Letters

Romans 1: 1Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, 2 which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, 3 the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh 4 and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit[b] of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, 5 through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, 6 including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, 7 To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So we’re talking about the Bible, about what kind of thing it is and what we’re doing when we read it together. So far we’ve talked about the Bible as Poetry, as History, and as Prophecy. And now that we’re basically a month into these meditations, I can’t help but notice a pattern emerging. Each of these genres are ways of wrestling with what’s here, right in front of us, to look for signs or meanings that are beyond or beneath what’s right in front of us. Poetry works with the concrete sounds of words and the images of the world in front of us, but it gives that stuff an organization, an order, a form through which the poet makes meaning of that stuff. And it’s similar with history—the events of our lives and our societies often seem kind of random and disconnected, but by tracing out causes and effects, “history” gives a form to events that offers meaning. And then Prophecy gives an alternative history, it looks to the breakdowns or cracks in history to tell the truth about how sometimes our nice orderly narratives cover over or forget the poor and the weak, and as the prophets tell the truth about those realities, they also act out signs of another kind of future, another movement of history, where the poor receive justice.

So across all of these different genres, these different kinds of writing, we see people wrestling with what’s in front of us to find meanings that are not apparent on the surface, and it’s in that wrestling, that interplay between what’s in front of our faces and what’s beyond or beneath what’s in front of our faces that the Spirit of God meets us. It’s not just in the surface, so that we can apply any of these words without discernment; but it’s also not just in the depths, as if these words are some cheap thing we can discard. In this way, some of the writers in the early church seem to think of Scripture as a laboratory for ethics, for how we live. The way we practice making meaning of these words, taking what’s in front of us seriously without letting it determine everything that’s possible, teaches us how to make meaning of our own lives and relationships and communities. We want to recognize what’s right in front of us, but we don’t want to be determined by what’s right in front of us.

This is why I think it’s so important that much of the New Testament is made up of letters. There are other traditions whose scriptures are made up wholly of esoteric spiritual maxims. And I think those traditions and those scriptures are really beautiful and there’s a lot we can learn from them. They present a kind of universal wisdom that really doesn’t depend on context. And in fact, the point of many of these traditions is to leave this world behind, to leave the body behind, to redirect desire away from things that decay and change and ultimately die so we can be absorbed into spiritual, eternal realities. You can find that sort of thing in our tradition as well.

But reading a letter makes us think about the world and our lives in a different way. The opening to the Book of Romans starts off, “Paul an apostle of Jesus Christ…” and ends “to all God’s beloved in Rome,” and the verbal sinew connecting Paul to the Romans is the story of Jesus. The Book of Romans is not presented as abstract, universal, spiritual truth. This was written by a guy. Paul is not the mouthpiece of an angel or a cipher for the Holy Spirit. To the extent that the divine speaks through him, it really is through him, mediated by Paul as a person, through his quirks, through his forms of speech, through his own experiences. In another letter, when Paul says, “It’s no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me,” it’s still Paul saying that and Paul’s personality comes out later in that letter when he tells some people who are saying adults need to be circumcised to join the church that people who make rules like that should castrate themselves.  A letter comes from a particular person.

And a letter goes to a particular person or community. Again, Paul is not writing universal wisdom that he intends us to slip in and out of any context like the component parts of a machine. This is important because words have meaning in context. Take the words, “Jesus is Lord.” Those mean one thing when I hear them in my subconscious as a panhandler is asking me for money. They mean something very different when a crusader shouts them as a he’s swinging an axe at someone’s face. The same words, but given different contexts, spoken by different particular humans, can mean not just different things but exactly the opposite thing. One reason this is important is because it means that when Paul says things about sexuality or women preaching, we’re not doing some illicit verbal gymnastics when we say, “Hang on, what’s the context there and does it really apply here?” That’s not twisting the text, it’s just knowing how to read.

This is hard for many of us to understand because we live in a world whose imagination has very much been formed by a concept called the “categorical imperative,” which is the idea that we should “act only according to the maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should be a universal law.” So an action is good if it’s good in every possible situation regardless of context, intent, or circumstance. So for example, in this system, it’s never OK to lie. You have a moral obligation to tell the truth, and so even if it’s a child saying “What do you think about this drawing?” Or a fascist asking, “Are you hiding people in your attic?” the moral choice is to tell the truth. I think a lot of times this shows up in a desire for consistency. I see this with my students when one of them is like “Why can they leave campus and I can’t?!” And it’s like, “Well, I’m not worried about them burning down Food Lion…You’re different people.” And it also shows up politically, especially around the “gotcha” line of thinking, like “Oh you’re against police violence but you’re OK with protestors setting a police station on fire?!”

But things don’t work that way in Paul’s letters. In another letter, he explicitly says, “All things are permissible, not all things are beneficial.” In he says that to a church in Corinth that’s thinking about who belongs at the table. These churches are made up of Jews who follow the Law of the Hebrew Bible and Gentiles who don’t. And a lot of those laws revolve around the details of what kind of food we eat and what kind of food we don’t, and so the question becomes, in the church, can Jews eat non-Kosher food (breaking the Law) or are Gentiles supposed to become Jews before they can become Christians. These are the kinds of things that we still have to negotiate. If your family keeps misgendering you, do you have to keep going to that table? Because we have norms around obligation to family. Some people feel really uncomfortable with the idea of going on strike, even if they’re mostly in favor of it, they’re nervous about their well-being and also we’ve all received notions that hard work and pushing through difficulty are how we show we’re not lazy, which is the chief sin of a capitalist economy. It’s in those kind of quandaries, where our norms come up against our needs, that Paul says, “All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial.” You can eat the pork, you can cut off that part of the family, you can get on the picket line, you can act like that 1000th rainbow drawing is the first one. It doesn’t mean there won’t be fallout, it doesn’t mean you should just act like a bull in a china shop, you can still be gracious and talk through things with people who’ll be effected by your choices, but there are choices available to you.

In writing letters, in saying that all things are permissible even if they’re not all beneficial, Paul is inviting us into discernment. Part of what the categorical imperative is designed to do is to take discernment out of our hands. Which is pretty important for the administrative work of the Nation-State. And that desire to have discernment taken out of our hands becomes really strong under the conditions of late capitalism, where our lives are a seemingly endless stream of logistical choices, often meaningless choices, but choices we still have to make. It reminds me of the scene in the show Fleabag where the main character is in a confessional talking to this priest she’s in love with and she says:

“I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning. No, I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to…tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that’s why people want someone like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it. You just tell them what to do and what they’ll get out of the end of it, even though I don’t believe your bullshit and I know that scientifically nothing that I do makes any difference in the end, anyway, I’m still scared. Why am I still scared? So just tell me what to do. Just fucking tell me what to do, Father.”

There’s something so resonant about that scene. I feel it on Tuesday nights when I’ve got to figure out what we’re gonna eat for dinner and I start doing the math for whether we can afford take out. I feel it when the surface of life, the texture of things becomes so tightly woven that  it smothers anything beyond that constant flow of choices. But the show is in some ways about how Fleabag comes to a point, painfully and tragically but still decisively, where she doesn’t need what she thought she needed from the priest. She lets herself fall in love and through loving becomes a fuller person who’s ready to try living without feeling she needs someone to tell her what to do.

And I think that’s the kind of life that Paul’s letters invite us into also. He is a person writing to other people and as we read in on their correspondence we can imagine a life where we’re not just automatons responding to stimuli according to programming, but people ourselves, free to work with our context without being determined by it, free to look deeply at the stuff of our lives, free to look beyond that stuff, free to try out new shapes, new forms, new organizations that give life where we are now. And in that way these letters are also letters to us, to the church across time. Not because we’re supposed to conform ourselves to the surface meaning, but because the surface meaning—the fact that these are letters—invites us to conform ourselves to the Spirit of God, whatever that looks like or requires in our time. Amen.