It is somewhat odd for me to write pretending people actually read this blog. But . . .
I started my first sermon blog way back when for two reasons. First, I have a robust interior dialog (sometimes aiding in my depression) but I require a sorting out of that dialog by putting it onto paper. Sometimes, if I don't get my processing out onto paper, I end up blocked.
The only way I can describe this "blocking" is it feels like something needs to be done in chronological order so I can move onto the next thing. I feel freed when I finally accomplish the task that has to be done before I move onto the next one.
The other reason I write the blog is that it is my own little vanity plate. From a negative point of view, the blog makes me feel like I contribute something to the world that will go on beyond my life.
From a positive standpoint, the blog pushes me to be forthcoming and public with my faith. There it is. Right there. That's what he believes, attempts to do with his life, and preaches. I have to get over my public vulnerability to set them out there.
I think my sermons are mediocre. Some are good. Some are bad. I think one of the reasons they are not particularly good is because they don't serve any persons being "one-off" masterpieces. I'm trying to move a congregation.
Therefore, I repeat. I repeat and repeat. As Fox News knows, repetition has a way of cutting through the buttloads of information people are receiving on a daily basis--even when you're not telling the truth. And I'm trying to tell the Truth--as best as I am able.
In trying to process out loud, I ran into Brigitte Kahl's incredible book, Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of The Vanquished. Over the course of several years, I have been teaching Bible 101 classes and happy with how I have led people through Hebrew Scripture. I preach quite a bit on Hebrew Scripture because I think it is safer.
The Gospels are a narrower focus of Jewish theology using a mixture of the narrow prophets like Amos and Jesus's teaching strongly derivative of the Jewish Wisdom tradition. I cut against my Jesus seminar roots to agree with Richard A. Horsely and say that if prophetic then the Gospels are decidedly apocalyptic. The prophetic story predicted an end of the unjust world in favor of a world that is gestating, behind-the-scenes, or being revealed. Quite literally, I think Jesus was giving small, base communities a foretaste of that with exorcisms, meals, mutual healing, and an understanding of a God who was accessible to them.
The Jewish Wisdom tradition that Jesus used had a different center than much of what we see in Hebrew Scripture. For the most part, a class of scribes authored the Wisdom tradition in Hebrew Scripture. Although those scribes critiqued excess wealth and policies and practices against the poor, they largely did that from outside the social status of the poor.
Jesus teaches the Wisdom tradition as someone who is economically poor, fraught with ecological disaster, and as the world is collapsing all around him. Taxes and leveraged debt are impoverishing more and more rural Jews. The land, the object of God's promise, is being sold off underneath the feet of already impoverished, rural Jews in Galilee. For a people whose primary story is rooted in liberation from bondage, Rome's foundation as a slave society was problematic. Jewish Temple taxes coming out of an urban Jerusalem are collaborating with Rome's crushing rule. Disease, deformity, hunger, and violence are part of everyday Jewish life.
As Jews rose up in protest, Rome was ruthless in their treatment and sometimes wholesale slaughter of the Jews. At the time of Jesus, 1.1 million Jews were crucified to set an example, quell revolt, and remind the Jews who was in charge. I was always taught in Sunday School that the crucifixion of Jesus, other than two criminals crucified with him, was somewhat exceptional. On the contrary, telling the story of Jesus's crucifixion was probably a way of saying, "Yes. Just like you. Just like any other Jew during our time."
Teaching and preaching the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, to people who live in the matrix of the United States empire, is hard. How am I to critically, honestly, teach what amounts to resistance literature when most people walking into the Gospels have been told that the whole story revolves around Jesus being crucified for their sins? Or that Jesus was a nice guy. Be a nice person like Jesus.
The Gospels are these strongly anti-imperial, anti-colonialist, resistance literature texts. How do I get there? And then how do I keep preaching it so it doesn't sound like screed or a milquetoast avoidance of what I know is really there?
I felt like to teach it meant I would be left with one group of people who did not understand what I was saying because they just could not comprehend something that did not square with years and years of Biblical teaching. And the other group might just get what I was trying to say and want me out of their church as fast as possible.
Where to begin Bible 101 in the New Testament?
After reading Kahl's book, I remembered that Paul's letters were anywhere from 10 to 25 years before the first gospel (Mark, year 60 to 75 CE) was written. And in Paul's letter to the Galatians, is a baptismal formula that pre-dates him. Maybe this baptismal formula was one of the earliest creeds we have from the Christian cult? Could we place it in the year 40 CE? Earlier than that?
In contrast to Paul's extrication from Judaism we see in much of the teaching about Paul, Kahl placed Paul firmly back into Judaism and made it clear that Paul never thought of himself as anything other than a Jew. Kahl makes an excellent case for seeing so much of what was thought to be Paul's critique of Judaism actually reserved for the Roman imperial project.
Paul was a Jew through and through. And a strong strand of Judaism is a critique of imperialism going all the way back to Egypt and Pharaoh. In fact, Galatians is filled with references to the Exodus story in its discussion of freedom and slavery.
Paul's radical teaching in Galatians began to emerge for me. I began to see Paul's letter to the Galatians as foundational to all of the New Testament and its radical anti-imperial, anti-colonial point of view. Even more so, Paul's letter to the Galatians is a radical egalitarian statement into the matrix of Rome's warring cultures and ethnicities (egged on by divide and conquer tactics), Rome's slave society, and Rome's patriarchy.
The imperial project always seeks to enforce binaries. And Paul repeated and expanded on a spectrum of possibilities. Paul's letter to the Galatians is an explicit critique of Roman law and order.
Galatians came up in the lectionary last summer but it began in a strange way. I was not ready for it.
In the Revised Common Lectionary, Trinity Sunday is followed by "Proper" Sundays. Depending on where Easter falls and the First Sunday of Advent falls, certain parts of the Revised Common Lectionary are lost.
So it was that last summer, the first "Proper" missed two or three Sundays which began the book of Galatians. We began with the Sunday that had the baptismal formula. And I wrestled and I struggled to try and get all of the material from Kahl's book into one Sunday but I failed miserably.
Again, I was thinking chronologically and I needed to work out the theology leading up to the baptismal formula. But I didn't have the time. All this year I have been stewing on the sermon (it ended up being two sermons) I needed to write to introduce Galatians 3:26-29. Everything I tried to write felt like a block.
So no sermons appeared on this blog because I hated them all. I touched up a Jeremiah sermon series but couldn't post it because I had yet to do the introduction sermon(s) for Galatians.
This week I finally finished those sermons. I will never preach them because one makes me out to be a hero (breaking a cardinal rule for my sermons) and I share too much in one of the sermons. I am a notorious over-sharer so always need to extract that for my final edits on a sermon. Because I'm not going to preach either, I kept it in here.
Now I can go back and add to this blog. For the one person who might read this sermon from a small town in Russia, I'm sorry. I know this had to be painful to read.
But if I hadn't written this convoluted, involved introduction I might have been--blocked. And I don't want to go through all that again!
I will now begin posting at will. Please, I love the conversation. If you want to reflect on any of these sermons, please let me know.
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