“Hyperbole, Hysteria, and Hypocrisy”

 “Hyperbole, Hysteria, and Hypocrisy”       

 

   April 21, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray  

 

Click here to see the video

 

 

 

Before Muhammad, before Jesus, and even before Buddha, there was the Greek storyteller, Aesop, who has had the singular literary success of having his stories repeated, especially to children, for 25 centuries. 

 

People of my generation all know the story about the boy who cried “wolf.” Aesop tells us about a young man who was tasked with watching over the village’s herd of sheep during the day, a singularly boring job, and so, to create some excitement, the boy cried out to the villagers that a wolf was coming to attack the sheep. Of course, he got a big reaction but when there was no wolf in sight, he was scolded. But later boredom set in again, and he again cried “wolf,” and as this happened over and over, eventually, the villagers ignored him so that when a wolf actually did come to kill the sheep, none of the villagers responded when the boy called for help, so that many of their sheep were lost. 

 

Hyperbole, exaggeration, can be useful literarily tools as long as such inflation is not overused. We know that Julia Robert’s smile is not really a mile wide and that none of you have every been hungry enough to eat a horse, but we know what is meant by this kind of hyperbole. But it is best when used sparingly. 

In this, the 15^th presidential election of my memory, I am aware that politicians have been crying “wolf” way too often. Of course, the 1800 election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was trumpeted as the most important election of a lifetime but even back then, such hyperbole was not reserved for presidential elections only. 

A hundred years ago, a Tennessee newspaper, the Greeneville Democrat-Sun, described their coming vote as being “the most important election in the history of the county will  … when Greene County will be called on to vote $200,000 for the purpose of resurfacing the roads.” 

 

So, I am not sure how to go about recovering the language of imperative after it has been so abused for hundreds of years, but folks, we are six months away from a presidential election that could, in very fact, be the last free and open democratic election in the United States. Our nation is in such grave peril, it is incomprehensible that it even needs to be said. But, evidently, it does.

 

In previous years, I considered myself to be a fairly astute political observer, but I have to confess that now I do not understand the world that I live in. I have always been a political liberal, for which I would credit my childhood in Christian Sunday School. Clearly, I was hearing something that my peers in rural Kentucky did not. The Bible I grew up reading was decisively anti-war, it taught compassion and charity towards the poor and the sick, it told me to welcome immigrants, to oppose racism, to be sexually circumspect, and to always tell the truth. 

Inexplicably, I grew up in the same part of the world with the same religious indoctrination as Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, with markedly different outcomes. 

 

So, naturally, I thought the election contest between Ronald Regan and Jimmy Carter would be the most important of my life. Then I thought the contest between the war criminal, George W. Bush and the war protestor, John Kerry was the most important race in my lifetime. 

 

I didn’t think that the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was all that important because there was no way that more than a dozen people in America could possibly be tricked into voting for Donald Trump. I and a whole lot of other people were wrong about that one. I watched the election returns that year from Belize where I was scuba diving with my daughter. My Asian daughter cried and for the first time in our lives, she referenced her race saying, “I don’t want to be brown in Trump’s America.” We were stunned.

 

I consoled my daughter then saying that Trump would only be in office for a month or so. He was such an obvious con man, a sexual predator, a liar, and criminal that he would have to be impeached almost immediately. I was wrong about a lot of things in politics that year and I have felt like a stranger in America ever since.

 

I even said to many friends in 2020 that I was relieved that since Trump was voted out of office that we could safely turn on the national news and never hear his name mentioned again. Trump made me ashamed to be American, and I was traveling to speak in Great Britain frequently in those years and there was no shortage of people who wanted to remind me of why I should be ashamed of what my country had become. But, when Biden took office, I felt like there would never be a reason to mention Trump in the news again unless someone happened to kill him in whatever prison he was in following the insurrection. My apologies to any of you who ever believed that I was smart. 

 

I clearly do not have my finger on the pulse of the American voter! But I have speculated several times over the past seven or eight years as to how voters were seduced into voting for a philandering, uneducated, dishonest, con man because his affirmation of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia validates the dark shadow, the id, that lies in many of us. 

But earlier this month Jeffery Goldberg published an article in the Atlantic that looked at the cowardice demonstrated by many Republican political leaders, elected officials, many with first rate educations and years of public service experience, who just seemed to have allowed their character, their judgement, and their morals to just collapse at the feet of Donald Trump. 

 

There were 43 Republican senators who had to run for their lives on January 6, 2021. They came back to the desecrated Capitol Building late that night to finish their work of confirming Joe Biden’s election, amid the millions of dollars of damage and feces smeared statues. Many stood up and railed at Donald Trump’s election lies, his refusal to do what every other American president has done, which is to demonstrate the strength of our democracy in a peaceful transfer of power. 

Instead, Trump called upon supporters from across the country to come and help him to “stop the steal” by storming the Capitol, beating down doors and beating armed police who had been ordered not to shoot the rioters. Had this insurrection happened a couple of generations ago, hundreds, if not thousands, of the rioters would have been shot and, I believe, Trump and many members of his family and administration would have been quickly executed after being found guilty of treason. 

 

One protestor was shot before she could break into the room where elected officials were hiding, Eventually, order was restored and many protestors were arrested and tried for their crimes but Republican leaders who so forcefully denounced Trump on the evening of January 6^th, by the time it came to vote on impeachment, a very mild and humane response to a national tragedy that we all watched unfolding before our own eyes on TV and which these senators saw in person from their hiding places, all 43 voted against impeachment in what has to be the most colossal display of cowardice and hypocrisy in American history. 

 

The voting public may have a very short memory but educated and experienced members of the legislature knew that what they experienced was treason, insurrection, an attack on our constitution and the free democracy it creates but out of fear and lust for power, they pretended that what they had seen with their own eyes, what they had heard and experienced, was not as bad as they knew that it was.

 

The rioters erected a hangman’s noose on the Capitol grounds to hang the vice president, Mike Pence, but if these events had taken place just a decade or two ago, surely it would have been Trump and his minions who would have been executed.

There may be some voters who are so deceived by conspiracy theories and the MAGA/Q-anon cult that they can’t see it, but you know that short of a couple of rather challenged Republicans on the hill, you know that they all know that it is true . . . Mitch McConnell, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and most of the others… they know that they have turned their backs on America, on democracy, in order to stay in power. None of them deserve to hold elected office or, in my opinion, a drivers license. 

 

The lust for power has remarkably extended to a kind of misogyny that I cannot even understand. We have debated the issue of abortion for years but sadly, to most people, it seemed like a tempest in a tea pot. No one but radical Catholics and Fundamentalists really wanted to take away the constitutionally protected right of a woman to manage her own reproductive life but that tiny minority was loud and persistent. Republican president after Republican president had promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v Wade but they never meant it and they never did it, but Trump did it and he didn’t really care about the issue. One can only wonder how many abortions he has paid for through the years to avoid paying child support from births from his many affairs. But he appointed judges who were willing to do it.

 

And in a fit of undiluted hypocrisy, the longest sitting justice, Clarence Thomas, not only voted to overturn Roe but in his comments on the decision he said that the court should also take up previous decisions that legalized same sex marriage and even contraception. How is that fact not being discussed in the news every day?

 

Thomas, who was revealed to have tried to start an in office affair with Anita Hill by telling her lurid stories about porn videos he had watched, now wants to legislate Catholic moral standards into law so that all of us who are not Catholic have to abide by the teachings of a Church that he blatantly ignored himself when he was younger. 

 

We have all heard the pushback against the pro-life movement, pointing out that if they were really pro-life that they would favor free child care, universal healthcare, and they would want to outlaw the guns so commonly used to kill children in school. And folks, this is not an argument. For there to be an argument, there has to be two plausible sides to the issue. There is no defense for being anti-abortion while also opposing social support and protection for children after they are born. This is just religious and political hypocrisy . . . there is no argument to be made here. 

I have never said much about Thomas Jefferson’s often repeated quote about how erecting a wall between the church and the state is essential in a free society. In fact, I might have thought this concern was rather dated. Churches can freely advocate for causes, either for women’s rights or in opposition to abortion, in favor of gay rights or in opposition to them, but churches don’t get to legislate.

 

But Clarence Thomas, in a curiously hypocritical religious passion, actually does want to write Catholic values into law. Why would anyone care if gay people are allowed to marry one another? Why would anyone want to prevent a woman from having access to contraception? Why, well, it isn’t a happy story but the “why” is as old as religion’s desire to control women, to control their reproduction, control their sex lives, and to make sure that straight marriage was the only legal option. None of which is any of their business and it should shock, horrify, and motivate all of us to realize that this is, in fact, the most important election of our lifetime and for reasons that make no sense at all, it is an election that very well may go the wrong way! Why would anyone who is not a billionaire vote for Trump’s economic policies? Why would anyone who isn’t a right wing, lunatic, fundamentalist vote for Trump’s misogynistic policies? Why would anyone re-elect any one of the 43 Republican senators who failed to impeach Trump in 2021? Why would anyone who loves democracy vote for anyone who has clearly demonstrated in their holding up aid to Ukraine that they support the re-establishment of the Soviet Union under Putin? 

 

I cannot believe that this is America. And I can tell you, people in Europe can’t believe that this is America. The only two people in Asia and Europe who are happy about Trump’s popularity are China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian president, Vladimir Putin; both of whom are despots who have refused to leave office when their constitutional term in office was over, and both are tyrants that Trump envies because he tried to not leave office and failed and will surely try again if given the chance. Putin wants to take the Ukraine and you know that he will not stop there. Xi Jinping wants to take Taiwan and you know that he will not stop there. 

 

Everything that spiritually conscious people value is in danger as voters in the world’s last great superpower and economic engine go back into the ballot box where a possible majority may embrace disaster. No one should sit this one out. No one should downplay the importance of this November’s election. 

And no one should vote to take away rights from women, minorities, immigrants, or any of the rest of us who are clinging to hope for a sane world.

"Why No One in the Bible Accepted Jesus Christ as their Personal Lord and Savior”

Why No One in the Bible Accepted Jesus Christ as their Personal Lord and Savior”

April 7, 2024    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

I grew up in rural Kentucky in a household that was on the lower end of the middle class. My parents had grown up in relative poverty on Kentucky farms. My parents raised their four children eating what poor farmers in early 20^th century Kentucky ate, which mostly consisted of foods that could be preserved without refrigeration.

A staple food in my home was fried corn bread. I had to go buy the corn meal and butter milk necessary to make these few pieces. Honestly, I had not made it in years, but my mother made it every day. Coarse stone ground corn meal, with a dash of baking soda, scalded with boiling water and then stirred vigorously while adding butter milk until it made a kind of batter. This kind of corn bread came out looking like a pancake. We had this kind of corn bread at one or two meals a day and there was usually a short stack of cornbread by the stove for anyone who got hungry between meals. You could put butter and sugar on it, crumble it into a glass of buttermilk, or just slather it up with peanut butter, but at most meals, we had it covered in pinto beans.

 

This was filling and, if you are going to go out and chop firewood for the rest of the day, beans and cornbread will keep you going until it kills you with clogged arteries. In most of Central America, beans and rice is the daily meal of the poor. 

 

During my many work trips to Nicaragua, our hotel staff would make eggs and ham for us in the mornings but there was always a large platter of rice and beans because they couldn’t imagine a meal without it. In fact, I would sometimes bring some of our workers from the villages where we were building houses to town with me to treat them to a meal that would be unique to them. If you took them to a pizza place and asked them what they wanted on their pizza, they would give a strange look and reply, “Gallo Pinto,” beans and rice, because they would never have even heard of peperoni or sausage. Their diets consisted of rice and beans and what might be found in the jungle: plantain, bananas, iguana, and what one of my friends called, “a lost chicken.”

 

I lived in Asia last winter, and there, a friend will not ask you if you have had dinner, or if you have eaten, they will ask you, “Did you eat rice today?” Rice is such an assumed stand-alone meal among the poor, that to have eaten rice is what it means to have had food that day. 

 

We tend to normalize our personal experience to the point that at the age of 12, I couldn’t imagine that every house across the country did not have fried corn bread every day. My friends in rural Nicaragua couldn’t imagine that anyone didn’t eat beans and rice every day. When you don’t know anything else, you assume that everyone is more or less like you. My family never ate in restaurants, but I assumed that the people who did were going there to eat cornbread and beans, just like my friends in Asia assume that most meals in most homes around the globe consists of a bowl of rice. 

We form views of what marriage is based on our parents’ marriage. And we assume that even though our friends all went to different churches, we assumed that they all believed basically the same things we did. The Catholics had more statues than we had stained glass windows, but they had the same Bible and we assumed that we were all just trying to get into heaven.

 

As I gradually changed from being a Christian who was trying to get into heaven into a spiritual person who didn’t believe in heaven or hell, I increasingly realized that I didn’t have very many peers in the world. People can understand it if they think you are an atheist, but not many people have a place in their brain for a pastor who doesn’t believe in souls, an afterlife, or a supernatural theistic god who answers prayers. For most people, everyone else in the world either believes the way that they do, or they don’t believe anything at all. 

We tend to globalize our personal experience. “Everyone is more or less like me, or, at least, they should be.” Let me give you an illustration from the recent news about the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore. Sadly, like almost everything else that happens these days, the collapse of the bridge spawned a sudden outbreak of new conspiracy theories about illegal immigrants or terrorism, but most of us accepted that a very big, heavy ship, had a mechanical failure, hit the bridge and brought it down. A tragic event in both loss of life and loss of a major bridge and harbor for several years.

 

The bridge will certainly be rebuilt, though it make take a few years to finish, but have you wondered if the new bridge will also be named for Francis Scott Key? 

Key was a lawyer and poet in Baltimore and he wrote the Star Spangled Banner during the war of 1812, jubilantly celebrating the American victory in a battle he witnessed. But there were critics of hi poem as soon as it was published because Key was a slave owner. Critics said that the United States was more like “the of the free and the home of the oppressed.”

 

Like a lot of people of his day, he was critical of the worst cruelties of slavery but he kept several of his own and he thought of himself as being a good slave owner. He was, in fact, a very ardent member of the Episcopal Church. He adamantly opposed the abolition of slavery and in fact, the third verse of the Star Spangled Banner, a verse you never heard sung at baseball games, says:

 

No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

 

This verse was a special derision of slaves and indentured servants who were fighting for the British so that they could be freed. Key assures them, in this verse, that they will find their graves before they find freedom. The Star Spangled Banner became our national anthem in the 1930’s in some of the worst of our history of Jim Crow laws, segregation, lynching, and racism. So, his connection to slavery and his opposition to abolition wasn’t much of a problem for white folks in the 1930’s and not enough of an issue to be seriously considered in the 1970’s when the bridge was built, but what about now?

 

Now Maryland has a black governor. Baltimore has a black mayor. Blacks outnumber whites, 2 to 1 in Baltimore. Shouldn’t we come up with a better name for a bridge in that harbor?

You know, Fredrick Douglas was a contemporary of Key’s, and he is from Baltimore. 

So was Billie Holliday, and Justice Thurgood Marshall, for goodness sakes, Ta-Nehisi Coates is from Baltimore! 

But see, even knowing that Francis Scott Key was a slave owner who fought against abolition, and advocated for freed slaves to be immediately shipped out of the United States and sent back to Africa, even if you didn’t know it before just this moment, do you, if you are white, still struggle with not naming the new bridge after Francis Scott Key? And while I am at it, why couldn’t “This Land is Your Land” become our national anthem. Just because white people were insensitive jerks in the 1930’s doesn’t mean that we have to be in 2024, or does it? Are we able to change our views in light of new information? 

 

It makes us uncomfortable to learn that Christopher Columbus funded his new world exploration by capturing Indians and taking them back to Europe as slaves. And illustrations like this one don’t even touch the fact that many were young women and boys who were taken to be sex slaves which is why many of you proudly announce that your “23 and me” results show that you are 2% native American… it isn’t a good story and some of your ancestors were horrible people. When we didn’t know the truth about Columbus, we could feel one way about his holiday, and now that we know, not many of us are willing to honor such a person. 

 

It is different when you didn’t know, it is something else when you know, and you don’t care. The famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, defines “evil” as being “militant ignorance.” And this is especially true in my field, which, if you have forgotten, is religion.

 

It is one thing to globalize your belief that everyone else eats what you eat, or to believe that Francis Scott Key was a noble patriot who wrote the song we sing at baseball games, though I hope that you can move past that; but when it comes to religion, most of us were raised to reject any new or different ideas. We were taught that it is a virtue to believe, by blind faith, things that just are not true.

 

Look, I live alone, as I have for many years, and so, social media becomes the place where I go for conversation about things that I am excited about, or what I am mad about, or what fills me with wonder. A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of some personal disappointment with public religion, I wrote this post: 

Two times in the past week, very educated, professional, people here in Florida have summed up the goal of religion as being coming to "know Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior." They say this in order to dismiss any religious differences, at least among Christian denominations and sects. 

I pointed out to both of them that the word "personal" does not appear anywhere in the Bible, not in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament and the concept of "accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior" was a creation of late 19th century revivalism in the 2nd Great Awakening based on a poor reading of John Calvin. They both just blinked and pretended that I had not said anything.

 

I pressed the point, saying, "No one in the Bible was described as having accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior." Again, these two very self-confident "scientists" made it clear that they still believed that the essence of the faith journey is just what they had heard in these echoes of 19th century revival preachers. 

 

In both instances, I tried to stress that the message of Jesus was about a kind of radical compassion and that to be "followers of the Way," as early Christians seem to have referenced themselves, was to embody that message of radical compassion (See Matthew 25:31-46). Again, this statement of the obvious had no effect. 

When it comes to religion, people's critical thinking skills often just go on vacation. They will believe something that is clearly not true because, as existentialists sometimes say, "it pleases me to do so," but in a matter as important as one's faith, why would anyone reject reason and especially reject contrary evidence????

 

This was just a Friday night rant for me but it turned out to be new information for a whole lot of people who had no idea that the word “personal” is not in the Bible and that no one in the Bible got saved by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior. But what really toasts my noodle is when people are made aware of this bit of theological insight, they insist upon holding onto a form of Christianity that was invented by nearly illiterate revivalist preachers in the American west in the late 1800’s. Why call it Christianity if you know that it is a formulaic religion that Jesus, Peter, Paul, James, and John wouldn’t recognize and surely wouldn’t approve of? 

 

It has been a long time since I have claimed to specifically be a Christian, but if I did, I think that I would want the real thing and not some snake oil salesman version of a once laudable faith! 

 

I thought my career had long ago moved away from the Biblical word studies that I talked about in the 1980’s, but if you’ll allow me one further point: the word “salvation” in the Bible never meant your one-way ticket on the soul train to heaven. The word is σωτηρία (sotiria), which means, “to be made whole.” 

Even scholarly translations of the New Testament often get this wrong. In Mark, chapter 10, when Jesus heals blind Bartimaeus, the text reads, “Go, your faith as made you well.” But in Greek, it isn’t “made you well,” it is “sotiria.” But in the passage about the sinful woman in the house of the pharisee in Luke, chapter 7, when he forgives her of her sins, he is quoted as saying, “Go, your faith has saved you,” but the word in Greek is the same. It is the prejudice of the translators who think that illicit sex is a sin that needs to be forgiven and blindness is a medical condition that needs to be fixed. In the language of the New Testament, they are the same. Salvation has to do with healing your brokenness, it has nothing to do with going to heaven. I could get excited about talking about salvation if people knew what the world meant. 

Americans have turned Christianity and Judaism and I suspect that the same has infected Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, with a notion of personal life enhancement and after-life fire insurance. Forgive me for being so blunt, but that is embarrassingly stupid. We Unitarians are fond of saying that “love is our religion” but that is not a baptized form of narcissism. The point is that we love other people. Remember the song, “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight”? Honestly, didn’t you catch the meaning of this in kindergarten? 

 We’ve covered a lot of ground today: Everyone doesn’t eat friend cornbread or rice every day. Neither Francis Scott Key nor Christopher Columbus were noble historical figures. And Jesus never asked anyone to accept him as their personal lord and savior. He did, evidently, ask you to love your enemies and forgive those who have wronged you. His message was self-evidently a message about showing radical compassion in how you live your life which should be obvious from everything he is reported to have said! 

And not that you asked, but if there was a hell, for me that would be having to spend eternity with the people who think they deserve to be in heaven. 

 

But maybe that’s just me.

The First Easter

 

March 31, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

 

 

I hope that all of you listening to this message today are having and will have a very happy Easter holiday and I hope that your family and friends have been able to gather around for a splendid dinner together. Whether you have young children who have had a smaller “second Christmas” with new clothes and a chocolate filled Easter basket or if you went to church today to hear, once again, that infamous Easter sermon that my preaching professor, David Buttrick, always ridiculed as the annual, “Yippee! We’re all going to live forever!” sermon, I would like to take this time to give a rather more sober and yet, I hope, more meaningful and at least a more believable account of the Easter event.

 

This is an extra “out of sequence” video that is not a sermon. This is a Bible lecture which, I’m afraid, may be offensive to traditional Christians but I hope that it will be reassuring and instructive for all of you who just can’t buy into the “yippee, we’re gonna live forever” sermons anymore. 

 

Religious people often believe a lot of things that don’t stand up to intellectual interrogation, some absurd and embarrassing things, but they defend those beliefs by calling it “faith,” which, I am convinced, is unfair. The meaning of the word “faith” has a lot more to do with courage than it does with assassinating your brains. “Accepting something on faith” should not be a pass for believing things for which there is no evidence or, even worse, are clearly not true.

So, to begin, let’s just remember that historically, no one in the bible, none of the apostles nor anyone in the first century church celebrated a holiday called “Easter.” Easter was an invention of the second century church; I will not belabor the roots of the word or the correspondence that we have from the second century about it. I’m just saying, it was not an original fundamental of the earliest Christians.

 

A religion is like a language, it is always evolving. That should not be an embarrassment, nor should it be seen as a criticism. It is just a fact. Let me remind you that the Canterbury Tales, written by Chaucer, is one of the first works written in English but English as it existed 600 years ago. It begins this way:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye,

So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

 

There is hardly a word of Middle English that is recognizable to the untrained ear, just as Chaucer would be totally lost if he could have somehow heard modern English being spoken. Languages evolve. 

 

Christianity as it existed in the 5^th century, once the New Testament had been formulated and the Catholic Church had begun to take a preliminary shape had very little in common with the faith articulated by Paul and the rest of the New Testament and much less to do with the historical teachings of Jesus. Jesus wouldn’t recognize modern Christianity and modern Christians would not think of the religion of Jesus and his apostles as being recognizable. Religions evolve.

 

Again, that is not a good or bad judgement, that’s just how history unfolds but let’s not kid ourselves; the religion we were taught as children, what was handed down to us from authority figures like our parents, Sunday School teachers, ministers, and community leaders was and is a modern invention. It is not the creation of God but rather it is the creation of an ever-changing culture. I am going to drill down on that more next week but today let’s focus on the Easter event. 

 

The four canonical gospels in our New Testament were not the earliest writings of the New Testament. All four were written decades after Paul had written his letters which we also know from the New Testament. All four gospel writers were familiar with and had some or a lot of respect for the letters of Paul and it is impossible to think that Paul’s letters did not influence the content of those gospels, although he clearly did not have any editorial control of them.

 

It needs to also be said that none of those four gospels, as they exist in print in our Bibles, are in their original form. All four of them underwent revisions and updates, possibly within the lifetimes of their original authors, though the process continued for as much as 900 years after they were first written. 

 

For example, the birth of Jesus is recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but the vocabulary and style of the birth narratives were clearly not written by the same person who wrote the body of those works. Again, if you want to know more about that, write to me and I’ll schedule a time to talk about it.

 

But for our purposes today, it serves to specifically note that Mark, the oldest of the gospels, has an empty tomb narrative but it does not have any accounts of resurrection appearances. If you are aware of the Gospel of Thomas, a possibly earlier first century work, you know that it also does not have resurrection appearances, nor does it mention an empty tomb.

 

Matthew and Luke have accounts of resurrection appearances, but they do not agree with one another. Both form resurrection stories to serve their theological needs and purposes, neither is attempting to record history. John is an early second century work with an entirely different theological agenda and we should not take any part of it as being historical, or even based on history. John is an early second century sermon with an elevated Christology. Again, a huge topic for another day.

 

We have no written accounts of eyewitnesses. The earliest Christian source we have are the authentic letters of Paul. We have several letters in the New Testament that make the claim of having been written by Paul but what scholars agree on as being the authentic letters of Paul are: Romans, I and II Corinthians, I Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon. The pseudo-Pauline letters are 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, Titus, and 1 and 2^nd Timothy. In the New Testament, Paul’s letters are arrange, not in the order in which they are written but rather they are arranged by length, from the longest to the shortest. Romans was probably Paul’s last letter  but because of its length, it appears first in the New Testament.

It is very informative to read all of the New Testament in the order in which it was written. And, you are in luck because one of the best New Testament scholars of modern times, the late Marcus Borg, published the New Testament in chronological order in his book, Evolution of the Word. You can get it on Amazon for $15 or download it on your kindle for $2. 

 

So, for our purposes, we believe that Paul’s first letters are: Thessalonians, Galatians, 1st Corinthians. And we are in luck because the first written account of the Easter event is found in Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Now, bear in mind, Paul never met Jesus when he was alive. He wasn’t around on the first Easter. 

 

Much later, he did meet with Peter, James, and John, but he emphatically states that they did not teach him anything and that everything he knows about Jesus he knows by direct revelation. Again, he talks about this in his own hand in Galatians. So, he is not an eyewitness, but he was at least a contemporary of Jesus and the followers of Jesus.

 

And though he claims to not be in any way inferior to the apostles that Jesus actually chose, it is also clear that Paul did inherit some early traditions from the churches he was associated with…. Their stories, in some cases, their hymns, and their practices. We sometimes have to look past Paul’s arrogance, which verges on narcissism, and try to glean what we can from his accidental historical references.

 

Again, I need to offer this warning, a lot of what church folk think they know about Paul is from the book of Acts. Acts was written by a Paul apologist long after Paul was dead, and most scholars insist that the author of Acts never met Paul and was largely inaccurate in his accounts. For our purposes, let’s allow Paul to speak for himself and consider Acts to be fan-boy literature from a generation after Paul had been murdered by Rome.

 

So, that being said, what is it that Paul says about the Easter event in Corinthians?

In 1^st Corinthians 15, we read:

³ For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures⁴ and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶ Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.^[b] 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸ Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

We learn a lot from this short paragraph. From this we know that by the second half of the first century that a shared experience of a post crucifixion Jesus was foundational to the early church and that several people, if not hundreds, had an experience of Jesus after his death. Also, we see here Paul’s belief that Jesus “died for our sins, according to the scriptures.” A historian would probably say that Jesus was executed by the Roman government for insurrection. We get an echo of that in all four canonical gospels when Pilate asks Jesus if he is the King of the Jews and that is the charge that was nailed to the cross. 

 

How do we get from insurrection against Rome to “dying for our sins”? The key is in the phrase, “according to the scriptures.” The early church looked to the writing of Isaiah, primarily, to interpret the life and death of Jesus. Because of his brutal, state sponsored, murder, he is seen as being the “suffering servant” described five hundred years earlier in the poetry of Isaiah. That’s obviously an absurdly labored reading of an ancient text; Isaiah was no more writing about Jesus than Chaucer was writing about me, unless you are determined to read Chaucer that way but, trust me, Chaucer wouldn’t be proud of you if you do.

 

But Paul accounting for the death of Jesus as having been in God’s plan is how religious people often interpret history as if God is a puppet master in the clouds, controlling human events. I don’t think many of us really think that way, but we sometimes talk that way. We will say that God healed a particular child of cancer without regard for how many children die of cancer, or even that God saved you a great parking place at the mall while allowing tens of thousands to die in the Gaza Strip . . . if it were true, God would surely be a monster, but we say these things out of what the Germans called, “heilsgeschichte” or “salvation history,” seeing everything that happens through a lens of faith. 

 

It is helpful to remember that none of the biblical authors were intending to write a history or a science textbook, they were, essentially, writing sermons and sermons are almost always intended to persuade and to teach faith, not science or history. I personally try to be very careful with facts, but you should assume that most preachers have more in common with fishermen than they do with historians or scientists. 

 

Not in this text nor in any other part of Paul’s writing does he speak of an empty tomb on Easter. It would be very unlikely that Paul would have thought that the tomb was empty. What he describes is a visionary experience. And what is more, he says that Peter, then the twelve, then James and 500 others had the same experience that Paul had, a vision or an experience of Jesus after his death. What was that experience? 

 

Again, if you can chase the dramatic gospel accounts out of your head, let’s let Paul speak for himself. I hate to sound like a broken record, but most of us have carried around images of Paul’s Damascus Road encounter with Jesus in our memories but Paul never mentions this experience. This is a literary creation of the author of Acts who is trying to describe Paul’s experience in concrete terms, but you have to wonder, how does Paul describe his experience of Jesus?

 

Again, we do not have to leave this up to conjecture. In Paul’s 2^nd letter to the church in Corinth, in chapter 12, Paul says:

If It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. ² I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. ³ And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— ⁴ was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. ⁵ On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. ⁶ But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. 

What kind of image do you get in your mind from that bit of prose? Nothing, nothing at all, right? Paul is describing what mystics have described in every century in every religion. Somehow, whether physically or just in his mind, he was taken away from normal life up into the presence of God, and Paul says that he saw things that can’t be described and heard things that cannot be repeated. That is how Paul describes his conversion experience in his own words. The way Paul describes his mystical experience is similar to ecstatic experiences described by Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. 

 

Mystics have life changing, indescribable, profound experiences, and they naturally express them in the language that is available to them. If Paul had this experience in India, he might have said that he encountered Krishna. If he had this experience in China, he might have said that he met Buddha. Just as children in Latin America, when they have an ecstatic experience, describe it as having seen Mary. Everyone uses the language and terminology that they are prepared for by their culture. Again, this is not a good or bad judgement. This is just how human cognition and communication works.

 

Now, the words of the book of Acts are full of images, even addresses, it happened on this road, he saw Jesus, he had a short conversation with him, he was struck blind, he later had scales fall from his eyes. 

You could make a movie script out of Acts, you could paint a picture of it . . . in fact, many movies and many paintings have described this event but what they are describing would not have been familiar to Paul because nothing like that ever happened to Paul . . . if it had, he would never have stopped talking about it!

We let the Acts narrative become so powerful in our minds that we elaborate on it and convince ourselves that it is real. When I was at Harvard, I took a class under the now late Peter Gomes, and he was talking about Paul’s conversion in his typical excited story telling way and he exclaimed that Paul was knocked off his horse and was surrounded by light as he laid on the ground. After class, I mentioned to Dr. Gomes that there is no horse in the Acts account. The text just has Paul walking when he was knocked to the ground. There is, however, a horse in many Renaissance paintings of the Damascus Road event. That was the day that I learned that it was never smart to correct Dr. Gomes.        

 

Still, it is easy to get these details confused. What Paul says that he experienced, was a mystical moment in which he cannot recount what was said nor can he even say if he was in his body or out of it when it happened and that, I contend, is the experience that Paul is saying that Peter, the twelve, and James, and hundreds of church members had the week of Easter, the way a tent revival can crank up hundreds of people into having an ecstatic experience . . . an experience which can be very real and even life changing for them but it is not evidence of a resuscitated dead person, or an empty tomb, nor anything of the kind.      

 

When you read the works of the New Testament in the order in which they were written, you can see how the accounts grew and evolved. Paul’s account of being taking up into third heaven, whether bodily or as a vision, becomes, 40 years later, the rather elaborate Damascus Road event we read about in Acts. The mystical vision of a post crucifixion Jesus that Paul describes in II Corinthians becomes a bodily resurrection in Matthew and Luke. 

There are hints of sermonizing even in those resurrection stories in the gospels. I would challenge you to notice that all of them happened on a Sunday. This is, if you miss church, you also don’t ever see Jesus. . . a lesson that Thomas learns all to well, everyone else saw Jesus one Sunday but Thomas went fishing that day and just heard about it. He learned his lesson and went to church the next Sunday and saw Jesus.

 

In Luke’s Emmaus Road account, disciples are walking to their church gathering and Jesus is somehow walking with him, but outside of community, outside of the gathered church, they don’t recognize him. When do they recognize him? Remember the story, it wasn’t until the community was gathered and he broke bread with them. It was communion, only in the community’s observance of the Lord’s Supper did the fog lift and they saw him in their midst, just before he disappeared. 

 

I’m not trying to disparage these accounts, I’m just pointing out that to understand them you must let go of thinking of them as being historical and think of them in the context in which they were written, as sermons, as teaching tools within the community of faith.  They were very important within the early church, but they do not record or convey history.  

 

Matthew, Mark, and Luke were not liars. They were evangelists, just what the church has always called them. They were preachers. They exaggerated the mystical experience of the early saints, making it more concrete and colorfully descriptive for the congregation, but I do not think that they intended these accounts to be solely interpreted as a promise of resurrection for all of us. Paul does articulate that belief among other beliefs but look at how literature treats the dying and rising savior in later centuries. 

 

The resurrection story has power for anyone who is moving from addiction into sober or chemical free living. It has power for anyone who walked up to death’s door with cancer and chemotherapy and has managed to recover health and strength. I can tell you from personal experience, that it has power for someone who has gone through a devastating divorce that felt worse than death but managed, week after week, month after month, year after year, to regain strength and hope for a new life, maybe even a new love.

 

Resurrection in any of these contexts are not insignificant, in fact, that can be life giving, just not in the “yippee, we’re gonna live forever” mythology.

 

Again, it is not my intent to offend people of traditional faith. It is my purpose to offer an academic and critical way of seeing the faith we inherited. As Scott Peck has said, “Anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.” You may have heard what I said about the first Easter and choose to dismiss my arguments and go on believing what you learned in your youth in church, but I am grateful that you had the courage to examine your faith and test its claims. 

 

Next week I will talk about how the Christian religion of the 20^th century was shaped by 19^th century revivalism and consider how it might change again into a more progressive faith in the 21^st century. And I promise, I will try to make it shorter than this presentation.