Jesus and the Disambiguated
“Jesus’ message focused on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of his people. He recognized fully that … no external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win the victory of the spirit against them.” – Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited.
I love to collect hifalutin’ words. A word I stumbled upon earlier this year and continues to haunt me I found on wikipedia: disambiguation.
In computational linguistics, word sense disambiguation(WSD) is the problem of determining in which sense a word having a number of distinct senses is used in a given sentence. For example, consider the word bass, two distinct senses of which are:
- a type of fish
- tones of low frequency
and the sentences:
- I went fishing for some sea bass
- The bass part of the song is very moving
To a human it is obvious the first sentence is using the word bass in sense 1 above, and in the second sentence it is being used in sense 2. But although this seems obvious to a human, developing algorithms to replicate this human ability is a difficult task.
I know…a bit technical . I took a couple of double takes at this short definition to get a layman’s understanding (and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it). To bring this word down to a street level it appears that this word means, in a basic sense, clarity. Dis-ambiguation is a way for a system to bring clarity to a word…to give us the proper meaning and sense of a word. It is the removal of ambiguity, the fuzziness, the cloud that often hangs around a word with multiple meanings.
In an exercise of postmodern playfulness I want to use this word, dis-ambiguation, in the sense of being given clarity.
In a gospel-sense, dis-ambiguation, would be a prophetic function. The prophetic, as I understand it, is about giving clarity to God’s people in order for them to be faithful to God’s covenant of shalom. It is the removal of ambiguity of the many narratives and powers that shape our lives. If my playfulness with the word dis-ambiguation is close to something like clarity in the sense of the prophetic then Jesus would be the ultimate dis-ambiguator.
Jesus, the Great Dis-ambiguator, would give a message, share words, perform practices, instill prophetic habits, and give cadence to the lives of those around him in a way that would give clarity of sight:
Luke 4:17-21: “And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him (Jesus). And He opened the book, and found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.’
Jesus was a prophet. And like all good prophets he gave people clarity about the place of their lives within the larger picture of God’s world. Jesus showed ‘what was the case’ and ‘what was hoped for’. Jesus was good at giving clarity or removing ambiguity. The ambiguity of the present and the hoped for future. In short, he was the Great Dis-ambiguator.
So…in Jesus’ redemptive wake are those attached to him, the dis-ambiguated. The dis-ambiguated are those, for whom Howard Thurman would say, that are emboldened and empowered to fight against the ’spirit of the time’ or zeitgeist.
To be dis-ambiguated by the gospel is to be gifted with clarity to see how we have been routed by the militancy of ‘sin’, both systemically and personally.
My use of “Jesus and the disambiguated” simply echoes Howard Thurman’s “Jesus and the disinherited”. Thurman, echoing the work of (pre)post-colonialist thinker Franz Fanon’s work (e.g. Wretched of the Earth) on the effects of oppression on the oppressor/oppressed, helped lay the foundation for liberation theology in our North American context.
As an African-american, Thurman, gave us insight into the first century Palestinian, Jesus from Nazareth as a liberator. Thurman’s location as being tied to an oppressed community aided him in having a hermenuetical solidarity with the Jesus community in Roman-occupied Israel. Like most of scripture and the African-american religious tradition, faith tends to be interpreted from the margins…from the bottom-up.
Bringing Fanon and Thurman into our postmodern context, where we are being made more aware of ‘all’ of ‘our’ complicity with anti-human stories and powers, we learn that disambiguation is not just about those in the margins.
The disambiguated can be everyone. ”All” of us are occupied territory of some sort. ”All” of us are like Legion the demoniac Jesus encounters in the gospel story. “We” are all Legion for ‘many’ things plague us and oppress us.
The dis-ambiguated is not limited to those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. We are all oppressor and oppressed. Jesus disambiguates us with the message of salvation…the proclamation of God’s redemptive order, the kingdom of God.
Emerging Profession: Resisting Maintenance of the Spectacle (3)
Under the weather for the past few days. Thanks to everyone who commented on this topic.
How’s the spectacle maintained? and what difference does it make. Since this whole thing is a conversation, not a dissertation, my thoughts will be fluid. In other words, no footnotes.
The spectacle of the CEO-pastor is maintained by constant deference to American Business culture and the legality of non-profit corporations.
We are inundated with conferences on ‘steps’ and ‘principles’ of leadership and management. The culture of North American churches is steeped in the language of corporatism. This is the air we breath. My contention is not that we live in this world. I am more concerned with the spectacle of the CEO-pastor as a possible un-just social relation that simply mirrors the social, political, economic inequities in our society. Where pastors hide under the ‘legality’ or ‘law’ of the CEO. As we learn from the deconstructionist ‘law’ oftentimes hides deeper structural injustices. Or as the apostle Paul once taught us: not the letter of the law but the spirit of the law. The law, it seems, oftentimes follows behind justice. I see the temptation of being swallowed up by narratives of competition, success, and acquisition that are counter the fruits of the Spirit. I am reminded some years ago when two large popular churches based in Atlanta had students in competition for ‘souls’ on their respective campuses. They saw themselves as part of competing camps or corporations striving to get the best part of the ‘soul’ market. Episodes like this are just an expression of the larger issue being discussed.
So…while many pastors point us to the legality of their positions as CEO-pastors there is a greater issue involved than the legality of their positions. The social, political, and economic relation of their positions to their churches and their larger communities.
I do not believe it is enough to point to the ‘legality’ of your ‘right’ to claim yourself a CEO. You must do the hard work of deconstruction and repentance. The hard work to see if your embracing of leadership philosophies from American Business culture are anti-thetical to the upside down kingdom of God.
Is your CEO-leadership style in harmony with the covenantal demands of God’s justice-making convenant? Solidarity with the oppressed, mercy, justice, love, shalom, vulnerability, reconciliation, charity, grace, etc..
Or do you maintain the spectacle of the CEO by hiding behind a mountain of leadership books, conferences, and Constitutional laws?
My Hymnal
Been listening to Nina Simone lately. Tempestuous, prophetic, and blue.
An Emerging Profession: Resisting the maintenance of Spectacle (Part II)
Continuing the conversation.
What do I mean by spectacle?
A thought from philosopher Guy Debord from his book Society of the Spectacle:
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
If you can recall we began this discussion with the example of popular pastor Bishop Eddie Long and his defense of his lifestyle: I am a CEO of a large non-profit multi-national corporation. Therefore ‘my accumulation of large slices of the pie is justified…I’m a CEO!’. The image of CEO gives credence, for Bishop Long and many others, to their accumulation of mass amounts of wealth. The mechanism of the non-profit is the machinery of accumulation. Calling his community a multi-national corporation makes it easier for his church to be the machinery of wealth accumulation.
Makes sense really. I mean could he get these images from the subversive witness of the Christian New Testament? When church leaders in the New Testament accumulated wealth and resources to themselves what happened to it?
Acts 4:32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. 33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. 34 There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35 and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.
Good Evangelical Protestant that I am I cannot help but hold the witness of Scripture as the norm by which I weigh things like this. This habit of accumulation of wealth for distribution to those in the margins is a consistent practice of early Church leadership. There is no amassing of the community’s resources for the apostles personal coffers. Why is that? It could be that the guiding image and metaphor of leadership put down by Jesus is quite different than prominent leadership images today (e.g. CEO, set-man). Jesus used the language of bond-servant and servant as the guiding metaphor and image of community leadership:
Luke 22:24 Now an eager contention arose among them [as to] which of them was considered and reputed to be the greatest.
26 But this is not to be so with you; on the contrary, let him who is the greatest among you become like the youngest, and him who is the chief and leader like one who serves.
27 For who is the greater, the one who reclines at table (the master), or the one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am in your midst as One Who serves.
Jesus taught the apostles that they were not to lead like the benefactors or patrons of their communities. What were the benefactors/patrons? Insights from the political-economy of ancient Rome-dominated Israel give us insight:
Roman warlords, emperors, and other patricians became obscenely wealthy. Not only did they bring boundless booty back from their conquests, they also built up vast personal empires of wealth from the practices of imperialism that made them wealthy and powerful while impoverishing and ruining the Roman citizen-soldiers. (p.24)
From Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder - Richard Horsley
Jesus de-mystified and de-constructed an image that upheld a social arrangement that maintained an imbalance of power in the community. He uses the image of the Patron or Benefactor as his foil or example. These were positions at the top of the political economy of Jesus’ day.
If Jesus were walking with us today (I know he is in his Body in asmuch we are faithful the gospel of the kingdom) which image of rulership would he use to de-mystify and uncover unjust arrangements of power? From the world of politics it would be Congresspersons, Judges, Presidents, and Prime Ministers. From the world of economics it would be Shareholders, CEOs, etc. From the world of religion it would be popes, bishops, apostles, etc. Jesus, I imagine, would demistify and uncover these images and metaphors to show us that behind these images there can and oftentimes is an unjust arrangement of power.
What has this to do with spectacle? Recall that Debord told us that a spectacle is a social relation that wants to appear as a collection of images. Oftentimes in church we want to use the spectacle of the CEO as an acceptable metaphor or image of leadership in the Body.
But how is this image or spectacle of the CEO maintained? If the image or metaphor of pastor-as-CEO is really a social relation what kind of relation do we oftentimes find in our communities when this image is bought wholesale? And how is it maintained?
Tomorrow.
