"My portion is God... I will hope in him"

As previously mentioned, I am reading following a program to read the Bible in a year. Which program, you might ask? This one. Apart from the fact that it includes what we Catholics call the deuterocanonical books, there is nothing special about it. I also don't mind sharing that I am using the Jerusalem Bible, a translation I like very much and one I haven't used in far too long. I didn't start right on New Year's Day. Thus far, I have read Genesis, Job, Exodus, and Leviticus. I am currently about two-thirds of the way through the Book of Numbers.

I bring this up not brag. After all, committing to read about three chapters of scripture a day isn't really that big a deal. I bring it up to point out something that people who read the Bible regularly discover over and over. What we discover is that every time you read a passage or a book of the Bible, you discover something that you previously overlooked and you make connections you did not previously make.

Today I experienced the latter: making a connection I have not previously made. The particular verse that served as my prompt was Numbers 18:20. Referring to the Levites, the descendants of Aaron, Israel's priestly tribe, God told Aaron:

You shall have no inheritance in their land, no portion of it among them shall be yours. It is I who will be your portion and your inheritance among the sons of Israel

It is the last sentence that struck me today.

The connection I made was to 1 Peter 2:9-10:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people set apart to sing the praises of God who called you of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you not a people at all and now you are the People of God; once you were outside the mercy and now you have been given mercy (Jerusalem Bible- italics in the original)

Indeed, when one considers baptism and confirmation, we explicitly believe, as per the rites, that one so initiated is priest, prophet, and royalty. You see, the priesthood of all the baptized is not some new-fangled idea thought up in the heat of the Reformation. It is a genuine recovery and understanding of the genuinely sacramental nature of these sacred rites.

According to Nicholas Afanasiev, an Orthodox theologian whose work exerted an ennormous influence on the Second Vatican Council, because of confirmation, there are no unordained members of the Church. In English, this prompts a neologism: laics. This term is to go alongside clerics.

While this may be a bit of a digression, I feel inclined to share that yesterday I listened to a conversation between Russell Moore and Rick Warren. A good part of their conversation was dedicated to the Southern Baptist Convention's decision to kick out Saddle Back Church, founded by Warren in 1980. Warren then served as senior pastor there for 43 years.

What led the Southern Baptist Convention to "disaffiliate" Saddle Back was the decision of that body of believers to lay hands on and give the title of "pastor" to women who serve that community in various ways. Even so, the role of lead or senior pastor is still reserved for men. I was utterly fascinated by Warren's explanation of both the decision to include women as "clerics" (though I think Baptists would not use that term) as well as his decision to appeal Saddle Back's disaffiliation at the Southern Baptists' summer convention.

What I found most convincing was Warren's assertion, rooted in scripture- though there is an exegetical question I'd like to ask him about his interpretation of the Great Commission in Matthew 28- was that the Church cannot fulfill Jesus' command to go, make disciples, teach, and baptize with one hand tied behind our back. The one hand that is tied is not fully availing the Church and the world of the gifts of women.

But here is the real connection, rooted in the juxtaposition of the verse from Numbers with the two verses for 1 Peter: because we are a priestly people, it is the Lord who is our inheritance. Therefore, we do not seek the land, or a land. It strikes me as pretty good case against not only Christian nationalism but all forms of Christian dominionism. Is this to say that Christians should disengage, refusing to be full-fledged citizens of the nations in which we live? No!

Saint Justin Martyr's First Apology still serves as a very good exposition on how Christians are to live in the world. In Chapter IX of this work, addressed to the Roman emperor, Justin wrote: "And when you hear that we look for a kingdom, you suppose, without making any inquiry, that we speak of a human kingdom; whereas we speak of that which is with God, as appears also from the confession of their faith made by those who are charged with being Christians... For if we looked for a human kingdom, we should also deny our Christ, that we might not be slain; and we should strive to escape detection, that we might obtain what we expect."

Whether you like Pope Benedict XVI or not, in his first encyclical, Deus Cartias Est, he did a wonderful job of explaining how easy it is to reduce the Gospel in this way and why it is important not to do it.

Someone I follow on Twitter has been piecing together a case for her thesis that both Christian Nationalists and those who seek to politicize the Gospel in the opposite direction are engaging in different forms of Christian dominionism. In other words, people who assert that being a Christian boils down to holding the "correct" political opinions seek to turn the Gospel into something exclusively this-worldly. Even when stated in such a general and unspecific way, given the divisions among Christians, it seems clear that this is a thesis worth exploring.

As a Catholic, I align myself with Catholic Social Teaching. This makes for political difficulties because it is easy to see that neither party is in harmony with convinctions that arise from the magisterium's modern social teaching that started with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and finds its most recent expression in Pope Francis' Fratelli Tutti. Politically, I think Christians should be baffling to non-Christians on both the right and the left.

I end by invoking another scriptural verse: "My portion is [God]," says my soul, "and so I will hope in him" (Lamentations 3:24- Jerusalem Bible)