I got this email from Ann Loar Brooks a few weeks ago. Take a look at the blog and comment.
"Here's some thought-provoking reading about churches in transition.
Ann Loar Brooks"
What did you learn? Any 'aha's'? What questions does it raise for you? How does any of the 10 signs apply to Brown Woodbrook? What makes you annoyed or angry, or makes you say, "That doesn't apply to us!"? Who can you think of whom you'd like to see the blog?
And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt. Deuteronomy 10:19
We’re a couple of weeks away from July 4 as I write. So I want to offer some thoughts around the topic of our American ideals.
When I lived in France for a year, a friend and I hitchhiked to Paris once. On the freeway somewhere, the police stopped us. They asked for passports. I presented mine first. They assumed I and my friend (who was French) spoke no French. So they just waved us off the highway. An American passport in France turned out to be a convenience.
When I lived in Zaire (now Congo) for a year, some friends invited me on a picnic on an island in the Zaire River. We didn’t realize that Zairian law required us to be off the island by sunset. It was a restricted area, to try to control smuggling.
When we sauntered across the bridge after dark back to the shore, a squad of soldiers met us. Luckily the driver of my car spoke some Kituba. So did the officer, who demanded to know what we were up to. We told him. He finally got disgusted, pointed to an unlit shack off in the woods, and told us he would put us in there and hold us if we didn’t tell the truth. We palavered for an hour or two. It turned out they just wanted to shake us down for whatever food we had left, and some money. They got the food and let us go.
On the drive back into town, we all admitted that the prospect of being held incommunicado was sobering. But we also realized that there were people who knew where we were, and if we didn’t show up, they would ask questions. And if push came to shove, we had American passports. Somebody at the American embassy would come for us if it came to that. In that case an American passport was a God-send.
It can be hard to be a foreigner—even if you have papers.
The truth is there are all kinds of places in the world where the niceties of any passport make little difference. People get killed or jailed or run out of their homes without any legalities at all.
It is an incredible blessing to live in a country of law. It is also a blessing to be able to receive people from places where law is held in less esteem.
I believe that when we are at our best in this country, we do our best to welcome strangers, to make them feel accepted. That among other reasons is why I am so dismayed by the campaign to overturn the recent Dream Act to allow the children of illegal immigrants who qualify to pay in-state tuition at Maryland colleges. The effort to repeal appeals to our fears, resentments, and too often, gross misinformation.
For Christians part of our story is having ancestors (albeit spiritual) who were slaves, foreigners, undocumented aliens in Egypt. Somehow we forget that piece of who we are. It’s time to remember.
Grace and peace, Jamie
On St. Patrick’s Day, I had the privilege of hearing Nick Perrin, a professor of New Testament from Wheaton College. He spoke about the story in Mark 5:1-20 of Jesus healing a demon-possessed man from the “country of the Gerasenes,” most likely on or near the northeastern edge of Lake Galilee. The eye-catching part is that Jesus sends the man’s demon into a herd of pigs, and the pigs all rush into the lake and drown. For some reason the hog farmers were not too excited about having Jesus stick around.
Of course people raise a number of questions. Didn’t the man have a mental illness, not an evil spirit? Where was Gerasa (there are three possibilities)? Why do the demons call themselves “Legion?” What was Jesus doing in that neck of the woods anyway? It was Gentile territory, and the text says nothing about going off for a rest or for prayer.
Dr. Perrin believes the best way to read the story is to take it pretty much at face value as a story about what the historical Jesus actually did. That in itself is a pretty big move, but let’s grant that it’s a reasonable and proper thing to do.
From his lecture it sounds like the key to understanding is linguistic. Jesus calls the demon an “unclean spirit.” That term appears in only ten stories in the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), so it’s not very common. It appears once in the Hebrew scriptures, in Zechariah 13:2.
Perrin’s reading is that Jesus consciously uses the term from Zechariah in order to evoke or express the same basic agenda Zechariah had: to oppose false prophets, idolatry, and the unclean spirit in the land. When Jesus calls the demonic presence an “unclean spirit,” he specifically links it with the presence of a larger unclean spirit in the land, the Romans. That’s why the unclean spirit calls itself “Legion.” Get it? As in a Roman legion. Perrin pointed out that the Fourth Legion of Rome had a major garrison in the neighborhood, near the palace Herod had built in northern Galilee, to catch the lake breezes presumably.
The heart of the unclean spirit of Rome (my term, not Perrin’s) lay in its arrogant assumption of ethnic superiority. There’s a lot of evidence, a lot of which Perrin cited, that most Romans believed they were by birth better than non-Romans. By a long shot.
So Jesus performs a “prophetic speech act” (Perrin’s term) against the Roman ideology of ethnic superiority.
It’s a provocative reading, and one I hadn’t come across before. To the degree that it’s true, it means Jesus was more political than we thought. It also means he had no patience with what we would likely call racism (which is largely what Perrin called it) –hatred of another based on ethnic heritage. (I recognize, by the way, that “race” as we think of it is largely a modern concept, created mostly as means for the wealthy to justify exploiting those different from them. The notion that some people are inherently superior, however, is ancient.)
My question, though, is this: doesn’t that leave Jesus open to the charge of being racist? Zechariah, after all, was preaching to Israel. His was a critique from inside the fold. Jesus here criticizes Rome from outside the fold. To a Roman, I think he would appear to be doing nothing more than asserting the superiority of his own faith (Judaism) to the ideology of empire (Caesar worship with it’s attendant notions of ethnic superiority).
That stance, to be quite reductionist, fits the stance of many prophets in Israel when they denounce foreign nations for attacking Israel and not worshipping the one true God. In time, they say, the "nations" ("goyim" in Hebrew; "ethnoi" in Greek) will all come to Zion to worship. The step from there to notions of superiority, be they racial/ethnic or religious or social, is not large.
What do you think? Is Perrin’s reading, or my blundering attempt to summarize it, persuasive?
Thanks for reading this far. Jamie
