Holy Mountain?

On this video you can see remains after an Ancient Hawaiian industrial operation near the summit of Mauna Kea.
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What has been happening on Mauna Kea has been fascinating for any student of ancient and modern religion. "Protectors of Mauna Kea" can serve as an illustration example of the use of religion for political (nationalistic) ends.
My academic qualification has been in the study of the Ancient Near East bronze age religion (more specifically Ugaritic Mythology). Over the last decade (unable to travel to Syria) I have been studying Hawaiian religion. I visited Hawaii more than a dozen times and even started to learn the Hawaiian language to better understand the cultural and religious mentality. 

I have also visited the summit region of Mauna Kea a number of times and I know that there are geologic features closely associated with the Hawaiian deities and religion. To the best of my knowledge there were never any signs of ancient (pre-contact) religious structures in the summit area.
At the same time I know that the mountain was NOT untouchable and ancient Hawaiians (still living in stone age) used the summit region for a major mining operation - quarrying hard basalt rock for their tools (mostly adzes). Substantial mine dumps (tailings or spoil tips) near the summit can be still observed. On this video is a mine dump the size of about 5.8 acres and the total area with signs of mining covers about 100 acres! By the way - this can serve as a prime example of the environmental impact of even the stone age cultures!
Ancient Hawaiians used the mountain for a major industrial operation (within the context of their technology) and modern Hawaiians are in the process of turning it into an untouchable holy mountain and making it into a substitute issue to voice their political, national and religious grievances.
This is how religions evolve, morph and transform and respond to ideological demands, how holy mountains are born.
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#Hawaii #MaunaKea #HawaiianReligion

Close look at refuse chips from pre-production of adzes.

 

An example of one smaller outlaying workshop with tailings of basalt chips.

Colorful Pearls

This Sunday we will listen to an enigmatic commandment of Jesus not to throw pearls before swine.   
    While researching the subject I learned that the knowledge of pearls came to the Mediterranean and the Western World quite late with the conquest of Alexander the Great from today’s Iran and India.
    The English word for a pearl came from Latin perla. But the more common Latin name for pearl was margarita which came from the Greek ho margarites which itself was a loan word from old Persian marvarit.
    The luster of pearls led to Italian, French and Spanish names for daisies (le margherite, les marguerites, las margaritas) and eventually gave name to a famous Mexican tequila drink the Margarita. 
    From Iran and its old Persian word through the Mediterranean all the way to the popular Mexican alcoholic drink - This is how our world is interconnected. If we ever sent all English words to their original homes, the English language would lose about 3/4 of its vocabulary and a substantial part of its grammar.
    Diversity, borrowing and distant integration is not only a feature of languages and peoples. The entire world is like a beautiful and colorful pearl, diverse and interlaced, immeasurably complex and beautifully simple.
    So, don’t throw pearls before swine! Join us this Sunday as we embrace and celebrate the beautiful diversity of our world and the original and surprising meaning of this often misunderstood Jesus’ commandment.

Precious Light

When Jesus said to his followers, “You are the light of the world” have you ever wondered how it might look? 

      On this picture is an oil lamp, a replica of an old terracotta lamp from the biblical period. It gave very little light. Thus in wealthy households they would use a number of lamps or alternatively they had lamps with several wicks and flames.
      We live in an age of relatively affordable electricity. One flip of a switch floods the space with light. One faint electrical bulb would need to be replaced with tens of oil lamps and cost would be prohibitive! Using an oil lamp will cost you a hundreds time more not to mention the side effects of soot and smell. In ancient times only rich people could afford a decent light. 

      When Jesus said to his disciples you are the light of the world - he also said to them, in God’s eyes you are precious. Join us in worship this Sunday when we look deeper into this beautiful and rich metaphor.

Silly Salt?

Can salt be silly? Jesus certainly thought so! He said to his followers, “You are the salt of the world.” thus lifting up and validating his disciples. But he also gave them a warning - “You are the salt of the world, but don’t be silly salt!” Silly, stupid, moronic salt was the one which lost its purpose.
For a number of years I have been collecting my own salt  and I can relate to it. (Here I wrote more about it.)

             Salt certainly has a spiritual and even a metaphysical dimension. It is spiritually transformative to collect one’s own salt and then use it to spice up food and life, and at the same time to be aware of salt as an offering and an apotropaic (evil-repelling) agent.
             In Jesus’ time salt also had a sharp social justice (fair taxation) edge. Many of Jesus’ disciples were fishermen and they depended on affordable salt to preserve their catch. They struggled with salt monopolies and unjust taxation. (This may be from a different time and land, but remember for instance Gandhi's Salt March!)
             And these days we can extend the activism of salt into eco-justice. It is widely reported that sea salt is polluted with microplastic and table salt is produced with potentially harmful nanoparticles. From our current experience we can relate to Jesus’
concern for the purity of salt.

“You ARE the salt of this world,” Jesus says to us, “So, don’t be silly!” And thus we join in worship and activism to strive for the spiritual, social and environmental common good.

Heavenly Hospitality

In the Bible, the Acts of Apostles (14:11-13), there is a bizarre story in which apostle Paul with his colleague Barnabas are on a missionary trip through the South Central Anatolia and are mistaken for the gods, Zeus and Hermes.
    Behind this bizarre misunderstanding is actually a beautiful ancient myth of hospitality. But unfortunately the misunderstanding of this misunderstanding is also connected with the growth of homophobia among the ancient Jews, Christians and Muslims.
    Let us start with the story of hospitality. It is nicely preserved and beautifully narrated by a gifted Roman poet Ovidius. He tells the story of Philemon and Baucis, an elderly poor couple who offered hospitality to strangers not knowing they were Zeus and Hermes in human form. Philemon and Baucis were rewarded for their hospitality while the rest of the hostile, hateful city around them was punished for neglecting their duty towards traveling strangers. (Interestingly, Ovid also situated this story to the South Central Anatolia)
    You might recognize that there is a typologically very similar story in the Bible (Gen 19). It is about two angels of the LORD visiting Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah. When I link these stories together, you can also realize why I did mention the emergence and growth of homophobia among the three Abrahamic religions. In all of them this story about hospitality and protection of strangers was twisted into the justification of vicious homophobia.
    Paul and Barnabas misunderstood and harshly rejected the genuine gesture of hospitality from the citizens of Lystra. They might not know the story of Philemon and Baucis and they did not recognize similarity to the biblical story because by their time the biblical story had been already influenced by homophobia. Soon afterwards the Church (together with the Synagogue and the Mosque) codified this misunderstanding for the upcoming centuries and twisted the story about hospitality into the foundational story of hatred.
    And this is something you might not know about the Bible. It is important to talk about it because only by talking about it and knowing about it we can undo centuries and centuries of viciousness and hatred and rejoice in the original story of welcome and hospitality.

If you come to our church this Sunday or if you know Ovid's poem,
you will understand why I picked this photo for this worship.

 

Secret gospel and homophobia

Now imagine this -- a brilliant and eccentric American scholar researching an old library in a tower of an ancient Middle East monastery paging through medieval manuscripts reading ancient writings and finding by a chance a quotation from a thus far unknown secret gospel. That quotation was part of a letter from the second century which mentions an ancient esoteric sect. Mystical interpretations are involved, secret initiation and magical rituals. There is even a perceived sexual innuendo. All is wrapped in cutting edge linguistics and theology and also involves accusations of ancient, medieval or modern forgery. And then this unique manuscript mysteriously vanishes from the Orthodox patriarchate in Jerusalem. To the best of my knowledge the only thing missing in this plot is a murder, otherwise it could easily compete with bestsellers like Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” or Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code.”
    But it is not fiction, this is a real part of recent biblical and apocryphal theology. Biblical theology can indeed be thrilling like best-selling mystery novels! And that perceived sexual innuendo played an unfortunate and important role as there were concerns about homo-erotic undertones. Thus Christian homophobia of the sixties, seventies and eighties and to some degree and in some circles even until now was likely behind the disappearance of precious manuscript. Without the physical manuscripts those accusations of modern forgery cannot be conclusively resolved in which ever way. This is how modern homophobia impacted biblical scholarship. That mysterious text is in almost every critical edition of early Christian Apocryphal Writings but with a note about its questionable authenticity.
    As we remember 50 years from the Stonewall uprising, and 50 years of struggle for LGBTQ rights this is something very few people might know about the dark legacy of homophobia in the realm of biblical scholarship.
    If you are intrigued, join us this Sunday to learn more about The Secret Gospel of Mark and its uneasy modern history tainted by homophobia.

Album parable

Today I want to talk to you about Elephantine Papyri but first allow me to share with you this rather lengthy introductory parable.

Imagine you are a member of an extended family. In your family you have a shared family story handed down from generation to generation and part of this lore is also an old photo album. It is called “The Album”.
    You remember sitting with your grannie paging with her through all those old pictures and stories, naming people, remembering memories; here is uncle so and so, and this is great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War, this is a grandfather’s maternal cousin whose farm burned down to ground, and this is a great uncle who was a supreme court judge in some European country, this distant aunt married to a builder of a famous viaduct, and here is paternal nephew, he was a clergy and became famous missionary. All well documented in ancient sepia pictures and labeled with names and dates, organized into an easy flowing and persuasive family narrative.
    You even received your own copy of The Album when coming of age. It is a true family heirloom. The Album records occasional trauma, but nothing really troubling,  mostly it is a real source of family pride. Few minor glitches can be blamed on history, times and customs were different. All in all The Album shows and teaches deep and generally commendable family roots.
    But then, while cleaning an attic of a family residence a large box of ancient correspondence and documents surfaced. Those ancient documents were written in difficult cursives and in several languages. It took some efforts to decipher and even years later it is still not fully finished.
    First you noticed names, events and dates you knew from The Album, but then things started to become ever more complicated. Not everything can be put together neatly and there is no easy and simple narrative anymore. Family history is turning into something substantially different and so complicated! You realize that The Album, your family album is largely just storytelling. Some events clearly happened quite differently and some might not even have taken place at all.
    You also realize that the storytelling hiccups and gaps in The Album can be often explained with the documents from the box, just like some of the palpable tensions around this or that uncle and many of those annoying family taboos and strange behaviours can also now be explained.
    Reaction among the wider circle of relatives was quite diverse and divided. Some relatives threw the entire photo album into the recycling bin stating they always thought grannie was making things up and that it is all just babbling of a senile old woman irrelevant for their modern lives.
    Other relatives, on the other hand, became all agitated. They made the album into a real shibboleth. In their part of the family children still memorize The Album and are made to swear on the veracity of every single picture and name. In their family branch everything is measured by The Album and its assumed lessons. The Album, thus divorced from any history and reality, is used to push some extreme agendas.
    And you are in the middle of it. You love the old Album. You respect your grannie and her story as much as you are now aware that much of it was just fabulation. There are lessons to be learned from grannie’s Album just as there are lessons to be learned from the documents which surfaced in the attic.
    Even more importantly, there are truly deep insights to be learned on the intersection between The Album and the archive, deep insights and appreciation for the family history and for grannie with all her complexes, great insights for your own self-understanding and understanding of the world.

I can imagine you can relate to this parable. We all know different aspects and parts from our own families. But I wrote this parable about the Bible (the Album) the church (the grannie-representation of institutionalized religious memory) and about documents uncovered by archeologists, anthropologists and theologians in the last one hundred years or so. Sholars found many old archives and archeological records which are complicating the shared lore. Today we will talk specifically about Elephantine Papyri ....

Picture of today's village on Elephantine Island.