A Ramble About Unification

Have you ever had one of those eureka moments? One of those moments of insight which seems to bring everything together, and suddenly the problem which you've constantly had in the back of your head churning away just resolves itself, and then you wonder why, when the answer was so simple, that it didn't present itself to you before?

I kind of had a moment like that this morning as I was cooking breakfast. I was frying up some potatoes, onions and eggs in a wok, with the intent of adding rice and diced tomatoes. At the time I was thnking of a conversation I had just had with my daughter the night before. We were discussing a book which had been given to us by the church we had been attending, and now because of what that book revealed about the church's beliefs chose to no longer attend. I had told her that I didn't want her to read that book, and was now having to explain why. I very rarely forbid my kids from reading different books from different faiths, and so my forbidding her to do so was very out of place. As a result, we had a very long conversation.

I had told my kids last night a simple truth; being right isn't nearly as important as being compassionate. Loving one another is what Jesus taught and commanded His disciples to do. Throughout his epistles, St. Paul continuously hammers home the need for fellow disciples to keep their “knowledge” to themselves and be tolerant of differences of practice and opinion and to practice love for one another. One of the worst things in his mind was to see a local church torn apart by sectarianism and factions. “Is Christ divided?” He asks the Corinthians.

A divided church is the norm today. It's the rule and not the exception. In many ways, the rampant factionalism of different sects, denominations, and independent churches is the nightmare which St. Paul was trying to prevent in the Corinthian church. It's an embarrassment to Christ, and no movement, no new church or doctrine or theology has been able to slow it down, but only makes it worse.

The worse part about it is when the different churches and denominations refuse to accept fellow disciples from other churches or denominations as fellow disciples and Christians. It is a mockery of Jesus Christ when a fellow baptized believer comes into a church and is told that, not only may he not take part in the holy communion, but he is forever condemned to hell unless he repents and joins that church, not because of any specific sin or lack of devotion on his part, but because he was not originally baptized in that church. Such was the case with the aforementioned book which I wouldn't allow my daughter to read, and the reason why we no longer attend that church.

Why is the church so divided? In a nutshell, it's so I can be right, and you wrong, or vice-versa. It's because our sin disorder, the spiritual illness (as opposed to mental or physical) which we all share, feeds on “this is right and that is wrong” with those things being designated right and wrong often completely arbitrary and capricious. The most basic proof of this was that the first thing human beings decided was “morally wrong” was being naked in spite of the fact that every other creature on the planet was and remains naked and this is how God, who declared His creation good as it was, created us.

St. Paul wrote that “all things are lawful for me, but not all things are edifying. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.” That is, nothing is “wrong” for him to do, but not everything is helpful and there are a great many things which are harmful, both to himself and to others. St. Paul knew and wrote in this passage and in Romans chapter seven that it is when we designate something “right” and something else “wrong” that the sin disorder becomes active. It feeds on it and becomes stronger. When we have to be “right”, we are actually feeding the disorder.

So, what was my eureka moment this morning? It is simply this, denominationalism and sectarianism will themselves cease and fail on their own if we adhere to the principle that being compassionate is more important than being right, and focus on our own discipleship instead of enforcing our theologies on others. When we all only focus on our own practice of faith and relationship with God through Christ, remembering that love is more important than being right, then the Church will be unified, and not before.

Why is this? Because denominationalism and sectarianism can only exist when we keep those barriers and divisions between ourselves. If we count them as no longer important enough to defend, then those borders and barriers will fall and so will the divisions between us if, and only if we place our care, tolerance, and compassion for one another as more important than whether or not we are “right” about things we can neither see nor touch nor hear. And this was exactly what St. Paul himself taught when he wrote to the Corinthians about the schisms which had grown up among them.

The divisions within the Church of Jesus Christ exist only so long as we want them to. When we no longer want them to, then, and only then will the Church be unified.

A Ramble About Jesus Christ

As I was looking at my Facebook news feeds lately, I saw several mentions of a new movie about the life of Christ called “Son of God.” I haven't seen it myself, but from what I've read, it is made up of extended clips from “The Bible” miniseries which aired on The History Channel not that long ago. I have heard this film being accused of everything from New Age teaching to outright heresy by those who haven't bothered to see it (hmm, sounds familiar from a number of things), and I have, myself defended its creators because I don't agree with denouncing something of this nature without at least seeing it for yourself. Personally, I wasn't that impressed with “The Bible” miniseries, and from a cinematic viewpoint don't understand why they thought it was a great idea to put the Gospel section of it into the theaters. I wouldn't have thought it was of sufficient quality to merit a theater release, not like Gibson's “Passion of the Christ” which is the de facto standard par excellence for movies about Jesus as far as I'm concerned. But that's my humble opinion. I suspect that it was because it only took 22 million to make, and even a modest showing in the theaters was guaranteed to make a profit. Yes, I'm just a little cynical when it comes to Hollywood and studio executives.

The chief complaint I saw on Facebook, after the critical parties saw the film in question was that it didn't do enough to evangelize people. That is, it didn't do enough to explain Jesus' death as a propitiary sacrifice for sins. For a Gospel film, it didn't present the Gospel as they understood it, instead only presenting the life, teachings, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.

The flaw in this understanding is the belief that the Gospel only entails one aspect of one part of who and what Jesus Christ is. That our whole existence as Christians is limited to a specific doctrine about Him without understanding which we cannot truly be called Christians.

Jesus Christ our Lord does not just play a part in the Gospel. The Gospel is not about Jesus Christ. The Gospel is Jesus Christ. He is our good news, and not just one part of His life. Not just one teaching about Him. All of Him. Everything about Him, and more; the Man Himself. He did not command us to remain or stay put in only one teaching about Him, He commanded us to remain in Him as branches remain on a vine. You cannot dissect Jesus Christ and say that only this part is important, or only that part is truly important. He is one Savior, one Lord, and one God through whom all of heaven and earth was created.

One of the greatest truths I've found whether in writing or preaching a homily is this: if I try to give my opinions on subjects, if I stray off to focus on this specific doctrine or that tidbit of speculation, anything I say loses its power and falls flat. It doesn't matter how well I prepare, or how much I study for it, or how much evidence I have to back up my claims. But if I focus on Jesus Christ, who He is and what He taught and did, then there is power behind it, not mine but His. And this is because the Gospel is the power of God to those who believe, and Jesus Christ Himself is the Gospel.

When we share the Gospel, we share Jesus Christ. When we preach the Gospel, we preach Jesus Christ. When we share or preach Catholic dogma or Reformation dogma or Evangelical Bible dogma we are not sharing or preaching the Gospel. We are not giving Jesus Christ to people. We are trying to make them Catholics or Protestants or Bible Evangelicals. In order to disciple people we must teach them Jesus, we must be Jesus for them, we must be connected to Him and allow Him to flow through us to them. Jesus Himself said as much when He said “without Me you can do nothing,” and “anyone not remaining in Me is cast out... and is dried up and thrown onto the fire where they are burned.”

Jesus Christ is the Gospel. He is the love of God made flesh, and the power of God for salvation to all who believe. Jesus Christ, not our endless speculations and theologies whose only purpose are to give our minds something to latch on to so that we can grasp the ungraspable. And it is all too easy to let go of Him in order to chase down some trivial piece of doctrine which may or may not reflect absolute reality which our human minds can't process to begin with.

Whatever its faults, this latest life of Christ movie has one thing going for it, as I understand it. It does nothing more or less than show the Gospel, Jesus Christ our Lord. And this, ultimately, is the most important thing it can do.

A Ramble About My Religion

When my kids were little and we were living with my mom in Southern California, a couple of Mormon missionaries came to the door one day. It was a really hot day, and they had been out “on patrol” riding their trademark bikes in their trademark white shirts and black ties. Mormons may be accused of many things, but they will always be snappy dressers. They were sweating profusely and obviously hot, so I invited them in for something to drink. I think I gave them either water or lemonade, and if nothing else I figured they could use some time in air conditioning, otherwise they might have dropped from heat exhaustion. After allowing them to give their normal schpiel, and politely refusing to inquire more—I had, by that point in time already, studied out the Book of Mormon and the Mormon Church quite thoroughly—they finished their drinks, cooled down a bit, and we parted on friendly terms.

Does this shock you? Why? This is nothing less than what Jesus taught. In some ways, this action of hospitality to missionaries of a known heretical sect brings us to the core of what Jesus taught and what the path of Jesus Christ is all about. And yet, I know for a fact that my action would be considered both shocking and offensive to many “Christians” and probably denounced as “giving aid to the enemy.” At one time, I would have been the one doing the denouncing.

The word “religion” comes from a Latin word meaning “to bind” and as such can be defined as “that practice of faith with which one binds oneself” regardless of the theology underlying that practice of faith. I have said, or at least inferred before that regardless of the denomination, we as Christians are not all different religions. We are different denominations of the same religion, that which follows Jesus Christ. What I am coming to understand though, is that while we all profess to be Christian, we are not all of the same religion. There are in fact, two distinctly different religions which occur across denominations which lay claim to the name Christian, though it is clear to me that only one can rightfully do so.

In no particular order, the first is a religion to which being right and holding fast to the “truth” is the most important thing. It is a religion which holds fast to its own theologies and liturgical practices and makes the rigid claim that one can only have the hope of heaven through its strictures, and its strictures alone. Those who hold to this religion will go to any lengths to convert people to it, and make strict judgments about those who don't follow it to their specifications. In my experience, this religion destroys all those who either don't make the grade, or challenges the “truths” which it holds so dear. I don't need to mention a denominational name, because there are just as many Baptists as there are Catholics, just as many Evangelicals as there are Church of Christ members, just as many Eastern Orthodox as there are Anglicans who belong to this religion, as I shamefully once did.

The second is a religion which, though holding to its theological principles, is more concerned with being compassionate and showing lovingkindness to others than it is about forcing them to accept its own version of the truth. This religion holds no opinions about who is and who is not going to hell, leaving those judgments to God. This religion is about loving others as Christ loved us and commanded us to do. This religion is willing to accept another professing Christian of a different set of theologies as a brother or sister, even if the person disagrees on many points, based solely on their mutual belief in Jesus Christ and practice of His teachings. This religion refuses to be judgmental. Again, denominational names are not important, as there are just as many of us who belong to this religion in one flavor of Christianity as there are in another.

I suppose I should also throw in a third religion, that of the chronic pew warmer who comes to church, whichever denomination it may be, listens to the sermon, figures he's put in his time and does whatever he likes during the week. No, this person really can't be called “Christian”, but then he can't really be called anything because he doesn't actually bother to learn enough about the teachings of the denomination he's chosen to honestly say he believes it. These tend to make up the bulk of most churches in the United States, and it is largely for these folks that pastors tend to lose heart and leave the ministry, believe it or not.

The fact of the matter is that those who practice the first religion are not in fact practicing the faith of Jesus Christ, but are instead directly disobeying or ignoring what He taught. These cannot be called Christians in any proper sense of the word because they are not Christlike in the slightest. Rather than adding people to the Church and building them up in the faith they are taking those who inquire and either make them twice the sons of hell that they are, or they destroy them as a threat to their own version of the “truth.” Those who practice the second religion are often under attack by those who practice the first as being too liberal or wishy washy. Somehow they are too shallow, or don't really understand the faith at all.

This is nonsense.

The religion with which Jesus taught to bind ourselves is that of voluntary poverty, lovingkindness, self-sacrifice, non-judgment, and compassion for all others. One who binds himself with a religion of defending theologies and liturgical practices is not practicing the religion of Jesus Christ. Theological structures have their place in giving us something to work with in interacting with and experiencing God as He wants to be experienced by us. But they must be approached with the humility which says that the human mind is unable to know things it cannot sense or experience with absolute certainty. They must also be approached with the common sense that says details such as whether or not one uses liturgy, instruments, or acappella singing in worship is of absolutely no consequence to their eternal salvation. Obedience to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, His life, teachings, death, resurrection, and ascension, this is what matters to one's eternal salvation; not the structure of his worship service.

I hope that people would be able to say of me that my religion was of the second variety, at least in this latter portion of my life. Those of the first have destroyed too many people, members of my own family included.

A Ramble About the Matrix

I rewatched “Matrix” again tonight. Part of my reasoning was to see if my kids would be able to handle it yet (not yet). As a teaching tool for philosophical and even spiritual concepts, this particular movie is the gift that keeps on giving and wonderfully illustrates even some of the most difficult of such concepts to explain.

For those who have never seen it before, in the movie, human beings are grown in fields of pods from which they are never actually born, but their brains and senses are directly hooked into a computer generated world they believe to be reality. This world is called “the Matrix”. They do not know they are in this computer generated world. Their brains are being directly fed the sensory information which the machines and AI software wants them to experience, and the vast majority of these human beings never wake up to the real world. The exception is a small group of renegade humans who are awake and freed from the pods and the Matrix's control, and who use pirate computers to hack back into the Matrix in order to tell people the truth and wake them up, bringing them back to the all human city deep underground in the real world. (For all those in the know, yes this is an overly simplistic explanation, but it will suffice for now.)

On occasion, I go back through and do rough translations of different books and portions of the New Testament. I don't do it to publish anything, but rather for my own devotional practice. As I was translating through the last supper discourse in the Gospel of John recently, there was one, fairly common, average word which stuck out to me again and again. That word in Greek is “kosmos.” Where Bible translation is concerned, it is normally translated as “world.” But this isn't exactly the best translation. Most translations continue to render it this way because this is how it has been rendered in English since the beginning of English translations from Greek with Tyndale's work..

The word itself actually, literally means “an ordered system.” It can also mean “ornament,” but translating it as “ornament” in the New Testament would usually result in some weird readings. When used in the sense of the world, it means the world-system of people, rules, governments, etc. and how it all works together as an ordered system controlling those living within and under it. As I was doing the translation, and coming up on this word, do you know what it reminded me of this time?

Yep. The Matrix. Right down to the renegades that were woken up and disconnected from the main computers that controlled and policed the Matrix to keep everyone asleep. Jesus said that He was sent “into the world” (“eis ton kosmon”) by the Father. As Jesus was saying to His disciples that once they were “of the world” (“ek tou kosmou”), by analogy, they were once connected to the Matrix like everyone else; but Jesus came and selected them to be “not of the world” just as he was not of the world. He, being originally disconnected from the Matrix entered it in order to disconnect them from the Matrix and turn them into renegades with a mission of disconnecting others from it.

In the Matrix, many of the people who were connected to it were so dependent on it for their reality that they would fight to protect it, right alongside the “agents”, the computer programs that were responsible for rooting out the renegades and deleting them, keeping everyone asleep and oblivious. It was made clear in the movie many times that everyone who was still connected to the Matrix was a potential agent, as they were able to inhabit the conscious presences of those people still dependent on it. This, in many respects, is a good picture of the world-system which Jesus disconnected His disciples from, although He taught us to have a very different response to these potential threats than the violent one the renegades in the movie gave. He taught us to have compassion on them and forgive them for their offenses against us. Like in the movie, most of these still connected people are oblivious to what they're doing, but also like in the movie, each one has the potential to become an unwitting agent for the system they're dependent on.

Unlike in the movie, once disconnected His followers have to really fight to keep from being re-connected. In the movie, once you were out, there was no going back. And while that may be true to a large extent in terms of understanding, there are many professing Christians who act just as connected to the “kosmos” as those who are not professing Christians. There is an underlying observation in that...

A Ramble About Percy Jackson

I have a confession to make. I've read every book published by Rick Riordan, and so have my wife and children. It's something of an addiction with us. The Percy Jackson series in particular, both the original “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” and the “Heroes of Olympus” series. The latest book, “The House of Hades” was devoured by my whole family in about a week's time give or take a couple of days.

When I first saw them on the shelf several years ago, I didn't think much of them. I thought they were cheap Harry Potter imitations (yet another literary obsession in our family). But when we were living in Tennessee, and shortly after the “Lightning Thief” movie came out I decided to buy one and give it a read. It didn't take long for my wife and daughters to follow suit. My son, initially believing “reading for pleasure” to be an oxymoron, took a little more time, but he eventually got into it as well.

You really have to hand it to Rick Riordan, he does his research on the mythologies he writes about and sets his characters in. From what I've seen in his books, the man must have the equivalent of a Master's Degree in Ancient Religious Studies from the amount of time and research he's put in to write his stories with not only Greek, but Roman and Egyptian mythologies and cultures as well.

One aspectof these mythologies which he illustrates clearly and frequently is the afterlife. This shouldn't be surprising because the afterlife plays a major role in all of the mythologies he sets his characters in. As a student of mythologies and religious studies, and of the New Testament and the Greek language it was written in, seeing these things illustrated in his stories has helped me understand some things about the afterlife as far as the Scriptures are concerned.

The first thing it has helped me to really grasp, is that the afterlife and underworld pictured in the Greek New Testament is in fact the afterlife and underworld understood from Greek mythology. This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, though I know it might even be considered offensive to some. But, like in Greek mythology, you have the underworld, Hades, and it is divided into different sections. You have the place of paradise, Abraham's Bosom in the New Testament and the Elysian Fields in Greek mythology; you have the place of torment, which in Greek mythology was the fields of asphodel, and you have the lake of fire, abyss, and Gehenna which are all referred to in the New Testament and Greek mythology as Tartaros. Further you have the mention of both Hades and Death being thrown into the lake of fire (Tartaros) in the Book of Revelation. In Greek mythology these are the names of the two gods who control and oversee the underworld, Hades and Thanatos.

The truth is that the view which the New Testament and Jesus in particular takes when talking about the underworld and the afterlife is a very Hellenistic view with which all of his listeners would have been very familiar. And this only makes sense because of the culture in which He taught. People in his day weren't merely concerned with death, but with the judgment which followed.

The view of the afterlife in the Old Testament however is almost non-existent. The only word in the Hebrew that you normally get is “she'ol”, meaning “the grave”. You get few if any descriptions of it. And this was probably also descriptive of the worldview of the Hebrew people to whom the Old Testament was largely written where the afterlife was concerned. The problem they were mostly concerned about was death itself, not what happened afterwards. Death was bad enough. This is interesting because you don't see the cultural preoccupation with the afterlife that the Egyptians held, even though the Hebrews spent four hundred years in Egypt and probably adopted at least some of their cultural worldview.

Salvation for them came to mean resurrection and rescue from death, and this carried into the Hellenistic period and became mixed with the understanding of an afterlife that saw people punished or rewarded based on how they lived their lives in this world.

When He teaches, Jesus does little to alter their understanding of the afterlife. He doesn't try to correct them to the absolutely accurate version. Instead He uses their conception and works within it to get His points across. In the end, it doesn't seem to matter what their idea of the afterlife is. He takes it and shapes it so that they are able to understand the truths He is trying to get across.

I think this is a lesson in and of itself that He left for us. More than anyone else alive, Jesus knew what lay in store for us after death and He could have corrected everyone's notions. But that would have required a massive amount of reteaching that would have been resisted, time-consuming and counter-productive. Instead He adapted His teaching, working within the cultural world-view, so that He could get across what needed to be understood, and not a detailed floorplan of the underworld which was, after all, immaterial to the Gospel itself.

When we are teaching and preaching to Gospel to others, we need to keep in mind what is important in our listeners' worldview and what isn't, and adapt our Gospel instruction accordingly. Jesus did so, and so did His Apostles and they were able to spread the Gospel of a resurrected Hellenistic Jewish Messiah crucified for treason from India to Spain, and from Egypt to Rome and beyond.