The Communion Sunday at the First Baptist Church of
the City of Washington DC brought up some issues that I might call “The
Pharisee Problem”.
The sermon, by Dr, Stan Hastey, “Unwanted Fame”,
starting off from Mark 1:28, where Jesus became controversial without his
trying to be so. In fact, according to
the sermon, Jesus asked the disciples not to repeat all the stories about the
miracles too soon, because his time to deal with political violence had not yet
come. To a modern person, this sounds
like self-censorship in the face of threats from a combative political enemy,
definitely applicable today. Sound like
the fallout of the “Cartoon Crisis”?
Hastey also mentioned the author Harper Lee, whose one
novel “to Kill a Mockingbird” became the
award winning film with Gregory Peck in 1962, a film shown now regularly in
high school (as it was when I worked as a sub),
Lee often worked with the more visible Truman Capote, especially on “In
Cold Blood”, the film of which I saw on my first pass during Army Basic in
Columbia, SC in the spring of 1968. Lee,
he said, did not seek limelight. Neither
did Jesus; it came to him. But even in a
low-tech world, rumors could go viral quickly.
The epistle, 1 Corinthians 8:1-13, gets closer to the
issue of gratuitous pursuit and distribution of knowledge. Although the passage seems to deal with
idolatry, it can be extended and understood as referring to “upward affiliation”
and the inability or disinterest in deal with people “where they are”, and in
looking at the context of the “knowledge” being made available to them. That’s closer to the “much speaking”
issue. Curiously, that’s a big theme in
the new Turkish film “Winter Sleeper” that I reviewed on the movies blog today.
It was also a factor in the major breakdown when I worked as a substitute teacher,
and personal materials I had placed on the Web were found and interpreted way
out of the intended context, in relation to other materials.
There is a bit of a "schizoid" moral paradox, in accumulating knowledge for its own sake, but in disdaining most of the people with to whom you could teach it because of their supposed personal flaws -- as in that film I saw yesterday.
One can understand why dress codes used to be so
important in business: to provide a
certain context for customers to feel comfortable with new technology or
products with which they had been familiar in the past. Remember how EDS was?
Update: Feb. 3, 2014
Harper Lee will publish a "second" (actually earlier) novel soon, "Go Set a Watchman", Vox story here.
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