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Rebecca Murphy
(First read aloud to the WPGrace community on Aug. 30, 2009.)
 Most of you know that I am marrying a man who follows God by practicing Judaism. Jewish tradition holds that a member of the community who is getting married during the week following a particular Sabbath is honored by being allowed to read the scriptures and to give a brief reflection. This is called an aufruf. Most Jewish faith communities have a proscribed schedule for which scripture gets read on a given week, so a person's "Torah portion" is kind of a crap-shoot.
Because my faith community is so important, I have asked Nanette and the worship committee if I could have my own aufruf at Wicker Park Grace. To reflect the tradition of the Torah portion, I've used the Revised Common Lectionary, which fulfills a similar purpose for Protestant Christian faith communities.
As luck would have it, the assigned Old Testament scripture for August 30 is an underhand pitch of a piece of scripture:
Song of Solomon 2:8-13 (The Message)
The Woman
8-10 Look! Listen! There's my lover!
Do you see him coming?
Vaulting the mountains,
leaping the hills.
My lover is like a gazelle, graceful;
like a young stag, virile.
Look at him there, on tiptoe at the gate,
all ears, all eyes—ready!
My lover has arrived
and he's speaking to me!
The Man
10-14 Get up, my dear friend,
fair and beautiful lover—come to me!
Look around you: Winter is over;
the winter rains are over, gone!
Spring flowers are in blossom all over.
The whole world's a choir—and singing!
Spring warblers are filling the forest
with sweet arpeggios.
Lilacs are exuberantly purple and perfumed,
and cherry trees fragrant with blossoms.
Oh, get up, dear friend,
my fair and beautiful lover—come to me!
Come, my shy and modest dove—
leave your seclusion, come out in the open.
Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice.
For your voice is soothing
and your face is ravishing.
Perfect for a wedding, right? Listen to the barely contained excitement of the woman awaiting her man: "My lover has arrived and is speaking to me!" Who doesn't like to be reminded of times when we've felt like nothing else mattered but the attention of the person we are infatuated with? Then, the passage goes on to describe the man's attempt to persuade the woman that she should do the scary thing and leave the safety of the life she's always known and join him "out in the open." I have never denied that getting married again scares the hell out of me. I mean, I know more than most that there is no guarantee. You can never know someone well enough to know for certain that he will want to do the hard work of staying compatible ‘til death do you part. I have needed a little persuading, needing to be told that my voice is soothing and my face is ravishing.
So, a perfect verse for a wedding aufruf, right? I mean there's that gag-me-flowers-puppies-and-sunshine stuff in the middle but we can all publicly laugh at that with ironic cynicism and know that it's OK that we secretly nurse a hope that someone will think we are the Spring that banishes their Winter.
It's a perfect verse but as I read it and re-read it, I was not quite content. It was too easy. So, I read some of the other options in the Lectionary, which also provides a designated psalm, New Testament epistle and Gospel reading. As I continued reading, the Gospel lesson tugged as my heart. It is such a difficult passage for Jacob and me in our endeavor to create a life where our two different faith traditions are compatible.
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 (NIV)
Clean and Unclean
1 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and 2 saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were "unclean," that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.)
5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with 'unclean' hands?" 6 He replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:
'These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
7 They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.'
8 You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.
14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a man can make him 'unclean' by going into him. 16 Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him 'unclean.'"
17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean'? 19 For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods "clean.")
20 He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' 21 For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.'"
Yeech!
When I read this passage, it seems to me like Jesus is saying, "You know those things that Jews do that help them identify as a distinct community of people? You don't really have to do them. In fact, they get in the way of doing what God wants you to do."
Harsh. Especially for an interfaith couple that keeps kosher, the practice of eating only "clean" foods, as directed in the Torah.
Last week we studied a passage similar to this and, in fact, for the past several months we have been studying Acts, the book in the Bible that describes in painstaking detail how people who followed God by following the teachings of Jesus separated themselves from the people who followed God through Jewish practices by changing their habits, loosening lifestyle restrictions and including the Gentiles as part of the club.
Separation is hard. Remember adolescence? So many of us needed to declare that our parents' beliefs –about our hair, about our friends, about God – were wrong in order to clear out the space that surrounded us. Once we had that space, we were free to determine for ourselves what we believed and wanted from life. Often, the process wasn't black and white and our parents (sometimes rightly) insisted on maintaining closeness.
Jacob and I stopped coming to services at WPG recently because Acts is full of this kind of separation pain and reading about and discussing that pain makes us fight. For instance, Stephen is a real jerk about it, comparing the Jewish people who he had been trying to convert to the Jews in history who had turned away from God, like with the golden calf. Is Jesus being a similar jerk? Is he saying that if I want to follow him, I can't keep kosher?
These kinds of passages make Jacob and I fight because they seem to be saying that we have to choose one side or another. Either you keep kosher dietary restrictions or you don't. Either you follow Jesus or you don't. And if you are going to be a couple traveling the same path, you both must choose the same things. But neither of us could live a life trying to talk to God in a language that is not the one we were born into. And yet, we love each other. More than that, we have the ability to make each other's lives better. It is like "The whole world's a choir—and singing!" when we live our lives together.
We have spent the last year hashing out whether or not there was a third option. Could we both continue to claim our separate faith identity while still being full partners in life, including raising children? We have decided that we can. However, this truth is still tender and vulnerable. We are still liable to lash out, or crawl inside of ourselves or get stuck in a bout of melancholy when someone challenges our resolve.
But when I look a little deeper, I don't believe that Jesus is testing our resolve. I think that Jesus is manifesting one of the most Jewish characteristics: iconoclasm. The midrash - which is a collection of stories told by rabbis to help explain the scriptures – describes Abraham, who was considered the first Jew, smashing the stone and clay idols in his father's shop with a hammer. This is iconoclasm. Worshipping god and nothing else is the first commandment handed down to the Jews by Moses at Mt. Sinai. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; Do not have any other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."
And what do we like to worship most? Personally, the idol I worship most often is my own life. I love looking at my own Facebook profile and reading my own blog posts after I have posted them. When I got my yearbooks in high school, I looked up my picture first. When people intrude upon my plans and interrupt my routines, I get upset and whine: "Is she going to be there?" "Do we have to leave so early?" I gather possessions around me and feel special because I've made just the right choice, finding the perfect item for $1.50 at the thrift store or acquiring a hard-to-find multi-purpose item to "simplify" my life.
These habits and choices are no different than the hand-washing rituals that Jesus condemns. Again and again, the scriptures tell us that the way to worship God is to serve others: to welcome the stranger and to care for the weak. The people Jesus was speaking to in this passage loved their carefully-chosen practices more than they loved making people feel affirmed and welcome. Instead of saying, "Hey, we're glad you're eating," they said, "Hey, what do you think you're doing?"
Many spiritual practices and regular everyday practices serve to bring us closer to God and to create a more strongly-knit community. For instance, while prayer might bring us closer to God, tooth-brushing allows us to draw close to each other. But Jesus says that we must never fall so far in love with these practices that we forget about the feelings of others. For "sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly" are, at their core, things that hurt the feelings of others. Literally, they make other people feel bad. If the necessity to pray in a certain way or time spent on Facebook cause us to neglect our duty to serve God through serving others, than it is itself an idol or "unclean" and must be smashed.
Jacob and I believe in this kind of iconoclasm. We believe that together, we can mend the world a little bit. By destroying the "traditions of men" that state that two people must stay within the well-defined boundaries of different religions, we think we are following God more closely than we would if we quietly, safely, peacefully accepted their restrictions. Those traditions have become idols that get in the way of serving God. And so, when Jacob says with his life, "Oh, get up, dear friend, my fair and beautiful lover—come to me!" I do.
(wedding photo by Jennifer Wiley) |
Being involved in the community of Wicker Park Grace as a student pastor is changing the way I think about faith and ministry. One of my first weeks at Wicker Park was a week for spiritual practice, so we were breaking up into small groups to discuss some Biblical texts. This particular week we were beginning to consider the theme of salvation and what that means for us. We were asking questions like "What is salvation?" and "Is salvation only about 'spiritual' things and the afterlife, or can salvation apply to our lives here and now?" There were a lot of complex ideas in the topic, and many people had strong feelings about it based on their past experiences with churches or other religious groups.
