Open the Bible to any page, and people are vulnerable, life is precarious, and the guys holding the whips and the weapons, chains and chariots and the nails tend to be so cold.

I got interested in Westerns while I was in seminary. My wife Elizabeth told me that, when in college, she’d taught a class on apocalyptic movies. Well I love apocalyptic movies! I love dystopias! What could she recommend? And she told me, most of the films she’d used were old Westerns. …What? But those take place in the past. And she said ‘well, it’s the future too.’ European culture tried to expand eastward, but it hit a wall…of Eastern culture. So it expanded west. And it went – it stretched itself as far and as thin as it could go, all the way to the California coast, and it could go no farther. But it was stretched too thin, so it crawled back again. And the wave left ghost-towns in its wake, dying outposts of European culture, populated with people who, for one reason or another, couldn’t go back. Women in last year’s Parisian dresses, now caked with dust, scars on their faces. Men in tattered three-piece suits, trying to maintain civilization in cheaply-built towns that look like a strong wind could knock them over. People basically waiting to die, because civilization has no future.

But there’s a theme I love in Westerns like “The Magnificent Seven,” “Shane,” “Pale Rider” and “Tombstone” and my favorite Western, “The Postman,” about… When civilization breaks down, people have a tendency to go back to what’s familiar, something deep inside them, a tiny voice long drowned out by the noise of progress…an instinct to return to what worked for humans for millions of years before the experiment with civilization began… Tribalism. Basic equality, cooperation, nobody gets food unless everybody gets food – nobody goes hungry unless everybody goes hungry. And the system works, and a little green shoot sprouts from the dry ground. It’s hope.

And then the bandits come along with their guns, and they see a system that supports life. And they say, ‘give us the best of your food and women, and we’ll be back same time next week.’ This is civilization, seeking to be reborn in its most primitive form – feudalism. Authority through ultimate force – that’s the title of today’s lesson, “Authority through ultimate force” – by which I mean “Do what I say or else…” or else what? “Or else I’ll kill you.”

And in these Westerns I’ve just named, where civilization has dwindled, tribalism has taken root, and civilization threatens to take hold again in the form of feudalism… A savior appears. A savior who also knows about ultimate force, but uses it to protect this fragile stem of tribalism. And when the bandits are defeated, the savior doesn’t set up a castle, establish a tributary economy, call himself king…he could, but he doesn’t. Instead, he rides off into the sunset.

…What does this have to do with violence in the Bible?

Everything. This, I think, is the closest we can come to understanding it. The Israelites groaned under Egyptian civilization and a savior appeared. He led them to the frontier, the wilderness, the west…which in this case was to the east. Moses did not declare himself king, but he could have. Joshua could have. Ehud could have. Jael could have declared herself queen. Gideon could have declared himself king – the people asked him to. Saul could have, but just wanted to be a general. David did and Solomon did and within a generation, the people groaned under Jerusalem civilization and God had to rescue them again. Or we could say God is the savior, working through these people, and God wants to protect Israelite tribalism. And the bandits come in the form of the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans. And they say “give us the best of your food, wine and women or we’ll kill you.” These stories turn out different ways.

And God sends Jesus… And there’s been a lot of conjecture and debate and argument about “what did Jesus want? What was this ‘reign of God’ that Jesus talked about?” Well, if I knew…there’s a line in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” – “If I knew everything, I’d be teaching theology in Paris.” If I knew what Jesus wanted I’d have tenure somewhere, spend my days reclining in some office, letting my eyebrows grow, with buxom seminary interns dangling bunches of grapes above my mouth… No, not grapes, that other thing…lit cigarettes.

Jesus comes and a lot of what he says kind of sounds like… Equality, cooperation, nobody eats unless everybody eats – nobody goes hungry unless everybody goes hungry. It sounds like tribalism. And the people say “when are you going to establish authority through ultimate force? When are you going to kill the Romans and declare yourself a king?”

I know I’m way out on a limb here. “No, no, no it couldn’t be tribalism!” Said the Roman Empire, in the form of the hierarchical structures of orthodox Christianity… While they spent centuries riding from church to church saying “give us the best of your food and wine and women or else we’ll sick our savior on you.” But there have been people like Saint Francis, who dropped out of civilization and started something like…tribalism. Most of them were killed by the church, burned alive or whatever, and others became incorporated.

In today’s lesson, we’ll be looking at authority through ultimate force, and how it is subverted or superseded by God sending saviors. We’ll be talking about Moses and Elijah and Jesus… (The rest of this lesson can be found at http://misterjsnodgrass.wordpress.com/)

A couple of years ago, I was talking to some friends at a seminary, and they started discussing an ancient Christology that eventually was declared heresy. According to the understanding of the nature of Jesus that was developed in Adoptionism, he was born as an ordinary human and then “adopted” by God at his baptism as God’s spirit, shaped like a dove, descended on him; God’s nature and God’s power did not enter into Jesus until this moment. Two of my friends argued that they believed this to be true, that God’s nature and God’s power could not possibly have rested in an infant’s body.

There was something very disturbing about this idea to me. I want to believe that incarnation means that God understands what it is like to live with the fragility and limitation that being human entails. I want to believe that God knows what it is like to be poor, hungry, tired, unable to communicate clearly, and dependent on people for life itself. When I need God and can’t even put words to my prayer, I want to believe that God “remembers” what it was like.

The scripture in the lectionary for today, the second Sunday of Advent, is Isaiah 11:1-10. It begins, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” This image speaks to me of fragility, of the seedling that needs protection, of the green life that needs care to thrive. This Advent, I am keeping watch for fragile things, the green shoot bursting into my life from some dark corner, the infant idea that needs my help to hold up its head, the emergence of God in delicate and breakable moments. Oh come, oh come Emanuel.

I found it surprisingly beautiful and for more interesting than what I’m used to seeing in Sunday School curricula. Way to go, Lutherans.

• What is your metaphor for God? Do you think of God as a father? a friend? a rock? the color purple? What image makes sense for you when you think about God?
• Where does your soul find rest?
• Where does God lead you?
• What are you afraid of?
• How does God comfort and protect you?
• How does God bless you?

Then give participants a paper with lots of space between the following lines:
The Lord is [blank]
I shall not want.
God makes me [blank]
God leads me [blank]
God restores my soul.
God leads me in paths of righteousness for God’s name’s sake.
Yea though I walk [blank]
I will fear no evil, for You are with me.
Your [blank] comfort me.
You [blank]
You anoint my head with oil.
My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Each blank corresponds with an answer to the question prompts in order. Give participants some time to craft their psalm. Invite people to share aloud. If you try this with your faith community, let us know how it turns out!

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This has gotten me thinking about the nature of the texts contained in the Bible. The question of whether the Bible is the “inerrant Word of God” is such a hangup issue for so many churches – it’s used as a litmus test to determine whether a believer is a “true Christian” or whether a teacher is a “false Prophet.” When the final version of the Torah was put together (probably shortly after the Babylonian Exile), did the redactors suspect it’d be used as scripture? Well, yeah, they probably did. When Paul wrote his letter to Philemon, did he suspect that it’d be read in churches thousands of years later and declared “the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God?” No, he probably didn’t.

In Jewish copies of the Bible, the books are clearly separated between Scripture (Torah), Prophecy (Nevi’im), and Writings (Ketuvim). In Christianity, the lines between the three are much, much more ambiguous, whether we’re talking about the Psalms or the writings of Paul. Since I’m much more familiar with the Psalms, I’ll focus on them.

1) Prayer. The Psalms were written by people, and are a representative of the ways humanity prays. The Psalms were written over a period of centuries, and some of them were written by poets, others by liturgists, others by members of the royal court, and others adopted from the hymns of other cultures. The cover the gamut of human emotion, including joy, hope, despair, anger, loneliness, indignation, thanksgiving, love, and patriotism, and in so doing they provide models for our own prayers.

In Jewish practice, Psalms are not chanted with the same trope as scripture; rather, they are changed like prayers. Similarly, monastic practice constructs round-the-clock services of psalm reading and psalm singing in order to follow Paul’s exhortation to “pray without ceasing.”

2) Scripture. Many people, of course, believe that the 150 canonical Psalms were divinely inspired, and therefor are not only a record of humanity speaking of God but also of God speaking to humanity. Personally, I do believe that the Psalms are divinely inspired, but I don’t give God credit for the word-for-word version of the Psalms we have in our Bibles today. Is God responsible for splitting Psalm 9/10 in half? How about Psalm 42/43? And why did God choose to omit Psalm “151,” a Davidic psalm which is contained in the Septuagint but not in the Masoretic text, while including Psalm 104, which is suspiciously similar to the Great Hymn to Aten, an Egyptian prayer?

Then there’s the fact that the Psalms contain so much brokenness, pain, and violent imagery. Although I can fully support the idea that people have these feelings and deal with them by bringing them to God, it’s harder for me to imagine that God endorses smashing the heads of our enemy’s children on rocks (Psalm 137). I do believe that the Psalms are scripture, but they were inspired by God, not written by God.

3) Prophecy. And, finally, lots of people treat the Psalms as prophetic books, interpreting many of the royal Psalms to be about Jesus rather than the Davidic monarchy. (People who subscribe to this idea use the word “prophecy” to mean “predicting the future” rather than “speaking God’s justice to those in power,” i.e. Malachi rather than Nathan.)¬† Although I do believe that the Hebrew Bible points towards the messianic truth revealed in Jesus, I don’t think it’s reasonable to ignore what the Biblical writers were actually writing about him, i.e. I think Isaiah really was talking about Cyrus the Great of Persia, that Psalm 45 really is about a royal wedding, and that Ezekiel really is talking about the end of the the Babylonian Exile.

Now it’s worth noting that the canonical Book of Psalms does have a strong apocalyptic bent to it, promising a messianic era when all will be made right in the world. This isn’t directly contained in the texts, however, but rather in the order in which the Psalms are arranged:

• Psalm 1: The Righteous flourish and the Wicked are punished. Good deeds are rewarded by God. This Psalm expresses how the world ought to be in the eyes of the person who compiled the Book of Psalms.

• Psalm 2: The King is anointed by God and is told to be wise and to serve God. This admonishment can be extended to everyone who reads the Psalms.

• Psalm 3: The Psalmist laments about persecution and general troubles. The person who compiled the Book of Psalms uses this to show us that the vision of the world presented in Psalm 1 is not the situation in the actual world – in the real world, the Wicked are often victorious and the Righteous are often sick, broken, and persecuted.

• Psalms 4-144: These Psalms detail the range of human experience, as well as a history of God’s covenant with humanity.

• Psalms 145-150: The are joyous psalms of exuberant praise, claiming that the entire world, all humanity and all creation, is of one mind in the worship of God. The compiler of the Psalms put them at the end to demonstrate that this is how the world will be in the future, so we should have hope in our coming deliverance.

So whether or not the individual Psalms were meant to be prophetic, the canonical Psalter has a prophetic and apocalyptic message superimposed on them. The fact that this message is not original to the texts doesn’t, however, mean that it’s not a message worth paying attention to, just as the superscriptions to the psalms are worth reading even though they are later additions to the texts.

Which is these is the “correct” way to read the Psalms?¬† Or, for that matter, the Bible in general?¬† I don’t think that question has an answer, for abandoning any of these three modes or reading makes the Bible less rich.

Also, for those who didn’t know, all the sheet music from the book and podcast is available for free download at Church Publishing.

If you’re podcast savvy, the XML feed is here: http://www.isaaceverett.com/audio/emergentpsalterpodcast/podcast.xml

If you want to to listen to it on iTunes: click here: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=322056809

If you’d rather just download it, the link is here: http://www.isaaceverett.com/audio/epp045.mp3

If you want to stream it from the site, click the big gray button below.

[audio:epp045.mp3]

Agents of Future

Todd and Angie Fadel, members of the Bridge, an emergent community in Portland, discuss hope, participatory music, and being Agents of Future. Go buy their new album at Proost.

If you’re podcast savvy, the XML feed is here: http://www.isaaceverett.com/audio/emergentpsalterpodcast/podcast.xml

If you want to to listen to it on iTunes: click here: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=322056809

If you’d rather just download it, the link is here: http://www.isaaceverett.com/audio/epp130.mp3

If you want to stream it from the site, click the big gray button below.

[audio:epp130.mp3]