Session 18 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 18 

As I look at the wisdom traditions that are found in the Bible and in the writings of our Christian traditions and in the inherited practices, I assert that the great insights we have received, sometimes called revelation have functioned to help our ancestors survive and forge an identity and transmit what each of them have added to a living tradition that still lives today.  Our tradition is not a tradition dead in letters in a page in a book or in books; it is words with Spirit that are alive enough to inspire new words of insight for pragmatic and wise living.

 We call the first section of the Bible, the Old Testament but for the Jewish people, it is not old at all, because it is their Hebrew Scriptures that they know to be alive within their worshiping communities today.  The Hebrew Scriptures functions differently for Jews who have located themselves more completely within the Hebrew Scriptures tradition.

In looking at the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures we find many insights that have arisen to address the great questions of life.  About the Hebrew Scriptures we might say that it was not written for me in the way that a personal letter is written to me.  In fact, though I presume the relevance of the Bible to me, it was not written to me or for me per se.  Any writing past or present has a writing occasion and in that occasion the writer is the sender of the message and there is a specific intended receiver.  Biblical writing was not writing like an anonymous message in a bottle and cast into the sea for some possible but uncertain future reader.  When one is looking at an ancient writing such as the Old Testament, it is very hard to define single writing occasions since the Book is a collection of the text results of writing occasions.  Some writing occasions include the complete re-using and re-editing of previous writings into a new occasion.  The final edition is made up of many different editors and we have lost details of the ancient contexts of the writing occasions (who wrote it, where, and to whom).  We have to do scholarly work to match up what we know from general history and archaeology to provide some light upon the writing occasions.  We mostly rely upon internal evidence itself, such as the reference to certain tools or weapons that indicate a particular Age or era.

When I look at the Hebrew Scriptures I find writing that is the technology of memory of great insights that inspired people as they dealt with the great questions of life.  The book of Genesis presents an insight in answer to the question of where we came from.  The infinite regression (mentally trying to conceive the first chicken and the first egg) is brought to a break through when the word of God creates life as we know it.  So word as emanating from God creates the world as the writers of the book of Genesis knows the world.  All definitions of beginning of anything still leave us with questions and mystery.  The word of God created this world.  In science, the big bang started everything and from a single bang has differentiated into what we have today.  What came before the big bang?  Is God a Being with language like human beings such that God would speak?  Whether scientific big bang or creation by word of God, we still are left with mystery.  The truth of the big bang and of the creation story is the universal truth of origin quest within humanity.  The “Origin Quest” make-up of humanity is the greater revelation of Genesis than being able to verify the creation story as an historic event.    This big insight is so profound as to inspire endless attempts to prove the “origin quest” truth.  And so the bigger question of life is living with “origin quest” as defining our basic humanity.  No one can presume to give a final answer to “origin quest” since it is something we live with and we give many insights about “origin quest.”

The Hebrew Scriptures gives many different goals to the creation story that arose because of the basic human “origin quest.”  One of the main functions of the book of Genesis has to do with the forming of a functional identity of the people who resided in what came to be called Israel.  The irony is that much of the writing and editing of this functional identity did not occur until after what were called the exiles.  The people of Israel were carried off into exile by the Assyrians, Babylonians and the Medes and Persians.  It was in the times of losing their land that the writing was done with a fervor that literally made their writing their new interior “topography.”  Their writing became what constituted (constructed) their identity as a people who could retain that identity without being in their land. At the same time the writing constituted the Jews as a people who were uniquely married to a particular land. This marriage is so profound that the connection remains today even for those who have never set foot there.  One cannot miss the profundity of how the Hebrew Scriptures have created this bond for such a long ethnic/communal continuity and a long connection to a particular geographical location.

The Hebrew Scriptures have more particular relevance to the formation of the identity of the Jewish people than it does to me as a “Gentile” Christian.  We cannot ever usurp or forget the particular relevance of the Hebrew Scriptures to the Jewish people; the Scriptures are inextricably woven into Jewish self-identity.  It is important for us to appreciate this as we attempt to understand how our community identity has been born out of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jews who were the architects of the Hebrew Scripture religious traditions.

Let’s be honest then; the Hebrew Scriptures are written from a point of view, namely, the point of view of the Jewish peoples.  The Hebrew Scriptures were written to help constitute them as a people and to serve as “Spirit of the words” to continue their communal identity in their future.  One of chief reasons that the Bible carries weight and authority is because it is unique in how it uses pre-historic wisdom epics as a way to give foundation to practices that are found in the practices of the Jewish community.

The writers of the Hebrew Scriptures use the pre-historic wisdom epics about humanity in general and the symbolic narratives from the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, tribes of Israel, Moses)  to create the foundations for how the historic identity was forged during the Davidic and post-Davidic times.  We will look at this use of pre-historic wisdom epics and symbolic narratives of the patriarchs as creating what I would call sonar or echo effect between history and pre-history.  It is something like this: The community practices Sabbath.  Why do I have to give up a day?  The ancient epic of oral tradition has the seventh day of God’s rest from creating.   Thus, there is a day of religious obligation.  The practice is taught by looking into oral epic story tradition and oral tradition comes to textual form as an explanation of the religious practice of Sabbath.  I hope that you do not cease to be amazed by the living Spirit in how tradition occurs and how it relives in new ways.  This will be even more crucial when we show how the New Testament writers used the Hebrew Scriptures as the template for telling the story of Jesus Christ.

Exercise:

Is this your vision of how the Bible came to us? A Holy Spirit Dove whispering verbatim words into various authors ears as they write them down.  Is this your view of how the Bible is understood?  All of the words have but one meaning and if I understand the meanings of the words, I can understand the correct meaning?  How do you think the Jews feel about Christian uses the Hebrew Scriptures as a Christian book for Christian purposes?

Father Phil

Session 19 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 19 

One of the many dilemmas of our modern life has been the growth of modern scholarship.  Modern life has provided the leisure for the people to become passionately interested in the study of the past.  We have special studies for all kinds of study of the past.  We have modern radioactive and carbon dating techniques that allow us to understand fairly accurately the age of earth matter and the age of human cultural remains.  We have better knowledge of history than the people who actually were responsible for the compilation of the Bible.  It sounds arrogant but it’s true.  Archaeologists and historians do not set out to prove the events in the Bible to be true; they try to interpret the various data that they have using the various methods of processing the historical data.

This means that we modern people have come to view objective history reports to be the main criteria of what is true.  This view of things that “truly happened” has then been used by defenders of the accuracy of the Bible to say all of the events in the Bible are true in the same way as modern journalistic writing.   People who love the Bible and its truths do not need to import modern historical criteria to appreciate its value for faith inspiration in our lives.  Modern persons embrace the natural laws of science as being descriptive of the world 2000 years ago as they are now.  So, if one threw a rock in the air 3000 years ago, the gravitational effect would be the same as we understand it today.  When Biblical writers report events that do not conform to the laws of nature as we understand them today, we do not have to make a false choice between modern science or the credibility of the Bible.  We in our own lives practice difference discourse with art and aesthetics than we do with science.  Every day we combine all kinds of genre and language types in our reading and speaking.  While we are fascinated with science, we might say that language use that moves us to change our moral and spiritual lives conform to the discourse of literary art and aesthetics and hence are true in a profoundly equal but different way than the truths of science.  You and I live this way whether we have ever come to actually express it in this way.  Do not let fundamentalists who are confused in their use of discourse tell you that you don’t have faith or don’t believe the Bible if you can appreciate the story value of a prophet levitating axe heads to the surface of the water without denying the scientific impossibility of the same.    We can still hold a special place in our discourse for the uncanny, the awesome and the wonderful without trying to say the Bible is a modern scientific view of how things actually happened.

Do not put false truth criteria upon the Bible or its writers and end up defending the wrong meanings for the wrong reasons.

As we look at the Hebrew Scriptures, scholars place the writing anywhere from 500 BCE to 250 BCE, with the Book of Daniel being even later.  This might logically seem like a late date for a book that gives an account of creation and pre-historic humanity.  It may seem to be more amazing that this is well after the years of King David (c. 1040–970 BCE) when events seem to be moving into the time of historical record.  It is important to understand the diversity of the kinds of writings that are in the Hebrew Scriptures and not to treat everything as historical events.

What we are going to look at are the main issues that are found in the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures and how they represent a literary wonder as the writers wrote to inculcate and inform the very values and the identity of the Jewish people.  As Christians, we have received the value of the Hebrew Scriptures in our formation and in our continuing journey to understand the foundations of our faith.  The words of the Hebrew Scriptures have created much of our ancient past from which most of our Christian symbols have derived.

Exercise:

Do you ever cry at a movie?  Are you ever moved or inspired by a piece of music or art?  Do you ever get emotionally involved or influenced by a work of fiction, a novel?  Are you griped by the excitement of a sporting event?  What is the truth value of your reactions to these different cultural experiences?  Are they true?  Does each and every word of the Bible have to be true in the same way that an eyewitness to an accident gives a “true” account of the accident?  Can you accept that the fact that you have very refined language finesse and you can make distinctions of meanings and truths when reading the Bible?  There is a series on the Bible on the History Channel that you may want to watch.   Look at what Dr. Joel Hoffman writes about history and fiction in the Hebrew Scriptures: http://huff.to/15tuVGP

Father Phil

Session 20 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 20:  

I make an assumption of us at St. Mary's Episcopal Church; I assume that we have not felt called nor have we chosen to be an expression of faith in the intellectual, social, cultural, technological mode of the Amish.  We choose not to fear our modern world and insulate ourselves in a lifestyle to keep the post-modern world from interacting with our daily patterns of life.  Yes, the abundance of modern knowledge and information threatens to dissolve the distinction of the words of our Bible, Prayer Book and Christian tradition.  The words of our distinct tradition may seem to be failing to make a recognizable difference among all of the other branding with words that we receive in our information age.  If one trusts the recent polls that reveal that the majority of American Roman Catholic lay people are at odds with their church leaders about current social issues, it is an indication that they do not want an “ecclesiastical” isolation or insulation from our modern world.  In our world women are empowered by acknowledgment of their inherent being and ability, the world is facing a population problem and there is a growing honesty about the deep orientations of people that cannot be ostracized or called inherently sinful while professing equal love and justice for all.  

We in the church have been caught flat-footed with the changes in the world and have too often just responded with church jargon of the past and perhaps believe that church jargon will just make us magically more engaged with the post-modern world or encourage post-modern people to enter a time-warp compartment on Sunday where we can pretend that the post-modern world never happened because we with our Scriptures and traditions can live in liturgical isolation even as our full participation in the informational age betrays such an isolation.

As a priest, I want for us to be able to speak our Gospel, our good news of how we can profess the meaningful and useful relationship with Christ in our lives.  We begin by understanding our post-modern situation.

To understand the postmodernism that envelops our culture we need to understand “word.”  In John’s Gospel poetic metaphor Jesus is called the Word of God that created all things.  One might also say that word still creates all things today in the sense of meaningful interaction with other people and our environment.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying, “My words are spirit and they are life.”  Words are invisible and they inhabit our invisible insides and we exchange our lives most intimately with each other through our words because words get processed in some mysterious perhaps electrical event in the brain.  And with our words the actions of our body get animated into the deeds we execute.  Words are spirit or mysteriously processed inside of us and they become flesh in our actions.  This understanding of John’s Gospel might be called a postmodern understanding of it.

In postmodernism, one can understand that all experience is mediated through our use of word.  When I say a certain object is a tree.  Endless follow up question can be asked. Which tree?  This tree?  What do you mean by this?  The one that I am pointing to now?  What does “pointing to the one” mean?  Yes, we assume a tree is there by the habit of our cultural training, but in interacting with the tree we end up assuming an endless chain of synonyms for the human experience of tree.  Fortunately most of our pragmatic use of items in our world is governed by a naïve realism of general cultural agreement on what words mean.  But In a real sense even when we grasp a certain tree with our hands we are expressing a colossal universe of our word culture.  This kind of verbal “play” seems silly when referring to things that we can see and touch but it becomes more evident when we try to speak about meaningful things that cannot be seen or touched, like God, love, joy and truth.  Suddenly it seems as though we can share more precise language about a tree that we can see than about God or love or “the church” all of which we cannot “see.”  When words begin to refer to things that cannot be seen or touched or heard then there is the lack of precision in agreement and that can make practical human agreement problematic.  However, the lack of precision in agreement should not discount the profound significance in meaning of words about what cannot be seen.

In looking at the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures one can find a collection of words that came to be created by a profound idea so profound that the people who discovered it confessed that it had come from the horizon of human experience.  And what was this profound idea that generated the production of the one of great written wonders of the ancient world?  It was the understanding of the profound notion of unity to be an organizing principle of the universe.  It is stated in the famous confession of Judaism: “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One.”  The revolutionary idea/revelation that was going to bring into being a new way of understanding how to be human in this world was this revolutionary belief in One God, a God whose greatness could not be fully comprehended.  The only humble thing to do was to admit that God’s name was unpronounceable. What I would like for us to understand as we look at the Hebrew Scriptures is that they were compiled by wisdom scribes who were perhaps dumb-founded by all that their people had survived and so they were inspired to write out as much detail of their corporate memory of why they had survived.  Because if they could write the mystery in words of their survival, they might leave those words as a gift to continue the survival and blessing of people who word read them and form their own worship identity from these word.  The words of the Hebrew Scriptures are spirit and they are life; they have and do mysteriously interact on the invisible place inside where word meaning occurs.

And so the scribes collected and collated the memory of how their people were formed and related to the revelation that “The Lord your God is One.”  And what one finds in these writings is that they are honest with human messiness.  They are honest with the struggle of people to understand the revelation and who live when there was the availability of a Smorgasbord variety of other deities to challenge their loyalty to the One God.

We will be looking at how the corporate memories came to writing in the Scriptures around this great idea, this great revelation, the change that came from a horizon of human experience and revolutionized a people, peoples and the world. 

Exercise:

Take an object and say the word for it.  And then see how long you can create a string of other words that equal what you have just said.  Do you see how words referring to other words could be endless even when you are talking about “this tree” right here.   You might Google the word “God” or “Love” and you would not have enough time in your life to explore all of the different words for these “meaningful” invisible realities.  How can something be meaningful but invisible?  What does that tell you about being human and words and using words about words that are supposed to refer to experience?  If you can appreciate the “above” you understand why in the midst of differences, it is practical to have an authority like the king of old who would say a yard equals the length of his arm, “end of discussion.”  So there are practical reasons to have methods of “authority” for promoting orderly community interaction.  The question today is whether allowing too much authority to reside in a monarch or pope is the most adequate way to live in our postmodern world.  How do you think authority works in practical ways in the Episcopal Church?

Father Phil

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