more ellipses

I'm finally getting around to reading Tony Jones' The New Christians which I highly recommend to anyone who is seeking to understanding emergent/emerging Christianity as well as anyone who has finally said "no" to partisanship in life, in politics, and in religion. In it he makes a great jab at the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) which my own church began using in December of 2007 as dictated by our Bishop as dictated by General Convention. His example is the Psalm appointed for the Day of Pentecost in all three years - Psalm 104.24-35 which reads:

104:24 O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

104:25 Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great.

104:26 There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.

104:27 These all look to you to give them their food in due season;

104:28 when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.

104:29 When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.

104:30 When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.

104:31 May the glory of the LORD endure forever; may the LORD rejoice in his works--

104:32 who looks onthe earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke.

104:33 I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.

104:34 May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the LORD.

104:35 But may sinners vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more. Bless the LORD, O my soul. Praise the LORD!

Tony writes, "a beautiful and provocative Psalm, to be sure, and a reading that's slated for on of the most important days in the church calendar, Pentecost, in all three years of the lectionary cycle. But strangely, the lectionary calls for this reading: 'Psalm 104.24-34, 35b.' In other words, the preacher is instructed to excise the line, 'But may sinners vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more.' This happens over and over in the lectionary: Sunday morning Bible readings are purged of their unsavory - some might say 'politically incorrect' - content. this dubious practice raises the obvious questions: how does censorship serve the faithful who sit in congregations across American? The answer: it doesn't. Instead, this practice is an injustice to both the Bible and to those who place their trust in the Bible's words. It assumes that average Christians can't handle all that the Bible has to offer, or worse, that preachers can't manage the prickly parts of the text." (pgs 131-132).

This a lot of filler just to say that a set of ellipsis in the Gospel for Sunday makes it almost impossible to see how the story relays the message of Jesus. Verse 13 of chapter 9 finds Jesus quoting Hosea from the Septuagint and adding on his own mission statement, "`I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." Then we miss the fact that he is immediately asked a question about sacrifice and Law:

"Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, ‘Why do we and the Pharisees fast often,often');" onmouseout="return nd();">^*151617 but your disciples do not fast?’ And Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding-guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.’"

Instead the passage picks up at verse 18 where "As Jesus was saying these things" he is asked to perform an act of mercy. Without hesitation, as if he were waiting with baited breath to get the heck out of there, Jesus is off and running to help, of all people (in Matthew's context) a Jewish leader. See what we miss.
1. Jesus articulates that mercy is above sacrifice.
2. People just can't let sacrifice go.
3. Jesus leaves to perform acts of mercy.

The ellipsis may not remove the "unsavory" but certainly causes the periocope to miss the full weight of its punch. The irony that it is disciples of John who ask the sacrifice focused question - gone. The image of Jesus creeping toward the door to get away from it all - gone. The relief that he must have felt when he was asked to, of all things, raise a girl from the dead - gone.

I complain a lot about the Lectionary, especially the RCL, but thanks to my actually reading a book I feel justified. Now, back to contemplating what I'll actually preach this Sunday.