June 28, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
My point being, Jesus was not some dirty homeless beggar. He was an organizer. He was strategic. He was a reformer with an agenda and goals. He was notorious for breaking the purity rules.
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“Fly Fishing & Wine”
Proper 8, Year C
June 27, 2010 @ 10:30am
by The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
“Purity” is a constant danger
for anyone passionate about an activity
or committed to a particular cause.
The lust for purity
has corrupted religion,
every religion,
across the scattered fields of human history.
But alas, I have started out too big, too broad.
I’m a big picture guy
and sometimes I just go directly from
Point A to some global abstraction,
without passing go,
and without bringing everyone else along with me.
Sorry about that.
Okay.
Here’s a simple, easy example close to home –
near and dear even,
to a few of you: Fly fishing.
It is a sport of purist’s.
I wear these fly fishing shirts –
in case you didn’t know what they were –
because they are cool.
Cool as in temperate.
I discovered them when I started going to
El Salvador.
They are light, breathable, vented
and with lots of pockets for travel.
Perfect.
But fly fishermen,
especially those who know I fish with a lure
rather than the demanding, finicky and
endlessly persnickety fly gear,
make snide comments
about a lowly lure-man
wearing the sacred uniform of fly fishing. Purity.
Baseball is another hotbed of purity.
Have you ever noticed that the intelligentsia
are baseball fans?
Rarely does NPR cover sports at length,
unless it is a baseball story.
Those Ivy Leaguers
that are mostly not interested in popular sports,
if they have a sport they know something about,
it will often be baseball.
I think it is because baseball
lends itself to endless statistical analysis
that offers the illusion that perfection
can be measured.
Wine is well known for purists.
Poetry has its fair share of purists too.
Jazz, small as its core of devotes is, is rife with purists.
And cooking, oh my gosh,
whether it is gourmet, vegetarian or grilling,
the food Nazis are everywhere.
And let’s not forget parenting or education purists.
Holy mackerel, some people live and die
on one idea or another
when it comes to kids, education and parenting.
So, you see what I’m talking about –
it’s not just religion.
There is a lust for purity in every dimension of life,
and everyone of us has that lust
about at least one thing or another.
So, back to religion for a moment.
Jesus was an enemy of the penchant for purity
but the successive generations that brought us Jesus,
reverted right back to that lust.
I can imagine John the Baptist
telling his followers, “Let the dead bury the dead”
but not Jesus.
Luke would have us see Jesus
as a homeless mendicant
who embraced poverty as a way of life –
Siddhartha style.
Luke’s Jesus has a radical, even militant,
quality about him.
“No one that puts hand to the plow
and looks back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
The Jewish Primal Narrative,
almost from day one,
is torn apart by dueling traditions:
the purists and the prophets.
Jesus is a prophet.
The purists see the world as a set of god-given rules;
keep those rules and all is well.
Break the rules and all is lost.
When the rules are broken,
then there are rules for repairing the fracture.
Every offense has a prescription
and every prescription has a secondary solution.
It is a tightly constructed world
built like Lego’s with a hierarchy of rules.
This is not unique to Judaism;
we all know Christian traditions
that seem to rest upon a spider web of intricate
prescriptions for making God happy.
Every religion has this purity tradition within it,
and often, the purity tradition is the one
that finds its way into power and control.
The prophetic tradition sees the world differently.
The prophetic vision is of a human landscape
that operates within a standard of equality,
where goods and services are distributed evenly,
and the good guys lead
while the bad guys get punished.
The prophetic can have its own purity virus within it, but often the rigidity of the purity faction
acts as a corrective for the prophetic movement.
So Jesus was a peasant.
He was impoverished by circumstance not by choice.
He was an outsider to begin with,
but he had a home – a house and a business.
We are told this early on in the Gospel of Mark.
He lived in Capernaum.
He had a house there,
and he likely had some kind of business
in his house,
at least before he became a preacher.
But he also had some friends with means
who funded his public ministry.
Lazarus, Martha and Mary and perhaps others,
must have provided capital to supplement
whatever collections were taken at the sermons.
Last summer when I was in El Salvador
visiting the work Canisius College is doing down there
with research on the Evangelical movement,
I met the pastor of a Church with 150,000 members.
They have ten services each weekend,
each service with about 10,000 people in attendance.
All along the streets on every side of the compound
are vendors selling food, beverages and clothing
from carts and booths.
The market is not there during the week,
as it is a shaded residential neighborhood.
But on the weekend
it becomes a crammed and jammed mishmash
of commercial enterprise.
I saw the church’s spreadsheet
for the month of June, and each week
the collection was $70-100,000 dollars.
That is roughly five million dollars a year
collected from extremely poor people.
Attending one of their services,
I witnessed people putting quarters in the baskets.
Five million dollars…
a few quarters and dollars at a time!
I suspect that when Jesus drew a crowd
his disciples also passed the hat.
I wish we could get a quarter every time
someone visits our website!
My point being,
Jesus was not some dirty homeless beggar.
He was an organizer.
He was strategic.
He was a reformer with an agenda and goals.
He was notorious for breaking the purity rules.
It is hard to imagine Jesus dining
with a Roman collaborator on the one hand –
someone that made his money collecting
Imperial taxes,
and extorting extra money for himself –
and then on the other hand,
rebuking a would-be follower
for wanting to say good bye to his parents.
I just don’t believe it.
I think it is Luke’s editorial bias coming into play.
So let’s just get this straight:
Jesus is a drive-in movie screen – bigger even.
Jesus is a huge canvass upon which we project
our own desires for him;
our own beliefs about him;
our own hopes for him.
Whether it is Luke’s projection
of a militant-healer,
or my projection
of a reform-minded organizer,
or Paul’s projection
of an eternal Christ-figure,
we do not get to know the original Jesus.
When it comes to Jesus there is no purity.
Purity may be possible in fly fishing and cooking
but not when it comes to Jesus.
If that’s true,
where does that leave us?
The Jesus Scholar, John Dominic Crossan
makes an interesting observation
about John the Baptist
who was a fellow prophet in Jesus’ day.
He points out that John’s followers,
who were many more in number than Jesus’
when they were both alive,
died out
while Jesus’ followers went on to from a new religion.
Crossan speculates that the Jesus Movement flourished
while the Baptist’s movement died out,
because John’s movement was all about John.
Jesus focused on his disciples and students.
He sent them out two-by-two
to preach and teach and heal just as he was doing.
Jesus’ movement
was not obsessively focused on Jesus, rather,
on the prophetic vision that he preached and taught.
When Jesus died,
that vision went viral across the Roman empire.
Eventually the Church,
the organized institution of Christianity
that became captured by the Roman Empire itself,
lost that vision but kept Jesus.
It made Jesus the focus,
and did very little to remember
or advocate for the prophetic vision.
That is still happening today.
The purity party has captured Jesus
and kept him imprisoned under glass, and he is now
the litmus test of purity and divine acceptance.
Jesus’ prophetic vision languishes
within the domesticated Christian churches
that have become, as much as anything else,
pillars of class and culture,
and purveyors of American Civil Religion.
When America looks at the Jesus
in 21st Century Christianity, it sees itself
and its own aspirations.
It does not see the prophet,
it sees the silhouette of it own standard for purity.
It does not hear a vision of equitable distribution,
it hears a justification for individuality
and a prosecutor for private property
and gun ownership.
If I were to tell you that Jesus was in fact,
an evangelist of basketball,
a faithful Gus Macker devote,
and a passionate partisan of Indiana University’s
“Hurrying Hoosiers,”
you would rightly dismiss it as bunk.
And yet, given the fact that we know little
about the actual Jesus,
what we hear from the purity guys
as well as the orthodox guys, is just as ludicrous.
It is not about Jesus.
It is about the vision that survived,
one that predated him by a millennium
and that he contributed to as a prophet of Israel.
We have the broad outlines of that vision,
and we also have the many debates and arguments
that have contributed to that vision over time,
including some of Jesus’ arguments and debates.
We do not have a single,
precise and concise version of that vision,
one that the purity party could use
as a form within which to mold an absolute product.
But we do have the ancient vision;
born on Mt. Sinai,
handed down from Moses and Joshua,
to Elijah and Elisha,
to Ruth and Naomi,
to Elizabeth and Mary,
to Jesus and Paul,
and all the way down to Dietrich Bonheoffer
and from Dietrich to Elie Wiesel,
and to you and me.
It is a vision to be debated,
interpreted, argued and shaped over time,
in every time;
not to be prescribed
or force-fitted
or purified.
Now I realize that this leaves
the fly fishermen
as just one kind of fishermen among many,
but then…
there’s all kind of wine
and all kinds of food
and all kinds of religion.
What there is none of…
is purity.
Amen.
