Religion? It’s okay that you don’t care
Thoughts on moving on from religion.
Finding Jesus of Galilee
“So what? What meaning does Easter still have for us today?” I wrote last week that this question is what we would turn to after dealing with the question of what the Easter experience actually was. But first let me say just a little more about the “what happened” question.
The gospel Easter stories of the empty tomb and the crucified Jesus’ physical reappearance were not known until decades after these events supposedly occurred. The belief that Jesus was, in some fashion, still alive, that he had been “raised,” likely arose in response to visions of him that occurred at various times to his followers. This is the type of experience described by Paul, our only first-hand account of the resurrected Jesus.
But was there something before the appearances experienced by the disciples? I think there was, and it both allows us as modern people to make sense of Easter and reestablish the central experience of the man Jesus himself.
The undisputed assertion shared by all the gospels is that Jesus was an extraordinary person. His teachings were astonishing and his interactions with people transformative. Unfortunately, that is about where the consensus ends. The gospels’ various accounts of what precisely those teachings were and just what he did that touched people so deeply are not consistent. Their views do occur within a reasonably narrow range, however, which we’ll come back to in a moment.
My belief, though, is that the impact Jesus had on his followers did not end with his death. Why would it? To varying degrees, his followers had become different people as a result of their experience of Jesus. Based on the gospel accounts, through Jesus they had had a new and profound experience of the presence and the love of God. Their minds and hearts were opened to a new appreciation of the reality and meaning of God. Most importantly, this experience was a communal one which drew them closer to each other and into a new sense of connection with people generally.
And then Jesus died. Executed by Roman imperial authorities. Crucified. In shock and grief, the challenge to his followers was to reconcile their experience of this godly man with his disastrous and horrible end. To make sense of this catastrophe, two things occurred.
The more literate of the disciples turned to the scriptures, the Hebrew Bible. There they found an assortment of passages and stories which could be summarized under the idea found in Isaiah of God’s “suffering servant.” Contrary to the usual idea of the Messiah as a conquering hero, a story was constructed of God’s anointed as rejected, condemned, suffering, and even dying for the sake of God’s people. Now, Jesus’ humiliating death on a cross could be understood and even celebrated.
But was that the end of Jesus? Not for his disciples, some of whom began having visions of him raised and in heaven. I suspect the first to have such experiences were women. I think this is what is behind the stories that women were the first to the empty tomb.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul recites a list of appearances to the disciples, and women are not mentioned. But Paul admits that these lists were given to him and they sound suspiciously creedal, like the Jerusalem church’s “party line” to preserve the priority of Peter, James and the twelve. Surprisingly, while it is said several times that the first appearance of Jesus was to Peter, there is no story recounting such an event.
Visions were relatively common occurrences in the premodern world. What would have stood out to those who experienced them and to those who heard about them, was not that they happened or their implication that Jesus was alive. What was important was that Jesus was now with God in heaven. His life and death were thus vindicated by God raising him to heavenly glory.
So, what are we to make two thousand years later of these visions of Jesus’ resurrection/ascension (which are really two words for the save event)? I don’t think we have to draw any conclusions at all if we don’t want to. While not as common as before, stories are still heard of modern-day visions and appearances. Countless people have claimed that they were visited in some way by deceased loved ones. Near death experiences (NDEs) often include encounters with the dead or with spiritual beings. What do we make of them? Some dismiss them, others affirm them. Most of us, I suspect, are agnostic and make no judgement.
Yet what a few dozen people may have seen centuries ago is irrelevant today. Easter can be a celebration of new life arising from death, and of hope overcoming defeat. Its ancient stories can still be enjoyable and touching to hear. These stories, however, are all filled with the imagery and ideas of the ancient world. Jesus ascending to heaven and sitting at God’s right hand is today just romanticism. Heaven has no meaning as a place in the universe and throne rooms are tourist attractions.
As modern people, then, the Easter stories tell us nothing of value about Jesus and do not move and change us as happened to the people who encountered him in his lifetime. Yet that today remains the goal: encountering Jesus, as much as we can two thousand years after his death, in ways that transform us, giving us hope and a new vision of ourselves and of the world we live in.
During his life, teacher (rabbi) and prophet were the titles most often given to Jesus. Messiah (Christ) and savior came later, after his death, as part of a dramatic and, I believe, mistaken attempt to redefine him for posterity and create a religion which he never envisioned. It’s these latter titles that have become essentially meaningless today and are hiding the astonishing Jesus that people encountered in the villages and on the dusty roads of ancient Palestine.
The robed young man in the tomb at the end of Mark’s gospel was right. What we are looking for is the Jesus of Galilee rather than the Jesus of Jerusalem. Who was that Jesus and what did he teach? For over two hundred years, scholars have been working to create a realistic understanding of this man, stripped of the religious dogma and theological labels that have nearly hidden him from our eyes. The results have been impressive, though far from perfect.
Nonetheless, their work has surprisingly—or not—yielded a picture of Jesus close to that which is often people’s common understanding of him. This is the Jesus of the parables and of the beatitudes, the Jesus who has gracious words for the poor and the sick, and harsh words for the rich and powerful. This is the Jesus who welcomes outcasts and shares a meal with those others judged unworthy. This is the Jesus who challenges everyone to open their eyes and ears, hearts and minds to recognize the presence of a gracious God within themselves, within their neighbor, and in the creation all around them.
This Jesus was not a lecturer in religion and ethics. He touched people and changed them with his words and actions. While Jesus’ ideas were and are profound, more importantly they were, and can still be, transformative. They can change lives. Experiencing this Jesus is the only “resurrected” Jesus that can be meaningful and powerful today and deserving of our attention.
“Blessed are those who have not seen”
The dramatic stories of Holy Week lead to the equally dramatic stories of Easter, celebrated this Sunday. If you read my blog post from last week, you might be thinking, “So, I suppose you’re going to say the Easter story is made up, also.” And, of course, the short answer is, “Yes.” But something obviously happened and that’s what we need to explore first. Then, we can turn to the next question, “So what? What meaning does Easter still have for us today?”
As with the stories of Holy Week, we must start by understanding the sources of the Easter stories. For the Easter morning story of the empty tomb, the answer seems to be the gospel of Mark, written approximately forty years after Jesus’ death. Paul, writing about twenty years earlier, never mentions this tradition. Nor do any other non-gospel writings in the New Testament.
I wrote last week that Mark was the first to create a “Jesus story.” Jesus’ life ended with his crucifixion but for Mark, of course, the story of Jesus went on as the risen Lord and Messiah. I believe that it was to convey that truth that led Mark to conclude his gospel with the story of the discovery of the empty tomb.
For many Christians today, the astonishing thing about Mark’s Easter story (which is the Easter gospel this year) is that the risen Jesus makes no appearance. Three women go to the tomb where Jesus had been laid and find the stone “door” rolled away. Inside, they meet “a young man dressed in a white robe” who tells them that Jesus is not here because he has been raised. He directs them to “tell his disciples and Peter” to go to Galilee where they will see him again. They don’t exactly follow his instructions.
So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
And that’s it. No Jesus, no disciples, no joyous reunion. Scholars have made many attempts to explain this odd ending to Mark’s gospel. Perhaps the most likely is that in the wake of the destruction of the Roman-Jewish War, Mark is declaring the Jerusalem/Judean chapter of the Jesus movement to be over. Galilee, symbolizing the bridge between the Jewish and gentile worlds, is now where the risen Jesus is to be “seen.”
It’s obvious that there was dissatisfaction with Mark’s ending. Some manuscripts of Mark have other endings where Jesus does appear, but these are now recognized as additions by later Christian scribes. Matthew and Luke, of course, add appearances of the risen Jesus to Mark’s story (on which their gospels are based), but they are not consistent with each other (or with John).
What this means, then, is that the first account of a physical Jesus appearing on Easter morning is not written until at least a half-century after Jesus’ death. It’s impossible to imagine that such astonishing events would not have been immediately and repeatedly spoken about. The only conclusion, then, is that those stories were first created decades later as part of the early church’s developing proclamation.
So what did happen on Easter? Was Jesus raised from the dead? That answer is (and has always been) in the letters of Paul. His most explicit statement is in 1 Corinthians 15.
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ … appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
The Greek word translated “appeared” is one commonly used in the ancient world to refer to experiences in visions or dreams, which were taken seriously and meaningfully. Paul’s own discussion of his experience, and even Luke’s account in Acts of Paul’s Damascus road experience, support such an interpretation. What is significant is that Paul implies his experience of the risen Jesus, late as it was, was of the same type as that of the disciples before him.
Other than Paul’s list, we have no stories of these appearances, not even to Peter (“Cephas”), who was supposedly the first to see the risen Jesus. It’s also possible that the first such experiences were actually among Jesus’ women followers, as the gospels seem to imply. Visions and appearances are subjective experiences, however, and this may explain the element of doubt in the gospel accounts.
In Luke, the women’s empty tomb story is met with skepticism by the disciples. “But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” And even when Jesus appears to the disciples themselves, there is uncertainty. “Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering.” In Matthew, Jesus appears to the disciples in Galilee with similar results. “When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.”
If the Easter experience was that of seeing a physically resurrected Jesus, this doubting makes no sense. But if instead “Easter” was a series of people saying (over a period of weeks, months, or even years, as in the case of Paul) that they had a vision of Jesus alive and in heaven, then the doubting is easily understood. “You say you saw what? I don’t believe it.”
The resurrection story in John’s gospel may point as this problem most directly. He seems to try to preserve the disciples’ reputation by attributing all the doubting to the hapless Thomas. Absent for Jesus’ appearance on Sunday night, when the disciples tell him, “We have seen the Lord,” Thomas responds, “I will not believe,” unless he, too, can see the marks of Jesus’ crucifixion on his body.
When Jesus appears again a week later, Thomas gets his wish and believes. Jesus’ response to Thomas’s confession sums up the early church’s dilemma, and that of the church ever since: What if you haven’t had a vision of Jesus?
“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
The appearance of a physically raised Jesus makes for good stories. But to take it beyond storytelling only leads to theological conundrums (e.g. where did his raised body go?) and distracts from the real issue of faith: What does it mean now to “see Jesus?”
To return to Paul, he asserts his experience of the risen Jesus (“Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?”) to justify his claim to be an apostle. He never says people should believe in Jesus because of his experience of seeing him. Where is Jesus now? “You are the body of Christ” he writes. Christ now lives in him and in every disciple, who bear in their lives the “fruits” of Christ’s Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
An obsession with the ancient gospel Easter stories is a way of avoiding the challenge of faith now. “If the Easter stories aren’t true, then there’s nothing to believe in!” Nonsense. Christianity isn’t about believing in incredible stories from two thousand years ago. If Christianity has any value, it is in faith that the God we encounter in the story of Jesus is just as real today.
The truth of that is not obvious, of course. That’s why it’s called faith. Yet that faith is not affirmed by closing our eyes tight and repeating “I believe. I believe.” Rather, faith is affirmed by taking the risk of living by it and experiencing its truth within us and in the world and people around us. Only then may we be able to respond like Mary Magdalene, “I have seen the Lord.”
Giving Up Bad Theology for Lent
Last week this picture was shared on Facebook. It’s from the front of University Christian Church in San Diego, giving the topics of their Sunday worship services in Lent. The overall theme, as you see, is “Giving Up Bad Theology for Lent.” There were dozens of comments on the post, almost all affirmative, and many giving more suggestions for the list.
The numerical shrinking of churches (both in size and number) is an unavoidable topic in church life today. The rise of the “Nones” (those who would respond “none of the above” when asked their religion) and the “spiritual but not religious” is widely discussed but with little depth or understanding. Most often that discussion seems like people timidly looking out of their church windows and wondering, “Where’s everybody going?”
But this church’s daring Lenten series, and the responses to the picture of their banner, confirm my sense that this is the wrong picture. While many in church are befuddled by people abandoning the church, I have found that at least as many wonder, “Why am I still here? Why am I still inside and not out there with them?”
The pandemic lockdown brought that question to the fore for many people. When churches reopened after nearly a year of closure, quite a few asked, “Do I really want to go back?” and then decided they really didn’t.
It’s often said that organizations hire consultants, not to make changes, but to avoid them. The consultant usually finds that those within the organization know very well what has gone wrong. A big, expensive report is prepared and presented to management. A few feeble attempts are made to implement its recommendations but soon it is filed away and forgotten.
Something similar has been going on in the church. The items on the San Diego church’s “bad theology” list have been kicked around for a century, at least. And commenters easily came up with more suggestions. Over the decades, notable theologians have pointed out in detail the many places that the church’s traditional beliefs and practices are incompatible with the modern world.
The past several weeks I have been facilitating a Zoom book discussion group. We are reading Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) by Bible scholar, Bart Ehrman. In the book, Ehrman reveals the New Testament to be a very human, multi-authored, heavily edited, often contradictory, historically questionable, theological hodgepodge. The Bible certainly still has value, Ehrman says, but it can’t be the inerrant, literally true, straight forward source which fundamentalists and others claim it is.
Ehrman repeatedly makes two points. First, nothing he says is radical or new in his field of New Testament scholarship. Second, but most of what he says is unknown to average church members. Then he asks: Why? Why are these things being kept under wraps? Why aren’t pastors teaching these things?
Ehrman is playing the role of the consultant. The organization knows what he says is true, but it doesn’t like what he has to say and wishes he would go away. And many have played Ehrman’s role before him, always with the same results. “Thank you very much. What you say is very important. But this just isn’t the right time to implement your recommendations. We’ll certainly keep them in mind for the future.”
But the future never arrives. As a result, the church’s creeds, doctrines, catechisms, liturgy, prayers, hymns, and preaching continue to espouse ideas that literally make no sense in today’s world.
Now, however, a growing number in the church’s pews also know they don’t make sense. Hence, University Church’s Lent series. But something keeps them coming: the music, the coffee and donuts, the kids’ ministry, a personable minister/priest, the community service programs, etc. In that sense, the church resembles those blown out Easter eggs which have a very pretty shell but nothing of substance inside.
Eventually, however, the shell cracks: the nice minister leaves, a favorite program gets cancelled, a squabble or scandal breaks out, and what held people is gone, so they leave. Some will look for a new church but increasingly many will not. They can find the aesthetic, communal, educational, or social service qualities they enjoyed somewhere else. The religious component? That was the least attractive part. And that, too, can now be found, more sensibly and more meaningfully, in other places.
During Lent and Easter, the church doubles down on many of its least believable and most outrageous notions. God requires the torturous crucifixion of his “only Son” Jesus to appease his wrath and forgive the sins of a disobedient world. Jesus is bodily “raised” and then goes to heaven, preparing the way for the faithful to follow him later.
But from grade school science we know that all physical bodies inevitably decay and disappear. In the universe of the Hubble and Webb telescopes, heaven is unlocatable and, even for the faithful, unimaginable. And the God who orchestrated Jesus’ death? The late Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote, “I wouldn’t love such a God. I’d hate him.” Yet the hymns, readings, prayers, and preaching this time of year will be filled with such incredible images and ideas.
When confronted about this, most non-fundamentalist clergy will talk about image and symbol and metaphor, spring and hope and rebirth. When pressed about the inadequacy of such a response, they may shrug their shoulders and say, “What can I do? It’s tradition. It’s what people expect.” The lectionary says use these readings, the liturgy says recite these prayers, the hymnal says sing these songs. And hopefully most people will understand the wink and the nudge that goes with it all.
“What can I do?” What can the church do? Well, for one, it could start taking seriously all those consultants: the countless theologians and biblical scholars it has trained and paid for who have tried to show a different way ahead.
They have actually done a pretty good job of, among other things, revealing Jesus without the layers of mythology and doctrine that have shrouded him for so long. This is the Jesus of the parables, of the beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, and of the mystical vision of God’s kingdom around and within us. This is the Jesus who hung around with all the wrong people and said God prioritized love and forgiveness over law keeping. In other words, these scholarly consultants have enabled us, as the late Bible scholar Marcus Borg said, to “meet Jesus again for the first time.”
What befuddles me is that I think this is the Jesus and the God most people, within and outside the church, know, appreciate, and believe in. Centering the church on them ought to be obvious and welcome. Yet they are nearly unrecognizable under the elaborate costumes of ages past which church authority clings to out of nostalgia, fear, laziness, and jealousy.
The only thing that will “save” the church is an enormous letting go. As Jesus says in a popular Lent text from John,
Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.
And in another popular John story, Jesus says after the raising of Lazarus, “Unbind him and let him go.” Jesus and God need to be set free from the ancient wrappings that have constricted them, and us, for so long.
No time for nostalgia
Shortly before Christmas, a pastor Facebook friend posted a bit of a rant. Why do so few churches offer late night Christmas Eve services anymore, he asked. And why have most dropped Christmas Day services altogether? I understood where he was coming from. I remember as a child going bleary-eyed to our church’s 11:00 PM (and only) Christmas Eve service. The sanctuary was filled past capacity, with folding chairs in the aisles. (And then we lit individual hand candles—a fire marshal’s nightmare!)
Now it’s a different story. Most services are in the evening or even late afternoon, and often no Christmas morning service is offered. In this, churches are responding to the desires and schedules of their members. My ranting pastor friend understood this. Culture has changed and people are doing lots of other things on Christmas Eve. But in the past, worship was the highpoint of the day.
They planned their Christmas celebrations around the church service rather than seeing it as an inconvenience or interruption.
In other words, people’s priorities are screwed up. But in his view, this also reflects a misunderstanding of what Christmas is about.
At the risk of seeming overly pious or dogmatic I ask, what is it again we’re celebrating? Is it family, particularly our own families? Or is it the birth of Jesus who brought the message of the place of all people in God’s family? Before long, if not already, Christmas will be little more than a cultural celebration with but a little religious window dressing for the more nostalgic.
I appreciate his frustration and early in my ministry shared it to a degree. But not anymore. I don’t see people as the problem. Rather, I see nostalgia preventing the self-examination churches need to remake themselves for a different time. My Facebook pastor friend never explains why a late service is better than an early one. That’s the way it was and the way it should be.
Of course, worship attendance has been declining across the board for decades, and the church’s festivals have not been exempted. For most people, both Christmas and Easter are now largely secular, family-oriented events. They, along with Thanksgiving, make up the national trifecta of big sit-down meal family gatherings.
For the church, beating the dead-horses of Christmas and Easter past isn’t going to change that. The symbolic meaning of these days and others like them are too faded now. My Facebook friend asks the right question: What are we celebrating? The voices singing “Jesus is born!” “Jesus is raised! Alleluia!” have gotten less enthusiastic and more uncertain over the years, and the celebration more anemic.
While the church knew better in the past, today it’s assumed these days are commemorating an event. Many evangelical churches have jumped the shark by declaring Christmas to be “a birthday party for Jesus.” Yet modern Bible scholars agree that we have no idea when Jesus was born (the December date having been adopted by the church in the 4th century), and that he was likely born in Nazareth, and almost certainly not Bethlehem. Further, only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, have birth stories at all, and they contradict each other more than agree. Mark, John, and Paul say almost nothing about it.
Similarly, Easter has lost much of its credibility as a datable event. For Paul, the source of the earliest writings in the New Testament, Jesus’ resurrection was demonstrated by visions he and others had some time after Jesus’ death. Mark, the earliest gospel, closes his work with an empty tomb but no appearance of Jesus. Such appearances are added, in different and often contradictory ways, by Matthew, Luke, and John.
Today, many scholars believe the historical “Easter experience” was a series of visions of the risen Jesus by his disciples sometime after his death (and the first may have been to women). To tell the Jesus’ story decades later, Mark created the empty tomb scene to bring his gospel to a dramatic and meaningful conclusion. His successors decided it would work even better to add the risen Jesus to the story, which they each do in unique and inconsistent ways.
Now most people, in or out of the church, may be largely unaware of these modern viewpoints. Nonetheless, to the average person the significance of Christmas, Easter, and the other “events” the church celebrates have all faded. But it’s the modern critical understanding of them that prevents the church from seriously re-energizing them in the old way. We know too much to do it with a straight face.
What’s to be done? This is where nostalgia gets in the way. It’s hard to forget those overflow holiday worship crowds. But they’re not coming back, no matter how the Christmas Eve schedule gets arranged, or whether on Easter you have multiple brass players, a hundred lilies, and a brunch and egg hunt (with a bunny!). In short, the church needs to give up on saving Christmas, Easter, and the whole culture-shaping milieu it created and presided over in the ancient and medieval Western world.
Lent is around the corner, and it provides a guide to what these days and seasons can be about. For Lent is not about what happened in the past but what is happening in our lives now. This was the focus of Jesus’ ministry but its one the church lost when it prioritized “saving souls.” By elevating Jesus’ life into heaven, it forgot that Jesus’ primary revelation was who we all are created to be here and now.
Christmas is a celebration of the incarnation of God in each of us, revealed in the life of Jesus. Lent and Easter present the dying and rising experience we all must undergo to set aside the false self of the ego and discover our true Self in God, enlivened by the Spirit of Pentecost. Learning how this new life happens and what it looks like ought to be the focus of the church’s life, in worship and everything else it does, even if it doesn’t get a folding-chair crowd.