11/16
I’m surprised to find a
young man inside a refrigerator box asleep on the steps. That hasn’t happened
in awhile. And behind him I see crutches. Sorry, but you’re going to have to
leave…services coming up…
Uh, it’ll take a few
minutes, OK?
Uh, yeah, sure. I ask
Stephen S to see if he needs help getting it together.
Jeremy’s first Sunday
back. He’s warming up and getting ready. Russ is first to arrive after our adventures
yesterday passing out fliers for West-Park at the Avakian-West dialogue.
Our first hymn is Joyful,
Joyful We Adore Thee, aka Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, to which Jeremy adds a little
Eric Burdon and the Animals We Gotta Get Out of this Place. (….It
actually does work, though we sing it
straight…and a nod to Eddie and the
Otters for that idea, though that’s another story…https://www.facebook.com/eddieandtheotters)
Jeremy has worked out a
sung response to our Psalm 123: To you O Lord we
lift our eyes.
Our reflection scripture
is Judges 4: 1-7. Just a teaser on the story of Deborah. One of those places
where the lectionary cops out. So I have us do a readers’ theatre of the rest
of the story.
I was originally going to
stick with Matthew, but when I heard about their discussion last week about the
difference in perspective between men and women, I knew I had to use a rare
story that was driven by a woman’s agency.
This was the time of the
Judges. The confederation of tribes had leaders who were both adjudicators and
military leaders. She wants to take on (and take out) Jabin, King of the Canaanites. (Who were
indigenous to the land, by the way…) Her commander Barak is hesitant to go
without Deborah, so she agrees to go, only she warns Barak that Sisera, Jabin’s
general, will fall to a woman.
Sisera’s army is routed.
He flees to the tent of Jael, whose people are allied with Sisera. After
calming him and giving him milk to relax, when he falls asleep, she drives a
tent peg through his head. And when Barak arrives, she shows him what she did.
This is clearly an FX/HBO
style story. Mature audiences…Language,
violence, sexual situations…shifting alliances like the houses in Game of Thrones, or the gangs in Sons of Anarchy. As Marsha reminds us in
community organizing, there are no
permanent friends, no permanent enemies…
Russ raises the issue that what we’re dealing with
here is the myth of redemptive violence,
biblically based. Our American culture is saturated with it. (See above). Even
in the dialogue between Avakian and West, neither spoke definitively on the
violence issue. And the tu quoque
argument about the violence of the empire gets us nowhere.
Marsha likes that Jael’s
action is direct and to the point. John R says, That’s reality…God is not the kindly grandfather, God is just God, the
Bible is what it is.
And for Jeremy, that’s why
he chooses not to rely on the Bible. And Russ speaks to how these stories
become the mythic narrative that supports what is.
There are a number of
points to make.
1. We all have a hermeneutic, an interpretive key by which we interpret
everything else. What Cornell West said yesterday for him, IE, God is love,that
goes for me too. Anything doesn’t make sense through that lens has to be
witnessed against. As former Riverside pastor Brad Braxton once said, sometimes
we are called on to preach against the text. We are called to witness against,
create an alternative to a culture of redemptive violence.
2. The time of judges was a time pre-monarchy. In a time of
covenant based confederacy, the emergence of a woman’s leadership is much
easier than in a hierarchical monarchy.
3. Which is why historically, women’s leadership would emerge in
horizontally based church structures while vertical hierarchies have been more
resistant to change.
4. We need to be about the work of creating communities of covenant
relationship, committed to love that is effective, not sentimental and resist
the culture of redemptive violence. Our own embodiments of the beloved
community to which we are called.
Our final song of the day
is Soon and very Soon…While we are
singing, Pastor Kadisha has entered the sanctuary with his daughter. He joins
us for our final circle of blessing, with little Xavier joyfully singing Amen.
Jeremy rocks out with one
more Beethoven/Burdon riff…
Pastor Kadisha will have
his first service here this afternoon.
The Revcoms are upstairs celebrating yesterday's turn out, over 1500 at Riverside Church.
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