Why The Virgin Birth Is Important.

 “Then that little man in Black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman!  Where did your Christ come from?  Where did your Christ come from?   From God and a woman!  Man had nothing to do with Him.”

—Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth, the great African-American liberator of slaves, correctly notices that, in the Virgin Birth story in the gospels, there are no men, that is no adult male humans, no members of the privileged, dominant gender, certainly no kings or emperors, involved in the actual conception and delivery of God into the world in Jesus Christ.  The only men in the story play mere secondary, supporting, or adversarial roles.  But it is a matter of God — specifically God’s Holy Spirit — Ruach in Hebrew, which is feminine — cooperating with Mary, a teenaged, Jewish woman.

So when Isaiah 7:14 uses a term that the gospels understand as “virgin,” it means not only that God’s future is coming, but that it is God’s future, that is, it is not dependent on the decisions or agency of any of the powerful people in the world, nearly all of whom were men.  No man would be able to claim paternity and therefore any of the credit for God’s Presence in the world.  No man would be the lord of the Lord.  The Messiah would not belong to any patriarchal bloodline (except that of David by adoption).  God’s future comes about in spite of and in contradiction to the plans and agendas of the powerful humans who think they are in charge.

That, and not any silly literalist conjectures about what is or isn’t gynecologically miraculous, or gnosticizing attempts to make the Lord's conception supposedly "sinless," or to keep Mary "pure," or to make Jesus "unique," is why the Virgin Birth story remains an essential part of Christian faith.

—Paul+

Buddy Holly's New Wine

There’s a scene in the movie, The Buddy Holly Story, where young Buddy is playing at, I think it was a roller rink, with his band, in Lubbock, Texas.  They apparently have to play basically nice, traditional, country-western songs.  We see some moms on the sideline smiling and swaying in complacent bliss to the familiar tunes.  

But Holly is getting frustrated and finally he tells the band to launch into something different, and they start to play some vigorous rock’n’roll.  The teenagers love it, but the parents are horrified.  

At that moment, Buddy Holly was channeling Jesus.

The parents are offended and annoyed, not just because the music is energetic and physical, country music has plenty of that.  But what Holly started playing was clearly derived from the Black community.  It was music from an oppressed and hated culture.  It was a threat to segregation and white supremacy.  That is why it had to be stopped.

This story reminds me of how the Lord Jesus talks about his ministry as “new wine.”  New wine is not offensive and dangerous because it is new; in a wine-drinking culture there would always have to be newly produced wine.  

Jesus’ new wine was a threat because it was foreign wine.  It was the wine of the other.  It was the wine of transformation.  It was the wine of the future.  I mean, Jesus turns water into wine, and he turns wine into his own blood, his life given for the life of the world.  This is not ordinary wine; it is miracle wine.  It is the wine of eternity.  And eternity is an existential threat to the Empire.  

The comfortable, complacent chaperones of Jesus’ society recognized it as such.  Holly’s raucous new music was the wine of equality and justice.  It was the wine of inclusion and compassion.  It was the wine of racial mixing and integration.  It was new wine because it was the wine of rebellion and resistance to the standard order of the Empire.  It was a new dance, outside of and in resistance to the officially authorized and acceptable ways of moving.  

Too many churches seem engineered to give comfort to the chaperones whose job it is to sit on the sidelines and make sure everything stays under control and totally familiar.  The same comforting music.  The same well-known prayers.  The same faces in the pews and pulpit.  

This consistency would be commendable were the church expressing and sharing the new wine of Jesus Christ, the wine of the Kingdom of God, the alternative to the Empire and its oppressive, divisive standards.  This is the “deposit of faith” which the church should be passing on to each generation, and passing out to the world.  But I fear this is not the case.  

The wine we are serving in the church needs to “gladden the human heart” and transport us into God’s Kingdom.  It needs to separate us from the routines and regimentation of the Empire.  It needs to give us God’s life of justice, equality, compassion, humility, and joy.  It needs to unite us with the oppressed, marginalized, dispossessed, and disinherited.  Indeed, it needs to be their wine.

That wine, becomes — to shift the metaphor — the powerful, living, growing yeast that leavens the whole loaf, causing it to fill with the Spirit and rise.  The Kingdom of God is like that.  It is like new wine.  It is like yeast.  It is like… Buddy Holly.

+++++++

   

 

Q-Anon, Gnosticism, and NPR.

So I am listening to one of my favorite NPR shows, called “On The Media.”  The host is interviewing Jeff Sharlet.

Anyway, he is about to explain his theory about how the virulent Q-Anon conspiracy pathology is an echo of an early Christian heresy.  Now, I love NPR, but they are not known for dispensing accurate information about Christian history.  I mean NPR will gladly fawn over anyone selling a book seeking to discredit the early Church.   

Then Sharlet reveals the ancient Christian heresy he says Q-Anon is echoing, and it’s (wait for it)… Gnosticism!  (Here’s a link to the extended version: https://www.wbez.org/stories/extended-version-the-ancient-heresy-that-helps-us-understand-qanon/83696be6-6cb3-44d2-888c-ce1102988205.)

Gnosticism.  The 2nd century pseudo-faith that many modernist critics proclaim to be the original, nicer, real, but tragically lost and “suppressed” version of Christianity.  And here is Sharlet on NPR, of all places, explaining in some detail Gnosticism’s toxic, ego-centric, bizarre delusions and their parallels with the idiotic Q-Anon nonsense… which is apparently supported by many fundamentalist Christians.  Basically, Sharlet calls out such people as heretics by associating them with the Ur-heretics of the whole Christian tradition!  Thus he disses Q-Anon, fundamentalists, Gnostics, and Trump in one OTM episode! by pointing out their contradiction of orthodox Christianity.

From my perspective I was gratified to find someone, anyone, on the more-or-less mainstream media speaking truth about the execrable Gnostics, a bunch of 2nd century holy rollers whose incoherent doctrines had in common a hatred of the creation and the Creator, yet who managed to become the darlings of some recent writers seeking a version of “Christianity” more suited to escapism, consumerism, and ego gratification. 

The shadow of Gnosticism has always pestered real Christianity, and it has been a particular temptation for us Protestants, whose commitment to “faith alone” makes us vulnerable to imagining that something is true because we "feel it."  It is well-suited to an age when people want self-centered “spirituality” that will allow them to continue to profit with impunity from the crimes of Empire.  Positing, like Q-Anon, a ridiculous and secret cabal of evil ruling the world, the Gnostics claimed to be the only ones who knew the truth, based on private “research” into the maze of their own fears and desires.

If there is anything positive about Q-Anon perhaps it is that it is waking up Christians to the rancid foolishness of the Gnostics, and how it gets exhumed in every generation. 

I am also confident that Q-Anon, like Gnosticism, will spin out of its own accord, not by some imagined persecution by the big, bad Church, but simply because it is based on lies and therefore does not withstand any encounter with reality.  I also realize that they may do a lot of damage on their way down.

Real Christian faith is not that obscure and complicated: Just follow the Jesus Christ of Scripture, in the Church.  Everything that does not do that is a distraction.    

Here’s two more articles on this. 

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2020/04/gnostics-qanon-covid-liberty-protests-and-the-myth-of-the-untutored-genius.html

https://religionnews.com/2020/08/17/qanon-the-alternative-religion-thats-coming-to-your-church/

Paul+

Recovery and Adaptation.

When I lived in Boston I noticed a lot of energy in the classical music community around early music.  They even had what was practically a fad about reproducing the music of those times as faithfully as possible, right down to using antique instruments.  Presumably they also implemented well-researched tempi, tunings, ensemble sizes, and venues.  They sought to present early music “authentically,” so that the listener would hear in 1984 exactly what one would have heard in 1684.

But then one critic made what I thought was a dazzling and cogent observation about this, noting that in reality this whole movement did not actually reproduce the music of earlier centuries so much as present us with a different kind of contemporary music.  This was not really a look “back” at all; it was a statement about, and a response to, our situation at the end of the 20th century.   A lot of what we heard was good, beautiful, and interesting music… but in the end it was a genre of new music.

That comment was a revelation to me.  First of all, it exemplified a critical post-modern sensibility, that recognized the socially and historically conditioned nature of everything.  There is no uninterpreted experience.  We simply do not have direct access to the past; everything is filtered through our present consciousness and situation.  Secondly, it compelled me to rethink a lot of what was going on in my own field, that of Christian faith.

The Reformation of the 16th century thought of itself as a recovery of the faith of the early church.  It was all about getting back to the Church of the Apostles.  In reality it was an adaptation of Christianity suited to the needs and desires of some people of that time.  People found what they needed and wanted to find, using criteria designed for the task.  A “traditional” Protestant worship service reproduces the forms of the 16th century, not of the 1st.  

The Church has gone through many versions of this.  In the last few decades we had the drive to recover the “Celtic Christianity” of the 5th-12th centuries, which has excited me.  And there are the “quests for the historical Jesus,” which have erupted periodically in the last few centuries.  

All these movements say they want to recover and restore something beautiful and good that has been lost; but all of them are responses to contemporary conditions.  They produce not some connective passage to the past, but new forms of Christianity designed to meet the needs/desires of people today.  They are no more “authentic” than Colonial Williamsburg is an actual reproduction of 18th century Virginia.  At best such efforts are sincere and educational.  At worst, they are about selling books and merchandise, adaptations designed to appeal to the 21st century market.

For there is no going back.  There is no recovery or restoration of something that is past.  And we now know that to make such a claim is a lie.  I’m not saying don’t listen to voices from other eras, far from it.  We need to be informed by a deep historical sensibility.  Let’s just be honest that all recoveries, reforms, and restorations are actually adaptations.  In short, we don't have the past event; all we have is tradition, which is the ongoing history of adaptation.

Those adaptations can be very valuable, faithful, and powerful!  They can provide a lot of useful and beautiful practices to the Church today.  The study of Celtic Christianity, for example, has produced amazing resources in terms of books and music, prayers, liturgies, and missional strategies.  It has opened us to nearly forgotten theologians like Pelagius and Eriugena, and drawn connections with more recent figures like George MacDonald and Teilhard de Chardin.  It has shown us different ways of doing theology and organizing the Church.  For me, it even gives a certain legitimacy to new practices if it can be shown they were used effectively by saints in the past.

Which leads me to the opposite observation that some adaptations can be destructive and actually undermine authentic Christianity.  This is where I place the various quests for the “historical Jesus.”  It is one thing to be informed by movements and theologies of the early Church.  It is another to eviscerate the heart of the New Testament itself and gouge out of the text words Jesus, according to someone’s arbitrary criteria, “did not really say.” 

How do we make this determination, that some expressions are in tune with the gospel of Jesus, and some are contradictions of that gospel?  It is not, as Modernity wanted to say, by using historical science to identify what is “oldest.”  That would be to begin with the assumption that faith is about the past.  “God is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live to God” (Luke 20:38), says Jesus. 

(Neither is it the uncritical reception and adoption of whatever is handed to us by the previous generation.  This conservative approach assumes an unadulterated process of transmission over the centuries.  But we know that contexts are always changing, and tradition is about continuity realized in adaptivity and adaptation.)  

The answer here is Presence.  Authenticity does not mean faithfulness to the past no matter how we represent it or claim access to it; it means faithfulness to God’s living Presence here and now.  

In his ministry, the Lord Jesus Christ does not seek to recover and restore the Israelite faith of the past; he comes to fulfill it.  He realizes it in himself and becomes the Way for us to experience and know the ever-present, living Spirit that animates the tradition of his own people, and indeed all of human spirituality.  Authenticity has to do with the Spirit.  The Spirit is always present.  The Spirit is always all-inclusive and non-dual.  The Spirit is always revealing fulfilled time, thus giving meaning and direction to our journey through time.  

The question of authenticity then is not about what is older.  It is about what is real.  Thus it always brings us up to “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture,” who “is the One Word of God which we have to hear and which we are to trust and obey in life and in death.”  Authenticity has to do with what is in accordance with Christ, as discerned by the gospel community that lives in trust and obedience of him.       

Voting With Jesus.

I saw on Facebook someone purporting to be a Christian saying she would vote this year based on candidates’ policies (as opposed to personality and character, I suppose, or political expediency).  Specifically, she said she would vote for candidates that advocated for low taxes, less regulation, a stronger military, freedom of religion, and support for Israel, and against abortion, “open borders,” and a “Living Constitution.”

It seems to me that the criteria for determining the “Christian" character of public policy have to be the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as we have them in the New Testament.  How do this person’s views on policies stack up with what Jesus himself actually says and does?  Let’s see.

1. Taxes.  The Lord expresses frustration over the crushing tax burden laid in his time on poor people and workers.  They were financing not only their own oppression by the Romans, but the expensive lifestyle and monumental projects of local leaders.  But Jesus also proclaims “the acceptable year of the Lord,” a reference to the Jubilee laid out in Leviticus 25, which is about a radical downward redistribution of wealth.  His attitude towards the rich is consistently and highly critical.  He lives according to the motto that everything belongs to God (Psalm 24:1).  Can we infer from all this that Jesus would have accepted higher taxes on the wealthy if it meant more aid for the needy?  That would be completely within character for him.     
2. Regulation.  In our time, people complain about regulation because they favor letting the market do as it pleases.  But when Jesus is advised to rely on the market to feed over 5000 hungry people, he rejects that option.  When the establishment turned the holy Temple into a marketplace, he is incensed.  Jesus understands that markets are modes of economic oppression and inequality because they inherently privilege the rich.  His ministry, on the contrary, indicates a preference for policies that create wholeness and equality.  He also sees God’s creation as a theater of God’s glory, full of living signs of God’s Presence.  He does not tolerate the kind of depredations wrought by an economic system based on greed and inequality.  Would he advocate for regulation?  Much of the Torah is a regulatory regime designed to prevent the Israelites from falling into an authoritarian, oligarchical polity like they one of which they experienced the business end in Egypt as slaves.  Jesus would have people’s behavior regulated by God’s Word and will.  He would curb the capricious liberties taken by the powerful against the weak.  If regulation means protecting workers, the poor, women, strangers, and creation, Jesus is all for it.      
3. A stronger military.  The Lord Jesus rejects the kind of coercive State power exerted by the military when the devil offered it to him.  He and his people knew the military mainly as its victims.  In his Sermon on the Mount he gives advice about how to deal with oppressive occupation soldiers.  It was Jewish Temple police who arrested him, and Roman militarized police who killed him.  Bearing in mind that the U.S. military is by far the strongest in history, with spending far, far greater than any other nation, more indeed than the next 10 or so combined, it is frankly and obviously impossible to imagine Jesus advocating for an even stronger U.S. military.
4. Freedom of religion.  Jesus lived in a context where Judaism was the official religion of his country and non-Jews were looked down on.  At the same time, the Roman Empire recognized a wide variety of religions, as long as they all worshiped the Emperor.  Jesus makes a point of ministering to and lifting up Samaritans, who were considered heretics.  He also heals several non-Jews.  He complains, sometimes bitterly, about religious rules being given the force of civil law; so he would certainly not have wanted his teachings enforced that way.  Jesus would have no part of any supposed “freedom” of some to impose their religion on others.  Would the One who heals all use his religion to deny health care (or even a cake) to someone?  Hardly.  
5. Support for Israel.  Jesus endures a situation of colonialism, ministering to its victims.  He certainly does not advocate violence in any case.  But it is far easier to see Jesus sympathizing and siding with indigenous people like the Palestinians than with the settlers and soldiers who are using violence to take away their land and lives.  It was Jesus’ opponents who were so apoplectic about preserving the Jewish State of his own time.  They saw him undermining their nation and religion.  It’s why they killed him.  So, no, I don’t see Jesus supporting any regime oppressing its neighbors.  And he, like the prophets, would be particularly critical if Jews, who supposedly know better because they have the words of the Torah and prophets, fall into these behaviors. It is impossible to believe he would have supported a colonialist, oppressive State, even (or especially) were it technically “Jewish” in character.
6. Abortion.  Jesus says exactly nothing about abortion.  It is safe to assume he would have been against it as an act of violence.  However, he also receives women as equals and empathizes with and heals their pain.  Since he doesn’t generally advocate inflicting coercive, heartless, and punitive laws on suffering people, it is hard to believe he would call for criminalization here.  Jewish belief is that human life begins with breath.  As with everything, the Lord is about humility, forgiveness, gentleness, wisdom, compassion, and life.
7. Open borders.  Jesus does not advocate for stronger national borders, or borders at all.  He himself wanders across local borders all the time.  He lived in the larger context of the Roman Empire, of course.  Implied by the fear of “open borders” is a racist hatred of “illegal” foreigners and immigrants.  Yet Jesus’ birth is welcomed by an entourage of enemy, “heathen,” foreigners.  And he understands the demands of Scripture that strangers be welcomed and cared for.  So it is hard not to believe that open borders would be fine with him.  
8. A “Living Constitution”.  The closest thing to the Constitution that Jesus knows is the Torah which guides Jewish life.  Neither he nor the early Church understand the Torah in a rigid, legalistic, literal way.  Indeed, his enemies thought he was dangerously lax in his Torah observance.  He repeatedly says in his Sermon on the Mount that his teaching overrides the literal sense of the Torah.  In reality, he makes the Torah more strict and more spiritual at the same time.  This is how he enacts a “living Torah.”  He wants Torah observance to express its Spirit, which is deeper than its mere letter.  Translating this to how we approach the U.S. Constitution is a stretch.  On the one hand, we have always talked about equality, liberty, and community as the spirit of the Constitution.  It our best, we have seen these characteristics emerge in our polity in broadening and creative ways.  On the other hand, it could be argued that the document was carefully designed to privilege white, male property owners and weights the system in favor of them and the States that practiced slavery.  So-called “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution focus on the letter of the law, which continues the implementation of these dictates, which frankly contradict the accepted spirit of the document.  Jesus most certainly does not approve of a polity that privileges people with money and power, which is what Constitutional originalism does.  If a “Living Constitution” approach is about applying the deeper spirit of the Constitution to contemporary issues and problems, then it is hard to see Jesus having a problem with it.

We may vote according to our consciences.  But we should be very careful about calling our advocacy of certain policies “Christian.”  Only Jesus gets to determine that.  And Jesus doesn’t necessarily see things the way we do.

It seems obvious, but I think Christians should base their political and economic views on the life and teachings of Jesus.

+++++++

Originalism.

As I write this, the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate is examining a nominee to the Supreme Court.  She is known to hold to the legal philosophy called “originalism.” Briefly put, this approach interprets the Constitution based on the original meaning intended by the authors.

We don’t call it by this name, but a kind of originalism is an important aspect of biblical interpretation as well.  We too seek to understand and apply, as far as we are able, the original intention and meaning of the authors of the Bible.  This is important in biblical studies because the authors are the prophets and saints who founded and defined the Hebrew and Christian traditions.  They have authority based on their sanctity, their unique witness to God’s work, and the acceptance of their writings by the Church over time.  With regard to the New Testament, they come from the first or second generation of people who knew Jesus of Nazareth, directly or indirectly.  Through them and their writings we see the revelation of God, which is to say ultimate Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

While we recognize that the authors of biblical texts were human and therefore historically conditioned, what they witness to, however imperfectly, is the emergence of the Eternal in our world.  So there is a sense in which a kind of  originalism has to be a central component of any interpretation of the Bible.  But it can’t be the end, as if articulating what the authors may have meant in their own time is all we have to say.  Interpretation necessarily includes the further step of applying what we have learned to our own lives and situation.  The Bible, because it is the unique and authoritative witness to God’s Word, is indeed a living text, not a dead letter.  God is life. 

But the U.S. Constitution is different.  The framers of that document were not concerned with or relying on divine revelation.  They hammered out the Constitution by means of compromise, power, personality, and political necessity and expediency.  They were not concerned with the communication of God’s will on God’s terms; they were forging a workable, sustainable State.  The Constitution was not intended as a witness to God’s saving work in the world.  Indeed, God does not come up at all.  Neither is Scripture referred to.  The framers wanted to create a political system that reflected the philosophies of the so-called Enlightenment.  These are what they themselves reference.  

In biblical interpretation, an originalist approach reminds us that the Bible was written by the descendants of liberated Israelite slaves explicitly to prevent any degradation back into a system like the one they escaped, which was dominated by Pharaoh and an oppressive ruling class.  The writers of the Bible are consistent in their lifting up of the poor and marginalized, and their political system is initially decentralized, egalitarian, and theocratic.  It is designed to mitigate and reduce the power of the strong and wealthy, even applying a periodic redistribution of wealth downward.  Biblical originalism means realizing that the text is a thorough critique and rejection of Empire.

Originalism in interpreting the U.S. Constitution, on the other hand, means attachment to the values and beliefs of a group of white, propertied, 18th century men, many of whom owned slaves.  In other words, it was heavily influenced by people who had more in common with Pharaoh than with the Israelites.  They showed scant interest in the concerns of the poor or marginalized, or of women, indigenous people, or slaves.  The fact that they designed a system which preserved the privilege and power of people like them should not be surprising.  In the ostensive interest of unity, they included features intended to skew legal and political processes in favor of States that allowed slavery.  It was biased toward white, male, property owners.  Indeed, in many States these were the only people allowed to vote.

So the first reason why Christians cannot abide constitutional originalism is that it intentionally privileges the perspective of the exact opposite class of people to those lifted up in the Bible, and expresses therefore the exact opposite policies and practices. 

Legal originalism is presented as an alternative against the understanding called the “Living Constitution.”  Indeed, Living Constitution theory holds that the meaning of the text shifts according to the contemporary interpretive context.    

In biblical interpretation, we do not believe we have to, or even can, choose only one of these two alternatives: faithfulness to the original authors or the view that the Bible is a living text.  Rather we understand both to be essential.  The original words, intentions, and contexts of the authors are important, and they pertain to every age.  This universal relevance is rooted in the subject matter of the Bible, which is God, who, as the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of everything, is never irrelevant.  By the Spirit, God is always speaking in and through God’s Word and Spirit.  The word for this work of interaction and balance between original text and contemporary situation is hermeneutics.

The whole point of biblical interpretation is to see the continued life and relevance of the Bible in today’s world.  But the point of legal originalism is to impose on people today the vision, values, mentality, and habits of a few propertied white men from 1789.  This is a form of idolatry.  It leads to legal decisions that privilege property over people, and one class over others.      

Originalist legal philosophy therefore militates against the life and teachings of Jesus Christ which reveal a continual expansion of blessing and goodness to include more and more people in God’s family.      

+++++++

The Split.

In a recent Sunday New York Times there was an article purporting to explain why so many Christians support the current occupant of the White House.  It turns out that these people have a rosily distorted memory of the old regime of White Christian America.  They long for a return to the days where there was, apparently, no crime, and no annoying Gay or Trans people always in your face; when Black people stayed in their literal and social place, there were no Hispanics around at all, the Bible was read in school, everyone stood for the Pledge of Allegiance and saluted the flag, there was no abortion, no extra-marital sex, women stayed home, the police were respected, veterans revered, churches were full, and America was on top of the world.  Among other things.  That’s they way they “remember” it, or how it was told to them by their parents and grandparents.  That is the great America that the current occupant of the White House promised to restore.

While this may come as an interesting eye-opener to readers of the New York Times, it was old news to me.  I grew up in and then worked in the Presbyterian Church for over half a century.  When I started in ministry, I thought my job had to do with helping people follow Jesus Christ.  But I quickly discovered that many of my congregants assumed my job was to somehow bring back the glory days of the 1950’s.  I was supposed to go out and haul back to church the people who stopped coming.  At the very least I was expected to share, articulate, and encourage their denial, bargaining, anger, hatred, paranoia, and scapegoating over the loss of those apparently wonderful days.  In my first church, I was eventually informed that I did not teach what they were used to being taught.  The understanding that some had of Christianity was different from mine, and had, as far as I could see, nothing to do with Jesus Christ at all, except using his name. 

Their Christianity was about patriotism, policing others’ sexual morality, stopping change, rugged individualism, and not drinking beer.  None of these are things with which Jesus is concerned in the New Testament.  (Except that he does appear to have been more a wine guy.)  The only change they seemed to appreciate was when the State decided to construct a new prison nearby.  That was popular.  I lasted less than three years there.         

It turns out that Christianity has always had a split between two versions of the faith.  One is the popular, egocentric, conformist, conventional, patriotic, privileged, rules-based, controlling religion of people who benefit from and support the establishment, which is to say the Empire of the time.  The other is people seeking to follow Jesus Christ.

We see this split in Jesus’ ministry, where he was continually sniped at and conspired against by the guardians and keepers of the establishment religion of his own time.  Those respectable religious people eventually connived with the Roman government to have him executed.  The things Jesus was doing and saying: like including all sorts of people in his group, performing healings and exorcisms, breaking many of the establishment’s complicated rules, offering people forgiveness and a new lifestyle in community, questioning basic social pillars like the family, were deeply threatening and offensive to the religious leaders, whom Jesus called “hypocrites.”

We see this split in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where his mixed community of Jesus-followers is existentially threatened by an invasion of privileged, establishment, rules-based, conformist, conventional religious leaders.  They required circumcision and Torah-keeping as a way for Gentiles to become officially Jewish, which they considered a prerequisite for being Christian.  That way they would stay safely within the Roman system.  Since that was the system that crucified Jesus, we can see why Paul got so apoplectic about this.

We see this split in the Book of Revelation, where John identifies and criticizes those who cave in to the lure of fitting into and accepting the benefits of Roman culture.  He spends most of his book graphically describing the imminent gruesome collapse of that system, warning Christians that if they participate in it, they will perish with it.

And so on into Church history.  There has been this division between those who want to uphold, defend, feed, and benefit from the establishment religion and culture, and those who seek to follow Jesus Christ.

These two ways have never been compatible, as much as we might like to imagine that we can follow Jesus somehow and still be loyal to whatever may be the prevailing nation, economy, civilization, religion, or moral regime.  Jesus says we cannot serve both God and what human authorities define as wealth.  There is simply no compromise between the Way of Jesus and the ways of the world.

Jesus says to seek first the Kingdom of God.  He does not say to seek first to restore some imaginary idyllic past.  He does not say to seek first “success” as the world defines it.  He does not say to seek first money, fame, and power.  He does not say to seek first what is good for America, or white people, or families, or property owners, or men.  He says to seek first the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is not White Christian America.  It is the life of compassion and justice, non-violence and humility, equality and forgiveness, simplicity and inclusion, honesty and community that Jesus demonstrated.  The Kingdom of God is about reversal that turns the world’s standards upside down so that the poor, hungry, sick, powerless, and excluded get what they need, and the rich, in the words of Jesus’ mother, are sent away empty.      

In the days of that supposed greatness of White Christian America, we still had overt racial segregation, oppression, and lynchings.  Violence against Gay people was routine and written into laws and even psychology textbooks.  The options for women were severely limited.  America was propping up and installing brutal dictators all over the world, even to the point of teaching torture.  Our national wealth was being sunk into an insane nuclear arms race.  There was abortion, and it often meant the death or maiming of women.  There was adultery, but it was okay for men.  And we were beginning to enslave ourselves to large corporations.  We were not even conscious of what we were doing to our own health (everybody smoked, seatbelts didn’t even exist) or to the planet.

White Christian America squatted on stolen land.  It profited from the labor and resources of others.  It remains blissfully unconscious of how severely the system is tilted in their favor, giving them all kinds of advantages.  Now that there has been a slight movements towards leveling the playing field, some wail like petulant children about all they are “losing.”  They even convince themselves they are persecuted for their Christian faith, which is not true.  There is not one thing for which White Christian America is supposedly “under attack” that is a matter of discipleship of Jesus Christ.  

All they are losing is status, privilege, control, and the right to impose their own agenda, which they equate with the gospel, on others.  Is there someplace in the gospels where Jesus instructs his disciples not to bake wedding cakes for Gay people?  Or to deny contraceptives in employee health care plans?  Is this even good evangelism?  Or just bitter, hateful anger about loss of influence?  And it makes Jesus and Christianity look oppressive, thus feeding into the very narrative they are resisting.  

The only antidote to such attitudes, I found, was to bring people to an encounter with the actual Jesus Christ we find in Scripture.  I am not going to say that even this had much of a direct effect, or that I was particularly proficient at it.  But occasionally the good news would get through to people.  Mostly I hope I was planting seeds.

And occasionally those seeds would germinate in people’s experience in the larger world.  They would encounter Gays, immigrants, African-Americans, poor people, and others they had assumed were the enemy, often in their own families.  I am hoping that some exposure to what Jesus actually did and taught prepared them to accept and love these “others.”

And that is what Jesus is about: loving and accepting those deemed as others, and bringing them into the family of God.  

I am not going to say that there isn’t a lot wrong with the way the world is headed.  Capitulation to and compromise with our contemporary culture is often as harmful as idealizing the 1950’s.  But through it all the only question in the hearts of Christians needs to be, “How do we follow Jesus here and now?”

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The Occupant.

Advertizers, con-men, and seducers, not to mention corrupt and authoritarian politicians, all know how to get people to do what they want.  They influence people by appealing to the force that occupies our souls: the fearful, angry, ashamed, and deeply selfish ego.  They represent and reflect back to us the worst and most destructive parts of us… which are unfortunately often the most appealing.    

Christianity is designed to liberate us from social tyranny by releasing us from the grip of this illegitimate occupant within.  This is what Jesus means when he says things like “You must lose your life in order to save it,” and “You must take up your cross and follow me.”  He is instructing us to get over ourselves.  The ego that tells us who we are has convinced us it is our very life.  But that is what has to go if we are ever to realize our true life in Christ.

Baptism has to do with this dying, which leads to a rising to new life which is fed in the  Eucharist with Christ himself. 

But far too often Christianity has grievously failed in this, its primary task.  It became largely a lapdog for our fragile, fearful egos.  Instead of the Way of transcendence and union with the Creator through Christ, Christianity was reduced to just another religion of laws, rules, control, and caste, serving the interests of those in charge.  Instead of bringing people to Christ, it inoculated people against him, injecting us with a weak, synthesized version of faith, designed to prop up and amplify the fear and rage of our ego.  We want a religion that feeds, comforts, and reassures our ego.  This is the way Christianity is used, most of the time.        

Bonhoeffer said that “when Christ calls us he bids us come and die.”  But that is absolutely the last thing people look for in a church.  Instead, we shop for the place that will provide themes benefits for our ego.  Church, in this view, should tell us what we want to hear.

How did this happen?  

As soon as we are flushed into this world, suddenly finding ourself separate from our secure and connected womb-environment, and where now everyone else is apparently separate from us, our brains go to work figuring out how to deal with this new situation.  We perceive that we are small, needy, helpless, dependent, and vulnerable.  We feel alone.  We feel trapped in a little, discrete container of flesh.  So we welcome the ego’s strong and soothing voice that gives us seemingly good advice for how to survive.  We develop strategies for coping, defense, getting what we need and want, and ingratiating ourselves to our caretakers and protectors.  We spin a personality, we tell ourselves stories, we manipulate memories, we build a self based on the instruction of this inner occupant, our ego.

The ego tells us we are at risk and “I alone can fix it.”  It says that only by following this regime of nihilistic narcissism, with its addiction to lying, cheating, stealing, hating, fearing, and killing, will we survive amid the “carnage” of this existence.  The motto here is “me first!”  No one else matters.  The ego accepts no responsibility; it is rather always looking to blame others for its circumstances.  It invents wild, improbable, even impossible tales to justify its own desires and strategies for meeting them.  It has a cold and callous disregard for the suffering of others.  It will seek ruthlessly to win, by any means necessary.  

The consequence is annihilation of the self, society, and planet.  It is the regime of death represented by the Beast in the Book of Revelation. 

Jesus threatens this system by proclaiming a different reality, that of God’s Kingdom, a true  alternative to the false and toxic tyranny of ego.  He brings us to see more deeply and fully, from a higher perspective, that we are not alone.  We are not at-risk.  Our fears are unwarranted; our anger baseless.  It is humans who think the world is dangerous, and who, by this thinking, make it so.  In reality “the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”  The truth is that we are children of a beneficent Creator who made everything “very good.”  We are all connected.  We are made for togetherness, delight, wonder, wisdom, and peace.  We are made to live eternally, in the fullness of time, in joy, praise, and thanksgiving.

When Jesus says we have to die to ourselves, he means we have to let go of the lies upon which we have based our existence.  Who our egos tell us we are is a lie.  Indeed, lies never hold up.  They and everything built on them collapse and crumble into nonexistence, a process which is always happening, and which is the cause of our suffering.  Our thinking is incompatible with the truth; our actions create a world of falsehood.  The collision between God’s truth and our lies generates the misery of our existence.   

To follow Jesus is to live in the light of his Word instead of the tempting slogans of our ego.

Before we will truly be truly free of the corrupt, lying, incompetent, fearful, angry forces occupying leadership positions over us, we have to deal with the occupant within us: the corrupt, lying, incompetent, fearful, angry ego that rules in our own souls.  And we have to let that all go.    

This happens when we to turn instead to Jesus Christ and his Word of compassion, forgiveness, non-violence, simplicity, generosity, and gratitude.  We need to base our lives on that Rock, thereby allowing Christ to emerge in us, and the Kingdom of God to emerge in our world. 

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Discipleship Is Everything.

I have long been of the opinion that discipleship is everything.

Sometimes people ask me if they should read this book, follow this leader, adopt this philosophy, do this practice.  My response to such questions is almost always to ask, “Is it a way to follow Jesus?  Does it help you follow Jesus?  If so, go for it.”

For Christianity is about following Jesus.  It is not about talking, or thinking, or hearing about Jesus.  It is not about adopting this or that creed.  It is not about pinning a label — “Christian” — on yourself, or wearing a cross, or reading a Bible, or even praying regularly.  Those can all be very good things… if they help us actually follow Jesus.    

Following Jesus, though, is a particular path.  It involves specific, identifiable behaviors and actions.  

We follow Jesus by living a life that reflects and expresses the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as these are attested in the Scriptures, especially the New Testament, mainly the gospels.

We find several places in the gospels where Jesus describes what he is about.  The Beatitudes and the whole rest of the Sermon on the Mount give us remarkably explicit instructions about what it means to follow him.  He sets out his agenda in several places, like the words from Isaiah he quotes in his home town of Nazareth.  In Matthew 11 he points out a list of healing activities that characterize his ministry and validate his Messiahship.   

Jesus’ life and teachings may be summarized as the expression of God’s love.  He demonstrates compassion, forgiveness, healing, welcoming, equality, and justice.  He enacts generosity, wonder, simplicity, reversal, gentleness, and community.  

Jesus is invariably on the side of the poor, the sick, the outcast, the lost, sinners, and losers.  He is also reliably critical of the rich, the powerful, the leaders, and the “religious,” whom he calls hypocrites.

Furthermore, Jesus is very demanding.  He says his disciples have to “lose their life” and “take up a cross.”  Following him means letting go of our ego-centric, self-serving motivations and illusions, in order to realize our oneness with all creation.  He demands courage and trust in him; he would have us be free of fear, anger, and shame.  He requires that those who follow him live not for themselves, but for others.

In the end he gives his own life for us when he is executed by the Romans for blasphemy and sedition… and at the same time he gives his life to us in the resurrection and the ways he gives us to participate together in his new life: the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist.

But the point is always discipleship: which is giving up our own lives and having his life emerge in us.  We surrender our greed, envy, anger, pride, gluttony, lust, and other self-centered behaviors, and we take on his expansive, loving, goodness.  We move from our little darkness into God’s great light.

Discipleship is the touchstone of Christian faith.  We find clear evidence that we believe in Jesus in the quality of our discipleship.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: “Only the one who is obedient believes; only the one who believes is obedient.”  Following Jesus and trusting Jesus are the same thing.  They cannot be separated.  

In other words, just calling ourselves Christians is meaningless.  It is discipleship, not semantics, that is everything.

Today — as in every age, unfortunately — we encounter people who call themselves Christians, but whose lives show scant evidence in their behavior that they actually follow Jesus.  Now, no one follows Jesus perfectly in this existence.  We may follow him better sometimes and in some circumstances.  I get that.  But on the whole our lives bend towards Jesus, or they don’t.  And discipleship means always striving to bring our entire life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

But there is no room in discipleship for attitudes and actions that move aggressively counter to the life and teachings of Jesus.  There is no room for murder, stealing, cheating, or lying.  There is no place, in following the One who welcomed and accepted all kinds of people, for nationalism, racism, sexism, or homophobia.  There is no room for paranoid conspiracy theories, in following the Truth.  Can we claim to follow Jesus if we hate Muslims, Gays, immigrants, or atheists?  No.  Can we claim to follow Jesus if our prior allegiance is to a deliberately divisive leader or a political movement that intentionally stokes our fear, our rage, and invokes a toxic nostalgia?

No.  Jesus was crucified by such people, people who wanted to uphold “traditional moral standards,” and maintain their religion and nation.  Some things are simply not compatible with discipleship.  

The problem for Christianity is that a long time ago we managed to make following Jesus optional.  Well, it became so optional that Christianity got identified with many things that Jesus himself rejected.  The Church got domesticated.

Discipleship means the undomestication of the Church.  Which is to say its re-wilding.  Discipleship is a feral Church, a Church that looks only to Jesus Christ and his Way of peace, love, and justice.  A Church that rejects all other “events, powers, figures, and truths” that we posit as expressions of Christianity.  A Church that really does strive first for the Kingdom of God.

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If You're Not in Tears You're Not Paying Attention.

• It was remarked about Simone Weil that she would start weeping just upon hearing of a tragedy somewhere in the world.

• Once on retreat I befriended someone.  We went to worship and the story of the Babylonian destruction of the Temple was read, along with Psalm 74.  I happened to glance at him during the readings and saw tears running down his cheeks. 

• St. Simeon the New Theologian said that we should not presume to come to the Lord’s Table without tears.  In fact, he places great emphasis on the place of tears in the spiritual life.  

Tears, weeping, crying: these are indications of an emotional immediacy that we normally keep repressed.  

But I suggest that the more “woke” we become, that is, the more present we are, the more we are aware of ourselves and our place in the world, the more directly we also  experience both the pain of others and our complicity in causing it.  Shedding tears of sorrow, shame, guilt, and pain is an authentic indication of spiritual awakening.

Now, most of us go through existence separated from the world’s hurt by thick and high interior walls of denial, defense, and ignorance.  Our egos project such barriers as a matter of individual survival; we could not function in the world if our minds allowed us to know the magnitude of creaturely suffering.  It is one of the reasons we lie to ourselves about our personal separateness and independence.  

So we go about our days in a state of numbness, our inherent connection to the Earth and to others rendered inert, our senses weak and ineffective, limited to the physical body and our thinking.

Part of waking up is coming to identify with others’ pain and our own responsibility for it.  

Our egos convince us we have no such responsibility.  Our egos drive us in a psychopathic direction, where others’ suffering has no more effect on us than when we swat a fly.  At worst we justify and even (God help us) celebrate atrocities like Hiroshima, lynchings, executions, torture, and police killings.  We hear of a famine in Africa, a typhoon in Asia, and earthquake in South America, and we shrug and scroll to the next story.  Maybe if we’re a little bit woke we will send some money; if it is a local tragedy perhaps even volunteer our time.  

The closer such events are to us personally, the more seriously we take them.  When they happen to our families, then we feel them more directly.  But when it involves someone else’s family on the other side of the planet, not so much.  Especially if we have decided they are “enemies.”  And when it happens to non-humans?  We usually find ways to ignore it.

If we imagine we have no such complicity in others’ suffering, there is an exercise I recommend.  Consider where you are right now: what are you wearing, using, touching?  Who manufactured our clothing?  Who grew the cotton or sheared the sheep?  Where did the wooden floor on which you stand come from?  The electricity powering your devices?  The food we eat?  The water we drink?  Were all these resources extracted and distributed sustainably?  Were all the people who did all the work paid fairly?  How was the land we live on acquired?  

I guarantee that we are benefiting from centuries of theft and violence, murder and extortion, wanton ecological degradation and destruction.  We sit comfortably atop of mountain of bones of those slaughtered by the Empire we feed.  Our existence is built on slavery, genocide, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the exploitation of the Earth and people.  We are participating in sin and suffering all the time.  

These are things for which we are complicit somewhat indirectly and therefore easy to disregard.  There are other things we do to others more immediately, even those we love and care for, that they will spend their lives recovering from.  The selfish and thoughtless parental actions.  The harmful and angry words.  The things we do to others “for their own good.”  The things we didn’t even know were bad at the time.  The things we rationalized, justified, explained.  

The more conscious, present, and woke we become, the more we realize in our own hearts what we have done and what has been done in our name.  That’s why the original Christian prayer is, “Lord, have mercy.”  That’s why when we look at the cross what comes to us is the awareness that, in the words of one hymn, “I crucified Thee.”

Wokeness appears to warrant existential despair.  But another effect of such a broadening awareness is to lose the scales of our blindness and to see something else emerge within us.  That is the other side of the cross: resurrection.  For if we identify and grieve for the mess we are making, we begin to find hope in the word of resurrection.  Our mess is never the last word.  And we can see another life emerging from deep within us.

That life is the true humanity we share with Jesus Christ.  It is our Essence, our true nature.  Once we realize how connected to, and indeed identified with everything, we are, we can stop treating others with careless violence, and start respecting everyone, all of life, all creation, with wonder and joy as sacred expressions of God’s love, bearing the very voiceprint of God’s creative Word, and energized by God’s Breath, the Holy Spirit.

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Heresy.

From the Greek hairesis "a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice, a means of taking; a deliberate plan, purpose; philosophical sect, school," from haireisthai "take, seize," middle voice of hairein "to choose.” https://www.etymonline.com/word/heresy

“Heresy” is one of the more abused words in our faith.  This is because the establishment likes to throw it at people who oppose them.  By this standard, Jesus, Paul, and the apostles were all “heretics,” as defined by the leaders of orthodox religion of their day.  This is what happens when we allow the ruling class to define heresy as whatever threatens them.  And this is the way the word has usually been used.  Which is why it is often embraced as a badge of honor among outsiders and radicals.  It seems that the only significant changes that happen are made by people the insiders initially declared “heretics.”     

Heresy actually means more of a personal preference or choice.  It means going against accepted standards of truth, and deciding to follow your own course, according to your own desires and reasoning.

In other words, it is the whole basis of the Modern world.  All our heroes are heretics, people who perceived the inadequacies of the present order, and chose to set and follow their own course.  Heretics are those who advocate and apply the new paradigm, while the old paradigm is still in force.  They get that label from the offended keepers of the old paradigm.  

The choice therefore seems to be adherence to the old order, maintained and enforced by the establishment of insiders, or think for yourself and set out on a new path, based on new data and evidence.  Of course, the old order is often based on something that had been considered heresy years or centuries before.  The revered pillars of the establishment were once persecuted rebels.  So it’s really just a matter of choosing your own way, or the way of some dead person whose perspective has been institutionalized as the accepted standard.  Those who label other people heretics are usually the descendants and successors of… people who were labeled heretics.  It’s your own personal preference or someone else’s personal preference.  Which means it’s all heresy, by definition.  It’s all personal choices, in competition.  And we’re fine with that.

Following Jesus Christ, however, is not supposed to be about our individual personal preference at all.  Indeed, discipleship means deliberately and intentionally subordinating our personal preference — which is conditioned and controlled by ego — to that of Jesus Christ, true God and true Human.  We call this repentance.  It is about letting go of our own mind, and thereby allowing the mind of Christ, which is always within us by virtue of our sharing his humanity, to emerge.

We release our preference, and become embraced by God’s preference.  We give up our choice in order to realize our having already been chosen.

      

This happens only within the new community of those who understand themselves to be called out of the world of their own choosing, and into the Light of God’s choice.  The ego is too powerful for us to do this as isolated individuals.  A community of compassion, acceptance, forgiveness, honesty, and discipline is necessary.  We realize the true humanity we share in Jesus Christ together.  That’s why the New Testament talks about the Church as the Body of Christ.

That means of course that we are responsible to this community, and in this community we are responsible to Jesus Christ, as he is attested in the Scriptures, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The Church emerges as the center, the locus and nexus, of God’s Presence in the world.

When the Church is faithfully doing its job of making disciples, that is to say, bringing people to the subordination of ego and the realization of Essence, which is Christ in them, it becomes an outpost and anticipation of the Kingdom of God, and the living embodiment of Jesus Christ.

So I hope to be always against heresy.  To put it bluntly, followers of Christ should not be making their own decisions at all.  The whole point is discerning together the will of God in the Church, expressed in Jesus Christ, and obeying.  It’s not about your choice; it’s about who chooses you for a life of humility, justice, compassion, gentleness, and service.

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