This is the Work of Song; This is Liturgy

In a couple of weeks I will be preaching on the story of Deborah in the book of Judges. This story is course well known for situating a woman in such a powerful position set within a context that has so often been condemned as the bane of women. There is also of course the murdering of King Sisera by the woman Jael who asks him to enter her tent to be refreshed. She offers him milk and then drives a tent peg through his head. Following this account is the Song of Deborah. The song is introduced as a duet (including Barak who leads, somewhat reluctantly) the army of Israel. But Barak is really more of a figure or symbol. The song is definitely offered as a solo.

There are some beautiful images here of how leadership flows into the mobilization of a group. The song begins,
That the leaders led in Israel,
That the people volunteered,
Bless the Lord!
As anyone in leadership knows this is no small accomplishment. This is a song. And so Deborah sings and what happens? God moves.
To the LORD I will sing
From there God marched out and the earth shook and the heavens were wrung of their moisture. Before this song community life was at a stand still but Deborah arose as
a mother of Israel
She saw that war was at the gates but even among 40 thousand not a shield could be found. Deborah's heart goes out to the people as they approach the gates. And what happens?
Awake! Awake! Deborah!
But to what end? She must take responsibility as their leader. She must be laying plans for war. No!
Awake! Awake! Sing a song!
And what comes? Here the translation could be challenged but perhaps,
Then survivors came down as nobles;
The people of the Lord came down to me as warriors.
The people are transformed and mobilized. And there was,
great resolve of heart
And for those who were not mobilized there was,
great searching of heart
For many people were not mobilized with God. But war went on as the kings fought and so did the stars in heaven. The stars fought from their own paths. There ordering is also mobilized for God's battle. The river torrent in its own path also sweeps along and carries away the enemy of God. And Deborah pauses,
Oh my soul, march on in strength
But those still searching and watching are now cursed they have not joined the fray.
But Jael did join. From her humble tent and her humble position she is now most blessed. To took what was at hand.
She offered milk.
She reached for the hammer.
She drove the peg.
She smashed his head.
And there between her feet Sisera,
bowed
fell
and lay.
And far off in a luxurious palace the mother of Sisera looks out and wonders,
Why does his chariot delay in coming?
Why do the hoofbeats of his chariots tarry?

Her plump princesses assure her. Oh don't worry. They are taken their time dividing spoils. They are trying to figure who can have one and who can have two women as their prize. No don't worry mother. He will return draped in fine cloth.
They lay in luxury but they are already decimated.
Thus let all Your enemies perish, O Lord;
But let those who love Him be like the rising of the sun in its might.
The battle belonged to the Lord. May we sing that God (and his people) would move.
This is the work of song. This is liturgy. Thanks be to God.

Read More...

Summary only...

A Review of Tripp York's The Politics of Martyrdom

The first volume of the polyglossia series provided me with a wonderful reentry into Mennonite theology. Volume Two was not a bad follow up . . . (thanks to Canadian Mennonite for the review copy)
In The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom Tripp York offers commentary on the social and ecclesial implications and meanings of dying for one’s faith. Perhaps more importantly for us York demonstrates how the possibility of martyrdom is tied up in the basic practices of the church which are inherently social and political. Martyrdom is not reserved for the super-human Christians but Christians are made able to become martyrs as the journey down the path of Christian practice and worship.
In the first chapter York lays out the fundamental themes of his book. By looking at the early church York demonstrates that martyrdom is public act. This act can be understood as a contest and a testimony. Often times potential martyrs were brought into the coliseum for public display to see if individuals would recant or at least break down and plead for mercy. Many of the early Christians did not see the contest as being between them and the wild beasts that they faced or even against an emperor. Rather the Christian “provided a vision of the actual celestial battle taking place between Christ and Satan” (35). The martyr’s life was taken up into the cosmic battles between good and evil. This understanding was possible because not only was the death of the martyr important but so was their life. Martyrdom was not possible because of a sudden burst of spiritual strength and resolve but because of the daily and nourishment of the church life. Martyrs are an example to us as much in their life as in their death.
After establishing his basic themes York goes on in chapter two to explore the Christian’s physical body as the field of conflict between faithful and unfaithful expressions. York then moves to the sixteenth-century in chapter three which is a move from pagans killing Christians to Christians killing Christians and the tension over who is a martyr and who is just a criminal. In chapter four York addresses the particular type of politics that the martyr’s demonstrate. Finally in chapter five York explores the life and message of Oscar Romero as a contemporary example of the politics of martyrdom. While the final chapter can be viewed as the ‘practical’ expression of York’s historical and theological accounts in the earlier chapters it would a mistake to do so missing the pervasive and persistent pleas to his readers throughout the book.
Chapter two, Body: The Field of Combat, demonstrates the sensual and bodily nature of early Christian spirituality. York is clear that the early martyr accounts view the spiritual battle waged by Christ as happening on the plane of the bodies of the faithful. Throughout this chapter York is asking the contemporary church to consider how it handles the bodies of its members through life and worship because for him the possible political significance of the church hangs in these practices.
Chapter three, Performance: The Sixteenth Century Debacle, attempts to walk the line between a Christian being persecuted or being prosecuted. After Constantine and into the Reformation church practices and beliefs were ecclesially but politically. Beliefs about baptism and communion were matters of life and death. And so to die a martyr or to be executed a criminal was a matter of doctrine. From this situation York asks the contemporary question of truth and its relations to doctrine and denomination. Is it possible that both the Catholic and Anabaptist church were faithful to Christ in the midst of its persecution and prosecution?
Chapter four, City: Enduring Enoch, attempts to flesh out some of the implications of his study. He frames the post-Reformation relationship between the church and state as own of the state’s perverse parody of the church establishing its presence as body with its own story of salvation. York then describes the church not simply as an alternative to the state but rather as preceding the state founded and nourished by the body of Christ. The church functions as a city that overcomes the world’s boundaries of space and time allowing fluid participation of people across borders and eras.
After exploring the life of Oscar Romero in chapter five as an example of some of what he has been trying York concludes by offering the Eucharist as the centre and source of the vision we are given from the martyrs and then reminds us that the martyrs are important because they point to Christ which is to be the aim of any faithful expression.
York takes some very large strides in this book moving across disciplines, eras, denominations, and continents. While this has surely limited York’s ability to flesh out any one aspect thoroughly I would rather view the entire book as a type of introduction that is calling for the church to continue to recover and enact the resources that are offered to us here. In presenting to us the martyrs York offered no militant call to heroic and dynamic exploits. Instead York followed the arc back from their deaths into their lives and pointed us to the daily practices that shape a world without end.

Read More...

Summary only...

Imagine

Last Sunday's sermon on Jubilee

Imagine

(August 17, 2008; Leviticus 25, Luke 4:16-21)

What if I told you that Canada existed only as an act of imagination? That we fight wars, pay taxes and support Olympic teams for an act of imagination. What could that possibly mean? I recently read two books by William Cavanaugh, someone who could very quickly become one of my favourite theologians. Cavanaugh makes just such an assertion. In the opening lines to one of his books he writes the following,

Politics is a practice of the imagination. Sometimes politics is the ‘art of the possible,’ but it is always an art, and engages the imagination just as art does. We are often fooled by the seeming solidity of the materials of politics, its armies and offices, into forgetting that these materials are marshaled by acts of the imagination. How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world and kill people he knows nothing about? He must be convinced of the reality of borders, and imagine himself deeply, mystically, united to a wider national community that stops abruptly at those borders. . . . Modern politics was not discovered but imagined, invented.

So why am I telling you all this? What does this have to do with our readings this morning? If we hope to accept the Bible and live out of its story and particularly this morning’s story then we are going to need to re-imagine the world around us. We need to the learn the truths and expose the falsehoods of our current story, as it is and step into the biblical story and allow it to shape and transform our expression of church. I believe that our reading this morning offers one such re-imagination. So this morning I am inviting us to consider our story and also the story and imagination that forms the concept of Jubilee.

Early in Canada’s history land was secured by the emerging government and then gifted and sold to those who would be most economically productive and stabilize the government. The legal immigration of people to Canada was developed around their potential benefit to our economic base and so our immigration act still disallows immigrants if they will be taxing on our health care system or are unable to financially support themselves. Land in our system is obtained and maintained by those who have the ability to obtain and maintain more land. This is not how land was imagined in Israel. Land in Israel was not distributed on the basis of a self-interested government but was a gift offered on the basis of a promise. The space and society this opened then was always based on this foundation. The foundation was that the land belonged to God and that every family in Israel had a share in it. It still happened that families fell on hard times and would have to sell their land or work it for someone else. But this was always in relationship to God’s promise. No one was allowed to continually amass more land and wealth. At some point in each generation the family’s promised land was restored to them and people were allowed another opportunity to provide for themselves. God says this to Moses, “The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.”

Can you imagine what the American and Canadian landscape would look like if in the 1980s, fifty years after the Great Depression, the children of those who profited from that time, those who acquired all the land from farmers who could not survive returned the land to the children of those who lost it? Economic theory is certainly not my strength but I can’t help but note the irony that it was in the 1980s that we witnessed the rise of huge multinational corporations and the outsourcing of work to economically impoverished counties. It was at this time that land and capital began to be increasingly centralized around fewer and fewer people. This is a movement that the act of Jubilee works directly against. So we need to ask ourselves how can we re-imagine the redemption of the land for all people?

In North America personal security is understood largely in economic terms. Our economic model encourages us to amass wealth infinitely through work and saving. In many cases this can nurture a healthy and responsible work ethics. However, the reality of our current economic model is that increasingly the most wealthy people in the world are making their money without producing any valuable goods or services. Even with the economic slowdown in the U.S. corporate CEOs continue to increase their own compensation despite posting losses and layoffs. Since 1965 CEOs have moved from making an average of 51 times minimum wage to 815 times what a minimum wage employee earns. Others have made millions off others’ adversity in the US mortgage crisis. A number of the most recent billionaires attained their wealth by opening online gambling sites which relies on the addiction we have to the promise of wealth. We live in a system where we find increasing security with increased wealth though the reality is that the most wealthy are not wealthy from hard work and prudent saving but make their fortune all too often off of the misfortune of others.

For Israel, at least as God would have it, wealth simply cannot be an end in itself. What we have flows from God and is not an object to be pursued and obtained. In Deuteronomy it says that even a king, perhaps today’s CEO, should not accumulate large amounts of gold and silver. And every seven years the people are not to plant their fields or gather from their vineyards. They are to eat only from what the earth provides and from what has been provided the following year. Rich and poor trust in God’s provision from the land. Can you imagine if after each six year cycle you would spend the entire year in the basic task of acquiring and preparing food and maintaining your home? Imagine the opportunities for family growth. Imagine the opportunities for personal growth and exploring passions. Imagine the opportunities for fellowship and relationships. How is it that we can we re-imagine our relationship to wealth and time?

In North America freedom is claimed as one of the highest goals in life. In Canada we sing of the true north strong and free while our neighbours to the south sing of the land of free and the home of the brave. Freedom is conceived of as strength and independence. We typically talk of freedom as the ability to live without interference or support, to be independent. We talk about having a free market system with free trade so that we can achieve freedom 55. We encourage free speech and free choice and we have people who call themselves free thinkers. However, this view of freedom is always defined negatively as freedom from something as opposed to freedom towards something. Freedom form constraints as opposed to freedom to construct. The recent movie Into the Wild portrays the true story of Chris McCandless. McCandless was a young man dissatisfied with what he saw as all the trappings and bondage of western society. After he graduated from university he donated the remaining 24,000 dollars of his college fund to charity and spent the next two years of his life wandering around the US with little or no money. His words and actions were constant attempts at freedom. It is a freedom we can all relate to. We daily feel the pressures of work, of the government, of advertising, of television and internet images portraying an ideal life that we seem always to pursue and never attain. McCandless attempted to free himself from what he thought were unnecessary and harmful pressures. The problem with how he approached this freedom was that he was still caught in the mentality and the culture that he was raised in. He kept pushing for freedom from things and not freedom towards things. One of his goals was to survive alone in the Alaskan wilderness and on April 28, 1992 he was dropped off at the head of the Stampede Trail in Alaska where he hiked into the bush and eventually found an abandoned bus where he lived alone for about 200 days before he eventually starved to death. There was no end or goal to his freedom. In some ways he became the ultimate expression of our attempts at freedom, which is isolation.

In one of the final scenes of the movie as he is already declining in health McCandless reflects on his past relationships and the realization of what is happening he pens the words, “Happiness can only be shared.” Our search for freedom must lead towards something and someone if it is not to lead towards isolation.

In Leviticus God says that every fifty years on the Day of Atonement a trumpet is to be sounded and then it says that the people are make the day holy and proclaim freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. This freedom was based entirely on restoring families and neighbours and space for worshipping and celebrating with God. We often assume in our minds that freedom is attractive and natural to live out but this tends not to be the case. God’s freedom is, from our perspective, a radically unstable way of living. Stanley Hauerwas expresses it as living ‘out of the control.’ It is the daily trust of the Israelites in the wilderness as they often longed to return to slavery in Egypt where at least there was some order and predictability to their lives. We tend to be happy living within the norms of our culture rather then running the risk of being shunned, humiliated or rejected by living outside those norms. This is the type of freedom Jesus announced at the start of his ministry. He proclaims freedom for the prisoner and release for the oppressed. And how did those caught up in the daily work of ‘living in control’ respond to his acts of freedom? Jesus compares these acts of freedom to an extravagant banquet that people are invited to. But when they receive the invitation one says that he must attend to his business, one says he must work his field and another says that he is off to be married. We refuse God’s acts of freedom because we attend to the demands of security and control, the illusions of freedom. Can you imagine if we allowed ourselves to be freed even just a little from the demands of productivity, accumulation, security and control? Can you imagine if we were free to invite friend, neighbour and stranger into our home? Can you imagine if freedom was understood solely in terms of worshipping God and loving our neighbour? How can we re-imagine and proclaim God’s gift of freedom?

In the Old Testament God revealed to Moses that in each generation there should be a time when things would be made right and restored to their original intention, a time of Jubilee it was called. Jesus came and lived his life in the spirit this Jubilee. He came to restore those who were ill to their original health. He came to redistribute the wealth of the few so it could be shared with the many. He lived outside the control of idolatrous temptations of wealth, status and power. And Christ gave his life for and his Spirit to the church that we might live this reality. But where are we now as a church? How do we understand ourselves? Are we a lobby group trying to influence the political process? Are we a social club that meets for fun and friendships? Are we a peer-support group that tries to help each through the difficulties of life? Are we an educational institution trying to form our children in a particular way? Are we a non-profit organization trying to serve the community? By themselves these expressions all have their appropriate place. But even if they were all put together they would still be too narrow to describe the church, the body of Christ.

In his book Cavanaugh asks what it would mean for the church to recover and re-imagine herself as a truly free and public space. Not one expression within in a national body but as the body of Christ within which national, racial and economic boundaries are overcome. In the New Testament language of God’s people took on the broadest terms. The church could have been referred to as a guild or association but instead Christians are called citizens of God’s Kingdom as well as members of God’s household. The calling of the church covers both the private and public life of believers. Recovering this understanding is a call back to a life of discipleship, or what Cavanaugh simply calls discipline. The church is called and equipped to practice the discipline of jubilee living. Oscar Romero the Catholic martyr in Latin America said, that “the church is well aware that anything it can contribute to the process of liberation . . . will have originality and effectiveness only when the church is truly identified as church.” Each local gathering of believers and the lives they live are called to express the social and global vision of God as church, there is no higher calling.

If the church is called to the discipline of Jubilee living then we will need to re-imagine our practices as church and begin to conceive the church, the body of Christ, as the central context for life. We need to re-imagine tithing as an expression of gracious thanksgiving for God’s provision and as our opportunity to distribute wealth in life-giving ways. We need to re-imagine Sabbath as a time to cease our own pursuits of living in control and rest, with our neighbours, in God’s presence and provision. We need to re-imagine the practice of forgiveness so that we can lead one another out of the bondage of guilt and shame. We need to re-imagine the practice of baptism so that those being baptized understand they are gaining a new citizenship in a community that is not bond by the powers of this world. That with baptism we accept and learn to live knowing that we are named as a child of God who is valuable and gifted. And as Mennonites we may need above all to re-imagine the practice of communion. As a Catholic William Cavanaugh has a well developed theological and social role of communion. He states that it is in communion that we consume the body of Christ and in turn we are consumed into the body of Christ which is freedom and equality. Communion is a common practice in which no one is privileged. It is through communion that some Catholics have re-imagined the social space of the church. Cavanaugh quotes Fr Rutilio Grande of El Salvador in a sermon he gave in 1977 in response to dominating expressions of power through wealth that he witnessed. He said,

The Lord God gave us . . . a material world for all, without borders . . . [Some say] ‘I’ll buy half of El Salvador. Look at all my money. That’ll give me the right to it.’ No! That’s denying God! There is no ‘right’ against the masses of the people! A material world for all, then, without borders, without frontiers. A common table, with broad linens, a table for everybody, like this Eucharist. A chair for everybody. And a table setting for everybody. Christ had good reason to talk about his kingdom as a meal. He talked about meals a lot. And he celebrated one the night before his supreme sacrifice . . . And he said that this was the great memorial of the redemption: a table shared in brotherhood, where all have their position and place . . . This is the love of a communion of sisters and brothers that smashes and casts to earth every sort of barrier and prejudice and that one day will overcome hatred itself.

The priest understood the Eucharist to be the ultimate order of reality one that would overcome all political or economic boundaries. In Israel the Jubilee announced that the land was sufficient for all people. In communion we share in the body of Christ which is sufficient for all people. This priest understood communion in the body of Christ as the place where God’s vision of jubilee could be enacted. Fr Grande was gunned by a government sponsored death squad only one month later. In response to this tragedy the Archbishop Oscar Romero declared that there would be only one Mass or service that churches in the area could celebrate on Sunday and it was to be a funeral Mass. All who called themselves faithful, rich and poor, would share in the same table and acknowledge this loss and this attempt to overcome the freedom that God proclaims.

In response to the destructive powers of the world Cavanaugh states that Romero enacted the global and universal vision of the church in that place at that time.

The practices of the church are not magic and they are not clever strategies. They are the gift of God for the salvation of the world. We need to daily recall and re-imagine the story of God’s Jubilee. We need to daily invite Christ to speak freedom over our lives, to release our grip from possessions and from time. To learn to take steps that are in faith and out of control. May we as a church recognize and practice the disciplines of jubilee in our gathering and in our scattering that the trumpet may sound and freedom proclaimed throughout the land. May we begin with this prayer,

O Come, O Come Immanuel and ransom captive Israel.

O Come Desire of Nations bind all peoples in one heart and mind. Bid envy, strife, and quarrels cease. Fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.

And may our days end with this refrain.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel shall come to thy O Israel.

Read More...

Summary only...

Kroeker on Our War

In "Is a Messianic Ethic Possible?" Travis Kroeker looks at Jacob Taubes and John Howard Yoder's public and social nature of love of the enemy as opposed to Carl Schmitt's private conception. Kroeker quotes this statement by Schmitt,

Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e. one’s adversary

Before disagreeing with the substance of Schmitt's statement Kroeker notes that Schmitt is actually in historical error on the case of Christians and Moslems. Here he quotes the moving piece by Michael Sattler the sixteenth century monk turned Anabaptist a movement of Christians at times condemned to death for not fighting against the Turks,

If the Turk comes, he should not be resisted, for it stands written: thou shalt not kill. We should not defend ourselves against the Turks or our other persecutors, but with fervent prayer should implore God that He might be our defense and our resistance. As to me saying that if waging war were proper I would rather take the field against the so-called Christians who persecute, take captive, and kill true Christians, than against the Turks, this was for the following reason: the Turk is a genuine Turk and knows nothing of the Christian faith. He is a Turk according to the flesh. But you claim to be Christians, boast of Christ, and still persecute the faithful witnesses of Christ. Thus you are Turks according to the Spirit

There were indeed Christians who thought of surrendering rather than forcing surrender. Kroeker then states the type of 'war' this conception of the messianic advocates,

This messianic pacifism is therefore no liberal strategy of depoliticization through the individualization and privatization of the public realm. It is nothing less than a declaration of war, a war of messianic sovereignty over against all other political sovereignties (whether ancient or modern, religio-cosmological or secularist) that order human relations on non-messianic terms. But it is a war waged by martyrs who do not resist their enemies through violence, but witness to another way, the messianic path of enemy-love. Such a politics, of course, will have no moral grounds for boasting in its own strength or virtue or purity. Messianic sovereignty dispossesses the faithful, as is indicated in the hos me logic of I Corinthians 7:29–31:
I mean . . . the time (kairos) has become contracted; in what remains (to loipon) let those who have wives live as if they did not (hos me) have them, and those who mourn as if not (hos me) mourning, and those who rejoice as if not (hos me) rejoicing, and those who buy as if not (hos me) possessing, and those who use the world as if not (hos me) fully using it. For the outward form of the world (to schema tou kosmou) is passing away.
There is a particular kind of “making use” of the world that treats it in a manner appropriate to its ontology of “passing away”—a using that is not proprietary, not related to human sovereignty or juridical ownership, that dwells in the world (“remain in the calling in which you have been called” [7:20, 17]) in a manner that opens it up to being made new, to “being known by God” (I Cor. 8:3).

And further,

The identity of the “Christian” born by the Messianic community, in other words, is not a new universalism that somehow transcends or escapes particularity and difference. Indeed it is not to be related to a form of universal “knowing” of any sort (“if anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know”). It is rather an identity “in Messiah” that seeks the perfection of love not in the domination or possession of any part, but in the apocalyptic transformation of all partial things to their completion in divine love. This transformation occurs in the messianic body conformed to the “mind of Messiah” that willingly empties itself in order to serve the other, a pattern of radical humility and suffering servanthood. It is a pattern that can only be spiritually discerned, even though it is being enacted in the bodily realm that is “passing away,” and therefore appears as failure.

Read More...

Summary only...

Travis Kroeker on Yoder and Augustine: Common Bread Part 2

As I read between Yoder and Cavanaugh I keep thinking that Yoder is not theological enough and that there is a crucial ontological difference between their two projects. Having read Travis Kroeker's article, "Is a Messianic Ethic Possible: Recent Work By and About John Howard Yoder" (Journal of Religious Ethics, 33: 141-174) I realized that in fact ontology itself is a key difference between the two figures.

Yoder intentionally tries to reinstate a Hebraic-historic approach which he pits against a philosophical-Hellenistic mode which is associated with Constantinianism (the whole articulation of the Gospel in terms of ontology then falls into this camp). What this leads to for Yoder are 'sacraments' that translate fluidly into 'secular' practices (i.e. the breaking of bread is the distribution of economic goods) which he calls 'mediating axioms.' It was at this precise point that I was a little at uneasy with Yoder. In Kroeker's article he compares Yoder to Augustine. Augustine is discarded by Yoder for his Hellenistic influences but Kroeker argues that Augustine is nothing if not an exegete. He then goes on to site an article by Gerald Schlabach who sees Yoder as "an interlocutor in the Augustinian tradition, providing a pacifist ecclesial social ethic in answer to Augustine's definitive question: How are we to seek the peace of the earthly city without eroding loyalty to the heavenly one?" It is here that Kroeker offers an important clarification between Augustine and Yoder. He writes,

While Yoder's elaboration of an ecclesial social ethic specifies more clearly the normative material implications of Augustine's own messianic realism in a creative politics for the pilgrim city that 'uses' well the peace of the earthly city, Augustine's more robust theology of creation prevents Yoder's useful 'mediating axioms' from developing into liberal pragmatic compromises of the voluntarist sort. That is, in Augustine's view, 'mediating axioms' that truly reflect the divine ordering of love and therefore contribute to the ordinata concordia of peaceable earthly communities, must have some kind of 'metaphysical' status beyond the value projections of human wills. Otherwise they would not be 'useful.'
[emphasis mine]

Kroeker remains convinced that Augustine is someone to read Yoder in order to develop his thought. At what point does one betray someone's thought in service of another. To what extent does it matter when we offer the common bread of communion? Was Yoder simply wrong in this area? I will probably be offering a few more excerpts from Kroeker's paper.

Read More...

Summary only...

Cavanaugh and Yoder and the Possibilty of a Common Bread - Part 1?

Being moved by the work of William Cavanaugh I was quickly brought back to the five walls (I am sure there was some functional reason for this) of my church office at Hillcrest Mennonite Church. I can harbour great admiration for the role of the Eucharist in Cavanaugh's Catholic work but can I have that inform in a significant way how I articulate and practice communion here at my Mennonite church? Having recently returned to the work of John Howard Yoder I was looking for some direction.
What I appreciated about C's work was how he based its beginning and end in a theological account of the abundance of God and its relationship to the kenotic expression of Christ and ultimately of our participation in that relationship. I viewed this in contrast to the recent highly functionalist accounts of responding to our social ills (namely Claiborne and McLaren). Between these two expressions I find of course that Yoder fits in neither.
Yoder does not believe that our strategic response can be in any way adequate to 'fix' the problems around us. Yoder describes what is still an obsessions with contemporary ethics in The Politics of Jesus,

One way to characterize thinking about social ethics in our time is to say that Christians in our age are obsessed with the meaning and direction of history [you could perhaps read here, 'save the planet']. Social ethical concern is moved by a deep desire to make things move in the right direction. Whether a given action is right or not seems to be inseparable from the question of what effects it will cause. Thus part if not all of social concern has to do with looking for the right 'handle' by which one can 'get a hold on' the course of history and move it in the right direction.

Yoder rejects any such handles whether left or right politically as having an inadequate understanding of reality. He states finally that, "It has yet to be demonstrated that history can be moved in the direction in which on claims the duty to cause it to go." Christians are rather to 'look' to the mover of history, Jesus, and walk in step with him.
I thought that at least there was some common ground to work with between Y and C understanding that human ambition and action were insufficient to the challenge before us. However, I think I underestimated the differences in the conception of the Eucharist or Breaking Bread.
Y takes as basic Jesus directions at the Last Supper to be instituting a 'common meal'. In his article "Sacrament as Social Process" Y writes,

What the New Testament is talking about in 'breaking bread' is believers actually sharing with one another their ordinary day-to-day material substance. It is not the case, as far as understanding the New Testament accounts is concerned, that, in an act of 'institution' or symbol making, God or the church would have said 'let bread stand for daily substance.' It is not even merely that, in many settings, as any cultural historian would have told us, eating together already stands for values or hospitality and community formation, these values being distinguishable from the signs that refer to them. It is that bread is daily sustenance. Bread eaten together is economic sharing. Not merely symbolically but in actual fact it extends to a wider circle economic solidarity that normally is obtained in the family.

Y looks to the immediate reality of the practices themselves and takes from that their meaning. Taking aim at a particular Catholic theology whose primary concern is understanding that what is being partaken is the body of Jesus. Y then makes the claim "that there is no direct path from this point to economics. The Roman Catholic authors who establish such a connection have to start over again from somewhere else." In the footnote to his quotation Y cites several Catholic theologians who have made this connection, which he sees as having started 'somewhere else.' This is the question I need to put C. But for now I will ask a brief question of Y.
Y states that the sacramental practices of the church are "wholly human, empirically accessible. . . . Yet each is, according to apostolic writers, an act of God. God does not merely authorize or command them. God is doing them in, with, and under human practice: 'What you bind on earth is bound in heaven.'" As such these practices are fully accessible to the 'secular' public for implementation. Then it follows that "sharing bread is a paradigm, not only for soup kitchens and hospitality houses, but also for social security and negative income tax." This find takes us far from C's almost ontological claims regarding the nature of the Eucharist. And should not Y in some way acknowledge this ontological reality. If the 'sharing bread' is sufficient as a paradigm and if God acts within it then must there not also be a claim to abundance not unlike the feeding of five thousand and the later outlandish claim for the people to feed on Jesus's flesh as outlined in John's gospel? Do we not then come into contact with something more explosive and generative then basic material distribution? Does Y imply something about the material order that he is not letting on here? He states later that these practices were not "revealed from above" but were derived from existing cultural models. I find it difficult to understand these practices as cultural 'all the way down'.
These probes and questions are preliminary as I will need to read more from both C and Y. Any thoughts?

Read More...

Summary only...