Human Rites

The Power of Rituals, Habits, and Sacraments

Dru Johnson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780802876003
• eBook ISBN: 9781467452625
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

What are we doing when we gather around the sacraments— or when we make the same breakfast every morning? Embodying rituals, says Dru Johnson. And until we understand what we're doing and why, we won't know how these rituals work, what they mean, or how we might adapt them.

In  Human Rites Johnson considers the concept of ritual as seen in Scripture and its role in shaping our thinking. He colorfully illustrates both the mundane and the sacred rituals that penetrate all of life, offering not only a helpful introduction to rituals but also a framework for understanding them. As he unpacks how rituals pervade every area of our lives, Johnson suggests biblical ways to focus our use of rituals, habits, and sacraments so that we can see the world more truly through them.

RITUALS IN CHRISTIAN RELIGION

Chapter 7

Getting Some Distance from Our Sacraments

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

When I was a teenager in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my friends and I came across a freakish scene on a walk through the woods. As dusk turned to darkness, we stumbled into a small pocket cleared in the woods. In this clearing, a fire pit held the charred remains of animal bones. Chickens, most likely. The bones were scattered all around, spines twisted unnaturally. Below those bones, someone had scratched a pentagram in the dirt.

We interpreted this as the remnants of an occult animal sacrifice. Remember the 1980s, when everyone was terrified of secret satanic societies stealing children and sacrificing them? Though I wasn’t a Christian at the time, Bible Belt culture had wielded sufficient influence over my views of the occult.

So, what had we come across? Was it a sacrament of underground devil-worshipers? Or other teenagers pranking on people walking in the woods? (If it was a prank, kudos to whoever you were.)

Whether sacrifice or stunt, the scene displayed my preconceptions about animal sacrifice: darkness, evil, and secretive ceremonies. It’s worth mentioning, though, that Roman citizens accused early Christians of cannibalism. Rumors spread about Christians killing and eating human babies in secret meetings, which didn’t endear Romans to those new underground believers.

What’s so wrong with chicken-killing rituals in the woods? After all, Christians pretend to eat their god and drink his blood. Jesus even scares away people with the prospect of such a practice. (If you don’t believe me, read 6:47–66 in John’s Gospel.) You see my point. Even those rituals we don’t consider dark and flimsy, those rituals we hold in high regard, are ones we need to consider and truly understand.

Familiar Rites? Rethinking Our Rituals

What we think about Christian sacraments affects how we practice them. If we believe that the waters of baptism wash away the spiritual impurities of sin, then we might start to think about baptism as a regular practice rather than a once-in-a-lifetime act.

Ancient Jewish sects living in Qumran on the Dead Sea did precisely this, incorporating baptisms into their daily rituals. Folks don’t usually wander through the Hebrew Bible long enough to realize that baptism descends from the Torah’s instructions. Baptism isn’t a New Testament ritual. Not only is baptism not new to the New Testament; it also gets strategically changed and re-utilized within the Hebrew Bible itself.

From the historical washing commands related to the Tabernacle (Exod. 30:18), to the command to wash the bodies of unclean lepers after they were healed (Lev. 14:8), to Elisha’s command to Naaman to baptize himself in a river in order to be healed of leprosy (2 Kings 5), the Hebrew Bible offers baptismal rituals that are adapted to particular circumstances.

Then, after the time of the biblical prophets (between 400 BCE to the birth of Jesus), Jewish traditions re-ritualized baptism in several ways, the most popular being a Sabbath ritual called mikveh baptism, where Jews descended stairs into stone and plaster baths and then came back up ritually clean.

That Jewish innovation of mikveh baptism was then re-ritualized for different purposes by the Dead Sea communities, John the Baptist, John in his baptism of Jesus at the Jordan River, Jesus in the baptism of his followers, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit after Pentecost.

In seeking to understand baptism, we can now see that decoding its symbols won’t get us very far. Even within the Bible, those symbols have been reinvested with new meaning. Taking this approach to baptism would be like understanding graduation ceremonies by decoding the symbology of the robes, mortar-board hats, diplomas, speeches, and photo shoots. Just try to think of what graduation robes actually symbolize. (Hint: they descend from seminary rituals.)

If we want to understand the rituals we perform, we must grapple with their lineage, maybe even more than with their possible symbolic meanings. Jesus’s strategic modifications of baptism in the New Testament stood in a long line of other forms of baptism, each strategically putting its own twist on previous water rituals. And he didn’t just alter baptism; he took an animal sacrifice and made it into the Lord’s Supper.

In order to gain a fresh perspective, it’s helpful to distance ourselves from our current relationship with the ritual. (No, it’s not a breakup—just spending some time apart.) To get to the foundation of baptism, let’s first look at the foundation of ritual itself. What are the non-negotiable waypoints of ritual in Scripture? What does a good ritual life look like? How do we know when we’ve gone overboard or off-kilter? In this chapter we’ll begin that exploration and keep asking defining questions in the final two chapters.

Two Rituals: One Strange and One Commonplace

To begin our task of distancing, let’s consider two ritual meals. The first may seem strange, and for good reason. The second will be more familiar (at least to those of us in Europe and the Americas).

The Nacirema Ritual

The Nacirema are a nonindigenous tribe still found throughout the Americas. For their primary religious ritual, the Nacirema gather together in a single room once a week. When the people are seated in orderly rows, the leader stands in front of them and commends them to worship their deities, a band of gods connected to an ancient religion from Southwest Asia. Though they sing songs together in honor of these gods, their emphasis on one particular god is unmistakable. The traditional writings of these people include biographies which indicate that the primary god was a charismatic leader, like Hinduism’s Krishna, with a large cult following in Southwest Asia.

After finishing their singing and other recitations, the group listens to the leader while he explains the current import of the primitive teachings and encourages those gathered to imitate the cult’s ancient leader. Up to this point, the practices seem mostly like large-group activities in their focus on singing, recitation, and listening. However, the memorial ritual at the end of the ceremony draws everyone into direct and intimate participation. It’s difficult to observe this ritual without noting how bizarre the practice appears. Based on the primary god’s instruction, members act out an incestuous cannibalistic ritual within the group.

Despite the ambiguous roots of the practice, spouses call each other “brother” or “sister” while they consume ritual substances as if they were human flesh and blood. They rip pieces from the ritual flesh and imbibe cups of the ritual blood alongside it. Even some children of the Nacirema participate in the rite. After concluding the ceremony and receiving the leader’s blessing, they depart to their homes.

The Congregational Barbeque

Elsewhere in the world, a congregation gathers at a public park in the center of town. As in many such public spaces, barbeque grills and benches indicate the communal and festive nature of the park. Because this community has a shared history, they celebrate with a large picnic for the whole congregation once a year. Each family is responsible for bringing their own food, but they enjoy it together. They begin with a prayer, led by the head shepherd of the group, in which they thank God for everything he has given them, specifically citing how good he has been to them in the past.

Because this town has a special appreciation for such gatherings, the barbeque grills are enormous, able to grill an entire cow if the celebrants so desire. They prepare their food together for several hours, and as dusk gives way to evening, they all eat together as one giant family. The mood is festive, and everyone eats and overeats until they can consume no more. Finally, they depart to their homes.

By now you’ve probably guessed what I’m doing here. The Nacirema are not an actual tribe. “Nacirema” is “American” spelled backwards. It’s an old trick that anthropologists have used to help people think more critically about their own culture, to distance them from that with which they are intimately familiar. The cannibalistic ritual of the Nacirema is usually practiced in church and called Communion, the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper. It’s a ritual that stems from an odd first-century Jewish-Christian practice with which many of us are acquainted.

Let the apparent oddness of the rite sink in for a moment. Communion requires a human sacrifice—Jesus of Nazareth—and includes symbolic cannibalism. Why do people drink wine meant to represent blood? Why do they pretend bread is flesh? If one can see no clear purpose for such a rite, Communion seems like one of the world’s most bizarre religious rituals.

Meanwhile, the congregational barbeque is actually a live animal sacrifice practiced on the top of Mount Gerizim in the Palestinian territories of modern-day Israel. The Samaritan people still practice the ancient Hebrew sacrifice of Passover, among other Torah sacrifices, near their temple ruins on the mountain above Nablus (ancient Shechem in the Bible).

When It All Finally Made Sense to Me

The Samaritan Passover, just like the Passover in Exodus, is a rite that requires actual animal sacrifice. In April of 2013, I was able to observe the Pesach sacrifice in Kiryat Luza, the small, modern town on top of Mount Gerizim. Several hundred of the world’s remaining Samaritan people live next to the ruins of their temple and continue to follow the Samaritan version of Moses’s law.

I lived in Jerusalem for a time, investigating the role of rituals in the Bible, so it seemed logical to me to witness a living version of Old Testament animal sacrifice, to splash the sacrificial blood of reality on my imaginings of biblical rituals. A Brazilian friend, bunking with our family at the time, came with me.

On top of Mount Gerizim, dusk had settled in as the spectators thickened around the fenced-off area in the center of town. Surrounded by the typical Israeli concrete-and-stone apartment buildings, the center of Kiryat Luza has an open space, what Europeans would call a plaza. This plaza, however, is of recent vintage: it’s a large concrete pad with a basketball court off to one side. On the edge of the plaza, six concrete-coated fire pits sink deep into the ground. In each pit, an orange glow pulses, and flames lick up toward the opening.

That night, thousands of people lined the fenced-off area or climbed on top of the roofs around the plaza. I could feel the mood of the crowd: they were ready for the drama of the killing. As the men of the Samaritan homes brought in the herd of lambs and the high priest made an entrance, the anticipation intensified.

The high priest led the fathers and brothers in recited prayers before preparing the sacrifices. My friend, also an Old Testament professor, and I commented back and forth on what we saw. We tried to compare the men’s actions to the Torah’s scarce instructions about the Passover sacrifice.

After the prayers ended, the men of each house brought their lamb to the trough that collected the sacrificial blood. As a group, we all intuited when the ritual killing began. Stillness took over. But, despite craning our necks and straining for a view, none of us could see the killing.

The mystery of the sacrifice created by this curtain of Samaritans crowding around only made the strangeness of this seemingly dark practice more pronounced. The killing space was narrow, and we could only see the commotion of the outermost ring of participants. Presumably the butchering occurred in the innermost ring. No flow of blood horrified us, and we spied no animals struggling to live.

Eventually, men posted themselves along the fence at cleaning stations with water spigots. They hosed down the bodies of the de-fleeced lambs, wiping down every animal with their hands.

Then each man took handfuls of coarse salt from a paper bag and rubbed it into the flesh of the animals. As we witnessed this slathering of salt on the lambs, my Brazilian companion turned to me, bewildered. “Churrasco!” he exclaimed. (“Churrasco” basically means “barbeque,” and Brazilians barbeque fine cuts of meat by coating them with coarse salt before turning them slowly over a fire.) Clearly, neither of us had previously thought of Passover this way.

As soon as the word “churrasco” left my friend’s mouth, it quelled my apprehension of occult sacrifice and the uneasy feeling of sinister darkness that came with it. And then it all made sense to me. This isn’t a secret chicken-killing cult in the woods; it’s a giant barbeque! It’s a meal. Even more, it’s a festival. I practice similar meals in my native culture, too. This isn’t cryptic or strange at all.

With that realization, the fourth wall shattered; I was no longer a lingering spectator. Like a movie character who turns to the camera and asks, “Now, how about you?,” I felt that the whole bloody ritual was suddenly familiar, intimate.

The mismatch of my expected feelings and the reality that I now witnessed and understood surprised me. On top of Mount Gerizim, I discovered some helpful ways to understand sacrifice and ritual, but, more importantly, I discovered the contours of my artificial boundaries.

What should a person like me expect when crossing over time and religion into a world fluent in ancient and cultic sacrifice? I found myself watching strangely normal human practices exaggerated and specially arranged for this day. After all, every meal with meat that I’ve ever eaten has also required an animal, sacrificed and butchered on my behalf.

Wesley Bergen observes the irony of our aversion to animal sacrifice: “In our society, . . . we reac...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by David Dark
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Know Your Rites
• Our Ritualed World
• Our Ritual Guides
• When Rites Go Wrong
• Rituals in Christian Religion
• Coda
• Appendix: Examples of a Ritual Inventory
• Suggested Reading