Better Call Saul

Without Works

Episode Notes

Lemuel: I am Lemuel Gonzalez, repentant sinner, and along with Amity Armstrong, your heavenly host, I invite you to find a place in the pew for today’s painless Sunday School lesson. Without Works.

Amity: This week we will begin an exploration of an equally influential and problematic saint in The More You Know. But first a moment of prayer in Not Necessarily the Good News.

Not Necessarily the Good News

On March 24, 2021, Representative James Talrico led the Texas House of Representatives in an Invocation at the start of the session. I will read it now in its entirety.

“Holy Mystery: you have so many names.

The Torah calls you Creator, the Quran calls you Peace, the Gita calls you Destroyer, the Dharma calls you Truth, and the First Epistle of John calls you perhaps the most beautiful name of all:

Love.

You are the strange love uniting all things. The love that drew elements together after that Big Bang; the love that drew life itself from those primordial oceans; the love that drew us all to this exact moment.

The love we were born of, the love we exist in, and the love we will one day return to.

In my faith, you expressed yourself through a barefoot rabbi who embodied your perfect love. A crucified carpenter who gave only two commandments: love God and love neighbor. Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.

Help us love not just in word, but in action. Help us honor not just the name of Jesus, but the way of Jesus.

Help us...

free the oppressed, feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, release the prisoner, welcome the stranger, forgive the enemy, and above all: protect your Creation.

The Word of God is Love. Let us not be hearers of your Word, but doers of your Word—in our families, in our communities, and in this chamber. Not just with prayers, but with policies. Not just personal love, but political love.

Holy Mystery: open our minds, open our hearts, open our hands so that we may build a new world in the shell of the old. A world that is more just, more free, more whole, and more in love with you.

In all your many names, we pray. Amen.”

Now this was read in an active session of a state legislature in a country whose Constitution explicitly spells out a division between church and state, so I can understand people being upset about the recitation of any prayer in that context. However, the outcry that actually occurred was much different.

Rep. Jonathan Strickland tweeted: “I am disgusted such blasphemy was spoken in the chamber. Lord forgive us for turning our state over to this trash. Where are the bold followers of Jesus Christ?” - Now this is also a man who called vaccines sorcery, so we don’t need to go down his particular rabbit hole. But he wasn’t alone in his ire, and there were other supporters that agreed that this, possibly the least offensive, most inclusive prayer that I have ever heard. - Thoughts?

Next up, let’s meet the man of the hour, or next few hours, in The More You Know.

The More You Know

So, church attendance is down. People are no longer declaring church or even religious affiliations. Why are people turning from faith and faith communities? Among the vailid reasons is a concern about the rigidity of religious dogma, and how it discourages and marginalizes some communities.

Religions like Buddhism and Christianity started as a rejection of contemporary conservative religious values. In Jesus’ time minor functions of daily life were strictly monitored by religious authority. Sin was everywhere. Not just sins that we think as deadly sins, but little things. Any kind of work on the Sabbath day could transgress the law. That could include spitting, or a woman carrying a brooch that weighed over a prescribed amount. Forgiveness of sins was granted by a priest and the proper sacrifice had to be offered to secure God’s forgiveness. Sins were erased by rituals, the elements of which were purchased at the temple, using special temple money. There was an exchange rate for that too. The more money you had, the more secure you were in God’s favor. If you could not afford these sacrifices, you were living in sin, a social outcast.

Jesus pushed back, sometimes physically, against this restrictive version of faith, a belief system meant to exclude people, particularly the economically deprived and marginalized. Jesus bypassed all the trauma and public humiliation for transgressors and just went along forgiving people their sins. “Your sins are forgiven,” he would say, and they felt accepted by God. It cost them nothing except a will to change and sincere belief.

Jesus’ kind of Christianity is not what people are rejecting. Where Jesus taught a faith of freedom and liberation, most modern people associate Christianity with conservatism and spiritual exclusion. Those are the same things that Jesus argued against! Why does Christianity mean misogyny and bigotry to unchurched people? Well, much of it can be put down to the writings of one influential man. His writings took Christianity in a decidedly conservative direction. For example:

"Women should remain silent in the churches, They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church."

Here is another example of his spiritual wisdom. He explains the orgins of homosexuality:

“... God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

Lets stop there; there are only three specific times where homosexuality is mentioned in the New Testament. All three specific mentions are negative, and all of them have a single author: Paul the Apostle, formerly Saul of Tarsus.

His story is complicated and his personality is contradictory. He started as a man out to persecute the early Christians, and then became a staunch and combative Christian convert. He was a proud Jew, and a strong believer in the primacy of the Jewish people and their primacy in the new faith, yet he rejected this, eventually calling his valued religious education, “fertilizer.”

For two thousand years Christians have had to reckon with Saint Paul’s contribution to the New Testament. He is remembered as a father of the church and its doctrine, but he never met Jesus, and encountered him only in a mystical vision.

A friend once described it this way; “Jesus was a rock star. Paul was an accountant.” Where Jesus tore up the rules and shouted down authority, Paul endorsed new restrictive rules, rules that he sometimes claimed were divinely inspired and equally his own ideas.

Historical Paul (This episode) His name was Saul, originally. He may have been named after King Saul, the first King of Israel. Like King Saul he was a member of the tribe of Benjamin. He was a roman citizen, and had a latinized name: Paul. He used the name Paul when addressing a gentile audience.

He grew up in Tarsus, an ancient city in what is now Turkey, It was considered an academic center, and Paul was a product of its educational system. He was a proud and pious jew who came from a family who leaned into the Pharisee interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures. He was sent from Tarsus to Jerusalem to receive his formal religious education from Gamaliel, a teacher of enormous reputation.

While living in Jerusalem, he found that members of Christian church, all loyal jews, were worshipping at synagogue, and making new converts. He resented them. It might have been that as a foreign born jew, he was anxious to show his devotion to his ancestral faith. He did have a fanatical drive to preserve his faith in a way that would have pleased his teachers. Whatever the reason he personally participated in the execution of a young Apostle, Stephen.

After that he became an active member of the hunt to expose Christians. He inveigled his way into the priestly community and even got a license from the high priest at Jerusalem to arrest and imprison Christians in neighboring communities, bringing them to Jerusalem for judgment and possible execution.

On one of these hunting trips, a trip to Damascus, he has a vision of Christ.

As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" "Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked. "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do." The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Paul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything. — Acts 9:3–9, NIV

He is struck blind, and remains that way until he reaches Damascus and is helped along by a man named Ananias who was warned to find Paul in a dream. He effects a miraculous cure for Paul, and he becomes an ardent evangelist for the religion he was persecuting.

He became a missionary, preaching to far flung corners. He made three excursions, reaching the christian communities, teaching, creating new ideas about how to run the church, and gathering monies to fund new missionary expeditions. Twenty years after persecuting the new faith, he becomes the victim of a mob of angry jews who accuse him of defiling the synagogue by inviting gentiles. This cases a riot, broken up by roman soldiers. They arrest him.

There is a trial, to which the mob is present. It is very like the circumstances that led to Jesus’ execution, but Paul has a trick to pull: To appeal, as any roman citizen has the right, to roman laws rather than jewish ones. This was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing his death sentence, but he prevented it long enough to continue his long disciplinary letters to the churches he helped found.

Over the next five episodes we will talk about Saint Paul’s controversial ministry, and the long shadow he cast over Christianity. The Topics will include:

Vessels of Wrath: Paul’s strange explanation of Evil. Women in the Church Doctrines on Gay inclusion in the Church Paul’s troubled relationship with Judaism An overview of all that we have learned.

In the next few episodes we will take a look at the peripheral saint whose writings became the foundation of Christian conservatism.

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