Diversion: Marriage as Community

Not surprisingly, John Vest’s contribution last week to the Fourth Church class on the marriage and the church was excellent and not long enough. For the first time, someone has explained for me, fairly simply even, what exactly the point of Christian marriage is and how it relates to God. The class two Sundays ago went through a whirlwind tour of bible passages that make reference to marriage and relationships, both good and bad passages to a present day progressive’s eye.

Two key lessons from the class:

1. The Bible has crazy things to say about marriage. As such, the concept that conservatives like to throw around of “biblical marriage” is ridiculous and means essentially nothing. Unless, of course, by biblical marriage, they mean marriage where wives are treated as property, where multiple wives are allowed, where adulters are stoned to death, where widows get the privilege of marrying their dead spouse’s brother, or where you’re locked in because you can’t have a divorce. I’m sure that’s exactly what they’re thinking of…
2. Marriage as a reflection of God, in the sense that God actually is relational (Trinity). This is the one that pretty much blew my mind. Said in another way, marriage is a recognition of the need for and value of community and it’s that relationship that is a reflection of what God is.

So, John didn’t exactly expound on this second point (in fact, he kind of backpedaled on it when someone in the class asked a question that took it in a different direction), but my boyfriend and I spent a lot of time discussing and dissecting it afterwards. I’m not talking about the whole “marriage is a reflection of the vertical covenant that God has with us” thing. I’m talking about the horizontal relationship between two people is a reflection of the relationship of God. Considering God is three entities in one, you can’t really get any closer than that. There’s no way, really, that people can be as close to each other as God-Jesus-Holy Spirit are to each other (since they’re one). So, marriage in the Christian (rather than legal) sense and the bonds of love that tie people together (including emotional and sexual) are the closest we can get. And then my boyfriend pointed this out in Genesis:

²⁶ Then God said, “ Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth. ”

²⁷ God created humanity

in God’s own image,

in the divine image God created them,^b

male and female God created them. – Genesis 1: 26-27

I think we all usually read that as God talking in the “royal we.” But, what if “us” meant he was talking inclusively about all aspects of the trinity? So then, the us is the trinity, but also, when it says “Let us make humanity in our image,” the us is again the trinity and the people are in the image of a community. I don’t know…kinda out there, but also kinda blew my mind and made me excited. My value system is very community-oriented and to think that marriage could be a reflection of ideal community via the trinity is pretty awesome. Of course, I am no expert and none of this is grounded in any theological study, but it answers my question, and I suppose that’s good enough for me.

I’ll leave you with a lovely song about Christmas and the Trinity:

100 Days!

I’ve been m.i.a. for awhile because the end of grad school is upon me and all the craziness that goes with that. Don’t worry, I have a huge backlog of posts for when I come back up for air in about a month.

In the meantime, we’re through 100 days of reading the bible!

Diversion: Dispatch from the Emergent Frontier

I’m becoming more and more involved with Fourth Church, attending more events and reading more blogs, etc. So, I’ve decided that every once in awhile, I’ll make a slight diversion from the regular programming of bible-in-a-year musings to comment on extraneous things. And today will be the first diversion.

I’m subscribed to John Vest’s blog (he’s a pastor at Fourth Church) and right now he’s doing a series of posts relating to some report he helped author for some commission he was on. Yes, I’m being intentionally vague, because, well, all this structure and organizational analysis is totally foreign to me. I grew up Catholic, remember. In Catholicism, the Pope makes all the decisions, maybe with the help of a bunch of Cardinals, but the “people” don’t get any say. It’s all very top-down and shrouded in secrecy. Protestantism seems to be so much more democratic and Presbyterianism in particular, I am told, is all about order and protocols and structure. But, I still don’t really understand all of it. So, I’ve been only half-reading most of his posts about this report because I still feel like a Presbyterian outsider with no real insight to have any opinion on this sort of thing.

One post about this report, however, caught my eye. The gist seems to be about how the church is discussing how to respond to the decline of mainline Protestantism in the face of both fundamentalism and a decline in organized religiosity in younger generations. So he quotes a theologian Tony Jones talking about the emerging church movement. I don’t totally know what that is, but it sounds like a postmodern rethinking of what the church should be and…I happen to agree with a bunch of the aspects of it. Choice morsels include:

“Emergents find the biblical call to community more compelling than the democratic call to individual rights.”

“Emergents believe that theology is local, conversational, and temporary. To be faithful to the theological giants of the past, emergents endeavor to continue their theological dialogue.”

“Emergents embrace paradox, especially those that are core components of the Christian story.”

“Emergents believe that church should function more like an open-source network and less like a hierarchy or bureaucracy.”

Anyway, take a look at the rest of the table included in his post. He includes books to read about these things (maybe I’ll add them to my “life after April” list…) and asks questions to think about.

The Gospel At Its Heart is Counter-Cultural (Acts 7)

Acts 7 is the story of Stephen, who was brought before the Jerusalem Council to defend himself and his spreading of the word of God against accusations from people who were opposed to it. The chapter is basically him retelling the whole Old Testament in a nutshell to the council, the council doesn’t like what they hear (basically because they’re being told they are hypocrites…which they are), so they kill him. Great. Unfortunately, we haven’t really come very far from that. No stoning here anymore (not in the U.S., at least), but there are a lot of people who don’t like to hear things they don’t agree with and will do anything to stop it. Ugh.

I’m going to keep this post short, but I’d recommend watching John Vest’s Fourth Church Youth video, in which he says:

“The gospel at its heart is counter-cultural. It’s subversive, it’s radical.”

And implores us to have the courage to speak up with the truth.

Compassion for Others and for Ourselves (Leviticus 6-7, Acts 6)

The first part of the assigned reading was Leviticus 6-7. When I read through this, all I could think of was “more boring rules.” It wasn’t until I watched the Fourth Church Youth video that I noticed what a big deal the first part is:

^“2 If you sin: 

by acting unfaithfully against the LORD ; 

by deceiving a fellow citizen concerning a deposit or pledged property;

by cheating a fellow citizen through robbery;

³ or, though you’ve found lost property, you lie about it;

or by swearing falsely about anything that someone might do and so sin,

⁴ at that point, once you have sinned and become guilty of sin, you must return the property you took by robbery or fraud, or the deposit that was left with you for safekeeping, or the lost property that you found, ⁵ or whatever it was that you swore falsely about. You must make amends for the principal amount and add one-fifth to it. You must give it to the owner on the day you become guilty. ⁶ You must bring to the priest as your compensation to the LORD a flawless ram from the flock at the standard value as a compensation offering. ⁷ The priest will make reconciliation for you before the LORD , and you will be forgiven for anything you may have done that made you guilty.” (Leviticus 6: 2-7)

So, basically, even though Leviticus is just a huge list of all the things you’re not supposed to do and the rituals you are supposed to do, even if you screw up, if you make amends, you will be forgiven. And that amends is generally directly related to the crime. None of this vindictive, punitive incarceration perpetuation industry discussed in a recent New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik that this all makes me think of.

And to continue the theme of compassion, the second half of the assigned reading was Acts 6. Again, I didn’t think a lot of the reading until after I read the daily devotion by John Boyle (Feb. 16) and then noticed the very first part:

“About that time, while the number of disciples continued to increase, a complaint arose. Greek-speaking disciples accused the Aramaic-speaking disciples because their widows were being overlooked in the daily food service.” (Acts 6: 1)

The gist of John Boyle’s point is that when we discriminate against people who are “other” or get caught up in petty, prejudiced squabbles (ahem… politicians…), the most vulnerable among us are the ones that suffer the most. We need to look past that and have compassion.

So Many Rules (Leviticus 1-3)

While Leviticus 1-3 wasn’t quite as dull as some parts of Exodus were, it’s still difficult to read through these long lists of rules that really don’t seem to apply at all today. Like, what exactly is an entirely burned offering (Leviticus 1: 3-17)? So much time is spent, not just here, throughout the Old Testament even, talking about them…what are they? I understand that the phrase is translated differently in other versions of the bible, but if this version is supposed to be such plain language, what is it supposed to mean?

The Fourth Church Youth video by John Vest that went with this reading talks about the way physicality can play a role in faith, as shown through Leviticus. And the daily devotion by Judith Watt that went with this reading addresses the fact that because of Jesus, we don’t follow all these tedious rules anymore. Instead, the gist of what we’re supposed to take from all these rules of lists is that we should try to do our best.

“The first three chapters of Leviticus are instructions given to the Israelites about proper worship. Proper worship in the earliest days of the formation of God’s people was centered around sacrifice at the altar and the centrality of the temple. We find ourselves reading these lists, quickly dismissing them. I can’t imagine how many of us could have met the obligations of proper worship in that day. And yet the theme that jumps out at me in reading all of these lists and also in reading the Acts story about Ananias and Sapphira [Acts 5] is the idea that God deserves our best. Thankfully, Jesus has given us a message that turns all of these former lists upside down. Our best is the best we have to offer in how we live and how we love. We don’t have to be perfect or unblemished or rich or smart to please God. We simply have to offer our best.” (Judith Watt, Feb. 14)

Picking and Choosing What to Follow (Exodus 35-36, Psalm 16)

This seems to be as good of a topic as any to kick-off my Bible Year blog. I’ll slowly catch up on posts from the last month and a half, but so as not to paralyze myself with feeling overwhelmed, I’ll just start posting as I go, as well.

The readings for Sunday, February 12th covered Exodus 35-36 and Psalm 16. I’ve been fairly bored by the chapters in Exodus that describe in very fine detail just how exactly to build God’s shrines and how to decorate them…and now, in the same level of detail, just how exactly the Israelites are building and decorating those shrines. So, originally, I hadn’t really thought there’d be anything to pull out of these readings and discuss. But then I watched John Vest’s video post on this set of readings in which he pulls out for discussion rules concerning the Sabbath (there’s a heck of a lot of that in Exodus, too…I sometimes think that I’m accidentally re-reading things I’ve already read!).

“Do your work for six days, but the seventh day should be holy to you, a Sabbath of complete rest for the LORD . Whoever does any work on the Sabbath will be put to death.” (Exodus 35: 1-2)

If you work on the Sabbath, well, you should be put to death. Who really besides the super Orthodox Jews and Chick-Fil-A truly follow that? Pretty much no one. And yet, you don’t see bible-thumpers protesting outside stores open on Sundays or flipping out about people who work on Sundays. And as far as I can tell so far, there are WAY more references to not working on the Sabbath (very very clear ones, at that) than there are, as John Vest points out, condemning same-sex relationships (and other things people like to use the bible to rail against). So, on behalf of myself and the many of us out there that do plenty of work every Sunday, let’s be glad no one’s claiming we should be put to death.

Update: My boyfriend reminded me that the Sabbath is actually Saturday. Which, I do know, but I guess I forgot when I was writing this post. Actually, at this point in the bible, the actual day of Sabbath has not been specified, so let’s just blame it on that 🙂