Thoughts

On the first day of the week,
    in the deep dawnlight,
        dew drenching garment hems
            and washing weary feet,
they tumbled toward the tomb - 
    breath stolen,
        hope all gone,
            joy an evanescing echo,
    their limbs animated only by love.
Blessed fools,
    don't you remember
        what he said?

I was at a workshop led by Pádraig Ó Tuama today, and he said two paradigm-shifting things I wanted to remember.

One is a personal maxim he tries to live by (pardon the salty language):

Do good.
Don’t be a dick.
Take no shit.

“All three parts are important,” he said. I appreciate the elegance of holding “Don’t be a dick” and “Take no shit” together, because they’re often seen as a zero-sum game. In other words, to be a person who takes no shit, you have to be a dick. Likewise, it’s often thought that if you commit to not being a dick, you’re going to have to take a lot of shit. “Not necessarily,” this maxim says. You can do both.

He also said, “It’s possible to clearly name the harm a person or group is doing without scapegoating them. The refusal to scapegoat someone actually sharpens your critique, rather than diminishing it.”

Again, I noticed a commitment to doing two things that are often thought to be incompatible. In clearly naming injustice, we often resort to scapegoating; likewise the refusal to scapegoat is often conflated with an obfuscation of injustice. Not necessarily, and in fact the refusal to scapegoat strengthens the naming of injustice.

Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls,
or drink the blood of goats?

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving
and make good your vows to the Most High.

Whoever offers me the sacrifice of thanksgiving honors me;
but to those who keep in my way will I show the salvation of God.

Psalm 50:13-14, 24

Do you think I actually eat the goats and bulls you offer? How about offering me a sacrifice of thanksgiving? And how about doing what you say you’re going to do?

Your sacrifices all by themselves don’t honor me, but gratitude does. And honor is good as far as it goes, but if you walk in my ways, you’ll see salvation.

Salvation is a way, not a possession. And salvation is a gift to be thankful for, not a reward for correct and comprehensive sacrifices.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive theology of inspiration, of course, but it occurred to me that, as we read the Scriptures and think about what God is saying about himself to us through them, that two things can be true at the same time:

1. God was truly at work in the stories told in the Scriptures, and God was truly at work in the inspiration of the Scriptures, and God is truly at work through the Scriptures to speak to us today everything we need for life and salvation, and
2. Ancient peoples could only describe how God was at work among them from within their metaphysical assumptions about God and the world.

Thus, we need not assume that their specific descriptions of how God was working are “objectively true,” just as we don’t necessarily assume their metaphysical assumptions about God and the world are true.

For example, today we don’t assume that mixing a little wine with one’s drinking water will help people with their stomach ailments, but this is clearly what Paul assumed when he wrote to Timothy to do this very thing. Likewise, we need not assume that Naomi’s best explanation for her tragic situation – “The Lord’s hand has gone out against me” (Ruth 1:13b) – is the absolute truth of the situation.

Ascribing the cause of the events in one’s life and in the world to God was a typical semitic way of giving honor to God. Just because the Book of Ruth records that Naomi described her situation this way doesn’t mean we must do so also. That kind of “flat” reading of the Scriptures isn’t a way of taking them seriously. It actually doesn’t take them seriously enough.

God worked and spoke through humans, and thus through the language they spoke, and the worldview they held. And God speaks to us today through the Scriptures, but we have very different assumptions about the universe and about divinity than they did, and thus we must learn to interpret. We must learn how to hear the voice of God’s Spirit for us, today, in a fresh way that speaks from within our metaphysical assumptions in the same way God spoke to them from within their metaphysical assumptions.

From today’s daily office lectionary readings (selections from Mark 6:1-6):

And [Jesus]… comes into his native country… and when the Sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue; and many who heard were astonished… and they were scandalized by him. And Jesus said to them: “A prophet is not dishonored except in his native country and among his own kin and in his household.” And he could not perform any feat of power there… and he was amazed at their lack of faith.

It’s hard to avoid the connection between the dishonor and lack of faith displayed by Jesus’s hometown and Jesus’s inability to perform any “feat of power” there. In other places, Jesus blesses those he has healed by saying “Your faith has made you well.” Clearly there is some kind of alchemy between God’s power and human faith.

This makes people nervous, because it’s rife with potential for harmful misinterpretation. The connection between healing and faith has been used by some to blame people for their own maladies, which is so deeply crippling for the soul. But if, in our efforts to move away from this kind of harm, we disconnect our faith from God’s power, we’re left with no one to blame for suffering and evil except God. And this is truly toxic for our faith.

Better to learn to live in the uncomfortable subtleties and tensions and mysteries of this connection than to dismiss it out of hand, I think.