Reading the Bible Again for the First Time

There’s a story I go to in the Hebrew Bible when I’m in the midst of adversity, and I’m fighting for the meaning and way of my life. It’s in the book of Genesis, Chapter 32. It’s night, and Jacob is about to meet his brother, Esau, whom he hasn’t seen in many years. Last time he saw him, Esau said he’d kill him, for Jacob stole Esau’s birthright. “That same night,” says the Bible, “Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and an angel of God wrestled with him until daybreak. When the angel saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the angel said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’”

That’s the story. Life is full of initiatory experiences, and they are difficult like wrestling matches against adversaries as daunting as angels of God. But if we persist, we will prevail—even though in the process our hip might be put out of joint, and the rest of our days we bear a scar from the struggle that transformed us forever and blessed us and gave us a new name, a name that says who we really are. If we persist, we will prevail, and we will become more fully ourselves.

Today I want to talk about Unitarian Universalism’s wrestling match with the Bible: the struggle of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors to engage the Bible rationally, for the sake of freedom—and how this has determined to a great extent who we have been, who we are today, and who we may yet become in the future.

Start with Michael Servetus in the 16th century, facing a church doctrine like the Trinity (the idea that God is a unity of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). Servetus opposed it. Didn’t matter that it had been declared official doctrine way back in 325CE during the Council of Nicaea. Didn’t matter that, by openly opposing it, even mocking it, he could be burned at the stake. Servetus stood his ground, because he believed that the soul of Christianity was at stake. People hungered for bread, but they were being given stones by a church that had lost its way. People hungered for spiritual liberty, but the church was binding them to falsehood and error. The way out—the way to freedom—was to cut through all the add-ons and accretions of institutional history and go back to the Bible. Use the Bible as the sole standard for everything, and use reason (not church tradition) to discern exactly what this standard was.

This was Servetus, wrestling with the angel. For him, the Bible, interpreted by the light of reason, was the way to liberty. The doctrine of the Trinity represented corruption; but reason would expose it for what it was. And though, for all this, Servetus was burned as a heretic, his larger vision and hope carried on. For hundreds of years, into the 18th and 19th centuries, religious freethinkers and liberals followed his pattern of being exclusively Bible-centered and relying on reason to discern spiritual truth. So, for example, in one of the great classics of Universalism, A Treatise on Atonement, published in 1805, Hosea Ballou went through the Bible with a fine-tooth comb to argue against a prevailing idea of his day (one that still prevails for many): that Jesus died on the Cross to atone for our sins—that God requires this for people’s salvation, otherwise, we are doomed to eternal hellfire. This, argued Ballou, was patently unscriptural and against reason. For how can finite creatures like ourselves offend the infinite God? Why might our finite sins, to be wiped away, require the infinite sacrifice of the Son of God? The real issue, said Ballou, is just not about God, or God’s accepting us. The real issue is that we don’t make ourselves available to God. We don’t believe that we could ever be loved as deeply and as truly as God loves us. The problem with the atonement doctrine is similar to that of the doctrine of the Trinity: both represented ways by which the church was binding people with falsehood.

But if we wrestle with the Bible and don’t let go, it will set our spirits free. That’s what Hosea Ballou, one of the fathers of Universalism in America, believed. And so did the father of Unitarianism in America, William Ellery Channing. “We regard the Scriptures,” he said in 1819, “as the records of God’s successive revelations to mankind, and particularly of the last and most perfect revelation of his will by Jesus Christ.” Yet one of the things that distinguished Channing’s approach from Ballou’s and definitely from Servetus’ was his acknowledgement of the rootedness of the Bible in history, and the need for reason to take this into consideration. “We find,” says Channing, “that the different portions of this book, instead of being confined to general truths, refer perpetually to the times when they were written, to states of society, to modes of thinking, to controversies in the church, to feelings and usages which have passed away, and without the knowledge of which we are constantly in danger of extending to all times, and places, what was of temporary and local application.” The Holy Spirit might have breathed inspiration into the writers of scripture, but Channing insists that “a knowledge of their feelings, and of the influences under which they were placed, is one of the preparations for understanding their writings.” Without this, you just can’t be faithful to the Bible. The result is disaster. We apply Bible insights to our day recklessly, ignoring the fact that what the Bible writers are talking about may be very different or even absolutely different from the present concern on our minds. Or we overlay present meanings onto the past. We read into the Bible our own agendas and interests and standards and make it kill when its proper function is to give life. Here’s a joke about this that Channing would have enjoyed:

A teacher asked her Sunday School class to draw pictures of their favorite Bible stories. She was puzzled by Kyle’s picture, which showed four people on an airplane, so she asked him which story it was meant to represent.

“The flight to Egypt.”

“I see,” said the teacher. “And that must be Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus. But who’s the fourth person?”

“Oh, that’s Pontius–the pilot.”

The joke is not so ridiculous, however, when you consider all the ways in which people (Unitarian Universalists included) ignore Channing’s advice and do something that’s equivalent to hearing about a “flight” to Egypt and then drawing a picture of an airplane. One of these mistakes is seeing the Bible as a single book. Do this, and it’s easy to assume that everything in it belongs to a single category of writings that can be interpreted using the same rules. A classic instance of this is viewing the Bible as a science text—everything in it to be interpreted as saying something factual about the world. Genesis says the world was created in seven days, so that’s literally what happened. Genesis says that Jacob wrestled with an angel, so angels must really exist. Fundamentalists define the Bible in just these terms and swallow it whole; reverse-fundamentalists define the Bible in these same terms, but they spit it out. Tastes gross. Yet neither stop to wonder about their basic assumption. Is the Bible just one book? Or is it more like a compendium of many books that has evolved in Wikipedia-like fashion over time, involving many authors and editors, incorporating as well many different kinds of literary genres to get its various points across? This last insight is especially important to absorb. We just can’t listen correctly to what the Bible is trying to say unless we realize the genre of the piece we are encountering. Take the recent Star Trek movie—we completely misunderstand what it is all about if we classify it as a documentary and expect it to communicate literal truths about what our future holds for us. Similarly, when we see the book of Genesis as science, rather than the mythology that it is, we completely miss the point. We’ve heard the word “flight” and we’ve drawn an airplane.

Channing once said, “We profess not to know a book, which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible.” It’s true. Consider yet another way in which we can hear “flight” and draw an airplane. Has to do with how people today read into the Bible an ethic of reporting history that is actually quite foreign to the mindset of the ancient Bible writers. Today, when someone makes a speech, every word can be captured on tape and transcribed accurately, so when we read about it in the newspapers—when we read “President Obama said…..”—we are expecting word-for-word accuracy. Nothing less is acceptable. But this is not the standard that ancient Bible writers followed. When reading “Jesus said…” or “Paul said…”, we have to press pause on our assumption that the words ascribed to them are the ones that literally came out of their mouths. Historians back then just had different standards than ours. Listen to what one of the best of them—the Greek writer Thucydides—had to say about this: “I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself, and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.” That’s what Thucydides says—and did you hear that? “To make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation” (!!!). But this was the standard in the ancient world. “The past is a foreign country,” says writer Leslie P. Hartley. “They do things differently there.” And we’ve got to honor this.

Back in 1819, when Channing made his key points about Bible interpretation, he was building a way that was new for America (and, almost 200 years later, is still new for too many people). The occasion was an ordination sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity,” and it’s a defining moment in our history. Before it, if you were a Unitarian in America, you belonged to a movement that was amorphous and in the closet. It had no clear leader. It had no clear definition. The name “Unitarian” was a badge of shame. But along came Channing. He outed the movement, gave it clarity, took up the name “Unitarian” with pride. He did all of this in his 1819 sermon. And a big part of it had to do with his wrestling with the angel of the Bible. The Bible, central to Channing’s sense of what Unitarianism was all about.

But Channing’s achievement would not prove final. Within his lifetime, in the very next generation, a different sort of struggle with the Bible ensued. Not so much about how best to interpret it, but whether it is the sole source of revelation available to spiritual seekers.

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is most definitely not. “Live after the infinite Law that is in you,” he says, “and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms.” Revelation, in other words, can’t possibly be contained just within the Bible. The wellspring is fundamentally within each of our souls; revelation bubbles up out of the spark of the Divine in our depths. Add to this the revelation of nature, as well as the revelation embodied by the Bibles of many times and lands, such as Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita. Ultimately the spiritual vision here is one of abundance, not scarcity. God is just too big to be contained by any single book. And it’s not only Jews or Christians who have ever wrestled with the sacred and written about it….

Despite this abundance, however, scarcity abounds. In Nature, Emerson says, “A man is a god in ruin. […] Man is the dwarf of himself. […] At present, man applies to nature but half his force.” This is Emerson’s constant complaint and argument. God bursts every seam, and God is within each of us, full to bursting. Yet we feel empty; we feel dry. Why? Emerson blames historical Christianity. It has “fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion.” It has done this by committing the sin of idolatry. Whereas Emerson believes that Jesus continually pointed people toward their own God-like potentials of compassion and wisdom, traditional Christianity says that only Jesus gets to be God. And then it gathers up the revelations of Jesus and of select teachers, seals them up in the one and only one Bible, and says that revelation is over, it is through. No wonder people are Gods in ruin. “That which shows God out of me,” Emerson says, “makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being.” “You shall not,” Emerson characterizes traditional Christianity as saying, “own the world; you shall not dare, and live after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ’s nature; you must accept our interpretations….”

Emerson’s message here is bruising. It’s not that he finds nothing liberating in the Bible, for he absolutely does. But he will not stand for the bullying that people can do in its name. And he will no longer abide by the exclusive Bible-centeredness of his forebearers: Servetus, Ballou, Channing. There are so many other Bibles to draw from. And above all, people must rediscover the Bible that lies within them. This is the way to freedom.

And this brings us to today. Transcendentalism expanded our spiritual universe, making the Bible just one source of the vibrant spiritual life and not THE source. Through Transcendentalism, we also learned that the Bible is not so much a record of what God says as a record of what humans have said about their long struggle for purpose and meaning in life. And perhaps because Unitarians and Universalists had engaged with the Bible so intensely and for so long, they were ready for different horizons. They felt that they had gone as far as they could with the Bible, and it was time for something new. Alternative forms of spirituality. Not Christianity, but theism. Humanism. Hinduism. Buddhism. Paganism. Blends of all these and more. Anything and everything but the Bible. In any other church or congregation, you better believe you are always going to have Bible study courses. But not in Unitarian Universalist congregations.

Meaning that the current state of our wrestling match with the Bible is different than it has ever been before. A first, in our long history. The current state is disengagement. It is apathy. We no longer know the Bible. It’s become strange to us over the years. Strange, and therefore threatening, because during our sleep, the Religious Right stole it and transformed it into a set of conservative talking points. And because we didn’t know any better—because we no longer read the thing ourselves with any degree of sophistication—we took their interpretations to represent what the Bible actually says. No wonder we don’t want to read it. It’s a vicious cycle.

Which is so sad, since there is a sweet wisdom in Scripture that can make the wounded whole. There is a sweet song that can lift our hearts and make them glad. Unitarian Universalist spirituality is there within its pages. We are missing out on one of the most fascinating and rich books in existence.

We are missing out personally, and we are missing out politically. Where are our Hosea Ballous today? Where are our William Ellery Channings, who might go toe to toe with the ridiculous James Dobsons and Jerry Falwells? Bible-based arguments continue to be extremely powerful and persuasive in America for shaping the common good, but we are no longer conversant. There is still more freedom to be won, but we have a lot of work to do to step up to the challenge. Angry voices argue, for example, that the Bible condemns homosexuality. They cite proof texts, one after the other: rat-a-tat-tat. But it’s not good enough any more to just shrug them off, shrug the conversation off. They need to be troubled by a better wisdom. They need to know and we all need to know that there is no word in the original languages of the Bible that corresponds precisely to committed and mutually respectful love relationships between same-sex partners. What does the Bible truly say about homosexuality in the 21st century? Nothing. And saying this is not evading the authority or demand of scripture. It’s being faithful to it.

Besides being spiritually vibrant, I know that this congregation is and wants to be even more a social justice congregation. I think it’s great. Of course. But I would add that, as essential preparation for this, we need to know the Bible. Whatever our individual theologies and passions happen to be, we need to know the Bible so as to enable effective social witness in our time, here and now. Our wrestling with the Bible is not over, not by a long shot. It’s showing no signs of easing up. We can’t let go. We’re not done. There’s a new name out there for us, a blessing to win, but we haven’t won it yet.

Letter to Mary

December 21, 2008. Dear Mary: It was two thousand years ago in a stable, surrounded by oxen and donkeys and your husband Joseph, when the main event was supposed to have happened: your giving birth to Jesus. The image of it is one I have known all my life, from Christmas cards, paintings and works of art, outdoor manger scenes, and even from some Canadian and American stamps I used to collect as a boy. The image of you holding the baby Jesus; the strength and protection of your arms. To this my eyes would always go, even if there were other amazements to look at, like wise men, or shepherds, or the Star of Bethlehem. There’s something special about you. 

 

And I’m not alone in my feelings about this. Through the ages, and around the world, feeling for you has always run deep. Catholic, Orthodox, and some Anglican Christians out-and-out venerate you. In your honor, Mary, they compose poems and songs; they paint icons and carve statues; they kneel before your image; they even pray to you for intercession with your son. I know this personally, for my own grandmother was Ukrainian Catholic, and I can still remember her fervent prayers, the depths of her reverence.

 

But it’s not that Catholics like my grandmother, or Anglicans, or Orthodox are setting you up as some idol. They don’t see you as God. It’s just that honor is being given where they feel honor is due—you, after all, are supposed to be the bearer of a God. Even Muslims, who deny that Jesus is God, honor you. You are the only women in the Koran who is directly named; and along with Jesus, you are said to be Ayat Allah, or the “Sign of God,” to humankind.

 

That’s what I call special. You are important for so many people around the world. Hunger for you is great. And that’s what this letter is about, Mary. The comfort and protection of your mothering arms. Your strength. People can’t seem to get enough of it. It all begs for a closer look.

 

Though right at the start, I need to acknowledge that opinions differ about the exact nature of the strength I’m talking about. Perhaps it boils down to a question that Christians have had from almost the very beginning: what you needed to be like to give birth to one who was supposed to be without sin. To raise a person like this. Did you have to be without sin, too? Or was your ordinary, imperfect humanity good enough? Exactly what kind of strength are we talking about?

 

The question is one of perfection vs. imperfection, and Catholics in particular have opted for perfection. That’s the official position, anyway. They see you as having a miraculous kind of independence from sex and death. This is what gives you your perfection and your strength. All sorts of doctrines laying this out. The doctrine of the Virgin Birth, according to which God directly impregnated you. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which says that you yourself were the product of a miraculous virgin birth. The doctrine of Perpetual Virginity, meaning that all of Jesus’ brothers and sisters had to have been cousins, or they had to have been children from a previous marriage of Joseph’s. And then the doctrine of the Assumption, proclaimed by Pope Pius XII in 1950, which says that you never physically died, and that you ascended bodily into heaven at the end of your days. All of these are doctrines Catholics have discerned over the years, as ways of articulating your strength and explaining how you were able to be the kind of mother you needed to be, to nurture and support the perfection of your son. Your miraculous qualities made you strong. 

 

Mary, my own mother’s family believed this, being the good Catholics they were. But I myself grew up Protestant and eventually became Unitarian Universalist, and both influences lead me to balk at all these doctrines. I never grew up thinking that life in a body and all that it implies is tinged with sinfulness. As a Unitarian Universalist, I absolutely do not. In being born, in sensuality and sexuality (whether gay or straight), and also in dying, all people possess inherent worth and dignity. I believe it.   

 

I also believe that you did not need to be perfect to meet the challenges of raising your son. Your ordinary, imperfect humanity was good enough, and gave you the strength you needed. In fact, there’s a sense in which it’s to everyone’s advantage that you were imperfect, since the idea that God could be born through someone living just an ordinary life is scandalous in a wondrous sort of way. The thought that people could be used by God for great things despite any and all limitations is wondrous. A source of great hope.

 

Mary, I really resonate with this idea. That you could be strong despite your flaws and imperfections. That you could be strong exactly because of your flaws. The Unitarian Universalist in me loves this, and every day, I walk in trust that the universe will receive whatever I offer up to it, however flawed, and turn it to some good, somehow. This is the core of my religious faith, and above all, it’s the core of my faith as a parent. As a father, the responsibility of parenting would be unbearable if I didn’t believe that being good enough was good enough. Know what I mean? This belief is sometimes all I have to go on, to get me through the times when I feel I’m totally screwing things up, and there won’t ever be enough money in the proverbial therapy jar my daughter will draw on to set things right. I just have to trust that being good enough is good enough.

 

I don’t know. Did you have to be perfect to do true justice to your child Jesus? To be strong enough for him? What’s clear is this. I’ve read stories in the Christian scriptures that hint at your parenting style, and I’m impressed. You really knew what you were doing. Here’s one story that springs to mind. It’s the story of Jesus turning water to wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. There you are, at the wedding with Jesus, who by now must be around 30 years old. He’s never performed a miracle before, and let’s assume that he’s wanting to be very careful about choosing the right first miracle, since the first of anything can be a predictor of everything else to follow. The first miracle has got to be special. It’s got to be right. And Mary, you know this. You also know that people can get so anxious about getting things right the first time that they might never even allow for a first time—to them, no time will ever seem special enough, nothing will ever seem good enough. So when you learn that the wine has all run out at the wedding party, you see that this is your opportunity to do a little mentoring. Light a little fire under your son, the brilliant rabbi. So you go to Jesus … and nudge him. “There’s no more wine,” you say. Jesus catches your drift, senses the pressure you’re putting on him, and he replies, rather testily, “Woman, what concern is that to you? My hour has not yet come.” In other words, Mom, stop trying to rush me! Stop pushing, already! Jesus is not very nice as he says this—calling you “woman” is just not nice—but you know that the bark is worse than the bite. I’ll bet you even rolled your eyes. You are the Mom, after all. And the rest is history. Jesus turns the water to wine, and this really was the perfect first miracle. It really was. It couldn’t have happened at a better, more joyous time (during a wedding party)—and the central message it telegraphs, essentially, is that the power of God (or whatever Mystery that that word “God” stands for) is everlasting abundance. Everlasting abundance that people can tap into even in the midst of moments of scarcity and loss. Even after the worst has happened. Even after all that, the best wine can still come. Don’t give up hope. Don’t give in to despair. Mary, this is a great message, and you are the one who nudged Jesus into making it. You helped get him unstuck. You were part of a great mentoring moment.

 

That’s got to be one of the reasons for why people can’t get enough of you. It’s about your awesome responsibility as a parent, and the great job you did, perfect or not. There’s also this: the way other people have experienced your parenting and protection, long after your physical death (or, as the Catholics would have it, long after your bodily ascension into Heaven). Here’s what I mean. I was reading the other day about the history of a country named Portugal and its political struggles, particularly in the early 1900s. The country’s monarchy had been ousted and replaced by an almost totalitarian regime, and this regime was determined to eradicate the country’s Catholicism. Religion, it thought, was pure superstition, and destructive, and wrong. Tolerance towards religion is just part of the problem, and only makes things worse. So this regime closed the churches down, and it confiscated their property. It banned religious holidays, as well as the teaching of religion in schools and colleges. Its actions were so aggressive that even people in rural areas—people who are usually unaffected by the quicksilver fads of urban sophisticates—took notice and went underground with their spirituality. Things got very, very bad. This is when you came in. The story goes that, in 1917, you appeared in a vision to three children from the rural village of Fatima. You encouraged them to stay hopeful in their religious faith, to pray for sinners, to keep on saying the Rosary. You appeared any number of times, and it is said that in your final appearance, on October 13, 1917, the crowd was far more than three children—something like 70,000 people, including newspaper reporters and photographers. Eyewitnesses said that it rained heavily that day, but at one point, the clouds broke and the sun took center stage, at which point it spun like a disk, radiated flames of scarlet, yellow, and purple, and then plunged towards the earth in a zigzag pattern, finally returning to its normal place, and leaving the people’s once wet clothing completely dry.

 

That’s the story. And whatever the reality happens to be, at least one thing is clear: religion in the hearts of the people is irrepressible, and it’s going to break through the walls put around it, every time. Whatever political or intellectual regimes do or plan to do, you, Mary, are not going to allow them to carry the day. You are a defender. People hunger for your presence, and you show up. And not just in Fatima, but all over the world, over the course of centuries. That’s what the record shows. I’ll grant that all we might be talking about here is some kind of communal hallucination—many explanations presuming nothing supernatural have been put forward—but what’s definitely real as real can be is that you are in people’s hearts and minds. You are there. And when the threat to religion or to life is great, they draw on you for strength, they take comfort from you, their imaginations soar with and through you.

 

Dear Mary, again and again, people go to you for strength. Some people might say that you were docile, and compliant, and weak, but I don’t believe it. You were strong enough to parent Jesus and give him good guidance and mentoring, and you’ve been strong enough in the hearts and minds of Christians through the ages to appear to them as a protector in times of tribulation. That’s what I call strong.

 

Yet there is one more thing that comes to mind when I consider people’s fascination for you, and it has to do with a different kind of strength. The strength it takes to step into the unknown. The strength it takes to be vulnerable and let go. The strength it takes to step back from broken dreams, and let them die, and still know that you are OK. Mary, you understand all about this. Blessed among women, you were condemned to witness your son’s execution on the cross. That’s what I call a broken dream. You know all about broken dreams. You know all about what it takes to step back from a dream, and let go.

 

This is the real reason for why I am writing this letter to you today. Perhaps the influence of my Catholic grandmother is stronger than I knew, and really, this letter is a prayer. For, you see, I’m praying for the strength to move into the second half of my life, and to let go of all my sadness and regrets. I know it’s not as dramatic as the death of your son on the cross, and yet there it is. I’m firmly into mid-life now, and with this has come a strange pressure building and building in my life, one that is pushing me to perform what I guess is itself a kind of miracle. Forgiving the fact that my body is changing and is not like it used to be; forgiving the fact that I was not able to accomplish everything I wanted to; forgiving the fact that all the brilliant, beautiful Christmases of my childhood will never come back again; forgiving the fact that precious people have died out of my life, and I will never be able to share with them who I am as an adult. This miracle of forgiveness. Water into wine. I need to perform it. I need to. It’s so I can make peace with my regrets. It’s so I can draw from my past in a healthy way. It’s so I can truly appreciate all the wonderful things I have right now: my family, my friends, my job, my health, my future. It’s so I can move forward, and keep on moving forward. It’s so I can believe that the best wine of my life will indeed come last, never fear.

 

Mary, I need a nudge from you, just like you once gave your son. I need you to light a fire under me, I need you to help me know that there’s no perfect moment for forgiveness, that there is no better time than now. Mary, in this Christmas season, I am praying to you for strength, for myself and also for so many others who are where I am right now, in one way or another. Whatever the age. Whatever the situation. Experiencing life changes. Facing the unknown. Feeling vulnerable. Strengthen all of us. Nudge all of us. Light that fire. And if we should snap back at you like your son did, and say, “Woman, what concern is that to you?” I know you’ll understand that the bark is worse than the bite. Just roll your eyes. You are the Mom. You’ve been there, done that. You know. Just show us the way to the most amazing kind of strength there is: to be hurt and yet come back; to be broken and yet to be whole; to endure ruined dreams and yet still dream; to give up so much, and yet, in the end, find more than you ever used to have. Water into wine. The best wine saved till last.

 

Mary, I thank you for your life, and I bless your name. Be with all of us this Christmas time.  

 

I am yours, sincerely,

 

Anthony

My Neighbor, Myself

December 7, 2008. Dear Expert in the Law: I’m writing this letter today because, recently, I had the opportunity to look again at one of the most famous parables in the Christian scriptures—the Parable of the Good Samaritan—and this time, it struck me with particular force that the center of the entire story is really you. Your thirst for eternal life. Your anxiety to justify yourself as having already “earned” it. What Jesus said to you, and how you might have actually heard it. Then his concluding invitation: “Go and do likewise.” Your learning and your growth are the real story here, and as I reflect on it, I see so much that relates to my here-and-now world. Your story speaks to mine, as well as to the story of the congregation I serve in Atlanta, Georgia, though we are separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles. Thus, this letter.  

 

I’ll start by acknowledging how your fellow Jews needed you. Devout Jews needed “experts in the law” because there are 613 commands that come out of the foundational texts of your religion, the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Five books, collectively called the Torah, conveying 613 laws which devout Jews are to practice so as to bring God into every aspect of daily life and to maintain right relationship with Him. Rules about talking, eating, walking, bathing, dressing, buying and selling, honoring one’s parents, no lying, no stealing, and on and on. A lot of rules, yes, but devout Jews saw themselves as privileged to have this kind of structure in their lives, one which gave them a rock-solid spiritual identity and kept their minds constantly on God. And yet, because of all the rules, no wonder people needed an expert. At the very least, just to remember them all. And then there were times when circumstances seemed impossibly complicated—circumstances in which multiple rules seemed to apply but also seemed to conflict with each other, and so people found themselves wondering how to balance the differing obligations in tension. Sometimes it wasn’t just an internal struggle but one between people, people who differed—sometimes violently—on what they saw as fair. In all such moments, they needed you: an expert in the Law.

 

Not that we do not require experts in the law today. Plenty of devout Jews these days who aspire to infuse their lives with God rules. And then there’s everyone else, us, whose lives in one way or another are, at one and the same time, both organized and complexified by rules of some sort or another. My congregation, for example. Its legal existence articulated through ByLaws. Its purpose defined through a mission statement, together with a statement of ends describing all the basic ways in which we want to bring positive change to people’s lives. Then what are called Executive Limitations, which basically hold us accountable to our highest hopes, and call us to stay within proper limits in our work together. Then its Covenant of Healthy Relationships, together with all the other guidelines, procedures, principles, precedents, and on and on, which help us get on the same page, and which we sometimes fight over. Some will think that there are way too many rules. Yet it sounds like a lot only because we are a large community, and the larger a community gets, the more explicit it needs to be about rules. Smaller communities, families even, have just as many rules, but many of them are tacit, unspoken, taken for granted, and usually you realize them consciously only when you blunder into them—and suffer the consequences. Not a helpful thing in a community as large as the one I serve. 

 

But you know all about this. You are an expert of the Law. And it was as an expert that, one day, you decided to test the upstart rabbi that your neighbors must have been gossiping about. This teacher, saying shocking things. This Jesus of Nazareth. “Teacher,” you said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” As you well know, he gave this question right back to you, and I’m struck by your answer, which Jesus himself liked very much. Basically you said “love to God and love to people.” “Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.” I’m struck by this answer, for two reasons.

 

Reason #1: How the emphasis is on doing right things, not believing right things. Too many people today think that believing “10 impossible things before breakfast” is the pathway to eternal life, the hallmark of authentic religious faith, and I refuse to lose that word—“faith”—to such a poor definition. I refuse to put my mind (with all its questions and curiosity) in one box, and my faith (which sustains my heart and gets me up every morning) in another box. For me, faith is all about action. Or, rather, it’s all about acting in trust that my effort to connect with the Spirit of Life—to create, to worship, to study, to meditate, to appreciate, to forgive, to serve—that any and all such acts will lead to something positive, no matter how frail or flawed the effort seems to me. Acting in trust that my effort to love another person, no matter how small, will somehow make a difference. Faith is all about action, and keeps us acting, keeps us from getting paralyzed by our fears. What is eternal life, anyhow, if not a quality of life right here and right now? Eternal life as a richness in each moment, as a timelessness of meaning, a sense of poise and courage in the face of adversity, a sense of triumphant abundance, a sense of release from all that knots up our spirits. Brings to mind a story by a classic 20^th century writer named Dr. Suess. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Wish you could see it—in particular the part where the Grinch realizes that Christmas doesn’t come from a store—means perhaps a lot more. The moment when his heart grows three sizes, the true meaning of Christmas comes through, he finds the strength of ten Grinches plus two. That’s it. That’s how the eternal breaks into life. That’s how we inherit it. 

 

But now let’s turn to the second reason for why I like your answer to the question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Short and sweet: it implies something very positive about humanity and its place in nature. Take the part about “love your neighbor as yourself.”  I’m reading this book with my congregation right now—called The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt—and in the third chapter, the author talks about how large, relatively peaceful animal societies become possible. Amidst all the variety in the animal kingdom, we see it only among humans, termites, naked mole rats, and hymenoptera (which is a name designating one of the larger orders of insects, including ants, bees, and wasps). Talk about strange company! Nevertheless, it’s only here where we find individuals living in large cooperative societies—individuals reaping the benefits of an extensive division of labor. In the case of termites, naked mole rats, ants, bees, and wasps, the explanation is found in a mechanism known as “kin altruism,” a reproduction system in which a single queen produces all the children, and everyone is literally brother and sister to each other, and “love your neighbor as yourself” happens quite naturally. All are part of one big family; all share a common parent.

 

Of course, human reproduction is NOT a matter of a single queen producing all the children. For us, the way to “love your neighbor as yourself” isn’t through kin altruism. Rather, it’s through existence of a deep instinct for what scientists call “reciprocity.” As in, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” An instinct that explains why it is, when someone does something nice, you reflexively want to return the favor even though you might not know them from Adam. Why it is, when people are sent Christmas cards from complete strangers, a great majority will go ahead and send a Christmas card in return anyway. It’s true! Reciprocity is hardwired in us. Part of our nature as human beings. And I think that that is cool. I know—“you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is not actually on the same level as the Golden Rule, but it puts us on a path that takes us to it eventually. The instinct for reciprocity is a start in the right direction, and everything needs a start. Above all, the start is nothing supernatural. Nature puts us on the path of ethics and spirituality. It means, ultimately, that even our highest aspirations for heaven are rooted in earth. The earth is truly and fully HOME.  

 

But it’s not all peaches and cream. Nature gives us predilections for hell as well. “Natural selection, like politics,” says Jonathan Haidt, “works by the principle of survival of the fittest, and several researchers have argued that human beings evolved to play the game of life in a Machiavellian way.” Part of this has to do with something we see in your story, where, right after you answer your own question about how to inherit eternal life, you ask Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” You do that because you have overestimated your own virtue. You already think that you’ve earned eternal life, and that there’s nothing else lacking. In effect, you are daring Jesus to prove otherwise.

 

The tendency to see ourselves as in a “rose colored mirror.” I do it too. We all do. There is evolutionary survival value to this, very definitely; “evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions.” True enough. But there’s a downside as well. Jonathan Haidt puts it this way: “Such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled.” In other words, disputes over who is doing more of their fair share of the work, as in spouses estimating the percentage of housework each does, and estimates totaling up to more than 120%. Disputes like this. Disputes over who is more wrong, more to blame. Disputes over who understands and applies the rules more fairly. Our biological-based penchant for overestimating our own virtue gets us in trouble, time after time, and in effect blocks the reciprocity instinct within us. We stop listening to the other person and imagine their action to stem from, if not malice, then no reason at all, nothing that would make what they did at least understandable. We stop listening, and we get resentful, we get enraged. Because others are not doing unto me as I deserve, well then, the worse for them! They better watch out! So much for “love your neighbor as yourself.” So much for eternal life.

 

The rose colored mirror gets us into trouble. It causes people to spin their case in their own favor, furiously, protesting innocence all the way. Russian author Leo Tolstoy said it like this: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Dear Expert in the Law, this is what you were doing—trying to put the spin on Jesus, and he knew it. He saw exactly what you were trying to do. And this was the launching point for his famous Good Samaritan parable. This is what was in back of his mind when he said those words, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead with no clothes. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.….” Did it shock you to hear that this is what the priest and Levite did? Especially when they, if anyone, should know that the way to eternal life is love to God and love to people?

 

It probably didn’t shock you. You are an Expert in the Law, after all, so you understand why they felt justified in staying away. One of the 613 commands of the Torah says that people should stay away from corpses, which are considered spiritually unclean. In the case of the priest, if he had come over to help the man, and the man turned out to be dead, he would have contaminated himself and would no longer be allowed to officiate religious rites at the Temple. Not permanently—but he would have had to go through a lengthy, arduous period of decontamination to get back to ritual cleanliness. Thus his reason for staying away.

 

But for Jesus, the reason was not good enough. It was just something that the Priest and Levite used as a basis for spinning the case furiously in their favor. They looked into the rose colored mirror, they thought only about how they are commanded to preserve their religious purity, and in the end, this blinkered form of idealism made it OK for them to commit what was, in truth, a horrible sin. Being in a position to help someone in dire need, and not doing it. Not loving a fellow human being and, in this way, not loving God. One of the Hebrew prophets, Amos, puts this in perspective when he speaks for God and says, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. […] But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” That’s what Amos says. Where established law and genuine human need are in conflict, choose compassion, as far as possible. That’s what you do.  

 

The rose colored mirror. It makes it so easy for people to appear, to themselves, far more virtuous and innocent than they really are, and to spin their case in their own favor, protesting innocence all the way. Jesus challenged you, and he challenges all of us, to take a long hard look at ourselves. “Why,” he asks, “do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” Why indeed.

 

But Jesus is not done. He’s got more to teach you. Later on in the parable, Jesus describes how a Samaritan helps the man by the side of the road and so behaves in a way that leads to eternal life. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus says to you. How infuriating. For this is what you know: Samaritans are the historical enemies of the Jews. All your life, you were taught that their faith is wrong. That their society is wrong. The very thought of them makes you burn. For you, the mere phrase “good Samaritan” is an impossible combination of words. On your own, you would never put those two words together in a sentence. But Jesus did. Jesus was telling you that someone you viciously and virulently hated—someone you didn’t even see as fully human—was worthy of eternal life, and not you. At least not yet. How difficult it must have been to hear this. How outraged you must have been.

 

Dear Expert in the Law, I applaud your courage in addressing Jesus. I’d be scared to death to test him. In his time, Jesus always took people to challenging places, and he never pulled his punches. He still does that today, when people read his words, and they are open to them.

 

In the end, this is what I think he was trying to get at. Samaritans are beaten up in their own way, by the society that surrounds them and vilifies them. And so, just as the Samaritan in the parable helped the man by the side of the road, would you be open to seeing the Samaritans around you with new eyes? Jesus was suggesting that, to “go and do likewise,” you didn’t have to wait for a circumstance identical to the parable but that you could start immediately, right that moment. Bring to mind a social group you have grown up to distrust, or hate. At the very least, bring to mind a person you are angry at, whom you feel is treating you wrongly, unfairly. As you do this, notice how your heart hardens. Notice how you immediately start to spin the case in your own favor, imagining yourself all right and the other all wrong. Above all, own up to it. Acknowledge the rose colored mirror. Acknowledge the log in your own eye. Then do your best. Try to walk a mile in their shoes. Try to understand. If the way to eternal life is anywhere, it is here.

 

I want to close this letter with a story, which captures some of the essence of what I’ve been talking about. I hope you find it interesting. It comes from a contemporary spiritual teacher named Ram Dass, and it describes his effort to deal with a kind of Samaritan of his own time. 

 

Once there was a spiritual man named Ram Dass, and he lived in a turbulent time called … the Reagan era. He looked around, and he could find nothing that he liked. But his aggravation happened to settle on a particular target: Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense. When Ram Dass thought about it, he realized that, in truth, Caspar was no worse than many others. But there was just something about him that got under his skin. So this is what he did. He got a picture of Caspar and put it on his home altar, together with pictures of spiritual heroes like the Buddha, Christ, Ramana Maharshi, and Hanuman. He included Casper right along with the rest. Each morning, when he’d light his incense and honor his heroes, he’d greet each with tenderness, and he’d feel waves of deep love and appreciation towards them. But then he’d come to Caspar’s picture, and his heart would constrict, he’d hear coldness in his voice when he’d say, “Good morning, Caspar.” Each morning he’d see what a long way he still had to go. But this is what he thought to himself. He thought, “Wasn’t Caspar just another face of God? Couldn’t I oppose his actions and still keep my heart open to him? Wouldn’t it be harder for him to become free from the role he was obviously trapped in if I, with my mind, just kept reinforcing the traps by identifying him with his acts? Do what you do to another person, but never put them out of your heart. It’s a tall order. But what else is there?”

 

And there it is, dear Expert of the Law. How shall we inherit eternal life? It’s all in the doing. What else is there?

 

I am yours, sincerely,

 

Anthony