Our renunciation

John the Baptist, as his epithet suggest, baptised people and with it he preached repentance. There is quite a widely shared and deeply rooted confusion what he actually meant.
     For John and in the Bible - repentance has little if outright nothing to do with guilt feelings or displays of self-affliction or self-denigration. The New Testament was written in Greek (Hellenistic Koine) and repentance in Greek is METANOIA μετανοια that literally means a thorough reorientation of thinking, of outlook on life. But John the Baptist did not speak Greek - his language was either Aramaic or Hebrew. In Hebrew repentance is TEŠUVAH תשובה‎ . This word is derived from root ŠVB שוב which means turning around, going one direction and then ŠVB turning 180 degrees and going back - that is repentance - redirecting of our life. No melodramatic outpouring of our inner spiritual feelings and our yearning for personal salvation. True repentance is a down to earth practical reorientation of our individual and communal lives, eventually an ideal  redirection of the entire society.  

For that reason in the past four years at Rutgers we adopted in our worship at least once a month this litany of renunciation and acceptance.

We renounce falsehood, lies, deceitful words, and actions.

   We take up truth, honesty and openness.

We renounce anger that leads to harm with words and actions.

   We take up words and actions that help create peace.

We renounce egotism, selfish grasping, and stealing.

   We take up honest work and care for others.

We renounce racism, nativism, and dividing people to us and them.

   We take up divine love which embraces all people.

We renounce insults, slander, and evil judgment of others.

   We take up what encourages, comforts, and offers hope.

We renounce bitterness, violence, and the desire to cause harm.

   We take up kindness, gentleness, and work for divine justice and peace.

We do it, because we want to live out biblical repentance and its true original meaning and ethos. Depending on the socio-political context it can be quite a radical part of liturgy. The more dire situation we live in the more radical it feels. 

And that was also the situation of John the Baptist and what he had in mind when he preached repentance - reorienting lives to be in harmony with God’s will. And conducting baptism - through baptism opening up a new realm - welcoming people to God’s future.

On this Baptism of the Lord Sunday we want to do just that. Reaffirm our Baptisms and commit ourselves to God’s will and God’s future.

Mythopoetic Baptism

Religions are funny. They are spiritual, ethereal, even sublime. But religious people have a constant urge to objectify the intangible substance of their faith. Many religious people, including Christians, are taking their religious poetry, metaphors and myths and present them or understand them literally. What was figurative is presented as factual. There is a illustrative example of it directly in the Bible in the story about Jesus’ baptism. 

In the oldest Gospel of Mark, a little more than a generation after the crucifixion we read: 

Jesus coming from water, he saw the heavens ripped apart, and the Spirit descending like a dove to him, and he heard a voice from heavens, "You are my beloved son..." (Mark 1:10-11) 

It is an entirely subjective report which is also rich in beautiful mythical assonances. 

About a decade later, Matthew writes in his gospel:
Jesus came from the water and look, heavens were opened, and he saw Spirit of the God descending like a dove on him and look, voice from the heaven... (Matthew 3:16)
It is becoming a collage of subjective and objective reporting.

In the Gospel of Luke, still a few years later it morphs thusly:
Jesus steps from water and praying the heaven was open and the Holy Spirit in bodily form of a dove on him  and there was a voice from heaven, "You are my son..." (Luke 3:21-22) The original comparison of the coming of the Spirit to the descent of a dove, gained here an avian body.

And finally, about a generation after Mark and two or three generations after the crucifixion. In the Gospel of John it is John the Baptist who is presented as giving testimony:
I have seen the spirit descending like a dove from heaven on him and I have seen and I testify that this is the chosen one of God (John 1:32-34)

 
What started as a beautiful subjective mytho-poetical image was transformed in 50 years into a forensic testimony. Of course there were religious and political reasons why it happened. But this unfortunate process of sneaking-in fundamentalism and literalism was happening even before the Bible was finished. And that is something you might not know about the Bible and our human religious proclivity to take something spiritual and make it concrete.

Come this Sunday to seek with us the original meaning and rejoice with us in the rich, beautiful and meaningful mytho-poetic nature of baptism.

Prophetic reenactors

The Advent season brings to us the story of John walking through deserts and baptizing in the Jordan river. Interestingly, John was not the only one doing something like that at that time. During the time of Cuspius Fadus as the procurator of Judea there was a prophet Theudas who took people to the desert promising them that he would divide the waters of the Jordan River and bring them back to the Promised Land. But Fadus sent a heavy cavalry and stopped them before they even tried.
    When Porcius Festus governed Judea, there was the so called “Egyptian prophet.” A man who allegedly came from Egypt, gathered a substantial number of people, took them for a round trip through the wilderness and brought them up to Jerusalem with a promise that he would make the walls fall down like Joshua did at Jericho. Festus sent troops and scattered them off.
    Jewish historian Josephus Flavius also has a summary report of more charlatans, imposters or deceivers (as he calls them), who misleading many people, made them act like madmen and go to the desert with promises of deliverance and social, economic and political changes.
    There are clearly some common repeating features: taking people to the desert/wilderness, crossing rivers, toppling walls. In fact, they were repeating old religious archetypes by reenacting Exodus and the Taking of the Promise Land while each had some special feature or emphasis.
    Among the biblical scholars there is little doubt that John the Baptist belonged to this group of reenactors. John’s special feature was the “washing” in the Jordan river and then sending the baptized one by one to infiltrate, retake and repopulate the land. Thus, in a more peaceful way start all over again a just and peaceful society as God would have it. John the Baptist was indeed this prophetic reenactor of liberation. And that is something not all might know about him.
    Join us this Sunday in worship as we ask what would John the Baptist do today? Would he still be by that muddy creak dividing Israel and Jordan baptizing the American fundamentalist tourists on that “exact” spot as he did those thousands years ago? Or would he be leading and supporting people through the Sonora and our other southern deserts? Or would he be helping people to cross the Rio Grande, Colorado River and its canals?

 

Mytho-Political Baptism

Did Jesus sin? All confessions declare that he was without sin! So why was he baptized?
Did Jesus need to repent? All Christians believe not! So why his baptism?
Was baptism the moment of his divine adoption (hence the solemn declaration of his divine son-hood)? The Church declared this teaching a heresy early on!
What should we do with teacher-pupil subordination? John’s statements reversing this order are badly disguised later Christian re-interpretations and insertions into John's mouth!
Christians always have had problems with Jesus’ baptism by John. For that reason it is a rock solid historical fact (or as rock solid as possible, one of very few). There is no way anyone in the early church could have made this story up. Jesus was baptized by John.
    The majority of these problems actually originate a century or so after the events in an utter misunderstanding of the forgotten original meaning of John’s prophetic gesture. I wrote about it some time ago in some of my older messages here and here. Baptism was not primarily a matter of personal piety. John’s baptism was an act of religious and political protest using a powerful religious and mythical idiom. It was criticism of the current social, political and religious status quo and enrollment into the vibrant movement of radical reform. This religious gesture was a complex religious metaphor. It declared, “In Judea and in Jerusalem something went terribly wrong; the entire project of the People of God in the Promised Land is completely broken. Superficial improvements would not help. Complete social overhaul is needed. It urgently needs to be restarted from the beginning. People of faith need to return back to Jordan, to the time of Josiah and start again, anew and fresh!”
    No surprise then, Jesus chose to be baptized. This was indeed the beginning sentiment and substantial part of his ministry and message.
    Baptism was and remains a powerful sacrament. This Sunday we will be talking about its deep mythopoetical roots, about its meaning for Jesus and his contemporaries, and about its radical mythopolitical meaning for us today.

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And for those who have read this far here is a little bit of the first century political geography. As mentioned earlier, baptism in the Jordan had great religious symbolic significance. For John it simply could not be just any body of water. This location also had great geographic and political advantage. John was preaching across the border to Judea. (Like the BBC during WWII, Radio Free Europe during the Cold War or, or evangelical radio broadcasting to North from South Korea). John got into trouble only when he started to criticize and diplomatically undermine his host Herod Antipas, lord of Galilee and Perea - I wrote a little more about it in my one of my previous blogs here.

Watered Down Prophet

This Sunday we will try to listen and take seriously the radical message of John the Baptist. I believe it is an important message for us, just as it was an important message for Jesus himself and his early followers. But unlike Jesus and his followers, we have a problem.
    John the Baptist did not speak to us directly. He did not deliver his message in our language. (Our oldest records of his preaching are already translations, to Hellenistic Koine, the old popular Greek.) He delivered his message almost 2,000 years ago. He addressed it to a very different society from our own (it was a pre-industrial rural Mediterranean society) and he addressed it to a completely different audience, predominantly to expropriated, and exploited peasants from Judea.
    Thankfully we are not the only ones or the first ones with this problem. The Evangelist Luke had this problem long before now. Luke undertook an uneasy task to translate the charismatic eschatological Judean prophet for an urban Hellenistic audience. It was an courageous endeavor instigated and inspired by Luke’s conviction of the great and universal importance of that message.
    We must take Luke’s endeavor seriously. He highlighted the social justice dimension of John’s message. But by re-directing the message to a different audience, Luke also unavoidably changed the message and unfortunately watered down the radical eschatological edge of John’s prophetic message.
    This Sunday we will take seriously Luke’s Johannine Catechism (the social justice oriented question and answer from Luke 3:10-14) and learn from its message. But we also need to take seriously the  inherent problems and shortcomings of Luke's translation strategy. Unfortunately, for centuries and almost exclusively, social teaching of many churches stopped at this watered down and tamed cultural translation of prophetic preaching. We must recognize this reality and get deeper, farther and beyond it. 
     We need to humbly accept, that we are not the original audience. We need to unlearn this "self-centered" middle-class appropriation of the prophetic message, which takes this message away from the original audience and their heirs. We need to re-contextualize the prophet and accept with the full seriousness that the primary audience were and remain people on the margins, the neglected, the abandoned, the disinherited of his time and of our time! We owe it to John the Baptist and to the divine spirit who inspired him.

Let us rescue the princess

       A naive king, a night-dark queen and one playful princess; 
       a banquet hall with a royal ball in a castle with a dungeon; 
       a royal wedding, a wrongful beheading, divorces and courtiers; 
       noblemen and haunting ghouls and border wars of honor. 
This is an outline of the Gospel lectionary reading for this Sunday (Mark 6:14-29). It has many trappings of a classic European fairytale.
       If you come to worship this Sunday, I would like to invite you to step inside this story and help transform it from within. 
       We will have the privilege of rescuing a royal princess from vicious and false accusations of wanton murder. 
       In our quest we will cross the chasm of time and traverse a bubbling swamp of literalism. 
       We will poke some holes in the dark armor of immoral morality of preachers and confront their pet beasts of Misogyny and Prejudice with their seductive grins, corrosive spittle and mighty bites. 
       I am convinced that if we succeed in our quest, we will vindicate the princess, transform the story, change our self-understanding and gain new insight and joyful liberty.


A few supportive theses for this new interpretation of Mark 6:14-29
1) John the Baptist was not executed because of the whim and vindictiveness of Herodias.
Antipas married Herodias and divorced Phasaelis(Shaudat?), daughter of king Aretas IV of Nabatea. Aretas was offended, tension grew, and hostilities eventually led to a regular war. The situation was even more complicated because Antipas was a client prince of Rome while Aretas started as a vassal king but grew ever more independent of Rome. This was an unpleasant conflict along the edge of the Roman domain. In such a situation John’s criticism of Antipas marriage was certainly viewed as subversive and undermining the morale of the army in the run up to the war. John was executed, later Antipas lost the war (Josephus Flavius also reported that people also made this connection between John's execution and lost war - Ant.18.5.2.§116ff) and eventually Antipas lost the support of Rome and was sent to exile in Gaul. Herodias (because of her Hasmonean descent) was given permission to stay in Galilee, but she chose to accompany Antipas to exile. (She did love him!)


2) Biblical families (royal as well as ordinary) cannot be used to model modern style families.

 
This is an elemental genealogy chart of the broader Herodian family as printed in The Anchor Bible Dictionary III.179. It clearly shows the complex nature of the endogamous family. Peasant families from Judea or Galilee would look very similar, perhaps even more intertwined and complex, but there is virtually no reliable data to create such a chart. The Herodian family was unique because we have data, not because of its form. More on the endogamous model of families and societal impact is presented here: Sociology of family values.

3) In traditional religious/folk tales, misogyny is quite a common and popular form of prejudice.
The story of Herodias and Salome casts the main female characters according to the standard model of manipulative seductress (power-possessed women abusing their sexual attraction, in this case divided into two personae). Another biblical example would be Jezebel and Ahab. This traditional misogyny was considered so potent that it was used to denigrate the associated male characters. Ergo: Antipas and Ahab are presented as weak and controlled by vicious women. (But that is exactly the prejudiced misogynistic scheme!)

4) Implicit as well as explicit religious criticism of immorality of the rich is generally shallow and inconsequential.
From a systemic perspective lasciviousness, absence of good taste, arrogance and excesses of the powerful are mere symptoms and not root causes of societal discord and disconnect. Criticism of blatant symptoms is popular but is not going to change the rules of the game. The implicit criticism of the sexual immorality of the Herod Antipas family is missing true immorality: Quisling (slavish) attitude towards foreign occupation, cutthroat exploitation of the poor and powerless and forced modernization of society without appropriate social nets  (Hellenistic urbanization and latifundialisation/land-grab of the country.)

Baptised to Re-Occupy the Land

What do you do when you see the land wounded, or people being forced from their homes which are then left to turn into ruins? What do you do when you see people losing their livelihoods, and becoming unemployed and destitute? What do you do when people are held hostage by their mortgage and loan holders? What do you do when the tax system is set up to burden poor people while the big owners are laughing all the way to the bank? What do you do when institutions which were supposed to alleviate social and personal hardships are not doing it? 

       You go and re-occupy the land! That is what John the Baptist did, together with many other prophets and popular leaders of his time. We will be talking about it this Sunday. They knew that their land, the Promised Land, was like a garden, able to sustain all the people. They knew that there was enough food for everyone. They knew that society, and the political as well as the religious systems, were supposed to function differently; they knew it from Moses and from the Prophets. They felt that it was high time for a new beginning, a new Exodus, for a new Crossing of the Jordan river, a new reclaiming of the Promised Land. And so they did it. They went to the wilderness, they went to the Jordan, they tried to return to their cities. They attempted to recapture the divine dream. 

       These are the origins of our baptismal practice. Baptism was not primarily personal or spiritual hygiene, as it was often (mis)represented! At its core was this broader and deep-seated religious, political and societal longing for a new beginning. A longing for a new start which would be fresh and just! In baptism we are sent to reoccupy the land, to reclaim the life for ourselves and for our God, to recapture the radical divine dream. And that is prescribed to us this Sunday in our lectionary reading from the Gospel of Mark (Mark 1:2-8).

Friday Message from Rutgers Church 2011-12-02 
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Popular movements reenacting the Exodus and the Joshua’s occupation of the Promised Land
according to Josephus Flavius writings Bellum Iudaicum – “The Jewish War”, and Antiquitates Judaicae – “The Antiquities of the Jews.” With few characteristic short quotations.
 
36 C.E. The Samaritan prophet who promised to lead people to the treasure of Moses on mount Gerizim. Killed and dispersed by Pilate at the end of his rule. (Antiquitates 18.85-87)
 
Between 44-46 C.E. Theudas lead people to Jordan River and promised to divide its stream like Joshua. “Now when Fadus was procurator of Judea, a certain pretender named Theudas persuaded the greater part of the mob to take up their possessions and follow him to the Jordan River. For he told them that he was a prophet and that at his command he could divide the river, providing them with easy passage. Saying these things, he deceived many. Fadus, however, did not permit them to take advantage of the madness, but sent a squadron of cavalry against them, which falling upon them unexpectedly killed many and took many alive. Capturing Theudas, they cut off his head and displayed it in Jerusalem. (Antiquitates 20.97-98)

52-58 C.E. “Deceivers and imposters, pretending to be under divine inspiration and fomenting upheavals, persuaded the multitude to madness and led them out into the desert, as if there God would show them signs of liberation. Against these Felix - for he supposed it to be the beginning of insurrection - having sent cavalry and armed infantry, destroyed a great multitude.” Later a certain Egyptian prophet (understand an Egyptian Jew) brought many to Mount of Olives and wanted to take Jerusalem by force promising signs of toppled city walls. Felix killed 400 followers and dispersed the rest of them. (Antiquitates 20.167-68 and 169-170 paralleled in Bellum 2.259-260 and 161-263)
 
59-62 C.E. Anonymous impostor under Festus promised salvation and rest from hard times taking them to the wilderness where they were destroyed. (Antiquitates 20.188)
 
Around 71 C.E.  In Libya Jonathan the Jewish refugee in Cyrene seduced people to wilderness preparing them for exodus. Catullus, local Roman governor, sent cavalry and dispersed them. (Bellum 7.437-40)