The Third Day

Last Sunday was the third Sunday in Epiphany, and we had the traditional Gospel reading from John 2: the wedding in Cana. Our Pastor, Deborah Geweke, in her sermon called our attention to the opening words of the Gospel: “On the third day…” The third day of what? The text doesn’t tell us, and she reminded us that weddings then were not the afternoon affairs we are familiar with, but, as is often still the case in the Middle East, multi-day celebrations uniting not only the bride and groom, but more importantly their families. So, perhaps it’s not surprising that the wine had run out. Days of merry making can make everyone thirsty. And the new wine was better than the original. And, of course, the water became wine on the third day, reminding us that in John, we are reading, not a historical narrative, but “a sign.” John signals more than the other Gospel writers that the miracles are not about miraculous events we should marvel at, but are pointers beyond the ordinary life the miracle disrupts. This miracle then points to the Resurrection. In John, Jesus is intensely present in this life, and also beyond this life, inviting us to enter into the life of God. Thus, we are invited always when hearing and reading scripture to look beyond the narrative as on-lookers and to take the opportunity to enter into communion with God via the story. Many methods have been put forward to help us do this, such as lectio divina, but they all are designed to get us beyond the literal meaning of the text, into a place where we might experience God more fully. The wedding at Cana is a good text to start this process, praying as we listen to be brought closer to God.

What Story Are You a Part Of?

What story are you a part of? When we find our life’s narrative in the story of God’s redemption in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we become Christians, part of the Jesus story, writes Neal F. Fisher in “Groundless absolutes?” (Christian Century, February 28, 2018). In one Jesus story, a lawyer asks, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29) and Jesus responds not with a rule but with a story, Fisher tells us. The story, of course, is “The Good Samaritan,” one of the most beloved of Jesus’ parables. Presumably, the lawyer knows full well that the God, we are called on to love, has shown chesed (a Hebrew word that can be translated as “loving kindness”) over and over, not toward Jews only, but also toward “the nations” or gentiles, even the Samaritans. The Good Samaritan story is “a hard saying” for the lawyer. He is part of a story filled with ressentiment toward the Samaritans. As Don Cupitt points out in “Jesus and Philosophy” (2009 SCM Press, London), Nietzsche uses ressentiment to sum up the whole range of reactive or negative feelings, including scorn, disgust, dislike, envy, lust, disapproval, repugnance, contempt, impatience, malice, irritation, anger, rage, fury, fear, terror, hatred, boredom, indifference, recoiling, seething resentment, begrudging, outrage, indignation at, despair of, and many more. The lawyer likely has felt many of these feelings toward the Samaritans. Fisher writes that “Jews cursed Samaritans in the synagogues and prayed that they would have no part in eternal life.” And, in turn, … “Samaritans defiled the temple in Jerusalem by scattering bones in the temple area, making it impossible for the faithful to celebrate the Passover.” Each group played tit for tat, in its expressions of ressentiment. And, remember the lawyer first asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25) So maybe the lawyer feels that in heaven, we want us, but not the Samaritans. Heaven should be a gated community, keeping undesirables like Samaritans out. Thus, he can’t bring himself to say “the Samaritan” when Jesus asks him which of the three passers-by was a neighbor to the man beaten and left by the side of the road. The lawyer could only mutter, “the one who showed him mercy.” Mercy, by the way, is another translation of chesed. Jesus knows about chesed. His most authentic sayings, as determined by the Jesus Seminar, reflect a major innovation in ethics with a shift from realism to emotivism, in which the moral standard is brought down from heaven and relocated in the world of human feelings and relationships, or, in Cupitt’s words, the world of ‘the heart’. To break the culture of ressentiment, Jesus stresses the moral importance of a high level of critical self-consciousness: Get the beam out of your own eye, calculate, and then be extravagantly generous, because that is what melts the heart, and unfreezes human relationships. (Matthew 7:3-5) In the Good Samaritan story, Jesus urges us to be part of a story that illustrates positive feelings. Such feelings do not cloud or block our relation to the other person, Cupitt writes. These feelings are mostly very cool and transparent and not numerous. They include regard, attention, interest, sympathy, pity, respect, admiration, allegiance, friendship, and love. These feelings are found in tales of God’s chesed, and Israel has many such stories. For example, Phillip Jenkins, reviewing “The Exodus” by Richard Elliott Friedman (Christian Century, February 28, 2018), highlights Friedman’s point that “…only some recent memory of bitter slavery could have led ancient Israel to include in its laws such vehement assertions of the rights of aliens and such unusual limitations on the extent of chattel slavery.” Surely, the Exodus story is the foundational chesed story, expressing love of neighbors, even love of aliens. Maybe the lawyer had forgotten these chesed stories, or, more likely, he is unable to break out his ressentiment story. Today such ressentiment stories are everywhere, particularly about aliens, and we are relentlessly urged to be part of them. For example, we are asked to become part of stories about “Mexican rapists” and about people from “shithole countries.” These ressentiment stories can generate negative feelings that are often violent and a threat to social peace. To overcome such feelings, Cupitt writes that we must often be almost supernaturally “big” and generous, going beyond justice. So, be lead by the Spirit to leave ressentiment behind, to be critically self-conscious, and to become part of God’s story of big and generous chesed.

Christianity is dead.

Christianity is dead. We hear this all the time, yet churches are open; people come. Despite this, I do believe Christianity is dead. Here is some evidence: 1) Man with semiautomatic rifle shoots at least 17 dead in south Florida high school. Semiautomatic rifles are available, no questions asked, at south Florida gun shows. Christianity is dead. 2) White cops who shoot and kill unresisting black people, go unpunished. Christianity is dead. 3) Men who rape, abuse, harass, and humiliate women have gone unpunished. Christianity is dead. 4) ICE rounds up, detains, and deports immigrants. Christianity is dead. 5) Report of sexual abuse of boys by priests and bishops is slander, says pope. Christianity is dead. 6) Police round up homeless people, and they “disappear.” Christianity is dead. Perhaps now you can see why I say Christianity is dead. When did you last hear a sermon on any of these atrocities? Never? People are suffering humiliation, injury, and death, and the church turns away from this suffering, because it may be “controversial,” “offensive,” or “not our problem.” The world returns the favor. The church just doesn’t get it, the church has nothing to say that’s real, or the church is an enabler of those who commit the atrocities. In any case, when suffering arises, the church is mute. Ironically, Christianity has at its heart a powerful resource that can help address the shock, grief, and disorientation brought on by atrocities. When faced with the atrocity of Jesus’ crucifixion, his followers, stunned, grieving, disorientated, soon began to hold memorial meals, telling stories and remembering Jesus, in spite of the Romans who wished to erase him by crucifixion. These memorials may be reflected in the Emmaus story in Luke 24. As the followers slowly recovered from their trauma, they began to seek meaning in these horrible events. For them, meaning was found by “searching the scriptures.” To do this, they used the Jewish tradition of midrash, which literally means commentary on Jewish texts. As they began telling stories about Jesus, they often told stories from the Hebrew Bible. In addition, as an aid to their oral story-telling, they often used a format, well known to all in Palestine in Jesus’ time: “The Tale of the Suffering Innocent One.” This provided the memory space to remember the death of Jesus. These memories are not “facts,” they are not “history.” Only to the extent that the crucifixion of Jesus is remembered, are they factual; all the rest is “fiction,” meaning that neither those remembering nor any one else available knew the facts of the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus. They told the story of Jesus crucified to give meaning to their feelings, not to leave a historical record. These ideas are laid out convincingly in a new book” Inventing the Passion: How the Death of Jesus Was Remembered” by Arthur J. Dewey. So at the heart of Christianity is a resource that could help those who have suffered loss, grief, and trauma if the churches would tell their stories within “The Tale of the Suffering Innocent One.” The Passion is not just about Jesus back when with no meaning for us now. In its outline, it’s the story of all of those traumatized, injured, or killed by powers greater than they are, including gun victims; blacks killed by white cops; women raped, harassed, humiliated by powerful men; immigrants rounded up, detained, and deported by ICE; boys and girls abused and silenced by priests and bishops; homeless people who have been “disappeared” by the police. We know about these atrocities not only because of news reports, but because gun victims are calling for gun control; blacks are saying, “Black Lives Matter;” women are telling their stories on #metoo; the sanctuary movement is calling attention to the abuses of ICE; “The Voice of the Faithful” is telling the story of sexual abuse in the church; Hope South Florida is helping homeless people tell their stories about police harassment. Where we are not hearing these stories is in church. The church usually stands mute in the face of all these atrocities. The church doesn’t want to get involved. It relates Jesus’ Passion as if it were an antique curiosity with nothing to do with us now. But now, many people are telling the stories of the atrocities that they or those they know have suffered. They are, even today, using much of “The Tale of the Suffering Innocent One.” Christianity is dead, as long as it refuses to see these stories as continuations of the Passion and to incorporate these ongoing stories into the Passion. May our Lenten journey include not only the story of Jesus, but the stories of all for whom he suffered.

Church Speak

I am a failed evangelist. For 62 years of my 83 years, I have been a convinced, dedicated, even enthusiastic Lutheran, but I can’t think of anyone who has joined the Lutheran Church because of my witness. Even my two sons aren’t active Lutherans, even though they were raised in an ELCA church. My older son married a Roman Catholic, and they are attending a Catholic church, so that my 7 year-old grandson can have his first communion there. My younger son married a woman who finds religion of no interest or perhaps actively evil; as a result, my son no longer attends church, even on Christmas or Easter when I would particularly like company. I attend ELCA churches, not only on Christmas and Easter, but nearly every Sunday. I believe strongly in hearing the Word and receiving the Sacrament every Sunday. I look forward to being inspired by the Spirit and strengthened for the work ahead. However, no one attends with me. I wish I could find someone to go with, to introduce church to, but, in spite of asking, no one yet. More precisely, my husband did attend church with me, once or twice, early in our relationship. I wanted him to understand how central church is in my life, but he hasn’t been back in the seventeen years we’ve been together. This was because he reacted strongly to the liturgy: It made him very angry. How dare that man standing up there tell him what to believe? The creed was a particular flashpoint: It was unbelievable, and he felt the pastor was forcing him to say things that he didn’t accept. Needless to say, we had then and continue to have many long conversations about the meaning of church and what happens there. This entire preamble is an introduction to my reaction to “Church Speak,” the message in the January, 2018, “Living Lutheran” from Elizabeth Eaton, the ELCA’s Presiding Bishop. She points out that Christians speak a language that is unintelligible to non-Christians. They don’t have the vocabulary, but, more important perhaps, they’re not part of our Christian culture. Make no mistake; we do have a culture that we inhabit often without awareness. Many, if not most nonbelievers, feel excluded from that culture. The language of “repentance” and “salvation” that many Christians (including pastors) throw around so casually is often seen by those outside the Christian culture as insulting and condescending: “What do I have to be saved from? “Why to I want to go to heaven with those tedious, boring Christians?” “Clearly, all the interesting people are in hell, often consigned there by the Church.” Since I was drawn to the Lutheran Church in 1956, I’ve been trying to bridge the gap between our insular church culture and the wider world. I’ve resisted the call to turn inward toward churchly matters. I’ve strived to pop the church bubble that Bishop Eaton refers to in her message. I try to live in two worlds and attempt to do justice to each. I’m a biologist and that means I admire Darwin immensely. His discovery of natural selection has shaped completely, not only modern biology, but its practical offshoots, medicine and agriculture. Without Darwin’s insights, I’m sure we’d not be as far along as we are in applied biology and in our broader understanding of life. Can I be a follower of Darwin and a Christian, too? I believe fervently that I can, but I feel sad also that the idea of a Christian Darwinist is an oxymoron to most people. This is because most Christians don’t worship God, but the Bible. This is part of the Christian culture that separates us from others. Most prominently, the unsuspecting priestly scribe urging the faithful to hallow the Sabbath in Genesis 1, could not have realized the trouble that would ensue with the Bible worshippers from the 19th century to this day. Thankfully, religious academic work from at least the time of Darwin in the 19th century until now has produced a picture of the Bible as a human document, specifically as a Jewish document using peculiarly Jewish means to shape the biblical narratives. Unfortunately, rarely do I encounter pastors who will use this vast treasure of academic work to discuss the bible as a human document with their parishioners. The Bible, they claim too often in their preaching, means just what it says (in English translation). They do this, so as to not upset the faithful (who are the ones most faithful in their giving), thus reinforcing the bubble and turning away any who are not of the culture. Of course, the numbers of those who have turned away have now reached epic proportions, and church people are wringing their hands in despair. The people outside the church aren’t interested in the church; they don’t want to know the “in” language of Christians, and they think our culture strange, if not bizarre and dangerous. Yes, I’m a failed evangelist, but I keep hoping that the real point of church will somehow become apparent to those I talk to: You are loved. In life and death, you are loved. No matter what you do, what you say, what you think, you are loved. This means you can love others, give you self away for others, be present for others. You can emulate the One we follow. That’s the Gospel, the Good News. Sometimes it’s proclaimed in church. Maybe, just maybe, if we go to church, we’ll hear it. Come with me.

Star of David

A few weeks ago, at the Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale, my husband, Franklyn, and I saw the movie, “Call Me by Your Name.” It is an intensely beautiful, erotic (not pornographic) gay love story between a precocious seventeen-year-old American-Italian boy, Elio, (played superbly by Timothée Chalamet) and an American man in his twenties, Olivier, (a very sexy Armie Hammer). They meet in the summer of 1983, at Elio’s family’s home in Northern Italy where Olivier, a graduate student in Greco-Roman culture, has been invited to spend six weeks studying with his professor, Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg). Elio is smitten with Olivier from their first meeting, but disguises his attraction, not very successfully, with irritation at Olivier’s blunt American ways. Soon, however, Elio’s growing interest is signaled when he begins wearing his own Star of David, very like the one Olivier wears on a chain around his neck. When Olivier asks whether Elio is a Jew, Elio says his mother (Amira Casar) calls the family “Jews of Discretion.” This very short exchange passes quickly, and their love grows, even as they attempt to reassure themselves of their heterosexuality through sexual encounters with some of the girls and women they meet. The six weeks go by quickly, and they spend their last days together on a hiking trip in the Alps, where we see a roaring waterfall symbolizing their now passionate love. Soon, however, they part; Olivier must go back to America, leaving Elio devastated. We later see a beautiful snowfall on the lake where Eli and Olivier once swam. Coming into his house, Elio revels in the smell of latkes frying; we see the menorah’s glow. It is Hanukkah. The phone rings, Elio answers. It is Olivier who announces his upcoming marriage to the woman he left behind when he came to Italy. As the movie ends, Elio is looking into the fire, crying. Why does the movie make Elio and Olivier Jews? The movie is certainly not about religion. Their Jewishness seems at first unnecessary to the story of their love, but as Franklyn and I talked about it, a parallel emerged. For many people, religious or ethnic identity is a given; it is just the way things are. This is probably true for many, if not most, Jews, like Olivier, for example. By contrast, in Elio’s very intellectual, upper-middle class family, it was a matter of “discretion.” Elio choses consciously to claim his Jewishness by wearing his Star of David in response to his love for Olivier. Some people have homosexual feelings; such feelings come unbidden. However, being gay is an identity, one that can be claimed or not. Elio and Olivier clearly had homosexual feelings for each other, but Olivier used his “discretion” to “be straight.” He ended his affair with Elio, went home, and was getting married. It is 1983, after all, and his career it likely to go better if he’s married, rather than if he is out as a gay man. What’s in store for Elio? The movie doesn’t tell us. His love for Olivier led him to claim his Jewish identity. Will it lead him to claim his gay identity?

Lunch with Bill

I had lunch with Bill this week. We have lunch every so often to solve the world’s problems. How are we doing? This week we circled around the problem presented by a new book we’re reading together. It’s “Inventing the Passion” by Arthur J. Dewey. Dewey explores the Passion narratives in the five (sic) Gospels. Are they eye witness accounts? Memories? History? Imaginative constructions from remembered stories? Or? We didn’t spend much time delving into the book. Instead we told each other stories from our lives about coping with pain: small, local Passions. Bill mentioned a woman who lost four family members within a very short time. She had questions. Why had this calamity happened? Why had God let it happen? How to cope? How to go on? He gave her Rabbi Kushner’s book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” May it help her. What helped the followers of Jesus to cope with his arrest, trial, and crucifixion? Interestingly, Dewey writes that no early depictions of the crucifixion have been found; while depictions of Jesus, the Good Shepard, have been. Why one and not the other? Was the crucifixion too painful to remember? Who hasn’t been told after a painful event: “Just put it out of your mind.” Forget about it. Don’t let it get to you. Maybe the followers tried to do that. Jesus had been murdered, so that he would be forgotten. Crucifixion was the way the Roman rulers tried to erase dangerous low-life scum. They were dead and, the Romans hoped, forgotten; never to be remembered. That’s what they wanted from crucifixions. Did Jesus’s followers think he was low life scum, after all? Even though once, they had hoped he was the Anointed One? After a while, after the crying, after the anger, the followers did something unexpected. They had dinner together; they had memorial dinners in the Roman tradition of eulogizing heroes at parties. But how could someone crucified be a hero? To his followers, Jesus even crucified was a hero, and they ignored what the Roman authorities wanted and remembered him. The dinners were political acts; being remembered, Jesus was not erased. In fact, as Luke 24 has it, he was not only viewed as the host, but he fed his followers, as he had the night before he was handed over. Jesus is still remembered at table; he hasn’t been erased. However, erasure continues to be the favored method for disposing of pesky people. For example, one church I know called the police on the homeless people congregating there. The vans came, the low life scum were put in, away they went, problem eliminated, and the people forgotten. And yet, some of us still remember.

3000 Years

“ …from iron sword to atomic bomb in about 3,000 years.” This is the short time humans have taken to escalate violence against our perceived enemies in our delusion that global control will lead to nonviolence. John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan remind us of this sad fact in their article in the January 31, 2018, issue of the “Christian Century,” entitled “Rising Up with Christ.” The Crossans have toured churches in the East and photographed some of their magnificent frescos, showing the Anastasis (Ana/stasis: Greek for up/rising) or the resurrection of Christ. These images are different from western depictions of Christ’s resurrection, where Christ rises alone in an individual resurrection. In the East, Christ invariably rises up with others, notably Adam whom Christ grasps by the arm with Eve following, as Christ guides them up out of Hades, out of death. Thus, in the East, universal resurrection is proclaimed. Christ takes all of humanity with him, past, present, and future, even as his cruciform halo reminds us that the resurrected is also the crucified: distinguishable, but never separate. “All religion is metaphor,” and, as the Crossans reminds us, “ …universal Anastasis is not a literal vision; it is a metaphorical vision. And—at least for our species—metaphor creates reality.” But for whom is this metaphor? Does it have meaning only in the church or for the public at large? Does it relate to the historical development of humanity? In the Neolithic period 5000 years ago, agriculture developed in the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. As agriculture became the main hallmark of civilization, violence escalated. This escalation is reflected in the story of Cain, a farmer, who kills Abel, his brother, a shepherd in a fit of rage when God accepts Abel’s sacrifice over his (Genesis 4:15). Violence, as the Crossans write, became civilization’s drug of choice. As we have gone from sword to atomic bomb in a mere 3000 years, we still are deluded that violence will bring us peace – or at least the cessation of violence. Even as civilization has saved us from barbarism, what will save us from civilization and ever escalating violence? The Crossans point out that the only credible answer is “Programmatic nonviolent resistance to violence….” They claim that nonviolence “… alone can end civilization’s trajectory of escalation.” Universal Anastatis pointedly contrasts Rome’s kingdom of violence with Jesus’ kingdom of nonviolence. Only nonviolent resistance to the normal violence of civilization, as exemplified by Jesus, can move us away from destruction toward a world transformed by the refusal to use violence to solve our problems. Thus, if civilization can will it (with the Spirit’s help?), the metaphor of universal Anastasis can lead to the reality of a nonviolent world, where we wean ourselves off of the drug of violence as the solution to our problems.

Stories of Gay Love

The latest issue of Out magazine features 26 gay love stories, telling of couples who’ve found each other and formed a loving relationship (http://www.out.com/). Each of these stories is inspiring, but I was particularly moved by the story of Samuel Colt and Chris Porter, who are gay porn stars. They have sex for a living, yet they say that they are faithful to one another.
On Gay.com, Colt explains: “"The heterosexual view of being faithful is so outdated.” “We don’t have to have sex only with each other to be faithful. I’m completely faithful to him, emotionally and with my heart. I can still get gang-banged and want to go back home to him."
Porter adds that they didn’t want a monogamous relationship because it didn’t fit their lives. That said, he adds that they have rules they both follow. "We don’t hook up with someone if we’re in the same city without the other one being involved,” he explains. “But if he’s out of town, I’ll hook up with someone. I’ll call and be like, 'Is that OK?' We’re honest and communicate."”
This is a refreshing antidote to the poison Paul spewed out in last week’s second reading (I Cor. 6:12-20), denouncing fornication and prostitutes. Not all fornication is evil, and God loves prostitutes. The Bible is filled with stories of prostitutes who saved the day. We should stop letting Paul’s repression and nastiness define sexuality.

Those People at That Church

My friend David Townsend writes on his blog, Anchorho(http://anchorholder.blogspot.com/):

Just north of Market Street, and across Church Street from probably the cruisiest supermarket in San Francisco—recall that it was in the Church and Market Safeway that Mary Ann Singleton tried to pick up Michael Tolliver at the beginning of Tales of the City—stands an unassuming little brick gothic church, built by Danish Lutherans in 1906. As the Castro came to be the Castro, the congregation could hardly fail to see that the neighborhood around them was changing. But more importantly, and perhaps more surprisingly, its pastor and members recognized that life meant embracing change, and they chose life, opening their doors to the burgeoning LGBT community that flourished around them, as to the marginalized and often homeless population along a very down-at-heel street.

In 1990, the congregation called Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart as its pastors, lesbian graduates of a Lutheran seminary who had been disqualified from ordination on the grounds that they refused to pledge abstinence from sexual relations. (First United Lutheran in San Francisco at the same time called an irregularly ordained out gay man.)

Keep in mind that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America presents itself as heir to the radical ecclesiastical disobedience of Martin Luther, when I say that nothing, nothing freaks the Lutheran hierarchy out like a refusal to capitulate to its authority. Years of wrangling led eventually to a classically Lutheran judgment. A commission struck to address the unsanctioned ordinations found that the congregation had acted in accordance with the dictates of the Gospel, and recommended that the ELCA in fact ought to reverse its position; but because St. Francis had failed to comply with good church order, the congregation had until January 1, 1996 to revoke its call to Ruth and Phyllis or else would be excommunicated from the national church—unless the national church in the meantime reversed its policy forbidding the ordination of out gay and lesbian seminarians who refused to pledge celibacy.

On the night of December 31, 1995, the congregation walked the walk by celebrating what they dubbed the Feast of the Expulsion with a big party in the church basement. As the congregation’s website (www.sflcsf.org) puts it in describing the next chapter of its history, “In the face of this judgment against us, we, along with our companion congregations, continued to stand by our decision, and continued to celebrate our diversity as part of our everyday journey with Christ.”

I first walked into St. Francis in 2000. There were maybe thirty-five people in a sanctuary that a hundred and twenty would pack to near capacity. As the Gospel book was carried in a very short procession into the middle of the congregation, everyone turned to face the reader, business as usual in “high” Lutheran congregations. Not so business-as-usual was that as people turned, they also crowded from the pews into the central aisle, hands laid on shoulders in a web that knit the whole assembly into a single body with a living voice at its center. And I lost it.

I was a mess all over again after Mass, when I walked out into the columbarium garden that flanks the church to the south, where the ashes of dozens of members rest—most of them gay men who died of AIDS in the 80’s and 90’s, when this church was a place of refuge from the complacent indifference of denominational hierarchies.

But long before I’d walked through the door of St. Francis—and long before I’d made the decision to reclaim the flawed, problematic inheritance of the faith I was reared in—I knew Those People at That Church: The St. Francis Lutheran Cookbook. It’s long out of print. If you can find a copy, grab it. This isn’t a volume of jello salads and tuna casseroles. It’s got the best broiled polenta recipe I’ve ever made, a wickedly spicy and variously flavored corn salad, and the cookies baked for Bill Clinton’s inaugural gala.

But far, far better, its cover sports a collage of the campiest, most joyful parish photo album imaginable: octogenarian matrons offering strawberries to the viewer, middle-aged guys wearing colanders as Easter hats, a lesbian couple standing back to back and crossing turkey drumsticks as they look over their shoulders to the camera, buff shirtless gymboys in barbecue aprons, smiling eight-month-old babies holding cupcakes. (Oh--and heterosexual couples. Did I mention heterosexual couples?) Sidebars flanking the recipes tell the story of the congregation and its witness, up to the date of publication in 1994, when expulsion from the ELCA loomed.

The lumbering behemoth that is the institutional church finally caught up to St. Francis Lutheran in 2010, and the congregation was readmitted to the ELCA. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s the ELCA that was finally reunited to St. Francis Lutheran Church. I know where the promise of freedom and grace lay, for me and people like me, during those intervening years that this quirky, outrageously brave little community went its own way for the sake of Truth and Love.

“Of Gods and Men”

Last night, we saw the new movie, “Of Gods and Men.” More than any movie I’ve seen, it illustrates Bonhoeffer's concept of “the cost of discipleship.” Eight French Cistercian Trappist monks living in an abbey in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria in the 1990s became pawns in that country’s civil war after the French colonialists left. Although the monks have the goodwill of the people in the area, tending to their medical needs, the monks are a reminder to the militant groups, vying for power, of recent European oppression. The local authorities are keenly aware of the militants’ feelings and repeatedly urge the monks to leave because the authorities will be unable to protect them from the violence that is an everyday occurrence. Much of the movie is devoted to the monks’ often anguished discussions about leaving or not. Some think it prudent to leave; others feel the need to continue their peaceable presence as friends to the people nearby who have endured continual bloodshed for so long. Their discussions and daily monastic tasks are interspersed with beautiful sequences of their singing the Mass and the Hours. Many of the psalms seem achingly pertinent to their debate, such as this excerpt from Psalm 91 (verses 5, 6): “You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday.”
Eventually, even as the possibility of their death becomes more likely, they all decide to stay. Soon, of course, the terror arrives in the night in the form of an insurgent group opposed to the Algerian government, and the monks are taken hostage to be negotiating tools with the French government. But to no avail; as the film ends, the monks are led off into the winter mist never to be heard of again. They are killed; their killers unapprehended.
The monks choose to stay – a very unwise choice. They could have been helpful elsewhere if they had lived. They choose to stay, because, as the prior says to one of the wavering monks, they had already died in Christ (Romans 6:4), and frightened as they were, their life in Christ was at the Abby. They were “fools for Christ,” as Paul writes in I Corinthians 4: 9, 10: “For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals. We are fools for the sake of Christ, ….”
The monks’ death was folly, but it wasn’t useless. They “become a spectacle to the world” (the movie was a sensation in France) and, as Tertullian wrote, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
Their deaths – and their lives – challenge us, especially those of us in the Church, to follow the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 and Jesus, the Gospels’ writers’ embodiment of the Suffering Servant. If we follow him into a life of peace and service, some will see the wisdom of our folly and find their life in Christ.
If, after you see the movie, you want to learn more, “The Monks of Tibhirine” by John Kiser is “A richly detailed and moving account of (the prior’s) life and the fate of his abbey,” writes A. O. Scott in his “New York Times” review.

“'The Kids Are All Right' and 'Sex at Dawn'”

We saw the new movie, “The Kids Are All Right,” the other night on DVD, and I thought of “Sex at Dawn,” the book I’ve been blogging about lately. The movie is about a lesbian couple, Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) with two teenage kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), 18, and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), 15. Joni searches for the man who was their sperm donor; she finds him nearby, and the plot thickens, mainly around Jules. She is the stay-at-home mom, who begins to work as a landscape designer for the donor, Paul, (Mark Ruffalo), and also begins to have sex with him. Jules is horrified by what her body is doing. She doesn’t love Paul; she doesn’t even like him very much, but she can’t stop. But, of course she does stop, and abruptly, when, at Paul’s during a dinner party with the whole family, Nic confronts Jules after finding Jules’ red hair in Paul’s shower and bed. With much weeping and gnashing of teeth, Jules admits her affair, but also blames Nic for being busy at work and distant.
At this point, I yelled at the TV, urging Jules to get in touch with her inner ape and proclaim that she came from female ancestors who had multiple partners and who called for more by their female copulatory vocalization (FCV) (The sex scenes were fairly noisy). Not surprisingly, she didn’t do this but continued to apologize and seek forgiveness from the family. Also, not surprisingly, they were very angry at her and furious at Paul, who is portrayed as a guy just going along for the ride. Although in the end, Jules and Nic seem to reconcile, Paul apparently is thrown into outer darkness and will never again be included in the family despite his reaching out to the kids. So, we’re left with a bruised quartet, rather than a possible quintet that might have included Paul. How sad.
And how sad that the five didn’t have insight into their ape natures, as discussed in “Sex at Dawn.” If they had realized that Jules was behaving naturally, they might have acknowledged similar feelings in themselves, understood, forgiven both her and Paul, and have begun a tentative search for an expanded family that included him.
Perhaps the moral is that we don’t always have to act out of our biology, but if we don’t know and accept our biology, we are likely to act, like Jules, without understanding and with much grief.

“A New Great Story”

Humans are story-telling apes. We tell each other stories to share our “world” with one another. Sharing our stories and experiencing others’ helps us understand, explain, and change our stories, which are our realities, our lives. The most useful stories are those that take our existing narratives and re-tell them with new information and new insights so that we are compelled to re-examine our old stories and to change them to accommodate the new material. In making these changes, our “world” changes, and we experience it in new ways. Leaving our old “world” behind may be painful, but if we are to move forward with life, we must accept the pain and let the new insights create a new “world” for us.
I’ve recently read two “stories” that have caused me to re-examine my “world” and to begin to create a new story and a new “world” for myself. One is “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality” by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, which I discussed in my posts on December 11 and 18, 2010 and on January 18 and 25, 2011. The other “story” is “A New Great Story” (Salem, Ore: Polebridge Press 2010) by Don Cupitt who writes: “In this book I aim to set before the general reader a fully-modern alternative to the traditional “Grand Narrative” theology of Latin or “Western,” Christianity…” (p1) This traditional narrative, which guided the West from the time of Constantine in the 4th century to the Enlightenment in the 18th, was set forth most notably in Augustine’s (CE 354-430) “The City of God.” It was “… a huge story of Everything that began and ended in eternity…” (p1) It tells of God’s creation of our world, our fall and redemption, the Last Judgment, and the triumph of the blessed. The Creeds summarize this story.
However, with Newton, Galileo, and Darwin we have new stories that, as the mathematician LaPlace said to Napoleon, have no need of God as a hypothesis. We are still coping with these new stories. Cupitt writes: “… the West found it extremely painful to relinquish its old faith, and extremely difficult to state its new faith with full philosophical clarity. Even yet, we have still not been able to settle into a lucid, confident and paradox-free secular-humanist world-view.” (p5) A major reason for this is our loss of “Objective Truth.” These new stories, specifically Darwinism tell us that “…our cognitive abilities are just survival-skills…” “…we cannot distinguish between ‘real’ truths and biologically useful fictions.” “All our knowledge is practical or ‘applied,’ and none is ‘pure.’” (p5) We are painfully learning that “There is no ready-made Real World, out there and fully independent of our language. There is only the historical succession of world-views, and of understandings of human nature, within the ceaseless motion of our language.” (p75)
Cupitt’s new grand narrative is based on these ideas. It “…will be a secular story about the whole process by which we have come to be what we are now are.” It will try to show how the world in our heads “…is made up of linguistic usages, myths, deep cultural assumptions, Gods, spirits, saints, our parents and our mentors, commandments prohibitions and valuations.” (p8) For most of human history our stories were predominantly religious, and they guided our progressive development. However, with the Enlightenment and the new scientific narratives, “…how are we to understand the queer fact that in the modern period religion seems to have led us beyond itself and become redundant?” (p9) As a result of this strange situation, Cupitt wants “a Christian narrative, and a story that makes religious sense, about the birth, the life, the death, and the afterlife of God.” (p9)
This new story is not about Fall and Redemption “… but the strangely-roundabout story of how we have become ourselves. It starts in the violent chaos of animal experience. Language irrupts, lighting up the chaos and beginning to make things intelligible and to shape life. The history of religion then develops as the story of how through language a world can be built, its law laid down, values posited, and long-term plans of action devised and carried out. Everything is first worked out at the supernatural level: the gods pioneered everything for us. Eventually, the fully developed Bronze-Age religious system produces a new breed of ‘enlightened’ individual critics – prophets, philosophers – who criticize it all and bring it all back down into the human beings for whose sake the whole process has been going on. The Grand Narrative then culminates in the Galilean preaching of Jesus, and the launch of a new divine-human way of living. The whole story is then surprisingly repeated into the history of Christianity, which also goes out into mediaeval elaboration, and then through its criticism in the Reformation and the Enlightenment gradually returns into the individual modern human being who at last feels able to accept contingency and to build a life of love without any remaining fear or bitterness.” (p9)
This progression of human religious development parallels to a remarkable extent the evolution of our sexuality described in “Sex at Dawn,” which outlines the evolution of our ancestors over the millions of years when they lived in foraging bands with multiple sexual partners. The rise of agriculture about 10,000 years ago led to, at least for women, monogamy. Monogamy grew out of agriculture, because a farmer wanted to be sure that his son, who was to inherit the farm, is indeed his son. To ensure this, the son’s mother had to have only the son’s father as a sexual partner. She must be kept from other men and to accomplish this, the father takes her as closely guarded property.
With agriculture, religion also changed. It became centralized and mediated by priests. Before agriculture, foragers and hunters moved about looking for food, with no fixed abode. Their gods moved before them, leading them into the future. In contrast, farmers settled down and needed markets for their produce. Markets developed into cities with the god’s temple on one side of the marketplace and the palace of the King, anointed by the god, on the other side. “By the priests, agriculture, religious cult, and culture were all woven together. And in particular, God invented markets, money and fair trade. God invented ‘centred’ life, and the city-state: politics, routine, law, and taxation. The first taxes, tithes, were paid to God the first landlord.” (p35)
The rigid hierarchy of this state religion could not completely eliminate the “…older type of religious professional – the charismatic, imaginative individual shaman or prophet …” (p61) We know best Israel’s prophets, who “…looked back to the simplicity and freedom of the old nomadic way of life…” (p63) These prophets sought “… a return of some form of religious immediacy. This in turn required democratization: God must decentre himself, coming down from heaven and distributing himself as spirit into human hearts…” (p64), as in hunter-gatherer times. This movement of our perception of God “…from the external socially-constructed world…” (p65) into ourselves comes to be known as “the Kingdom of God…”, and “…the old mystical yearning for union with God was also a demand for the disappearance of God as objective being, as Other. Instead, God becomes at last fully and completely internalized.” (p65)
Of course, this is the core message of Jesus: “… ‘the Kingdom of God’ was near, or had already arrived. The ancient prophetic hope was fulfilled. The divine world and the human life-world were at last coming together and becoming one.” “…God ceased to be an objective being. He had emptied himself out into human hearts. God and the human self were no longer two; they were now concentric. It followed that the difference between the pure and the impure, and between good and evil, was no longer imposed upon human beings ‘heteronomously’ – that is, in the form of a code of divine laws revealed to Moses and received thenceforth from tradition – but depended solely upon the autonomous human heart. Living well was not a matter of keeping rules: on the contrary, rule-morality does not produce and never could produce the kind of person Jesus wanted to see. No: for Jesus – who in moral philosophy was a straight emotivist and expressivist – you live well if you live in a ‘solar’ way, out from the heart, without any duplicity, so that your expressive life pours out upon a current of open, direct, generous and affirmative feeling. Jesus makes his point here by insisting that law-morality makes us mean-spirited. We are forever looking sideways at our neighbors, and feeling aggrieved if they are doing better than we think they deserve. He insists, paradoxically but brilliantly, that unless you are ready to go beyond mere justice and perform acts of ecstatic, excessive generosity, you are not a truly moral person at all.” (p68) In at least some of the sayings of Jesus, we can see: “…The superior human being (who) lives without resentiment or reactive feeling: he is purely affirmative. He does not nurse any kind of grudge or ill-feeling.” (p69) My post of Sept. 15, 2009 on Cupitt’s “Jesus & Philosophy” discusses this further.
Some of those who heard Jesus must have liked his message. “Otherwise, his memory and some of his words would not have reached us at all.” (p69) Of course, the synoptic gospels also preserve much sharp criticism: He was crazy, in league with the devil, kept bad company, lax about ritual purity and keeping the Sabbath, and he enjoyed feasting. He was eventually charged with being an all-out blasphemer and executed by the state. Cupitt thinks that the charges are historical; no one would have a motive for inventing them. He also thinks them justified. “Jesus was after all announcing the end of (his hearers’) world, and in many cases their livelihoods. St. Matthew tries, rather absurdly, to claim that Jesus endorsed the Mosaic Law in full (Matthew 5:17-19), but the fact is that not long after Jesus’ death the early Jewish Church did resolve not to impose the Law upon Gentile converts.” (p70)
“…the ethical teaching of Jesus in Galilee, approximately – and perhaps best preserved in Q/Luke … is Act Four of our new Grand Narrative theology and completes the main story. The plot is complete: everything has come together and there is only the endless, purely-contingent flow of things in our language-formed human life-world. … After Galilee there is no further or greater reality for us to aspire to.” The 1980 years since Jesus have seen repeated circular movements: a going out into catholic elaboration and the return into immediacy. “So, in a certain sense, we made God, and then God made us, completing his work by dying into us. Religious thought has been a laborious business, but it has somehow brought us a very long way. We are only a lot of dumb apes who have somehow been able to dream strange dreams that have lifted us out of the relative darkness of animal life, and made it at last possible for us moderns to say a whole-hearted Amen to our world, and to our own lives in it.” (p 75)

Nicholas Kristof, Don Cupitt, and the Sermon on the Mount

Nicholas Kristof writes in his “New York Times” column today of the differences between the Roman Catholic bishops and Catholic hospitals around the country which are sometimes not as strict in their abortion policies as the bishops would like.
As I read his column, I was struck by this passage:
“To me, this battle illuminates two rival religious approaches, within the Catholic church and any spiritual tradition. One approach focuses upon dogma, sanctity, rules and the punishment of sinners. The other exalts compassion for the needy and mercy for sinners — and, perhaps, above all, inclusiveness.”
This echoes almost uncannily Don Cupitt’s reading of the Sermon on the Mount in his “A New Great Story” (2010), which I quoted in my post on January 25th. He points out that The Sermon on the Mount is a mixture of passages that call for the “…almost existentialist ethic of open whole-hearted expression, and freedom from anxiety or calculation” (Matthew 5:13-16, 38-48, and 6:25-34). and others that “…take for granted the value of a strictly-interpreted religious Law, and a piety of secret good works and hidden inwardness which pursues and expects a heavenly reward after death.” (5:17-33, and 6:1-20 and 24) (p81, 82)
In Kristoff’s interpretation, the actions of some leaders of the Catholic hospitals could be seen as existentialistic and whole-hearted with anxiety and calculation taking the hindmost. While the bishops’ position values a strictly-interpreted religious Law with heaven as a reward for obedience to this Law. Cupitt writes of the Sermon on the Mount: “The difference is astonishing. In the two groups of sayings we find two entirely different, indeed opposite religious personalities.” (p82) He also points out that these different approaches are “…deeply embedded within the best texts we have”. (p81) What Cupitt calls “Church Christianity” had begun, by the year 50, shifting the focus “…from Jesus’ teaching to his person – and in particular his exalted status in the cosmic hierarchy”. (p79) It is this latter position that the bishops are defending today. Kristof writes about one such instance of “Church Christianity”: The bishop of Phoenix demanded that St. Joseph’s Hospital there never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother. In contrast, Linda Hunt, the president of St. Joseph’s responded, “St. Joseph’s will continue through our words and deeds to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus.” Two starkly different positions each rooted in different parts of the Sermon on the Mount. You pays your money, and you takes your choice.

My Response to David T.'s comment

David T. has commented on my post on January 18th. Below is my response to his comment.
David,
Thank you for your comment. Monogamy and the nuclear family are often bound together in our culture, and, as you point out, children’s loss of stable relationships within the fragile nuclear family can be very hard on them. Of course, the more complex webs of adult relationships you write of are a good remedy for the shortcomings of the nuclear family and probably reflect to some extent the relationships within our ancestral foraging bands. In the case of my own family, my children had extended relationships. This was especially true of my younger son who found great strength within the family of his best friend, whom he met in second grade. My son and his friend initiated this relationship, and all that the rest of us needed to do was to encourage it. I think that families would do well to be on the lookout for the possibilities of such ad hoc extended families and then to foster them.
What can be said about fundamentalists? Not much except to emphasize that if you start with a false premise, you get a bad outcome. The rest of us have to keep on offering other positions in contrast to this lust for certainty. One good alternative is Cupitt’s solar living: Give yourself away like the sun, shining for all, doing your best without regard for reward or the assurance of success. This is difficult, but it is a lot of the reason why Jesus is such a compelling figure. As Cupitt points out, his “…almost existentialist ethic of open whole-hearted expression, and freedom from anxiety or calculation” (p82 in “A Great New Story,” 2010) can be found in some of Jesus’ sayings in the Sermon on the Mount, (Matthew 5:13-16, 38-48, and 6:25-34) but not in other passages (5:17-33, and 6:1-20 and 24), which are mixed in with the other sayings. These “…take for granted the value of a strictly-interpreted religious Law, and a piety of secret good works and hidden inwardness which pursues and expects a heavenly reward after death.” (p81, 82, “A Great New Story”) Cupitt draws attention to the fact that “…the conflict between the original outlook of Jesus himself and the remodeled Jesus of the emergent Church is already deeply embedded within the best texts we have, making it very difficult in all periods for people to hear Jesus’ own voice. (p 81, “A Great New Story”) Obviously, these two opposing views are still with us. No wonder we struggle to follow Jesus. It’s either extremely difficult or just a matter of “faith.” May the Spirit be with you in your struggle.

My Response to Bob Y’s comment on “Sex at Dawn”

Bob,
Thanks for you comment on my post on "Sex at Dawn" (December 18, 2010). Here is my response.
Yes, modern sexuality is complex and bewildering, because, as “Sex at Dawn” maintains, we don’t recognize that we are apes, or, more to the point of your comments, we are still apes. Sexually, we tend to act like apes, specifically our closest ape cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos, and we chafe at the restrictions of monogamy. We and these two other species evolved to live in foraging bands, in which all is shared: food, sex, and the perils in the environment. Before the rise of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, our ancestors had to depend for survival on the other members of the band with what Ryan and Jethá call fierce egalitarianism. Nothing like that exists today in our agricultural or post-agricultural world. We left interdependent foraging bands behind for the advantages of agriculture, namely a steady food supply and a settled existence that in some ways was less dangerous than foraging, which necessitated fending off predators.
However, agricultural societies have features that can be viewed as disadvantages, especially compared to the dynamics of foraging bands. Perhaps most important is the loss of equality between the sexes. Although equality in the bands is not complete, males and females have sex with many partners within and outside the band. As a result, the paternity of offspring is both not known and not an issue; the offspring are members of the band and are raised communally by the band.
However, with agriculture came the concepts of paternity and of private property. Farm land is possessed and passed down from father to son. The land becomes the most important possession the father has, and he wants to be sure that it is passed down to the one who is without doubt his son. Paternity must no longer be unknown, as in the band, and, in order to insure that the son has one father, known without doubt, the mother must have only the father as a sex partner. In order to enforce this arrangement, the woman becomes the father’s property, controlled as strictly as the land.
Also, with agriculture, came produce. With excess produce came trading, and with trading came trading centers that became cities. Cities developed a ruling class of administrators to regulate trade and priests to mediate between man and a distant, exalted God who was worshipped in the hope of ensuring good crops and peace. Or not. Because land was of ultimate value, agriculture also led to armies that waged war to defend property or to gain more. So, agriculture has much to answer for: patriarchy, monogamy, private property, cities, armies, and war, for starters.
However, as you point out, today most people live in post-agricultural, urban societies, but these are still defined to a large extent by private property and war. Although you’re correct that in many societies, especially outside the U.S., traditional extramarital arrangements have eased the strictures of monogamy, this easing chiefly benefits males without much disturbing the primary monogamous marriage. What clearly threatens monogamy, as you also point out, is the rise of women’s sexual liberation. At least in theory, women need no longer be dependent on men for support, nor do they need husbands to have children. Moreover, as with men in modern urban societies, their work outside the home can become their primary focus, and their relationships with their colleagues may become more important to them than their relationships with members of their families. With these changes, the important question today becomes how do these changes affect children? Most studies point to the advantages to children of parents who are present for their children throughout their lives. How do we insure continuity for our children while the traditional structures of patriarchy and monogamy are disappearing, and while wars continue unrelentingly? Going back to foraging bands clearly is not the answer, but in our post-agricultural, “liberated” societies, what is the way forward?

Bob Y.'s comment on my post on "Sex at Dawn"

Below I'm showing Bob Y's comment on my post on "Sex at Dawn", because I can't get it to go into the comment box. I'll comment on his comment as soon as possible.
PeteM

Dear Peter,
I read your blog while taking a break from a major task/chore. You have certainly put a great deal of effort and thought into it. And that sti9mulates serious thinking on the part of the readers. I think, however, that sexuality particularly in the modern context is a much more complex and bewildering subject. Let me share my impressions albeit it is from the perspective of male-female interactions.
Culture: this is perhaps one of the most important variables in defining sexuality. In many societies in Asia and the Mediterranean, sexuality can occur in two different contexts. One is directly linked with marriage, family, and social stability. That sexuality is monogamous and is directed towards having children. At the same time, and socially acceptable, there is sexuality that exists outside of the marriage and is cemented by emotion, personal feelings, and a broader freedom in selection of mates. And it may turn out to yield a true companionship, but does not have to lead to children.
Modernity and change. There are major trends that affect how sexuality is expressed. Among others:
Urbanization: your thesis is grounded on the ideas of an agricultural society. However, UN statistics indicate that this year, more than 51% of the world's population will be urban and that this will increase rapidly beyond that. Besides that, multimedia technology now has introduced rural communities to the values of an urban society. So increasingly, the definitions of sexuality will be increasingly that which exists in the cities.
Science: we have done well in expanding the frontiers of reproductive medicine. For one, we can now routinely make use of contraception to avoid having children, i.e., self-standing yuppie couples. Alternatively, you can have children without necessarily having a relationship or even intercourse - in vitro fertilization, surrogate parenthood. So sexuality can be detached from the bearing of children.
Workplace: the explosive growth of women in the skilled and professional workplace. This allows women to be financially independent which can lead to the choice of being single mothers. Again we see the separation of a sexual relationship from having children. But perhaps what I find most interesting is the development of workplace relationships where a man and a woman will spend most of their time and a great deal of their emotional and intellectual energies in shared efforts to the degree that they have more in common with each other than with their formal partners. This can occur even in the absence of a sexual affair which makes it interesting that it can be seen as sexuality without sex.
So changes in sexuality are likely to accelerate driven by the forces sketched above. Yes, Peter, sex and sexuality are a complicated business.
Best, Bob
________________________________________

“Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality”

God wants abundance for all, says Isaiah: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.” (25:6) Luke tells us Jesus says that the basis of abundance is sharing: “Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.’’ (6:38) Sharing also precedes the feeding of the multitude in all four Gospels (Matthew 14:13–21, Mark 6:31-44, Luke 9:10-17 and John 6:5-15). In these stories, Jesus takes the disciples’ little bits of bread and fish, blesses them, and, lo, everyone has more than enough: “And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full” (Matthew 14:20).
In other words, sharing is God’s way. At least when it comes to food, but most definitely not when it comes to sex, according to the Bible. For example in Matthew 19:4-6, Jesus is quoted as saying: “…Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” No sharing here. As the traditional marriage ceremony says: “…and forsaking all others, (will you) be faithful to him (her) as long as you both shall live?” According to Christian tradition, monogamy in committed relationships is God’s way.
But, it is not evolution’s way. As Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá write in their new book, “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality”, “We didn’t descend from apes, we are apes.” And we are closely related to two other apes, bonobos and chimpanzees, because just five million years ago (an evolutionary blink), they and we shared a common hypersexual ancestor, making bonobos, chimps, and, yes, us, horny and ready for sex with multiple partners all the time. Remember, a genius is someone who thinks about sex only 95% of the time.
Up until about 10,000 years ago, we, like bonobos and chimps in the wild, lived in small foraging groups of about 100 to 150 individuals who moved around to find food and who shared almost everything, including food, shelter, protection, child care, even sexual pleasure. (p6) Although romantic love was not unknown in prehistoric communities, with or without love, a casual sexuality was the norm for our prehistoric ancestors.
However, about 10,000 years ago, human life changed profoundly. We discovered farming and we settled down to farm and raise domesticated animals. We no longer foraged over large areas, but settled down and farmed. Agriculture could, in good seasons, produce food surpluses and allow more people to survive, but it also led to: “…hierarchical political structures, private property, densely populated settlements, a radical shift in the status of women, and other social configurations that together represent an enigmatic disaster for our species: human population growth mushroomed as quality of life plummeted. The shift to agriculture, wrote author Jared Diamond, is a ‘catastrophe from which we have never recovered.’ (p9) Before agriculture, our “…ancestors lived in groups where most mature individuals would have had several ongoing sexual relationships at any given time. Though often casual, these relationships were not random or meaningless.” (p9) “An individual male’s parental investment,…the core element of the standard narrative (supporting monogamy), tends to be diffuse in societies like those in which we evolved, not directed toward one particular woman and her children…” (p13) Instead hunter-gatherer societies are characterized by their fierce egalitarianism. “Sharing is not just encouraged; it’s mandatory. Hoarding or hiding food, for example, is considered deeply shameful, almost unforgivable behavior in these societies.” (p11)
Sharing, however, became a casualty of agriculture. “…it became crucially important to know where your field ended and your neighbor’s began. Remember the tenth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house; thou shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is thy neighbour's.’ (Exodus 20:17) Clearly, the biggest loser (aside from slaves, perhaps) in the agricultural revolution was the human female, who went from occupying a central, respected role in foraging societies to becoming another possession for a man to earn and defend, along with his house, slaves, and livestock.” (p14) “Land could now be possessed, owned, and passed down the generations. Food that had been hunted and gathered now had to be sowed, tended, harvested, stored, defended, bought, and sold. Fences, walls, and irrigation systems had to be built and reinforced; armies to defend it all had to be raised, fed, and controlled. Because of private property, for the first time in the history of our species, paternity became a crucial concern.” (p 14, 15) So, perversely, agriculture, which increased food production, also restricted access to food and, because women became property, to heterosexual sex as well. Furthermore, Ryan and Jethá quote Timothy Taylor, author of “The Prehistory of Sex”: “While hunter-gatherer sex had been modeled on an idea of sharing and complementarity, early agriculturist sex was voyeuristic, repressive, homophobic, and focused on reproduction.” “Afraid of the wild, farmers set out to destroy it.” (p 14) Farming, which increased food supplies for those lucky enough to own land, also introduced scarcity for all those who were landless and poor.
Also, the focus on paternity and keeping the private land in the family in agricultural societies set us on the road to monogamy, always unlikely, because we evolved to want multiple partners, which minimizes the genetic perils of interbreeding. Even today, which after all is only 10,000 years since our foraging days, many men and women want multiple sex partners. However, “…the true story of human sexuality (is) so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by moralizing therapists.” (p2)
Monogamy is difficult and usually boring. The “bloom is off the rose” too soon, and many husbands and wives stop having frequent sex. Men can develop a roving eye and indulge in extramarital activities, leaving their wives neglected and angry. It’s not that men no longer love their wives, but rather they begin to love them as their “best friend” or “sister,” a sure sign that the incest taboo has become active. Furthermore, male and female orgasms are very different. Men can usually be aroused and ejaculate quickly. Too quickly, women complain. They often take longer to become aroused, but once they are, they want many more orgasms. And often they let anyone in earshot know their desire for more by their female copulatory vocalization (FCV). These sounds in other primates are invitations to males outside their own troop to come and mate, thus increasing the chances that their eggs will be fertilized by sperm from males unrelated to the males in the female’s group. (p257) It’s a good bet that these sounds in women evolved to serve the same purpose. Ryan and Jethá write: “This symmetry of dual disappointment (of men and women in monogamous relationships) illustrates the almost comical incompatibility between men’s and women’s sexual response in the context of monogamous mating.” If men and women evolved to be monogamous, why are they so incompatible? Ryan and Jethá suggest: “…isn’t it time to accept that our ancestors evolved along a sexual trajectory similar to that of our two highly social, very intelligent, closely related primate cousins (who evolved in promiscuous groups)?” (p245) They continue: “Perhaps the far-fetched denial of our promiscuous sexual prehistory expresses a legitimate fear of social instability, but insistent demands for a stable social order (based, as we’re often reminded, upon the nuclear family unit) cannot erase the effects of the hundreds of thousands of years that came before our species settled into stable villages.” (p246)
Furthermore, whether we’re for or against monogamy, it is failing, and with this failure, “the nuclear family unit” is disintegrating. Ryan and Jethá write: “In 2008, almost 40 percent of the mothers who gave birth in the United States were unmarried.” However, two parents are better for children than only one. Ryan and Jethá quote Caitlin Flanagan in Time magazine: “On every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households.” The outcomes included longevity, drug abuse, school performance, dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior, and incarceration. (p302, 303)
The village that Hillary Clinton writes about in her book, “It Takes a Village,” can help relieve the pressure on the nuclear family and provide needed support for single parent families, but it wouldn’t restore us, our families, and our sex lives to Edenic bliss, where food and sex partners were readily available for all. A village is basically an agricultural settlement, and with the rise of villages, our foraging days ended. Moreover, improved agriculture has increased the earth’s population to unsustainable levels. In just the last 2000 years, population has grown from 170 million to nearly 7 billion. (p156) With all these people, there is no longer room to roam and forage.
We need to discover new ways to be sexual and familial in this post-foraging, post-monogamous world. As we struggle with the knowledge of our sexuality and the failure of monogamy, will the church help or hinder our efforts? It’s all too easy to dismiss the church as an impediment to sexual progress, but the Gospel is ever calling for us to be true to ourselves and thus to God. Remember John 8:31, 32: “Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’” One “word” attributed to Jesus, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18b, is: ‘“…you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”’ (Mark 12:31, 32) If we embrace the “truth” that we are sexual beings who seek multiple partners, we may also begin to experience these partners as “neighbors.” It worked for our foraging ancestors; can it work for us, their descendants?
To read more comments on “Sex at Dawn,” go to: http://www.google.com/search?q=Sex+at+Dawn+%2B+reviews&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8

The Bullying of Gay Youth: What Can be Done to Stop It?

What can be done to stop the bullying of gay youth? The horrible deaths of the young men reported recently in the media are very disturbing. What can we do to stop this bullying? Below are some suggestions.

1) Keshet (http://www.keshetonline.org/), the organization that works for full inclusion of sexual minorities in Jewish life, suggests:

Ten Things You Can Do Today to Strengthen Our (LBGT) Community

1. Find truth in the Torah. Ask your rabbi to give a Dvar Torah (or write your own) about the tragic events of the past month and our responsibility as Jews to speak out and work to end homophobia and transphobia. Here's a beautiful example from Rabbi David Mitchell, Radlett & Bushey Reform Synagogue, UK.

2. Speak out. The next time you hear someone say "That's so gay," tell that person why those words are hurtful and can have disastrous consequences.

3. Make your support visible. Post a Jewish GLBT Safe Zone sticker in your synagogue, classroom, camp bunk, office, or website.

4. Take action for equal rights. Contact your legislator to support ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that prevents people from being fired or discriminated against at work for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.

5. Keep youth safe and supported. If you are a Jewish educator or administrator at an educational institution, provide training and resources for your staff on how to create safe, inclusive spaces for GLBT and questioning youth. Help start a Gay-Straight Alliance.

6. Come out as an ally. October 11 is National Coming Out Day. If you are a straight Jewish community leader, let people know that you are an ally to GLBT people and keep the messages of support coming.

7. Come out. If you identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and/or queer, come out and keep coming out. This simple act will help others.

8. Talk to your children. Middle and high school students witness homophobic and transphobic bullying and teasing every day. Tell your children you support them and that all kids deserve to be treated with respect and kindness.

9. Tell your story. Whether you are queer or a straight ally, upload a video to the It Gets Better Project" and share your story with young people who need to hear your message. Visit the Make it Better Project to see powerful stories about what young queers and allies are doing right now to improve their schools and communities.

10. Seek support/give support. If you or someone you know is struggling with issues around sexual orientation and/or gender identity, know that you are not alone. Crisis support is available 24/7 through The Trevor Project, 1.866-4.U.TREVOR.


Do Not Stand Idly By: A Jewish Community Pledge to Save Lives. Go to the Keshet website to sign it Now!

2) From the news website, 365Gay, John Culhane suggests many avenues of action. See his column at: http://www.365gay.com/opinion/culhane-what-can-be-done-about-bullying/

May we find truth in the Torah!

"A Huge Loss of Belief in the Fundamental Narratives of Christianity and Judaism"

The letter below, published in the "New York Times" on August 14th, describes in a few words the challenge facing all religious organizations today: How do people view the relationship between divinity and humanity? Our search today is for a way of talking convincingly about this relationship, if it exists.
In his latest book, "Theology's Strange Return" (London: SCM Press, 2010), Don Cupitt writes about how talk about that relationship is evolving. He points out "... that a surprising amount of traditional Christian belief - including a new Grand Narrative, and a non-metaphysical theology - is currently returning to us in secular form." How will this play out? Our search continues.

Re “Congregations Gone Wild” (Op-Ed, Aug. 8):
Although G. Jeffrey MacDonald’s essay about the congregational ministry is on the mark in many ways, the real issue is much deeper than “congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling.” It is a huge loss of belief in the fundamental narratives of Christianity and Judaism, the biblical concepts of divinity in relation to humanity. The crisis of the ministry is theological.
During the many years I served in the congregational rabbinate, I witnessed the radical changes taking place in the beliefs or nonbeliefs of both professionals and congregants. Nothing will solve this problem except radically revised theological perspectives in response to radically new conditions, if that is even possible.
Jack D. Spiro
Richmond, Va., Aug. 8, 2010

History Ain't on Your Side

I found the Blog post below on CCBlogs. It's by Marvin Lindsay whose blog is called Avdat. The URL is: http://marvinlindsay.typepad.com/avdat.
I'm glad someone else has read Peter Brown. I wrote about his treatment of sexual renunciation on my blog in a post called, "The Curse of Virginity." It's at: http://churchofnon-realism.blogspot.com/2007/09/curse-of-virginity.html

27 July 2010
History Ain't On Your Side
by Marvin Lindsay
My next contribution to the peace, unity and purity of the church will be to teach a course on early Christian sexuality. If we're condemned to fight over sex ad infinitum, I want both liberals and conservatives to know that neither has history on its side.

Imagine a time when substantial numbers of Christians regarded procreation as a great evil. Imagine a time when the counter-cultural "left" practiced sexual renunciation. It's not some science fiction future. We've been there and done that.

As part of a directed study on monasticism I read Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Susanna Elm's Virgins of God. Both are excellent historical works. Brown's book could just as easily been titled All the Reasons Why Primitive Christians Quit Having Sex.

There were practical reasons, to be sure. Given the appalling levels of infant and childhood mortality, Roman women needed to give birth to six children just to maintain the population level. The Caesars pressured them to do just that, for the ruling class needed offspring to inherit all that upper crust wealth. Patriotism asks a lot of its soldiers, but Roman patriotism asked even more of its women. Six kids! In fourth world squalor! No wonder many Christian women found celibacy appealing.

But a purely materialist explanation won't suffice. It was the power of an idea that drove many Christians, male and female, to renounce sex.

Origen's ideas, especially. Origen theorized that before we were born, our souls had rebelled, and we fell into material bodies. Origen did not regard the body as evil, as Gnostics did, but as God's tailor-made tool to instruct the soul on how to return to God.

Sexuality then, was not part and parcel of our identity, for sexuality belongs to our material existence in this world. Didn't Jesus say that in heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels? Origenist thought held out the possibility that here and now one could transcend one's embodied and thus sexual nature.

Renouncing sex was one means. Fasting was another. A diet of one loaf of bread a day will, over time, cause your period to dry up and your breasts to shrivel. Women went into the Egyptian desert and passed for male monks. Origen's notorious act of castrating himself did not prevent him from having sex, but it did diminish his secondary sexual characteristics, most notably the philosopher's beard his competitors would have grown in Alexandria.

For other Christians, celibacy was tinged with apocalyptic fever. Tatian's disciples in Syria wondered why anyone would have children, because procreation just fed the death machine. Quit reproducing, and the kingdom will come.

The non-canonical Acts of Thomas, to which we owe the legend that Doubting Thomas preached the gospel in India, contains a similar idea. On the way to India, Thomas ruins a royal wedding when he convinces the bride and groom make a chaste marriage because kids are more trouble than they're worth. The King was not amused when he realized this stranger had cheated him of grandchildren.

In the early fourth century, this stew of ideas had generated bands of mixed sex, wandering prophets whose women cut their hair short, ridiculed marriage in general and married clergy in particular, and showed no interest in settling down and leading orderly lives, much less begetting offspring for the good of the Empire.

Other Christians were appalled, and as the fourth century unfolded, it would prove to be a decisive one not only for doctrine and church-state relations, but for sexual ethics. The misogynist Jerome and monastic architect Basil insisted that the body could not be transcended but only transformed. They developed a two-tired system of clerical celibacy and strictly monogamous lay marriage, with monastics separated into male and female houses--not over against pagan hedonism, but over against celibate Christian "extremists," whom they regarded as the real enemy.

This is why I love history; it scrambles your categories.

If conservative means preserving the past, then today's conservatives are holding on to a rather thin slice of it. Where are the conservatives who dare to proclaim the old time religion of: celibacy good, childlessness better, androgyny best?

Likewise, while critiques of empire are here, there and everywhere on the Christian left, I am unaware of any that make celibacy a core practice of imperial resistance. Today's feminists would liberate women from gender discrimination and for orgasm. But the feminists of old secured the former by turning their backs on the latter.

Neat, huh?