Christian Agnostics?
Kent Hayden, M.Div (Princeton) on The Case for Christian Agnosticism:
There is no poetry in the accumulation of answers. Poetry, and truth along with it, comes from an encounter with those corners of life which have not yet been filled with language. It comes from entering into our ignorance with the honest courage to question. It comes from a willingness to shake up the mental sediment in which we have hidden our secrets.
On the cross, Jesus was an agnostic. He was willing to face death with a why on his lips. Sometimes, in the comfort of a sunny afternoon, when much less is at stake, I have found the strength to entertain such questions myself. And when my belief is stirred by the gusts of doubt, and my knowledge is silhouetted against the beauty of mystery, I feel the uneasy presence of something beyond my capacity to speak, and I am grateful for all I don’t know.
People are often surprised to learn that Mother Theresa secretly harbored significant doubt. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising. The most difficult questions we ask of God are those that arise out of suffering and in the face of evil - precisely the intersection in which Mother Theresa lived and worked and prayed. It was in the face of unimaginable suffering, personal and intimate and real, that Jesus asked, “My God, my God - why have you forsaken me?”
I don’t think we can ever know God in the same way that we can ‘know’ a formula, a definition, a specification or measurement. We can, however, experience God. This is a very different way of ‘knowing’. The first way - the way of measurement and observation - suggests God exists wholly outside of ourselves. The second - the way of personal experience - suggests he exists within us. Jesus’ words in Luke 17 are ambiguous; various translations state that the kingdom of God is ‘within’ and ‘among’ you. ‘Within’ indicates a personal and individual experience of the Kingdom of God while ‘among’ can refer only to an experience shared in community. In either case, Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees is unequivocal: it can’t be identified through a rational process. The Kingdom of God can only be experienced and part of that experience might include doubt, questioning and uncertainty.
Press in to God. Do not give up, do not despair, do not walk away. Press in. P.U.S.H - Pray Until Something Happens. This requires considerable effort. It means clearing the decks of all that is irrelevant, time wasting, distracting to our search. No, you probably can’t quit your job, but you can not watch television for two or three hours a day, you can take time from other activities, you can open time in your schedule. You can pray for three or four hours a day - you just have to figure out how. Get up in God’s grill. Hang on. Do not let go. Holler, bellow and wail, plead, beg and cajole. But press in, and keep pressing in, until you hear from God.
To live in the mystery of God is one thing. To reconcile yourself to the questions that cannot be answered is another, and Dr. Hayden suggests he has found a way of living with both. To live in abject doubt, though, is to aimlessly wander the corridors of a peculiar kind of living hell. Trust me on this, it’s awful. I hate it.
Press in. P.U.S.H. My experience has been that I’ve never received the answer I was looking for. Almost inevitably God bypasses the question altogether. But I have always gotten the answer I needed.
P.U.S.H.
Jesus Says Fraud is Okay by Him…
Or so it seems. Ah yes, the parable of the ’shrewd’ manager. The enigmatic parable of the shrewd manager. The one in which Jesus praises a guy for taking advantage of his boss.
Take a few minutes and read the story. Think about. What’s really going on here? Jesus ends up praising the man for trashing his boss’ business - to benefit himself? How does that work?
We’re going to be talking about it on Sunday. We’re going to break into groups, ask some simple questions, try to get a handle on what’s really going on here. I suspect there will be more than one take on this. And you know, that’s part of what makes Third Space unique - we’re willing to hash this stuff out together, knowing that we might not all land on the same square, understanding that it’s okay.
Messy, but beautiful. I love it.
Questioning Faith, Accepting Doubt
I’ve got questions about God, about Jesus, the Holy Spirit. I’ve got questions about the bible, about how we got it, about what it says and doesn’t say. They’re real questions. They’re not going away.
Over the last year or so I’ve found myself increasingly disturbed as I pursue these questions. What unsettles me, far more than the questions themselves, is the way Christians seem to respond to them. No one ever says, ‘yes, I’ve wondered about that too,” or, ‘I’ve really struggled with that issue as well’. No-one has ever said to me, ‘I don’t know’. Instead? Simple, one-size-fits-all answers. I’m so sick of that kind of Christianity. I hate it.
Let me be clear that it’s not the mind-numbingly simple answers to complex questions that bothers me. Not so much. Not any more. What bothers me most is that the struggle isn’t acknowledged or understood. For most Christians, they’ve never wrestled through their beliefs; they been handed a list of pre-approved doctrines and accepted them wholesale. I know this is the case, because I used to be one of those Christians. I have an atheist friend who says that if you haven’t come to your faith without some kind of struggle then what you have isn’t faith. Most of us, however, treat doubt as the spiritual equivalent of a small fire in the kitchen. Kill it - fast, clean up the mess, make damn sure it doesn’t happen again.
That’s just wrong.
This week we’re looking at the testimony of John the Baptist about Jesus. “I must decrease,” he said, “so that He can increase”. So let me ask - how is it that Jesus increases and we decrease? How does that happen? You know what i think? I think if you’ve never heard that question before, and you can answer it in less than three days, you haven’t thought about it. No, really. Three days.
Here’s another possibility - because that’s what thinking for three days does, it opens possibilities. What if it’s just something John said? It meant to apply to him, in his role as a prophet, that he was talking about his ministry fading into the background as Jesus’ fame grew? Nothing more than that. Most of us evangelical types have been taught - our whole lives - that being a Christian means growing to be more and more like Christ and less and less like us. He increases. We decrease. If that’s not what John’s talking about - at all - then a tantalizing vision for a new way of life emerges. What if we’re not supposed to submerge our humanity below the surface of Christ, but to fully live out our humanity? Is it possible that we might be fully human, fully alive in this world and fully present in Christ at the same time? Is this not the ultimate triumph over sin and death entering into the world - the ultimate redemption of humanity in the redemption of our humanness?
How do we live like that - fully human and fully present in Christ, as he is present in us? What does that mean for our everyday lives?
Wait - don’t answer that.
This Sunday? Oh, just another miraculous healing.
In the lectionary readings for this week is a curious story about Jesus healing a man. There was a pool in Jerusalem that, every once in a while, had the waters stirred up by an angel. The first person who got into the water when the angel stirred it up was healed of their ailments. Naturally, this attracted a crowd, most of whom probably lived there, waiting day and night for the angel to roil up the water. This was not some freaky thing on the outskirts of town - a kind of holy roller tent meeting for the ancient world. A terrace had been built, columns, a roof. As you can see from the model in the picture, it was pretty hard to miss.
So Jesus comes along, strides into the middle of the crowd, picks out one guy and say, ‘hey, buddy, pick up your mat and go on home’. And he does. A few minutes later the religious leaders of the day see him carrying his mat and ask him who he thinks he is, carrying a mat like that on the sabbath. He offers that the guy who healed him said to do it. Later Jesus finds the guy in the temple and says quit sinning, or something worse might happen.
Okay, so this story raises far more questions than it answers. Above all else, I think, it serves to illustrate that Jesus has the power to heal. And that is precisely where the questions arise. Why this man? Why not someone - anyone - else? The man didn’t ask to be healed, didn’t even know who Jesus was. This is quite unlike any other healing we see in the gospels. What’s with Jesus saying ‘quit sinning, or something worse might happen to you’. What are we to make of that?
And what are we to make of this whole healing business, anyway? What do we know about healing? What do we not know? What do we believe? What do we know that we’ve learned from real world experience?
Yeah, let’s talk about that on Sunday morning.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on the Gospel
Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked him what he was reading this time.
So Rosewater told him. It was the Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He suppsed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again, “Oh, boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!” And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch?”
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!
[From "Slaughterhous 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.]
Dear Woman
Jesus, a Jewish Rabbi, meets a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. He not only asks for a drink of water but strikes up a conversation with her. This just isn’t done. This is not just a woman, it’s a Samaritan woman. A less than ‘pure’ woman. A less than fully human being. And what’s more Jesus short circuits thousands of years of racial bigotry and apartheid by explaining to her that the time is coming when all God’s children will worship God in Spirit - that it won’t matter who belongs to what caste or tribe, that God’s love will fall like rain from the heavens and she - yes even she - can be welcomed and fully loved in God’s family.
But he does something else. He answers her question. Not the, ‘what about the temple in Jerusalem’ question. He answers her real question. The ‘what about me’, cast off in the world, cast off by God’, question. He begins by saying, “Believe me, dear woman, the time is coming when…” I wondered at this. Wondered at the word ‘dear’. Wondered enough to look it up at Dictionary.com. It means loved. Precious. Cherished. It also means ‘expensive’, like the price of Christ’s life, perhaps.
Believe me, Jesus says, you are loved, precious, cherished. Believe me, Jesus says, I love you. And then he goes on to say that the Spirit will come, this apartheid will end. How many times have I read this story and missed those four words? Believe me, dear woman. Believe me, I love you…” In that moment, and in those few words, she was given a new name, a new identity. She was born again.
I no longer believe that the reason Jesus came was to make unrighteous people righteous. Jesus came to make broken people whole, to heal our broken world. The only paradigm in which we can fully appreciate the person, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ - and his coming, again - is that of healing. Love is the balm God applies to our lives and our world. Shalom is the end result - a state of well-being beyond health or prosperity; a state of transcendent wholeness. Any other approach perpetuates wounding, the terrible cost of vanity and brings death. Yes - death.
Believe me, I love you…
Easy and Light
I’m always happy to have Christmas and New Year’s done with. If you work in retail or hospitality - or for the airlines, I suppose - Christmas means nothing more than stress. Long hours, lot’s of activity, a crush of people. I have friends who work 12 hour days during December - 6 days a week - and still must find time for family and shopping and parties and whatever is left of their life after that. For 25 years I was ‘that guy’ and this is the first year I’ve been free of the overwhelming stress of Christmas. It’s been difficult to change my way of thinking about the holidays - our emotions have memory, too. For many people, though - and to a certain extent myself - what follows Christmas is more difficult that what precedes it. Many of us are, right now, in the midst of the Great Christmas Crash.
It’s understandable. There’s so much hype, so much build-up, so many parties, baking, travel, shopping, travel - and on and on - that when it’s all over we bottom out on the emotional roller coaster. There’s a particular and unique kind of exhaustion that sets in at this time of year - an exhaustion that seems to encompass our whole person; mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Seasonal Affective Disorder is a serious concern for many of us. For most of us, though, there’s a definite sense of struggling through these remaining weeks until light and life return. Here’s the good news: it will return, and each passing day brings us closer to the world being born again.
So what to do with all this? As John the Baptist languished in the darkness and despair of Herod’s prison he sent his disciples to Jesus with a simple question: “Are you the one?” Jesus responded by pointing to the evidence: people receiving healing, freedom and wholeness, people receiving hope. He speaks to John’s doubts before speaking to the unbelief of the everyday people - like you and I - who lived in Korazin and Bethsaida. Jesus also speaks to the unbelief of the religious leaders saying, ‘no matter what I do you’re not happy’. Through it all he’s speaking to a people who are burdened by the law, exhausted by the law, separated from God by the law they can’t possibly keep, forever under judgment and condemnation. Into this world of darkness, sorrow and longing Jesus says, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”
I often find that much is made of the ‘yoke’ in this passage. I think that’s an exercise in missing the point. The yoke isn’t about working for Jesus, or even working with Jesus. He’s contrasting what the religious leaders of his world were doing to people - crushing them under rules and regulations - and what he offers, which is rest. Some commentators on this passage suggest the ‘yoke’ is Christ’s teaching. That may be so, but it’s hardly the point. The point is that he’s offering us rest.
Think about that for a moment. When was the last time you heard a sermon that suggested Jesus wants you to rest? When was the last time you were asked to do less for Jesus? Sometimes our lives are stressed to the max. Sometimes are lives are so busy that our to-do lists just keep getting longer and our inbox is never emptied and it seems like there’s not enough hours in the day or days in the week. Jesus stands in stark contrast to our obsession with doing more and, although we can work our way to wealth I think it’s pretty clear that we can’t work our way to rest. Jesus brings us to the precipice of a great truth here, namely, that we also can’t work our way to God. Instead, Jesus invites us to himself, and promises that we will find rest for our souls in him. I don’t think this is a one-time, sudden or miraculous event he’s talking about here. I think that he’s asking us to spend time with him and to allow him to teach us. He promises to be gentle with us, joining us in humility. What Jesus is asking us to do is to be present in him, and allow him to be fully present in us.
It’s difficult to grasp the full significance of what Jesus is offering. This is not a Jesus who is giving us a way to be better versions of ourselves, able to do better things for better reasons. He’s suggesting that we completely, totally and magnificently re-orient ourselves from the stress and strain of all our activity to the quiet stillness of being with him. It is the exact opposite of everything our world tells us. But those of us who are suffering under the burdens of that world need to make the change. Given the time and our willingness - and courage - to follow Jesus, real rest is possible; the kind of rest that lives within us, an ever present peace that exists not in separate from our life and circumstances but amidst them.
There’s one last thing I want to say about this ‘easy’ yoke and ‘light’ burden - something I’m going to try and keep uppermost in my mind this coming year. It’s simply this: If following Jesus is difficult then you’re doing it wrong. It’s that simple. When you need something it will be provided for you. When you need an answer it will be given to you. When you need to find your way the path will be revealed. Let Jesus be your guide.