|
This is NOT an April Fool’s joke, rather a serious conversation I had with my New Testament students yesterday. I was surprised to learn that most had never pondered the notion of female authorship for the unpenned book of Hebrews that is neither written by Paul nor meant for the Hebrews. Instead, what we have in Hebrews is homily like material presented in such a way that Hebrew narrative is offered up in the tradition of Greek philosophy such that our best guess is we have a Hellenized author who was also part of the Pauline circle writing somewhere around 100 C.E. Students were assigned Ruth Hoppin’s article “The Epistle to the Hebrews is Prisca’s Letter” and I draw from her here as well as my own research across the years consulting fragments, archaeological evidence, and epigraphy to reconstruct a portrait of Prisca, the early church holy woman. The individual who wrote this work was educated, literate and close to Paul, as we study what can be known of her, Prisca fits all the above requisites. Mentioned six times in the New Testament canon, Paul describes Prisca and her husband Aquilla as persons who “work with me in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my sake, to whom not only I but the whole Gentile church gives thanks” (Rom.16.3,4). Because of their status in the canon, we know they are close companions and co-laborers in the Gospel with Paul. Scholars have noted that of these six instances, in four of them, Prisca’s name is listed first which seems to indicate her prominence in the work according to Paul. Because of archaeological evidence, we are able to discern a highly probable link between Prisca and the wealthy patrician family the Acilli Glabriones of ancient Rome. If she is a daughter of this famous house, then it stands to reason she would have been both literate and educated and well versed in philosophy. It is also possible that she fell in love with a Jewish Barbarian slave or freedman from her house who took on the family name, Acilli which morphed into Aquilla, that she later left Rome with him during the Claudian exile and together they encountered Paul in Corinth (Acts 18.2-3). As we read through Hebrews, we are aware of Greek, even Platonic undertones even as the author is working to convey the story of Israel. The first four verses of the epistle read as from an ancient hymn drawn from early liturgical practices that pre-date Paul’s own letters. While much has been written about possible authorship, some have wondered if it’s original author was Apollos; I want to ask, maybe the author of Hebrews was our girl, the one who took Apollos aside and taught him the ways of Jesus (Acts 18. 26-27). Of course, we can not come to any definitive solution here, time and space and sometimes agenda have prevented us from certainty. But if we know Prisca was an early Pauline circle leader, if its likely that she hailed from the Acillia Glabriones and was educated and nurtured in both Philosophy and the Paul’s Gospel of Jesus then is it too far to ponder her possible role as author? May God help us hear the voices of our mothers, chosen and called and vibrant in the texts we hold as sacred.
0 Comments
Today as the snow falls in central Indiana, when the would be lamb seems more like a lion, it is a few days past the time when Catholic sisters and brothers across the globe celebrate the feast of Annunciation. The feast is celebrated on March 25, the time to gather to light candles, breathe prayers and acknowledge the power of a moment, when she said, “Yes!” one of my favorite days in the liturgical calendar-- but this year-- I missed it. Somewhere between the World Vision madness and my own broken heart shattered and beleaguered as believers tear at each other again while children go hungry and folks who pursue Jesus are cast aside by the church once more, I read my twitter log and blog roll, and consumed with grief, I missed the quiet, life changing announcement of hope in the darkness. The Annunciation, after all, is the celebration of an adolescent girl who was confronted with the power and presence of God. In the Annunciation, a young woman who finds herself in the glowing fire of Gabriel’s wings surrenders to the impossible call of God which invades her life and changes the trajectory of her future and all of human history. Protestants too, do well to mark this high and holy day for many good reasons. We should pause to remember the Annunciation because it reminds us of the narratives of Scripture when God comes to the world and moves in and through the feminine. These are stories of our foremothers and they ought not be taken from us, rather celebrated so that we might reclaim what has been lost, a sense of God’s call to and for women even in the delicate work of birthing forth God’s Word. We should wrap our hearts and minds and arms around this opportunity built right into the church calendar to inspire young women and to remind people everywhere to do as she did, to allow the call of God to invade our lives and to take us where it will. The miracle of the Annunciation is hard for us in the twenty first century, we are unable to lay down our plans, our smart phones and our long term goals, our mission statements and our vision boards to be slow and still enough to notice angels in our midst, to heed the call of God wooing us into some unheard of, unbelievable, unfathomable future but that is exactly what the Annunciation calls out of us. In the observance of this day, we are invited to believe as Mary did, “nothing is impossible for God” (Luke 1.37). We don’t need to restate the obvious, that she was young, unmarried, and would be scandalized for her response, perhaps we do need to say that it is likely she had plans of her own, desires and dreams, hopes and an entire scenario according to which she believed her life would unfold. Whatever her plans might have been, in a moment, she gave them over; she surrendered and she said yes instead to the unfathomable plan of God come to her on the lips of the angel. Instead, unlike Mary, in the midst of our own fear we spew hate and we dig into our camps and we forget the miracle of God with skin on, of a king born to a poor unwed teen in a backwater town in a horse stall, we forget that God works in ways not our own. We forget that what makes the most sense is often a device of human invention and not the work of the divine who shatters cultural norms and breaks open wide the realm of logic and reason and invites us into what is miraculous, wild and free. In the Annunciation, we reaffirm our belief in this God who works not according to creaturely conventions, but who is above it and who will be made known through whom God will be made known. We remember that nothing is impossible so we envision a reality when people who love God, follow the example of Christ empowered by Spirit are able to coexist and work together towards the common good of feeding hungry children no matter our interpretation of particular biblical passages regarding marriage, we pray for a moment when we look beyond our hermeneutical/interpretive differences to hold hands across the world to make the Kingdom known. We whisper “yes” in the face of the impossible because we believe in the redemption of all things, our hearts pound as we step forward into an uncertain future and a territory not crossed before, we know we may be scandalized, we know we may be read wrongly if our hearts and the mysterious of work of God is not made known, but we decide our differences are not all we are but it is our deep love for this One that unites us, it is our allegiance to Jesus that will see us through. And we say with Mary, "I am the hand maiden of the Lord, let it be done, according to your word." Click link below to access Pres. Jimmy Carter's interview with Indiana Public Radio on his latest book, "A Call to Action" where he addresses religion and subjugation of women and human trafficking. http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/292429202/jimmy-carter-issues-call-to-action-against-subjugation-of-women I grew up in the Wesleyan Holiness tradition, more specifically in the firey Reformation Movement known as the Church of God, Anderson, IN. Raised in a church pastored in the early 1930’s by a woman, I grew up steeped in the stories of our pioneers and their work for gender and racial equality. Before I was old enough for the youth group, I knew about Evangelist Lena Schoffner who had preached a revival in the racist South just on the heels of the Civil War. In the tent where she spoke, there was a rope hung down the middle dividing space where black and white folks could sit. As she preached the kerygma of gospel holiness and unity, she called for the rope to be torn down and the divisions to be forgotten since we are all one in Christ Jesus. Later, those who opposed Schoffner’s message of unity blew up the site where the church had been gathering. I am not sure what it was, but as a very young child, I felt connected, felt at home in the company of a people who were committed to human rights and dignity, who believed in Paul’s words that Christ had made us one, who acknowledge there is no longer Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free (Galatians 3. 26-28). This sense of unity, holiness, justice seemed to resonate deep in my bones and in some ways, defined me and my place in the world. It wasn’t until later that I’d learn about the great Holiness revivals of the late 19th century, that I’d learn about sisters and brothers who born of the same water and fire. All of us descended from John Wesley’s Methodism, the Free Methodists had broken off because they believed the poor should not be excluded from worship if they couldn’t pay dues; the Wesleyans had separated during the fight for the abolition of slavery, my own tradition distinguished itself over the insistence of inclusion, that all are welcome at the table of the Lord. As I have matured, have studied, have grown, I have wondered about those early days, about the passions and call that drove us forward that seems all but lost across the last century. I wonder where the fire burned during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, where we lost our way in the fight for gender equality, how it is that we have been silent on issues of justice, have forgotten the poor and the alien in our midst. Instead there has been much talk on justification, taking Augustine’s perspective on justification as conversion. We have busied ourselves winning souls for their safe keeping in the afterlife with no attention to living in such a way that we might make this world a better more just existence. This is a misunderstanding of the Pauline notion of justification, at best, and a complete and total missional estrangement at worst. For Paul, justification cannot exist without justice and the justice of God is worked on this earth through the people of God who live and love as Jesus (1 Cor. 15). As God’s creatures, we are saved to do the work of God in the world, to partner with God in setting all things right. This summer, the Church of God, Anderson will gather in Oklahoma City, OK, a different location than where we have gathered for the past 100 years. We will gather in a place that is not the site of our fear, not in the site where in the early 1900’s we asked our darker skinned brothers and sisters not to convene due to mortal threat of the Ku Klux Klan. Instead, we will gather in the city where our spiritual mother Lena Schoffner was called to pastor in 1903 and we will dream new dreams and we will see new visions of hope and peace and justice. In this season of Lent, I have been thinking a lot about wilderness- the place of no words; I have been reading the stories of the ancients, St. Anthony who stood upon the stone, Amma Matrona who wrote, “We carry ourselves wherever we go, we cannot escape fear with flight.” Others who chose to walk out into the bareness believing that it is only in suffering we truly commune with God. Jesus’ own wilderness wandering is not unlike that of Old Testament prophet Elijah, the man of God who called down fire from heaven to smite 400 prophets of Baal on the high point of Mt. Carmel (I Kings 18). I am intimately acquainted with this story; Elijah is my favorite biblical character according to aptitude tests administered upon my acceptance to seminary. Those esteemed folk who read the bubbles colored in with a number 2 pencil said, I chose Elijah because his is the character with whom I most identify. It seems I have some deep resonance with this one who was fed by ravens when the famine took the land, Elijah who revived the widow’s son from the grave, Elijah who prayed and upon whose word the rain ceased to fall; Elijah prophet fierce and wanderer afraid. Admittedly, I love the parts of the stories where Elijah is bold and fiery, when he mocks the prophets of Baal, rolls right around on the ground laughing at them. I am in awe of the conviction with which he stood before Ahab unflinching and am humbled by the unwavering stance of his commands. It is the part where he’s so afraid, so frail and insecure that makes me squirm in my seat. My face flushes pink and hot and I wish he had not run away from Jezebel, regret that he threw in the towel and was brought low by his fear, I twitch, I writhe, but I know. I know what it is to lose faith, to lose composure, to lose the power to maintain the strong face you want to present to the world. I know what it means to be brought low and need help, to buckle at the knees and be found at the end of my own strength, again. In some ways this is the gift of the wilderness, what the desert mothers and fathers knew, that when we find ourselves stripped of all comfort and assurance uncertain of our own ability to survive, it is here where what is mystical is manifest and we find the solace of God. It is in this deep poverty of spirit where heaven meets earth, when words are scarce but presence is real; it is here in the dust when the angels attend us. Perhaps it is wilderness that helps us speak our raw, real need, we cry out, “help!” And they come--with chicken noodle soup and chocolate chip cookies, with soft blanket and fuzzy slippers and valentines stamped with baby’s footprints. The words roll in text messages delivered with stardust, facebook posts, emails and cards through the mail as if they had flown in on gossamer wings, and this--this is oxygen, the humidifier in your childhood bedroom that helps you breathe, in and out and you concentrate on doing just that. You begin to realize out there in the wilderness, what is true. Fear is not from God, but fear is a part of you and at some point you have to accept it all, even the broken parts of yourself that you wish weren’t there. In the wilderness you see the ugliness, the scars, the unhealed wounds and you have to find a way to love those places and then to show them to those who love you. It is not easy, when you have fought so hard to keep fear at bay, to stamp it down and keep it covered to no avail, maybe the wilderness teaches us, you have to pick fear up and take it by the hand acknowledge it is a part of you so you can make it known and healing can begin. Maybe the biggest step towards faith is making peace with fear because what you make peace with can no longer keep you down. For all of you, fighting great battles may the angels attend you as face fear and love your scars. May your lungs fill up with the oxygen of presence so that you might be revived and walk on. Today I took the ashes, had the grey black soot smeared across my forehead to remember my mortality and then I bought a rhinestone necklace because everybody grieves differently. Today is both Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent and today marks eleven years since my life changed forever. I never wanted grief to be my specialty; never wanted to know so intimately what it is to lose so much or so many whom I have deep loved and known. I never wanted the sparse, parched earth that is wilderness to become so familiar, to be able to trace the rugged landscape from memory, feel the rough hewn stones scrape my flesh over again. Today I am full aware that it has been eleven winters since it all began, grief upon grief and sorrow unto sorrow; eleven seasons of snow since the first phone call in the night, the first tragic, unfathomable loss which has now been made fresh as I relive and rehearse in yet another unspeakable loss. Broken, calloused, stunned and stumbling I walk into wilderness again. I look for words like manna, search under rocks and rubble for clarity and insight, I want to understand, want to name, need to make sense of bitter terrain. I look for the words of others, scan Amazon for new releases, download ancient rabbi’s and dessert mothers, I am desperate for the stories of those who have come through, I am desperate to know someone who has been where I am. I wonder if anyone in this century has had anything to say, so many in my own time lured into fragile theologies that lack any acceptance of, humbling before, reckoning unto suffering. We run hard into glory and alliterate our pain and spiritualize the craggy, dusty, wasteland of wilderness though for Jesus wilderness was an integral passage along the way. In the Hebrew, midbar, wilderness, means literally, a place without words. There is something so honest in this which is the reason that I love this ancient language, it always tells the truth. The wilderness is the place of searching, straining, longing for words. We remember Jesus in the wilderness, led by the Spirit there, attended, kept, sustained by the Spirit as he faced the grueling temptation of choosing what seemed most logical, the sensible path, that which was destruction but looked like milk and honey. He resisted, he came through, found his way to hold onto the words of his past. He recounted words written deep into his person, words that formed belief and though he may not have had any faith to muster, he clung to words that had been stamped upon his heart, words that he had known before the harsh, bitter wilderness. As you walk through this season, intentionally or by force of the circumstances of life, remember the words that washed over you in your in your baptism, words that held you in the night, recall the words that remind you who you are and to whom you belong. Find ways to mark your path and know the sustaining presence of the Spirit with you and for you through it all. Just a word of thanks to my readers and friends; to all of you who have prayed for my family and me at the untimely passing of my nephew. We are devastated beyond words but we are comforted by your love and support. For those of you who are not aware, Logan's death follows on the heels of my mother's passing in 2011, she who raised Logan after his own mother, my sister, died when he was seven. We have suffered grief until we are broken open and stripped of all but what is real, what remains, and we are trusting love to see us through.
God's presence has been most evident in these last days through your kind words and tearful embrace, in the prayers you have offered on my behalf; I am grateful to so many who have wrapped arms around me in this darkness. Most of all, I am grateful to have known and loved this precious baby boy from the moment he drew his first breath until his last; to have laughed with him and celebrated him, to have held him up to heaven and to have baptized him into the faith, to have clothed him in Under Armour and Hilfiger, to have shared honest, real love and life with him for eighteen sacred years, to have anointed his brow and surrendered him to God; this has been the privilege of my life. To Logan, you are beautiful and bright and the best of us and we will love you forever. Donations can be sent to the Simon Youth Foundation on Logan's behalf. We don’t tell the truth enough. We don’t explain to young, idealistic called persons how hard it will be to follow God. We don’t make it plain to them that they will struggle and fall and inevitably lose their way, or at least become unsure of it. We tell them they’re special, fill them with sermons on purpose and providence but we forget to say, life will take you places you don’t want to go; your heart will shatter into a million pieces more than once and you will look up and wonder where it’s all coming from and where your provision has gone, how it was that your favor wore off and you will realize that you are flesh and blood, you will hurt and you will bleed and you will know for certain that you are real. It is the gift of Paul’s life really, the testament of a broken body and spirit, staring back at us from the pages of scripture that we’ve picked clean for rules and regulations. This holy writ that we have too long understood as a book of answers rather than an extension of divine love, the presence of God scribbled down in ink, preserved across the ages, a song that dances in the wind to remind us we are not alone. This Paul who never had a success in the span of his life, this one who was made blind so he could see, was beaten and bruised and scarred and poured out every drop of life left in him for the good of the church and never, not once, was able to look back over his shoulder and say, “there” that’s all good now. Though we speak of the New Testament church as the model of goodness and grace, let’s be clear, that’s not what the letters convey. Everything Paul planted, all he put in place, everyone he ever trained got confused, felt wrung out, came to themselves and realized they were unsure and Paul, their mother would get word and he’d have to scratch out a letter laced with love and venom to call them to themselves, to help them recall the good news they had known. According to Jerome Murphy O’Connor, the “thorn” in Paul’s flesh was his people, the ones he loved, poured himself into, gave his life for; the people that he saw birthed into the kingdom who would question his truth as soon as he left town. I guess what I’m saying is, we are not the first people to have obstacles in ministry. We are not the first ones to find ourselves shipwrecked at sea on the way to some critical encounter, we are not the only people who have ever left a meeting that didn’t go our way, we are not the first souls bitten by betrayal and we will not be the last. So let’s be honest. Let’s tell the truth as Qoheleth did (the female gatherer that we have falsely identified as King Solomon), life is hard and most of the time it doesn’t make much sense, but God is near. “Write the hard stuff” they say, this is what the people need. And tell them, don’t forget to tell them about this ineffable grace, sing the song of this love that will not let us go even unto our own selves. Stripped Love, telling our story, listen to this CBH Viewpoint broadcast on how it all began. If you'd like to be a part of what we're doing; message me here! As the new semester dawns, so do all my dreams about inviting students into the Holy Scriptures in ways that will stun and amaze them. The truth is, there is so much there to discover;courage and scandal, faith and mystery. One of my favorite courses to teach has been the Introductory to the Bible seminar required for all non-majors at my confessional school. Every semester, some disinterested 18-22 year olds would register for my course; a number of whom were unsure of who Moses was, others who thought this a waste of their time because they’d been reading the bible since childhood, and still others who needed a nice nap before facing the rest of the day. To date, there are few thrills that compare to watching intrigue mount in the heart and eyes of a student who for the first time really engages the ancient text and finds out, there’s something powerful there. As a way of beginning discussion, drawing from Barbara Brown Taylor a literary mentor of mine, I always ask them to start in the beginning and tell me the story of the fall. Most feel confident with the tenants of this epic universal narrative; a husband and wife in the Garden of Eden, the woman is seduced by Satan and in turn seduces her husband, they eat the forbidden apple and, sinning are cursed and cast out of the garden. I ask my students then, to go home and underline in their bibles or highlight on their iPads the words, husband and wife, apple, seduction, Satan and sin. Inevitably they return, astonished because they didn’t find the words, they didn’t see what they thought had been there. In fact, Adam and Eve never have a wedding ceremony; the serpent is never called Satan and, seduction or sin-- never mentioned. I tell my students, they have a very important decision to make in studying scripture; they must decide that they will strip away all the layers of stuff they “thought” was in the text and instead, allow the text to stand as it is and to join me to struggle and grapple through centuries of context so we might glean the meaning of the words, the nuances, the gaps and the community understanding across the ages of texts that have instructed the faithful for millennia. This is why study is imperative, this is why I love what I do; we must strip away preconceived notions and engage the text in an informed and open way. Otherwise, the result is an uneducated church who touts “biblical” imperatives without understanding the intent of the texts they breathe with red hot fire. The result is crazy notions of rules of submission between genders drawn from the original Empire itself and Roman household codes. The danger is that we apply modern paradigms to categories that did not exist in the ancient world.The danger is that we domesticate a text so we might apply it before we understand that it is wild and free and centered on the radical love of God. How do we bridge this gap, how do we invite persons of faith into real and in-depth study of the texts they venerate. I wonder what would happen if we began to offer small group studies on life in Ancient Israel, if we spent time teaching the difference between Hebrew and Greek world view, understanding Latinisms and Roman household codes, oral tradition and the formation of the canon; if we decided we’d help people understand the texts they love so much. How about a Sunday School session on “What is not nor has ever been in the Bible?’ What if teaching context, time and space returned as work of the church rather than limited to the realm of the academy? Perhaps this is how we serve one another and resume the holy enterprise of building up the kingdom. |
Subscribe Today for Free GiftBLOG
Archives
July 2019
Categories
All
|