2024.07.07 Who DID Write the New Testament Anyway? Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post

When I read biblical readings about politics, the politics of St. Paul stand out! Paul  frantically wrote to fulfill his calling to spread the good news preached by Jesus of Nazareth, or Galilee, or Ephesus, or Corinth, or in your heart. Paul was a convert, not programmed to endear many, and admitting he was wrong—sometimes.   

I remember the omnipresent and ever-irritating examination question in the final exam for the course in New Testament at Yale Divinity School. Students knew it was coming. We had been well prepared. We knew our stuff, yet everyone quivered.

WAS there a “right” answer? 

The question:  Who wrote the New Testament, Jesus or Paul? 

                                   *  *  * *  

I plunged fearlessly in with every intention of making my case for Jesus. I ended up with Paul. Why? In short, my personality is just like Paul’s. Thanks to the patriarchal culture of  his day (mine as well!) it took time. This Jesus was not selling yet another religion, or himself as THE Messiah, but rather a gospel full of parabolic stories about people who broke rules for the sake of justice. It got Jesus crucified of course, but Paul picked up the roots and the wings by which ALL Creation could connect and live peacefully. 

The Great Commandment: Do NOT do to others what you would not have them do to you. God, how boldly simple that is?  To call it LOVE is dramatically misleading. You simply have to treat all living things (land, plants, animals, yourself, all neighbors) with compassion and respect, just as their Creator does.  

                             *  *  *  * 

In the 1970s in the Episcopal Church, I jumped into my own simmering desire to stand behind an altar as a priest of the Eucharist, rather than kneel at a rail, my hands up, my tongue extended, begging to be fed. I know “they” called such a posture humility, but I experienced it as humiliating. 

The Episcopal Church had its own hoops through which an aspirant would jump.The screening committee told me I would be embarking on a “dual vocation.” I could not be a mother AND a priest. I thought of Paul rushing about nagging anyone who would listen, grabbing himself a travel companion, revising his manuscript as he went, and traversing a huge desert called “holy.” I followed. 

It took me well over the expected time it took anyone to get ordained. I did not get tossed into prison like Paul, but if I had I’d have tried to sing hymns, as Paul did. Like Paul, I found friends and allies along my way. Also, I wrote letters to God who from the beginning had listened to my ramblings, dwelled in my heart, and taken me seriously. 

*  *  *  *

My memoir, God Is Not a Boy’s Name. Becoming Woman. Becoming Priest, was published in 2016. Like Paul, I’ve continued to hammer and chisel away at the patriarchal armor through which the expansive love of God continues to shine, no matter what. Like Paul, I trusted divine omnipresence more than divine omnipotence. Paul’s first letter to the squabbling new churches in Corinth felt familiar. “The Spirit searches everything—even the depths of God. . .” (I Cor. 2)

Paul never gave up, broke every law on the books, fiercely and naively insisted that divinity was greater than all our imaginings. He did not found any single church! WE did. 

*  *  *  *

So who did write the New Testament? Paul of course! Jesus didn’t have time to write!

Now I’m 85 years old. I’m still talking and writing without ceasing about that steadfast God Paul trusted. Me too.

 

2022.03.20 Ehyeh asher Ehyeh. Spiritual Lemons, Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post. 3/20/22

The Bible is a source of frustration to many, a source of wonder to some, and a source of trembling awe to others. To me it is a source of all of these aforementioned states of mind and heart. 

On this Sunday in Lent, the biblical readings from the Hebrew Scriptures, from St. Paul of many words and even more semicolons, and from the Gospel, according to Luke, all artfully bombard listeners with one central theological theme: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, Hebrew for “I am as I am”—no more and no less. I am is God’s personal name: I am I Am. God’s name is the verb To Be, a verb that indicates presence. God is present—no matter what.  

Ehyeh asher Ehyeh

Not too many or of us will ever see a burning bush that is not consumed, because fire always consumes, burns up. Nevertheless, many of us see something like a burning bush, something that communicates to us the omnipresence of God as Being itself.  I memorized many omni- words in Sunday School. The only one that stuck to my soul was omnipresence, because it always proved true, even in the worst most dreary or painful times—time in which I could see no way out, no place for me, no clarity for my hopes and dreams. Once years ago I was staring at a liturgical calendar on which the special, holy days—Easter days— were marked in white. Logically, it was the Easter season. Illogically, I suddenly saw all the days’ numbers appear as white. I tried to blink away what I saw, decided I could be going mad, and then, like Moses, shed my doubts. (And did you know that the verb for “shed” is the same in Hebrew as the word used for a snake’s shedding its skin each year, without which shedding the snake could never grow?)  So I shed my doubts and shrugged: “What the crazy hell, it’s all white, every day!” I’m okay. 

Ehyeh asher Ehyeh

Just last week I saw a small, round, completely white snowy owl perched atop a tall tree outside our window. I rushed to get the binoculars. We always try to prove our vision, don’t we? But this one was provable. There she was, pure white just waiting to be joined and blended into the big snow blizzard that would be upon us that evening and into the next day.  Then suddenly she was gone. Up and away, she flew, leaving only the impression of her presence behind my eyes. 

Ehyeh asher Eyheh

As Paul writes to the grousing Corinthians, read any of us much of the time: Hey you, stop grumbling. There isn’t much happening to you that has not happened to others. There is not a test you cannot survive, for God will provide you the way out, as well as the strength to bear it. This is often quoted, sometimes flippantly, as if this truth is obvious when you’re in the middle of great grief and fear. Well, it is not obvious at all, and should always be taken lightly and spoken gently with one hand on your own heart  and another hand on the heart or head of the other in your presence. It is terrifying to be present like this. I’ve been with dying people and suffering ones in the hospital, and I want more than anything else to flee. But I remember, I’m not alone. 

Ehyeh asher Eyheh

And in the gospel of Luke (13:1-9), Jesus makes a bit of fun of us “poor me” types who imagine our own suffering to be the worst of all, our own guilt the most unbearable, our own failings the most, well, deserving of grace. Nonsense, Jesus tell them. We all fall to the same fate  equally. Get some new perspectives. Change your viewpoint. Jesus offers a parable of a fig tree that, year after year, has failed to produce. The owner is angry and orders this one tree to be cut down, for it is useless trash. But the vinedresser, the one who cares for this vineyard and knows all the trees and their vines intimately, calls for reprise: Give this one another year. I will hoe around it and fertilize it, and if it bears fruit another year, fine. If not let it be cut down. I am tempted to excise that last line, because I am sometimes afraid of dying, afraid of being useless, think that all my efforts have been fruitless. But then. 

Ehyeh asher Ehyeh

Weak and Strong—Whatever

I remember in seminary we frantic students, just trying to keep up with heavy readings and papers due all at once, used to engage in strenuously absurd debates about the “weak” and the “strong.”  We, without proper exegesis, thought that Paul was teaching that weak people were inferior to strong people who could eat meat sacrificed to idols to their hearts’ content. Like us!

Our level of hysteria about this teaching of Paul to the Church in Corinth (I Corinthians 8:1-13)  stood in direct correlation, if not cause and effect, to our own painful uncertainty about what we were doing studying God when we could hardly breathe from the strain of our, yes, weakness: believing that studying God might just bring us closer to God.

The lector who read this Pauline passage today in our parish church is a very competent reader, an intelligent man, and a master of grammar. He did pretty well, only stumbling once over Paul’s rhetoric and hopelessly run-on sentences. Poor Paul suffered from too many semi-colons, if nothing else. And we? Do we suffer from fearing we might be “weak”? Do we blame Paul for our imagined spiritual deficits?

I hope I have obfuscated enough to make myself sound like Paul, whose image is even blurry. It’s a cover-up for how truly weak I do feel, because I am not able to help one of my adult children the way I think a strong  mother should. I can love; I can be present; I can listen without judgment; I can talk to compassionate souls; I can pray silently and mightily that all will be well but never say that out loud because I don’t know.

Is this what Paul meant by “weak”?  Sort of, yes. Paul was writing about the state of one’s conscience with respect to certain cultural expectations or personal wounds we do not understand. I can not know or understand. I can cry.

Back to scripture. Historically, sacrificing animal flesh to the gods was customary atonal practice—bringing people closer to God. Paul acknowledged that for some people such a practice had spiritual value. Christ’s reconciling work however rendered this practice idolatrous. “Food does not bring us close to God.” Christ does.

BUT—here’s the kicker: The “weak” of conscience still believed, for whatever reasons, that such practices would bring them closer to God. Those who knew better, the “strong” of conscience, would sin against Christ if they failed to respect the conscience of the “weak.”

My late aunt, an aggressive convert to Roman Catholicism, believed it necessary to the salvation of her immortal soul to eat fish—never meat—on Fridays. Her rival sister, my mother, thought this was “stupid.” They argued. I agreed with my mother. [Well, as a child I agreed with her. Today I think I'd be better off fasting every day, for soul and body management at 79.]. Mostly, we avoided having my aunt for dinner on a Friday, but if we did have her, we did NOT serve meat out of respect for her  beliefs, letting our own judgments go—at least for that night. 

I’d love to tell you we were doing this for Christ’s sake, but I couldn’t swear to it. I hope I am in Christ with my vulnerability and helplessness, but I can’t swear to it. And so: Amen.