christians

Could be sage advice for those who fashion themselves Christian. Jesus pissed off everybody. The local religious right hated him, and got him killed. Even his disciples got extremely upset with his willingness to fraternize with the freaky and infectious. If your concept of Jesus makes you extremely comfortable, you may need to start comparing your beliefs and actions to the stories of his life. If you still feel completely comfortable, you are either a true saint, or you're fooling yourself by glossing over parts of Jesus' teachings and actions that you disagree with.

Do you pass the homeless without blinking when you go shopping? Many of the religious right view these people with contempt, calling them lazy. They call them bums. You'd never see a televangelist stopping on the street to wash the feet of a prostitute. Yet, these same people sell icons and salvation. Look out, Jesus might be coming after you with the same scourge he used to chase the salesmen from the temple of Jerusalem!

Genesis 19:1-11

In story of Sodom, two angels are guests in Lot's home, and all the men surround the house and demand that Lot bring out the two men, "that we may know them." Lot offers to them his two virgin daughters instead, saying, "Do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof." The men of Sodom start to break down the door, and the two angels pull Lot back inside, and strike the men outside blind. Then God pops a cap in their ass, and destroys Sodom, yada yada yada... The misunderstanding is what the sin being professed here actually is.

Their sin is the attempted gang rape of Lot's male guests. That they are all male is inconsequential. The gang rape of a woman by men doesn't mean that all heterosexual behavior is wrong. For the same reason, gang rape of a man by other men doesn't mean that all homosexual behavior is wrong. What's wrong is the rape. A story with a similar message, which also refutes the idea that homosexuality is inherently wrong, is in Judges 19. In this story, a group of men attempts to gang rape other men, but this time, when a woman is offered as a substitute, she is gang raped and killed.

There's actually another sin in this story, although it's less relevant in modern times. In Lot's time, when you provided hospitality to someone, especially in the desert, you were giving them sanctuary because being exposed to those conditions too long would be certain death. To provide hospitality to the two angels was a very important duty, and to allow them to be dishonored, as the group of men would have, would have been a gross violation of his sacred duty.

Jude 7 and 2 Peter 2:4-10 refers to Sodom, too. Jude speaks of those who "indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust." In the New Revised Standard Version, a footnote says the literal Greek is, "went after other flesh". Peter uses the phrases "depraved lust," or "unlawful acts." These references to Sodom are sexual in nature, but they are applicable to the sinful, immoral, and unethical capabilities of all. According to scholars the phrase, "went after other flesh," probably refers to Lot's guests, who are angels disguised as men.

By the way, in the King James Version of the Bible, the word 'sodomite' is used incorrectly. The New Revised Standard Version has a more accurate translation saying, "None of the daughters of Israel shall be a temple prostitute; none of the sons of Israel shall be a temple prostitute. You shall not bring the fee of a prostitute or the wages of a male prostitute into the house of the Lord your God." In Hebrew the word translated as "sodomite" in the King James Version actually means "male temple prostitute."

Bloomfield, New Jersey, sits on the border of Newark, part of the urban fringe. No commercial farms exist here now, and if someone pursued such a quixotic venture, they would not grow wheat. We already have Kansas for that.

Still, given the rabid efforts of many Americans in these parts to grow lawn grass, it seemed a reasonable proposition to grow some wheat in a tiny patch of the backyard. Wheat is just grass all grown up.

One May afternoon, I scattered about a pint's worth of seeds over a 20 square foot patch, scritched the earth with a rake, and then went about my business. Three months later, I had my very own amber waves of grain fluttering in the warm August breeze.

I carefully cut down my wheat, tied it up into stooks, and let it dry. A little pride crept in as I admired my stook, my connection to the past, smug as only a Luddite can be. My smugness would soon be cured.

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Separate the wheat from the chaff.

A quaint Biblical expression, easy enough to interpret. The wheat is the solid, good stuff. The chaff is the fluffy bad stuff. Throw the wheat in the air, and the heavier wheat berries fall straight down, while the chaff wafts away with the wind. In the old days, the collected chaff would be burned, not out of some symbolic representation of Hell, but just as a quick way to get rid of bullky waste.

So on Sabbath you head off to church, root for the the good guys (the wheat), tsk, tsk the bad guys (the chaff), pat yourself on the back for falling in with the wheat crowd, then go home and munch on some bagels made from, well, wheat.

Turns out it's not so simple. While today's pastor can glibly warn his flock to avoid the chaff types, any farmer back in Biblical times knew that wheat did not come in two parts. The chaff is an integral part of the wheat plant. The chaff is the dry husk surrounding the wheat berry, the actual grain used for food.

Before winnowing the chaff from the wheat berries, you need to thresh the wheat. Threshing is basically knocking the wheat kernels off the rest of the plant. Today this is done with a combination reaper/thresher (called combine for short), a machine that can cost well over a million dollars.

Back in Biblical times, combines did not exist. Today they exist, but I was not going to invest a million dollars to harvest a tiny patch of wheat. I got to do it the old-fashioned way--beating the wheat until my arms were ready to fall off.

Initially I tried a Wiffle ball bat. Little success.

I made a flail--two sticks tied together end-to-end, allowing me to beat the heads of wheat much more efficiently.. A flail looks like nunchaku, or nunchucks, for a good reason. Nunchaku were initially farming tools..

Flailing is very hard work. I pounded and pounded my small stook. I once shoveled scrap metal on ships in Port Newark. I'm not sure which is harder.

The chaff is an integral part of the plant, not some sinister fluff stalking the grain. Separating the wheat from the chaff is not about separating good folks from bad. That's too easy.

Before separating a part from itself, you need to break it. Threshing wheat requires violence. The wheat plant is broken. Separating the wheat from the chaff involves breaking one's lesser tendencies from the better. Indeed, the actual separating part is easy. Once the grain is threshed, wait for a breezy day and toss the threshed grain in the air. The wheat berries will bounce at your feet, the chaff blown away. People once knew this. wheat and chaff were not distinct elements until after the threshing.

The parabolic statement about wheat and chaff reminds us not only that the community is mixed but also that each of us have our own good and bad elements. There is for each of us chaff that needs to be blown away and burned. There is a separation here of good and bad, useful and useless; but it is not like the difference between apples and oranges. Each of us individually is wheat and chaff.

The Very Rev. Dennis J.J. Schmidt, from The Wheat and the Chaff, December 9, 2001

I will not likely grow wheat again; I have too little land, and the work of threshing by hand is a bit much for a man in his 5th decade.

What do I have to show for it? Well, I have a half pint of homegrown wheat sitting in a Mason jar, enough for a couple of bagels should I grind it into flour. More importantly, I have a better grasp of "separating the wheat from the chaff," and what a loaf of bread meant to my forebears, and still means to most of the people alive today.

I feel like chiming in on this, though the other entries cover most ideas associated with Christmas, I feel as though the latter portion of Hai-Etlik's contribution deserves a response. While, Christmas is conveniently placed to offset winter solstice celebrations, its origins may actually lie with the Late Antiquity idea that famous and great people die on the day of their conception. And who is more great and famous than the Son of God?

Thus by the logic of the ancient Mediterranean, Jesus must have been conceived on the same date as His crucifixion. The problem arises in that, by the time the early Church was trying to figure this out (late 2nd-early 3rd century C.E.), the exact date of Jesus' death had passed from memory, and since the Passover (and thus the date to determine Easter) was not fixed in relation to the Roman calendar, a clever solution was devised. Pick a Passover around the time that it was thought that he was crucified and extrapolate. Thus, the Feast of the Annunciation became March 25.

At this point you may be asking, "Why is this important?" Well, first of all the Feast of the Annunciation is important, because it and its cycle of stories occupy a much more prominent place in the Gospels (and the early Church tradition) than the Nativity, because the recall that the patristic writings and creeds, while focused on the Incarnation (among other things theological), don't get into the details of Jesus' birthplace and date, so much as they get into 'concieved by the power of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.' Second, the Annunciation, and the associated stories of John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin Mary, contain alot of liturgical material that has been used since at least the time of Hippolytus and his Apostolic Tradition (an early Eucharistic liturgy), such as the Magnificat and the Song of Zechariah, in addition to all the prefiguring texts from Isaiah. So, that's why we go to all the trouble of figuring out the Annunciation first. After that, it's just math to figure out the date of the Nativity. Of course, while there are cases of the Nativity being celebrated rather shortly after the Annunciation became widespread (especially in North Africa), it wasn't until around the time that the Roman emperors tried to unite all the winter solstice festivals into one gigantic multi-week state-sponsored festival of "The Undying Sun (i.e. the emperor)" (bread and circuses, bread and circuses my friends...) that Christmas became widespread. However, the cause and effect isn't clear since the chronology isn't entirely clear. It may be that 'The Undying Sun' was a response to Christianity (and other religions) who were taking the luster out of Saturnalia. Or, it could be the other way around, in that a relatively minor Christian feast was elevated (see Hanukah) to meet the cultural challenge. In either case, Christmas as a counter-cultural event began to die out with Constantianism, and was finally killed off by the 19th century and the rise of commercialism.

But that's another story.