Religion without Borders

How much better would the world be if religious people who do really good things to help people would just leave behind those outmoded doctrinal particulars that do nothing but divide people?  Well, actually . . . .

Jeff Johnson: Pastors' Imperfections and Connecting with God

This video contains a short message by Jeff Johnson, the author of Got Style?: Personality-Based Evangelism.  I'm privileged that Jeff is the member of the pastoral staff of my church's American Baptist region who is focused on supplying wisdom and resources to congregations and connecting them to each other for joint ministry.  At a training event for people who help churches without a pastor to get linked to one, Jeff gave this brief talk about the imperfections and foibles of every pastor that God calls and about how important it is for us to separate from our busyness to connect with God.  Enjoy.

"Family" ≠ "Christian"

So here's something that peeves me.

I think it was when I was a kid in the 80's that the word "family" got to be more and more popular in Christian circles.  Most likely some of the impetus came from the radio program (later ministry/political action juggernaut) Focus on the Family, which was accurately named, because the program consisted of child psychologist Dr. James Dobson Focusing on the Family.  But then the word "family" started showing up more and more places.  You started hearing churches refer to themselves as "a family church" (meaning what exactly?).  At some point (I don't know when) a retail chain called Family Christian Stores emerged.  And eventually it became routine for "family" to be used as sort of a fuzzy synonym for "Christian" (specifically "Evangelical") in Christian branding in the hopes (I guess) that it would feel socially nice and improve the Evangelical image.  So you had "family [i.e., conservative Christian] values," "family [i.e., Christian] radio," the American Family (i.e., politically super-conservative Christian) Association, and so on.  (Feel free to use the comments section to list examples that I missed.)

I hate it when the term "family" is used as a synonym for "Christian."  Hate it, hate it, hate it.

One reason that I hate it is that the word "Christian" puts Christ front and center.  Nothing else should be in his place.

But another reason is that family isn't good.

Well, I should clarify that.  Family is an essential feature of the human race, which God created in his image and called good.  So family, as God created it, is good.  And substitutions or innovations in family, as God created it, which the human race has toyed with since Lamech took two wives, aren't good and in fact are ultimately devastating.

But family, just like the rest of human nature, was perverted by our fall into sin.  So family is just as good as human beings are.  It's also just as sick, depraved, and vicious as human beings are.  And I'm not just talking about extreme cases of child abuse or domestic violence.  I'm talking about ordinary families' ordinary interactions, because this is exactly what the Bible describes.

I was reminded of this again because a number of us in my church are going through Beth Moore's study The Patriarchs together, which examines Genesis 12-50, in which the main characters are Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and in which much (probably most) of the drama concerns their interactions with their wives, siblings, relatives, and slaves.  It had been quite a while since I had gone through Genesis, and it was jarring once again how grossly sick and messed up this family (as Christians, our family) was.  And yet, much of the time the stuff they do is not all that far-fetched; you've probably seen some of it in your own family and in families that you know well.

So when we use the word "family," let's be clear about exactly what family is.  Family is not by itself virtuous.  Family is under a curse because of sin and desperately needs to be redeemed.  And let's not delude ourselves into thinking that our churches will be stronger if we can just attract families into them.  The families that we attract are the very ones that need the transformative grace of God in order to be pleasing to him, and if they resist that grace then they have the potential to bring an entire church down.  And let's finally remember that the family that Jesus really cared about consists of those who "hear the word of God and do it" (Luke 8:21), a family united by his blood alone with God as its Father.

The Church mustn't view family in any other sense than the way the Bible views it.  Our failure to do so provides a safe haven for idolatry—the worship of our families, our kids, our marriages, our elders—and all manner of wickedness that idolatry gives birth to.

So please, I'm begging you, use "family" when you mean "family" as the Bible describes it.  Use "Christian" when you mean "Christian."  And don't mix them up.

"Pastor-Scholar" Postscript: Advice to My Former Self

In an unexpected and timely twist, I recently received an e-mail from my seminary asking alumni to submit advice for this year's graduates that will be bound in a booklet that each will receive.  Below is my submission.  I'm grateful for the moving experience of putting it into words, even if it (at least the good parts) doesn't make the cut for the booklet.  I'm including it here partly as a sort of sequel to my earlier post about my seminary but mostly because you might be in a situation where this advice would be encouraging to you.

---

I haven't met you, but I love you.  Since I can't see you, I can't give you a hug, and since I don't know you, I can't advise anything but what I would advise myself when I graduated with an M.Div. eight years ago.

It is tempting to believe that earning your degree prepared you for ministry.  It didn't.  It prepared your brain for ministry.  That is essential, and there is no seminary better at doing that than this one.  But pastoring isn't something that's thought or written or even spoken.  It's something that's done.  And you can't prepare for most of it except by doing it.  And much of that can't be simulated by Mentored Ministry, because you're not faced with it until you sit in that chair and bear the title of pastor.

You'll find that you never have enough time for anything.  For example, no matter what they told you preparing a sermon looks like, it's almost never going to work out that way.  You'll find yourself continually unprepared, not having written a flawless, well-researched exegetical paper and converted it into the crystalline Big Idea with perfect supporting illustrations for that week.  Fear not, beloved.  You have been preparing to preach that sermon since the first day you read that passage as a new believer and probably longer ago than that.  God wastes nothing.

Beloved, you don't know what you don't know, and it won't do you any good for me to try to tell you.  But don't be afraid.  As you do your job you'll find out, and you'll have the opportunity to learn what it is.  And yet more that you don't know that you don't know will emerge.  It never ends.  Learn not to be afraid of your ignorance.  Learn to accept it, laugh at it, embrace it, be humbled by it, revel in it.  Ignorance is not nakedness if you're robed in Christ's righteousness.

Never forget the reminder of the most brilliant mortal God ever spoke through: "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up."  You can't ultimately go wrong by loving the people God has given you to love.  And beloved, you are loved.  No matter what you think you need to do or your world thinks you need to do, at the end of the day, the only thing that your Father wants from you is to accept his love for you and to love him in return, wherever you are, honored or ignored, successful or middling, content or in anguish.

And beloved, if you are that student who has been ground into powder to get to this day, if you are limping across the finish line and cannot celebrate the passage, if you don't know where you're going next, if you feel abandoned and forsaken, if you are living in a famine of hearing the voice of the Lord, hear me: he still loves you, and he's so proud of you.  He may be asleep in the back of your storm-tossed boat as it's going under, but he hasn't left it.

Look me up if you want to talk.  And be blessed of the Highest One.

Love,
Cory Hartman
M.Div. '03

Good Questions

Tim Geoffrion hasn't blogged for a few months, but I'm glad he broke his silence.  This is a real, raw, searching, genuine post about some questions that he's asking himself that really challenged me.

The New Look: Let the People Be Heard!

To the loyal readers of 1st Corynthians:

I have altered the color scheme of this blog.  The red background is still very warm but less "hot."  The text is a tad darker and larger.  My intent is to make the blog more readable but still keep its unique look to set it apart from the other 892,306,461,547,392,091,728,972,107,308 pages on the internet (when I counted earlier this afternoon).

But at the end of the day, my friends, it's all about you.  (Take that, Rick Warren!)  So let your voices be heard!  Do you prefer:

(A) The new look.

(B) The old look.  (No guarantee I can recreate it, though.)

(C) A more conventional, neutral-colored, dark-text-on-pale-background look.

Nehemiah and the Selfhood of Israel

At some point in my life of learning the Bible I was introduced to Nehemiah as the guy who rebuilt Jerusalem's wall.  That's true—Nehemiah led a third wave of returned Jewish exiles (though perhaps a small one) to Judea 13 years after Ezra did and 91 years after the first wave came back and Jeshua and Zerubbabel started rebuilding the temple.  But rebuilding Jerusalem's wall was not the most important thing he did.  As a matter of fact, the wall is completed toward the end of the sixth chapter of Nehemiah's 13-chapter book.  His project was much larger than the impressive construction of a fortification in 52 days.

Nehemiah's actual work was the reconstruction of a conceptual wall between the Jewish people and their neighbors in the same vein as the work of Jeshua and Zerubbabel and Ezra before him (the last of whom also worked with him).  Nehemiah's main challenge was the porous boundary between returned Israel and its neighbors.  The failure or absence of this boundary revealed itself in situations in which the people of God and their neighbors were so intermingled as to be indistinct from one another.  The lack of a boundary was caused by Israel's failure to grasp and maintain its uniqueness, which in turn facilitated the invasive behavior of prominent Gentiles.  Nehemiah's objective was to reestablish Israel's national selfhood.  Doing so required Israel to know and be committed to who it was, which in turn required them to know and commit to who they were not.

Nehemiah's first step in his campaign was to build Jerusalem's still-ruined wall.  It is instructive to note why Nehemiah felt that the ruin of the wall was such a bad thing.  The report he received about the returned Jews was that "[t]he remnant that remains from the exile there in the province are experiencing considerable adversity and reproach.  The wall of Jerusalem lies breached, and its gates have been burned down!" (1:3).  When asked by the Persian king what is wrong, Nehemiah replies, "Why would I not appear dejected when the city with the graves of my ancestors lies desolate and its gates destroyed by fire?" (2:3).  And after he surveys the condition of the wall, he urges the exiles, "You see the problem that we have: Jerusalem is desolate and its gates are burned.  Come on!  Let's rebuild the wall of Jerusalem so that this reproach will not continue" (2:17).

The problem of the broken wall wasn't physical safety, because hardly anyone was living there anyway and because Nehemiah had no intention of setting up an independent Jewish state with defenses against the Persian military (contra his enemies' slander in 6:6-9).  The problem of the broken wall was reproach, shame, and embarrassment before the nations, exemplified by the desecration of the graves of the Jews' ancestors.  It is worth remembering that shame first appears in Scripture with the sin of Adam and Eve.  Prior to their fall they were both naked but unashamed.  In their perfect state their sense of who self was to be was so powerful that it could not be threatened even when completely exposed.  But when sin entered them, they had to erect a physical barrier between themselves and others—clothes—to cover their emptiness and to make an artificial delineation between where oneself stops and the world starts.  Jerusalem's wall was that artificial delineation for the Jewish people.  Without it they were naked and ashamed and subject to total violation as a people by their neighbors.  If allowed to continue, the boundary would become so vaporous that they would cease to be a people altogether.  With the Persian army nearby, the wall of Jerusalem was unnecessary for security, but it was essential for the self-concept of the Jewish nation.

Nehemiah instinctively knew this, and that's why he concentrated his early effort on the wall.  While the people built the physical wall, they were also building the conceptual wall between themselves and non-Jews.  They were relearning who they were and who they weren't.  This immediately led to problems with certain prominent Gentiles among the Jews' neighbors who had become accustomed to having considerable sway in the Jews' affairs.  Nehemiah was leading the people to push them out of the Jewish sphere and back into their own, and so their resistance grew more and more furious.  Once again, note that the Jews' physical safety wasn't threatened until after they had been working on the wall.  Prior to the reconstruction physical safety was a nonissue because Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem enjoyed their influence in the Jewish community.  It was only after they recognized that a line was being drawn and they were on the opposite side of it that violence from them became a real danger.

Nehemiah's intention to reestablish the self of the Jewish people ties together all his activities.  He enforces the Law of Moses with respect to forbidding lending at interest to fellow Jews, and 5:8 implies that he led a campaign to buy back Jewish slaves of Gentile masters in order to prevent that forced intermingling.  Similarly, Nehemiah connected all Jews living in Judea to the genealogical record that had been composed when the first exiles arrived, and on that basis he enforced the ban on intermarriage as Ezra had.  Much of what Nehemiah did was centered in the temple as the heart of what made the Jews, Jews, once again following the pattern Ezra had set.  So a major focus for Nehemiah was requiring the traditional contributions to be brought into it for its upkeep and the maintenance of the priesthood.  Nehemiah continued to encourage Ezra's agenda to teach people the Law of Moses and how to follow it (especially the Sabbath), and he took part in a major covenant renewal ceremony that rehearsed Israel's history.  All these efforts reinforced the boundary between the Jews and the nations and reminded the Jews that they were unique.

Nehemiah has frequently been cited as a premier biblical study on leadership.  I agree wholeheartedly, but not because Nehemiah effectively gets things done (though he does).  It's because Nehemiah depicts the real-world trials and tribulations of a leader who is trying to elevate the cohesion and maturity of character of his organization in the face of forces within and without that relentlessly try to keep it stuck in the dysfunctional mess that it was when he got there.  A major lesson of Nehemiah is that true leadership always produces sabotage that makes the leader feel painfully alone.  Not only does this leadership temporarily lead its followers from false peace into openly dangerous conflict, but it also invites roundabout pushback by those who are outwardly compliant but actually undermining reform.  The most glaring example in Nehemiah is that, try as he might, he could not get Tobiah the Ammonite permanently out of the community of Israel.  The very leaders of the people were joined with him through marriage and tried to broker a truce that would compromise Nehemiah's mission.  While Nehemiah was back in the Persian capital serving the king for a spell, his whole renewal project began to degenerate, and Tobiah managed to carve out a nice room for himself in the very temple, courtesy of the high priest of all people!  When Nehemiah returned he promptly threw Tobiah's belongings out and cleansed the place and likewise reasserted his other lapsed reforms.  Since he couldn't build the wall again with the symbolic significance that that entailed, he did the next best thing, which was to hold a grand and elaborate dedication ceremony for it twelve years after it had been built.

That ceremony included a reading from the Law that Nehemiah summarized like this:

On that day the book of Moses [presumably Deuteronomy] was read aloud in the hearing of the people.  They found written in it that no Ammonite or Moabite may ever enter the assembly of God, for they had not met the Israelites with food and water, but instead hired Balaam to curse them.  (Our God, however, turned the curse into blessing.)  When they heard the law, they removed from Israel all who were of mixed ancestry [13:1-3].

The identification of the Ammonites and Moabites as people to be forever excluded from the assembly is significant, because Tobiah was an Ammonite and Sanballat was a Moabite (from Horonaim), and these were Nehemiah's two main adversaries.  However, in the very passage that the Jews heard that day (Deut. 23:1-8), God affirms that Edomites and Egyptians are allowed in the assembly of Yahweh.  In his zeal for purity, Nehemiah seems to have overlooked that part and led the people to exclude all foreigners from Israel.

It is at this point that Nehemiah seems, ironically, to have overstepped his bounds.  It is one thing to exclude who you aren't because you are establishing who you are.  It's another thing to establish who you are in reaction to who you don't want to be.  That seems to be the case here.  Indeed, there is no hint in Nehemiah that the very purpose of Israel's strong identity as the "kingdom of priests and holy nation" of Yahweh is for the redemption of all the nations.  A new kingdom and nation would have to be established to become the conduit of that blessing—provided it remains as holy in its own way as Nehemiah wanted the Jews to be.

Ezra Postscripts: Secondary Separation, and Serving in a Mainline Denomination

Before I complete my short series on purity in the post-exilic Judean community with a post on Nehemiah, I want to make a couple of follow-up comments to my last post on Ezra.  That post demonstrated how Ezra exemplified an Old Covenant assumption that when the holy/clean make contact with the common/unclean, the holy/clean are compromised.  In the New Testament, however, this is not always the case.  Contact itself does not defile; otherwise Jesus would have been defiled by the incarnation itself, not to mention what he did (whom he touched, whom he conversed with, etc.) in the flesh.  Nevertheless, the saints (i.e., the holy people) may still be defiled, not by mere contact with ordinary people, but by lingering wickedness within themselves that leaks out in the midst of settled alliances with ordinary people.  My two comments in this post have to do with some difficult practical applications of this principle.

My first comment has to do with what's sometimes been called "secondary separation."  Secondary separation goes like this: I'm separating myself from all impure people, especially professing Christians who aren't living the life right somehow, and I'm avoiding interaction with them as much as possible.  But you're a good one, so I'm in relationship with you.  But then I find that you aren't separating yourself from all the people that I'm separating myself from.  So I have to separate myself from you because now you're compromised, not because you're doing or saying anything wrong yet but because you're in relationship with the wrong people.  For example, I love Bob the Christian Pastor/Speaker/Author/Celebrity; I own all his books, go to his conferences, and follow his tweets.  But then I get the bad news that Bob appeared at the same conference or signed the same public statement or blurbed the same book with a Charismatic (or Anti-Charismatic) or Fundamentalist (or NIV-user) or Catholic or Liberal or Prosperity Guy or Whatever, so now I question Bob the Celebrity's integrity and might not be able to lead the small group material that he wrote anymore, even if I haven't seen any evidence that he promotes anything that I disagree with.

To use a term from the last post, I wonder what Christians' "purity maps" are, especially the purity map of a person who engages in secondary separation.  The purity map has boundaries between holy and ordinary, probably multiple gradations in fact, and there is fear of corruption if a boundary is crossed.  It occurs to me that the impulse behind secondary separation is remarkably akin to the approach to cleanness established in Moses' Law, encouraged by Ezra, and practiced by the Pharisees in Jesus' day.  Uncleanness for them was like a contagious disease, like cooties; and if you've been infected, even if you're not showing the signs of it yet, I need to get away from you so that I don't get infected too.

People with this bent to separate might have a noble motive of seeking to remain pure and holy, but they live like they're in the old dispensation, because Jesus never acted anything like this.  He wasn't afraid that people he made contact with or people that they made contact with would corrupt him, and he never taught his followers to worry about it either.  Actually, the group of people that Jesus did urge separation from were hypocritical Pharisees and Sadducees, the very people who were so concerned to remain apart from everybody else.

It seems that people with a secondary separation mindset identify themselves very closely with the people that they are in relationship with, so closely that they can't distinguish between the actions of the people that they are in relationship with and their own actions.  In other words, if my friend goes out to dinner with Mr. Dangerous, then I think I did too, so I have to retreat.  The inability to distinguish between self and the people self is connected to doesn't look very healthy to me.  In fact, it doesn't seem to me to be the evidence of great faith but the evidence of great doubt—doubt that I'm holy because of the blood of Christ, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and adoption by God the Father, and doubt that he will see my sanctification through to the end.

Nevertheless, as I take issue with secondary separation I don't want to lose sight of the genuine concern for purity in the New Testament.  Contact with the unholy can't defile us.  But a settled arrangement of linked values, goals, agenda, and journeys with the unholy can, because it brings out in us what ought to be put to death.  That leads to my second comment, which is about the challenge I have knowing exactly how to put this into practice as a pastor in a Mainline Protestant denomination, the American Baptist Churches USA (ABC).

First, some explanation is in order.  The term "Mainline" doesn't mean "mainstream."  It refers to Philadelphia's Main Line, which passes (or used to pass?) through the swankiest part of Philadelphia and was dotted with churches of old, well-established, well-endowed denominations.  Mainline Protestantism refers to those WASP-ish, generally northern, "establishment" denominations.  These denominations happened to take a decidedly liberal turn theologically in the 20th century.

My denomination, the ABC, is unusual for a few reasons.  It is the most conservative denomination of the Mainline.  It is also the most liberal of the Baptist denominations in America.  And it is one of the few denominations—perhaps the only one—that is far enough from its WASP-ish roots that it has no ethnic majority.  In short, it is outrageously diverse.  On one end are conservatives who practice such fierce separation that they have no relationship with any other churches and are American Baptist only in name.  On the other end are people who by profession and practice are Unitarian Universalist in everything but name.  And all kinds of folks are in the middle.  It's a tent that's so big that I wonder if anyone fits under it (kind of like the old Yogi Berra-ism about a restaurant that's "so crowded nobody goes there anymore").

Another thing that makes us unusual is that the ABC is more a federation than a denomination.  Congregations opt into associations, associations into regions, and regions into the denomination.  Most of the denominational apparatus itself is a set of separate, cooperating boards.  There are ties (including legal ones) that bind all the constituent parts together, but a feature of this bottom-up structure is that, basically, no one can tell anyone else what to do.

This explains the ABC's curious stance on the issue of homosexuality that has vexed every Mainline denomination.  I've had people tell me that they know of the ABC as the Baptists who are in favor of homosexuality.  That's because there is a small but energetic minority of Baptist churches that include as members, marry, and ordain homosexuals.  Some associations have actually ejected these churches from membership, but the "Welcoming and Affirming" churches have joined other ones and remain connected to the denomination.  Despite this, the denomination actually has an official public statement on homosexuality that says, "We affirm that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching."  (Yep, that's the whole statement.)  So our corporate statement expresses disagreement with homosexual practice, but our structure isn't designed to facilitate enforcement of corporate statements on member churches—and more to the point there generally isn't the will to do so.

I'm not going to get into what my denomination ought to look like, in my humble opinion.  The sticky question, and the one that matters more, is what do I do?  Am I corrupted because I am in league with the ungodly since there are some in my denomination who deny central premises of Christian doctrine (including the word "doctrine" itself) and endorse sinful practices?  Or am I pure despite their presence, and in fact might I be an agent of sanctification within this fellowship?

The book of Jude has a lot to do with this dilemma.  Most of Jude's letter uses lavish images of purity and pollution to condemn false teachers and demand total avoidance of them and their wicked ways.  But at the end Jude writes, "And have mercy on those who waver; save others by snatching them out of the fire; have mercy on others, coupled with a fear of God, hating even the clothes stained by the flesh" (22-23).  Though Jude's insistence on intolerance of falsehood remains unwavering, he views propagators of falsehood and those tempted by it in different categories.  The propagators are to be rejected completely.  Those who are being unknowingly influenced by it, on the other hand, are to be treated with mercy that reaches out to save.  It is a fearful mercy that recognizes the potential that oneself might be led astray if not careful, but it is mercy nonetheless.

In my relatively short time as an American Baptist, I have encountered a very small number of people who actively and openly propagate ungodliness, deny the gospel, and exalt unregenerate human opinion over the Word of God.  But most people don't do that, even people that could fairly be called Liberals.  I have to say, this surprised me.  My upbringing and even more so my college and seminary educations conditioned me to believe that every Liberal was an axe-grinding, 19th-century German higher critic who woke up in the morning chomping at the bit to identify more parts of the Bible that didn't really happen.  But that's simply not so.  Liberals can no more be fairly reduced to a caricature than Evangelicals can.  Most of the Liberal-tilting American Baptists that I've met, including clergy, are genuine folks who read the Bible respectfully, desire to follow Jesus, and show evidence of salvation.  Some of these people are also dangerously open to the false teachers.  But that doesn't prevent me from having a relationship with them.  As a matter of fact, my relationship with them (in addition to others' relationships with them) is more likely to counteract that falsehood than anything else.  I often find that if I show that I want to listen to them, they become very interested in listening to me.  I also find that some of what they have to say, far from being false, actually drives me to uncomfortable passages of Scripture that I might avoid if I only let myself talk to people who already agree with me.

Now having said that, I do stand in a dangerous place.  My denomination is not pure like it should be and in fact is much more afraid of the journey to purity than it is of the effects of pollution.  I don't have much hope that it's going to improve in purity in the short term.  I could become corrupted.  On the other hand, there are many within it "who have not stained their clothes" (Rev. 3:4) who are leavening the whole thing as well as living as salt and light in the world, and there are many who are wavering who yet might be snatched from the fire.  And God has been clear with me that I'm not to go.  So I think I'll stick around.

When the Holy Meets the Unholy: Ezra and the New Testament

Sorry for the long gap between blog posts!  No, I haven't forgotten about 1st Corynthians.  I've just had to generate so much output for other, non-bloggy things that I haven't had the time left for here.  But I'm bursting with things I want to blog about, so hopefully April will be more content-rich than March.

Now on to the topic for today.  When Ezra the scribe led a second group of Jewish exiles back to Judea, he was immediately confronted with a problem.  "The people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands who practice detestable things . . . ," said the Jewish leaders.  "Indeed, they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race has become intermingled with the peoples of the lands.  Worse still, the leaders and the officials are at the forefront of all this!" (Ezra 9:1-2).  In order to understand the significance of the problem we need a general understanding of the concept of purity expressed in Scripture as "holiness" and "cleanness."  (The following is heavily influenced by David A. deSilva's Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture, which I blogged about in a previous post.)

It's most helpful to think about purity by thinking about dirt.  Dirt is "matter out of place."  For example, if I am gardening and spreading peat moss-enriched topsoil on my flower bed, it is "earth" or "soil."  But if I accidentally track some of it into my house, it becomes "dirt."  What changed?  Not the substance but its location.  Human beings organize our worlds with invisible but extremely powerful definitions of where stuff should be.  Not all human beings or human cultures draw the lines in the same places, but all of us do it somehow.  If something crosses one of those lines, it becomes dirt, and we abhor it.

All religions contain "purity maps" that proceed from the same impulse.  These maps put divine beings at the center and mark everything else, especially us humans, exactly where we can be positioned and not be considered by those divinities as "dirt."  One's holiness is one's position on the map.  A person is born with a particular degree of holiness based on his or her household/clan/caste/tribe/nation, sex, and/or order of birth among his or her siblings.  For Israel, this came to be depicted architecturally by the layout of the temple, particularly according to the reconstruction by Herod the Great.

In the center was the Most Holy Place (Holy of Holies) where only God could dwell, with the exception of the yearly visit of the high priest on the Day of Atonement.  The next level outward was the Holy Place, where other priests occasionally served to burn incense, change the showbread, etc.  The next level outward was the Court of the Priests, where they made sacrifices, and next to that was the Court of the Israelites, where Jewish men who were offering sacrifices entered with their gifts.  The level after that was the Court of Women and the wider court outside it, where all Jewish laity could gather.  Beyond that, separated by a low barrier, was the Court of the Gentiles, where non-Jews who desired to worship the God of Israel could stand and pray.  And we might even extend the topography to the Antonia Fortress just outside the temple complex where the idol-worshiping Roman garrison was stationed.  You notice that each ring of the temple complex corresponded to a type of person.  The further in you could go, the holier you were from the perspective of the God of Israel.  If you look at it from the opposite direction, everybody outside the level of holiness where you stood was considered "common" or ordinary—holiness is specialness, because you can enter where most can't.

A related concept is cleanness.  If holiness defines how close you could be to the Holy One and not be considered "dirt," cleanness describes whether you were allowed at the present moment to function at your level of holiness.  Your holiness was connected to unchangeable characteristics of your identity (such as Levite, Israelite, male, firstborn).  Your cleanness on the other hand came and went.  Everyone was unclean sometimes.  For example, if you touched a dead body (say you were a pallbearer for a relative) then you would be unclean for a week (provided you followed the appropriate purification ritual in Num. 19:11-13).  There was nothing sinful about this (though sinning was also considered to be contracting uncleanness within), but it meant that while you were unclean you couldn't be present in worship at your typical level of holiness.  You temporarily became "dirty."  In fact, you were excluded from the whole worship system until you became clean again, and if you made contact with anyone else you would make that person unclean too (think cooties).

Now one reason it is so useful to conceive of holiness and cleanness—or rather their opposites, commonness and uncleanness—in terms of dirt is what we do with dirt when we find it.  We eradicate it, at the very least pushing it into its proper realm but often trying to annihilate it altogether (think squashing a bug in your house that you would ignore outdoors).  The mental maps humans impose on reality are so powerful that arguably the most dangerous place for any substance on earth is anywhere that a human believes it to be dirt.  God reveals himself as dealing with dirt the same way.  This is why appearing in his presence is so terribly dangerous—one is positioned for imminent obliteration.  (See for example Isaiah's response to his vision that he, a common Israelite, was standing in the Most Holy Place, with "unclean lips" no less.)

It is also useful to think of commonness (vs. holiness) and uncleanness (vs. cleanness) as dirt because the presence of dirt makes things dirty.  It is not that the presence of non-dirt makes things clean.  If a sock comes in contact with soil, the sock becomes dirty; the sock doesn't extend its cleanness to the earth that makes contact with it.  The same is true with holiness and ritual cleanness.  If the holy mixes with the common, it becomes unholy; the holy doesn't elevate the common to holiness.  And as has been said before, if the clean contacts the unclean, the clean becomes unclean, not the other way around.

This leads us back to the problem Ezra faced.  "The people of Israel . . . have not separated themselves from the peoples of the nations who practice detestable things," and as a result the dirty deeds of the nations were by contact defiling God's people and making them unclean.  Furthermore, "they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race has become intermingled with the peoples of the lands," and the result of these marriages between the holy and the common were common, unholy children.

This wasn't mere accidental behavior.  Moses' Law made room for marriage between Israelite and Gentile in a particular circumstance: if in war Israel annihilated all men from a community by sword or enslavement and took wives by force.  This is a jarring and rather horrific thing for us to contemplate (which is probably the topic for another post), but the point is that that kind of marriage was compelled from the Israelite direction only.  Any other marriage, particularly in that place and time, was a bilateral negotiation not between two individuals but between two entire families.  These families were wedding themselves to each other through the union of the couple, which is why royal marriages were often used to cement peace treaties between nations.  This is the kind of intermarriage that the returned exiles were engaging in.  The intermarriages were a sign of a close fraternization to the point of union between the people of the Holy One of Israel and the worshipers of pagan deities without number.  To push the point one step further, it was an intermarriage between Yahweh and empty idols and the demonic shadows behind them.

Therefore, when Ezra heard this news, he ripped his tunic, tore out some of the hair on his head and beard, and sat down, dumbstruck and devastated, all day long.  Then at the time of the evening offering he cried out to God for mercy (vv. 3-15).  The Jews had brazenly violated God's explicit commands exactly as they had the first time he had given them, when Moses led Israel out of Egypt toward Canaan.  The persistent willingness of the God's holy people to make themselves unholy, of the people he had cleansed to make themselves filthy, was what led God to treat them like the dirt they insisted on making themselves.  It was for this reason that God had ejected them out of the land he promised them like someone sweeping dust off his or her porch.  And yet, despite all that Israel had done, God still had enough mercy to take a remnant of these defiled people and bring them back for another go.  And yet they went ahead and soiled themselves again—even the holiest among them, the priests!  Ezra was terrified that this time God would not only remove them from the land but wipe them out so that they would cease to be a people at all (v. 14).

As Ezra wept and prayed, a crowd gathered around and joined him.  And in their contrition and desire to repent, they settled on a drastic solution that Ezra administered: they divorced their non-Jewish wives and disowned the children of those unions (10:1-8).  Perhaps if they removed their defilement as much as they could and sincerely pled for forgiveness, God would be willing to spare them and not scour them away again.  It was a shocking move, but if the holy became common and the clean became unclean when the two mixed together as the Law indicated, then it was a perfectly logical course of action.

It was for this very reason that the appearance of Jesus over 400 years later seemed so illogical.  With Jesus, when the holy intermingled with the common, the holy wasn't corrupted; instead, the common was sanctified.  When the clean contacted the unclean, the clean wasn't defiled; rather, the unclean was cleansed.  Simply put, Jesus could not become impure; to the contrary, he purified what he touched.

This contrary pattern began in the incarnation itself when Holy God became united with human nature—sin-affected human nature cursed with mortality no less.  That abhorrent mixture should have polluted God, but instead it redeemed human nature in the very person of the Son of God.  As a matter of fact, Matthew goes out of his way to note four unholy (by ethnicity) or unclean (by behavior) women in Jesus' ancestry, women who were partners in exactly the sort of marriages that made Ezra tear his clothes (Matt. 1:1-17; esp. vv. 3-6).  But their ultimate offspring wasn't unholy—he was the Holy One himself!  Indeed, one might suggest that the Son sanctified his mothers.

The pattern continued in the actions that Jesus took.  In encounter after encounter that in our day we don't immediately see the drama in, Jesus violates norms of purity by physically touching and being touched by people who ought to defile him, with the result that the impure are purified.  Jesus doesn't merely speak the word, "Be healed," to the leper (as he does, for example, for the centurion's slave).  Instead he touches the leper, whose disease causes uncleanness, and says, "Be cleansed."  Then he commands the leper to undergo the appropriate ritual with the priest at the temple according to the Law "for a testimony to them" that a new and superior purification is taking place (Luke 5:12-14).  This entire episode is backwards.  Jesus should have fled from the man whose skin disease was obvious, but the physical contact, rather than infecting Jesus both physically and ritually, results in the purification of the one afflicted.  The offering at the temple is perfunctory—it is simply a sign to those under an old regime of holiness and cleanness, because the actual cleansing has already happened by Jesus' authoritative declaration.  We can multiply examples of this from the Gospels.  Two that particularly jump to mind are the menstruating woman who touched Jesus' garment to be healed (and was mortified when she was discovered, because she had covertly made the entire jostling crowd unclean by contact) and the forgiven, once-immoral woman known to engage in unclean sexual behavior who kissed, anointed, wept on, and wiped Jesus' feet.  You can understand why the Pharisees, the theological descendants of Ezra in 1st-century Judaism, were as vexed about Jesus as Ezra had been about the returned exiles centuries before.

Jesus' example signaled a profound departure from Old Covenant assumptions about purity.  No longer is it a given that the pure are always polluted by the presence of the common and unclean.  God, who in his perfection is under no threat of defilement, has chosen to transgress those boundaries for the purpose of sanctifying and cleansing the human race.  Obviously this stretches in the most profound way to include Christ's saving work on the cross.  The blood of the Perfect One radically and irrevocably makes common people into the holy people of God and cleanses all their moral and ritual filth.  The Old Covenant purification system could not do this.  As the author of Hebrews points out (emphasis mine):

[The Law is] completely unable, by the same sacrifices offered continually, to perfect those who come to worship.  For otherwise would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers would have been purified once for all and so have no further consciousness of sin? . . . By [God's] will we have been made holy through the offering of the body of Jesus once for all. . . . For by one offering he perfected for all time those who are made holy (Heb. 10:1-2, 10, 14).

The pattern of purity in Jesus extends still further to his ascension.  Not only did his offering of himself give believers access to the holiest of holy places in heaven where God dwells, but then in his name God gave believers the gift of the Holy Spirit.  In the most shocking leap over purity boundaries yet, the Holy One himself now lives inside human beings with mortal flesh and a vicious sinful nature.  But rather than the Holy Spirit's presence vaporizing every body he enters, he actually converts our bodies—and our collective body, the Church—into his holy temples!

The amazing work of God to make the holy/clean transform the unholy/unclean rather than the other way around leads us to a very unusual New Testament parallel with Ezra's situation.  Like Ezra, Paul had to deal with the situation of a holy person married to an unholy spouse.  But Paul's viewpoint was, at least on the surface, completely the opposite of Ezra's:

To the rest I say—I, not the Lord—if a brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is happy to live with him, he should not divorce her.  And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is happy to live with her, she should not divorce him.  For the unbelieving husband is sanctified because of the wife, and the unbelieving wife because of her husband.  Otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy.  But if the unbeliever wants a divorce, let it take place.  In these circumstances the brother or sister is not bound.  God has called you in peace.  For how do you know, wife, whether you will bring your husband to salvation?  Or how do you know, husband, whether you will bring your wife to salvation? (1 Cor. 7:12-16).

For Ezra, when the holy Jew married the unholy Gentile, the Jew's cleanness was compromised and the children of that union were unholy.  But for Paul, when a holy Christian is married to an unholy unbeliever, the unbelieving spouse is actually sanctified through that union, as are the children that come from it.  Now, there is some question as to what this sanctification is.  We know from what Paul says at the end of the quoted passage that this sanctification is not tantamount to salvation as it is in the Hebrews passage quoted previously.  But perhaps this leads us back to the idea of the Christian's body (and the church generally) as the temple of the Holy Spirit.  Earlier in 1 Corinthians Paul says, "If someone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him.  For God's temple is holy, which is what you are" (3:17).  Because God lives in the believer, God jealously guards that believer.  That includes the believer's body, which of course is still imperfect and shouldn't be fit for a holy God, but he guards it anyway.  In fact, if an unholy person attempts to harm the holy temple of God, imperfect though it is, God will sweep him away as fiercely as he did when the unholy came into his presence in the Old Testament.  (See, e.g., 2 Sam. 6:6-11 for an example of God's anger against someone who breaches the boundary of holiness and yet also blessing for those who abide near it at the proper distance.)  The same appears to be true for the Christian's household.  God is living in that household in the Christian who lives there, and so he considers the household his sacred dwelling, worthy of protection (particularly because the unbelieving spouse has allowed God into it by remaining married to the believer in whom God dwells).

And yet, despite the difference between Paul and Ezra on the subject of holiness in a mixed marriage, there is similarity too.  Ezra's situation involved holy people who chose to become united with the unholy.  Paul's situation involved an unholy person who became holy through the work of Christ after being married.  When Paul turns to the subject of a holy Christian considering marriage, however, he draws the same line that Ezra does: "A wife is bound as long as her husband is living.  But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes (only someone in the Lord)" (1 Cor. 7:39).  A holy person mustn't willingly choose to be united with the unholy.  Paul states this strongly and unequivocally in a profound passage that doesn't just relate to marriage but to any wide-ranging, settled alignment of purpose between believers and unbelievers:

Do not become partners with those who do not believe, for what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship does light have with darkness?  And what agreement does Christ have with Beliar?  Or what does a believer share in common with an unbeliever?  And what mutual agreement does the temple of God have with idols?  For we are the temple of the living God, just as God said, "I will live in them and will walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people."  Therefore, "come out from their midst and be separate," says the Lord, "and touch no unclean thing, and I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters," says the All-Powerful Lord.  Therefore, since we have these promises, dear friends, let us cleanse ourselves from everything that could defile the body and the spirit, and thus accomplish holiness out of reverence for God (2 Cor. 6:14-7:1).

Here we see the paradox of holiness in the New Testament.  In the Old Testament it was simple: when the holy/clean touches the common/unclean, the holy/clean is defiled.  The New Testament is more complex.  On the one hand we have the example of God himself in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, who flagrantly transgress all normal purity boundaries and rather than be defiled, they transform what they touch.  In at least some circumstances (such as a converted spouse), the same thing operates through believers too.  On the other hand, we see here in 2 Corinthians that it is still possible for a holy person to be defiled by contact with the unholy.  How do we sort this out?

Well, despite that this is a cliché answer, it seems to be that we must be "in the world but not of it," which is a paraphrase of what Jesus prayed on behalf of his disciples:

I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. . . . I have given them your word, and the world has hated them, because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.  I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but that you keep them safe from the evil one.  They do not belong to the world just as I do not belong to the world.  Set them apart [sanctify them] in your truth; your word is truth.  Just as you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.  And I set myself apart on their behalf, so that they too may be truly set apart (John 17:11, 14-19).

Jesus makes clear that he has sent his disciples to be in the world and transform it with the truth exactly as Jesus did.  Their presence in the world wouldn't automatically defile them; instead, they would effect change in the world.  However, they were not to be like the world they were in, and for this reason they would be resisted and hated by the world under Satan.  Notice how Jesus employs the language of holiness here: "Set them apart/sanctify them," just as Jesus himself is sanctified and set apart even though he is "God with us."

This goes right along with guidance that Paul gives the church at Corinth (notice how often they pop up in this investigation of holiness?).  A member of that church was sleeping with his father's wife, and Paul insists that they must discipline him by excluding him if he refused to repent.  He concludes,

I wrote you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people.  In no way did I mean the immoral people of this world, or the greedy and swindlers and idolaters, since you would then have to go out of the world.  But now I am writing you not to associate with anyone who calls himself a Christian who is sexually immoral, greedy, or an idolater, or verbally abusive, or a drunkard, or a swindler.  Do not even eat with such a person.  For what do I have to do with judging those who are outside?  Are you not to judge those inside?  But God will judge those outside.  Remove the evil person from among you (1 Cor. 5:9-13).

Notice how Paul makes clear that he has no intention of gathering the church into a "holy huddle" that has no contact with the outside world.  The church is not defiled by contact with the world but rather is the means by which the world becomes sanctified.  However, if the church tolerates worldly, unclean behavior within itself, then it does become defiled and risks the judgment of the Holy One (cf. Rev. 2:12-29).  The defiling element must be purged.

This is the very same way that Jesus and the apostles describe individual holiness and cleanness.  Jesus said,

"Don't you understand that whatever goes into a person from the outside cannot defile him?  For it does not enter his heart but his stomach, and then goes out into the sewer."  (This means all foods are clean.)  He said, "What comes out of a person defiles him.  For from within, out of the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, and folly.  All these evils come from within and defile a person" (Mark 7:18-23).

A clean person, like a clean church, doesn't become unclean by contact with the unclean on the outside.  He or she becomes unclean by the unclean things that are already inside and leak out.  (For comparison, note my earlier post on keeping the Law within.)  Likewise, interacting with an immoral person doesn't defile the Christian, just like it didn't defile Jesus.  But when a Christian develops intimate ties with an immoral person, the immoral person's influence reveals the unholy motives, values, and agenda that were already lurking inside the professed believer.  This is the resolution of the New Testament paradox of purity.  The world itself cannot defile us, nor can the people in the world.  But the lusts in our sinful nature that are titillated by the world and its people can make us impure, and when indulged, they do.

Two Yeshuas and the Samaritans

This is the first post of a short series exploring how the Jews who returned from exile in Babylon to their homeland dealt with the non-Jews who surrounded them as depicted in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah.  We'll see similar themes throughout, but because I have to start somewhere I'm going to proceed through chronologically beginning with Ezra 4:1-5.

Ezra 1-6 (except for a "flashforward" in 4:6-23) describes the first return of Jews to what would be called Judea and the beginning of rebuilding the temple during the reign of the Persian King Cyrus (Kurush) and then the completion of the building during the reign of Darius (Darayavahush) I.  When they settled in Judea, the returned exiles reestablished the temple site as the place of worship and built an altar there (3:1-6).  The following year they started the reconstruction by acquiring materials and organizing themselves (3:7-9) and by laying the foundation of the temple (3:10-13).  When other inhabitants of the area saw what the Jews were doing, they wanted to participate, so they talked to the two chief leaders of the project, Jeshua, the high priest, and Zerubbabel, who later succeeded Sheshbazzar as the local governor of the Jews under the authority of the governor of the province "beyond the River [Euphrates]" (which comprised the territory extending eastward from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean).

The Jews' neighbors phrased their request, "Let us help you build, for like you we seek your God and we have been sacrificing to him from the time of King Esarhaddon of Assyria, who brought us here" (4:2).  Apparently these folks had a lot in common with the Jews, right?  Zerubbabel and Jeshua didn't think so; they replied, "You have no right to help us [or, 'We have nothing to do with each other to'] build the temple of our God.  We will build it by ourselves for the LORD God of Israel, just as King Cyrus, the king of Persia, has commanded us" (v. 3).

Why so harsh?  What was the problem?  Well, the Jews' neighbors had indeed been making sacrifices to Yahweh, but not exclusively.  They were worshiping Yahweh as part of a whole pantheon of gods.  After the kingdom of Israel (the northern half of the entire Israelite people in contrast to the southern kingdom called Judah) was annihilated and many of its people were deported by the Assyrian Empire, the Assyrian King Esarhaddon eventually relocated other people from elsewhere in his empire to Israel.  These immigrants were being eaten by lions sent by Yahweh, so to appease "the god of the land" the new arrivals started to worship him too (2 Kings 17:24-41).  So though their descendants 150 years later were indeed worshiping Yahweh, their worship and probably even knowledge of him was not in accord with the laws God had given Israel through Moses, most notably in that they were worshiping other gods right alongside them.

Jeshua, Zerubbabel, and the rest of the leaders were rightly wary of allowing these folks to join them in building the temple.  Israel's relentless tendency since meeting God in the Exodus was to worship Yahweh while worshiping other gods in idol form at the same time.  Their persistence in this practice was what led God to exile them in the first place as he had first warned centuries before.  They knew that serving shoulder to shoulder with these worshipers of other gods would lead them right back down that road.

And yet I can't help but suspect that Jeshua and Zerubbabel's response was overkill.  Because even though God was crystal clear in his Word about the danger of fraternizing with worshipers of other gods, he also told Israel to expect that other nations would come to them asking to worship the True God with them (e.g., Isa. 2:1-4).  That looks like what the Jews' neighbors, at least some of them, may have been doing here.  This may have been a pregnant opportunity to teach the ignorant nations the truth about Yahweh that the Jews wasted out of a legitimate but disproportionate concern for the purity of their worship.

Ironically, the Jews' ability to worship Yahweh in purity was impaired as a result of them spurning their neighbors.  Jealous and enraged, the non-Jews intimidated the Jews and bribed officials close to the successive kings of Persia to withdraw and withhold their support for the Jews' project, and construction of the temple lapsed for 14 years.  The hostility escalated from there.  About three quarters of a century after Ezra 4:1-5 took place, the Jewish scribe Ezra led Jewish men to divorce their Gentile wives and disown their children from those marriages (which I'll discuss in my next post).  One can only imagine the seething resentment those children had toward Jews once they grew up.  In the days of Nehemiah there was the threat of physical violence from the Jews' neighbors, some of whom were the descendants of those rejected by Jeshua and Zerubbabel.  Back in Ezra 4:1 we see the original party in the dispute introduced as "the enemies of Judah and Benjamin."  Without a doubt they were enemies after they heard Jeshua and Zerubbabel's response, not to mention when Ezra recorded the history a few generations after it happened, but I wonder if they were enemies from the start and if they had to be.

Four centuries later, the descendants of those who had been relocated to the old northern kingdom of Israel were known as Samaritans, and the enmity between them and the Jews had continued to simmer through all that time.  By then the Samaritans' religion was much closer to Judaism, but it still had some of its own quirks.  This hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans frames the ministry of a second High Priest Yeshua who appeared on the scene.  ("Jeshua" and "Jesus" are different transliterations of the same name, "Yeshua.")  Jesus took an entirely different approach from Jeshua and Zerubbabel.  He responds with grace when a Samaritan town refuses him hospitality.  He tells a story to a Jewish legal scholar in which a Samaritan is the model of adherence to the Law.  He converses with a Samaritan woman whose sexual promiscuity recalls her ancestors' spiritual promiscuity, asserting that though the Jews have the facts from God, a day had already begun in which pure worship would be defined by Spirit and truth and could be entered into by anyone.  And because he considers the residents of this woman's town part of the harvest that the Father gave him to reap, he stays there and many more believe in him.  So it isn't surprising that some time after Jesus' ascension to the Father unholy, heterodox Samaritans would hear the gospel and believe and receive the Holy Spirit with power.

The contrast between the two Yeshuas' responses to the Samaritans seems to me to be a sort of parable of the tension between purity and mercy, two essential but paradoxical virtues that God wants us to exhibit.  Jeshua and his contemporaries leaned all the way towards protecting their purity and made scant attempt to show mercy to seekers ignorant of the truth (the indication of an exception perhaps being Ezra 6:21).  By contrast, Jesus was able to show mercy to Samaritans without his purity being tainted in the slightest.  We'll look at how Jesus was able to do this along with the nature of purity and holiness next time.