The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
July 6, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 26

Everything But...
           I am back and many need to be thanked. I will start with thanking the members of Knox-Metropolitan for having enabled me to embark upon this sabbatical at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton. The time spent there was wonderful and, well, sacred, as I accomplished a great deal, met lots of new people and old friends, even saw a track meet and a ball game or two. And don’t forget the crab cakes.
           The Lectionary takes us where we sometimes don’t feel comfortable in going, for some still find the sequence of stories from Genesis not appropriate for Christian worship. They are too earthy, too mundane, too profane, and too Old. In the second century of Christianity a fellow named Marcion thought anything Old (Testament) was just not Christian, so he eliminated it. He also took a pair of scissors to the Gospels and Epistles to cut out any references or citations to Judaism and its way of religion and faith. A lot of people agreed then, and many today continue to believe there is no place for the Old Testament in the Christian Bible. So the story of Isaac finding Rebecca for his wife is inane at best and corrupting the rest of the time.
           For the record, Marcion lost and was declared a heretic as the Church emphatically and consistently proclaimed that the Bible means Old and New. The New Testament would make no sense without the Old for that is what Jesus and his followers were continually quoting and alluding to its characters and events in virtually every verse. More, we rediscover a world not much different from our own - full of violence and sin and power and sex, virtue and the holy - with the Gospel always threatening to break out. We are fools not to listen very carefully to what is Old.