MyQuest

Sunglasses

After seven years of intending to, I've finally purchased perscription sunglasses in preparation for our vacation to California next week.

Wanted

Michael and I have agreed on most of the films we have seen recently, though we disagreed on this one.  He liked it; I didn't care much for it.

I felt like I'd seen most of it before.  I'm getting tired of the over-the-top, unrealistic CGI.  It just doesn't wow me like it used to (if you want animation that wowes, see Wall-E). 

There were some set pieces that I found quite enjoyable, but they were either poorly edited or so rushed through that you really couldn't sink your teeth into the moment.  The best example of this is the train wreck, which could have been this really spectacular dramatic sequence, but I felt they didn't take the opportunity to really develop the drama.

Angelina Jolie was great, though.

3 popcorn kernels

1 film reel

Summer Photos

I've spent the last couple of hours uploading a number of new photos from this summer's festivities -- church picnic, Father's Day, trip to Miami, Gay Day at the Zoo, Pride, Turner Falls Trip, Fourth of July, etc., etc.  They are in the photo album to your left.  Enjoy.

Podcast Interview with Homebrewed Christianity

Tripp & Chad's interview with me, following up on my lecture at Wake Forest Divinity School, is now posted.  Listen to it here.

War Powers

Wow, we continue to debate core constitutional issues!  I really think we've spent a decade going through an era of constitutional import -- impeachment, contested election, executive power debates, precedent-setting Court decisions, etc. 

Today James Baker and Warren Christoper release their study of America's War Powers and recommend new legislation to better define them.  They wrote an Op-Ed in the NYTimes to explain their position.

I happen to be one of those who believes that Congress has greater power in these matters than it currently executes, and I would prefer something that leaned even more heavily in the direction of Congress than the law they suggest, however, I find their law a HUGE improvement over the status quo and heartily endorse it as a step in the right direction.

From Flesh to New Body

From Flesh to New Body

Romans 1:18-2:1

Romans 8:1, 9-11; 12:1-8

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

Cathedral of Hope – Oklahoma City

6 July 2008

 

    Today we are going to tackle Romans 1 and the passage so often used to debate the current status of homosexuals in the church and society. So, let's look at Romans 1:18-32, though I'm going to do something rarely done and read the first verse of chapter 2 with this passage, so you'll get the connection to last week's sermon.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God's decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.

Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.

    Tonight I want to take more of a bible study approach, rather than coming at this text as a normal sermon. I think it is important for us to work together as a community through the issues that arise from the reading of this text.

How can we read this passage? And I purposely frame the question this way. So often we ask the question, "what does the text say?" when the text really does not say anything. We read the text. Even the effort to get to the author's original intention is ultimately not successful, because we can never be certain as to what that intention was. In the end, it still comes back to how we have read the text.

    You've known me long enough now to have some sense of how I handle scripture. I think that we engage scripture as part of a community, empowered by the Holy Spirit. Our conversations with, about, and in scripture are on-going conversations. I am neither the kind of conservative who accepts the written text without the on-going conversation, nor am I the sort of liberal who rejects certain texts wholesale. I believe that even the most difficult, even the most terrifying of texts must be engaged by us as a community. And it is when we engage all of scripture that we are continually shaped and re-shaped by it into the people of God, the Body of Christ that God will use to speak to world of our time and place.

    So, how can we read this text?

    First off, we should be aware of a few things. The interpretation of scripture takes serious study and work. Fortunately, you and I don't have to do the most difficult portions of it. We aren't digging through the codexes in the Vatican library or hiking to remote monasteries in the Sinai Peninsula in order to handle brittle papyri. Our conversation is part of a far larger conversation including thousands of scholars of various disciplines and spanning the entire history of the church.

    Does this mean, then, that interpretation of scripture requires certain knowledge and that without it you cannot read scripture? Does it mean that unless you've read the latest issues of Biblical Archaeology Review, for instance, you shouldn't try studying the Bible?

    No, it does not mean that. The reason is the Holy Spirit. Each of us is empowered by the very Spirit of God and that Spirit can guide our own reason, experience, and feeling as you and I read the Bible. In fact our point of view may contribute something unique and wonderful to the on-going conversation of the church. We are each called to engage scripture, though different members of the community will engage it in different ways.

    This is one of those passages that calls for us to examine the context, which means that some of what we have to do is rely upon the work of the academic community in describing that context for us.    

    There are three overall areas of context I think we should consider. First, the context of this section within the overall letter to the churches at Rome and within Paul's story of the Gospel. Second is to consider the audience to which Paul was writing. And finally to consider the social and historical contexts of the letter.

    Well, I purposely did not begin our Romans study with this passage, despite the fact that it comes at the beginning of the letter. The reason is because I wanted to convey Paul's overall story about God's righteous work in Jesus Christ. We've already talked about what Paul had to say about sin, about salvation, about the character of God. Remember I told you that for Paul we are always enslaved to something, either God or Sin. Sin, for Paul, is a power which controls us, over which we have no power of our own. The only thing that can save us from Sin is for God to rescue us, just like God rescued the Israelites during the Exodus.

    So, when you look at Romans 1 you see phrases like "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness" in verse 18 or "Therefore God gave them up" in verse 24. Paul believed that humans rejected God and in rejecting God became enslaved to Sin. The rest of the book is how God fights on our behalf, through Jesus Christ on the cross, in order to rescue us.

    Another thing about the context of this passage in the overall letter. Last week we examined what I think is one of the central themes of Romans, which is that no one should judge anyone else. If you look at the way chapter 1 flows into chapter 2, chapter 1 is part of the argument against judging that is found in chapter 2. Now how often do you hear that point made by those who use this passage against gay people?

    A few weeks ago I mentioned that since this is a letter, it is important to know to whom the letter was written. This isn't just some abstract essay but is intimate communication between people. Scholars disagree about the audience, but I put forward the ideas which had persuaded me and grabbed hold of my imagination. The audience is mostly Gentile, though many of them were practicing Jews before becoming Christians. It is also possible that a significant number of the people named in chapter 16 were slaves. If that is true, then it affects how we read chapter 1. Why?

    Well, slaves were owned by their masters and could be used and abused by them. Sexual use and abuse of slaves was common and generally accepted. So, imagine you are a young slave who has been routinely raped by your master and when you go to church you hear these words from verse 28, "And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done." You are going to hear that passage as a strong condemnation of your abusive master.

    That opens us up to considering the larger historical and cultural contexts of this passage. One we have already referred to. Sexuality in the ancient world was structured according to a power hierarchy. Anyone below you on the hierarchy could be used for your own pleasure. It was common for married gentlemen to have sexual relations outside of marriage with servants and slaves, with prostitutes, or generally with other people. The use of children as prostitutes was common, including a particular industry in young boys. Sexuality was also used in ritual worship of some of the religions.

    We know that generally the Jews were turned off by the sexual practices of the Romans. Part of this was a bias against same-sex sexual activity. There are a number of Jewish writings from this period which betray that bias. One of those is the Wisdom of Solomon, a book which appears in the Roman Catholic Old Testament but does not appear in the Protestant Old Testament. Paul's writings here have strong similarities to those in the Wisdom of Solomon and other writings, though there are important differences too. According to this bias, same-sex sexual activity arose because of a distortion of the desires a person commonly had. There was no widespread understanding that same-sex desires could arise naturally.

    There was also a Jewish mythology about the origin of the pagan religions, which ties to their views on sexual immorality. They believed that at one point in very ancient history, everyone had worshipped the one God. According to this myth there were great human heroes who became idolized by other humans and eventually those heroes were treated as gods. When pagans created idols, they were glorifying the human body, rather than glorifying God. This is how the Jews explained the stories of the Greek and Roman gods such as Zeus, Aphrodite, and Hercules. According to this Jewish myth, when polytheism, the worship of many gods, was introduced into human society it led to immorality, particularly sexual immorality. Why particularly sexual immorality? Because, it was the glorification of the human body in the idols made in the images of these heroes which had led to the rejection of God. So, according to this Jewish myth, idolatry and sexual immorality were intimately connected.

    Why do I tell you that story? Because it is the story Paul is telling in Romans 1! Look at verse 23, for instance, "they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles."

    Does Paul believe this myth? I don't know. It is possible that he is simply referring to a story that people would have known. In the same way that I might refer to a popular movie. He could just be using it as a rhetorical device in order to make a point.

    Or it is possible that Paul believes the story and shares in the bias of his fellow Jews against same-sex relations. But is there any reason for us to believe this myth or to share in that bias?

    Now Paul is not simply writing in a Jewish context, he is also in a Roman context. And interestingly, this passage has similarities with the writings of Roman philosophers and ethicists. The Romans themselves were becoming more and more alarmed at the excesses to which their citizens were inclined. At least the intelligentsia was alarmed, and it is their writings which have survived. In Roman ethical thinking there was a distrust of desire. The ethical problem for Romans was not what one desired, the object of one's desire. The problem was that a person might have too much desire. So, for these Roman philosophers, it was morally wrong to lust after the wife you were legally married to.

    In fact some thinkers went so far as to distrust desire itself. They thought you should have no desires, whether sexual or related to food or any other form of physical or emotional pleasure. St. Paul was influenced by these thinkers. Paul believed that desire itself was dangerous because it could be so easily enslaved by Sin. In First Corinthians 7:9 Paul writes that "it is better to marry than to burn." As in burn with passion. Paul thinks that if you get married, then you will be able to control your sexual desire. If you look throughout the passage, Paul thinks it is better for someone not to marry if they are strong enough to control desire. Even here in Romans 6:19 Paul writes, "so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification."

    Paul believed that desire itself was wrong. Even heterosexual desire. In verse 26 when he writes, "God gave them up to degrading passions," he thinks that all passions, any passions are degrading. That he goes on to refer to same-sex passions, is just his use of an extreme example.

Most conservative readers of this text do not share Paul's views on desires. It is part of his Roman cultural context which they reject. Most conservative heterosexuals believe that sexual desire can be a healthy part of one's spiritual life. And there have always been Christians which believed that, even in Paul's day.

So, what does Paul himself think about same-sex sexual relations? It is very possible that he was "agin' 'em" as they say in the South. But if he was against them, it was because of his own cultural biases and his view that all sexual desire was wrong. Faced with our modern understanding that same-sex desires arise naturally and are not a distortion of opposite-sex desires, we don't know what St. Paul would have thought.

It is also possible that Paul was not condemning homosexual people in Romans 1. He might have been using these cultural biases and this myth about the connection between idolatry and sexual immortality, in order to make a point. He may have been using them as a rhetorical trap which he springs in chapter 2, when he says that we are not to judge anyone else.

It is also possible that he continues to deconstruct these biases. He teaches that we should not be ashamed, because we are the children of God. He teaches that personal purity or impurity do not matter because we all equally stand in need of the grace of God. He even debunks the idea that what is natural is what is moral when he claims in Romans 11:24 that God acted contrary to nature when God saved the Gentiles! For Paul the gospel itself is unnatural, which is why it has the power to save!

We now return to the question, "How can we read this passage?" We who have minds. We who have experience. We who are empowered by God's Holy Spirit.

The issue here is not sexual orientation. Our scripture reading tonight came from Romans 8 and 12. Look again at that reading, particularly Romans 12. It is here that I believe we find Paul's central teaching on the role of the body in the new creation.

If we have faith in God. If we are following Jesus Christ. Then we offer our bodies to God so that we might becomes members of the one body – the church. And it is our engagement with the church which will transform us. I do not believe that the good news of Jesus Christ is concerned about whom you sleep with. I believe that the good news of Jesus Christ is about how we use our bodies to build up the kingdom of God.

Reading Scripture

Give me your thoughts on these two quotes:

"In my view, the text of the Bible is not Scripture in itself.  It is Scripture when it is taken to be Scripture -- holy writing, the "word of God," "inspired" -- by the church, the community of Christians, the communion of the saints."

"I find it helpful to think of the meaning of Scripture as residing in the performance of Scripture."

These come from Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale in his book Sex and the Single Savior, which is less about sex and gender in the Bible and more about the very nature of biblical interpretation itself, using those as touchstones.

Wisconsin Gay Couples Could Face Jail Time for Getting Married

An old law on the books in Wisconsin says it is a crime to get married out of state if your marriage is not recognized in Wisconsin.  Read more.

Letter Response

Today there was a letter to the editor, responding to mine.

Answer: Yes.  As long as a group of people were being terrorized as a group and not just a crime of one individual against other individuals or someone trying to terrorize all of society.

From Judgment to Mercy

From Judgment to Mercy

Romans 2:1-11; 14:7-13

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

Cathedral of Hope – Oklahoma City

27 June 2008

 

    If you are going to be judged, then you want God to do it.

    Why?

    Because God created you. Because God knows you more intimately than anyone else. Because God really knows your heart and your deepest self. Because God's character is filled with justice, compassion, and mercy.

    And you don't want to be judged by anyone else.

    Because they haven't created you. They do not know you intimately. They do not know your true heart, your deepest self. And you are fully aware that they can be motivated by self-interest, hypocrisy, anger, or any array of emotions.

    Paul knows us all too well. Especially pious, religious people. After all, he was one. And he was one of the most judgmental.

    God calls the church into solidarity with God's self. Which means we are supposed to be more like God. God has chosen to act mercifully toward people. Well, so should we.

    Reflecting on all these topics this week, I remembered a story. It's about Ruby Turpin.

    Our story is set in rural Georgia sometime before desegregation. Ruby is a good Southern woman. She works hard, goes to church, lives a well-ordered life, and dominates her husband Claud.

    Claud was kicked in the leg by a cow, so they have to go to town to see a physician. When Ruby and Claud enter the doctor's office, the waiting room is tiny. Ruby is annoyed by this. With all the money that physician's make, surely he could afford a larger waiting room. Ruby is a big woman, and she fills the space.

    There is only one empty seat, which Ruby gives to Claud. There is a couch, but a young child is sitting there taking up all the space. He is dirty and his nose is running. He does not move to make room for Ruby, which annoys her.

    While standing and waiting for a seat to open up, Ruby surveys the people in the room. There is one well-dressed woman whom she labels as the pleasant lady. There is also the boy, his mother, and grandmother. Ruby identifies them as white trash. Ruby has no regard for white trash. There is also a young woman, about 19 or 20, who appears to be the daughter of the pleasant lady. This young woman is ugly. She is fat and her face is covered with acne. Ruby pities her. The young woman is reading a large book entitled Human Development. There are a couple of other people, not relevant to our story.

    Eventually a seat opens up and Ruby takes it. While listening to the gospel music on the radio and occasionally entering into polite small talk with the other people, Ruby begins to think about herself and other people.

    We, the readers, learn the following about Ruby:

Sometimes at night when she couldn't sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn't have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her. "There's only two places available for you. You can either be black or white-trash," what would she have said? "Please, Jesus, please," she would have said, "just let me wait until there's another place available," and he would have said, "No, you have to go right now and I have only those two places so make up your mind." She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, "All right, make me colored then – but that don't mean a trashy one." And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.

And we learn this about Mrs. Ruby Turpin:

Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them – not above, just away from – were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there were colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with registered . . . cattle on it. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head.

    Now, I mentioned that Mrs. Turpin enters into polite conversation with the other folk present in the waiting room. For instance, the pleasant lady asks about the Turpin's farm and if they have cotton.

"We don't have much cotton . . . . If you want to make it farming now, you have to have a little of everything. We got a couple of acres of cotton and a few hogs and chickens and just enough [cattle] that Claud can look after them himself."

    "One thang I don't want," the white-trash woman said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "Hogs. Nasty stinking things, a-gruntin and a-rootin all over the place."

    Mrs. Turpin gave her the merest edge of her attention. "Our hogs are not dirty and they don't stink," she said. "They're cleaner than some children I've seen. Their feet never touch the ground. We have a pig-parlor – that were you raise them on concrete," she explained to the pleasant lady, "and Claud scoots them down with the hose every afternoon and washes off the floor." Cleaner by far than that child right there, she thought. Poor nasty little thing. . . .

    "When you got something," she said, "you got to look after it."

    Now throughout these conversations, the young ugly woman continues to make faces at Mrs. Turpin. She will look up from her reading and scowl at her. Sometimes, when Ruby is thinking about the other people, after her thoughts the girl looks at her. It is as if she knows Ruby. In fact, Ruby feels as if the girl "was looking at her as if she had known and disliked her all her life – all of Mrs. Turpin's life, it seemed too, not just all the girl's life. Why, girl, I don't even know you, Mrs. Turpin" thought.

    One of the gospel songs on the radio gets Mrs. Turpin to thinking about her goodness and her blessings:

To help anybody out that needed it was her philosophy of life. She never spared herself when she found somebody in need, whether they were white or black, trash or decent. And of all she had to be thankful for, she was most thankful that this was so. If Jesus had said, "You can be high society and have all the money you want and be thin and svelte-like, but you can't be a good woman with it," she would have had to say, "Well don't make me that then. Make me a good woman and it don't matter what else, how fat or how ugly or how poor!" Her heart rose. He had not made her black or white-trash or ugly! He had made her herself and given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! she said. Thank you thank you thank you! Whenever she counted her blessings she felt as buoyant as if she weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds instead of one hundred and eighty.

As she was thinking these thoughts,

All at once the ugly girl . . . [fixed her eyes] like two drills on Mrs. Turpin. This time there was no mistaking that there was something urgent behind them.

Girl, Mrs. Turpin exclaimed silently, I haven't done a thing to you!

    Mrs. Turpin decides that she will not be intimidated, so she asks the girl if she is in college. The girl doesn't answer. The girls mother then says, "The lady asked you a question, Mary Grace."

    Mary Grace responds, "I have ears."

    The pleasant lady then answers for her daughter. Mary Grace goes to Wellesley. She's a real book worm and even during her summers she reads and reads. Her mother wishes that she would get out more and enjoy herself.

    The pleasant lady goes on,

"I think people with bad dispositions are more to be pitied than anyone else on earth," . . . .

"I thank the Lord he has blessed me with a good one," Mrs. Turpin said. "The day has never dawned that I couldn't find something to laugh at." . . .

"If it's one thing I am," Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, "it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting. 'Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!' I could have been different!" . . . At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. "Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!" she cried aloud.

 

The book struck her directly over her left eye. It struck almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table toward her, howling. The girl's fingers sank like clamps into the soft flesh of her neck. She heard the mother cry out and Claud shout, "Whoa!"

    Everything was chaos for a moment as the nurse and physician run in, Mary Grace is wrestled off of Mrs. Turpin and pinned down to the floor where the doctor gives her an injection. After Mrs. Turpin's head clears, she looks down at Mary Grace.

There was no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her, knew her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition. "What you got to say to me?" she asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting, as for a revelation.

    The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin's. "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog," she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her eyes burned for moment as if she saw with pleasure that her message had struck its target.

    Mrs. Turpin sank back in her chair.

    An ambulance is called, and Mary Grace is taken away. Ruby and Claud finish his appointment and return home. They are so tired they lie down for awhile. While resting she begins to think about what the girl has said,

The image of a razor-backed hog with warts on its face and horns coming out behind its ears snorted into her head. She moaned a low quiet moan.

    "I am not," she said tearfully, "a wart hog. From hell." But the denial had no force. The girl's eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath.

    Eventually Ruby gets up and goes about her business. Then she heads down to the pig parlor to wash down the pigs for the evening. Standing there, with the hose pointed on the hogs, she enters into conversation with God. "What do you send me a message like that for?" she asks. She demands to know why. She is a good woman, a hard-working woman. She isn't trash. She tells God that if he likes trash better, then he should go get himself some trash then. Eventually she is so angry that she's yelling at God, "Go on, call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There'll still be a top and a bottom! . . . Who do you think you are?"

    Then Ruby stares for a long time at the hogs, as the sun is setting behind the hillside in front of her. There is a strip of purple left in the sky by the setting sun. She imagines it as a bridge leading to heaven. Ruby Turpin has a vision:

She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of blacks in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.

    At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.

[from "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor]