Widening the circle of inclusion

8/20

Still working on details for a long term relationship with Noche. Nate and Teddy hard at work hanging mirrors in the session room...Donna drops in to see if there’s any mail for she and Dave. Things seem to be working out well in Harlem.

Tonight’s Bible Study has us back in the 6th and 7th chapters of Mark. We’ve got Jesus on the other side of Lake Geneserat overwhelmed by people seeking healing. Again. Then comes this long complicated back and forth with the scribes and pharisees over his disciples eating habits. He takes on the fact that they have added to the Law of God with their own laws, interpretations. And finally he goes after the food laws altogether. What’s at stake here is ritual purity, but also that these rules help create definition, separation, ethnic, national, cultural identity. And Jesus is after integration, removing barriers.(The pathway from traif, IE non-kosher, food to viewing one who consumes non-kosher food as traif is not a long one...) Fact is all our traditions need ways to say who we are as opposed to whose not we. The food laws have  the further benefit of inspiring a mindfulness to eating as opposed to just mindless consumption. As well as humanitarian concerns. But Jesus is more concerned about the heart of the matter. Expanding the definition  of we. An ever expanding circle of inclusion. 

He also takes on the practice of pledging your property and goods to the temple (corban) as potentially leaving impoverished elderly without support. (And thus breaking the commandment to honor your father and mother.) And what follows is a long list of what wrong heartedness can lead to: avarice, envy, licentiousness, slander,etc. And we notice that all these are relational...not about what one believes but about what one does in relationship with other people. 

He heads north, over the border to the region of Tyre and Sidon. By the text, he’s there to get away, not continue his mission. But even here he is pressed to perform. Do something for a woman, a syro-phoenician woman. A person who is not only a woman, but an other...Like the earlier woman with a hemorrhage, her approaching him is more than inappropriate culturally, it’s offensive. But approach she does. And he tries to send her off with a cutting comment about food not intended for dogs. A typical ethnic slur. 

And she is not deterred by this. She persists with her comment....but even the dogs can get crumbs from the table. And this stops him. Because of what you have said, your daughter is healed. Not because of her faith, but because of what she said, this skilled debater, used to taking on learned scribes and pharisees, has just been bested by a pagan Arab woman. 

We’re all aware of how embarrassing this story is. How linguists translate the word dogs as puppies. (Does that really help?) But we feel it fits. That Jesus has been preaching. About how actions speak louder than words. About inclusion. And now he has to face that reality himself. 

Perhaps he was tired. Annoyed at one more demand. Been there. It’s not the tenth needing person’s fault that they weren’t there first. My annoyance is not related to them. And her word back to him helps him to understand what he was really saying, really asking of his followers. Where it gets real, so to speak. If Jesus is both fully human and fully divine,then he doesn’t always understand everything. He has to have these moments  of growing awareness. And open the door for us. Week by week we marvel at the literary quality of Mark. How well thought out it is, how intentional the placement of events in sequence is. How rich the text is. Wonder at what we haven’t seen before. That’s what we mean by a living word. 

It’s been a good night again. Time  to wrap up. Head back up Amsterdam. Home. 

Bullfighting, business and Bible study

8/6

Martin and Teddy are taking a break in the studio. Martin is talking about business. It’s like bull fighting, he says. When the bull is charging straight ahead, he feels in control, indestructible. He is! But if you get him spinning around, he gets all confused. Then you draw him in real close to you, and you take the estoque and you put it in and there! you have him. 

I say, Martin, I think you just told me how you negotiate. 

He says, NO, no, I don’t negotiate....Teddy on the other hand, he’s a natural...

That’s right, Teddy agrees, I am. 

I take a break to go home before Bible Study. Tonight we’re still in the Mark 6. I go back and say that when the crowds back home were criticizing him, not only did they question his paternity, but they are accusing Jesus of abandoning his mother economically. As for the mission of the Twelve, it’s like a guerrilla group establishing  safe houses. Except, that as they gain welcome, they are to stay. And they are never to commandeer food or anything from anyone.  

The John the Baptist/Herod story seems to come out of nowhere. Who does Herod think Jesus is? John the Baptist come again. That is, his movement kept going by Jesus.

Josephus, Jewish historian of the  time,  has Herod kill John because he’s a threat. Mark is more complex. John speaks out against Herod’s marriage to Herodias, who was his brother’s wife. Bur he keeps John around, protects him. It’s Herodias who has the most to lose, which Teddy picks up immediately. 

It’s a birthday party. John R says this is why Jehovah’s witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays. (Bad things can happen?) Who is the crowd? His soldiers, the bureaucrats and leading businessmen. The holy trinity of power and privilege. 

So Salome dances. Herod makes a drunken promise. She asks for John’s head. And even though it grieves him, Herod has it done. As Luisa says, to some, people are expendable.  

Aubrey Beardsley's Salome with John's head

I mention Oscar Wilde’s play where Salome is attracted to John and seeks to have him beheaded when he spurns her. And Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration for Wilde. (I once encountered a woman bar tender in New Orleans who had the whole Beardsley illustration tattooed down her arm. She was impressed that I could identify it.) And Richard Strauss’ opera of  Wilde’s play. (Hearing my then friend Lauren Flanigan sing Salome’s aria to John’s head with the San Francisco Symphony Orchsetra remains  one of the most astounding performances I’ve ever heard. Chills down the spine. Literally.) And now Salome is a regular character on the HBO vampire series True Blood. She has staying power. 

Then we go to Mark’s version of the feeding of the 5000. (Did they come out to protect him, assuming he was taking John’s place?) Here the disciples set the story into motion. Jesus says, You feed them. They say, you want us to spend two hundred denarii for bread? He tactfully does not ask them where they got the money from. He does ask the to see what they have.  Just five loaves and two fishes. (No boy vendor here.) And he divides the people up, starts blessing and distributing  and there’s more than enough. 

He assessed the problem. Took inventory of available resources. Organized the people.The miracle was one of distribution, not production. We have enough.There are enough resources in the world to feed everyone.  It’s a matter of will. 

Teddy recalls the early days of Zucotti Park. There was always enough food. I remember working at Ground Zero after 9-11. How on the first Sunday after our church made 1500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. How did we do that? Where did all the bread, pb and j come from? How some of us cut onions at Boule for the gourmet meals they prepared. Our night serving meals at St. Paul's chapel at Ground Zero, The guys who drive up from Louisiana with a truck load of jambalaya. Which we served all night while they played cajun music.

For the first time, we see that the John story is not a random insertion. We see the careful, intentional literary craft of Mark’s work. The John story is, as John R says, a foreshadowing. It’s a warning to the disciples of where their mission could lead. The feeding of the 5000 is the repudiation of Herod’s world of domination and power and privilege. Of military and money. It’s a new kind of community, a new way of being. An ethic of sharing abundance, not hoarding in scarcity. It all fits together seamlessly.

John R says he gets the sharing. It’s forgiveness that is hard. 

A new guy, Jonah, (though some people call me Shiloh) participated after we found him on the table meditating and doing yoga. We’ll see what his story is.

(Bible Study informed by Ched Meyer, Binding the Strongman)