Authenticity and the Sacraments.

On my book shelf I have, in a clear plastic square box, a dirty baseball.  On the baseball appears a date scrawled in ballpoint pen: "4/26/08."  On that date, my son, playing for his High School team, hit that ball for his first home-run.  I saw this happen; the game took place in Perth Amboy.  He gave me the ball.

Thus this particular baseball, otherwise no different from millions of other baseballs, became unique in its connection to a particular event on a particular date at a particular place.  It is not the same as an ordinary baseball.  And the fact that my son died thirteen years later, makes this particular ball even more significant to me.  It makes me sadly reflect on how things might have gone differently.

This mythic power of the particular flows through the sport of baseball.  At every MLB game, a person called an "authenticator" sits in the front row.  Whenever something happens of any significance, the authenticator takes the object -- usually a ball or a bat -- and marks it, setting it aside, distinguishing it from every other similar object.  Thus we can verify that this particular ball was a player's first major league hit, or hundredth home-run, or unassisted triple play.

The Church has from the beginning found the power and significance in particular objects and sites connecting us to Jesus and his followers.  We call the objects "relics," and, although it got out of hand for a while, I wonder about the Reformation's wisdom in purging this aspect of the faith altogether.  For we do experience special holiness in some places and surrounding some things.  The world is not flat but textured.  When I visited places like the Holy Land and Iona this became apparent.  Special things and places transport and connect us.  They transcend and unify time.  They ground us in a common life and tradition reassuring us that someone didn't just make up this thing out of their imagination yesterday as an expression of their own ego.  It has lasted and will last.  It has been prayed and thought over for generations.  We can depend on it and participate in that stream ourselves.

We have a faith rooted in the Incarnation.  It keeps us from dissolving into a gnostic fog where everything is neutral and meaningless, a blank slate onto which the Empire might impose its preferred meaning by force.  God does not remain a mere amorphous idea; God literally becomes flesh and dwells among us (John 1:14) in Jesus Christ.  I don't have much regard for attempts to nail down the details of the "historical Jesus;" but the fact that he existed in history as an actual human being remains absolutely essential.  

The closest we have to an authentic record of what Jesus said and did appears in the New Testament.  The New Testament itself acquires holiness from its unique and authoritative witness to him, as well as from the history of its use by faithful communities for nearly two millennia.  The text, even with all its variants (which themselves testify to authenticity) constitutes and shapes the faith of those who follow him in every age, ie. the Church.  I would no more advocate changing or fixing, adding to or subtracting from those words than I would intentionally scrub the dirt off my son's baseball, or scribble something else onto it, or relegate it to a garage sale, or substitute a newer, "better" ball for it. 

A couple of years ago I attended a worship service at a Presbyterian church on a day when they celebrated the Sacrament of Baptism.  When the time for this sacred ritual arrived, with the proud parents standing by, and the minister, holding the baby, begins to enact this ancient ceremony by pouring water on the baby's head three times and reciting the words of the Lord Jesus from Matthew 28, connecting us and this child to Jesus and all his followers of every race, gender, nation, and language, over whom these very words were solemnly recited, century after century... and she didn't.  She made up her own words, apparently.  I don't even remember them.  Does it matter?    

Now, I know the arguments.  I have heard them all my career.  "Don't be so superstitious."  "Don't be so literal."  "It's not about the words, it's about the faith of the people."  "It's not a magical incantation."  "Isn't it better if I express myself than repeat some old words no one understands?"  "The historical Jesus didn't say those words anyway."  "Calling God 'father' props up the patriarchy."  "I don't want to be reminded of what a jerk my father was."  And so on.  All of which sounds very Protestant and Modern, enlightened and progressive, liberated and relevant, forward thinking and trying to appeal to the young.

But instead of connecting this child to Jesus and immersing them in Jesus' life by doing what he says to do, changing the words of this ceremony really makes it all about... the minister.  To use a Buddhist image, it focused on the finger and forgot the moon to which the finger supposedly points.  The child, rather than getting immersed in the Name of God, rather than sharing in the blessed continuity of a sacred tradition, rather than participating in an act of humility and obedience which embodies and exemplifies a life of trust and faith, simply got dunked in the same ego-centric, DIY, "have it your way," consumer-driven, inauthentic/counterfeit/fake/flat/disenchanted experience that will characterize their existence everywhere else in this world.  Instead of Jesus' words, we heard one person's arbitrary preference.  When a minister blithely decides to ditch the words of Jesus and substitute "better" words of their own composition, it is an act of egocentricity and control.  The minister thus functions as a tool of an Empire that wants more than anything to separate us from the Creator, and coax us to have things our way instead.      

In other words, fascism: one person rules and claims authority over others.  "We will not do this Jesus' way, we will do it my better way."  The authenticity is determined not by the witness to a particular event, not by humble obedience to a transcendent other, or even a venerable tradition, but gets dictated by the one who grabs the authority.  Empire imposes its regime, negating the particular, reframing things and places according to however it perceives its needs at the moment.  When you replace Jesus' words with your own you affirm that you, not Jesus, are Lord.  You claim the authority.  Like Caesar.  The steadfast lifting up of the authentic and the particular which Empire does not define or control thus becomes an act of resistance against Empire.               

If I ever end up leaving the Presbyterian Church it will be because of this kind of thing.  Joni Mitchell sang about how we're paving paradise to put up a parking lot, referring exactly to this destruction, so endemic to Modernity, of the authentic for the sake of the... what?  Convenient?  Profitable?  Popular?  Useful?  Comfortable?  Marketable?  Gratifying?  Ideologically correct?  Relevant?  "Perfect"?  Whatever the Empire decides has value.  The same attitude destroys mountains to get at and extract the coal under them.  The same attitude inflicts vivisection, euthanasia, slavery, and torture on the living entities.  The same attitude says we "destroyed the village in order to save it."  It epitomizes the nihilistic entropy of Modernity to reduce everything to what appeals to my desire, my fears, my ego, my quest for money, fame, and power.  "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?"

(I hesitate even to add that inventing your own baptismal formula explicitly violates Book of Order W-3.0407 mandating the use of Jesus' words at all baptisms.  Because of course in the opinion of some this makes me a heartless and backward-thinking legalistic rules-nazi who just doesn't get what people want today.  It reminds me of that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy has to choose from among a table full of cups the authentic one of Jesus.  The villain chooses a pretty, gaudy, jewel-encrusted chalice he prefers because it suits his idea of the Son of God... and promptly dissolves into dust.  Indy chooses the battered and worn one that looks like it might have been used by a Judean peasant.  I hope to always care more about what Jesus wants than what people today want.)

And all this goes as well for the Words of Institution at the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper.  We have a bit more leeway here because the New Testament has several different versions, but they all share Jesus breaking the bread and saying "This is my Body," and sharing the wine with "This is my blood."  This speaking and acting, with the surrounding prayers and the congregational context, sets this particular bread and this particular cup of wine (or juice) apart, changing them and those who share in them into a sacrament of Jesus' living Presence.  They become different from ordinary bread, different even from what they started as.  Again, the words matter.  In conjunction with specific actions, they do the work of authenticating particular objects and lifting them up as mediators of the Creator's grace.  

I do not oppose change.  In fact, I have always enthusiastically advocated for changes that would free the Church of excrescences, adulterations, and deletions resulting from its centuries of suffocating entanglement with Empire.  The Church needs to recover its deepest identity as a witness to and agent of the liberation we find at the core of Scripture, beginning with the Exodus, and finally revealed in Jesus Christ.  Hence, we Presbyterians hold to the motto semper reformanda, affirming that the Creator is always reforming the Church according to the Word, Jesus Christ.  Change therefore does not mean the arbitrary or random adoption of this or that fad or trend.  Still less does it mean expressing our personal preference, or that of some leader.  Legitimate change moves us closer to Jesus Christ, it moves us along in our evolution from being dominated by ego, to having our Essence emerge within us.  In real change we become not what our ego wants, but what our Creator wants, and has already installed within us.

Change needs to lead us closer to an authentic connection to Jesus, and further away from Empire's agenda of flattening and relativizing the world so as to impose loyalty to itself as the main thing.  The hegemony and domination of Empire over us starts with and gets expressed as the hegemony and domination of ego within us.  But the rule of the Creator within and among us has to start with this humble wonder and gratitude over the One who becomes flesh to dwell among us, whose living Presence remains mediated through the words of Scripture, and the places and artifacts that are particularly charged, and indeed, all creation. 

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Which Jesus?

Both the conservatives and the progressives seem to me to be full of the same kind of intolerance, arrogance, empty-headedness, and to be dominated by different kinds of conformism: in either case the dread of being left out of their reference groups.

--Thomas Merton

The Empire of Modernity tolerates and encourages two different false pictures of Jesus.  To make this point, I broadly reduce these to "red" and "blue" admittedly hyperbolic caricatures.  But most American Christians lean towards one of these two poles.    

1.  The Red "Jesus"

     

In my experience many Christians who loudly proclaim that they rigidly stick to the Bible, nevertheless often project a wildly unbiblical "Jesus" who functions as a mascot for the worst impulses of Empire.  He haunts the imagination of many Christians raised within the old Christendom model.  The most extreme versions show a gun-toting, white nationalist "Jesus" with predictably blue eyes and long blonde hair, who hates LGBTQ people, immigrants, the poor, Blacks, Muslims, and Jews -- but somehow also loves the Israelis.  The January 6 insurrectionists invoked this "Jesus," as did the KKK before them.  We call them White Christian Nationalists.  

Even if they don't go for that explicit picture, many still see a "Jesus" who supports Capitalism, militarism, colonialism, patriarchy, and a return to the traditional morality of the 1950's.  He advocates, or at least tolerates or even disregards, the wanton exploitation of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, therefore denying and exacerbating the climate crisis.  He justifies self-righteous violence, lying, theft, bullying, and brutality done in his name, especially by law enforcement or the military.  He seems to need us to protect him.  The Positive Thinking/Prosperity Gospel rendition of this "Jesus" transactionally blesses his followers with material wealth and rewards the strong willed.  

This version of "Jesus" exists mainly to separate and differentiate the "saved" from everyone else.  His disciples seem to have a deep concern that hell be fully populated; at any rate, they enthusiastically threaten hell as a consequence of behavior they deem bad.  Their Jesus died only for the sins of those who believe in him, who often call themselves "born again."  This apparently licenses them to sin further without consequence.  His death placated the offended honor of an angry heavenly Father, whose wrath may yet be unleashed on America unless it keeps feeding Him the blood of weak and poor people to maintain the Empire's social order.  Many believe he will shortly "rapture" them all up into a heavenly paradise, allowing everyone else and creation itself to fall into painful horrors, while they watch from afar.  Until then, their "Jesus" serves mainly to hand out to very few worthy believers tickets to an afterlife in heaven.

Sadly, many Christians only know this perverse and false "Jesus," and they assume/demand that all Christians relate only to him.  When some come to realize the damage this all does, to themselves, others, and the earth, not to mention its wild distortion of the Jesus to whom Scripture attests, they understandably flee.  In the process they also too often either reject Christianity altogether, or seek (or invent) a less toxic "Jesus."         

2.  The Blue "Jesus"

On the left we have a very different "Jesus."  If the red one was about grief, fear, and anger, craving power, stability, and security, and valorizing the past, the blue "Jesus" exists mainly to gratify our desires and point us towards a glorious future here on earth.  These Christians believe in reason and progress.  They want to "build the Kingdom of God" here and now.  If red believers work their own theological contortions to render Jesus' uncomfortable teachings inert, the blue people place the Jesus of the New Testament under the knife of scientific, historical-critical vivisection.  This gives them a more sophisticated way to rationalize ignoring and dismissing the parts of the scriptural witness that do not fit their preconceived ideology and preference.  

Thus the blues as well have produced a "Jesus" that looks like them: a cynical teacher who wandered around Palestine making wry comments on the one hand mystifyingly esoteric and on the other advocating revolutionary social change, in the end unwittingly getting himself crucified by Rome.  He, of course, did not make any claim to deity, and his tragic death had no purpose beyond identification with others similarly maltreated.  He worked no supernatural healings or miracles, much less exorcisms.  He did not talk about Satan, or angels, or demons, or of the end of the world.  He certainly did not rise from the dead except in the most metaphorical, symbolic, and psychological sense.  The blue "Jesus" required nothing of his followers except that they do what they want and be themselves. 

Blue "Jesus" was "spiritual but not religious," and actively opposed establishment institutions and traditions.  He looked, talked, and acted like a 1960's hippie: an airy, vague, new agey guru (who probably did a lot of weed and shacked up with Mary Magdalene).  Unfortunately, his followers (the worst being Paul) quickly established the oppressive institutional Church which perverted and distorted his teachings, in the process violently stomping out innocent and gentle flower-children like the Gnostics and other so-called heretics, who were way more like Jesus than the nasty men who constructed the New Testament.  

Neither "Jesus" comes very close to the Jesus Christ to which the New Testament attests.  Rather, they each package and sell a "Jesus" which protects the interests, values, biases, desires, fears, and fantasies of those inventing, sustaining, and projecting him.  Both of them ignore and/or mangle aspects of the New Testament text in order to extract a "Jesus" who gets them to their goals and justifies whatever their prior psychological, political, economic, and social commitments demand.  And both represent ways of thinking pushed by Empire/Modernity.  Like sports teams, they look adversarial, but they play the same game according to the same rules.  No matter who happens to win, it is always merely "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" (Pete Townsend).

Red Christians want to block undeserving people from coming to the table, while blue Christians want to allow everyone equal access to the table... but both relate to Empire's table, in the sense of investing in Modernity's values, habits, assumptions, and ways of thinking.    

3.  Full-Spectrum Jesus Christ, Attested in Scripture.

The Jesus of the New Testament, however, overturns Empire's table, and proclaims a different Table altogether.  This Jesus challenges, undercuts, and existentially threatens the authority of Empire, offering an alternative commonwealth he calls "the Kingdom of God."  We cannot domesticate, co-opt, neutralize, tame, or even conclusively define this Jesus.  At any point Jesus may strike us with some word or action that does not compute according to our ideology and way of thinking, and even contradicts it.  Jesus offends both the right and left sides of Modernity's binary framing.

We see this, for instance, in the two groups of people Jesus took heat for associating with: prostitutes and tax collectors.  Accepting prostitutes rankled people concerned with preserving conventional morality.  And reaching out to tax collectors annoyed those interested in conventional ways of resisting the establishment.  We also see it in the fact that Jesus' antagonists ranged across the political spectrum from the collaborationist Sadducees, to the more populist Pharisees, to the revolutionary Zealots.  

The Jesus Christ to whom Scripture attests understands his mission as one of liberating the creation and human life from submission to malevolent supernatural, and earthly political/economic, influences that cause injustice, disease, possession, and death.  Jesus readily talks about angels, demons, and Satan as significant powers in human existence.  Jesus presents a rather high bar of redemption, saying things like "Many are called but few are chosen," and talks about an eternal life beyond the death of our physical bodies.  Jesus insists on the seriousness of our moral decisions and actions, insisting that we will all receive the consequences of our complicity in evil, which may include rendition to a place of spiritual retribution. 

Jesus teaches and calls disciples to a life of nonviolence, humility, equity, sharing, gratitude, forgiveness, and fearless joy.  Jesus includes in his circle a radically wide spectrum of humanity, welcoming those excluded, silenced, judged, and condemned by the religious and political/economic establishment.  This Jesus directly alleviates the suffering of people in their bodily, temporal existence, and offers to all an inextinguishable life of union with and in the Creator and all.  

Where red Christians manage to reduce morality mainly to the personal, private, and sexual, Jesus talks mostly about the pursuit of money, fame, and power, and targets mainly the rich and religious hypocrites.  He thus has a radically anti-establishment, anti-Empire mission.  

Jesus challenges everyone by insisting, against Modernity generally, upon the necessity that we renounce the rule of ego in order allow his own Presence, to emerge with, within, and among us.  This will necessarily entail suffering.  Jesus himself instructs his disciples to take up their own "cross" and follow him.  His death on a Roman cross shows his resistance to Empire, and his resurrection thereafter reveals Empire's powerlessness against his work.  Jesus inspires and gathers a community of followers who witness to, anticipate, and exemplify the Creator's emerging Reign of shalom.  Jesus foresees the ongoing violent collapse of the Empire and the simultaneous emergence of the Creator's Reign among all.

The Church will always find it challenging to have this Jesus Christ as its only Sovereign in life and in death.  But it only lives by, in, and for him.  Our entire life means discerning, embracing, and following God's will.  We need systems and processes that empower us to do this.  And that will not happen until we let go of Modernity's rules and criteria, and let go of Modernity's false Jesuses -- red and blue.

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