Avdat

History for horndogs

Speaking of women's agency, Mrs. Avdat and I, searching for new TV programming passion, are checking out The Tudors on Netflix. It's a great show for couples. Women will appreciate the breathtaking period costumes. Men will appreciate the breathtaking ladies-in-waiting when they slip out of their costumes. Which seems to happen all the time.

Now 16th century England was quite the patriarchal society. That said, I imagine that even then and there women had opportunities for creativity and advancement apart from sleeping your way to the top. Thus far, the show permits the viewer one of only two relationships with its female characters--lust, if they're young and have the King's eye (Anne Boleyn), or pity, if they're matronly and don't (Catherine of Aragon).

But it's Showtime, so what should I expect? Howard Zinn's People's History of the English Renaissance?

Oh, I'm forgetting. There's Margaret Tudor who, in this less than historically accurate telling, is married off to the elderly and lecherous King of Portugal, much to her chagrin. When the King grasps his chest in pain after they consummate the marriage I thought, "Ah, there's your escape. Wear him out until he checks out!" But she found a quicker way, smothering him to death with a pillow, his gout-swollen big toe quivering to the very moment he expired. Now that's agency!

Still, I imagine I will continue to watch. Sam Neill is outstanding as Henry VIII's confidant Cardinal Wolsey. Neill is so good you can almost hear the gears in his brain going click, click, click as he manipulates his driven but somewhat erratic monarch at every turn. Why Neill in a red cap isn't the top hit on a Google image search of "medieval corruption" I have no idea.

Saving the innocents with a magic screwdriver

It's just as well that the congregation where I was going to fill in this morning canceled services. I was getting ready to offer a definitive answer to a question that I'm only prepared to think out loud about: why did God save only Jesus, and not all the innocents in Bethlehem?

In an article in Review and Expositor, Frank Tupper offers an interesting answer: Joseph was the only one to whom a warning would have made any sense. For example, if I had dreamed last night that my children were in mortal danger, I would not have packed them in the car that very instant and driven to Florida. I would have got up, fixed myself a glass of water, shaken the cobwebs of that nightmare out of my head, and returned to bed. And so would have the fathers of Bethlehem.

Joseph was in a different situation. Joseph knew the true identity of the boy in the crib under his roof. Joseph, like everyone, knew he was ruled by a ruthless monarch. Furthermore, Joseph surely knew that the identity of his son was known to the king, thanks to the visit of the magi. Finally, Joseph had experience trusting and acting on his dreams. So when the angel visited him one night prophesying doom unless he and his family got out of Dodge, Joseph alone was prepared to act on that information.

Thus, says Tupper, the Slaughter of the Innocents suggests that God's special providence (miracles) usually defers to God's general providence (God's creation of a world whose orderliness we call "laws of nature," conditioned by time and space, filled with human beings whose exercise of free will--embedded in the mysterious nexus of finitude sin and redemption--is the story of history). God may well intervene in a given situation to give it a nudge toward the best possible outcome, but what is possible is to a great extent already determined by what has unfolded up to that point. This is not to say that there are things God cannot do, but it is to say that when God intervenes, God does so respecting the integrity of what God has created and permitted--which is another way of saying that God is always true to himself.

Clearly this won't satisfy everyone, and if we have experienced the murder of one of our own children we might well want a bit more intervention from the Almighty. But I can't imagine that a more active intervention would make the situation any better. Chaos and evil make life unpredictable and at times  unbearable, but so would a Deity who kept stepping onto the stage of human history coaching the actors on blocking and intonation according to plot changes he's composing at that very moment.

I imagine it would be like living in the world of David Tennant's Doctor Who. As a Time Lord, the Doctor frequently intervenes in history both for its own sake and to make subsequent events turn out OK. Usually such interventions are known only to the viewer and the Doctor's lovely human sidekick, but during Tennant's run as the Doctor, he saves planet Earth from full-scale, extraterrestrial and very public invasions of Daleks and Cybermen, not to mention nudging a crashing spaceship away from Buckingham Palace. As I watched the human race experience redemption on an annual basis by a mysterious, benevolent visitor in a flying phone booth, armed only with a magic screwdriver, I couldn't help but wonder, "If this were really happening, how would the markets react?"

If the angels were to act any more overtly in their war against the demons than they do, I'm not sure we could tolerate it any better than the present miseries that make us question God's power and goodness. I do wonder, however, if a series of gentle nudges can get the universe to the place where the scriptures promise that it will wind up: where death is destroyed, and the home of God is among mortals. That would seem to require a kind of special revelation at odds with the general revelation we see on a daily basis.

On the other hand, Paul compares our present state to our resurrected state by appealing to the continuity and discontinuity between a seed and a fully grown plant. If we didn't know anything about botany, it would seem incredible that a series of small steps could lead from one to the other. Yet it does. So maybe this incredibly violent, evolving universe can be nudged toward utopia.

But if so, that would seem to require patience. If it took 13 billion years for the first resurrection to occur, it might take another 13 billion years for all the rest of them to occur.

Casserole seasons

Here in the south we have mild winters. Another way to say it is that we have long springs and long autumns. The leaves aren't all down until after Thanksgiving, and the city's leaf removal efforts don't begin in earnest until December.

Now this December we've experienced a cold snap and some snow. I welcome it. It really puts you in the Christmas spirit, especially in these parts where snow is rather rare. But now the snow has started to melt, revealing a truly revolting sight: soggy, half-rotten piles of leaves under the discolored snow.

It's gross. It's... it's... it's SEASONS TOUCHING! That's what it is. It creeps me out like when I was a kid and the foods touched on my plate.

I'm glad that this big storm blowing in from the west coast is going to swing out into the Atlantic and leave us dry on Christmas Day. This city needs a good two weeks of hard core raking and leaf removal before it can snow in decency again. Just like you need a clean plate before you go get dessert. Apple pie sitting in mashed potatoes and gravy residue just won't do.

Mary's agency

While preparing a sermon that may or may not get preached this weekend depending on how this nor'easter sets up, I ran across an unfortunate contrast that Douglas Hare draws between Mary and Joseph in the Interpretation commentary on Matthew:

By focusing on Mary, Luke emphasizes the essential passivity of the human response to God's action: "Let it be to me according to thy Word" (Luke 1:38). Matthew, on the other hand, by selecting Joseph as his leading actor, stresses the active component in the human response. Three times Joseph is instructed by an angel in a dream, and three times he must do something.

I take it that, as a NT scholar and a Protestant, Hare doesn't buy into medieval Catholic notions of Mary delivering Jesus without painful contractions or a breach in her hymen. So what does he think the Mother of God was doing those nine months? Watching General Hospital and eating bonbons? How is consenting to a shotgun marriage more active than consenting to an unplanned pregnancy?

Granted, "He took her as his wife," sounds more active than "Let it be to me according to thy Word." The verb in the first sentence is transitive and indicative; the verb in the second is intransitive and subjunctive. (In English anyway; my Greek is horribly rusty).

But the difference is more apparent than real. Mary's response sounds like a variation on the Royal We, a more majestic way of saying, "I agree," or, "You've got a deal." Maybe one reason why Roman Catholics call Mary the Queen of Heaven is that she talks like one.

And granted, one could read the Annunciation as supine acquiescence to the sovereign will of the Almighty. One could interpret Gabriel's words as "An offer she can't refuse." He doesn't say, "Will you conceive?" but "You will conceive."

But one doesn't have to read it that way. Gabriel doesn't announce a fait accompli and depart. The climax of the story is Mary's "Yes" to the angel, and I believe that her Yes was genuinely hers. Indeed, she can only say Yes by the grace of the Son to be born in her, but God's grace does not create robots; it liberates men and women who were formerly slaves of sin to offer themselves wholeheartedly and willingly to God's strange purposes for their lives.

I wonder if Joseph's seems the more active response to God's action because in the back of our minds float traditional notions of who is the more active partner in the sex act, despite the fact that intercourse reportedly did not occur in this instance. But as Hugo Schwyzer points out, one can speak of a woman enveloping, engulfing and surrounding her partner just as easily as one can speak of a man penetrating his partner. That we don't has less to do with the biological reality of intercourse and more to do with the social arrangements in which intercourse is situated.

Likewise, if we fail to speak of Mary's agency in the incarnation event, that has less to do with the text itself, and more to do with the social arrangements in which the text is read and interpreted.

Santa Claus must die

What do fundamentalists like? Not Santa Claus. Click here, and you'll see an anti-Old Saint Nick screed in the margins of David Hoffman's Common Man's Reference Bible--the perfect gift for your grandchildren who are home for Christmas from some college other than Bob Jones University. Put it in their hands, man! The Bible between thee and godless secular humanism! (HT)

The comment thread at the above linked-to site mocks this fundamentalist Bible to no end. They miss the point entirely. Haven't you people seen "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?" Santa Claus is a jerk. He is the apotheosis of the white, male, capitalist hegemony. His contempt for Rudolph's red nose is but the tip of an iceberg of species-ism, a hatred and loathing for diversity in general, and specifically for an arctic form of caribou that "very considerably in color and size." That Rudolph's father Donner sides with the racist old man against his own son proves nothing. The oppressed are often prisoners of a false consciousness. And what would you expect from the reindeer version of "that guy" at every Little League game you've ever been to? May he choke on that ridiculous whistle--little man with a big job.

Like bank bailouts and free trade, Santa Claus is an issue that ought to unite the far left and the far right. Who will rid us of this "unisex freak of Satan" by plunging a knife in that bowl full of jelly as Ehud, the judge of the Lord, did to the wicked king Eglon?

Incarnation and mission

Warning: this post is long,rambling, and ranting.

In an essay in the book The Cross-Cultural Proces in Christian History, Andrew Walls disputes the conventional wisdom that Church History is the story of Christianity going from strength to strength. In fact, Christianity often has found itself in deep, deep water, only to survive by having the good sense to grab whatever lifeline was thrown to it from some distant shore.

Case in point: Christianity had essentially hit a dead end only a few years after Jesus' resurrection. If it hadn't been for some anonymous believers in Antioch who got a wild hair to preach the gospel to some Gentiles, Christianity likely would have died out as any number of apocalyptic first century Jewish sects did. Instead, Christianity uprooted itself from its Palestinian Jewish soil and flowered in Greco-Roman society. In a few centuries the Jewish Messiah had become one substance with the immutable God of the philosophers.

Examples abound. It was mighty convenient that when the dioceses once administered by Augustine, Athanasius and the Cappadocians were falling to the Muslims, Pope Gregory was commissioning a mission to the Angles and the Saxons, the new pagan overlords of Briton.

The same process is at work today. Secularism has displaced Christianity in Europe far more quickly than Islam ever did in North Africa and the Near East, yet Christianity has found a new lease on life in Africa. At the beginning of the last century, 90% of Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today, 60% live in Africa, a monumental and lightning-quick shift in the religion's center of gravity with which no one yet has come to grips.

Walls makes a couple of points about this two-steps-forward, one-step-back narrative.

I'm simply having a wonderful Christmastime

It's Christmas. They say it's hard on people. It's hard on the bereaved who must go through the holidays without their soulmate. It's hard on the clinically depressed who cannot muster the required jocularity. Why, it's even hard on Christians, we're told, what with having to share the date with Kwanzaa (HT).

I don't get it. Christmas is awesome. The music is awesome. Bright, tacky lights are awesome. Getting to drink egg nog, guilt free, is awesome. Egg nog and bacardi gold is even awesomer. Kids in bathrobes are awesome.

(And No, Christmas pageants are not sentimental; they are a legitimate form of proclamation and catechesis. When our teenager who played the Virgin Mary let out a squeal of fright when the angel Gabriel introduced himself, the whole congregation laughed--but only because she'd nailed how disturbing  an encounter with the holy must be. Afterward I asked my younger son what he got out of the story, and he replied, "I think she was terrified, but she went through with it anyway." He gets it. He's of age now, as far as I'm concerned.)

Even gift-giving is awesome, as long as you don't max out the credit card to do it.

Christmas must be awesome because my older, autistic son, absolutely loves it. He loves celebrations of all kinds. But he particularly loves Christmas. He loves the decorations. The three-year-old wonder in his thirteen year old eyes as he handles the bright, shiny objects before they go onto the tree is all the confirmation I need that the season is a blessed one.

I didn't always feel this way. Being a Presbyterian means being long on truth and goodness and short on beauty. Thus I tended to scold (not preach) my way through December. Too much consumerism! Jesus is the reason for the season! Keep Christ in Christmas! All true, but I focused too much on the pitfalls, too little on the promise.

The resources for dealing with depression and bereavement are embedded in the season--companionship and bittersweet music. (The sacred music tends toward bittersweetness more than the secular music). Make judicious use of these resources. Christmas can be your friend.

And if the check-out clerk at Wal-Mart wished you a Happy Holidays rather than a Merry Christmas, you were by no means thrown to the lions. Get over yourself. Stop looking for excuses to get your nose out of joint, and don't dress up your umbrage in the red robes of martyrdom.

UPDATE: I should be clear that "our teenager" is our congregation's teenager. She's another couple's daughter.

Stimulate me

So, Congress and the President are going to stimulate the economy with a payroll tax cut. I heard someone somewhere say that a family making $40K per year will take home an extra $800 in 2011. That works out to $67 per month. Do I feel an extra night out at Ruby Tuesday coming on? Oh yeah!

Why, with an extra $67 in your pocket, you can show that lady who just tattooed the name of your band on her forehead how special she really is. You can even offer to spring for her kids. Ladies like that--when you act like you care about their kids. 

(Admittedly you don't really have a choice since she's got them this weekend. But it is a generous offer on your part, especially considering that the boy's father totally screwed you over when he fled the scene of the accident, leaving his dime bag to be found in your unconscious lap by the police. You went away seven months for that!)

So it's a Long Island for you and a strawberry lemonade for your lady (because the refills are free)! Long Island refills aren't free, but you know that if you drink half of it and complain that you can't taste the liquor, the unctuous manager will pour you a new one on the house. Sliders for the kids (extra well done--nobody in this house is gonna puke tonite!) You'll have the half rack of ribs, but you want that broccoli well done too, just like your meat; and a ribeye for your lady.

She knows the drill as well as you do. She'll gnaw on half that steak and then complain, "I don't know... It's just a little too... It's a little too... fatty." It's a ribeye, you moron; it's a fattier cut of meat! But she knows she can weasel out a free dessert if she's insistent enough.

Anyway, ribs, steak, drinks and kids dinners come to, we'll say, $57. And when you think about all the free stuff you weaseled out of them, you made out like bandits!

You leave three twenties on the table. You round up the kids who've been running up and down the aisle for ten minutes now. You walk away with a to-go box of limp french fries in your hand, avoiding the pile of parmesan chicken pasta left on the floor when that boy of hers tripped a server, and tell your waiter not to worry. You can keep the change. Why? Because you got a tax cut!

Where did the extra seven dollars go? Condoms. Cuz later on, you gonna have some shake with those fries (heh, heh). You're feeling full, expansive, generous. Life is good.

Meanwhile, you were the only table your hapless server had the last hour he was on. Why was he working so late, even though he worked a double? Because he's either too stupid or too principled (the two do seem to go together) to flirt with the hostess or the manager, the two people who have absolute power to get him home at a decent hour. So add his base pay of $2.13 to your $3 tip, and once he tips out the bar and the hostess, he made the minimum wage that last hour he worked. That is, the minimum wage for 1997, unadjusted for inflation.

In the aggregate, more take home pay means more nights out, which means more Florida farmers and Kansas ranchers will expand their operations to meet demand for all those steaks, ribs and lemonades. Plus there will be more truck drivers hired to haul all this great American food to restaurants, and more servers hired.

But remember, clawing our way out of this abyss starts with one cheapo family begetting one chump server going home with a chump change burning a hole in his pocket, just aching to do some stimulating itself.

I love this country.

And I'm not bitter.