Brueggemann on Ezekiel, Occupy, and Good Shepherding

I just came across an excellent piece by Walter Brueggemann over at Huffington Post.

As part of HuffPo's On Scripture series, Brueggemann explicates Ezekiel 34 in connection with the recent Occupy movement. The passage is a scathing condemnation of oppression, especially that of leaders ("shepherds") who fleece their flocks. The clear reading of the passage opposes leaders who exploit their position for imbalanced gain of any kind. Ezekiel takes a dim view of the 1%.


Ezekiel takes the long view though, recognizing that the abundance of abusive and mutton-hungry shepherds points (ironically) to a servant-leader, a "good" shepherd, a priest-king that will pasture the nations well, for the flourishing and feeding of humanity.

Brueggemann recognizes the potent messianic hope that the early church hailed in Jesus' declaration that he is the "good shepherd." He finishes by drawing the principles that society can learn from such an example of sacrificial leadership:

"...the news of Ezekiel is that because of God's resolve, mediated for Christians through Jesus, the Son and regent of God, it need not be so. As Israel need not have poor self-serving kings, so a democratic society need not suffer poor outcomes from an exploitative oligarchy. The promissory nature of Ezekiel's oracles articulates what good leadership looks like -- in government, in corporations, all through the private sector. That rule consists in,

-Seeking the lost,
-Bring back the strayed,
-Binding up the injured,
-Strengthening the weak,
-Feeding the hungry.

"In a word, good leadership consists in the restoration of the common good so that all members of the community, strong and weak, rich and poor, may live together in a common shalom of shared resources. The text is a powerful reminder of what might be; it is at the same time a summons to a political will for leadership that is not occupied, through ideological cant, with feathering its own nest. It is not enough to recite, in pious tones, the 23rd Psalm about "The Lord is my shepherd." What is envisioned (and required) is the formation of a different leadership that has in purview all members of the community. Ezekiel knew that is the only way to have a future that does not replicate the failed past. It is still, among us, the only way!"

It is still the only way. May the lies of the many fleecing shepherds be silenced and swallowed by the peace, the security, the truth of the Good one.

Read the full piece at HuffPo. 


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Saved through Childbearing

(C) 2005, Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey

This beautiful image was threaded through our church's liturgy this past Sunday. It especially captured my wife's imagination as we're expecting our second child any day now.

If you're familiar with biblical imagery and symbol, you'll recognize the pair as Eve and Mary. Their simple,  interplay of nakedness and clothing, shame and forgiveness, defeat and victory centers on the profound mystery of Mary's bulging belly. The mother becomes the daughter becomes the mother.

The "foolishness" of the Christ-story is much more than the passion, cross and resurrection. Central and inevitable is the mystery of God taking upon himself the brokenness, the limitation, the beauty, fragility, and mess of humanity.

It is a great, strange comfort that the lord of all things entered my world through slime, in the birthblood of an animal.

A Good Quote from Helmut T.

 

This quote struck me deeply when I came across it today.

"Truth seduces us very easily into a joy of possession: I have comprehended this and that, learned it, understood it. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that. I have greater possibilities and also greater temptations. 

Anyone who deals with truth—as we theologians certainly do—succumbs all too easily to the psychology of the possessor. 

But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving." 

-Helmut Thieckle, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

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Shane Claiborne on Jesus and OWS

Out of Ur published author and activist Shane Claiborne's thoughts on the "Jesus-ness" of the OWS movement. Claiborne's is a refreshing perspective, that grounds the important action of OWS protesters and advocates in a larger - and compelling - theological context.

Shane writes

"One of the constant threads of Scripture is “Give us this day our daily bread.” Nothing more, nothing less. Underneath this admonition is the assumption that the more we store up for tomorrow the less people will have for today. And in a world where 1% of the world owns half the world’s stuff, we are beginning to realize that there is enough for everyone’s need, but there is not enough for everyone’s greed. Lots of folks are beginning to say, “Maybe God has a different dream for the world than the Wall Street dream.” 

Maybe God’s dream is for us to live simply so that others may simply live. Maybe God’s dream is for the bankers to empty their banks and barns so folks have enough food for today."

Maybe, Shane. Well said.

Read the full article at Out of Ur.com

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Who's the Monkey Now? Cynicism, Love, and Human Origins

Don't be an Organ Donor.

Ever since the Scopes Trial, the American conversation about where people came from has been a bit heated. This conflict has only intensified as recent genomic discoveries - made by an evangelical Christian committed to the view of the evolutionary process as God's tool for shaping the comos- have seemingly overthrown the possibility for the human race to have descended from a population of two individuals as the traditional reading of the biblical account would suggest.

NPR's recent piece Christians Divided Over Science Of Human Origins highlights this tension well, and breaks my heart in the process. Please take the time to listen to it.


Perhaps the most troubling thing about this piece is not the debate itself - though the issues at stake on both sides matter deeply. Perhaps the real catch is that two well educated men who claim to love Jesus need to be refereed by a radio host because they are so eager to jump at one another's throat on national airwaves. 

Where is civility? 
Where is balance? 
Where is humility and a Christlike commitment to both speech and to silence? 

Whispers of Innovation

This year's CCDA Conference focuses on the theme of innovation, especially as it connects to creative solutions to the broken American educational system.
Last night we heard from pastor Thurman Williams of Baltimore, MD as our plenary speaker.

Williams expressed theological and biblical foundations for innovation and creativity in ministry, connected with the concept of God as a profoundly innovative doer of new things.

Wind, Fire, Whisper

Williams grounded his call for innovation in 1 Kings 19, where the discouraged prophet Elijah encounters a difficult question from God while on the run from the powers that be.

The text is an interesting one. God asks the fleeing prophet: What are you doing here, Elijah?

Paraphrased, his answer is "Running for my freaking life because I'm the only one in the whole wide world who gives camel spit about you and your justice."

God's response is to tell him to go outside the cave he's squatting in, onto the side of the mountain. You know what happens next:

Tossing Rocks in the Digital Cave

Up on the web was a lonely goatherd...

Google's partnership with the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum is making the Dead Sea Scrolls available to scholars and the public in a groundbreaking new way.

Realizing that the physical copies of these manuscripts from the Qumran community have a limited shelf life, the team is digitally archiving the collection. This is itself is important, and impressive. Their project is about much more than simple storage, though.

What makes this so exciting from the perspective of a biblical student and text critic is the fact that it the end result (according to the project's website)"gives users access to searchable, fast-loading, high-resolution images of the scrolls..."

In the era of Project Gutenberg, searchable pdf files, and advanced web crawling, this may not seem so impressive. Don't yawn though. This is a really, really big deal.

What this means is that texts that previously even the most respected scholars could never have dreamt of handling or studying for themselves are available - for free - to the general public. These texts are now fully searchable, and offer translation directly tied to the image being studied. This is a big deal.

Play around with the Great Isaiah Scroll for a sense of the project.

Part of my fascination with the scriptures has to do with the vulnerable, messy way that they have come to us. The story of the bible's development rambles and winds through millenia, through myriad ethnic and religious communities, across barriers of language, culture, race, and belief. We hold flaps of papyrus, bits of parchment and vellum as evidence of its antiquity, and use these to carefully compare to what we have today, to faithfully interpret the meaning of those texts.

This careful criticism holds profound implications for how we study, exegete, translate, and teach the scriptures. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a key part of that study.

Now that they are archived in the cultural and scholarly "commons" means that any student of the Bible's text and story can directly interact with these manuscripts for themselves, compare their conclusions with those of the wider community, and bring that story a bit closer to the narrative of their own lives.

It's my sincere hope that this project is a vision of "things to come" in ancient text criticism. Though the real beauty - and danger - lies in the interpretation of the manuscripts, having them within easy reach of anyone whose heart lies in the letters on that old paper is a really, really good idea.

And though they might not say it, the desert hermits of the Qumran community would probably be a bit jealous.


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