Theological Terrorists

I find it hard to name my beliefs using traditional Christian language because that vocabulary has been taken hostage by theological terrorists and tortured beyond recognition (Parker Palmer, introduction to The Promise of Paradox).

That's the thing...

So this weekend I took part in two very odd conversations that I haven't figured out yet. Saturday night, staring into the popcorn ceiling of a Hampton Inn hotel room in the Shenandoah valley, I sat listening to a good friend reading aloud from Leviticus (the Gideons provided us this entertainment). I know that when I have been really angry at church (I mean, angry at Christians and physically sitting in a church), I have whipped out Leviticus and read it, glorying in the proof that those many conservative Christians who claim to believe that everything in the Bible is the literal word of God have mostly not read the whole thing, or given it any independent thought.

In situations like this, I am the only thing there to represent Christians, and it is not a role I am comfortable with. Hearing Leviticus being scorned in a hotel room with two of my oldest and dearest (and gayest) friends made me think of how effectively the church has alienated gay people. One of these friends grew up Catholic, and his distaste for church turned into scorn when he was still a child, when he heard the preaching about how only Catholics would go to heaven. He is now an atheist but is loathe to tell people so because, where he lives, atheism equates to amorality-- why, if you didn't have the fear of hell, would you bother to do good things? The other grew up Baptist in the South, and spent his first year in college singing with the Baptist Student Union Choir and pledging chastity-- until he came out and discovered a new world. That new world has not, for either of them, had any place for religion.

And I don't blame them. The conversation saddened me, because I felt obliged to try to explain how I feel about religion / church / God, and I did a piss-poor job. The only thing I guess I can be sure of is that I have sometimes connected with something that felt transcendent. And I get something out of struggling in a spiritual community. And I am heeding the Dalai Lama's advice to practice our own traditions, rather than try to take our Western hearts and minds and curve them entirely to Eastern religious practice. One of these friends, who has experienced similar moments of transcendence, identifies most closely with transcendentalism. The other (and this unaccountably made me sadder) dismissed (he would say explained; to me it felt like dismissed) emotion as chemical synapse-firing. I understand using science to explain things; since the Enlightenment, science has been our culture's religion-- but it seems to me that science attempts to nail down, to explain fully, to take all the mystery out of life. And religion (when it's done right) admits and even celebrates the mystery.

I just hate trying to articulate these ideas, when it feels like I am in a debate of for and against... something I am not even for. Even though we all love each other very much, and I am not a regular Christian (one of Palmer's theological terrorists)-- I don't want to represent for something I don't know, believe, associate with. Sucker.

The second conversation was brief but weird. At a gathering of teacher-friends, we were talking about our Christmas experiences. One had been at a party on Christmas Eve where there was a birthday cake decorated with "Happy Birthday Jesus". Her sister had misread it as Jesse, and then as Jesús, the Spanish-inflected name. They looked around for a little Jesús, couldn't find one, and started asking whose birthday it was. Funny! But then this friend, in explaining further their dismay and hilarity and chagrin when her mom pointed out that it was JESUS's birthday, said something like, "I mean, who's into Jesus anymore?!"

Who, indeed? Even among these straight people, I guess because they are 21st century progressive intellectual types, I am an odd person out for having this vestigial attachment to something so clearly passé and ridiculous. I certainly couldn't explain it to my very secular French friend, as she wondered at my going to church on purpose (she gets dragged by her very Catholic Italian grandfather when she goes home for Christmas). How could I explain it to these people? I can't even explain it to myself.

Then I guess she felt awkward, because she turned to me and asked an even worse question: "Who are you more into, God or Jesus?"

I don't know how to answer that question. God because God is more universal? Jesus because I find the New Testament and especially his focus on compassion and care for "the least of these"?

That's going to haunt me for a while.

Hebrews

Lectionary for this week, per the church newsletter: Micah 5:2-5a; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-55

I don't get much from the Micah (Bethlehem being one of the "little clans" of Judah, from which nonetheless will come forth a ruler of Israel-- I get it; Christ was predicted, so his coming is a fulfillment of prophecies)... and you'd think that Luke is where I would want to hang my hat this week; ever since I sang a setting of the piece by the 20th century composer Halsey Stevens (how I wish I could link to an online version here! But as far as I know, there are no official recordings of the piece), I have loved so many of its lines-- especially "He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts": it's not just the medieval upside-down world of carnaval where "he hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away"-- although that's good too.

But this week it's not the Luke but the Hebrews that is speaking to me, because I'm newly and inexplicably obsessed with this idea of salvation. It's like it's all new to me, all of a sudden, and yet surely I have heard the message a hundred times over. It's just that all of a sudden and, it feels like, for the first time, I get the idea of the revolutionary concept that "in Jesus Christ, we are forgiven".

It seems attached to the Buddhist idea of releasing the attempt to control the cycle of suffering and pleasure; as in the four noble truths:

1. Life as we know it ultimately is or leads to suffering/uneasiness (dukkha) in one way or another.
2. Suffering is caused by craving or attachments to worldly pleasures of all kinds. This is often expressed as a deluded clinging to a certain sense of existence, to selfhood, or to the things or phenomena that we consider the cause of happiness or unhappiness.
3. Suffering ends when craving ends, when one is freed from desire. This is achieved by eliminating all delusion, thereby reaching a liberated state of Enlightenment (bodhi);
4. Reaching this liberated state is achieved by following the path laid out by the Buddha.

For the Buddhist, suffering ends when craving ends. For the Christian, does suffering end when one "accepts Christ as one's Lord and Savior"? I hate that concept, or at least that wording; it's so tied up with the tracts you pick up at bus stations that urge you to "pray this simple prayer" and then sit back and wait for transformation. And that bumpersticker, "Christians aren't perfect-- just forgiven-- always seemed to me to be the kind of pride God would want to scatter...

Does suffering translate to sin? Sin is an inevitable part of life, caused by desire, attachment, our attempts to control our position in the world and in our relationships, how other people perceive us-- sin ends when we align ourselves with a different set of values, embodied in Christ?

This connection doesn't seem so organic when I try to explain it. My mind's eye grasps something that my fingers can't type.

But the God who used to love a good burnt offering sent Jesus instead to be the final sacrifice? And "the blight on man is all undone"? And "there shall be no death"? Once for all?

Hebrews 10:5-10

⁵Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me; ⁶in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. ⁷Then I said, ‘See, God, I have come to do your will, O God’ (in the scroll of the book it is written of me).” ⁸When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), ⁹then he added, “See, I have come to do your will.” He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. ¹⁰And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

Luke 1:39-56

³⁹In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴²and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” ⁴⁶And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, ⁴⁷and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, ⁴⁸for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; ⁴⁹for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. ⁵⁰His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. ⁵¹He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. ⁵²He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; ⁵³he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. ⁵⁴He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, ⁵⁵according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” ⁵⁶And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

Scary

So the Presbyterians too are against the anti-gay bill pending in Uganda.
Funny how much press this is getting, when seven other countries punish homosexual activity with the death penalty.
Funny, though, how often female homosexual activity is legal, but male homosexual activity is punishable by fines, imprisonment (including a life sentence in Barbados), hard labor (in Jamaica, among other places) or death.

http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Same-sex_marriage

the blight

Once again, can hardly make it through "In the Bleak Midwinter". My voice closes up at the question of what I can bring him, poor as I am, and also, strangely, at the idea that "our God, Heav'n cannot hold him, nor earth sustain"-- this God being greater than time and all creation.

And another line from another song-- this one's lyrics being from the 20th century:

the blight on man is all undone,
and there will be no death...

For heaven's sake, this is the entire message of the gospel and I have no idea why it seems like I am hearing it for the first time. A couple of months ago I was imagining what life would be like / how it would feel to believe that God loved me entirely, unconditionally, just as I am. Now I am wondering what it would feel like to believe that death has no power, and that our human condition (not just mortality, but frailty, weakness, imperfection, "sin") was overcome once and for all by this savior.
How can I have been a christian for more than twenty years and never thought of this before?

The blight on man... original sin.
Son of God comes... negates it.
Changes our relationship to God.
Makes all kinds of new things possible.
And "death, thou shalt die". (<-- okay, that's John Donne, but still.)
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

...on all my holy mountain

Isaiah 11: 6-9

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
⁷The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
⁹They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

...read tonight at the mid-week Advent worship service, a new idea (mid-week worship during Lent? Check. During Advent? Huh?)
Another new idea (new to me... probably not to your theologians and Bible commentators): this text, which is seen in the light of the New Testament as referring to Jesus (the "shoot from the stump of Jesse" in 11:1), lays down a new vision of Original Sin. Remember how God cursed mankind in Genesis 3 (after the apple incident)? Actually, I guess it was the snake he was cursing when he said,

I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.

In this story, God MADE the snake and the nursing / weaned child mortal enemies. Our fault; natural consequences of our sinful actions. But then this shoot from Jesse comes along and changes the game. Because we all know him, or know God through him, the child can play around asps and adders, and neither shall harm the other.

Before Jesus: sinners, all.
After Jesus: lions and lambs, cows and bears, children and snakes.¹⁶

From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son,who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

I was about to say something else about this revolutionary idea (look! I found it echoed in the second reading, from the first chapter of John-- the [letter of the] LAW was given through Moses, but the SPIRIT [grace and truth] came through Jesus!)-- when I realized that anyone who has gone through Christianity 101 (by which I mean: Bible School. Sunday School. Church Service. ANY of it) could have told you that.

That's the whole damn point of the gospel, isn't it?

So why does it feel like a new idea to me? After countless hours of worship, reading, discussing, learning, singing in churches and academic contexts: I just NOW made the connection that Jesus reset the clock on sin and righteousness?

Jesus.
So to speak.

Ybounden

Adam lay ybounden, bounden in a bond,
Four thousand winter thoughte he not too long;
And al was for an apple, and apple that he took,
As clerkes finden writen, writen in hire book.
Ne hadde the apple taken been, the apple taken been,
Ne hadde nevere Oure Lady ybeen hevene Queen.
Blessed be the time that apple taken was:
Therfore we mown singen Deo Gratias.

How did I make it to 39, singing in chorus and choir, and never encounter this 15th century text?

Certainly a different way of looking at original sin-- if this apple had not been taken, Our Lady would never have been a heavenly queen... so blessed be the time that apple taken was!