Acts 1:6-14
June 5, 2011: 7th Sunday of Easter
There are parts of the bible that when we hear the words, our ears perk up. They ring familiar, sometimes we have an immediate, emotional reaction, and we might even think “that really speaks to what I’m dealing with today.” When a liturgist reads them on a Sunday morning, we are engaged, and we actually hear the words.
• Blessed are the peacemakers.
• I have come to bring good news to the poor.
• Wives submit to your husbands
Other parts of the bible make our eyes glaze over, our minds wander, our heads nod sleepily.
• The sun turning black, the moon turning blood red, stars falling to earth like figs right before the rapture.
• Long, complicated theological treatises by Paul explaining a God that makes no sense to us in the end.
• Discourses about Jesus the high priest seated at the right hand of the Father.
Why the difference? It’s about relevance. If something seems relevant to us today, we are engaged. If something seems like a supernatural hallucination of people who lived 2000 years ago, or made up fairy tales people are trying to pass off as nonfiction, well, why not think about what you’re going to have for lunch today.
The bible isn’t the only thing that suffers a relevance problem. Sometimes our understanding and images of God and Jesus get in the way of us being able to relate to the divine, much less the bible, in any meaningful way. Most of our images and ideas about God come from what we learned as children, or what we hear in pop culture and the media. God is a father up in heaven, looking down, foreseeing and controlling every little thing. God is a judge up there somewhere, throwing lightning bolts at people who are doing the wrong thing. Our understanding of Jesus is of a miracle working superhero, who was literally raised from the dead, defying, of course, any and all science. These are not uncommon ways to think about God and Jesus, they are embedded in most of our psyches whether we are conscious of them or not.
It’s interesting, because those images persist in most of our minds, but then, because we accept the findings of science, and live in modern, post-Enlightenment times, we don’t in our hearts of hearts really “believe” in those things. They may not have been bad starting places when we were children. They might have started us well down the path of faith. But, now, they are more fairy tale than bedrocks of our lives.
The problem is this: Those images persist, and they don’t necessarily help connect us to God, but we, generally, don’t have other images or understandings of God to replace them. God, as father, judge, magician up there in the clouds somewhere, becomes irrelevant to our lives and we’re left with no way back to the divine.
Marcus Borg is a scholar and theologian who is passionate about making God, Jesus, and the Bible relevant to people – especially mainline, progressive, science-embracing, people that live in this in between space of doubting what they know about God from Sunday school, but not having a more mature, sophisticated image of God to replace the old ones. He wrote books like, “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time,” “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time,” and “Meeting God Again for the First Time” (okay, maybe he’s not the most original book title giver ). But he is a skilled, accessible writer that tries to help people reconnect with God.
In describing what he sees as the problem for Christians in the modern world he writes about three different responses to the disconnect between our modern worldview and the worldview of the bible:
“Some of us resist the impact of the modern worldview by becoming fundamentalists, by insisting on the truthfulness of premodern Christian ways of seeing things in spite of their conflicts with modern knowledge. Others of us seek to add the notion of God to the modern worldview. We view the universe as a gigantic machine, made up of tiny bits and pieces of “stuff” all operating in accord with natural laws, then we add a notion of God as a supernatural being who created the whole but who is essentially outside the process. This makes God distant. Still others give up the notion of God altogether…and not always consciously. This makes God irrelevant.”
I have chosen Borg as our Easter person today because he has, for many people, resurrected God and Jesus, and even people’s faith by offering a fourth response; new, better images of God, something other than our insufficient childhood understandings. He has given people permission to expand their understanding of God, which has made God relevant to their lives again.
One reason he can do this for others is because of his own experiences. Borg grew up in the church learning from the adults in his life about Jesus and God and the bible. He learned it well. God the distant mastermind, Jesus the supernatural sacrifice and way to heaven. But, by the time he got to college, he realized those ideas were not sustainable in the face of the real world. They could not be reconciled with what he knew of science and the world around him. Because for him those images were so strong, and because he had been told how sacred they were, he couldn’t see God any other way, but he could no longer believe in this God. And so, he drifted from faith, from Church and from God.
As an adult, he reconnected to Christianity through the scholarly study of the New Testament. He found in his studies of history, and of the context in which the authors of the bible lived that the images we learn as children are gross oversimplifications of what is in the bible itself. The understandings and images of God in the bible are so varied, so rich and multi-layered, so nuanced and complex. Such a God can be relevant in a varied, multi-layered, nuanced and complex world. He realized that when we never grow beyond what we learned as children we are ignoring the God described by these incredible people of faith who wrote our scriptures. Most of the time our images of God are far more simplistic, facile, and child-like than theirs ever were.
One of Borg’s contributions to rethinking theology that moved people beyond simplistic ideas was by distinguishing between two different Jesus’ we find in the new testament: the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus. The pre-Easter Jesus is the historical Jesus. The post-Easter Jesus is what Jesus became after his death to those who sought to follow him. Specifically, the post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience, not the Jesus of history.
The gospels contain two kinds of materials: some goes back to Jesus as a figure in history, and some is the product of the communities themselves decades after Easter, laying what they now believe about the post-Easter Jesus back over the historical Jesus. And often these two Jesus’, post and pre Easter, are present in the same biblical passage, the same story. The Jesus of the bible is a combination – something can be based in history but then a layer is added that is myth and story born of the experiences of people who didn’t know the pre-Easter Jesus. This is why we get different accounts of his birth, life, death and resurrection in all of the gospels. They are not history – they are a mix.
This doesn’t make the bible any less true. People were experiencing God through this post-Easter Jesus. They themselves didn’t think they were writing history. They were writing religious truth and experience to lead others to understand God and follow Jesus. The problem is when we collapse the pre and post Easter Jesus into an historical figure, and then demand we believe in that Jesus. Borg says we are far more likely to connect with God when we tease out the two Jesus’ and try to learn what the biblical writers were trying to say through myth and story to the Christians of their day.
This reimagining of Jesus coupled with the personal story of Borg opened many, many people up to reconnecting with their faith, with God, with the bible and with Jesus. It gave them new ways to look at these things that incorporated a modern worldview, rather than ignore it.
When we are freed from stale, insufficient notions of God, Jesus and the bible, we can return to the bible with a different lens – and maybe we might even find some of those eye-glazing passages have actual relevance to our lives today. Take, for example, our passage today: the ascension of Jesus. I’m going to guess this is in the eye-glaze-over category for most of us. Probably about the time Jesus is whooshed up into heaven in a Hollywood rapture-type scene, you’ve stopped thinking about its relevance to your life and visions of eggs and bacon creep into your mind.
But, by not insisting on a literal interpretation that has no chance of being relevant, we are free to relook at a story that might have something to say that really would apply to our lives. No longer calling things like the ascension historical events that really happened, we can ask ourselves why the author used this myth. We can see new meanings in texts that used to seem distant. We aren’t imposing old, useless images back onto this wonderful text, we are allowing new ones to emerge.
The story of the ascension is obviously about the post-Easter Jesus. It is not history – it is myth, meant to illuminate something about Luke’s experience of God and his hopes for the early Christians of his community. Luke talks about the Spirit, and in this story, we see that Spirit is a new image of God for these disciples. What they had before is no longer helping them connect with God and move forward in faith. Jesus, who was to be the new king of the world had died, left them when he was killed on the cross. God as the one who would overthrow the oppressors seemed a joke given nothing in their lives had changed since Jesus came as God-in-flesh. They had to let go of what they knew and allow a new understanding in, so God could once again be relevant in their lives.
Their reality had changed since Jesus died…significantly. Now their understanding of God had to change as well. Admitting that Jesus was really gone, and that they really didn’t know if and when he was coming back, Luke still feels God’s presence through this powerful Spirit he writes about. Luke says to his community, “Jesus left, but his Spirit remains,” and for Luke, when they connected to the Spirit, they would be compelled to now be God-in-flesh in the world.” Luke was offering his readers a new way of seeing and connecting to God.
Such a message can speak to me today. Sometimes the old ideas about Jesus and God don’t work for me. They don’t inspire me, motivate me, or make me feel at all connected to something divine. But, Luke, as well as Borg, suggest I need to stop looking back to old understandings and instead connect with the divine in new ways that fit my experiences and worldview so that I might be compelled forward in my faith and life.
The ascension, even though it is not an historical event, or maybe because it is not an historical event, does raise questions we can struggle with: What is our experience of God? Do we need to let go of some ideas that have just become barriers to our faith? What replaces those ideas? How do you experience the divine? What difference does God make in your life?
Your ultimate ideas about God obviously do not have to match Borg’s. Although Borg has offered a helpful alterative that makes sense to many people, it is only one person’s way of talking about a God that is relevant and fits his experience. Borg is an Easter person not because he found the answer once and for all. He is an Easter person because he shows us how to continue a journey with God. He gives us permission to let go of images that no longer help us. He encourages us to develop understandings and images of God that fit our experience and make God, Jesus, and the bible relevant.
Something I take from Borg’s work is that those of us who are progressive Christians, who don’t insist on literal readings and understandings of God, who have let go of simplistic images of God that most people don’t find relevant to their lives today, can help resurrect God and Jesus for others. We can share our experiences, give permission to embrace both science and faith, articulate an intelligible, relevant God that speaks as much to us today as to those who wrote our scriptures. We can talk about how passages in the bible that would be irrelevant if read literally can be meaningful when seen as myth and metaphor.
Often when people reject faith and religion, they are rejecting a very particular idea of God or reading of the bible. We might have something to offer folks who still yearn for connection to the divine, but don’t have anything to grab onto other than old, stale, useless images that come up short. Like Borg, we can bring God back to life for people, we can help them feel the Spirit of God, and connect them with meaning and purpose. Amen.
