EASTER VII May 23, 2004

A few weeks ago I read a short work by the influential 11^th century Muslim religious teacher, Al-Ghazali, wherein he advocated the necessity of personal religious experience for a full religious life, rather than relying on interpretive authority, or philosophical logic, or just conforming to tradition.

I agreed with a lot of what he had to say, but some of the arguments he made in support of his basic point, I thought, actually hurt his case more than they helped. One in particular that struck me was his statement that the insights of astronomy and medicine were proof of divine reality and prophetic power because they could never be arrived at by human effort alone.

Clearly he was wrong (except maybe in the most subtle sense that nothing comes by human effort alone). He had mistaken the knowledge, understanding and worldview of his particular time for some kind of universal standpoint.

It’s like what’s known as the "God of the gaps" approach to theology, where anything that’s not understood is attributed to God or to miracles. The problem with this, of course, is that as knowledge increases God retreats.

Certainly Christians have done that as well.

Two examples emerge from the lessons today.

One is the Ascension. Last Thursday was the Feast of the Ascension, and, as the Sunday after the Ascension today’s lessons, or at least the Collect, assume it. (I don’t think that either Paul, or the author of Revelation, or the author of the Fourth Gospel knew anything about the Ascension, so it is an unwarranted assumption. But it has been assumed by the Church.) All four Gospels mention the resurrection appearances but only Luke talks about the Ascension. It provides a kind of stage direction for Luke to get Jesus off stage so the Spirit can make its entrance. Luke divides, in this way, his understanding of salvation history into an age of Jesus, the time of foundation, and an age of the Spirit, a time of beginning and a time for the mission of the Church. But Luke does this based on a faulty understanding of the cosmos. The Ascension assumes that heaven is "up", that it is above the sky, above the domes of the sun and moon and the planets and the stars. But, today we know there are not such domes, the sky is a reflection, and "up" is a relative concept. Now, within the context of our own Christian faith, this may not seem like much of a problem. But it can seriously block the communication of the essentials of our faith (the "good news" I spoke of last week) with people who don’t already believe, with people who aren’t willing to check their brains at the door of the church, with people who are the very people we are best situated to reach.

The other example is the story from Acts today about the exorcism and the earthquake. Fortune telling, demon possession, and personally targeted geological events are all part of a worldview that isn’t shared today. And this is not just an innocent distinction. I have seen tremendous harm done to those suffering from mental illness when some well-meaning but naively arrogant friend tries to apply "Biblical therapy" to their situation. Earthquakes don’t just shake off shackles and open locked doors without bringing down walls and ceilings that leave the prisoners in a worse-off situation than before the earthquake happened. But I am not even saying that the modern view is "right", and the 1^st century view is "wrong". I’m just saying that, as with Al-Gazali, these examples that were written to convince unbelievers of the truth of Christianity, in a modern setting, only serve to keep them away.

But actually they do worse than that. They keep us away as well. Unless we’re in a cult or a sociologically isolated community, and only listen to Christian radio and home school our children with a creationist curriculum we can’t help but share the worldview of our dominant 21^st century secular society. We’ve seen men walk on the moon. In order to maintain our understanding of things like the Ascension and the stories from Acts as factual, "gospel truth" on every lever we have to split our consciousness with one part for our religion and another for the rest of our life, which makes our religion useless for our life except as an escape from it. Worse yet, it pulls God down into our world, subject to our limits, and at times by implication, under our control.

To doubt this kind of thing is not faithless. Rather, as Martha pointed our in her sermon about Thomas on the Sunday after Easter, doubt frees us for true faith in our real lives and frees the Gospel to be an active spiritual power rather than just a God of the gaps.

We don’t need to reject these stories. (The Holy Scripture remains Holy Scripture.) But we do need to turn, to reframe, to convert them in certain ways to find their relevance and power for the Church, for us, today.

One turn involves moving from the literal, objective sense of scripture to a sacramental, subjective sense. A sacramental act – baptism, the holy Eucharist, any sacramental act – is defined as "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." The act always points to a reality beyond itself, and is necessitated by the fact that the reality toward which it points is incapable of direct, objective expression. Sacraments were developed as a way within the world of subject-object consciousness to move beyond and experience life beyond that subject-object split. We understand that in the Episcopal Church. We also understand the dangers that arise, under the heading of "idolatry", when a sacramental act takes on more importance than the spiritual reality, the grace, toward which it points. These stories and images from the Bible – the Ascension, the exorcism, the earthquakes – can be seen in the same way.

We need to read, mark, learn, inwardly digest, and meditate on these stories, not because they’re examples of God’s miraculous powers intervening in the early church, but to find where in our own lives we can ascend to be with God, where we can be healed, where we can be set free from whatever chains bind us. Where is spiritual grace for us in these outward and visible signs?

As I said in the newsletter article about images this month, both Biblical literalism and modern skepticism are trapped in a materialist worldview. But this kind of sacramental approach to the Bible can lead beyond that, for them and for us.

Still there is another way to read these stories that overcomes the dangers of dualism, isolation, and idolatry that are part of a literalistic interpretation, but avoids the personalized, subjective approach of either Al-Gazali or the sacramental interpretation. And that is to look at these stories as calling us to transcend our current worldview as much as our current worldview transcends that of the 1^st Century. Both the literalistic and sacramental approaches to these stories are asking what they mean for us. The real question may be; what do we mean for them?

God is not a part of "our" reality. Our reality is part of God.

Jesus said I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, and he prayed that we be made completely one.

Healing, earthquakes, the Ascension are all signs of transformation…transformation that will take us from who we think we are to the realization of who and what we were created to become: sacraments ourselves, outward and visible signs, of God’s wonderful web of love that constitutes creation…grace upon grace that leads into glory.

The world is dying of thirst while it’s standing right next to a stream of living water.

Look around. Look up.

Let every one who hears say "come".

Let everyone who is thirsty come.

Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus

Thanks be to God.