Religious Speech 17B

 

Proper 17B Religious Speech

I have spent much of the past 14 days reacquainting myself with the nature and meaning of scripture with assistance from Karen Armstrong’s remarkable achievement, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts (Alfred Knopf, New York:2019) – a history of religious speech, specifically as it has emerged from ancient Israel, India and China. Speech. The sacred texts of most if not all civilizations are meant to be read aloud, chanted or sung in a community setting or ritual. Our tendency to study a text quietly, as individuals, and apply modern understandings of history and science to tease out the meaning of a specific text flies in the face of how these scriptures were meant to be experienced.

 

Sacred texts are understood to have “being” and life. They are meant to transform life. “The Word of God is living and active!” [Heb 4:12] Sacred Scriptures mean to lead us and inspire us to change and radical transformation amidst the challenges and crises that surround us, to imagine what can be, and to bind us together as a community. To do all of this they comment on past predicaments, and then must be allowed to speak directly to current predicaments and crises. As new crises arise, the narratives and myths are constantly revised to meet new challenges. So, Sacred Scriptures are always a work in progress open to new interpretation as necessary to address new circumstances. Scriptures, narrative, myth and poetry, seek to help the listener to discover that which is constant and essential to human life. It can be said that religious language, indeed all language as metaphor, seeks to make life meaningful, and that thus we create the world in which we live by means of speech.

 

For instance, the Song of Songs, sometimes called the Song of Solomon, is a group of love poems, possibly gathered together in one book to be recited or sung at weddings. It is portrayed as a conversation between a man and a woman. In chapter 2 verses 8-13 the woman hears the man’s voice declare that a recent crisis is coming to an end:

"Arise, my love, my fair one,

and come away;

for now the winter is past,

the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of singing has come…”

 

Perhaps this declares an end to loneliness, but could also refer to one of the periods of exile Israel experienced, or even a community’s sense of abandonment by God. The Song of Songs has often been understood as a conversation between God and God’s people, with God declaring undying love despite all challenges of the present situation. Addressing the present, it would be no stretch to think of the “winter” to be the ongoing threat of nuclear winter, or the current Climate Crisis declaring that one day flowers will once again flourish and our singing of hymns and songs to the God of all creation will once again be heard throughout the land. Perhaps if we would sing the Song of Songs, we would find ways to bind the world community together to seek ways out of a crisis created largely out of our conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels.

 

Then in Mark Chapter Seven we hear a dispute. After episodes of feeding and healing large groups of people, Jesus and his now dozens of disciples pause to share a meal with one another. Such meals are themselves sacred and the foundation of Biblical religion. Some Pharisees seemingly travel all the way from Jerusalem in the south to Galilee in the north to lodge a complaint: that Jesus’s disciples do not wash their hands before meals “according to the traditions of the elders?” Jesus recognizes this as a trick question right away and calls them out as hypocrites – literally actors or posers.

 

Oh yeah! I will see you and raise you tenfold. He first appeals to the prophet Isaiah, remembering that prophets were first and foremost temple priests acting as social critics:

 

‘This people honors me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me;

in vain do they worship me,

teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

He concludes, “You abandon the commandments of God and hold to human tradition.”

 

There was no commandment in all the 613 commandments in Torah to wash hands before a meal (sorry, parents!). Most of Israel, including the Sadducees in Jerusalem, did not wash hands before a meal. Jesus says you just made that up. Furthermore, in verses strangely omitted by the lectionary, he accuses them of not Honoring Thy Father and Mother by another clever practice the Pharisees made up. Ouch! Finally, he wraps up by saying that nothing that goes into the body defiles the body, but rather only that from within, from within the human heart, do evil intentions come: “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things that come from us are what defile us and others.” No amount of handwashing can change this.

 

His accuses the Pharisees of mishandling the sacred texts and then simply make things up which contribute to evil intentions. That is, listening to untrue and unfaithful speech like that which you and your fellow Pharisees do is what damages human relations. We listen to the Word of God which is living and true to guide us through the current unpleasantness of the corrupt and corrupting military occupation by Rome along with the complicity of some of our leaders in Jerusalem. He then retires to a house in the region of Tyre to get away from it all, which of course is impossible, and leaves it to the crowd, the Pharisees and all of us to ponder just what this episode is meant to tell us.

 

For six days each day after an early morning run, I would sit near the beach, watch the waves coming in and going out, the occasional pod of dolphin diesel by, and modern-day Sun Worshipers standing with their smartphones high in the air to take photos or video of the sunrise to assure themselves the Sun once rose and might again. I would scribble a few notes and try to make sense of what has been going on all around us in this time of the Pandemic. Unwittingly, perhaps, or by divine inspiration, the last day at the beach I penned what may be one way to apply Jesus’s response to our current predicament and attendant crises:

Bethany Beach Entry #5-6    08/17-19/2021

“I must down to the seas again…”

No “go” as Maesfield wrote it, 

But as most have learnt it!

Yet, “go” we must it seems

As side by side down the beach

A Yoga class saluting the rising Sun

While fifty yards further

Beach Boot Camp makes it burn

Namaste vs grunts and shouts

Whilst most sit at the water’s edge

Quietly listen to the sound of the 

Gently rolling waves

The running tide which cannot be denied

Clouds flying overhead

Each morning a low hanging 

Line of small transparent clouds diesel by

The rising Sun

Like the pods of bottle-nosers

Who leap to our utter delight

Down to the seas

Makes us smile

Say “Good morning” to strangers

Nod to one another as we run 

Opposing directions

On the boardwalk

We discover we are 

Created to welcome 

One another

The Other

This feels good, makes us smile

Until we allow the chattering class

Make us feel afraid of 

One Another

Bash one another

Destroy one another

The Earth

And all its creatures

The seas remind us

To practice kindness

Joy

To stop each time we think

To bash someone

The Other

Stop

Reset

Be mindful

Grateful

Positive

Kind

We become

What we say and do

 

After spending three or four hours each day this past week at the Franciscan Priory in Ellicott City, I recall the words of St. Francis about preaching: “Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” The language we use and the things we do create the world we live in. Amen.