Category: exegesis

Lazarus in two parts: Part II – Was it Lazarus slumped in the closet?

I did not mention in Part that I have been to Lazarus’ cave.  It is actually quite close to where I live now.  Lazarus’ cave is an apartment one floor directly below where I used to live on Wellington Ave.  Chantal and I were caretakers for that apartment block.  I did not know Lazarus well having only passed him on the stairs a few times.  But I came to realize that something was happening in his life, that he was falling ill.  Things were not good and people were coming by and asking about him out of concern.  One day myself and the superintendent for the apartments (our block was part of a larger church housing project) stopped to talk with him.  After our meeting we became concerned about what he might do to himself.  The superintendent went back and talked with him and then she left.  About four days later around midnight I received a knock on my door asking if I had keys to Lazarus’ apartment.  It was the police.  I did not have keys so I called the superintendent and she came.  We gathered in front of Lazarus’ cave.  The apartment building was small and so there was no real hallway only a square space where four apartment doors were located on each floor.  Gathered in that space was Chantal and I and the superintendent, two police officers, Lazarus’ brother-in-law and Lazarus’ daughter.  At this point my memory becomes hazy in detail but almost infinitely pronounced in impression.  As the door was opened I remember only two things and they filled the physical space and they filled all of my own humanity.  I remember the smell.  And I remember the scream of Lazarus’ daughter as she collapsed on the ground.  Both the smell and the scream were utterly and profoundly devastating.

If this was Lazarus’ cave, as I believe it was, then where was Jesus?  Was it Lazarus’ daughter who screamed in pure agony over the loss of her father?  Was it Lazarus’ brother-in-law who went into the stench of death to identify Lazarus?  Was it Lazarus himself slumped in the closet who may have whispered the words, my God, my God why have you forsaken me, before the towel tightened around his neck?  Was I Jesus in the way I lived almost indifferently to Lazarus in those four days knowing later that perhaps I could have done something differently?  Or was Jesus simply not there?  I don’t know.  All of the answers are perhaps true and terrible in their own way.  What I know is that this experience, especially Lazarus’ daughter, helped me to understand what that polite and passive phrase ‘deeply moved’ means when it comes to Jesus’ experience.  What I also know is that there was no voice calling Lazarus out of his tomb.

Lazarus in two parts: Part I – Jesus you don’t need to do this

Lent began with temptation in the wilderness.  The temptation was to resolve the tension of good and evil; the tension to gain control over the circumstances of suffering without entering into the lives of those who suffer.  Jesus was tempted to bypass the work of being truly human and, instead, move directly into the position of Pharoah or Ceasar, that is, a human who thinks he is god as opposed to God who lives fully human.  It is the temptation to be a false god or an idol that Jesus rejects at the beginning of Lent.  This means that Jesus cannot move into an earthly enthronement, Jesus is now set on a course in which the love of neighbour and love of God are truly and fully integrated.

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Job and the thunderstorm in Kierkegaard’s Repetition

Well I just caught up with my (rough) Kierkegaard reading schedule having finished Fear and Trembling and Repetition.  Both were re-reads and I found Repetition a much more illuminating re-read.  I think Fear and Trembling has had so much press that despite how arresting it can be it may need another form in order to achieve ‘repetition’ which leads me to Repetition.

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Is this heaven? No . . . its the 44.

A few weeks ago in the first Sunday of Lent I challenged our congregation to fast from the fruits of privilege.  One minor act on my part has been to ride the bus as often as possible.  As a country-boy the bus has always been a source of fascination for me and this spiritual exercise paid dividends this last week as my experience ended comprising about half the sermon.

Continue reading “Is this heaven? No . . . its the 44.” →

Lent 1 – Taking positions

An abbreviated version of my Lent 1 sermon this Sunday.  (For some other great reflections see here and here)

I can, quite clearly, remember a handful of times having an upset stomach when I was a child.  I don’t think this was any sort of chronic issue that I suffered.  The memory embedded itself because of its strangeness.  It was not like a cut or a bruise or even a headache where the source of pain or discomfort was readily and clearly identifiable.  An upset stomach was something a little more buried.  It was something that shifted and churned.  At one point it could be a pain and at the next moment a nauseous feeling would wash over me.  Something at the centre of me was out of place and it affected my entire orientation.  And so I remember trying to sit or lie down in certain positions.  I tried to find some way of being that would ease these subterranean flows.

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Between slavery and control

Perhaps this imagery goes without saying but I think there is still significant contemporary theo-political content to be developed from the Pentateuch.  Here are some excerpts from last Sunday’s sermon on Leviticus 19,

I think one of the most misunderstood aspects of Leviticus as well as the first five books of the Old Testament in general is the notion that the commandments given represent some sort of static or fixed law.  The center of Old Testament faith is not the following of particular laws.  This may flow out from the center but the center of Old Testament faith is the presence of God.  Everything in Leviticus as well as Exodus and Numbers finds its orientation in relationship with the Holy of Holies, the center of the Tabernacle, which was the Tent of Meeting, around which the Israelites camped as they travelled in the wilderness and when they first settled in Canaan.  And what is at the center of the Holy of Holies?  Inside that space is the Ark of the Covenant.  The Ark is a box covered with a lid sometimes called the Mercy Seat that had two angels, called cherubim, mounted on either side on top.  I view the Ark as a sort of frame.

At the center of other religions at that time there would tend to be a physical idol that would represent who or what was being worshipped.  However, in the Tabernacle there was an empty space between the wings of the cherubim on top of the Ark.  In the book of Exodus God says to Moses, “There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the covenant, I will deliver to you all my commands for the Israelites.”  What is the significance of this image?  God comes to meet with Moses from the place that humanity cannot control and confine, in the space that is left open and empty.  God cannot be directly equated with our conceptions, with our tradition or with our expectations.  So while we have the framework, so to speak, of ethics and tradition that provide some continuity and stability we must always be open to the newness or aliveness that the love of God will speak into situations.

. . .

The Tabernacle by its nature is movable.  The Tabernacle as well as Mt. Sinai exist in a special place in the Old Testament story.  These sites exist between the experience of slavery in Egypt on one side and the experience of slowing taking power and control in Canaan on the other side. The Tabernacle exists in the freedom of reliance and dependence on God between and therefore beyond being enslaved or being in control.  And as the author of the Gospel of John put it so well of Jesus saying literally that “the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.”  We are to learn to be a tabernacling people. . . . We remain a people with history and tradition but can these things be dismantled, stakes pulled up, to set up the site again in a new place?

. . .

And so like the nomadic Hebrew people of the wilderness we must nourish the ability to migrate, gather and frame the possibility of God’s holiness over the spaces between slavery and control.  We gather and walk with one another and with our neighbours seeing how our objects, our actions and our minds relate to one another.  This is the body of Christ that walked the earth 2000 years ago.  He never grasped for political and social control and even when his body was ultimately grasped by these forms of control he never became enslaved to them.  He always held open that space for the love of God which enters the world as the love of our neighbour as our self.  This is to be the body of Christ today, that is the church, it is to spread and wander with eyes attentive to power and bondage and then to stand between them.

The mockery of careful planning

I have always been a little uneasy with Jesus’ parable of ‘planning’ (Luke 14:28-31).  Jesus asks whether the people would not plan ahead of time to make sure they had sufficient materials to complete a tower and sufficient soldiers for victory.  The ‘moral of story’ as I have received it is that of the wise stewardship of resources.  I could not quite put my finger on why this bugged me other than the fact that it seemed to propagate good, bland suburbanites.  I’m not sure why I didn’t see it but the two images obviously have strong connections to the Old Testament in the Tower of Babel and David’s census taking.  Both of these acts reflect careful planning.  They are also both sins.  Who has the materials to finish building a tower? The answer is no one,  because a tower is never finished.  Who has the man-power to win a war? The answer is no one, because a war is never over.

The parable drives this home in a way that should have made it clear.  The parable  is book-ended first by the command that one cannot follow if they do not first hate their family. And at the end of the parable Jesus offers a re-articulation that states that you cannot become a disciple if you do not give up all your possessions (i.e. ending the production of tower-building and war-making).  The internal space of these commands is the mockery of ‘careful planning’.

Christ, Who Fills Everything in Every Way

This past Sunday I preached on Ephesians 4:4-16.  I wanted to draw attention to two themes in the book.  First is the abundance of language about abundance.  Believers are filled with riches, power and wealth.  Second, this is set within the context of the body of Christ which (who) fills all things.  A broad theme in my recent reading is on the notion of capitalism as that body which currently (and rapidly) seeks to fill everything.  From last Sunday’s sermon,

The basis of economic growth is of course to make more money.  This requires more resources to make products and more markets in which to sell them, and ideally cheaper labour by which to make the products.  Consider how coorporations scour the entire globe in search of resources and labour.  Consider the manner in which resources that arguably should be public are increasingly coming under the umbrella of private coorporations.  The issue of access to water comes readily to mind; the patenting of seeds for agriculture is another.  Think of ever expanding marketing we face.  Children are marketed, lifestyles are marketed, environmentalism is marketed, health and beauty, relationships, status; the list could go on forever.  The public space for gathering is now the food court surrounded by the constant refrain of the mall to consume.  High-interest money-lenders are popping up everywhere taking more money (and security) than they will ever give.  The market of money knows no limit to its desire to bring everything under its control.

Borrowing heavily from Philip Goodchild I then went on talk about how the financial crisis exposes both the power and the fragility of contemporary capitalism.  Even governments submit to its whims.  Though the ‘limits’ of contemporary capitalism are also becoming more apparent (increase in material costs).  In this way capitalism forms a mocking portrayal of an expanding and universal body which we participate in.

Also, borrowing heavily on Goodchild, I turned to the role of attention as a primary indicator of piety (whether ‘secular’ piety of religious).  To what then does the body of Christ call our attention to?  Here I returned to the Ephesians text and drew attention to what had seemed like a strange insertion for me.

[E]ach of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.”  (When it says, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) Eph 4:7-10

Here I drew attention to Christ’s descent.  The primary movement for the body of Christ is one of descent.  It is after this movement that ascension occurs, captivity is held captive and gifts are released.  Therefore our attention is turned to the descent.  I described this as attention to suffering and vulnerability.

This is the paradox of the body of Christ.  That in turning our attention to the vulnerability and suffering within and around us we enter in the joy of God’s grace; in feeling bound and helpless by the scope of suffering Christ binds bondage and frees us with his gifts of grace.  We are called to draw near to that strange place where we face each other, where crying and laughing become almost indistinguishable. [I thought of the description of the Cairo protests as by one participant as a ‘wedding feast’]

I had a relatively strong reaction to this sermon both positive and negative.  I ran into one group after the service vigorously discussing the implications of the sermon.  I also ran into other individuals who felt that the message was too ambiguous and loosely connected.  This sermon was part of a small series on ‘lay’ leadership.  In this way I suppose I could (or should) have been a little more ‘practical’.  However, I could not shake the notion that practicality in the church has typically meant ‘plugging into’ existing programs that are often ‘unplugged’ from pressing issues.  While the Mennonite church may have a slightly better track-record in this regard my hope is that ‘abstract’ sermons like this one can eventually build a new framework for church expression.

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony – Some Quick Thoughts on Method

The Concept of Irony is not recognized by Kierkegaard in his later work The Point of View on My Work as an Author.  Noteworthy, I think, is the fact that The Concept of Irony represents his first and last direct engagement with the academia.  Subsequent works were all published independently or jounralistically.  His writings had no backing or initiative from the academic institution.

While Kierkegaard received unanimous approval for his thesis it was not without qualification.  Nearly all critical comments were directed towards style and method. Kierkegaard himself notes this at several points and explicitly states in the conclusion of the first section how the whole treatise “departs somewhat from the now widespread and in so many ways meritorious scholarly method” (156).  What I take K to be referring to here is the subjective dialectic (or ironic method?) being employed.  K is trying to outline the Socratic as ironic but to do that he must wade through the mediated sources of Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes.  This is no ‘Quest for the Historical Socrates’ (those scholars would have done well to read this).  Rather, Socrates is in some sense intuited by the misunderstandings of these three writers.  In a footnote K clarifies this mode,

Wherever, it is a matter of reconstructing a phenomenon by means of what could be a view in the stricter sense of the word, there is a double task: one must indeed explain the phenomenon and in so doing explain the misunderstanding, and through the misunderstanding one must attain the phenomenon and through the phenomenon break the spell of the misunderstanding (155).

This seems to me to be a healthy pre-Gadamer understanding of the situatedness of both the reader and the text.  And K presses forward pushing all scholarly boundaries by conceding that in all this he already had an ‘end’ in mind.

During this investigation, I have continually had something in mente [in mind], namely, the final view, without thereby laying myself open to the charge of a kind of intellectual Jesuitism or of having hidden, sought, and then found what I myself had found long ago.  The final view has hovered over each exploration simply as a possibility.  Every conclusion has been the unity of a reciprocity: it has felt itself drawn to what was supposed to explain and what it is supposed to explain drawn to it.  In a certain sense it has come into existence by means of reflecting, although in another sense it existed prior to it.  But this can scarcely be otherwise, since the whole is prior to its parts. . . . If I had posed the final view first of all and in each particular portion had assigned each of these three considerations its place, then I would easily have lost the element of contemplation, which is always important but here doubly so, because by no other way, not be immediate observation, can I gain the phenomenon (156). [emphasis mine]

This is not a simple admission that K found what he was looking for . . . eisegesis as the biblical scholars like to accuse.  Rather this seems at first to be a negative dialectic.  Perhaps it is already K’s attempt at Socratic irony.  However in the next part K says that he will shift methodology now incorporating ‘historical facts’ which he will treat in their ‘inviolate innocence.’  We’ll see where that goes . . .

Born Not of a Husband’s Will

This Sunday I will be preaching John 1:1-18 . . . well were could I possibly go with that?  I took the opportunity to begin with the only joke I can remember which which is Zizek’s Lacanian joke about the man who believed he was a grain.

A man had been seeing a psychiatrist for some time.  The problem it seems was that he kept believing he was a grain of seed.  He and the psychiatrist worked on this issue for some time.  They made slow progress until one day both he and the psychiatrist were sure that the problem solved.  The man no longer believed he was a grain of seed.  The two shook hands and parted encouraged by what was possible.  The man left the office onto the street and a few seconds later returned in fear and panic.  Obviously concerned the psychiatrist asked what was wrong.  The man said that there was a chicken standing right outside the office door.  The psychiatrist responded, “Remember you are not a grain of seed.”  The man replied, “I know that, but how I can be sure the chicken does?”

From here I moved to what seemed like the obvious parallel.

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