From Glory into Glory

The Rev. Michael W. Hopkins
October 23, 2006, St. James of Jerusalem

Prosper, the elder cat of the house died today after a good seventeen and a half years of life. He had been diagnosed with cancer a little over two weeks ago and he was unable any longer to eat or get himself in the litter box, even though he weighed next to nothing.

Prosper was my first “pet” on my own as an adult. He came into my life a few months before I was ordained a deacon and has lived with me through two relationships and the lonely time in between. I learned from him that “pet” is an unworthy word for a companion who is a gift from God.

Prosper was named for St. Prosper of Aquitaine, who lived in the early 5th century and famously said, Legem credendi lex stuat supplicandi (the law of prayer establishes the law of belief). I was a student at the Catholic University of America studying liturgical theology when he came into my life. The Latin words were stenciled on the cover over his litter box for many years.

His name caused me to remember him, though, whenever I said one of several psalms that use the word, especially Psalm 122, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, may they prosper that love thee.” And there was also a favorite hymn that includes the words, “Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy way and defend thee.” Of course, most people, including John Bradley when he first came into my life, thought he was named for the Star Trek greeting, “Live long and prosper!”

Prosper was not a lap cat; he was his own cat. He meted out affection when he wanted to do so. He was, ironically, however, a great purr-er, and would launch into a table-shaking purr if you just looked at him. He purred to the end, by the way, despite barely being able to breathe.

Prosper was mortally offended each time a new being came into the house. First was John Bradley, who he attacked regularly (and literally) for several weeks when we were first dating. He did not, in particular, like John in my bedroom, which was his domain. Then came Serge, our other cat (who died earlier this year), whom Prosper always regarded with aloof disdain. Finally came the worst, the dog, whom Prosper was convinced was the hound of hell (for his part, Cuthbert has always been convinced that Prosper was the devil incarnate). For many years this standoff led to Prosper’s living in the partially-finished basement of our townhouse in Maryland, his favorite hideout being above the ceiling tiles to which he could get by leaping from floor to washing machine to hot water heater to furnace.

Once we moved to New York two years ago, he lost his basement hideout and, miraculously he and the dog reached an agreement of mutual tolerance (tolerance, however, was as far as it ever got). For these last two years he also lived with diabetes. He almost always purred through his twice daily shot.

I am not in the least bit ashamed to say that I loved that cat. He was my friend. They say animals don’t have souls, but Prosper taught me that they are quite wrong. If nothing else, how could something without a soul, leave mine so wounded at his passing.

While we were waiting for the vet to come today, I ran across this verse from the Qur’an (Koran):

There is not a beast on earth, nor fowl that flieth on two wings, but they are people like unto you, and to God they shall return.

My feline friend returned to God today. I am heartbroken, but also grateful because, of course, he was a gift from God to begin with. I prospered who loved him.

Michael W Hopkins
The Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene
Proper 22B: The 18th Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 10:2-16
October 8, 2006

The Jesus Hardness Test for the Bible

On a Sunday when we seem to have a difficult Gospel reading to deal with we actually have a wonderful opportunity for Jesus himself to teach us how to interpret Scripture.

What’s happening in this story? It’s quite simple, really. Pharisees come to Jesus and try to catch him up in one of the religious controversies of his day. Strange as it may seem, it has to do with human sexuality (as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever).

[I want to say right up front that the Rev. Dr. William Countryman is helping me preach this morning, my primary source being a sermon he preached on this text three years ago. Most of the following thoughts originated with him].*

The religious controversy in which the Pharisees try to snag Jesus had to do specifically with divorce. The Jewish Law (the Torah) mentions divorce only once, and even then, in passing. It was a matter of some significant disagreement as to how that passage should be interpreted.

Now the first thing to note here is that people of Jesus’ own day had trouble figuring out the precise meaning of the Bible. There is nothing new to conflict over the interpretation of biblical texts.

Deuteronomy 24:1-3 says that a man may divorce his wife. It is not at all clear on what grounds he could do so. Was it just because he felt like it? Or did he need some clear reason? We know from non-biblical sources that Jewish authorities of Jesus’ day disagreed about the answer to these questions. Jesus is being asked to take sides in their debate.

Instead of taking the debate head on, however, Jesus goes in a different direction. First guideline to interpreting the Bible: don’t get caught answering somebody else’s question.

Jesus says something that would have been quite outrageous to all sides of the debate.

Moses wrote this commandment because of your hardness of heart.

What is Jesus saying here? Well, first of all, he’s saying do not assume that just because it’s in the Bible it is the will of God. Jesus said that. I didn’t make it up because I’m some revisionist heretic liberal. Jesus said that. Do not assume that just because it is in the Bible that it is the will of God.

Sometimes what is in the Bible is about people’s hardness of heart rather than the will of God. And not just “bad” people. After all, Jesus is saying this to a group of perfectly good religious people. Moses wrote this commandment because of your hardness of heart, he says.

What is the hardness of heart about here? A big piece of it was that these were male rules written by males for males. Males made all the decisions about marriage in Jesus’ day (as well as in Moses’ day). Marriage was a contract between two males, one of whom was “giving away” his daughter in order for children to be born for the other one’s family. The woman had no security in this arrangement whatsoever until she had produced a male heir and he had reached the age of maturity. Then, and only then, did she have a secure place in his family. Until that point if she was divorced and sent away, her son stayed with his father and she had to hope that her own father would take her back.

Divorce, like marriage was something men did to women. And divorce was almost always disastrous for women unless they were the very rare exception of being a woman with some independent wealth.

That is the cultural context for this story. And the biblical story backing it up was the story in Genesis to which Jesus refers. Jesus goes back to that story as well, but he re-interprets it. This is what God really meant, he says. In the beginning God made them male and female, equal. And when they are married they become one flesh, equal. The man should leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, not receive her from them as if she were a piece of property. So he adds his own bit of commentary to the Genesis story, “Therefore what God has joined together, no one should separate.”

God did not mean what Moses told you. What Moses told you only reflected your own prejudices, your own hardness of heart and your own mean-spiritedness.

The Law preserved the power of men in Jewish society. Jesus is clearly concerned about the abuse of that power. If he seems to advocate the abolishing of divorce altogether it is in order to protect women, something completely and totally new from a religious authority of his day.

But now we are left with the problem of Jesus prohibiting divorce, aren’t we?

Perhaps. But surely Jesus did not intend simply to set up a new and different license for hardness of heart. Interestingly enough, Eastern Christianity (the Orthodox and related Churches) have never understood what Jesus says here as absolutely prohibiting divorce. They hold that Jesus was establishing the ideal of lifelong marriage, which is different from setting up a new, rigid rule.

Western Christianity, however, did set up a new, rigid rule. No divorce, period. If you are divorced, you cannot remarry. It is still true in the Roman Catholic Church. It was true in our Church until the 1960’s. Does this rule condemn you to living in an abusive relationship? Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Does this rule mean that you are not a Christian in good standing if you re-marry? Tough luck, those are the rules. As Bill Countryman says, “Hardness of heart sneaks in the back door again.”

He goes on,

What Jesus is really doing in this story is turning the whole use of Scripture on its head. The Scriptures, he says, are not a book of statute law to protect the powerful. They are a book of astonishing insights into God’s extraordinary generosity. The purpose of God all through the Scriptures is the well-being of God’s beloved human creatures. If you find things in the Scriptures that seem to speak otherwise, consider who benefits from that. Whose hardness of heart caused that blemish in the sacred text? Whose hardness of heart is maintaining that interpretation even now?

One of the big problems in reading the Bible is that most of us read it selfishly, not intentionally selfishly, mind you, but selfishly nevertheless. We read it expecting it to be primarily about us, telling us what to do, usually so that God will be happy with us.

But what if that is not the primary intention of Scripture at all? What if the primary intention of Scripture is not to tell us about ourselves, particularly how bad we are, but to tell us about how good God is? The Bible is first and foremost about God, not about us.

I believe that Jesus believed that about the Bible. He was not what we would call a biblical literalist or conservative. He felt free to re-interpret it and to throw parts of it out. On the other hand, he was also not a biblical revisionist or liberal. He expected the Bible to say something serious to us.

Jesus expected the Bible to teach us about relationship with God, a living God full of surprises and challenges and, mostly, love and when something in the Bible got in the way of this living God, they had to go.

Of course, the hard part is knowing what to keep and what to throw away. But Jesus gives us a standard in the story this morning. I call it The Jesus’ Hardness Test for the Bible. When the Scriptures either confirm your own hardness of heart, or seem to want to harden your heart, they fail the test. When they do that they are not about God, they are about our hardness of heart and we should throw them out just like Jesus did.

The Bible, when it is being the true voice of the living God, should instead break open our world and make it bigger and, most importantly, more loving, since the Name of the living God has been revealed to us as Love itself.

Remember Jesus Hardness Test for interpreting Scripture as you listen and as you read. It will serve you, and, more importantly, God, well.


*The Rev. Dr. L. William Countryman is the Sherman E. Johnson Professor in Biblical Studies at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. The Sermon was preached October 5, 2003 at Good Shepherd, Berkeley, California. It can be found online at www.clgs.org/marriage/sermon_countryman.html.

The Primates or the Mikros?

The Rev. Michael W. Hopkins
Proper 21B: Mark 9:38-50
Dignity-Integrity Rochester
October 1, 2006


Recently the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, sent a letter to those in the Anglican Communion who exercise leadership in the member churches and call themselves “primates,” in which he said the following:

In our uncertainties and explorations in the Communion, my prayers are not only for those who, like ourselves, have the responsibility of leadership in our Provinces, but most especially for all those ordinary people of God, in the Episcopal Church and elsewhere, who are puzzled, wearied, or disoriented by our present controversies. So many say they simply do not want to take up an extreme or divisive position and want to be faithful to Scripture and the common life. They want to preserve an Anglican identity that they treasure and love passionately but face continuing uncertainty about its future.[1]

I could not help but remember his words as I read today’s Gospel passage in which Jesus loses his temper with the disciples. They are upset that someone outside their group is “casting out demons in [Jesus’] name.” Jesus testily replies,

Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will be no means lose the reward. If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.

I suspect that Dr. Williams would equate those he called the “ordinary people of God” with “the little ones who believe in me” of the gospel passage and the “stumbling block” being placed in front of them “the extreme and divisive position,” which we can only assume is the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons in the life of the church. It would be better then, using Jesus’ logic, for the majority of the Episcopal Church to have a great millstone hung around its neck and be cast into the sea. Certainly several of the so-called “primates” are ready and willing to do so, having already made the measurements.

Of course, there is another reading of this passage and the current situation in the Anglican Communion, and one which I believe is personally more in line with the text itself.

Jesus speaks in the text of “the mikros,” “the little ones,” who believe in him. The word is used in the Bible (and was frequently used in the world out of which the Bible came) in two different ways. It can literally refer to those who are small. Zacchaeus the tax collector, from Luke’s Gospel, for instance, is described as mikros, short in stature so that he had to climb up a tree to see Jesus in the midst of a crowd.[2]

But the other use of mikros is to describe those “of no account,” “insignificant,” “weak,” or even “defective.” Clearly that is the use intended here. In particular, Jesus uses the word mikros to refer to the one who had been casting out demons in his name, but whom the disciples had stopped because he wasn’t part of the group. Clearly mikros for Jesus also meant “outsider.”

In any case, none of these things necessarily means “the ordinary people of God,” unless one assumes that they are all weak, insignificant and marginal, which, I suppose is a possible view from someone who allows himself to be called a “primate.”

No, “the ordinary people of God” in the story are the disciples, who are already part of the group, threatened only by the inclusion of others and their jealousy that something is happening outside that should be happening inside. Earlier in chapter nine the disciples themselves, you see, had tried to cast out a demon and had failed.[3] Imagine their frustration when just a few days later they come upon someone they don’t even know, not part of the inner circle, who was doing it well. One can almost imagine them saying, “we are just trying to be faithful to Scripture and the common life,” and these outsiders are saying that they are your followers too!

Now it may seem obvious that my point is that in this situation lgbt folks are the mikros and those who are called “primates” out to be worrying about having their necks measured for millstones (I don’t blame the “ordinary people of God” here because they are a creation of Dr. Williams to justify himself). I am making that point.

More importantly, however, my point is how dangerously close we are as a church—be it Episcopal/Anglican or Roman Catholic—to acting completely antithetical to the Gospel we are called to proclaim in word and deed. Those of us who live in “high church” traditions have always lived in this danger, mind you, and frequently succumbed to it. The Church ends up getting in the way of the Gospel because it begins to consider itself more important than Jesus himself.

For Anglicans, one of the principle reasons we remain separated from Rome is that we do not trust that particular system not to succumb to that temptation (and I don’t mean to score debating points with my Roman Catholic sisters and brothers here, I am just describing what is real), and yet, here we Anglicans are, in the full nature of human hypocrisy, screwing it up just as royally ourselves. We’ve created a system with rules of behavior that determine who is in and who is out and created a super-hierarchy with persons we call “primates.” Can anyone in their right minds imagine Jesus—or even Paul, for that matter—thinking it was a good idea for Christians to call some people “primates” who have “primatial authority?” It’s enough to make this good catholic boy a mad-raving protestant!

Does Jesus want a church formed around the primates or the mikros? The answer is quite obvious and betrays the very sad state of affairs we have gotten ourselves into. And the sad thing is, we knew better.

I don’t know what the answer is on the global scale. This “ordinary person of God,” if I dare to call myself that, is increasingly disgusted by how the Church is behaving, and no leader stepping into the role of Jesus and saying, “Enough, boys and girls, the game of who is in and who is out is somebody else’s game, not the church’s. Let’s get on board with anyone who happens to do a deed of power—even giving a glass of water—in my name. If they happen to also be mikros, the weak, the despised, the defective, the outsider, well, that’s no big surprise, is it. Jesus wasn’t actually clear about many things but one of them was that it was they who were going to bring in the kingdom of God.
[1] Letter to the Primates of September 15, 2006 reported bythe Anglican Communion News Service in message 4190, www.anglicancommunion.org.
[2] Luke 19:1-10
[3] 9:18.