Poetry vs. Prose

David Whyte on On Being

Prose is about something.

Well, I always say that poetry is language against which you have no defenses. Otherwise, it’s not poetry. It’s prose, which is about something.

https://onbeing.org/programs/david-whyte-the-conversational-nature-of-reality/#transcript

Elizabeth Alexander on On Being

https://onbeing.org/programs/elizabeth-alexander-words-that-shimmer/#transcript

DR. ALEXANDER:So let’s turn to that.

[reading: “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe”]

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we ourselves
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I'”),
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

So I think that the truth of that poem is not about true things or things that happened, but rather in the question: are we not of interest to each other?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43308/kitchenette-building

kitchenette building

BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms
Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?
We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

Gwendolyn Brooks, "kitchenette building" from Selected Poems, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions.

Source: Selected Poems (Harper & Row, 1963)

Shame and relaxing faith - Nadia Bolz-Weber

I love this quote:

Catholic theologian James Allison describes faith not as intellectually ascending to a set of theological propositions, but he describes faith as relaxing. Relaxing in the love and presence of God in the way we relax in the presence of someone we are certain is fond of us. When we are in the presence of someone we are certain is fond of us, we are funnier, more spontaneous, softer and less defended. If I know for sure someone likes and loves me there is no reason to pretend anything. Allison says faith is relaxing.

Relaxing faith! Not scared of judgment, not worried about what God will think, not ashamed or guilty.

If Shame Could be Bottled as an Energy Source it Could Easily Replace Fossil Fuels
Sermon on the Samaritan Woman at the Well

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

The Gospel reading is from John 4 - The Woman at the Well

Recently I was talking with a friend about the practice of keeping a diary – she’s always written down the things that have happened in her life, what she really feels about her lovers, things she’s done and thought that no one else knows. She has a place where she puts all of it and I said that, to me, keeping a diary feels way too risky – because I’d always be afraid of someone else getting ahold of it and then knowing the things about myself I would rather keep hidden.

To which she was like, “Are you kidding me? You’ve published way worse things about yourself in your memoirs than I write in my diary - anyone in the whole world can read about your damage!”

True. But not the whole truth. I mean that’s the dirty secret of people who are self-revealing – on some level, it’s like voluntarily pleading to a misdemeanor so there’s no felony on your record.  It’s really just a tightly controlled PR campaign that on the surface looks like it’s the whole truth. But of course, it’s not.

So I’ve been thinking about the hidden things in me–– the stuff where I’d rather die than have it come to light….the damage and sin and shame that I can’t admit to – and how that stuff is such a powerful force in my life, that it’s like a propeller.

It also happens to be what makes great characters in fiction. 

I think I am not alone. I mean, the wounded parts of me –whether those wounds were inflicted by the sin others or by my own sin, are what keeps me in motion – because I have to try and make up for them, or try and convince myself and everyone else that they aren’t there, or I have to try and get them healed by the love and attention of other people even though none of that ever works….. but wow, it sure does keep me in motion.

 I mean, I think that if shame could be bottled as an energy source it could easily replace fossil fuels.

And this is what I was thinking about all week when I thought about the woman at the well.  Because I wondered what propelled her toward a well in the heat of the noon sun and not in the cool of the morning when the other women would be there.

Just parenthetically, I think it’s important to say that all we know is that she has had 5 husbands, and at the time the man she lived with was not her husband.  But we don’t know why. Was she a tramp? Was she a victim? The latter is so much more likely than the former. And yet the Samaritan woman at the well has been characterized as a whore throughout history. It’s this thing we do with women…they are either virgins or whores and since the Gospels already have Jesus’ mom, the virgin role has been cast – so then all the other women must be whores. As a woman, I’m sick to death of it.

Conservative preacher John Piper’s treatment is characteristic. In a sermon on this passage, he describes the woman at the well as “a worldly, sensually-minded, unspiritual harlot from Samaria” but doesn’t it feel like that kind of detailed assessment of her says so much more about the assessor than the assessed? And I don’t know about you, but if I go the rest of my life without hearing one more woman-hating interpretation of a Bible story I still would have heard too many.

We don’t know why she’d been married so often – maybe she was a teen bride widowed and passed along through a line of her elderly husband’s elderly brothers or maybe she was divorced for being infertile. Or maybe she was forced to be a concubine. I mean, fine…maybe she lured men into her trap, killed them after a year of marriage and just kept getting away with it. Who knows. All I know is that no matter if the wound was self-inflicted or inflicted by others or some combination of the two, she had a wound. Like we all do.

And maybe that wound made her want to not be seen by other women.

We don’t know why she was there at noon, but a safe guess is that maybe it’s sort of like why I took my kids to playgrounds at weird off hours. Because while I wanted my kids to be able to play, I also very much wanted to avoid the other moms. I would never belong to their club – like I could never relax around them so I thought it best to avoid them.  Maybe the Samaritan woman wanted to fill her water jar but also very much wanted to avoid the other women who traditionally would have been there at first light to avoid the heat of the day.  Perhaps she couldn’t relax around them. Perhaps she didn’t want to be seen. Because sometimes being seen is painful even if it is also the very thing we really want.

Yet the whole plan of not being seen didn’t work out for her.

I imagine her lost in her thoughts, the heat of the noon sun pressing down on her, sweat stinging her eyes and she makes out a figure sitting at the well and she takes a deep breath, braces herself, and makes sure to not make eye contact.

Which doesn’t matter because for some reason he starts talking to her. Not only does he chat with a woman (big no-no) not only does he chat with a woman who is an ethnic outsider (bigger no-no) not only does he chat with a woman who is an ethnic outsider who has had 5 husbands (there aren’t enough no-s for that one) but this is by far the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in all of the Gospels.

 All of that is amazing but what struck me so deeply this week was how when he says to her that he offers her living water the gushes up to eternal life and she says Give me this water so that I may not thirst then goes straight for her wound. 

She says give me this living water and he asks about her husband.

He wasn't avoiding the subject. He was avoiding the BS.

You want to stop trying to quench your thirst with things that will never satisfy? You want this eternal life then it starts with the truth– the naked truth of your original wound and your original beauty and every good and bad thing about you. You have heard it said that water finds it’s lowest point – living water finds your lowest point.

The Living water offered by Jesus Christ finds your lowest point.  It finds your original wound. The thing that you spend so much energy trying to heal through all the insufficient ways – relationships, religion, success, more graduate degrees, more therapy, working out, trying to get your parents to love you more, being a perfect parent because your parents sucked. There are a million ways we use substitutes for God to try and hide our damage – so much so that our damage becomes the great motivator.

I’ve mentioned this several times before but Catholic theologian James Allison describes faith not as intellectually ascending to a set of theological propositions, but he describes faith as relaxing. Relaxing in the love and presence of God in the way we relax in the presence of someone we are certain is fond of us.  When we are in the presence of someone we are certain is fond of us, we are funnier, more spontaneous, softer and less defended.  If I know for sure someone likes and loves me there is no reason to pretend anything. Allison says faith is relaxing.  I think this is what happened to the woman at the well.

My favorite detail of this story has always been that she leaves her water jar behind. I’ve just always seen the water jar as a metaphor for what we think will quench our thirst but never does I mean, you know what relaxing in the presence of Christ looks like? It looks like leaving your water jar behind along with the well water because living water has found your lowest point. And Oh my gosh do I have some water jars I need to forget about. Things I think will make me whole, hide my wound, make me loveable – I need those jars to just slip from my hand without even caring they are gone.   So much so that I forget what I was trying to substitute for true wholeness. 

Because being known and loved and forgiven in our true form by our true God can quench our spiritual thirst in a way that no amount of success or admiration or romantic love or good works ever can. I don’t know why this is God’s economy – that our greatest wound, our deepest shame, our greatest sin is also our greatest gift, our greatest teacher. I just know it is. 

This is how seen we are by God.

So, good people, whatever that lowest point of you is, whatever the deepest wound, the vilest sin, the damaged thing in you is, the living water of Christ’s compassion will find it, can find it, has found it.

You can just leave your jars behind.

Beatitude Benediction by Nadia Bolz-Weber

A Benediction 

(Spanish colonial icon, 18th-19th century)

Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’ lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside who his world—like ours—didn’t seem to have much time for: people in pain, people who work for peace instead of profit, people who exercise mercy instead of vengeance.

Maybe Jesus was simply blessing the ones around him that day who didn’t otherwise receive blessing, who had come to believe that, for them, blessings would never be in the cards. I mean, come on, doesn’t that just sound like something Jesus would do? Extravagantly throwing around blessings as though they grew on trees?

So I imagine Jesus standing among us offering some new beatitudes:

Blessed are the agnostics.

Blessed are they who doubt. Those who aren’t sure, who can still be surprised.

Blessed are they who are spiritually impoverished and therefore not so certain about everything that they no longer take in new information.

Blessed are those who have nothing to offer. Blessed are the preschoolers who cut in line at communion. Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.

Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction.

Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones, for whom tears could fill an ocean. Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like.

Blessed are the mothers of the miscarried.

Blessed are they who don’t have the luxury of taking things for granted anymore.

Blessed are they who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else.

Blessed are those who “still aren’t over it yet.”

Blessed are those who mourn. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.

Blessed are those who no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. The laundry guys at the hospital. The sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers.

Blessed are the forgotten. Blessed are the closeted.

Blessed are the unemployed, the unimpressive, the underrepresented.

Blessed are the teens who have to figure out ways to hide the new cuts on their arms. Blessed are the meek.

You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.

Blessed are the wrongly accused, the ones who never catch a break, the ones for whom life is hard, for Jesus chose to surround himself with people like them.

Blessed are those without documentation. Blessed are the ones without lobbyists.

Blessed are foster kids and special-ed kids and every other kid who just wants to feel safe and loved.

Blessed are those who make terrible business decisions for the sake of people.

Blessed are the burned-out social workers and the overworked teachers and the pro bono case takers.

Blessed are the kindhearted football players and the fundraising trophy wives.

Blessed are the kids who step between the bullies and the weak. Blessed are they who hear that they are forgiven.

Blessed is everyone who has ever forgiven me when I didn’t deserve it.

Blessed are the merciful, for they totally get it.

I imagine Jesus standing here blessing us all because I believe that is our Lord’s nature. Because, after all, it was Jesus who had all the powers of the universe at his disposal but did not consider his equality with God something to be exploited. Instead, he came to us in the most vulnerable of ways, as a powerless, flesh-and-blood newborn. As if to say, “You may hate your bodies, but I am blessing all human flesh. You may admire strength and might, but I am blessing all human weakness. You may seek power, but I am blessing all human vulnerability.” This Jesus whom we follow cried at the tomb of his friend and turned the other cheek and forgave those who hung him on a cross. Because he was God’s Beatitude—God’s blessing to the weak in a world that admires only the strong.

God bless you.

-Nadia Bolz-Weber

"Be Not Afraid" - A Mini-Sermon on Fear, Love, and Kent Brockman, Nadia Bolz-Weber

"Be Not Afraid" - A Mini-Sermon on Fear, Love, and Kent Brockman, Nadia Bolz-Weber

Old photo of my brother Dan and chickens

Well, today I started to think that maybe it’s not safety that keeps us from being afraid. Maybe it’s love.

Love that. God does not keep us safe. He loves us like a mother hen. Like Aslan - is he safe? No, but he is good. He is love! And the song by Anne Murray, "...on the other side of fear is love."

https://nadiabolzweber.substack.com/p/be-not-afraid-um-yeahok?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozMTUyMzYyLCJwb3N0X2lkIjozMjA3NTAsIl8iOiJvNi84MSIsImlhdCI6MTU4NDY1Nzk1OCwiZXhwIjoxNTg0NjYxNTU4LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjM3MzMiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.I2vePWFgQNW7p8PdbXLCi7uMUns2XsaJEhhdTCKO3zM

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me,‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.….Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! (Luke 13)

(I posted a video of me offering this message here if you’d like to watch and listen)

There’s a minor character on the Simpsons named Kent Brockman who is kind of a news anchor spokesperson guy with a chiseled face and a low voice. He is the picture of self-confidence, and one my favorite moments on the Simpsons was an infomercial for a self-help CD series Kent Brockman made called, Get Confident, Stupid!

I think of Kent Brockman telling us to “get confident, stupid!” pretty much every time I think about how often Jesus said “be not afraid” since I tend to file both of those statements in the easier said than done category. As if the only reason we lack confidence is no one ever said Get Confident, Stupid!, to us - and the only reason we’re afraid is because we just needed some well meaning messiah to come along and finally say “be not afraid”. 

But never once have I stopped being afraid just because someone said that.

I AM afraid.

I’m afraid that I might get sick or the people I love might get sick

I’m afraid of America turning into Grapes of Wrath again

I’m afraid of what this election might mean for our country

I’m afraid of my children making bad choices that will have lasting implications.

And strangely, I’m also afraid of stepping on spiders in case they have some secret way of communicating with all the other spiders around and they will all know that I am a spider killer and they will all come and get me when I least suspect it.

And yet, the words Fear not show up in the Bible over 100 times, (parenthetically, the phrase Get Confident, Stupid….doesn’t show up even once.  Shocking, I know.)

So anyhow, folks came to Jesus and said he should leave town since Herod wanted to kill him. And just to be clear, Herod had previously imprisoned and then beheaded Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist. So, unlike my spider conspiracy theories, Herod represented very real, actual danger.

Which is why I love Jesus’ reaction. Because Jesus was the embodiment of be not afraid….he was like, “Oh Herod wants to kill me? Well, tell that fox that I’m like, SUPER busy!”  He basically said to the same guy who beheaded his cousin “Oh sorry if this comes as a shock to your fragile, bully ego but I’m just not afraid of you”

Jesus, the guy who again and again says “be not afraid” shows us here exactly what being unafraid looks like. 

Which is pretty badass.

 … but does it take away my fear? Not really.

I mean, let’s be honest, I’m never going to be Jesus. And neither are you.

So I cannot bear to preach a “What Would Jesus Do” sermon. We already have plenty of messages out there telling us that everything will be ok and we will feel safe if we can just manage to hoard the amount of hand sanitizer that guy in SC did, and then maybe muster up the compassion of Mother Teresa, the physique of our Crossfit Coach, the entrepreneurial genius of Mark Zuckerberg, and now, the fearlessness of Jesus.  I mean, knock yourself out, but I’m pretty sure none of that a) is realistically possible or b) will actually keep me safe.

So maybe our hope for becoming unafraid is found in the rest of this story – the part where Jesus calls Herod a fox and then refers to himself as a mother hen. 

A mother hen. 

Maybe that beautiful image of God could mean something important for us: and by us I mean we fragile, vulnerable human beings who face very real danger. I can’t bear to say that this scripture is a description of what behaviors and attitudes you could imitate if you want to be a good, not-afraid person. But neither can I tell you that the Mother Hen thing means that God will protect you from Herod or that God is going to keep bad things from happening to you. 

Because honestly, nothing actually keeps danger from being dangerous. 

A mother hen cannot actually keep a determined fox from killing her chicks.  So where does that leave us? I mean, if danger is real, and a hen can’t actually keep their chicks out of danger, then what good is this image of God as Mother Hen if faith in her can’t make us safe?

Well, today I started to think that maybe it’s not safety that keeps us from being afraid. 

Maybe it’s love.

Which means that a Mother Hen of a God doesn’t keep foxes from being dangerous…a Mother Hen of a God keeps foxes from being what determines how we experience the unbelievably beautiful gift of being alive.

God the Mother Hen gathers all of her downy feathered, vulnerable little ones under God’s protective wings so that we know where we belong, because it is there that we find warmth and shelter. 

But Faith in God does not bring you safety. 

The fox still exists. 

Danger still exists. 

And by that I mean, danger is not optional, but fear is.  

Because maybe the opposite of fear isnt bravery.  Maybe the opposite of fear is love. Paul tells us that perfect love casts out fear. So in the response to our own Herods, in response to the very real dangers of this world we have an invitation as people of faith: which is to respond by loving. 

It’s like the famous story about Martin Luther: when asked what he would do if he knew the world was about to end, he famously said if he knew the world were ending tomorrow, then he would plant an apple tree today.

I love that because it is defiantly hopeful. As though he actually listened to Jesus when Jesus said “do not be afraid”. If the world were ending he would respond by loving the world.

Because the Herods of this world, the dangers of this world the foxes that may surround us, do not get to determine the contours of our hearts. Nor the content of our minds. 

So, we can plant trees and cast out demons and heal, and we can squeeze every single drop of living out of this life. 

So to hell with fear. Because it does nothing to actually keep the bad things from happening ….it just steals the joy of appreciating the good things around us. 

So, love the world, good people.

But, you know, for now, do it from home. 

Amen.

Thresholds by John O'Donohue

A threshold is not a simple boundary;

    it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres.

Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience

    or a stage of life that it intensifies towards the end into a real frontier

    that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.

At this threshold a great complexity of emotion comes alive:

    confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope.

This is one reason why such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual.

It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds:

    to take your time, to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there,

    to listen inwards with complete attention
    until you hear the inner voice calling you forward.

The time has come to cross.

To acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge.

It demands courage and also a sense of trust in whatever is emerging.

This becomes essential when a threshold opens suddenly in front of you,
    one for which you had no preparation.

This could be illness, suffering or loss.

Because we are so engaged with the world,

    we usually forget how fragile life can be and how vulnerable we always are.

It takes only a couple of seconds for a life to change irreversibly.

Suddenly you stand on completely strange ground
    and a new course of life has to be embraced. 

Especially at such times we desperately need blessing and protection.

You look back at the life you have lived up to a few hours before,

    and it suddenly seems so far away.

Think for a moment how, across the world, someone’s life has just changed –

    irrevocably, permanently, and not necessarily for the better –

    and everything that was once so steady, so reliable, must now find a new way of unfolding.

Though we know one another’s names and recognize one another’s faces,

    we never know what destiny shapes each life.

The script of individual destiny is secret;

    it is hidden behind and beneath the sequence of happenings

    that is continually unfolding for us.

Each life is a mystery that is never finally available to the mind’s light or questions.

That we are here is a huge affirmation; somehow life needed us and wanted us to be.

To sense and trust this primeval acceptance can open a vast spring of trust within the heart.

It can free us into a natural courage that casts out fear and opens up our lives

    to become voyages of discovery, creativity, and compassion.

No threshold need be a threat, but rather an invitation and a promise.

Whatever comes, the great sacrament of life will remain faithful to us,

    blessing us always with visible signs of invisible grace.

We merely need to trust

~ John O'Donohue, "Benedictus" ("To Bless The Space Between Us" in the U.S.)

Stations of Mercy by Joseph R. Veneroso, M.M

Mercy spares Barabbas
From certain and humiliating death.
Mercy receives the cross
To prove God’s love
and forgiveness.
Mercy struggles to rise
And inspire all who
repeatedly fail.
Mercy holds broken hearts
As Mother and Son
exchange silent glances.

Mercy forces Simon
To pick up and bear another’s shame.
Mercy risks public ridicule
To wipe the face of one doomed to die.
Mercy bids women weep
For their children in a heartless world.
Mercy stands naked
Before judgmental and accusing eyes.

Mercy comforts the thief
With the promise of Paradise.
Mercy offers bitter wine
To quench soon-to-be silent lips.
Mercy pours out grace
Upon an indifferent and uncaring world.
Mercy prepares a proper tomb
For him whom others despised.

Mercy rises at dawn to anoint
The body of the dead but finds
Nothing but an empty tomb.

Jesus was a badass

I thought this was a very interesting article. Of course, we all know Jesus was a Jew and I've even heard a little bit about the historical times he lived in, with the Roman occupation. But this put more context into the time and culture.

https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/jesus-is-a-jew/

JESUS IS A JEW
The ineffable becomes intelligible in Israel.
by David Brooks

This Year in Jerusalem

There are different lenses through which to see Jesus. I suppose there is a Florence Jesus—the pale, gentle, Caucasian Jesus of the Italian Renaissance paintings, with a scraggly blond beard and two fingers raised in blessing. There’s the Managua Jesus, the peasant revolutionary. There’s the Jesus of the American slaves, the suffering Christ bearing the burden of the oppressed. There’s the Oxford Jesus, the strong, elegant, protective Aslan for those who came to faith through C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Anglophilia. And then there’s the Jerusalem Jesus. This is the lens that sees Jesus the Jew.

This is the lens that tries to see through two thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism; that tries to see through two thousand years in which Jews and Christians have defined themselves against one another, magnifying their differences. This is the lens that tries to see Jesus in his original Jewish context, that tries to put his Israelite and Jewish experience in the foreground, and not in the background.

I’m always amazed by how many people who have dedicated their lives to Christ have never actually been to Israel. They have money to travel, and go off to Europe and such places, but they haven’t directly experienced the clashing confrontation of faiths, powers, and tribes that marks Jerusalem today and was just as present in Jesus’s own lifetime. They haven’t given themselves the chance to appreciate how misleading it is to associate the faith with the serenity of a church pew or the reasoned domesticity of a Bible study. The world Jesus inhabited was a world of fractious intensity. The Israel of Jesus, like the Israel of today, was a spiritual and literal battle zone. He was love in the most hostile environment imaginable.

The starting point of the Jerusalem view of Jesus is the fact that is everywhere acknowledged but rarely given sufficient weight. Jesus was Jewish. He presumably had the skin colour of modern Sephardic Jews. He wore tzitzit, or fringes, that modern Orthodox Jews wear and donned the phylacteries that Jewish men still put on. He and his disciples kept kosher. He argued with other Jews but within the context of Judaism. In Matthew he tells his disciples not to bother evangelizing among the Samarians and the gentiles. His ministry begins with lost sheep within the house of Israel itself, before it broadens to contain all the world. “Think not that I have come to abolish the Torah and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them,” he says in Matthew 5:17.

In my experience, many Jews today know very little about Jesus. But there have always been some Jews who read about him and recognize how completely Jewish he was. Martin Buber called Jesus a “brother.” Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, a leader of reform Judaism, once declared that if Jesus came back to earth today it would be at a Reformed synagogue where he would feel most at home. The Jewish writer Amy-Jill Levine says she doesn’t worship Jesus, because she’s a Jew, but “I also have to admit to a bit of pride in thinking about him—he’s one of ours.”

Rabbi Leo Baeck, who led German Jews during the horrors of the Holocaust, put it best: “We behold a man who is Jewish in every feature and trait of his character, manifesting in every particular what is pure and good in Judaism. This man could have developed as he came to be only on the soil of Judaism, and only on this soil, too, could he find disciples and followers as they were. Here alone in this Jewish sphere, in this Jewish atmosphere . . . could this man live his life and meet his death—a Jew among Jews.”

To be a Jew in Jesus’s day was not to embrace a “religion” or to practice a “faith.” They didn’t have these concepts yet because they did not yet have the concept of secularism. Judaism was an enveloping lifepath, total worldview, a covenantal relationship, a way of living out and searching for truth. It starts with the claim that of all the many peoples of this earth, God had chosen this one scraggly little band on the eastern edge of the Judean hill country to be his people and the recipient of his covenant. As N.T. Wright puts it, the sheer absurdity of this claim, from the standpoint of any other worldview, is staggering.

If you were within this covenant, it must have felt completely self-enclosing. The pressure must have been intense. We today have a sense that the world is filled with many diverse cultures and nations and their rivalries are just the normal stuff of politics.

The Jews, two thousand years ago, had a sense that Israel stood out from all the other nations and lived out its own unique destiny. They saw relations between nations not just as the normal jostling of peoples but as the running tally of divine judgment: Are we favoured or are we punished? Is the covenant betrayed or fulfilled? God shapes history to teach us hard lessons.

Welcome to the Apocalypse

Which leads to another pivotal reality that defined Judaism in Jesus’ day: foreign occupation. Jerusalem and the towns around it were perpetually under the control of foreign powers. The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in 587 BC. The Syrian ruler Antiochus took over and desecrated the Second Temple in 167. The Maccabees revolted and restored Jewish independence at that time—and then squandered Jewish pride by assimilating ever closer with Hellenistic culture. The Romans conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC.

Think of the questions that would have bedevilled the nation under occupation: Why are God’s chosen people subordinate? How do we survive within the pressure cooker of this oppression? Who among us is collaborating with the other side? Is our persecution God’s just judgment on us for the sins that we have allowed to fester? Which messiah will save us and when?

The military and political occupation kicked up all sorts of spiritual crises. There was an imminent sense that the moment of holy reckoning was at hand—the Messiah is coming, the climax of history is approaching. The Qumran scrolls give us a sense of the apocalyptic atmosphere: “This shall be a time of salvation for the people of God, and the end-time of dominion for all men of His lot and the ages of annihilation for all the lot of Belial.”

Everything was fraught, semi-hysterical, and tension-filled. Under the boot of the Romans, Jews clung intensely to the temple as the remaining foothold on this earth. Desperate criminal gangs roamed the countryside looking for plunder. Minor-league revolutionaries were perpetually rising up and getting crushed. Wright lists seven small revolts between AD 26 and 36 alone, around the time of Jesus’s ministry. A few decades later an Egyptian Jew led a mass movement to the Mount of Olives. He promised his followers that the walls of Jerusalem would fall down, and they would enter the city in triumph. Instead the Roman soldiers cut them down where they camped. The destruction of the Second Temple happened a few years after that, in 70, and the mass suicide at Masada came in 74.

Galilee was a common origin point of these revolts. The historian Simon Dubnov writes that “from Galilee stemmed all the revolutionary movements which so disturbed the Romans.” Other historians say he is exaggerating, but not by much. There was a general sense that if you were Galilean, you were mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Galileans were known for being poor and poorly educated, violent and rabble-rousing. When the elites in Jerusalem heard this Jesus fellow speaking with a Galilean accent, they would have been on high alert right away.

Galilee was late to Judaism. People there converted around 120 BC. The region was geographically separated from the other Jewish population centres, surrounded by hostile peoples, including the Syro-Phoenicians to the north and Samarians to the south. According to the biblical scholar Bruce Chilton, Jesus’s part of Galilee was so backward that it lacked a currency-based economy. When Jesus walked from Galilee to Jerusalem he was crossing worlds.

Jesus is commonly said to have been born in Bethlehem in the Judean hills near Jerusalem. But Chilton suspects that this is a geographical error. Jesus, he argues, was probably born in another town named Bethlehem, in Galilee, and just seven miles from Nazareth. Bethlehem means “house of bread.” The name was given to many towns where bakers worked.

You Are Not to Be Called Rabbi

Jesus would have been born into a tighter community than anything we can quite imagine today. Even today, Judaism feels more groupy than modern American Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity. A Christian is supposed to see himself as part of the body; part of the wild vine that was grafted onto the vine of Israel. But as it is currently practiced in real life, at least in the United States, one hears a lot more of individual salvation than group salvation; about a personal relationship with God more than a communal one. Jews experience faith as a people and not so much as individuals. Sin and repentance are communal acts, not individual acts. Identity is tied to the land of the fathers. Peoplehood passes from generation to generation. Two millennia ago, before current conceptions of privacy and Enlightenment individualism, this collective tribal consciousness would have been the ever-present flavour of Jesus’s milieu.

Jesus was born into a tight collective, but he would probably have been treated as an outsider within it. Others in Nazareth would have seen Jesus as a mamzer, Chilton argues, as a child born from a forbidden relationship or with questionable parenthood. Mamzers were untouchable, often destined for the servant class. “No mamzer shall enter the congregation of the Lord,” is how the book of Deuteronomy puts it. Jesus would have been treated as something of an outcast from the beginning—though obviously he was not barred from the synagogue for it.

He was also born into a world of sects. The intense pressure of life under Roman rule produced a profusion of Jewish factions. Some aligned with rebel groups to keep Judaism pure and distinct from Hellenic influence. Others withdrew into deeper private study of the Torah, creating a Judaism far removed from Roman influence and the corrupted forms of Judaism in the cities. Josephus, writing at the end of the first century AD, reports that there were twenty thousand priests, four thousand Essenes, and six thousand Pharisees. The Pharisees’ agenda was to purify Israel, to return her to her ancestral traditions, to be a vanguard spiritual army in the study of Torah and the theocratic liberation of the Holy Land. Faced with pollution all around, they focused on cleanliness. They evolved complex rules about the purity of meals, how food was kept in the home, the rituals for washing the hands and storage vessels. They put purity into practice in the humble acts of everyday life.

When he began his adult ministry, Jesus would have cut a familiar figure. He fit the pattern of miracle-working prophets like Elijah and Elisha. He also fit the pattern of the many great rabbis and teachers who were emerging amid the tumult of that time. The great Rabbi Hillel lived in Jerusalem during the time of Herod, probably just before Jesus’s birth. The Rabbis Akiva, Tarfon, and Gamaliel, also giants in Jewish thought, emerged shortly after his death. Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa was a first-century healer rabbi and miracle worker who also lived in Galilee, about ten miles north of Nazareth.

Like Jesus, Hanina chose a life of poverty. Like Jesus, he showed relatively little interest in legal and ritual matters, and concentrated on moral and spiritual questions. For example, Hanina teaches, “Any man whose fear of sin precedes his wisdom, his wisdom will endure; but if his wisdom precedes his fear of sin, his wisdom will not endure. “

Like Jesus, Hanina could fall into spiritual trances. There is a story of him praying so deeply that he was bit by a poisonous snake and did not notice. He didn’t die, but the snake did. “It is not the snake that kills, but sin,” he told his followers

The adult Jesus seems at first in league with these other great teachers. He preserves the core of Judaism. His great commandment that you shall love your God with all your strength and love your neighbour as yourself comes straight out of Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

But ultimately he stands apart from these figures. Jesus is not presenting himself as just another kind and learned rabbi. There is a story he tells about his own person that is different, more powerful and bizarre. He doesn’t fit into any group in the culture wars of his day. He sometimes offends the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but other times wins them over. He is uncategorizable. He transcends the fractious din.

He is somehow playing a different game. He is taking all the traditional categories of Jewish thought and somehow seeing them differently, from a different vantage point, and fusing them together in new ways. He is at once a product of his time, but he is also offering a new paradigm, sparking a new gospel, and so is standing beyond his time.

For example, all Jews speak of abba, the Father. But when other Jewish groups do it, it sounds like a communal father, the founder and lord of our people. When Jesus speaks of the Father it feels different. There is a direct mystical intensity to it—my own father. As Amy-Jill Levine puts it, when Jesus talks to abba in Gethsemane “his address is entirely personal. He is not speaking on behalf of anyone but himself.” The category abba is transformed.

Refractions

All Jews speak of messiah. But for Jews the word has a clear historical meaning. The messiah will bring about an earthly paradise in which nation will not lift up sword against nation. The Jewish messiah brings an end to politics and an end to history. The Jesus messiah is a redeeming messiah, a healing messiah, one who casts out demons. In the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead, and the forgiveness of sin, Jesus provides a foretaste of the paradise to come. The category of messiah is transformed.

Similarly, all Jews speak of purity and sanctification. For other Jews it was the tangible purity in the here and now, enacted physically on the outside. Jesus tends to speak from a purity that happens within. “There is nothing outside a person, entering in, that can defile one, but what comes out from a person defiles the person” (Mark 7:15).

When we tell the story of the miracle at Cana, the turning water into wine, we always focus our attention on the wine. But in the Jewish context the water may have been the more important element, Chilton argues. The waters Jesus transformed were waters of purification. By turning them into wine, and having people consume them during the festivities, Jesus was demonstrating that purity could happen from the inside. The category of purity is also transformed.

There’s one final truth that becomes clear about Jesus when you see him through the Jerusalem lens: He was a total badass. He lived in a crowded, angry world, and yet took on all comers from all sides. He faced stoning in Nazareth. He took on the debt-laden elite in Capernaum and ridiculed their banquets. John the Baptist was beheaded after he attracted a mass following. Jesus, undeterred, did the same thing and courted the same early death. “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace but a sword,” he declared, “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother….And a man’s foes shall be they of his household” (Matthew 10:34–36). He was a prince of peace with a flair for conflict.

Chilton describes the contradictions admirably in his book Rabbi Jesus: “What a weird combination he was! Both humble and proud, overflowing with compassion but adamant in his assertions of the terrible judgment of God. He seemed lost at times, the direction of his life unclear, but he then could turn around and flaunt his prophetic conviction. His certainties could be frightening.”

His climactic confrontation at the temple was in character. Jesus entered Jerusalem at a time of power jostling between Roman and Jewish elites. Pilate’s power was ebbing. He had lost a mentor and protector back in Rome, who had fallen out of Caesar’s favour. The high priest of the temple, Caiaphas, took advantage of the moment to strengthen his position.

The temple was the great gathering spot where people brought their animals for sacrifice. But the vast throng of animals produce piles of dung, which defiled the grounds. Pilgrims often lost their own animals amid the throng. So Caiaphas ruled that henceforth animals would not be brought from home; they’d be purchased in the Great Court. This was commerce that Caiaphas could control. When Jesus came to the Great Court and saw the new policy in place, he was appalled. He made a whip out of short cords and drove the merchants out of the temple, putting himself in direct conflict with Caiaphas and his police.

Essentially what Jesus did was this: He walked into a complex network of negotiated and renegotiated settlements between various factions of the Jerusalem elite, and he challenged them in a stroke. We all know the story of the overturned tables in the temple, but when you see it from the perspective of Jewish history of that moment, you realize how many powerful parties Jesus was confronting all at once. His boldness is stunning.

Or maybe there’s a better way to put it. When you see Jesus from the perspective of Jewish history of that moment, you see how many power structures he was simply circumventing. He was bringing access to the kingdom directly to the poor. He was offering a triumph directly to the downtrodden and outcast. There was a fractious social structure—a logic of contention in which a thousand factions and powers engaged themselves in an intricate and violent dance. He fit in with none, but pierced through them all.

The Jerusalem lens gives us one way of seeing Jesus, like the Florence lens, the Managua lens, or the Oxford lens. But in one important way the Jerusalem lens is different from all the other lenses. It is the one on which all the other lenses depend. That’s because it is the prism within which the historical Jesus lived his actual life. It is the lens all of Jesus’s disciples used to see Jesus because they were Jews encountering another Jew.

Christianity does not supersede Judaism. It does not replace it. But Judaism does precede Christianity and make it possible. There is no Jesus without Jews. There is no Son of God without God, who is the God of the Israelites. There are no beatitudes without the Ten Commandments and the 613 mitzvot. There is no Last Supper without Passover. There is no way to meet Jesus except as the Jew he was, one chosen among the chosen people.

Jesus is inherently mysterious—a lion who is also a lamb. But he is also intelligible. And that’s because he lived an actual life in an actual historical context. Through the Jerusalem lens you see what a maelstrom that context was, with mud and sticks and stones and spears and insults and prophecy flying in all directions. You see Jesus up to his waist in the muck of it all. And yet you also see the powerful and ultimately triumphant word of God, which had been passed to the disciples and all the Israelites, friend and foe, through the Torah. Jesus is amid the muck and armed with the Word, and yet emerges as a figure ultimately alone—a vortex of spiritual forces converging in one person, no one else quite like him.

God's "No Leper Left Behind" Program by Nadia Bolz-Weber

https://aleteia.org/2018/02/10/jesus-heals-the-lepers-and-restores-our-relationships/

God's "No Leper Left Behind" Program

a message for this COVID19 time

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

A special reading from Leviticus, especially for COVID19 season. 

The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, "Unclean, unclean." he shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.

Recently I had the chills and my neck ached and I mistakenly thought I was coming down with the plague that has laid out so many people this season. And as soon as I thought I may be sick I immediately wondered what I had done wrong. Like, it was clearly a spiritual failing. 

The Levitical codes, were in a way, a public health manual that was developed so that the Hebrew people would not only be safe but also remain distinguishable from the other nations. Our world contains contaminates that pose real health risks, and it wasn't uncommon for societies to deem these same elements religiously “unclean”.

And one way to protect the community is to have the sick and unclean live outside the camp.  I can see this from a public health standpoint.  Quarantine protocols make sense in terms of protecting folks. 

But I wonder if there is also more to it than just that. I wonder if wanting lepers to live outside the camp so to speak, serves another purpose as well, an unspoken, less noble purpose. 

I mean, maybe folks in Jesus’ day didn't really want lepers around, not just because of public health but also because lepers make human frailty and brokenness so disturbingly visible; their bodies a reminder of what could happen to any of us. 

Unlike so many other ways of being un-well, you can’t pretend not to have leprosy.

Of course if someone has an illness that is contagious we want to keep our distance. Totally reasonable. But, maybe it is also true that we prefer to not be in close proximity to those who remind us too much of things we don’t want to think about.   

I was at an event recently in which someone referred to a girlfriend of theirs who, at the age of 50 is pregnant with their first child. 50.  I had such a strong reaction to this. I literally couldn’t hear anything they said after that. 

I do not want to be reminded that I could still get pregnant at my age. I do not want to be reminded that I could be a day away from a cancer diagnosis and a cancer diagnosis away from being homeless.  I am more comfortable believing that I am following a formula that is working. I want to believe that the reason I don’t have leprosy and someone else does, is because I lead a moral life, or the reason I don’t have cancer and my friend Kate does is because I don't eat processed foods. There is plenty of religion and spirituality out there that will happily sell you the formula for how to control life, how to release miracles – books and seminars from both New Age and Christian Sources that will tell you The Secret (so to speak) to “manifesting” health, wealth, and happiness. But it just doesn't work like that.

10 years ago I wrote a profoundly unimportant book about bad Christian television which required me to watch 24 consecutive hours of so-called prosperity gospel preachers on Trinity Broadcasting network. There was an ad that came on while I was watching - complete with images of televangelist John Hagee laying hands on the heads of various folks: While a voice over said Miracles happen everyday for those who know how to release the healing power of God.  Pastor Hagee wants you to meet God's conditions for a miracle and he has prepared a special healing package. Package includes a Book and CD for$25.

I realized off the top of my head I could think of the following conditions for healing in the New Testament: 1. You have faith (like the woman with hemorrhages who touched Jesus' garment), 2. You may or may not have faith but your friendsdo (like the guy who was lowered through the roof to Jesus) and 3. you not only have no faith, but you don't even know the name of Jesus (like the lame man at the Bethesda pool who, when asked who healed him, was like, "I don't know, some guy.")  So when it comes down to it, the only condition for healing is that… you are sick. 

A $25 book and CD will never teach you how to release miracles…the power of positive thinking is great and yet it cannot keep your kid from having a drug problem. A few years ago my friend had a head cold and like a moron I asked what she thought her body was trying to tell her – and she answered that it was trying to tell her that it had encountered a cold virus.

But I do highly suggest reading my friend Kate Bowler’s book about being diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in her early 30s soon after giving birth to her baby boy and both the book and the title of the book are amazing. It’s called Everything Happens For A Reason; And Other Lies I’ve Loved.

There are a lot of lies I love. Like if something bad happens to someone they must have done something wrong. And if something good happens to me I must have done something right. Deep down I know these are lies but these lies let me maintain the illusion of control.

Don't mistake me, we can take steps toward healthy living, we can strive for mastery in our professions, we can live as decent people. We can for sure wash our hands.  But what we can never do is control things in the ways we like to believe we can. Which is why grace is ultimately more reliable than virtue. Grace is the healing hand of God, the source of life, the strategic reserve of mercy that no one earns and everyone gets.

It’s not depressing to me to say that I have a need for God’s grace, that I have a need for healing…what’s depressing to me is believing that I can make myself worthy or I can make myself entirely well, but that I just haven’t managed to do it yet.

The good news is not that there is an inside group who have done the right things to release health and happiness in God’s favor and there is an outside group that doesn’t meet the requirements for a good life and that yay! -  the church can make sure you are in the inside group.  The good news is that there is no longer an outside group. The kingdom of God means that no one is left alone outside of the camp. None of your story is outside the camp. There is no "outside the camp" because since the moment of the incarnation God has jerrymandered the whole thing.  God entered our profane places of uncleanness and shame, pride and sickness and reached out to touch it all.  This is the kind of stuff that got Jesus in so much trouble.  Because we tend to prefer that the unclean remain alone outside the camp – whether those be the homeless or the homosexuals; Steve Bannon or Tanahasi Coates; the immigrant or the Enron Executive.  It makes everyone uncomfortable when Jesus messes with our purity systems. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the Kingdom of God is like a "no leper left behind" program.  And in this program Jesus touches all that we place outside the camp – outside our desires for how we wish to be perceived – outside our plans for how we hoped our lives would look – and he says "I do choose". 

The good news isn’t a plan for living - it’s just grace. This is the gospel. Which my friend Kate says is simply this:  that God is here. We are loved. And it is enough. Amen.