Category: liberation

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.

Debating whether or not I care

I recently crossed paths with someone heavily involved in an atheists group at the local university.  This person was not of the ‘sort’ I expected.  In any event the encounter spurred me to do a little snooping around on the internet for local atheist blogs and see what was happening.  In the process I ran into The Winnipeg Skeptics.  One of the contributors has his own blog Startled Disbelief.  I started reading various posts and before long I chimed in with a few comments.  Now I have to say I appreciate Gem Newman’s tone at Startled Disbelief and so was quite open to hearing his positions.  After my initial comment Gem directed me to an earlier post which outlined in broader terms his position as a skeptic.  We had a decent little exchange going before I realized that the arc of the conversation was quickly moving into territory I simply had no interest in pursuing.

If you are interested in the full conversation see the last link (I did quite appreciate his overall presentation).  In any event there was one aspect to the conversation that continued to trouble me.  Gem constantly pushed the notion that skepticism was somehow non-political.  Skepticism is simply a method of critically examining claims (as he puts it).  I didn’t think anyone believed in a neutral mode of scientific inquiry anymore.  Gem went on to say that skepticism does not “provide a personal moral framework” and also that “atheism says nothing about politics, economics, or even belief in the supernatural.”  He claimed I was confusing the politics of particular atheists with the politics of atheism (I had earlier proposed that atheism was actually a much more robust approach than skepticism . . . for him atheism is a one-off subject).  Gem claims that he is “a skeptical, liberal, humanistic atheist.”  I suppose it is this combination that clarifies his politics.  However, he continues to maintain a broader skeptical orientation in saying, “I think that everything should be open to question. All conclusions are provisional.”  How is this not political?  How will that not continue to deny participation to decisive and potentially life-threatening postures that need to be taken in response to abusive powers?

Now so far as theology goes I would agree that a skeptical atheism comes much closer to biblical faith than many other contemporary theologies do in its rigor for idol-smashing.  However, biblical faith is a decidedly declared position.  That is, biblical faith will always ultimately undermine earthly authorities which abuse power.  This is Christology (as well as good Old Testament theology).  So I put it to Gem saying that I am much more interested in the proposition ‘love everything’ as opposed to his tagline ‘question everything’.  Love maintains a critical posture (because of its love for others) but always orientates the person towards a constructive and engaged posture.  This is where things started coming off the rails in my mind.  Here Gem began ‘applying’ his method.  His defense of and basis for skepticism was simply the apparently self-evident role of the Enlightenment as “proven to have held up.”  This is exactly my criticism he does not address.  The Enlightenment does not hold up because it offered nothing socially or politically substantive to engage the West.  I am then accused of a ‘false dichotomy’ in my opposition of love-or-question everything.  Though, I should add that love under Gem’s definition is some sort of fond cuddling.  When I advanced my view of love (as something restorative) I was accused of having a definition that “seems vague, misleading, needlessly complex, and in some cases probably guilty of equivocation.”  Oh man, I guess Gem has the definition down for love.

It is at this point at the end of the conversation that Gem offers the strange example of giving lectures to teachers on how to teach mathematics.  In this example it would not interest him to consider how to integrate the possibility that some children are unable to learn due to unstable life circumstances.  That sort of clinched it.  I suspect he would say that indeed would care about it but he also says that he has “neither the skills nor the inclination to be a counsellor, and the fact that some of them may need counselling does not make teaching mathematics any less important.”  Who the hell would argue from that example that mathematics are not important?  Yes, fine we are all able and limited in various capacities but to consider one aspect of education as ‘pedagogically pure’ regardless of circumstance seems unhelpful.

Why am I recounting this?  I guess I wanted to process it for myself.  Christian and skeptical/atheistic apologetics are pretty big these days.  I thought it might be a good exercise to understand why I don’t care.  What this has clarified for me is the reality that by and large these expressions (on both sides of the fences, as I have encountered them) have a drastically insufficient or at least dis-integrated view of politics as though they can go about their business because they are a-political.  Its not my responsibility for what others do with the sacred truth I discover.  In any event it seems more like bullshit than before.

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.