Session 21 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 21 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

At a rather late stage in the history of the people of Israel the technology of memory through writing attained progressive production of written documents.  The compilations that came to text from 760 BCE to perhaps150 BCE represent a water-shed for the Jewish people. It was guided by a scribal motive of teaching the values of the community using editorial license to combine a variety of writing genres.  The body of great oral traditions of the prehistoric past were creatively and imaginatively retold to inform the people of Israel about  how and why they came to be who they were at the times of writing.  The writing goal might be said to deal with this community formative principle: Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One.  In one theory of composition the Torah or first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures include the combination of four different sources at four different times plus a final redactor or editor who put the sources together in a final form.  The sources are given letter abbreviations: J or Yahwists, E or Elohists, P or Priestly and D or Deuteronomist.  Each of these sources represents a different age and school of thought and different priorities in recounting their traditions.  Some scholars think that it could be the scribe Ezra in 458 BCE who was the final editor of the Torah.  Imagine the literary class of Jews in Exiles for 49 years in the Babylonian Captivity and when Babylon was captured by the Persians, the Persians allowed a trickle of Jews to return to Jerusalem and eventually begin to rebuild the Temple.  The Temple was destroyed in 586 by the Babylonians and rebuilt in by 515 BCE.   Imagine the effort that had to be made by the community with over 100 years of lost contact with the homeland.  Some determined not be assimilated into their captors life style.  They had to try to maintain their religious and ethnic identities and their emotional connection with their homeland.  Many were never able to return.  You can see how the writing became an interior topographical homeland in maintaining their very identity as Jews.

In the J, E, D P, writers the pre-historic and semi-historic memories were retold as undeveloped archetypal situations that were developed in the actual priest led liturgy and worship that came to be practiced.  So, for example the pre-historic oral tradition of God resting the seventh day became in the practice of the later community, a Sabbath day of religious observance.  The appeal to the antiquity of a practice has the effect of conferring authority for the practice. 

Imagine a people who had been carried off in exile and who had been given permission by their captors to maintain religious, social and ethnic identity. The leaders of a community exile would be responsible teaching that identity and they would have write about what had been lost by the community.  And what had been lost?  Their homeland and their temple.  Without a Temple, the priests had no place to offer the sacrifices.  Scribes and sages became the leader of the gatherings. People in exile would have to be taught the meaning and value of their homeland.  They would have to be taught about its origins and its history.  It would also be taught as an idealized place.  Absence makes heart grow fonder.  The writing was also a preparation of people to return to their homeland and beginning afresh when the Temple had been rebuilt.

Their questions arose: How did we get to where we are?  How did the land of Israel come to be and how did it come to be lost?  Creation stories and pre-history would need to be told with an outcome in mind.  Ancient nations such as Persia had divine right of king as part of their legitimation propaganda.  Ancient Persia was a place of exile for the people of Israel and it was impossible to avoid influences from the lands of their exile.

We know the profound phenomenon of patriotism; but when a land and a religion are linked the effervescence is intensified.  The task included finding the destiny Israel and Jerusalem in a direct link with creation of the world by God.  A view of history was told showing how God’s plan culminated in what came to happen in Israel.  The story was told as a parallel dynamic in heaven and on earth.  As the God El was ascending in heaven in the council of the other gods, so the story of Israel on earth was unfolded in poly-theistic lands of Israel’s neighbors.  The success of Israel in battle mirrored the heavenly success of the One God.  Israel’s success was understood to be because of a special covenant between the One God and Israel.  In our own country we have the manifest destiny behavior of Europeans justifying conquests of the native populace under this doctrine of America being a Promised Land for Christian people from Europe.  A covenant with God can be the justification for a “might makes” right practice.  The ancient people of Israel in understanding themselves understood themselves as a people of destiny and a presumption of being special in God’s plan.  Patriotism always involves presumption regarding the specialness of the homeland.  If we judge this notion harshly, one could respond that every ancient people had the right to claim their own manifest destiny and write a history of their own specialness.  It just so happened that one people did this in a way that has been remembered in the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures.

What does the creation story teach?  The divine designation of humanity to have dominion in the created world.  How?  By being created in the image of this one God who was unseen but had a emanating creating Spirit.  How is humanity made? Part earth and part spirit.    Why are we moral beings?  There was a prehistoric moral test that was given, since if human beings were created only to do good in innocence, their choice would be mechanical and not valuable.  The forbidden fruit story attempts to be a commentary upon the value and freedom of our choice.  Why is the world in disharmony?  Why is there antagonism among created order?  The serpent tricked naïve human beings but their freedom was made authentic.  The end result: expulsion from innocent ideal place.  Imperfect people cannot dwell in a perfect world.  How is humanity expelled from perfect environment to be related to God?  By covenant?  In pre-history covenants were made with patriarchs who stood as archetypes in the teaching of progressive covenants that would reach their summit in the covenant given to Moses on Mount Sinai.  The covenant to Adam was to “dominate or be in charge of the earth” but in failure part of the covenant was the curse of an unruly earth, painful childbirth and death.  Other patriarchs had covenants; Noah was given the covenant that the earth would never be destroyed by God.  The rainbow was the sign of this covenant.  There were flood stories in ancient cultures.  When cities located on great rivers floods, an entire flooded river valley made it seem as the entire known world was being destroyed for people who spent most of their lives very close to home.  Why is there more than one language on the earth?  It seems inconvenient but the tower of Babel story tells the divine origin of many languages. God confused the language because people with just one language became too proud of their accomplishments.

In the Patriarchs of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the pre-historic stories began to become more developed because there is more specificity for the set up for the great event of the covenant, the giving of the Law to Moses.

 Exercise:

Read Genesis 1:1-until Genesis 2:4.  Note the Translators in Genesis 2:4 begins to use the word LORD God (Yahweh Elohim) when in the first chapter of Genesis the translator only uses the word God (Elohim).  So scholars believe different writers were involved because two different names for God were used.  Also the second chapter of Genesis is a retelling of the creation story in a different way using the two names Yahweh Elohim for God.  So scholars call the writer who used Elohim, writer E and the writer who used Yahweh Elohim, writer J, since Yahweh was transliterated into English often as Jehovah. 

Father Phil

Session 22 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 22  Introduction to the Episcopal Church

In the final product of Hebrew Scriptures one can note that there aren’t always smooth transitions in story lines.  Why tell and retell the creation story in different ways and place them right next to each other?  There was reluctance of a later editor to leave early sources out and so both stories were preserved side by side.  Modern persons think that writing is the work of one identifiable person who owns a text as copyrighted intellectual property.  This notion can be naively projected upon God as the inspiring author and upon a supposed single oracle such as the person of Moses.  A more fitting metaphor for Hebrew Scriptures is the quilt: material from various cloth events of a family’s past are retained in an overall new quilt to serve the current need of family for warmth using pieces of cloth from the past.  Modern people are too hung up on the singular author but the way Hebrew Scriptures are put together reveal them to be a continuous writing and editing process within the communities.  The writings belong to a living community and the fact that the writing indicates a tendency to conserve even if there seems to be contradiction is an indication of the honesty of the writing tradition.

How are we going to conserve our traditions so that our children can know our connection with our ancestors and why we are who we are?  Writing was a technology of preservation in times when a people’s stability could become unsettled.  Please note that living in the Diaspora or away from Israel has been the normal nomadic experience for Jewish peoples throughout their history.  This early community experience of living away from homeland only has enhanced the importance and the critical factor in the maintenance of their community identity.

As we look at the growing specificity in the stories of the patriarchs of antiquity, we can begin to look at how a community of teachers/writers/scribes/priests is trying to cite relationship of current practice with the ancient pre-historic stories of antiquity.  As we anticipate how the writers of the New Testament will use the Hebrew Scriptures I would like to introduce a model of the spiral or coil.  Imagine historic events as a rising spiral or coil.  A place on a higher ring of a coil lines up with a place on a lower previous coil.  History does not actually repeat itself, but the sameness of the themes of human events recurs in a cyclical way.  When one is tracing textual traditions one sees the recurrence of themes.  And so a previous event then predicts or anticipates the recurrence of a similar event or the understanding of an event.   Example in the Bible: miraculous or unique birth traditions for great persons.  Isaac, Jacob,  Moses, Samuel, John the Baptist, and Jesus are in this story genre tradition.  If a person is great in the Bible, they had to have the signs of this known before they ever actually did deeds of greatness.  The marvelous birth tradition accompanies how one tells the story of a great person.  This is a motif of story-telling traditions in the Bible.  It is a marvelous literary tradition but not to be confused with modern journalistic writing.  We cannot impose the methods of modern journalist writing upon the writers of the Bible.  It only confuses the writing purposes of both.

In Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, sons of Jacob and Joseph as the twelve tribes of Israel we have the stories still in the mist of prehistory of antiquity that are used to see traces of the precedents for subsequent religious, ritual, social and legal customs of the community.

In this cycle of stories the theme of covenant is further developed.  How does the story get from the Garden of Eden to the area we know to be Palestine?  It happens when Abram is called to leave his home in Ur of the Chaldees (Iraq) and travel west.  Abram and his wife Sarai are childless but in the hero cycle the hero is one who is able to receive direct and specific voice message from this One God.  Just imagine the psychological judgments that we moderns would place upon people who regularly hear the voice of God in such specific ways.  Do you see how unique and infrequent this kind of communication has to be regarded in understanding a tradition?  What if everyone was chosen and heard voices to go and move around?  We also know that the religious leaders today who claim to hear God’s voice so clearly are often part of communities who practice behaviors that put them at great odds with some of the commonsense realities of modern sciences.

With Abram we have a further covenant.  God is going to bless the world through Abram’s offspring even though he and his wife Sarai are old and childless.  The covenant promise is ritually sealed through an animal sacrifice.  In these story cycles we see the precedents for the full-blown practice of animal sacrifices in the Temple.  Obviously the priests and the Priestly writing tradition would be interested in developing the primeval origins of the sacrificial tradition.  It started with Adam and Eve; remember Abel the shepherd gave a lamb.  It continues with Noah and with Abram.  Abram loses his faith in believing that he will have a son with Sarai, so Sarai gives her maid Hagar to conceive a child with Abram.  Ishmael is born; Sarai is jealous and Ishmael and Hagar are forced into the desert, but God speaks to Hagar (so in the Bible the tradition of the Arab people come through Abram but the covenant to the Arabs come by the voice of God to Hagar when the covenant is made to her son Ishmael).  Abram after many problems, like having a problem relative in Lot (got Abram in lot of trouble in Sodom and Gomorrah)  and a run-in with a Pharoah where Abram actually pimps his wife in presenting his wife Sarai to the Pharoah as his “sister,” and finally Abram and Sarai have a son, Isaac and they get their names changed to Abraham and Sarah.  The covenant comes to fulfillment in a marvelous birth.  The covenant is ratified with God with two further “blood” rituals.  The circumcisions of Ishmael and Isaac continue the symbol or a permanent marking on the males in Abraham’s line that they are sons of this covenant.  The next “blood” ritual is when Abraham is tested by God; God tells him to sacrifice his only son (do you see a theme that was adopted in Christian theology?) in the land of Moriah.  Abraham takes his son to obey God and God’s angel only intervenes when the knife is lifted and ready to be plunged into Isaac who is tied to an altar.  God’s angel allows that a ram can be sacrificed as a replacement for Isaac.  The place of this sacrifice is supposed to be the very place of the first temple in Jerusalem and it is the place over which the Islamic Mosque the Dome of the Rock now stands. 

Exercise:

Notice how our society is so used to this stories from Scriptures even while our in our modern practice we would judge these practices as primitive and barbaric.  What kind of God would tell a parent to sacrifice their child?  What kind of Father would even hear such a voice say such a thing?  Today we disagree about the necessity of circumcision.  But remember the spiral of history and tradition; themes return.  We look at the present in light of what was similar in the past.  What parent in Christianity sacrificed his only son?  Do you see how the Abraham Isaac story provided the templates for early followers of Jesus to understand the significance of his life?

If we think this coil of history is silly just think about our own way of processing current events.  If one speaks of Roger Maris one speaks about Babe Ruth.  We talk about the importance of hitting lots of homeruns because of Babe Ruth.  Same with golf; when we speak of Tiger Woods, we speak of Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklas.  Why?  We see and understand the significance of present through the past.  The past templates can even seem to predict the present events.  We need to understand this dynamic to understand the Bible.

Father Phil

Session 23 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 23  Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Did ever wonder why children play the games that they play?  They play house, or school, or doctor, or war, or princess or super hero.  The topic matter is supplied by our culture but why is it that they play at all?  How is it that a mere stick from a tree can morph into almost anything in the imagination of a child?

Could it be that in the midst of a vast universe that children begin the reductive practice of making life very, very local to themselves?  By playing house, school or doctor, they are creating a liturgy of their art imitating life outside of their play as perhaps their mode of giving them a sense of freedom and control in the face of such vastness of experience that could overwhelm them.  Their liturgy of play gives them confidence that their free acts make a difference and influence the wider scope of life.  Play is structured by how we take on language and it involves speaking language acts, play objects on which our imaginations are projected and it includes stylized body acts or ceremonial acts.  All of this might be like a parallel play event to the world outside as it gives a child a safe place to train for the reality of living in a family, going to school and going to the doctor’s office.

The play proclivity of humanity is obvious in our post-modern world as we devise endless ways to play and be involved in games.  Churches with highly ornate liturgical or ceremonial tradition understand the proclivity of humanity toward play.  There is no shame in admitting liturgy and ritual as our communal “play” toward God done with each other.  Churches that declare that they eschew “superstitious” ritual only reinvent their rituals and call it something else like, spontaneous words and praise for God.

In the study of religion the word “cult” is an academic term and is not used to refer to wacko religious groups who try to ensnare people into programmed behaviors that trick them into leaving the religions of their birth.

When we read the Hebrew Scriptures we must understand the progressive unfolding of the cult and ritual of the Jewish people.  Children, aboriginal peoples and people of the pre-scientific past were able to be more honest about the proclivity of play in humanity that would be known as cult or ritual for adult practitioners of community.  We moderns can readily accept all kinds of secular games but then be very dismissive about “silly superstitious liturgical games” of the church.

Let us also admit that in former times the religious ritual events of a community commanded more respect because there was less competition of other offered events.  The modern world has created the proliferation of specialization in every field including the field of games and entertainment and so the religious events occur within a greater field of choice.  I don’t feel sorry in retrospect for Moses who had to compete with those who made golden calves: “Sorry Moses but I have to compete with youth sports, golf, professional sports and an entire array of weekend leisure alternatives.”  I don’t have the luxury of anger in the face of such competition; but I will continue to try to make the case for the importance of a communal “holy play before God in worship” and remind people to complete themselves by including an activation of their “holy play” proclivity.

One of the text generating groups in the writing of the Hebrew Scriptures is called the Priestly Source.  So the Hebrew Scriptures provides us with pre-Hebrew religious archetypes for cult, ritual and priestcraft.  The pre-historic patriarchs practiced a kind of lay priesthood.  They offer animal sacrifices to cement covenants with God and each other.  They offered meal offerings and special meals to angelic visitors.  They had contact with pre-Levitical priests; the famed Melchizedek who received gifts from Abraham and the great Moses worked for his father in law who was a Midian priest.

One cannot read the Hebrew Scriptures without missing the preponderance of the interest in priestly things.  This tells us about the editorial influence of priestly writers in the compilation of the Hebrew Scriptures.  An entire family was dedicated to the priesthood.  Aaron, the brother of Moses was the first Levitical priest in their lineage.  (Please note how a genealogical priesthood becomes a spiritual line of priests and bishops in Christianity.  So in Hebrew Scriptures one can find the inspiration for what we call apostolic succession or the historic episcopate).

One cannot even think of Jews and Judaism without thinking about the Temple and Jerusalem.  What did the priestly writers need to do to give the logic and authorization of the priestly role in their community?  One could say that much of the writing of Hebrew Scriptures involves a legitimization of the role of the priest and the place where the priest practiced, namely the Temple and other regional shrines.

The profession of the priesthood is about having a craft for the ritual proclivity and ritual fulfillment of community.  Of course then the public ritual was the socialization process of inculcating religious value as the dominate value in the lives of the members of the community.  The ritual function also provided for the maintenance of the distinct identity of the Jewish people and a way to continue to pass on this community identity to the next generation.  Religious gatherings had a segregationist exclusiveness about them.  Such segregation was based upon people who willingly wanted to follow the rules of inclusion.

In the holy play of cult and ritual for adults there is an acknowledgment about the smallness of humanity in the face of a vast universe.  In ritual behavior, priests, prophets and sages continually look for wise ways to interact in healthy and safe ways with the great observed behavior of the natural and human order.  How can we express a forced upon us humility in face of things that happen to us that we cannot control?  Can we build mini-shrines, temples as a smaller model of the universe where we can play and then go outside of the liturgy of play to be bolstered to face the realities of living in the greater temple of this grand universe?

The priestly caste then devised codes of worship for times and prayers, incantations, blessings and curses, as a way of forming the person to face the truly great problems of life.  The priestly caste tried to set behavior boundaries of the community so that the community in a poly-theistic environment would not break down and lose its distinctive identity.

In America we hear people worried about the Islamic Sharia law.  Some people worry about Sharia law even while they hope that their own brand of religious law and piety could be forced upon the entire country.  Let us be clear, wherever there has been a wedding between political power and religious power, there has been something like Sharia law.  The Torah was an embracing law for a theocratic culture in Israel.  Religious law was public law when it could be so enforced.  In Christendom, when popes controlled monarchs, one can find a similar dynamic.  The priestly caste of ancient Israel sought to order society with a Holiness Code.  If the Lord your God is One, that God is also special or holy.  And such a holy God requires that the people of covenant must also be holy.  And so the priests set out to define and write down holiness codes.  And every holiness code is based upon ancient presuppositions and even upon their own ancient science.  One could conceive injunctions against the eating of pork arising from seeing the effects of trichinosis.  But one could also see it as developing as a way of distinguishing their own community from a surrounding community of “pork eaters.”  It could also have its basis in economic; if one came from a nomadic culture sheep, goats and cattle were more likely to be herded in longer distances than swine.  Pigs may have been more common with already settled people who had begun to do farming.  No matter what we think about the purity codes (read the book of Leviticus for the most potent dose of codes) there were probably specific reasons for the development of such practices.  If a priestly writer can add the ideology that it is a requirement to please a holy God then the code received promulgated authority within the community. 

Exercise:

Church begins with a prelude.  What does this mean?  It means “before play.”  Ludic means playful.  Liturgy is holy play.  Can you accept that part of a basic universal proclivity or capacity is the capacity of play?  Can you understand the value of ritual as the play preparation of evoking God’s will in heaven in a ordered way on earth so that we are given an orientation toward the ordering of the world outside of church towards our aspirations of what we think God’s will is for this world?  We received a profound history of holy play and ritual from the Hebrew Scriptures and keep this in mind when you are reading the Hebrew Scriptures.

Keep the holy play aspect of your personality alive and well.

Father Phil

Session 24 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 24 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

We are on our way in trying to get some insights upon the great questions and answers that arose in the Hebrew Scriptures in how they set up the templates for the way in which the followers of Jesus presented their understanding of Jesus and the early Christian communities.

As a priest and preacher, a liturgical preacher who tries to reflect upon the Scripture readings appointed for the Sunday, most of the time it is easier just to pretend to jump into a biblical story and interact with the story as though it had self-consistent symbols that are being used.  But probably the most literal book in the entire Bible is the short letter of Paul to his friend Philemon asking him to receive back a runaway slave into his good graces.  The setting and context is so obvious.  For all other writings it is hard to determine what scholars call provenance: why was it written and to whom exactly was it written and where was it written.  When there are writings that have been collected and edited and reedited and applied to communities in completely different life experiences circumstances over such long time periods we have lost access to the actual occasion of the original writing events.  Do you see the easiest way out?  It is to limit scholarship about background information and just respond to the text itself as though it could exist with self-evidential meaning in every age.  And this is basically how most people read the Bible; a valid devotional way to read it to look for insights for living well.  But if we were to collect and write down the insights and “truth” that people say they have received from the Bible, we would find it to be varied and contradictory.  So there is some importance of doing scholarship in history, original languages, archaeology, historical anthropology and any other related field to help to put some “limits” on what something could mean based upon when it was written for the first time and also based upon accepting the laws of gravity.

What will biblical scholarship do for you?  For one thing it will confuse you thoroughly.  All biblical scholarship is “political” in the sense you can easily end seeing what you are looking for.  So even if you do a study using Wikipedia you will find that scholars disagree and widely disagree.  And these scholars are people who have spent their entire lives learning language and history very well.  So if scholars disagree, where does that leave a typical pastor or lay person?  A typical priest or pastor has some biblical knowledge somewhere in-between what the specialized biblical scholars have and what a lay person in the pew has.

What you cannot believe is when a preacher tells you, “The Bible says..”  The Bible does not talk like a unified person with whom you can have a dialogue discussion.  When a preacher says, “The Bible says,”  he or she is really saying, “This is way that I interpret a particular biblical writing.”  By saying, “The Bible says” the preacher may want to assume some self-evidential authority of some particular verse, but the use of Bible in this way is very misleading.

So in the midst of such disagreement among scholars how should we respond?  Well, if the experts can’t agree then perhaps the Bible is not reliable for truth; so why bother?  That is one response.  Another is to ignore all scholarship and make Bible reading a personal event where a reading can be like a personal oracle event between God and me.  This may be a valid devotional reading of the Bible.  There is another response: The continual collaborative reading of the Bible by a faith community to discover biblical insights in many forms of interpretation.  We do this not because we can find a final and perfect biblical truth or true reading of the Bible; but in the process of reading and discussing we are building our interior word base that hopefully is re-programing the lives of our deeds and words towards more excellence in the art of living well.  We interpret the Bible best with the winsome deeds of our lives that declare, God is Love and Christ loved us and gave himself so that we might give ourselves to each other in care and loving actions.  When someone is kind to me, that deed is an infallible truth to me.  It is biblical truth experienced by me.

This session is a digression of an always frustrated preacher who is always trying to look at biblical scholarship. Then I look for the universal patterns that are evident in the biblical texts because if I can intuit or articulate those universal patterns in the lives and language of biblical writers, I then look for their corresponding patterns today in our life and time.  Details of ancient cultures and our culture will be different and so deep patterns of God’s love and grace will render different words and different details today in our cultural behaviors.

The goal of the sermon then is to give my reading of the Bible and offer my reading to see if the insights can help a listener progress in the art of living towards the values of Jesus Christ, which I take to be: Loving God and our neighbor as our self.

Exercise:

Think about not so ancient writing and cultural details.  The Second Amendment of our Constitution is about the right to bear arms.  It was written in the days when the arms in question were muskets with less than rapid fire.  And jump ahead to now: How does one interpret principle of second amendment in the details of fire arms and weaponry available today?  How much disagreement do we find in our society today about principle and detail?  Now imagine principle and detail issues in biblical writing that were written long ago and we don’t have any original documents.  And the writings cover many centuries of development within changing communities.

Father Phil

Session 25 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 25  Introduction to the Episcopal Church

 In our consideration of the Hebrew Scriptures I would like to suggest you to a mode of dealing with the body of oral tradition that is archived by a community of editors and then re-presented to the editor’s contemporary readership/audience.  Such writing is done with what I would call an anticipatory tense.  In the anticipatory tense the story of the past is told in a way to give reason for the practices of the community at the time of the writing or editing.  The writer assumed that all past writers and oral stories are left open with a future anterior tense of expectancy, “this will have happened” (future anterior is a verb tense that other languages have).  In some way writers bestow a precise divining prophetic gift to peoples in the past.  This gives the writers and the heroic characters of the past authority and it gives extra validity to what was “predicted” since it has already occurred.  By assuming precise prediction it also assumes a God who is directing very specific outcomes.   This understanding of the past in an anticipatory sense of “predicting” a current event is a valid ancient method of interpreting the Scriptures.  It becomes very important for the writers of the New Testament who are using the Hebrew Scriptures as the template to tell the story of Jesus and the church.  Modern historians use their own methods for looking at the past and their methods differ from the method within a committed confession community of seeing the present as predicted or as a template from the past that anticipates the present.  We still have members of the church using the Bible as a precise predictive template for the present, particularly those who use apocalyptic biblical passage as predictive of current events in Israel as we move toward what they believe is a “great battle.”

What were watershed semi-historical events in the lives of the people of Israel?  The life of King David was foundational in understanding Israel’s identity even though scholars and archaeologists disagree about the accuracy of the biblical accounts( c. 1040–970 BCE ) which were written no earlier than 700 BCE.   We know about a time of reform during King Joash when there was perhaps some literary activity 835 – 796 BC.  We know about the time of the exiles (the forced exiles of large number of Jews from their homeland), the destruction of the first Temple and the return of some Jews to rebuild the Temple.  Many scholars place most of the composition of the Hebrew Scriptures after the Persian exile and the re-building of the Temple.

The Hebrew Scriptures include quite a variety of literary forms.  Many of the forms were known from the practices and writing of neighboring communities and the communities of their exile.  There were various names used for the gods of the people in the land of Canaan.   We know that the God of Israel is proclaimed as a competitor without significant rival in the heavenly courts.

The editors and redactors (editor of editors) integrated the legends and sagas of the ancient story tradition of the entire region to point to the significance of the God of Israel who had a special covenant with the people of Israel.  The One God who made covenant did it with individuals in the pre-historic tales of the patriarchs.  Those legends provide the etiology or origination of a place or the defining life message of a person.  One can read the Hebrew Scriptures and simply translate the names of people and places.  The authors link up the connection between the name of a person and a place and a particular action of a person or circumstance of an event.  So, Bethel means “house of El or House of God.”  And this was a place where the famous Jacob had his dream about the angels on a ladder.  Most of the ancient Hebrew names are definitive of an aspect of the person’s character or an event in a person’s life.  Jacob=trickster and supplanter.  When Jacob wrestled with the angel, he received the new name of Israel (the one who strives with God and prevails)  and so we find an origin story beginning the transition from the stories of the Patriarchs to the formation of the identity of people of Israel.

How did the people of Israel get to their land?  How did they get their name?  When did the people of Israel become a settled people?  Were they nomadic Bedouin like tribes before they settled?   What kind of technology did they have?    Why did their ancestors not have kings?  When and why did Israel get kings?  How successful was the period of kings in Israel?  What is the period of the divided kingdoms of Judah and Israel?  Why did the promise in the Davidic covenant end?  Why did God’s people get carried away into captivity?   Why was the Temple important?  What was the proto-model for the Temple?  Who were the Temple ministers or priests and how did they come to be?  What did the priests do?  Were music, singing, dancing, hymns, poems, drum and other instruments used in the worship?  Were there other religious figures besides priests?  Who were the judges?  The Scribes?  The Wisdom teachers?  The prophets?  What is the meaning of the Messiah and the Messianic prophecies?  And what is the type of literature call Apocalyptic is written with very cryptic imagery?

The Hebrews Scriptures were written as a way to inform the community about why things were the way they were.  And it meant theological reflection on the events that had happened.  Why did God’s people get carried away into captivity?  They broke the covenant with God.  (Modern historian might simply say that there were massive armies that came against them).  It was often the task of the scribes and prophets to warn about what would happen in failure to obey God.  There was a belief that God used history to correct God’s people.

The personal covenants to individual pre-historic patriarch eventually became a body of law for a group of people that needed social ordering.  The Holiness Code was a group covenant requirement.  Covenant means that legitimacy is established beyond the merely human within the Divine and a different kind of authority is accorded to the rules of social cohesion if they are understood to have derived from God.  The writers collected body of laws to prescribe personal and social behaviors for most situations in their community life.  When their kingdoms had failed the religious leaders idealized the most memorable King of all, King David.  He became the prime exemplar of the God’s anointed or Messiah, even as it is amazing how honest the writers were about the weaknesses of David and his family troubles.

One of the theological motives of the Hebrew Scriptures is about theodicy.  Theodicy has to do with justifying the reality of God in the face of the problem of sin and evil and innocent suffering.  How could the religious leaders convince their people about God and justice and the covenant when most of the history of the people reveals the experience of very difficult times?  The notion of resurrection arose in the writings of the prophets as a way to convince people that they could believe in justice.  Times may be bad and evil doers may seem to have the upper had but they will have to face a judgment day in the afterlife.  The possibility of an afterlife is more distinct than simply a holding place of the dead known as Sheol and this became a way to promote a belief in justice.  The case for justice created the conditions for the apocalyptic genre of writing in the Hebrew Scriptures and other extra-canonical writings.  Idealized person, a messiah in the mode of David and an idealized Golden utopian age of harmony in nature became a part of the visionary literature of the prophets in the apocalyptic mode.  The way in which we can understand apocalyptic writing is to see it as a kind of visualization pain management.  People in suffering need to be able to have narratives of hope to help them endure in difficult pain, even as a modern cancer patient might undergo visualization therapy for pain management.  Apocalyptic literature is completely true in the intent of comfort of the message for suffering people.

Please remember in reading the Hebrew Scriptures that they were functioning to hold together and forge the identity of a threatened people.  The truth of this function is known in a variety of narratives and literary forms.  Remember to seek the greater truth behind the very reason for the Scriptures themselves and not the particular detail of the specific people whom the writings were originally addressed.  In this way you and I can match up the corresponding truths that we seek in our own formation in our personal faith and faith community.

  

Exercise:

If we are God’s people why do we suffer?  Why do children have to suffer?  How can we believe in God’s love and in justice when there seems to be so much in life that is unfair?  You and I understand these great questions and we live into them today and we try to help each other as we face these questions.  Try to read the Hebrew Scriptures with these great questions in mind. Their faith leaders were trying to keep the faith community together and seeking the “other world” narrative to comfort the community in this world.

Father Phil

Parable

Parable

Resisting our role as stewards of God's creation in recognizing God's ownership of all is like the vicar who was upset because his bishop and congregation required him to work on Sundays.

The Afterlife as Living at the Grand Canyon

19 Pentecost, Cp21, September 29, 2013 

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16

1 Timothy 6: 11-19  Luke 16:19-31

Lectionary Link

Youth Dialogue Sermon

Connor: In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Please be seated.

I was rather interested to find out in reading today’s Gospel that one of the images of the afterlife fits the biggest attraction in the State of Arizona.

Kalum: Are you speaking about 120 degrees in the shade in the summertime?  And are you implying that parts of Arizona resemble Hades in summertime?

Connor: That is not what I had in mind.  But the New Testament was written in Greek….and so it is all Greek to me but there are two Greek words in our Gospel lesson which refer to the main attraction of Arizona.  Can you say, Mega Chasma.

Kalum: Mega Chasma.  They both are retained in the English…Mega means very big.  Chasma means Chasm.  But how does that refer to Arizona?

Connor: Mega Chasma can mean Grand Canyon.  The image that Jesus uses for the afterlife is a Grand Canyon.

Kalum: Well, the Grand Canyon is a magnificent work of water and wind erosion that has been created over many, many years.  But do you think that this Grand Canyon of the afterlife is an attractive tourist site to visit?

Connor: Well, I think the point of the parable of Jesus is this: The attraction of the Grand Canyon of the afterlife depends upon which side of the Canyon you are stuck on.

Kalum: The good side to be on is with Abraham and Lazarus the leper.

Connor: The bad side to be on is the side of the rich man.

Kalum: This parable uses the story theme of “trading places” as a way for people to learn about empathy; learning how to walk in other people’s shoes.

Connor:  Do you think that this means if we have it good in our current life, then as way of cosmic balance, we will have to have it bad in the afterlife?  Does justice mean that the afterlife is a way of balancing out the experience of good things and bad things among all people?

Kalum: I guess it could mean that.  But the parable is a story about giving insights on how to live now.  It really is not about the afterlife.

Connor: What do you mean?

Kalum: It could be that each of us find ourselves in this life on one side and there are people whom we neglect, don’t see, don’t care about who live on the other side of the canyons of our lives.

Connor: So, like water and wind erode over time, we can with small habits of prejudicial thinking slowly separate people from our lives until we complete ignore them and don’t see them, or worse, mistreat them.

Kalum : Yes, Lazarus was very close to the rich man when they were alive; Lazarus sat at his gate and for the rich man, he was one of those irritating members of the “welfare” class.  The rich man saw Lazarus every day, but he really did not see him in a way that acknowledged his human dignity, his worth and his needs.

Connor: So even though the rich man was close to Lazarus he slowly built a Grand Canyon with his habits of neglect and by the end of his life, the Grand Canyon was what he took with him to the grave.  It became the character of his life.

Kalum: In the parable, the rich man found out too late about this Grand Canyon of separation and he wanted to warn his family not to make the same mistake.

Connor:  In the parable of Jesus, Jesus was not very hopeful about messages from the afterlife.  It is not like Ghosts of Christmas Past can visit Scrooges and frighten them into charity and kindness.   Father Abraham said that if they did not listen to Moses and the prophets, they would not even believe a person who came back from the dead.

Kalum: Does this contradict the main teaching of Christianity?

Connor: What do you mean?

Kalum: Well, Christianity is based upon people believing that Jesus came back to life in some significant way to comfort his disciple and give birth to the church. 

Connor: Perhaps, the church was dealing with the fact that many people were not convinced about the resurrection.

Kalum:  The writer of the Gospel of John obviously knew about the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.

Connor: Why do you say that?

Kalum: In the Gospel of John, the story about a man who is brought back to life is about a man named Lazarus.  And we are told that after Lazarus came back to life, many people still did not believe in Christ.  So this story in the Gospel of John complemented the parable told by Jesus that is recorded in the Gospel of Luke.

Connor: I believe the main point of the parable is to warn us about the slow formation of separation between people that can come because of wealth and poverty, race and gender, national origin or any other form of prejudice.

Kalum: Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Connor: What do you mean?

Kalum: Seems like the division between the wealthy and the poor is a very ancient problem.

Connor: It still is a problem today; one wonders if the message of Jesus has been successful at all in this world.

Kalum: Well, one could also say, what would the world be like if we did not have these warnings and the efforts to correct patterns of prejudice?  The world could be a much worse place if we did not have people who reminded us about our responsibility for the care of all people.

Connor: The Gospel is supposed to be good news.  And the poor need good news.  And God has left it up to all of us to learn how to practice good news with each other.

Kalum: Well, we could really be depressed about the poor conditions for many people in this world.

Connor: Or we can know that we still have work to do in learning how to live together.  Good news would cease to be good news if the conditions were perfect, and we are not there yet, so we have lots to do to bring good news to people.

Kalum: We begin by not letting Grand Canyon of separation build between us and other people.

Connor: The Gospel of Jesus encourages us to accept love and empathy as the greatest calling in our lives, no matter how we earn our living.

Kalum: And if we recognize that Grand Canyons exist between people in this life; if we have inherited Grand Canyons of separation then we have another calling to do some major engineering.

Connor: What kind of engineering?

Kalum: Bridge building.  We need to join people who are separated by building bridges of contact and recognition and empathy.

Connor: So we have lots of work to do.

Kalum: We have preventive work to do.  We need to respect the dignity of each person so that we don’t get separated from each other.

Connor: But we also have to be bridge builders.  We need to be honest about the Grand Canyons that exist between people.  And from honesty we need to build bridges of connection.

Kalum: There’s lots of work to do and I’m tired already.

Connor: But there is good news.

Kalum: What’s the good news?

Connor: The good news is that the Gospel is never going to leave us unemployed.  So let’s get to work.  Let’s work to prevent separation among people.  And where separation exists between people, let us build bridges of connection.

Kalum: Let’s make sure that the Grand Canyon is  but a beautiful place to visit  in Arizona and   not a Grand Canyon of separation that we take to our afterlife.   Let us learn from Christ to build bridges with each other in this life.  Amen.