• II Samuel 6:-15,12b-19

Having taken Jerusalem from the Canaanites and established it as the new capital of a united Israel, King David further enhances its status by bringing the “ark of God” to the new “city of David.”  Its arrival is marked by a huge assembly, a ritual sacrifice, accompanied by singing and instruments.  Then, “David danced before the Lord with all his might.”  (David’s wife, Michal, Saul’s daughter, sees the wild display and “despises” David.)  When the ark arrives at the sanctuary tent David had constructed, he offered a burnt sacrifice, blessed the people and distributed food to every “man and woman,”

• Psalm 24

After an introductory allusion to God as Creator, the psalmist uses question/response to compose a song for worshipers approaching “the holy place,” “the mount of the Lord.”  “Who shall go,”  a cantor intones; “those who seek the Lord’s presence,” all respond.  “Who is the king of glory?”  “The Lord valiant in battle,” comes the response.

OR

• Amos 7:7-15

The prophet Amos has a vivid revelation.  He sees God holding a plumb line against a wall.  Amos explains it is a sign that the Lord has said: “the sanctuaries of Israel shall be desolate,” and the Lord will initiate war against the King, Jeroboam.  The High Priest in Bethel, Amaziah, reports the words of Amos to the King, who tells Amos to go away, “earn your bread” in rival Judah.  Amos eschews the title “prophet,” and says he is only following the Lord’s direction: “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”

• Psalm 85:8-13

Because God had previously reversed God’s-Self and forgiven the peoples’ sins, the psalmist prays for another reversal.  God will again bestow kindness and truth, justice and peace, bounty and justice.

• Ephesians 1:3-14

The “letter” to the church in Ephesus, although attributed to Paul, is generally regarded as a later iteration of some Pauline themes, but with a distinctive tone.  The writer takes great comfort and satisfaction that he and his readers are among the chosen recipients of Christ’s redemption, forgiveness and the “riches of his grace.”  This is all part of a “plan” he sees.

• Mark 6:14-29

The writer of the gospel the church attributes to Mark interrupts his narrative about the life, ministry and fate of Jesus to record the death of John the Baptizer.  (Commentators note that contemporary histories which mention John vary from this account, especially Josephus.)  Taken as narrative, not as history, Mark is dealing with the complex relationship between John the Baptizer and his disciples and Jesus and his followers; confusion seems to exist between the followers as well as  the general reader.  He links the fate of John with the twisted King Herod and his bizarre family.  At a birthday party Herod threw for himself, the King offers to grant any wish to his daughter.  “I want you to give me the head of John the Baptizer on a platter,” she tells her father.  She gets her wish.  John’s disciples come to take the body and place it in a tomb.

Despite a few attempts (such as Ephesians) to conceptualize and ‘spiritualize’ the texts, the greater majority of the biblical narratives are brimming with human passion, ricocheting emotions, bawdy and sinister behavior, blood and gore with occasional acts of extravagant generosity and faithfulness:

If we permit ourselves, we can imagine David in a frenzied dance, sweat flying off of him as he twists and writhes before the ark of God.  The narrator tells us that this wild display causes David’s wife to “despise” him. 

We can also easily imagine the outstretched hands and perhaps some pushing and shoving among the crowds to get the free food the King is giving away.

Even  measured against the accounts in contemporary accounts of the neurotic and brutal Herod, the story Mark tells is amazing and disgusting.  A father, with a peculiar affection for his daughter, grants her gruesome wish at his birthday party.

Why is it so easily forgotten that most of the biblical narratives are about people being people, with all the good and the bad that entails?  What is so “spiritual” about these stories?

Jean-Luc Nancy’s short (less than 200 pages) book, entitled Corpus is already being labeled “canonical.”  Since its publication in French in 2006 and English in 2008, its influence has grown significantly.  In it Nancy writes:

Corpus: a body is a collection of pieces, bits, members, zones, states, functions.  Heads, hands and cartilage, burnings, smoothness, spurts, sleep, digestion, goose-bumps, excitation, breathing, digesting, reproducing, mending, saliva, synovia, twists, cramps, and beauty spots.  Its a collection of collections, a corpus corporum, whose unity remains a question for itself.”  “Nothing is more singular that the sensuous, erotic affective discharge that certain bodies produce in us (or inversely the difference that certain others leave us).  A certain build, a certain thinness, a certain hair color, a bearing, a spacing of the eyes, a shoulder’s shape or movement, a chin, fingers, almost nothing, only an accent, a wrinkly, an irreplaceable feature…

And here is where Nancy makes his point.  All this earthiness, this humanness, this complex of  sounds, looks, smells and feelings is “not the body’s soul, but its spirit.” (p.155)

With the skill and grace of a brilliant surgeon, Nancy maneuvers among the remains of Platonic and (Platonized) Christianity and their heir– Descartes– and returns to an understanding of humanity, human spirit, human experience that,  just incidentally, seems to have recaptured something crucial in biblical narratives.  He urges us to reconsider the Greek concept of a “soul” awkwardly and uncomfortably “incarnated” in a body and the “ugly dualism” it inexorably sets up, which haunts Western assumptions, even remaining  inchoate, to the present. (p.133)   Having deconstructed Descartes, we can now declare, Nancy insists: 

“There is no longer a subject, ‘back behind’.  There’s only a self-sensing, as a relation to self as outside.  And that’s what’s being oneself is.” (p.132)

Which means, Nancy writes:

“The body’s simply a soul.  A soul, wrinkled, fat or dry, hairy or callous, rough, supple, cracking, gracious, flatulent, iridescent, pearly, daubed with paint, wrapped in muslin, or camouflaged in khaki, multicolored, covered with grease, wounds, warts.  The soul is an an accordion, a trumpet, the belly of a viola.” (p.152)

When we read in the biblical narratives about  sweating, dancing Kings, wives who “despise” their husbands, sociopaths who grant sick wishes to their daughters at birthday parties, we are not reading some disembodied “spiritual” narrative, we are reading a flesh and blood narrative.  Deeply flawed people do horrible tings, sometimes, but do glorious things after an encounter with the jarring grace of the living God.  (David’s whole story, which we are following this summer in the first alternative reading in the lectionary, is as full and complete example as there is.)  We see ourselves in these narratives, warts and all.  We see ourselves, too, in the occasional act of generosity that advances God’s justice in the world.  A passionate God who can intimidate on one occasion and nearly overwhelm with grace on another is at the center of these narratives.  That is the real plot of these biblical narratives.  The body does not uncomfortably “house a soul;” the body is the heart, the soul the spirit.  It can engage in pure evil or staggering generosity, sometimes in the same person!  The wild-card in the game is the God — and God’s seemingly random, generous grace– who is anything but predictable.