Some Fundamentals: Uncertainty

            It’s about eighty-five degrees outside, ninety-five percent humidity.  The kids are happy to be inside.  We’re in New Orleans on a week long work and educational trip.  Right now an old man is telling us his version of a story we’ll hear again and again throughout the week.  He describes his experience of Katrina.  He talks about leaving, hearing about the catastrophe from afar, returning to death and devastation.  His details are different, but the story is a sliver of that great tale of anguish and appreciation.

            He’s talked for almost an hour now.  The youth minister leading the trip raises her hand and asks about his faith.  How did it help him during the flood and after, when neighbors died and the city lay in ruins?

            “Sometime you’ll get to the point where all you have is your faith.  That’s all you have to lean on,” he says.  The kids nod appreciatively.

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

            This week, five months later, I listen to a debate between an atheist and a Christian.  They are remarkably polite to one another and that’s more interesting to me than their tepid arguments for and against the existence of God.  It’s their stories and their generosity to one another that catches my attention. 

Then the moderator describes the atheist’s position as not like Christopher Hitchens for whom religion was a virus.  This debater speaks of religion as a placebo for the soul¯.  I think in some way that’s how our guide to Katrina was describing faith.  It can actually help.  It can push back the darkness.  It can make sense in a chaotic world.

            Placebos are amazing in that they do not depend on an outside influence to heal.  They tap into the body’s innate strength.  Placebos depend solely on my ability to believe and my body somehow responding to that belief in order to produce whatever it needs to survive.  But their worth is limited.

            Placebos don’t work against bullets, for example.  The catastrophe of the Ghost Dance demonstrates that¢.  Belief will carry a person a long way, as will determination, drive, will, and fear.  But after that, when I come to the end of myself, I need something more than me.

            I’m somewhat resistant to the notion of faith placebos because I’m all too aware of my own limitations.  If supernatural things depend on my ability to believe, I’m dead in the water.

I think where I sometimes frustrate people is in my unwillingness to say that what I believe about God is synonymous with God.  Caution in speaking for God is a growing area for me.  It seems like the best we can do is to say what seems to be the case, what seems consistent with God’s character, what people in the past have observed about God.

            I’m not even comfortable saying that what the Bible says about God is how God is.  It’s observational, certainly, it is even revelatory, but it isn’t God.  When I say God I mean someone who cannot be understood by the finitude of the human mind.  Any description of God, like my favorite, “God is love”, is limited by our ability to comprehend.  Language can’t contain God any better than temples can.

            That is not to say that there is nothing true.  Some people have determined “absolute truth” to be absolutely important.  I do not think it is, but I am not opposed to the idea that there is such a thing as absolute truth.  In fact, I think that the people who insist on it are really insisting that God is, and that God does not change like we do.  I’m perfectly happy with that idea, even though it seems rather small and less useful than a lot of other ways of speaking of God.  What I am at pains to point out and model is that human beings do not have access on an intellectual level to absolute truth.  At the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfield: we know only what we know.

            A non-theological example of this is the idea of the atom.  Around the middle of the fifth century BC, Democritus summarized concepts that had been floating around the Greek world and the Indian subcontinent.  He said that all matter was made up of very small parts, atomos, which were irreducible.  Today we are told by scientists that atoms are actually made up of even smaller bits.  And we believe it.  Atoms are no longer imagined to be tiny balls of solid matter, but as whirling energy.  Were Democritus and the early Indians wrong?  Not exactly.

We know only what we know.

The postmodern word is uncertainty.  The religious word is humility.  Both are useful for approaching God.  Both are valuable in reading the scriptures.  Both are indispensable for human interaction. 

Neither is easy.

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¯ Well, actually, I made the for the soul part.  He just says placebo affect.  I like my turn of phrase better, though

¢ Look it up.  It’s a fascinating tale.

Am I A Christian?

Several weeks ago I was talking with a woman about the paint job on the outside of her house.  I pointed out that there was only one coat on it and that several windows had not been caulked.  I thought it really should be done again.  She agreed and then proceeded to tell me all the things the general contractor had messed up.  The list wasn’t extensive, but I could agree that a plumbing leak and a bad paint job are pretty annoying.

            Then she said, “You’re a Christian, right?”

            For not the first time in my life I wished I could pause the conversation, open this woman’s head, pull out the file of the conversation, and see what she meant.  She said “You’re a Christian, right?” but behind that simple question was a myriad of assumptions.  I actually hesitated and reviewed what I had observed about her: Obama posters in the house, Jesus fish on the fridge.  Maybe a “Christian like me”?  I cautiously stuttered, “Yes?”  Like that, with the rising end like it was a question.  “Yes?”

            “Well,” she began.  Then something engaged in me and I knew what she was going to say.  She was feeling slightly guilty for complaining and bad-mouthing this contractor.  She was going to say, I know I should forgive him.  It’s silly of me to still be upset, but I am.  And I was going to say, Hey, it’s tough sometimes.

            Instead she said, “The worst thing was that he didn’t tell us he was a Mormon.”

            I said, “Well, he’s a jack-Mormon.”  A jack-Mormon, this contractor’s wife had once told me, was a non-practicing Mormon.  Not an apostate, per se, but not really in line with the whole thing.  She told me that when she and her husband were an active part of the little church I was planting.  That was, coincidentally, when he was building the house.

            “No,” the home owner insisted, “he and his wife told us they were born-again Christians.  That would have been a deal breaker for us, if we’d known.”

            “Really?” I laughed.  “Not getting the painter to do two coats would have been a deal breaker for me.”  We chuckled politely at one another as I made my way out the driveway.

            But I felt like that was the deal breaker for me.  That was the day I decided I didn’t want to be a part of this whole thing, if that’s what this whole thing is about.  And it seems like that’s what we’re talking about.  It looks to me like the entire Christian enterprise is less about loving God, loving your neighbor, and loving your enemies, and more about setting up false walls of us and them, of in and out, and double standards for “believers” and “non-believers”.

            I am at a loss when Christian friends and acquaintances send me the emails about the way Barak Obama is an enemy of religion and the next week send one protesting the building of a mosque in New York City.  Mosques are religious buildings.  I don’t know why some people don’t like Tim Tebow, but I wonder if it really has anything to do with God.  Our culture mocks all sincerity, and making a big deal about anything usually seems pretty funny.  If a football player thanked his mother every time he turned around I’ll bet it wouldn’t be long before he started catching a little shit from the fans.

            The view of God Jesus seemed to be at pains to reflect, present, incarnate, and demonstrate seems to me nearly the polar opposite of the view given by my Christian friends.  His view of God was an expansive view, a turn from petty tribalism to a global embrace.  If Christianity is simply a return to the balkanization of the human race, or an imperialistic push to bring everything under its own influence, then maybe I don’t want to be a part of it.  Maybe I can’t.

            It would be easier to ask if I can still be an evangelical, or if I am a fundamentalist, than to ask of I am truly a Christian.  But history is littered with Crusades, church/state alliances, power-over evangelism, and rejected rejects.  It isn’t evangelicalism or narrow-mindedness or fundamentalism or anything like that.  The ideology that sprang up in response to the Jesus movement is not one of inclusion and embrace; it is not one of log-in-my-own-eye humility.  It is about rules of engagement that demand rejection of the other.

         So this whole thing leaves me wondering if the term Christian even applies to me any more.  I know plenty of other people have rejected the label plenty of other times, but now I am a cliche wrapped in a stereotype.  Sorry.

Some Fundamentals: Bible, Part 2

The Bible is an essential piece for approaching and appropriating the world.  It helps form the ways we see God and the world.  It gives us language to speak of God; its stories form an endless well from which to draw identity.  Obviously there are nuances upon nuances that I hadn’t considered at eighteen.  Now it seems obvious, in answer to Mark Simone’s assertion about the Bible as the greatest source for information about Jesus, that people learn as much or perhaps more about Jesus from the tradition of their church as from the Bible.  And that makes sense.  The Bible is part of the tradition of the Church, which has existed longer than the Bible, and whose faithfulness to that collection of archaic writings is all that has preserved it for us today.  It is the tradition of the Church, along with its reverence for the Bible, which shapes Christian faith.  It’s the constant turning to the tales woven in Scripture and Laws and the poetry which then shapes the Church.

            I used to teach an adult Sunday School class called “Stories You Wish Weren’t In The Bible.”  We talked about the Bible as though it were written for adults, not a children’s’ bedtime story book.  We read stories like the near-death of Isaac at the hands of Abraham, the rape (or was it a seduction?) of Dinah, the wholesale slaughter of  Israel’s enemies, and Ananias and Saphira and their money, lies, and deaths.  Those are troubling stories for twenty-first century people to wrestle with.  But there they are.  We dealt with them, and in doing so we came closer to understanding our own assumptions about God, the Bible, and life in general.  It was fruitful and challenging, at least for me.  I think that’s true for some class members, as well. 

One story we read dealt with Tamar, whose husbands kept dying on her.  By tradition, her father-in-law, Judah, from whose name comes the land of Judea and the contemporary Jews in all their diversity, was obligated to give her another son.  Then another and another so she could have children.  After a couple of boys dies, Judah decided that Tamar was cursed or worse.  He refused his obligation.

            Then his own wife died.  After a suitable amount of time, he went off to visit a nearby shrine prostitute.  It happens.  Guys get lonely, they get desperate, they get stupid.  Tamar heard all about it and disguised herself as the prostitute and had sex with Judah.  I guess she kept the veil on and didn’t talk much.  When it was over, the old man found himself financially embarrassed.  “No worries,” said the still veiled naked woman, “just leave me your staff (not that one) and your seal.  We’ll settle up later.”

            A few months later, who turns up pregnant?  The errant man-killer Tamar.  Well, we’ll just have to stone her.  After all, why break tradition now?  Two birds and one stone, so to speak.

            “Well . . .,” says the adulterous witch, “we might want to get the man who planted this seed, right?  I’ve got his stuff right inside.”

            The old man, on seeing his own cane and seal, says, “She is more righteous than I am.” 

To which I reply, “No shit.”

            But a woman in the class says, “But, Judah was a good Christian man, wasn’t he?”  And I can’t tell if she’s being funny or what.  No, Judah was nothing like a Christian, living so long B.C.  And his goodness is surely in question in this tale, at least.  That’s the beauty of the Bible.  There are seldom black and white stories, laws, or descriptions.  It’s as complex as the world it describes and the minds whence it sprang.

            We didn’t even start to explore the clear contradictions in places like the Samuel books or Chronicles and Kings, and especially not in the gospel accounts of Jesus life.  We aren’t talking about paradox here, the only real way to understand complex realities, but simple contradictions in detail.

I actually don’t have any trouble saying that the Bible is the word of God.  How that’s true in probably different for every person.  There are people who use the words inerrant and infallible to talk about the Bible.  In fact, those words have come to mean more to some people than the words of scripture themselves.  They say that in the original manuscripts, the writings were inerrant, without fault, perfectly communicating God’s intentions to us.  They would have no room for redaction, editing.  Those manuscripts, alas, are lost to history and history’s thieves – mildew and decay.  So, for all practical intents, the theory of inerrancy says we no longer have the Word of God available to us.  This from people whose only intention was to maintain some reverence for the Bible. 

Inerrancy and infallibility are descriptions too brittle for the real world, let alone a real God.

Another way of thinking about the Bible as the word of God is to say that as it is spoken, read, or pondered, it becomes the Word all over again.  In a sense God snatches the dusty words from a page or from the air and appropriates them to speak to new hearers.  It is in that way that the Bible never gets old.  It’s like a sponge that has soaked up water and is never dry.  Not because of some inherent property in the words themselves, but because God chooses that arcane collection to communicate to new generations in new ways.

In other words, if I took a copy of the Bible, buried it in the back yard, and forgot about it, it would not be the Word of God, nor would it carry the thoughts of God.  It would be fertilizer in no metaphorical sense at all.  If someone dug it up, and if she could read English, then God could speak to her through the wormy pages.  But only then would it ever come close to being God’s word.

In the struggle for the Bible, by and large the fundamentalists have won and even liberals are pretty sure of it.  Consequently they spend a lot of their time trying to look like they don’t take the Bible all that seriously or explaining it away.

The fundamentalists have even won over the nonbelievers.  Whole forests have been felled to convince the public that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible.  Anyone who can read (including the people who edited and collected the Bible) can see that the entire collection is rife with contradictions.  But believers and unbelievers, fundamentalists and liberals, accept the proposition that if parts of it are less than true, none of it can be true.  Again, too brittle.  We need something flexible, alive, organic.  The truth is, it really doesn’t do much to damage the credibility of the Christian faith to point out the problems with the texts if we remember that the texts are part of the tradition of the Church’s tradition.  They’re part of what helps us understand Jesus.

Some Fundamentals: The Bible

            When I was about eighteen I asked Mark Simone, king of all youth ministry, why some people I’d recently met seemed to hold the Bible in such high regard that it became a fourth member or the Trinity (I don’t know what that would be called, off the top of my head – Quadriny, maybe).  His top-of-the-head answer has helped to shape my understanding of the Bible ever since.

            “Yeah, but, you know, it’s a really important book.  Where else do you learn as much about Jesus?”

            He also once told a group of us something like, “You don’t have to believe all of the Bible to believe some of the Bible.”

            I don’t think he worded it so concisely, but that’s pretty deep for a youth minister, even if he is the king of all youth ministry.

            I might add that one need not believe much of the Bible to believe in Jesus and to be known by Jesus.

            I’m still puzzled by people who approach the Bible as though it were the very thoughts of God, captured for time and eternity in inky black (and redÀ).  I thought at eighteen that if a person thought about it and read even the little bit of scripture I had, they’d probably have to let the Trinity remain threef.

            One rainy seminary afternoon about seven years later, a few of us stretched out on couches between classes in the student lounge, drinking coffee and pontificating as seminarians are wont to do.  As our course steered toward the authority of scripture, one person said that just as Jesus was the incarnate Word of God, the Bible is also the incarnate Word of God.  Rich argument ensued.  I think several of us forgot to go to our next class.

            I thought this was an idiosyncratic bent on my classmate’s part, but subsequent reading revealed the same thoughts from lots of evangelicals and fundamentalists.  I was honestly surprised.  While I came to faith among people who loved and valued the Bible, I cannot remember anyone actually saying that Jesus and the scriptures were, in fact, synonymous.  Sure, there were those people I had asked Mark Simone, king of all youth ministry, about in my teens, but I really thought their thoughts were aberrations from orthodox evangelicalism.  The people who helped form my faith were too impressed with Jesus to ever make that mistake.  But, as I read, I found writers like Harold Lindsell, editor for a time of Christianity Today, a flagship evangelical publication, “There are two Words: the Word of God incarnate, Jesus Christ, and the Word of God written, the Bible . . .”  Never mind that the Bible itself doesn’t ever make such claims, nor that it opens doors these folks would never want to openJ, there it is.

            Words are symbols, metaphors to carry the world into our minds.  But the Word of God is different.  The words of God are, in some sense, the things themselves.   God speaks, and there is light.  The Word of God comes out in a still small voice and mountains tremble in the heart of the sea.  The Word of God, indeed, kills and the Word of God, indeed, makes alive; it breaks rocks into pieces«. 

So when we refer to the Bible as the Word of God, this is another thing altogether.  There are plenty of examples on the Bible of prophets saying, “The Word of the Lord came to me . . .” but there are also places where the Apostle Paul says, “It seems to us and to the Holy Spirit . . .”  Both are contained within the cover of the anthology we now call the Bible.   When God speaks, it is action.  When we speak, it is wish and speculation.  Both are found in the Bible.

It’s the anthological nature of the Bible that starts moving us toward the essence of the issue.  The Bible did not fall from the sky, marker ribbons all aflutter.  It was formed, evolved, really, over many hundreds of years.  When I first started contemplating that fact a long time ago, it seemed like that ought to bother me.  I ought to be threatened that the Bible, the Word of God, was really the product of naturalistic processes whose outcome could not be plotted before its completion, but whose trajectory now seems perfectly reasonable in hindsight.  It’s like tracking the domestication of corn from seedy grass to the superfood of continents.

What we have in the Bible is an interconnected (and terribly disconnected) set of stories, myths, poems, civil laws, admonitions, letters and ancient biographies that work together to form a fascinating whole.  It’s a lot like the whole science of emergence, where you have a collection of disparate parts like birds or ants or neurons, all working together to form a whole which is, in the words of the old cliché, greater than the sum of its parts. 

The power of the Bible is not arithmetic, it is exponential.

That means that the strength of the Bible doesn’t rest in surreal origins, nor in some specific authorship, but in the way God uses it to speak to people today.   Parts of the Bible are certainly supernatural in origin (even if they’re not magical) and parts are obviously written by specific people we might all recognize and value.  Believing that God uses the Bible to communicate with us and others liberates the Bible from the straightjacket of magic and lets God work however God wants to work. 

So various books of the Bible can have more than one author, be edited and corrected before they become God’s words for us.  At least, in the way I understand the Bible and its place in the faith.  For others, a particular author (usually the one names at the beginning or in the title imposed by tradition or guess, not by the text itself) along with a very specific set of words that have never changed or been changed is essential to preserve the actual intention of God.  But that simply isn’t the case, and even the witness of scripture bears that out.

           

For instance, when whoever it was who wrote or edited or redacted the gospel of John came to try to place Christ in the grand scheme of God, he or she or they decided that the best route was back to the Word of God, spoken into the world and remaking everything.  The anonymous and mysterious writer of the Letter to the Hebrews said that in the past God spoke through prophets in different ways, but now, in the final days, God spoke through God’s Son.  God has had many things to say, and God’s last Word is Jesus Christ.  Then, apparently using the memories of someone who was an eye witness to at least most of Jesus’ ministry, they constructed a theological piece for their community.

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À Tony Campolo, among others, started referring to himself as a “red letter Christian”, meaning he takes especially seriously the words of Jesus in the four canonical gospels.  I guess this might bother some people, those who would say that Leviticus 6:10 in as important as Matthew 5-7 {yeah, look them up; it’s worth it}.   More about a gospel worldview later in this chapter.

f Or even, God forbid, question the whole use of such language as Trinity as an imposition onto the text.  Just a thought, half-formed at best.

J Doors like: if God can be incarnate in two forms, why not more?  Think about it.  It would make a great comic book.  The second son of God . . . no, the dog of God, or the pencil of God, or the tuna can label of God, wanders the earth, bereft of anything or anyone to save, looking for something, anything to do.  Somewhere else I’ll talk about incarnation, likely in the parts concerning Jesus directly, but let me reiterate myself again for a second time: the incarnation was a divine gamble, a risk so wild that only a wild God could take it.

« Yeah, those are references to scripture.  Google the words and find the places.

Sopme Fundamentals: Cain

AN OLD STORY FROM ANOTHER BLOG.  IT FITS THE THEME OF FUNDAMENTALS

I didn’t think I’d kiss her. It just happened. She left the stage and took off a feathered head piece and I was thjere and I kissed her. I’d thought about it often, but now I'd done it.
Walt saw the whole thing. I didn’t care. He said nothing. My brother stood alone.
Her breath tasted like coffee and tobacco and whiskey and fatigue. But I didn’t care.
Her lips were greasy Oriental silk.
It was a new era of electric lights and motor cars and Edward was king and I was an actor.
So was she.
She had a past: orphan from London, making her way to San Francisco on a steamer, paying her way with skin, not songs.
Her body was an island of experience, clouds and forests of the past, dense with men from every layer of society. I knew it all and I didn't care.
Walt’s eyes burned like the tip of his cigar. I knew he loved her; my brother loved her with flame in his belly that kept him awake at night, a burning spear that ignited fights in bars and on street corners. I could hear his heart beating and I stopped my ears.
Walt was her past, but he was passed. I was here now, and I led her toward her dressing room.
Inside, she was my new country, wrested from savages, tamed by my genteel hand. I felt the heat of her and I thought of my wife, I thought of Walt, I thought of a thousand things, but I pushed them from my mind. The blood in my ears was the surf on the shore of my new, uncharted continent.
I didn’t hear the door, didn’t see the knife until she was falling over me, shuddering: shaken by pain, not passion. I felt the steel and I saw Walt and he was Cain and I was Cain.

We Won! The War On Terror Is Finally Over. Bring The Troops Home!

I'm wondering today over the reaction of Americans to the death of Osama bin Laden.  Clearly the guy was an asshole, but he was an asshole with a mission.  A mission, as my son pointed out yesterday, whose approach doesn't differ much from a lot of other missions we see in the world: to get your way it is often necessary to kill steal, destroy, and lie.  For a religious man, a follower of an ethical monotheism, those are grievous sins, sins that ought to have stopped bin Laden in his tracks.  Bin Laden stands convicted by his own convictions.  But the majority of American are also ethical monotheists of one stripe or another, and look at our methodology.  The United States has killed far more people that 3000, ugly as that event was.  You could lay blame at the feet of President Bush for his role in those deaths, then move forward in time to blame President Obama for continuing.

The joy we see now has something to do with our sense of redemptive violence.  Bin Laden ordered massive killings out the pagan sense that he could push back the chaos of the world-not-as-he-thought-it-ought-to-be.  "If I can throw enough sinners into the hole, I'll restore the world to it's rightful balance." The United States kills bin Laden in the same spirit.

Bin Laden is dead, and so are the 9/11 victims, as are untold numbers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and God only knows where else.  I can understand the impulse in some people to see violence as salvific, but when it comes to my co-coreligionists, I'm baffled.  We believe that Jesus is the ultimate victim, that in him suffering comes to a final point.  Because of that, we know that killing others does nothing to alleviate the chaos; it only exacerbates chaos.  We believe that in the death and resurrection of Jesus chaos is finally dealt with, and we no longer have the excuse of fear to drive us toward violence.

AND YET .....
And yet I see people, some of whom must share a commitment to Jesus as the ultimate expression of God's active love toward creation, dancing in the streets, waving flags, and chanting, "USA! USA!" like soccer hooligans.  We didn't just win an Olympic sport, we (and I mean we, collectively, together, through the actions of our elected officials and the military we pay to protect us as well as to kill in our name) we killed a man.  Actually, a few men and at least one woman are dead.  And the myth of redemptive violence is exposed to the air and withers and dies.

Except that it doesn't.  The dead stay dead, but we dance.  The towers remain fallen, but we sing.  The wars continue, but we wave flags as though a new day has dawned, new possibilities break over us, and the world is made fresh again.

Politically, militarily, and strategically, bin Laden's death might have accomplished something, though the talking heads are still debating what.  But, dare I say it, spiritually, it has done no good, no good at all.  In fact, enjoying the death of another human being, even if we deem that death necessary, might damage us as a people more than we realize.  Kill, perhaps, but mourn at the same time. 

Maybe if the past decade had not been one of mounting death tolls under US bombs and at the end of US rifles, from rebels and jihadists and frightened patriots, from missiles and stones and swords, we'd be able to see bin Laden's demise as a tragedy.  The man more or less chose his own death, as well as the death of how many Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis, Europeans, Americans, Asians, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Christians.  That ought to make us mournful, not jubilant.  These ought to be days of black armbands, not flags.  One more person is dead.  The world is no safer today.  Chaos is not appeased by his death. 

Bin Laden doesn't matter.  Miraculously, two revolutions in the Arab world came off with remarkably little violence.  The others remain to be seen.  But whatever happens, it's clear that violence and repression and extremism are not the way of change in the Muslim world.  Al Qaeda had no part to play in Egypt or Tunisia.  Bin Laden's approach was, like violence and evil do, destroying itself and becoming inconsequential.

I hope his death does not change that.

Fundamentals: The story of Heaven, Part II

A few years ago I went to a gathering of ministers in Denver.  I didn’t pay the price of admission, and cobbed rooms from a couple of friends.  One friend was the Reverend Doctor Michael Van Horn.  As I was drifting off on the floor, wrapped in an extra blanket, I asked the Rev. what the word spirit signified to him.  He said something like, “Spirit means orientation, toward God or away from God.  That’s your spirit.”

That’s probably the best definition of spirit I’ve heard: orientation.  Not an extra substance, not something separate from our existence as flesh and blood men and women, but where our focus is.  It’s not necessarily a comforting idea, but it seems consistent with both scripture/tradition and with experience.

In the Book of Genesis, God breathes into the nostrils of the clay-man Adam.  The clay man becomes a living thing.  Some people say that’s what sets us apart from animals: the breath of Gods in our lungsÅ.  Christians might say that this is the origin of the soul, the eternal part of the human person.  The breath of God stuck in Adam’s lungs and became our eternal bit.  I think a rabbinical story based on that might say that in each person that breath is constantly longing to return to the creator.  Or perhaps it’s the breath of God that animates our thoughts and desires.  Or maybe it’s the spark of life that then allows our bodies to emanate spirit.

Then, of course, there’s the whole issue of eternal life.  Jesus talked about it, to be sure.  St. John’s gospel is replete with references to eternal life and how to get it.  Immediately we jump from that phrase to our own ideas of something called heaven, a place of . . . well, no one is sure, but there is a lot of talk about knowing things of which we are currently ignorant, getting to do what we love, be it bowling, hunting, having sex, or eating.  And sure, there are definitely some references in the rest of scripture that speak of something beautiful and unimaginable in the future.  But the story of heaven that gets passed around the majority of Christianity sounds more like a Buddhist grasping at detachment than a Jesus story of eternal life.

When John’s version of Jesus talks about eternal life, the other gospels refer to the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heavena.  Kingdom of God is usually followed by a story, a parable about what the realm/reign/reality is like.   Interestingly, this reign or commonwealth or kingdom doesn’t have even the slightest whiff of our common conception of “heaven”.  There is not one word concerning, “after you die”.  Instead, it seems like a turning-on-its-head of the world-as-we-know-it.  Justice is done, the hungry are filled, and the rich go away empty.  Reading the parables Jesus tells of this kingdom, one cannot help noticing that 1) it’s not a fair reign, since everyone is treated well, not only those who have earned it, and 2) it has a very earthy feel to it.

The kingdom of heaven is political.  Before you run to get your bible and find the spot where Jesus himself tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world; otherwise my followers would fight for it,” remember that being “not of this world” is not the same as being ethereal.  “The world” is used in much of the New Testament to indicate the way things are, the systems built on corruption, or systems built ostensibly to fight against corruption. 

In the mid-nineties a group of kids passed through Gunnison, Colorado, where my wife and I were living.  They had just finished a Rainbow Family Gathering and were on their way to Oregon.  They camped for a couple weeks in the National Forest near town, and we got to know some of them.  Most of these kids spoke derisively of the world system – the government, capitalism, communism, everything – as “Babylon”».  They picked that word up from Rastafarianism via reggae music, which in turn gleaned the concept of an empire of oppression from the Bible.  The Bible both describes the historical Babylonian empire (which enslaved its neighbors and reeked havoc in the name of keeping the peace) and the metaphorical Babylonian empire(s) centuries later.  The ending book of the New Testament, in fact, identifies Babylon with Rome and her empire.  It’s a natural step to understand all empires, be they economic like multi-national corporations, political like the United States, or religious, like ____________ (name your favorite).

The kingdom of heaven stands in stark distinction of any empireb because it is not about power over, but power under.  Power over is how all empires operate.  They expand by incorporating their surroundings, absorbing everything, appropriating what works and crushing what doesn’t, always changing, always hungry.  The power under kingdom of heaven constantly gives, taking as its source of energy the weakness of God in Christ, giving itself away to the unworthy, especially the weak, the oppressed, the marginalized, but also to the power-mongers, turning the other cheek, surrendering shirts and going the extra mile. 

The kingdom of heaven is personified in Jesus and is always on the move, never finding a place to sleep, hounded, afraid, but relentless in love.

            Despite their bad press in the pages of the gospels, the Pharisees gave birth to two important children: the Christian movement and the rabbinical tradition.  And despite their divergence from one another and from the source(s) of their inspiration, both movements have a lot to teach one another.  Around the time of the Jesus movement, the rabbis started talking about something they called, in Hebrew, Tikkun Olam, or world repair.  Fixing the world.  Today it means any kind of social justice work, but maybe there’s something lost if it doesn’t include the importance of prayer.

            In the same way, Jesus taught his followers to pray that God’s realm would come on earth as it is in heaven.  In other words, despite the apparent separation of God from creation, the fractured nature of things as we see them, God desires to repair the world and desires our help in doing so.  In fact, says St. Paul, we are to be co-workers with God (or for God, or of God) in Tikkun Olam.  This is the kingdom of heaven, not a gauzy afterlife on a cloud.

            The end of the Book of Revelation is about “the kingdoms of this world now become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ,” of the celestial realm descending and God dwelling with God’s people.  There is definitely a future element to the kingdom of heaven, but waiting it out isn’t part of our present.  Working for it is.

            Hoping for an eternal existence of taking our ease, fat on soul food at the heavenly cafeteria (good and corny as that sounds even as I re-read it) isn’t the goal of any life, and especially not of the Christian life.  The entire story of Jesus, death and resurrection, is a pattern for all of creation, not least of which is humanity.  Jesus was only the first to pass under the mountains and emerge on the other side, glorified and ready to face the sun.  We are also headed that way.  Resurrection is seldom understood in any Christian setting, liberal or conservative.  Instead, the focus is on the symbolism of the resurrection, which for liberals is feeling better about myself and for conservatives is dying and zipping off to heaven.  Maybe resurrection means a little more.  Maybe it signifies the rebirth of the cosmos.  Not just signifies, but anticipates.  Maybe St. Paul’s creation groaning for the appearing of the sons and daughters of God in our resurrection is a real thing and symbolic of the work we’re to be about.  Maybe.

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Å I think it’s the ability to tell stories that make us different.  But some animals, especially chimpanzees, can tell stories.  They can lie.  So, maybe I’ll have to rethink my theory.

a This was out of reverence for God’s name and a reluctance to toss it around too cavalierly.  We might do well to think about that precaution.

» One guy, whose “Family name” was Sasquatch, refused to come to our house and shower, even though his friends begged him to.  He asked me one day as we rode around in his van if there is any evidence of combs in the Bible.  I didn’t know.  A little research showed that ancients were somewhat concerned with hygiene, even though they might be dirty by contemporary American standards.

b Some people have actually used the word “empire” to translate the NT word Baseleia.  That isn’t inaccurate.  In fact, it works as well as kingdom.  One of the problems with much of NT theological work is that it uses words and phrases from the world around the writers.  The writers often do not simply tweak those phrases, but twist, turn, pound, and reshape them to mean nearly the direct opposite.  The emperor was “Son of God” and “Savoiur”.  The Roman Empire brought a kind of peace among those who pleased the Son.  A quick glance at the NT shows how those words were co-opted to very different ends.

Fundamentals: Love Again

This is only a little thing, but it helps me think about the nature of love in the cosmos.  I started by describing the birthplace of stars, the explosive violence at the center and beginning of the universe.  That’s the macro picture of love. 

Now for the micro.  Since about 1959 some biologists have become increasingly aware of horizontal gene transfer, where-in an organism shares genetic material with another which is not its offspring®.  That’s like me giving you a coat if you’re cold, or you bringing me medicine when I’m sick.  I think Jesus had a few things to say about that.  As we become more complex systems of cells, we lose the ability to be altruistic naturally.  It’s no longer part of how we operate.  But it’s still there, peeking out in the most unlikely places: love, whether it’s clashing and roiling, or slipping useful adaptations among cells, or giving hard earned cash to anyone less fortunate than yourself, the love of God, the love who is God, reflected in creation.

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® The other kind of gene transfer is vertical, just to keep our metaphors straight.

Fundamentals: Love Part II

Surely my understanding of love is influenced by my having been raised in a relatively stable household in a time of great prosperity».  I can’t help it: God’s love means something to me that it doesn’t mean to a 12^th century Spanish mystic or a Bronze Age patriarch stumbling out of Ur.  And their sense of love is alien to me, too.  I realize that there are people in this profoundly privileged epoch who don’t see it that way.  In fact, I knew a woman who was reticent to even tell her own children she loved them, lest they grow accustomed to it and take it for granted.  God, for her, felt the same.  God’s love is not ubiquitous; it must be curried like a Dark Age feudal lord’s favor.  Go figure.  Relative to both my past and my reflection, I think that the ubiquity of God’s love forces people to take it for granted.

I cannot help seeing the universe through the lens of love.  When St. John says, “God is love”, he isn’t looking at that God and that love through my privileged twenty first century eyes.  He never read a Hallmark card and didn’t have any memories of those little naked doe-eyed people from the seventies saying things like, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”à He didn’t love chocolate cake, had never made love to a woman·. 

In love making there is a disruption of everything, a disordering and chaotic grinding together.  In the aftermath there is at least the possibility of new arising from the ashes of the old.  Cells collide, combine and divide, splitting and joining. 

            That kind of love, shredding division and clanging union, is powerful. 

            Love is fundamental and paradoxical.  Life is brutish and short.  All organisms are genetically selfish.  That is to say, they do not share useful adaptations with just everyone.  They only pass those along to their offspring.  So a dolphin, for example, isn’t going to give you the genes necessary to hold your breath for a long time.  That wasn’t always the case.  There was a time, scientists speculate, when simple single celled organisms had porous walls and were able to give and take genetic code from one another.  So if you as a cell had some beneficial adaptation, you could give it to me. 

            Clearly those cells don’t behave that way because they’re kind or altruistic, but in a sense love is a mindless giving.  Love is promiscuous.  It doesn’t care who it touches and rubs up against.  It gives to its last breath.  Jesus said that God showers the just and the unjust.

            When I was a gardener, I watered my garden.  I carefully set up the sprinklers to hit only my plants, with a minimum of overspray.  That way I wasn’t wasting water.  Love, on the other hand, is naturally wasteful.  It falls not only on my deserving garden, but on the lawn, the weeds, the trees, the roof, the sidewalk, the street: everywhere in wasteful abundance.

The good news of Jesus is about love.  When Jesus was asked the key to the Law and the Prophets, he said, like any good rabbi, that the commandment to love God with one’s totality is where it’s at.  Actually, the Hebrew tradition in which Jesus was so steeped was too visceral, too bodily, too bloody for as soft a summary as that. 

Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.

You shall love the LORD with all your heart,

with all your soul

with all your mind

and with all your strength¥.

Then, just like any good rabbi, and in keeping with the scriptures of his people, Jesus couldn’t resist adding a second bit to the question of which Law summarized them all.

You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Then he told the story of the Samaritan, the dying man, and the innkeeper, to show that neighbors are not just those people who look, think, speak, smell, spend, believe, worship, eat, make love, and keep house like we do or would like to do.  Neighbors can be enemies, as Jesus reminded his hearers in another place.µ 

            At the risk of sounding like those tough guys who have in recent years  taken the men’s movement of the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s and recycled it into a Christian manhood movement with a macho Christ who can hunt, throw a football, and open bottles of light beer bottles with his wedding ring, love is tough.  It’s strong and abrasive and natural.

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» Not that we saw much of that prosperity.  The 1970’s aren’t remembered as times of enormous wealth for Americans.   My family was no different.  Even before Reganomics trickled down and made us fabulously lower middle class we didn’t have much.  But every day of my childhood I ate, lived under a roof, had access to clean water.  We even had toys and a television.  Compared to the rest of the world, and most of history, we lived like kings.    

à Which is, in my thinking, both profound and a tremendous load of crap all at once.  One of the ways I express love is in apology.    On the other hand, I would hope that I could be gracious enough to forgive before I’m asked to do so.

· I assume, based on his time, not his virginity or studliness.  Maybe first century people “made love”, but I’ve never heard it referred to that way.

¥ Look at The Story of Heaven.

µ There are plenty of resources available to tell you how many times Jesus talked about various things, most usually noted are money, love, hell, and homosexuality.  Suffice it to say that Jesus talked a lot about love.