evidence to the contrary.

What we do know is that the gospel we received was universalist, though that word can mean many things.

Continue reading “He who? 14 April 2023”

Acts 4:32-35

During the second year of my professional degree program, I completed a major paper on prayer. I particularly wanted to explore what prayer could mean once you moved beyond human constructions of a puppet-master God who was arbitrary and capricious, who granted some miracles and denied others. 

As part of that process, I spent some time on the Lord’s Prayer, which is problematic despite the fact that it is still central to our collective and individual lives. Does God really expect us to wait passively to receive daily bread, or has God already given us the gifts we need to produce our own bread, and to provide bread to those who cannot? 

What sort of God would lead us into temptation? This is something members of the Catholic clergy have been wrestling with in European language versions in recent years.

None of this is helped by the fact that Jesus would have likely spoken the prayer that went from oral tradition to gospel in Aramaic, but the gospels were written in Koine Greek, and for the Roman church, the authoritative text comes from a third layer of translation, in Latin.

One of the most difficult passages to translate is the reason we have multiple versions of the prayer in the English language tradition. The Greek word “opheil?” refers to a legal and financial obligation in ancient Greek literature as well as in the Greek translation of the Hebrew language scriptures, and this is the only word used in Matthew’s version, the one we recite. But Luke, using the same Q source as the authors of Matthew, asks God to forgive sins, “amartias,” while commanding us to forgive those indebted to us, “opheilontí.” Luke can do this because by the time the gospels were written, “opheil?” was most frequently used to mean a moral obligation, something also reflected in the changing use of the Aramaic root in Rabbinic Literature. 

In the end, neither “trespasses” nor “debts” alone will suffice. We should be asking forgiveness for our sins, and forgiving both the financial obligations and moral wrongs of others.

Now multiply this debate by a million doctoral dissertations, and you have a sense of the challenge of translation, and that only of the text itself, never mind the need to translate practice and theology across wildly different intellectual, conceptual, and cultural frameworks. 

Continue reading “7 April 2024”