Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport
March, 2009:
A new twist(ing) of John 8
I was getting ready for church this morning and had the radio tuned to our local NPR. Unfortunately this is not a very good radio so every time I move over to the closet the radio starts picking up a Christian station. This morning the preacher (I have no idea who it was, suggestions are welcome!) was taking as his text the (in)famous passage from John 8. You know the one, where the woman is caught in adultery and Jesus stoops writes in the dirt (“the names of all those who had committed adulterer, perhaps” said the preacher) and so on. Here, I should just quote the salient part.
John 8:3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. 5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6 They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Given all that follows I am morbidly curious to know what this preacher (hardly Qoheleth!) said, if anything, about the fact that this passage is a very late addition and of dubious origin. But to get to the portion that I heard clearly, so clearly, in fact, that it took me another 3 minutes to pick out a tie I was so stunned by the comments.(Paraphrasing, but I promise you the substance is as spoken.)
Jesus, who knew the Law so well since he was the one who had given it to Moses was not saying that someone caught in adultery should not be punished and stoned. Jesus is also not saying that anyone who is without any sin should cast the first stone, but merely that those who had not committed this sin, the sin of adultery, may step forward and stone the woman. Assuming, that is, that witness were brought forward, as required by the Law.
Wow. Look at that again. Jesus wasn’t saying that those without any sin should cast the first stone (in which case, of course, no one could cast said stone since all have sinned), but only those who had not committed this particular sin. I assume this preacher’s logic went on to assert that all those present had at some point enjoyed this sin since they all walked away, but I had chosen to eschew a tie all together and headed out to church at that point. But tell me, who comes up with stuff like this?
If I am generous I can only assume that the preacher was trying to push back against those who use this passage (as I have often heard it in my own church) to argue that we should not tell anyone that anything is a sin since, after all, we have all sinned and therefore should “cast no [metaphorical] stones.” (Matt. 7:1 is of course often brought in as well.) I am certainly sympathetic to such an effort, but this is just a remarkable twisting of the passage.
I cannot be sure, without hear the full sermon, but he seems to have ignored the context (“They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him”) and the fact that there is a fundamental shift in concepts of forgiveness that Jesus brings to the scene. Sure, developing an hermeneutic that takes in both the continuity of the Law and the transformation that comes from Jesus’ sacrifice “offered once, for all” is difficult, but just because it is hard does not excuse us from the work.
*shakes head* I would love to hear the full sermon. If anyone has a clue as to who it was, let me know. I think it was on WGRC but their program list only shows contemporary worship music from 9 – noon.
Has anyone heard a crazier sermon lately? Do tell!
There is honor in AIG
All companies and entities have good and bad people and most folks are just doing their job. The AIG Executive Vice President in charge of the financial division that has received so much notoriety resigned this past week and sent his letter of recommendation to the NY Times. The honor that I see here is not so much that he resigned, but rather that DeSantis wanted to help correct the problems that others created. He took responsibility for the situation and sought to remedy it. In contrast, when Liddy was being challenged by Congress he did not stand up for his people nor did he stand by the agreements that he himself had affirmed multiple times.
(As an aside, did anyone in Congress mention that DeSantis and others had a salary of only $1/year and that the “bonuses” where in fact their only real payment for the work they were doing to make AIG viable and thus give the government and the taxpayers a decent return on their investment in the company? I didn’t think so.)
It is a very legitimate debate as to whether such contracts should have been allowed the first place. DeSantis and others, for example, could have simply been given a “relatively” low salary of $200k, for example. But they were not. The real concern for our recovery is that if Congress and the administration is allowed to change contracts after the fact why would anyone want to do business with them? How will Geithner get the private investors he says his plan needs? No, in all this mess DeSantis strikes me as an honorable man who tried to do the right thing and was abandoned by his CEO and government.
After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.
I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.
His entire letter is well worth the read.
Jillette believes there is no God
This is not news in fact, it is from 2005, but I noticed @Ihnatko tweet about it and so I headed over to NPR to give it a listen and read the text. I am not sure what he would do with several hundred pages, but in 500 words (or less) Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame (“he is the tall one”) has one of the most reasonable and accessible (perhaps even persuasive) essays I have read for not believing in God. He concludes
Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.
Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
Seems to me Ehrman would agree with these sentiments. And as I grieve the passing of a colleague and friend whom I had far too little time to get to know, I certainly understand his point of view. Still, “this I canll to mind and therefore I have hope….”
