Mission of the Church – Peculiar Faith

The Word of the Lord?

“Just rip out those pages from your Bible!”

That was the advice given by one of my faculty colleagues to a seminarian some years ago. The student was a gay man who had been tormented for years by the so-called “clobber passages” about sexuality in the Bible, those verses that seemed to label him an “abomination,” or “unnatural,” certainly “immoral,” and by extension even “spawn of Satan.”

Rather than dragging up all the historical-critical textual tools at our disposal as modern Christians to engage yet again with the insidiously deceptive practice of using sacred texts to justify cultural bias, my colleague (both exasperated by this student’s religious PTSD and also seeking to be kind) said, “oh, just rip those pages out and be done with it!”

As a gay man myself, and also a proud “liberal” (sometimes even an aspiring “progressive”), I empathized with that advice—and I was also appalled. Granted, the project of integrating religious faith and sexual orientation can feel terribly arduous, especially in a society with a well-established repugnance toward “non-straight” people. But integration at least implies some level of respect for both sides of the equation, in this both the human and the divine, and I can’t imagine physically shredding a sacred text.

On the other hand, preserving the “sanctity” of a text is often used as an excuse to maintain a cultural status quo rather than engaging with the much harder work of historical analysis, or communal confession, or the tasks of healing and reconciliation.

Consider, for example, the long and brutal history of Christian anti-Semitism. The Gospel according to John (among other texts) has been used frequently in Church history to both justify religious discrimination against Jews and, in some cases, to promote social and political violence. John refers to “the Jews” more than 60 times in his account of the Gospel (and no fewer than 19 times in John’s so-called “passion narrative” in which Jesus suffers and dies); these ancient texts continue to show up in contemporary contexts where “Christ-killers” still operates as a dangerous epithet for Jewish communities.

Some have suggested replacing “the Jews” with “religious leaders” in those particularly problematic passages. But this can easily obscure the underlying social dynamics of that powerful story in ways that drain the story itself of its human/divine drama. Equally troubling: in this harrowing time in U.S. society when our own government is erasing our own history—of transgender people, of Black people, of indigenous people, basically anyone who isn’t straight, white, and male—we must resist doing exactly the same thing with our sacred texts and our sacred history; erasing the problem won’t solve it and will likely make it worse.

Adding to these canonical conundrums, the progressive ire toward problematic texts is rarely applied evenly or consistently, and for some good reasons. The Bible has been used poorly and sometimes with horrific consequences concerning such a wide range of issues that no one person can keep track of them, whether with reference to race and ethnicity, or gender and sexuality, or economics and ecology. If “erasure” were generalized broadly—just remove, delete, ignore, or omit whatever troubles us, might cause harm, or doesn’t align with our preferred theological positions—we would not only have very few pages of the Bible left, we would surely eviscerate what it means to refer to a text as “sacred.”

But doing nothing about these religious vexations is not an option, either. I have spent too many years picking up the pieces of religiously ruined lives not to appreciate how damaging institutional religion can be, including these ancient texts that can sometimes be brutal, violent, and soul-killing.

So, what’s to be done and what can we do? I would propose taking three modest but nonetheless important steps.

The first step: stop calling the Bible “the word of the Lord” in public worship. That ritual declaration enjoys a long history and appears in most mainline Christian churches, and it’s time to retire it. Referring to texts from the Bible as God’s own “word” perpetuates the notion that even the vilest of biases originates with God and thus grants (religious) permission to act with (cultural) violence. “Don’t blame me,” misogynists like to say when treating women badly, “it’s in the Bible.”

No longer referring to a liturgical reading from the Bible as “the Word of the Lord” will sound to some people nearly as severe as my faculty colleague’s suggestion to rip pages from that book’s binding. But The Episcopal Church already approved that liturgical change back in 1997 (the “Enriching Our Worship” collection of supplemental liturgical texts). In the parish I’m privileged to serve here in Michigan we use those newer options more often than not: the lay reader usually concludes a reading by saying, “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”

I love the ambiguity, or perhaps “Anglican breadth,” in that liturgical statement. After all, the Spirit might want to encourage us to heed a biblical exhortation, or the Spirit might urge us to resist a given biblical writer’s point of view—there’s no way to predict in advance what the Spirit will be “saying” to God’s people concerning a particular text for a specific occasion. Even so, that liturgical invitation still affirms the inherent value in the Bible itself, reminding us that biblical texts can always prompt insight or provoke engagement.

Inviting people to hear what the Spirit is saying right now with a biblical text can also remind all of us that the Bible has been heard and read in many different ways in countless contexts over the course of many centuries; our job is not to figure out which one is “correct,” but to hear what the Spirit is saying—right now. (And this, by the way, is just one piece in the ongoing and urgent need to develop a robust “theology of Scripture,” which the late-biblical scholar Dale Martin passionately urged: if the Bible does not just contain “meaning” we’re supposed to “find,” what does it look like actively to make meaning today from those texts?)

And by the way, even the great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther insisted that the Bible is not the “Word of God.” But, Luther said, the Bible can become the Word of God when good news is preached with it. How we use the Bible matters, and the “good news” we might make from it will vary depending on the time and place in which we use it.

A second step, related to the first: clergy need to step up and shoulder their responsibilities not only as “pastors” but also “teachers” in their congregations (teaching should actually be considered part and parcel of providing pastoral care). If the lectionary assigns a particularly difficult or challenging text for a given occasion of public worship (and what counts as “difficult” will vary depending on the community and current events, among other factors) the ordained minister has a spiritual responsibility (and in some instances, an obligation) to name that problem explicitly. Even if the occasion does not afford sufficient time for a thorough treatment of the passage, it matters to have the challenge named.

Not long ago, I preached at a diaconal ordination on the Feast of St. Barnabas. The Gospel text appointed for that occasion came from Matthew (10:7-16) and included a reference to “Sodom and Gomorrah” and divine judgment. While I did not dwell on that portion of the text, I also did not ignore it.

“We just heard a reference to ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ in the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel,” I said in that sermon. “And I can guarantee that every LGBT-identified person in this assembly today experienced stomach-churning anxiety, even if only for a moment, when they heard that reference.”

I then connected that anxiety to the ministry of a deacon, who is called to make the needs and concerns of the world known to the Church—and this includes, of course, the ongoing and shameful abuse of the Bible that traumatizes whole communities. Simply omitting that phrase from the proclamation of the Gospel in that liturgy would have been a form of religious denial and also a missed opportunity to illustrate how a religious text can shape the ministry of healing even when the wound itself came from that same religious text.

A third step, and perhaps the most important: remind ourselves regularly that the Bible was assembled by the institutional church for the sake of the church’s mission. The church does not exist to serve the Bible, in other words; the Bible exists for the sake of the Church. (As a priest in The Episcopal Church, I would say the same thing about the Prayer Book.)

Putting this point in a slightly different way: not everything in the Bible reflects something “true” about God; but every book of the Bible does reflect something vital about the person who wrote it or the community from which it emerged. And that matters—to me, it matters a lot. One of the many things I appreciate about the Bible is how it preserves stories of people and communities who struggled, sometimes mightily, in their efforts to know and love God, and to discern how they ought to live as God’s people in the world—exactly what I hope the church today is likewise trying to do.

Remembering in that way what the Bible is and the Bible’s proper role in the life of the Church does not in any way diminish its religious significance; it still counts as a “sacred text,” and I would say, even more so. After all, what could be more sacred than a tool to help God’s people participate in God’s own mission of healing, reconciling, and promoting a life of flourishing for all God’s creatures?

I can’t think of anything more “sacred” than that.

Fierce and Faithful, Persistent and Poor: Walking with Widows on the Gospel Road

In the Gospel reading yesterday morning, the road to Jerusalem in Mark’s account of the Gospel at last brings Jesus and his followers to the Holy City.

It’s worth remembering when we read this story in the U.S., where “church” and “state” seem separated on paper only, that first-century Jerusalem was the seat of Judean religious power and also Roman imperial power for the province; these two forms of power come together at the temple treasury in the story from Mark (12:38-44).

Mark wastes no time in setting the stage for violent conflict in Jerusalem. Mark’s Jesus quickly clashes with every possible authority group in that capital city; in yesterday’s encounter, it was the “scribes,” the interpreters of Mosaic Law—the religious lawyers, in other words.

Mark’s Jesus has been arguing with these scribes about a wide range of issues and his patience has simply run out. Many Christians are familiar with Mark’s rendering of that moment, but probably not with an exasperated Jesus. While rich people drop big sums of money into the temple’s donation boxes, a poor widow contributes two small coins—all the money she has.

The lectionary compilers know quite well that late autumn is the time for fundraising campaigns in most churches—thus the readings about money at this time of year. But the temple story from Mark is far too often and too crudely used to guilt people into giving more money: If even a poor widow can give all she has to the Temple, then surely you can give a bit more to the church…

Mark would be horrified by using his story that way. The poor widow in this story is not the poster child for stewardship campaigns; she is, rather, the shining emblem of God’s own commitment to a world of justice. (Ched Myers provides an invaluable resource for interpreting Mark in the frames of social and economic justice; I am indebted to his analysis of this Markan story.)

As Mark’s Jesus continues his teaching in the temple, he issues a warning: “Beware of the scribes,” he says. Beware of the religious lawyers who tell you what the law means but then “devour” the houses of widows.

That rather strange phrase refers to a first-century legal practice regarding estate management. When the male head of a household died, his estate was given over to the religious scribes to administer because the widow, as a woman, was considered unfit to do so. (And by the way, lest we look down with smugness on that ancient practice, let us not forget that women in the United States were not allowed to have a credit card or take out a loan in their own name until 1974.)

Back in the first century, the scribes were compensated for their estate services by taking a percentage of the estate. As you might imagine, abuse was common in this system, forms of embezzlement to the point of impoverishing the widows—or as Mark’s Jesus puts it, the houses of widows were devoured.

“Beware of these religious scribes,” Jesus says, and then he sits down “opposite the treasury,” Mark says—a phrase we should read as not merely about geographical location but moral orientation: over and against it, as opposed to the temple treasury, where this social and economic abuse of widows is on display.

Quite honestly, after many decades of reading and hearing this story, I have consistently failed to see Mark’s point in telling it. The reason the widow is poor in this story is because the scribes have stolen her money—some of which they were putting in the offering plate, right in front of Jesus! These religious experts would have known that the Mosaic Law they claimed to interpret explicitly provided for the care of both widows and orphans; it was a divine commandment.

But right there, in the temple of God’s presence, the scribes no longer protect the poor but crush them, and then flaunt it. Right there in the outer court of the temple, economic oppression is on display and barely concealed with “long prayers,” as Mark puts it.

Jesus is outraged.

Despite all the pietistic sermons I have heard (and yes, preached) in the past about this impoverished woman giving all she has, Jesus is not commending the widow for her religious piety; he’s calling out the scribes for their religious hypocrisy. Jesus then leaves the temple in disgust, and, it turns out, for the last time before he is arrested and killed.

Among the four gospel writers, Mark is especially keen to address economic injustice as a vital component of the Gospel. Mark is also eager to point out how religion gets used to support the financial inequities of social systems—systems that are almost always designed to favor men.

When Mark’s Jesus insists that the poor widow has actually given more than all the rich people, he is not congratulating her or recommending this practice; he’s drawing attention to the injustice of a system in which the poor contribute proportionally far more to the system than those who are wealthy, a common dynamic in nearly every human society throughout human history—including the United States.

This kind of social and economic analysis can make most of us deeply uncomfortable, including me. But that is precisely the “discomfort zone” the Gospel calls us to inhabit, and I am fairly confident that this will increasingly be the case in the weeks and months to come.

Given the rocky road likely ahead of us, it’s worth remembering that the road to Jerusalem in Mark is the good road of the Gospel, the one that leads not only to the Cross but also the Empty Tomb. The good road of the Gospel marks a journey of costly discipleship for the sake of flourishing—for all. The good road of the Gospel is not easy to find, but just ask anyone on the margins of a wealthy and powerful world; they will have a map.

The many books of the Bible, written over many centuries by different communities, are remarkably consistent about this: care for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger is religiously non-negotiable; and resisting unjust systems of oppression is the very definition of discipleship—not because people on the margins deserve our pity (that tired old noblesse oblige of the wealthy West) but because the excluded and forgotten can usually show us the best road home.

Yesterday’s lectionary texts all confirm this—from the story in the Hebrew Bible about Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, a city of Gentiles and outsiders (1 Kings 17:8-16); or from the psalmist who praises God for giving justice to the oppressed, care to the stranger, and who sustains the orphan and widow (Ps. 146); and of course from Mark, whose story in the temple I now read quite differently than I ever have before: the poor widow embodies a fierce faithfulness, the persistence to live with the dignity God gave her while living with virtually nothing that the world should have given her.

Searching for appropriate visual images for worship this past week, I did a Google search for “poor widow,” and the usual suspects appeared immediately. But scrolling down the screen I stumbled on an odd match: “The Calla Lily Vendor,” by Alfredo Ramos Martinez. I still can’t figure out why Google included this one, but I’m glad for it. The “poor widow”—too often a frail old lady in my imagination—is just as likely a determined single mother doing whatever she must to care for her children as she is a demure recipient of social security checks.

“Calla Lily Vendor,” Alfredo Ramos Martinez (1929)

The stubborn faithfulness of widows—my own dear mother embodied this to the very day she died—showed up in all sorts of guises in recent days. A gay friend of mine posted on social media last Wednesday morning, the day after the election. He wrote about waking up disappointed and also afraid. “But then I realized,” he wrote, “that I woke up with the same two arms and the same two hands that I had yesterday. I realized that no election can take away my capacity for kindness, and love, and service.”

He noted that this election might very well take away his rights as a gay man; it might take away still more rights from women, who are already afraid for their safety. While this election might very well cause harm in countless ways, he wrote, “I will continue to choose kindness and love and service.”

That’s exactly the good road of the Gospel God always calls us to walk but especially right now. Mark’s story in the temple offered me a powerful reminder about how we learn to walk that Gospel road: in solidarity with the poor in a rich world; and with women in a patriarchal world; and therefore and also with LGBTQ people in a world of bullies.

Standing in solidarity with all those on the margins is a Gospel posture.

Walking with them is the way of discipleship.

Offering kindness and love to each other on the road is our service of healing.

This is always true, and that has always been how disciples of Jesus walk the Gospel road home, regardless of election outcomes.

Yes, and, I think it is especially true right now.

Amusing Grace and Biblical Sodomy

The season after Pentecost is dedicated in many ways to mission—to God’s mission in the world, a mission in which God calls the Church (among others) to participate.

The portion read in Church this week from Matthew’s account of the Gospel is a classic instance of that mission as Jesus sends out his disciples to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom. “Cure the sick,” he said, “raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons!”

That’s quite a mission statement—and not a little daunting.

Meanwhile, Sarah laughed.

Sometimes, participating in God’s radical mission of revolutionary love can feel ludicrous, like we’ve walked on stage in some theater of the absurd.

And so many also heard the story in church this weekend about Sarah laughing. She laughed quietly but she laughed nonetheless when God said she would bear a child (Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7).

Now, if you’re not merely a post-menopausal woman but you’re actually ninety years old and you’re told you would soon give birth, I think you’d laugh, too.

By the way, Abraham also laughed about this. In the chapter from Genesis before the one about Sarah, the 100-year-old Abraham actually fell on his face laughing when God told him he would have a child!

I would call this the “sacred laughter” of the Kingdom of God, a truly amusing grace, and I want to focus some attention on it. But we need to clear away some obstacles first, especially from that passage in Matthew’s account of the Gospel, which is no laughing matter (Matthew 9:35-10:8-16).

As Matthew’s Jesus sends out his disciples, he tells them that if any town will not receive them, “it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgement than it will be for that town.”

In this LGBT Pride Month, it’s so vital for all church-goers to understand that every LGBT-identified person of faith feels their stomach churn whenever they hear those words—“Sodom and Gomorrah.” We must not treat this kind of religious language lightly, especially in places where LGBT people are eager and even desperate to find hospitality, welcome, and safety.

So let’s be perfectly clear: it does not feel safe to be in a religious space and be reminded of the story in Genesis when God destroyed those ancient cities with a storm of fire and brimstone, of burning sulfur. That story has been used to condemn lesbian and gay people and damn them to hell—and it quite conveniently comes pre-packaged with a popular image of the fires of hell itself.

“The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” John Martin

Countless preachers have used that story from Genesis as a religious weapon, terrorizing and traumatizing their congregations. Every year, a horrifying number of LGBT youth take their own lives because of it—one would be too many.

Connecting the fate of Sodom with particular sexual acts even made its way into modern legal terminology. Still today the concept of “sodomy” is used in roughly 65 countries to criminalize lesbian and gay relationships; in eleven of those countries, the penalty is death.

In this country, sodomy laws were still on the books in some states and even enforced as recently as 2003 when the U. S. Supreme Court finally overturned them.

These religious and legal entanglements are so seamlessly woven into our cultural idioms that many of us scarcely think twice or even notice when they show up in jokes or in sitcoms or casually tossed into political speeches.

Back in 1966 John Huston directed a film called “The Bible…In the Beginning,” a classic Hollywood epic depicting the first 22 chapters of Genesis. The film won several awards, including for best director and even an Academy Award for best musical score.

The segment in that film about Sodom and Gomorrah portrays every single resident of those ancient twin cities as limp-wristed, effeminate, lisping gay men—those stereotypes are emblazoned on our shared cultural memory and they are a constant source of violence even though nothing about those stereotypes bears any resemblance whatsoever to the biblical story; that scene in the film is actually more about the misogyny of modern Western society than it is about the Bible!

Many people find this shocking, but it’s true: the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction is not about gay men; it’s not even about sex!

When biblical writers make reference to that story in Genesis—as Matthew did—they are concerned primarily with a grotesque violation of hospitality, persistent patterns of injustice, and physical violence.

The ancient Hebrew prophet Ezekiel could not be clearer in that regard: “This was the guilt of…Sodom,” he wrote; they lived with “hubris, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy” (16:49).

As more than a few commentators have suggested, interpreting “sodomy” as the behavior of a small sexual minority is easier and more comfortable than to suppose this ancient story might actually be directly related to our own economic system and a community’s collective failure to live hospitably and with justice.

Perhaps this is why Matthew’s Jesus refers to Sodom and Gomorrah as he sends his disciples out as emissaries of God’s Kingdom, to do the work of hospitality, and healing, and justice-making. And perhaps this could help us interpret for our own day what Jesus means by “curing the sick, and raising the dead, and cleansing lepers, and casting out demons.”

It might mean that God is calling us to soothe the hearts of those who are made sick from their social exclusion; or to notice just how toxic racial hatred can be as it kills the human spirit; or to rescue those shunted to the margins and treated like lepers just because of whom they love or how they understand their own gender; participating in God’s mission of reconciling love might mean naming and rebuking the demonic spirits of division and animosity that keep us from even just talking to each other in this country.

And don’t forget—Sarah laughed.

And Abraham fell on his face laughing.

I would call this “sacred laughter”—perhaps not at first in this story, when they laughed because of the absurdity of God’s promise, but over time when they laugh because of God’s astonishing grace, the grace that always exceeds our most reasonable expectations.

We know and touch this grace ourselves whenever we laugh in the midst of our tears, trusting God’s grace to transform what we cannot bear into something we cannot imagine.

I love that Sarah and Abraham’s child was given the name Isaac, which means “laughter.” This naming is God’s own embrace of tears and laughter mixed together into something called joy.

I think the world wants exactly this kind of life, and yearns for it—a life where we can acknowledge our pain and sorrow and name it with each other precisely because we’re on a road together toward healing and wholeness, and a road toward that great and wonderful day when our tears and laughter blend seamlessly together into the joy of God’s presence.

I think the world longs for a community devoted to curing the sick, and cleansing lepers, and casting out demons—a community where God raises us up, all of us, from death to life with an amazing grace and laughing hearts.

There’s really no time to waste. The world really wants to believe this is true—and the Church needs to show that it is.