Revised Common Lectionary Page for 1 January 2012 (First Sunday after Christmas, Year B)
Isaiah 61:10-62:3 • Psalm 148 • Galatians 4:4-7 • Luke 2:22-40
When people tell their own stories, we always do so in relationship to models: we can depart from them or model our own on them, but we’re always in relationship. When conservative Christians tell our stories of faith, our models, whether we’ve read the originals or not, tend to follow the patterns of Augustine or of C.S. Lewis. (The latter, of course, largely patterns his own story after the former’s, but that’s just another exhibit that supports my claim.) And the two of those, as anyone who has read them knows, tell their own stories in decidedly Pauline tones. The story is not an unfamiliar one: for intellectual reasons or for want of purpose in life, the young person rejects the faith, coming at a vital point in life to the realization (it need not always involve a miraculous light that knocks one off of one’s steed) that the Christian faith is the true way, and after that dramatic moment of turning, life does not proceed without difficulty but always has a sense of purpose.
Paul’s, of course, is not the only story that the New Testament presents: if we look for stories to which we can relate, there’s Peter’s tale of rash promise, failed promise, and restored promise. There’s Cornelius, the one who sought truth and found his reward when the faith he seeks transforms before him. There are the sons of Zebedee, the masses at Jerusalem, Barnabas, and Apollos. And in this week’s reading, there’s Simeon, the man who spends his whole life waiting for something, something that certainly, in his advanced age, he had an idea of, yet something which surprises him when the Spirit leads him to enter the temple.
Simeon sings the joy of one who has heard the voice of the Spirit for a long time but who has only in the moment discovered the form of the Spirit’s movement in the world: although he has no sense of Cross or Resurrection, Simeon knows that, by some means, this will be the one who brings to fulfillment the grand promises that God made to Abraham in the earliest days of Israel’s story, the one who will teach all the nations the way of the LORD and who will bring those who elevate themselves crashing down. Because the Spirit leads him, he knows what he sees, even if his sight only sees what happens on the far side of Jesus’s dark demise.
Simeon also sees that this child will be a revealer, one who discloses the secrets of people’s hearts. No longer, when the salvation that Simeon sings comes to completion, will the hypocrisy that characterizes power at all levels stand in the world. No longer will those who lord it over others be able to call themselves benefactors without their true intentions coming to the light. No longer will those who use the name of God as a cynical strategy for control be able to keep the light from shining.
When the prophetess Anna begins to tell everyone about the child at the end of this passage, many years and many mysteries lie between Israel and the salvation of the Resurrection, but the word has come. Many folks I’ve talked to have lived the same story: surrounded by the culture of Midwestern or Southern Protestantism, nonetheless they can name a day when God showed up, perhaps not revealing all that lay before them, the crosses and the sorrows and the friends’ deaths that would mark their stories, but certainly knowing that salvation had become present. For those who can remember such a day, just as much as for those who can remember a road to Damascus, the salvation of Jesus the Messiah has come, and in this season of Christmastide, such is great and good news.
May our stories be stories of deliverance, and may our prayers be prayers for the Kingdom.
Check back in the next couple days for this week’s Lectionary post. Christmas celebrations have delayed but not canceled it.
Programming note: This is a sermon that Nathan Gilmour preached at Athens Christian Church on December 18, 2011. The sermon text was Luke 1:46-55.
Insurrection: To Believe Is Human, To Doubt Divine.
by Peter Rollins
185 pp. Howard Books. $16.00.
In 2009 I started a journey into existentialism, a body of philosophy and literature that I’d heard of in my college days, largely skirted through graduate school, and only returned to because my friend Michial Farmer (you might know him from the podcast) talked me into reading and discussing Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time with him as he prepared for his comprehensive exams. Once we’d worked our way through that, I turned around and read most of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and (because a student of mine is using it in his senior research project), Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. Before 2009, for other reasons, I’d also read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov and several of Nietzsche’s books, which also usually get listed as influences on existentialism. I did all that reading before 2009, and I taught Brothers Karamazov this spring. So when I wrapped up Peter Rollins’s book Insurrection, I knew that I was looking at a popularization of existentialism for Christians, and I knew that Rollins has put together a pretty good treatment of the intellectual movement for non-specialists: coming away from this book, someone without the background in literature and philosophy that I happen to have will be able to say that there’s a strain in Christianity that emphasizes the felt absence of God as a valid part of the experience of confessing Christ; that the trappings of popular piety often serve as psychological defense mechanisms that keep people from having to confront unpleasant things in life; and that the crucifixion names not only a historical moment but also a way of relating to the world.
Rollins breaks down the “movements” of existentialism (though he does not call it that) into a movement that holds up God as the one who protects everything for the sake of the believer, a movement that gives up everything for the sake of God, and a movement that gives up everything, including God (30). Turning to Christ’s call on the cross, Eloi Eloi lama sabbachthani (Mark 15:34, Matthew 27:46) as his central text, Rollins spends the first half of the book articulating a psychological theology with the felt absence of God as its starting point. The end result reminds me of Saint John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul (I refer to the longer version, the one I’ve spent the most time with) in its focus on the long periods of dryness in which the presence of God gives way to a sense of absence. In Rollins’s vision, the experience of being-abandoned-by-God is not something that happens to some but not others but something that lies at the heart of Christianity, something that the cowardly can block by means of ideology (chapter 2) or by holding onto Church liturgy as a sort of security blanket (chapter 3) but which, for those Christians who choose honesty over self-deception, is the shape of most of the Christian life. Such is the main focus of the book’s first part.
Before I move to the second part, I should note where I depart from Rollins’s sort of Christian existentialism. Perhaps it’s because I work so regularly with college students and church congregations rather than with book publishers and conference audiences, but I found Rollins a bit tiresome as he reduced other people’s differences from his own ideology as satisfactions of “psychological need” and as he referred to those who differ from him as possessed of “infantile faith” (50) and as he took again and again the role of the Nietzschean psychologist, ignoring the content and substance of other people’s ideas in favor of swipes at other people’s inner states. I point to these not as limitations of Rollins’s own intellect (he could very well have actual arguments published in other texts) but as shortcomings of this book: in the first part at least, Rollins tends towards grand suspicions of other people’s motivations and consciousness rather than self-examination in the face of difference. The difference between my own existentialism and Rollins’s is not so much in the content as in the approach to difference, but it’s not unimportant: where his prose tends to treat those who differ as inferior, I’m far more inclined to think that the difference might distinguish different kinds of goodness rather than always between goodness and badness, and furthermore I’m far more suspicious of myself: after all, if there is a distinction to be made between better kinds of being-Christian and worse kinds, I always suspect that mine might be the worse.
Part two, labeled “Resurrection,” takes readers past the existential angst of “Eloi Eloi” and into a way of life that Rollins calls Resurrection life but which bears little resemblance to the traditional Christian doctrine of the same name. Rather than turning to 1 Corinthians 15, which in my own thinking is the best starting place for thinking about Resurrection as a horizon, or to Romans 12, which is as fine a place as I can immediately imagine for thinking about how Resurrection informs life in the Saeculum, Rollins turns to Camus and Nietzsche as helps to say what Resurrection looks like. Invoking a very Camus-flavored Sisyphus in the sixth chapter (128), Rollins calls Resurrection life an affirmation not of the hope of a life filled with goodness where this existence so often falls short but of life as already experienced (129). Resurrection for Rollins is not a rejection of a Nietzchean sense of eternal recurrance but an embrace of the same, a yea-saying to life as it is, with all of life’s horrors rolled into it (130). In short, nobody gets resurrected for Rollins: some just stop crying out for a life that makes human beings suffer.
Such an embrace of power as the core reality of existence rather than a corruption of the same logically leads, as far as I can tell, nowhere in particular: I’ve known Nietzscheans (and Foucaultians, the English department’s version of the same) who were right-wingers and Nietzscheans who were left-wingers. After all, when there is no good life to which one might compare and by which one might judge this life, any difference is just more difference. Or, if you can’t resist (as I can’t), it’s difference, difference, difference all the way down. Rollins, when his coin got flipped, landed on the left, so the second half of the book early and often names typically New-Left causes as the true outgrowths of mature Christianity. Rollins makes the typical and the unreflective move of equating racism, sexism and homophobia (140), sneering at people who volunteer at homeless shelters and hold down jobs that those homeless people cannot have (151-52), and even at one point going after Batman as someone who could use his money better for school improvement than for Batmobiles and Bat-Caves (142). Rollins’s earlier embrace of Eternal Recurrance quickly enough falls away in this section as he holds forth the hope that the same stuff, with the proper social agitation, won’t happen to the next generation as it did to the current one (148), and by the end of the book, Rollins, in his fervor for New-Left protest, seems to make of that group of folks something like a cross between Hegel’s world-historic souls and Plato’s philosopher-kings (174).
None of this is to take away from the first half of the book, which even as it shows seeds of the later elitism, still does a good job of popularizing Christian existentialism. But when Rollins ventures to step beyond Eloi Eloi, he becomes, for better or for worse, a fairly typical avant-garde New-Left liberal, one happy to fly from continent to continent speaking at conferences while decrying the “bourgeoisie” (the folks Marx would likely have called workers) and their clinging to superstition. Because Eternal Recurrence has no content, has no telos against which to compare the recurring, Rollins easily enough turns his affirmation of “life” (a word which is always contested, even when a book pretends that it ain’t) into a programmatic progressivism and folks of his ilk, as they wander from conference to conference as the harbingers of “life.”
Those who have read more than one of my reviews know that I tend to be suspicious of the traveling consultant, much preferring the Benedictine stability of the parish preacher or the small-college professor to the grand ideas and finger-pointing from the guy-from-out-of-town. So it goes. But I still assert, and may those with ears to hear listen, that one tells trees apart by the fruit they bear.
General Introduction
- The end of the semester
- Freudian slips
The Surplus Population
- Scrooge and Thomas Malthus
- Enlightenment optimism
- Population checks
- Tiny Tim as a check on Malthus’ checks
Victorian Ghost Lore
- The chains
- The teleology of ghosts
- Conventional skepticism
- Gravy and graves
Dickens and Capitalism
- Fezziwig vs. Scrooge
- Misers vs. capitalists
- The capitalist as the life of the party
Tiny Tim
- Symbol or character?
- Wise children and noble cripples
- Christ the healer of the lame
- Tiny Tim as Pelagian Christ figure
Christmas Yet-To-Come
- Where Disney gets it wrong
- Imagining your funeral
- Scrooge’s conception of fate
- Does the reality of the vision matter?
Dickens and Advent
- Gilmour’s doubleminded Christmas
- Conversion story
- A Christmas Carol as somewhere in between
- How to live in both worlds
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2011.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Norton, 1976.
Irving, Washington. The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
Pliny the Younger. The Complete Letters. Ed. P.D. Walsh. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
Scott, Walter. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2011.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. London: Arden, 2006.
Revised Common Lectionary Page for 25 December 2011 (The Nativity of the Lord, Year B)
Isaiah 9:2-7 • Psalm 96 • Titus 2:11-14 • Luke 2:1-14, (15-20)
I did preach the Sunday morning sermon on Easter 2001, but I’ve never preached a Sunday morning sermon on Christmas. I will not be preaching on Christmas morning in 2011 either, though part of me wishes I were. Luke’s version of the Nativity has been part of my imagination since I can remember, certainly before I was baptized. I wish I could say that I was an avid Bible-reader as a youngster, but like many my age, I come to Luke’s version of Christ’s birth first through Charlie Brown and only later through the New International Version.
When Luke sets about telling the Nativity story, he frames the whole act in a series of sent messages. Caesar issues a decree, then God sends angels, then the shepherds go and make known. I have little desire to revisit debates about early Imperial census-taking practices; enough ink has been spilled there. What’s far more interesting is the movement from messenger to messenger. The people carrying Caesar’s decree never appear in Luke’s text, though certainly most readers can imagine the official agents of power as they declare in the provinces that life as the people know it must cease so that Caesar can exert and display and bolster his own power. The Empire’s message finds the people as they are and declares, under penalty of Rome’s harsh wrath, that those who hear must go.
When the angels come, their message relies far more on the compelling grandeur of the message itself: they do not command the shepherds to do anything. Instead the angelic decree declares that the Christ, the Lord, is born to all people, for all people. The angels tell the shepherds that when they come to the city of David they will see certain things, but the shepherds go there on their own, compelled by hope rather than coerced by fear. Though they fill the field (or the sky, if you’re going with traditional iconography), the Heavenly Host themselves remain secondary to the proclamation. The shepherds do not talk of angels but of kings when they depart; the young Messiah is himself enough warrant for them to get on the move.
The shepherds themselves are the perfect third element of Luke’s tale of tidings: with no power to coerce and without the splendor of the angels of Heaven, the shepherds, as Luke tells the story, simply make known what they had witnessed. Foreshadowing what the resurrected Jesus says of his disciples in the opening of Acts, the shepherds go and become witnesses. And despite the shepherds’ own social standing, people are amazed by the things to which they bear witness. Thus in microcosm, the Nativity in Luke takes the shape of the whole of Luke-Acts: the powers of the world exert their might to move people by fear, then an act of Heaven strikes the lowly and inspires them to bear witness, and in the end, the true wonder and marvel of it all lies not with the might of Rome or even with the splendor of the angels but with the lowly witnesses, telling stories not of their own heroic might but of the wonderful salvation of God which, entirely by grace, they’ve been able to see.
As Advent gives way to Christmas and winter to the growing light of day, may our own lives as witnesses to the gospel bring wonder to all those who have ears to hear.
I see no need for show notes this week—let the bibliography speak for itself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: A Selection. Ed. Helmut Gollwitzer. Grand Rapids, MI: Westminster John Knox, 1994.
Benedict. The Rule of St. Benedict. Ed. Timothy Frye. New York: Vintage, 1998.
Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005.
Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: NAL, 2003.
Donne, John. The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons. Ed. John Carey. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Constance Garnett. New York: Norton, 2011.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2000.
Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Hackett, 2003.
Plato. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson. New York: Hackett, 1997.
Sayers, Dorothy L. Gaudy Night. New York: Harper Touch, 1995.
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
Thomas Aquinas. The Summa Theologica. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Christian Classics, 1981.
Updike, John, Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995.
Revised Common Lectionary Page for 18 December 2011 (Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year B)
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 • Luke 1:46b-55 or Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26 • Romans 16:25-27 • Luke 1:26-38
Once again, I’ll be preaching this text on December 18, so I’ve already given it some thought. The way our congregation does the Advent candles, love is the culminating candle, the fourth in the Sundays of Advent and that which comes directly before the central Christ candle. Anyone who has been around theological disputes for the last decade (perhaps the last couple millennia) knows that love is one of the grand contested words in the Christian tradition, one that takes its cues from the stories that people tell and that resists assimilation into those stories and that becomes one of the truly knock-down arguments within Christian circles: nobody can come out of a theological dispute as the voice of wisdom if the other voices can demonstrate that the position one holds is un-loving.
A traditionalist myself, I always start out, when thinking and preaching and writing about love, assuming that the rich traditions of the Church, including but not exclusive to church song, must inform the words we use, and the Magnificat must be one of those grand, central songs. There was a span of time, I’ll admit out front, that Luke 1:52-53 was for me the core of the Magnificat, that the rest of it was basically liturgical decoration, but as I’ve written my sermon for next Sunday, I realize that the lifting of the lowly, while indisputably the content of God’s salvation that Mary sings, cannot stand alone lest it become an agenda for electoral politics rather than a song of God’s acts in the world.
What strikes me now about the Magnificat is that God starts out the song as Savior. Those familiar with the early generations of the Roman Empire no doubt will recognize that Savior is one of the titles that the Emperor claimed for himself. (I always want to write Saviour, because I think of the Romans as British, I suppose.) Mary’s song here, coming to us in Luke, thus starts out subversive not because of the social reversals later (though it gets there) but because “my Savior” in this song is not the Empire-appointed savior, one that secures “safety” by means of brutal wars and cultural assimilation. Instead, Mary’s Savior is the invisible God, who comes to each generation not in the trappings of conquest and territory but by means of stories, the faithful songs that the faithful sing about the powerful men who thought they could stand against God and the God-fearing weaklings of the world whom God chose to bear witness against them. Mary can sing confidently that generations will call her blessed not because she has powers of her own but because the God about whom Israel sings has placed her centrally within the grand Salvation Song.
Mary remembers, however, that God is holy, and that governs the song just as much as the word Savior steers it against Empire. Perhaps later in life Mary will fall victim to the same ideologies that seemed to follow Jesus, those that would make him a new Judas Maccabeus or a Philistine-smashing new David. Perhaps she beheld Jesus, suffering in Jerusalem, and despaired that her son was dying because he was a failed Messiah. But in this moment, singing this song, Mary stands back, averting her eyes and singing the holiness of the name of God, the acknowledgment that if God’s ways are strange, they stand so not because of a defect in the divine but because the hopes and the fears that life in Empire breed in all of us have distorted our ability to see the goodness of God. The Gospel is indeed strange, but the strangeness is a function of our inability to see straight, not anything in God which, seen through faithful eyes, would itself be amiss.
When Mary sings of the descendants of Abraham in the final lines of the Magnificat, then, she sings of those who, like Abraham, have been called away from the life of the grand Chaldean ways of Empire, those wandering the wilderness as God’s people, perhaps crying out like John, perhaps encountering the nations like Philip, but always tested like Christ Himself, always facing the hard realities of Satan and countering them with the Torah stored away in our hearts, with the gratitude that comes from seeing one’s self as a saved sinner, from the songs that God has given us to sing. The faith that sings might indeed give shape to a world that looks misshapen, might reveal the joy that lies beyond suffering, might illuminate for us God’s love at every turn.
May our songs shape us, strike the ears of the nations, and come to God as the gifts of faithful servants.
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