Category Archives: Bible Study

Please pass the voodoo chicken

Posted on by Sare

Alrighty folks.  This one came from this week’s Exegete.

Appropriate music to listen in the background: True Blood Sountrack, London Calling, or the Tallis Scholars.

Appropriate accent to affect in head while reading: Generic Southern.

This, on St. Paul’s commentary to the church at Corinth, concerning whether or not to eat meat sacrificed to other gods… (1 Corinthians 8:1-13)

Once upon a time there was a Voodoo Chicken.  It was known as Voodoo Chicken because it was used in a vaudun ritual, but you know, it was also marinated afterwards in the most mouthwatering fashion.  And you know, a dinner party is a dinner party.  You can’t fault your host for their odd taste in religious piety when they serve mouthwateringly good roasted chicken.  Some of us like to say a little, unobtrusive blessing over our food, but to each their own, right?  And since we all know (in our separate religions) that ours is the only right one, there’s no harm in letting other people attempt to invoke a god that doesn’t actually exist, so live and let live. And pass the chicken.

This is all well and good when you’re surrounded by people who are firm in their faith, whatever that faith may be.  The Vauduns know that eating the Voodoo Chicken will bring them closer to fine, and the Christians know that the Vauduns really know how to roast a chicken or twelve, and that their own understanding of God requires neither chicken nor lack of chicken for Divine Union.

However, it all goes to hell in a hand basket but quick when you’ve got newbies in your midst.  Newbies get a little rabid, you know, and they’re really clear about wanting to get things Perfectly Correct and Appropriate.  It really hits the fan when your newbie is their oldie.  Then you’ve got someone looking at your enjoyment of the damn chicken (whose not actually damned, just damned inconvenient) and their knee jerk reaction is that you’re getting a little closer to fine, when it’s really just the seasonings.  Now, these newbies know it’s not Divine Union, because our God doesn’t go in for Chicken.  This is about the time that the confusion and resentment sets in.  Perhaps there’s even some serious doubt about the bigger things of life – they are newbies, remember.

So, you know. Practice discretion.  Not because there’s anything wrong with the Om Nommy goodness of the Vaudun’s chicken dinners, but because in the long run, is your gastronomical satisfaction really worth causing that much angst amongst the newbies? Give the Voodoo Chicken a pass while they’re in the room, for heaven’s sake.   You can always have some next week.

Of Men & Whales…

Posted on by Sare
Marzipan Whale by Alex Bruda

And the whale goes 'om, nom, nom'

I love Jonah!  Somedays, when I’m feeling awfully cranky, I think I am Jonah.  The fact that Jonah never actually existed is completely moot because he’s a perfect archetype for the outraged believer, a pair of shoes that can fit all of us on one day or another if we’re not ever-so-careful.  Can you hear it?  I can… Continue reading →

The Msg of Jesus vs. That of Peter & Paul

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So, we were discussing this at our sermon group this morning.  On the one hand you have Jesus saying that The Most Important Thing Ever (the Summary of the Law, it is called in some circles) is A) Love God with everything in you and B) Love your Neighbor as Yourself.  All of his ministry and most of his teachings that are told of in the four canonical gospels support this and the ones that don’t are suspected by many biblical scholars to be later additions and edits by his well-meaning but utterly clueless and totally unhelpful students.  Okay.  Nifty.  Very clear.  Love-Love-Love.  It’s a reeeeally easy doctrine to remember.  Less easy to live out, but not a whole lot of memorization required.

But you know, all throughout the four canonical gospels, over and over again, his students ranged from Not Getting It to Seriously Misunderstanding with exceptionally brief intervals of seemingly divine epiphany in which they Sort Of Understood, A Little.  Pentecost notwithstanding, I don’t think much changed with their understanding of his message after the Roman Empire executed him.  What makes me say this? Continue reading →

Monday Morning Exegete Cover Art

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You know, not only is the Monday Morning Exegete dead useful and chockful of research and insight, it’s also awfully pretty.  After doing it for a month, I’m no less excited every Monday when I sit down and roll up my sleeves.  Go figure–I might be a church geek.  Anyway, I wanted to share some of the pretty with you.

Issue 1, Volume 1The Monday Morning Exegete Presents 8th Sunday of Epiphany, Cover

This was my first effort as a monday morning exegete and was for the penultimate Sunday of Epiphany.  This first time it took me an entire week to produce, but now that I’ve got the kinks out of the system I can do it in one very full day.

One of the main themes of this issue was taken from the portion of Isaiah assigned to that Sunday, “See, I have you inscribed on the palms of my hands,” God says of his people, and he said this by way of saying that he would never, not ever, not slightly or even a little bit forget us.  God with his love tattooed, or if you prefer, etched, on his hands… that’s kind of a compelling image, don’t you think?  And so I found pictures – a woman with Henna on her fingers to make her hands more beautiful, someone with ‘Sweden Forever’ tattooed on their arm to proclaim a lifelong devotion, and Boston’s Holocaust Memorial which includes among other things, the following: “My number is 174517.  I will carry the tattoo on my left arm until I die.”  Tattoos… clearly they are used for all sorts of different things.

The wordstudy of this issue is ‘oligopistos’, meaning ‘of little faith’ in Greek.  I chose this word because the collect (prayer) for the day directly connects fear with faithlessness: “Protect us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties…” Isaiah is all about God’s refusal to forget us, the Psalm is about resting in God, the Epistle about being in this deep and trustworthy relationship with God, and the Gospel is about choosing God or choosing worldly fears and wealth which seems to hinge on faith, or lack thereof.  Curious?

Continue reading →

The Monday Morning Exegete

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So, what is all of this exegetical nonsense, anyway?  If you’ve been following along on Twitter and you’re not a #chuchgeek yourself, it’s probably just a word your eyes have glossed over.  Or, if you’re my sister Rose, it’s a word you’ve gone and looked up.  (Bless her heart, she’s very supportive of me.)

The Monday Morning Exegete Presents: Lent 3

So, exegesis is an in depth study and interpretation of a text, especially the bible.  An exegete is one who does exegesis.  When I started this weekly endeavor–me spending all day on Monday doing exegesis on the following Sunday’s readings and then making it super duper pretty and sending it out to people who have a paid subscription–I was chatting with my friend and colleague Phil.  He pointed out that I had an unfair advantage in the production of such a thing, as I went to a seminary that actually required of its students not one exegesis, but many.  (And oh, how we bitched.  But we did it anyway.)  It’s true.  My seminary, Virginia Theological Seminary, has many faults ::cough::liturgy::cough:: but let me tell you, biblical studies isn’t one of them.

So, I’m doing this thing.  I’m calling it The Monday Morning Exegete, for perhaps some obvious reasons.  It’s for normal people who find the Bible scary, daunting, out of date, or just plain confusing.  It’s for parishes who want reasonably researched and insightful blurbs for their weekly newsletters.  It’s for preachers who have never preached on this passage before, or who have already preached on it four times.  It’s a jumping off point for conversation groups–the ones at the coffee shop, or the ones in your head.

It’s $20/month, but if you’re interested, drop me a line and I’ll set you up for a month for free and you can check it out yourself.  And just because I love you, and I’m not above shameless self-promotion, here’s this week’s Monday Morning Exegete.

It’s On My Card: Dresser of Sycamore Trees

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It’s On My Card: Dresser of Sycamore Trees

Me and my man, Amos, we’re two peas in a pod.  He was a god-fearing man, born in a time of corrupt religion.  In his day, religion wasn’t just the place you and the members of your family went to worship and get atonement for all the ways in which you were crappy to yourself and others.  I mean, it was one purpose that religion did in fact serve in his day, but in the big picture, religion had a very different role that was as much if not more important.  It was religion’s job to be a check on the corrupting influence that power has on people, most particularly in politics, most particularly in the king’s court.  You see, every king had a prophet, or a school of prophets that when not corrupt themselves, had the delightful effect of moderating the king’s rule.  When any king started lording it around, levying oppressive taxes, passing laws that benefited his wealthy associates at the expense of the scads of people living it poverty, it was the prophet’s job to tell him ‘God says knock that shit off, right now.  The God you worship doesn’t stand for this kind of tomfuckery, and you bloody well know it.  Also, your people are starving, jackass.’

As you might imagine, genuine prophets were frequently killed. Continue reading →

Who is my neighbor?

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Who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:25-37)

Speaking with respect – why is this so difficult for us?  Swearing, racial slurs, ethnic jokes, belittling comments, attempts at ‘redeeming’ words… the redemption of words, an effort that comes to us from groups who have abdicated or been refused the power to ask or demand that certain utterly disrespectful words and tags not be used.  Nigger.  Bitch.  Cunt.  H00r.  It’s all the same.  The effort of redemption is to say, ‘no, we are blessed, too’ and to say ‘no, your words cannot hurt us, see? we’ll use them, too’ but it is a double edged sword whose blade never truly dulls, even with gentle use.  As our skin develops callouses and a tough, leathery exterior from the thousand cuts we deliver to our own, and to ourselves, we fool ourselves into believing that our leathern armor is proof against the M-16′s, for what is a sword in our own hands becomes an assault rifle in the hands of the powerful other – literally powerful – these are the people to whom we cannot or will not say, “Do not call me a cunt.  You may not call me a whore, or a h00r, or a ho.  It is not allowed that you should call me a nigger, and I’ll thank you to stop that.”  While we effectively desensitize ourselves towards compassion and empathy on the subject with our own – literally, we are no longer sensitive to this – we fall into the illusion that by calling our best friend a bitch it will somehow mitigate the pain and degradation when someone else spits the epithet in rage and anger at our best friend, a woman who we personally know to be wonderful and who deserves much more respect than that.

Language is so very important.  It fails regularly in the conveyance of what we actually mean, and we fail in our attempts at using it to that end.  And yet, it is language, tone and body that are the tools which we have to communicate, and of these three, language offers, both alone and combined, the method of greatest nuance and complexity.  Language.  For good or ill, it’s the best we’ve got.

And so I, at least, am resolved to once again examine my use of language with a special eye towards speaking respectfully towards and of others.  I suppose this means that I can’t say ‘Fuck You’ to Terry during our clergy colleague/bible study meetings Tuesday mornings at Panera – rather, I’ll have to be honest and direct, knowing that I am not powerless and that my words do have power.  Instead of fuck you, I will say, ‘that hurt my feelings, I’m still really sensitive about that,’ when he jokes about me being an utter failure at my previous position.  And as we had this very conversation about language and respect and power and redemption, I brought up this example and he was surprised when I said, ‘that hurt my feelings’ – perhaps as surprised as the rest of the table had been when I’d originally said ‘fuck you’ in between bites of breakfast.

Love your neighbor as yourself, he said.  Who is my neighbor? the other guy asked.  And then he spins a story illustrating that your neighbor can really be anyone, even the person you passively distain, or the person you actively hate – or who hates you.  Or, in my case, the person who pushes your buttons without even trying.

Who is your neighbor?

Treacherous & Lengthy Commute

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After the treacherous and lengthy commute from work to home (how embarrassing to trip over your own patio furniture, all because you forgot to turn the back porch light on, and the illumination from the outbuildings only goes so far), I am home again, still somewhat Typhoid Mary, but stuffed to the gills with excellent potluck fare (four cheese quiche, pasta salad with pine nuts, turkey salad, and salsa rice & beans with bread), and my head full of interesting thoughts about John 12: 23-30.

Hm.  What was that bit I rewrote/retranslated in the end?  Shoot.  Something like… If you live for your ego at the expense of the common dignity of humanity, then in the end you’ll have nothing but your ego left.  If you sacrifice your ego at the altar of the common dignity of humanity, you may lose you ego, but you’ll have gained the whole world.  Yea.  Something like that. I think I could preach that.  In fact, I think I will.  (Subject to change.)

Anyway, it was very cool to see some new faces there, and I hope they found it interesting, worthwhile, and above all, safe.

Still thinking about what I’ll add to the clergyblog.  But I’m thinking about renaming it ClergyBlog.

A Smidgeon of Not Much

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This is just a little moment of reflection.  

This evening’s potluck/biblestudy was on Jesus’ temple temper tantrum, as found in the gospel of John (aka, John 2:13-22).  There were some different voices there tonight, which always makes for a different group dynamic. But as always, even when I have doubts mid-stream as to how well this particular bible study is going to turn out, by the end there’s always something.  Though, I suppose that’s how this sort of bible study goes: you warm up from beginning to end.

It’s going to be interesting, preaching on this gospel snippet. 

Hm.  And now the choice:  do I go read the next few chapters of the Bishop Spong book I’m working on (‘Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism’), do I work on my novel, or do I fritter away the rest of my evening poking about on the internet?

Eeenie, meanie, miney, mo…

 

And what did we eat tonight? High carb.  It’s a good thing no one was gluten free – they could have had the coffee, and the butter.