Persistent Questions
Thursdays, Word Team meets, 9:30 to 11, to help the preacher
find something to say about the Sunday readings, ten days out. We’ve been
meeting for years, decades maybe, a shifting group with a few regulars. It has
been the trip of a lifetime.
We are all different; we gave up trying to find a common
purpose, or even a common set of reading questions. Our one firm rule: we go
around the circle once for initial thoughts before we get into discussion or
any kind of interchange. That has worked for us.
I’d like to report on my persistent questions from this
enterprise. They are mostly mine, though I think some team members share them.
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What do we do about our own moral and intellectual
maturity? We are, most of us, older than
pretty much anybody writing or reported on in either testament; all of us are
older than Jesus. We grew up in the center of something like an empire, as
citizens. Most of the voices in the testaments come from the margins. These
points are usually taken in a self-critical way: we may have lost our youthful
enthusiasm and sense of urgency. We can recover that from these texts. We may
have become too comfortable with our astonishing privilege to take good account
of the perspectives of the poor and the powerless, to see the urgency of basic
social reform. We can recover also that perspective from the texts.
But what do we do with the possibility that we may have
learned things in 50 or 80 years that
were just invisible to any of those speaking in the Bible? Did the requirements
of empire, of large scale government, call forth real values, invisible to
those on the margins? Have the discoveries of contemporary science have shown
us objects of reverence (and elicited varieties of reverence) unknown to the
best thinkers in the First Century or earlier?
Progressives of many denominations routinely make this kind
of correction with respect to sexism, saying pretty clearly, “This is an evil
and insidious pattern of thought, common and accepted in many enlightened
circles in biblical times, now seen to be totally unacceptable – in light of
experiences that were unavailable to people in those times.” The shift to
inclusive language in scripture readings reflects this idea.
The possibility of such correction doesn’t end with
sexism. Think about the New Testament
idea that wealth and true faith are fundamentally at odds. This should frighten
a U.S. audience very much, living as we do in what would have passed for
palaces in the First Century. But we also know that our personal wealth enables
us to do unquestionably good things, to work effectively for all kinds of good
results. Further, the amassing of wealth through corporations and large-scale
business dealings makes levels of benevolence possible which would have seemed
like miracles to people even a hundred years ago. Bill Gates devotes his
fortune to eradicating diseases worldwide; could any other entity have
concentrated that much wealth on this problem? Steve Jobs, whose management
style had elements of cruelty and ruthlessness and sheer perversity, made the
company that standardized universal communication for much of the world. We saw
the results of this after the North Minneapolis hurricane: relief efforts
coordinated through Iphones and Facebook were astonishingly effective. And, can anyone name a philanthropist who did
a hundredth as much for humanity as Nicolai Tesla whose ideas about power
transmission made rural electrification possible?
So, when we preach on wealth, we are caught. We recognize
that none of us are going to strip down to even “First Century wealthy,” and we
also recognize that we have a personal, selfish stake in justifying wealth at a
certain level – whatever level we have or aspire to. We are not disinterested
thinkers. At the same time, the New
Testament on wealth is over-simple.
There are other issues where this comes up. In biblical protests against injustice, you
don’t find arguments for clearly written laws, an efficient bureaucracy,
effective public health safeguards, good roads, the promotion of trade. What
one hears are calls for mercy and fairness and basic decency – all reasonable,
all part of the mix, but not what inspires those kinds of public service that
prevent misery, that tend over time toward prosperity for the poor, that make
oppression more difficult. To the extent that we leave all that out, focusing
our recommendations on direct service, we channel our children into the Peace
Corps, into nursing and medicine, and
leave those with administrative and organizational gifts without a spiritual mandate
– left to think of themselves as largely “secular.”
We leave out science as well. I just learned that Saint
Patrick is the patron saint of engineers; he introduced some Roman technology
into Ireland. He’s better known as an exterminator of snakes and an explainer
of the trinity. There is no working engineer in the pantheon of saints. There
is no saying of Jesus, “And, when you get done feeding the poor, you might
consider trying to invent something cool.” So, where does that leave the kid
who wants to become an engineer or an inventor? Do we really want to say to
such a kid, Sunday after Sunday, that his or her ambitions are irrelevant to
what is REALLY important?
To put it simply, thinking about scripture has to be both:
hearing the message and recognizing the unavoidable limits of that message. And
preaching has to reflect the same dual understanding.
This is one of the ongoing issues that make Word Team
exciting for me.
This first question addressed the possibility that we may
know things that biblical writers didn’t know, may appreciate values that they
neglected. A second major question for preachers, as I see the matter, goes in
just the opposite direction: what insights might be contained in scripture that
are not just difficult for us but beyond the horizon of our understanding?
One version of this question points the issue: “How smart
was Jesus?” We are accustomed to praising Jesus for compassion, courage,
humane-ness. Those are all followable virtues. We have the ideal clearly in
mind. We know why it is important. The problem is living up to it. So, we often
understand Jesus as caring more deeply about matters that we also care about
than anyone before or since, immersing himself more fully in uncontroversial
truths. But it is also worth asking, “Was he, in the normal understanding, an
intellectual prodigy?” Such people do arise, even in places with limited access
to education. The lack of education blocks some manifestations, allows others.
Is it possible that Jesus understood connections that we just don’t get, that
he had a vision of the fundamental human condition broader than we can imagine?
A quote from Tolstoy’s “What I Believe” shows the urgency of the problem: “To put an engine in position, to heat the boiler, to set it in motion, but not to attach the connecting belt, was what was done with the teaching of Christ when people began to teach that you can be a Christian without fulfilling the law of non-resistance to him that is evil.” Tolstoy’s study of the New Testament placed pacifism in the center of Jesus’ teaching – and presumably, placed every military enterprise whatever outside of that teaching. One can hardly accuse the author of War and Peace of being naïve about the reasons for going into battle: Napoleon was an enemy worth defeating. Yet Tolstoy eventually adopts a pacifist Christianity.
What does a preacher do, finding in the texts a clear message that runs counter to the moral intuitions of his or her country, and to the moral intuitions of most of the congregation? How much respect does such a message deserve? Was Jesus seeing something that we miss, or was he simply overlooking very hard cases of personal and national self-defense? On the answer to this kind of question rides the whole relationship between the preacher and his or her audience.
I ran into a simpler example in my early catechism classes in Forest City. I had read the passage in Matthew where Jesus says, “Swear no oath at all.” I asked the priest about it. He denied that the passage was there, saying that Jesus would have said, “Keep your oaths.” He just couldn’t imagine that Jesus could have cared about swearing in court. It is pretty strange to us to. I generally ask judges for the non-religious formula (“on pain of perjury”) because it seems to me it might be worth holding this line. (Jesus didn’t say, “Thou shalt not” all that often.) But I don’t understand what is at stake here. There are some reflections in ordinary language philosophy, coming out of Wittgenstein and Austin, that criticize special or careful speech, technical speech, extra-trustworthy speech in ways that seem to suggest that some very big mistake lies behind this simple act of privileging some utterances as especially serious or especially accurate. This might lead to a different appreciation of what is morally or spiritually important, with oaths, and what other kinds of attitudes go along with the rejection of oaths.
I suspect that this oath matter is important. If one takes it seriously, as the early Quakers did, one is obliged to make a fuss on occasions when nobody wants fuss; imagine the President refusing to take the oath of office. Further, one is obliged to make a big deal out of something that most people regard as no deal at all. These are very difficult acts, for the normal Minnesotan. As a preacher, one hesitates for a long time to recommend such acts. One also hesitates to say that this was likely just some trivial Jesus-opinion, out of the mainstream of Jesus’ fundamental teaching, which we, of course, fully understand, because it isn’t rocket science. (It’s just all about love, you know.) Well, maybe some of what Jesus had to say IS rocket science, and maybe he had the brain to think such thoughts, and it’s our job to catch up as best we can.
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I like Word Team because it does important intellectual work
in a regular and orderly way, over a long enough time to get something
accomplished. I can imagine, in the Church I hope for, every parish providing
an open forum for people to struggle with the large questions of loyalty to a
sacred tradition. Such a conversation needs many sorts of specialized
knowledge, particularly historical and linguistic knowledge, and also the sense
of priorities and proportion that come from having had experiences and made
mistakes and suffered. It is close to the perfect meeting place for minds of
very different formation. It comes close to realizing that line from Paul,
“There are many gifts but the same spirit.”
