Easter II April 3, 2005

One of the most interesting and sometimes most helpful means of Biblical interpretation involves trying to piece together what could be called the "shadow scripture." This involves reading the Bible as if it were one side of an ongoing dialogue. As if you were listening to only one side of a telephone conversation, and trying to figure out what the other side is saying. You can do this pretty easily with St. Paul, when he is arguing that the Galatians have become to legalistic, or the Corinthians have become to charismatic. Martha is doing research that involves this process in some ways as she explores how Christianity came to separate itself from Judaism. Elaine Pagels, the Princeton Biblical scholar, has done this with the Gospel of Thomas and other Gnostic literature in dialogue and competition with orthodox writing, particularly with the Gospel according to John. Pagels believes that this fourth Gospel…the Gospel according to John…was written, if not directly in response to the relatively recently discovered Gospel according to Thomas, then at least in response to the major point of that Gospel: that what is required to be fully in relationship with God, what is required for "salvation", is a special kind of knowledge, an esoteric wisdom rather than "blind" faith or a moral life.

Today’s reading from John summarizes the challenge to that gnosticism: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."

Pagels favors Thomas. She sees Thomas as representing a more individualized, more accessible, more egalitarian Christian community or communities. And she sees John as representing a more and more institutionalized, patriarchal, and eventually co-opted church structure that won the day at the Council of Nicea and proceeded to try to wipe out any dissenting opinion in the name of a unified empire.

I’m not really sure these two views are necessarily mutually exclusive. In the Episcopal Church in particular, we are aware that you can have different ways of understanding God, different ways of reading and interpreting scripture, different ways of worship, different ways of structuring authority without excommunicating one another. (At least we have been aware of that up until now.)

People have different gifts, differing personalities. If we only hear the gospel read one way, it may not be our way, and we may lose the way.

And there are strong points and weak points in every approach, so a balance may be helpful. We need both the light and the shadow in order to see the depth of things.

I’ll talk about two other approaches next week, but I wan to focus today on this difference between John and Thomas. (I’m afraid that this discussion may be a little academic, but it is certainly not beyond people who come to church on the 2^nd Sunday of Easter that is also the Sunday we spring ahead into Daylight Saving Time.)

The line of belief and practice that comes out of the fourth Gospel leads on to Nicea and the official church. It emphasizes the revelation of a supernatural Christ on the one hand, and, on the other hand, with the incorporation of the three synoptic Gospels the response to that revelation with a moral life. This moral life is in turn a prelude and a qualification for the believers later participation in that supernatural realm. Jesus comes from heaven. Jesus goes to heaven. And, if you are good, you go to be with him after you die.

You can see this view develop right in the New Testament in the progressive heightening of status of the Christ. For Paul, God makes Jesus Lord at the resurrection. He writes to the Romans that Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh, and was declared to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit by his resurrection from the dead.

Mark places the "adoption" at Jesus’ baptism. Matthew and Luke include birth stories. John writes of the pre-existing Word of God through whom all things came to be. And then, toping it off, the Council of Nicea says that Christ is "of one being" with the Father, as we say in the creed.

Belief in this dogma, and the other creedal affirmations that supported it came to mark the orthodox, catholic, official Christian faith. And outside that faith, another dogma said, there was no salvation. The support for these teachings (although with some fairly convoluted interpretation) came from the books and letters contained in the New Testament, the contents of which were also voted on and adopted at that same Nicene Council. The whole process was watched over by a church hierarchy composed of Bishops who were recognized by the Emperor Constantine as standing in line of succession from the Apostles. Discretion concerning belief, interpretation, and communal authority passed thereby from individual believers and their local congregations to an officially sanctioned regional and imperial institutional structure. And we still live with the heritage of that structure, with the centrality of the Pope for the Roman Catholic Church, with our own waiting around to see what the Anglican Primates decide about who can be a Bishop and who can marry whom. It’s a kind of delegated faith where I don’t have to worry my pretty little head about most of it. I just say yes or no.

The benefits of this approach include a deep sense of security. "God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world." And there is also a challenge to do the right thing: to love our neighbor as ourself, to repent when we know we have done wrong, and to work to do better, for ourselves and the whole human race.

Many religious traditions see life and history as a kind of endless round of more of the same. Some even see a steady decline from an imagined prior golden age. But there’s something about this standard version of Christianity, continuing out of the Judaic tradition that planted the seed of progress and justice in the history of the last 2000 years. And that’s a very important thing. It’s a very good thing.

The problem is that power corrupts, and the delegated power of the hierarchical, authoritarian church has needed to be reformed again and again. And there is also something about the supernatural emphasis in this Johanine theology that misses out on what Jesus called the presence of the Kingdom of God, the sacred quality of the here and now.

That’s where Thomas comes in.

Thomas asks for proof perhaps because he doubted, but perhaps because this touching the risen body of Christ, literally or metaphorically, is the only way to really make salvation a part of the life we actually live.

The spirituality of the Gospel of Thomas, of Elaine Pagels, and many others (including me for the most part), is really more a spirituality of enlightenment than it is a spirituality of salvation by faith or works. It has much in common with eastern religions. (And there was a lot of commerce back and forth at this time between South Asia and the Middle East.) It comes out of the Old Testament Wisdom literature, and flows on through the Gnostics to influence groups and individuals throughout Christian history both in the Church and out of it clear ‘til today.

For this spirituality the problem isn’t as much sin as it is blindness. It emphasizes more the teachings of Christ then the person of Christ, to cut through the fog and see the truth of God’s creation, experience the truth of God in creation. In this view we don’t have to wait to die to go to heaven. In our fullness, in our wholeness, we’re already there. The dangers with this approach are in many ways the opposite of the dangers inherent in the spirituality of the Fourth Gospel and the institutional church. Instead of delegating authority to a hierarchy, everyone has to find out the truth for themselves, and there’s no real external test to show whether your going in the right direction or the wrong one. So this approach, in some ways, can relativize our perception of good and evil, and lead to a great deal of self-serving rationalization. And, instead of God being overly supernatural and distant, this spirituality flirts with a kind of pantheism and naturalism that runs the risk of taming the awesome otherness of God.

I think in response to the dogmatism and the judgmentalism, the hypocrisy and shallowness of much of official Christianity many people, people who had lost their faith, have found new faith through this way of Thomas, this way of Wisdom.

But I also think there has been a backlash against that.

One of my fears is that we’ll end up with two Christianities; one asserting a 21^st Century brand of orthodoxy delegating all thought to new popes and new emperors, new bishops and standing committees with another, much smaller, group sitting around and having interesting discussions with each other in total irrelevance.

My hope is that these two poles, these two approaches can enter into and stay committed to an on-going conversation, creating a new catholicism (meaning universal) that appreciates and supports what William James termed the "varieties of religious experience.

I’ll do what I can and I invite you to join me.

Thanks be to God.

3 EASTER April 10, 2005

Last week I talked about two approaches to Christian faith. One of these is primarily found in the official, institutional church. It emphasizes the acceptance of the church’s dogmatic teaching on the one hand and the conforming to the church’s model of a moral life on the other. Salvation by faith, salvation by works…. They have been woven together in one proportion or another throughout the history of the Christian Church.

The other approach was what could be called a "Gnostic" approach or a way of knowledge, a way of wisdom, a way that sees salvation coming from a kind of "enlightenment." It’s a way that reaches out with the mind and opens to the truths of eternity, and realizes them in the here and now.

Now interestingly, there are subtle references to both of these ways in today’s Gospel story about the disciples’ encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus.

Notice toward the end of this passage the disciples rush back to Jerusalem to tell the others about their experience, but before they get to tell them, the eleven were saying "The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon." Simon, that is, Peter, had to be the first to experience the risen Christ because that is what gave authority to the official list of eleven apostles with Peter as their head, Peter as the rock. And that, in turn, was the justification for the official episcopacy with the Bishop of Rome as the first among equals of that group. Only those writings that supported this "apostolic succession" made it into the New Testament…which then, through a very circular reasoning, became the scriptural basis for the authority of bishops in that succession.

And yet even here in this account from Saint Luke, which was clearly a part of the official church canon, even here there’s an expression that seems to support the Gnostic or enlightenment-based type of spirituality. "Then their eyes were opened," it says, "and they recognized him." Throughout the New Testament the references to blindness and the healing of blindness, to closed eyes and open eyes, are not just references to Jesus’ opthomological skill. They refer to awareness, as do the references to light and darkness. They refer to enlightenment, to seeing life, the world, death and the soul in a new way, in a new light. "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light."

The official Church may have demanded doctrinal orthodoxy, but they realized that most peoples’ lives are not changed by intellectual assent alone. They need to see differently in order to be differently.

But these contrasting approaches to salvation of faith and of wisdom, as important as they were for the later Church, are really only side points in this story about the road to Emmaus. The main point is liturgical.

In a way, much of the gospel accounts of the ministry of Jesus can be read as meditations on the Holy Eucharist. The Fourth Gospel starts the ministry of Jesus off with the story of the marriage feast at Cana, and the transformation of the water into wine. And its concluding scene involves Jesus on the beach with Peter following the resurrection telling him to "feed my sheep." A central story in all three synoptic gospels is the story of the feeding of the five thousand. The Last Supper is highlighted as the entry into the Pssion narrative. Eating and drinking, water and wine, transformation, the vine and the branches, this is my body, this is my blood, again and again arise as images central to the good news of God with Us.

I think that we in the modern world, especially in America, are very separated, even alienated, from the kind of liturgical piety at the center of this approach to Christian faith.

At the Wednesday Eucharists we usually pick the closest saint’s day for the lessons and a reading from a book of associated readings. And this past Wednesday we celebrated the ministry of William Augustus Muhlenberg, who was a 19^th Century Episcopal Church reformer of really far reaching influence.

One of his innovations was the weekly celebration of Holy Communion which, in the early to mid 1800’s was really very radical. Communion was celebrated rarely in those days…maybe four of five times a year. And it was preceded by elaborate preparation so the believer could enter upon the sacrament with maximum purity of heart.

Muhlenberg felt that as a source of grace, the Eucharist was appropriate even for the less pure and well prepared, but he did agree that one of the dangers of frequent Communion could be that it would lose its mystery, its power to convey the sacred, and be taken lightly. And he was probably right.

I think in some ways that the opponents of changes in the prayer book and the ordination of women or others who have been formerly excluded may carry that same feeling, not so much logic, or theologic, but a concern to maintain the purity of access to the sacred at the heart of liturgical piety.

The word "liturgy" means "the work of the people." I don’t know that we understand anymore what we do here in the Eucharist to be a work. I think we look at it more as something we receive than as something we give. Our "work" is seen in "outreach", in social action", in the day to day running of the church rather than in worship. But that’s not always been the case.

If you go to Orthodox churches, particularly in Greece or Russian, if you go to Roman Catholic Churches in Mexico or the Philippines, if you go to some Episcopal Churches in Wisconsin, or Saint Luke’s Los Gatos in our own diocese, you realize that something else is going on in this service than just a weekly parish family gathering for renewal and mission.

These ancient forms and formularies are meant to help us enter the divine. The vail in this place between time and eternity is very thin. And we may want to pay more attention to that. The danger of course is that sacramental acts can become a kind of superstitious magic. That’s what the Protestant reformers were worried about. But I think that happens only when we’re disconnected enough from the heart of the sacrament to pretend that we’re in charge. We’re not in charge!

Now while this third, liturgical, approach to faith is probably the least practiced of the four approaches to spirituality in our society, the fourth approach, the way of relationship, the way of love, is probably the most practiced. In spite of the conservative reaction to a more Gnostic spirituality we see around us, that reaction hasn’t really sent people into a deep focus on the creeds, or institutional hierarchal authority. But it has sent people into a deeper personal relationship with Jesus.

Charismatic renewal, evangelical renewal, much of the liturgical renewal (if you look at music and the feeling tone of new liturgies), maybe even the motivation for renewed Gnostic exploration comes from this desire for a deeper personal relationship with God.

As society becomes globalized and more and more complex, our ability to communicate vastly more information with vastly more people somehow casts a shadow of a deepening personal loneliness. Families move away from each other, communities don’t communicate very well.

Compare the day to day relationships among people in this congregation (which is really one of the more relational congregations that I have been associated with)…compare this with the life of the Church described in the lesson from Acts today where, "All who believed were together and had all things in common, they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need."

It’s no wonder we respond so much when we feel the love of God in our hearts, when we have the Shepherd call us each by name. "Were not our hearts burning within us while He was talking to us on the road," they said.

That personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the personal relationship with the Spirit, with God, whether we experience that most at Church or at a Cursillo or in the mountains or on the sea can be the most affirming experience of our life.

It needs to be expanded. If our spirituality is limited to this one-on-one relationship we miss the communal side which is essential in the Judeo-Christian understanding of religious practices, and was certainly essential for Jesus.

And if this one-on-one relationship is all there is, we run the very real risk of just projecting our own face, our own will, our own needs onto the figure of Christ. And, like any time we "fall in love", we’ll end up in a relationship with our own unconscious rather that the living God and Savior. But these dangers aside, our religious life must include our emotions or, sooner or later, we’ll just stop caring.

So all these ways, the institutional/creedal approach and the Gnostic/wisdom approach I talked about last week, and the maybe less rational, but for that maybe more powerful, approaches of liturgical spirituality and relationship spirituality…all these ways are ways to God. We may be drawn to one or the other or any combination in any proportion depending on a lot of factors. And we need to be aware of their dangers and their limits, but I think we need mostly to be celebrating our good fortune in having access to all of these ways. And, as a congregation we need to strive to enhance access to all these ways, for ourselves and all those who don’t know God as we do, in any way we can.

Just as he appeared to Simon Peter…our eyes can be opened…we can know Him in the breaking of the bread…our hearts can come afire.

My Lord and my God!

Thanks be to God.