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+