Jason Micheli's Blog, page 98

Episode #228 — Chaim Saiman: Halakhah: The Jewish Idea of Law

What if the generations of Talmudic interpretation demonstrate an inherently gracious nature to the Jewish Law? What if Protestant Christians are wrong and the Law is not a burdensome command meant to induce repentance but a gracious entry into thinking about everything in the world?

Just in time for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Chaim Saiman, Professor of Law at Villanova University, is back on the podcast to talk about his most recent book, Halakah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law.

Though typically translated as “Jewish law,” the term halakhah is not an easy match for what is usually thought of as law. This is because the rabbinic legal system has rarely wielded the political power to enforce its many detailed rules, nor has it ever been the law of any state. Even more idiosyncratically, the talmudic rabbis claim that the study of halakhah is a holy endeavor that brings a person closer to God―a claim no country makes of its law.

In this panoramic book, Chaim Saiman traces how generations of rabbis have used concepts forged in talmudic disputation to do the work that other societies assign not only to philosophy, political theory, theology, and ethics but also to art, drama, and literature. In the multifaceted world of halakhah where everything is law, law is also everything, and even laws that serve no practical purpose can, when properly studied, provide surprising insights into timeless questions about the very nature of human existence.

What does it mean for legal analysis to connect humans to God? Can spiritual teachings remain meaningful and at the same time rigidly codified? Can a modern state be governed by such law? Guiding readers across two millennia of richly illuminating perspectives, this book shows how halakhah is not just “law” but an entire way of thinking, being, and knowing.

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A Gift Exceeding Every Debt

Genesis 22 and Hebrews 10

I know you’d never guess it from unimpressive me, but I have been a preacher for almost twenty years.

And sure, it reveals a lot  about me that in those years I’ve preached four different sermons on the prophet Isaiah prophesying in nothing but his birtday suit (it’s really in there). 

I’ve preached three different sermons on King David collecting one hundred Philistine foreskins from reluctant donors in order to win Michal as his bride (it’s in there too), and I’ve somehow managed to preach five different sermons on the talking ass in Numbers 22.

Every time, someone has left church telling me, “It takes one to know one.”  

Twenty years—

But, in all that time, I’ve never once preached on today’s passage. 

Luther was haunted by it. Rembrandt and Chagall painted it. In his asthmatic kitty dry-heave of a voice, Bob Dylan sang about it going down on Highway 61. 

But, I’ve never studied it closely until this week. 

I’ve never preached on it until today. 

And yesterday…

Yesterday, I stood outside in the church cemetery next to a shallow grave and a tiny two-foot coffin. 

Tossing a fist full of dirt I clawed from the ground, I looked into a mother’s vacant, tear-filled eyes and, in the name of Jesus Christ who is Resurrection and Life, I promised her— I promised her— that God did not take her child from her. 

Was I wrong?

Sylvia was only four months old. 

The way the undertaker had prepared her body— she looked like she was nursing. She’d been dressed in a coat that looked like the kind Marilyn Monroe wore on her wedding day. 

Next to her body, I told her parents about Jesus Christ, about how God-in-the-flesh wept beside a grave just like Sylvia’s, wept over a friend who, like Sylvia, died much too soon. “On a day like today,” I said, “it’s good to remember that Jesus is weeping and is angry that any of you need to be here.”

I promised. 

Was I wrong? 

Did I bear false witness?

———————-

Is the God I promised to them, the God I promised was for them in Jesus Christ and with them in the Holy Spirit, the same God who tells Abraham, “Take your child, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and sacrifice him there as a burnt-offering?”

It’s hard to hear Jesus saying, “Abraham, I know I said “Put down the sword” but I’m going to need you to pick it up and (really big favor) take your son Isaac, slit his throat, and set him on fire. As a sacrifice to please and appease me.”

It’s hard to hear Jesus saying that, and that’s a problem, because if God is Trinity then, by definition, God has always been Trinity. 

Because God doesn’t change. 

God is immutable. 

“God is the same,” the Bible says, “yesterday, today, and forever.” 

Therefore, if Jesus Christ is the exact imprint of God’s very Being, as the Book of Hebrews declares, then not only is God like Jesus, God has always been like Jesus. 

There has never been a time when God has not been like Jesus. 

The Son who prays “forgive them for they know not what they do” is the same— of one being— as the Father to whom he prays. 

The Father was always like the Son. 

From before was was. 

God has never not been like Jesus. 

If Jesus Christ is the one by whom all things were made, as the creed confesses, if Christ was present at creation, as the Bible teaches— if Christ was present at creation and God doesn’t change, then present with Christ from before creation was his desire for mercy not sacrifice. 

———————-

“Go and learn what this means,” Jesus tells the grumbling Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” 

“Go study that Bible you like to thump,” Jesus says, sending them back to the prophet Hosea who declared, “Thus, says the Lord: I desire mercy not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, not burnt offerings.” 

God’s desire apparently is always falling on deaf ears because God keeps repeating himself. Through the prophet Micah, God speaks the same word, 

“Hear what the Lord says: With what shall you come before the Lord? Will the Lord be pleased with the sound of a thousand rams sacrificed? Shall we offer our first born children, the fruit not of the land but of our bodies? He has told you, o mortal, what is pleasing; to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk in humility under your God.”

When King David gets caught red-handed, having broken about half the Ten Commandments, God doesn’t demand any quid pro quo.

No, God reveals to David that “God takes no delight in sacrifice.” 

“If I were to give you a burnt offering,” David sings in Psalm 51, “You would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken and contrite heart.” 

Not only does God not want sacrifices of any sort, sacrifice, as the preacher of Hebrews says in today’s text, does not work. 

Sacrifice just tempts us into thinking we can right the scales of relationship with God. 

Thus sacrifice doesn’t atone for sin, it exacerbates sin because, fundamentally, it’s a refusal of grace.

But there’s the question:

If God doesn’t want sacrifice, if God has never wanted sacrifice, if sacrifice is a futile gesture that accomplishes nothing but deluding us into thinking we’re steering our standing before God, then why would God want to assess Abraham by Abraham’s willingess to do what God does not want done?

———————-

To test his faith?

That’s the usual explanation. 

God takes Abraham through this sadistic charade to test his faith by asking Abraham to do the unthinkable. 

Abraham has already sacrificed his past, being summoned by God out of his homeland. 

And here, Abraham is asked to sacrifice his future in order to make his future dependent not on biology but entirely upon God’s gracious provision. 

Just kidding— I was only testing you. 

Never mind that this makes the God of infinite Love and Goodness exponentially worse than Michael Scott fake-firing his employees at Dunder Mifflin, that’s the conventional answer. 

And, that’s why for Jews this passage is about akedah, obedience, and for Islam this story is about the virtue of surrendering to the will of God no matter where your discernment of God’s will takes you. 

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that Abraham here demonstrates what true faith entails. 

True faith is contrary to what our senses tell us (even our sense of right and wrong). 

True faith exceeds the rational; such that, to anyone else faith looks absurd.

Which I take to be an absurd answer. 

Because in scripture the proper measure of faith isn’t the quantity of it. 

It’s the character of it. 

It’s not how much faith you have.

It’s who and what your faith is in. 

It’s not about amounts; it’s about allegiance. 

The chief priests and the Pharisees had alot of faith. 

They just placed their faith in the wrong who, “We have no King but Caesar!”

The measure of faith is not how much you have but to whom and to what you are allegiant. 

For Christians, there’s no such thing as blind faith, because God has shown himself.  

Fully in Jesus Christ. 

And God has also revealed himself through the law— laws like “Do not kill.” 

Therefore, it’s not a leap of faith to do that which is contrary to who God has revealed himself to be. 

This is not a test of faith, asking Abraham to do the unthinkable. 

For one thing—

Everywhere else the Old Testament , when God tests his People it’s for the purpose of making them holy. 

Holy means different. 

Whenever God tests his People, it’s to make them distinct from the pagans and idolators around them. 

So, for example, after God gets his chosen People out of Egypt, he tests them in the wilderness in order to get the Egypt of them. 

And this is how Jesus’ testing in the wilderness functions too. It’s to shape him to be different than all the other would-be-messiahs. 

“All these kingdoms of the world, I will give you,” Jesus is tested. 

And only Jesus declines the opportunity.

The purpose of testing in the Bible is make God’s People holy. 

To make them different. 

And that’s the other thing—

Child sacrifice was not different.  

This is not a test of Abraham’s faith, to see if he’ll go through with the unthinkable, because for Abraham it was not unthinkable. 

Not at all.

Don’t forget—

Abraham exists in an ancient near eastern world where child sacrifice is not unusual. 

The reason God has to spell it out in the law and say, “Don’t do it,” is because the Canaanite religions of Israel’s day did do it. 

Thus, child sacrifice would not be a way to test Abraham. 

It would not be a way to make the People of Abraham different because everybody else did it too. 

It would not make Abraham holy. 

It would make Abraham the same. 

And remember—

Abraham is only a recent convert from paganism. 

When God called Abraham, he was a ziggurat-attending, moon-worshipping pagan. 

Abraham’s father, the Talmud says, was an idol maker. 

That’s why Abraham doesn’t question this command he discerns to kill his kid. Child sacrifice— it’s what the gods do.

But what about the God who is Jesus Christ?

“The whole Bible is about me,” the Risen Christ tells the disciples on Easter, “go back, read it, and find me in it.”

It’s like there’s two different gods here testing Abraham. 

———————- 

Yesterday morning before the burial, I was standing by the bell tower, talking with Sylvia’s uncle about how we’d process down to the gravesite with the baby. 

Stupidly, I asked him how he was doing.

And he said to me, “I know God didn’t do this to my family. I know God didn’t take her. But, still, I keep thinking God did it. I can’t help it. It’s like I’m being tested to sort out what’s true and what’s not.”

———————- 

What if the true test Abraham passes is a different test than the one we presume? What if the actual test Abraham passes is a test we fail to the extent that we fail even to notice it? 

It’s all right there in the text. 

The key to the passage is that it uses two different Hebrew words for God. 

The text refers to God as Elohim. 

Elohim is the generic Hebrew term for God. Elohim is like our English word God. 

And, in the Old Testament, Elohim can refer to the God of Israel but just as often— because it’s a generic term— elohim is the word used to talk about all gods, even the other false gods.

When the First Commandment says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” elohim is the word for gods. 

And when the prophet Elijah does battle against the false prophets of Baal, the Bible uses elohim to refer to the false god. 

Today’s text uses the word Elohim, but it also uses a different word, Yahweh. 

Yahweh isn’t a generic term. Yahweh is the name given to Moses at the burning bush. Yahweh is the true God who can be known only by God’s self-revelation.

It’s Elohim who asks Abraham to take his only son to Moriah, slit his throat, and set him ablaze as a sacrifice. 

It’s Yahweh who tells Abraham to stop. 

Actually, it’s the angel of Yahweh— who the first Christians identified as the pre-incarnate Son— who stills the blade of sacrifice. 

There are two gods in the story. 

And discerning the true one— that’s the test Abraham passes. 

That’s the test that makes him holy. 

Different.

Different even than from many of us, who think God demands payment.

———————- 

Traditionally, today’s passage is assigned by the lectionary for Easter. 

And to understand that scheduling, to hear today’s text as the Easter Gospel its meant to be, imagine that Abraham went through with the deed on Mt. Moriah. 

Imagine he did it. 

Just like we do it, for Moriah is Golgotha. 

Imagine Abraham raising his arm and plunging the knife. 

Imagine Isaac’s scream and the silence that would follow it, save for the bleating of a lost and forgotten ram amid the bushes. 

Imagine Abraham making his three day trek back down the mountain path to Isaac’s mother. 

And imagine a stranger approaching Abraham’s campfire that first night and, in the comfort of the darkness, Abraham confesses to this stranger his story about what he had believed god required, how it led him to violence and murder, how in his grief he knew now that heaven wept with him, how he had been blind and deaf, his faith had been unfaith, how as he plunged the knife he realized he had mistaken the gods for the true God. 

Imagine Abraham spilling out his shame, and then realizing he’d not even asked for the stranger’s name. 

“Tell me your name,” Abraham asks. 

And the stranger lifts up his bowed head and pulls back his hood and replies, “Isaac.” 

And then imagine Isaac showing Abraham his hands and his side. That’s how to hear this story as Easter. 

———————-

God doesn’t take. 

God gives. 

Ceaselessly.

Even when we take— taking, even, God’s own Son— God returns the gift. 

That’s the Gospel. 

The suffering of Christ upon the cross is not the punishment God demands for our sins. 

The suffering of Christ upon the cross is the patience God demonstrates in the face of our sins— in our act of sinning. 

The cross isn’t the really big sacrifice God wanted all along, of which Isaac is a hint. 

The cross is the end of sacrifice, the final judgment on the whole way of thinking that God collects on our debts.” 

We’re naive if we think that ours isn’t still a world of many gods. 

False gods.

Idols who convince people that sacrifice— payment— must be made; therefore, this must be happening to me because of that thing I did (or didn’t do). 

God must’ve taken Sylvia because of…

And that’s why it’s important that we pay attention to today’s text from the Book of Hebrews. 

There, Jesus declares that God wants not sacrifice, but a body. 

The body that God has prepared for Jesus. 

The Body of Christ. 

A people who are holy, Hebrews says. 

Different. 

Different enough from the world to assure Sylvia’s mother and father, as we did yesterday, that “the True and Living God does not deal in death, for Death is God’s Enemy.”

They were wearing t-shirts with Sylvia’s picture on the chest. 

They were all wearing t-shirts with her picture emblazoned on the front

“Nor does the God of Jesus take from us to make good on our debts,” I promised them, “God did not, God could not, God would never take her from you, for the empty grave reveals once for all that God’s grace is a gift that exceeds every debt and the promise of the Gospel is that in the fullness of time every good gift will be given back.”

And, even though they were sobbing, they nodded their heads. 

Like Abraham before them, they’d passed the test. 

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Episode #227 — Angela Denker: Red-State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump

“If you take nationalism out of the equation for a lot of Trump supporting Christians, than there’d be a mass exodus from the church next Sunday.”

Donald Trump, a thrice-married, no-need-of-forgiveness, blustery billionaire who rarely goes to church, won more Evangelical Christian votes than any candidate in history on his way to winning the 2016 US presidential election. Veteran journalist Angela Denker set out to uncover why, traveling the United States for a year, meeting the people who support Trump, and listening to their rationale.

In Red State Christians, readers will get an honest look at the Christians who gave the presidency to the unlikeliest candidate of all time. From booming, wealthy Orange County megachurches to libertarian farmers in Missouri to a church in Florida where the pastors carry guns to an Evangelical Arab American church in Houston to conservative Catholics on the East Coast–the picture she paints of them is enlightening, at times disturbing, but always empathetic. A must-read for those hoping to truly understand how Donald Trump became president.

Before you listen!

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(Her)Men*you*tics: Yahweh Part Deux

We’re working our way through the alphabet one stained-glass word at a time and we’re nearly done. Here’s the latest episode, the second part of our conversation about God’s name.

 

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Babies with the Bathwater

Genesis 6.11-22, 1 Peter 3.18-22

  Father Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest from Los Angeles. In 1986, having served in Bolivia, Father Boyle was appointed pastor of Delores Mission Church in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East L.A. 

At the time, it was the poorest Catholic parish in the city, and surrounded by public housing projects.  The church was in the middle of a sea of gang violence. The parish had more gangs and gang activity than anywhere else in the country. Between 1986 and 1988, Father Boyle buried 294 victims of gang shootings, most of them kids. 

In 1988, Father Boyle and members of his church decided to do something about the flood of young deaths around them. They established an alternative school, since most gang members had exhausted all their opportunities in the public system. 

They started a day care program to help keep kids off the streets. They started a jobs training program to give gang members an option to a different lifestyle. 

And then, because so few businesses were willing to hire former gang members, they started their own social enterprise business, “Homeboy Bakery.” 

Homeboy Bakery has since grown to become Homeboy Industries, and it’s the largest and most effective gang rehabilitation program in the world. 

They help ten thousand men and women each year overcome the violence of their past, find forgiveness and healing, and train them for a different future for themselves. 

I heard Father Boyle share a story about a former gang member named, “Jose.” 

“Jose works at Homeboy and one day,” Father Boyle said, “he knocked on my office door and came in looking oddly at rest, reposed.”

“My father died,” Jose said. “And I just found out.”

“Jose’s father had been deported to Mexico twenty years ago,” Father said, “Jose hadn’t seen or talked to his Father in all that time.”

But a couple of days before he learned his Father died, Jose called his father, because he learned his Father was dying of cancer.”

And then, in relaying the story, Father Boyle filled in the back story. 

“When Jose and his twin brother were eleven,” he said, “They’d made a pact with each other. They’d promised, “When our father comes home tonight drunk and starts to beat on our mother, let’s stop him. Let’s protect her.’”

Predictably, Jose’s father came home drunk and soon became violent, and Jose and his brother, just little guys, jumped on their Dad’s back, knocking him down to the floor, and then they climbed on top of him, pinning him down. 

After the initial daze, Jose’s father threw them loose of him. 

Then, he beat both of them. He dragged them out of the house by their hair. He threw them into the street. 

And then he screamed at them, “I regret ever bringing you into this world! I’m done with you! You’re no good to me! You’re dead to me! Don’t ever come back to this house again!”

They were eleven-year-old boys. 

And they never went home, again. 

They lived in a park a few miles away. 

“There was a big trashcan in the park,” Father Boyle said, “and at night Jose would pull the bag out of the can and tilt the can on its side, and he and his brother would slide inside it and rest in each other’s arms.”

Jose and his brother sold drugs to survive. They got caught up in a gang and spent half of their ensuing life in prison. 

“But one day Jose knocks on my door,” Father Boyle said, “and after telling me his dad just died, he tells me he’d called his father a couple of days earlier.” 

“I heard he was dying,” he told me with these big tears in his eyes.

“I heard he was dying, so I called him, because I wanted to tell him that I forgive him. I forgive him for everything, all of it.”

“And again,” Father Boyle said, “He looked so at rest as he told me about forgiving his father.”

Here’s my question—

Which of the two is more like God?

Who’s the better image of the Almighty?

Jose, who forgives the evil done to him?

Or his father, who beat him and then blotted him out of his life forever?

Is God the Father like Jose’s father? 

It sure sounds like it. 

Just four chapters, just one Bible page, after declaring everything “Very Good,” God declares:

“I will blot from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

“I regret ever bringing you into this world! I’m done with you! You’re no good to me! You’re dead to me! Don’t ever come back to this house again!”

It sounds like Jose’s father. 

And it doesn’t sound like the Son, like Jesus. 

The ancient Christians had a catch-phrase they used to think about God. 

In Latin, it’s: opus ad extra, opus ad intra; that is, who and what God is towards us in Jesus Christ (opus ad extra) God is eternally in himself (opus ad intra). 

There is no contradiction between the two.

If the one born at Christmas is truly Emmanuel— God with us— and nothing less, then who and what God is in Christ on Earth, God is antecedently and eternally in himself.

If Jesus is the supreme expression of God, then he must have always been so. 

Before he’s Jesus of Nazareth, in the flesh, he’s the eternal Son. 

If God is Trinity, by definition, God has always been Trinity. 

Which is to say, God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. 

There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus, and there never will be a time when God is not like Jesus. 

God doesn’t drown you for your sins one day but die to your sins on another day. 

The Father and the Son are one. 

But again, God the Father sure doesn’t sound like God the Son here today in Jose’s story. 

The word in Hebrew is mabbul. 

The English word flood doesn’t really capture what the story wants you to see. Mabbul refers to Creation’s architecture as the ancients understood it, where a protective shield above the earth and a protective shield below the earth— the firmament— held back an infinite ocean of water, protecting Creation. 

“In the beginning God swept across the dark waters,” we pray at baptism. 

God pushed back the dark waters and then held them at bay with the firmament. 

And so, that Hebrew word mabbul— it isn’t simply a lot of rain. 

It’s literally God taking a hands-off approach to Creation and walking away and letting the primeval ocean pour in and drown all that he’d made. 

It seems unfair to all the animals considering that none of them can be guilty of the crime for which God condemns them. 

Animals cannot have evil in their hearts. And more tragic than the animals, what about the babies? 

Don’t forget, in the Genesis story this is nine generations and one thousand years after Adam. 

Eve’s offspring has been fruitful and multiplied. 

What about the babies that God throws out with the bathwater? 

Infants cannot commit violence and so they cannot be blamed for it. 

And isn’t it evil to visit violence upon a vulnerable child? 

And isn’t that exactly what this God does here on a global scale? 

And would it be any more justifiable if there had been only a single newborn in Noah’s day? 

“The water covered the peaks of the highest mountains,” Genesis says. This isn’t local news; it’s an ecological apocalypse. 

Thanos only killed 50% of the population, and, just in case you haven’t seen the Avengers movie, Thanos is the villain. Yet, Thanos is even more merciful. Thanos just snaps his fingers and half of everything disappears. 

But God does it slow. 

Drip, drip, drip. 

A slow, soggy holocaust.

Notice— 7.1:

Noah doesn’t even know why he’s building the ark until he’s finished it and God tells him to get on it with his family. 

God doesn’t even trust Noah to close the door behind him; God shuts the door behind him. 

Why?

Because Noah would be tempted to rescue others?

Which is to say, because Noah is more merciful than God?

And what sort of god is this anyway?

He changed his mind?!

But God, by definition, can’t change. 

God is immutable. 

“God is the same,” Scripture says, “Yesterday, Today, and Forever,” because God is without beginning or end.

He changed his mind? 

He got so upset he decided to waterboard all of creation? 

That doesn’t sound like the capitol-G God. 

That doesn’t sound like the Father whose fullness is the self-offering, enemy-loving, peace-declaring, cheek-turning, sin-forgiving Son. 

Jesus Christ, the Book of Hebrews declares, is “the exact imprint of God’s very being.” 

Jesus Christ is of “one substance with the Father” the Nicene Creed confesses, as light is from light. 

“The whole Bible is about me,” the Risen Christ tells the disciples on Easter, “go back, read it, and find me in it.”

Okay, so where is the God who looks like Jesus here?

Because this god— admit it— sounds more like a pagan god. 

It turns out—

In order to find the God who is Jesus Christ in this story, you have to know how this story is different. 

You have to know what makes this story different because— pay attention, now— this story of the flood is not unique.

And you have to know a date, 587 BCE. 

That’s the 9/11 of the Bible. 

That’s the year Babylon invaded Israel, destroyed the temple and left the promised land in smoldering ruins as they marched God’s chosen people back to Babylon in chains, where they were sorely tempted to believe the violence visited upon them was the vengeance of a holy God, that God was punishing them for their sins.

Exiled in Babylon, the Israelites learned a story told by their captors. 

A scripture story, the Epic of Gilgamesh. 

See if it sounds familiar:

The “great gods,” seeing the sorry state of mankind, planned to cause a great flood upon the earth. 

The gods swore one another to secrecy about the destruction they would send upon mortals. 

But the god Ea breaks their secret, whispering the news through a reed wall to a mortal whose name means, “He Who Saw Death.”

Ea commands the mortal to demolish his house and build— you guessed it— an ark.

So, the mortal and his workmen construct an ark with six decks and nine compartments and a hull 120 cubits on each side. 

When they finish the ark, the mortal loads his silver and gold into the ark, along with his family and his workers and all the beasts and animals of the earth. 

And then the thunder god rumbles and the storm gods converge and the lightening god flashes, shattering the dry land like a clay pot, and then the torrent of rain falls. 

The rains last six days and six nights. 

On the seventh day, “He Who Saw Death” releases a dove to search for land, but the dove flies back to the boat. He releases a swallow, but it comes back. Finally, he releases a raven, and it does not return. 

After he exits the ark, he offers a sacrifice and the aroma of the offering pleases the gods and they swarm to the source of the scent where they discover some mortals have survived. 

The god Enli becomes enraged, “How do these mortals live? No one was supposed to survive our annhilation.”

The ark and the animals, the flood and the reason for it— it’s all the same. 

Notice though what’s different—

The rainbow.

There’s no rainbow. 

At the end of the Noah story, after Noah offers a sacrifice and the aroma is pleasing to the Lord, God sets a rainbow in the clouds (literally, God hangs up his anger) as a sign of God’s promise never again to destroy his creatures because of their sins. 

You see what Israel did, right?

When they were prisoners and slaves in a foreign land (not the Promised Land); when their temple had been razed and their homes destroyed and all the promises God had made them (to be their God no matter what) seemed broken beyond repair; when they had every reason to believe that God was punishing them for their sins, for their unfaithfulness, for not holding up their end of the covenant, they take Babylon’s story of the flood. 

A story with gods just like that— angry, wrathful, fickle gods, gods who mete out their vengeance with violence, gods who dole out what we deserve. 

They take Babylon’s story of the flood, and they stick a rainbow on it at the end. 

“I’m not like that anymore,” God promises to Israel. 

Which is Israel’s way of saying that the true God has never been like that. 

And maybe that’s why Israel changed not only the ending to Babylon’s story, they changed the name of the arkbuilder too. 

From, “He Who Saw Death,” to “Noah.”

Which means rest.  

Comfort.

“I heard he was dying,” Jose told Father Boyle. “So I called him, because I wanted to tell him that I forgive him.”

“And then out of the blue,” Father Boyle said, “out of the blue Jose suddenly shifts gears and he says to me: “You know something, Father, I’m really enjoying the person I’m becoming here, like I’ve never enjoyed anything else in my life.”

“That’s a good feeling, isn’t it?” Father Boyle asked.

“Oh God, it’s the best feeling in the world” Jose replied. 

Unpacking what Jose had told him just then, Father Boyle explained, “That’s the sound of someone inChrist.“

 

That’s it. 

That’s where Christ is in the story.

“The whole Bible is about me,” the Risen Christ tells the disciples on Easter, “go back, read it, and find me in it.”

Christ is the ark. 

Christ is our ark. 

“That’s the sound of someone inChrist,” Father Boyle explained.  “That’s the sound of someone inside the ark of Christ’s Body, the Church, transporting him from his old life to a new one, where he can love, forgive himself, forgive those who’ve done him harm, and find a new identity.”

“Jose is working now,” Father Boyle added. “He has a lady friend— He has a reason to look towards his future. He’ll leave our program in 18 months, and the world will rage and storm all around him, but this time he won’t be swallowed up by it. The world and its troubles might toss him and to and fro, but he’s inside now. He’s safe, at rest in Christ, and he’ll be okay.”

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Episode #226— Samson Turinawe: Advocating for LGBTQ Africans

Our guest today is Samson Turinawe. Samson is the Executive Director of the Universal Love Alliance, a grassroots organization in Uganda which advocates for LGBTQ people.

A Ugandan humanitarian, educator and human rights defender. He believes that “every human being should be respected simply for being who they are, a part of Life’s creation.” Tolerance, inclusiveness, love, compassion, dialogue and reconciliation are all central themes in his work. Through his teaching and activism, he emphasizes that “ignorance can be defeated through education, poverty through hard work and possession of capital, and internal schisms and separatism through unity. Samson is working for a new generation — one that is open-minded, open-hearted, diversity-embracing, and committed to serving all of humanity.

You can find out more about his work here.

And go to www.crackersandgrapcejuice.com to find other episodes and to support the show.

 

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Episode #225: David Bentley Hart — That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

We recorded this so long ago I’d forgotten how funny he is in it:

What turns you on?

Lt. Nyota Uhura

What’s your least favorite word?

Donald Trump

What’s your favorite curse word?

Donald Trump

David Bentley Hart is back on the podcast to talk about his new book, which I can say is as irrefutable as it is controversial, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. It’s a slim book with a straightforward argument which I would commend to anyone.

Before you listen, while you listen, or after you listen go to www.crackersandgrapejuice.com and click on “Support the Show” to become a patreon (this stuff ain’t free for us, people!). If you do, we’ll send you a free “Incompatible with Christian Teaching” pint glass.

Or, you can click on “Swag” and get your own Stanley Hauerwas “Jesus is Lord and Everything Else is Bullshit” t-shirt.

If you’re a cheap bastard, then just find us on Facebook or Twitter and share this episode and give us some love.

 

 

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Hell Yes, I Believe in Hell…Just Not Its Eternity

In Romans 8 Paul famously crescendos with the promise to the baptized: “There is therefore now NO CONDEMNATION for those who are in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

     But if nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus then how is it good news that Paul, only six chapters later, tells the same audience: “We shall all stand before the judgement seat of God?” 

How do you square “…everyone will come before the judgement seat of God” with what Paul said four chapters earlier that “…everyone who confesses with their lips that Jesus Christ is Lord will be saved.” 

     Which is it? Everyone will be judged? Or everyone will be saved?

     How does “…all will stand before the judgement seat of God…” square with chapter eleven where Paul said that all will be saved, that God will be merciful to all— even to those whom God has, for the present time, “consigned to disobedience?” 

     Judgement. Mercy. 

     Which is it, Paul? 

     It can’t be both/and can it? That everyone who confesses Jesus Christ will be saved and everyone will stand before the judgement seat of God? In fact, Paul repeats it almost word-for-word to the Corinthians: “We must all appear before the judgement seat of God.” And you can’t dismiss this verse about judgement because the Apostle Paul here sounds like Jesus everywhere— all over the Gospels, Jesus warns of the Coming Day of Judgement. As in his final teaching before his Passion, Jesus promises that he will come again to judge the living and the dead, gathering all before him. 

Not some. 

All: 

unbelievers and believers 

unrighteous and righteous

the unbaptized and the born again 

    All— not some— all, Jesus says, will be gathered for judgement. 

    The “saved” are not spared.

     And all will be reckoned according to who fed the hungry and who gave water to the thirsty and who clothed the naked and who welcomed the immigrant. 

     And who did not.

     “All shall stand before God for judgement,” Paul says. 

     Just like Jesus said. 

     And according to Jesus’ Bible that reckoning will be a fire. 

So, like the first Christians and the early Church Fathers, hell yes I believe in hell.  

I just disbelieve in hell’s eternity and its retributive torment.

The fire of God’s judment, depicted by Michaelangelo and rhapsodized by Augustine and Calvin, is not the fire promised by the Bible.

The fire of God’s judgment, the Bible testifies, will be refining fire. 

The prophet Malachi, the last voice we hear between the testaments, says on the Day of the Lord our sinful self—- even if we’re “saved”— will come under God’s final judgement and the the Old Adam still clinging to our soul will be burnt away. 

     The corrupt and petty parts of our nature will be purged and destroyed. The greedy and the bigoted and the begrudging parts of our nature will be purged and destroyed. The vengeful and the violent parts of our selves will be purged and destroyed. The unforgiving and the unfaithful parts of us, the insincere and the self- righteous and the cynical- all of it from all of us will be judged and purged and forsaken forever by the God who is a refining fire. 

     Keep in mind:

Purgation is not damnation. 

     Purgation is not damnation. 

     But neither is it pain free. 

The Gospel is not that God’s love and mercy are at odds with God’s justice; therefore, some— maybe many, to listen to some Christians— will be consigned to eternal torment. No, for a finite creature could never justly merit an infinite punishment. 

The Gospel is that in God, in his love and justice, is dragging all of sinful creation unto himself, and this means that prior to the Endyou will stand before the judgement seat of Almighty God, stripped and laid bare, all your disguises and your deceits revealed, naked wearing nothing but your true character, so that you can be fit for heaven. 

“The Gospels,” as David Bentley Hart writes, “simply make no obvious claim about a place or state of endless suffering.” And Gehenna, the child-sacrifice-site-turned-garbage dump outside of Jerusalem, which gets translated into Jesus’ mouth as hell, was thought of in Jesus’ time principally “as a place of purification, a refining fire for the souls of those who have been neither incorrigibly wicked nor impeccably good during their lives,” who eventually, their penance due, would be released and taken up to paradise.”

Says Hart:

“The figure of Christ in the fourth gospel passes through the world as the light of eternity; he is already both judgment and salvation, disclosing hell in our hearts, but shat- tering it in his flesh, so that he may “drag” everyone to him- self. Some things then, perhaps, exist only in being surpassed, overcome, formed, redeemed: “pure nature” (that impossible possibility), “pure nothingness,” prime matter, ultimate loss. Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always al- ready been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest—for, being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to (as Gregory of Nyssa so acutely observes). Hell exists, so long as it exists, only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lin- gering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul. This age has passed away already, however long it lingers on in its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to come, and beyond all ages, all shall come home to the Kingdom pre- pared for them from before the foundations of the world.”

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(Her)Men*You*tics: Yahweh

We’ve been working our way through the alphabet one stained-glass word at a time, and this week Johanna leads us through a conversation on possibly the most important and elusive word of all, God’s name.

That God will be who and where God will be means there is no way to follow this God apart from the narrative and the narrative community in which this God has disclosed himself.

Here it is…

 

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All Must Be Saved Because All Are Who They’ve Loved

The smell of chicken thighs browning in a cast iron skillet with olive oil and garlic, onions, and peppers sautéing next to them, reminds me every time of my grandmother. Every old guy who walks out of church on Sunday morning smelling of Old Spice recalls my grandpa. My handwriting, down to the same black felt tip pen, is his. The small of my wife’s back feels to my hand as much me as my eyes when I rub them. I can’t imagine the world other than seeing it as I’ve learned to see it from her. And if we’ve done even a partial job of parenting, then one day our boys will say the same about us.

One of the people in my constellation of memories is the theologian David Bentley Hart. My first theology teacher at the University of Virginia, he opened up to me a breadth and depth of Christian thinking that flummoxed me, captivated my imagination as a new Christian, and fortuitously set me on a different path than the one I had anticipated. Because I know his public reputation among some readers and critics is contrary, I should note that I have, over the years, found David Bentley Hart to be a warm, winsome, compassionate, and thoughtful mentor. He has been unfailing in following up to inquire about my health. He often ribs me good-naturedly about the deficiences of National League baseball and how my Washington Nationals would scarcely be more than a bottom feeding team in the AL. The passion of his prose and the ferocity of his humor stem from an authentic zeal for the good and the beautiful. He can be uncompromising with sloppy thinking because theology isn’t merely an academic abstraction but can and often does have monstrous consequences for how we conceive of God and our neighbors, especially the poor and the vulnerable. 

The person I am is literally inconceivable apart from him. He is a good example of how none of us are persons in isolation from others. 

My point:

We are who we’ve loved.

From this incontrovertible axiom follows an equally incontestable assertion:

Hell for some would be hell for all.

If who I am is constituted by the memories given to me by those I’ve loved, then what would it mean for me to be in heaven were they in hell? Heaven would be a torment to me, or if their memory blotted out from me, to spare me the pain of their damnable suffering, then the part of they constituted would likewise be erased. To believe in an eternal hell for some is likewise to believe that the host of heaven have been, in decisive ways, hollowed out, as much shadows of their former selves as CS Lewis famously sketched the souls in Hell.

Such a hell would require of heaven an eternal lobotomy.

David Bentley Hart puts it better than me:

“[There is] an incoherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian traditions: that is, the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the eternal torment of the damned.

It is not merely peculiarity of personal temperament that prompts Tertullian to speak of the saved relishing the delightful spectacle of the destruction of the reprobate, or Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas to assert that the vision of the torments of the damned will increase the beatitude of the redeemed (as any trace of pity would darken the joys of heaven), or Luther to insist that the saved will rejoice to see their loved ones roasting in hell.

All of them were simply following the only poor thread of logic they had to guide them out of a labyrinth of impossible contradictions; the sheer enormity of the idea of a hell of eternal torment forces the mind toward absurdities and atrocities.

Of course, the logical deficiencies of such language are obvious: After all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us?

We are those others.

To say that the sufferings of the damned will either be clouded from the eyes of the blessed or, worse, increase the pitiless bliss of heaven is also to say that no persons can possibly be saved: for, if the memories of others are removed, or lost, or one’s knowledge of their misery is converted into indifference or, God forbid, into greater beatitude, what then remains of one in one’s last bliss?

Some other being altogether, surely: a spiritual anonymity, a vapid spark of pure intellection, the residue of a soul reduced to no one.

But not a person—not the person who was.”

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