C
Proper 5 10 Ord BFC 2016
Galatians
1:11-24
June
5, 2016
I’m
sure many of you have heard that one of the pressing issues in the present
presidential election is the amount of media coverage given to presumed
Republican nominee, Donald Trump. I
think the conventional wisdom is that the amount of coverage has provided
candidate Trump with a celebrity and popularity that has led to his
nomination. Such conventional wisdom recognizes the power
of the Fourth Estate in our culture, how the media can drive and control not
only the message but also the concerns and values of a nation.
Who controls the media then dictates
our concerns and values. That was never
made so clear as when I was in Chiapas, Mexico, for the first return of
refugees back to their homeland in Guatemala.
It was an incredibly historic day for a people, a nation, that had
waited for so long. Refugees in over 100
refugee camps would make the long bus ride back into their homeland. Huge!
Big!
The day before the historic return, Barb Wenger, the
Witness for Peace volunteer, who had gracefully taken me in like a stray dog, led
me out to the camp that was to start the historic return to Guatemala. We came back to the city by hitching a ride
from a BBC reporter. Barb asked, “How
will the coverage go? Will the
international media cover the full return?”
The BBC reporter was frightfully honest.
“We don’t do well with history that doesn’t follow a continuous news cycle. The refugees will need to leave
tomorrow. They will need to arrive in
Guatemala City by the next day. The
following day they will have to arrive at their destinations in Guatemala. Otherwise, we will be pulled from the
story. As you know, the United States is
about to invade Iraq. And what the U.S.
government pays attention to, we must pay attention to. So unless we can prove that there is
something to cover each day here, the United States government
will probably dictate international focus and coverage.”
In the most extreme extension of “if
it bleeds, it leads”, the violence and devastation wrought by war captures our
attention like nothing else does. And so
it becomes our regular breakfast, lunch, and dinner not only for the news but
also for gaming and the most popular movies.
“Captain America: Civil War!” Because
even the Avengers who are friends can’t find a way to talk out their
problems. They use violence and war to
work through their issues. I think Iron
Man and Captain American would have been better to find a good therapist. Use your words, boys! Collateral damage in these superhero movies
has become a small footnote to justify even more violence and war. Are there people in those buildings being
mowed to the ground? But what we are
being told, over and over again, is that justified, sacralized violence is the
only thing that can save us.
So it also was in the ancient
world. After the Roman armies levelled
the city of Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E., they sacked it of all of its
valuables and brought back the booty.
Rome also returned to the capital with 7,000 Jewish slaves to help build
the Roman Colosseum including the Arch of Titus, a tribute to the Roman general
who would soon become Roman Emperor.
And by becoming Emperor, Titus would take his place among the pantheon
of the divine. The Arch of Titus shows
with great architectural detail the Romans marching off with valuables of
Jerusalem, one panel clearly showing them carting off a menorah. This then was the message. Through the violence, carnage, torture,
victory, and spoils of war, generals elevated themselves to divine status. They became sons of God. Christian origins scholar, John Dominic
Crossan, wrote, “Roman imperial theology was advertised with poems and
inscriptions, coins and images, statues, altars, and structures. It was, Crossan states, “a multimedia context
that could have learned but little from Madison Avenue.”[1] As Seneca, the great Roman statesperson and
philosopher from the first century wrote, “Religion is regarded by the common
people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
Indeed, Roman imperial theology, their
talk of the gods and the sons of god, was about maintaining civilization
against the barbarism that infringed upon its moral, cultural, and geographical
borders. Roman law was opposed by
lawlessness. Roman culture was opposed
by savages. And Rome made violence and
war a sacred necessity to defend their boundaries against transgression.[2] This imperial theology was not new to
Rome.
Union Theological Seminary New
Testament Professor, Brigitte Kahl turns to how Greek imperial theology set the
stage for how Rome understood itself over and against the barbarians of their
time. And that can be found in a massive
political and religious architectural piece from the 2nd Century
BCE. To guide us through some of this
art work, I have asked my resident Greek mythology expert, Sophia Heilman, to
share her observations and reflections of this work.
The Great Altar at Pergamon,
c. 170 BCE, from the Hellenistic Attalid dynasty.
Father
Zeus slaying three giants. In the many
friezes, the greek gods
come from above while the giants come from below. The Attalid dynasty, through their rulers,
saw themselves as “sons of god” and therefore linked to their destiny. Roman emperors took for themselves the titles
god and “sons of god” and used this theology to understand the way they moved
against other peoples or the Other as justified and sanctified by the
divine. State violence becomes
sacrament.
“The monument of a dominant
world order—and of a primeval world war. In manifold combat scenes of supreme
artistic perfection the gods and goddesses of the Great Frieze are shown in
battle against the Giants attacking from below. The deities above fight
vigorously but in a composed manner, clearly victorious and in control. Their
opponents, on the other hand, appear in all poses and stages of dying and dead
as they are impaled, mauled, hacked and trampled down by the divine force. The
hair of the defeated Giants is wild, their bodies are naked, rage and despair
show in their faces. Lacking calmness, restraint and all the other features
that mark their conquerors as superior and civilized, some of them are even
depicted as half-beastly with nasty snake legs. We cannot miss the point that
the battle unfolding before our eyes is the holy war of civilization protecting
itself against barbarism. The order of the world and the whole cosmos is at
stake.”[3]
The Pergamene city
goddess Athena and winged Nike in battle against the earth goddess Gaia and her
favorite son Alkyoneus.
“If we look at this image closely we can see
how Athena from above tries to separate Alkyoneus, Gaia's favorite son, from
his mother below, stepping between the two of them with her beautifully-draped
knee, at the same time pulling him up by his hair. Legend has it that Alkyoneus
must die the very moment he loses touch with mother Earth. The poison of
Athena's snake is already entering his body, and his face is in pain.”[4]
Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, steps on
the face of a defeated Giant. To the
right, another snake-legged winged Giant is attacked by Eros from above.
Architecture
such as this was, effectively, the media of its time, the massive and
monumental thing you might see every day as you entered the city, walked to
work, or went to buy essentials in the marketplace. This was the Roman newspaper. So you might ask, “What does the Great Altar
at Pergamon have to do with Paul’s letter written to the Galatians some 200
years later?” The Greek word for
Galatians covers Gauls and Celts in general and are thought of, in general, as
the “northern barbarians.” These
architectural panels relate the successful military campaigns of the Attalid
dynasty over and against what were termed the “marauding Gauls.”[5] These are the lawless, the savages, the
defeated and the vanquished. Carried on and
co-opted into Roman mythology and world-view, the Galatians are the bearers of
chaos into the law and order of Rome.
Ok, I
know that is just a ton of mythology to put out there for us all to try and get
a grip on for understanding the apostle Paul.
But my main point today is this. We
so strip the New Testament of its political context, backdrop, or matrix
sometimes that we hand deliver it to people who think the world-transforming
news is about who gets invited to heaven and who gets shunned into hell. No! We
explain Paul as concerned with “faith versus works, grace against law, foreskin
versus circumcision.”[6]
By doing so, we totally strip him of any
concern for the real world. We make him
concerned about other-worldly things rather than the real, world-transforming
news in which he sits, walks, and teaches.
The world-transforming
news, traditionally translated the “gospel”, was a word regularly used by Roman
rulers to proclaim military victories in the here and now. And ambassadors and teachers like Paul were
trying to say that the Jewish gospel understood through the lens of Jesus had
to be understood in a radically different way.
Jesus, crucified, as Paul preached him, was one of the vanquished and
defeated, one of the barbarians at the border, one of the savages undercutting
culture, one of the lawless usurping Roman law and order.
Paul
was not preaching who gets invited to heaven and shunned to hell. Paul was saying that the world-transforming
news is all about who gets invited to the table, who gets to share bread, who
gets to partake in the resources for earthly life and sustenance and joy. Paul writes that the shunned are those who
would use law and order to keep others from the table. And lo and behold, Paul uses a pre-existing
baptismal formula to say that the lawless, the savages, the barbarians, the
vanquished and defeated all get invited.
And get this: the host of that
feast is the most vanquished, defeated, barbaric, savage, lawless person you
can imagine. Rome crucified him as a way
of saying that violence and war carry the day.
Other-centered and other-hearted people said that there is a God who
comes from below to raise up a mission and ministry that is greater than war
and violence.
So
today, we say, we proclaim, that if you feel excluded through cultural norms
that have you feeling like you are on the outside looking in, this meal is for
you. If you belong to a race or a
culture or a religion that does not fit into the official religion that sanctions
death, war, and violence, this meal is for you. If you feel odd or strange or misplaced or
struggling with a culture that wants you to achieve, go deeper into debt, shop
until you drop, and work until you can barely scrape by, this meal is for
you. Share in the Anointed’s baptism and
eat at the Anointed’s table. For Paul
teaches that the world-transforming news is that Christ’s table blurs the
boundaries of law and order, breaks down the walls of civilization, calls into
question what it means to be a savage, and de-bases a world view that
legitimizes violence and war against the already defeated and vanquished. The
world-transforming news is: this meal is
for you, as a sign and seal of God’s intent for your sustenance, life, and
joy. Praise God! Amen.
[1]
John Dominic Crossan, In the Shadow of
Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a
History of Faithful Resistance (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Richard
Horsley, ed., p. 61.
[2]
Brigitte Kahl, Galatians
Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of
the Vanquished (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2010). I find
Kahl’s conclusions around Galatians nothing short of genius and think she will
help re-define scholarship around this early letter.
[3] Ibid. Here is the theology as described by Kahl, “The
Giants are fatherless in an even more shameful and abominable way. According to
Hesiod (Theogony) and Apollodorus (Library 1.1-6) the following
happened: When Ouranos/Heaven, the primeval partner of Gaia/Earth was trying to
kill the first generation of their children, mother Earth hid them and
eventually made a sharp sickle-shaped weapon that was taken up by Kronos/Time
against the tyrant-father. He emasculated Ouranos. The blood dripping on the
ground made mother Earth pregnant and she gave birth to the Giants. These
deviant sons literally are the brood of rebellion against the divine father—and
against the sacred institution of patriarchy as a whole. It is "in their
blood" if they finally rise against the deities and try to de-throne them.
They are the seed of insurgence against divinely sanctioned law and order.
Violence against this viper's brood is therefore saving the world.” This is sacralized, justified violence.
[4]
Ibid. How can we not see this as what
empire is doing to the daughters and sons of Gaia (Earth Goddess) in this
present day? If we are lifted from this
earth, we will lose connection and power.
[5]
Ibid.
[6]
Ibid.
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