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So there seems to be a fundamental difference in the sentiments being created by these two remembrances.  One tells a people their shared history of survival through the will of God.  The other tells a people of the survival of their God, in SPITE of the will of the people. Strange, huh?  Both reveal that God is more powerful a force than death and oppression, but in very different ways… Anybody else have any thoughts on the difference between these two?

Eric Thompson: “And Peter said to him, ‘Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!’” ought to about cover it.

And yet, I find myself thinking a lot these days about that habitual kind of “ritual.” The small and homely kind. Brushing your teeth, reading the paper, kissing someone good night and good morning. It seems to me that these things that we repeat – week by week, month by month, year by year – transform us too. They give shape and order to our lives. They make us into the people that we are becoming.

As the calendar rolled over to 2010, my brother and his girlfriend stayed with me for a couple of days. On Sunday morning over a leisurely breakfast, they pulled up their Sunday websites to share with me: PostSecret and the New York Times Weddings & Celebrations. As we looked over shoulders, the silence was punctuated by sighs, laughter, and the occasional groan. I was moved and surprised. My brother and his girlfriend are completely secular people, and yet their Sunday rituals still carry a sense of setting time aside for something special, sacred even. They bear witness to other people’s secrets. They share in other couples’ joy.

It made me think about my own habitual rituals. Are mine transforming me into a person of empathy, compassion, and joy? Do they shape me into the person that I would like to become? I’ve joined my brother and his girlfriend in reading secrets over Sunday breakfast, and added a dose of dance and poetry. Then I go to church, for the healing of the ritual and the shaping of the habit.

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.

http://www.transmissioning.org/2007/01/27/kimball-macarthur-and-me/

Well, it turns out two years later, Phil Johnson felt the need to refute me in his essay “Joyriding on the Downgrade at Breakneck Speed: The Dark Side of Diversity,” published in Reforming or Conforming?

Check out the link – I’m in footnote seven.¬† Although I disagree with his presuppositions, it’s a very interesting read and worth a few minutes of your time.

I’m not sure that my own eucharistic theology is quite that high, but I am in love with the idea the eucharistic table is something bigger than the food that’s on it and the people sitting around it – that’s an act that unites us with all Christians everywhere and everytime.

This is one reason why so many liturgical traditions sing a sanctus as part of the liturgy, and why it’s important that it’s sung by the congregation and not just by the minister or choir.  Isaiah had a vision of angles singing this song without ceasing, and so when the people sing it at communion they are singing along with the seraphim – when the minister says something like:

Therefore, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify Your glorious name, evermore praising You and saying…

Or, at Transmission sometimes:

With strangers, neighbors, saviors, ravers, saints and angels, raise a song
As one with some whose work is done and others here or yet to come

This is what’s being referred to.

Angels aside, it is pretty amazing that this song has been song so often, so consistently, and in so many many ways throughout the millenia.  Folks have never stopped singing it, but they’ve also never stopped coming up with new ways to sing it.  Here’s a playlist of this song through the ages for your listening pleasure:

A sephardic cantor singing it in perhaps the oldest version of it I know:

Deborah Van Dyke singing it as a meditative chant (kadosh):

In Dulci Jubilo singing it as Ambrosian Chant (santus):

Helen Shapiro singing as full-on gospel melodrama (kadosh – the Lord He reigns):

The Psalters singing it as only they can (hosannah):

Rachel Cole singing it as Christian pop (kadosh):

Adom9 singing it as trance electronica (sanctus):

All of the above are available on iTunes, so if any of them struck your fancy, go buy them!

A lot of churches have a tradition of reading scripture in a variety of languages on Pentecost, but the act of sitting and listening to something you can’t understand seems to be the exact opposite of the Pentecost story me. So this afternoon I cooked up a sound piece that tries to convey what it’s like to be listening to a cacophony and suddenly realize that you understand what’s being said.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Hebrew word ruach is the word for both “spirit,” “breath,” and “wind.” This is why in the beginning of Genesis, some Bibles say, “and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters” while others say “and a wind from God moved over the waters.” Personally, I prefer “and the breath of God moved over the waters.” Curiously, this synonym also exists in Greek – Pneuma could mean either spirit or breath, and even in English “spirit” comes from the same root as “respirate.”

So I encourage you to take a moment today to think about your breathing, how it’s constantly a part of you, how it connects you to your environment, and how natural it is. Use your breath to connect to the Spirit of God, that aspect of God which lives inside each of one of us.

So, since ritual is probably the best tool in existence for creating transformation in a community, we decided that we needed to have a “renaming ritual” for him, officially giving the support of the community to him and adopting his new name and gender. (Note it’s likely to be confusing, but I’ll refer to Joy/James as “she” before the ritual and “he” after the ritual, since that’s the way in which the ritual was constructed.)

Like most Transmissions, this one was held in the home of friends with lots of home cooked food, but everyone in attendance had been instructed to come wearing clothes of the other gender. (As someone who is not into gender-bending myself, I found this part to be incredibly uncomfortable, which was probably the point.) We spend the first hour or so just hanging out, eating for, playing music, and enjoying each other’s company.

Over the course of this hour, each of us would take a turn putting a braid into Joy’s hair (she had hair down to her waist or so). Then, once her entire head was put into braids, we gathered everyone together and each one of us cut off the braid we had made and had the opportunity to say something privately to her, before her transformation. We were also given the choice of keeping the braid or donating it to locks of love. Once her hair had been shorn, all of us, including her, took of the clothes we’d come in and put on clothes of our “appropriate,” gender – it’s amazing how much more comfortable I was after I was allowed to wear boy clothes which, again, was probably the point.

At this point, Joy no longer dressed or looked like a girl, and hostess of the event introduced him to the crowd as James. It felt quite similar to the moment after a baptism when the preacher holds up a child and introduces him or her to the congregation, or at a wedding reception when the couple is introduced to the crowd as unit for the first time. We each had the opportunity to go to James, shake hands, and say whatever we wished, and the party continued.

This was not a Transmission event, but it felt very Transmission-ish in that was a home-brewed ritual focused on efficacy and built around a community. By the end of the ritual, I found it very easy to refer to this person I’d known for almost a decade by a new name, and he felt affirmed and supported in his journey. I spent much of the time thinking, “Wow, I wish I were still in Seminary so I could write a paper about this!”

It also led me to think about the fact that there are many important transitions in life for which we don’t have liturgies. At The Crossing, an emergent community in Boston, they recently laid hands on a community member about to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and she described it as one of the most moving worship experiences she’d had. Perhaps Transmission should make a project of collecting liturgies which will never be printed in a prayer book…

This is what I’ve come up with:

Transmission is an emergent house church made up mostly of New Yorkers in their twenties and thirties. It attracts both the “churched,” many of whom have gone to seminary and now work for churches, as well as those who are attracted to Christian spirituality but do not feel fed (or comfortable) in traditional churches. Transmission is very interested in the relationship between worship and community, as well as the relationship between innovation and tradition, seeking to craft new ritual and liturgical exploration while remaining in continuity with the larger Christian tradition.

What do you think? Is this accurate? I’d love your feedback on it!