By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Later Dad will tell me why he believes it is right for Ali to remain Muslim. He will invite me into his room and sit me on the edge of the bed, his computer across his lap, and read a line from his journal: 

Ali has an old faith and an old country and we have a new faith and new country. If we were to convert all of the Muslims, that would be the end of us. Their culture is too old, we would be the ones that were assimilated. We might not even know it but we would become Islam like Christianity became Rome. 

If you live in Utah, then you have no excuse: get yourself to Writ & Vision in Provo tonight at 6:00 for the launch of Josh Sabey’s new book, Ali: The Iraqi. If you don’t live in Utah, you may still be able to catch a flight, or start driving, or just move there. It will be worth it. This book is that good.

Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.” He answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? (Matthew 15:1-3. NRSV)

Both Matthew and Mark tell the story of the dirty hands. It is one of the most baffling conversations between Jesus and a group of interlocutors—in this case, a group of Pharisees—who challenge the disciples in the name of the dominant religion. Both Gospel writers take us quickly through the conversation because we should already have a sense of the basic idea—which is that (pace Confucius) performing correct rituals is not the same as being a good person. It is not even close.

Growing up in a very orthodox, orthoprax LDS family in the 90s and 00s, I experienced Easter as a rather awkward holiday. We had no Easter bunny, Easter baskets, or anything else that would distract our focus from Jesus; our few activities (egg dyeing, egg hunt) were on Saturday, prefaced by how they were Not The Reason for Easter. 

And so broke Easter morning. We ate our colorful eggs reverently. We got ready for church, sometimes in new clothes (thanks to my mom), but usually not. When there were Easter programs at church, they often focused on Joseph Smith and the Restoration. After church, we stayed in church clothes (like every Sunday), watched church videos (like every Sunday) and got ready for a big dinner (like every Sunday). We’d eat ham instead of pot roast, on fancy china instead of Sunday dishes. We ate a spring-themed dessert (courtesy of my mom) and, for family scripture study, we paused wherever we were in the Standard Works to read the Easter story. 

Conceptually, Easter was A Big Deal – the holiest day of the year, as we reminded each other – our focus solemnly dedicated to “what Jesus did for us.” But that was both as far as it went and what we did every Sunday. So, in practice, Easter was just another Sunday, except with a little extra guilt, a different scripture story, and an extra fork and spoon at each place setting.

As it is Easter, I am returning, as I have many times before, to what is, in my opinion, the finest, most powerful, and most Christian personal essay which Mormon-Americana has yet produced: Eugene England’s “Easter Weekend.” It was originally printed in the Spring 1988 issue of Dialogue, and so is 35 years old this Easter season. You can read the whole thing here. I will include some excerpts below.

Gene has been dead for over 20 years, but his legacy lives on. I didn’t know him well, though there are many members of the BCC community who did. But whether you knew him well or only a little or not at all, we all can re-read his words, and look forward to someday hearing his voice again.

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One hundred and seventy nine years ago, on April 7, 1844, Joseph Smith delivered a sermon to commemorate the death of King Follett, a close friend of his who died a month earlier in a construction accident. Smith spoke for two and a half hours to an audience of around 20,000 people. No exact transcription of the discourse remains, but several extensive reports, mixing quotation, paraphrase, and commentary, survived.

About two years ago, I wrote a piece for Square Two Journal in which I advocated for a move away from military/war imagery in LDS religious discourse. I suggested that even though the Abrahamic tradition has always included such language, the LDS church’s contemporary message is one of “healing for all of creation that is grounded in God’s love” and that “military/war language detracts from what we are actually called to do as Christians generally and as the ‘true and living church’ specifically.” I continue to believe that.

We are rapidly approaching the two-year anniversary of the announcement of the Vienna temple: the 4th of April 2021. I remember the day well. We were all watching conference from home during those pandemic times, so I wasn’t able to see the immediate reactions of my ward, but I’m sure audible gasps echoed around living rooms all around the country. The excitement was felt as far away as North America. People I hadn’t heard from in years—mostly former missionaries I had served with in the Austria Vienna mission in the mid-1990s but also family members and friends—reached out to share felicitations on an occasion that seemed to validate a lot of hard work by a lot of people over decades.

As a missionary, I recall members in a Vienna suburb showing us a map where they thought the temple was going to be built, even labeling it “temple square” (Tempelplatz). I don’t recall how they had determined that that would be the place. It was just an empty field in an unremarkable part of the country, far enough from Vienna that you could afford to build a house and raise a family but not so far that you couldn’t commute into the city for work. There were already a number of member families living there, so maybe someone had purchased the lot and intended to donate it to the church when the time was ripe. See below for details:

At any rate, a temple is something members have been working towards for a very long time.

We’ve all been there. You are sitting in some Sunday School or Auxiliary lesson and some chucklehead goes on and on about how they are so obedient that if God asked them to kill someone, they would. They think they are the height of righteousness because they are chomping at the bit to get some blood on their hands. These people are psychopaths; avoid them if possible. But sometimes they influence people, so here are a few things to help.

I normally avoid the “horizontal harmony” model of New Testament commentary—analysis that takes pieces out of each gospel and strings them together into a single narrative that supposedly tells a single story. That’s just not how narratives work. Each gospel was created to be a complete story in its own right. Each evangelist had different doctrinal and rhetorical objectives, and we miss these when we smush them all together or treat the New Testament like a jigsaw puzzle with nicely interlocking pieces spread across four different boxes.

Guest author Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s most recent work has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Portland Review, CALYX, Tinderbox Poetry, and Anti-Heroin Chic, is the recipient of the 2022 Banyan Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the author of Stunt Double and serves as the current Poetry Editor for Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought. Read more of her work at elizabethcgarcia.wordpress.com.

My four-year-old daughter is leaning her whole body over my arm from the back seat, waiting to be dropped off at preschool, reaching to press the “skip” button on the music for the tenth time—a need she’s developed in my habit of allowing her to choose the music in order to persuade her to go to school at all. I’m hungry, eager to get a bite after drop-off, having chosen to exercise, shower, and put on makeup this morning instead of eat (because all my experience with mothering three kids has taught me that to skip my workout will lead to late afternoon burnout, tipping the domino that leads to a depressed and grumpy mommy at bedtime)—and my daughter’s body pressing in on me suddenly evokes a barrage of irritation at all the ways in which I’m expected—by them, by whatever idealized image I have in my head—to go without, to put myself second, in order to mother them. That when I metaphorically raise my hand to protest (“Could you please fill my glass of ice water at the dinner table after I’ve laid it with homemade hot food?”), it’s like I’m suddenly asking for an appendage.

Last Friday our ward celebrated the Relief Society’s 181st anniversary with an ambitious program involving all the organizations: the Relief Society prepared a play in three acts recounting the founding; the Primary was tasked with sewing bonnets for all the women; the Young Women and Young Men decorated the cultural hall; the bishopric set up the sound reinforcement; and the elders quorum was asked to cater dinner in accordance with guidance provided by the Relief Society.

The central feature of the dinner menu was to be roast chicken. There were a lot of moving parts for the dinner, so I decided to delegate the side dishes and deserts to members of the quorum and took responsibility for the main dish myself.

A week before the Relief Society’s gala event, I placed an order for 20 roast chickens at the grocery store deli just down the street from the church to be ready for pickup a half hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin. The same deli had taken care of twice as many chickens for our Christmas party, so I figured they were up to the task. Deli staff were happy to take my order, and when I followed up in person on Wednesday they gave me two thumbs up—everything was on track.

“It is not possible for man to sever the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the other frie; that must be the Angels Ministery at the end of mortall things.”—John Milton, Aeroipagetica

The Kingdom of God is the ultimate ineffable concept: a kind of society that has never existed before and that contradicts every established theory of social or political development. Even its name, “kingdom,” implies a human domination structure that is completely alien to the thing described. To inspire his followers with the possibilities of this society, Jesus must first find ways to describe something for which his audience has no point of reference. This is the central narrative problem of the New Testament: how to eff the ineffable.

The solution to this problem comes in the form of the “Kingdom Parables,” a subset of New Testament parables designed to illustrate some element of the Kingdom. The thirteenth chapter of Matthew is the mother lode of Kingdom Parables. In this one chapter, Jesus gives eight parables, fully interprets two of them, and explains the reasons that he speaks in parables in the first place.

“CHRISTIANA began to knock . . . she knocked and knocked again. But instead of any that answered, they all thought that they heard as if a dog came barking upon them. A dog, and a great one too; and this made the women and children afraid. Nor durst they for awhile to knock any more, for fear the mastiff should fly upon them. . . . . Knock they durst not, for fear of the dog; go back they durst not, for fear that the keeper of that gate should espy them as they so went, and should be offended with them. At last they thought of knocking again, and knocked more vehemently than they did at the first. Then said the keeper of the gate, “Who is there? —John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II

Even by the standards of 1678, the first volume of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is hostile to women. When the hero, Christian, discovers that he is among the elect, he turns his back on his wife and sets out to find salvation on his own. Though The Pilgrim’s Progress went on to become the bestselling book of the century (and of the next two centuries after that), readers expressed great dismay over the fate of Christian’s wife.

In the ninth chapter of Matthew, Jesus seems to have gotten really fed up with people asking him why he eats with publicans and sinners. Here’s how we can tell. After he gives his standard answer to the question, he gives the guys who asked it a reading assignment:

And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners? But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Matt 9:10-13, KJV)

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You may know that the LDS Young Woman’s program was way cooler in the early 20th century than it has been during the lifetime of anyone alive today. But you probably didn’t know how cool it was. Mikayla Thatcher is here with Beehive Girl to tell you that it was amazing beyond your wildest dreams.

In our church, we don’t do confession. Nor do we offer absolution. The church has made the decision to not be an arbiter of your stance before god. However, we do have worthiness interviews.

“A church is not a museum for the saints—it is a hospital for sinners.”
― Abigail Van Buren

Much of America’s national theology in the 20th century came from syndicated advice columns, including the sentence quoted above. Though the phrase has been attributed to Saint Augustine, Saint John Chrysostom, and many others, its first recorded use actually occurred in a 1964 column by Dear Abby A couple calling themselves only “Sinners” wrote Abby to say that they had been living together without the benefit of clergy for 25 years and did not feel worthy to go to church. “The very fact that you are troubled by the way you have been living proves that you are worthy,” Abby wrote. “A church is not a museum for the saints—it is a hospital for sinners.”

It would not have been out of place coming from Augustine or Chrysostom, though, because the sentiment (factoring out the modern origins of both hospitals and museums) comes directly from Jesus. When the Pharisees saw Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners, they (quite logically) asked his disciples, “why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus heard them and said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Matt 9:11-12, NRSV).

For my money, the best joke in the New Testament is the one about the camel going through the eye of the needle (Matt 19:24). This is not a slam dunk. The bit about forgiving your brother 70 x 7 times is real hoot too (Matt 18:22), as is John the Baptist’s bit about God making children of Abraham out of rocks (Matt 3:9). But the camel through the eye of the needle joke gets all five stars. It is a first rate joke.

Here’s how you can tell that it is a good joke; for 2000 years, serious Christians with limited senses of humor have been making themselves look ridiculous by not getting it and trying to explain it away as a serious statement

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
—Matthew 13:13-16

The first thing we must grapple with in interpreting the “salt and light” passage from the Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus does not speak in the form of a command. He does not say, “be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.” He does not even make it a suggestion, like, “it would be really cool if you guys could be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.” There is nothing in the grammar to suggest that he is instructing us to be salt or light at all.

Click here for Eric Huntsman’s translations of New Testament passages created specifically for readers of this book.

Latter-day Saints have always been allergic to liturgy. This allergy has nothing to do with doctrine or even church policy. It is just our inheritance from the pragmatic Yankee Puritans and low-church English immigrants who first converted to Mormonism and created our worship patterns. For these Christians, there were very few things more important than not looking too much like Catholics.

Without any liturgical tradition, however, Latter-day Saints find themselves separated from much of the Christian world at times like the Advent season and Holy Week—the extended periods of devotion and reflection that surround the holidays of Christmas and Easter. We often lack knowledge about basic things that most Christians take for granted And we deprive ourselves of both the structure and the opportunities for reflection that come with a regular liturgical calendar. [Read more…]

In yesterday’s post, I said that it simply didn’t matter whether or not John’s story about Jesus turning water to wine actually occurred because historical fact is not the kind of truth that John was telling. I also suggested that nobody in John’s day would have considered the question important because biography and documented history were not genres that people in the ancient world understood. These, of course, seem like the kind of flippant and faithless statement that academics are always making in order to tear down people’s faith. Like Korihor. Since that is actually not what I was trying to do, I wanted to do a follow-up.