On Scripture: 2:1-10

One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the LORD. The LORD said to Satan, "Where have you come from?" Satan answered the LORD, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it."

The LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason."

Then Satan answered the LORD, "Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face." The LORD said to Satan, "Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life."

So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.

Then his wife said to him, "Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die." But he said to her, "You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?" In all this Job did not sin with his lips.

Next time: How does this text baffle me? How does it accuse me?

On Scripture: Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22

On Scripture: Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22

The king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther. On the second day, as they were drinking wine, the king again said to Esther, "What is your petition, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled." Then Queen Esther answered, "If I have won your favor, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be given me-- that is my petition-- and the lives of my people-- that is my request. For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated. If we had been sold merely as slaves, men and women, I would have held my peace; but no enemy can compensate for this damage to the king." Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther, "Who is he, and where is he, who has presumed to do this?" Esther said, "A foe and enemy, this wicked Haman!" Then Haman was terrified before the king and the queen.

Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs in attendance on the king, said, "Look, the very gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word saved the king, stands at Haman's house, fifty cubits high." And the king said, "Hang him on that." So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the anger of the king abated.

Mordecai recorded these things, and sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, both near and far, enjoining them that they should keep the fourteenth day of the month Adar and also the fifteenth day of the same month, year by year, as the days on which the Jews gained relief from their enemies, and as the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday; that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, days for sending gifts of food to one another and presents to the poor.

How does this text guide me? What is it concerned about, what are its interests?

It's worse than I thought. The king's anger didn't save the Jews. At least, his anger alone did not do so. The lectionary omits the scene where Haman falls on Esther's feet pleading for his life. This happened because the king was so angry that he left the room. Haman knew he was probably moments away from death. So did Esther. She looked the man in the eyes. And she did nothing. Not even when the king came back in and claimed Haman was trying to rape her, which he clearly wasn't trying to do. She lets the man die on a trumped-up charge that was probably an excuse to get rid of a political opportunist (even touching a king's woman was tantamount to coup de' etat). Meanwhile, we see from the text that she is a pretty astute political opportunist herself.

Stone cold. I bet she did that with a solemn expression.

Now, the text has a lot to say about ironic reversals and getters getting got. It's beautifully written. And, written in the post-Exilic period, it clearly has a lot to say about the triumphant deliverance of the Jewish people and the celebration of Purim, a Jewish holiday whose origin does not appear in the Torah. But not only does Esther turn down what had to be an honest supplication, the reaction of the Jews in succeeding chapters may well be a bit excessive. 

So, yes, Ether is a controversial book. It was a late addition to the Jewish cannon. It does not mention God. It does not mention the law. Luther wished it had never been written. It may have contributed to Jewish hostility against Gentiles (of course, they would say, so did the attempted genocides). On the other hand, it sounds like Joseph and wisdom literature and Daniel and does know its Jewish history. And Esther comes the whole way out of the closet about being a Jew, probably a good thing in the Diaspora. 

So that's what the text means to do. Character matters. Talent, intent and utter accident all accomplish the will of God. Evil will be overturned, perhaps to the degree that it has sought to overturn the good. Communities love the come-uppance of their enemies. And of course the text says that both anger and serenity, whether for the arrogance which believes that the world must change just because it wants it to or the arrogance which believes it will not change despite all the pressures of circumstance...neither of them have to worry about looking foolish. 

Because on the one hand, they already are, and on the other hand, what matters is what God chooses to do with one's particular foolishness. Absolutely, the portrait of Esther is at least somewhat embarrassing, in the sense that she reminds us of King David, to some degree, where every action has a secondary purpose, and all of this has been very, very carefully considered. I don't laud David for it. And I don't praise Esther. 

But I can't condemn her for it, either. We are all of us two-edged swords. 

next time:  How are these words healing me? When this text loves me, who does it love, and how?

the Curious Monk

 

On Scripture: Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22

The king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther. On the second day, as they were drinking wine, the king again said to Esther, "What is your petition, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled." Then Queen Esther answered, "If I have won your favor, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be given me-- that is my petition-- and the lives of my people-- that is my request. For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated. If we had been sold merely as slaves, men and women, I would have held my peace; but no enemy can compensate for this damage to the king." Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther, "Who is he, and where is he, who has presumed to do this?" Esther said, "A foe and enemy, this wicked Haman!" Then Haman was terrified before the king and the queen.

Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs in attendance on the king, said, "Look, the very gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word saved the king, stands at Haman's house, fifty cubits high." And the king said, "Hang him on that." So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the anger of the king abated.

Mordecai recorded these things, and sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, both near and far, enjoining them that they should keep the fourteenth day of the month Adar and also the fifteenth day of the same month, year by year, as the days on which the Jews gained relief from their enemies, and as the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday; that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, days for sending gifts of food to one another and presents to the poor.


How does this text baffle me? How does it accuse me?


"Then the anger of the king abated." The people of Israel are saved by the pragmatic wisdom and righteousness of a Jewish queen. That is the story we often hear. It is the story I would like to read; I've always appreciated a good, strong woman. It is the story no doubt that many feminists would like to hear. But, make no mistake, the people of Israel are also saved by the wrath of a heathen tyrant-king who almost certainly gave more thought to increasing or maintaining power than he did the fate of the chosen people of God. Without one man's pure, incandescent rage, Israel dies and if God's story continues it must do so with a different people.

I don't much like anger. I spend a lot of my time not getting angry. I almost always shut my anger down as soon as I see it developing. That's what all the quiet meditation's for. And it's not that I'm afraid I'll do something terrible, like that I'll Hulk-out and destroy entire apartments or anything. It's that I'm afraid my anger will be ineffective. I'm afraid it won't work. I won't break my dresser. I won't scare the bad guys away. I'll only end up hurting myself. And I'll just end up looking childish, foolish, and pathetic.   

Vanity. Pure, unadulterated, intellectual vanity. I am mature, I am calm, I am in control. God, that's my drug of choice. And I don't know about the psychology of this, and I don't particularly care, because when I say healing I don't mean that I'll find out the mystery of my pain was something that happened on a camping trip when I was six, although that may also be important -- I mean I'm asking how anger, pure unreasoning wrath, can serve the purposes of God.

And by God I don't know. I don't see it. I don't have any idea. Not in me. Jesus with the cords, sure, but that's Jesus. What we have here is the king and his gallows. What we have here is David and the sling. What we have here is Elijah with the sword, Jael with the tent peg, Samson with the lion skull, and, yes, why not, even Jesus with the whip. Do we honestly believe that these people did those things with expressions of serene devotion on their face? Do we think they really committed brutal violence with somber countenance?

I can't believe they did, because I can't believe that God has much use for actual psychopaths. This is murder two at most. God, apparently, loves the thuggery. Or at least is willing to make use of the thuggery for God's own purposes. And that matters because it takes a certain mentality to drive a sharp iron through a man's skull or bring the Temple police at a run or, to put the Pauline spin on it, even find one's self in prison. Those are the people that God picks. They have a typical temperament.

And I don't have that. I don't have that at all. 

Next time: How does this text guide me? What is it concerned about, what are its interests?

Essay: The Healing of Interpretation

When I tell people about my thesis - that we would pray that all our interpretations heal - they immediately ask at least two very wrong questions. And they are "do you mean this is something we should do or something that happens anyway" and "do you mean this to just be for Christians, or do you think this is all interpretation." And they're wrong questions because they presuppose things that I do not, though I often have trouble articulating what they are. 

Because I don't think in the way that leads to those questions, and I think my thinking is so basic to me that they always throw me because I haven't thought enough about this. But I would like to, because I believe my thesis matters, not only to me, but perhaps to anyone who cares about interpretation. And I can't believe that either Christians know the truth exclusively or everyone knows it universally. What I believe instead is that Christians are simply first adopters of the truth. Insiders are just the first outsiders who showed up. Or, to be technically correct in the line of Abraham, the second group of outsiders to show up.

But if Christian don't believe that we have stumbled into something - the revelation of Christ or the freely given love of God or the forgiveness of sins - something that the rest of the world hasn't gotten to just yet, then I don't know what we would be doing here, or why we would call ourselves followers of Christ in the first place. And that's not arrogance because it's not our doing. And it's not exclusive, or at least not essentially so, because we believe that what we have, absolutely everyone on earth can have, too. We don't know anything that anyone else can't understand, and we have been given nothing that we can't convey to others. Indeed, that is why we have been given it in the first place. Our understanding is understanding-for-others, and that may well be the only reason we have ever had it.

So I think you can see why the Christians-or-the-world question throws me. And I think if I think about it a little more, I can see why the prescriptive or descriptive question throws me, too. Because if Christians are early adopters of the truth, then we must certainly have learned something, however imperfectly, that not everyone has yet adopted, and that perhaps we have not yet fully adopted ourselves. And yes, that's mostly luck, or, as the faithful would have it, the grace of God. Even a blind camel sometimes finds a watering hole.

So if some of our interpretations heal right now, and I believe they do, then there should be at least the possibility that they all would heal in turn. Prescription is the proper response, after all, to accurate diagnosis. And further prescription is the best logical response to treatment that has already begun to work. Christians have to believe that the truth we have is truth-for-others, unless the word evangelical has utterly lost its meaning.

Now I should amend that I don't believe we can say up front which of our interpretations will heal. That's the peril of early adoption. Augustine wrote that if your interpretation builds up love, then you have not erred. Past tense: by their fruits you shall know them. And that is why I include the prayer that all our interpretations would heal. Surely approaching texts with questions of health in mind would change the way we interpret them, be they sacred texts or no.

Because interpretation is the act, or at least an act, of making whole. Right? We have the facts, we have our points of information, our given datum, and then we piece them together to make, if not a story, then at least a coherent concept or idea. That ought to be, in its own way, an act of healing; the process of making something whole must surely make us more whole as well, but my thesis would ask the question about what kind of wholes our interpretations make, or mean to make. Do we mean them to support ourselves, or do we mean them to lend aid and edification to others? I get the sense that this may not often and naturally be our foremost hermeneutic question when we sit down to interpret.

We are much more concerned with getting it right, with our interpretations being correct - or, more flexibly, faithful to what is actually the case, what most aligns with the information. And I do not want to miss this or even to eschew this, but I do want to raise the point that this has not been the only interpretive question for most of history. As I said above, Augustine believed that our interpretations should love, or should result in love. Augustine believed that information took a backseat, from time to time, to formation. And it was not that accuracy or fidelity to texts did not matter, it was rather the case that accuracy and fidelity served a greater purpose than themselves: for building up in Christ. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

My thesis would simply state that we should see where we have been set free, and thus we shall discover when we have known the truth. It is, I know, a backwards way of thinking, and I realize that I've come dangerously close to conflating healing with love and truth and freedom in turn, but I think the same pattern prevails, and that perhaps modern ways of thinking geared toward the future serve us less well hermeneutically than historical or communal ways of thinking geared toward memory of salvific moments and liberating narratives.

Salvation. The Greek, of course, connotes healing as well as deliverance. And I swerve toward healing rather than love to convey its sense of concrete transformation over what have become the contested abstractions of classical theology. Every evidence indicates that when Paul said love, he meant something that could not be referred to without action, without decision. Paul, after all, believed in participatory atonement - that salvation was less something that happened to you and more something that picked you up, that told you to get up and walk.

By the end of my first semester of seminary, I had learned the basic precepts of more than thirty schools of interpretation, everything from Historical Criticism to the New Critics to Post-structuralism and Post-colonialism. Remembering my contention that more than one, but clearly not all, interpretations must certainly be valid, I would dare to offer in this age of bewildering information that formation matters not less, but more than ever before, and that that archaic concept of wisdom, sapientia, can help us sort through the hall of mirrors that hermeneutics has become. And remembering my second claim that truth runs in families, I would dare to assert that, even in retrospect, a geneology of healing would help us divide helpful from unhelpful thinking.

And yes, I would offer that asking ourselves, praying through ourselves, that our interpretations heal, even as we approach our interpretive task, would be likely to bring more healing fruit, not less, from the hermeneutical tree.

The Curious Monk

On Scripture: Jeremiah 11:18-20

Jeremiah 11:18-20

 

It was the LORD who made it known to me, and I knew;

    then you showed me their evil deeds.

But I was like a gentle lamb

    led to the slaughter.

And I did not know it was against me

    that they devised schemes, saying,

"Let us destroy the tree with its fruit,

    let us cut him off from the land of the living,

    so that his name will no longer be remembered!"

But you, O LORD of hosts, who judge righteously,

    who try the heart and the mind,

let me see your retribution upon them,

    for to you I have committed my cause.  

How does this text heal me? How do I hear the love of God in this text?

The prophet's double movement is like my own, though it is not mine. When one reads the prophets, one should not imagine Anne Frank, scribbling her confessions in a journal. When one reads the prophets, one should think Glenn Beck, in all his paranaoic insanity - not because the prophets were unbalanced or because Beck has the voice of God - but because there is no syllable of oracle, vision, or confession that was intended to be private. This is political grandstanding. There was an assassination attempt against me! I am innocent! I am persecuted! God has revealed to me the conspiracies of my enemies! One can almost hear Jerusalem Radio 1570 across the centuries. 

This is a difficult notion to swallow. As difficult as David lamenting Saul and Jonathan at a very politically expedient time, or David going out to console his men only after he heard that they would leave him otherwise. Yet one cannot double the canonical sincerity. There are people, says God, after God's own heart. So there is this double movement, in Jeremiah's case too: I will trust in God and I will rhetorically and politically manipulate. Clearly one does not come to the Old Testament for purity, despite one commentator's blithe assurance that we see here Jeremiah's simple trust in God. If Jeremiah as text is any indication, there was not as much as one simple thought in Jeremiah's heart. 

 

And yet. Here we are. Jeremiah reaches for the world and God at once. Jeremiah perhaps does not know where to place himself. This text wounded me because it wanted to call me on the carpet and stand somewhere. I did not want to be stood. I could not say if I was sheep or the tyranny of evil men. Innocent of assassination, I stand guilty of nearly everything else. Cruel thoughts conspire behind the kindness of my face. Often I cannot say if my own trust in God is simply American carelessness, heedlessness of consequence. And the rarity of that dilemma will tell you how often I might even try to relinquish control to the Master of the Universe.  

 

And yet. This text declares that is the motion that matters - yes, that double, impure motion toward God is movement nonetheless, but also that God is barreling through history to bring us to himself. Whatever his hesitations, Jeremiah was swept up in something far greater than himself, lifted off his feet. The size of both Jeremiah's self-aggrandizement and Jeremiah's faith pale in miniscule comparison to the natural disaster that is the love of God, a tornado of salvific intent. Jeremiah was prophesying at a time when the disposition of Israel might not even have mattered very much. It's the scale of the thing that gets you. Paranoids are always rambling about the magnitude of the deception, the abuse of power going all the way to the top. 

Well, Christians, people of faith, suspect a conspiracy of a different sort, a misdirection in plain sight that has guided every event in the history of the universe. And yes, our enemies might well scheme against us. But we see wheels within wheels, plots behind plots, and the organizer of this master plan could be no higher. And of course the conspiracy is a bit inverted, intended for our collective benefit. He's gonna save everybody, man! Everyone! 

the Curious Monk

On Scripture: Jeremiah 11: 18-20

Jeremiah 11:18-20

It was the LORD who made it known to me, and I knew;

    then you showed me their evil deeds.

But I was like a gentle lamb

    led to the slaughter.

And I did not know it was against me

    that they devised schemes, saying,

"Let us destroy the tree with its fruit,

    let us cut him off from the land of the living,

    so that his name will no longer be remembered!"

But you, O LORD of hosts, who judge righteously,

    who try the heart and the mind,

let me see your retribution upon them,

    for to you I have committed my cause.  

 How does this text guide me? What is it concerned about, what are its interests?


Those familiar with the Psalms should recognize this as lament. The figure of the lamb is Psalmic, as is the tree and the conspiracy of the wicked. In its larger context, the lament here is about an assassination attempt against Jeremiah, who was not favored among his people, accusing any number of them of being false prophets and priests. The people involved are more specifically of Anathoth, descendents of those priests who once aided David in his flight from Saul. It is not surprising that he records the Lord's judgment against them as slaughter without remainder, as that is what they intend for him. Indeed, the hard language of the punishment is possibly why it was not included in the lectionary along with Jeremiah's petition. Of note here is the solitary nature of the appeal: Jeremiah has no one to trust but God, and appeals to God alone. Yet he will go on to question God at some length, turning the lament into an interrogation of divine justice - so Jeremiah seems at least as double-minded about his trust as most people who turn to God.

The book as a whole, of course, was written at the very end of the independent existence of Judah and after the first major siege of Jerusalem. Jeremiah was a young priest in that city, and would later flee to Egypt when Jerusalem fell, after the revolt by Zedekiah failed to gather promised Egyptian support but quite succeeded in provoking a Babylonian assault. Between those events, Jeremiah wrote, or rather dictated to his scribe, long oracles against Jerusalem and Judah and foreign nations. He was occasionally regarded as a traitor, yet is known as one of the "court prophets" of high education and political influence -- much like Isaiah, with whom he otherwise has much in common. It is not clear whether he thought his oracles would have much effect, or whether or not he thought there was hope for national reform.

All this quite indicates that Jeremiah sees himself quite clearly as the righteous man of Psalms 1 and 23, and sounds otherwise Davidic in his appeals. Noteworthy is this similar sort of double-motion of complete and utter trust in God simultaneous with considerable political savvy and acumen. Jeremiah may be innocent of whatever the assassins would accuse him of, but he's certainly not innocent of a world in which assassins might come after you - a difference from myself and most of my American readers. I wonder how African Christians might read this, or those of more political exposure than myself. 

 the Curious Monk

Sermon: I've Got a Perfect Body

This series will be the texts of a number of sermons I've written, both delivered and undelivered. The first is one from my first thesis and that will probably otherwise never see the light of day. Enjoy.

I’ve Got a Perfect Body

(Genesis 2: 5- 9; Psalm 104: 25-35; John 20: 11-23; 1 Cor.15: 35-49)

Come, O Spirit, fill the hearts of your people, and kindle in us the fire of your love.

“I’ve got a perfect body,” sings Regina Spector.  “I’ve got a perfect body, because my eyelashes catch my sweat. Oh yes, they do. They do, they do, they do, they do.” Now I do not expect that you know this song. It is new and not particularly popular. But it is a good song. You get the startling claim that someone has a perfect body, which is rare these days. And what makes this body perfect is not that it is physically fit or beautiful. No, it’s a perfect body because it does what it is supposed to do. That’s it, nothing more. This is all it takes. And that's an elegant solution that should put many of us at ease. It should really appeal to those of us who are young and whole and well. 

I’ve got a perfect body, oh yes I do. 

But what about the rest of us? What of those whose arms and legs do not respond quite so quickly anymore? What about the aged? The infirm? The handicapped and physically disabled? What about the mentally unstable, those who neurological chemistries predispose them to certain kinds of illness? What about those people who have metal hips and knees, long-term or recurring illness? Protracted fatigue or insomnia? No, the more we think about it the fewer and fewer perfect bodies we have, even by this better definition.

Yet: I’ve got a perfect body, oh yes I do. It’s a line good enough to sing.

So maybe there’s a better definition still. Maybe there’s a perfect body that everyone might get. So let’s talk about Genesis. “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” Now that’s odd. I don’t think I look like dust, and I can tell you that you don’t either. But I do feel like dust, sometimes. I think we all do. We become irritable and irritating. We chafe, our words cut and sting. We can’t decide what to do, blown here and there by our anxiety or our frustration. We can taste the grit of insults and rumors on our tongues. From the dust we come, to the dust we shall return. Doesn’t sound too perfect.

On the other hand, here we are. Man became a living being. The Lord God breathed into our nostrils the breath of life. Sounds better. You can imagine this, can’t you? A figure kneels and leans over the man, makes that seal around the mouth and nose, and blows. Cardiovascular resuscitation! But tradition has it that this is the work of the Holy Spirit. “The Lord, the giver of life,” we say in the creed. This is it: this is what the Holy Spirit does, right here. Brings that man to life. Man became a living being – and women too, I must say.       

Breathed into life by God! Imagine that! And everybody’s in. Adam is every body. Doesn’t matter if your body’s healthy or sound, appealing or appalling. We all qualify. We’ve all been touched by God, blown into being by the Holy Spirit. Of course, we're still dusty. God did not blow us clean. So we’re still kind of dead. That’s what dust means, right? It’s dead earth, loose, infertile. “When no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up.” 

From death, life from the Lord. There is this tension. A professor once remarked that this passage means that we are divinity and dust. Whenever we feel that we are either, what we need to do is remember that we are also the other. When we feel like dust, recall that divinity, the breath of God moves within us. When we feel like divinity, you’re probably soon going to be humbled, humus, of the earth. Good advice, though it would hardly make an entire way of life.

I’ve got a perfect body. Oh yes, I do.

“When you hide your face,” says the Psalm. “they are dismayed. When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.” Dust without divinity is dead. Without breath, you can’t go on. And the thing about breathing is you have to do it again. You breathe once, you die, you exhale. You breathe twice, you live again. 

But how does one receive the breath of God?  And he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Mouth to face. Face to face. When you send forth your spirit they are created. And you renew the face of the ground. You breathe in, you breathe out. God breathes in, God breathes out: the motion of the Holy Spirit. The whole world breathes with God. In, and out. We are the face of the ground. Renewed, not just once. The Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life...gives life twice. Breathing doesn't stop. You should have been face to face with God, forever.

I’ve got a perfect body, oh yes I do.

So we’re not there yet. But I do have another candidate for the perfect body. Because there is someone who did receive life from the Spirit twice. Right? Rabonni! Mary did not recognize him. Sounds like a different body. Was it? You all know the story: put your finger here and see my hands, he tells Thomas. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. The point is not doubt but recognition. Who is Jesus after death? Where’s the body? They have taken away my Lord, Mary says. I cannot see his face, she might add. But when the doors of the house were locked, Jesus came and stood among them. And he breathes on them and says “Receive the Holy Spirit.” 

Now I have often wondered what this might have been: is he blowing out a candle or breathing on a mirror? Might have even been a kiss. Or it might have been that cardiovascular resuscitation. But you know the story: Jesus is God, breathing face to face. “Receive the Holy Spirit.” God breathes in, God breathes out. God breathes with us. The Spirit gives life, and then the Spirit gives life again. Face to face with God.

And that's not what you might expect. Receive the Holy Spirit and if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. Dust, but dust together. Dust, but dust caught up in some divine wind. Forgiveness. Forgiving is what God does. Divinity does not think that we are just dust. Jesus carries the wounds, the marks, the scars. He died. No getting out of that one. So maybe it’s our infirmities, which remind us of our deaths, that look the most like Jesus. Now there's a thought.

But it's not enough. The risen body of Jesus tells us is that death is not enough. Or, rather, that it is enough for more. The Spirit gives life, and then the Spirit gives life again. God breathes in, God breathes out. Do not hold on to me, says Jesus, because I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Ascending, borne aloft on the wind. Heavenly dust. Ashes to ashes to....what? What happens to dust after it ascends? The world breathes with God. I’m going to my Father. Face to face with God. Peace, indeed.

I’ve got a perfect body. Oh yes, I do.

So there’s your perfect body: Jesus. What is that to us? Well, we get that perfect body when we share the Eucharist. Episcopalians know this. When we share the bread, the broken bread, we become the body of believers. We chew our faith, Thomas Cranmer said. And once we become the body of believers we become the body of Jesus Christ – incarnate, crucified and risen. We are what we eat. Christians know that. We are the perfect body, because of our infirmities and insults, our dust and our burnt-out ashes. 

Hard to believe, isn’t it? No annual meeting can go all that well. So this must be a heavenly reality, one of those that started but just ain't finished yet. That's what Paul says. You do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed. The glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. So there is our body now, and that perhaps is this body, this church. Divine dust, forgiven dust. Our living, breathing glory and make no mistake. But then there is another breath. Another body, raised in glory, breathed in power, raised in spirit and in heaven and in Christ. 

So maybe in the end we'll just talk about dust that is divine. Heavenly dust, face to face with God. Dust that does not sting. Dust that is not dirt. One can hardly say. It is what we have been promised. As is the man of heaven so are those who are of heaven. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Jesus said to them ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.” Not a commandment, certainly not a condemnation. Because that's not what we need. What we need is breath, a promise from God. And a promise from God is just as good as a gift from God.  So maybe we all already are standing, just a little bit, face to face with God. Breathing with God.  

Cause enough to say, and I know you can say it with me:

I’ve got a perfect body. Oh yes, I do.

Amen

On Scripture: Jeremiah 11: 18-20

 

Jeremiah 11:18-20

It was the LORD who made it known to me, and I knew;

    then you showed me their evil deeds.

But I was like a gentle lamb

    led to the slaughter.

And I did not know it was against me

    that they devised schemes, saying,

"Let us destroy the tree with its fruit,

    let us cut him off from the land of the living,

    so that his name will no longer be remembered!"

But you, O LORD of hosts, who judge righteously,

    who try the heart and the mind,

let me see your retribution upon them,

    for to you I have committed my cause.  

How does this text baffle me? How does it accuse me?

In other words: how does this text hurt? 

I do not know where I place myself. If I'm the one who prays, then I skate along the surface of life mostly oblivious to the moral and mortal danger in which I constantly am. I do not know and cannot understand the depth of the protection of the love of God. "It was the Lord who made it known to me, and I knew." I do not know the evil lurking in the hearts of men. I do not know the unguarded thoughts of those I pass walking along the streets. Arrogantly and self-righteously, I assume that they, like me, are too civil or too fearful to physically harm another. But that I have not done such a thing does not mean that I cannot. Cut off from the land of the living, from friend and kin in kind, would I plot evil in my heart? Do I think against an other?

I am not the fruitful tree. I do not dwell in the land of the living. I will not be remembered. And I most certainly do not judge righteously. I seek my retribution; I forget the Lord. Am I vindictive? I cannot will the prosperity of others if I myself might once have gotten it. Do I kill others? I happily reside in a nation responsible for the death of thousands upon thousands of men, am complicit in the poverty of children, and do little or nothing to love even my own closest neighbor. I've dreamed, half sleeping, of murder. I've called many men fools. I've called innocents naive, and wise those corrupted by the world. Can I really call myself a lamb?

There is only one Lamb, of course. And I pray most fervently that he would save us all from the time of trial because I know that I myself would not endure it. I do not know where to place myself because I fear for myself. How does this text accuse me? It names me where I will not name myself. It wants to place me where I do not wish to go. How does one begin to answer even the language of the righteous judgement of the Lord? How does one stand beneath the knowledge the Lord would give to him?

the Curious Monk

On Hermeneutics: Meaning and Significance

In this book, E.D. Hirsch takes the difference between meaning and significance as one of his largest thematic concerns. I intuit that it is also his most correct one. Basically, meaning is what Protestants would call the "plain sense" of a text, that is to say, our best, most basic understanding of what any text might mean. Yet significance is what it means that the text means - or, to put it another way, the broader context or field of understanding of a text. So the sentence "The dog bit John" straightforwardly means something about a canine mandibly mauling a person named John. Meaning, of course, can get quite a bit more complicated than that, but this is one of the simplest cases and it happens to be what I believe most language truly does: somehow convey a sense of what is actually the case, or at least what the speaker believes to be so.

Significance, or thought-world, for Hirsch comprises the field of understanding which makes meaning or denotation possible. So the sentence "The dog bit John" in the setting of a night-club might refer to a low sort of man drunkenly chomping off the ear of our good friend - or in the context of a park, a poodle having a go at our Labrador who we for some reason we can't precisely remember happened to name John. The obvious upshot is that meaning and significance are not unrelated, and that significance, particularly, can have a great influence on meaning.


This is clear in Hirsch's most salutary example of the case of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." A puzzle, and one of interpretation's oldest knots, is what to do with irony. In the Proposal, Swift obviously does not mean what he says, but conveys what he means by saying its exact opposite. When one grasps the significance of the Proposal, its meaning becomes clear. Hirsch's contention is that where much modern hermeneutics posits the inescapability of the hermeneutic circle, where a reader re-iteratively returns to significance in light of meaning and meaning in light of significance, what actually happens is a more linear and narrowing process: slimming from an originally broad array of possible meanings, as we grasp more and more of the significance of a text, its meaning becomes more and more clear to us- a kind of hermeneutic dickering that eventually arrives at a determinable price: once we "get it" we understand that Swift does not, in fact, want the Irish poor to sell their children to the English rich for consumption on a massive scale.

Does this system of meaning and significance work for paradigms other than irony? Hirsch would have us believe it does, reflecting it on everything from denotation and connotation to whether or not literature can have intrinsic value - it can and does, he says, but only in the light of the broader ethics of a culture. And it helps Hirsch avoid hermeneutic's Two Wrong Answers. Right? It's not that Hirsch thinks the one right answer is in the text - he's clearly against the New Critics. And it's certainly not that he thinks that any interpretation is correct. The man's clearly reacting to popular relativism with this book.

It's that he thinks we can objectively get what we have in fact gotten. The price is right because we have agreed to it, ruling out all those other bad deals in the interpretive marketplace. And once that price has been set, you can't really argue that much more about it. It is what it is. And so Hirsch has given at least a clever way of thinking through many knotty contemporary problems, though Hirsch's reading of Gadamer struck me as flat-footed - I don't think they disagree as much as Hirsch thinks they do, but that is all neither here nor there. And I think he might have pulled the theory along for more miles in more different directions than it was really ready to go.

But I would love for Hirsch's paradigm to work for my own test of healing in hermeneutics - we should pray that all our interpretations heal. So when I say that, of course, I don't mean that the meaning of any particular text should heal or else we've got the wrong meaning. That would be absurd. What I'm saying is that when we "get it", our understanding of the significance of healing in all understanding would make any and all texts newly clear, in the same way that Hirsch understands irony in the case of Jonathan Swift. We would have new ground for interpretation, new weights for the valuation of texts, and new rules for the process of slimming down its possible meanings. Where I suspect Hirsch and I would disagree is that my narrowing isn't going to take it all the way down to one. Hospitals, after all, always have many rooms.

Thanks,
the Curious Monk



 

On Scripture: An Introduction

Hermeneutics is nothing if not a pragmatic art, so, as a corollary to my other work - and to generate mass, mass appeal! - I'll be interpreting scripture down in the trenches right along with my Vicar and the Revised Common Lectionary. But I'll be doing so by my own rules. Afew years ago I developed/outright stole what I called a hermeneutic of love, a series of questions that read scripture with love implicitly in mind, and based on the conversion of Saul the Pharisee in Acts. And then, because I was terrified, I never actually tried them out. Anyway, here they are, with a little bit of explanation:

 1.  “How does this text baffle me? How does it accuse me?”

To bow to the text is to fall on one's own face. It is to confess one’s limitations and one’s own prosecutorial intent. It is to see with blinding clarity how the text challenges one’s own assumptions. It is to recognize that I did not write the text, but that another full and human and different person did. To bow to the text is to to profess the limitations of one’s own understanding and the enormity of one’s own incomprehension. It is to realize that the text will leave me with questions I will never answer. So to bow before the text is to bring oneself as human, as a failed, broken, and mistaken person, to a text one does not deserve to understand. To bow to the text is to present oneself as a person needing – and thus capable of receiving – love, to confess to the limitations that make love possible, to be stopped in one's own tracks.

 

2. How does this text guide me? What is it concerned about, what are its interests?

To feel out the text is to stand up wherever we are and walk forward nonetheless. It is to accept a guiding or willing hand, to use all the resources as one's disposal. Feeling out the text, we realize that limited understanding is not non-understanding, but that we must be willing to be led. To feel out the text is to try out tools other than one's own assumptions. When we do so, we risk actually learning about the God that Scripture loves, rather than the God that we might like. But that is the joy of discovery: with senses as strange as feeling must seem to the newly blind, we grope our way forward into understanding, and might be surprised by what we find. 

3. How are these words healing me? When this text loves me, who does it love, and how?

To listen to the text heal is to listen to the message the text has been given to say. Letting the text heal me means taking it to heart, internalizing the healing hands of God which have, while I’ve been reading, caressed my own face. It means taking the text into my being not as myself but as part of someone else, God, the author, the community of people that have brought me and baptized me into the world I now share with Scripture. It is to accept the gesture of the other, of God, that removes the scales from my own eyes, to let Scripture do what family does: to touch our faces and mouth and eyes, to break bread together in the rites of daily life. To let the text heal is to take it into our own flesh, to stand under its authority as though we had been newly born, to let our new, vibrant understanding transform us to our toes. To let the text heal is to see the world anew.  

4.  How can this text heal others? How might my understanding contribute to the greater love of others, of a community? 

To release the text is relinquish control of our own understanding by giving it up to Jerusalem. When we release the text, we confess that our own understanding, our healing, our restoration, has never been for our own sake. It was always for someone else. We have only been given this text in trust, and so we give our understanding up to others. Releasing the text means that our interpretation will be interpreted, and so will we. And we will be have been incorrect in ways we could not know. And we will be misinterpreted in ways we could not possibly predict. But we bow farewell to the safety of the house of Ananias, and offer ourselves up to the streets. To release the text is to sign off on it, to let go of our interpretation and listen, once again, to what another person has to say with compassion and without fear. It is to pray that our interpretations would heal, because that is what has been done to us. When we release the text, we begin to walk the spiral of love that leads from God, to myself, to others, and back again.  

They are, I realize, damned hard questions. They are that way by design. Talk about love and people think you've gone soft, when in fact the very opposite has happened. But it's terrifying. I don't, for certain, know what I'm going to say, how personal my hermeneutic will be. 

But I hope, more than anything, to hear from you. This feature exists for you. It's purpose is you. And it cannot live forever without you. 

So I hope to see those comments. 

Thanks,

the Curious Monk