Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Last week, we jumped into a consideration of patron saints. And Jeremy got the ball rolling with his discussion of Renee Gerard who you should catch up on if you didn't catch us last week. As Jeremy mentioned, in these conversations, we're playing with the idea of who or what patron saints are. Introducing you to a few individuals who have shaped us in our journeys and our formation. Yes, we're doing that.
Speaker 2:But also, I think one of the things we're doing too is we're introducing you to individuals who we think might represent a particular impulse or perspective or practice that defines who Commons is and who we're becoming together. And today, I'm super excited to discuss the work and perspective of notable biblical scholar, Amy Jo Levine, with you. But before we jump into that introduction by talking about pathways and where we're from and disruptive stories and ultimately about holy envy, I wanna pause for a second and pray together. Join me now. Loving God, we do take a second.
Speaker 2:We choose to make a little space here in this moment with this gift of quiet reflection that we're given. We choose to be aware of your goodness as an opportunity to reset perhaps, to consider the rhythms of these past few days, how grace has kept us through challenge and through celebration, To think about how we've pressed through and how we've made gains, maybe we come to this moment feeling worn out, feeling anxious, feeling empty. With all of these things in our hands, we now come and we ask for courage to trust your persistence and your gentleness. This force in our lives that invites us to move toward wholeness always. Even as we ask, be present in our conversation, in our connection today, be around and in the words and images that will come alive for us, we pray in the name of Christ, our hope.
Speaker 2:Amen. Okay. Well, before I introduce you to doctor Levine, I wanna take a second to talk about saints because I grew up being shaped by a Protestant Christian community that didn't ever talk about them, and we certainly didn't use them to engage Christian history. I think I was probably in my early twenties before I realized that my imagination or in my imagination, there was the book of Acts, and then ta da, there was my church and all the churches that looked just like it. I had this vague sense that there were people like Saint Patrick who one day I would come to know as the saint of mediocre green beer.
Speaker 2:Right? I also think that I must have, along the lines, heard about Martin Luther, but whether I was being taught about the sixteenth century reformer or the African American civil rights leader with a nearly identical name, I don't know which one it was half the time. And I would guess that my experience may not be unique, and that I wasn't really taught to have a historical perspective of the church. I was taught that there's the bible, and then there's the world you live in. And I think that it's a really anemic way to conceptualize the continuum of the church as I've come to believe.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I love about more historically rooted expressions of our tradition is the way that they foreground the saints. They produce images of them in icons and frescoes and windowpanes, and they preserve some semblance of the myth and the stories that come with these people, and they connect the dots between the world of sacred text that we read and the sacred world that we walk through. See, patron saints are often associated with particular places or particular human experiences. And, yeah, the church has created a long and somewhat comical roster of them, but you know what? That's fine with me.
Speaker 2:I think we need the reminder that every saint was probably just a regular person. They had unique perspectives and hang ups and anxieties and capacities like you and like me. And one of my favorite access points for the saints is through the paintings and Instagram account of Gracie Morbitzer. If been in my prayer apprentice course, you're aware of my love for modern saints by Gracie. Go follow her if you don't already.
Speaker 2:Morbitzer has built this amazing catalog of images that depict the saints of the church in their appropriate age and ethnicity, and then she sets them in contemporary settings and world. Some of my favorites include fourth century Saint Augustine, who's arguably one of the most imaginative informative minds in the tradition, and he started writing in his early thirties in North Africa. Then we have twelfth century Saint Hildegard, charismatic leader, critic of social inequality, naturalist, and also, don't forget this, she's one of the first to document the use of hops in fermented beverages, so don't forget to raise a glass to her this afternoon. And then, finally, thirteenth century Saint Thomas Aquinas, who I have a deep attachment to because he's the patron saint of academics, I e, all those who can't find a way to stop going to school. And I love how Morbitts replaces these heroes in the world that I see and encounter.
Speaker 2:I love how she often images them with an inquisitive piercing gaze, which I think is a representation of how I think our faith is meant to be formed in a kind of mirror. The saints looking out and ahead to us and us looking inward and back toward them. The mystery of life and meaning in the world just held there in this gaze we share, and it that might seem a little overplayed because they're just images after all, and maybe you don't like them or find them compelling. That's fine. You find your own way back to the saints.
Speaker 2:But I wanna be honest with you. One of the only reasons I still feel like there's room for me in the tradition is because of the lives of the saints. Because when I look back at them, I see that there's actually a lot of room for the work and the creation that we do, for the believing and the doubting that I undertake each and every day. Their imaginations and determination and failures and mistakes, they help me remember that the measure of my faith is not in being right because they thought so many different things. The measure is in carrying haphazardly, faith falling out of our pockets kind of way, the beauty and the justice and the care that Christ modeled the best I can.
Speaker 2:And I think the saints help us in this by embodying the innumerable pathways our tradition has taken to come to this moment that we share. And I'm convinced that they embolden us as we chart our own course forward, which brings me to Amy Jill Levine. And right off the top, I need to mention a couple of challenges that I face in making this introduction. Amy, comments, comments, Amy. First, unlike the other three people that you're gonna hear about in this series, AJ, as she is known to many, is very much still alive, at least I hope she is as I'm speaking today.
Speaker 2:She is distinguished professor of New Testament and Jewish studies at Hartford International University for religion and politics. She's all over the Internet and podcasts and Amazon, and she continues to speak and teach and write in her late sixties. And while it's not normative to consider and commemorate people as saints while they're still alive, I hope you'll understand why I've chosen to talk to you about her as we move along. Now with that said, the second challenge is that she is not part of the Christian tradition. See, Amy Joliveen is a Jewish scholar, and while she dubs herself an unorthodox member of an orthodox synagogue, she would place herself firmly in the camp of those who honor and respect Jesus but don't believe in him in any way.
Speaker 2:And this is something I wanna come back to before we're done today, what we're supposed to do with those we admire, those we respect, those who shape us from outside our tradition. And this this is really important to me personally because of some of my experience. See, in my late twenties, I went back to grad school. I intended to pursue an academic life, and at that point, I was hoping to become a biblical scholar teaching the stories and the texts that I had loved as a child, and they had shaped me. And even at that point, I'm not entirely sure why, I wanted to learn with and from people who didn't agree with me, people who were from outside my tradition or perspective.
Speaker 2:Not really sure why. I think I have inquisitive sensibility. I did back then. I still do. But looking back, I can see that some of this was fueled by the ways that I felt the church had built a big wall around me, and I kinda wanted to know what was on the other side.
Speaker 2:Some of it was also just pragmatic and selfish. I wanted to study at big research universities that I thought would enhance my reputation as I tried to become a scholar, so I started my graduate work at the University of British Columbia. And there, I was influenced and trained by a lovely Jewish scholar, Vita Dafna Arbel, and it was her who introduced me, Scott, Amy, Amy, Scott, introduced me to Levine's early feminist writings and her newly released book at the time called The Misunderstood Jew. And in that book, Levine argues that with all of the emphasis that the church places on Jesus' divine nature In all of its attempt to build theology from Christ's teaching and ethics, sometimes what gets forgotten is that Jesus was Jewish. And I could actually hear Amy in my head saying, of course, he was Jewish.
Speaker 2:He liked fish and chips, but he's not from Boston. Like, she would say something like this. Right? Jesus was a person. Jesus was from somewhere.
Speaker 2:And she highlights what scholars refer to as the scandal of particularity, that while Christians believe that Jesus came in the image of the invisible God, Christ appeared in a particular setting and with particular people. And Levine sets out to show how Christian interpreters of the gospels often misstep in our reading simply because we don't understand that Jewish particularity, and often we actually stereotype it. She gives several examples in the book. I'm gonna give you two of them. The first is that she outlines how some Christians assume that all Jews wanted a warrior messiah and that they rejected Jesus because he taught a message of peace.
Speaker 2:And in answer to such interpretations, Levine is quick to point out the diversity of messianic perspectives that there were within Jewish scripture and history, some of which were rooted in peaceful and apolitical advocacy. And Levine does a masterful job of illustrating the irony there is in Christians broadly painting Judaism as a religion of violence while collecting a slight history full of militarism and revenge themselves. Second one, she also discusses the widely held stereotype that Jesus was a feminist in woman hating Jewish culture, and she quotes what she thinks exists there. And she points out that Judaism was not monolithically anti woman. And how does she show this?
Speaker 2:Well, she does this by pointing to Jesus because Jesus had well positioned female followers who were free to travel and access their own funds after all. They had resources and privileges that they used to freely support Christ's ministry. So Lubin argues that while it's fine to admire how Jesus interacts with women in the text, we don't have to stereotype Judaism negatively or think of Jesus as unique in this way in order to do that work. And this is a kind of perspective that's been really helpful for me over the years. It's helped me adopt a faith that doesn't just take Jesus as savior without thinking about where he's from.
Speaker 2:And I think this is important for in our life and in our aspiration to be a community that's intellectually honest. Because considering where Jesus was from helps us read the bible with more care. It helps us be more honest about how sometimes there's some distance between our privilege and Christ's ethic. It helps us be honest about how these texts have been used to do harm in the world and how we can do our best to avoid those same pitfalls. I think it can also help some of us be honest about our love for scripture and our struggle with it.
Speaker 2:See, if we're honest that Jesus was from somewhere, this helps us be honest about where we're from and where we want to go from here. Now I'm not sure if this is right, but I would think that if you've heard Amy Jo Levine's name dropped here at Commons before, it's likely been because of her work on Jesus' parables. In 2015, she wrote a brilliant and accessible book entitled short stories by Jesus. It's always one of the first places I go when we're working through parable texts as a community. And in that book, Levine's chief contribution to our ongoing attempts to understand Jesus.
Speaker 2:Her contribution is to root our interpretation as modern readers in a consideration of how he might have been heard and received by his original Jewish heroes. Levine loves Jesus as a storyteller, and it is right to focus on how Jesus has this tendency to tell an enigmatic and sometimes disturbing story in the middle of a conversation. Sometimes it feels like Jesus liked making it awkward. And in her scholarship, I think Levine cultivates a kind of fascination with this facet of Jesus' teaching. Because over her career, she hasn't stopped talking about how Jesus' storytelling is so layered and how it's so mysterious at times.
Speaker 2:She contends that Christ's parables are like this specifically because they're meant to challenge the hidden aspects of our perspectives and our values and our lives. See, Jesus' parables ask great questions, and they unearth answers that we don't always anticipate but answers we probably need. Lavin contends that parables invite a different kind of artful listening from us, where we can put away familiar and allegorical and moralized interpretations that have been attached to them. And the way that this happens is if we try to listen, as she teaches us as an author, teaches us to listen with a first century Jewish sensibility as much as we can because this is a sensibility which knew that this genre of communication, the parable, it was meant to provoke and to disrupt. And as an example, she works through a series of familiar stories, parables told by Jesus to some some scribes and some pharisees in Luke chapter 15.
Speaker 2:I wanna read them to you quickly here. In the first story, Jesus says this, suppose one of you has a 100 sheep and loses one of them. Doesn't he leave the 99 in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? Here's what I found. And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home.
Speaker 2:And then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, rejoice with me. I've found my lost sheep. Jesus goes on in the next verses. He says, or suppose a woman has 10 silver coins, loses one of them, doesn't she light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she does, she calls her friends and her neighbors together and says, rejoice with me.
Speaker 2:I found my lost coin. And then in the third, which is familiar to many of us here today, Jesus tells a story of two sons, the youngest of which takes his inheritance, wastes it in another country, and then returns in hope of being welcomed home. And in the story Jesus tells, the father rushes to meet the youngest son and says this, quick, bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf.
Speaker 2:Kill it. Let's have a feast. Let's celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.
Speaker 2:So they had a party, the text says. Now Levine suggests that we should hold loosely the way that Luke allegorizes Jesus' words here, how the author of the gospel text makes these stories about God finding sinners. And Levin encourages us to do this in part because the same story appears in Matthew's gospel chapter 18 with a completely different audience and with a completely different interpretation, which just means that there's some room here for us to consider what a first century audience may have noticed about the stories themselves. And Levine proposes that many of the peasants listening to the story would not have had a 100 sheep in their flocks. They wouldn't have had 10 silver coins to rub together, and few if any of them would have had large estates with servants and stores of clothing and extra calves to fatten like the father of the two sons.
Speaker 2:She observes that in for such an audience, these stories would have had a particular edge, and this is what it was that perhaps it was those who have a lot. They're the ones who are the most likely to fail to notice what is missing. Levine argues that at their core, each of these stories centers on the response of a character who sees that they're missing something. Right? The the man goes in on this ravaged search to find one sheep, and the woman urgently searches for one coin, and Levine notes that this father who just casually lets his first and younger son the younger son go early on in the story eventually realizes that someone's missing from the homecoming at the end of the story and goes out to find the older one.
Speaker 2:He notes that in each of these stories, there's a finding that leads to celebration, to community, to greater connection, to restored relationships, but that that celebration only comes to those who go out searching, to those who and I quote Amy Jo Levine here, don't wait. Those who look now, those who look hard, those who take a second to count what they have. And this is a disruptive way to read these familiar stories. See, I think it disrupts me and that it encourages me to consider the thing that might be missing in my life, whether that's a practice, whether it's a routine or a habit that I've neglected. Maybe I've been busy.
Speaker 2:Maybe I've been lazy. Maybe I forgot how life giving that thing was. It also encourages you to go looking for the intuition and the wisdom that may have been missing in your life. Maybe you stopped listening to your body. Maybe you got sidetracked with your career or some other interest, and you have forgotten to rest or to laugh or to play.
Speaker 2:Maybe you've neglected your roots or the your commitments, the things in your past that you know served you well at one point. I think for all of us, it actually encourages us to consider who we've lost, the friendships we valued, the time and space has made it hard to connect with. It could be a partner or a child that we're feeling distant from, unsure of how to step toward them. Really, it's probably any relationship where we haven't paid attention to how they're doing, how they're coping, and how maybe they've been trying to tell us those things we haven't paid attention. See, what following Levine's suggestion into more disruptive reading does is it brings these texts to life, and not in some spiritual or pious way where we can go home today feeling like we know what the Bible says better.
Speaker 2:No. But in the way where they send you out into your life with your eyes and your heart open, paying attention to what you have, looking for what's missing, free to love and forgive and connect as you were meant to. And that brings me back to what we're supposed to do with voices and influences like Amy Jo Levine, who I hope I've convinced you just a little bit, help us be better at putting Jesus at the center. Those people in our journeys who past or present stretch our definition of sainthood, who while they might not be card carrying insiders, they certainly deserve our admiration and our gratitude. Levine does this for me with her keen mind and her academic acumen for sure, but she also does it with her cheerfulness and her humor.
Speaker 2:Seriously, go watch an interview of her. She's brilliant, funny, hilarious. She's the best. But as I prepared to make this introduction, I kept coming back to a conviction that lies at the center of Levine's work, and it stems from her early life. See, as a Jewish girl growing up in the predominantly Catholic neighborhoods and subculture of Massachusetts, Amy Jolevine was regularly the outsider.
Speaker 2:She had lots of Christian friends, spent lots of time in Christian Sunday schools, and grew up with this deep awareness of the stories that were shared between her tradition and that, the Christians around her. And she has written and talked many times about how on one occasion when she was seven years old, a young classmate came up to her and said, you killed our lord, which isn't usually what happens on playgrounds, but it is an obvious anti Semite statement. It's derived from certain readers of scripture, and it's been deployed many times in history to harm Jewish communities. And Levine tells the story in different ways that she didn't really understand what this girl was saying to her, but she claims that she responded by going home and telling her mom that she was going to go to church, that she was gonna participate in their catechism classes in an effort to learn and in an effort to try to end antisemitism. She talks about how then over the course of the many years afterwards, she spent time with so many Christians who didn't share the sentiment of her little classmates' words, and that this got her thinking about how it's possible to read the same scriptures and come to such desperate conclusions.
Speaker 2:These are thoughts that led her into a life spent getting Christians to read with more generosity to their Jewish roots, And she's also spent a lot of time trying to get Jews to read with more generosity to their Christian offspring. In her most recent book, the bible with and without Jesus, with her coauthor, she contends that, quote, the better we can see through the eyes of our neighbors, the better able we are to be good neighbors. And that might be the most important reason I wanted to introduce you to AJ today because she inspires me with what theologian Christer Stendhal refers to as holy envy. Her ability to appreciate the perspective of others and this willingness that I think she invites us to cultivate to follow other people's compelling examples even if they believe or pray or live differently than us. The truth is that Levine inspires me with her love of ancient words and scripture that are not her own.
Speaker 2:And I imagine that if I were to read other scriptures and blogs and tweets and facial expressions with generosity similar to hers, I'd be more in line with Christ's command to love my neighbor. And maybe that blurs the lines of who the saints are or who they should be. I kinda hope so because I'm convinced that any envy, imitation, or following we do of others that makes us more gracious, more peaceful, more generous, it's teaching us the way of Jesus. Pray with me. God, we are grateful today for all those who stand as guides and encouragers, the voices of compassion, the voices of correction, voices that remind us that the only way forward is to live, to do our best to embrace the mystery of faith and love and belonging.
Speaker 2:We're also so grateful for the ways that there are many who help us know what to do with these texts. People like Levine who invite us to consider an ancient world so that we can know how we stand in our world. People who invite us to embrace scripture as a force that disrupts us for our good because it disrupts the status quo of our world if we let it. And we're grateful to you for those who invite us to be kinder and curious and better neighbors. Through them, gracious spirit, you make us more alive.
Speaker 2:And so we pray, would you come and would you restore our imagination? Would you inspire our thoughtfulness and our play this week? Would you come and guide us in all of our searching and our finding of the things that we're missing. We pray in the name of Christ, our hope. Amen.