Power to the [lay]people!

Last week I had a hard time writing blog posts. Not out of a lack of content, mind you – I’m a veritable fountain of near-useless information that I’m all too ready to deploy on the unsuspecting world. Rather, I had one little thing on my mind that I didn’t really want to write. This one little thing was totally blocking my other thoughts and creativity, preventing me from writing anything half-interesting.

Hoping this one little thing would pass, I managed to squeeze out 2 blog posts. Ok, I’m lying. I didn’t actually write those 2 posts. My older brother Jesse wrote last week’s post on Passover & Easter. And thanks to my younger brother Aaron for this beautiful song. So really I wrote 0 posts. But I still managed to satisfy the demand for ultimate blogging success and stuck to my schedule of 2 blog posts per week. All in the name of Blog the Great.

But here we are a week later and I still have that one little thing on my mind. Like a stubborn kidney stone, it just won’t pass! Only way to make it pass is write it here and off the chest it goes, I hope, freeing my mind and skillful fingers to write fanciful prose not seen since the days of Shakespeare. Or just the usual junk I write. Either-or.

Let me tell you what that one little thing was.

Weeks ago I was talking theology with 2 leaders in the Messianic movement. Oh yeah, I’m sly like that. The theology was about things that don’t matter much in the long run: the calendar, and the exact timing of Yeshua’s death and resurrection. Even though these things don’t matter that much long-term, there was some heated, fierce debate. (We religion-people like to do that a lot, turn little nothings into big somethings.)

 

The Jewish Calendar

J.K. McKee, a Messianic apologist (perhaps the Messianic apologist?) and academic, a guy I have a whole boatload of respect for, wrote a post on the Jewish calendar. Now the calendar issue is a silly one: To compress a volume into a sentence, the issue is that the current Jewish calendar, created in the 4th century CE, is not the same one defined in the Torah. [Duh.] Some follow the Jewish calendar (like McKee) and others (like me) follow an agriculture calendar we hope is more faithful to the Scripture.

Yeah. It’s a trivial thing to argue about. You’d think we’d have something better to do with our time than argue about calendars. But religion can make you dumb like that.

J.K. McKee’s post angered me, but, armed with my newfound wisdom of a pragmatic faith, knowing full well the world is not impressed with our silly arguments about calendars, my response was gentle and gracious:

As you know, JK, I’m an agricultural calendar guy.

[big, wordy response goes here…]

In the end, I think we shouldn’t be dogmatic about calendar issues. There are way more important things to tackle, greater things to concern ourselves with.

Ta-dum! Situation resolved peacefully. But, alas, it didn’t remain so. I’ll explain in a moment.

 

The timing of the Messiah’s death and rising

I switched gears and totally forgot about McKee’s post.

A day or so later, I went over to the blog of another guy I have a lot of respect for: Derek Leman. Derek’s a Messianic gentile who really has a heart for the Jewish people and Judaism. I love his well-researched studies. He’s very grounded and very real, something uncommon to encounter in a sea of airy spiritual people. So I like him. I respect him.

Derek wrote a post about the timing of Messiah’s death and resurrection. Which day of the week did Messiah die? Which day of the week did he rise? That kind of thing. Fun to debate about, silly to get dogmatic about. Derek posted a well-researched belief: Jesus was crucified on Friday. I disagreed and said so in the comments.

Armed again with the dual-wielding pistols of pragmatic faith and knowledge of the silliness of certain dogmatic arguments, I spoke graciously:

I’ve done a boat-load of study on this stuff. Seriously, a boat-load. :-) Here’s my current understanding:

[long-winded, stuffy details here]

Ok? So that’s my best understanding. I’ve done a lot of research to arrive at this conclusion. There are probably holes in it and things not quite right. But that’s my best Scriptural understanding I’ve come to at this point.

Oh boy, what a mistake it was to post that!

Things started getting heated. Derek started sweating profusely as I sliced him apart with my cunning theological arguments. Ok, I’m lying again. Derek tore me a new theological hole, ripping apart everything I hold dear. No, that’s not the truth either. Basically, we went back in forth in the comments, starting off graciously, but each comment getting more heated than the last, passive-aggressively getting on each other’s nerves.

In an off-the-record email, Derek said to me,

Your starting point must be Torah, the way the festival works, and the data from the gospels.

Ummm. Yeah, Derek. Thank you, Captain Obvious.

I wanted to say, “Thanks for dismissing my views as if I never once glanced at the Torah nor took a gander at the gospels in the last 5 years. Thanks.”

Thankfully, I held my tongue again, my response containing only a reassurance to Derek that I am indeed using data from the Torah and gospels as my foundation.

But things raged on, as J.K. McKee chimed in the comments, saying:

It is insufficient for any reader to examine the English of Leviticus 23 and then start making conclusions…

Oh, so first I wasn’t studying the Torah or gospels, and now I’m just looking at Leviticus 23 and pulling theology out of my magic theology hat! Woohoo! Isn’t this fun?!

Finally, Derek said something that sent me over the edge into a violent fit of internet argument rage! Grrr! Hulk ANGRY! Derek said something that really frustrated me. Really. He said:

Please think and study before making such statements that further confuse the issue.

Oh, man! What a mean, sneaky rabbi! My first thought, thank God I didn’t post it, was, “I’ve studied this stuff for 5 years now. Who the hell are you to talk to me like that!” It was as if Derek was the old, wise, bearded man of the mountain, and I’m just some youthful traveler foolish enough to contradict him. “Please think before posting.” My butt.

Thankfully, I didn’t post anything nasty. Twice now I’d been angered, despite trying my best to be gracious and loving, but praise God, I had some patience and longsuffering, something I’ve learned from certain Messianic leadership. I stepped away from the computer. I let it cool down. Coming back later, I told Derek,

Whew, this is getting a little heated. I didn’t want this to become a spiteful debate about things that, in the long run, don’t really matter that much.

Derek, I’ll respond after I’ve had time to study more on the objections you raised, and after things have cooled down a little. :-)

Shalom, guys.

I might have been lying; I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to talk about it anymore. (I still haven’t responded 2 weeks removed.) If it’s just gonna turn ugly, gosh, forget that crap, I don’t want any of it.

(There were a million + 1 other passive-aggressive statements uttered, but they’re uninteresting and I fear I’ll lose your valuable and ever-short attention span, dear blog reader, if I recite each one.)

Oh, if only it ended there. I always regret my acts of disgrace, and ungracious I was soon to be…

 

Back to the calendar

Remember McKee’s post about the calendar? Well, some folks at our Bible study sent it around to each other and started discussing it. As the discussion of it progressed, I realized that McKee’s post was too dismissive and spoke from a lofty, high ground of educated understanding. Like that old man perched up on the mountain, speaking down to us mere mortals, so was McKee on his blog. It was clear to me his post contained conjecture and subjective musings, not the real gold-plated truth some painted it to be. “A bunch of crap!” I thought to myself.

I was tired of being belittled. I have been gracious on calendar and dating issues, yet in a single week I was twice insulted and belittled.

I decided it was time to let it all hang out.

Dismiss all my appointments. Cancel my meetings. Turn off the Old Tyme radio, Marge, SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET.

I wrote a crisp, short, cutting response to McKee. I really told him what’s what. I told him in what was now my 2nd comment, one which didn’t make it past blog comment moderation:

John, we’re trying to follow the Torah the best we can. I can’t speak for everybody else, but we follow the agricultural calendar because that’s the message we get from the Torah, not because of some scary apocalyptic timeline.

You might say we’re dumb — most of us lack higher theological education, we don’t have the necessary astronomical, historical, and contextual knowledge to make sound judgments. We don’t have the background in Greek and Hebrew to get the word straight from the horse’s mouth, so our judgments are off.

Maybe that’s all true, but damn it, we’re following God best we can. And the best we can do, when it comes to the calendar — interpreting the Scriptures best we can — leads us to something other than the Hillel II Jewish calendar created in the 4th century.

Thus, I wrote my first ungracious comment in 2009. :blows celebratory horn:

Gah. Old friend J.K. didn’t take too kindly to this comment, pointing out my use of profanity. I apologized for being ungracious, but told him I’m not ashamed of the comment. J.K. was kind enough to see past my spurt of ungraciousness. He forgave my ungraciousness. We haven’t talked since. :cries:

I was ungracious, overwhelmed by zealous emotion, for which I apologized. But there is something legitimate there I was trying to communicate, poorly as usual. And now that I’m 2 weeks removed from that blinding zeal, I think I can communicate it properly…

 

Power to the laypeople!

I’m a lay person by all means. That means I’m not part of the educated clergy. I’m just a dude in a congregation. That’s ok. I have a short college education at a tiny community college in Joliet, Illinois. I can’t even remember the name of my college’s sports team. More importantly, I’m not privy on the newest theologies, not well-informed of the latest doctrines! I don’t have a theological degree, unlike Derek Leman and John McKee.

But I’m not stupid, either. At least, I play a smart guy on the intarweb blogging scene. That counts, right?

What I wanted to communicate is in 2 parts. I’m going to communicate them now. Ready? They’re simple, so you don’t have to think very hard to understand them.

The first part is that laypeople like me should respect and value the theology of the highly educated in our movement. They’ve spent great personal fortunes, undoubtedly depleting said fortunes, in an effort to become learned. They’ve succeeded. All other things being equal, we laypeople ought to value their opinions, conjecture, and theologies higher than that of laity.

The second part is that our educated leadership should not dismiss views of laypeople on the sole count that we’re laypeople. That’s the feeling I got when talking to Leman and McKee. “Please study and think before talking…”, “You can’t just read 1 chapter and pull theology out of it…” “You need to understand 2nd Temple Judaism before you can have any understanding in the area…” And so on. Thanks for assuming I’m a dumb redneck with no education, no context, no study. Because that’s the message my educated leadership was sending me. Don’t do that, dear educated leadership. Not all of us are dumb.

(Hmm, maybe I should copyright that sentence. Not All of Us Are Dumb®. There. )

 

Conclusion

I love the educated leadership in the Messianic movement. I regularly give money to them whenever I can afford it. I routinely hold up their words as examples when talking to people about Messianic Judaism. I value them more than they know. I wish I could write a hundred paragraphs about them, if only it would not bore you fine blog readers. If we in Messianic Judaism lost this irreplaceable generation of educated leadership to Christianity or Orthodox Judaism or agnosticism, inexplicably worse off our movement would be.

I only ask that our educated leadership would value our contribution, the contribution of the laypeople. By all means, pick apart our arguments, show us where our theology is wrong. But don’t dismiss us while you stand on that steep lofty mountain of higher education, dismissing us just because we’re laity. And don’t assume we’re all dumb. That’s insulting.

We can learn from the Methodists. John Wesley sent out laypeople as preachers, lay-preachers – an unthinkable and widely criticized act at the time. These men weren’t ordained by the Church of England, yet religion took a turn for the better because of them, despite these men not always having the proper ordination or higher education. God can use us dumb people.

Likewise, even though many uneducated leaders in Messianic Judaism have occasionally hurt the movement, on the whole, the faith is better with us in it. Really. We can make it better through our faith and servitude, even though our academic knowledge pales in comparison to the great, educated leaders going before us.

And now that that’s off my chest, a load has been lifted. It’s smokin’ to high heaven, like incense on the altar.  

Thanks for listening to this rant. We now return you to our regular scheduled programming.