Category: church

Initial thoughts on the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8

The Ethiopian eunuch is biding his time.  Well, his time . . . I guess I am not sure.  Our time remains marked by a language that demands his masculinity, his balls, in any event.  It is not his time, as time now possesses <strike>him</strike> the eunuch.  Perhaps it is better to say the eunuch waits.  But waiting is a terrible term.  It gives the illusion of passivity and detachment.  What does the eunuch do?  The eunuch reads,

Like a sheep he was led to slaughter,
and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.

In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.

The eunuch reads the words of his own silence.  There is silence but there are alsosilenced words.  These words remain internal or are ignored as foreign or corrupt.  So the eunuch pronounces his silence.

How does one become a eunuch and what does it mean?  I have read just a little.  The eunuch in many traditions is close to power, either human or divine.  The eunuch can be a priest.  The eunuch can be a royal official.  The eunuch is close to power but does not draw close to this power.  Rather the eunuch is positioned close to power.  The eunuch is allowed next to power because power has been stripped from the eunuch.  The eunuch is a place holder.

As the eunuch recites the eunuch’s silenced words for his life is taken away from the earth he remembers his encounter with a teacher of the law on his visit to Jerusalem.  The scribe tells him of the corruption in the Greek text that he is reading.  The prophecy is of one who is cut off from the land of living.  This, this must be a castrated one.  What else could such an expression mean?  The eunuch feels something welling up within him but as yet there is no release, no outlet for his urge and desire.

The eunuch’s tradition positions him next to power by stripping him of life.  What sort of power could this be?  It is the power of death.  But what of this foreign religion?  This religion that in its founding traditions denies a eunuch from even gathering in worship.  He again recalls the scribe who looked on him with pity reciting the blunt prohibition from Deuteronomy,

No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.

The God of Israel does not gather passive servants (eunuchs) to minister in the Temple.  The God Israel does not even allow them to gather in worship. But what of this castrated one who was silenced and humiliated as I was?  Does the prophet speak of himself or someone else?

An alternative (to) education

Here is last Sunday’s sermon on the new covenant in Jeremiah 31.  I welcome feedback and pushback.

31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

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Experimenting with Rosenzweig and spiritual discipline

I admit that I am experimenting.  And so I am also admitting that I do not know what I am doing.  But I am hopeful.  I am increasingly trying to integrate my general interests in philosophy and theory in my profession as a pastor.  Sometimes this works easily in cases of preaching.  Other times it works surprisingly as in the case of hospital visitation.  And sometimes it must just be experimented with.  This is what I will be doing this Sunday.

Over Lent we are having an adult education series on spiritual discipline (big surprise!).  I am leading the opening session which will hopefully give some ‘frame’ for what follows.  I was originally going to frame sessions in the context of ‘prayer’.  This of course could have been helpful but I did not know where I would go with this and also many of the other sessions deal directly and indirectly with prayer.  I have recently finished Franz Rosenzweig’s Understanding the Sick and the Healthy.  I decided that I would experiment with this work as a context for understanding the motivation and direction for spiritual disciplines.  I will in fact introduce this framework as a spiritual discipline in that I am confessing it for testing and examination.

Understanding the Sick and the Healthy is an attempted diagnosis of the illness of philosophy in its tendency to essentialize reality.  Essentialism for Rosenzweig is the isolating of aspects of reality for examination in a way that ends up distorting the manner in which reality is distinguishable but integrated (Rosenzwieg uses the image of ‘flow’ as the metaphor for engaging reality).  What is the world?  Who am I?  Who is God?  These are ultimately paralyzing questions in isolation that lead to a sickness and insulation from reality.  Rosenzweig calls then for a return to ‘common sense’ which is re-establishing an appropriate view of World, Humanity, and God.  These are pictured as distinct mountaintops in which it is impossible to have all three in view at all times though one must have a ‘base’ at the centre of the three if healing is to occur.  So what is a common sense view of the three mountaintops?

What is our world-view?  Rosenzweig warns against the notion that we can dip water out of the river to analyze as it as the world and believe that in so doing we understand it.  My reading of Rosenzweig on this is that we should not look for deeper meaning when it comes to the world.  Understanding the world means beginning precisely on the surface.  The world is not us and the world is not God.  The meaning of the world is in its relation to Humanity and God.  Therefore we enter each day “frankly confronting each thing as we encounter it; we look for nothing beyond, do not try to walk suspiciously around the object; nor do we peer into its depths, but accept it rather as it is, as it hastens towards us.  And then we leave it behind and wait for whatever is to come tomorrow.” (74)  Therefore we do not look for God in the World because the world is something and therefore not God.  This frees us to embrace a fully scientific model of engagement (as though this should still be a major question) and warns against viewing God’s ‘blessing’ in particular world events.  Because if God blesses in this way then wouldn’t God also curse in this way.  Let the world be the world in all its ferocious and unyielding consistency.

What is our life-view?  There is tendency towards trying to ‘pin-down’ our identity.  But again to isolate and abstract in this manner is to have things truly come unhinged and find ourselves in a crisis of identity.  You cannot set out to ‘find yourself’ except maybe in spite of that process.  Nevertheless we tend to situate ourselves in some form of ‘worm theology’ or act as though we are ‘like gods’.  Both instances are unhealthy thou both instances present themselves with a sort of ‘security’.  I sense again the Rosenzweig is interested in a simpler descriptive account that has no interest in a stable definition but understands the basic variability of humanity in its temporal orientation.  Here is a fabulous quote,

Let us seek not seek for anything beyond ourselves. Let us be ourselves and nothing more. Such a moment of existence may be nothing but delusion; we shall, however, choose to remain within the moment, deceived by it and deceiving it, rather than live in deception above or below the moment.  Let our personal experience, even though it change from instant to instant, be reality.  Let man become the bearer of these shifting images.  It is preferable that he change masks a hundred times a day (at least they do belong to him) rather than wear continually the mask of the divine ruler of the world (gained by thievery) or that of the world’s bondservant (forced upon him).  The hundred masks will serve in lieu of one countenance. (79)

The strength of humanity might not be in securing identity but in accepting the variability.  Let humanity be human in all its fabulous variability.

What is our view of God?  How can we speak of God?  But didn’t we also have trouble speaking of the World and of Humanity when we sought essences?  Why would we expect anything else when seek God in this way?  But the stakes do seem higher.  When we claim or secure our identity of God then what we may be doing is articulating our own highest value and therefore become more threatened and aggressive when opposed.  But God is not us and God is not world.

Throughout his work Rosenzweig gives attention to the way in which language, words, and names form the bridges between these three peaks; that allow for the flow of the river.  The same is true of God.  The world is named by humans.  Humans engage past and future through their names.  God does not need a name but a gives a two-fold name.

One the one hand He embraces sinners (Humanity); on the other, He proclaims law for the world. The root of all of man’s various heresies is to confound the two parts of His name with one another; God’s love encroaches upon His justice, His justice upon his love.  It is indeed God’s task both to maintain the two-fold character of His name as well as reconcile them.  So long as there is reason for such a division, so long as God is not God-in-Himself whom philosophers drivel about; if He remains God of man and the world, then it is He, who by means of His two-fold name transforms – and we use the word in its technical sense – human energies into the energies of the world. (92)

Have faith in God.

What does this have to say about spiritual discipline?  Spiritual disciplines are the acts by which reality is properly distinguished and properly joined.  We do not secure and reside ‘in the world’ creating life as cogs and law.  We do not secure and reside ‘in humanity’ allowing ourselves to think too highly or too lowly of ourselves and each other.  We do not secure and reside ‘in God’ retreating from the responsibilities of life and creating an idol that will not heal and redeem.  It could be argued that for Rosenzweig spiritual disciplines are those things orient life thus,

There is in addition to the world and himself, He who turns His face towards both.  He it is who summons man by name and bids him take his place in the congregation who calls upon Him.  He it is who orders things so that they may form a kingdom bearing His name.  Thus man may act unconcerned with the outcome; he may act according to the requirements of the world as it is today.  That day, the day when action is required, lets him understand what he must perform. . . . Truth waits for him; it stands before his eyes, it is ‘in thy heart and in thy mouth,’ within grasping distance; ‘that thou mayst do it.’  In the same way as he has achieved certainty concerning the reality of the world and has found courage to live, he must also have faith in God who brought him into existence. . . . The proper time then is the present – today. To avail himself of today, man must, for better or worse, put his trust in God. . . . The proper time has come [when need calls], and thus God assists you. (93)

If I have given any justice to this short work then it should be somewhat apparent that Rosensweig has indeed given us a ‘common sense’ account of things in which the world is allowed to be the world, humanity is called to be human, and God turns toward and takes responsibility for both.

I am not entirely sure what to think of this project let alone how the presentation on Sunday will go.  What I appreciate about this project in terms of spiritual discipline is its liberating and clarifying possibility.  There are many critiques out there that deal with our need to ‘let go’ of our need for control but rarely have as helpful a supplement for how to take responsibility.  Perhaps after the session I can articulate some of those possibilities.

The hundred masks will serve in lieu of one countenance.

I hope to do a more extended post on my reading of Franz Rosenzweig’s Understand the Sick and the Healthy but I could not resist putting up this quote.  What can I say I really am an existentialist at heart (wait, is that self-contradictory?!).

Let us seek not seek for anything beyond ourselves. Let us be ourselves and nothing more. Such a moment of existence may be nothing but delusion; we shall, however, choose to remain within the moment, deceived by it and deceiving it, rather than live in deception above or below the moment.  Let our personal experience, even though it change from instant to instant, be reality.  Let man become the bearer of these shifting images.  It is preferable that he change masks a hundred times a day (at least they do belong to him) rather than wear continually the mask of the divine ruler of the world (gained by thievery) or that of the world’s bondservant (forced upon him).  The hundred masks will serve in lieu of one countenance.

The Devil, Hell, Demons, and Excorcism (enough to interest you yet?)

This is a rough draft of my sermon on Sunday (Mark 1:9-15; 1 Peter 3:18-22).  I will likely make some more edits and developments but I am curious if there is any feedback that I should take into consideration here.

At times the church gets criticized for holding on to outdated and backwards views of the world.  And we do need to be open to these criticisms and concerns.  But it is interesting to note that while many churches on the one hand are working hard to remove unhelpful ideas about mental illness being some sort of evil spirit or of heaven and hell as literal places in the clouds and in the center of the earth on the other hand we find so-called enlightened western culture fascinated with movies about books about zombies, vampires, demons, ghosts and all sorts of hellish creatures.  Out of curiosity I went online to search for videos on YouTube about demon possession and exorcisms and I found plenty, some with millions of views.  What is going on here?  How do we discern these matters as a church?  Is there a relationship between our current curiosities and interests in evil spirits and other hellish matters and what is happening with Jesus and the Devil in the wilderness and Jesus message to the spirits of the dead in prison?  I think there may be a connection but I think the connection is in their opposition to each other.  Let’s start by looking at our current and ongoing fascination with the realms of the dead.

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A Note on Luke 7:35

I am not a huge proponent of the ideology that says one must know Greek and Hebrew to really understand the Bible, though of course, we must have those who do know it.  Anyway, I will be preaching on Luke 7:31-35 which culminates in the fairly well known saying by Jesus,
Wisdom is vindicated by all her children.
I don’t always do a much work in the original text but I thought I would take a quick look and saw the relatively simple construction of this phrase.

καὶ ἐδικαιώθη ἡ σοφία ἀπὸ πάντων τῶν τέκνων αὐτῆς
and / passive verb ‘be justified,released’ / wisdom / from, by / all her children

Another simple and direct translation could be,
Wisdom is freed from all her children

This strikes me as offering an altogether different sense given so much of the preceding context speaks about various ‘genealogical lines’, namely that of a mother and son, John and disciples, John and Jesus, John and those of the Kingdom of God.

It also seems altogether plausible that both translation could be put forward as opposed to having to choose.

Any thoughts?  We’ll see what I come up with for Sunday.

Do my words ring

The readings for this Sunday included the following:
Genesis 1: 1-5 – creation
Mark 1:4-11 – the baptism of Jesus
Acts 19:1-7 – an account of Paul baptizing believers and the believers receiving the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and prophesying.

My sermon last Sunday began with tracing the trajectory that connects creation in Genesis to Jesus’s baptism in Mark.  The imagery of creation (chaotic waters/deep, wind/spirit moving over them, dry land/body appearing) has to be one of the best candidates for helping to form a ‘biblical theology’.  I spoke of the culmination of this imagery in Jesus’s baptism and how the words of creation that are now spoken are ones of love.  However, I went on to say that the trajectory does not end there and continues into Acts 19.  Here is the second half of the sermon,

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Taking as its medium

I have for some time now moved away from using language that refers to life and action as somehow ‘poetic’.  This shift has happened for a couple of reasons.  First, I had developed a theological writing style that employed a certain type of poetic language.  And what I mean by this is that I wrote about theological topics in a style that was simply supposed to ‘sound good’.  Theology, along with other disciplines, can afford one this opportunity.  No one can really verify if my explication of the Trinity is really valid or relevant.  Rather, it is supposed to move or  persuade.  This style tends to work fine when keeping the conversation theologically ‘in-house’.  As I began to expand my theological discourse I found that my language was running aground on folks who simply did not share some of my presuppositions and basically had the refrain of bullshit called out to me on several occasions.  This presented a clear intersection in how I was going to proceed.  I could entrench my approach and state that the conversation stalled on mutually incompatible presuppositions.  Or I could head back into the workshop and take another look at how I was going about things.  I decided on the latter.

This experience was part of larger theological shift that saw me move away from theology and practice as a discipline of orthodoxy (yes I can be challenged on how I understand orthodoxy) to theology and practice as a mode of understanding and engaging joy and brokenness in the world.  And I should also note that this past year found me heavily influenced by Kierkegaard for whom ‘the poetic’ is a false attempt at immediacy in life which actually puts oneself at arm’s length from life through ‘pretty’ language (I am grossly paraphrasing here).

This process also left a profound mark on how I now read theology.  Theology that was once inspiring now came off flat.  I don’t think I have many illusions about some neutral or material access to reality ‘as such’.  But I am much more interested in beginning from a phenomenological perspective which attempts to describe and not only describe what I see and intuit but also describe my location and perspective.  If I could now characterize my theology I would call it something like an existentially minded attempt at liberation theology.

All this to say that I was somewhat taken aback by Tim McGee’s recent post which outlines James Cone’s understanding of theology as a sort of poetic task.  Now as I read it I could see that the use of ‘poetic’ was different than the understanding I had moved away from.  It still struck me, however, that I had almost completely discarded any expression of the ‘poetic’ in how I express theology and practice.  Poetics for Cone is a response to the possibility of liberation.  We are creative and evocative because we are free.  This is an embodied and holistic poetics.

I had posted a comment on Tim’s blog stating briefly something of what I here stated above.  After that comment I went to a hospital to do some visits.  At the hospital I encountered what we all encounter at hospitals.  I saw bags of urine stacked on a cart in the hall.  I saw a bloody skid mark on the floor next to one person I visited.  I hear the calls for and saw the silhouetted nursing aids clean soiled patients.  I saw a neighbouring patient with a foot bloated literally like a blown-up surgical glove.  I heard sounds and moans coming out of doorways; one with the never ending refrain
Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me . . .
I experienced all these common hospital scenes and I thought of the pretty words that people hold on to in this time; the pretty words people look to me for in this time.  It is many of these pretty words that I am trying to speak less of.  I am trying now to understand what theological poetics would look like and sound like taking as its medium the piss and shit of these places.

Kierkegaard on politics

In Kierkegaard’s Postscript to his treatise on authority and revelation, also known as The Book of Adler, Kierkegaard makes some telling political statements.  Kierkegaard is of course popularly criticized for his lack of politics but rarely is it mentioned that he is most often simply trying to maintain a rigorous qualitative distinction.  Some may simply disagree with his distinction but it needs to be clear that Kierkegaard is entirely intentional in what he develops.  Kierkegaard makes clear in his postscript that he this writing is ‘ethico-religious and has nothing to do with politics’.  The point of departure for the religious is from above, from God, “and the formula is this paradox that an individual is employed.”

Humanly understood, an individual, according to all reason, is infinitely nothing in comparison with the established order (the universal), so it is a paradox that the individual is the stronger. . . . When there are hundreds of men, what comes to pass is explained simply by the activity of the hundreds of men, but the paradox compels us (insofar as freedom can be compelled) to take notice of God, that he is taking part in it.

Kierkegaard then goes to talk about the political which comes from below, that is, how does politics attempt to change the established order.  I will include several excerpts as there are few times in all his published corpus that he speaks this directly.  The political as he understands it is being conceived and built now as a ‘monstrous multitude’.

“The multitude,” an absurd monster or a monstrous absurdity, which nevertheless is physically in possession of power, of outcries and of noise, and besides that has an extraordinary virtuosity in making everything commensurable for the decision of the hands upraised to vote or the fists upraised to fight.  This abstraction is an inhuman something, the power of which is, to be sure, prodigious, but it is a prodigious power which cannot be defined in human terms, but more properly as one defines the power of a machine, calling it so and so many horsepower: the power of the multitude is always horsepower.

This abstraction creates politics as a game and the game is played for the multitude whoever can win over the many legs.

This human mass becomes at last enrages by friction, and now demands – or rather it demands nothing, it does not itself know what it wills, it takes the threatening attitude only in the hope that something after all will come to pass, in the hope that the weaker side (the established government, the ruler) will perhaps become so much alarmed that it will go ahead and do something which neither the multitude nor those at the head of it, the stronger ones, the courageous ones (if there be any such), have the courage to speak out in definite words. . . . In alarm the king goes off and does something – and what the king does, that the human multitude then adores, maintaining that it had done it.

Kierkegaard then returns to the individual.

While the individual who truly connects himself with a religious movement [in the internal sense] must watch out and be ready to fight lest the dreadful thing should come to pass that this monstrous abstraction should wish to help him by going over with its legs to his side.

When the abstract of the multitude has finally taken the throne the result is idolatry.

Wherever this abstraction is set upon the throne there really is no government.  One is obedient only to the man whom he himself has boosted up, pretty much as the idolater worships and serves the god he himself has made, i.e. one obeys himself.  With the discontinuance of the rational State the art of statesmanship will become a game.  Everything will turn upon getting the multitude pollinated, and after that getting them to vote on his side, with noise, with torches and with weapons, indifferent, absolutely indifferent, as to whether they understand anything or no.

Kierkegaard’s politics are of course conservative but what I would want to further reflect on is the implications of his theology.  It will of course have political implications.  Is it necessary to label and criticize Kierkegaard’s politics as unduly conservative without considering the implication of what it would mean to be engaged in his aesthetic-ethical-religious movement?  For instance Kierkegaard, towards the end of his life, made the political gesture of abstaining from public worship on Sunday.  He sat outside at a cafe nearby the church so he would indeed be visible.  I am not convinced that Kierkegaard would have spoken out against various forms of progressive political theory. What seemed to be his concern was his perception that ‘these days everything is politics’.  This led for him inevitably to a herd mentality in which the ‘horsepower’ of the multitude would ultimately be wielded for destructive purposes.

I am hoping within the year or so to get into Hardt and Negri’s trilogy in which ‘the multitude’ is explicitly leveraged.  I am curious to see how that notion is developed.

Deep calls to deep

I became an ordained minister this past Sunday.  While it is not always the tradition to do I decided to speak at my own ordination.  The preparation for this ‘sermon’ was different than how I had prepared for a sermon in the past.  My guiding thought was not about communicating the meaning of some particular text but in communicating a sense of how I understand my role and my calling.  As such the sermon developed more along the lines of ‘imagination’.  It was, I guess, poetic.  I sat somewhat uneasy with that direction.  I became concerned that it was too pious or was just some pretty window dressing.  My hope was that it was an inhabitable imagination that would draw, challenge, and invite change for those who heard it.

Well, in any event, here it is.  Based on Psalm 42:1-2, 7-8.

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