Commensality

Commensality. I introduced this word four weeks ago, on Easter, and I wanted to reflect about it with you further today. It’s from the Latin root for table. Commensality refers to the fact that who we take meals with, and how, is socially structured and recapitulates the overall social structure. I cited anthropologists Peter Farb and George Armelagos who wrote:

“In all societies, both simple and complex, eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining human relationships…. Once the anthropologist finds out where, when, and with whom the food is eaten, just about everything else can be inferred about the relations among the society’s members....To know what, where, how, when, and with whom the people eat is to know the character of their society.”

Jesus taught a way of being – and being together – in which everyone had a place at the table, everyone would be fed, and equal.

“Open commensality is the symbol and embodiment of radical egalitarianism, of an absolute equality of people that denies the validity of any discrimination between them and negates the necessity of any hierarchy among them,”

writes the New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan.

In that Easter sermon, I mentioned two illustrations from the New Testament of Jesus teaching and exemplifying open commensality. One is the story of the loaves and fishes. Jesus takes the bread, gives thanks for it (i.e. blesses it), breaks the bread (i.e. prepares it for sharing) and gives. I imagine most of those assembled had hidden away in bags or sleeves a little food for their own use, and under the influence of Jesus’ teaching example, they bring out what have and share it around. As Jesus models taking, giving thanks, preparing for sharing, and then sharing, those gathered then follow his model. Thus community of abundance is created, replacing fearful scarcity thinking. There is enough for everyone – abundantly – when we can but learn to trust its supply and pass it around. The miracle of the feeding of the multitude is the miracle of neighborliness, of our human power to form community. And in this case it is a community of radical equality: everyone equally giving and equally receiving.

As Crossan writes:

“Took, blessed, broke, and gave have profound symbolic connotations and may well stem from that inaugural open commensality itself. They indicate, first of all, a process of equal sharing, whereby whatever food is there is distributed alike to all. But they also indicate something even more important. The first two verbs, took and blessed, and especially the second, are the actions of the master; the last two, broke and gave, and especially the second, are the actions of the servant. Jesus, as master and host, performs the role of servant, and all share the same food as equals....Far from reclining and being served, Jesus himself serves, like any housewife, the same meal to all including himself.” (181)

The second illustration I mentioned is the parable Jesus tells about a man who sends out his servant to invite people to his banquet. ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ Such a dinner would be highly disruptive of the stratified society of Jesus time – but radical equality is the point.

We may now add that Jesus’ commitment to equality also shows up in his itinerancy. The more common model in those days for a healer and teacher would be to stay in one place, set up shop, as it were, and let the sick, and those to wished to hear his teaching, come to him. Thus he could have established a small center of power and influence. We recognize today that there is a power imbalance between teacher and student, and between doctor and patient, and it is important to recognize that that power is there, so that we can also be vigilant against abuse of that power.

But Jesus takes steps to minimize that power imbalance. He stays on the move. He goes to the people rather than having them come to him.

Compare and contrast Jesus approach to another school of itinerant teachers in those days – a school of Greek philosophy called the cynics. This school began with Antisthenes, who had been a pupil of Socrates in 5th century BCE. For the Cynics, the purpose of life is to live in virtue, gaining happiness by rigorous training, rejecting wealth, power, and fame, in favor of a simple life free from possessions. Cynicism began to decline after the 3rd century BCE, but it experienced a revival with the rise of the Roman Empire in the 1st century CE, so Jesus and his followers would have been aware of them. Cynics could be found begging and preaching throughout the cities of the empire, and the influence of this tradition can be seen in Jesus and in early Christianity.

The cynics traveled around with nothing but knapsack and staff, symbolizing their complete self-sufficiency. “The Jesus missionaries, in contrast, are told precisely to carry no knapsack and hold no staff in their hands,” writes Crossan. He then asks,

“Why this striking difference? Since a reciprocity of healing and eating is at the heart of the Jesus movement, the idea of no-staff and no-knapsack is symbolically correct for the Jesus missionaries. They are not urban like the Cynics, preaching at street corner and marketplace. They are rural, on a house mission to rebuild peasant society from the grass roots upward. Since commensality is not just a technique for support but a demonstration of message, they could not and should not dress to declare itinerant self-sufficiency, but rather communal dependency.”

In contrast to the cynics itinerant self-sufficiency, the Jesus movement modeled itinerant mutual dependency.

After Jesus’ death, the open and equal table was ritually re-enacted as the eucharist, the communion of wafer and wine. But the eucharist ceremony reflects and reinforces hierarchy and authority, as a sacrament that comes only through priestly authority. Thus, writes Crossan, “open commensality has been ritualized, which was probably inevitable, and ruined, which was not.”

All of this does connects to our theme of the month for May, which is happiness, and to that connection we now turn.

What you’ll find in this month’s issue of “On the Journey” is “The Reflection” by Christine Robinson and Alicia Hawkins, which stakes out happiness as the intertwining of mood and meaning.

Mood is one of the factors. Sometimes we’re in a happy mood – and that feels good. Some of us are genetically predisposed to a sunny temperament, and are in a happy mood almost all the time. Others of us are genetically predisposed to inhabit more pensive or sadder moods. Those who aren’t so constantly happy, maybe, sometimes, find those people who are annoying. Actually, though, having cheerful people around usually helps us feel more cheerful. The more common response is to be attracted toward cheerfulness. We like to be around a little sunny optimism.

On those relatively rare occasions when cheerfulness may be annoying, I suspect that would be because a sunny outlook feels like a challenge to the more dour outlook with which we have come to feel identified. There is more to happiness than a happy mood, and maybe sometimes some of us can get a little resentful of a someone else having a relentlessly happy mood if the other factor of happiness is not evident.

The other factor of happiness is meaning. A happy life is one of meaning. Meaning comes from a sense of contributing to a whole greater than ourselves. Fellowship and community – connection with others – is a crucial part of our well-being, and not just because of what we receive from others, but from the chance to contribute to them, to the whole of which we and they are a part.

Consider for instance Robert F. Kennedy’s words from his 1968 campaign:

“Fellowship, community, shared patriotism – these essential values of our civilization do not come from just buying and consuming goods together.”

They come from

“dignified employment at decent pay, the kind of employment that lets a man say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself, ‘I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures.’”

That was 55 years ago, and maybe these days it’s harder to see contribution to nation as very important in life’s meaning – and that is a loss. With that source of meaning diminished, it’s harder to feel satisfied, happy – and, indeed, our politics today is consequently dominated by anger and rage. (Of course, there was anger and rage in 1968, too, and that was connected to people being shut out from the chance at dignified employment at decent pay and the chance to be a welcomed participant in our country’s great public ventures. The dearth of contributive justice – honoring everyone’s right and need to contribute to some big “us” – plays out in a rather different dynamic today, but generates frustration and anger just the same.)

With less role for national identity, we look to other ways to contribute to something bigger than ourselves – family, faith community, possibly work community.

If a pill were to become available, as cheap as aspirin, and not addictive, without any negative side-effects, and simply by taking this pill once a day, you would be blissfully happy, would you take it? I might try it – if the evidence were pretty solid that it really was safe. But the prospect of living that way – taking the happy pill along with my daily vitamin every morning – does not appeal to me -- as long as I wouldn't need such medication to fend off depression.

I want my happiness to be real – and what “real” means when it comes to happiness, is that component of meaningfulness – that component of contributing to something bigger than me. I don’t want to be blissfully or ecstatically happy while the world falls apart around me. If the world is falling apart, I want to be engaged in shoring it up. I’d feel ashamed if I thought I was turning my back on everyone, withdrawing into a private bubble of my own bliss.

We need meaning, we need to be able to contribute. We need respect – which, in its best form, is the recognition that we are meaningfully contributing as we are able to the good of others. So happiness cannot be a matter of the pharmaceutical companies finding a more perfect anti-depressant.

On the one hand, yes, serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins are crucial, but we can’t really be happy unless our lives are real, not self-centered, self-enclosed. To be really happy we need to feel there’s a reason to be happy – a purpose we are serving, a greater good to which we are contributing – and to which our very happiness itself helps us contribute.

And that brings us back to the model of commensality, of the open table, of serving and being served. You see, what I’ve been leading up to this whole time is this: we just had a pledge drive. Rather than hoarding our treasures, we have trusted their supply and passed them around. We have manifested abundance, and manifested community, for community IS abundance.

Our annual canvass is concluded – though you can still get in your pledge, or revise it – the forms are in the lobby. And we are celebrating today the way that we come together and sustain ourselves as a community. We’re having a literal open table today at the brunch after the service, and we thereby embody together serving and being served. And the literal welcome table we lay serves for us as a symbol representing everything about us: how we sustain each other, how we stand to each other in a relation of equality, how here we contribute to something bigger than ourselves. And we know this contribution is meaningful, because we are also the recipients of others’ similar contribution, so we feel directly how meaningful each contribution is, and that must include our own.

One other thing I mentioned four weeks ago on Easter was that John the Baptist was into fasting, while Jesus was more into feasting – and the open table, for him, showed us the way to feast. Fasting is what you do to prepare – to spiritually prepare for some revelation or dispensation or post-apocalyptic vision. Feasting is what you do to celebrate what is already here. Indeed, Jesus did tell us that the kingdom of God – the kin-dom of God – is here now. The kin-dom of God is within you and among you, he said.

We meet then at the welcome table in recognition of the fact that we have never truly been anywhere else. Therefore, as it is writ in the Gospel According to Wayne’s World: "Party on, Wayne." "Party on, Garth."

Amen.

Whose Jesus?

Rev. Naomi King

I served our congregation in Gainesville, Florida for seven years before leaving there to put myself at your disposal. One of my neighbor colleague ministers in Florida at that time was the Rev. Naomi King. At state clergy gatherings where I had a chance to talk with and get to know Naomi and attend some worship services that she led for us, I discovered she is at least as creative as her father. Rev. King’s father’s name, you see, is Stephen. For those who like their theology traditional and settled, the daughter is also scarier than the father. She gave a presentation once and just the title would make the blood run cold if you’re the sort of person who believes the faith of our fathers is not to be meddled with. It was titled, “The Queer Pirate Jesus Wheels into Port.”

With that as my introduction, Happy Easter, everyone! It’s the most significant day on the Christian calendar. Early Christians met to celebrate on Sunday, rather than the Jewish sabbath of Saturday, because their savior was resurrected on Sunday. We gather here on Sunday, every Sunday, in continuation of that tradition. And today is THE Sunday – the Sunday that is that reason all the other Sundays are celebrated.

Some of us are Christians, and many of us who don’t call ourselves that now were raised in a Christian tradition. And all of us are shaped by the influences of Christianity throughout culture. The understanding we have of Jesus is important, whether we are Christian, Jewish, atheist, or however we might identify our faith. So on this Sunday of Sundays, let us ask again: Who shall we say Jesus is? Who, and whose, is Jesus?

I didn’t see Naomi’s presentation – I only know her title: "Queer Pirate Jesus Wheels into Port." Provoked by that title, another minister, Rev. Thom Belote, and I have reflected on the idea. I’ll be utilizing some of what I learned from Rev. Belote (HERE), along with my own thoughts.

If the resurrection is about renewal, and if renewal is about getting a different perspective on things, what different perspectives on Jesus might we consider? Consider this – you may have known about this, but you might not. In the deaf Christian community there is fierce debate about whether Jesus knew sign language. Until I learned this, it was not a question that had ever occurred to me. But, then, I’m not deaf – yet. For a deaf Christian, I can see how this would be important. From their point of view, they need to know if this man – this man that their faith tells them is God – was able to communicate with people like them. For a deaf person, it’s the question of whether God is accessible to them. And that matters.

Forensic anthropologists' reconstruction of a
typical 1st-century adult male Palestinian Jew.

Likewise it matters, as feminists have been pointed out, that God is presented as male. And it matters that Europeans have been depicting a Nordic looking Jesus for hundreds of years. Whose Jesus is it?

As for Jesus’ sexuality, official doctrine is that he didn’t have any. Authors such as Nikos Kazantzakis in “The Last Temptation of Christ” and Dan Brown in “The Da Vinci Code” have imagined a sexually active heterosexual Jesus. Others imagine that he might have been gay. There’s not much evidence either way on that question, but there is that curious case of the naked young man in the Gospel of Mark. In Chapter 14, as the Roman soldiers are arresting Jesus, we read:

“All of them deserted him and fled. A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.”

So there was a scantily-clad young man hanging out around Jesus and his followers. Speculation about what he was doing there can only be an exercise of our imagination – fan fiction, perhaps -- not history. (Still, imagination is essential in theology. If we aren't pushing the edge, we're not only humorless, but a faith is losing freshness. For "cyborg pirate ninja Jesus" see HERE.)

Still, Carter Heyward, of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, speaks of the queerness of Jesus. She says:

"The term 'queer' as I am using it, let me be clear, is not simply a code-word for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and other ways of being at odds with dominant gender culture. 'Queer' is not simply a reversal of a negative epithet so often hurled against LGBT folks in homophobic culture. 'Queer' is not simply a synonym for being 'odd,' 'unusual,' or 'out-there.' Queerness is public solidarity in the struggle for sexual and gender justice and of irrepressibly making connections to other struggles for justice, compassion, and reconciliation. [Episcopal Divinity School] is, by the grace of God, a Queer seminary."

Such “solidarity in the struggle for sexual and gender justice” is found in the way the Jesus of scripture breaks gender rules and gender roles. He befriends prostitutes, lepers, and other outcasts, challenges traditional family values, and ignores his family of origin in favor of those who became his "siblings" by loving God and neighbor. He makes a new family of allies – an experience all too common among LGBTQ folk who have been rejected from their families of origin.

Jesus’ ministry embodies radical acceptance. African-American Christians connect Jesus’ own scourging and crucifixion with their people who have been the victims of whipping and lynching. And LGBTQ Christians view the Passion as a hate crime. Was not Matthew Shepard crucified?

Queer Christian art has adapted traditional iconography such as the Stations of the Cross and the Passion narrative to address LGBTQ suffering. In so doing, these artists enlarge the way we all see God. A Jesus that is accessible across a greater range of diversity is a prompt to us all to recognize the image of God in ourselves and in others.

Jesus’ ministry and teachings were subversive of the order that privileged some. (Were I here to add “at the expense of others,” then I would be merely redundant, for privilege by its nature is inherently unequal. When a good or a benefit is equally and universally provided or protected, we call it a right.)

Jesus’ continual theme throughout his teaching is this concept usually translated as “Kingdom of God.” I will often use “Kin-dom of God,” as better capturing the realm of concern and respect for all that I think Jesus had in mind. The original Greek – which isn’t really original, since Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Greek, but, as the language in which the gospels were written, is as original as is available to us – is basileia tou theou.

Theologians seeking to avoid the connotations of English translations, speak of the basileia – the siblinghood of radical acceptance that is Jesus’ predominant theme. Theologian Robert Goss, for instance, writes of:

"the basileia, the reign of God which signified the political transformation of his society into a radically egalitarian, new age, where sexual, religious, and political distinctions would be irrelevant. Jesus acted out his basileia message by standing with the oppressed and outcasts of society and by forming a society of equals." (Elizabeth Stuart describing the work of Robert Goss, as quoted by Terence Weldon, HERE)

For Goss, the resurrection represents God’s endorsement and confirmation of Jesus’ basileia message. The resurrection tells us that not only Jesus, but God, is on the side of the oppressed. This is what Goss means when he says that at Easter, Jesus became the “queer Christ.” Goss is making no comment on Jesus’ sexuality. Rather, he’s starting with the standard claim that the resurrection turned Jesus into Christ because the resurrection signaled the special status of Jesus as the messenger of, the bringer of, the embodiment of, salvation. And then he’s adding that, in particular, the resurrection turned Jesus into queer Christ because the salvation that Jesus represented lay in what Jesus taught: namely, a basileia of respect and acceptance for queer people, and for all people. The resurrection reveals God’s orientation toward the excluded.

Thus Goss calls the resurrection God’s “coming out” as queer – queer in Carter Heyward’s sense of queerness as “public solidarity in the struggle for sexual and gender justice and of irrepressibly making connections to other struggles for justice, compassion, and reconciliation.” Jesus’ call for radical equality continues to resonate wherever there is inequality of concern or respect.

So where does the pirate bit come in? Hold on to your chair, mateys. On this point, Rev. Thom Belote, engaged in a very different project, made a discovery. Rev. Belote was trying to get inside the mind of Thomas Jefferson, because Jefferson had some rather Unitarian ideas about Jesus and authored the first laws guaranteeing religious freedom in the U.S. Belote read hundreds of pages of laws that Jefferson wrote for the State of Virginia. One discovery he made was that the punishment for piracy in the State of Virginia was significantly harsher than the punishment for the equivalent of highway robbery. This was baffling. Why would this be?

He explains:

“The basic answer is that highway robbery exists within a closed system; pirates live outside of the system and threaten the entire system. Highway robbery is a form of illegal commerce, but it reinforces the validity of commerce. Piracy is an attack on not only the material goods that are plundered, but it is also an attack on the idea of property. If a mechanic quotes you an exorbitant price to fix your car, you would accuse the mechanic of highway robbery, not of piracy.”

Yes, pirates are thieves and criminals. Specifically, they are thieves and criminals who function outside of the dominant social and economic system.

Kester Brewin, a British Christian blogger offers this analysis:

“What pirates do, as a rule, is emerge from the underbelly of a ‘stuck’ orthodoxy and, by way of actions that are initially perceived as heretical, reinvigorate that practice. And this is what Jesus did. He saw a religion blocked – a temple which had access restricted by merchants and priests. And he set about plundering the booty in the temple, and setting it free for all to enjoy. This was the heresy of Jesus Christ.”

Jesus upends and plunders the social system when he says that in order to follow him you must first sell everything you have and give the money away to the poor, when he overturns the tables and drives the moneychangers out of the temple (which leads directly to his execution), and when he overturns the law by pronouncing that the “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27) In parable after parable, Jesus’ teachings ransack accepted economic principles.

As Christians identify themselves with a symbol of death – the cross – so, too, pirates identify themselves with a symbol of death, the skull and cross-bones. In both cases, the symbol proclaims fearlessness of death. Pirates and Christians both claim a radical power beyond the powers and principalities that pretend to rule the world. By renouncing life, the pirate and the Christian claim life.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul describes the early Christian church. His words might also describe a band of pirates:

“Honor and dishonor, praise and blame, alike are our lot: we are the impostors who speak the truth. We are unknown and yet are well known. Dying we still live on;
disciplined by suffering, we are not done to death; in our sorrows we have always cause for joy; poor ourselves, we bring wealth to many; penniless, we own the world.”

Pirates have a certain attraction that no other criminals have. Children on Halloween don’t dress up as arsonists, aggravated assaulters, or tax evaders – but every year a number of them will dress up as pirates.

I think we romanticize pirates because they represent subversion of the usual order of privilege and inequality. While other thieves and crooks pretend to be normal law-abiding folk, the pirates are out there openly under a flag of their own, the jolly roger. They capture our imaginations with a vision of a life liberated for the sort of inequalities that pervade mass society, and that weigh down the spirits of everyone, whether you’re on the top or the bottom of that inequality.

It’s not that pirate ships were utopian models of egalitarian sharing – but they did represent small face-to-face community, where everyone knew everyone else, and where they were out from under the sort of inequalities and frustrations perpetuated by invisible and faceless bureaucrats.

In recent times, the Somalian pirates were certainly problematic. The international community united to take steps to effectively end that problem – and we absolutely had to do that. But at the same time, let us remember the bigger picture.

Let us remember the 1801 to 1805 war against the Barbary States undertaken by the Jefferson administration to suppress the Barbary Pirates who were interfering with the crucial trade interests of the young nation. It was the first but not the last time the United States would go to war against a part of the Islamic world to protect our financial interests. Let us remember the conditions to which the Somalian pirates were responding. Western powers came to Africa, enslaved the people, established colonies, stole the natural resources, divided Africa into oddly shaped nations without any understanding of or regard for local history, and overthrew politicians that Africans elected when the Western powers didn’t like them. Who should be lecturing whom on respect for property? Or even on respect for life?

Jesus was a subject of an empire militarily and economically oppressing the conquered people of Israel. Jesus’ actions and teaching reverse the economic and political worldview of Rome. When Jesus upsets the moneychangers' tables outside the temple, he's upsetting not just tables, but a religio-economic worldview that protects privilege. So, yeah, it’s not so big a stretch to compare him to a pirate.

On this fine Easter morning, the stone of the tomb is rolled back, and the tomb is empty – because the queer pirate Jesus is wheeling into port somewhere else. I don’t know if Naomi talked about the significance of wheeling into port, and Thom Belote’s reflections don’t go into that. Wheeling into port, to my mind, suggests two things. It has a feeling of bringing it home – coming from “out there” and into our hearts with the message of basileia – of beloved community of radical acceptance.

More darkly, though, I reflect that pirates don’t come into established ports unless they have been captured and are being brought in to be locked up and executed – as, indeed, Jesus was. Yet even from the gallows – or the cross – they inspire imaginations to dream of what liberation might look like.

Other theologians and writers have developed the idea a disabled Jesus, an immigrant Jesus, a woman Jesus, a transgender Jesus. When all of us imagine a Jesus that is accessible to each of us – not narrowly cast as a Nordic-featured straight (or asexual) white able-bodied citizen of the empire – then possibilities of liberation open up to us all. When we all see the image of God in each of us, we see it better in ourselves as well.

Yes, these are imaginative exercises, but the gospels were imaginative exercises from the beginning. Theology IS imagination. Our imaginations empower us, and our imaginations make empathy and compassion possible. The basileia is an imaginative exercise – and one of tremendous power. The basileia is for all of us – everyone needs to see it embodied in someone that looks like them. We all also need to see it embodied in someone different from ourselves.

When Rev. Thom Belote explored Naomi King’s ideas of queer pirate Jesus, he concluded by musing that perhaps his next sermon might be: “The Transgender Cowboy Buddha Skips to the Market.”

Happy Easter and may we all be risen.