Pharisee babe

Lection meditation Luke 20:19-26

The problem with all the imaginative depictions of the Pharisees in art and film is that they look like what they are inside. So they're all kind of craggy and nasty. That can't be how they really looked. They were probably tall, dark and handsome, with shining eyes that gazed compellingly at folk. Try imagining them that way and see what it reveals. The beautiful and powerful vs. he who had no comeliness.

Relgious rituals and child worship

Having returned from my cousin’s daughter’s bat mitzvah, I want to reflect a bit on my reactions to the service and what that means about my faith. There is so much to admire: the Rabbi’s incredible high heels, the abilities of my young cousins to read Hebrew, the elderly woman beside me who drove their wheelchair bound 90 year old grandmother) to all the services and was following along with the prayers, her finger under the Hebrew letters, the ability of all these people to sit through both an hour and a half service on Friday night and a full two hours on Saturday, the touching moment when she lit the yhartzeit candle for the seven-year=old Holocaust victim she’d been assigned as her twin. And this is actually a key point, what makes this service, though it does delight in the young person, and the family and the passing on of tradition, different from the child worship of St. Jonah’s and so many other protestant churches. It is one thing for those at the top of the social order to cluck over their children. It is frankly a bit unseemly. They have picked it up from the ethnic groups—the bat mitzvahs of the Jews, the quinceanos of the Latinos, etc. St. Jonah’s people admitted it: when they went to a bat mitzvah they were envious. But when they try to translate such rituals into Episcopalianism, and create new quasi-confirmation celebrations, it becomes self-aggrandizement. You see, the difference is not in how deeply both groups hold their faith, or whether or not they really believe any of the things they profess. How many of the Jews holding their prayer books to the Torah and kissing them really believe this to be God’s word? Some. Many, perhaps. But not all. In both liberal traditions, people are welcome and accepted whatever they think, because, after all, how important are all our thoughts? Not very, in truth. But when a victimized group like the Jews delights that our children are here, are alive and understand their connection to the God of our Tradition, it is truly something to fill all hearts with thankfullness; it eases the pain of the terrible loss that mars us all. To look at a beautiful young person reading this ancient text, the very scroll that was rescued from a synogogue where none of the people survived, no matter who or what we believe in, we must be in awe, and thankful. I’m sorry: white middle class Protestants can never emulate this. Don’t try. Let your children sit and behave themselves, please.

The good old days

An Anti-Israeli musician articulates the desire underlying all those who object to Israel's right to defend itself when he states that he will play music "from the time when Jews didn't have armies and police to harass freedom fighters, when Jews were victims..." Ah yes, I remember those days. Wasn't there something about ovens back then? See Gaza Protesters for the full story, including reasonable explanations of why the Israelis are not the ones using innocent people as cannon fodder: Hamas is guilty of that.

Lectionary Meditation

Feeling rather gloomy, after the prayers for the people at the Ascension Day service suggested in not so many words, that the nation of Israel ought to just roll over and play dead (be dead) I was struck in today's office reading that Luke says Jesus was 'full of joy through the Holy Spirit." Luke 10:21-24

I'll have to do a search on this later, but it seems to me that Jesus doesn't really express a lot of joy or delight or pleasure. Mostly he is weeping or mad or just plain exasperated, particularly because the disciples just don't get what he is saying about his impending death. This time he is joyful because they are having an aha moment. As a teacher, I can relate! Okay, he may not have succeeded in reaching the "wise and learned" but he got through the "little children."

Please stop clinging desperately to the wisdom of this world. Read this: "Palestine Betrayed"

Multiverses

The miserable chaplain who's losing his faith in Catch-22, which I'm listening to on my iPod, wonders what God was doing for all that endless infinite time before the creation of the universe. That's actually a theologically correct question to ask, because God must exist outside time and space, whether there is one universe or many. You are probably aware that there is a sudden spate of programs explaining astrophysics to laypeople. Likely this is due to how good the images all look in Hi Def. The last one we watched dealt with the possibility of parallel universes. I knew physicists consider this a possibility, but I didn't know they'd actually got funding to run experiments in their giant collider that might possibly create a particle that could somehow prove their existence. Of course, it could go on indefinitely without disproving it.

Mr. Crackles and I got to talking. Maybe Heaven and Hell are just parallel universes. Heaven's the place where everything went right and we can't get there in these bodies but our souls can slip through the wormhole. There could be zillions of Hells. Maybe God exists in that Heaven dimension. He can reach through to us, but we can only reach Him with spiritual energy: prayer. Hmmm. The scientists say someday we could replicate our universe if we can figure out how to send something through to a parallel universe. Maybe God did that, made our universe that way.

I get a chill. Mr. Crackles doesn't see what my problem is. He likes that God can be explained as a possibility even scientists can accept. But then he's just bigger and better than us but not ontologically different. I can be annoying and use words like ontologically when I have to. But he's soo soo vastly beyond us: isn't that what God is? I don't think so, actually. Better isn't better enough for me to give my soul over even if my soul would benefit. My God can enter the space/time continuum but He doesn't have to. The God of a parallel universe seems stuck there somehow, not really infinite. My God does exist in some way I can't understand before time and space.

Deja Vu

Listening to the news revealing more details about the behavior that drove a teenage girl in a neighboring town to hang herself, I find myself reacting the same way as I did during the hearings for Clarence Thomas, when Anita Hill described his sexual harassment. Oh, you mean that isn't just normal boss behavior, school behavior? The sad fact is, both kinds of harassment have been standard operating procedure since time immemorial. Now we are bringing it to light and saying it is wrong. Will that change it? I don't know. I just wish Phoebe had been tougher, like me, and like all the others who survived the malicious talk and threats.

Lectionary Meditation

January 8, 2010

Today’s readings all present pairings: there’s the “Massah and Meribah” of Exodus 17, aka, Kvetchin’ and Moanin’ a name that could be given to some churches I know. “Is the Lord with us or not” is the question those who were thirsty were asking. Moses names the places after the behaviors. In the time of John’s gospel, the places named are already redolent with associations: Bethlehem, the place of royal promise, Galilee, the place of those who do not count. Which one is Jesus from? It can’t be both, can it? But that is the genius of the Gospel narrative. It is both. And Colossians proclaims that union: visible, invisible, earth, heaven. What with holding all those things together, combining Galilee and Bethlehem was a small feat indeed!