C Proper 6 11 Ord BFC 2016
Galatians 2
June 12, 2016
As many of you
know, I consider Rabbi Sharon Brous, leader of the IKAR community in Los
Angeles, one of my unilateral spiritual directors. Unilateral in that the only give and take has
been her gracious response to a few emails I have sent her way. I
consider her one of our country’s spiritual leaders. When I listen to her podcasts, my heart is
fully open to hear the Truth—richly, fully.
Rabbi Brous’s
writing and preaching spawn courage in me, articulate things I already know,
and work out the Heart of God for me.
But several weeks ago I listened in on one of the podcasts in which she
asked Reza Aslan, Western Muslim intellectual and author, to reflect on the
state of the world’s affairs for her Jewish congregation. I have heard Mr. Aslan on CNN and listened to
his summation of the book he wrote about the historical Jesus, Zealot.
Though I disagree with some of Aslan’s conclusions, I appreciate and
welcome his thoughtful work on faith and religion. That is, until I heard the podcast. And the podcast led me to a place of despair
and hopelessness.
Reza Aslan was
asked to define the people behind and involved with Al Quaeda and Isis, these
two Muslim groups who use terror and violence to make their way in the
world. While Aslan said that we knew
what Al Quaeda was all about because it is a group filled with intellectuals,
which has been around, and taken pains to print their beliefs and
understandings, ISIS is too recent, unschooled, and seemingly not as concerned
with sharing their beliefs with the rest of the world. Then came an unfortunate turn. Mr. Aslan stated that what we are finding out
is that the understandings and theology of ISIS, an ideology which is broader
than nationalism, has no value or hope for life on this planet. So Aslan, argued, ISIS’s theology puts them
in a place where there is no negotiation.
We must kill them. But we, the
United States, must not be the ones who kill them. He was enthusiastically affirmed by the
Jewish community in the room.
I don’t know
what came over me. I felt my heart fall
into my stomach. Internally, I found
myself weeping. I’m not naïve. I spend time going back and forth as to
whether I think nonviolence is pragmatic in a world where the only resource
some people have to end their suffering and death is to fight back. But I just heard a Muslim intellectual and
scholar, totally divorced from the context in which ISIS was born, namely our pre-emptive
war without reason in Iraq, say he didn’t know about ISIS and then reverse
course and say they had to be violently eradicated, preferably not by us. We represent order. They represent lawlessness. We represent civilization. They represent barbarity. We represent harmony. They represent anarchy. He didn’t know. And then he provided the imperial cookbook
for how the conquered are to be known.
We/them.
I think I was
receiving this information so much with my whole heart that my critical brain was
catching up only to find my heart empty and scarred. I felt adrift and lost.
In the last
two weeks, I have been trying to tackle one of the most mythologically loaded
books of the Bible. The body of that
letter is found in chapter 3, verses 27 through 28: “You are no longer Jew or
Greek, slave or freeborn, male and female.
Instead, you all have the same status in the service of God’s Anointed,
Jesus.”
In the sermon
two weeks ago, I began by talking about the broad meaning of Paul’s letter to
the Galatians as one that asked us to be open to God’s world-transforming news,
to say “yes and” or “yes please” and participate in seeing those we are told as
“other” as welcome at the table.
Rather
than clutching, clawing, and drawing unnecessary boundaries which prevented our
ability to see the new thing that God was doing, Paul invoked the most ancient
baptismal formula of the church to find our unity regardless of race,
ethnicity, culture, or religion (Jew or Greek), our common cause regardless of
economic or social status (slave or free), our mutual ministry regardless of
gender or sexual polarities (male or female).
I hesitated to share that with you because issues of race, ethnicity,
cultural, religion, economic and social status, and gender or sexual polarities
have all been solved and are rarely seen in the news today.
Last week I shared some of Paul’s
matrix or context to show you the violence in the friezes of the Great Altar of
Pergamon, the Hellenistic theology appropriated by Rome to represent themselves
and their Caesars as sons of the divine, to justify and make sacrament the
violence over and against people they portrayed as the uncivilized, the
transgressors of boundaries, the savages, the barbarians. In Hellenistic theology, the broad name for
these barbarians was the “marauding Gauls” or the Galatians.
In
189 B.C.E. the Roman general Manlius Vulso, in a "pre-emptive" and
highly disputed military action, massacred or enslaved 40,000 Galatians,
quoting them (according to Livy) to be the notorious enemies of Rome all over
the world and a permanent threat to Roman interests in Asia Minor [modern day
Turkey], even if they had not taken up arms against Rome at this point (Livy
38.12-39.7).[1]
Manlius Vulso believed he was saving the world from the
Galatians. In Vulso’s victory speech, he
references the Galatians over and over as terrorists. Ancient Greek and Roman writers were unified
in referring to the Galatians as the people of “terror et tumultus” (terror and tumult, or fear and confusion).[2] I hesitate to share this with you because I’m
not sure there is a historical people close by we called “savages” to justify historical violence; or
a recent pre-emptive war, with highly disputed military action, we waged because we whitewashed history to refer to a people as
terrorists. The Bible and its teaching
can be so archaic. (deep sigh)
This is the setting for this third
reading from Galatians, one where an intra-Jewish dispute has Jews from
Jerusalem changing the behavior of Cephas by the invoking of Jewish Law. Throughout
Hebrew Scripture or the Old Testament, the Jewish Law is a source of grace, and
beauty, and neighborliness. It brings
life to the Jewish community and holds out an identity for the Jewish people
when conquering nations demand that Jews abandon their faith to serve foreign rulers and foreign gods. The Jewish Law created “a space of
nonaccommodation to foreign rule and religion.”[3] The apostle Paul believes, however, that
Roman law and order has co-opted Jewish Law.
The two have become conflated.
Roman law and order reminded the populace who was in and who was out,
who was legitimate and illegitimate, who was Roman and who was other. Empires create necessary divisions to surveil
and control the populace. In the First Century, the difference, the
unaccommodated space between what the Jewish Law and the Roman law and order do, in Paul’s eyes, becomes unidentifiable.
In the passage
that Aaron read for us today, the apostle Paul is chastising Cephas for his
hypocrisy. Cephas was regularly breaking
bread with Gentiles when Jews with more exacting interpretations of Jewish Law
arrive in Antioch. Cephas stops eating
with Gentiles. By doing so, Paul
believes, Cephas does not what the Jewish Law requires, but interprets Jewish
Law to be a mere imitation of Roman law and order. Empire divides between insiders and
outsiders, winners and losers, the victorious and the vanquished. Christ . . . unifies. The world-transforming message says that
there is no insider and outsider, no legitimate and illegitimate. We could go on and on—no documented and
undocumented, no Christian and Muslim, no conqueror and collateral damage.
Paul believes
that true religious faith and loyalty which reflected a neighborliness that commanded
his people to see the widow, the orphan,
and the stranger as part of Jewish community has been captured by a Roman civil
religion which feels, sounds like, and acts in a way that draws lines, foments division, and
excludes people from the table. Could it
be that Jewish Law not only sounds like Rome and its Caesars but also like Egypt and its
Pharaohs? Is God indistinguishable from
the will of Rome and its Caesar? Is the
primary focus of the Jewish Law to provide a simple morality play where we
decide who is in and who is out, who is civilized and who is barbarian, who is
righteous and who is transgressor, who is citizen and patriot and who is
foreigner and terrorist? Is that what
religious faith is to be all about?
Again, I hesitated to bring this to you because I’m not sure there is a
modern day example of a people who have been co-opted by a civil religion which
seems to value, above all other things, determining who are the chosen,
righteous few and who are the unclean and impure. It probably sounds unfamiliar to you, in our day,
that the unclean and impure,
by their very immoral and savage existence, will bring calamity and natural
disaster from a God who must be equally just as loving. God,
not unlike Caesar, stands over the world waiting to give a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” through hurricane, flood, and earthquake.
Paul sought to
distinguish Jewish faith and life apart from Rome. All satire aside, it would appear that a
large portion of our culture missed Paul’s necessary critique and has
appropriated the religion of Roman law and order. In the
religion of Roman law and order, our main task is to find a way to become “an
insider” away and apart from the unbelievers, heretics, the lame and the leper
who cannot drag themselves to the pool for healing, the outsiders, the people
who clamor at the border. This form of Roman law
and order then has the enforcers of it, covering their ears, seemingly immune
to the pain they have caused, “Make
them stop screaming! Why are they
causing trouble? Do they not understand
the limited, divine resources we have?
The great unwashed masses teem at our shores and borders. For heaven’s sake, we have only so many bread
and circuses for these barbarians! Shut
. . . them . . . up!”
So though we may
have created the need through war, climate change, or embargo, when this
becomes our language, when we have adopted the Roman theology, it is only a
short hop, skip, and a jump to justifying whatever violence we deem necessary
to institute our form of culture and civilization.
In contrast, I
believe Paul, as a Jew, is calling people to a faith described by activist
Audre Lorde, “It is learning how to stand alone unpopular and
sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as
outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all
flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them our
strengths. For the Master's tools will never tear down the Master's house. They
will temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to
bring genuine change . . . .”[4]
For people and institutions of Roman law and order, salvation was and is
found in the heavy-handed legions who kill the Galatians before they actually
became a threat. They do violence
against others promising that the others will eventually do violence against
them. They impose law and order against
the O/other by standing guard outside of bathrooms. They speak of the law and order of God coming
in floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes to vanquish the sinful. They tell us to be afraid, very afraid,
seeking to project their terror on others so that they never slow down to see
themselves fearful, quaking in their own shoes.
As people who wish to stand within the tradition of Jesus the Christ and
his ambassador, Paul, how are we then to be in the world? For people within the apostle Paul tradition,
people of loyalty to Jesus as Anointed, we need to be aware of Roman
behavior. Beware. Beware the name-callers. We learn over time that name-callers are
calling people “marauding Gauls” or “terrorists” as a prelude to institutional
or State-sanctioned, justified, and sacralized violence. Beware.
People of the Pauline tradition also know that the world is not to be
divided into saints and sinners, the righteous and the infidel, the Sons of God
who can justify their violence from above to quell the rebel violence from
below. Salvation is a refusal to see the world in
these binaries. And we look for
salvation among the outsiders who refuses to see themselves as other. We begin to see them as angels in the
architecture. These angels in the
architecture are people who sees the world as one, join in common cause, make mutual
ministry. It is Malala, the Muslim girl
who refuses to see herself as “other” to say that women should not be excluded
from the table of education. With a
heart the size of God’s heart she says, “I don’t want revenge on the
Taliban. I want education for the sons
and daughters of the Taliban.”[5] It is Malcolm X who returned from his
pilgrimage to Mecca to understand the world as one and threatened even the
powers within his faith who wished the sanctification of violence to continue.[6] It is Muhammad Ali who knew that if he
registered for the draft he would never be sent to Viet Nam but become a poster
child as a celebrity-athlete for the war in Viet Nam[7],
he refused to see himself as separate, apart.
Why
should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop
bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in
Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not
going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply
to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the
world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been
warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have
said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I
will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to
enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.[8]
As sports columnist Dave Zirin
said, Ali was not just for peace, he was against empire. It is Yusuf Islam, one of the pallbearers
at Ali’s funeral, formerly known as Cat Stevens, who took us back to a time
when we were all one, to remind us when
morning had broken.
As people of Paul’s religious tradition, our task is not to beat back
Rome so that we might declare ourselves the new insiders. Rather, we are to say that the dichotomies of
winners and losers, civilized and barbarian, clean and unclean, sinner and
saint, hold no value in the arms of a God who seeks our peace and
well-being. We cast our lot with those
found outside Rome’s walls, along its shores, lying outside its borders to
remember the faith of our Anointed, the Christ, who found common cause among
the sinner, the forgotten, the misshapen, and the vanquished, even to the point
of his death on a cross. As he hung from
that cross, he drew the curtain back for a criminal to tell him that God’s
paradise was wide and broad and more expansive than he could ever imagine.
I depend on that faith to
be true knowing that I am too often found giving lip service to the gospel of
Christ and serving the gospel of Rome.
Next week we listen to the body of Paul’s letter where we come front and
center with that baptismal formula:
neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female in serving Jesus
Christ.
I am hesitant to share it with you.
Living in the midst of Rome, you might think it nonsensical and
archaic. Or . . .you might just hear the
world-transforming news for the first time, take it as your own, and begin to
see people who are not like you in ethnicity, culture, or religion, economic
and social status, sexuality or gender, as . . .your neighbor. And if or when you do, may the scales fall
from your eyes so that you see the wide, broad, and expansive arms of God as
She welcomes you home.
In the Muslim tradition, it is the season of Ramadan, a time when Muslim
people all over the world fast to remember their common lot with the poor and
hurting of the world. They break their
fast at the end of the season by inviting everyone around the table for a huge
feast, a reminder that we are all one in our fasting and feasting. As Jesus the Christ taught us, these are our
neighbors. We are one. Praise God.
Amen.
[1] Brigitte Kahl, Galatians
Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
2010), pp. 62, 65.
[2]
Ibid, p. 74.
[3]
Ibid, p. 215.
[4]
Audre Lorde, “History Is a Weapon,” 1979, http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/lordedismantle.html.
[5]
Ashley Fantz, “Malala at U.N.: The Taliban failed to silence us,” CNN, July 12, 2013. http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/12/world/united-nations-malala/.
[6]
Pierre Tristam, “Malcolm X in Mecca: When
Malcolm Embraced True Islam and Abandoned Racial Separatism,” about.com, December 26, 2015. http://middleeast.about.com/od/religionsectarianism/a/me080220b.htm.
“Throngs of people, obviously Muslims from everywhere, bound
for the pilgrimage,” he’d begun to notice at the airport terminal before
boarding the plane for Cairo in Frankfurt, “were hugging and embracing. They were
of all complexions, the whole atmosphere was of warmth and friendliness. The
feeling hit me that there really wasn’t any color problem here. The effect was
as though I had just stepped out of a prison.” To enter the state of ihram required of all pilgrims heading for
Mecca, Malcolm abandoned his trademark black suit and dark tie for the
two-piece white garment pilgrims must drape over their upper and lower bodies.
“Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jedda, was
dressed this way,” Malcolm wrote. “You could be a king or a peasant and no one
would know.” That, of course, is the point of ihram. As Islam interprets it, it reflects the equality of man
before God.
[7]“Interview
with Dave Zirin, Don't De-Islamicize Muhammad Ali: Scholar Says Muslim Faith
was Central to His Views on Racism & War,” Democracy Now!, June 10, 2016.
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/6/10/don_t_de_islamize_muhammad_ali.
[8]
Muhammad Ali, “Muhammad Ali Speaks Out Against the Vietnam War: 1966,” Voices
of a People’s History of the United States, ed. by Howard Zinn and Anthony
Arnove. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), p. 431.
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