Saving Jesus (Sunday Reflections for May 16, 2010)

Jesus’ primary mission was to expose the world’s sinfulness and then die on the cross so that the sins of those who believed in him would be forgiven, enabling them to go to heaven. He was not especially concerned about people’s daily lives, except for sexual impurity which he strongly condemned.

Attending many churches today or listening to many TV preachers, one who could easily believe such a statement summarizes the importance of Jesus. This Jesus, however, bears almost no resemblance to the Jesus we meet in the gospels. In the gospels, Jesus talks A LOT about people’s lives, especially their relationships with other people. He talks about the use of money and material possessions far more than he does about sex. Jesus says very little about “getting to heaven” and (with the possible exception of John, the last gospel to be written) does not interpret his death in those terms.

A group in our congregation has been reading a book by Oklahoma City pastor and author Robin Meyers. Its provocative title is Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus.Meyers’ contention is that within a few centuries of Jesus’ death, the church effectively “declawed” Jesus (my term) as a result of its agreement with Constantine to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Jesus stopped being a radical voice for change in human relations and in society. Instead he became an object of worship and, through the clergy, the sole official dispenser of tickets to heaven.

Over the past two centuries, modern biblical scholars have been attempting to re-discover the Jesus of history and it is this Jesus that Meyers is trying to promote. The world has changed—for the better—so that now people have little interest in a Christ to be passively worshiped. Today people are looking for guidance in dealing with the challenges and complexity of their lives and so instead the church needs to be presenting a Jesus to be followed.

Not everyone in the church endorses such a shift, of course. Clergy, especially, are reluctant to relinquish their “keys of the kingdom” power even if fewer and fewer people are interested in the door those keys supposedly open.

A recent article by Luther Seminary professor Gracia Grindal, a leader of ELCA dissidents, says that people traditionally came to worship to “hear the Word of God, to be reproved by it, not to be affirmed; to be cleansed of their unrighteousness.” Abandoning this tradition is what has led to the ELCA’s dramatic drop in worship attendance, she contends. Yet this ignores the fact that a church which presumably has kept this tradition, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, has declined at the same time and just as fast at the ELCA.

The church as “morals police” is another role hard to let go of. Speaking this week in Fatima, Portugal, Pope Benedict declared that abortion and gay marriage are some of the most “insidious and dangerous” threats to the world today. Hearing this it’s hard not to recognize that an obsession with rooting out evil only leads to a complete distortion of one’s view of the world and of reality—and of Jesus. Ecological destruction is not a threat, even as a runaway well is dumping thousands of gallons of toxic oil into the ocean? Nuclear terrorism isn’t a threat, even as weapons multiply, their control weakens and global tensions increase? Economic injustice isn’t a threat as millions lose jobs, despair for their future, and the world’s wealth shifts ever more to the industrial titans at the top of the financial pyramid?

When in the 4th century the Roman Emperor Constantine formally embraced Christianity it was for one purpose: to find a new social glue to hold his tottering empire together. Sadly, the church’s leadership enthusiastically embraced this role and the prestige and power it gave them. In the centuries since the church has continued to view itself in this way, even as political and economic powers have found new and much more affective means for achieving Constantine’s goals.

The church’s pretense to either earthly or heavenly power now simply looks pathetic. It’s no wonder people today walk by the church’s door bemused and shaking their heads, if they notice it at all. What Robin Meyers and many others have recognized is that Jesus would be among them. The church established in his name has become exactly what Jesus himself railed against, an institution that is irrelevant when it’s not being oppressive.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, however, people and the world still have real and important spiritual needs. Religion still can and should serve a genuine purpose, such as the five functions I quoted by Philip Goldberg. Such religion can’t be engaged in turf battles with religious and secular rivals. It can’t be obsessed with controlling people’s morality and personal lives. It can’t be distracted by theological disputes over words and rituals.

Rather, religion must do what Jesus did nearly two thousand years ago. It must take seriously people’s individual lives. It must help us see and understand two things: our lives and our world as they really are and how they could and should be. It must lead us to care for one another even as it leads us to a new appreciation of who we ourselves uniquely are.

Meyers quotes the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart: “This then is salvation: to marvel at the beauty of created things and to marvel at the beauty of their Creator.” For the “Jesus movement” to regain any value or relevance, it must return to the very beginning and affirm the Bible’s understanding of our world and everything in it. In the first chapter of the first book, God looks on everything he has made and proclaims it all “very good.” In the second chapter Adam and Eve are placed in the garden to “till it and keep it.”

This world is indeed a beautiful marvel and we are the ones responsible for caring for it, which includes caring for each other. Reminding people of that and challenging those who failed to do that, especially those with power and authority, was Jesus’ message and mission. It is also what Jesus asked his followers to do. For the sake of the world, the church needs to get back to following that Jesus.

Putting religion back to work (Sunday Reflections for May 2, 2010)

Typically we evaluate religions based on their beliefs. In a recent essay on Huffington Post, spirituality teacher and author Philip Goldberg says it’s more helpful to think of the functions religion serves.

As I see it, religion in its most complete form serves five basic functions. I've given each of these a name beginning with the prefix "trans-", which means "across," "through," or "beyond," because religion at its best crosses boundaries and points to realities beyond the ordinary. Those five functions are:
1. Transmission: to impart to each generation a sense of identity through shared customs, rituals, stories, and historical continuity.
2. Translation: to help individuals interpret life events, acquire a sense of meaning and purpose, and understand their relationship to a larger whole (in both the social and cosmic senses).
3. Transaction: to create and sustain healthy communities and provide guidelines for moral behavior and ethical relationships.
4. Transformation: to foster maturation and ongoing growth, helping people to become more fulfilled and more complete.
5. Transcendence: to satisfy the longing to expand the perceived boundaries of the self, become more aware of the sacred aspect of life, and experience union with the ultimate ground of Being.

Goldberg’s five functions are reasonable and pretty easy to understand. His functional understanding of religion is one that I think a growing number of people accept (even if they might define those functions somewhat differently). I wonder though if we realize how different such an understanding is from that of previous generations. Being able to think about religion as Goldberg does is almost entirely the result of one development in the modern world. Namely, we now have religious choices, including the option of having no religion at all.

Until recently, most people were born into a religion, either via geography or family. It came with the territory or it came with your pedigree. The United States was the first major exception to this tradition. From the start, it was made up of immigrants from a variety of religious traditions. The country’s founders were also acutely aware of the chaos and suffering caused by religious strife in Europe. As a result, the relatively new idea of religious freedom conceived by European intellectuals was put into practice and built into the constitution of this new country in the New World.

Acceptance of religious freedom did not become a global phenomenon until after World War II. It was championed by Americans as part of a post-war new world order (e.g. FDR’s four freedoms). What really moved it forward, however, was the dramatic growth in communication and transportation.

The new burgeoning global economy was soon sending people in all directions. Suddenly countries and communities that had been identified with one religious tradition found themselves with significant minority populations following other traditions, sometimes to the point where everyone was a minority. Growing secularism also weakened religious ties and many people simply dropped religious affiliation from their identity altogether.

By focusing on beliefs, religions end up in a nearly unending state of conflict. Internal squabbles arise continually as there are always differences over interpretation of scriptures, doctrines, theology, ritual, etc. As the world has gotten smaller and more interconnected, there are also increasingly strident inter-religious rivalries as each one, at bottom, inevitably assumes it has the truth and the others are in error.

Goldberg’s view sets aside the question of the truth of a religion’s beliefs but instead asks about a religion’s usefulness. A religion or religious community should be evaluated on how well it is helping its members meet certain basic human needs:

• Is it helping them establish a meaningful and positive identity?
• Is it helping them navigate and make sense of the challenges and stages of human life?
• Is it helping them understand their role in society and guiding them in their interactions with others?
• Is it helping them mature emotionally and socially, especially in learning to balance their personal ego needs with the needs of the community?
• And does it connect them with the wider world and give them a sense of meaning and place in the universe?

The orthodox faithful or “true believers” do not and cannot see their religion in this way. They follow their religion because it is true and right—end of discussion.

More and more people, however, see the religion they personally may follow and all the world’s religions as part of a larger whole, which includes the whole range of human experiences and endeavors. For them it is impossible not to realize how all religions have developed historically and influenced each other, sharing traditions, gods, stories, myths, rituals and scriptures. Recognizing this, to then ask which religion is “true” is not only impossible to determine but pointless.

Fundamentalists would see Goldberg’s perspective as blasphemy but he is, in fact, trying to preserve what he believes is the vital role religion plays in our world and in people’s lives. While born in antiquity, the world’s religions cannot remain anchored there. Much of the energy of contemporary fundamentalism comes from a fear and rejection of the extremes and imbalances of modern life. Such a response is often entirely justified but dragging the world back to religion’s ancient origins is not a workable solution.

Goldberg (and many others) recognizes that religion provides an important critique of human life and its excesses. It provides guiding principles and interpretive stories which help us keep life in balance, individually and as a society. By insisting on remaining stuck in the past, religion is losing its ability to perform that essential role. Indeed doing so often allows it to be manipulated by the very forces it ought to be keeping in check (e.g. despotic political leaders wrapping themselves in religious images and symbols).

Religion’s value and power is not in what it thinks it knows about past events, the origin or make-up of the universe, or about God (which even the Bible insists is ultimately unknowable). Rather, religion’s value is its insight into our hearts and minds, i.e. the human soul. It doesn’t take much awareness to realize that the souls of many individuals and indeed of the planet as a whole are hurting badly. Rather than contributing to that darkness, religion must rediscover how to be a guiding light leading to wholeness and life.