Committed Critic

At least 850 elderly or disabled residents in or around Chalmette, LA still need their houses gutted, so here’s my bid to encourage folks to volunteer. They’re pushing for people to come during one of four “work camp” times:

October 13–23
November 17–27
December 8–18
December 27 –– January 8

The work is difficult but doable and necessary. You can go work for a day or two, or you can stay for a full ten days. I recommend working from late one week through early the next, since they don’t work on Sundays and it’ll give you a break in the middle of your work. Housing is free, and they provide your food for $10 each day.

Hilltop Rescue & Relief is run out the second floor of an elementary school whose first floor was ruined by the flooding and whose students no longer need the classroom space in this decimated town. They have months and months of experience leading groups, and they run their program efficiently: they help you do what you can in the limited time you have to volunteer.

The pile of trash pictured above is what we pulled out of the yellow house behind it in a day and a half of work.

Below is a photo of a room that I worked on for most of a day, taken after I spent two hours throwing out wheelbarrow- and arm-loads of crumbled dry wall which had fallen from the ceiling, along with mattresses, closet doors, and countless clumps of nondescript matter which used to be the contents of an elderly couple’s master bedroom. When I first arrived, I had to climb over stuff to get into the room.

The finished house is gratifying, and it’s an enormous burden off the shoulders of the homeowner:

This is a rare opportunity to do work that solves an actual problem for people who can’t do for themselves, working for an organization that won’t waste your time and efforts. For details, visit the Hilltop website. If you know people who are capable of this kind of work, please consider referring them either to this post or to the Hilltop web site.

My departmental seminar this week asked us each to describe in one page how we approach theology (personally and professionally) from our different fields, so I thought I’d share mine here, hopefully to provoke discussion. (Incidentally, if you’ve never tried to write something in exactly one page before, it’s a great exercise in saying what you mean and omitting what is beside the point.)

Theology can aim to describe at least three different things: what is true of God, what a certain person or groups believes of God, or what is helpful to believe of God.

I feel called to theology primarily to learn to say what is true (as far as possible) concerning God. Claiming to know truth can lead to blind dogmatism, of course, but one’s attitude (rather than one’s aim) is the deciding factor in that risk. If we worship a real God, at least some theologians must dedicate their work to finding who that God really is.

The latter two approaches, secondary in my mind, are useful but more limited. Studying a particular theology can help us understand better our own theology, understand people of other faiths, or just explore interesting ways to think about God; but it also can lead us to ignore who God is in favor of pet topics or abstract ideals. Determining which beliefs about God most benefit (or harm) people’s lives can call our attention to points at which we should take special care; but it also can give us license to create the God we want in a vain effort to make religion safe.

I pursue theology first through the study of the Scriptures because Scripture provides the strongest available corrective against simply saying whatever we please. But because my study requires analysis of the individual theologies within Scripture, determining what Scripture says requires a sort of dialogue even within the text itself. Grounded in Scripture’s web of ideas, theology also must then take into account the reality of our lives. The Bible itself provides countless examples of God’s people trying to make sense of their faith: Job’s discourses on God’s justice; the prophets’ declaration of what God really wants; Jesus’ insistence that some parts of the Torah hang on others; Paul’s application of the theology of the cross to evangelism and baptism and imprisonment and church and sickness. A biblical theologian presumes to follow in this line.

On a road trip with my friend Josh a couple of weeks back, we were listening to a weekly podcast by the editors of Relevant magazine, when they started talking about the Israel/Lebanon conflict. We were both a little startled when the Scripture that says to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem” was mentioned, and one of the hosts commented about the need for Christians to support Israel. Then, the other two hosts chimed in in agreement.

That verse in psalm 122, they contend, commands Christians to actively support the modern political state of Israel.

It doesn’t surprise me when Pat Robertson makes a comment like that, but the editors of Relevant spend their energies hunting down interviews with Sufjan Stevens and Bono, so they’re hardly extremists who set themselves up against the world –– at least from what little I had previously heard about them.

But regardless of their particular loyalties, support of Israel apparently is a position shared by millions of North American Christians, and a position they believe is mandated by Scripture.

Naturally, we all should be praying for peace in Jerusalem –– as we should be praying for peace in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and the streets and homes of America. But that’s not what the folks on the podcast were talking about, and I don’t think it’s what most of those featured on this website have in mind either.

But come on. To quote Mugatu, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here. Something like sixteen different (but mostly interrelated) reasons jump out at me why this whole thing is nonsense.

Just read the psalm: It’s a song sung by a Jew about his pilgrimage to the Jerusalem temple to worship. It emphasizes the “tribes” going to worship according to the “statute given to Israel,” visiting the place where those who sit on the “thrones of the house of David” maintain justice for the land. The prayer for peace is for “the sake of my brothers and friends” and “for the sake of the house of the Lord our God.”

It’s difficult to imagine a more culturally specific psalm. There’s not a lot of mystery here: the Jerusalem temple was the symbol of God’s presence among the Israelites, and to pray for its peace was to pray that God would remain faithful to his people and protect them and their king amidst the enemies that surrounded them. The pilgrimage (”going up”) was a regular event as commanded in Torah, and Jews (Jesus and his family among them) obeyed and celebrated it.

Now try to apply that to Christians today. The temple was razed 1,936 years ago, the sacrifices have stopped, and virtually none of us make the pilgrimage for the feasts. Everything tying the religious content of Psalm 122 to Jerusalem no longer exists. So by what sick interpretive contortion do we pull from this that God is commanding us to help Israelis keep Palestinians out of their homeland?

The first problem, I suppose, is a misunderstanding of genre. Psalm 122 is a song of praise and exhortation to worshippers, not a legal text prescribing what everyone must do. How much of what’s said in the psalms do we actually consider commands to be obeyed? To use the easiest counter-example, if we could find a society of Babylonians, should we bash their infants’ heads against a rock (Psalm 137)? Wait –– Babylon is essentially modern-day Iraq, so maybe that’s not such a stretch…

But second, even if the psalm was intended as a genuine command, it clearly is a text for Jews worshipping under the old (from a Christian perspective) covenant. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem was absolutely essential to Palestinian Jewish identity, and absolutely not required of Gentile believers.

To borrow from a recent discussion on matthew’s blog the other day, Jesus claimed explicitly to inaugurate a new age in which worship is centered not on a location, but in which “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:23). So even a conservative reading of Scripture here should lead us to see the entire context of Psalm 122 as obsolete. If we are to read this psalm as Christians, then, it must be symbolically. As commentator J. Clinton McCann Jr. writes,

Ironically, much of the ongoing controversy surrounding Jerusalem stems from the failure to discern its symbolic function; the city has often been viewed only as a place to be possessed rather than a symbol of the concrete presence in the world of a God who cannot ultimately be possessed and whose presence certainly cannot be limited to a particular place (as Psalm 121 proclaims!).

A Christian reading of Psalm 122 should focus on worship, not geography, and we ought not pray concerning a particular geographical/political entity, if what we’re aiming for is the preservation of God’s presence among us. To do so is actually to deny what Jesus claimed about the nature of worship under his messiahship.

So am I missing something here? Have I just lucked into a better reading of the psalm because I grew up in a tradition that believes in a sharp divide between the old and new covenants? Or am I ignoring some key New Testament text concerning the end-times, which would give me a fuller perspective?

Feel free to comment with agreement, disagreement, lament, outrage (at me or at these other folks), or perhaps suggestions for broader perspective.