In two different settings recently, the story of Jesus' encounter with the Sadducees has occupied the center of my message. One was at a funeral in which it was appropriate to speak about the destiny of the dead. The other was last week at our Bible conference, in which we discussed that same topic under the broader category of eschatology.
Though I probably preached a synthesis of the three versions of the story, appearing as it does in Matthew (22:23-33), Mark (12:18-27), and Luke (20:27-40), it was a line unique to Luke which proved critical.
"To him all of them are alive." This was the line Jesus used to sum up his defense of the resurrection to the Sadducees, "those who say there is no resurrection" (20:27). It came following Jesus' brilliant recontextualization of Exodus 3, "the story about the bush" (20:37), for an audience, that is, the Sadducees themselves, which accepted only the five books of Moses (of which Exodus is one) as scripture. Other Hebrew texts, for example, Isaiah (26:14, 19) and Daniel (12:2) had taught more explicitly the resurrection of the dead; these, however, were not authoritative for the Sadducees, though they were for both Jesus and other Jewish groups such as the Pharisees. As a result, Jesus did not base his response to the Sadducees on texts which were not to them scripture; he made his point from their (and, yes, also his) scripture. He selected the story of God's self-revelation to Moses in the wilderness, in the burning bush.
In that story, God had revealed Godself in relation to God's people; God is God because God is God to someone, in this case, "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob", three men who yielded their lives, not each to his self, but to God. When they died--and they had been dead for centuries by the time Moses appeared on the scene--their lives remained in the presence of their God who is, the "I am who I am" (Ex. 3:14). Or, as Jesus implied, God did not say of Godself in relation to the dead ones, "I was", but "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."
In other words, "he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive" (20:38).
Jesus' logic in this story had always perplexed me. Approaching it from an academic point-of-view, his logic seemed more like an affirmation of the existence of the person between biological death and the resurrection of the dead--the so-called intermediate state--than it did the resurrection of the dead, the actual issue at hand in his encounter with the Sadducees. That is, it was not obvious to me that the continuation of personhood after death for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob automatically proved their coming resurrection on the last day; the only "proof" of that was Jesus' appearances to his disciples following his own death, a unique mode-of-being within the corpus of post-death experience available to us from the scriptures, a resurrection promised also to us who "have been united with him in a death like his" (Rom. 6:5).
However, preaching the story, that is, approaching it with a pastoral intent, introduced different questions and, in turn, yielded different answers.
The specific Africans in whose presence I proclaim the Word of God do not, like the Sadducees, have a difficult time accepting the continuation of life for the dead. Quite the contrary, the dead are all too alive for them! The dead still demand attention, still receive care--and this at the great expense of the living. In such a setting, the key question and answer comes from Luke.
To whom are "all of them" alive? "To him all of them are alive."
The dead are not alive to us, their living descendants. The dead are alive to God, their and our living Creator. God remembers the dead. God loves the dead. God cares for the dead. God judges the dead. If the dead receive such good care from an all-powerful God--if to him all of them are alive--what more can we give them? What more do they need from us?
We do not honor the dead by seeking their favor, or fearing their wrath. We honor them by seeking the God who holds them in his care.
-Joe
Monday, August 17, 2009
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
a satisfactory word
It was a model of its kind, the most brilliant of scriptural insights: attentive to the narrative, creative, culturally-relevant, pastoral, transformative.
Pastor Ntapo stood at the front with five other students, reporting on what their respective small groups had discussed in this August session of Bethany Bible School. The text: 1 Samuel 28:8-19.
I had chosen the text because it was a potentially explosive text for our students' real-life context. Saul, in a time of crisis as leader of the people Israel, goes against the will of God to seek advice from the dead through a diviner, or a sangoma (Zulu), an igqirha (Xhosa). He disguised himself and went by night to a woman who could call up the spirits of the dead. Against her own wishes--"you know what Saul has done, how he cut off from the land all the wizards and diviners"--she agrees to call up for Saul the one whom he names. Saul is seeking the counsel of his old prophet, now dead, Samuel.
The woman, of course, succeeds in calling up Samuel. She lets out a great cry when she sees him, for she recognizes him as the one who in life was associated with Saul--the very one who has cut off her kind from the land. "Why have you deceived me--you are Saul", she says. Saul, now identified for the first time in the text as "'the king", encourages her to carry on. "Do not fear; what do you see?"
From what she saw, Pastor Ntapo reported on what he sees. "First," he said, "we see that Samuel was wrapped in a robe. From that we take that Samuel was a priest. This shows that one is identified in death by what he was in life. If you were a tsotsi [a gangster, a criminal], you would come back in tsotsi's clothes. This goes to show that the dead don't need anything from us. They are already clothed, so they don't need us to give them a blanket."
I remembered what Pastor Ntapo had explained to me many months earlier. When a Xhosa person sees, much like the woman saw Samuel, "an old man" in his/her dreams, one of the most common cultural assumptions is that the dead ancestor is cold. He is appearing now to his living descendants to serve notice of his discomfort. In response, the living will slaughter a goat for the dead and leave its coat on the floor beside the bed; there the ancestor will sleep in the warmth of the goatskin. But, as the text peers into the spiritual world, it sees that such costly sacrifices are unnecessary, for the dead person is yet provided for in the clothes which he donned in life; he has no need of more. Since the dead person has no need of more, the old cultural assumption is a lie. On the contrary, the dead want to rest as they are, just as Samuel scolded Saul, "Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?" Consequently, it is for that reason also that Pastor Ntapo does not attribute visitations to the living from the ancestral spirits to the ancestors themselves. Rather, they are "from Satan", pictures of loved ones sent by the Deceiver in order to take sacrifices for himself.
"That is a blue lie," the pastor has said to me on mulitple occasions. "You will find that whenever they do that [sacrifice in response to such a vision], a death will soon follow." People may sacrifice innocently, out of ignorance and even genuine concern for their dead, but the Evil One only wants to take more. Satan will never be satisfied.
God, on the other hand, has given us his word, and God is satisfied in it. Thanks be to God for interpreters like Pastor Ntapo who open that clear word for others in order that it might become flesh in the lives of God's people.
-Joe
Pastor Ntapo stood at the front with five other students, reporting on what their respective small groups had discussed in this August session of Bethany Bible School. The text: 1 Samuel 28:8-19.
I had chosen the text because it was a potentially explosive text for our students' real-life context. Saul, in a time of crisis as leader of the people Israel, goes against the will of God to seek advice from the dead through a diviner, or a sangoma (Zulu), an igqirha (Xhosa). He disguised himself and went by night to a woman who could call up the spirits of the dead. Against her own wishes--"you know what Saul has done, how he cut off from the land all the wizards and diviners"--she agrees to call up for Saul the one whom he names. Saul is seeking the counsel of his old prophet, now dead, Samuel.
The woman, of course, succeeds in calling up Samuel. She lets out a great cry when she sees him, for she recognizes him as the one who in life was associated with Saul--the very one who has cut off her kind from the land. "Why have you deceived me--you are Saul", she says. Saul, now identified for the first time in the text as "'the king", encourages her to carry on. "Do not fear; what do you see?"
From what she saw, Pastor Ntapo reported on what he sees. "First," he said, "we see that Samuel was wrapped in a robe. From that we take that Samuel was a priest. This shows that one is identified in death by what he was in life. If you were a tsotsi [a gangster, a criminal], you would come back in tsotsi's clothes. This goes to show that the dead don't need anything from us. They are already clothed, so they don't need us to give them a blanket."
I remembered what Pastor Ntapo had explained to me many months earlier. When a Xhosa person sees, much like the woman saw Samuel, "an old man" in his/her dreams, one of the most common cultural assumptions is that the dead ancestor is cold. He is appearing now to his living descendants to serve notice of his discomfort. In response, the living will slaughter a goat for the dead and leave its coat on the floor beside the bed; there the ancestor will sleep in the warmth of the goatskin. But, as the text peers into the spiritual world, it sees that such costly sacrifices are unnecessary, for the dead person is yet provided for in the clothes which he donned in life; he has no need of more. Since the dead person has no need of more, the old cultural assumption is a lie. On the contrary, the dead want to rest as they are, just as Samuel scolded Saul, "Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?" Consequently, it is for that reason also that Pastor Ntapo does not attribute visitations to the living from the ancestral spirits to the ancestors themselves. Rather, they are "from Satan", pictures of loved ones sent by the Deceiver in order to take sacrifices for himself.
"That is a blue lie," the pastor has said to me on mulitple occasions. "You will find that whenever they do that [sacrifice in response to such a vision], a death will soon follow." People may sacrifice innocently, out of ignorance and even genuine concern for their dead, but the Evil One only wants to take more. Satan will never be satisfied.
God, on the other hand, has given us his word, and God is satisfied in it. Thanks be to God for interpreters like Pastor Ntapo who open that clear word for others in order that it might become flesh in the lives of God's people.
-Joe
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
an interpretive stone
Another Bible conference. Another obscure reference to Absalom.
Last May, you might remember, one man had asked about the kiss of Absalom.http://joeannasawatzky.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-kisses.html On Saturday, in the reports of small groups to the general assembly, a young woman unveiled Absalom's stone (2 Sam 18:18).
If you don't get the pun, you don't live in this part of South Africa. The woman's "unveiling" of an obscure part of scripture for me came precisely in the context of her using that verse as a justification for her cultural practice of "unveiling tombstones" for deceased loved ones. Although I think it can happen at the same time as the funeral, tombstone unveilings commonly occur some months to a year after the person's death. As many families do not have enough money for both the funeral and the stone, the stone often follows at a later date. At that time, the family will again hold some kind of service (one of our Committee members in the Bible School assures me that an unveiling is strictly a family event, just a small event, and need not involve the broader community or the church. In reality, people often do make a big deal of it).
At any rate, the young woman's comment irritated me. The topic for the day was eschatology, or the theology of "last things." Because most of our students are fixated not on eschatology in its sense as the goal of history/creation but as the destiny of their dead loved ones, I too chose to focus the lesson on its personal dimensions, that is, on so-called "personal eschatology". Closing the first session leading into small group discussion, I had left students with the question, "What is our responsibility toward the dead?" Now I was getting the answers from this young woman. First, "we bury them." Then, "we unveil tombstones". Both answers, of course, came not on their own but with a scripture verse thrown in for support. And therein lies my irritation.
If there is a scriptural justification for tombstone unveilings, this was not it. First, Absalom was not setting up a stone for a loved one; he was setting it up for himself, worried that he would die without a son to remember him. Second, who is Absalom, and why should we follow him? The young woman's answer showed little concern for these considerations. In the end, Absalom's practice in this verse has no more to do with the woman's own than the stone. And that, it seems to me, is no rock on which to build the house of God.
-Joe
Last May, you might remember, one man had asked about the kiss of Absalom.http://joeannasawatzky.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-kisses.html On Saturday, in the reports of small groups to the general assembly, a young woman unveiled Absalom's stone (2 Sam 18:18).
If you don't get the pun, you don't live in this part of South Africa. The woman's "unveiling" of an obscure part of scripture for me came precisely in the context of her using that verse as a justification for her cultural practice of "unveiling tombstones" for deceased loved ones. Although I think it can happen at the same time as the funeral, tombstone unveilings commonly occur some months to a year after the person's death. As many families do not have enough money for both the funeral and the stone, the stone often follows at a later date. At that time, the family will again hold some kind of service (one of our Committee members in the Bible School assures me that an unveiling is strictly a family event, just a small event, and need not involve the broader community or the church. In reality, people often do make a big deal of it).
At any rate, the young woman's comment irritated me. The topic for the day was eschatology, or the theology of "last things." Because most of our students are fixated not on eschatology in its sense as the goal of history/creation but as the destiny of their dead loved ones, I too chose to focus the lesson on its personal dimensions, that is, on so-called "personal eschatology". Closing the first session leading into small group discussion, I had left students with the question, "What is our responsibility toward the dead?" Now I was getting the answers from this young woman. First, "we bury them." Then, "we unveil tombstones". Both answers, of course, came not on their own but with a scripture verse thrown in for support. And therein lies my irritation.
If there is a scriptural justification for tombstone unveilings, this was not it. First, Absalom was not setting up a stone for a loved one; he was setting it up for himself, worried that he would die without a son to remember him. Second, who is Absalom, and why should we follow him? The young woman's answer showed little concern for these considerations. In the end, Absalom's practice in this verse has no more to do with the woman's own than the stone. And that, it seems to me, is no rock on which to build the house of God.
-Joe
Sunday, August 2, 2009
gleanings on gleaning
Yesterday, my wife preached, by request, on the topic "the responsibility of mothers in building up the church". She chose as her primary example the story of Ruth, in which Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi orchestrate a plan to provide for their own security.
After the service, while commenting on the sermon, the pastor remarked that "this Jewish culture [in the biblical text, the story of Ruth] is so much like our [Xhosa, and in particular, Pondo] own." The example he went on to cite from Ruth was the part in which she, in her economically-disadvantaged status as a widow, gleans grain behind Boaz's workers at the harvest (Ruth 2). This, of course, is a narrative example of Jewish law, in which provision in this manner was written in on behalf of the poor (Lev. 19:9-10). The pastor said, "it was just like that in the village where I grew up. The poor people would follow behind the harvesters collecting mealies."
I do not know whether there was a prescriptive dimension to this practice in Pondoland, whether the haves were sanctioned to leave what fell for the have-nots (if so, the law in this case was "only" oral). Regardless, the stories of the Bible read as a close descriptive parallel to many African cultures, and therefore also contain great power.
On the other hand, "these practices are no more there [in his boyhood village]," says the pastor. Because the pastor was born in 1973, it seems to reason that his memories of gleaning would date from at least into the early-mid 1980s. It also indicates how rapid was the erosion of such practices: from a fact of life to nonexistent in 25 years. An entire generation of children, though rural, has grown up ignorant of the old agrarian ways. In that case, a new generation of Africans will perhaps also have to listen harder for the voice of God in ancient texts whose relevance was once so overtly obvious to their mothers and fathers.
-Joe
After the service, while commenting on the sermon, the pastor remarked that "this Jewish culture [in the biblical text, the story of Ruth] is so much like our [Xhosa, and in particular, Pondo] own." The example he went on to cite from Ruth was the part in which she, in her economically-disadvantaged status as a widow, gleans grain behind Boaz's workers at the harvest (Ruth 2). This, of course, is a narrative example of Jewish law, in which provision in this manner was written in on behalf of the poor (Lev. 19:9-10). The pastor said, "it was just like that in the village where I grew up. The poor people would follow behind the harvesters collecting mealies."
I do not know whether there was a prescriptive dimension to this practice in Pondoland, whether the haves were sanctioned to leave what fell for the have-nots (if so, the law in this case was "only" oral). Regardless, the stories of the Bible read as a close descriptive parallel to many African cultures, and therefore also contain great power.
On the other hand, "these practices are no more there [in his boyhood village]," says the pastor. Because the pastor was born in 1973, it seems to reason that his memories of gleaning would date from at least into the early-mid 1980s. It also indicates how rapid was the erosion of such practices: from a fact of life to nonexistent in 25 years. An entire generation of children, though rural, has grown up ignorant of the old agrarian ways. In that case, a new generation of Africans will perhaps also have to listen harder for the voice of God in ancient texts whose relevance was once so overtly obvious to their mothers and fathers.
-Joe
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