Category: priesthood

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.

A Pauline Christmas

Preaching Advent has been a highly rewarding experience (well for myself in any event . . . I won’t speak for the congregation).  I preached three of four Advent Sundays.  I decided to follow the Romans texts.  I was able to integrate the first two texts within the broader and more traditional context of Advent with relative ease.  First Advent was a re-evaluation of time (entering Messianic time); Rom 13.  Awake the time is at hand.  Second Advent was the need for local, particular traditions to be challenged so that Christ might enter into them; Rom 15.  Fourth Sunday in Advent, however, takes us right back to the beginning of Romans.  It was in preparation for this sermon that Paul’s non-Christmas imagery was catching up with me.  What the hell I am supposed to do with Paul’s call to be a servant, set apart for the Gospel?  I could focus on his note that this was promised beforehand through the prophets but that felt like a cop-out.  I decided to go canonical on this one and embrace a Pauline Christmas.  Romans 1 is the first chapter of Paul’s first book in the New Testament so I took it as programmatic and read this as Paul’s Advent.  Here are a few excerpts;

Continue reading “A Pauline Christmas” →

Sanctify

As I prepared for my sermon last Sunday I found myself using the word ‘sanctify’ to express where I felt the text and the trajectory of my sermon heading.  This surprised me somewhat.  I was exploring the use of word ‘delight’ (delight yourself in the LORD; Ps 37) in other contexts in the Old Testament.  In nearly every instance the term was directly accompanied with images of abundance and often of feasting.  The trouble of course is that the larger contexts of these passages often dealt with the poverty that people were experiencing at a given time.  While it may be legitimate in some passages to speak of a not yet that is gestured towards I was hesitant to reduce the present implications of these passages to an attitude that will help us in our impoverished state.  It seems that if we affirm the goodness of creation and also affirm the abundance that is possible through delighting in the LORD then the two should be related.  This led me to the term ‘sanctify’.  This means that the material aspects of our context remain paramount and are indeed actually transformed in faithful acting; that a material context once impoverished becomes abundant in real and engaging sense.  This may well be related to a spiritual sensing (eyes to see and ears to hear) but what does not get emphasized enough is that these remain sensing; they remain in the sensual realm of touch and taste.

These are just inklings of what emerged from sermon prep.  They relate to my larger theological reconstruction of priesthood that I hope to find renewed time and energy to flesh out.

A Theology of Home Owning

My wife and I are, for the first time, looking seriously at buying a house.  My first impression is that I did not expect it to be as ‘spiritual’ of a process as I am realizing.  First there is the question of ownership.  My recent theological trajectory arcs towards the need to identify where I try and control questions of God, truth, morality, etc.  To what extent do I remain open even vulnerable to changes that I did foresee or create?  How does this relate to home owning?  My impression is that the saying a man’s home is his castle remains powerfully relevant (to what extent the gender ascription is relevant I don’t know).  The modern house is designed to be a space of dominance; a space where control and predictability are attainable.  We essentially colonize a small space for benevolent or destructive ends.  Is there a way of approaching home ownership that does not fall prey to this tendency?

What I am beginning to see is that the process and act of home buying must be integrated into a person and family’s larger theological and spiritual orientation.  For instance my wife is interested in a space that can be renovated so that it can be a type of canvas to explore new environments of living that can facilitate and nurture relationships.  I am interested in examining my motivation for location so that our purchase does not entrench further social, racial, economic boundaries that are based on fear.  From my brief conversations I find fear to be probably the most influential emotion in how people have gone about decision making.  It is certainly not the only influence and it is not always the strongest but it is almost always present.  I have had little fear in my life so I need to be careful in recognizing the roots and realities of other people’s fears.  Theologically, however, these fears must be discerned and sorted so that they do not create decisions that only enforce a continually fearful world for other people.

And of course tied in with all this are questions like the proximity to work, family, friends, and schools as well as the issue of transportation (what is walking and biking distance). What this means is that there is no one right house or approach to home buying.

Then there is the whole question of trust.  So we begin with a trusted friend who refers an agent.  We meet the agent and the agent refers a mortgage broker., etc. And suddenly a web spins out that would have looked entirely different had we cast an alternative first strand.  I cannot become an expert in all these fields while starting a new job, caring for a new child, all the while living under my in-laws roof!  So we trust.  Lord help us.

What I must shed regardless of our decision is the notion, the illusion, that a home can be a refuge or escape from the world.  The world will always reside within our homes in one form or another.  Our purchase then cannot be about possession and control because there remains too many variables (internal and external) that will continue to effect my family’s life no matter how well I reinforce the castle walls.  Our actions, spaces, and objects emerge as spiritual realities (whether residual or ontological).  They are not neutral.  They are engaged with God’s work of creation and redemption.  The image becomes almost levitical thinking of how priests concerned themselves with the mold on walls and binding of diverse threads.  Spaces and objects can be holy or profane, clean or unclean and they are never in these states permanently because these states are bound up in our ongoing engagement with God.  This gives me hope.  Perhaps the holiness of God can even be encountered as far away as the suburbs . . . perhaps.

The Torah’s Vision of Worship – Part II.2 – The Liturgy of the Covenant; Covenant as Sanctuary Building and World Building

(Table of Contents for  NOTCP series)

Exodus 25-40 deals primarily with the construction of the tabernacle which has been a hobby horse for many arm-chair architects over the years.  Though if one approaches this section in such a pragmatic fashion you will be “faced with a unique combination of long-winded description on the one hand and total omission of various particulars on the other” (citing M. Haran, 137).  Balentine, instead, explores the theological construction that is occurring in and around this section.

Continue reading “The Torah’s Vision of Worship – Part II.2 – The Liturgy of the Covenant; Covenant as Sanctuary Building and World Building” →

The Torah’s Vision of Worship – Part I – Creation’s Liturgy and the Cosmic Covenant

I don’t suspect that the next number of posts in this series will garner great interest (though I do indeed think Balentine’s work deserves a wide audience).  I have created a page above as I hope these posts will eventually build towards to a contemporary and constructive theological account of the priesthood as expressed in the Pentateuch.

Continue reading “The Torah’s Vision of Worship – Part I – Creation’s Liturgy and the Cosmic Covenant” →

Yielding or Navigating Empire in the Pentateuch; Or Church as Secondary State

This post continues an exploratory question that ended up asking about the extent to which the Old Testament development of priesthood can be used as a contemporary theological resource.

My basic orientation for reading the priestly literature of the Pentateuch comes from the work of Samuel Balentine.  His book The Torah’s Vision of Worship explores the priestly theme of worship from sociological, anthropological, and rhetorical perspectives which are ultimately in the service of theology (I may address the methodological issues in this approach later).  This is a departure from the standard historical-critical approach that dominated the subject until the last few decades.  Balentine is not interested in re-constructing what the possible priestly cult looked like but rather uses his method to understand how the literary corpus we received was developed within its historical context.  His work then is “a study of worship in the Hebrew Bible not of Israelite religion” (33).  This is a study of the final form of the text, as it was developed in its social context, with an eye on “the larger reality that is encoded in the Torah’s vision” (35).

Continue reading “Yielding or Navigating Empire in the Pentateuch; Or Church as Secondary State” →

An Alternative Question

The question of alternative is becoming more and more pressing for me theologically. With the return or unveiling of universalism manifest in our global economic structure I have begun to wonder whether it is still possible to speak of alternatives with any integrity. To what extent are socially, economically, and environmentally responsible alternatives simply a practice of personal therapy or self-soothing?

One of the reasons I have stayed in the Mennonite church is because I believe it carries a history of alternatives. It has often been called a ‘third way,’ a mode of ecclesial life that does not conform to the binary pressures of Protestant and Catholic (apologies to the Orthodox). It also has a strong tradition of social, economic and environmental responsibility long before it became a trendy or urgent cause. I could offer anecdotal evidence out the yin-yang of average folk in congregations I have been in that practised the most beautiful expressions of care and service that flowed with ease from their basic approach to and understanding of faith. I won’t even start with the Amish and Old Order expressions. But are these any longer true alternatives? Is there any way of living in western/affluent societies in which we actually give more than we take; heal more than we destroy? Framing the question in this way raises a sort of fatalism within me; suicide as our most ethically responsible choice.  This is the sort of all or nothing that the notion of alternative drives home in me.  It creates the assumption that we are complete and definable, able to transfer ourselves neatly from one paradigm to another.  I am thinking this is a dead end (pun partially intended).

For some time I have been exploring the expression of holiness and priesthood as it develops within the Pentateuch.  Holiness in this context is entirely divorced from any modern concept of piety.  Holiness reflects a complex web of relations that is navigated by appropriate boundaries.  Holiness breaks out and what is unclean can transgress and defile what is holy.  What attracts me to Torah’s concept of holiness is first that it is still a largely un-mined resource for contemporary theology, ecclesiology and ethics.  Samuel Balentine notes that the rise of Protestant historical-criticism disdained priestly liturgy and writings as a low-point in hebraic thought which verged at times on being anti-Jewish.  The larger theological thrust of Protestant anti-ritualism also led to the neglect of further study and reflection on these texts.  But I am not interested in these texts simply as a historically neglected curiosity rather I find the paradigm of holiness an embrace of all of life; personal/ethical/religious (maintaining right relationship with neighbour and God; the golden rule is found in Leviticus), biological (the breaching of semen and blood are to be accounted for), social/relational (the stranger within your land is to be treated appropriately), geographical/political (borders and their maintenance are tremendously important), structural (needless to say the Tabernacle functions significantly as an overall paradigm) animate and inanimate objects (mold breaking out on a house needs to be addressed).  It is a complete, a universal model that does not seek a utopia (as the Conquest can be greatly misunderstood) but navigates the daily threat towards and blessing of holiness.  It does not create an alternative but  creates instead a sense or a posture of how to engage a world full of objects and relations that can be otherwise than they are (that are otherwise than they are . . . if that makes sense).  This is a model of creating, maintaining, restoring, and experiencing boundaries that do not violate and do not insulate but rather facilitate right relationships between people and God.

After recently reviewing The Gift of Difference (CMU Press) I found my thinking resonating with Peter Dula’s article “Fugitive Ecclesia.”  Dula’s article explored the extent to which many contemporary theologians appear to have despaired over the possibility of the contemporary western church as constituting any alternative or challenge to the larger economic forces.  To what extent can the church exist ‘outside’ the spaces structured by economic forces?  While Dula offers many possible ways of addressing this situation what I want to take from his articulation is the possibility that the church can still exist as the church even when it is not the church.

[F]ugitive ecclesia could also create the space for a renewed attention to friendship.  If the church is as rare as these theologians think, then all their reflections on the church, while important, also make room for greater attention to pairs instead of communities.  We may even want to revive the long discredited epithet ‘organized religion.’  It may suggest all we can hope for is the occasional intimacy of two or three (127).

With respect to the priesthood this reminds me of the significance of the cloud of presence and the maintenance of the fire lit by God that is to continue burning.  The sacred can become profane but that does not negate the priesthood.  That in fact is what the priesthood is called to which is an exploration of what it means to consecrate.  We do not create or establish a complete alternative, again questioning the possibility of clear and distinct paradigms, but instead we remain at work in the world possible which is the world of objects and relations which can be holy and clean but they can also be profane and unclean.

Over the coming months I hope to return and review earlier work that I have done in this area and review and revise it for contemporary expression.  In this way I hope to develop new resources for a contemporary expression of the priesthood of all believers.

And His Government Shall Have No End

Through most of my adult life I have essentially withdrawn from the formal political process.  This has been the result, I think, mainly of my inability to understand political process and my theological hesitancy in viewing government as the means to what God is doing in the world.  It seems I have been able to do little correcting the former and I have tried not to take a militant position on the latter as I have encountered many for whom political process has made constructive contributions.

In Revelation 5 we hear about the new song sung by the four living creatures and the 24 elders.  They praise the lamb who was slain whose blood purchased people for God.  These people come from every tribe, language, ethnicity, and nation.  They are made a priestly kingdom and will rule the earth.  Revelation of course is shot through with the conflict around the earth’s rule.  Spending more time in this text I have begun to reflect again what it might mean or look like for the ‘lamb’s people’ to rule.

What came to me was really quite a simple and unoriginal contrast.  Traditional government is always willing to put others at risk.  Soldiers are themselves at risk and they put foreigners at risk.  Police themselves are at risk and they put other citizens at risk.  Who are these risked lives trying to secure.  I think they are trying to secure a type of non-life or static life.  This structure of government secures those who are passive as well as those who are able to risk others.  There is a brave refrain among the families of those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan believing in the greater good of what is being fought for.  But their lives are not secured.  Their lives are shattered, at times it appears irredeemably broken.  So they say it is for their children but this fighting poses no guarantee of that belief.  And so the ones secured are only in the present, only those who do not need to fight and probably do not really care about it.  Those secured are the stabilizing block, masse, that government needs for support and credence.

So what of the ‘lamb’s people?’  They themselves rule by placing their lives in temporal risk for eternal security.  When they witness risked people they engage themselves directly for the securing of others.  Their authority then is acknowledged through their sacrifice . . . worthy is the lamb.  Kierkegaard’s notion of the eternal is significant here as it functions in the rupturing of every moment which humanly tends towards the temporal and the securing of the self at the cost of others.  Here there can be no allegiance to tribe, language, culture, or nation for all are represented in the call of the lamb.

It should also be noted that this is not a mindless risking on the part of the faithful it is rather a willing risk in light of and in discerning response to the ills and risks manifest around them.  This is where critical discussion and charitable response can join.