discussion. I’m not concerned with how we should reshape the church. I’m asking the much more basic questions for which I suspect there are no answers. And I have no notion what the responses should, or even could be. What could the church be, what should the church become, what ought to be the mission/task of the church today and tomorrow?
I think that saving the world for Christ, and selling Jesus to every human being have become stupid missions. We need to radically rethink just what Jesus wanted us to be about, and what we think we ought to be about, religiously and morally. Convincing everyone that Jesus is the way, the only way has become dysfunctional, counterproductive, dangerously divisive and antagonizing. It’s not merely repackaging the product that’s needed. It’s rethinking what we’re trying to accomplish. Jesus is no longer the product we’re selling. It’s whatever Jesus and Buddha and Mohamed and Moses were all about, what they hold in common, what is the root of all religious thought and action.
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Pentecost XXIV—November 7, 2010
I think it has become time for me to start writing, but how to start? Maybe with the linchpins I have in hand today (I seem to be swinging ape-like, from one set of linchpins to another, towards something, or just indiscriminately?).
(1) I am reading about mystics. They seem to be among the great innovators, re-directors of the church, of the faith, in other religions as well. But I wrestle with “What are they?” Rare persons who really can be in touch with god, the divine, the Absolute? Or merely special persons able to do . . . . What? In deep contemplation to put things together, develop insights, experience? Or re-experience prenatal comfort/memories? What are these mystics? They seem to provide some common ground across religious boundaries.
(2) Robert Wright makes deep sense to me, debunking the Scriptures, talking about cultural evolution, sensing a moral compass built into the universe. But where do you go with that?
(3) I see/hear/experience the Dalai Lama, a person with a truly remarkable comfortableness, humility, an informed naivete, some very profoundness, but in this world extremely improbable/impractical insights. He truly makes (Tibetan) Buddhism sensible, more sensible than the Christian gospels. It all makes the Hebrew YHWH seem quite childish. Yet the Dalai Lama is silent about God, as though God makes no difference (which may be correct). Buddhism is a system about living not a metaphysic about pre-universe. Attractive, but not my circle of standing stones. Our Scriptures are a Rorschach; ergo tradition must move to the center, replacing the Scriptures, traditions about the hows of interpreting Scriptures, i.e., what and how to project without violating (whatever).
(4) I become more and more convinced that Christianity is just one expression of what lies beyond, one expression among many equally valid expressions. But what does lie beyond?
(5) Sin is an outmoded, unuseful, misleading notion. Buddhism’s interdependency and intertwinedness is a much more functional model, but does it sufficiently cope with the evil in the world? Really need to work on that.
(6) All religion, all religious ideation/language is purely metaphorical. Yes, but how to more adequately conceptualize what lies beyond the metaphor? And so I need to completely rethink what our religious language and ideation means in this twenty-first-century world/universe. And especially re-think whatever the mystics are trying to convey to us.
(7) The main business of the church is to stay in business. The truly religious/spiritual/ spiritually enervating things happen outside the church, at the fringes of the church, and never can be at the center. When the main, dominating mission of the church is to stay in business, to survive into the next millennium, then any mission emerging out of spiritual insight must take place outside the church or it will simply be overwhelmed, swallowed up by the survival efforts of church.
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I’ve spent my life’s work theologizing, and I simply can’t turn it off. I can stop priesting and sermonizing but not theologizing.
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Advent I—November 28, 2010
So, as I wrote John Kauffman, the Christian metaphor has gone dry and dusty for me. I can bemoan and grieve that, or I can move out into the wilderness. It seems useless, non-productive and pretty stupid to waste my energies screaming about inconsistencies, inaccuracies, misdirections and such. Instead, the real and productive challenge is to look through the storied metaphor as a lens that may help see beyond the physical, and learn to search out what lies beyond. I know the God is not in the story. But what clues does the story give me to what is beyond? And to see beyond the God, to see what is it about?
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Epiphany VI—February 13, 2011
Another take on this morning’s gospel reading, Matthew 5:21-37 (from the Sermon on the mount). I need to begin with a footnote: the Buddha lived and taught some half-millennium before Jesus. There is only the vaguest, unlikeliest possibility that some of his teaching may have reached Jesus’ ears. It is only a slightly less vague possibility that, both being mystics, they taught similar things. And further, it is similarly the distinct possibility, nay, probability that Jesus’ followers wildly misunderstood some of his teachings, and in particular this set of teachings. End of footnote.
Matthew the Hebrew, preaching to an orthodox Jewish community, presents these teachings like a reformist Pharisee, as intensifying the take on Torah and the concurrently developing oral midrash. He fills the law up thereby making it so much more stringent, so much more as to make it impossible to keep. That take I think quite misunderstands Jesus’ intent. I think it quite perverts his intent and misdirects our attention. I think what Jesus is trying to teach is not a more stringent law which we are doomed to fail, but rather a wholly different understanding of law, of the sweetness of Torah (sweeter than the honey-lemon lozenge the rabbi places on the child’s tongue to give her/him a taste of the sweetness of Torah). Following the gaze of Matthew’s misdirection we come to understand law/justice and mercy as opposites, as mutually contradictory, oxymoronic. Instead I think what Jesus alludes to is a wholly different understanding of law and of grace. When we live in right relationship with our fellow man, then mercy and law are the same thing; when we live in love among ourselves, then we fulfill Law/Torah without thinking about keeping laws, without intentionality, without any need of being restricted or directed. It is a matter of basic attitude toward our fellow-beings. When we live in whole, healthy relationship, then there is no murder, no adultery, no false witness. Those simply are not options within such relationship.
The Buddha rejects our concept of sin or sins, understanding instead in its place ignorance of the most basic reality, that we are all one, that we are totally intertwined and inseparable, that only when we live in deep compassion with our fellow beings, with the whole of creation of which each of us is merely a tiny intertwined fragment (i.e., an emanation of the whole), only then are we healthy, whole, unignorant. I have to stretch very hard to grasp that notion, but I confess it makes far greater sense, invokes a far greater sense of the integrity of human existence than Augustine’s damned fancy for original sin or our more common Christian notions of sins and sinfulness, which I am convinced are themselves completely debased and worthless coinage. And in its place the Buddha reaches out to grasp compassion. If we live with and in compassion, then there is no need, there is no occasion of murder, adultery and false witness. Jesus too calls us, not to greater stringency and purity, but to the deepest compassion.
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Epiphany VII—February 20, 2011
At coffee hour discussion we heard about Mormonism. John Smith was fourteen when he had his first vision (still in testosterone drenched puberty). At the age of twenty
