Staying Put II

Two? Yes. Surely you remember reflection the first.

This time, refreshing words from Edward Oakes on why Protestants are not, from an intelligent Catholic point of view, heretics:

"When the Western Church fissiparated in the sixteen century, the Reformers took a portion of the essential patrimony of the Church with them, and they thereby left both the Roman Church and themselves the poorer for it."

He might have added that remarks similar to those of Therese of Lisieux which he mentions also show up in the Catholic Catechism itself (see 2011).

Christopher Merrill

So much then for art going secular. What about the opposite direction, when art returns to religion, hat in hand? I can't think of a better recent example of this phenomenon than the poet and writer Christopher Merrill's chronicle of what happens when a literature professor meets Mt. Athos. It is the story of a man wavering in his devotion to two masters: Art and God... and one wins:

"In his Nobel lecture Saul Bellow remarks 'There is another reality, the genuine one, which we always lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without art we can't receive.' But art is not the only intermediary between us and the divine. My pilgrimages to Athos, my encounters with holy men, my readings of Scripture and patristic literature - these have convinced me that prayer is a more direct route to the other reality, which is why Gregory of Nyssa called prayer 'the leader in the choir of virtues'" (215).

And if you missed it that time, Merrill lays it out again.

"'Poetry is a means of redemption,' wrote Wallace Stevens, seeking a supreme fiction by which to live in the absence of God. He believed the loss of faith was a form of growth, yet a priest reports that on his deathbed Stevens converted to Roman Catholicism, saying it was time, 'to get in the fold.' I treasure this story, which complicates our picture of a poet who once said that 'God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms as, for example, the form of high poetry.' But Stevens often visited churches, and I suspect that in his last days he discovered the limits of the poetic imagination. As a friend said, 'He wasn't taking any chances.' Nor am I" (257).

That may have earned him a few sneers in the faculty lounge. But it did get him a spot on millinerd.

millinerd sermon time

Here is a sermon I preached today for Epiphany 3. I did my best to follow that time-honored preaching motto, Christum praedicare ex fontibus, that is, "preach Christ from the sources." Though I understand that the alternative My opinion praedicare ex movie clips is also popular.

Continue...

Readings: Nehemiah 8:2-10, 1 Corinthians 12:12-27, Luke 4:14-21

To the Anderson Coopers of the ancient world, that is, to anyone whose job it might have been to observe the current affairs of the Ancient Near East... Israel was finished. What reason could there have been to assume the survival of a relatively insignificant nation that was first divided, and then destroyed twice? Divided due to internal tensions into a northern and southern kingdom. Then the mighty Assyrians destroyed the north in 722BC, and the mightier Babylonians destroyed the south when they sacked Jerusalem in 586BC.

Israel, it must have seemed to contemporary observers, had had a decent run. First just a wandering tribe, they had somehow gotten themselves out of slavery in Egypt, and after migrating to the Jerusalem area had even pieced together an infrastructure complete with a king, a temple, an army.

Though never even approaching the expanse and power of Egypt, Babylon and Assyria, still considering their size they had at least done better than the Canaanites or Hittites. But after a division and two destructions, and their elite being transported to a foreign city where it was very tempting to remain, it was probably time to write Israel off.

Egypt Assryia, Babylon - Empires were the real game of the ancient world, and they left their mark. Just a train-ride away in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are remnants of all of them - tombs of Egyptian rulers, friezes from the intimidating thronerooms of Assryian kings, even some of the glazed brick that decorated the Processional way through Babylon's legendary Ishtar Gate, bricks that the Jews would have seen as they were marched for the first time into that foreign city. But walk past the Babylon display at the Met and you'll also see remnants from the great stone carvings of Persepolis, the capital of the Persian Empire. And God used these Persians to give Israel a second chance.

As the Babylonians conquered Assyria, now Persia conquered the Babylonians, and Cyrus the king of Persia, took a unique approach to Israel. He entered the Babylon that he had conquered and allowed the deported elite of Israel to return, if they please, to Jerusalem - and he even offered a government grant to rebuild the temple. This was perhaps the first case in history of a ruler granting permission, even financial assistance, to a religion other than his own.

Some Jews were comfortable enough in Babylon to stay, but others took Cyrus up on his offer, walked back to Jerusalem, and this is the context of the Nehemiah reading today. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah both chronicle this critic period of reconstruction in Jerusalem.

First the temple was rebuilt with royal funding. It was a task not without bureaucratic difficulties - it was in fact stalled for several years - but the building was completed. Biblical scholars estimate the date of completion to be around 515 or 516. If you do your math and subtract 516 from 586, the year of the destruction of Jerusalem, your left with 70 - just about the exactly the number of years that the prophet Jeremiah foretold the punishment of the Judeans would endure.

After the temple came the task was of rebuilding the walls, which due to the unpopularity of the project had to be done with a sword in one hand and a spade in the other. But these tasks now completed, it was time to worship. Ezra, a new priest had been sent from Babylon was placed in charge. It was disobedience to the commandments that had led to the exile, and a new generation of leadership in Israel was determined not to let this happen again. So aside from the reinstitution of temple sacrifice, Ezra the priest performed a public recitation of the law for all the people. According to the text, "both men and women and all who could hear with understanding" were invited to hear. It was a family occasion.

In our reading we see that Ezra erects a wooden platform, a platform that recalls the bronze platform that Solomon used when he dedicated the first Jerusalem temple so long ago. Maybe the implication is that when the Scriptures are read God's presence is invoked just as if the temple was right there. The text tells us this happened on the first day of the seventh month, which subsequently would be known as Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year's Day. Because for this congregation, the remnant of Israel restored to Jerusalem, a new era had begun.

They read from the Scriptures all morning. Six hours. And Nehemiah says that they added interpretation - "They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading." Perhaps the interpretation was necessary because the people now spoke Aramaic and the Scripture were in Hebrew. Or perhaps the interpretation was necessary, because the only way to insure obedience to the law in this crucial moment of congregational renewal was by explaining it to the people, bringing their minds into conformity and active engagement with God's commands.

The response of the people to hearing the law - the law that they had broken - was to weep. Perhaps they wept for the sins that led to the exile, or for fear that they couldn't keep the high standard that God's law required, but Ezra the priest stops them. He tells them not to weep but to feast, for "the joy of the LORD is your strength."

Whatever sin had caused the exile - and if we're to take Isaiah and Jeremiah at their word it was sin that caused it - whatever sin it was, the way to not succumb to it again would not be by a downcast and sober moral compliance, but by a joyful, reverent obedience to the law which was not a burden but a privilege. In that joy would be the strength to carry on.

And that was how, the nation of Israel, which by common sense would say had no reason to continue, continued.

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The practice so vividly described by Nehemiah, the public reading of the law, continued as well. Public reading of the law with interpretation. This was the ritual of the synagogue. Males of age were given this privilege, and in the Gospel for this morning, Jesus, now of age, is poised to give it a shot himself. But the catch is, it's his home-synagogue. Luke tells us in gospel text this morning that after a brief healing tour, Jesus is coming home to Nazareth, a town about to receive a small scale version of the second coming of Christ.

Perhaps you consider Princeton your hometown, but if not, you may have visited your hometown recently over Christmas. One of the unsettling aspects about hometowns is that they know you pretty well. Though you may have attained some measure of significance amongst colleagues and friends, the hometown typically knows you from the bottom up, and if necessary, can cut you down to size.

Luke tells us that at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, already "a report about him spread through all the surrounding country… Christ was praised by everyone," but Nazareth wouldn't be nearly as easy to impress.

It's the Sabbath day, he unrolls the scroll, and he finds the place where it was written:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor...."

He finishes the reading, rolls back the scroll. And, like we saw in Nehemiah, prepares to give the interpretation. Luke pauses for drama: "The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him." And then Jesus gives a rather abrupt interpretation. "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

What had been recorded centuries ago by one of the greatest prophets was, Jesus tells his mom, dad, friends, neighbors and former playpals, referring to him.

As we'll discover in next week's gospel, this didn't go over too well. To the hometown crowd who knew him - a claim to fulfill prophecy must have seemed arrogant. Nevertheless, we know that what would have been arrogant, and what still would be arrogant, coming from the lips of anyone else, was, when coming from the lips of Jesus, a truthful statement of fact.

Because, simply put, Jesus Christ fulfills the Scriptures. There may be many interpretations of the Bible, but there's only one fulfillment - and that is Christ. Luke tells us that at least since the age of twelve, Jesus had been "sitting among the teachers, listening and asking them questions about the law." Back then the all in temple were "amazed at the understanding and answers" of this twelve year old. But Jesus didn't stay twelve. He must have kept reading, thinking, praying, maybe even struggling with conclusions he was coming to. Could he really who Isaiah had predicted? Did all Israel's promises, all the world's hope really fall to him? Yes. It cannot have been easy for him to accept that, but he accepted it - he accepted it for us - and when the time was right, he went public with his staggering realization. And his answers did the same thing then that they do today - make people nervous.
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Today's three readings give us three snapshots of congregational life, we've looked at two, and the third is Paul's words to the perpetually divided congregation at Corinth.

Last week Father Diogenes began this chapter, pointing out danger of equating spirituality with the extraordinary or ecstatic, for the Holy Spirit is just as prone to move in the ordinary. After all, as we've already seen God did not choose to give his inaugural address amongst the big city lights of Rome, but in an ordinary, no-named village like Nazareth. The only foolproof indicators of God's presence, we learned, are not flashy pyrotechnics, but fruits of the Spirit such as peace and patience. Also pointed out was the danger of assuming that because the Holy Spirit worked one way with someone, that hence such a manifestation should be expected from everyone else.

These themes continue in today's passage, and a new theme emerges as well - one popular in Paul's day - the analogy of the body.

Read to the ends of the book of Ezra or Nehemiah, you'll find an urgent concern that the returned exiles separate from the Gentiles. Foreign spouses - even if they were half-Jewish - would lead to foreign gods, so Ezra and Nehemiah were prepared not just to prohibit Jewish intermarriages with foreigners, but to even break up marriages that already existed, sending widows and children away. That is how serious the returned exiles were about national purity.

Yet, to the Corinthians this morning Paul has the audacity to proclaim that in the church of Jesus Christ, "we were all baptized into one body- Jews or Greeks, slave or free." No longer is national purity an aim, for all national and individual impurities are drowned in the waters of baptism. Up from those waters comes a new organism, the church - a corporation in the Latin sense of corpore - body - the body of Jesus Christ that, because of its international flavor would exhibit an unusual amount of diversity. But rather than valuing the many ways the Spirit was moving, the Corinthians were valuing only those that were externally impressive.

Strangely enough, Renaissance art theory sheds light on this passage. In the early 1400's, the clerics who wrote about painting naturally assumed that there could be only one kind of beautiful form, one proper kind of style that, with the appropriate technical training, anyone could achieve. But as a diversity of artists take up the brush, those who wrote about painting were forced to abandon a theory that proved in time to be too constricting. Experience showed there to be in fact many kinds of beauty - Michelangelo's proportion , Raphael's grace, Leonardo's subtle use of light, Titian's bold use of color. But it took well over a century for Renaissance theorists to discover that.

We learned last week that Paul was way ahead of the journalists at the Economist who think God can be identified with abnormal brain activity, and here we see that Paul was way ahead of Renaissance as well.

"If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?" Paul playfully asks the Corinthians, "If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?" If everyone painted like Michelangelo, where would Raphael be? If every artist was Leonardo, where would Titian be?

The upshot is that there is not one way to be faithful to God at Corinth or at All Saints', there are many, and though important, highly visible channels of ministry are not to be coveted. With his body analogy, Paul seems to be suggesting that to assume, as the Corinthians did, that the most important people of a congregation are the most visible ones, is as foolish as assuming that the most important parts of the human body are the most visible ones like the eyes and hands, as oppose to those minor, inconsequential parts of the body like, you know, like the heart or the lungs.

Paul suggests that the fact that someone is not visible might mean they're even more important, for if they stopped doing their role of quiet prayer or some anonymous but essential service, then the church might collapse as quickly as a body whose heart stopped beating because it wasn't getting face-time. Each of the various roles at Corinth and at all Saints - are essential.

But there one time when one given person or family is more important than the other is when they are suffering - for then, as with a broken leg, the whole rest of the body joins together to support it, a heavier load taken by the unbroken leg, the arms taking up crutches. Likewise when one of us suffers, the rest suffer as well and move in for support. Conversely, when one of us rejoices, the rest rejoice as well.

Therefore we don't have to wait for the next Seminary congregational dynamics textbook to learn the secret to healthy interaction at All Saints. The secret is as immediate as our own bodies. According to Paul, everybody, literally every body in this building right now are walking textbooks as to how to best be members of this congregation.
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I'd like to close with what seems to be a paradox. Paul concludes this morning's readings with the words, "You are the body of Christ and individually members of it." Yet soon we will approach the altar and be handed a consecrated wafer and told, that in fact that bread is the Body of Christ. So which is it? Are we the body of Christ, is the bread the body of Christ, or is it all just symbolic talk that shouldn't be taken too seriously?

It should be taken seriously, and we should not be surprised if such mysteries put a strain on our minds. Christ's ascended body is capable of being present in more ways than one. Yes both we are the body of Christ and the bread is the body of Chirst - which is why another word for what happens at the altar is communion. In a way, we who are the body of Christ, are most fully ourselves at the altar, when we receive the body of Christ - becoming very members incorporate in the mystical Body of the Son. - whose Eucharistic presence is one of the greatest gift we have been given, to sustain until we behold his glory in the age to come.

Amen.

upcoming conference

Three birds (i.e. scholars I'd like to see in person) with one stone (i.e. one conference): David Freedberg, Margaret Miles and William Dyrness. I don't know why this isn't getting more attention:

"Wrestling with the Angel- Art and Religion in the Twentieth Century"
Co-sponsored by the Fordham Center for Religion and Culture and the Museum of Biblical Art.

Free and Open to the Public
RSVP: 212.636.7347, ReligCulture@Fordham.edu
Friday, 26 January 2007
Fordham University, McNally Amphitheatre
140 West 62nd Street

If you can't make it, I'll do my best to blog it. Blogging a conference is one of the best services bloggers can provide. That and those essential "I went to Target today" posts.

UPDATE: I forgot to add this part:

Presentation: "Biblical Art in a Secular Century"
Saturday, 27 January 2007
Museum of Biblical Art
Education Center, 2nd Floor
1865 Broadway at 61st Street

art for art's sake?

According to Moshe Barasch,

"Aestheticians nowadays say that the perception of beauty - often called the aesthetic experience - is a quiet contemplation, leaving the spectator without any desire to go beyond the experience he is having. In Michelangelo's view beauty has the opposite effect: experiencing beauty makes one long for the ultimate origin; it awakens our desire to go beyond the experience itself. This is a motif that constantly recurs in Michelangelo's sonnets ( 195)."

And they wonder why I think art theory gets more interesting the further one gets from the present!

Furthermore, in an episode reminiscent of the famous end-of-career epiphany of Thomas Aquinas, Michelangelo confesses in a 1555 poem "his sorrow and remorse for having 'let the vanities of the world' rob him of the time 'for the contemplation of God'"( 199).

What if that really is what our cultural titans wish to teach us?

Children of Men

A guest post by Denise Milliner

As some of you may know I am the designated fiction reader in the family. Poor millinerd just doesn't have time to read anything that falls outside the categories of "Art" or "Theology". So today I'm here to discuss the latest movie-based-on-a-book: Children of Men.

In P. D. James's 1992 novel a chilling but not-too-distant future is described: humans have inexplicably lost the ability to reproduce and must grapple with the problems unique to the end of civilization. The church has become irrelevant, democracy redundant, group suicide (voluntary and involuntary) a convenient solution. Around the world humanity is grappling with what it means to literally have no future. This is no futuristic science fiction scenario. James pointedly tackles the very questions we must concern ourselves with today - care for the elderly and end of life issues, the maternal instinct, rites of passage in a post-Christian society, the dissociation of sex from procreation and the role of government in guaranteeing quality and meaning in life.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but that's not going to keep me from commenting on it. And why should it? After all, as this interview makes clear, director Alfonso Cuaron didn't bother to read the book before making a movie based on it.

"I had a very clear vision of the movie I wanted to do. So I said to [screenwriter Tim Sexton], you read the book, and based on this movie I'm telling you, there are elements of the book which you will write into the movie."

In other words, Cuaron made a movie he thought up using an idea or two from James's masterwork and a screenwriter.

Based on most reports the story Cuaron tells bears little resemblance to the novel. The characters have been reorganized, assigned new and important human rights activism responsibilities and the Warden of England, the locus of power and evil and bureaucracy and hopelessness in James's tale has been entirely written out. The first child to be conceived in a quarter century is borne not by a devout (and deformed) woman but a persecuted refugee. I'm not surprised that the profoundly Christian nature of James's work has been jettisoned - all that Book of Common Prayer stuff isn't exactly current to today's moviegoing audience. But I am disappointed that the other powerful themes have been supplanted by Cuaron's desire to raise the alarm about U.S. policy.

The brooding and evocative power of Cuaron's work has drawn much praise so we will probably see the film, but I heartily encourage you to take time to read the book. And, of course, this would hardly be a millinerd.com post without an audio link, so for more on James and her work check out this program from Mars Hill Audio.