Focus verse: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

1. The Christian life is meant to be a Festival, not a carnival, nor an Inquisition
2. Whether a carnival or an Inquisition, the same sin is behind all other sins at work: “proud” defiance, resistance against repentance and grace & dependence upon God
3. Our Passover festival is celebrated with bread of sincerity & truth, i.e. openness to correction and repentance, honesty, transparency and mutual accountability (not sinlessness and perfection)

When we looked at this passage over breakfast last Tuesday morning, two questions immediately popped up: 1) What does this passage have to do with today’s baptism and new membership, when its about kicking someone out of church membership?; and 2) How good do we have to be lest we too get dis-fellowshipped or expelled? Since none of us is perfect, wouldn’t this passage set us on some sort of feeding frenzy, at the end of which, no one would be left on our rolls, or in our pews, or…. in the pulpit?

Well, to answer the second question first, today I have commissioned several big, strong bouncers standing in the back who are going to go through the sanctuary this morning taking every known and suspected sinner out of the pews and escorting them out of the sanctuary, and….

Now, why do they seem to be heading for the pulpit first?

Just kidding.

But some of us here have had experiences with just that kind of judgmental feeding frenzy, and sometimes over the oddest of things, like the length of your hair or the color and style of your clothing. All the while that they were fixating on those things, they were overlooking the real sins of fear and hostility that fueled such a feeding frenzy. When I pastored in Kansas, I got to know many who were kicked out of the Holderman Mennonite churches for such alleged sins as having pictures of their family members up in their house or at their work sites. It showed pride, they were told. Some of them joined our Western District Conference Mennonite churches, while others were so badly hurt that they left church all together.

That kind of feeding frenzy is not what Paul is encouraging in us today. He’s encouraging us to think of the Christian life, and the Christian community, as a festival. In particular, the Jewish Passover Festival. The Passover is a festival celebrating God and his work of freedom, redemption, liberation, and the restoration of human dignity from Egyptian slavery. Its celebrated in family, with friends, with the sharing of food, love and faith. An even greater freedom, redemption, liberation and restoration of human dignity is now possible for all of us because of the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the final, perfect Passover Lamb of God. We, his disciples, get to celebrate such a festival of freedom, dignity and liberation not just once a year but every day of our lives through eternity.

But somebody in Corinth had turned the new Christian passover festival into a carnival, worse than the most lewd and crude Carnival/Mardi Gras images you might ever have seen in the evening news from New Orleans or Rio de Janeiro. It was so bad that people outside of the church would blush and barf at the mention of it.

But it would be no better if we turned the new Christian Passover Festival into a Mennonite version of the Spanish Inquisition. That was five hundred years ago, when Catholic church officials were prying into everyone’s homes and lives and burning people at the stake who wouldn’t repent of being Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Anabaptist, atheist, agnostic, pagan or whatever. They don’t do this today; the Pope even apologized for it, so we shouldn’t hang it about the necks of our Catholic friends anymore, except to recognize that, in this day and age when anything goes, we are likewise tempted to circle the wagons in a fearful, defensive stance against the world, and to seek security by controlling all sorts of external things about each other.

I suppose that’s why I occasionally get phone calls from people who are interested in checking us out, as long as our church imposes some sort of dress code, especially upon women, and that we don’t do any contemporary, upbeat music. I understand their fears and can sympathize with them. But I don’t think that controlling dress or styles of music will get at the things they really fear most. “Come see the beautiful African clothing, especially around Easter,” I say. “And we have a pretty good worship band, plus a full string orchestra.” But they don’t come. I figure its better to tell the truth and disappoint them over the phone than to have them go through all the trouble to come and get disappointed.

As grievous as was the particular sin mentioned in Corinth, the there is a more grievous sin behind that sin. Paul tells us what it is in verse 2 when he says, “And you are [even] proud!” He means “you” plural. So it wasn’t just a person at fault; there was an entire church faction in his corner. With those words we look beyond the unmentionable sin to the sin behind all sins, the proud, willful, stubborn, defiant resistance to God and his gifts of counsel, repentance, forgiveness and restoration, manifested by pride in the sin and its acceptance. It was the sin of believing himself, against all evidence to the contrary, to be not a sinner.

That sin is uniquely dangerous and destructive because, unlike other sins, it amounts to slamming the door on community, counsel, forgiveness and reconciliation. It amounts to painting ourselves into a corner where the gifts of counsel, of repentance, forgiveness and a change of life cannot reach us, where we would remain alone, thumbing our noses at God and others. Because of his pride in the sin, and not just the sin itself, Paul calls for the de-membership of the Corinthian offender until the fruits of his conduct affect him and confront him with the need to repent and reform. After all, the person in question, by his unwillingness to receive counsel, by his certainty that he had nothing to confess or be forgiven, was already distancing himself from God, the community and its mission.

And, like yeast in bread dough, this defiance of God’s grace was contagious and had begun infecting others with this same spirit of defiance and divisiveness. Others in Corinth were boasting about their acceptance of his conduct. That boasting indicates something else more destructive than the sexual misconduct, as bad as it was: it means that they were turning their inner orientation away from God and toward the world, making themselves actors for hire on the world’s stage, seeking to please society, more so than God. Since no one can act toward all sides of a stage, some will then play to different sides of society’s audience, such as for the right or the left, for the revolutionaries or the reactionaries. When that happens, a bridge club can’t stay together, let alone a church. So, defiance of God’s grace leads inexorably to divisiveness in the church.

And this is just as true if we should also turn the Christian life into an Inquisition. Its just as divisive and destructive whether we’re drinking ourselves silly, or snooping in each other’s refrigerators. Whether we’re committing theft, or auditing each other’s check books. Whether we’re dressing immodestly, or whether we’re enforcing a dress code. In either case, its the same temptation and the same sin: to abandon our trust in God in favor of self-reliance and self-justification, whether through a carnival, or an inquisition.

So, to the second question, How good do I have to be to not get kicked out of the community of faith? Well, that would happen only if we weren’t sinners. Actually, when it comes to God’s household of faith, people really, finally don’t get kicked out. Or they shouldn’t. But people may eventually remove themselves, through this willful defiance I have described, to the point where the community must finally acknowledge their leaving, and grieve it. And the surest way for anyone to remove themselves from the community of faith would be if we stopped being sinners in need of God and each other. Or at least, if we were sure we were not sinners, like the Corinthians and their poster child. In the spirit of I Corinthians 5, church membership is only for sinners.

That’s even what our church’s Mission Statement says. It begins by defining us as, “a community of sinners redeemed from the guilt and bondage of sin by the grace of God and the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ.” No sinless people need apply.

But the other side of the coin is expressed in our annual membership covenant, where we promise each other “...the compassionate giving and receiving of counsel among all members and attendees…” So don’t anyone join this church, or attend it, if you don’t want to start growing from sinners toward sainthood. Don’t join if you don’t want to give and receive help along the way. The old saying, “Every saint has a past and every sinner a future” is the plot line of our worship, our songs and our hymns. Its our life stories. And that of the man who wrote today’s Bible passage. He called himself, “the chief of sinners.”

And that leads us back to the first question: What does this passage, about church discipline and expulsion, have to do with today’s celebration of baptism and a new church membership? Well, look again at the focus verses, 7 and 8: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

At Emmanuel Mennonite Church, our baptismal vows and our membership covenants commit us to those two things: sincerity and truth. Not to sinlessness and perfection, because we’ve probably all missed our chance at those, but to sincerity and truth. The truth I take to be God’s Word. Sincerity I take to mean honesty, transparency and openness with each other in a spirit of care and compassion for each other. In our life-long Passover celebration together, our “bread of sincerity and truth” is made of our willingness to review our lives, honestly and compassionately, by the standard of God’s truth, to repent and make amends however often they’re necessary, to give ourselves and each other as many chances as we need to get up from our falls and failures and start over, and to accept the gracious, compassionate help of our brothers and sisters to do just that. It may not always be wise to spill everything about our lives before everyone all the time. But hopefully, to some trusted people in God’s household of faith, all of our lives are an open book to someone. Without this regular diet of truth and sincerity, our spirits starve and die.

I hope that every time someone is baptized and embarks on a new Christian life, all of us reflect anew upon our relationship with God and each other. Today, Rediet is joining the new Passover festival in Christ, to purge any of the old leaven of hostility and wickedness, and to share with us the new bread of sincerity and truth. She is committing herself to Christ and to us, to join us on the life-long journey of growth in godliness. Let Rediet’s decision today remind us to keep sharing and feeding on the bread of sincerity and truth, of honest counsel, repentance, forgiveness and newness of life. Its a matter of life and death. Especially for those who need it.

For maps of Israel’s 40-year sojourn, and the allotment of the land by tribes, check out: http://www.bible-history.com/maps/route_exodus.html.

Central to this section is Israel’s conflict with Midian, or Moab. Moses’ (first?) wife was from this region, and Jethro, his father-in-law and a priest among these people, had given Moses some good counsel. But now Moab is standing firmly in the way, seeking to block Israel’s advance. After watching Israel’s 38 years of apparent wandering in the desert, the fear of the Lord has worn off and Egypt’s vassal states assume they can keep the Israelites in the desert forever, if not by direct conflict, then by temptation and enticement away from their patron God. Thus the moral/spiritual meltdown around the cult of Baal-Fegor, probably a fertility idol, complete with the sacred female prostitutes (25: 1-3). It nearly worked, and the cult could be uprooted from Israel’s ranks only at terrible cost of something approaching civil war and the deaths of 24,000.

This is the story behind the war of vengeance and near-extermination against Moab, and laws regarding the spoils of war (Numbers 31), meant to prevent Israel from going to war for their own economic enrichment, as their neighborings states often did. For the modern reader, especially one of pacifist, Anabaptist sensibilities, these stories of Holy War, of merciless killing, both of fellow Israelites and their neighbors, including noncombatant women and children, raise some serious issues, to say the least. It doesn’t seem to square with the peace teachings of Jesus. Greg Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills, has done much writing and thinking on this matter, which you can peruse at http://www.gregboyd.org/. Our church’s member, Philip Friesen, has also written a book on this matter, The Old Testament Roots of Nonviolence. I’ll come back to this issue several times as we encounter it again throughout the Pentateuch and the books of Joshua, Kings and Chronicles.

Suffice it to say, for the moment, that Jesus himself treats these documents as foundational to his identity and mission. They were authoritative, even sacred, to him, so they should be for his disciples, as well. They inform our understanding of him and his mission, as well as vice versa. So we must let them question us, as well as us questioning them. The Old Testament presumes that the Giver of life has the right to take it back when it is being misused by injustice, idolatry or violence. We must deal with it. That does not give us the right to make ourselves agents of God’s judgment, because “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (including ourselves) and “the wages of sin is death.” So we come to the Old Testament as those over whom the sword is poised.

Euro-American pioneers who claimed the right and precedent of the Exodus to drive out and exterminate Native Americans put themselves in the wrong part of these stories. So did the White South Africans, and other European colonialists in Asia, Latin America and Africa. We Christians are most definitely not to claim the mantle of God’s  conquering warrior people in our relations to non-Christians and other cultures and nations. In Romans 9-11, Paul tells us that we, the Gentiles, are the wild branch grafted into the tree of Israel, i.e., that we are, in effect, the pagan nations faced with the inevitable coming of new management who would do well to sue for peace and submit ourselves to Israel’s God and his merciful covenant, unlike what Moab and other tribes and nations did. Then we will discover how gracious, patient, merciful and compassionate is this warrior God. As someone else has said, “If God is ‘a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29),’ he is a fire that burns cooler and sweeter the closer we approach him.” More thoughts on Old Testament holy war and Jesus’ assertive non-violence in posts to come.

A powerful and intriguing summary statement of the relationship between God, God’s law and God’s land is posted at the end of Numbers 35: ” ‘Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it. Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the LORD, dwell among the Israelites.’ ” Here is an interesting angle on sacrifice, especially that of Jesus, God’s final and perfect Passover Lamb, the sacrifice which perfects and completes what the recurrent sacrifices of ancient Israel could not complete (Hebrews 9-10). But what does this say about the history of bloodshed on our own soil, whether that of the Native American, driven out by bullet and bayonet, or of the African slave and his descendant, by the lash or by lynching? Again, this does not obligate us to capital punishment, because the blood sacrifice of Jesus pays for all. Yet we can say that the land remembers what we try to forget. The seeds sown by bloodshed in one generation will bear fruit for generations to come, until we too offer the atoning sacrifices of confession, repentance, reconciliation and restoration.

The majority report of the twelve spies (Numbers 13) sets off a panic and a revolt among the Israelites, from which their generation never recovered. Some scholars assert that, had they believed the minority report of Joshua and Caleb and continued marching into Canaan, not only would they have cut 38 years off their wilderness wanderings (the first two were necessary for installing the rites, laws and institutions that would keep them from becoming Egypt-point-two), they might have avoided much of the bloodshed they suffered and committed in the invasion by the next generation. For “the fear of the Lord” was still upon Egypt’s buffer and vassal states in the region. Many of them might have fled, or sought peace with Israel, maybe even assimilating into Israel’s faith and governance. By the time the faithless generation had died off (except for Joshua and Caleb), the tribes and states in the land were united, ready and resistant to Israel.

WHAT HAPPENED TO MOSES?

What did he do to forfeit his right to enter the Promised Land? In Numbers 20, we read about another community plague of panic, this time over water, or the lack thereof. God instructed Moses to speak to a certain rock, and it will bring forth water (A biblical parable about prayer to God, The Rock?) Moses seems to have had a temper tantrum instead, speaking harshly to the people, and striking the rock twice with his rod. Small, minor details, it seems, but they may indicate a bigger picture of the state of Moses and a persistent flaw in his leadership, as great as it otherwise was. The Bible interprets itself in Psalm 106 :33: “rash words came from Moses’ lips.” Such weakness would handicap the people upon their entry into Canaan. Here again we see a striking difference between the Bible and other religious literature that took shape among Israel’s pagan neighbors at the time. In the latter category, the founding/leading religious and political figures are usually one-dimensionally perfect, all-knowing, all-sufficient, all-conquering, divine or semi-divine figures. All of Israel and her leaders and servants are, by contrast, flawed and fallible human beings whom God uses, almost in spite of themselves.

LIFTING UP THE SERPENT—Numbers 21

Compare the story of Numbers 21: 4-9 with with how the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth interpreted the story in John 3: 14-15: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” Then II Cor. 5: 21 for Rabbi Saul of Tarsus’ take: “God made him [Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

There was something about facing the symbol of their affliction that overcame this affliction. Likewise, God’s incarnation and identification with us mortal sinners through the human Christ is our healing from death and sin.

Numbers 22-24: PROPHET VS. PROPHET, Balaam vs. Moses

Before we consider the stark contrasts of pagan magic and divination with Israel, her law and prophets, the reader must determine why the angel of God is ready to kill Balaam when he is obeying God’s directive to go with the royal emissaries of Balaak. When the angel tells Balaam, “Go with the men, but speak only what I tell you,” (italics mine) it may indicate that Balaam had first gone with a greedy spirit, thinking or hoping he had divine permission to curse Israel for hire. In the Bible’s self-interpretation, this seems to be the case, as Peter points out in his “Second Letter, chapter 2, verse 15: “They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam son of Beor, who loved the wages of wickedness.” Balaam shows up in other, later Bible passages as a symbol of spiritual power for hire, against the purposes of God. Though Balaam was unable to curse Israel, he helped engineer the curse of sacralized, idolatrous temptation in Moab’s pagan shrines, to entice Israel into the conjoined twin sins of idolatry and fornication (Numbers 25), thus dispelling (temporarily) God’s favor and protection. When Israel went to war with Moab, on the way into the Promised Land, Balaam was listed among the kings and priests killed. Balaam and Moses then become studies, by comparison and contrast, in prophecy and prophetic ministry, that of Israel and her God, versus that of Egypt’s imperial vassal and buffer states and their local gods.

But the story, stretching over chapters 22-24, raises several other questions:

1. Why would anyone think that a priest or prophet could engineer an effective curse against anyone, let alone a nation?
2. Why would anyone think that changing the location of the ritual might change the results?
3. Why would God even show up and talk to a pagan priest, prophet and diviner like Balaam?

The third question first: This story is one clue, among many others in the Pentateuch, that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was already well-known among Israel’s neighbors, considered perhaps as one god among many, or a supreme One above all the others, but not as one friendly to the gods of war, empire, commerce, magic and fertility, nor to the divinized human beings at the pinnacle of political and military power (i.e., kings and queens) who demanded worship, sacrifice and obedience as gods. So YHWH, God of Israel, may have already been a familiar (but feared?) figure to a shaman, priest, sorcerer and soothsayer like Balaam. Balaam may have been like one of the spiritually gifted people I have met who, though not disciples of Jesus, whatever their religion, are more sensitive to and aware of spiritual forces and realities around and within themselves than is the average bloke, even the average Christian. Most of the time, it is a blessing that we are in the dark about the unseen spiritual forces and beings around us, as long as we are clinging to God and under his authority. While this heightened spiritual sensitivity is a gift (which I don’t have), it can also be a curse, if it is sought and developed for reasons of pride and power over others. Come to think of it, this same temptation afflicts Christians and their leaders. With this gift, one might have special insight into the workings and presence of God, as well as of other spiritual entities, forces and movements. For Christians, such gifts are called “discernment” and “prophecy.” But their employment is for entirely different reasons than those of Balaam, who sought wealth, prestige, power and distinction over and against others.

As for the first question, Why would anyone think that a priest or prophet could engineer an effective curse against anyone, let alone a nation? we have to place ourselves into the pagan, pantheistic, primal mindset. In that worldview, the line between the Creator and Creation is not solid; indeed, nature and divinity are one and the same. Thus its not unreasonable, in this worldview, to think that certain human beings, or all human beings with the right rituals, tools and words, would have divine power to curse and to bless, because they themselves are divine, or semi-divine. As Christians we should take seriously our God-given mandate to bless others, not because we are God or gods, but because God dwells with and within us.

Which leads to the second question: How would moving from one shrine or mountain-top to another change the blessing or curse coming from Balaam’s mouth, as Balaak seemed to hope? In the primal, pagan worldview, if all people are divine, and some more divine than others, then the same is true of places. All places are infused with divine presence and power, some more so than others. And some places are infused with the powers of some deities and spirits, while others are the shrines and abodes of others. Like a caller wandering around to get better cell phone reception, Balaak and Balaam hoped they might get a more favorable spiritual event from a different spiritual location. Though YHWH God chose to make the Jerusalem Temple his (temporary) footstool, it was already revolutionary enough, in the time of the Exodus, for him to dwell with a people on the move, in a portable Tabernacle. Then, with the giving of God’s Holy Spirit, God is enshrined in his people everywhere throughout the earth, where they live, love and worship.

(I wrote this review several years ago, and post it now, as it is as timely as ever.)

“You’ve simply got to read the book,” my friend e-mailed me. “It explains so well why we have evolved to the stage where we simply can’t afford religion anymore.”

”I haven’t read The End of Faith yet,” I replied, “though I know that it and other books like The God Delusion [by Richard Dawkins] and God Is Not Great [by Christopher Hitchens] are stirring up a lot of press and passion. I suppose I should. How about we both discuss it?”

I haven’t heard back from my friend yet, but I took him up at his recommendation and read The End of Faith by Sam Harris. If my friend wanted to “save me” or convert me to atheism, his book recommendation failed to do the trick. But I’m glad I read it.

Harris’ argument against any and all organized religion goes roughly like this:

• Religious faith effectively requires mental and intellectual suicide.
• This mental and intellectual suicide is dangerous: do this and you could do or approve of anything else (like flying passenger jets into skyscrapers)
• In a world of nuclear weapons and of economic and technological advances and interconnection, religious extremists with a 14^th Century mentality have access to 21^st Century weapons and their killing scales [nowhere does Harris question these 21^st Century weapons].
• Therefore, the human race, to survive, cannot afford the luxury of any gods, faith or religion.

To Harris, it does no good to object, “But my religious beliefs regulate my own behavior, not yours, and they are all about peace and non-violence.” Harris insists that peaceful and “moderate” religionists are just as guilty as rabid fundamentalists on a bloody jihad, because peaceful and even pacifist believers, by the very act of believing in God, are providing intellectual ammunition and cover for the jihadi and the Crusader. That strikes me a bit like saying that, since my dear, departed, Slovakian grandmother was opposed to the Nazis, she is just as guilty of the fire bombing of Dresden in 1945 as were the Allied Air Forces. I don’t hold atheists like him guilty of the crimes of other atheists like Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot.

Nor is Harris impressed by all the good and virtue that religious people have shown or done over the millenia. Without religious faith, he believes, humanity might have been even more virtuous and have advanced farther and more quickly than it has. And since most people in most cultures have been religious anyway, there was almost no one else around to do anything at all, either good or bad. Finally, Harris asserts, whatever good religion and the religious may have done is vastly outweighed by the evils they have committed, such as the Crusades, the Inquisition, jihads, witch-burnings, pogroms, and child abuse and its cover-ups.

I’d like to know by what measure he might possibly make such calculations.

Which is all quite sobering, to say the least. But it didn’t prove to be as scary as I had thought. I began the book with some hesitation, wondering, in the back of my mind, if this book should contain the drop-dead indisputable evidence and arguments that will prove God a lie and the Christian faith a hoax. Instead, Harris seems to assume these things, and then builds his case against religion and the religious from there. Most of his cases involve setting up the most absurd examples and outrageous caricatures of religion, and then knocking them down, verbally or logically. After so many pages of ridicule and the worst assumptions and stereotypes, you start to wonder when and how that ever got confused for critical, logical thinking.

It would be so comforting if his salvos against church, mosque and synagogue lacked any potent ammunition. But Harris has a lot of rotten fruit lying around to lob at us precisely because the church has provided so much of it. He is spot on when he asks questions like, How is that Galileo and Copernicus were excommunicated from the Church while Hitler never was? I won’t even begin to say what projectiles the mosque or the synagogue have coming back at them because, as a Christian, I have to take responsibility for what has been done in my name, or in the name of my Lord. And there’s plenty to take responsibility for. But Harris reserves his most shrill and frightening language for Islam.

At the very least, Harris builds a very strong case for separation of church and state. I suspect that he is unaware of the number of Christians, especially Anabaptists, who are with him on that one, or who even made it possible by their martyrdom. He also builds a very strong case for humility, especially within the ranks of church leadership and structure. I also felt some sympathy for his arguments against the church imposing its faith-based morality upon the wider society. As much as we might rightly decry sexual immorality, abortion and recreational drug use, do we really, as Christians, want to do everything necessary to deny, discourage and punish these things among nonbelievers? Is our witness better served by going after people for doing these things, or by people going after us for not doing them?

Harris also makes the case for secular society not giving the church a free pass and a respectable, but hypocritical, nod anymore. As someone very concerned about the church’s witness, I would much rather deal with Harris’ kind of hostile engagement than with the disdainful but polite indifference and calculated avoidance that I so often encounter. Harris repeatedly asserts that one can only arrive at religious belief by pulling the plug on your mental faculties and running in a blind panic from any and all contrary beliefs. But I have found that some of my deepest spiritual breakthroughs and insights have come from honest debate and discussion with people of other religions, or of no religion at all.

Which is another weakness of The End of Faith. He assumes that dialog and discussion with religious people are pointless and impossible. The End of Faith is, therefore, meant not so much to convert (or de-convert) believers, but to preach to the choir and dish up heaping, steaming plates of verbal red meat for any and all who have been hurt by or angry with organized religion. I say this not to frighten us but to help us prepare for the suspicious-to-hostile missional context in which are increasingly finding ourselves. There are more of such people around than we might think, judging by how quickly the newest atheist manifestos are flying off the shelves of bookstores and enjoying unexpected additional printings. The manners and politesse by which Harris, Dawkins and others might once have given us at least a respectful space are wearing thin. I occasionally run into this emerging stridency in places such as the French language conversational groups I sometimes attend, where, at least once, other non-believers were so shocked by the way someone else was verbally abusing my faith that they came to its defense without my having to say a thing. Rather than feeling aggrieved or insulted, I was glad to be out of my customary church cocoon and in contact with such beliefs.

For beliefs these are, requiring every bit as much faith on Harris’ part as do mine. For example, Harris believes that science will soon explain all things moral and spiritual, such as conversion or virtue, by way of neurobiology or evolutionary advantage, thereby rendering God and faith obsolete. He also expects reason and evolution to give us soon a workable moral code which will be self-evidently correct, at least to everyone with a university degree. Aside from being a faith statement no less hopeful than mine, what would a brain scan of meditation or an evolutionary advantage for prayer or virtue prove except that they happened in the brain and were good for our survival? A believer in God might find that quite reassuring, not challenging.

What Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens and other militant missionary atheists overlook is that they are effectively serving up another religion in place of the ones they condemn: a religion of positive scientific advance and enlightenment, with self, science and society as God. By looking for evolutionary and neuro-biological explanations for spirituality, they are also admitting that humans are incurably religious. Martin Luther even said so. And while they accuse all religions of being inherently violent, lacking any internal restraint against murder and domination (they’ve never read Mennonite theology), their own proffered religions also lack any internal restraint against violence or persecution of people who differ, whatever their faith.

But I agree with Harris and others that we have less to fear from atheists like themselves and more to fear from religions and religionists in the service of ego, power and domination. I believe it was Plato who said that there were three kinds of atheists:

1. One who says that because there is no God, we are therefore free to discover how evil we might be. They are few and are often safely in jail, having found out just how evil they might be.
2. One who says that because there is no God, we must be as good and virtuous as possible on our own power. Among these we find some very noble souls. Despite the drubbing he gave me, I’ll give Harris the benefit of the doubt, and place him in this category. He does work hard at finding an ethical approach to life. But when they find such efforts unworkable and unsustainable, such atheists are also in great danger—of becoming believers, as did Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis and the woman who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, and who, when I heard her story, had become a youth ministry specialist for the United Methodist Church.
3. One who says that because there is no God, we are free to make one up for our own purposes.

This third group of atheists are the most dangerous kind, for they may actually hide behind pulpits, camouflaging themselves as believers, pastors, bishops and theologians, and thus bring disaster and disgrace upon themselves, the church and the faith that they exploit. Because they are often so adept at manipulation, disguises and demagoguery, we have much more to fear from them than from outright and openly hostile atheists like Harris and Dawkins. They are the ones who will continue to pile up the most damning evidence in Harris’ favor.

If we would take seriously our witness in the world and “be ready to offer an explanation to everyone who asks of you the reason for your hope (I Peter 3:16),” then we must be ready even for an occasional outbreak of some of the hostility and contempt that Harris serves up. But just being peacefully present and available to it will itself be something of a victory, even if we don’t have all the answers to satisfy our interrogators. No one has. And its not what is asked of us as witnesses. It may even be that, by peacefully and respectfully absorbing some of the wrath that has understandably piled up over church sex abuse scandals, and the church’s historic complicity in war, segregation and the oppression of women, without returning wrath in kind, we will have provided some venue for healing and a more effective witness than any words or arguments can provide.

In the face of criticism and hostility I take comfort from the following things:

1. that we are being held accountable to the very standards and beliefs that we, our Bible and our Christ have advocated in the world, or which are logically inferred from our beliefs and standards;
2. that critics are always doing us a favor, often in spite of themselves. To the extent that they are right, we have learned something helpful. To the extent that they are wrong or exaggerated, we have an opportunity to display the patient and gracious love of Christ.

Often our critics and opponents are working with an element of truth. In Harris’ case, he has taken the verbal equivalent of a baseball bat to a job better suited for a surgeon’s scalpel. That so much of his fear and hostility is in reaction to religiously-based violence makes this a very good time for a peaceful Anabaptist witness to Christ that is uncompromising in its love for friend and foe alike, to the point of being willing to die for our enemies and detractors, rather than to kill them. Such love is our most powerful witness, our most convincing argument.

The Apostle Paul, reflecting on the very histories we are reading, wrote: “For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert. Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. Do not be idolaters, as some of them were; as it is written: “The people sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in pagan revelry.”We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did—and in one day twenty-three thousand of them died.We should not test the Lord, as some of them did—and were killed by snakes. And do not grumble, as some of them did—and were killed by the destroying angel. These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! (I Cor. 10: 1-12)

ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE, RACISM TOO?

In Numbers 13, we read that Moses has a “Cushite wife.” Beyond that, she is not named. Cush we usually associate with Ethiopia. Was his wife, Zipporah, whom we first encounter in Exodus, “Cushite?” Moses married her during his sojourn in the Desert of Midian, east of Egypt, so that’s unlikely. Or complicated. Or had Zipporah left and divorced Moses? Or died? Or had he divorced her, or even taken a second wife? That wasn’t technically illegal under Mosaic law, nor unusual for the Patriarchs, but it never went well. By the time of Jesus, both he and his fellow Jews were re-affirming the Edenic ideal of “the two become one flesh.” We don’t know the answers to these questions. But the fact that she was “Cushite” very likely Ethiopian, brought scorn from Moses’ brother and sister. And that brought a harsh response from God. If racism was the problem, all the more ironic that Miriam turned “white” with leprosy. This story may reflect two ideas that were revolutionary at the time: 1) that the Hebrews and fugitives from Egypt were a mixed lot in color and culture, down to the level of their families; and 2) God was declaring himself, in the strongest of terms, opposed to racism.

Though I’m Christian, not Muslim, I am just as distressed at the idea of the proposed “International Burn the Quran Day” as I would be if it were “International Burn the Bible Day.” But that’s precisely what Pastor Terry Jones and his church, the Dove World Outreach Center, of Gainesville, Florida, have proposed as a way of observing the next September 11, 2010, the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5AuRgeoAE): burning copies of the Quran.

I’ve studied the Quran (or at least an English translation of it) and my supreme loyalty is still to the Bible. Yet I offer the Q’uran respect similar to what I offer my Muslim friends, just as most of them respect me and my Bible. This seems a fair and reasonable exchange. If Pastor Jones and the Dove Outreach Center wish to help people come to know Christ, as is his stated goal (mine too), will they gain a fair hearing by such a threatening and provocative act of flagrant disrespect? Or is his a magical world in which he expects respect, but he doesn’t have to give it?

In his interview on CNN, Pastor Jones recites a litany of charges against Islam, such as forced conversions, terrorism and lack of freedom. I’ve also heard Muslims recite litanies of historic grievances against Christians, going back to the Crusades and to old and contemporary forms of Western colonialism. Their reasoning is so similar, they must either both be right, or equally mistaken. To me, Al Qaeda is to Islam as the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity. Both appeal to one religion or the other, and both are perversions of it. So, just as I would not want myself and my sacred scriptures discredited by association with the Ku Klux Klan, we must make the same distinctions when relating to all who call themselves Muslim. I know, love and respect all the many Muslims in my life. And I haven’t met an Al Qaeda jihadi yet.

I’d like to take Pastor Jones to meet some of my Muslim friends, including the Muslim family in West Africa that effectively “adopted” Becky, our daughters and myself, without requiring us to become Muslim. They even said we could host prayer meetings or a church on their property. That may not be as unusual as Jones thinks.

So, count me as a conscientious objector to International Burn the Quran Day on September 11, 2010. We have, as a nation, more and better grieving to do about the events of that tragic day, nine years ago, if we are to break out of the cycle of victimhood, vengeance and violence. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the burning of the Quran are part and parcel of our entrapment in aborted and misdirected grieving. Doing something as vindictive and disrespectful as burning the Quran, in order to poke Muslims in the eye, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with the events of that day, will lead to no one’s healing, including our own. Quite the opposite. Respect and reconciliation will go much farther toward healing the wounds of September 11, which were felt just as strongly in the Muslim community of America, as among non-Muslims.

Similar errors and attitudes are at work over plans for a newer, larger Islamic center in Lower Manhattan, near the site of the World Trade Towers attack. My thoughts: outside of the people of Manhattan and their elected and appointed city officials, its no one else’s business. There may be reasons related to zoning laws and civil safety codes that would argue for or against it, same as if a church were proposed for that site. Religion (or which one), however, should not be a deciding matter in the case, unless we want to start a precedent of legalized religious preference and persecution. We Mennonites should be familiar with where that leads. Our experience has taught us instead that the Holy Spirit has more powerful means of convicting and convincing people than what human laws and regulations can ever provide.

More importantly, what does it say about us that a proposed mosque has become a major national election year issue? Besides fear of Muslims and Islam, it also indicates ignorance. There are already thousands of Muslims living, working and worshiping in Lower Manhattan, with plenty of mosques there even now. Furthermore, the imam and potential builder of the proposed Islamic Center is a Sufi Muslim. Sufism is the most peaceful and universalistic sect of Islam, the one least likely to inspire, recruit and send forth armed jihadists and suicide bombers. In fact, Sufis are more regularly targeted for persecution, violence and murder by Al Qaeda types than are Christians and Westerners, at least by number of successful attacks and body counts.

It all comes down to this: Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Wiccan freedom of religion (and atheist freedom from religion) is our freedom of religion as well. Respect for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans and atheists is tied up with our respect as well. Respect does not mean agreement, nor is it to be confused with postmodern relativism, the belief that all beliefs are equally true, that they all lead to the same destination. They aren’t, and they don’t. To say otherwise is not even respectful to any religion and its adherents. But respect is indispensable to a Christ-like way and witness in the world. In this fearful post-9-11 age, it could even distinguish us.

Pastor Mathew Swora

Grace and Law: “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1: 17). “The law brings wrath…..but the promise comes through Jesus Christ” (Romans 4: 14-16). That’s as Dispensational as I get. But there are significant connections between the law of Moses and the grace of Jesus that are vital to the understanding of each one. Each dispensation is necessary to our understanding of the other. The law served, among other purposes, to protect the identity of the Covenant People for the coming of the Messiah. That meant that holiness had to protected from moral, physical and spiritual defilement in the world lest sin, shame, uncleanness and defilement take on contagious lives of their own. Jesus, by contrast, operated on the faith that God’s holiness would overcome sin, shame and uncleanness through the contagious life of the Holy Spirit. This we see in many of his healings and interactions with others. The woman with the issue of blood for 18 years (Luke 8:43-46) was legally unclean when she touched Jesus, and so would Jesus have been considered unclean for her having touched him. Yet he commended her for her faith, instead of reprimanding her for “defiling” him. Grace means that the health, healing and holiness (all cognates of the same word) in Jesus overcame the world’s sin and defilement, instead of vice versa.

So it was with the quadriplegic man on his mat (Mark 2:1-12), whom Jesus healed. He and others who cleaned up the bodily issues over which he had no control would have been considered unclean according to the Levitical laws. That would have included the four men who carried him on a cot to Jesus. Again, Jesus commended their faith, rather than chewing them out for ritual impurity. “Your sins are forgiven” could also be taken to mean, “You just got from me the release from defilement that you would previously have had to get through sacrifice at the Temple.”

The purity laws consigned the Gentiles to a state of perpetual ritual uncleanness, and yet Jesus related to them graciously, affirming and encouraging whatever steps of faith they took toward him. This led to Peter’s visit under the roof of a Roman officer, Cornelius, and to Cornelius’ faith in Christ (Acts 10).

Its not that the holiness code was bad or unnecessary. We must come to terms with the contagious power of sin, shame and moral, spiritual defilement. We cannot appreciate nor understand salvation from something we don’t take seriously. But Christian faith also means that our faith is in God and in his power to forgive, cleanse and accept us, and not in our own power to keep ourselves pure by our own observance. Christian faith means that our trust in God’s power to overcome our sin, separation and uncleanness is greater than our fear of sin, separation and uncleanness.

Old Testament Law VS. Canaanite Sacralized Sex Some of the Levitical laws might strike the modern reader as unnecessarily prudish and puritanical, such as one prohibiting stairs leading up to the altar, so that “no one may see the nakedness” of the high priest under his robe. There were also prescriptions for uncleanness and purification after menstruation, night time ejaculations of semen, childbirth and sexual activity. If this were because of some sort of pre-Victorian prudishness about bodies and sexuality, then that doesn’t jive with the rest of the Bible. Either Leviticus would have to go, or The Song of Solomon. More likely, these laws served to radically distinguish the worship of Israel’s God from the pagan worship of fertility deities, which may have been marked by sacralized sexual rituals that are probably not worth mentioning here. According to Romans 1: 18ff, that is where the worship of the Creation, rather than the Creator, always eventually leads.

SABBATH AND JUBILEE LAWS

The Bible does not make the distinctions between personal piety and purity, and social justice that modern Western Christians often do. Greed is another form of idolatry, according to Colossians 3:5. To curtail greed and avoid the otherwise inevitable accumulation of wealth, to the increasing oppression and disadvantaging of the poor and vulnerable, God instituted laws of Sabbath, Sabbath years, and Jubilee. Every seven years, the land was to have a year of rest, all debts were to be forgiven and all slaves released. At least as they applied to fellow Israelites. Applying these laws to all non-Israelites around them and among them would have bankrupted the nation. In the seventh year, any foods and fruits that grew of themselves were for the poor and the wild animals to glean. There is some biblical and historic evidence that some Israelites, in some places, did keep these sabbath years, but observance was spotty at best. Every fiftieth year, the land was to be returned to its originally allotted owners, with the exception of homes in walled cities. That, too, was to prevent the accumulation of land in fewer and more powerful hands.

Behind these redistributive social justice laws, and their implications, lay the understanding that God is the landlord, and the source and owner of all wealth derived from the land. “The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants.” All real estate transactions were understood only to buy time for use and stewardship of the land, and not the land itself. If God’s people did not keep these laws, the land itself would vomit them out into exile (Lev. 20:22), which happened in 586 BC. “Then the land will enjoy its sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. All the time that it lies desolate, the land will have the rest it did not have during the sabbaths you lived in it (Lev. 26:34-35).”

When Jesus began his ministry, he declared himself and God’s kingdom to be the fulfillment of the Jubilee principle. In his inaugural sermon in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth, he quoted the Jubilee language of Isaiah 61, saying:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Don’t forget that the Jubilee year began, not with the sounding of the ram’s horn (that came second), but first, with the sacrifice on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Jesus, the Lamb of God, is God’s announcement of creation’s Jubilee.

The Law and The Death Penalty

Breaking many of the O.T. Laws and much of the Holiness Code could get one killed. Murder, adultery, witchcraft, cursing one’s parents, offering foreign fire on the altar, among others…..all self-destructive acts. This is also foreign to modern sensibilities, although our military adventures and expenditures are the highest ever, and our entertainment media celebrate death for all sorts of minor reasons.

The death sentences of the Law underscore the essential unity between death and sin. Sin involves a dying of the human soul with every expression. God warned that the first sin would lead to death (Gen.2:17). Through the prophet Ezekiel, God again affirmed, “the soul that sins shall die.” The Old Testament has no problems with the right of the Giver of Life to reclaim his gift when its being abused.

When presented with an open-and-shut capital offense, in the case of the woman taken in adultery (John 8: 1-12). Jesus did not argue with either the crime nor the punishment. He raised a question about who should enforce it. Because all those gathered with stones for the execution were themselves sinners, not a one was qualified to carry it out, lest no one but Jesus leave the place alive.

The Law convicts us all of sin and its intrinsic, organic death sentence. It was logical and necessary that a society under Law exercise God’s judgment. But once started, where would it stop? Grace offers us release and remediation of our lives (Titus 2:11). Under grace there is neither necessity nor reward for exercising the judgment that belongs only to God. So Jesus himself, the Judge and sinless Lamb of God, refused to carry out the death sentence on the woman in question, and instead offered her a second chance. Or third, fourth, however many were needed. Too bad her partner in crime didn’t show up to seek grace, too. Maybe he was there among the men holding stones. All the citizens of God’s kingdom are “the chief of sinners (I Timothy 2:15)” and the repentant and redeemed. I personally think this invalidates even the death penalty in the wider society.

Any among us who have recently been to Rome just missed an opportunity to experience the following spectacle: to hear the bold, brash blare of trumpets, the stirring roll of drums, the rhythmic tread of marching feet and the deep clop-clop of horses’ hooves, the fluttering of broad scarlet banners with the golden eagle emblem, to the wild cheering of the crowds as through a special gate opened only for such occasions, the Porta Triumphalis, the army of a triumphant general or emperor, returning victoriously from war, marched up the street called La Via Triumphalis with his soldiers, his captives and his loot. Where the likes of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Marcus Aurelius rode their chariots, with laurel wreaths around their heads, at the front of their victorious and surviving soldiers, cars and buses now sit in the sweltering heat of summer traffic jams. Or people sit at sidewalk cafes cooling down with a cup of gelato, on that same street now called La Via del Forii Imperiali. (Sound familiar to anyone?) Anyone who was there recently just missed such a spectacle by only 2,000 years at most.

That is the scene that Paul the Apostle had in mind when he told the Corinthian Christians,.”..God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like men condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men. We are fools for Christ…We are weak…..we are dishonored!” Paul puts himself, and the other apostles, on the ancient Via Triumphalis, or today’s Via del Forii Imperiali in Rome. Except for the cars, the buses and the gelato of course. Paul and the other apostles are in the triumphal procession of a general’s victory parade. Only you’ll find them near the end of the parade, among the captured enemy soldiers, hands tied, feet chained, naked or clad in rags, marched off to the Coliseum to face wild beasts and gladiators, unarmed, to die for the entertainment of the masses. But the masses need not wait to take their seats in the Coliseum. Its perfectly permissible for them to jeer, taunt, curse and pelt the prisoners with rocks and waste from their garbage cans. Or their chamber pots. In fact, it would be taken as a show of public spirit, patriotism and good citizenship to do so. In the parade of worldly, imperial life, that, Paul says, is where God’s agents should be prepared to find themselves.

If these are brutal things to say or to contemplate, then we’ve just tasted the sting of the whip that Paul says he might bring when he visits the Corinthian churches, if they don’t take his warning and do an attitude check. When he concludes this section by asking, “What do you prefer? Shall I come to you with a whip, or in love and with a gentle spirit?” don’t think of a real cowhide whip, like what cowboys might use on horses or cattle. Think of the confrontational images, words and questions that Paul has just used to shake up and wake up the Corinthian Christians from their arrogant dreams of pride, and their desire for strength, status and wealth in the world.

Since arrogance, pride, envy and lusting for power and prestige are common to the human condition, in both the church and the world, we’re never done needing a sting of the occasional reality check to confront us and to interrogate us with some pretty basic questions from time to time. So as we ponder this passage, take note of three things it contains: 1) a confrontation; 2) an interrogation: and 3) an invitation.

As for (one) the confrontation, that’s in the apostle’s image of the Triumphal Entry, the wrong end of it, that is. I felt something of a similar confrontation this week when I heard the tragic news of the ten aid workers, most of them Christians, who were killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan, for the alleged crime of evangelizing. One of them, Glenn Lapp, there with Mennonite Central Committee, was known to several of our own members and attendees. They weren’t evangelizing, and they had always served notice that they wouldn’t. But to the Taliban, just being a Christian, or in league with a Christian, is tantamount to evangelizing, a crime, under Islamic law, worthy of death. And in a way, they’re right. Not the death sentence part. But the actions and the conduct of those aid workers were evangelistic, in that they represented Jesus quite faithfully, even without them uttering a single evangelistic word. And that put them at the end of the Taliban’s victory parade, as targets of dishonor and death.

Their deaths, like Paul’s words, confronted me with some pretty basic questions, like: Why am I a Christian? Is it to garner the respect and admiration of polite society? That may have worked in the 1950′s, when church growth in America was nothing short of amazing, when church membership was part and parcel of postwar middle class, upwardly mobile, loyal American respectability, along with the new suburban home, poodle skirts and bobby socks, and the big car with tail fins. It was not unusual– even legal back then– for employers to ask potential employees during job interviews if they attended church and if so, which one. Such respect gave the pastor and the priest automatic access and success. So we got invited to pray over sessions of city hall and the commissioning of new nuclear submarines.

I think that many American Christians miss those days of triumphal Civil American Religion, and long for them back. But that was an odd, unusual and temporary moment in all of global church history. And they are long gone, especially now, when increasingly, almost any statements of Christian belief and moral boundaries are confused with bigotry, or labeled as much.

It seems from Paul’s words that such respect and respectability vis a vis their society is what some among the Corinthian Christians were striving for. In polite Greek society of the time, what was religion for, anyway, but to cultivate success and social access? That led people, as Paul put it, “to boast in one [apostle] over another.” Or to consider themselves different, wealthy, strong, honored, even kings and royalty…already. Or at least to put on such airs and appearances.

While this kind of social striving is normal, it is devastating to the church. We’re called to be God’s showpiece to the world of the coming class-free jubilee kingdom, in which the first shall be last and the last shall be first, no one will have too much and no one too little. The Corinthian arrogance and lust for honor and respectability led some of them to play fast and loose with Christian doctrine and with Christian ethics. Its why some of them taught that there was no physical resurrection, neither for Jesus nor for us, as we saw in Chapter 15. Because that would be scandalous in polite Greek society. Its why some people were porking out at their communion services/love feasts while the poor members just looked on, to leave hungrier than when they came, as we saw in Chapter 11. Because it was not chic in polite Greek society to share food and tables with slaves and the poor.

Before Paul could set them straight on matters of Christian belief and behavior, he had to confront this arrogance and social striving. “You can boast all you like in your apostle versus someone else’s,” he’s saying, “but notice where we apostles are in life’s parade: the very place you fear most, at the end of society’s Triumphal procession, not the head. So we work with our hands; we go hungry and thirsty, in ragged clothes; considered the scum of the earth and the refuse of the world; we are persecuted but we endure it, cursed, but we bless; a spectacle to heaven and earth.”

Confrontational words these are, with all the subtlety of a cracking whip. But notice the questions they imply (and this is my second point, the interrogation part): Questions like, Just why did we become Christians in the first place? Whose approval and acceptance count most to us? Whose honor and esteem were we seeking when we were baptized? That of the world, so that we might march at the head of society’s parade? What did we expect as a result of our confession of faith in the Crucified Jesus, some sort of victory parade?

Actually, our victory parade is coming. We can count on it. And even on being at the head of it, with the victor’s crown, or laurel wreath. For as Paul told the Roman Christians, “We are more than conquerors, through him who loved us.” That the Corinthians wanted to be at the front of the Victory Parade was not all bad. They just had their timing wrong. And the wrong sponsors. And with this I come to the third part of this message, the invitation.

Paul does invite us all to a victory parade, a triumphal procession, for Jesus, for himself and for us, when he says, in verse 8, “Already you are kings, and that without us. How I wish that you really had become kings so that we might be kings with you!” Because there will come a day when we and the apostles and all of Christ’s followers will be crowned and revealed for the royalty we really and already are. Christ himself is heaven’s king, come as a servant, to share our humble human condition. The good news today is that Christ conquered not people but sin and death, so as to lift us up, exalt us and make of us a nation of priests and kings like himself. When he returns, that will be his triumphant parade. And ours as well. You are invited to the head of that parade.

But Christ’s example also shows there are no shortcuts to the head of the parade. He was willing to put in his time at the end of the procession, dragging a cross among the jeering, taunting crowds. So were the apostles. So were the ten aid workers killed in Afghanistan.

And so must we. Will we accept the invitation in this passage to join Christ and the apostles there as well, at the end of the procession, as the potential target of the world’s contempt and dishonor?

As hard and difficult as that sounds, the end of the line turns out actually to be a place of great freedom. Remove from our calculation the desire and the cost of public approval and it will be easier to do what Jesus would do. Such as when Shane Claiborne, the speaker at last month’s youth conference, and his friends camped out with homeless families who found shelter in an abandoned cathedral in Philadelphia. They did so in order to stand in solidarity with the homeless, and to help focus resources from the wider community on them. Society expects little else, and hardly even notices when poor people and people of color end up on the streets. But when college-educated young adults from middle class homes get evicted with them, people of their class, family and background are more likely to see human beings among the people and families huddling over ventilation grates on cold winter nights. For this act of solidarity with people at the end of life’s parade, City Hall and the Archdiocese made threatening moves to arrest and evict them all. So did the Fire Marshall, who claimed that the cathedral was a fire trap. His coming inspection would prove that, he said. But Claiborne and his friends stayed, effectively taking their place at the end of society’s parade.

But they weren’t alone. Friends joined them there. The night before the Fire Marshall came, fire fighters showed up to install smoke detectors, fire extinguishers and other equipment, free of charge, so that the abandoned sanctuary would pass inspection for human habitation. And it did, much to everyone’s surprise, joy and relief.

So the end of the parade turned out to be not such a bad place, after all. In fact, it became a place of partying, with lots of friends. The fact that most of them were homeless and poor didn’t detract from anyone’s joy. In fact, the end of the parade was where God showed up with riches and resources, in the form of friends and free smoke detectors and fire extinguishers.

By contrast, the front of the parade, where the conquering general rides alone, is a lonely, solitary place. He had his chariot to himself, although some accounts say that he was accompanied by a slave who held an umbrella over him, to shade him from the hot sun. This slave was also said to whisper repeatedly in the conqueror’s ear, “Remember that you are mortal.” All the more proof that sometimes being at the head of the parade is over-rated.

Unless its Jesus’ victory parade, where we will be immortal. Will we join him there, by declaring and maintaining our loyalty and love for him, even though it might mean marching in the back with him, among the prisoners, the poor and the despised? Will we free ourselves of the need to be respected by the world, and stand with Christ whenever the world heaps contempt on him, and all he stands for? If so, then we can count on his promise, that “Whoever confesses me before men will I confess before my Father.” When that day comes, at that moment, he will be at the head of the parade. So will those who stood with him. And who walked with him, at the end of the procession.

In the next eleven chapters of Leviticus (10-20), the modern reader is likely to find mysterious, baffling, and maybe even tiresome the lengthy and detailed passages of purity regulations, often called “The Holiness Code.” The Christian reader will have at least two questions: 1) why are there such purity regulations around animals, food, clothing, bodily functions and issues (including sex and death)? And 2) what of this applies to us today, as Christians?

The second question first: These regulations do not apply to Christians. And they do. They do not apply in detail, but they say something to us in their spirit. In fact, the Apostle Paul warns us that if we seek to obey them, especially in order to justify ourselves to God, then we will have put our salvation in jeopardy. “You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace.” (Gal. 5:4). The Orthodox and observant Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, turned his Orthodox and observant disciples in a new (but old) direction regarding the purity regulations by saying “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’ For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” (Matthew 15: 17-19). In so saying, Jesus moved us toward freedom from all the sacrificial and purity regulations, while upholding the truest, deepest meaning of purity, morally and spiritually speaking. Murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander, and more are also addressed by the Law of Moses.

To grasp his point, we must make the distinctions that Jewish rabbis have always made, back to and before Jesus, between the ceremonial/ritual law, the civic law, and the moral law. The latter, such as the Greatest Commandment (To love God and neighbor, Ex. 3: 6 and Lev. 19:18), and the Ten Commandments, apply in any time, culture, place or people. To them we are bound, for the well-being of our souls. Disobeying them does not disqualify us from salvation, but it could, if persistent and willful, “shipwreck our souls”(I Timothy 1:19). These distinctions are not always easy to make. Among the minute details of the holiness code we also find statements of deep and universal moral and spiritual reach, especially Leviticus 19: 18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” So don’t be too quick to skim over the Holiness Code and dismiss it all as quaint or irrelevant. Sometimes even the seemingly oddest ceremonial detail expresses some universal truth.

Still, the civic and ceremonial laws, such as what we’re reading now in Leviticus, existed in a time and place, as the Rabbi Saul of Tarsus (the Apostle Paul) put it, “when we were children” (Galatians 4: 3). Then, “we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba,Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.” (Gal. 4:3-7). So the details of these regulations no longer apply to us. Join me, if you wish, in a warm pork brat with sauerkraut, or a shrimp cocktail salad, after giving thanks to God, of course.

But reading and pondering these purity regulations is still of some value to Christians, at least to know the world and the scriptures from which Jesus was operating, and in which the church of the New Testament was working out the relationship between Gentile and Jewish believers. Read them also in order to understand and identify with the universal human concerns that these regulations address: shame, uncleanness, defilement and alienation, often through no fault of our own. As tolerant and accepting as we should try to be of all people and of their weaknesses and troubles, these purity matters are still basic to the fears and feelings that drive and divide us. In Israel’s sacrifices and purity regulations were daily reminders of the defilement, shame and separation that still afflict and estrange us for reasons of moral defilement (as sinners and the sinned-against), or even for worthless reasons of status, appearance, fashion and wealth. In them were also reminders of the grace and acceptance of God, and the cost of which, which would be born by Christ himself, who endured the most shameful of ritual impurities, to die and hang, as a cadaver, on a tree (Deut. 21:23). Christ died for our sin and our shame, to redeem us and to cleanse us. “He became sin, who knew no sin…”

There are other reasons for these laws, and functions which they serve. Check out the 2000 online Journal of Evangelical Theological Studies at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3817/is_200012/ai_n8922535/?tag=content;col1 for a full list of reasons and rationales given. The most convincing to me are: 1) to provide cultural barriers between Israel and her pagan neighbors, in effect, speed bumps against cultural and religious assimilation; and 2) to flesh out aspects of social justice and re-distribution of accumulated wealth; and 3)to reinforce the holiness (“otherness”) of God, of God’s people, and of God’s sanctuary, whether the Tabernacle or the Temple (Lev. 15:31). In the costly shedding of blood to redeem the firstborn sons or even the messes of the most ordinary aspects of life (sex and childbirth), there are reminders of the supreme value of the gift of life, and of the supreme otherness and exaltation of God, the giver of life. Finally, they give visual pictures, in the flesh or on the walls, literally (Lev. 14) of the effects of the greatest and most universal defilement, sin. Think about this a while and see if it doesn’t start to make your breath catch or your spine to tingle. If so, you are beginning to experience something that Dr. Rudolf Otto, early in the 20^th Century, called “numenous,” the mysterium tremendum, the tendency to invoke fear and trembling, and mysterium fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. The ancients called it “holy fear,” or “the fear of God..” Reading and thinking about these purity regulations and sacrifices reminds me of the words of the hymn, “Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.”Life, bounded by such purity regulations, and re-balanced as needed by sacrifices, would have many daily symbolic reminders that “you are my chosen people.” Therefore, “you shall be holy [separate, other] because I am holy.”

From previous passages and commands we already knew how many poles there would be and how big they should be. The same is true of other details relating to the altar and instruments of sacrifice, plus those of the priestly garments. Then we encounter passages like Exodus 38: 21-31, in which we read long lists of the materials given for the tabernacle, the altar and the priestly vestments, and of their value at the time. The modern reader is tempted to skim through these passages, in part because such things no longer exist. So why the long, detailed and repetitive lists of items?

One thing they tell us is that every detail of obedience to God counts. There are no moments, choices, actions or contributions we can make in which we are not reinforcing and stockpiling something that will endure forever in the very shape of our eternal souls. Nothing is wasted nor forgotten in God’s kingdom.

But in such detailed and repetitive prose we are also encountering a stark difference between our contemporary Western culture and that of ancient Israel, indeed, of much of the world still today, especially the non-literate world. Especially, the non-hurried and more reflective part of the world that does not need to hurry up its Bible reading, or any other activity, to get it out of the way before; 1) I have to go to work; 2) John Stewart is on TV; 3) the kids need picking up at school and ferrying to the soccer field; 4) the movie starts at 7PM…….. In other times and places, life is lived more in the moment, without the pressure of tight schedules. So to sit in the synagogue and hear the detailed and repetitive words of this part of the Holy Writ is not only just about the only entertainment in town, the words constitute a form of poetry, even liturgy, in themselves. The repetitious nature makes them all the more accessible to non-literate people who have amazing powers of retention, who need hear such passages only once or twice before they have large chunks of them memorized. They don’t rely on their bookshelves, nor their computers, nor the Internet, to store information for them.

MORE THOUGHTS ON SACRIFICE

Now that we’re into Leviticus, a lot of blood is flowing through the reader’s imagination, the blood of bulls, goats and pigeons on the altar of the Tabernacle. This may seem archaic, at best, for the Christian who understands Christ to be the final, culminating sacrifice. What we now offer up to God are ourselves (Romans 12:1-2) and worship, generosity and hospitality (Hebrews 13: 15-16).

Some of this sacrificial blood in Leviticus is flowing for sins committed in error and ignorance. Part of me says, “Give us a break!” But then I remember that I have been trained by my culture to understand sin in terms of willful, intentional actions (or the lack thereof) that violate a code, creating a rap sheet of incidents. Its called guilt, and it has much biblical precedence. But there’s another angle on sin and estrangement, felt more keenly by much of the world, that understands sin in terms of defilement and uncleanness. Something I did by error or ignorance shouldn’t make me guilty. But in this other worldview, it still makes me unclean. And that leads to shame. I feel guilt for the wrong I’ve done, or the good left undone. One often feels shame for what and how one is, even if that state was foisted upon us by someone else, intentionally or otherwise. For some people in some cultures, something as minor as being licked by a dog, or stepping on camel feces, induces uncleanness and therefore shame. So, many of the sacrifices we read about in Leviticus are for cleansing shame, rather than guilt. And what more precious, costly substance can there be to cleans shame but blood?

“The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!” Hebrews 9:13-14