WHICH JESUS DO WE HOLD MOST DEAR?

WHICH JESUS DO WE HOLD MOST DEAR?  Dr. Roger Ray

This lecture will be delivered in various locations in England during the first two weeks of May 2018. 

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  Carl Sagan

Who was your favorite James Bond in the 007 series? Who was your favorite Dr. Who? Or your favorite Sherlock Holmes? You have a single character, who first came to life on the pages of a book, a product of an author’s imagination, but in the hands of different actors and directors, we seem to get several different kinds of secret agents, detectives, and whatever Dr. Who is.

You can multiply that diversity by thousands when it comes to talking about Jesus of Nazareth. We have several iterations of Catholic Jesus’, several Orthodox, and Protestants are all over the board. Even when a movie maker has several million dollars and an office building full of writers, when they try to put Jesus on the screen, we hardly recognize them.

The incomprehensibly popular 2004 movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” focused on the suffering of the son of God. It was remarkably violent and in the course of 2 hours he appeared to lose about 18 gallons of blood. The script combined biblical images with obscure Catholic mythology and was brought together by an anti-Semitic fanatic who, for reasons that confuse me, had a big impact on Americans.

In 1988 the very controversial “Last Temptation of Christ,” gave us a much more human and apparenty mentally unstable and rather lusty view of Jesus.

The one that stands out as being more remarkable to me si one you can lay a certain amount of claim to yourselves since Tim Rice attended St Albans school for at least a part of his education. Rice wrote the lyrics to the 1970’s rock opera and I still find it hard to believe that he had not studied any of the historical critical thinking about Jesus that was available at that time because he dis a nearly miraculous job of setting the Jesus story in a almost human context that was so different from the Jesus that I had heard about in my rural Kentucky protestant church that it was like setting my skull on fire.

There is a proverb that says, “Marriage is not a word, it is a sentence.” Similarly, we can say that “Jesus” is not a singular name or a single person, but we have to honsetly acknowledge that there are thousands if not millions of perceptions of Jesus that evolved very quickly from the first century Jewish reformer into the stained glass, son of God, who died to set us free from the bonds of hell and to give us hope of eternity in heaven.

We are no longer dependent upon the creeds and doctrines of the church to tell us what we must believe about Jesus. For two hundred years, a lot of very earnest historians, linguists, theologians, and literary critics have been trying to get at the real Jesus.

When we try to discover the Jesus who actually lived in the first half of the first century in Palestine, we find that there trail has gone pretty cold. There are those who have leveled 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.  Even though 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. But we cannot depend upon Paul to tell us much about that Jesus.

So, when I ask, “Which Jesus do we hold dear?” I am acknowledging that there are several views of Jesus that are of varying degrees of historical credibility.

A few years ago, a forensic anthropologist, working from the skull of a first century Galilean, gave us this image of what the historical Jesus might have looked like… or at least some guy who lived in Jesus’ neighborhood.

I am going to suggest that there are at least four layers of the Jesus tradition that we can rationally talk about that come from the first century following the life of the historical Jesus. The first is a Galilean Hebrew who set out to reform his faith. I hesitate to even call him a Jew because in the early first century, the Jews in Jerusalem called Jews who lived everywhere else, Gentiles. That’s not the way you are used to thinking about it but the Jews in Jerusalem had the temple, they still had animal sacrifice, and they were in charge of the rituals, holidays, temple taxes and they were married to the monarchy or what was left of it under Roman rule.

Away from Jerusalem, the religion of the Hebrews was centered in synagogues that were, in one way or another, in competition with the temple cult. Jesus can from the Galilee, from synagogue country where they did not have priests. They had teachers who were called rabbis. Away from the Temple, these synagogues were much more inclined to reflect regional customs.

For example, in the strict orthodoxy of Judaism in the temple cult, all images of every kind were forbidden. Even Jewish coins had only numbers and letters on them, no images of rulers or historical characters. But we find synagogues of the era out in the Galilee that had elaborate tile Byzantine floors with the images of the Zodiac. That could get a Jew killed in Jerusalem, but in the Galilee, lots of places wrote their own rules.

We have very little to go on about this historical character other than echoes from the gospels. If the travel log of the canonical gospels tell us anything, Jesus didn’t go to Roman towns or many blended towns, but largely kept to his own people. He went to Synagogue and was familiar with the Hebrew scriptures. We do not know if he could read and write.

The Jesus Seminar spent two decades going over the canonical gospels and the Gospel of Thomas, trying to discern what they found there that could be most likely traced to the historical Jesus. They literally voted with colored beads on passages: red beads meant that they thought it was an authentic Jesus saying, pink was for passages that might have a kernel of the historical Jesus present, gray when it was likely not a Jesus saying, and black for sayings that were certainly not a Jesus saying.

I know that church folk will object to this project saying, “They weren’t there,” or “How can they know?” I can tell you that this is serious scholarship and that linguistic and historical criticism, while not an exact science, is not just a guess in the dark. I don’t have time to explain the process, but I am going to share academic conclusions with you today in the hope that you will read more closely. Reading their conclusions published in “The Five Gospels” will be quite illuminating.

This body of scholars did not find many sayings in the gospels that they thought came from the historical Jesus. More than 80% of the sayings ended up in the black category. What did up in red were radical statements of forgiveness and peace, such as “love your enemies,” and “if someone strikes on one cheek, offer them the other cheek.”

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, which can also be said about John the Baptist and several of the Hebrew prophets, especially Isaiah.

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.

We do not think that the historical Jesus thought of himself as a son of God. We do not think that he believed himself to be a sacrifice for the sins of others. He was killed in Jerusalem in the manner of execution used often by Rome. We don’t know exactly why. We do know that Mark wrote his version of the passion narrative very artfully and used a lot of literary elements to weave his story. For example, we do not think that the character of Judas is a historical character. Paul makes no mention Judas and though, in reciting the communion liturgy, he speaks of Jesus having been betrayed, he neither suggests that it was one of the twelve apostles or a member of Jesus’ inner circle. In fact, in 1^st Corinthians, Paul says that Jesus appeared to the “twelve” and in the gospels, Judas is dead before Easter.

Judas exists as a literary creation. The name “Judas” and the name “Jesus” come from the same root and it seems that Mark created Judas to represent the whole of the Jewish people who rejected Jesus. Mark uses this kind of symbolism a lot.

We know from Paul’s writing that several of the personal friends and Apostles of Jesus continued to live in Jerusalem after Jesus had been killed. They stayed there in spite of the fact that they were Galilean Jews who had not been welcomed there and Jesus had been killed there. To my mind, this is the most inexplicable part of the historical Jesus narrative. But we find, in the middle of the first century, a remnant of a church in Jerusalem that Paul went to visit at least once and probably twice.

That remnant probably never saw themselves as being a part of a religion that was separate from Judaism. None of those people wrote any part of the New Testament and people like me are still kinda mad about that. Two generations later the Temple was destroyed and Jerusalem was burned and there is nothing left to aid the historical record of that time and group of people who actually knew Jesus and most of the historical record of Jesus died with them. They repeated and enlarged on the teachings of Jesus and some of that undoubtedly filtered into and were preserved in our gospels but it is covered in layers of editing and tradition.

So, the first Jesus we could focus on was a traveling wisdom teacher who had a very short career and was killed by Roman decree. Though some of his followers reported having visions of him after his death, it is doubtful that they would made any claim of an empty tomb-bodily resurrection. That Jesus was more like Gandhi than like the Jesus of the church’s creeds.

The second wave of the Jesus tradition we can call “Jesus the Christ.” This picture is the oldest known painting of Jesus. It was found in Syria and dates to the early third century. This person, the Christ figure, is an invention of Paul. 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. But Paul wrote first and it is evident that Paul’s thinking influenced the final form of the gospels we have in our New Testament. Paul had no interest in the man, Jesus, and he insisted that he assiduously avoided allowing anyone to tell him anything about the historical Jesus. This passage is a little long but please let me share it with you to let Paul make my point in his own voice:

 

Paul’s image of Jesus as the Christ, as he said himself, has virtually nothing to do with the actual Jesus. From existing early churches, he evidently learned the ritual sentences used in communion celebrations and it seems that he sometimes quotes from early Christian hymns but that is as close as he gets to historical material.

He does not mention Mary, Joseph, or Judas. He does not appear to know about a miraculous virgin birth, nor does he believe in an empty tomb or a physical resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus, for Paul, was a vision. A vision shared with other’s to be sure, but he felt like his vision was just as good as the vision that Peter, James, and John had and that he was just as much of an apostle as they were.

Paul took up a collection among the gentile churches that he brought to the Jerusalem church which could be seen as an acknowledgment of their legitimacy or you could see it as a bribe, begging for their approval.

Paul came from the Pharisaic school of Judaism that had incorporated into Judaism the Greek belief in heaven and hell and in a final judgment. Paul wanted that divine judge to be a Jew and Jesus was the name he chose but he did not embrace the historical Jesus or any of the message of Jesus.

Paul, like many of his contemporaries, believed that the world was coming to an end and he portrayed Jesus as the eschatological agent whose death was bringing about the end of time. He framed that in the language of Jewish sacrifice but the theology was more dependent upon Greek mystery religions.

Paul died shortly before the temple and most of Jerusalem was destroyed. With that event, a form of Judaism died and what was left was the synagogue- based Judaism and Christianity soon began to go its own way. The death of the priestly cult-sacrifice form of Judaism spurred the creation of a more formal approach to the Jesus narrative.

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 though he does have an empty tomb… whether that is to be understood literally or symbolically is unclear. Matthew and Luke, in the forms that we have them were written about twenty years later and they 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.

Many scholars have written about these two images of Jesus. They will call it the movement from the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith. Some try to make this easier for church folk to accept by talking about the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus and that has a certain attraction because, like in the higher Christology of John’s gospel, it is as if we are meeting the risen Christ on page one of the fourth gospel.

Reza Aslan published this very popular book presenting what I would like to call a third image of Jesus: Aslan 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.

I don’t know any college professors who have used Aslan’s book in a college class because it is full of fairly sloppy use of source material and a very inconsistent treatment of biblical literature but there is some good material to find there. I believe that after the first Jesus was lost to history, while Paul was traveling the known world peddling his version of a end-of-time Christ, that there was a third Jesus movement that was decidedly anti-Empire.

In house churches under the bloody oppression of Rome, the Jesus movement because an alternative to the state sponsored emperor worship. It was in these brave little congregations that they began to take the titles ascribed to Caesar and give them to Jesus. Caesar was said to be a son of God, and the state religion said that he was born to a virgin. On the coins of the realm, he was called “savior,” and “lord.” We see reflections of this third Jesus movement in the gospels and we can find evidence of it in the early persecution of the church as an enemy of the Empire.

Caesar became powerful by killing millions of people. Jesus, in these little churches, became powerful by dying. Caesar’s power was the power of an army and the power of Jesus was found in loving, forgiving your enemies, sharing your bread, eschewing wealth, property, and even tribe, to be noble and ethical people.

Aslan presents this Jesus as the historical Jesus and while it is tempting to embrace that view uncritically, it does not stand up to historical criticism. Still, it is an option because, let’s be honest, the Jesus we cherish is the Jesus we choose from among the available options and this one has a lot to recommend it… especially if you are an American… probably if you are British.

The fourth Jesus movement is similar to Paul’s mystery religion but it is the Jesus of the early second century when the Roman empire began to accept Christians as being one of the many religions they tolerated. And we all know how Constantine institutionalized a form of Christianity that was almost entirely focused on the afterlife. This form of religion is what all Empire’s try to use to control the population and to fill the ranks of their armies. In 50 a.d., Jesus was an alternative to the Empire but by 120 or 130, Jesus was virtually an employee of the empire.

Since we know almost nothing about the historical Jesus and we since progressive scholars dismiss notions of 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. 

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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 21^st 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, a shared common 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.

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 preachers in our day can still say that Jesus is Lord as 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 to the poor and as a bulwark against the abuses of the powerful.

“Truth beyond Courtesy”

“Truth beyond Courtesy”       April 29, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your Stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.  Ann Lamott

This has been quite a week in America. The first of what could be called #MeToo movement convictions came down. Bill Cosby, once thought to be America’s Dad, a black actor and comedian that I literally grew up listening to his albums, watching his cartoons, and enjoying his TV shows, was convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault. It took 40 years to get to this point, with two trials and a sentencing still in the future, but it is most likely that he will spend the rest of his life in prison. I heard the news with an odd combination of relief and sadness. It would have been horrible if he had been able to translate his fame, money, popularity, and age into some kind of escape from judgment and yet it hardly seemed entirely right to celebrate. I hate that these crimes happened. I hate that he had convinced himself that it was OK to do these horrible things. And I hate that he gave away whatever positive influences of his life’s work by undermining every decent thing he has ever done with these salacious sex crimes. 

I hope that his victims feel that they have now been heard. I hope this offers them some support, some healing, some hope for the future. But there is no way to un-ring a bell. Nothing can undo what has been done. But Cosby’s victims have yet been denied one thing that might have helped. Cosby refused to acknowledge his crimes. He offered no apology, he showed no remorse. 

It was a much less serious crime but there has been another controversy stirring lately around one of MSNBC’s rising stars in the news industry.

Joy Reid has become one of the most credible and popular journalists on the air in recent months, but she has suffered from a recent revelation that she had posted some very mean and homophobic posts on a blog. Her initial reaction was that her account had been hacked. But then she thought better of it and said that she simply did not recognize the person who had written those horrible things, but she acknowledged that it was who she was, in the past, though it is not who she is now.

In a courageous and possibly career saving move, she invited several members of the LGBTQ community to be a panel on her Saturday morning show. She profusely and sincerely apologized and then took the reprimands and sat through the largely kind and supportive responses of her panel but they did not only pull punches. It was hard. She was embarrassed, but, as they say, sunshine is the best antiseptic. She did what she needed to do, which was to be honest about her offenses, to ask for forgiveness, and to take what was offered to her without trying to down grade or dismiss what she had said.

She will have to wear the scars from having said what she said, but she also gains the credibility that comes with honest confession. Unlike, if I may point it out, one of her peers on MSNBC, Chris Matthews, who constantly insists that he was one of the only journalists who publicly opposed the invasion of Iraq. The truth is that at the time he not only supported the invasion, but he said that if Bush was successful that he should have his bust added to Mt. Rushmore. He has denied that so many times that he appears to believe it himself but, sadly, for people in his profession, you can look up the video on YouTube. This kind of dishonesty is what is wrong with journalism today. You can make mistakes and correct them but lying about them has no honor to it.

I believe that I can defend everything I have said about the LGBTQ civil rights issues over the past 25 years but, I am 61 years old. I may not want to be reminded of what I might have said 30 years ago. I can’t be sure that I am entirely “woke” now but I know that I was not terribly aware 30 years ago. I changed. I have changed enough that I have thrown away all of the sermons that I wrote in the first 25 years that I was in the ministry. I am not sure that I would even want to defend everything I said seven or eight years ago. I don’t believe what I used to believe. I am not who I used to be, and I am glad that I have been serving a church these past ten years that has not only allowed me to grow but you have encouraged it and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.

But it isn’t just me that has changed. The world has changed. There was never a world where Cosby’s habit of drugging women and sexually assaulting them while they were unconscious was acceptable, but there was a world in which women were discouraged from telling their story, they were sometimes paid off in out of court settlements that included nondisclosure clauses. Sometimes they were paid off with jobs. Sometimes they were threatened with law suits or physical violence. 

That, thankfully, is changing. Victims are, much more often, being given the opportunity to tell their stories. This can be dangerous stuff because not every story is true and not everyone will be able to substantiate their story. But there are other issues. A couple of recent internet memes have tried to shine a bit of sunlight on our faltering progress.

Fifty or sixty women can feel some relief with the conviction of Bill Cosby but there are at least 20 who are still waiting for the world to be click here to see the videowilling to hear their stories of Donald Trump’s manipulation, payoffs, and, in at least one case, child rape. Power and money still mean too much in our court system.

And we cannot escape the fact as much as we may feel some justice in the case of Bill Cosby, we can’t help but notice that other rapists, manipulators, liars, and misogynists who are white, rich men have not yet gone to court and I just don’t see how that can be true. Can it be that race still plays an important role in our judicial system?

It reminds me of that famous scene in Casablanca, when Captain Renault, after years of accepting bribes, shouts, “I am shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here!”

We are progressives, which means that we hope for and work for progress. I believe that we are making progress, but Rome wasn’t built in a day . . . it did burn down in a day and if we don’t make some real progress on this front, we might need to get ready to hand Nero a fiddle.

I often think of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. After years of violent enforcement of Apartheid, there was a reasonable fear that when Apartheid was ended that an understandably angry majority black population might turn on the white population that had done so many unspeakable things and kill them all.

In setting up the commission, Bishop Desmond Tutu said: “Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.” 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered the brilliant and spiritually profound opportunity for the guilty to publicly confess their sins and escape criminal prosecution. It hasn’t been perfect, but the much-feared blood bath has not happened.

This will not make me very popular to say, and, like Chris Matthews, I will have no way to hide this comment in the future, but I feel terrible cognitive dissonance whenever I am in a meeting where we are expected to stand for the national anthem or repeat the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. I don’t pledge allegiance to an empire, even if I am a citizen of that empire because empires always defend economic exploitation, institutional racism, and militarism. I believe that I am patriotic, but I do not consent to evil, even when it is domestic evil… or I should say, especially when it is domestic evil.

And while the first verse of our national anthem is thrilling and triumphant, I know its author was a terrible, pro-slavery and racist, assuring slaves and indentured servants that they will be found in a grave if they should try to free themselves.

In fact, if we had time to go into the weeds, much of the real motivation behind our 2^ndAmendment was keep slave owners armed against their constant fear of a slave revolt. It all makes Collin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the singing of the anthem seem like a very mild protest. He and all other American blacks have every reason to speak their minds about, not just current police violence against blacks, but a three-hundred-year history of slavery and economic oppression. I would say that I was boycotting football because of the way owners have treated Kaepernick but since I have never watched football, that would be a rather thin threat.  

But people say that a sporting event is the wrong time and place to speak. They say that victims of homophobic hate speech and sexual assault are always wrong to tell their stories now. If I may quote the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, I have to call “B.S.” on that. It is always the right time for victims to be able to tell their story. As the author, Ann Lamott, has said:  You own everything that happened to you. Tell your Stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

We cannot rid the world of injustice but we sure can make the decision to always come down on the side of telling the truth. We are in the truth telling business. We cannot un-ring the bell of our history of sexual and racial injustice but, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

We can’t fix everything but this much I do know, telling victims to be quiet, telling them that the time is not right, or this is not the right place, only means that the wound festers. We are in the truth telling business; not to be mean, vindictive, or punitive but to be healing. Hate does not drive out hatred, only love can do that, and we are in the love business. 

Beyond Belief

Beyond Belief     

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April 22, 2018

 1 John 3:16-18                   
We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us--and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.
How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?
Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

One of my favorites among our listeners is a Jewish refugee from the Ukraine who lives and teaches in New York. Mikhail often shares his surprisingly insightful views of learning about both America and Christianity from his students. He recently sent me this clip from a student paper:

For the benefit of our podcast listeners, this paper is explaining the severe suffering imposed on Job in the Biblical story this way, “God did what he did to him out of love. It is safe to say that this is similar to the way parents treat their kids. Sometimes parents yell or beat their kids, but they might not tell you why. Eventually, when you grow up, you come to learn that they did what they did to teach you right from wrong.”

Now, this obviously provokes lots of responses, not the least of which is that this student’s parents apparently beat him without even the dignity of an explanation. The second is that this has influenced his view of God and God’s love such that the suffering of Job was not some bazaar, anthropomorphic, ego betting between God and Satan, but was, in some twisted way, for Job’s benefit.  Hard to explain killing Job’s children and employees as a loving gesture made out of concern for Job’s welfare, but this student is obviously trying to do just that.

A child psychologist was once describing his observations of an abused child through a one-way mirror looking into a hospital play room. As the child beat the doll to pieces she was shouting, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

We know that almost all child abusers were abused when they were children. It is not an excuse but there is a relationship between being a victim of abuse and justifying abusing others . . . and here is the real paradox, calling the abuse love seems to somehow make it virtuous . . . spiritual . . . noble. 

Just as the victims of child abuse have a tendency to become abusers, isn’t it obvious that victims of religious abuse are also likely to become religiously abusive? It is 2018. The telescope has been around for 400 years. We have been traveling in space for over 50 years. Still, literally billions of children will be reared in this century with the belief that God lives above the clouds, watching their every move. Even their thoughts are not hidden from the prying eyes and ears of God who knows every foul word, every vile and evil thought you have, and will surely punish you in agony for ever if you don’t stop it. 

And we wrap up this whole judgement scene in pretty Christmas wrapping paper and hand it to you telling you that the threat of eternal torment comes to you from a loving God . . . who would like to talk to you about your computer browser history and some of the movies you have downloaded on Netflix. 

We tell these lies to children when they are too young to fight back, when, even if the contradictions are so strong that they scream out inside their little skulls… they still take it in. They internalize this belief in a loving God who is a stalker, a peeping Tom, a divine voyeur who is willing to do unspeakably violent things to you for being human. Most of us know better than to take our children to see violent movies but we take them to Sunday School where they are exposed to a father who was prepared to cut his son’s heart out because the voices inside his head told him to, and images of demons, devils, and fiery torment. 

Our little MidWestern city doesn’t make it into the national news very often but when we do it is often a story like this one, taken from USA Today about the arrest of one of our very loud and annoying street preachers. This one is Aaron Brummit, but he is not the only one who draws attention to himself by trying to stop downtown revelers from enjoying themselves. Sometimes the college kids will stop and argue with him, yell at him, heap abuses on him and make fun of him, but what they do not realize is that such abuse is what he wants. Calling him abusive names is like giving Scooby Snacks to Scooby-Do. 

Because he was brought up under the threat of an abusive God who loved him very much and he, like a child pounding a doll’s head on a table while yelling, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” believes that abuse is love. I saw standing on a stool and preaching on the corner of Walnut St. and South Ave. just Friday night. And I imagine trying to engage him in conversation. If I were to tell him that “love is my religion” I suspect that he would not initially disagree. Until he could come to understand that I really mean that… that I practice my religion by being loving. 

The use of the word, “love” is an important adjective in religions whose real practice involves deception, manipulation, threats, fear, and abuse. The belief system uses adjectives that allow it to mask its abuse as being something else: piety, religious fervor, virtue, in short, a sincere Christian life. 

When, in any meaningful sense, a religion is not defined by adjectives as much as it is defined by verbs. If your religion is predicated on a God who is love, then shouldn’t your devotion, your worship, your discipleship, shouldn’t that be loving? 

Many Unitarian Churches have taken up the use of the phrase, “beyond belief” to describe what they are trying to do. You have heard me for years talking about the difference between “orthodoxy” (right beliefs) and “orthopraxy” (right behaviors). Belief systems are all about orthodoxy but that isn’t what we really want out of religious people, is it?

Over the past 20 years, I’ve spent a lot of time in Nicaragua and our teams of house builders or physicians or teachers, often share hotel space with other church groups who have come with Bibles, salvation tracks, and usually a lot of candy. I have sat in the hotel lobby listening to these eager young missionaries talking about going to the dump outside of Managua where children root through garbage for something to eat and these North American’s offer to give them candy in exchange for the opportunity to tell them about Jesus, and heaven, and hell, and the Holy Spirit, and sometimes they will throw in some Spanish hymn singing and if they are really lucky, a little demonstration of speaking in tongues.

And we can sit here, wagging our heads in disbelief that anyone could be so hypocritical, so crass, so fundamentally evil but let me tell you this: when they engaged us in conversation about what we were doing in Nicaragua, they didn’t mind that we were building houses, paying for school supplies, bringing doctors into rural neighborhoods, or making micro business loans to start small businesses, but they were mortified that we were not using this charity to save their souls. We didn’t hand out Bibles or tracks, we didn’t sing hymns, and though I have a little bit of Spanish and German vocabulary, I just can’t speak in tongues at all. 

What is obvious to us is that love must be accompanied by action. What is obvious to them is that meaningful religion must protect innocent children from the risk of going to hell… and that is an ideological bridge that is very hard to cross. 

When people ask me what I believe the future of the church will be, I have to qualify my answer with this:  we will either make the transition from beliefs to actions, or I do not believe there will be a future to the church. 

I cannot remember what this little guy’s name is but let’s call him “So-What?” I visited his school in a rural village in the mountains above Matagalpa and I stole a line from my friend, Keith Jaspers, the founder of the Rainbow Network: I said to this little class of about 20 students in a dirt floor classroom, 

“I have heard los estudiantes aqui en este comarca– the students here in this village are –son las mas intelejentes in todo el mundo– are the most intelligent in all of the world – es verdad que dice– is it true what they say?” They didn’t want to lie. They don’t see many visitors from outside of their village and certainly no Norte Americano blancosbut I prompted them, “es verdad?”And eventually they found the courage to shout back, “Si! Es verdad!”

Maybe it is true . . . it was true, at least in that moment. But I come back home and our little progressive church is so small and just down the highway there is a church that will send teams down to Matagalpa with candy and Bibles, and they have six, seven, eight thousand people attending their three campuses.

But I think of this little guy and I think, “so what?” What does having three campuses, thousands of members, eight, count-em, eight drum kits on stage in front of a choir of 400, but add all that together and kneel down by this guy making his letters in his notebook and wonder, “so what?” If your religion can’t protect him from malaria infested mosquitoes and get his bed up off the floor away from the scorpions. . . if your religion can’t drill a well in his village so that they don’t get their water from the same little pond where the cows and chickens poop, then your religion is nothing but a joke. 

Your holy writ, your doctrine of the trinity, your creeds, . . . it doesn’t matter under what liturgy you were baptized if he can get a clean drink of water and your communion ritual is nothing but an insult if this kid can get a decent piece of bread. 

Keep your Bibles and your candy and go change the world so that this kid and all of the kids who are like him can go to school, sleep safely at night, and wake up to a decent breakfast in the morning. Because religious beliefs mean nothing at all if you can’t move beyond belief to practice. 

And look folks, I’m not saying that communities of faith need to take over social services in our own city or in other nations. No matter how grand our goals are, we cannot raise enough donated dollars, or convince enough people to join teams to go solve the world’s problems. What we are doing, what we mean when we talk about our spiritual preference for the poor, is that we are practicing compassion. 

You will never hear me say anything that is more obviously true than just this:

You learn to dance by dancing, you learn to sing by singing, you learn to ride a bike by riding a bike…. It doesn’t matter what books you have read about dancing or what you believe about singing, it doesn’t matter what your grandmother believed about bicycles . . . spirituality is the same thing. You learn to show compassion by practicing compassion. You learn to forgive by forgiving. You learn to love by loving. 

In many ways, crosses, steeples, labels, denominations all get in the way. What makes our religion real is how we practice it. And by practice, we become more compassionate, more loving, people and when we vote  

We remember this guy. I don’t know who will win the next elections but when the votes are counted, and you look at this guy and wonder “so what?” I hope you have a good answer, and if you don’t, then practice some more so that you will have a better answer the next time.