“Yes,” I said. “Please. That would be wonderful.”
When the day came, she took over my desk up front, pulling one thing after another out of her overstuffed backpack. First she shook a white cloth in the air and covered the table with it. Then she dug out a candle, a plate, and a cup.
“You’ll have to imagine the challah and the wine,” she said to her classmates when everything was ready. “Also another candle, since there are supposed to be two.” Then she settled her prayer shawl over her shoulders, lit the candle, and waved her hands over its flame, pulling the light toward her face in a gesture as old as time. The only sound in the room was people breathing. When she began the Hebrew blessing over the imaginary bread, using the ancient melody her rabbi had taught her, the walls of the classroom fell away. Her song took us someplace most of us had never been. When she stumbled in her new language, she quickly recovered and let the song lead her on.
This was not a performance. This was a prayer. By the time she said the blessing over the imaginary wine, it was clear there was nothing imaginary about her devotion. Rochel became a Jew the following year by full immersion in a community mikvah. Last Passover she invited all of her Gentile friends over for supper. She is still working on her Hebrew.
Will she remain a Jew forever? Is she in the vanguard of a generation who will choose a faith with no help from their elders? The scary beauty of the present time is that no one has reliable answers to such questions. What we have instead are the great religions of the world, all pointing at something beyond themselves, and these fragile souls of ours, tilted toward the divine mystery that enfolds all our lives.
6
Disowning God
God speaks to us in three places: in scripture, in our deepest selves, and in the voice of the stranger.
THOMAS MERTON
When I was not teaching at Piedmont, I was traveling around the country speaking at university chapels, churches, and continuing-education events. The contrast between the classroom and the stage was dramatic. The classroom was my kitchen, where I cooked up something different for the students every week. I wore comfortable shoes that let me dash from the lectern to the white board to the computer on the podium, scattering colored markers as I went. Sometimes I only made it halfway through my class plan, because a student pressed a question that was more interesting than the plan. I even knew what the quiet ones were thinking, since I read their papers late into the night.
Things were quite different on the road. When I packed for the airport, my best suits went into the suitcase along with a carefully prepared manuscript and a pair of heels I knew would torture me every step of the way. They were my hair shirt, meant to remind me that I had left the kitchen for the banquet hall. In short order I would be standing in front of hundreds of people who rightfully expected me to say something both intelligent and complete. They had read things I had written but I had read nothing of theirs, which made this job the opposite of the classroom. There would be no home cooking in front of the microphone. The dish I served had to be innovative, delectable, and beautifully presented.
There was still great synergy between the two kinds of work. What happened in the classroom informed my talks on the stage, where I was often called upon to speak to Christians who were engaged in their own religious reformations. The majority of them were my age or older. White hair was the norm. They had taken or taught every course their churches had to offer and were still hungry for more. The faith that had sustained them through their middle years had gotten as tight as their old clothes. Their views of God, scripture, the church, and the world were all under renovation.
In many ways, they reminded me of college students. They were eager. They were ready to think in new ways about important things. They took notes while I talked. What made them different was their long immersion in Christian faith, practice, and imagination. When I made fast turns, they kept up with me. There was no need to stop and define my terms. Because they were biblically literate and fluent in the Christian language, it was possible to explore things with them that it was neither possible nor appropriate to explore with college students. For all these reasons and more, I began to approach the stage as a place to deal with the personal questions that were coming up for me in the classroom.
What does it mean to be a person of faith in a world of many faiths?
If God is revealed in many ways, why follow the Christian way?
Is Christian faith primarily about being Christian or becoming truly human?
How does loving Jesus equip me to love those who do not love him the way I do?
What do religious strangers reveal to me about God?
Just as questions like these were gaining urgency for me, I received an invitation to give a baccalaureate address at a small university in upstate New York. The chaplain went over the details in her letter. The student body was religiously diverse, she said. If I accepted, I would share the stage with leaders of Jewish and Muslim student organizations. The audience would also include Asian students and their families from a variety of traditions along with some who claimed no religious affiliation. “We hope you will speak from your own religious tradition while avoiding exclusive or triumphal language,” she wrote.
I had to stop and think about that sentence, because no one had ever said anything like that to me before. My audiences on the road had been uniformly Christian, with some diversity among the mainline Protestants in the room, but no obvious differences in race, culture, or country of origin. So that was one thing. The other thing was the “exclusive or triumphal language” part, which reminded me of what I had learned from the Jewish psychiatrist about the unconscious language of contempt. I did not think I sounded exclusive or triumphal, but wouldn’t I be the last to know?
I accepted the invitation with no idea how much it would change me. If the apostle Paul’s conversion made scales fall from his eyes, mine made plugs fall from my ears. When I attended church services, I heard things come out of my mouth that I had not really listened to for years. These included some all-time favorite hymns, such as the thrilling one that begins, “Crown him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne; / Hark! how the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own.”1 I have sung that hymn many times with gusto, without giving a thought to those whose music I might be drowning out.
Another favorite hymn mourns Israel’s lonely exile from the Son of God. Another yearns for a future in which every knee will bow to Jesus. Another urges Christian soldiers onward, marching as to war. When I imagined singing it with a Muslim or Hindu student sitting next to me, my voice dried up. It was a song for insiders, not outsiders. If I had learned anything from going on all of those class field trips, it was how religious language sounds to outsiders, and how much that matters.
After I started hearing the hymns differently, scripture was next. This was not an entirely new exercise for me, since I was once an outsider to Christianity myself. I knew how scripture sounded from the perspective of the damned, but the memory had dimmed. I had not stayed outside Christianity, after all. I had made my way in, where I had acquired the skills to read the Bible in much greater depth, with far more nuance. Once the plugs fell from my ears, however, I was reminded how scripture might still sound to someone who heard it with no padding.
The language of contempt is not the only shadow language in the New Testament. There is also one that uses the rhetoric of men first, followed by silenced women and obedient slaves. There is another that divides reality into opposed pairs, pitting church against world, spirit against flesh, light against dark. There is even one that glorifies suffering for suffering’s sake, leading some Christians to hurt themselves—or others—for reasons that have nothing to do with the gospel.
The purpose of staying on the lookout for languages like these is to prevent them from becoming uncontested parts of the Christian worldview. Every time I run into one of them hard enough to hurt, I turn around and look in the opposite direction, where there is
almost always a counternarrative in scripture just waiting for someone to notice it. When I run into a hard corner of Christian thinking about the subordination of women, I remember that the angel Gabriel did not ask Mary’s father if it would be all right for her to bear a son out of wedlock; Gabriel asked her. When I am walloped by Christian condescension toward those who are not Christian, I remember how many religious strangers played lead roles in Jesus’s life: the Canaanite woman who expanded his sense of agency, the Samaritan leper who showed him what true gratitude looked like, the Roman centurion in whom he saw more faith than he had ever seen in one of his own tribe.
If narratives like these are easy to overlook—or worse yet, to distort—then that is because our accustomed ways of hearing scripture often stop our ears to what is actually on the page. The old tape starts playing and we just let it run. This is one of the reasons why I remain a devoted student of the Bible: because what it says is so often not what I have been taught it says, or what I think it says, or what I want it to say. Scripture has its own voice—sometimes more terrible than wonderful—but it has never failed to reward my close attention, either with a fresh hearing or with the loud slamming of a door that tells me to come back later.
Why persist? Because in a world where empires rise and fall, where legendary places of worship become museums, and where operating systems of all kinds have shorter and shorter life spans, the Bible offers me ballast that little else can. I turn to it the same way chemists turn to the periodic table or Supreme Court judges turn to the Constitution. It is my baseline in matters of faith—something far older than I am, with a great deal more experience in what it means to be both human and divine. There are times when I read the Bible literally—as when Moses complains about what a royal pain in the ass it is to be a religious leader, or when Jesus nails an inquisitor on his or her own iniquity—but on the whole I read it literarily, as the consummate work of divinely inspired human memory and imagination that I believe it is.
When religious arguments based on the perspective of a single century or culture reach a high pitch, or when people who seem to have read only excerpts of the Bible use it to propose legislation, I return to the Book—not to find a solution, but to remember how many possibilities there are. There are passages that make me want to take a pair of scissors to them and others that I have copied in calligraphy for framing, but that seems to be the point. The Bible is bigger than I am. It does not care what I like and do not like. It preceded me by millennia and will likely still be around when my civilization returns to dust.
In the meantime, the Bible not only connects me to people around the world who hear it in different languages and whose experience leads them to interpret it in different ways; it also gives me a place to meet people right here at home who are equally devoted to it, though for different reasons and to different ends. Every time someone wants to argue about what God or Jesus or Paul really said, I say, “Show me where.”
Once, in a class on the book of Genesis, a student challenged me after I noted one of Abraham’s more regrettable character flaws, which was to pass his wife Sarah off as his sister so that other men could have her without thinking they had to kill him first.
“But she was his sister,” the student said, somewhat missing the point.
“Show me where,” I said, not believing her for a minute. The next time class met, she had her Bible with her, and she did show me where. In Genesis 20:12, Abraham says that his wife Sarah is also his half sister—the daughter of his father by a different mother. You could have knocked me over with a feather. The student won the scripture duel fair and square. She enjoyed winning, and I enjoyed finding a verse that had been hidden in plain sight. I hope she is still telling the story, just as I am, though it may only be of interest to people who spend as much time studying a twenty-five-hundred-year-old book as other people spend playing games on their phones.
The problem with every sacred text is that it has human readers. Consciously or unconsciously, we interpret it to meet our own needs. There is nothing wrong with this unless we deny that we are doing it, as when someone tells me that he is not “interpreting” anything but simply reporting what is right there on the page. This is worrisome, not only because he is reading a translation from the original Hebrew or Greek that has already involved a great deal of interpretation, but also because it is such a short distance between believing you possess an error-free message from God and believing that you are an error-free messenger of God. The literalists I like least are the ones who do not own a Bible. The literalists I like most are the ones who admit that they do not understand every word God has revealed in the Bible, though they still believe God has revealed it. I can respect that.
I can respect almost anyone who admits to being human while reading a divine text. After that, we can talk—about why we highlight some teachings and ignore others, about how we decide which ones are historically conditioned and which ones are universally true, about who has influenced our reading of scripture and how our social location affects what we hear. The minute I believe I know the mind of God is the minute someone needs to sit me down and tell me to breathe into a paper bag.
Once my holy envy led me to ask more of my tradition than the narrative of exclusive salvation and everlasting triumph, I began to search for counternarratives that sounded more like Jesus to me. In particular, I looked for stories that supported Christian engagement with religious strangers—not as potential converts but as agents of the God who transcends religion and never met a stranger. Beginning with the Persian magi in Matthew’s Gospel and ending with the Roman centurion who recognizes Jesus as the Son of God, the Gospels are full of such characters—people who come from beyond the tribe to bless the tribe and then return to where they came from. In Judaism they are called “righteous gentiles.” I do not know what they are called in Christianity, but Jesus receives them more than once, whether they come from Samaria, Syrophoenicia, Canaan, or Rome. In story after story, they enter stage left, deliver their blessing on the Christian gospel, and exit stage right, leaving their mark on a tradition that is not their own.
If it is easy for Christians to overlook the “otherness” of these religious strangers, then I think that is because we assume that once they enter our story they never leave it. In gratitude for their blessing, we baptize them as anonymous Christians. We make them one of us. A few do join us, but this is not the norm. In the case of the Persian magi, their appearance in Bethlehem is as surprising as a delegation of Methodist bishops arriving in Dharamsala to recognize the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama. Once they deliver their gifts to the starlit Hebrew baby, they go back to where they came from, presumably to resume their vocations as Zoroastrian priests. Yet every Christmas we sing of them in church, as if they had never left.
This tradition of strangers bearing divine gifts begins early in the Bible with the story of Melchizedek, a Canaanite king and priest who comes out of nowhere bearing bread and wine for Abraham (then Abram) after a great battle. You can find it in Genesis 14 if you want, but since it is only four verses long you are also welcome to my summary.
First Melchizedek blesses Abram in the name of the God Most High, whom he serves. At no point is there any discussion about whether Melchizedek’s God and Abram’s God are the same God. After blessing Abram, Melchizedek blesses God. In gratitude, Abram gives him a tenth of everything. Then Melchizedek exits the story as suddenly as he entered it, leaving Abram to become Abraham, the father of the Jews. The End.
Though Jews and Christians have made much of this mysterious stranger, some going as far as offering up elaborate interpretations of Melchizedek’s identity in order to establish their own priority, the story needs no embellishment. As short as it is, the narrative already has a clear message in place: God works through religious strangers. For reasons that will never be entirely clear, God sometimes sends people from outside a faith community to bless those inside of it. It does not seem to matter if the main characters und
erstand God in the same way or call God by the same name. The divine blessing is effective, and the story goes on.
Other examples of redemptive religious strangers in the first testament of the Bible include Bithiah, the Pharaoh’s daughter who plucked the baby Moses from his rush basket in the River Nile and raised him as her own; Jethro, the Midianite priest who was Moses’s father-in-law and teacher; Ruth, the Moabite who became the ancestor of King David; and Cyrus, the Persian king who ended the Babylonian exile and allowed the Jews to return home—the only non-Jew in the Bible who is ever identified as God’s anointed one.2
Perhaps stories like these help explain why the divine command to love the stranger shows up so often in Jewish teaching. It appears for the first time in Exodus as the direct word of God. “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him” (22:20, JPS), God says in the same speech that includes the Ten Commandments. In subsequent speeches, God presses the point home.
“When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the LORD am your God.” (Lev. 19:33–34, JPS)
“When you reap the harvest in your field and overlook a sheaf in the field, do not turn back to get it; it shall go to the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow—in order that the LORD your God may bless you in all your undertakings.” (Deut. 24:19, JPS)
“You and the stranger shall be alike before the LORD.” (Num. 15:15b, JPS)
However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture’s wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self. You are to offer the stranger food and clothing, to guarantee the stranger justice, to treat the stranger like one of your own citizens, to welcome the stranger as Christ in disguise. This is God’s express will in both testaments of the Bible.
Holy Envy Page 10