IN HIS book of commentary on the lectionary, Gift and Task Walter Brueggemann goes on with the commentary from what I posted yesterday, so I'll do that too. He comments on Genesis 42: 18-28 and 1 Corinthians 5: 9-6:8. He starts with the passage of Joseph as Pharaoh's food Czar and how he recognizes and decides to teach his brothers who sold him into slavery a lesson. As a prelude to the commentary Brueggemann starts with a prayer.
Lord of the church and governor of the nations, we pray for wisdom that might include the shrewdness of Joseph and the compassion of gospel truth. In your name, Amen.
Here's the commentary:
Joseph is practicing the rough art of stagecraft, testing the suppliants who have come to him for food. But he is also toying with his brothers, secretly working revenge on them by keeping them in suspense and letting them experience the danger of being before him.
By contrast, Paul continues his rigorous instruction to the Corinthian Christian community. He makes a sharp contrast between those inside the church community who are held to a higher moral expectation and those outside the church. He urges that because of a more radical ethic, the church will do well to maintain its own discipline.
The juxtaposition of these texts poses the difficult question of the relationship between a public ethic that governs both the state and the corporate world, and a more intense ethic that guides the church. On the one hand, Reinhold Niebuhr has famously allowed that much more latitude is to be recognized in the public domain, as public affairs require greater "realism" about issues of justice, unlike the church , with its more insistent requirement of mercy and compassion. On the other hand, Stanley Hauerwas more recently, in a sustained appeal to the "peace church" tradition, refuses such a sharp distinction and expects ore in the public sphere.
This is an issue with which Christians must be engaged, especially since our public economy has largely been taken over by an oligarchy of wealth that skews all social relationships and that readily leaves behind those it judges to be dispensable. Paul seems to want an exclusive focus on the church. In our time we might do well to require more of the state and the world of corporations.
I think, first, it's interesting how Paul's double standard is set up as more stringent, more precisian in its demands on the church, the People of the Church, than on those outside of it. I think that's not unreasonably considered as a possible habit of thought he had from his heritage as a Pharisee, one of those zealous for The Law among Jews, their responsibility as those to who The Law had been given as an example to the nations. We know from Romans that he held even higher expectations of those to whom The Gospel had been given.
As I've thought more about the discussion I had with a family member about the police and how, ideally, they should have very high standards of ethical behavior in service to the entire public. I've known a few police officers who I know took that seriously and they tried to live up to that, though it's clear not all of them do. I think that some of that failure is due to the difficulty of what the job that they are supposed to do and the means with which they are expected and, indeed, allowed to do it. It would be impossible for them to protect and serve the public if they didn't use violence on occasion to do that, the people they have to stop and arrest are often not pacifists. And they don't always have the time to make tidy analyses of the situation they have to deal with in real time, often making decisions on the spot that can be wrong.
There was complaint that I said nice things about the police, yesterday, while being critical of nominal liberals. I would guarantee you that if such liberals in their own mind were afraid they would be the first to call the police, if they were scared enough they would want them to clobber whoever was making them afraid, probably matching the various "Karens" so much the focus of entirely justifiable online ire. I have to say the most satisfying of those videos were the ones where the cop who answered the call clearly knew he was dealing with a crazy person who wanted to have their own way, wanting the cops to do that for them, usually against a Person of Color. There are lots of nut cases who call the 911 line for things like they didn't get enough cheese on their Big Mac or something, too.
I never considered becoming a policeman, back then gay kids would know that was not a career option safely open to them, but the issue of having to carry and be ready to use a gun or a stick were even bigger reasons I'd never have considered it. But I have had reason to call the cops, once because I was attacked as a gay man, I was grateful to the ones who came to my aid and, though they couldn't make an arrest, they told the guy to leave me alone strongly enough that it worked. AND THAT WAS BACK IN THE 1970s EVEN BEFORE THERE WERE ANY ANTI-DISCRIMINATION STATUTES THAT COVERED LGBTQ PEOPLE.
We are not ever going to have a society in which the police will not be needed and policing will never be such that there are not ethical and even moral ambiguities involved in what they will have to do to provide the imperfectly administered legal protection and service to the public which will always be the best possible in policing. Defunding the police is not going to do much to erase those ambiguities and lapses and to correct those, if that were true worse financed police services would do a better job than well financed ones. I'm not convinced that is the case.
I'm entirely in favor of holding the police, DEMOCRATIC politicians, public servants, teachers, etc. to high standards but not to impossible ones. I am in favor of there being real and effective EXTERNAL review of the police and all the rest of that list. But as long as we ask the impossible of them as a society which is not willing to act consistently with the highest regard for the rights, the lives, the welfare on an equal basis in society, we have no right to demand that those we ask to do hard things do them perfectly.
The church that demands the impossible of other people should bring the same standard they demand for others onto themselves. I have never seen an instance where that was something the church willingly held itself to, certainly not in matters other than some piddling issues of orthodoxy to some doctrinal or dogmatic standard, some secondary or tertiary matter of theology - which will probably, eventually, be seen as antiquated and get scrapped. I certainly think that is the case in many though not all matters of sexual morality as fought over in the churches and which the churches most demanding of adherence to THEIR teaching on that which they then are found to violate, sometimes knowingly and on a regular basis, themselves.
Yesterday's Gospel in the Catholic lectionary was Matthew 23:1-12.
Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying,
“The scribes and the Pharisees
have taken their seat on the chair of Moses.
Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you,
but do not follow their example.
For they preach but they do not practice.
They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry
and lay them on people’s shoulders,
but they will not lift a finger to move them.
All their works are performed to be seen.
They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels.
They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues,
greetings in marketplaces, and the salutation ‘Rabbi.’
As for you, do not be called ‘Rabbi.’
You have but one teacher, and you are all brothers.
Call no one on earth your father;
you have but one Father in heaven.
Do not be called ‘Master’;
you have but one master, the Christ.
The greatest among you must be your servant.
Whoever exalts himself will be humbled;
but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
Of course the churches should think about that and how they don't come close to honoring that, I have to say I wonder what Paul the self-described Pharisee would have made of it. But I think liberals should consider it too, not only about themselves but, especially at the end of it, in regard to public servants who take up pubic service as a life work, including those who announce their purpose is "to protect and to serve."
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