Drinking blood

When Jesus toldhis followers to drink of his blood, I wonder if they thought about Leviticus 7: 26-27.  It says, “And wherever you live, you must not eat the blood of any bird or animal.  If anyone eats blood, that person must be cut off from his people.’ “

I wonder if there was some sense that they were choosing to be cut off from others, that they were choosing be to cut off together.  A sentiment not altogether different from when Jesus’ biological family came for him and Jesus said “The people who follow me are my real family.”

It’s also not too distinct from the idea that to be Holy is to be set apart from God.  And it’s so perfect, so consistent with the way that Jesus progresses in such a counter-intuitive, backwards-appearing way: It’s a way to say “You’ll be set apart by God because the rest of society won’t want you.”

Even more on “The Worst Story Ever Told”

Marty has been leading us through a sermon series on Judges 19.   I have been thinking about the middle portion of the story, where the Levite cuts the concubine up into 12 pieces and sends them to all the tribes of Israel. 

First off, I have been thinking about power dynamics, rape, and homosexuality.  Stories like this one are often used to demonstrate the “abonimation” of homosexuality.   Like many rapes, this is not really about gender, homosexuality, and heterosexuality at all.  It’s about the Benjamites demonstrating total domination over the visitors. 

If it was a sexual thing we’d expect a gender preference to be expressed.  The Benjamites ask for the man at first, and they initially refuse the women.  I’d suggest that this refusal occurs because the women are considered to be of lower status than the men.  Ultimately, the bandits “settle” for the concubine.

We’re not told why they end up settling on the concubine when they initially refused that idea from the owner of the home.  One possibility which I admit there is only a smidgen of evidence for:

Perhaps they somehow barricaded themselves in after throwing the concubine out. 

My smidgen of evidence: the concubine is on the door step at dawn and they do not come out until then, though it seems that she has been lying there for some time.   This image is even more horrible: the idea that the cowards inside would not let her in out of fear that the bandits would follow her in.

At any rate, my next question about all this:

Was the concubine dead at that point?  I have a few small pieces of evidence in this direction, as well:

#1) Scripture doesn’t say that she was dead.

#2) It says that he put her on the donkey.  “Put”, at least in English, doesn’t imply that it was much work to get her to stay there.

#3) As a Jewish guy, presumably informed on the scriptures, would he have touched a corpse at this point?

The Jewish people had quite script expectations around not touching dead flesh.

Of course, he had to touch her dead body at some point, as he chopped her up.  But I wonder if she died on the journey home and that this pushed him over the edge into madness.  It’s one thing to suppose that he had possession of his faculties if he’d only sent the corpse to the 11 other tribes.  Strangely, scripture states that he sent pieces of her to all 12 tribes.  If he was rational, what would be the point of sending it to the Benjamites?

It’s interesting that the whole dead-flesh thing never even comes up.  By our standards today, I’d feel pretty gross and manipulated if somebody sent me a chunk of a human body.  It was a much bigger deal for them to have touched a dead body.  Yet nobody gripes to the Levite about this.  I wonder why?

Would readers at the time take this is as yet another sign of how decadent that society as a whole had become?  Did they believe the Benjamites sent the pieces of the concubine?  Were they manipulated into such a rage that they never stopped to realize what they had done?

I don’t know.  I don’t even have a teeny-weeny piece of evidence in this direction.

My last thought on all this:

Fast foreward a bunch of centuries.   Jesus sits having dinner with his disciples.  They were versed in the scriptures.  When Jesus says “This is my flesh” Do the disciples think about the Levite?

It’s an startling comparison between the new covenant and the old.  In the first story, the man chops up the woman whom he didn’t marry.  The pieces of her flesh lead to the 12 tribes focusing on each other, going to war.

In the new version, the man is offering his flesh to the people who will come to be described as his bride.  (The church)  This flesh is not meant to antagonize us into making war with each other.  Rather, we’re supposed to eat it.  And in eating it, we realize that we are the enemy, or atleast we were before we took him into us.  (I’m not suggesting that the literal act of taking communion saves us.  I’m suggesting that communion is a representation of taking Jesus into our hearts, and that this saves us.)

My happy place

     The breeze ruffles the curtains.  It carries the smell of the sea and salt.  It lands on my skin. 

     The room is long and narrowish and light and high.  Ten rows of bnenches fill up the majority of the space in the room, but mostly they escape notice.  The butt and back of the benches are lined with thin burgundy cushions.

     The stage is half a step above the rest of the room.  The cross is bigger than life, which is as it should be.  The sunlight comes in through the skylight and casts a rectangular, God-made spotlight on it.

      This rectangle is echoed across the room by six rectangles of light which fall on the pews and into the aisles.  There are 3 on each side; the long windows let more than just the breeze in.

      It is modest, this place, and some would say small.  I smile as I walk out the front door and take it in from the outside.

       The white paint on the outside is not brand new but the church carries a well-loved air about itself.  It’s the sort of place, that if you put any thought into it, you would just know that it’ll get repainted before the whiteness begins to actually chip.

     The building has a minty green trim.  The shape of it is close to the shape of a capital “L”, except that the horizontal, lower portion is a bit to small and stubby.  This added on room– the horizontal part of the “L”– has no door from the outside but it does have large windows.

      I could walk across the green (but not perfectally manicured) lawn and step between the bushes that hug the perimeter of the building.  I could look through the window and peer at the simple wooden table that dominates the room.    There is a copper platter just to the left of the center of the table.

      Two-thirds of a loaf of French bread sits on the platter.  The reflection of the simple overhead light on the platter is broken by the few crumbs gathered by the open end of the bread.  A mostly-full bottle of wine sits close to the right edge of the table.  The sun has dried most of the condensation that once clung to the bottle.  Only a few drops remain where the neck widens.

 

The above was this image, incredibly clear, and powerful, that just popped into my head.  I decided to get it out of my head and write it down.  It’s a place I’ve never been to, but I love it there.  It’s my happy place, this little perfect church in my heart.  I’ve gone back there, every now and again, to get away from everything. 

Do you have a “happy place?”

 

Untitled communion poem

The grotesqueries are the point.

It is a cracker, yes,
but it is also His Flesh
being ground to grit between my molars.

Not the Jews (or for the Jews)
Not the Romans (or for the Romans)
but me
for me

And yes,
it is simply lemon tea (instead of grape juice, we’re out)
in a chipped mug but
it’s also his blood
in my mouth
and down my esophagous

that full warm tang
surprises me
shocks me
sickens me
nourishes me

I am a canibal-vampire.
And it seems that this is how it must be.
And so I offer my thanks to God
for it.

The body and Christianity

I’ve just had this epiphany.  (A warning: my epiphanies have about a 50% success rate at seeming meaningful later.  Perhaps comments can help me decide if this counts as a real epiphany or not.)

It’s about how important the body is to Christianity.

Lots has been said, written, and discussed about how midevil Christianity perverted Christ’s message, most specifically in interpetting Jesus’ teachings as being anti-body, anti-flesh.  I’m accepting this premise as a given here; I’m not going to explore the whys, or the hows of where we went astray.  I’m more interested of what Jesus was about in the first place. 

My first realization was that the institution of communion is radically body-affirming.   When Jesus first mentioned that we would need to eat his flesh, scripture reports that he freaked many of his followers out.  It almost seems like a turning point.

Even by todays standards, this claim is down right creepy.  I can only imagine what it seemed like to Jesus’ followers.  They’d grown up in a culture where dead flesh and blood of animals were more than disgusting: these things so polluted us that they made us unworthy to approach God.  For us, dead flesh is a hygiene thing.  For them, it was a moral thing, an obedience thing. 

But Jesus said we need to take his flesh into our flesh.  His body into our body.  It wasn’t enough to take his ideas into our mind.  It wasn’t enough to internalize his teachings in our heart.  His flesh into our flesh… What an amazing declaration about the importance of the body!

I’m thinking about the words “incarnation” and “carnal”.  Interesting how they both how the same root, meaning “the flesh” in Latin.  We praise Jesus embodiement while decrying our own. 

This is not to say that being in the world is how we’re supposed to be.  This is not to say it’s o.k. to behave in ways we often describe as “of the flesh.”  But I think that locating, for example, sexual sin in the body is a cop-out.  It’s a way to pass the buck, to locate the problem elsewhere. 

Maybe what it all comes down to is that Jesus was about concrete, physical  things in the real world.  He made (multiplied) real loaves and fishes; he tells us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner.  He certainly new about active listening, and emphasizing, and all sorts-of touchy feely, non-physical ways we can take care of each other.

But he said that the church is his body, and that the church is his bride; two physical entities.  He could have compared the church to a conscience, or lots of other nonphysical things.  But he didn’t.  And I think that’s significant. 

his flesh, his blood

These grotesqueries

They are the point.

Yes, it is a cracker.

But it is also His flesh

being ground between my molars.

Not the Jews.

Not the Romans.

But me.

For me.

Yes, the drink is lemon tea

in a chipped, cheerful mug.

But also His blood

in my mouth

and down my throat.

The full warm tang

surprises me

shocks me

sickens me.

I do not want to know

that I am cannibal-vampire.

but if this is what I am

and if this is how he will come

than I will thank God for it.

The Tunnel

In those days it seemed like there was this euphoria that undergirded everything

like I might be able to dig in the right place and find a pool that was essence of bliss

or I might peel away a flimsy wall and find a divine glow shining there

where the two-by-fours should be…

if I could tune the radio to just the right station I’d hear the angel’s singing.

My favorite thing about drinking wasn’t being drunk,

back then.

My favorite thing was the later-time

when the mellow remnants of a buzz clung on to me…

My favorite thing about being stoned was being stoned, really stoned, knocked-on-our butts stoned…

what I really relished was the aftermath:

when my thoughts were just begining to return to a semblance of obedience

when walking wasn’t so much an act of the will

a state of being that Simon and Garkfunkel described so elequently as:

Feeling GroovyWe had this place that wasn’t much but our everything.

A drainage ditch that lead into some kind of tunnel beneath the street

We’d taught ourselves not to think too hard

about what the puddle was beneath our feet.

Our eyes became anachronisms quickly in that place.

but We always new where to stop.

and Somebody would pull out a flute,

one of the clay, circular ones

the kind you buy at Renaisance faires.

And we’d breathe to the almost rythmn of that half-song.

Sometimes somebody would sing these nonsense words of wisdom

to that airy attempt at a melody

sometimes we’d talk about the most important things

sometimes those most important things were among us anyway.

Isolated from the extranous,

cut off from seeing with our eyes

A reality emerged in the darkness, a reality for us and between us back then.

But the years rolled in and they pulled us away from that place

and I spent a while trying to go back anyway

I did not realize that this was as pathetic

as Mick Jagger still begging for satisfaction while he is pushing sixty years old.

When I gave up on going back to our tunnel

I spent so long pushing foreward then, and away from it

and it didn’t seem like I got anywhere.

But last night I embraced the wierdness

of what it was I was doing.

I sipped this cup I call Jesus’ blood.

I looked around to the second group I chose as a family

and I thought maybe, just maybe

I heard those soft flute notes again.

Joy

I.I believe in many things

and they are joy.

I believe in Joy:

it is all joy and forever joy;

joy in the damp pool at the bottom of the darkest well

and joy at the core of the furthest star,

the boundary and edge and glory and meaning of this life,

the secret and silent underside of all things.

II.

There was a joy lost in the garden

and a joy that Christ left in heaven.

But we will return to it

as He returned to it.

And could His descent have been only duty?

If so then call me Peter, for I will deny him three times before the cock crows.

If so then call me Judas for I will sell him for 30 pieces of silver.

And I have been Peter

and I have been Judas

in those time I could not find joy:

I am broken after I drive that spike into his palm, both innocent and calloused.

Because I look into his eyes as I must as I do it.

and beneath the hurt there is something more:

promise and invitation

I will eat of His body and will drink of His Blood

and I will reap His Joy.

I will fall back in His arms

by turning my arms over to him.

In the names that we might speak of him

and all the names that are unspeakable:

Joy