Nativity Mystery (5 minute skit for 5 actors) by jSnodgrass
December 12, 2007
NATIVITY MYSTERY: THE ELEPHANT IN QUESTION
by j. Snodgrass, December 2007
NARRATOR : Five blind-folded people are put in a room with an animal and asked to identify it, based on their sense of touch. One says it’s a donkey, for it has a donkey’s tail. One says it’s a snake, for what he holds is a long, writhing tube. Another says it’s a bat, not knowing what she holds is actually an ear. Others offer different answers, each is certain they’re right. But when the blindfolds come off, they realize that none were fully correct - they’ve been describing different parts of an elephant.
The elephant in question today is Jesus. More specifically, the birth of Jesus as described, or not described, in the four Canonical Gospels. And we’re very fortunate today to have the Gospel-writers with us. Admittedly, none were actually present at the birth of Jesus, nor did any of them know him personally. But perhaps they can shed some light on the great Nativity Mystery. They’ve asked to be called by their pen-names, since they’ve forgotten who they really were. So please allow me to introduce Mark…
MARK : Shalom.
NARRATOR : Matthew…
MATTHEW : Greetings in the name of Christ the king.
NARRATOR : Luke…
LUKE : Down with the system.
NARRATOR : And John…
JOHN : The Father is known to the Son who is known to the Father.
“Some Dude” (Expect the Unexpected)
November 25, 2007
by j. Snodgrass
Matthew 24:42-44 “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
The Lord, breaking into your house at night. Expect the unexpected.
My wife is in medical-school, and has learned that in Emergency rooms across the country, legends abound to tell the exploits of that mythological character known only as “Some Dude.” “Yeah, I was just minding my own business, and some Dude shows up with a baseball bat and starts whaling on me.” “Yeah, this lady asked me to hold her purse for her, and I was, and then some Dude came up out of nowhere and beat me down, and gave the purse back to the lady…who had asked me to hold it.” “Yeah, I was just having a smoke outside my building and some Dude shot me five times.”
Oddly enough, if Emergency Rooms had existed in the times of the book of Genesis, Jacob would probably have showed up with the following story: “Yeah, I was just crossing the river with my two wives, two girlfriends, eleven sons and all my stuff, when some Dude jumped me! And he beat on me all night, and pulled my hip out of its socket. I never saw his face, ’cause it was dark. As the sun came up he said ‘alright, I’ve gotta go,’ but I said ‘Dude, you’re going nowhere till you’ve blessed me.’ And the dude said, ‘Alright, from now on your name is Israel.’ And then he was gone.”
True story, paraphrased from Genesis 32. The name he was given by this mysterious Dude was “Israel,” meaning “Struggled with God.”
God jumped Jacob. Expect the unexpected.
Earlier in the book, Genesis 19, a man named Lot was living with his wife and two daughters in the city of Sodom… And looking out his doorway one day he sees these two guys walking around and invites them into his house. But the Sodomites see the guys go in, and a great mob gathers - they start banging on Lot’s door, demanding the opportunity to give these visitors a proper Sodomite welcome. Lot says everything he can think of to make the mob go away, but it’s no use.
Genesis 19:9-11 They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break down the door. But the men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. Then they struck the men who were at the door of the house, young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the door.
It turns out these two Dudes happened to be angels of the Lord. I can just see the scene in the Sodom Hospital Emergency Room - “Yeah, we just wanted to give these dudes some presents and they blinded us!” Of course, the Sodom Emergency Room would have had bigger concerns, what with the entire city being destroyed later that evening.
Expect the unexpected. Is this going to unexpectedly tie in with the theme of Advent?
I don’t know what kind of prenatal care they had in Bethlehem around the time of Jesus’ birth…I know he was eventually born in a barn. But it must have been a fascinating scene when Mary told her fiancé Joseph she was pregnant with the son of the Most High God. “Yeah, I was just minding my own business when some Dude showed up, told me I’d be getting pregnant by the Holy Spirit.” Somehow I doubt that Joseph was so impressed with this - in fact, according to the Gospel of Matthew, old Joe started hatching plans to let her go. Couldn’t call that unexpected. But a few days later, Joseph came to Mary and said “Hey, everything’s cool. We can still get hitched and then we need to leave and hide out in Egypt for a while, because the powers that be are gonna be looking for this kid.”
That was unexpected. Joseph? The Biblical character best known for what he didn’t do? And just how did Joseph come across this information?
Yup. Some Dude told him so.
- - - -
Written for the Marble Collegiate Church, Marble Connection (Young Adults in Their 20s & 30), Sunday Conversation, November 25, 2007
Isaac & the “musicianhood of all believers”
August 7, 2007
There’s a great interview with Isaac by Becky Garrison on emergingchurch.info.
Definitely worth checking out…
I like his bit about a “musicianhood of all believers”
Martin Luther talked about the “priesthood of all believers” and the broad, folky appeal of his hymns suggest that he believed in the “musicianhood of all believers” as well. The job of professional ministers and musicians should not be to direct liturgical and musical activity, but rather to facilitate them. A liturgical leader’s job is not merely to pray and to worship, but to get the entire congregation praying and worshiping. Similarly, my job is not just to play well, but also to get everyone in the room participating in the music; my job is to help everyone find an entry point into the ritual activity.
buy or borrow Kester Brewin’s new book
July 23, 2007
signs of Emergence:
A Vision for Church That Is Organic / Networked / Decentralized / Bottom-up / Communal / Flexible
{Always Evolving}
I’m just about to start Part 2, but wanted to share some snippets from the first 100+ pages while they’re freshly percolating in my imagination…
With our eyes suckling from cathode-ray nipples feeding us a skimmed diet of soap opera and home improvements, we have lost the ability and mental space to simply talk and share thoughts and receive wisdom… Part of the prophetic role of the Emergent Church will be to encourage society to recover its memory and have a healthy balance between past, present, and future:
Christ has died,
Christ is risen,
Christ will come again. (108)Our problem today: the space for imagination to expand and take shape is inversely proportional to the speed at which we live. Yet if we stop and wait, and close our eyes to the “buy now, take me now” images, and rest our weary retinas, we will begin to remember, new worlds will form, new exits will become apparent. (57)
Christ’s incarnation in a specific time and a specific place demands of us, the body of Christ, that we too undergo incarnation and are born somewhere specific, committing to it and putting roots down. We cannot be reborn in first-century Palestine; we need to be incarnate to the place where we are and the place that needs us most. We must learn how to incarnate the church in the city. (73)
This is the extraordinarily consistent truth about our cities, our brains, our ecosystems, and, I am suggesting, our churches: somewhere between these two poles of anarchy and rigidity - a spectrum with death at each end - there exists a place where a system begins to live, to self-organize, to become more than a sum of its parts, to develop a character, a culture, a soul, if you will- as if some breath has entered it and commanded it to live. (82)
Scripture on Sewing, Pride & Prejudice
July 6, 2007
Here are some Bible passages I found and may use in our Stitch-by-Stitch Circle. How do they resonate with you? Are there others you can think of? Please comment below!
Some Sewing Quotes
on PRIDE– Genesis 3
* Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. (Gen 3:7)
* The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. (Gen 3:21)
on PREJUDICE – Matthew 9:14-17
* No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. (Mt 9:16 )
Stitch Circle Quotes
on colored YARN – Exodus 28 (it’s worth reading!)
* Make pomegranates of blue, purple and scarlet yarn around the hem of the robe, with gold bells between them. (Ex 28:33)
on a CIRCLE – Mark 3:31-35
* Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! (Mk 3:34)
Pride in Widsom Literature
* When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom. (Prov 11:2)
* Pride only breeds quarrels, but wisdom is found in those who take advice. (Prov 13:10)
* Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. (Prov 16:18)
in a PSALM – Psalsm 10 (see more below)
* The wicked are so proud that they care not for God; their only thought is, “God does not matter.” (Ps 10:4 )
Creation Series #5
June 19, 2007
“then God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”
Many of you probably know this already, but the Hebrew word which is usually translated as “soul”, i.e. nephesh, doesn’t really mean that at all. Biblical Hebrew, in fact, doesn’t even have a word for “soul.” Yep, you heard me right - all of those beloved passages like “Bless the Lord, oh my soul,” and “You shall love the Lord with all your strength, all your mind, and all your soul” don’t actually mean what you thought they mean.
Take this passage from Genesis, for example. When God breathes the breath of life into Adam, he becomes a “living being,” a nephesh chayah. Some people would interpret this to mean that God put a soul into the clay, but that word is also used for all the animals in creation, as in Genesis 1:24, “Let the earth bring forth every kind of living nephesh: cattle, creeping things, and wild beasts of every kind.” So either we make like the Hindus and believe that every dog, cat, and tapeworm has a soul or we are forced to call into question the central basic soul/body dichotomy which is so prevalent in our culture.
Genesis 2 gets it right; we are earthly creatures, physical creatures, and I mean “creature” in the literal sense of “that which has been created.” As I mentioned earlier, the word used for humanity in this passage, adam, is a variation on the word for soil, adamah. This word used to be translated as “man” or “mankind” and was later translated as “humanity,” but the most literal translation would be something more like “earth creatures.” As much as I love Origen, there’s no evidence here for the preexistence of souls.
Why does this matter? Ever since Descartes (or some might say, Aristotle), we’ve been taught to view pursuits of the mind and of the soul as higher than pursuits of the body. We’re taught that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, that sexuality is purely procreative and not spiritual, that only shallow people care about their appearances, and that people who work with their bodies should earn less than those who work with their minds.
And yet Genesis seems to tell us that we are our bodies. Suddenly the fact the average American spends 90% of his or her time indoors seems not only unnatural, but sinful. Suddenly obesity, alcoholism, and violence are not only physical problems, they are spiritual problems. Suddenly, taking care of our sisters and brothers with physical disabilities is a spiritual ministry.
Ultimately, it’s important to realize that divisions like “mind, body, and spirit” are completely artificial. All of those things make up who we are: our nephesh.
So at tomorrow’s Transmission, we’ll be celebrating creation and exegeting Genesis through movement, blessing the Lord with our entire integrated beings. Come join us in Sheep Meadow, 7pm.
resistance: fall of man
June 11, 2007
If you haven’t heard, the Church of England is considering suing SONY because it reproduced Manchester cathedral in last year’s premier first-person-shooter for the Play Station 3. Needless to say, this is not being received well within the gamer community, which has responded with a great deal of polemic about Christianity’s inability to differentiate fantasy from reality. Hmm.
It seems to me that the real issue is not whether a violent, bloody action game like Resistance falls in line with the church’s values. Rather, the real issue is about intellectual property: if the Church of England owns the interior design of a space, does someone else have to get their permission to reproduce that design the way they would for a photograph or a poem? I don’t know anything about British IP laws, but it seems a reasonable question to me.
Unfortunately, however, everyone is treating the church’s complaint as if it’s a battle over values, and therefor the church is again coming off like a tired old man shaking his fist at a bunch of kids smoking on a street corner. How could we react to this sort of thing in a positive way? I applaud the fact that they’re trying to get Sony to fund anti-gun crime groups in Manchester - how could this sort of activity be brought into the foreground?
Creation Series #1
June 10, 2007
Our next Transmission will be on June 20th, which is almost the summer solstice, and we’ll be doing it in Central Park (unless it rains, in which case we’ll be at Katherine’s). The solstices aren’t exactly Christian holidays per se, but they are sufficiently astronomical that they make their way into my religious traditions (some suggest that Dec 25 was picked for Christmas in order to coincide with the winter solstice).
In any case, in order to celebrate the longest day of the year, the day during which the sun is directly over the tropic of Cancer, the day when the eart is tilted most towards the sun, I thought it would be fun to examine the creation accounts in Genesis. Not only does this subject seem appropriately cosmic, but the recent opening of the Creation Museum in Kentucky has put the first few chapters of Genesis in everyone’s mind.
Maybe it’s because I’ve heard it since I was a kid, but I still get chills up and down my spine when I hear the words “In the beginning, whe God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from god swept over the face of the waters.” It’s just so beautiful There’s so much contained in these stories, in fact, that I’ll be doing a brief series on them here on the blog to prepare for the next Transmission.
This first one will be short since it has much introduction, but I just wanted to give a brief overview of what I’ll be doing. First, I’ll be holding myself to the first two chapters; The Garden of Eden stories are very powerful, but there’s so much to deal with in terms of original sin, gender roles, and patriarchy that I’d rather stick with creation. Second, I’ll be examining these stories with as many lenses as possible, but my interests are going to be theological, not scientific. As my New Testament professor told me, “the authors of the Bible didn’t always write down what happened, they wrote down what it meant.” That’s the attitude with which I’ll be exploring Genesis.
Enjoy!
Seeing God in a Tree
June 9, 2007
Usually, when people see faces in clouds, mildew, and grilled cheese sandwiches, they see the face of Jesus or Mary. Recently in Chicago, however, some people have found the visage of a former mayor set in tree bark.
Except, of course, for one stalwart woman:
“I see Jesus,” said Cathy Sansone, the membership director at the health club who says any resemblance to the late mayor is simply the “power of suggestion.”
Now personally, I’ve always been pretty contemptuous of these sorts of claims. Why would God make the effort to create an icon of the crucifixion in a bag of cheetohs and yet not make the effort to stop the violence in Darfur?
Recently, however, I’ve started questioning my cynicism. Even if God did not create these images, that doesn’t mean that people can’t see and experience God through these images. If my worldview allows for someone to experience God through a eucharistic worship service, through the first letter of Timothy, through a piece of art, or through a particularly magnificent sunrise, then why can’t I accept someone experiencing God through a vaguely face-shaped bit of water damage?
The church spends so much of its time trying to distance itself from the supernatural, sometimes we forget about awe and wonder. We’re so concerned about making Christian theology compatible with modernity that we forget that contemporary culture has already moved passed modernity. When so many of my fellow New Yorkers are seeking God in mystical pursuits like Sahaja meditation, yoga, alternative medicine, and therapy, perhaps we should spend less time demythologizing the church and more time affirming that God can be revealed in anything God choses, even a grilled cheese sandwich.
The Emerging Church: A Few Questions
June 9, 2007
Not sure where or how I want to start this post to our group but having been on the east coast for a couple years now, being originally from California and having lived in London, my experiences of churches in these places has been really… eye opening…
I never realized till I left California (2 years ago) how different the traditional church there, is to my experience of church in other parts. A traditional church in California tends to have a group of people coming together in a strip mall shopping center where the church is renting some office space / store and has a number of chairs lined up side by side to look like pews. The people show up in anything from the really casual attire such as jeans and a t-shirt to slightly more dressy attire such as “business casual”. Or I think you call it “smart casual” if my memory serves. The traditional church in this part of the world tends to sing songs to a “rock band” in some form of contemporary worship and then the pastor will speak. This is such a contrast to “traditional” church in NY and England where there are pews and big gothic looking churches which remind you in their splendor how big God is in comparision with us. This form of traditional church has an actual priest in most cases who dresses in the traditional robes and communion is taken with real wine instead of grape juice. Having grown up in the first and not in the later, my concept of church tends to be more modern and contemporary in comparision with my later counterparts. In a church much like the second type that I speak of, I tend to get very uncomfortable and uneasy. It is hard for me to relate to and understand the ritual and liturgy of that style. I try to connect with it but I don’t know how. The thing for me here is that this style is not something I am accustomed to so I don’t understand why we need to go through each step of the liturgy to reach out and touch God because to me God is reachable whether or not we make those steps. If I want to speak to God right here and now I do not need to walk through each of those steps, I just simply call out. If I want to understand God’s thoughts and mind, I read the word. I don’t need an experience of God or have a ritual to tell me God is here with me, right here, right now.