“Holy Discomfort” by Pat Conover

 The Samuel and Daniel passages make reference to three periods of Jewish history. Each passage was written by priests as stories that expressed their visions of kerygma, a word that means “saving truth.” Each story was written for there and then guidance.

The second Samuel story, the Song of Hannah, was written six hundred years after Empire and inserted into the Samuel scroll to address the challenges of living in exile.

The apocalyptic Daniel story in the second half of the Book of Daniel is probably the last written story in Hebrew Scripture as recorded in the Protestant Bible, about seven hundred and fifty years after Empire and one hundred and fifty years before the birth of Jesus.

The strengths of each story is that they addressed the spiritual needs of their diverse audiences. The weaknesses of each story is that they obscure or distract from the kerygma that was valuable during the period of reference. The same is true of the Mark story, a Jewish-Christian version of the apocalypse story we have in the Daniel passage.

The first story presents the genealogy of Samuel capped by a special birth story. It is similar in narrative structure to the special birth stories of Isaac to Abraham and Sarah, of Caesar Augustus, of various Greek and Roman Gods, of John the Baptist, and of Jesus. This story is fitting for the character Samuel presented as the Great Judge and Priest, a model of what was good about the time of the Judges. The next step in the original scroll contrasts Samuel to the corrupt priestly sons of Eli. What it does not do is illuminate the wonderful kerygma of the leaders of the time of the Judges.

Samuel as king maker obscures the reality that anointing David as king is part of a story of civil war in which David rebels against King Saul, raises a raiding terrorist army, and finally defeats and kills King Saul. We know this was a narrative problem because the author has David slay the messenger who comes to tell David that Saul is dead.

Now lets look at the kerygma of the period of the Judges, the actual time when Judaism catalyzes as the major religion it became. Here is an over-simplified sketch of the actual formation of Israel and Judaism stripped of the marvelous stories of the ancestors and promises.

Joshua inherits the Moses tradition and leads a cooperating coalition of tribes who finally have enough combined strength to cross the Jordan river from East to West. The Mosaic coalition defeats the fractioned Amorites, Canaanites, and others. They capture Jericho and move on to capture the hill towns between the Jordan river and the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The establish a ritual center in Shiloh, a hill town about eighteen miles North of the hill town not yet called Jerusalem. Shiloh is ritually marked as the location of the Arc of the Covenant which was presumed to hold the stone tablets of the ten commandments written by Moses.

The tribes hold a conference in Shiloh in which the twelve tribes, and some others, are at least theoretically assigned areas of Palestine, some of which are still firmly controlled by the Philistines. Three tribes are assigned poor land East of the Jordan, are basically dumped out of the winning coalition, due to some ritual impurity. Then the nine or so tribes attack the exiled three tribes. It is messy and confusing and the actual chain of events cannot be adequately sorted out.

What matters for kerygma is that in Shiloh, there is a religious center with religious leadership that emphasizes living by the law as the guidance of justice as a cultural basis for cooperation for some tribes. This messy moment contains the kerygma of the rule of law referenced to principles of justice that is at the heart of founding of the United States as a democracy. In the Shiloh coalition, the Priests/Judges rule based on the authority granted by a tribal coalition.

The kerygma of the period of the Judges was cooling off as attention shifted to the spiritual challenges of empire and then to division, threats, and military defeats. Military defeats were not assessed in military terms, or as failures of political cooperation. Instead, the priestly narrative is that the defeats were the punishment of God for turning away from the ethical and ritual guidance of the priests, of sinning against the laws of Moses. There was plenty of sin to point to, but the interpretation was nonetheless self-serving for priests who were preserving dreams of dominance referenced to the characters of Samuel and Solomon. In the time of failing Empire, and despite the self-serving motives of the priests, they nonetheless were carrying forward the importance of law and covenant as a basis for cooperation. Five centuries later, in the time of Jesus, they were back in power in a deal cut with Rome following the Maccabean revolt.

The failure of the priests in the first Samuel story was described by Max Weber as the routinization of charisma, the collapse of vision and cooperation into rituals and rules to the benefit of those who control the rituals and rules.

The second Samuel story, the Song of Hannah, is an insert into the Samuel scroll. The author wrote for the faithful in the Babylonian Exile, six hundred years after the Empire. It was a time after the last remnants of Empire were swept away. It was a time of powerlessness for the priests. It was a time for new leadership.

“Our God is a God of knowledge who weighs our actions. The bows of the mighty are broken and the feeble gird on strength. He raises up the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.”

Much as I appreciate the Song of Hannah, it obscures and distracts from the kerygma of the time of failed Jewish kings and military defeat. That kerygma was carried primarily by the rise of prophets who challenged both kings AND priests.

The wisdom tradition, including the second chapter of Samuel, like the like the deuteronomic histories, contains saving truth while at the same time distracting attention from the problems that arose when Jewish priests collaborated with foreign rulers which gave them significant, if geographically limited, control over the daily lives of Jews.

The gospel writers follow the tradition of Jewish apocalypse stories but make the failures of the Jewish leaders part of the reason for Judgment Day theology because they colluded in or possibly initiated the crucifixion of Jesus. The Daniel story and the Mark 13 respond to different moments of tragedy and hopelessness. They both obscure and distracts from the kerygma of justice and covenant, of prophetic vision and guidance, of the wisdom tradition for living well during diaspora under foreign rulers. In addition, the mark story distracts from the kerygma of Jesus. The fundamental failing of apocalyptic stories is that they distract from inspiration and guidance for responding to challenges in difficult or tragic contemporary lives to focus on an imaginary future centered on revenge against enemies and reward for the faithful.

Developing the kerygma of Jesus is another sermon. Suffice it to say that both the emergence of modern Judaism and the emergence of Christianity grew out of a synagogue oriented theology that studied scripture and was adequate for successful diaspora transformations.

The Christian Testament, the source book of Christianity, produced a great religion which has flourished in many flavors. For two thousand years Christian denominations and theologies have reasonably used the Christian Testament to wander away from the kerygma of Jesus, and have had periods of renewal when prophets and leaders refocused on the guidance of Jesus again and again.

Most of us have come from Christian traditions that used the Bible to justify doctrines as guidance statements. A lot of such doctrinal guidance is commonly viewed now as bad news rather than good news, particularly guidance referenced to sexual activity and gender expression. Claiming the Bible as a source for doctrine-like statements is likely to receive a limited welcome in Seekers. It seems to me that many Seekers have learned enough biblical scholarship to be suspicious of the Bible as a source of guidance, and not enough Bible to passionately appreciate the hard won kerygma claimed by a thousand year or so of biblical authorship. Our spiritual ancestors paid painful tuitions for their lessons and then largely forgot them as times changed and different spiritual challenges arose. We can choose to learn the best lessons from all of them.

The pattern in this sermon is one of Jewish and Christian authors repeatedly making mistakes out of their strengths rather than their weaknesses, mistakes arising from the inadequacy of obscuring or cherry picking memories of the past to support slogans of relevance. It is the mistake of walking North on a South bound ship and feeling good about ourselves because we are facing in the right direction.

What mistakes is Seekers making because of its strengths?