Sarx

TEXTS FOR Proper 8 (13), June 28, 2009
2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15, 2:23-24
Psalm 30
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43

Do not fear, only believe.

HIS BUILDS ON LAST Week’s readings – The disciples crossing the water with Jesus asleep in the boat. They wake him up because the storm is getting too bad – Jesus calms the storm and goes back to sleep. They come to land and very first thing is this man’s daughter, then the bleeding woman…

I said at church last week (comments not published) that I was reminded of the way we all get on with our lives – Jesus might as well be sleeping – until some crisis hits.

This week there are two more crises. In fact, they are coming so quick that they overlap! Jesus gets off the boat and is met by a man whose daughter is quite sick. But before he can get there a woman touches him… and gets healed. Then he goes and raises the dead!

There’s a LOT going on here, I wonder if it has anything to say to us and how it parallels with the boat incident from last week.

First this underscores something about Jesus: another level of Jesus’ complete (at least as far as text goes) ignoring of the ritual purity laws of his people. While almost nothing about Jesus’ teaching can be called “non-Jewish” – nearly all of it is found in other Rabbis of the period – Jesus does have one major innovation to his credit: Jesus is never shown in the text to be following the laws of ritual purity. From not washing his hands before eating bread or, as in today’s text, not worrying about being touched by a woman, Jesus is very much an innovative Rabbi. Further, this text shows that it can’t be that important on a number of issues: having been touched by a woman who was bleeding he enters the house of a leader of the local synagogue and performs a miracle in his impurity.

No one seems to care.

I don’t want to imagine what Jesus thought all this meant. I don’t want to shove my own meaning down his Gospel. But his own actions speak very loudly about his attitude towards what were, essentially, the taboos of his people.

It would seem that Jesus wants us to see or, certainly, the communities that gave us the four Gospels want us to see that “taboo” was not intended to be a way to relate to God.

This seems as if it might have been important in the discussions of dietary laws in the early Church.

I *want* to imagine one thing further, but my available sources disagree on this matter: are the laws of ritual impurity as important as the positive and negative “moral” laws? If one spends most of one’s life in ritual impurity is that as bad as “being in sin”? Is the division between the ritual laws and moral laws (as understood by Christians – not by Rabbis) an important division in the law or something that we’ve made up to keep our cultural biases in place?

As I said, my available sources disagree on that last bit.

What is clear is that Jesus’ state of ritual impurity didn’t prevent him from performing a miracle in the house of a local leader. Nor did his evident impurity (and thus the impurity of everything in his path) prevent the Rabbinical leader from telling abroad the story of the miracle.

Where does this leave us?

How many of the “laws” of our Christian religion are simply taboos – ie superstition?

At one time it was suggested that if we spilled the consecrated wine on a man’s beard, we should have to burn off the beard. As a result of this superstition, the laity were denied the chalice in favour of a neater and cleaner religion. But the early saints wanted people not only to hold on the elements – but to daub the wine on their eyes and ears! Bits of the bread were to go home for home communion! We’ve since decided that the laity might somehow do damage to the consecrated things so we don’t let them out of our sight. And, while we accuse the laity of superstition, the church (ordained folks) can act with equal superstition.

When I was trained to be a Master of Ceremony at St Mary the Virgin church in NYC, I learned the ins and outs of Anglo-Catholic ceremony. My personal favourite content was “what do do if the chalice should ever spill after the consecration.” There’s a complex dance you do, involving when to step over the puddle and when not. When it’s over and the all-clear is sounded, everyone is supposed to turn away from the former-puddle in a show that nothing is happening now.

So imagine my horror, as we passed the chalice around the Altar at St Gregory of Nyssa Church one Christmas Eve, when the cup spilled all over a woman in a wheel chair! Imagine my horror one Sunday, praying some private devotions before communion, when I looked at my feet and saw there crumbs of communion from the early service – not just in one place, but all over!

Superstition is easy to develop: a practice arises based on need. Then we theologise backwards to justify the action. Suddenly no longer performing the action is a theological violation and an entire school of ritual and tradition evolves to support the action…

What would Jesus do?

Is there a difference between the purity laws of Judaism that he willingly (and often) broke, on the one hand, and the odd purity laws we, the Church, have developed over the last 2000 years?

Here’s a couple of theories:

I Eucharist:
1) Jesus’ meals of fellowship were originally repeated within his community – sort of a divinely inspired pot luck intended to share the wealth around the community in his name.
2) Very early on, the distribution got uneven and people who should have been fed were going hungry.
3) The *action* of feeding each other and seeing Christ in that got transferred to the sharing of bread and wine as a symbolic action. But soon the bread and wine acquired their own, special meaning.
4) Theologise backwards and it’s always been this way.

II Initiation.
1) In the days of Roman persecution it was important to make sure that a new member of the Church wasn’t, in fact, a spy.
2) The practice of “initiation” evolved, teaching, experience, trust evolving in the community.
3) Finally admission to the sacraments via an oath.
4) Over the course of 3 or 4 centuries, a specific theology evolved to justify this course of initiation.
5) When persecution finally ended it was clear God had *always* wanted it to be this way. Our theology clearly says it can never be different.

Why do I suggest this “theologise backwards” idea? Because we can see it now: in the Eastern Churches nearly every liturgical action is conducted under several layers of “myth” and “real meaning”. The idea of liturgy without an iconstasis can scandalise some folks – unless they know that Hagia Sophia (and earlier churches) didn’t have them. The solid, floor-to-ceiling wall in Russia is a mid-18th Century innovation. Sure it works, but it’s not the end all and be all of the liturgy – and the weight of all the theological silliness we’ve thrown on it – plus the evidence of our own history – nearly makes every such wall collapse.

Where I want to take this is to the idea that each one of these necessary (at the time) evolutions have become for us, now, superstitions. Religion by Taboo. You must not touch the bread until you’ve washed your hands.

Imagine my horror.

Do our superstitions help us or hinder us in the spread of the Gospel?

If we say “either way” is fine or if we pick one or the other, what does that say about our understanding of the Gospel, about our superstitious fear of violating Taboo?

What will God do to us if we keep breaking the rules that way?

Jesus, I note, does not answer these questions. He only does them. Although it is Gay Pride day in some places, the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, I’ve not compared any of this to issues of human sexuality – and that on purpose. I’m more concerned with the superstitions of our faith, at this point, than with the doctrines. Or can we tell the difference? Does Jesus care that we come fasting to communion or that we have washed our hands, or maybe touched something impure?