The Heavenly Banquet

In this episode Charlotte Elia and Chad Rhodes discuss the tools and perspectives used by Origen, Cassian, and Augustine in the interpretation of scripture.

Chad: The thing that impresses me most and has really kind of changed the way I think about the scriptures is this idea that you see in the early church that in coming to the scriptures I can encounter the risen Christ, the person versus an idea that I learn about Jesus in scripture, which is certainly true obviously, but I encounter the living, risen Christ in it.

Charlotte: I think all three of these thinkers would look at the historical-critical method and say, “Okay, that’s fine, but it’s not enough. It’s lacking something.” It’s lacking faith seeking understanding, ultimately. I mean, because it’s really a set of tools you can apply to any text, ancient, modern, etc, but we’re coming with different questions as people of faith, of what claims those texts or Christ within those texts have on us.
Charlotte Elia offers this sermon on Matthew 22:1-14, commonly referred to as the Parable of the Wedding Feast.

“This is a parable that like Jesus’ teachings, a parable that like Jesus’ life, shows the absurdity, the lies, the ultimate ineffectiveness of supposed power. Power seeks only to maintain power, and power is maintained through cruelty, manipulation, violence. Power serves itself, but love offers itself, empties itself in service. And love can’t be overcome while power is often its own undoing.”

This sermon was preached by Charlotte Elia at Chester Presbyterian Church in Chester, Virginia on Sunday, October 15, 2023.
Join Charlotte Elia for a time of guided contemplation and centering prayer for spiritual rest and renewal. Put on some comfy clothes, settle onto a mat or bed, and give your breath, your body, and yourself to God.

During our practice you will be invited to focus on an intention, for healing or wholeness, for yourself or someone else, something that you want to release to God’s care. You might take a moment to think about an intention before your begin. You don’t need to search your mind for something. If nothing presents itself, you may simply choose the intention of rest for yourself.

If you should fall asleep during our practice, that’s okay. Don’t fight that. It’s what your body wants. It’s what your mind wants. It’s what God wants for you. You are safe here in this space, in this sanctuary. Receive the gift of peace, of rest, that God grants you.

“You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” -Augustine
On this episode Charlotte Elia and Chad Rhodes discuss the relationship between faith and science. What threats might they pose to each other? Could they possibly enhance one another? Are there even ways that science might bring us to a deeper understanding of faith? And what might we do when faith and science seemingly come into conflict?

Charlotte: These folks are in a position of protecting a particular reading of scripture because it has become their god. That’s the thing that is at risk, right?

Chad: The scriptures have become god, yeah.

Charlotte: Like we’ve talked before about this confusion between the word of God in scripture and the Word of God in Jesus, and there’s not a one-to-one relationship. Not only does that seem to exist, but it seems to exist around a particular reading of scripture, so that what science is threatening is the whole faith itself, so that’s why there’s this kind of crusade energy against it. And I think the distinction there between the way that those folks are reading scripture and the way that we’re reading scripture is that as science informs my worldview more and more through what I learn or through new discoveries, then I’m realizing that the thing that I might be modifying is my own understanding of scripture, again with all of those variables that I’m bringing to the table, and one of those variables is always how much I know about the world, right? And that’s okay for me because the whole scheme isn’t going to fall apart. It’s the one little piece of it that I was grasping in a particular way and now have a different handle on because I’m trying to fit these pieces in some congruent way. But it’s not going to threaten my idea of the existence of God because I haven’t hinged everything on my one particular understanding of a piece of scripture.

I wish this didn’t sound as condescending as it’s going to, but here it goes: One of the things that I think ultimately is so sad about folks who are rejecting science in favor of a scientific reading of scripture is that they put themselves in a very defensive position and that, I think, is antithetical to our faith, to be clutching onto a particular idea, whatever it is, but being closed to one another, to the world around us, ultimately to the Holy Spirit. And it’s not just defensive; it’s a defensiveness that manifests itself in a very combative way often.

Chad: And it can be so rigid that instead of adjusting, it just breaks.

Charlotte: Exactly. Exactly. You took that right out of our podcast description, I think.

Chad: That’s right. I actually thought about that when it occurred to me.
In this episode Charlotte Elia and Chad Rhodes discuss creation care. Why have so many Christian absolved themselves from the dominion mandate or chosen to interpret it in a destructive way? What’s lost in relationship to the faith when parts of creation are marred or destroyed? And why aren’t we in constant lament for the destruction of our planet?

Charlotte: Just the idea that creation is a reflection of the Creator… It just has to be. I mean, we think about that with art and other things. You know, like, this is an expression of somebody’s personality, of somebody’s mind, right? And you want, of our great artists and musicians, you want the fullest expression of their art to understand that person and to understand their art in context. There’s this kind of skepticism, on one hand, around that saying, “Oh, no, then you’re worshipping creation,” or something. I think we’re all smart enough to distinguish between the two, but there is something all around us that’s reflecting the Creator’s mind, the Creator’s face, within everything because that’s who made it! That’s just almost too simplistic, but destroying any piece of that is destroying part of the reflection. It’s primary source material that we’re throwing out because it’s inconvenient or somehow not worth saving, but it’s God’s handiwork.
In this episode Charlotte Elia and Chad Rhodes discuss apokatastasis, a form of Christian universalism prevalent in the early centuries of the faith. What are some primary features of apokatastasis? Why was it championed by so many leading figures in the early church? Charlotte and Chad consider these questions and others as they exam a more hopeful and loving account of Christian faith.

Chad: They don’t jettison the whole notion of hell, (well, hell of course isn’t actually in the Bible), the notion of an age of punishment. The thing is the punishment is cathartic, versus purely retributive, because God is always trying to separate good from evil. And so what happens is, if you enter the next age and you’re still, as Gregory of Nyssa would put it, welded to evil, you’re going to be separated from that, partly because you will be drawn to the good, which you’ll have a clearer apprehension of, but that will be painful because you’ve welded your nature to evil… It’s a process of purification. I think the caricature of universalism is that I walk into heaven and there’s my grandmother, who was a saint, and Hitler playing checkers together. It’s like everybody dies and goes to heaven. If you’re welded to evil, you’re going to be separated from that, and that’s going to be painful. It’s going to cause suffering.

Charlotte: So there’s still real incentive for me to do as much of that work as possible now in this life, as well as incentive for me to help others do as much of that work, so it’s not an antinomianism.

Chad: Right. Exactly. Yeah.
In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia discuss recent actions by the Southern Baptist Convention to further suppress women. They then look at the scripture most often used to justify this misogyny and consider some of the absurd non-biblical arguments raised.

Chad: Here’s the thing: Paul is writing letters; he doesn’t see himself as writing scripture. And at times Paul makes explicit that what he is saying is his own position, not the Lord’s. You know, this is not coming from the Lord. In 1 Corinthians 7:12 he said, “This is from me, not from the Lord.” And I think the question we have to ask ourselves is does he qualify that every time he gives his opinion? Probably not. And so I think the onus of responsibility falls on us to discern if what he is saying is from the Lord or his own opinion. And the example I always give is which sounds more divinely inspired to you? “In Christ,” Pauls says this, “In Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek.” Okay? Or, “I don’t let women speak in church because Eve was deceived and Adam wasn’t?” I mean, clearly to me the more inspired statement is “In Christ we are one.” This idea that the way that we carve up humanity in groups is- it causes division, and it’s about power. It has nothing to do with the kingdom.
In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia discuss a recent church service in Nuremberg, Germany that was organized and led by ChatGPT, and that leads them to muse on the nature of preaching, our capacity for creativity, and what it means to be human.

Chad: I mean, the computer is just a program. I don’t know if people need to hear that. It’s encryption all the way down, turtles all the way down. There’s no understanding there. There’s no agency, desire, will, goals unless it’s programmed into it obviously. But not the desire and will, the goals are obviously going to be programmed into it. But it doesn’t have agency, and it’s not aware of its own experience in the world.

Charlotte: Maybe that’s the angle, that love of neighbor presumes love of self. Love of self presumes self-awareness.

Chad: Yeah, the ability to be aware of my own experience and then equate the experience of others with something similar, you know?

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Charlotte: But they’re only returning what we’re putting into them, either through those prompts or the information that we’ve fed to them and through the programs that we’ve written for them. And in that way, they actually reflect more on us as their creator than as some other entity.
In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia talk about Jesus’ sayings in Matthew and Luke regarding the “sign of Jonah.” Here they revisit the story of Jonah, investigate how it illuminates Jesus’ work, ponder how Jesus might have understood Jonah’s story, and ask what bearing these comparisons have on the work of biblical interpretation.

Charlotte: What I love about Jesus’ interpretation of Jonah, shall we say, is he’s kind of doing some midrash here. He’s filling in some blanks in the book of Jonah… You wonder why would you have been so taken with this person, this Jonah, that you would have responded.

Chad: Unless you saw him come out of a fish.

Charlotte: Unless you either saw him or that word got around. And that word probably would have traveled faster than Jonah, wouldn’t it have? I mean, that word gets on the trade routes before Jonah can figure out his way to get to Nineveh. So I like to think that’s what Jesus is doing, is filling in this part of the tradition… It’s certainly not the effectiveness of Jonah’s speech. Probably more compelling than Jonah’s speech is “That’s that guy what got thrown in the water and the storm stopped, was in a whale and got vomited on a beach. I’m curious what he thinks about things.”

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Charlotte: From the beginning, literally in the beginning, Genesis 1:1, it’s a story about us and the world, us and creation, not as just actors on a stage of creation. And part of our responsibility then of caring for creation is to be mindful of all of our impact on creation, the fact that everything that we do impacts creation.
In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia chat a bit about the doctrine of the Trinity, what they most value there, some challenges it presents, and their favorite analogies of the Trinity.

Chad: There’s something about the idea of this perfect identity of diversity in unity that hits a lot of high notes for me. I mean, the creation reflects that. We live in a universe that is a diverse unity, that’s a nice reflection of the creator. And I think there are moral implications, which I think you’ve already touched on, but this idea that any efforts toward homogeneity or uniformity or pitting one group against another because of inherent differences does not reflect the nature of God who is inherently diverse and one. What reflects the divine nature is diversity working together in love as one. The diversity isn’t lost in that process.

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Charlotte: I think that anytime we cut ourselves off from groups of people, we’re cutting ourselves off from knowledge of God.