Rev. Wil Gafney, preaching on the story of Bathsheba, first David’s victim, then mother of his children. Inspiring, moving, and sensitive to victims of rape and domestic violence.
A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church Year A Proper 25: 1 Kings 1:1–5, 11–18, 29–31; Psalm 61; James 5:1–6; Matthew 6:19–27 Sermon begins at 46…
The King Is Dead All Hail the Queen
This essay discusses Barbara Redman’s 1991 article Sabbatarian Accommodation in the Supreme Court, in conversation with chapter 2 of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time by Judith Shulevitz, 2011, “Group Dynamics.”
I was delighted by the clear analysis of political power in Redman’s paper: “the status quo favors majority religions,” and thus “exemptions for [minority practice] give to minorities that which the majority already has by virtue of suffrage and representative government.” I’m tempted to carry it around on cards that I can hand to people who engage in the simplistic “if it’s bad when A does it to B, then it’s equally bad when B does it to A” reasoning that underlies [axis of oppression]-blind policies. Her conclusion that exemptions can thus be seen “not as preferential, but restorative” could be helpful to Catholics confused by our “preferential option” for the poor and marginalized.[1]
The discussion of “perceptual selection”[2] clearly laid out the mechanism by which members of the majority not only come to perceive majority norms as universal norms, coterminous with objectively right and proper behavior, but may even fail to perceive non-normative behavior at all. This is why diversity and inclusion are so important: above and beyond representation, if we don’t look around to see who is not in the room, and go invite them, then we cannot know what we are not perceiving, and our reasoning and decisions will be biased.
I particularly appreciated Redman’s conclusion that it was understandable that the white, male, Protestant men who have constituted the majority of Supreme Court justices were affected by perceptual selection, but that this does not justify some religions being “more equal than others.”[3]
In this context, I cannot recommend highly enough the good work being done by the “Jew Who Has It All” account on social media.[4] Its authors portray life in the Islamo-Judaic nation of Medinat America, which certainly makes reasonable religious accommodations for its Christian minority, but naturally requires that public school students provide a letter signed by their Christian rabbi stating that their attendance at shul is required in order to obtain an excused absence on an ordinary school day. I’ve learned an enormous amount by seeing American Christian normativity through the looking glass.
Redman’s discussion of perceptual selection brings us neatly to Shulevitz. “Sabbath works,” she writes, seeming a bit surprised at her own assertion, because its observance within a Sabbath-observing community is the majority norm, and thus benefits from the perceptual cycle. As she poignantly observes, “The Sabbath of summer camp, because everyone around you observed it, too, felt much more real than any Sabbath I’d experienced in the real world, where my mother and my siblings and I seemed to be the only ones who even noticed it.”[5]
While Redman takes for granted that time can be analyzed in monetary terms, Shulevitz argues compellingly that time is not like money; it is not fungible. “The value of time is relative and situational.”[6] At the same time, Shulevitz makes what strikes me as an economic foundation for the work prohibition on the Sabbath being a mutual “non-compete clause.”[7] If you cheat by working on the Sabbath, then you’ll get ahead of the rest of us, and that’s how we end up in a relentless rat race.
Earlier, in her retelling of the manna stories, she writes “God expects the self-control without which collective life would be impossible.”[8] This is a broader and stronger statement, and reminds me that the Greek root of both “economy” and “ecumenical” means “household”.
We all have multiple identities, and those identities are all socially constructed, even when we perceive them as pertaining to specific individual characteristics. Each axis of oppression/privilege is also an axis of perception. As Redman observes, conflicts among our community identities can create cognitive dissonance that affects all of them, directly or indirectly.[9]
In contemporary American experience, no community is an island: some of them interpenetrate, and all of them float in the multicultural, pluralistic sea of secular society. This inevitably and often powerfully affects how we live out our identities.
<fin>
References & bibliography can be seen below.
One of the first things I learned about the pope in theology school was that the office of the papacy is ordered towards the unity of the entire church. That the pope, by virtue of his office, has a charism for unity — a gift that comes with a call. Today, through the wonders of the internet, I witnessed an extraordinary1 exercise of that charism by Pope Francis.
The screenshot above is from the Ecumenical Prayer Vigil held in Rome on the evening of September 30, as preparation for the Catholic Church’s third stage of the Synod on Synodality. I gather that the inspiration and much of the planning for this prayer service came from Taize: an ecumenical monastic community in France, explicitly not a Catholic monastery, which hosts pilgrims from all over the world, especially young people, who come to pray together. Taize is best known for the particular style of song that it uses: ostinato refrains, in Latin, with verses in varying languages.2
What you see there, from the close of the prayer service, lined up in a row near the top of the central aisle, is Pope Francis in white, seated in his wheelchair in the center, together with the leaders of other Christian churches who participated in the prayer service:
All assembled, by Pope Francis’ invitation, to join him in the closing gesture of blessing the crowds, at the end of the final prayer.
Many of the prayers in the vigil contained a symbolic component, and I believe this was a symbol of Francis’ closing address to the assembly. It wasn’t long; he made three clear points, and I recall that he mentioned that Jesus prayed for the unity of the church. This was about 8 hours ago, and I don’t have the text in front of me, but I think the basic vibe3 of the speech was, What if we just started to act like it?
What if we just started to act like it. What if we just… acted like one family, one church, all the Christian traditions, like we did here, today. What if the next step on the road to unity is to… just… act as if it’s true?
This is extraordinary.
In that same ecclesiology class, we spent some time pondering what the role of the Pope would be, in a united church. If there would be no ecumenism of return, all the wandering sheep obediently coming back home to Rome — which was explicitly rejected at Vatican 2 in favor of a recognition of the real though partial unity of baptism — then what would the Pope do? Would he be a spiritual leader? A figurehead? How could the papal charism of unity be exercised? What would it look like?
Maybe it looks like this.
I note that a decision to just start acting as if it’s true would be quite consistent with the experience of the United and Uniting Churches formed during the 70s or thereabouts, when the ecumenical movement had a particularly energetic burst. I researched them for one of my ecclesiology papers, and in almost every successful case, the decision to be united came first, and the details were hammered out to make it so. I remember one case in particular, a Uniting Church forming from traditions that had different practices around baptism: some held to infant baptism, while others held to believer’s baptism as an adult. How can you be one church if you can’t even agree on how the most basic initiation rite should be celebrated?? Well, it wasn’t easy, and it took time and effort, but they found a way, because the important thing was to be one church, and they weren’t going to let this stop them.4
The opening prayer today was Adsumus, Sancte Spiritus, which the Vatican News commentators noted is traditionally prayed over the Council Fathers when a church council is convened. By Pope Francis’ request, the traditional text was set to a simpler melody, so that all those assembled could participate in the sung prayer. After this vigil, the Synodal Fathers and Mothers were heading off to a three day retreat, a time of prayer, reflection, and most importantly, listening to the Holy Spirit in preparation for the Synod.
Please pray for them, and for our one, holy, small-c catholic, and apostolic church in all its many forms, that this Synod on Synodality may produce an abundant harvest of good fruit.
Gracious God, we pray for your holy catholic church.
Fill it with your truth; keep it in your peace.
Where it is corrupt, reform it.
Where it is in error, correct it.
Where it is right, defend it.
Where it is in want, provide for it.
Where it is divided, reunite it;
for the sake of your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Sabbath is a gift, a practice1, a discipline.
In my Roman Catholic tradition, to participate in the eucharist is sometimes described as “to become what we already are,” a new creation in Christ. Sabbath calls us to remember what we already are: the people of God, created by God on the sixth day as an integral part of God’s creation, entrusted by God to care for creation — or perhaps “to remember and guard” creation, just as the sages wrote we are to remember and guard the Sabbath.
This identity claim is profoundly prior to any and all other identity claims made on us. Before I am a worker, an older sister, a citizen, a person of the 21st century, I am a child of God, one of the people of God. Before we are anything else, we are human2.
The discipline of Sabbath, when kept faithfully, guards a time and a community that regularly reminds us of that prior identity claim. This is the gift of Sabbath: it unbinds us from the time into which we happen to have been born, the place in which we happen to live, and allows us to see that another way of living is possible. We are a people set apart and made holy, just as God set the seventh day apart and made it holy. Keeping the Sabbath reminds us who we are3.
This gift is especially valuable if we happen to be born into a time or place of tyranny, of exploitation, of oppression. By keeping the Sabbath, we take back our dignity. Sabbath reminds us that another way is possible; and one cannot begin to mend the world, to bring forth the reign of God, without that vision. One cannot work towards justice with never a respite from injustice.
Thus Sabbath give us a means of resistance to the reigning tyranny of the day, be it the fascism of our grandparents’ day or the exploitive capitalism and gig culture of our own. Sabbath insists that we do not have to earn rest through productivity, nor to justify rest as enabling productivity4. We deserve rest, simply because we are human5. We are commanded to rest, in imitation of the One who made us.
Against the reigning hyper-individualism of our day, Sabbath insists that we do not belong to ourselves alone, but to God and to each other.
Sabbath rest is not mere idleness; nor is it simply the bodily rest that sleep provides. Sabbath kept properly is consolation for the soul, recreation that is re-creation, a steady weekly rhythm of rest that punctuates and thereby shapes the busy measures of our lives. This suggests to me that the discipline of Sabbath could be a remedy for acedia, traditionally translated as “sloth”: the spiritual malady of passive aimlessness, of idleness that does not refresh6.
The most significant characteristic of the Sabbath is joy. My tradition teaches that joy is an infallible sign of the presence of God. When we gather on the Sabbath in joyful community as the People of God, then God is present among us, rejoicing with us.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Sabbath. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005.
Shulevitz, Judith. The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. New York: Random House, 2011.
What is a practice? https://bltnotjustasandwich.com/2013/01/23/what-is-a-practice/, retrieved on 19 September 2023.
Friday was the beginning of the Season of Creation: an ecumenical observance that calls for prayer and action as inhabitants and caretakers of God’s good creation. I didn’t plan it this way, but I’ve spent time working in my yard both yesterday afternoon and this morning, encountering creation up close and personal.
First, let me explain for any non-churchy types that “Creation” is church-speak for the secular term Nature, meaning the outdoors, the environment, the Earth, the universe. “Creation care” is sometimes used to describe environmentalism, and a number of churches now have a “Green Team” or something similar, made up of volunteers who offer both educational and hands-on opportunities to care for creation. My parish’s Green Team planned a pollinator garden on the grounds last year, for example, and there are periodic events where anyone can come help and learn. In 2015, Pope Francis published an encyclical titled Laudato Si‘: On Care for our Common Home, which has prompted a heightened focus on care for the environment in Catholics all over the world. Francis has stated that he intends to write a sequel to Laudato Si’ this year, focusing on climate change.
Ecumenical comes from a Greek word meaning household, and related to economy: not in the sense of saving money, but with a connotation of the household being ordered properly for the flourishing of all its members, with no waste and no scarcity. This came to mind today as I was pulling down vines and chopping down weed trees… because I really, really don’t like to cut plants back. I want everything to grow! Grow grow grow, happy little plants, do your vegetative thing!
However. Letting plants grow unchecked, wherever and however they want, is actually not good for them. If you are a gardener, you probably know this. My gardener friends told me this. “It’s not good for them,” they said. “You have to cut them back,” they said, “otherwise they’ll get overgrown and get diseased.”
It’s not that I didn’t believe them, exactly. It just wasn’t enough to overcome my reluctance to cut things back.
But yesterday and today, I had up close and personal encounters with what that looks like. Plants that had flourished last year — and so of course I didn’t do anything to them, why would I — are unhealthy this year. Their leaves are turning orange or even black; when I pull them up I see that they’ve been rotting away behind the fence. The grass clumps I left on either side of my gate because they had lovely wispy vertical fronds have become mostly yellow and stiff like straw, with only a little green at the top, their wispy fronds bedraggled. Vines that had grown lavishly up the side of the house and over the yard were strangling the other plants. Shrubs were growing long lanky branches, to get any sun at all.
This was not a well-ordered household. Its inhabitants were not flourishing; they were making each other sick. Some plants got more air, water, sunlight than they needed, while others grew ill from their lack. A properly ordered household allows all its inhabitants to flourish: not just the greedy, pushy ones.1
Plants and trees, flowers and fruits, vines and grasses, evolved as part of the household of Creation. In the wild, they don’t grow unchecked, because all kinds of critters eat them, or trample them, or pull them up to make nests. If I don’t cut those plants back, then as the local apex predator that chased most of the lesser predators away, I’m leaving all those ecological functions unfilled: that’s the first place my science-y brain went.
Today, reflecting on the Season of Creation, and Creation as a household, and Genesis 1, maybe I can work with thinking of myself as a gardener, instead.2 In many English translations of Gen 1:28, God tells the humans to have “dominion” or “lordship” over creation.3 Certain interpretations of this passage have supported the unchecked exploitation of natural resources, whether in the earth, on the earth, or over the earth. That rapacious exploitation has significantly contributed to the perilous climate we find ourselves in today.
But… in feudal societies, a good lord was one who presided over a well-ordered household, in which all its inhabitants thrived. A lord who helped himself to anything he wanted, just because he wanted it, would be notorious as a bad lord; and that’s not the kind of lord that God is.
Some versions use stewardship, rather than dominion. In contemporary English, it’s easier, I think, to see “care, order, and protection of all its members” in the steward of a household, rather than its lord. But the steward was traditionally concerned with the indoor household matters, while the head gardener or groundskeeper would be concerned with the grounds. And Jesus used gardeners in his parables. So I’m quite inclined to think about this verse in terms of humans being gardeners of creation, ensuring its proper order, so that all its inhabitants have what they need to thrive.
And who knows, perhaps gardener could helpfully contextualize that pesky subdue earlier in the same verse: because I’ll tell you, I did a whole lot of subduing the floribunda and raspberries in my yard today, with a lot more to do after I get some thicker gloves — those things have thorns!
It’s been ten years since I attended classes at the Ecumenical Institute, and there have been a lot of changes. Everything I’ve heard about Canvas from every academic I know prompted some trepidation when I sat down to try it out. I’d planned to do my practice during the time that class will be meeting; but by the end of the work day I really needed to be off the computer for a while, so it was after yard work, sunset, and dinner that I finally got started.
It wasn’t too bad, honestly. The main thing that troubled me was that it was way too hard to figure out how to change my password from the default — I practically broke out in hives at the thought of not being able to change it. But I found the relevant help article, and was able to reset it. I navigated through all my options, changed some profile settings, read the syllabus, downloaded the reading homework1, and watched the profs’ 9 minute introduction video. Then I settled in to write this post.
That was Tuesday.
Last week’s #Blaugust theme was “Staying Motivated.” I’ve got plenty of motivation, I just don’t have enough energy!! I wrote two sentences while doing the dishes, gave up, and went to bed.
The final theme of the month is “Lessons Learned.” I’ve re-learned some things I used to know about my blogging style back when I was blogging frequently, like writing while doing the dishes or tidying up: I have a standing desk in my living room, and I like to think while I putter, then stop what I’m doing & write when inspiration strikes. I’ve learned enough of the new WordPress block editor that it is no longer alien terrain, at least. Most important, probably, is that it’s better to write part — any part — of a larger project than it is to keep dithering about what order I should write them in. That alone was worth the price of admission, as the saying goes.
I’ve also really enjoyed interacting with other bloggers on the Blaugust Discord, a sort of cross between a party and a support group. Being able to talk about what I’m doing always helps me with doing it… which is why I started a theology blog in the first place.
Hello, Canvas! My Jewish and Christian Views of Sabbath course starts on Tuesday, and comes with a side of blogging motivation.
Farewell, #Blaugust! I had a blast. See you next year!
This interesting article came across my feed the other day. From the earliest, exclusively-Protestant days of the modern ecumenical movement, it seems, the notion of praying together was being considered, at least in some lay circles: not only as permissible, nor even desirable, but as a necessary element of the journey towards unity.
Who could have been the author of a paper on the relation of prayer to Christian unity published by the movement for a world conference on Faith and Order in its early years?
— Read on www.oikoumene.org/news/on-an-anonymous-layman-and-how-lukas-vischer-supported-paul-couturiers-view-on-praying-together-for-unity
The Catholics didn’t join in until after the Second Vatican Council, which remarkably included Protestant observers as one of the first steps the Catholic Church took towards the ecumenical movement. The Council produced the even more remarkable teaching that the Church of Christ — the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” church of the Nicene Creed — “subsists in” the Catholic Church: rejecting the original draft that reiterated prior claims that anyone outside the Catholic Church was not part of the church affirmed in the Creed.
The notion that Catholics and Protestants were all Christians together was new and invigorating. In the 70s, at least in my childhood diocese, the norm was that Protestants were welcome to receive communion at special occasions such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals. My current parish was founded in the seventies, in an interfaith center shared with several Protestant congregations. They decided together that they would all take the name St John the Evangelist, as a sign of unity. I am told that in the early years, on Palm Sunday, the churches would all celebrate the procession with palms and the liturgy of the word together, separating only after the homily/sermon to celebrate the Lord’s Supper separately, according to our separate rites and beliefs.
Alas, these ecumenical practices were repressed as part of the soi-disant “reform of the reform”, and my parish’s interactions with the remaining Protestant congregation in the center tend to be practical cooperation rather than prayerful. We do not, for example, come together for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which I find particularly disappointing given our history and location.
Today Christians of all traditions, he notes at the outset, pray for the unity of the Church of Christ. … What makes problems – indeed theological problems – is divided churches praying together for unity.
In recent years, I’ve experienced ecumenical prayer in two contexts. First, during my time as a master’s student at the Ecumenical Institute, many of our classes began or ended with prayer, typically the Lord’s Prayer since we hold that (mostly) in common. This was not explicitly prayer for unity. Second, at a weekend meeting of the North American Academy of Ecumenists, which I blogged about at the time. I found the prayers liturgically wonderful, but not, as far as I recall, explicitly ordered towards repentance for our divisions, as advocated by the anonymous layman referenced above.
While discussing potential paper topics for my first ecclesiology course at the EI, I commented to my instructor that I was surprised that no one, as far as I was aware, had compared the rending of the churches, Christ’s mystical body, to the rending of Christ’s body on the cross. “The problem with that,” she said, “is that it would imply that the divided churches are necessary for our salvation.” So much for that idea, in her course, at least.
But I disagree with that reasoning. For one thing, we’re talking about metaphor. A metaphor by definition doesn’t take on all the attributes of its referent; you might as well say that we can’t call God “Father” because it would imply that God has a penis. For another, it seems quite possible to me that the divided churches might be necessary for our salvation, as part of the long, slow, Spirit-led, but still human, process of understanding, interpreting, taking on, and living out the Good News. Sometimes you have to take things apart in order to see how they fit together. In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity; but humans are easily confused about essentials versus non-essentials,
The essence of the problem of remaining divisions is the churches’ lack of penitence and the means to solve it is… prayer.
But this anonymous layman’s article suggests to me additional support for making such a comparison. Jesus’ suffering and death have been a locus of penitence and sorrow throughout the Christian tradition. If the problem is a lack of penitence, then framing the rending of the churches in terms of Christ’s passion might well elicit it.
Imagine Friday prayers for Christian unity composed in such terms, for churches to pray either separately or together. Surely they would inevitably move us to praying together, as one body, one spirit in Christ.
Gracious God, we pray for your holy catholic church.
Fill it with your truth;
Keep it in your peace.
Where it is corrupt, reform it.
Where it is in error, correct it.
Where it is right, defend it.
Where it is in want, provide for it.
Where it is divided, reunite it;
for the sake of your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Will comes up a lot, in Catholic liturgy, devotions, formation. My dad, who converted from a Holiness tradition a couple years after I was born, always said that what he liked best about Catholicism was that it wasn’t about feelings: it was about what you thought, what you decided, what you willed, how you acted. Your inferred status as saint or sinner didn’t depend on how you felt, and there was no pressure to feel a certain way in order to avoid Doing It Wrong, as in his childhood experience. It was intellectual, rather than emotional.
I generally associated “will” with something I was supposed to stomp out in favor of *God’s* will. Especially as a young woman who was constantly pointed at Mary as a role model: you know, obedient, meek and mild, pondered all these things in her heart? (Not really, but that’s what I got growing up.)
“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will” — there was a song in our hymnal with those words, when I was in college. Again, as a young woman, coming of age during Second Wave feminism, it sounded far too much like patriarchal submission to me. It creeped me out, honestly, but it was held up to us as something to which we should aspire.
I remember vividly when I started to wonder about that. It was Holy Thursday, praying before the Altar of Repose where the blessed sacrament was placed after the service.
This is a Holy Thursday practice that I adore, by the way! (heh, see what I did there?) It’s the only time that eucharistic adoration actually makes sense to me. We’ve just liturgically re-enacted Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, and instituting the Eucharist at the Last Supper; then, like the disciples, we go out with Jesus to a secluded place, where he asks his best friends to keep watch with him while he prays, and suffers the agony in the garden… and they fall asleep. So we, we keep watch with him on this night, and don’t fall asleep like the disciples did.
Anyway, so I was praying before the blessed sacrament, meditating on Jesus’ experience in the garden, and I had this thought:
….but Jesus had to have a strong will, right? because he was so afraid that he was sweating blood, but he didn’t run away. Having a strong will must be *important*. And how do you get a strong will if you don’t ever *practice*? Your will must be a tool, like a hoe, or a bow and arrow; and if you don’t keep in practice with it, then it won’t do you any good when you really need it.”
It seems to me that “will” has at least three distinct connotations in Catholic Christian thought:
I find it very unhelpful that we use the same word for these related but distinct concepts!
I’d love to hear from my readers about your religious associations with “will”, especially from men who were raised Catholic, and non-Catholic Christians.
That was always the subject of the email, whether it contained a scrap of an idea, a concept, a link to an article, or a paragraph or two. “Conversation fodder” — it was our shorthand for “hey, wanna talk about this sometime? I think it would make a great discussion.” We must have sent dozens of those emails, in both directions, during the years of our never-ending conversation.
My dear atheist friend Mark died eight years ago yesterday, and yesterday I came across this Commonweal article that I would so love to have sent him. It’s just the sort of thing he’d be interested in: a secular, scientific approach to ethics.
Is ethics like Math? A new biography of philosopher Derek Parfit explains the eccentric philosopher’s quest to find a legitimate secular moral theory.
I don’t know what he would have thought of it, or of the review of the biography. Often, if the fodder was an article, he’d print it out at home, bring it to work, and then pull it out of his pocket during our walk around campus that we filled with conversation. He would have marked up sections to talk about, or made notes in the margin, and bring it with him for reference.
Mark and I were officemates for about six years, I think. We started our conversations after he heard me delightedly explaining to someone that the academic conference of religious scholars was devoting a whole session to whether the Flying Spaghetti Monster qualified as a religion. He paused to listen, and then inquired, “You take your religion very seriously, don’t you? I mean, you post flyers on the bulletin board outside your office about religious stuff.” “Yes, I do,” I said. “But… you like the Flying Spaghetti Monster?” I agreed, enthusiastically. “Don’t you realize we’re making fun of you?” he asked bemusedly. When I said yes, he said he’d like to talk more about that sometime. That’s how it started.
I don’t know what he’d say about this book review, whether he’d want to read, or skim, the book… or perhaps read up on Parfit in some other source that didn’t come from a Catholic magazine. I don’t know if he’d find the reviewer’s comments persuasive; I think maybe some of them he would, but others, perhaps, would only be convincing to people who already accepted the reviewer’s theist perspective, as often happened. Either way, we would have had a lot of intellectual fun together.
I used to share my homework essays with him, too, if I were taking a course like moral theology. Each one was good for a day or two of conversation, and would often spark additional threads that he kept track of on the folded up paper he kept in his pocket to refer to, when it was time for a new topic.
I’m excited about going back to school in September. But I wish Mark were here, so we could talk about my class. Or science fiction. Or politics. Or Star Trek. Or what we each believed, and why we believed it. He was a fantastic conversation partner. We had so much fun together.
I miss him year round, but it’s harder in August.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I will be auditing a class this fall, and I’m excited about it. It’s not the best time for me; this has turned out to be an extremely busy year at work. So why did I sign up anyway?
Mainly because the Ecumenical Institute, where I got my masters, is offering a course on a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about anyway, and the format of the course looks fantastic. Also, as an alumna, I can audit a course at a discount… and I’ll only be auditing, right? It’s not like I’ll have to write any papers or anything… [and if you believe I’m not going to write papers, there’s a bridge I can sell you for a fantastic price.] Plus the critical prerequisite: the EI has embraced hybrid learning since the beginning of the pandemic, so I can attend virtually, no commute and no COVID risk. This is a fantastic move for the EI, in my opinion, because they can now attract students beyond the local area.
I’ll be auditing the Jewish Christian Studies Course on Sabbath, and it’s being taught by two women, one Christian and one Jewish. Who could ask for more?? The text is The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. I got both the paperback and the ebook versions, because I do like to write in my theology books (thank you, Ann O.); but on an e-reader, any book can be a large print book! My last class was ten years ago, and my vision isn’t what it used to be. I’m presently dithering about whether I want to take notes on paper or on computer, since at work I generally type my meeting notes. But meeting notes are very different from class notes, so I’m still pondering.
As a kid, what I absorbed was that Saturday was the Sabbath for Jews, and Sunday was the Sabbath for Christians — the Lord’s Day, the one we’re supposed to “keep holy” according to the Ten Commandments. I didn’t think too much about it.
In college, I learned that the earliest Christians, who were mostly Jewish, of course, kept the Sabbath on Saturday like always… and then got up early before work to gather for the Christian worship. Huh, I thought, that’s interesting. That’s serious devotion. Imagine getting up early every Monday morning to go to church before you had to be at work.
But over the past few years, I started rethinking this: partly out of my own experience. I’m generally so tired at the end of the workweek, and honestly, I’ve never found going to church to be restful. I was a liturgical minister of one sort or another for most of my adult life, and even when I’m “only” part of the congregation, my full and active participation takes a lot out of me. Someone told me at some point that the etymology of liturgy was a word that meant work, that Christian liturgical worship was “the work of the people.” It feels like it, at least to me.
Additionally, I’ve been very impressed in recent years by some of the rabbis that I’ve followed on Twitter, and how they talk about the Sabbath: that rest does not have to be earned, that we deserve rest just by virtue of existing. That’s a terrifically prophetic word for our productivity-obsessed society. (I also want to shout out the brilliant @JewWhoHasItAll , from whom I learned that it’s not Saturday, it’s Seventh Day, as well as what it’s like to be a religious minority in a supposedly-but-not-actually “Judeo-Christian” society.)
So, I’ve started to think that it might make sense, to rest on the seventh day as the LORD did after completing the work of creation, and to rise Sunday morning, the day of Christ’s resurrection, to celebrate the Eucharist in remembrance of him. I’ve started to cautiously incorporate it into my practice and my writing; cautiously, because Christians appropriating Jewish things is INappropriate and disrespectful. So that’s something I’m looking forward to bringing up in class.
Tuesday nights from 6 to 8, starting Sept 2: I can’t wait!
Gaudete Theology 