Returning . . . an answer to Billy's question.

well my friends . . .

In the eyes of a Jew, sin is breaking the Torah. Yet, Jesus comes along and really compromises the general use of the Torah among the spiritual leaders in his society. Suddenly it's no longer eating pork, or touching fish that makes one sinful. Pay attention to the contrast he sets up here. Jesus was a layman. He was no Ph.D. He was not a man who had spent his life in a library contemplating the depths of metaphysical truths. The power of his parables and his proverbs is the fact that they should be obvious, only we can't see them for their simplicity. The simple truth is that things in the world are actually the opposite of what they may seem. The Pharisees in the presence of Jesus and his disciples were attempting to show them as being inferior because they could not fully keep the law. The Torah, in all it's detail, proclaimed Jesus and his disciples as sinful. They touched things that were unclean. They broke the Sabbath by exerting themselves to pick grain. In the generally held view of the day, they were sinful.

Yet, Jesus has a different perspective on God, God's purpose in the world, and God's intention with the Torah. Jesus says it is not the letter of the law, but the heart behind it. It is not the details, but the purpose that the Torah holds for the world. It is in this light that Jesus expresses the contrast of how the Pharisees read the law, with how he reads it. The Pharisees see the law as the infallible dictation of God's will for the people of Israel, therefore these sinful fishermen should recognize their proper submissive, 'sinful' status. They should not tread on the spiritual high-ground of the pious Pharisees. Jesus reverses their assumption, saying that it is not the food they eat or the things they touch defiling the person, but the attitudes of heart that come forth revealing a persons impurity.

I really don't think Jesus ever intended for this to be taken to the extremes of introspective psychological torture, which Western Christianity seems to have been plagued by since Augustine. In fact I think the overt introversion that has been typical of Christian thought has done much to distract us from the social redemption that Jesus and his early followers sought with the fullness of their being. The moral compass that we have long used to alert us to sin has too often become a moral scalpel to disect our intentions until there is little life left in us.

To a Pharisee to repent was to return to strict observance of the Torah, word for word. For Jesus to repent was to return to the heart of the Torah, which was the ultimate will of God. Simply put: for Jesus the will of God was the overarching peace of God (shalom) to dwell among men and women living in a community ethically centered on service and love. This is the theological measure that the Torah and the interpretation/application there of was weighed. If an interpretation of the Law, even if the Law itself! were to compromise the well-being (shalom) of humanity it must be pushed aside. In this way we seek not a perfect understanding of the Law as so many were in Jesus' day. Instead, we seek first the Kingdom, and things are set right as God wills them to be.

The early Christian community was convinced that the person of Jesus, his character and the actions they remembered from him were the standard of how this Kingdom was incarnated into our world. As the Torah became flesh in Jesus (who broke the Torah by the way), the World/Kingdom that the Torah alluded to became flesh in the community that followed him. It was a community free of domininance, which upheld the poor and oppressed as the standard.

So, what then does it mean to repent?

Well, in light of my last post, I see sin as the broken competitive nature of our world. Sin is a term for the social games which keep others at disadvantage. The structures of society that maintain separation between rich and poor, holy and righteous, privileged and oppressed are the lucid display of evil in human nature. The greatest denial of God is the theft of human dignity. Sin is the action of the person which would displace God with our self, and therefore see fit to have other humans serve and worship us. This is the epitome of sinfulness. I think we often get carried away with the worry that our bad thoughts will condemn us to hell; meanwhile our thoughtless daily activities and ignorance to social patterns of domination and violence contribute to hell's presence in the periphery of our society.

Heschel says, "The Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, means return. Yet it also means answer. Return to God is an answer to him." To a Pharisee repentance is a return to Law-keeping. To Jesus this was not enough. The Pharisees kept the Law, and the world was every bit as broken as it had ever been. The various religious leaders of his day used the Law and their interpretations of it to oppress other people whom, being sinful, were inferior to them. Jesus instead took a stance with the poor, the marginal, the whores, the 'sinners'. He stood alongside all these less pious people and declared that they cared more for setting the world right, that is, for seeing the Kingdom come, than the spiritual elite did. These people were answering God's heart, not with feeble words, but by living in service and equality. It wasn't about a benign moral existence. When spirituality is controlled by the rich and privileged it is used to castrate those of lower class. Jesus taught in a way that freed the sinful from the tyranny of the spiritual elite, and the marginalized found the living God on their side. These marginal people then entered the Kingdom of God with power restoring human dignity to the world around them. These actions, these words of life, these hands serving daily were their return to God. Repentance is lending oneself to the restoration of shalom.

When Jesus speaks of all the persecution his believers will face, this is why: there is no social structure that will be left in tact. Returning to God is a dangerous activity. Jesus spoke with little remorse that the Temple, which was the center of all political, social, and religious activity, would be demolished. No stone would be left on top of another. This attitude toward his society was radically subversive. Repenting is returning to God and serving his Kingdom. The Kingdom is no supplement to the way things are, it will destroy everything we know, including our concepts of right and wrong, all for the sake of watching the seeds of Eden grow up anew.

Sinners

What exactly is wrong with tax collectors, whores and sinners?

To a first century Jew a tax collector was one who had sold out his own people, and therefore cut short their status as God's people, for the sake of getting a pay check. They were traitors. It was surprisingly difficult to make money as a tax-collector. Zaccheaus was a rare exception as a tax collector who had been able to extort enough money out of people to gain some wealth. No doubt, this meant abusing his Roman connections more, and thus making himself more hated than most of the 'lesser' tax collectors like say Matthew. We don't hear any stories of Matthew having to give his wealth back to those he had stolen from, because in all likelihood he had no wealth to give back. He like most tax collectors probly made just enough money being a tax collector on which to eat. Sad situation: being hated by everyone, and only making enough money to scrape by. Let's keep in mind that tax collectors lived a miserable existence. They were lonely, afraid, hated, spit on, and making ends meat generally.

Whores? Well, taking off our puritan blinders for a minute, prostitutes live probably the most miserable lives of anyone. Their daily existence steals all hope of finding any human dignity in their lives. They are abused in every way a person can be abused. The aspect of human existence (sex) that should bring one the closest kind of intimacy is used to steal from them the chance of knowing and being known. On a Freudian level, many of us put prostitution into some kind of moral structure of thought. We should stop doing this. Prostitution has little to do with sexuality. The overwhelming majority of whores are such because they have NO other options. Starve to death or sell something that can always find a purchaser. Romantic notions of sex are ridiculous in the context of poverty.

Sinners? Hmmm. People who cuss right? Well, in the Bible this could refer to people who don't keep the Torah/Law. And, in that sense it could also apply to social law-breakers, meaning actual criminals. It could also just apply to people who are less desirable, people who work jobs that none of us would work. Street vendors. Sea men. In Jesus day, all the jobs that required one to be "unclean" by Torah standards were therefore jobs that only sinful people would work. It was very reminiscent of the caste-system in India. Certain jobs are for untouchables, who are untouchable because of past misdeeds, but seeing as they're 'untouchable' are required to live in ways that would probly mean they will be reborn untouchable. Since they do such deeds the society mistreats them, but what choice to they have. Sinners live in a world of vicious circles. Yet, it seems it is not fate, but other people that continue to shove them into the circles.

Now, growing up in church this was not my understanding of 'tax collectors, whores, and sinners.' I was told that these were bad people. If you grow up in church the world is presented in black in white terms. Everything is simple and these were simply people who chose the dark, seedy side of life. I should therefore choose carefully so that I didn't end up like them.

Yet, in truth, tax collectors and whores are what they are out of economic social reasons as much as for poor moral decisions. But, not sin . . . right? . . .

Actually, when Jesus uses the term sin, he never seems to be referring to personal moral lapses. He uses it as it was typically thought of in his day, as people who broke the Torah Law. Yet, he seems to always have "grace" for such lapses. So often when we say grace what we really mean is this:

God holds to the letter of the Law.
When we break it, punishment must occur.
Jesus being God, suffers for us.
Our law-breaking is atoned for.
Thus Jesus/God shows us grace, and treats us kindly even though we didn't keep in step with the letter of the Law.

I think this is crap. I think theologically it is a sign of God entrapped in his own system. It is a God devoid of creativity, and a God who is slave to the human conception of consistency. It is a grossly perverted sense of what 'Justice' is. I have no trouble leaving behind this view of the stern-faced God, because it is garbage.

Grace is this: instead of seeing sin in terms of a person's moral lapse, Jesus sees it for what it is, a social/economic category. "Sinners" were not pawns of the cosmic ontological struggle between good and evil, they were people trapped in social networks that on a practical level condemned them to a category of 'less human'. In Jewish society a fisherman was a sinner, because the only way he could make money was to touch things that the Old Testament declared unclean. He was therefore sinful by vocation, and of a lesser caste. Consider that next time you read as Peter says 'Away from me Lord, I am a sinful man.' Corpses were unclean for Jews to touch. But in the funeral procession Jesus takes the dead girl by the hand. Oops, the Son of God was sinful.

Jesus shatters the concept of sin. He makes his closest friends out of sinful people: fishermen, a tax collector. He touches corpses, people with leprosy, he speaks with gentiles, he has multiple associations with prostitutes. He allows women to do outrageous things in his presence, subverting the patriarchal culture. All these things were sin in the eyes of the first-century Jew.

Consider when Jesus stands before the adulterous woman and says he does not condemn her, but tells her to leave her life of sin. What was this womans sin? Sex outside of marriage? That would be breaking the Torah. I think we read this story and see a woman who fell into a lustful relationship with a man and got caught. What if she lived in poverty like the majority of Palestinian society at the time. What if adultery were a way of getting dinner for that evening. This is conjecture, but it is also possible. Adultury is rarely as simple as we think it should be. At the most basic level we can read this story in John 8 as a story of moral degredation and Jesus giving forgiveness. I think we can also see it from another, likely perspective. In Jesus' society women were disadvantaged. They were also generally the ones who suffered the worst from poverty. Women were generally prevented from aquiring skills that could lead to them making a living. Thus when a woman's family fell on hard times, and no friends or extended family could offer help, there was little a woman could do to bring in extra income. Often husbands were required to prostitute their wives in such situations for lack of other options. Or, wives could offer illicit favors when the husband was desperately seeking work . . . The point is, this womans sin was likely caused by much more than lustful desire.

When Jesus tells her to leave her life of sin, he might be saying more than 'obey your moral compass'. If the Torah was written for people and people not made for the Torah, he might be saying something more along the lines of don't sell out to social sin for the sake of putting food on the table. Don't let poverty force you into relationships that steal the humanity the God of the Torah gives you.

I would feel that slightly cruel except that Jesus was doing something about it. The community he was gathering around him was one which became known for providing for each other. They lived in such a way that poverty never needed mean that another had no choice but be a 'sinner'. Jesus also crushed views that would say someone was sinful based purely on the fact that they fished for a living. Yet, in it's early stages, the egalitarian nature of the Jesus momement provided an alternative for prostitutes and tax collectors. It forgave them their offenses, but also provided financially so that widows and orphans were not doomed to disreputable vocations.

then we got the idea for church buildings and it all went to crap.
but i thought it was an interesting shift in perspective.

Why Worship Music Sucks

I write most of my songs in the key of E,
it's a bad habit i need to get out of.

The key of E:

E
F#minor
G#minor
A
B
C#minor
D#diminished
E

I guess in theory one could say that minor chords are equal to major chords. Minor chords tend to feel heavy, sometimes bitter. So, in music there should be a relatively equal amount of bitter/heavy chords and major chords. One could say that major chords represent "completeness". They sound full to the ear, like nothing is lacking.

This is why worship music sucks.

The average devo song written in the key of E will consist of E, A, B, and sometimes C#minor. This formula applies to 95% of the worship music out there. Shift it to any key: take the 3 major chords and one, at most two of the minor chords and rip off a psalm or something out of Isaiah and you could win the next Dove award.

Why does this make worship music suck?

Because worship music is like much of our consumer culture . . . it likes to ignore the way things are, in preference of smiling to make oneself happy. By playing only major chords perhaps we'll forget that minor chords exist. And, I think it is this attitude that is increasingly making church irrelevant in our culture.

I'm not happy all the time.
I don't use the words 'holy' or 'glory' in normal conversation.
My life consists of a good moments and plenty of bad ones, and in the bad ones I long for resolution. And, resolution is something far too often lost in worship music. Instead we sing songs that somehow give the impression that we are called to live our lives in major chords.

Most songs, even depressing ones, end on the key note or on a note that feels like it will be followed by the key note. I wonder if God did this on purpose. What I mean is that a song can go a thousand different ways. There is an unlimited bredth of different melodies that can come from any key, but it seems that all, if they end, should end by returning to the key note. Our lives seem to do the same thing.

Life is written in a key.
It starts with one chord.
It proceeds as a melody.
There are moments where it seems full (majors).
There are moments where it seems lacking (minors).
There are moments of excitement (sevens),
and tension (diminished).
One moment leads to another.
Full moments may seem like they should mark the end,
but the song continues,
and when the proper time comes:
resolve. We return to the beginning.

I imagine the state of praise music is the way it is, more as a byproduct of our mental state as a culture, still clinging to the American Dream. As Americans maybe our holy hour on Sunday is the last place we can pretend life is really an affair of major chords. Families know their messed up outside the churches walls, its only Sunday morning when we all play our personal role on Leave It to Beaver, and pretend like our perfect lawns don't have weeds in them.

For church to matter, we need songs that are creative with melody. We need songs that display our imperfections musically and lyrically, and long for resolve.

the gospel apart from feminism is no gospel at all . . .

Adam came first.
Then Eve.
Adam was benignly obedient, though gullible.
Eve . . . ehh, not so much.
Adam (men) now as a result has to labor and toil.
Eve stays home and raises babies.
The greedy son kills the good one. . . again, thanks to mom.
Their daughters . . . well we don't know their names, and maybe that's for the best if they're anything like dear old Eve.
So the story goes.

This is Divine Revelation and historical fact according to some. It is a reliable source that women are not to ultimately be trusted (by men), and that with this classic case study of what happens when women are left to their own devices is destined to be bad. So, basically religion is a 'man' thing. This is something revealed by God himself. Don't question it.

Yeah, right. Lot's of people are questioning it now. Not least, Elisabeth Fiorenza. I'm reading her book In Memory of Her. I had heard of the book for years, before I started reading it this month. The "Her" the title is referring to is the anonymous woman in Mark 14. This woman makes a bold move to come in to the Passover feast, in the presence of the heads political-religious authority, and pour perfumed oil on Jesus' head. Now any Jew with an IQ over 50 would have seen the symbolism here. The woman was not trying to make Jesus smell good, she was annointing him as the King of Israel. To pour oil on another's head would have instantly brought to mind stories of Elijah and Elisha annointing the former kings. Recall who Jesus was in the presence of . . . religious teachers. I assure you this sort of biblical allusion was not lost on them.

Keep in mind also, that this was no cheap bottle of olive oil. This was perfumed oil. John reports that it was worth close to a year's wages. Imagine someone pouring 30,000 dollars worth of perfume on someone else's head. The likelihood of this being a mere gesture of repentance at the feet of Jesus, sounds very unlikely!!

Here we have something far more volatile than a sign of an anonymous woman acknowledging the divinity of Jesus and asking for forgiveness. We have a woman (evidently one that could afford to possess a $30,000 bottle of perfumed oil and spend it as she saw fit) walking into a room with representatives of religious and political authority present, and in their sight in open defiance of patriachal culture, annointing Jesus as the King of Israel, a.k.a. the Son of God.

The likelihood is that this woman was rich, and very influential. Evidently she was also bold enough to make an explosive political statement in the presence of the most feared leaders of Jewish culture. Notice it wasn't Peter or John that annointed Jesus. Jesus' male disciples either lacked the courage, or didn't believe in him enough to make such a statement, especially in the presence of such society. No, Peter who had claimed Jesus as the Christ, didn't have the courage to proclaim this to heads of power, but a woman did. They attack her as frivilous, not to mention insubordinate . . . and Jesus defends her. In fact he makes a statement that his message is now inseperable from her action. He assumes that if we proclaim him as King/Lord, we must also proclaim the woman who annointed him as such!

Fiorenza's point to all of this is that we have been deprived of this; that Jesus' words have been suppressed partially because we no longer even know the woman's name. Matthew and Mark are silent on her name. John, written at least 25 years after Mark, tries to connect the dots by assigning her to be Mary, Martha's sister. Luke, written for Gentiles with an even greater bias against women, reduces this woman from being a woman of influence and wealth to a sinful woman seeking repentance. In Luke and John she does not have the privilege of annointing Jesus as King, but instead pours the oil on his feet, re-emphasizing her lowly status and Jesus as the mediator of mercy. The proud woman who boldly proclaimed Christ's identity is reduced to a friend or a whore groveling at his feet in need of forgiveness.

Yet, in reading Mark we can question why is it that immediately after this particular event Judas goes to the high priests to betray Jesus? Had he gone too far in allowing a woman to annoint him? What kind of Kingdom would this Messiah bring if a female was allowed to serve the role of Elijah the prophet, annointing the King? Surely a woman's annointing could not count. Surely this could not be part of the gospel of Jesus the Christ!!(Annointed!) How could this homeless rabbi who had spent so many nights hungry sleeping in the open wandering from town to town let a woman waste $30,000 on an annointing that couldn't really be told to others with any due seriousness? What kind of army would follow a king like that???

It's well known to anyone who knows history, that history belongs to the victors. The last blow that is given to the repressed peoples of history is having their memories stolen. How many American history books in U.S. schools are written by Native Americans? How many Mexican authors are allowed to teach us about Texas history? How many Iraqis are given free voice on U.S. TV right now?

How many female authors are there in the Bible?

The Bible is a rhetorical document: designed to persuade particular audiences to believe in Jesus of Nazareth. It makes sense that it would have been counter-productive in the first century to make the NT a women's liberation document when Graeco-Roman culture was the desired target. Yet, if there were any documents written by women they are largely lost to us now. We have no history of 'Acts of the Female Apostles', why?

With historical critical knowledge it is becoming increasingly hard to justify the idea that Jesus' movement was really patriachal in nature, or that women were allowed only minor supportive roles. It appears instead that the memory of women in Christianity has been firmly repressed by men who have seen Christianity as one more religious means to preserve the secondary status of women in history.

It appears that the Bible is a male document, with male biases, but which still contains numerous traces of how things really were. And, they were much differnt than what we have long thought to be the case. Recovering the meaning of such traces becomes an act of history-making which thereby gives life and freedom to those whom politically-motivated religious doctrines have long silenced.

I find this to be quite in line with Jesus' character. After all, he was a man who seemed to challenge everything that lended support to hierarchies and power structures that held so many men and women from having life to the full. I don't believe there is a single place where Jesus upholds patriarchy in family or society as a God-ordained system. Only in this understanding to I find it possible to see how a community arose, fixed on the belief that Christ superceded all distinctions:
Jews/Gentiles
Slave/Free
even Male/Female (Gal. 3:28)

Others

What to do with the crazy people? This is one of many questions that all societies have to somehow figure out. For most of human history the answer was simple, keep them away. This still goes on, in high schools at least. You have your varied social cliques, and then, the 'other' people. The strange ones who kinda just get ignored. Whether this applies to people with physiological insanity, nasty diseases, or any number of other differences, we have an innate tendency as humans to exclude the other.

It was only when the 'other' did not respect such exclusion that in times past there was seen a need to intimidate or kill for social security. Madmen were laughable; the butt of jokes. Yet, still there was a provisional respect for the 'freedom of their soul' so long as it did not interfere with the greater social good. A schizophrenic in the middle ages was excluded from society at large, but only treatened or killed when they did harm to another person whom was in on the society.

Micheal Foucault points out that in such times, the social outcast was still left to freedom whereby they could roam the countryside unhindered, and often provided for by social charity as long as the did not interfere with the society which required a 'healthy' distance from them.

Yet, in entering into the modern period, with society increasing in complexity, this freedom grew to be distrusted. As society grew further in its reach and more delicate in its structure, the potential for 'mishaps' caused by those free outcasts came to be more costly and disruptive. Something had to be done.

Thus, social exclusion evolved from locking the 'others' out, to locking them in. The asylum and prison were born. At first there was little differentiation between the two. Both served the purpose of "controlling" those people who did not quite conform to the norms of the dominate social structure. At first psychotic schizophrenics were put in the same prison courtyard as tax evaders . . . often with macabre results to say the least. As time went on differentiation between inmates was deemed necessary.

Now, here is what I find interesting. What we see in the evolution of the penile/mental health system, says a lot about us. Consider, in the middle ages, exclusion was one means of a society defining itself. For people to belong to a society, they need a proper social understanding. In other words, every group/clique requires communal understanding of who they are as a group. One part of how this social definition is accomplished is by exclusion of intolerable behavior. In ancient times this has taken the form of simply locking out those who did not fit, but in modern times we no longer see this as plausible. Somewhere in our social conscious we have found different social values, that have changed the nature of how we deal with otherness.

First, we can see a deep insecurity about the fragility of life, and of the society. The complexity of the modern state is due in large part to the vast quantity of people it is dealing with. We have come a long way from warring tribal clans. Yet, as humans, we cannot really fathom life outside of the social context we have inherited. If America falls, then in some way I cease to exist . . . whether that mean I die physically, or simply that I lose all that has been characteristic of life up to now. In the modern world we live in the prepetual fear of losing our society which gives us life, or of losing our life itself. This fear manifests itself in thousands of safety mechanisms. Seat belts. Smoke detectors. Homeland securtiy. The jail system.

Think about the terror people live in when a criminal escapes prison. Why is this? After all, we did send him to prison to get "reformed" right?? Right? . . . anyone? What is it about the magical dates set by parole boards that make us assume that people have been 'reformed' on any level? And furthermore, what do we really mean by "reformed"? Perhaps just that they are now a docile cog to fill a space in the big social machine.

Docile . . . hmmm. Consider this, in earlier times, should one have escaped prison the town as a whole would probly have banded together with torches, pitchforks, and a few shotguns, and swept through the fields the convict . . . and when they saw him, they likely would have killed him on the spot. There wasn't much tolerance then. But, our society is sedated with tolerance. Here is the other thing I see in our prison system. In former times, when outcasts still served as a means to define what "we" are not, judgement and punishment were public affairs. Now, judgment takes place in private courtrooms away from the public eye. Punishment even more so is removed from the public eye. If the average person on the street were to see what goes on in the average prison, one wonders how long our penile system would stand. Yet, most of us, myself included, are ignorant to the deplorable conditions of prisons, as well as the racial/economic bias within them that casts trenchant doubt on the judicial system that feeds them full of mostly poor and minority inmates.

There are few angry mobs screaming for judgment in our society. When there are, they are not allowed into the immediate courtroom. Judgment is not much of a community affair, nor is punishment. What punishment we are allowed to see is quite sterile. This is in contrast to the ways in which the community at large used to join together punishing those who would compromise its unity, or conformity. We no longer join in together condemning what "we" are not. We merely entrust the offenders to 'the system'. What does this say about us??

I think that our system is designed to pacify not only the inmates, but ourselves as well. It is a sterile emotionless system, that teaches those outside as well as those within, to merely 'trust' that it is working . . . and go back to bed America, it's a long day at work tomorrow. In other words, it is a means by which we teach ourselves that we are 'rational and objective' in our judgments of others. We taught to ignore the demographics as best as possible and just believe that the system is not prejudice . . . because we are not prejudiced people. In the system we see what we want to believe about ourselves as Americans. We want to believe we are ethical in the way we treat those "others" who don't quite measure up, or fit within our society. We want to believe that we are 'reforming' the others, and that the means we have set up to do so are just and honorable. We want to believe in ourselves, but have found blindness and self-deception are the only means by which we can achieve this.

We want to believe.