The Sins of Scripture (28 page)

We cannot become mired in a meaningless debate about the accuracy of first-century explanations. We do not serve our faith tradition well by literalizing the explanations of antiquity. That is to make a deity out of human words. Our concern when reading epic history is to seek the experience behind the explanations and to ask whether or not that experience was real.

Jesus was not believed to have been a God experience because of his miraculous birth, his walking out of the tomb or his cosmic ascension. Rather, the exact reverse is the fact. Stories of his miraculous birth, his walking out of his tomb and his cosmic ascension were written to try to make human language big enough, dramatic enough and supernatural enough to capture whatever it was that the early followers had experienced in Jesus. Once one believes that in a particular life the holy God, the power of the divine, has been met, then explanatory language inevitably breaks the boundaries imposed by the rational mind to try to capture the moment. The explanations are always expansive, filled with wonder and expressive of the perceptions of reality known by the writer. The explanations are therefore always rejectable whenever they are literalized. That, however, does not dismiss or even call into question the experience that made those explanations necessary. That experience is our goal. The experience is that which is transcendent, wondrous, lifting us to a new level of consciousness. What was the Jesus experience, and why does it matter? When we enter that question, then we begin to understand how the Jesus story got added to the epic of the Jewish people and how in the process it transformed that epic into one that embraces all humanity. To that story we turn next.

THE SIGN OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD–THE EPIC UNIVERSALIZED AND HUMANIZED

T
hose creatures that we today call Homo sapiens are a product of the same evolutionary flow that produced all the plants and all the animals. We are connected on the DNA charts to all living things. Are Homo sapiens therefore identical with human beings? I do not think so. To be fully human a creature needs to cross that anxious line between consciousness and self-consciousness. That means that we have to develop that fearful capacity to see ourselves as separate from all that is, living in a medium called time that has a past that can be remembered and a future that can be anticipated. I doubt if that experience is fully possible until we develop language, which assumes the ability to think symbolically and thus abstractly. That enormous evolutionary step, as I previously noted, is probably no more than fifty thousand years old. Language and self-consciousness seem to have evolved together. The basic verb in every language of the world is the verb
to be
. Without that verb no one can say “I am,” which is the essence of self-consciousness. When language finally becomes so symbolic that it can be written, then we have the ability to capture the past, to freeze it and to celebrate it. We can even embrace the reality of a time before we were born, our first hint of eternity. Then as our consciousness grows, an awareness of our own mortality dawns, enabling us to contemplate a time when we will be no more and even begin to plan for that eventuality. Finitude is a gift of self-consciousness. Human beings are Homo sapiens who live in history.

Our ability to embrace the world was quite limited at the dawn of humanity’s birth. We had no sense of how large the planet was. We did not know what lay beyond the mountains, the river or the sea that marked our own environment, to say nothing of what lay beyond the oceans. We knew only two kinds of people: those who were members of our family, clan or tribe and those who were different. We assumed that “different” was somehow evil, or at the very least, strange. We assumed also that to be different was to be dangerous, so we were always on guard.

Our ancestors lived under skies that were clear. They watched the sun rise and set. They learned the rhythm of light and darkness and adjusted to that rhythm even though darkness and night were shrouded with fear. These early humans surely wondered why the sun rose and set, why the moon turned until it disappeared, only to reappear just three days later. They had theories about everything that moved, about the purpose of streams, trees, bushes and living things. They lived in fear that enemies lurked around every corner. Defensiveness, even a certain degree of paranoia, was part of their nature and is part of ours. They wondered what it meant to die. The threat of nonbeing produced so much anxiety that they made survival their highest value. That resulted in human cooperation, which is adaptive, survival-oriented behavior. They embraced only as much reality as they could process. The human world was, in those days, a very small world.

It still is today for many people. I come from very humble stock. My mother, who died in 1999 at age ninety-two, grew up in rural North Carolina near Charlotte in a place called Griffith Station. It was on a rail line, but the train did not stop there. Once a week, she said, the train would slow down enough to kick a keg of salt fish off the boxcar for the local country store. That was the connection that Griffith Station had with the wider world.

My mother did not finish the ninth grade. She was a girl; and girls, said her father, who was a farmer become mill worker, do not need to be educated. They need to know only how to cook, how to sew, how to keep house and how to care for babies. A person did not learn that in school, he said, so school for girls was a waste of time. My mother was thus functionally illiterate. She lived her life in a very small orbit and died within twenty-five miles of the place where she was born. She could name on both hands the number of trips that took her more than a hundred miles away. Her honeymoon was one. A trip to be in attendance when I was ordained as the bishop of Newark was another. That was her first and only ride in an airplane. I met her at the gate. That was possible in those pre-terrorist days. She came off the plane on the arm of the flight attendant. When I got her in the car she said, “Son, the people on the plane were so nice, they gave me a free Coca-Cola.”

Later in her life she heard on the radio about a tornado in Texas. She called my brother who lived in Texas to make sure he was safe. She had no idea how big Texas was. She read in the paper that there was a demonstration in New York. She called to make sure I was not in danger, for she knew I lived near New York.

When I became controversial in the church over matters dealing with sexuality, she became aware of this only after I had done some lectures in Charlotte on the subject of homosexuality that were well covered by the press. Those stories resulted in a spate of letters to the editor in which some not very flattering things were written about her son. She read them and worried.

When I called one Saturday morning in the midst of this controversy, she said something like, “Son, I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t like you; you’re such a nice boy.” I responded by saying that if she would just tell me what it was she did not understand, I would be happy to explain it. “Well, son,” she said, “what is a heterosexual?” She perceived only a very little bit of the reality that engaged my life.

I say these things not in any way to be derogatory. I adored this special mother and owe her more than I can ever say. She was born when a horse and buggy was the primary mode of transportation. She died after space travel had become commonplace. Reality kept breaking in upon her, as it does upon all of us. Hers was an incredible life, given the circumstances with which she had to deal. She illustrates for me, however, something of the various levels of consciousness that human beings must engage, based upon their opportunities and life experiences.

In some sense the human race has always had to do just that. It is the destiny of the human being to move into new vistas, embrace new realities, grow into new awarenesses and develop new levels of consciousness. It is therefore not easy to be human. Consider how traumatic such new insights must have been for the fragile, newly self-conscious human creature when the vast size of the universe began to explode into his or her awareness. It actually took years for the insights of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei to gain a hearing. When they did, however, the insecurities and fears that those insights unleashed were palpable. It is no wonder that the church, the voice of values and the source of stability in that society, was so negative to Galileo that it sought to silence him. He presented a vision that was more than the human people of that day could absorb. It loosed the demons of insecurity. What if there is no superhuman parent God above the clouds who watches over us, guards and protects us, keeping the tides inside their boundaries and the rains timely and moderate? Could we survive psychologically; could we manage the trauma of aloneness? Or would we simply fall apart, close our minds and pretend that nothing had ever changed and that the sky was not just the roof of the earth but also the floor of heaven?

When Charles Darwin challenged our special status as creatures just “a little lower than the angels” who bore God’s image, suggesting that we too had emerged from the evolutionary process, we recoiled in fear and struck back with hostility. We were simply not ready to face the fact that human beings might be nothing more than one more species of living animals that inhabit this earth, perhaps of no more ultimate value or worth than a cockroach or a bird. That was a lot of reality to embrace. Unable to bear the message, we ridiculed the messenger.

Our security was further shattered when Sigmund Freud suggested that our gods were simply parental projections in the sky, and again when Albert Einstein suggested that the truth by which we lived was never objective and real, but was always subjective and relative. We have had to learn how to live with the anxiety of uncertainty, the angst of watching our security systems crumble. That is what happens when the world expands and consciousness increases. Better not to enter that world than to fall apart. That is why closed minds are still with us today. In a small world we can identify our enemies, control at least to some degree our destinies, protect our lives, sustain our values and cling to our image of a God who justifies and shapes all of these defining realities. If the world in which we live keeps expanding, however, then even our God is not able to keep up with the pace. So God totters, the “Word of God” is revealed to be much less than ultimate, the linchpins of certainty are pulled and humanity appears to float freely on an ever-changing sea. That is where we live today and inside that kind of world with that kind of consciousness we must shape our values, our beliefs and our purpose. Some human beings validate that truth and give substance to that insight when they opt to live inside religious systems by rejecting the world. Others choose to live in the world by rejecting all religious systems. Both bear witness to the fact that yesterday’s religious systems cannot continue to live in today’s world.

It is quite possible, maybe even probable, that the Jesus served in most of the Christian churches of the world today is simply an idol created in a primitive time that is destined to die. The story of a theistic deity who assumes human form suggests as much. When this incarnate one is said to have entered history via the miracle of the virgin birth and to have departed via the miracle of the cosmic ascension, one’s suspicions should be heightened. Trinitarian language likewise does not communicate in our world; neither does the image of the vicarious savior who absorbs on the cross the punishment due to us for our sinfulness so that God’s righteousness can be fully served even as we are washed in the saving blood of the sacrificial Lamb of God.

What if Jesus was not that, however, but was rather the dawning of a new consciousness in human life? What if he was a human life who saw beyond the traditional boundaries of our security system, whose mission was to lift our vision, to empower us to embrace a reality that we never before even knew existed, enabling us to walk into a new humanity? What if God is not a being who lives beyond the sky who can be manipulated by the prayers of the faithful and of the fearful? What if God is not a security-giving heavenly parent who hands out threats and favors, rewards and punishments and who wants us to remain childlike, docile and dependent? What if God is not a judge who delights in our quivering before the throne of judgment, a deity who urges us to be born again so that we will never have to grow up into mature beings? Would we welcome such a god? Or would we kill this deity because the threat we perceived at the divine hand was still intolerable to our security?

To step beyond religion is to grow into human maturity. It is to leave behind all of the security boundaries that we have erected against our fears. It is to recognize that the world is so large that differences can be embraced and honored. It is to step beyond tribal boundaries into a new and fuller sense of human identity. Perhaps another way to say it is that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, Jew nor gentile. Tribal divisions come out of limited consciousness. A universal sense of what it means to be human is a gigantic step into something quite new, an expanded consciousness. Perhaps this is why a gentile soldier was placed at the foot of the cross in the earliest gospel, to point to that life on the cross that had been given away (Mark 15:39), that life that did not grasp at survival. This gentile said that that is what God is like: a life of endless giving, endless loving. Jesus’ was a life so full that he did not resist hostility, a life so complete he had no need to cling to survival. His capacity to give was without limit. It was total. Nothing held in reserve. When we read Mark’s story of the crucifixion we hear this centurion’s words and translate them to say, “Truly this man was the son of God” (15:39), as if he was affirming the creedal orthodoxy of the third and fourth centuries.

That is not what this story means, however. It is a narrative about one who stood on the other side of the great security divide that separated Jews from unclean gentiles and who crossed it to embrace the vision of a new humanity. The experience of Jesus meant to him that human life was not bounded and that God was not external. We human beings enter God and life simultaneously the moment we step beyond our fears and become free. One cannot be human and reject those who are different. One cannot limit God to that sense of holiness we meet only inside the boundaries of tribal worship. That is why Jesus could be heard to say that the first step into God is to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44), or to “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6:27–28). This Jesus was perceived as one who removed all fear.

Perhaps that is why those inside the Christ experience wrote that human life could never have produced the experience they found in him. He must have been of another realm. Perhaps his birth was said to have been announced by a star because a star does not illumine just a single nation; its rays shine over the entire world. His life drew all nations and all people beyond their limits. That is why the wise men came to present him gifts and to worship him. They were gentiles who recognized a new humanity in him. By their gift of gold they pronounced him king, the highest symbol of human achievement. By their gift of frankincense, they acknowledged that humanity at its fullest participates in the meaning of divinity from which it follows that the way into divinity is to become fully human. It was a new consciousness that overcame an old boundary. By their gift of myrrh they acknowledged that it was through the pathway of self-giving, including the giving of one’s life, that the way is found into infinity. Death becomes the doorway into life. One dies every time one has the courage to give himself or herself away (Matt. 2:1–12). That is a new consciousness, the doorway into a new humanity. That is the Christ presence.