Author: MASadmin

Closeted Christians and Sympathetic Procurators

Last night, I made my acting debut.

During Lent, my internship site has a midweek service series that involves readings, prayers, and a dramatic presentation. The dramatic pieces were taken from a series of unlikely and hypothetical meetings of characters, and their families, in the passion story of Jesus. The scripts were reworked six years ago (and reworked again for this season) and my supervisor asked me to be involved. For the last service (last night), my wife and I played Pontius Pilate and his wife. It was fun because we got to have a play fight and argue about the nature of Jesus after he was crucified.

Now, I’ll admit that the script was difficult for me to work through mostly because, well, there was quite a bit of imagination infused into this scene that seemed problematic. There was an attempt, in some of the formulation of the script, to actually make Pilate’s wife a secret-Christian and make Pontius Pilate a sympathetic character. And I really really really dislike these ideas. Sure, it’s possible to read that lens into the gospels but just because that can be read into the story does not mean that it is actually life-giving. I really actively fought against this perspective and my wife did too. It’s one thing to identify with Pontinus Pilate and dwell deep with why the gospels depicted him (and his wife) the way they do but it’s quite another thing to romanticize the characters away from their own contexts. We’ve already had that in the Acts of Pilate and I don’t think we need to do that again.

However, I really had a lot of fun doing this. It was stressful worrying about it, seeing it on the calendar, organizing rehearsals, and trying to memorize my lines. I really am bad at memorizing things so I spent quite a bit of time on the subway annoying my fellow riders by reading and moving my mouth at the same time. I didn’t have a costume (though I dressed in a shirt and tie, feeling like I was making a contemporary commentary on our real world) and, at the last minute, I discovered I really like props. The folks in the front row got to witness my use of puns and humor by noticing that I had a file with Jesus’ name on it in the “out box” on my desk. I’m pretty proud of that joke actually.

Afterwards, I was amazed with the reflections that people gave me and I realized that I’d make a terrible actor. It seems that in the other dramatic presentations, there was a change that occurred with at least one of the characters on stage. The character would move from one place to the other. However, in my scene, the characters, at the end, ended up in the same place where they started. People expected Pilate to change but he did not. He thought Jesus was silly and insignificant and that is where he ended up. And that, it many ways, is my own take of who Pilate was. Rather than my embodying the character as it was written, I imposed my own view of the character onto the script and I refused to let him change. He flustered but I changed the script before I changed my view of Pilate. I want Pilate to be a jerk and stay a jerk. I don’t have any need to make him a sympathetic character and I think its problematic to do so. So I made Pilate come off as a jerk even if the script explicitly did not do so. I wouldn’t be a good actor because I would refuse to let the character be as they are written. But I did enjoy pretending to be an actor one for the first time last night.

Silver Chalice, Dish Soap, Love Affair

This morning, while serving as an acolyte at my school’s chapel, I discovered a fun fact. It seems that if you use dish soap to clean a silver chalice, the soap clings to the silver and does not come off if you rinse it. For those on chapel duty, or who are partaking in the heavenly meal of Eucharist, you are left with communion wine that tastes not only a tad soapy but the taste lingers for quite awhile. So, when it comes to silver chalices, the method used to clean cast iron pans works best or else Jesus just doesn’t go down easy. Though I guess you could run with this idea and make quite a few jokes about Jesus being the New Dawn. Anti-bacterial Jesus, leaves hands lemony fresh!

Future Hope

Yesterday at my field site, I helped lead our youth education for our middle schoolers. There were about seven of us in a smallish conference room and rather than going over the lesson for the day (from a curriculum that is just a tad too Arminian for my tastes), the CYF director suggested that we do a “Hot Topics” session. With the Trayvon Martin shooting in the background of the news, we thought it might be smart to take their pulse, see what they’ve heard, and just provide a space where they could talk about it.

Now, like most groups, there’s no way that we’re only going to stay on one topic for an entire hour. We covered a lot of ground – from video games, the problems downloading from X-Box live through some local news events and the last episode of “The Walking Dead.” We did get around to Tryvon Martin and we had a great conversation. I asked them about hoodies, fear, stereotypes, and what they thought that happened. Now, I’ll admit that I have a certain perspective on what happened and that my view did infiltrate the conversion – but I really tried to focus less on what happened in Florida and more about what happens in their lives in New York. I was impressed with how up-to-date on local events they were. They knew about the controversies we’ve been having over the stop-and-frisk policy of the NYPD. They had all experienced or witnessed the ageism associated with their being young kids and whenever they are “in packs.” And since they all live in a large city with a huge variety of people, they did share some common sense experiences of how they handle each other and other people. They also were honest about times when they felt discriminated against. We also shared what racism and stereotypes were. It was great being able to share my own experiences of being on the negative end of stereotypes and racism. Eventually, one of the kids even brought up what it means to be an American and I asked each of them what that meant. It was great because race, skin color, class, gender, sexuality, or anything like that didn’t show up in their definitions. They sounded so optimistic, I almost got emotional. I just wanted to tell them “NEVER CHANGE! Keep being open! Don’t limit your definitions to ‘a look!’ America should be bigger than that! My olive toned future kidling will greatly appreciate it!” I didn’t say that, of course, but I guess I’m optimistic about the future too.

Conquistador Paul

In my course on First & Second Corinthians, we examine the letters from Paul through various perspectives, contexts, contemporary theological movements, and racial/ethnical/colonial lenses. It involves a lot of reading of contrasting opinions and views that usually leaves my brain feeling over-saturated, full, and completely confused which is a lot of fun, to be honest.

This past week, the concept of Paul as colonizer came up. I’ll admit, I struggled with this view a lot. In certain ways, this image makes sense. Paul, leaving Judea & Antioch, traveled through out Asia Minor and Greece, established (or met with) communities of the Jesus movement. He viewed himself as the Apostle to the Gentiles and planted communities everywhere. In his letters, we can trace the conflicts he had with the communities he interacted with. This image, of taking the message of Jesus out, into new lands, and waving his authority around, seems to match our understanding of what it means to “colonize.” And, for post-colonial people, seeing Paul as a colonizer helps to build a lens of Paul that doesn’t assume that the authoritative structures that he interacted with (or revolted against) and that later Christianity developed and imposed on others, should be accepted as the default meaning of what the Scriptures says. This image worked in the classroom and I saw many of my classmates move see this image of Paul and relate it to colonial movements throughout history. But I struggled with it because I really have a hard time seeing Paul as a colonizer since the image of colonization that I envision is what happened in the New World. England, France, and especially Spain’s, use of military force, economic might, and disease to destroy, conquer, and the native americans of the Americas is how I imagine colonization to be. It’s hard for me to see Paul as a conquistador since he didn’t have a Spanish Galleon supporting him (though, legend has it, he did have the horse).

Of course, my model of colonization isn’t the only one that existed in the world. The British experience in India, the United States with Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and other stories of imperialism doesn’t necessarily follow the New World movement to a T. But there is the issue of force applied to those situations and this force seems non-existing in Paul’s letter. Sure, Paul throws his authority around and tries to claim that he has force (and his language can be very violent and angry), but he doesn’t have the external force that I envision colonizers to have. And his argument for the subjection, or containment, of the subs-sections of his community, while forceful, are actually limited in the larger scheme of things. It was Rome, not Paul, who was the imperial power and it was Rome, not Paul, that re-founded Corinth as a Roman colony. The best image, in my mind, for Paul would be if Native Americans had sent a mission to Spain in 1510 – a mission that didn’t involve them arriving in chains.

Now, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to see Paul as a colonizer nor do I think it unreasonable to see the later pastoral epistles and its structuring of authority as a direction towards imperialism. Nor should my problem with seeing Paul as a colonizer in anyway get Christianity off the hook for its role in the history of imperialism and colonization. But I just can’t seem to subjectively withdraw, take a step back, and see him as the role of the conquistador. And the fact that I keep using that term is part of the problem. My own experience, as a Mexican-American, has embedded my image of colonization through the hispanic experience. It isn’t that I don’t have the imagination to see the colonial experience through other lenses but that I can’t seem to just…get it. I guess that’s one of my biases then.