What do We do When We Gather as a Community?

Chapter 7 - WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WE GATHER AS A COMMUNITY?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

"This has to be said; so let it now be said. Whoever you are, whatever in other respects your life may be, my friend, by ceasing to take part in the public worship of God, as it now is, you have constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: you do not take part in treating God as a fool....."  Soren Kierkegaard 

Christian liturgy should intensify the "cognitive dissonance" between the community of faith and the world surrounding it.
Richard John Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment

Just seven years ago there were a couple of dozen people meeting on Sunday evenings to talk about why we didn't go to church anymore and to consider what we could do with our spiritual instincts.  We read books together about religion and social justice.  We were liberals, we were progressives and so we had little difficulty in setting aside traditional Christian beliefs and embracing a scholarly approach to the Bible and the historical Jesus.

We quickly and easily agreed on the priorities that should be a part of any spiritual community..... working to save the planet, fighting poverty and prejudice, working for the civil rights of minorities, gays and lesbians and immigrants...working for international peace and inter-faith dialogue.  With each essential priority we named, there was always at least a little bit of looking backwards.  We talked about how the churches we had left had disappointed us in these areas.

After several weeks of conversations, one brave lady stood up and asked in a very demanding way, "Why don't we just start our own church?"  A bit of electricity moved through the room but it died out just as quickly when I began to ask my friends what we would do when our new church gathered.

Would we sing hymns?  If so, what kind of songs would we sing?  Would we have corporate prayers?  Would we practice communion, baptism or any other sacramental or ritual observances?  In a group of about 25 people, it became evident that we couldn't get more than three or four to attend any church service that we could design.

This may seem like the least interesting chapter in this book and yet, I assure you, if your intention is to create communities around progressive faith, this will be the highest hurdle you have to jump.  After several months of conversation, we decided that we would give starting a church a try.

Our experience paralleled much of what I have heard about other new church starts.  There was a lot of coming and going in the first two years for all of the reasons we had identified in our pre-church conversations.  There were those who wanted a church that was open and affirming, pro-marriage rights, etc. but who still wanted pretty traditional evangelical theology and practice.  Others were quite firm in their post-theistic views and were quickly disdainful of any religious ritual or use of words such as "worship" or "Lord" that had followed us from our traditional roots.

I have no uniform service suggestion to make here for how progressive churches should gather.  In the end, when we started our little congregation, our first service looked a lot like my last service in a formal denominational worship service.  My theology had evolved but my habits took longer to change and they are, in fact, still changing.

Though we had some interfaith and some no-faith participants from the start, most of us have come from either Catholic or Protestant traditions.  Both consciously and unconsciously, we brought some assumptions with us about what it meant to have a church service.  My liturgy professor at Vanderbilt was a strict, formal, high church Presbyterian who could be aptly described with the words John Steinbeck used to describe Liza Hamilton in "East of Eden" - "...a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken...with a sour Presbyterian mind and code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do."

For twenty-five years I was a liturgical purist, adhering to the formal traditions of the church and rejecting all forms of syncretism with American culture.  I have no excuse for why it took so long for me to realize how absurd this was.  The ancient church seasons and holidays were predicated on the harvests and traditional observances of the cultures that gave birth to them.  The timing of the spring wheat harvest in Palestine, that is the root of the early celebration of Pentecost, should not carry more weight with us than our nation's observance of Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving or even Mothers' Day.

Many popular hymn tunes were not sacred in origin, some were even quite colorful drinking songs in their earliest incarnation.  We owe no fealty to hymns that, though familiar to us, articulate a theology contrary to our own.  The issue is to find some balance in which we give ourselves permission to honor our heritage while being free to grow, learn and change.

One of the great architects of progressive thinking is Bishop John Shelby Spong, who still often appears in public in the clerical collar he wore as an Episcopal bishop.  Marcs Borg, who has done as much to de-mythologize our understanding of the historical Jesus as any author alive today, still speaks in very devotional Christian language.

In our church, we have slowly evolved away from much of the language and formal practice the church traditions of our past.  We never sang the traditional doxology but we did sing a gender inclusive version of it until a member of our church asked, "Why are we singing a Trinitarian song if we don't believe in Trinitarian theology?"  There was no rational explanation beyond the fact that none of us had ever consciously thought about the Trinitarian nature of the doxology.

We have since written new lyrics that are focused on our faith community but the new version doesn't pack the nostalgic punch of the more traditional one and, as some observe, without some vestiges of our former experience, our gatherings do not "feel like church."  Still, the next generation of progressives will not likely want to hold onto theologically sanitized hymns and prayers.  My suspicion is that they will not continue our observances of communion, they will probably not want a hymnal at all, nor will they preserve the cross or the clerical vestments that some of us still need to make our gatherings look and feel enough like what we associate with the practice of faith to stay connected to our community.

We freely blend the reading of scripture with the public reading of passages of philosophy, theology, science or other wisdom sources.  We blend traditional religious music with secular music. And though we primarily come from Christian roots, we now freely blend the literature and conventions of all world religions in our gatherings because we are trying to foster and strengthen our spirituality but not sectarianism.

We may be one of the only progressive churches in the world that begins our Sunday service with a chanted Psalm text.  I have argued in favor of holding onto this because, for me, it marks the movement from ordinary time into a time when the community is gathered for the specific purpose of being the church.  We still have congregational singing and prayers because, we believe, the blending of our voices in unison is a way of both becoming and expressing community.

Our services maintain the traditional four fold movement of formal liturgy:  Gathering, Proclamation, Thanksgiving, Going to Serve though any one of its parts would seem rather different from what you would experience in a Catholic, Episcopal or Lutheran church. We have eschewed the use of such words as "praise" and "worship" because we do not believe that there is an ego deficit Deity enthroned in the clouds who needs, wants or would enjoy our worship and praise.  We strive to avoid religious language that would in any way encourage or institutionalize gender or sexual prejudice, dominance or triumphalism..... which, of course, cuts out most of the hymns we know by heart!

While many progressive churches have given up on offering classes or even including sermons in their services, we have doubled down on both.  We believe that the teaching function of the faith community is central.  We cut a lot of corners to save money but we have invested heavily in guest lecturers and seminars because we are convinced that critical thinking and a well-informed membership is vital to our success.

As the progressive movement was starting to find its legs at the end of the 20th century, two books made an important impression on me.  The first was a little volume by Leander Keck entitled, The Church Confident and the second was Marva Dawn's Reaching Out without Dumbing Down.

Both argued that our gatherings should be theologically rich, instructive, intelligent and that we should strive for excellence.  Keck very specifically decried the lack of beauty in the world and pleaded with us to infuse our gatherings with art, music, poetry and even architecture that can feed our starving souls, indeed, astonish us in a way that changes us, enlarges our vision and awareness.

Though they did not quote the Great Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, I think that both Dawn and Keck would have said "Amen" to Kierkegaard when he praised those who had stopped going to church because in refraining from attending public worship as it was in his day, they were at least avoiding publicly insulting God.

Our public gatherings, by the simple fact that we are gathering, promotes the building of community.  Some of the most important parts of our Sunday mornings take place around the coffee pots and in the church aisles.  If, as St. John of the Cross has said, we pass every other test but fail the love test, we are still failures.  Our gatherings should nurture friendships and break down the walls of indifference and anonymity.  The language we speak to one another should be obviously seasoned with sincere love and a cherishing of one another's humanity.

But what happens between prelude and postlude should include instruction, inspiration and moral challenge.  While much of what happens under steeples in America seems intent upon slowly killing parishioners with boredom, Richard John Neuhaus said that "liturgy should intensify the 'cognitive dissonance' between the community of faith and the world surrounding it."
There are things going on in the world about which we should be shocked, grief stricken, and provoked into action.  Most of those things will never make it into the media but they sure better make it into the liturgy.                                    

On a perfect Sunday, those who attend our gatherings will learn something, experience a sense of awe and wonder, and they will leave this hour feeling more closely connected to one another and more determined to go into the coming week prepared to bear prophetic witness to justice and to serve in sacrificial and meaningful ways to being healing to the world.  We won't get all three every week but if we fail to consistently get one or two of them then we should just quit and turn this place into something more useful, like a used car lot or a flea market.

The modern church should take its prophetic voice in society seriously.  If they lack the courage and insight to be prophetic they should at least be of service in an exemplary manner.  But the old saying that you should either lead, follow or get out of the way applies nowhere more than it applies to churches.

Perhaps the old motto of the French Foreign Legion is not too much of an over statement:  If I falter, push me.  If I stumble, help me up.  If I retreat, shoot me.

What is Church, Synagogue, Mosque or Temple to Us Now?

Chapter 6 - WHAT IS CHURCH, SYNAGOGUE, MOSQUE OR TEMPLE TO US NOW?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

We are all connected
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically
-Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist)

M. Scott Peck, the late psychiatrist and self-help author, wrote a book about creating community called A Different Drum.  It is regrettably dated, having been written in the midst of the Cold War.  However, his chapter on "Patterns of Transformation" is as helpful as anything in his more famous book, The Road Less Traveled.  He describes the movement from childhood chaos into institutional, dogmatic religion followed by a time of questioning and doubt.  The persistent and the fortunate find their way beyond that emptiness into a fourth stage of spiritual evolution, one that is a more mystical approach to faith that offers a synthesis between what can be known and the sense of awe and wonder associated with a spiritual perspective on life.

I hate to brush over this important observation but if you will allow me a very brief summation.  Children are born into a frightening universe full giants and in which they have little or no control over anything that happens to them.  In many instances, they resolve the fears of early childhood through incorporation into a formal, institutional religion that gives them solid answers to the big questions of life and very distinct marching orders about how to live in a way that makes you one of God's best friends and avoids any eternal conflict with the universe.

Those answers, however, don't hold much water when they are critically examined.  Most people do not dismiss them outright but they move their importance way down so that they can remain tacitly Jewish or Christian or Muslim and in that way they hold onto a bit of divine fire insurance without letting institutional religion mess their lives up too much.  If people took traditional Christianity literally, we would see a lot of people selling everything they own, giving the proceeds to the poor and living their lives like ascetic monks.  But we, in fact, rarely see anything other than symbolic devotion to the weightier demands of traditional faith.  Most people hold onto a symbolic fragment of religion, sometimes using it to excuse their own failings and sometimes using it to pass judgment on others but rarely allowing it to change their own lives.

Sadly, most institutions of religion are fairly happy with this arrangement.  They are holding onto members who at least visit now and then, offer some financial support and good will that allows the institutions to continue to exist.  But the more persistent critical thinkers will find the courage to swim against the current of family and society and be entirely dismissive of the truth claims associated with religion.

Most of Northern Europe and the coastal North America have arrived at this third stage.  Middle America is following suit.  That was certainly Scott Peck's own journey through his childhood and evolving awareness in medical school and psychiatric training.  But he was one of the ones who were not willing to simply live in perpetual skeptical individualism.  He pressed on to find a faith that embraced both science and a more mystical awareness of our connectedness to one another and to the universe.

I had the chance to have a brief personal conversation with Peck in the late 1980's.  He advised me to get out of the ministry as soon as I could.  He said, "There is no spirit left in the institutional church.  You need to find a better way to help build community in the world than you can possibly do in a church."  It was not the advice I was expecting from him and now, twenty-five years later, I think that I can say that he was both right and wrong.

I don't have much hope for denominational Christianity or in much of what goes on the institutional mosques, synagogues and churches of the 21st century unless they are willing to undergo radical transformation. They cannot have a future while they remain attached to ancient myths that fly in the face of modern science.

Institutions of religion tend to discourage critical thinking in favor of unquestioning loyalty.  Even many churches that publicly boast of being open to those who doubt or question seem to have a fairly short period of tolerance before some level of conformity to traditional superstition and magic is expected of them.

It is horribly disappointing that so many great minds were presented, early in their lives, with a choice between reason and belief, between religious superstition and science.  Richard Dawkins said that he was raised in the Anglican Church and only left when he was in his mid-teens.  He realized that the theory of evolution presented a more plausible explanation for how the world came to be in its current form.  He not only abandoned faith in favor of science but he has also devoted passionate energy to publishing aggressive attacks on religion, imploring other people to give up on faith entirely.

He said, "There is a new wave of reason sweeping across America, Britain, Europe, Australia, South America, the Middle East and Africa where superstition had a firm hold."  I hope that he is right but I do not believe that wave of reason needs to sweep away all forms of spiritual communities.  In fact, I am depending on that wave of reason to help us to become healthy again.

But Dawkins is not alone in turning his back on religion in favor of rational thought and scientific inquiry.  Recognizing that the religion of our parents and the doctrinal claims of traditional Judaism, Christianity and Islam simply do not stand up to the light of reason, necessarily gives us an experience of loss.  It is not that traditional religion has no value.  In truth, it had tremendous value to us at one point in our lives and we give it up with a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth!

Every day I talk with and receive mail from people who are both hurt and angry that they have been lied to, deceived, manipulated, and made to feel guilt, shame and fear by religious authorities, family members and friends.  And yet, they still somehow want to salvage something of their faith tradition but you can hardly blame them for having trust issues.

It is entirely understandable that when you realize what a mental prison that religious superstition has been that you want to run and have nothing to do with anything that uses the language of church, synagogue, mosque or temple ever again.  At the risk of sounding a bit ironic, I believe that the future of the church is absolutely dependent upon large numbers of people adamantly rejecting and vacating the institutions that have perpetuated these Bronze Age myths.

It is difficult for anyone to receive what progressive faith has to offer until they have the courage to let go of the security blanket of a familiar though out grown religion.  Most of the members of the progressive congregation where I am the pastor spent several years in that "in between" region, having left traditional churches and having little reason to go in search of something that was simultaneously rational and yet open to spiritual perspectives.  Only gradually have my peers allowed themselves to reconsider being a part of an organization that is defined as being a church.

For many of us, the question of "Why bother?" with any kind of church or spiritual community is a question with no clear answer.  When I left denominational ministry, I vowed never to set foot in a church again and I am not entirely free of those sentiments, even as I sit here writing this book.  Institutions of religion have promoted wars, violent oppression of the poor, minorities, women, homosexuals, the divorced and even those who were just free thinkers.  The victims of religion number in the billions, even today, as gay people try to live straight lives to conform to the expectations of their faith community, driving many to suicide, substance abuse, infidelity and violence.

Young men and women have their critical thinking skills curtailed by religious insistence upon forcing themselves to pretend to believe what is clearly not rational.  The young grow up with confused feelings of self-loathing, fear of their own bodies and neurotic guilt for having feelings and appetites that are purely human.  And that is before we even get into the matters of church politics where so many of us have been tortured as employees of the church.

What brought me back to church was a need to be connected.  Humans are pack animals, after all.  We have an existential longing to be connected to one another, even though, after millions of years of evolution, we do not appear to be especially good at doing it.

The last few years that I was in the employ of a traditional church, I found the greatest meaning in the relief work we were doing on the Louisiana coast with Hurricane Katrina victims and among the poor of rural Nicaragua.  When I left parish ministry, I found that I listened to the news with an entirely different perspective.  In the days following Katrina's devastating landfall on the gulf coast, I was able to pull together a team of volunteers, raise financial support and head down to the coast to help.  As an individual, learning of natural disasters produced sorrow and sympathy but left me without any reasonable means of personally responding beyond my meager individual ability to send contributions.

In community, I am able to be involved in what Bruce Cockburn called, "kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight."  I am a part of a volunteer team that takes hot meals to hundreds of the unsheltered homeless of my hometown every week.  On my own, my efforts would be, at best, symbolic and sporadic.  In community, we encourage one another, inspire one another and plan together so that any Thursday or Friday morning of the week our church is found among the most desperately poor of our city.

The comedian, Jon Stewart, has said that "If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies." I am afraid that in most cases, when we are not a part of community, our convictions largely reside in our own heads.  They are not even hobbies.  They are just opinions.
They may be passionately held and expressed opinions but they are much less likely to become meaningful action unless we are united with others of similar convictions.  I am confident that if the congregation where I am now the pastor suddenly ceased to exist that most of the good work we do for the poor of our city would just stop happening.  We remain disciplined in meaningful service only because we remain in contact with one another.  Those who abandon the church may have very similar views and opinions as ours but as loners, they are of little use in actually doing anything.

Secondly, and I must ask for some grace in how I am going to say this.  There are very few things that I can claim as being original to me but I have one theory of psychology that is my own.  And to get the full impact of it, I need to ask for your permission to say it in a rather crass way.  I call it my, "theory of asses."  And it is this:  Everyone will be just as much of an ass as the people around him will allow him to be.  Without close community with others, we can all become pretty self-centered and self-serving jerks.

In the academic world we champion the concept of "peer review."  That is, anything you discover in research or come up with in terms of your own theorizing or creation must be subjected to the critical review of the other professionals in your field.  Peer review is not perfect because sometimes your peers are asses themselves.  But any substantive progress in science, medicine, physics, and, I would argue, even in art and literature, are dependent upon peer review.  We need each other to provoke one another to good deeds, to check one another when our egos or our ideas become irrational.

Being in a faith community keeps us in a kind of peer review.  Buddhism teaches that the greatest of illusions is our sense of separation.  Interesting then that scientists, specifically, physicists are starting to sound like Buddha when they speak of how connected we all are.  I believe that the church has a future because it can be an expression of that great human connection and because, when we are connected we really can change the world for the better and in the process we will inevitably find that we are also being changed for the better.

And that, my friends, is not something that will happen on Twitter or Face Book.  I'm staying in church because I need it and as irritating as I can be, I sense that at times you need me too.  Together we will become better people while we help to give birth to a better world.

Religions are the Languages of Faith

Chapter 5         "Religions are the Languages of Faith"
Roger Ray, D.Min.

Mother, Mother, Mother!  Everyone foolishly assumes that his clock alone tells correct time.  Christians claim to possess exclusive truth... countless varieties of Hindus insist that their sect, no matter how small and insignificant, expresses the ultimate position.  Devout Muslims maintain that Koranic revelation supersedes all others.  The entire world is being driven insane by this single phrase:  "My religion alone is true."  O Mother, you have shown me that no clock is entirely accurate.  Only the transcendent sun of knowledge remains on time.  Who can make a system from Divine Mystery?  But if any sincere practitioner, within whatever culture or religion, prays, meditates with great devotion and commitment to Truth alone, Your Grace will flood his mind and heart, O Mother.  His particular sacred tradition will be opened and illuminated.  He will reach the one goal of spiritual evolution.  Mother, Mother, Mother!  How I long to pray with sincere Christians in their churches and to bow and prostrate with devoted Muslims in their mosques!  All religions are glorious!       Ramakrishna (a 19th Century Indian Hindu mystic)

Garrison Keillor had a regular skit on his radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, about a guy named Bob who was starting his own religion.  He called it "Bobism" explaining that he would have named it after his wife, Judy, but the name "Judaism" is already taken.

Of course, religions don't really start that way. Jesus didn't mean to start a new religion.  He was, at most, a reformer of Judaism.  Even Islam, which claims to have a very specific beginning with a single founder, was, in any honest assessment, a reform movement that blended existing traditions.
The major world religions could all be compared to a mighty river that might be able to be traced to a specific original source but by the time it is a real religion, it will have drawn from hundreds and thousands of contributing sources.  It is safe to say that the Buddha would not recognize modern Buddhism any more than Jesus would recognize Christianity or Moses would recognize Judaism.  Muhammad would recognize a lot of the language of Islam but you can bet that he would disown most modern practitioners.

Several influences factor into the birth of a religion.  Once human beings became self-aware they began to search for the meaning of their lives.  They tended to personify the great mysteries and forces of life.  The earth became a mother, the sun and sky a father.  They gave the oceans and rivers, the four winds and even the seasons of the year, names and characters to make them into gods.

Every culture's religion became the repository of the wisdom and rules that seemed necessary for them to survive.  Some parts of the kosher dietary laws of ancient Judaism had to do with their beliefs about what was healthy to eat and what was not good for you.  These traditions became ways that they distinguished themselves from surrounding rival tribes.

The Jews preserved their identity through generations specifically by keeping certain different rules about what you could wear, how to cut your hair and other parts of your body and by what you could and could not eat. Their ritual religious practices and sacred texts identified them as being separate and apart from the Hittites, Philistines and Canaanites. And, you have to take your hat off to them because it isn't hard to find a Jewish community almost anywhere in the world but you just don't hear much out of the Hittites and Philistines anymore.
Religions evolve to meet the needs of a changing culture.  As nomadic tribes became settled agrarian cultures, their rituals and life style rules changed as well.  Monogamy became important, not because the Creator of the universe has a vested interest in who is sleeping with whom but because the tribes needed to know who owned which farm and which vineyard.  Property followed patriarchal lines of inheritance.  Therefore a man could have lots of wives but a woman could only have one husband.

As the nation became entirely settled and the land divided such that having huge families was economically unwise, the practice of polygamy also went away.  Ancient restrictions against homosexuality reinforced the need to have more babies so that you would always have an army to defend the nation against competing tribes.  Religious fundamentalism, devoted to religious values and practices that have long outlived their usefulness, becomes a liability to the world rather than a help.

In the gospels, Jesus condemns divorce and I suspect at that time what he said protected women from what was very abusive divorce practices in that era.  Women could be cast off in favor of a new wife and they would likely get no property, support or even access to their children.  The early church threw a cloak of protection around women in the first century but in our time, that condemnation of divorce has more often been used to force women to stay in abusive relationships under the entirely neurotic belief that God would condemn them to hell if they became unwilling to suffer any more beatings.

There is a line in that old hymn, "Once to Every Man and Nation," that says, "time makes ancient good uncouth."
Like the tradition of men always having to pick up the tab for a dinner date, what purpose does that serve?  Okay, maybe that was too personal but you get my point.

Moses didn't write the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.  There may have been a prophetic liberator in Israel's ancient past but their religious texts were an evolving collection of wisdom and tradition that served an ancient tribal religious sect.  Jesus didn't say very much of what is attributed to him in the gospels but the historical Jesus became the bulletin board onto which the early church posted their closely held beliefs and values.

As such, every major religion of the world becomes a kind of language in which we tell our sacred stories, express our values and pass along our morals.  You would not say that French is right and German is wrong.  There are things to like and things not to like about any language but while one may be better than another for certain purposes, you cannot say that one entire language is just inherently better than another language, any more than you would say that one kind of music or one song is right and all others are wrong.  You have your favorite songs and there are probably kinds of music that you can't stand but it doesn't take anything away from you if I have a different favorite song or if you can't stand the style of music that I like the best.

As I have previously pointed out, one of the real weaknesses of monotheism is its inherent investment in the belief that any one religion is so right that all other religions must be wrong.  One of the things we really need to learn from eastern religious traditions is the willingness to learn from all wisdom sources without having to be exclusively loyal to any one of them.

My Christian faith has been enhanced by my formal study of Islam and Judaism, of Buddhism and Hinduism.  I find most of Mormon religious texts to be absolutely hilariously absurd but I envy the often very loving integrity of their families. I think that Christian fundamentalists are often an oppressive danger to society but I can also see that their strict pietism has been salvific for some people who could not otherwise control their appetites for drugs, alcohol or sex.

I find the exclusivism of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam to be anathema.  I think that all forms of sectarianism is counter to healthy spirituality but that does not mean that it is helpful to condemn these religious traditions.  As Madeline Albright argued in her book, "The Mighty and the Almighty," we need to work to encourage the better, the healthier and the more helpful aspects within each religion.

It is true that nearly all international terrorists right now claim an aspect of Muslim faith.  But Islam is not an inherently violent religion.  In fact, it can be a source of inspiration for both international peace and individual charity towards the poor.  Christianity doesn't have to be misogynistic, homophobic, militaristic or even in bed with out of control capitalism and the political right.  Christianity can be a source of compassion, mercy, forgiveness, peace and passion for justice.

Religious tolerance should not be mistaken for tolerance of abusive, oppressive and neurotic religion.  We do well to confront, reject, correct and to refuse to tolerate any religion that perpetuates gender or racial prejudice, that seeks to convert, control or dominate those who do not adhere to their sectarian views.  We should not just passively accept that Catholics discriminate against women and Baptists discriminate against gays and lesbians.
No one should use religion as a means of legitimating their abusive prejudices any more than being a member of the KKK would make it acceptable to be a racist.

A persuasive case can be made that most religions have their origin in counter cultural movements intended to defend and improve the lives of the very poor and oppressed.  You can certainly see how Muhammad was attempting to rescue his people from chaotic and violent circumstances.  Jesus specifically sought out the poor and outcast of a people whose land was occupied by a militaristic empire.  In as much as the Moses story is rooted in some history, he was a liberator of slaves, leading them from bondage to independence.

Each world religion was eventually coopted by governments and institutions of religion that used people's faith to control them but there remains in each faith the roots of slave rebellion, a yearning for liberty, self-determination and meaningful living. That is our real spiritual inheritance and that is what progressive faith must restore to adherents of all world religions.  There is no reason not to learn from one another just as there is no defense for trying to convert one another.

No Muslim needs to become a Christian, they just need to be a better Muslim.  And no Christian needs to become a Jew, they just need to be a healthy and open minded Christian.  Every religion has things both in creed and history for which repentance is the only appropriate response but each also contains the seeds of hope for a better future.  We progressives are not rejecting our religious heritage, we're just deciding that we are going to get healthy.

Which Jesus do We Hold Most Dear?

Chapter 4- WHICH JESUS DO WE HOLD MOST DEAR?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."  -Carl Sagan

Not very many years go by without a new popular book about Jesus dominating the market.  Some are better than others and though each would seem to have some redeeming qualities, none are, it is fair to say, either perfect nor will they prove to be "the last word" on the topic.  Reza Aslan has received a lot of media attention in the spring and summer of 2013 following the release of his book, Zealot.  Though Aslan now self identifies as a Muslim and he has certainly gained a lot of notoriety for his publication of the history of Islam in No God but God, he presents a fairly devotional though non-divine view of the historical Jesus. In some ways, progressive Christians will find a natural ally in Muslim thinkers who affirmed over a millennia ago that Jesus was a prophet but insisted that it was blasphemous to call him God.  We will not find many practicing Muslims who do not try to work Jesus into being a prophet of a supernatural theistic God but there should still be some good common ground for conversation between progressive Christians and Muslim scholars in the rejection of incarnational theology.

At present, while Zealot is giving Aslan a forum to quote New Testament gospel passages as if they were reliable reports of what Jesus actually said, there is an even more radical group attempting to support the charge that Jesus never existed.  They say that there wasn't even a village of Nazareth in first century Palestine and that the entire Jesus narrative was made up by second century Roman aristocrats to create a religion that would calm down the peasants.

We cannot realistically just brush the skeptics aside.  There is not much in the written historical record about Jesus and there is no physical evidence at all.  Travelers to modern day Jericho may be shown a Sycamore tree that tour guides will tell them is the actual tree that Zacchaeus climbed up into in the gospel account of the encounter between Zacchaeus and Jesus (Luke 19).  Etchings in the pavement in Jerusalem or even an old building dubbed the "upper room" are used to thrill tourists with the prospect of walking where Jesus walked or drawing near to historical evidence of gospel accounts.  For more on this I can only refer you to proverb mistakenly attributed to P. T. Barnum:  There is a sucker born every minute.  But most of us have, at one time or another, fallen prey to being suckers for a good Jesus story because we so wanted to believe that what our pastors, priests, Sunday School teachers, parents and peers had told us was true.

Though I suspect that there was a village known as Nazareth that was a poor Jewish suburb of Sephoris, a much larger city of blended Greek and Palestinian people, it is impossible to prove from currently extant written records or archaeologically certain finds.  I am disinclined to jump off the cliff with the skeptics and say that Jesus is a literary creation but honesty compels us to acknowledge that most of the Jesus tradition is a matter of conjecture, tradition and false attribution.

More than a century of sincere and scholarly research into the historical Jesus has resulted in several quite plausible images of this Palestinian religious figure and some scholars would even object to the idea that he was religious.  Most of what we know about Jesus we know from the four gospels in the New Testament, all of which were written to accomplish a theological goal and none of which give us eye-witness or contemporary reports.

Possibly our best support for the claim that Jesus even existed comes from the hand of the self-appointed apostle, Paul.  Paul never met Jesus and did not seem to have much interest in the actual history of Jesus, the person.  However, Paul does report having gone to Jerusalem and met with the family and close friends of Jesus with whom Paul was, essentially, a competitor.  By his own reporting, his relationship with them was more than a little strained and he was at considerable pains to make it clear that he didn't learn anything from them and was not indebted to those who actually knew the Jesus traditions first-hand for anything that Paul preached.  We could wish that he was a lot more curious and a lot less arrogant but we have to depend on the Paul we have and not the Paul we might wish for.  Almost by accident, Paul gives us enough evidence to assume that Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, lived, taught and made a life long impression on some followers.

It is not a stretch to say that were it not for Paul most of us would never have heard of Jesus.  The Jesus tradition may have been just a brief blip on the radar of history had Paul not taken his name and sketchy historical background to use as the language set for the mystery religion Paul taught that is a synthesis of Jewish thought with Greek salvation and mystery religions.  What we can say with confidence is that the message that was central to Paul and the message that was central to Jesus have little or nothing to do with one another.

It is evident that Jesus had a following that included even at least one of his brothers and all of us who have brothers can testify to the fact that this was no small feat.  What Jesus said and did was sufficiently profound and meaningful to cause a following to remain intact after he was dead.  So there were those who repeated what he said, told stories about what he did but those traditions come down to us only through obscure non-canonical sources such as the fragmentary sayings source, The Gospel of Thomas and a few other pieces of gnostic writings and the four gospels of the New Testament.

Paul, as the first and most popular writer in the Christian tradition, undoubtedly influenced how all four canonical gospels were written.  Mark is the oldest of the four gospels and each of the others were largely dependent on Mark's story line.
Twenty years after the facts, Mark tells a martyr's tale beautifully, memorably and persuasively.  Mark's narrative contains no virgin birth and no resurrection appearances.  Matthew and Luke, written about twenty years later add contradictory virgin birth narratives and totally different resurrection appearances to the theological evolution of the Jesus tradition.  When another generation has passed, the gospel attributed to John takes the final step in the evolution of Jesus into being, literally, the eternally existent God.

Paul, the first known author to write about the resurrection of Jesus, describes the event in 1 Corinthians 15 as a visionary event in which his own encounter with the resurrected Jesus was just like the experiences of Peter, James, John and the other Jerusalem witnesses.  Paul never mentions an empty tomb and would not have believed that the body of Jesus of Nazareth had been transformed into the spiritual Christ of Paul's theology.  Mark's gospel gives us an empty tomb narrative but not a resurrection appearance.  Matthew and Luke add resurrection appearances that are highly symbolic and that do not agree with one another.  John adds to the resurrection appearance traditions in even higher Christological terms, which makes John the favorite of those who want a very divine Jesus.  Traditional Christianity has tended to view all of the gospels through the lens of our least credible ancient witness, John.

Since we know almost nothing about the historical Jesus and we since we acknowledge that there is no incarnation, substitutionary death or creedal path into a glorious afterlife, why is Jesus still important to us?  The unsettling but honest answer is that Jesus is only important to us if we choose to gift him with importance.  There is no supernatural theistic deity demanding a blood sacrifice to save us from eternal damnation.  Progressives then see Jesus as being one of the many historical characters around whose name a body of spiritual teachings has been collected.  We know the names of many others and there are thousands more who have contributed to human spiritual evolution whose names we do not know.  The religion that claims the Jesus tradition has been numerically successful for political and sociological reasons as much as for the actual content of the teachings.

Liberated from a controlling ecclesiological authority or the darkness of pre-modern superstitions, we recognize that what draws us to a spiritual life is a desire for truth, meaning and insight.  Now the guiding issue is:  does the Jesus tradition have something to offer to the 21st century and if it does, just what is it?

Of the major academic trends in historical Jesus studies, several paths do not lead us to a Jesus that offers much to us.  If Jesus was only a reformer of first century Judaism then while he may have some historical interest to us, we would never be inclined to quote him as a moral authority in our lives.  Even those who try to temper theological excesses with more realistic historical boundaries often end up trying to preserve a certain fealty to the institutional church's need for a supernatural theistic god who intervenes in human history.  I appreciate the helpful steps offered to the evolution of progressive faith by those authors who helped to build a bridge from traditional Christianity to a more progressive faith but I cannot convince myself that there is a future for Christianity that asks post modern thinkers to accept the unverifiable truth claims of traditional orthodoxy.

Extraordinary claims, as Carl Sagan has said, demand extraordinary evidence and there is no credible evidence for heaven, hell, a Trinity, souls, angels, demons or a personal God who is out there somewhere.  The claim that the sacrifice of Jesus is the necessary and only way to a right relationship with God is the most extraordinary of claims and there is no evidence that such an absurd assertion has the slightest veracity.

While gospels written long after Jesus death by people who had never met him record accounts of miraculous events all of the way from changing water into wine to restoring life to the dead, we have no reason to take any of these accounts to be factual.  We can, however, find a great deal of moral insight and even personal inspiration when we read them for what they are, messages of spiritual instruction.

There are good reasons to conclude that the Jesus of history was interested in speaking only to his own Galilean Jewish constituents.  We, however, are only interested in how the Jesus tradition applies to every nation and race of modern society.  A credible case can be made that the Jesus of history may have even been something of a racist but the Jesus tradition we choose to extoll teaches universal harmony.

The historical Jesus may or may not have believed in an immanent apocalyptic end of history.  If he did, he was wrong.  Either way, we don't believe in an apocalypse of divine creation but we are faced with potential forms of apocalypse from warfare, disease, pollution or economic collapse and so any spiritual insight we can gain to help us avoid the real potential of apocalypse rather than the imaginary apocalypse of religious superstition is going to be of tremendous value to us.

The Jesus of the later church, once thoroughly turned into the spiritual Christ of salvation from hell myths, has been useful to both institutional religion and to empire building governments but, for progressives, we can safely say that is the mental and emotional prison from which we have declared ourselves to now be liberated.

There are three things that I propose keep us tethered to Jesus.  In order of ascending importance I suggest that we continue to talk about Jesus because the Christian traditions help us to understand ourselves through rituals around birth, coming of age, marriage, illness and death and in the processes of living within families and societies.  Secondly, as I will discuss further in a later chapter, a religion gives us a language set of stories and ideas that allow us to communicate with one another about meaningful living.  For many of us, the Christian scriptures and traditions form an irreplaceable base of mutual understanding.

Finally, and most importantly, between the stripped down view of the historical Jesus and the exalted presentation of the magical Christ, there is a Jesus who stands up in history as a loving advocate of the poor, sick and vulnerable who challenges the power and abuse of the rich and of the/any empire.

The canonical gospels are written when the Roman Empire has won its battle for dominance of the Jews and, so far as they were concerned, the known universe.  Still, we find in subtle ways, a distinct anti-empire thread in how they tell the story.

The exaggerated titles heaped up on Jesus in the evolving christologies of Mark to Matthew and Luke and finally John, can be seen as a distinct alternative to the empire and their enforced emperor worship.  The titles of "savior," "son of god," and "lord," were all given to the Roman Caesar.  Even the tradition of virgin birth was given not only to powerful emperors but also to influential philosophers.

There is a distinct and undeniable way in which the Jesus tradition is offered as an alternative to cowering before wealth and power.  There was a point at which saying that Jesus is Lord was a way of saying that the Caesar is not lord.
In our day, the coercion, deception, manipulation and abuse of governments and corporations demands an alternative.  A renewed devotion to the truth is the best antidote to the misdirection of corporate media.  A spiritual sense of connection to the poor, to war refugees, the uninsured, the uneducated and the hopeless is the best response we can give to an economic system that continues to transfer the resources that should be fairly spread among the people of the world into the hands of a smaller and smaller super elite.

Jesus, as a teacher of radical compassion and self sacrificing devotion to the truth continues to be symbol of the kind of spiritual depth we must claim as our own in order to transform the world in ways that brings good news the poor and as a bulwark against the abuses of the powerful.