When Thurgood Marshall learned Clarence "Uncle" Thomas would be taking his seat on the Supreme Court, he remarked, "You had chicken salad. Now you have chicken shit." That's proved to have been an understatement, but it accurately describes the current state of my old musical home.
I spent seven seasons in the choir at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Salt Lake City. It was great being back in a music group, especially one that was decent as opposed to the Turdville Chum Shovellers. And we had good clergy. Tyler Doherty, rector and then also dean. And Holly Huff, rising through the ranks to assistant priest. COVID hit, but we kept burbling along courtesy the powers of the Internet.
But it soon became apparent COVID had hit harder than we knew. When I got it in January 2021, the gift it kept giving me was a torpedoed GI tract and a gut biome I had to rebuild and still have to monitor. That was nothing compared to Tyler. He couldn't get rid of it, and it was sucking the juice out of him. He needed a cane to walk. The services he conducted became fewer, and he had trouble standing for any length of time. By the time he finally threw in the towel, resigned, and went on disability a year ago, he was practically a phantom. His farewell service he had to sit through entirely. Holly stepped into the breach to become priest-in-charge. She was young (barely older than my youngest daughter) and managing a long distance relationship (a draining pain in the ass as I well know), but she held things together. Then they announced the selection of a new dean, her partner finished grad school, and on my birthday she left the cathedral and headed for NYC. Probably with a severe case of burnout and a deep reluctance to return to a second fiddle role, especially since the new boss will be far less than Tyler.
In the meantime they brought in another priest to help Holly and now fill in until the new dean takes over. Steven Smith. In all honesty I don't care much for him, and today's sermon was a good example of why. The Old Testament reading was Jonah preaching in Nineveh, and Smith kept talking about how we know this and we know that with respect to the Book of Jonah. No. We. Don't. What we know is: 1) there likely was a man named Jonah in the 8th Century BCE in the North Kingdom, and he may have been considered a minor prophet and preached at Nineveh; 2) there was no big "come to Yahweh" moment at any point in the Neo-Assyrian Empire; and 3) the Book of Jonah was not written until several centuries later, after the rise of Aramaic. The only people granting any historicity to the Book of Jonah are evangelical "scholars" like Donald Wiseman, i.e. hacks. It's a fairy story, and while we know what it says, we do NOT know anything in it is a true story. Quite the contrary. If I wanted to hear sloppily ascribed Bible stories, I'd go listen to some vangie Bible thumper rant away. It has no place in an Episcopal church.
But then he kept going. Supposedly, the moral of the story is that God does not relent. Right. I would submit the moral of the story, as with so many of the stories in the Bible, is that God can't be bothered to do his goddamned job. Time and again He sends frightened, barely literate bumpkins into harm's way to deliver His message, when He could do it Himself far easier and with greater effect. So why doesn't He? Apparently He's either cruel, lazy, a buffoon, a dick, or some combination thereof. And in a hairy plot twist, God ultimately DOES relent. Because Nineveh sorted itself out, God refuses to destroy it, much to Jonah's chagrin, who holds to the position that Nineveh should get what it has coming. And God ends up having to chastise him about this. And that's why many modern scholars view the Book of Jonah as misinterpreted satire.
And then he kept kept going, into the Gospel reading, the Parable of the Vineyard Owner and the Laborers. Smith's takeaway, which frankly is the standard takeaway, is that the folks who have been saved a long time shouldn't be resentful of those who get saved at the last minute and still receive full salvation because God has infinite love and infinite salvation to go around. Let's set aside for the moment the inevitable consequence of a parade of Musks and other evil rat fuckers receiving salvation on their death beds after lives of leaving nothing but destruction in their wakes, a result we can see as nothing but unjust (contrary to the message of the Bible) and reinforcing of the need to make them pay in THIS world (also contrary to the message of the Bible; fuck it). The real takeaway is that finite systems do not scale to infinity. God may be able to get away with payouts like that, but a vineyard owner can't, and he'd find that out in a fast hurry. The next work day, all the laborers show up at 5, work two hours, and demand a full day's pay. That can't work. Obviously. And contrary to what Smith preached, it isn't about "deserving", it's about earning. The full-day laborers aren't telling the owner he can't pay the part-day laborers whatever; they're telling him he has to pay them more than the part-day laborers because they earned more. This isn't some Golden Ticket for Salvation, where one is all you get because one is all you need. This is their daily bread. So the analogy is silly, worthy of C.S. Lewis, yet people have slurped it up with a big spoon for nearly 2,000 years.
And now we come to the crux of the problem. This parable, and nearly every Bible story, was just an attempt by finite people to explain the infinite acting on the finite world. People who had little if any idea that infinity existed in any sense other than "really effing big". People who had little understanding of how any aspect of reality worked. So their stories, when actually examined, have proved to be wrong or at least silly. Churches should be explaining how these stories can still be considered to explain anything, if in fact they can. This is the intellectual and spiritual heavy lifting that churches should be focused on. And that they avoid every Sunday.
