The Jesus of history and The Jesus of Dogma

I’m halfway through a book that is finally putting a wooden stake through the heart of a monster in my life.  But at the same time I wonder if the author is going to address the question, “What’s left now?” 

Frustration started with childhood questions unanswered.  Then some anger, even today.  Why weren’t we told? 

Centuries ago, when science confronted the scriptures, and the church, over issues of factuality the response was violence and the threat of violence.  Today, we are getting apologies and acknowledgement of error from the church.  It took that long. 

But more conflict followed.  And for me, hints of a crack in the foundation of church dogma were first openly and gingerly discussed at seminary, 1970-74.  Sadly, my class and others could not share this with their congregations for fear of losing their jobs and perhaps their careers.  Most of us sold out for “practical considerations” and for that I offer my heartfelt apologies to those young people who I misled out of cowardice and lack of faith in God’s direction for us. 

In the decades following my ordination, so much more has been learned both from science and from history. The author I’m reading now is among many scholars who think that beliefs we have (about) Jesus, and the most likely picture of the Jesus of history, are far different.  He maintains that the budding church in the first and second centuries faced extinction unless it organized itself and developed an enforced system of belief (about) who Jesus was.  This system of belief, written in the creeds and dogma of the church, served the purpose of addressing fears and problems among Christians.  It was, and is, not factual, and it worked in terms of rescuing the church as an organization. 

That leaves two persons: the Jesus of history and the Jesus of dogma.  But I would guess that the vast majority of people don’t even want to deal with this.  Let’s get real, I don’t expect everyone to be interested in history or theology any more than I’m interested in cooking. 

Nonetheless, there is something basic that we all desire and recognize. 

There’s not the slightest shred of evidence from honest study of scripture or history that Jesus intended to organize some kind of “church.”  Churches have a record of being in the business of business, and control, and influence.  Jesus had something more important to give and that something can be found living within, and subverting, any human institution. 

I now try to worship the God that Jesus worshiped, a God who Jesus intended to be seen as a parent – a mother or father figure.  (I have heard from so many sources of dying soldiers calling for their mothers, and we virtually ignore this very real part of our humanity and God’s reality.) 

I can’t bring myself to harm any person I really know, even if that person is not like-able.  I can only work for good when I see a person, or nature, or even an object, as part of myself.  Justice is about oneness (giving of self), not about division (punishment).  The monster of literalism is dead in me now, replaced with the loving and challenging world I share with a living God.

(Ironically, many of the non-factual metaphors about Jesus that were endorsed by the church in its early history were most likely seen by Christians then for what they were: non-factual.  Perhaps they knew that saying “is” makes for a static, lazy way of thinking, but saying “is like” compels us to think and imagine and be moved. These metaphors/myths pointed people to greater truths and gave them strength and hope.  They bring us to God, but we have taken away their power and spirit by falsely presenting them as factual.) 

(Van Hagen, John. Rescuing Religion, How Faith Can Survive Its Encounter with Science: Polebridge Press, 2012.) 

The Best Christmas Gifts Ever...

Best Christmas gifts ever:

Rossmoyne steel and aluminum toy fire truck almost two feet long and intricately detailed.  I kept it for forty years. 

Benjamin .22 cal pellet rifle.  I wish I still had it. 

7-speed English-made touring bicycle – glad it’s gone. 

Working miniature steam engine. 

All the food.  All the anticipation. 

Then there was the graduation-present car that I never got when I was eighteen.  In 1964 I only wanted a ’57 Ford.  The kid down the block got a new GTO.  I understood.  We didn’t have the resources but it was still bitter. 

It never occurred to me that I could arrange my life for a higher income.  I wasn’t brought up that way.  My mind did not recognize or travel that path.  I had no hope because I didn’t know that hope could exist.  Poor folks have poor ways, they say. 

Now I’m a little better, and I really, really want to hold on to that insight when I see the lives of my poor friends. Can they be given hope, some kind of hope?  Isn’t that a kind of faith, a carrying of our minds beyond what we know? 

I’m adamant.  That’s what Jesus was about. 

Something to Talk About

I confess that my life is, at times, taken over by an obsession.  I am a machinery freak.  I love to tinker with them, ride them, drive them, look at them, handle them, shoot them, talk about them, read about them. 

On the other end of the scale, a lot of us don’t talk much about our faith journey – that which has liberated us from spiritual bondage.  Is it because this hasn’t really happened in our lives?  The joy and excitement with which we talk about our machines, or our gardens, or our grandkids may not be reflected in our spiritual lives. Is that because we do not have a spiritual life to speak of? 

I think it’s discovery that prompts genuine witness.  Yes, we’re willing to defend that which we’re afraid of losing.  We will argue for certain beliefs that are important to us but I’m not sure that we are really witnessing when we do that. 

I discovered that it was not necessarily God’s call that I follow family tradition in my career choices - 25 years late.  I discovered that all of the disturbing texts in the Bible are not God’s inerrant words.  Rather, I should be disturbed by the distress of my sisters and brothers in this world.  I discovered that I’m God’s child best when I’m real about myself and that says more about God than it does about me and it saves me. 

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.

Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Teach your parents well,
Their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you. 

(Graham Nash)

Let Go and Let God

Petty, pathetic little lives mostly wasted…  Ernest Hemingway said that a day spent without going fishing was a waste.  He didn’t say anything about writing. 

Snowed in…  at seventy degrees the imagination said that being snowed in would be a great opportunity to catch up on reading and balance the checkbook, but that doesn’t happen…  just moping around the house imagining doing something else. 

Nelson Mandela spent years of his life in a prison cell while wealthy, self-righteous politicians were calling him a terrorist. 

The clueless scattering of people that was the church in the second century developed legends about Jesus to keep him alive in people’s minds. 

But life doesn’t depend entirely on our plans or our efforts.  Life can come out of that energy, but life can also come out of wasted time and inactivity.  It isn’t about us, it’s about God’s spirit also working in our inactivity, our misdirection, and even our resistance. 

There are times to let go and let God.

Phoebe Ann Moses

One of my heroes is a girl named Phoebe Ann Moses, a person whose story you have already heard. 

She was born into such abject poverty, here in the U.S., that her widowed mother was forced to put her into a situation of near-slavery to another family.     

Between her impoverished family and her forced labor she managed to survive.  As a small child she learned to trap, and sold game to local merchants.  She eventually entered show business and was such an adept performer that she became internationally known.  She enjoyed a long career. 

But when she was about forty-four years old, a wealthy newspaper magnate increased his fortune by publishing a false report, stating that she had been arrested for illegal activities in support of a drug habit.  She spent years taking his various publications to court in defense of her reputation.  She won most of her cases (54 out of 55), but the awards from the courts could hardly cover her expenses and lost income. 

When she was sixty-two, she and her husband were seriously injured in a car accident.  She wore a brace on one leg for a year and a half, and upon recovery returned to show business. 

She died at age sixty six.  Her husband was so broken by the loss that he stopped eating, and died himself days later. 

I think today’s media would hold her up as an example of a person rising out of poverty by sheer grit and hard work.  But this is a false impression.  It misses the most important part of her example.  It oversimplifies her life and tries to apply a false value to all people.  The fact is, hard work does not ensure success and I see something in her life that has far greater value. 

In spite of all the terrible things done to her and the tragedies that dogged her life, Annie Oakley never made her life a quest for revenge.  Evidently she didn’t have it in her, and the fact that her husband loved her so, and her audiences too, is a testimony to a great heart, not a great ambition.  This is the thread that runs through great religions, great nations, and great people. 

(I acknowledge that I get much of my information from Wikipedia, unlike some public figures who present it as their own.)

Bible Study

I find it astonishing how our minds can twist simple facts to suit our prejudices.  “Bible study” comes to mind in this respect. 

Reading a document is one thing.  Studying a document is entirely another thing.  For me, reading the Bible is not studying it. 

Study is a search for truth, and in searching for truth the student who has any degree of integrity will examine any and all sources of information available and being honest about her/his personal inclinations. 

But nobody can do that entirely.  Bible study involves bringing up issues of language, history, culture, and the knowledge and opinions of today’s scholars and their predecessors from centuries before.  That may be why a lot of people are put off from even reading the Bible.  Yes, there are good faith-building stories there, and comfort, encouragement, even direction; but there are also some zingers to one’s faith and there are ancient cultural mores that do not conform to the spirit in Jesus’ teaching.  Not a lot of us want to struggle with such a mixture.  That dusty book on the shelf is dusty for a number of reasons. 

Take the story of Sodom for instance.  That was God’s judgment on homosexuality, correct?  Not.  We certainly hear plenty of that interpretation from Americanized Christianity, but wait… Would the interpretation of another writer from the Bible itself carry any authority?  It should, but nobody seems to pay attention to the prophet Ezekiel who, in condemning Jerusalem in the 16^th chapter says, “The crime of your sister Sodom was pride, gluttony, calm complacency… they never helped the poor and needy; they were proud, and engaged in loathsome practices before me, and so I swept them away as you have seen.”(Jerusalem Bible)  “Loathsome practices” is listed as a repeat, for emphasis, on the social injustices of the city.  Homosexuality is not even mentioned, nor was it even known as a “condition” by that Biblical author.  And yet, our homophobic culture today actually uses “Sodomy” as a legal term to describe sexual practices that offend some people.  I am so delighted to see the credibility of this mindset slowly melting away.  And I don’t think it happened as a result of “Bible study” by Americans.  It has more spiritual roots. 

This may hurt our Christian pride, but people of all religions, and people with no religion, all normally have a sense of justice.  The atheistic communist, the pagan, countless others, all possess that same kind of sight.  It would seem that Americans, whatever their spirituality, have come to see the illogic and intrinsic wrongness in our homophobic culture and are moving to correct the problem, sometimes in direct and public opposition to their own churches’ policies. 

I’m certainly not saying that the Bible has no value.  I’m just saying that we must be aware of a greater source. We should likewise be aware that our congregations and religious institutions have similar status.  Ideally they are places of both mutual support and challenge and whose real life comes from the spirit of Christ.  There’s more to do.  Perhaps next on the list should be: Stewardship of God’s Creation, and Stopping the War on the Poor. 

There’s hope after all.  To paraphrase more than one great person of faith, “Without God, we can’t; and God, without us, won’t.”  (attributed to Nelson Mandela, Augustine of Hippo, Desmond Tutu, and others in various forms)

You Can Do Anything

Getting old has made me more brazen.  I care a (little) less about what people think of me.  I don’t have time to jack around with stuff I consider trivial and I don’t have some kind of compulsion to fix every little thing I see going wrong. 

Peter Kjeseth, if you are reading this I still remember sitting in your office and hearing you say, “Neal, you can do anything.  Why don’t you consider the mission field for your first call?”  

That was good advice and Rhonda and I had five delightful and adventurous years as a result.  And the villagers taught us as much as we taught them.  

We all knew that I really couldn't do everything.  I just took that as encouragement.  But I have learned another thing, Peter, and that is the ability to accept and even celebrate the things I can’t do.  I am driven by the command of Jesus to seek justice for the disempowered and pray that I will do so, as I am gifted, until I have no more energy.  As for how that’s done, I have to explore.  I will “push the envelope” for the gospel, but I truly believe now that, when seeking out God’s will, I occasionally do people more good by not doing because it’s not about me.  

My voice is failing.  I've also come to realize that I have a genuine disability in “reading people.”  That is, I can’t get past face-value when people speak to me.  I can’t read between the lines.  It’s a little like being color-blind I guess.  

Albert Einstein supposedly said, “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he(she) has attained liberation from the self.”  None of us need to have an IQ of 160 to accept ourselves as we are and know that the greatest force of love in the universe is one with us too.  That’s salvation for me.

~ Neal

I'm Not Afraid to Die

“I’m not afraid to die.”  

How often do we hear this?  Have we said it ourselves?  

And smaller “passages”: Letting go of a possession can be, in a sense, letting go of a little bit of one’s life.  Are we becoming a nation of people clinging to money and possessions as some sort of entitlement?  

Let’s say we accept the idea that possession of many things separates us from genuine peace.  In moments like that we can say, from the heart, that we could part with these things and be better off.  

But watch what happens when the time comes.  

It’s entirely another matter when the doctor tells me that I have to give up salt, now, or die.  Perhaps I had been saying that I was cutting back, hopefully, eventually, to the point where I regained my health.  But now??  I’m not ready for that big step.  The time is wrong. 

Here’s where I discover that it’s not the intention that counts so much as the timing.  This has to be my idea.  I have to be ready. It is going to be dreadfully unpleasant, frightening, if I’m not prepared to some degree. 

A mortal injury, an incurable disease, unexpected loss of a loved one, the fire that destroys our property… let’s be honest.  The timing is never right.  I know of only one way to live with this.  

We have made all this stuff a part of ourselves, which is actually a good thing.  But in taking the next step, the feeling of possession, we begin to lose our spiritual health.  By “possession” I mean the exclusion of others.  

How about… making it a habit to pass things on, not letting them sit around and begin sticking to us.  Let’s not just accumulate things, let’s give things away more than we have been doing – a gift to a darling niece or a beloved charity.  Sell stuff, at a profit or a loss, as a frequent habit.  In this way we give of ourselves.  In this way the timing is frequent and joyful and that final act of giving up our life here, is just the last of many.  Perhaps then, when the time comes to go through the gate we won’t have so much baggage holding us back.

~ Neal

The Devil Walks the Streets

It’s Halloween and the Devil walks the streets.  

A preacher tells her flock that Halloween is a pagan festival.  

A priest tells his flock that Halloween, the eve of All Saints Day, is connected to a celebration of people who have built up and influenced the Christian faith, and who have died in God’s grace.  

In my opinion both of them are right.  

Some of our Halloween customs are connected with the pagan celebration of Samhain at this time of year, when it is believed that “the veil separating life and death becomes thinner.”  And it has been the practice of the Christian church in new venues to appropriate locally held customs and beliefs and apply those very pagan elements of a culture to Christian teachings and customs – hence Halloween as it is now.  

Taking a people’s previous religious customs and adapting them to Christianity is a gentle way to bring people to an understanding of the Gospel, and yet some people vehemently oppose this practice, calling it “syncretism.” 

So the devil walks the Halloween streets and the devil is not a ghost or a corpse; the devil is a bigot.  If I want to feel superior, I need to separate myself or my belief system, from others and then declare my beliefs superior.  I don’t think Jesus’ intent was ever to instill a sense of superiority in his followers so when I hear Christians railing against someone else’s beliefs I immediately doubt the hearts of the accusers.  

When we, with prejudice, make a blanket condemnation of other religions and try to exercise control in our own favor we are only exposing the frailty of our own faith in the presence of another, when in fact that other faith can inform us about our own.

~Neal

Scrotch-Scrotch-Scrotch

My neighbor had a Beagle named Alvin, and Alvin loved to snack on earthworms.  

Alvin’s owner and I were having a conversation outside when I heard, “Scrotch-Scrotch-Scrotch.”  I looked down to see Alvin scraping his teeth on the sidewalk trying to dislodge a dried-up earthworm – not good for his dental health.  It’s amazing what self-destructive things people and other animals will do in order to engage their passions.  And passions embrace many kinds of appetites, including the desire to feel superior by hating another. 

I understand the feeling.  I’ve been there myself.   I’m repeatedly tempted to go back and, to my shame, I get a reminder that I’m out of line when I point a finger.

Can we hope that at some point the human spirit will evolve toward a more corroborative mindset?  The model has actually been with us for a long, long time. 

In order to practice hatred, one must first divide.  There must be the “them and us.”  The division can be anywhere where there is a difference: political, cultural, racial, between species, between genders, and even between humans and creation itself.  But there is a thread in the fabric of most religions that points toward a healthier reality. 

A healthy spirituality sees God as loving parent, people as sisters and brothers coming from a common ancestor, humans as embedded and dependent on the natural world; all this is there if we just look, and read, and hear; if we embrace words of grace and commonality, actions of love.  The alternative is destructive passions based on ego and a can of worms for a life.  The choice should be obvious. 

- Neal Z.

Did you miss this Sunday's sermon?  Or would you like to hear it again?  Follow this link: Sunday's Sermon Sept. 29 to listen to Pastor Rodger's sermon on Trusting God.

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