Do No Harm.

One of the vows that physicians take is, “First, do no harm.”

It sounds simple.  These words could also be embraced by everyone.  As a bare minimum wouldn’t it be great if we could get through life without doing any harm?  If you can’t be a great hero, accomplishing amazing, powerful things, at least try to do no harm.  Surely we could handle that?

But the sad fact of human life is that we do harm.  All the time.  We are not conscious of a lot, if any, of the harm we are doing.  When we act out of our ego, motivated by selfishness, fear, anger, desire, and even reason, we slash our way through the world and we hurt people and other things in the process.  Even when we think we are doing good, if we are motivated by self-interest, we very often do harm.  

No one sets out to do harm.  Excepting perhaps some of the mentally ill, everyone imagines that their plan for every day is beneficial in the long run.  I’m sure that Nazis working at Auschwitz told themselves they were not doing any harm, that torturing and murdering Jews and others was all for the greater good.  The guys doing the waterboarding at Guantanamo, men working mountaintop-removal coal mines, investors putting their money into Exxon or Lockheed Martin, even farmers burning the Amazon to make room for palm oil plantations… they all think what they are doing is in some sense good, at least for themselves or their people.  They don’t see the harm.  If they are doing any damage at all, they rationalize that it is temporary and surely outweighed by the benefits.  To them.  

Spirituality is becoming conscious, waking up, coming to self-awareness.  Self-awareness involves consciousness of the wider world and other people.  It has to do with coming to know that we are all connected to each other.  Other people are real.  They have the same feelings, dreams, voices, needs, joys, and desires that we do.  The more self-aware we become, the more our separations and differences dissolve, and we see that we are all one.

Jesus Christ is the One who embodies the fullness of our true humanity.  He is infinitely self-aware, and recognizes his oneness with all.  Indeed, he is therefore also the incarnation of the God who breathed existence into everything.  He shows us that self-awareness means identification with everyone.  The pain of another is our pain.  The joy of another is our joy.

Crucified, Jesus bears the consequences of our unawareness.  He is viciously harmed, and identifies with all the degraded, lynched, sacrificed, exploited, sold, devalued, disinherited, and forgotten.  He absorbs the violence projected into the world by our egocentricity… and he neutralizes it.  For it is based on the lie of our separation and independence.  And he transmutes that experience into resurrection: which is an opening into a completely new kind of life.

We Presbyterians don’t use crucifixes.  Our crosses are always empty as a witness to the resurrection.  I understand that.  Truth be told, crucifixes still kind of creep me out.  But they also convey a side of the faith that we tend to miss: God’s identification with the lynched.   

In the crucifix we are shocked into facing the harm we are doing in the world.  “I crucified thee,” is how one spiritual song puts it.  Jesus is our victim, the One we choose to torture and kill to assuage our fears and maintain our power.  He represents every soul we have pressed into the service of our agenda.  He represents the people we have broken and used, whose land and labor we steal, whose tears and blood have fed our gluttony, greed, and lust.  He represents a good creation pinned to a board and dissected, disassembled, its resources extracted and squandered… the burning rain forests, the tortured and slaughtered animals, the wrecked atmosphere… it’s all there represented in the broken figure nailed to the wood of the cross.    

Perhaps the point is to shock us into consciousness and awareness of the harm we are doing.  We are to identify with the innocent victim, with all those broken by our egocentric desire, and to change our ways of thinking and acting.  An injunction to “do no harm” makes no sense until we realize the damage our actions are doing already.  And that doesn’t get through to us until we put ourselves in the position of our victims.  To identify with them is to identify with Jesus Christ; it is to identify with God.  It is finally to realize a oneness with all things.

That is basically an application of Jesus’ Golden Rule.  It asks us not to do to another what we would not want done to ourselves.  That is the definition of “harm.”  

Because in Christ the division between us and “others” breaks down.  In him we are all one.  What we do to others we ultimately do to ourselves.  

Maybe this Lent it would help if we focused on doing, well, less harm.  We could recognize, admit, and finally face the consequences of our actions in the lives of others, and find ways to minimize the damage.  We could abstain from doing harm, as much as we can.  When doing harm seems unavoidable we could name it and confess it.  We could look for other ways.  We could make amends for the harm we have done and continue to do.  

We could stand in solidarity with the harmed, and witness to the triumph of Jesus Christ, by sharing and taking upon ourselves the harm others are experiencing, especially as a result of our sinful behavior.  We could be beacons of love and acceptance, healing and peace, in our embrace of harmed people, and a harmed Earth, in the name of the Lord.    

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How We Really Got the New Testament.

I am finding that many people these days entertain wild misconceptions about how the New Testament was originally put together.  They seem to adhere to a fictitious but very powerful narrative.  It goes like this: 

Shortly after Jesus died his followers rejected his nice, simple, peaceful teachings and began twisting, adulterating, and doctoring his original words to fit their own biases and agendas.  But there were other secret Christians who did keep Jesus’ real teachings and wrote other books containing them.  When the Church decided which books to include in the New Testament, they threw out and violently suppressed the nice ones and kept the bad, doctored ones.  The only criterion the Church used in this decision was what preserved the privilege, prestige, and power of the evil Bishops who were in charge.  

On the one hand, in service of this narrative, scholars dedicate themselves to ripping apart the text of the gospels in an attempt to mine from it the “original” words of the “historical Jesus,” separating them from the “less authentic” material added later by his followers.  

On the other hand, at the same time, some of these same scholars lift up a collection of recently discovered writings that they insist preserve Jesus’ original teachings. 

The facts are quite different.  In reality, in deciding which books would be included in the New Testament the early church used a much wider set of criteria.  These criteria were: 

1. “Apostolicity.”  In our time this means that a book has a pedigree going back to the 1st century and the preaching of the original witnesses to Jesus.  In other words, it is old.  It had been used and commented upon for a long time.  
2. “Catholicity.”  The Church felt that, to be canonical, books had to have more than a merely local interest.  They had to have been accepted, shared, and used by the wider church.  
3. “Orthodoxy.”  The books chosen for inclusion had to agree on the basic Christian story, even if there were differences, sometimes pretty wide, in emphasis, interpretation, and detail.  
4. “Traditional use.”  The Church did not value novelty.  They trusted the books that had been profitably used by Christian congregations for the previous three centuries.  If books were found to be of such value that people had them copied, disseminated, and commented upon across the known world, they met these criteria.

In other words, the Church chose the books that were already being widely used by Christians.  There seems to have been a pretty broad consensus about them.  There were a few books that were argued about for a while.  But the list agreed to in the 4th century or so was more or less the same as the earliest such lists we have, from a 200 years before.

The church excluded some books from the canon that they still continued to use, only not as Scripture.  There is a book called “The Shepherd,” by an early Christian named Hermas.  There are letters by Barnabas and Clement of Rome.  And there are even non-canonical gospels like the Infancy Gospel of James, or the one attributed to Nicodemus, that the church kept in a secondary category.  They met some of the above criteria for canonization, but not all.

Then there were books that met basically none of the criteria.  They were not witnesses to Jesus, but clearly written in the 2nd or 3rd century.  They were not commonly accepted, but only used by a small number of Christians.  (The fact that these Christians tended to think of themselves as better and more spiritual than everyone else didn’t help.)  And finally, what these books taught was often radically different from what the rest of the New Testament says.  For instance, the New Testament believes, with the Hebrew tradition, that the creation is the good product of a good Creator.  But many of these books said creation and matter were evil products of an evil demigod.  So they didn’t make the cut.  We call the writers of these books “Gnostics.”

So it is emphatically not true that the Bishops sat down in the 4th century with a stack of books and determined, by a corrupt political process designed to enhance their own power and suck up to the Emperor, the books that would be in the New Testament, then violently suppressed all other books.  

If that were the case, we would not have the New Testament we now have, which is an inherently and essentially anti-imperialist document.

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How We Are Still Ruled by a King, a Pope, and Caesar.

In John’s gospel, the Sea of Galilee is called “the Sea of Tiberias.”  John uses the official Roman name of this body of water to remind us however subtly that Caesar had claimed possession over all bodies of water in the Roman Empire, and that anyone fishing in those bodies of water was required to pay Caesar for any fish extracted from “his” lake.   

Here we see one of the ways imperialist powers implement their colonial authority over conquered peoples.  By the brute force of their militaries, they simply declare ownership over land and water belonging to others.  In other words, they steal it at gunpoint.  This reduces the people who have always owned and worked the land or the water to subjects, servants, vassals, slaves, and employees.

Recently there was a legal case in my State of New Jersey between a Board of Trustees at the First Presbyterian Church of Newark, and the Presbytery of Newark, the regional body of the Presbyterian Church USA.  The Trustees were claiming independence, saying they were not bound by the rules and standards of the PCUSA that apply to every other Presbyterian Church in the denomination.  The basis for this claim was a “charter” granted by King George II of Great Britain to the church in 1753.  This charter gave the Trustees authority over real estate in America.

Judge Jodi Lee Alper ruled in favor of… the King.  

I’m serious.  

She said this ancient document took precedence over the ecclesiastical polity that the church embraced when it became part of the PCUSA and its predecessor denominations.  

This leads me to ask a more fundamental question: 

“Who gave King George II the right to dispose of land he did not own 

on a continent 3500 miles away across an ocean 

in the first place?”

The answer is: Pope Alexander VI.  

Alexander VI was a member of the infamous Borgia family and is universally regarded as one of the worst, most corrupt and venal Popes in history.  One of the very grievous things perpetrated by Alexander VI is something called “The Doctrine of Discovery.”  This was a papal ruling in 1493 that “gave” lands in the Americas to the King of Spain.  It was later extended to other “Christian” countries.  

This Doctrine of Discovery is the self-serving legal framework upon which the whole enterprise of stealing land from indigenous peoples, and their wholesale slaughter, is based.  It also gave European powers the right to enslave the inhabitants of conquered lands.  Thus if slavery is America’s “original sin,” Alexander VI is the snake. 

Oh, and where did Alexander VI get the idea that might makes right and the strong have absolute rights over the weak?  Maybe he was relying on the example of the ancient Romans who were the heroes of the Renaissance, then in full swing in Italy.  In other words, it all sinks back to the depravity of the same Empire that claimed ownership of the Sea of Galilee and also crucified Jesus.

In 1823, the Doctrine of Discovery was adopted officially by the Supreme Court of the new USA.  Conveniently overlooking the “Christian” part, of course, (the USA nowhere in its founding documents claims to be a Christian nation), they just claimed the same rights for themselves as “successor” to Britain.

To claim to be “successor” to Britain effectively denied that we had any kind of real revolution.  The USA was apparently not something new at all, but merely the “successor” to the King and therefore that was the basis of its own authority and legitimacy, particularly its claim on land in North America.  All the Treaty of Paris did, then, was transfer the deed to some property that the King got from the Pope, to the Continental Congress.  

Therefore, let’s be clear.  The legitimacy of the US government doesn’t come from “the consent of the governed” or “we the people” or any other such sentimental propaganda that we like to tell ourselves.  It comes from a King who got it from a corrupt Pope authorizing the application of brute force by nations claiming the label, “Christian.”

Until the Doctrine of Discovery is annulled, courts will continue to fall back on the foundations of imperialism and colonialism, not to mention racism and slavery, in their decisions.  

This is not just limited to arcane ecclesiastical property disputes like this one in Newark.  But whenever courts rule in favor of owners, capital, money, corporations, and privileged, powerful people, the ultimate rationale undergirding such decisions comes down to the Doctrine of Discovery.  Those who favor a “strict constructionist” approach to the Constitution rest on this foundation.  They are about protecting the rights of property and wealth and those who have it, which mainly still means white men.  Think “Citizens United.”  

This is also why voting rights are not absolute in this country and are in fact routinely and systematically abridged and suppressed by governments when they perceive it to be in their interest to do so.  Indeed, the Constitution is explicitly designed to mitigate against the will of the people because it was feared that a majority might someday want to overthrow slavery.  Hence we still have slavery-protective institutions like the US Senate, the Second Amendment, and the Electoral College.  

But look: America was never the Pope’s to give away.  Which means that the only real revolution we could ever have in this country would be to overthrow the Doctrine of Discovery and find a new foundation for our common life, one free of the imperialism and colonialism that currently and fatally infects our polity today. 

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