Religiosities
Reflections on the Lectionary for September 1st
A couple of years ago, I was catching up with some old friends as I was passing through the town where they lived. It was a Sunday—that happened to be the day I was passing through—and we met for lunch at a restaurant. We had a great time reconnecting and talking about our lives, but then as the meal was winding down one of my friends got cagey. She started looking nervous and a little bit rattled. “My pastor just came in and sat down,” she said, with a look of panic in her eyes, “and I skipped church today.”
I didn’t think much of it, but as time went on, she got more and more agitated. She was really worried that she was in trouble with the pastor, and that her standing with him had taken a hit, because she had not attended church that day, even though she attends all the time. As we all got up to leave, she made a point of leaving in a way that didn’t take her by his table. But she was rattled, and as we left my friend was brainstorming ways to participate in something at the church mid-week to make up for her Sunday absence.
I was a little taken aback. After having been away from that kind of religious life for a long time, I had forgotten how strong the demands and incentives for religious participation can be. I didn’t remember the intense social pressure that can accompany religious life, and the ways people can feel monitored and even controlled by religious leaders. (Perhaps, as a religious leader myself, this is something that I simply don’t notice about my current contexts). I had not remembered how strong the norms of religion and religious life could be, and how transgressive it could feel to break them.
In the lectionary for September 1st, several of the texts talk about just this question: how to be religious. The question of how to be religious is connected to broader questions, both in these lectionary texts and in our everyday lives. How should we live our lives? How should we treat each other? How should we think about our collective belonging? How should we think and act as we go about our days? We all think about these questions and struggle with them in one way or another, and religion has a way of focusing them and making them more acute. Religion often (but not always) is concerned with the living of life both individually and in community, and it sets up different standards and guardrails for our day-to-day living. But these standards and guardrails can be really diverse and varied, even within the same tradition. And in the lectionary texts for September 1st, we see that even within the Bible, there is a huge range of what counts as religion and religious life.
In Deuteronomy 4:1-2 and 6-9, for example, the focus is on the ways communal belonging is formed and maintained by communal adherence to rules and laws. This text was written with a particular audience in mind: the ancient nation of Israel. It’s framed as an address to Israel, by Moses, and the audience of Israel and Israelites is really clear there in 4:1 where Israel is addressed explicitly. Deuteronomy stands out among the books of the Torah for a few reasons, some of which are important here. Deuteronomy can probably be thought of as a kind of reformist book, as its title suggests; “Deuteronomy” comes from the Greek for “second law,” as Deuteronomy was a kind of restatement or reiteration of the Mosaic law. And Deuteronomy has a special focus when compared to other legal texts in the Torah; Deuteronomy really emphasizes the unique and special nature of Israel as a nation among other nations. Deuteronomy wants to be really clear how Israel is not like everyone else, and a huge part of Israel’s uniqueness is the law given by God and mediated through Moses. You can see these themes all through today’s passage (and in verses 3-5, which the lectionary leaves out because it’s the part where Moses spikes the football about the divine destruction of some Baal worshippers). This part of Deuteronomy really wants Israel to know that it’s special, and that what makes it special is its unique relationship with its God as expressed through the law.
Christians, and especially Protestant Christians, have been conditioned by centuries of anti-Jewish theologies to read anything having to do with “law” as bad, regressive, and oppressive. Protestants tend to resist what we sometimes call “legalism” and see it as a sign of false religion. But that’s not the perspective that Deuteronomy takes at all. Check out Deuteronomy 4:8: “And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?” This reminds me of the rhetoric of some on the political left in the United States these days, who proclaim that “we are a nation of laws” as a way to draw a distinction between law-abiding behavior and lawless behavior. Deuteronomy thinks that the divine relationship as expressed through the law is what makes Israel great. Law and legalism, for Deuteronomy, aren’t bad or regressive or oppressive. Law and legalism give structure and meaning to communal and individual life.
The second of the Psalms given in the lectionary this week, Psalm 15, takes a similar tack on religion and religiosity. “Who may abide in your tent,” it asks, and “who may dwell on your holy hill?” Who, in other words, can be in the presence of God? The Psalm goes on to answer its own question: the people who can be in the presence of God are the ones who follow the rules and the behaviors expected of people who are in covenant with each other and God. And here, the rules mostly have to do with how we treat other people, not how we treat God. Psalm 15 admonishes the reader to speak truth, not slander other people, not to treat either friends or neighbors badly, to honor promises made, to not take bribes, and interestingly, to not lend money at interest. (This last one is a pretty pervasive idea in the Hebrew Bible—that you shouldn’t make money charging interest on lending—but it seems to have been conveniently and wholly abandoned by the people who want to bring “biblical values” into American society). In short, Psalm 15 is making a tidy association: the ones who get to hang out in God’s presence are the ones who treat other people decently. This isn’t quite law, in the sense that Deuteronomy is imagining it, but it’s reflective of a kind of ethics that flows from law—the kind of just and righteous society and citizenship that Deuteronomy thinks will come from Israel’s adherence to God’s special law.
If Protestant Christians have tended to reject law and legalism over the years, then a lot of that rejection has landed on the book of James. Martin Luther famously called James “an epistle of straw” because it advocates doing good things rather than simply believing right things, and that conflicted with Luther’s ideas about “faith alone” being sufficient for salvation. But in this regard, James stands in a long tradition of biblical texts that ask people to put their beliefs into action—to put their faith into works, to use the Protestant language. In James 1:17-27, this week’s lectionary offers a passage that would fit pretty well with the others we’ve already discussed. It’s focusing on ethics and good behavior as a mark of religiosity and religion, asking people to take special care in how they relate to each other, angering slowly and watching what they say so that they don’t hurt other people.
But I want to point out something really interesting about this passage from James, because it relates to the way we’re thinking about the lectionary texts for this week (and the way I’ve been framing them together in this post). In James 1:26 and 27, the NRSV of the book of James uses the words “religious” and “religion.” This might seem unremarkable; after all, what could be more appropriate for the Bible to talk about than religion? But things are not what they seem. The word being translated here is threskeia in Greek, and it does not really mean “religion.” There have been books and books written about this problem: the modern concept of “religion” did not really exist in the ancient world, and none of the ancient words that we translate as “religion” really meant “religion.” (My favorite book on this topic is Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, by Brent Nongbri, which is very readable and accessible. Another denser and more involved one is Carlin Barton and Daniel Boyarin’s book Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities, which is great if you are a language nerd). The word threskeia used here in James means something more like “devotion,” which is related to the idea of religion but not by any means identical with it. In James, it’s referring to a way of life, I think: people who claim to be devoted to discipleship of Jesus but who “do not bridle their tongues” are not, in fact, very devoted to a Jesus-following way of life. The word that most often gets used in Latin, and which gets cited as a predecessor for our word “religion,” is religio, which certainly looks like “religion.” But that word doesn’t really mean “religion” either; it means something like “tradition” or a way of belonging to a tradition. In that sense, both threskeia and religio are poor counterparts for our modern notion of “religion,” by which we mean organizational and theological systems with marks of belonging and adherence and participation (like attending regularly, what my friend at the restaurant was anxious about). The ancient notion of what was going on between gods and people and communities isn’t necessarily a great match for what we think is going on in the present.
The final passage in the lectionary this week that relates to this theme of living a religious life is Mark 7, which the lectionary cites spottily (verses 1-8, then 14-15, then 21-23, skipping some parts that further elaborate the points Jesus is making and focus more specifically on food). Here, we find a familiar scene: Jesus is arguing with some scribes and Pharisees. I have said this a number of times in this Substack, but it bears repeating: the fact that Jesus argues with scribes and Pharisees does not mean that they were his enemies, as many Christians (especially Protestant ones) have often supposed. To the contrary, it probably means that Jesus thought of the Pharisees and scribes as friends, or at least equals worthy of debate and exchange. I think it was more likely that Jesus and the Pharisees were allies, or at least frenemies (friends who are also enemies, enemies who are also friends), because there are moments in the gospels when the Pharisees and Jesus seem to collaborate and agree and share meals together. Here in Mark 7, they are arguing, but they are arguing in the service of this same question we’ve been asking: what is the best way to live a religious life? (Or, to take the ancient meaning of threskeia, what is the best way to live a life of devotion?).
In 7:5, the Pharisees and scribes pose a really good question: why don’t Jesus’ disciples walk in the ways of the ancestors? Why, in other words, don’t they follow and keep the law that is laid out in places like Deuteronomy? Jesus’ answer shows that like the Pharisees, he is also thinking about purity and a life of devotion. But he has settled on a different form of it, and he seems to have taught his disciples that the actual practice of hand-washing before meals is subordinate to the concern for purity that the hand-washing represents. It’s more important, Jesus is saying, to control what comes out of the body than to control what goes in. (I might be with the Pharisees and scribes on this one; it seems important to pay attention to both what goes in and what goes out). Jesus turns the exchange into an opportunity to talk about the things that come out of the body, metaphorically speaking, and he offers a list of them in 7:21-22: murder, avarice, sexual immorality, and the like. He reframes the discussion of purity away from ritual efficacy and readiness (a ritual form of purity), and toward behavioral and ethical purity. While Christians have tended to privilege and favor the latter, ethical kind of purity, because of passages like this one, the exchange with the scribes and Pharisees shows that there are many different ways to think about what religiosity might mean, and many different ways to live a religious life.
I think this is important to remember. We encounter religious “others” all the time—people whose religious beliefs and practices are different than ours. Sometimes these are people who have a different religious tradition than ours, and we struggle to understand even the basics of what their religious life is all about. But perhaps more often, we encounter people whose religious traditions are pretty close to ours, and that can be even more difficult. Think about the religious folks who get under your skin; they are probably the ones whose traditions are broadly the same as yours with different emphases and practices. (For my branch of progressive Mainline Protestantism, the ones who get under our skin are usually evangelical or conservative Christians). Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees were arguing not because they were so different but because they were 99% the same—because they were close enough to each other to have small but important differences of opinion on things like purity. Christians often argue with other kinds of Christians for the same reason; it can be harder to tolerate someone who is mostly like you than it is to tolerate someone who’s completely different.
All of these lectionary texts offer some version of a reflection on how to be religious. And perhaps in the end that is what is important: not that we settle on one way of being religious, but that we are reflective about it, and that we are thoughtful about how and why we engage in a religious life. Maybe the reflection—offered in several different ways in these different texts—is the point. It might be that the takeaway from Jesus’ conversation with the scribes and Pharisees, and Moses’ address to Israel, and the Psalmist’s reflections, and James’ admonitions, have less to do with who is right and wrong, and more to do with the need to be thoughtful and reflective about the way we are religious. Maybe the call is to understand why we do religion the way we do, and to see that there are many different ways to do it, and to cultivate openness to multiple religiosities.
I love this sentence: “It might be that the takeaway from Jesus’ conversation with the scribes and Pharisees, and Moses’ address to Israel, and the Psalmist’s reflections, and James’ admonitions, have less to do with who is right and wrong, and more to do with the need to be thoughtful and reflective about the way we are religious.”