A Tough Sell for Modern Ears

Two weeks ago, as I reflected on the texts for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, I found my attention reluctantly returning to St Paul’s words in the epistle reading from 1st Corinthians 6:12-20. Today, on the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany I find my attention drawn yet again to the continuing argument Paul makes concerning freedom. The gist of his developing argument continually throws up examples in the life of the community that highlight the tension between the operation of grace and law. In chapter 8:1-13, his example concerns the hot button issue of eating meat sacrificed to idols. Context is everything – well almost. As I mentioned two weeks ago, unadulterated Paul is often a tough sell for 21^st-century preachers, and listeners, alike.

The ancient Greek city of Corinth – like its modern-day counterpart – occupied a strategic position situated on the isthmus of Corinth – a narrow neck of land between the Aegean and Adriatic seas that provided a narrow land bridge connecting mainland Greece with the Peloponnese Peninsula. The significance of ancient Corinth lay in its equidistance between the two regional powers of Sparta and Athens. In counterbalancing both the political and military power of the two great rivals, Corinth played a key role within the organisation of Greek city states known as the Archean League.

Corinth controlled not only the east-west axis route between Sparta and Athens – but commanding harbors on Aegean and Adriatic sides of the isthmus is also controlled the passage of goods unloaded in one harbor and transported the short distance across the isthmus to be reloaded on ships moored in the other side – thus enabling ships to avoid the longer sea journey around the Peloponnese Peninsula.

During Rome’s conquest of the Greek city states, Corinth was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC. It lay in ruins until a century later, when Julius Caesar began the rebuilding of Corinth as a Roman colony for the resettlement of Rome’s growing population of freed slaves originally captured in the many campaigns in the Eastern regions bordering the Mediterranean. A mixed population of Syrians, Egyptians, and of course many Jews – together with numbers of Rome’s poor transformed Corinth into an economically dynamic melting pot. With colonial status also came an infusion of Roman tax revenues – triggering a huge rebuilding program of ancient Corinth’s temples and civic buildings which had lain waste for over a century.

It was into this bustling and cosmopolitan caldron that Paul arrived sometime around 50-51AD. Luke in Acts mentions that Paul travelled to Corinth where he was joined by Silas and Timothy. We know that Paul lodged with Aquila and his wife Priscilla, two Jewish refugees from the emperor Claudius’ expulsion of Rome’s Jews in previous decade. Like Paul they were tent makers. There was always considerable business from the need to constantly repair and weave new tents and awnings to protect the Corinthians from the effects of the hot sun. Perhaps it was noting the fevered building boom, that led Paul to fashion an image for himself in Cor:3 as a skilled master builder laying the foundations on which others will build.

As a result of Jewish hostility to Paul, he left his Jewish hosts to stay with one Titius Justus – a gentile God-fearer. God-fearer was a term the Jews used for newly converted but often still unconverted gentiles who participated in the life of the synagogue. In the face of growing Jewish resistance Paul switches his missionary focus to the gentile God fearers who because of their attraction to, and familiarity with Jewish faith and custom were already primed to respond to his preaching of the gospel. Among the God-fearers many wealthy women exercised power and influence. Paul’s letters reveal that it was often to such women that he turned for support in his fledgling communities.

During his first sojourn in Corinth, two significant events occurred. The first was his penning of two letters to the Thessalonians. The second was his arraignment before the Roman Consul, Gallio, brother of Seneca, at the instigation of Corinthian Jews on a change of blasphemy. Gallio dismissed the case because Paul was a Roman citizen and he declined to judge Paul on the basis of Jewish religious matters. Vindicated, Paul nevertheless must have felt that it was time to leave Corinth sometime in late 51 or early 52AD. Later in Ephesus, sometime between 53 and 54, Paul pens his two letters to the Corinthian church.

Reading Paul’s letters is like listening to one side of a cell phone conversation. We read his responses – but as to the questions he was posed – the text is largely silent. Yet from what Paul writes we can surmise that a number of serious divisions were emerging as a reflection of Corinth’s rowdy and permissive, cosmopolitan culture.

The Corinthian church struggled with the moral issues of the right use of sex, the right attitude toward wealth. Corinthians had a reputation for sexual permissiveness and the conspicuous display of wealth – the latter leading to the denigration of the poor within the worship and community life of the church – issues not unfamiliar to modern Christian communities – for human nature has not changed much in the passage of centuries.

The Corinthian church also struggled with the corruption of the notion of truth and the importance of shared values. Paul is concerned by the charismatic sway of some teachers who assailed their hearers with alternative truths, alternative facts, alternative values rooted in baser instincts – pouring scorn on shared values of mutual respect. Yet, he is particularly worried by the report of two developments in the Corinthian church.

Many, it seems, were becoming vulnerable to the subtle invitation of teachers giving a gnostic spin to the gospel message – inviting their hearers into the allure of secret knowledge. Paul has them in his sights when he writes that knowledge puffs up, whereas love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something is really admitting that they know nothing. It is through love in action not puffed-up claims to knowledge that we become known by God.

Others were becoming susceptible to the Judaizers who demanded gentile submission to the requirements of the law. The master builder of the gospel message – Paul was always deeply worried by others erecting the wrong kind of building upon the foundations he had labored so hard to lay.

As in chapter 6 when Paul employs sexual practice to highlight the tension between what may be lawful but not necessarily beneficial, in chapter 8 he grounds his wider development of Christian freedom in the issue of food sacrificed to idols. Not an issue for us – you might think. Yet, moving beyond the immediate 1^st-century contextual details –that is – the status for Christians of the pagan temple sacrificial food offerings– can we not hear Paul addressing us today – we who live in a culture characterised by a scandalous misuse of food – from food deserts to food profligacy and waste of monumental proportions?

Remember, Paul is writing in a religious context – both pagan or Jewish – where food was an integral part of religious practice. It is here we begin to grasp the revolutionary import of his words – for Paul is doing something hitherto unimaginable. He is decoupling food from religious practice. Writing prior to the first gospel, did Paul know of Jesus teaching on the subject? In any case he affirms Jesus’ words that it’s not what goes into a person that defiles but what flows out from the heart. Paul tells his readers: Food will not bring us close to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat and no better off if we do.

At the heart of his first Corinthian letter is Paul’s development of a notion of Christian freedom that flows from the grace and not from the absence of prohibition. In chapter 6, he startled his hearers by proclaiming all things are lawful for him – but though lawful not necessarily beneficial for him or those with whom he’s in relationship. In chapter 8 he further spells out this revolutionary idea.

Christian freedom does not derive from the absence of prohibition. It flows from the acceptance of responsibility for the impact of one’s actions. The sin is not in eating the wrong food. The sin lies in the offence and confusion eating it gives to other members of the same community who being younger in faith are still struggling to internalize the break with their pagan past. The limits placed on freedom come not from the regulation of rules and laws – prohibitions – but from our acceptance of shared responsibility (shared value system) – demanding of us an assessment of the impact of our actions on others.

Christian freedom’s rule of thumb is not – have I the right to do this thing – but what will the impact be for others if I do so? Can there be no more urgent a question for our 21^st-century ears. It’s the burning question in America today. Might I also suggest it’s a central question for the Sunday of the Annual Meeting – when we celebrate our community’s achievements in the previous year – and holding this question before us as we prepare to meet the challenges and grasp the opportunities ahead?

January 27, 2024 0

A Prophet – A Disciple : But of What kind?

Image: Jonah and the whale

God calls us to be prophets, or in the more intimate language of the gospels, Jesus calls us to be his disciples. What is our response? What kind of prophet, what sort of disciple do we want to be and more importantly are prepared to become?

The OT reading for Epiphany 3 offers a brief extract from the book of Jonah. On its own the reading is somewhat opaque – jumping into the story almost at the end. In it we learn that Jonah is being addressed by the word of the Lord for the second time with the same request which Jonah continues to argue with God about.

The story of Jonah is well-known. This short book of four chapters is read by Jews every year on the afternoon of Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement. The drama of the morning liturgy with its solemn chant of the Kol Nidre, the prayer of atonement – is past and the expanse of the afternoon opens before the fasting penitents whose hunger and thirst only increase as the day draws on. Reading Jonah reminds them of the fruitlessness of any attempt to evade the examination of unpalatable truths of one’s life through the lens of the last 12 months.

The story of Jonah and the whale is one of the more well-known bible stories among Christians and has risen in our collective memory to the level of a universal folk fable. Wikipedia describes a fable as a literary genre – a succinct fictional story, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are given human traits, emotions and intentions to illustrate or lead to a particular moral lesson. Therefore, in the days of my childhood when we were all taught bible stories – the story of Jonah exercised a special power over children’s imaginations. We all understood implicitly that if we were not good, we too might be swallowed up by a whale. The more enquiring among us came to understand the whale as a symbol for all kinds of other rather icky things that might befall the badly behaved.

Technically, the writer of a fable is known as a fabulist. I note that in our modern disenchanted times the term fabulist carries a derogatory implication – for a fabulist is someone who makes things up and therefore is not to be trusted. In today’s world, have we not all become the unwilling but more often unwitting victims of the fabulist’s art?

The story of Jonah is of a man who receives a request from God to speak truth to power – to call the capital of the greatest Empire the world to that date had known to repent. The gist of the story is his attempt to evade the divine request before finally being cornered into complying though a conspiracy of tempestuous elements and a creature from the fishy deep. In his attempt to escape God, Jonah son of Amittai– incidentally whose name means dove-son-of-truth – boards a ship to take him in the opposite direction from the one God wishes him to take.

Of course, there’s no escape from divine writ and Jonah’s ship becomes imperiled by a violent storm. Jonah sleeps through the storm – I mean who does that? – making the sailors even more irate at him for they blame Jonah for the storm and toss him overboard to supplicate the divine wrath. Jonah is rescued – swallowed up by a passing whale. After three days of severe indigestion the whale spews Jonah up on the shore of the land God had originally directed Jonah to travel to.

Pissed-off doesn’t do justice to Jonah’s feelings about being thwarted by divine conspiracy and so begrudgingly he trudges off in the direction of the great city of Nineveh –and finally does as God desires of him – to speak the truth to power and bring about a change through repentance. Jonah’s mood is hardly improved when he discovers that the Ninevites not only hear him, but from the greatest to the least don sackcloth and repent – thus averting God’s lust for destruction. Mission accomplished – so you might expect Jonah to be relieved and pleased. But not a bit of it.

Nineveh is one of those place names that carries huge symbolic significance in Jewish history. The book of Jonah purports to be set in an earlier century when the Assyrian Empire and its great city of Nineveh was at its height. Nineveh’s symbolism lies in later scholars looking back on the events of the 8^th-century when in 721 the Assyrian armies swept down and destroyed the Northern kingdom of Israel – wiping it not only from the map but also from the pages of history.

Rather than its 8^th-century setting, the fable of Jonah belongs in 6^th-century after the return of the Exiles from Babylon. Jonah is a story addressing the exilic community as it struggled to rebuild Jerusalem where apart from the difficulties posed in the physical reconstruction the burning issue concerned intermarriage of Jews with others of more dubious mixed-race heritage.

Knowing this context helps answer the double question: why did God dispatch Jonah, an Israelite prophet – to the non-Israelite Assyrians of Nineveh- and why was Jonah so unhappy with the successful outcome of his preaching?

From the outset, Jonah questions God’s intention to show mercy to non-Israelites. In his actions he shows the extent of his opposition to the project. When finally cornered by God he complies, but with bad grace. Fully expecting the Ninevites to reject his message to repent and prove him right with God, his very success – in his own eyes – calls his credibility as a prophet into question. He seems more concerned with his wounded credibility than that thousands of lives have been saved by God’s mercy because of him. Finally unable to argue with God further he sulks and pouts – telling God if that’s the way God want things then he would rather die than live with what is for him a contradiction – that the Lord God of Israel should extend his mercy to those outside the chosen race. The book ends with God decrying Jonah’s self-centered pettiness.

The issue of intermarriage in the post-exilic community is of burning significance. In the writings of this period, we have the book of Ezra in which Jews who had intermarried with foreigners are commanded to reject their wives and mixed-race children and return to the Lord – while in the book of Jonah God’s intention to include all races within his plan for salvation could not be clearer. However, the central issue at the heart of internal post-exilic discord is less about the dilution of Jewishness – though this is undoubtedly a concern. The main issue is theological and concerns the promise of salvation. Is God’s promise of salvation a universal promise inclusive of all nations or not?

Subsequent Rabbinic interpretation of the book of Jonah has gone back and forth on the theological issue. Some Rabbis argued that Jonah shows God’s clear and unequivocal intention to invite all of humanity into the plan of salvation hitherto declared only to Israel. Others have argued that God only saved the Ninevites so that Assyria could be the instrument to fulfil God’s plan to punish Israel for its sins by wiping it off the map and out of history. At the end of the day – through its prescribed reading on the Day of Atonement – Jewish practice firmly established the message of Jonah as a rebuke to self-centeredness – personal and racial.

Following Jewish practice – we cannot find meaning or peace without an honest examination of how we, individually and communally, participate in attitudes and actions that seek to limit the extent of God’s mercy, compassion, and generosity to my or our tribe, my or our community, mercy offered only to those like me or us.

The Lectionary in placing a reading from Jonah alongside Mark’s depiction of Jesus calling his first disciples presents us with an uncomfortable challenge. God is not only more generous and loving – more than we might care for God to be -towards others who are different from us. As God expected Jonah to be a divine agent – in the call to discipleship Jesus expects us to be agents, voices, hands, and feet in the work of proclaiming the divine call for universal inclusion. Placing the two readings side-by-side reveals another striking comparison. Jonah thought he could qualify God’s desire for mercy – and when that failed he thought he could evade God’s call. The men who drop everything in response to Jesus’ call had no preconceived notion of what they were letting themselves in for – they simply felt compelled to respond.

God calls us to be prophets, or in the more intimate language of the gospels, Jesus calls us to be his disciples. What is our response – and more crucially – what sort of prophet, what kind of disciple are we prepared to become?

Notes on Nineveh

Philip Jenkins in a 2014 feature appearing in The Christian Century notes the ancient Christian history of the Middle east has become agonizingly relevant. Cities central to that history appear in headlines in the context of fanaticism and mass destruction. The State Department’s maps of the latest atrocities coincide with the most vulnerable landscapes of Eastern Christianity. Jenkins is writing about the fall of Iraq’s second city Mosul to the forces of the ISIS caliphate.

From Apostolic times Mosul remained a great center of Eastern Christianity. The ancient Christian culture of the Middle East thrived – surviving Persian, Arab and Ottoman conquest. During the First World War the Ottomans inflicted an Armenian-style genocide on Christian Mosul – leaving the city subjected to increasing attack and infiltration by the Kurds. The most recent chapter in the history of Mosul concerns its conquest by ISIS and reconquest by the Iraqi army so that today Mosul – ancient Nineveh is a largely Kurdish city with a sizable Arab minority. The once strong Christian community has largely fled – mostly to North America – where the patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church now reside in Chicago.

January 20, 2024 0

Nihilistic Times

Sam Wells, the Vicar of one of London’s most well-known churches, our namesake St Martin in the Fields, is acknowledged as a foremost exemplar of a strong Anglican-Episcopal preaching tradition. He views the sermon as less like listening to a lesson and more like taking a shower. You stand in the shower and rather mindlessly let the water flow over you. We are conscious of the water falling on us – inducing at best a state of what I think of as even hovering attention. As the words from on high cascade across the congregation – the task is not to concentrate too sharply but to listen for the one or two points that you are in need of hearing. The task of listening is certainly not to take it all in at once because at least at St Martins, sermons are always available in print, audio, and video formats for subsequent revisiting and in my case, the text can be previewed from 9pm the night before. So, in church or online simply listen for the points you need to hear – and believe me you will hear them.

Hope has been at the forefront of my thoughts in this dark time when the descent into strife and conflict seems to be both inevitable and non-resistible. The message of hope sounded loud and clear on Christmas Eve as we reflected on John’s Prologue which tells us that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. In the Christmas Eve sermon I suggested that not only does the darkness not overcome the light, but the darkness provides the fuel for the light to consume to burn ever brighter. As Christians our responsibility is to summon our courage as people of faith – inspirited with the Holy Spirit – ever moving towards a hope-filled future that sets the direction of travel – illuminating the path of action in the present.

As I reflected on the texts for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, I found my attention reluctantly returning to St Paul’s words in the epistle reading from 1st Corinthians 6:12-20. I say reluctantly because unadulterated Paul is often a tough sell for 21^st-century preachers, and listeners, alike. Of course, the problem lies less in what Paul says – although it sometimes does – but more with the cultural filters through which we’ve come to hear him. So having decided I’d tackle Paul’s opening lines about things lawful and things beneficial, I found myself reminded of a recent review of a book chiefly addressing the primary obstacle for hope – believing in a hope in a future better than our present.

Maeve Cooke, professor of philosophy at University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy has written a review of Wendy Brown’s new book Nihilistic Times appearing in the recent edition of Commonweal Magazine. Wendy Brown is one of America’s foremost political theorists and the first professor of political science at the UC Berkeley. The Harvard Review of Nihilistic Times notes that Brown asks some very timely questions. How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? She proposes that the answer to such questions can be found in the current prevailing culture of nihilism.

Nihilism comes from the Latin nihil meaning nothing. Nihilism is the existential philosophy that claims that systems of meaning are illusionary. Look for God behind the elaborate curtain of organized Christianity – and you will discover that there’s no there, there. God is dead proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche – the high priest of nihilism. If God is dead – then why not do whatever you like? And the Nazis did. And the Kremlin does. And so do other nefarious actors – much closer to home.

Max Weber’s 1918 Vocation Lectures provide the catalyst for Brown’s analysis of the current crisis of truth and values in both the university and political life. Weber identified nihilism arising through the gaps opened-up in a modernity where knowledge, values, and belief have become split off from one another – leading to a depletion in all three areas of societal life.

Cooke notes that – values are not just trivialized and weakened; they become more numerous and diverse, leading to moral chaos. Nihilism’s egocentric and instrumental relation to the world manifests today in widespread, disinhibited assertions of power and desire shorn of concern for truth, justice, or future consequences.

Our world today is characterized by an erosion of shared values. We live in a world where our notions of truth, values, and the facts we rely upon to inform us about the world are continually contradicted by alternative truths, values, and facts. Sometimes the alternatives to the truth, values, and facts we hold are genuine if competing truth and value narratives worthy of scrutiny. However, more often today alternative becomes a euphemism for whatever some political, social, or religious pundit decides to make up to suit one transactional purpose or another.

Inspired by her reading of Weber, Brown explores the contested terrain of human freedom, human value, and the human need to embrace a higher purpose in life. Freedom is an essential element in living lives of human value, Cooke notes. She defines freedom as a practice, a mode of self-realization that has its wellspring not in the calculating ego but in “the soul.” It involves enacting a life we have chosen and living by the lights of our beliefs.

Freedom as the practice of self-realization is not found in the exercise of ego – which is always asking – what can I get out of this, what do I have to control to give me what I seek? The practice of self-realization is a practice of soul – which asks what do I long to become? Becoming open to the new- now there’s a countercultural proposition if ever there was one. The practice of soul as living according to the guidance of a set of beliefs and transpersonal values – is a hope-filled, future oriented, spiritual antidote to the current pervading climate of disillusionment flowing from the denial, and dislocation of shared systems of value.

Weber, Brown, and St Paul, it seems, understand that freedom is so much more than the mere absence of restraint (Cooke). It may seem a big jump from Weber via Brown and Cooke to St Paul. Yet, Paul too addresses the question of freedom as a lived practice of soul. In proclaiming freedom as so much more than the absence of constraint – he cries-out from the page: All things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by any–thing. Of course, Paul’s overarching theological motif here is the tension between living under the law [of Moses] and living in the light of grace given through Christ.

In addressing himself to the nature of freedom Paul sees on the one hand, that the law is normally an instrument of restraint on freedom- so that where the law does not prohibit – lies and assumption of unfettered freedom. On the other hand, there’s what’s beneficial – that which offers the greatest freedom from enslavement to things. His point is just because something is lawful does not mean it’s moral or ethical. Just because you are free to do something does not mean you are not enslaved by your actions which lead not to in an experience of liberation – but simply to a different kind of being unfree.

Paul offers the arena of the sexual appetites to illustrate his point – not because he was a sex hating misogynist – although in some quarters the jury’s still out on that one. Paul chooses sex because the prevailing attitudes towards male sexual practice in his 1^st-century Roman world were characterized by an extreme nihilism. For a Roman man any form of sexual practice with any sexual object choice was not only without any legal restraint – but was also without moral inhibition or ethical constraint.

Paul is reminding the Corinthians, that despite the absence of legal prohibition, theirs’ and other bodies are not to be used simply as the impulses of desire and the permissiveness of the culture allow. Their bodies belong to God – paid for at a price by Christ. Translated into our contemporary nihilistic context – Paul’s words remind us that our lives are not our own to live shorn from the values that connect us to one another. We cannot live as if our actions carry no consequence for others.

Freedom is the practice of self-realization – rooted not in the exercise of ego – what can I get out of this, what can I control to give me what I seek – but in the practice of soul – what have I the courage to become? True freedom is not simply as the absence restraint – legal or moral. The practice of soul – is living according to the guidance of a set of beliefs and transpersonal values that results in the experience of true freedom.

The practice of soul is hope-filled. It clings to the light. It does not fear the darkness – knowing that the seeming deepening of darkness is only a process of gathering fuel for the light to burn more brightly. Burn brightly when we might ask? The answer is if not now then eventually! In the meantime, hope emerges from within this struggle as our future oriented, spiritual antidote to the current pervading nihilistic climate – providing us with what Brown refers to as the missing step to take us from discontent to effective resistance.

The movement from discontent to effective resistance – from here to there – breaks our enslavement by the forces of apathy, despair, and violence. To us falls the task of fashioning a hope-filled vision of a future that empowers us in the present to reclaim a values based political empowerment for the task of societal renewal. We are engaged in the raising up of that which has been cast down and the renewal of that which has grown old. We will accomplish this through being true to a practice enacting a faith life and living by the light of our beliefs.

To be hope-filled is to live by the light of our value laden beliefs. The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not – nor ever will – overcome it.

January 13, 2024 0