Vegetablearians?

Were Early Christians “vegetablearians”?
       I know, it is a funny neologism. Many Sundays ago it was used by a six-year-old during the children’s time in church. I loved it, and have occasionally used it ever since. (This year that child is graduating from high school.)
       The wording of the question might be playful, but the question has  real meaning and substance and the answer might surprise you.
       It is not that widely known, that the pre-Christian ancient world did not know what we would call “secular” meat. All the meat from larger animals came from the temples. Meat might be sold by local butchers, but ancient cultures did not have secular slaughterhouses. In one way or another, all or almost all meat came from religious sacrifices. Ancient Jews in diaspora (away from their own temple) did not want to eat meat sacrificed to pagan gods and so they developed a ritual slaughter called Shechita. But with growing tension between Christianity and Judaism, early Christians almost certainly became vegetarians by default and of necessity, or until they developed their own non-religious slaughterhouses.
       But is our contemporary “meat-making” really secular? Non religious? Haven’t we eventually, little by little, replaced one set of pagan gods with another, even nastier set of modern idols of mass production, greed, industrially generated HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) obesity, unbridled consumerism and gluttony with few ethical considerations? And I am not even mentioning the homophobic chicken biscuits (of Chick-fil-A) and many similar situations!
       I have no doubts that what we eat, where we eat and how we eat have manifold consequences for our own health, for our spiritual life, for the broader community, for farmers and growers, for producers, for animals, and for global environment.
       This Sunday the Apostle Paul and early Christians will lead us and inspire us in our search for a healthier lifestyle, physical, spiritual, societal and environmental.

What Would Jesus Deconstruct?

Program for the last weekend in September in Rutgers with John Caputo.

Egalitarian feast

Can you imagine Holy Communion with a lump of soft sweet butter? Well, that is exactly the way Sikhs celebrate their holy meals.
    But allow me to step back to explain a little more. One Sunday morning in the summer of 2004 I came to my church in Binghamton and I could hardly believe my eyes! In a pew close to the front, there was a real Sikh, complete with sky-blue turban and genuine untrimmed white beard. It turned out that he came with his Presbyterian wife (a blond Scandinavian from Iowa). We were their second stop that day. Originally, they went to a larger, main, Presbyterian church of the town but received such suspicious and disapproving looks, that they quietly left well before their worship began, and managed to find their way to our doors.
    They came, they were welcomed, and they stayed all summer, as Dr. Singh was a summer locum tenens (temporary substitute) in the local hospital. They returned for several more summers. We had a marvelous time together. One Sunday morning during the children’s time we all learned how to make a true turban (or at least we had the opportunity to learn). We welcomed the Singhs in our church and they introduced us to a local Sikh community. From that moment on, one local Sikh boy attended some of our Sunday School programs and games. The Singhs worshiped with us, and they also invited us to Sikh worship.
    Every Sikh worship is closed with a real feast called Langar. Kitchens and dining rooms are integral parts of every Gurdwara (Sikh sanctuary), and they are as large if not larger than worship spaces themselves. Meals are cooked in the sanctuary by volunteers and given free to everyone. They have a marvelous egalitarian spirit; men and women, rich and poor, old and young, different races and even different religions and traditions sit and eat together. Dishes are intentionally vegetarian so that no one is excluded regardless of their dietary restrictions. Almost always the meal is crowned with a royal handcrafted desert called Ladoo or Laddu, a ball of butter, sugar, crushed almonds (or other nuts), and whole wheat flour. If you want to experience how the Holy Communion in early churches must have felt, go to Gurdwara! (Unfortunately, these days in our society, this resemblance will include also murderous prejudice against the community!)
    This Sunday we will read how Jesus made meals into an integral part of his ministry and into an instrument of social and societal transformation and healing. This Sunday we will also celebrate Holy Communion, without sweet butter, yet in Jesus' spirit of radical, egalitarian inclusivity.

The Singhs with Martina and Jakob in 2007 at Green Lakes Park near Syracuse, NY

Isthmian Games!

The Olympics are all over our media these days. The games are a lot of fun and great entertainment. But I am not that much impressed. It is because I know the backstage story.
 
    Can you imagine me pole vaulting, tipple jumping, throwing a javelin, shot putting or running a steeplechase (3k with hurdles and water ditch)? Well, I did all of it when I was in school. As a teen I attended a special school with an extended education in field athletics. We were trained in all disciplines and later picked one. I was a long distance runner. As a teenager I ran 1k well under 3 minutes and I was able to make a mile in 4:05. In the stadium I was training along with and regularly meeting with at least three world record holders and Olympic medalists. I was part of what could be called the Eastern Bloc sport incubator. It was intense, it was fun, it kept me out of trouble and unlike similar institutions in East Germany our sport school did not do any doping (and I am thankful to our teachers and coaches that they kept it that way).
 
    It all changed quickly when we graduated from our youth programs and were taken over by adult coaches and instructors. They treated us like race-horses. Intense training led to injuries, innocently looking pills were offered for treatment. Thankfully, I grew up in a medical family, so we checked out those pills. They were anabolic steroids! It was a no-brainer, I threw my spike shoes to the cupboard, and never looked back. Anyway, I always had and still keep serious reservations about ideology, chauvinism and commercialism of the top competitive sport. Yet, under the intense training program I learned self discipline, focus on distant goals, a sense of honesty, team spirit and fair play.
 
    The Apostle Paul probably had some similar experiences. As a person educated in Hellenistic schools he certainly received at least basic introduction and training in some sports. Then, when he wrote to the Corinthian congregation, most likely around the time of famous local Panhellenic Isthmian games, he was well prepared to use a vivid sport-based  similitude (illustration) to make his point. Sport games can offer us marvelous and vivid, positive as well as negative examples for our individual and collective education and spiritual growth!
 
    Come join us this Sunday morning to gain more than entertainment from the Olympic or  Isthmian games. We will “wrestle” with ancient and modern sporting similitudes being coached by the apostle Paul. ;-)


1 Corinthians 9:24-27 (Dynamic equivalent translation)
Dear Corinthians, allow me to use another illustration -
    I assume you all know how it is on the stadium - all the athletes run the race, but only one takes the prize. Run to win!
    You know, how much effort and sweat the athletes put into their training! And then they come to your city for Isthmian Games with a hope to win a wreath made of cilantro leaves! Aren't we after something much better?
    I do not know how about you, but I am running hard for the finish line, and when I wrestle, I am not punching empty air.
    Like athletes who discipline and control their bodies, so am I doing my best to stay fit and on top of the game. I do not want to end up like someone who is telling everyone else what to do, and in the end turns out a nonstarter of the day. 

 

Jesus on the biblical catwalk

When I was in school, I got into trouble from time to time. Sometimes it was truly bizarre. One summer morning in those lazy last days of the school year I was stopped while walking from one class to another and ushered directly to the headmaster’s office. I could not figure it out. I was completely oblivious of anything I did or did not do in the recent past, and I was not even faking it! I received yet another reprimand and spent the rest of the day in the school suspension. It turned out that I committed a serious ideological offense by wearing a T-shirt. On it was an artistic representation of a Canadian Mapleleaf! Our good family friend lived in Calgary and sent us this innocent gift. But for the petty communist apparatchicks and ideology-minders, those Canadians were clearly like cousins of a devil and part of imperialistic archenemy camp.
    Then I heard from Prof. Charles Jones (In one of the lectures from The Teaching Company) about how in his college years in the late 1970's (roughly at the same time) he and his friends also got into fashion trouble. They wanted to advertise their school radio station with a T-shirt. On it was a station frequency, beneath the head of Karl Marx wearing headphones (!) and the slogan “the opium of the people”. The vigilant college administration banned it straightaway. Well..., no antireligious Marxist hints in good old Kentucky! Not even from a future professor of religion and culture.
    What we wear and how we wear it can indicate conformity, or register a protest; dress can display national, religious, cultural, political, or generational affiliation. Our dress is an important part of the semiotic codes - our clothes contain and are often used to send important contextual messages. This Sunday’s lectionary reading will place Jesus on the biblical fashion catwalk. One, often overlooked, verse (Mark 6:56) will offer us a rare opportunity to “read”, analyze and interpret biblical fashion, its historical contextuality, its deep religious meanings, and its import for our physical and spiritual well being and healing.

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.)

Enlightenment Music Therapy

What do you do, when you are exposed to toxic levels of political and religious prejudice, intolerance, narrow-mindedness, lies and hatred? I intuitively and subconsciously seek medicine.
    Most of the last week I spent with our clerk of session in Pittsburgh at the General Assembly of our denomination. We were there, together with many others, to advocate for our denomination’s unequivocal support for the same gender marriages. We tried our best and only time will tell... But at the same time I felt almost suffocated by the poisonous gasses of fundamentalistic ignorance, hateful obscurantism and pious hypocrisy of would-be friends. If this is a mainline denomination, one of the more progressive in our nation, what does it say about the rest of our society???
    I came home from Pittsburgh and I listened to full two and half hours of Die Zauberflöte. After a week of evangelical darkness I needed an antidote of enlightenment. The Magic Flute can provide just that. On the surface it might look like a simple fairytale, but under the surface there are deeper meanings. For me it is a complex parable of Theressian and Josephine reforms of the Austrian enlightenment.
    These enlightenment reforms had some serious pitfalls, yet the list of their achievements as well as their goals are nonetheless impressive for the 18th and early 19th centuries: 1) the social reforms of liberation of serfs and the taxation of nobility and the rich; 2) the institution of civil rights, the judicial and prison reform and abolition of torture as well as capital punishment; 3) the education reform with compulsory public schools; 4) the medical reforms with the beginning of public healthcare and hospitals; 5) religious reforms of tolerance, pluralism and curtailing the most conservative and totalitarian segments of the religious spectrum...
    The problem is, that although American society was born under the same star of enlightenment and although many founding fathers were strongly influenced by this movement, American society has never truly embraced and internalized this important stage of civilization. As a result, our society is perhaps technologically advanced, but at its core it remains essentially pre-enlightenment or seriously divided on many or all of these matters.
    I think that it is not a mere coincidence that one of the most progressive movements in our denomination is called “More Light Presbyterians.” I know that they are predominantly a GLBT advocacy group, but the symbolism and meaning are significant and deeper. After the week at our General Assembly I know that our denomination as well as our whole society deeply needs liberation from the darkness of religious prejudice and narrowmindedness and the presence and witness of progressive, loving, caring and enlightened communities of faith like our Rutgers Church. I hope you will join us this Sunday in our worthy endeavor of being more light alternatives of life and faith in this world.