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.

 

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.

2013.07.07 Interpreting Scripture, Necessary But Dangerous Ministry

On May 12, 2013, in Curaçao, the Dutch island off the Venezuela coast,  Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached a sermon on the text Acts 16:16-34 that raised a theological ruckus. (Source: NYTimes news story, June 12, 2013, Mark Oppenheimer.)

Now how often does a theological ruckus make the NYTimes?  And from a text in the Acts of the Apostles, a book notable for its joyful exaggerations about the high speed growth of the young Christian Church, read evangelism?  Miracle after miracle. And the Holy Spirit Herself notably in charge of this expansion. Who would critique Herself?  Who could find controversy? It struck me as very funny. 

It had to do, of course, with how scripture is interpreted and what scripture means in different contexts. Every generation must interpret scripture for its own time. That’s the point. That’s what keeps it holy—and alive.

So what was the ruckus really about?

Here’s a paraphrase of the biblical account, in brief and with NO interpretation, which is also the point—and the problem.  Scripture leaves room for everyone’s take:

Paul is on the move spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ through Greece with spectacular success, financed by a businesswoman/convert named Lydia. So far so good, but then one day a slave-girl with “a spirit of divination” (seeing beyond the obvious) shouted out,‘These men are slaves of the Most High God who proclaim to you a way of salvation.’ ”  The girl followed Paul and his disciple Silas around calling out until Paul got annoyed and ordered the spirit to come out of her in the name of Jesus Christ. Which it obediently did causing the girl’s owners distress because they were making mucho money from her fortune telling. Her owners schemed to have Paul and other Christians arrested and thrown in jail  for disturbing the peace and preaching the rhetoric of conversion.  In prison  Paul and Silas sang hymns to God; a violent earthquake shook their chains loose and all prisoners were free to escape but didn’t—in order to protect the jailer from losing his job or worse. The grateful jailer of course converts, is declared “saved”and he AND his entire household are summarily baptized.  

Instant Christians and we all go out singing and rejoicing!! There you have it.

You see what I mean about Acts? Just the right amount of too many too happy endings!

In the meantime what happened to the poor slave-girl who, thanks to Paul’s pique, had been relieved of the divination gift that was her livelihood?  Perhaps Paul was not really angry at her but at her exploitive owners? Nevertheless, the girl took a hit.

And what happened to Jefferts Schori?  She preached about Paul’s failure to value diversity and to see the girl’s “difference.”  She noticed, as did I, that the girl proclaimed the basic Christian kerygma: “These men are slaves of the Most High God who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”

Well, duh, I thought to myself. She even used the same slavery rhetoric as Paul used when he preached about Christians being "slaves" to God—and to no other I presume. 

But the Presiding Bishop’s interpretation went viral. Angry Episcopalians flew around cyber space, defending Paul—and patriarchy I might add.  Objectors denounced the Presiding Bishop for her provocative interpretation, questioning even her standing as a good Christian. 

Most of the disgruntled Episcopalians were of a more traditionalist stripe and unhappy with Jefferts Schori’s support of gay and lesbian marriage and her hard line politics and legal stances against dissenting congregations who voted to secede from the Episcopal Church and expected to take their properties with them.  NOT.

But is it not equally a NOT to biblical literalists to stay with a Church that has over-ridden biblical prohibitions against same-sex marriage? Again, a matter of interpretation in context.

You get the picture: a similar extremist tension to that which polarizes/paralyzes our government.

Scholars who were consulted agreed that Jefferts-Schori’s  interpretation was not what the original biblical writers intended. Another duh—also the point of the ongoing tradition of  scriptural interpretation incumbent on the Church. But what does it mean today? 

Are you bored?  I am.  Yet I declare that my vote goes with the slave-girl who: 1) was exploited for her strange gift; 2) turned out to be a proclaimer of the gospel; and 3) was relieved of what the culture of her day thought of as “demonic” but which the text in Acts does not call “evil.” She might have looked on Paul as her abuser not her liberator.

Who, after all, would employ her now? Is there not, from a contemporary point of view, a sexist, possibly ableist, tinge to this text?—and to the extreme reactions to Jefferts Schori’s take? She too is a woman.   

 Jefferts-Schori said of prior generations of interpreters when asked for comment: “They had a limited view, because none of us is God.”

Jesus, I imagine, might take these two women out for lunch, (or to a quiet place) not for reprimand but to listen to their concerns—graciously, inclusively—and thank them for speaking truth to power, each in her own way.

2010.11.17 Profile in Courage

A woman recently told me a moving story—hers. It’s a story of mother/daughter love that comes from womb and know no bounds even when a painful relationship break happens.

Once upon a time a woman gave birth to a daughter, dearly beloved. Every day she loved this child with all her heart and did the best she could living with a difficult marriage and trying to manage her own decisions.

Every day the woman prepared meals for her daughter and other siblings, and every day the children ate well and grew up strong and healthy, until something began to go wrong. The daughter started the torturous route of addiction. It began slowly as it does with experimentation, adolescent stuff, maybe hanging out with friends that supported her growing habit rather than her health.

The mother’s response began slowly as it does with the usual parental warnings, hand wringings, and setting limits moving on to more desperate measures to try to control the uncontrollable. She offered advice, rescue and in time money, all good and obvious things to offer.

The daughter got sicker and sicker moving beyond alcohol. The drugs stole her personality, her sweetness, her intelligence, and her conscience. She became hard, unloving, a walled impenetrable brick house, containing terror.

The mother experienced about the same symptoms without the drugs—sick from worry, helplessness, grief, rage. All her way weren’t working to help her daughter. She didn’t stop loving her daughter.

The daughter was losing her life to addictions and the mother was losing her life to her daughter.

One day someone told the mother about AlAnon and she went. At meetings, as well as in therapy and with ongoing support from a steadfast and wise sister (not a nun sister) and her other children, the mother managed slowly to take back her own life and selfhood, which by now she had deeded to her daughter who occupied her mind,heart, soul, and body, leaving no room for herself.

The mother started to love herself as much as she loved her daughter. Years passed. The mother got well but couldn’t quite get the lost daughter off her mind. She wasn’t free.

It happened one day. It happened inspirationally. It happened because of a community of support and because of the grace of what 12-step recovery programs call Higher Power and some people call God, Buddha, Jesus, Allah,Universe, and many other names, all meaning Loving Mystery.

We pray for a rescuer and we got a lover.

Such Love has power in impotence. How odd. The woman connected with her own internal power fueled by her love for her daughter and drove unannounced to her daughter’s house where she encountered a cold hard woman she hardly could recognize, a woman facing a trial and a prison sentence, a much bigger limitation than her mother could ever manage.

Neither God nor mothers are very good jailers.

The woman made a simple statement to her daughter, one that told the daughter about her hurt. She told her “It hurts when........”

She didn’t tell her daughter “You hurt me when you......” The difference in language is subtle but the honest message is the same.

The mother told her daughter she had come to say good bye. I can’t imagine a more painful moment.

She also told the daughter she always had and always would love her.

Then she left. The door closed behind her and she drove away feeling free and weeping, the kind of tears you cry when you have labored long and finally a child pushes through to grab her own separate life. The umbilicus is severed usually by a doctor. This mother had to sever her own to give birth to herself.

Love, human or divine, is never severed however. Its power takes a long long slow time but one day it will show up.

Maybe, as it did for St. Paul, in jail .

Transitions: Holy Fodder

Transitions are holy fodder.

Think big, like the French revolution, poverty and squalor being fodder for new life en masse. Without this fodder they would never have stormed the Bastille (an event remembered today, July 14) demanding political change, liberation and food.

It was a revolution and a resurrection distinguished by violence, desperation and marked by cries for liberté, fraternité and egalité—spiritual basics of communal health.

Think small, like not being able to locate your favorite hanging hoop earrings buried in the chaos of cartons it’s too hot to unpack. Can I live like this for some time and find my soul without my order, my structures? Chaos has been fodder for finding deeper harmony, letting go of my usual need to get it all organized so I won’t feel stressed.

Can there be roses with a trellis? For a while they rise up indeed!

Fodder at its root is from the German word for food, but fodder can mean anything that primes your pump, gets your juices going, provokes explosions like cannon fodder, or helps you look elsewhere for manageability, finding it in surprising places like laughter, your husband’s voice, a squirrel dancing from limb to limb.

Transition is a low key word for all this but when you’re in one, which can be almost daily for some people, it can be fodder for defeatism or for choosing life in the midst—and everything in between.

Transition times are between times, times when you are so disoriented that you make space for Godde to enter your fret and chaos in spite of yourself.

Transitions are times for soul work, because things come up from the depths. Ideas you aren’t even thinking about just arise from spirit, the depth dimension of your psyche. I call this the voice of Godde within because it is not my own voice; it always provides wisdom I have never thought of; it leads me to choose to see things or live things in a new way; and finally it gives me hope.

And, as St. Paul says, hope never disappoints.