The Country We're Living In.

I heard a story about a young Black woman, just after the 2016 election, very disappointed about the results, bitterly complaining to her mother, who just shook her head, and said, "Did you forget what country you're living in?"

As an old white guy I am continually having to learn what country I am living in.  It is not the same country as Americans who are Black, Latino, or Indigenous, or women, or LGBT.  But my reaction of surprise and righteous indignation to the Rittenhouse verdict shows that I am not over this expectation that America is about "liberty and justice for all."  I continually tend to forget that I am really living in a country in which a white boy with an illegally obtained gun is able with impunity to enter a city and kill unarmed people whom he claims "threaten" him. 

I have been reading Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste, about race relations in the United States over the last four centuries.  It is so full of horrendous and tragic stories that I can only get through a few pages at a time before having to pause from heartbreak and nausea over the casual cruelties inflicted on Black Americans by white people enforcing their supremacy.   

Occasionally I am pleasantly surprised, like when a jury in Georgia actually convicted three white men who murdered an unarmed Black man whom they claimed "threatened" them.  That would most certainly not have happened 50, or even 10, years ago.  (Indeed, it almost didn't happen this time as the DA failed to take up the case until forced by a viral video to do so.)

People pining for "the way it was" and hoping to restore American "greatness" need to open their eyes and look at what was actually happening back then.  All this sordid and violent injustice and abuse was effectively hidden from comfortable, privileged, white people, who were able to live in an imaginary wholesome country characterized by piety, patriotism, prosperity, peace, and nice, happy families.

I have heard about this country from people in every church I served over the last 40 years.  The nostalgia for it and the anger over its "loss," and identifying people to blame, and the fear of a lawless, chaotic future (featuring prominent non-white people) was often palpable.  Indeed, only recently someone mentioned to me how good it is that the local school is once again going to celebrate Columbus Day.  Because forcing children to learn lies will somehow make America more comfortable for white people, I guess.  

That self-righteous longing for a time when we innocently feasted on the produce of oppression is utterly opposed to the Spirit and Word of God.  It has kept the Church crippled and separated from her Lord for centuries.  It is the most effective and debilitating barrier to discipleship.  Indeed, it sullenly and petulantly gives the finger to Jesus Christ, who explicitly identifies with the people who were systematically brutalized and exploited to feed our pathological, rosy delusions about White Christian America.            

The thing is, the more we realize that the country we are living in is founded on and sustained by injustice and violence against Native, African, and poor people, not to mention the Earth itself, the more we find ourselves able to understand the Bible better.  Because the Bible was written by, for, and to people who knew oppression, injustice, violence, marginalization, and defeat.  And if we do not read it from that perspective we don't understand it at all.  

Repentance means waking up to the truth about what country we are really living in... and at the same time becoming aware of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God that the Lord Jesus announces.  The true greatness of a nation is found, not in the fantasies it tells itself and enforces with cruelty and carelessness, but, he says, in justice and equity, compassion and forgiveness, simplicity and sharing, inclusion and kindness.

That Kingdom is waiting to emerge among us.  But that won't happen for us as long as we remain narcotized in self-serving lies about what country we're living in.  Those lies will continue to crumble and collapse.  We can be pointlessly angry about that.  Or we can look for the new heaven and a new earth as it emerges with, within, and among us. 

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The Virgin Birth Is True… Whether It Happened or Not.

A couple of Decembers ago, in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof interviewed William Lane Craig about the Virgin Birth.  Craig is a philosophy professor at Houston Baptist University.  His entire response was to say that it really happened, and to point out the historical sources: Matthew and Luke.

I rolled my eyes in frustration.  Claiming that the Virgin Birth “really happened” neutralizes it into the absolute irrelevance of a distant historical event which means nothing to us today.  It is an artifact, and nothing more.  It is merely asserted to have happened by some smug, self-righteous, credulous Christians.  As if deciding that it happened is all that matters.

The “did it really happen” argument is pointless because there is no way to answer it.  Even if proof could be available one way or the other, it misses the meaning of the stories.  Indeed, I wonder if the real point of historical arguments isn’t to neutralize and deflate the truth.  

For deeper and higher truths 

may only be communicated by means of 

myth, story, image, symbol, ritual, metaphor, and poetry; 

we don't find them in history.  

These are exactly the means of discourse that Modernity has ruled out of hand as lies, superstition, fiction, and fairy-tales.  (Actually, even many fairy-tales communicate truth to us more effectively than a lot of historical analyses.)

To reduce a story to mere history is to kill it.  It is to render it a dead past event, something dissectible and disposable.  The demythologizing project of Modernity was always intended to undercut truth, so that self-serving propaganda may be inserted in its place.  And the most effective way to do that is to evaluate a story based on its “historicity.”  Thus the “did it really happen” question is taken for the only measure of truth… and it just so happens that it is unanswerable.  In this way the Modern Age systematically replaced truth with fake news.  That is, we devalued the myths and stories that convey truth to us, and replaced it with the glorified advertising copy which often passes for historical analysis.  What we call history — and often science — is always filtered through the subjective, ego-centric, thoroughly biased consciousness of the observer.  In the end it’s all entertainment. 

Once we have hit the impasse of, “yes, it did happen,” vs. “no, it couldn’t have happened,” we have nowhere else to go.  And we have failed to listen to the story itself.   

In terms of the Virgin Birth, it is not about history or gynecology.  One person who understood the story well was 19th century anti-slavery activist, Sojourner Truth.  When challenged by male religious professionals who attempted to silence her, she pointed to the story of the Virgin Birth.  Christ comes into the world by God and a woman, she said; a man had nothing to do with him.  Therefore, one meaning of the story is that God’s entry into the world is an explicit contradiction of a world order that privileges maleness.  It is an inherently anti-patriarchy narrative. 

And that’s just one political meaning of the story.  There are meanings that go even deeper into human consciousness and destiny.  Meister Eckhart talked about how it shows God being born in each of us.  Karl Barth noted that it tells us that humans do not have the power to bring God into the world.  And then there is the whole question of the Incarnation, and its meaning in terms of the relation of Creator to creation.  “God became human so that humans might become God,” is the way the early Christians talked about it.

And so on.  All of which is lost if we focus exclusively on the tiny, pointless, and unanswerable question of whether it "actually happened" or not.  

Caving in and allowing the Modern world to define truth for us is what is killing faith and the planet.  I used to think that Christianity was courageous for applying historical analysis to its core documents and history.  Maybe.  Certainly we may have gained a lot of helpful knowledge about the context of the Scriptures.  Certainly we have liberated the gospel from some forms of self-serving institutional oppression.  But at the same time we have lost way too much in this exchange.  And too often what we were left with was even worse, if more subtle, forms of institutional oppression.  

Fortunately, we did not lose the stories themselves.  In spite of attempts to extract and dissect, slice and resect pieces of the Scriptures, the texts remain.  And the faith remains.  Because in the end reality wins.  Truth is.  Propaganda, fake news, advertising, and “history” all collapse for lack of any purchase in reality.  But the Word of the Lord endures forever.  (It is not by accident that the attitude of some scholars to the text is identical to the way the petrochemical industry comes at the planet:  Extract, waste, consume, and profit.)

The late Phyllis Tickle related how she once talked about the Virgin Birth story at a conference.  One of the young servers at the hotel overheard her, and approached her later to observe that the Virgin Birth story is “too beautiful not to be true, whether it happened or not.”

Exactly. 

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Following Jesus Means Following Jesus.

It seems to me that some Christians don't really follow Jesus.  I have seen bizarre and disgraceful renditions of a white "Jesus" who somehow hates Gays and loves guns, who is wrapped in an American flag and voted for Trump, who despises immigrants and endorses capitalism, who opposes publicly-funded healthcare and vaccines.  The Jesus of some appears to be just a name for the sponsor of the White Christian America they mistake for Christianity.

None of that expresses the Jesus we find in the gospels, who famously (among other things) fed, healed, and liberated people purely on the basis on need and all for free, criticized the wealthy, welcomed the outcast and strangers (ie. migrants), and advocated forgiveness and non-violence.  That Jesus was arrested and executed by the State (ie. police), acting on behalf of the political, economic, and religious establishment.

At the same time, there are also Christians at the other end of the ideological spectrum who seem to do basically the same thing: invent a Jesus different from the one in the gospels in order to serve their political and social biases and goals. 

For instance, they apply arbitrary scientific criteria to invent a "historical Jesus" distinct from the Jesus of the gospels, and thereby decide that he "didn't really say" words that the gospels indicate he did.  In the process, they have to cut many pieces out of the gospels, and get rid of almost the whole gospel of John.  Their theory is that the Church (even though it was founded by people who knew Jesus personally) misunderstood and deliberately corrupted and misinterpreted his original teachings, and that by their own methodology (developed and perfected in German secular universities in the 19th century) only they, at a remove of 2000 years, somehow finally manage to recover the real and pure historical Jesus.  

Unsurprisingly, their new "Jesus" appears designed to offend or disturb the people they disagree with.  For instance, he is non-apocalyptic and he does not make any claims to divinity.  Coincidentally, these are things they didn't like about Christianity to begin with.  And, of course, he doesn't do anything that sophisticated Modern people would consider "supernatural."   

It is important to note at this point that these two false "Jesuses" are not equivalent!  The arrogant, AR-15 wielding, redneck "Jesus" of the right is hateful, bigoted, and violent, and therefore far more egregious than the vague hippie philosopher "Jesus" of the left, who is basically harmless and easily ignored (which is the point).  But while one approach ignores or radically reframes the Jesus of the text; the other attacks the integrity of the text itself.  Which is worse, I wonder?  

If we are going to follow Jesus we must decide whether we are going to follow the actual Jesus as attested in the New Testament, as inconvenient, annoying, and difficult as that may be), or some other "Jesus" that allows us to remain stuck in our comfort zone, legitimating our own fear, anger, desire, ratifying everything we already believe, know, and follow.  If we just invent a "Jesus" that suits us -- no matter how sophisticated our methodology -- then what we are really obeying is our own ego.  We're using "Jesus" as an excuse and blessing to do as we please.

Let's be clear here.  The only Jesus that matters to people truly seeking to follow him is the one found in the New Testament.  Following means obedience.  It means setting our individual egocentric agenda aside, which takes a lot of strenuous spiritual work.  In short, the actual Jesus of the New Testament is about transformation.  Indeed, it is to avoid the demands of this Jesus that we dream up less threatening ones to worship.

How do we know if the Jesus we follow is the real one?  Hint: It's not the one who vindicates us.  The real Jesus calls on us to change, and not just in a technical or even adaptive way.  "When Christ calls someone he bids them come and die," is how Bonhoeffer put it.  We have to lose our selves.  If we are privileged and powerful we need to let that all go.  At the same time, if we are broken and enslaved, then that identity is what he calls on us to relinquish.  If the Jesus of Scripture isn't sticking in our face a fundamental existential challenge, we are probably not encountering him at all.  He comes to turn our lives, and the world, upside down.  

The point is that we start to emerge with his mind and in his Image.  We have to resonate with the Jesus we are given in Scripture.  Conformity to him is all that matters, personally and in terms of the whole world.  We begin living in what he called the Kingdom of God, a complex of relationships and practices distinct from what we want or are used to.

But this depends on not following any "Jesus" other than the one in the New Testament.

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