Bishop Spong's Articles February 2010

Paul talks about his experience of encountering the Christ as that which enabled him to transcend all of his limits and to cross all of those boundaries that separate him from others. In this newfound sense of an expanded humanity he came to a new sense of oneness. Because he was quite sure that this new wholeness resulted from his encounter with the risen Christ, he desperately needed to find the words to explain just how that worked. He was a Greek-speaking Jewish man living in the Mediterranean world of the first century of the Common Era and had no other categories of thought to use except the ones that his world provided. Our task in this column is to search through the time-bound words that he used in order to find a way to separate the eternal experience, which was so obviously real to him, from the pre-suppositions of his time and place in history that he used to explain his Christ experience, most of which have been dismissed by modern knowledge as no longer bel ievable inside our world view. That means that, as students of the New Testament, we must always be engaged in an activity that is not unlike delicate surgery and we will find it a never-ending task. The world does not slow down to give any of us time to adjust. We begin with an analysis of Paul's view of human life.

Paul's writing reveals a person who is very much aware that something is wrong with humanity in general and with his own humanity in particular. He is quite sure that whatever this distortion is, all human life somehow shares in it. Paul expressed this in his ever-present sense that he was alienated from God, from all others and even from himself. There was indeed a war, he said, that is going on in his members. His Jewish tradition affirmed this sense that human life is somehow separated from God. The Jews, over their long history, had developed an annual fast day, which they observed with great solemnity and which they believed enabled them to acknowledge liturgically what their human reality was. They called this day "Yom Kippur" or "The Day of Atonement." The observance of "Yom Kippur" involved the slaughter of a carefully chosen sacrificial lamb, the blood from which they then smeared on the mercy seat in that part of the Temple called the Holy of Holies, which t hey believed was God's earthly dwelling place. A second Yom Kippur ritual occurred when they symbolically piled their sins on the back of a goat, known as the "scapegoat," and then drove this sin-bearing creature out into the wilderness, thus leaving them purified and newly at one with God.

Similar doctrines of atonement are found in almost every religious tradition the world over because there is a universal human sense of being separate and alone that I believe is born in the emergence of self-consciousness, which only human beings possess. It manifests itself in the idea that none of us is what God intended us to be. The content of that statement varies widely, but the experience is part of what it means to be human. The Jewish version of it was based on the idea that God was the creator of all things and that nothing God made could itself be defined as evil. They had, therefore, to find a way to account for this human definition without blaming God. The ancient creation story in the beginning of the book of Genesis served this purpose well. In that story the goodness of God was upheld by the assertion that God looked out upon all that God had made and pronounced it good. The problem of human alienation and its resultant human evil, therefore, had to b e something that human life brought upon itself. In that ancient Jewish story the perfection of God's creation had been broken by the disobedience of Adam and Eve. As a direct consequence, Adam and Eve, and through them all future human beings, were condemned to live not in "Eden" but "East of Eden," to borrow a phrase from John Steinbeck. Human beings, this story asserted, were not so distorted that they did not remember their original glory, so they still possessed a yearning to return to the mythical garden where before being expelled they had once lived in the oneness of God. The story asserted, however, that the gates to that garden were forever locked and were now even guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. Human life, the story suggested, could never return to its original status. So in this world of imperfection Cain killed Abel, Jacob cheated Esau out of his birthright, Joseph's brothers sold him into Egyptian slavery, the Jews escaped starvation by moving to Egypt only to be cruelly treated by their Egyptian overlords and ultimately God was said to have intervened in history to bring these Jews to freedom. That is the way the biblical story unfolded.

That story, with that understanding of human life, shaped the liturgical life of the Jewish people. That is what created Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to provide an annual occasion for the Jews to recall the glory of their creation and to face liturgically the fact of their alienation from that original goodness. The perfection of the sacrificial lamb, both physically, in that it could have no blemishes or broken bones, and morally, in that it did not have the power to choose to do evil, represented to them what human life was created to be. So the perfect lamb was offered to God as a substitute for the human life, which was not worthy to be that offering. Human beings, out of their sense of alienation had to come to God only when they had been cleansed by "the blood of the perfect lamb of God."

Paul, shaped by this Yom Kippur understanding, interpreted Jesus under the symbol of Yom Kippur's the "Lamb of God" who had the power to "take away the sins of the world." He saw the death of Jesus on the cross to be analogous to the slaughter of the lamb on Yom Kippur. It offered a doorway back to God for all people. This is not only what salvation was all about to Paul, but that is also what Paul believed he experienced in the person of Christ. He accepted this gracious gift, undeserved and freely given, as that which had rescued him from "the bondage of sin." Thus he climaxed his theological argument in Romans by proclaiming that now "nothing in all creation can separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus." To offer this compelling gift to the world was what fueled his missionary fervor.

We live today, however, on the other side of Charles Darwin, whose thought has destroyed most of Paul's presuppositions. For Darwin there never was a perfect creation. Life rather evolved over billions of years from a single cell into self-conscious complexity. Without original perfection there could have been no human fall into sin. If there was no human fall, there was no need for a divine rescue. No one can be rescued from a fall that never happened or be restored to a status one has never possessed. So the basis upon which Paul has constructed his concept of salvation has become inoperative. The universal experience that Paul sought to address may well still be real, but his explanation has been destroyed by the march of time.

Students of the life sciences have identified the drive to survive as a universal characteristic present in all living things. Survival drives adaptability. It is seen when plants gravitate to the sun, when vines snake across the forest floor in search of the tallest trees to which they then attach themselves, when desert cacti develop a capacity to store water, when fresh water plants develop elaborate systems to filter salt in tidal rivers and when wasps and ants in the jungle develop mutual defense alliances. This drive for survival is instinctual, not conscious in plant or animal life. In self-conscious human life, however, this drive to survive rises to our awareness and is installed as the highest human value, making us the world's first self-conscious, survival-oriented creatures. Everything in human life is bent to the service of our survival and that in turn inevitably makes human beings self-centered. This is not the result of some prehistoric or mythologic al fall, this is in the nature of our biology. Out of this survival mentality all of our fears about "others," our xenophobia and our prejudices arise. It is out of our survival needs that we fight wars, enslave and segregate those who are different, denigrate women, abuse homosexuals. That behavior religion has dubbed "sin," the result of "the fall."

Can one find salvation by being rescued from this, as Paul seemed to believe? I do not think so. We can, however, find wholeness in the experience of being lifted beyond these boundaries. I am now convinced that this was the heart of what the Jesus experience was.

Next week, in our final column on Romans, we will seek to tell the Christ story as Paul experienced it, but against the background of this analysis of what it means to be human. It still rings for me at least with authenticity and integrity.

The question I have is about prayer. For so many years I have begun my prayers with "have mercy on me, O gracious God." Having been well taught to be guilty and unworthy, it is hard to come up with a positive prayer. At times I feel like my religious beliefs are like a bowl of scrambled eggs and I keep trying to unscramble them.

Dear Twila,

Yours is just another form of the question that emerges constantly among my readers and those who attend my lectures. Prayer focuses our theology as does nothing else. In your words, you were taught to begin your prayers with a plea for mercy. You were taught to be guilty and unworthy. That is the experience of many.

Look, however, at what these words commit you to believe. You are making an assumption that God is a powerful parent figure in the sky who elicits fear and guilt. You have defined yourself as one who has failed to satisfy what you perceive to be this God's requirements. Perhaps that is because you have been taught that God is a judge "unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hidden." Who among us would not feel guilty and afraid before an authority figure who knows us this well?

This God might be very useful if controlling behavior is religion's primary agenda. If, however, the purpose of Jesus as interpreted by the Fourth Gospel is correct that he came "that they might have life and have it abundantly," then a prayer based on an understanding of God that elicits primarily guilt and fear will never accomplish that goal.

It is not, therefore, a positive way to pray that you seek, but a whole new understanding of life and what the word "God" means in terms of that life. That then becomes something that cannot be addressed in a question and answer format. It also points to why people like you have increasing difficulty participating in the life of traditional religious institutions that are more into guilt rather than grace, fear rather than faith and judgment rather than Jesus. If prayer is the activity of your life through which God is experienced as life, love and being, then prayer is more about who you are than what you do.

The journey starts there — travel well.

How did the holy God become present in Jesus so that this gift of salvation in Jesus could be offered? That was not so clear in Paul. He gives no evidence that he had ever heard of the late-developing (9th decade) tradition introduced by Matthew that Jesus was miraculously born of a virgin, who had conceived by the Holy Spirit. Of Jesus' origins Paul says only that "he was born of a woman," like every human being is born, and that he "was born under the law" like every other Jew. The word Paul used in this reference had absolutely no connotation of "virgin" in it. Paul also appears to have no knowledge that Jesus was a miracle worker. He never mentions a miracle attributed to Jesus in the entire Pauline corpus. Miracles appear to be an 8th decade addition to the developing Jesus story introduced primarily by Mark, then copied by Matthew before being developed in more detail in both Luke and John. For Paul, Jesus was not a deity masquerading as a human being or a divi ne visitor to Earth; he was rather a human life in whom God had been experienced as present. As I mentioned earlier in this series, Paul seems to say in the first four verses of Romans that God actually incorporated Jesus into God at the time of the resurrection. Whenever Paul talks about the resurrection, he describes it as an act of God, not an act of Jesus. God raised Jesus from the dead for Paul; Jesus never rises from the dead by his own power. Paul did speak in Philippians, in a passage that I will get to soon, about God somehow emptying the divine presence into Jesus of Nazareth, but the words there do not mean preexistence as they are so often interpreted to suggest. There was, however, a God presence that was in Christ of which Paul was certain, and in that God presence he rested his claim for the salvation that he was certain Jesus came to bring. Can we translate Paul's experience of being made whole in Christ Jesus into an explanation that is appropriate to our time, when to speak about God as dwelling above the sky violates everything we have learned since the days of Galileo in the 17th century? Can we speak of God as intervening in life and history in a supernatural way without violating everything we have learned about how the universe operates since the days of Isaac Newton? Can we still speak of the original perfection of human life and its subsequent fall into sin without violating everything we have learned about human origins from the time of Charles Darwin? That is our task in this column.

We begin by turning the religious question around. What was there about Jesus that caused the people who had experienced his presence to explain it in supernatural terms? What was there about him that caused people to assert that human life alone could never have produced what it was they met in Jesus? That was what virgin birth traditions were designed to do. What was there about Jesus' life that caused them to attribute miracles to him ��� nature miracles, healing miracles, raising of the dead miracles? In the climax of the Jesus story, what was there about Jesus' life that caused them to believe that death itself, what Paul called the last enemy, was overcome by him? Paul was certain that wholeness was the gift of Christ, that in this Jesus the world that had long been separated from God was now reconciled, that in Jesus God and human life had come together and that humanity and divinity had entered one another. The eternal and the temporal had in the life of Jesus touched each other.

In seeking to understand how the disciples of Jesus tried to communicate this truth we have to look at the way the Jesus experience was described in the later gospel tradition. First, tribal boundaries were transcended. The call of Christ was to a new humanity in which tribal identity mattered not at all. We see this all over Mark's Gospel, as he has Jesus heal the daughter of a Syrophoenician Gentile woman and then raise back to life the daughter of a Gentile named Jairus. It is Mark who has Jesus feed a Jewish crowd of 5000 people with five loaves on the Jewish side of the lake and then feed a Gentile crowd of 4000 with seven loaves on the Gentile side of the lake. It is Mark who puts a Gentile soldier underneath the cross to watch Jesus draw his final breath and then to pronounce that truly God was present in this life. "Surely this man was the Son of God," he is quoted as saying. This soldier was not engaged in a 4th century Christological debate, as he is so often interpreted to be doing. He was rather describing the new God-filled humanity found in the human ability to give life away, to escape the survival-oriented reality of humanity. It was Matthew who has Jesus' final words be the divine commission to carry the meaning of Jesus, the life-giving love of God, beyond the boundaries of our tribal security by going into all the world — to those who are different, unbaptized, uncircumcised, unclean, but still not beyond the love of God as this Jesus revealed. It was Luke who suggested that the story of Jesus was not complete until it had rolled from Galilee, where it began; to Samaria, the home of those who were the objects of the deepest Jewish prejudice in the first century; to Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish world; and finally to Rome, which was then the center of the world itself.

The Jesus experience that would ultimately dominate the gospels would set aside human prejudice against Samaritans, against lepers, against women, because human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another. The Jesus of the gospels would transcend the boundaries of religion in the name of humanity, best symbolized in the words attributed to him that all religious rules are finally in the service of expanded humanity. Even the Sabbath day laws must always be set aside if they ever diminish human life.

These were the things that seemed to flow from the life of this Jesus, bearing witness to the fact that his humanity was full, complete and free. He did not need the sweet narcotic of human praise in order to be whole. He did not have to build himself up by tearing down another or even lording it over another. He embraced everyone just as they were, from the rich young ruler to the woman caught in the act of adultery. He loved them into being all that they could be.

This quality of the life of Jesus is more profoundly recorded in the story of his crucifixion than anywhere else. Jesus was betrayed and he loved his betrayer. Jesus was denied and he loved his denier. Jesus was forsaken and he loved his forsakers. Jesus was judged worthy of being condemned, mocked, persecuted and murdered and he loved those who condemned, mocked, persecuted and killed him. That is not the picture of a broken human life, but of a whole life, a complete life, one free to give life away because that one possesses life so fully.

The quintessential essence of his life comes in the portrait of his dying. Jesus is not pictured as grasping at life or seeking to extend it another minute; rather as his life is draining away, he is still portrayed as giving life and love to others. As he dies, he is pictured as speaking a word of forgiveness to the soldiers, a word of hope to the penitent and words of consolation to a grieving mother. That is a life power in him that death cannot overcome. Those who do not know how to live cling to life with a desperation born out of fear, but those who possess life are free to lay it down because death no longer has dominion over them. That is what people saw in Jesus.

These were also the things about Jesus of Nazareth that grasped at the heart of the fragile, self-denigrating Paul, the Paul who felt fragmented, who experienced a war between the law that governed his body and the law that governed his mind, the Paul who cried out in anguish, "O, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?" In and through Jesus, as Jesus had been presented to him, Paul experienced the healing presence of the love of God, a love that accepted him as he was and called him into being all that he could be. That was the meaning of salvation for Paul and since only God could bring that salvation, so Jesus must be of God. Paul opened himself to that experience and lived into it. That is why he claimed that he lived in the glorious liberty of the children of God. That is why he could write that nothing could separate him from the love of God. It was out of Paul's sense of having found wholeness, reconciliation and atonement in Jesus that he wanted to bear the Jesus message to the world. All human life, he believed, quite accurately, must find a way to be lifted beyond its survival mentality into the ability to live for another, to give life away to another. Paul found that power in Jesus.

The Christian Church lives today but for one reason: To make people aware of the love of God that accepts us as we are and then calls us to life fully and to be all that each of us can be. Then we give that gift away to all. That is what it means to say God was in Christ.

Would it not have been difficult for the gospel writers to discuss Christ in the synagogue, or had Jewish animosity towards him subsided by then?

Dear Barry,

I don't think you grasp the first century synagogue picture accurately. The Christian movement was part of the synagogue until they were expelled from it about 88 C.E. The picture most of us have about that time in history comes from Paul, who visited synagogues located in the Gentile Mediterranean world to which he came to do his missionary work. Most of Paul's converts were not the Jews of the synagogue but the Gentiles attracted to Paul's message, which seemed to offer them Judaism without the ritual acts of circumcision and the cultic acts of Kosher diet and Sabbath day observance. Please recall that Jesus was a Jew who regularly participated in synagogue life as were his disciples, Paul, Mary Magdalene and the community of believers who stand behind the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. The real negativity toward the Jews on the part of the disciples of Jesus did not begin to grow until the Jewish/Roman war from 66-73 C.E. The excessive theological claims for Jesus we re also not developed until a much later time. For example, Matthew portrays him as a new Moses, Luke as a new Elijah. The synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) all reflect life in the synagogue. I think John does too, but that takes more time to develop than I have in a question and answer format.

These words were, however, implanted vividly in my mind as I recently completed a monumental study of western history, by the noted historian Jay Winik, entitled The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World. This 1000-page book concentrates on a narrow slice of history, the 12 years between 1788 and 1800, showing the deep interconnections that linked the Russia of Catherine the Great, the United States of George Washington and everything in between. As every historian knows, the cataclysmic event in the western world that occurred during those years was the French Revolution, which turned from grievance to revolt and revolution, to a killing and vindictive anarchy and finally to the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, the 5' 4" military leader. Order was finally imposed on French chaos, but at the price of a dictatorship and one of the bloodiest wars in European history.

Winik's book was a frightening one to read for two reasons. First, it made me newly aware of how evil human beings can be. More than 50,000 French people, including Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette, were decapitated at the guillotine as violence engulfed the nation. Before that violence had run its course, many of the leaders of the Revolution itself, including one of its chief architects, Robespierre, had themselves been executed. Second, it made me even more apprehensive as I watch the rising tide of anger in American politics and the deliberate attempt by the minority party to render our government inoperative, which causes me to wonder if we are spiraling out of control with a similar conflagration on our horizon. As this anger grows more intense and we even hear talk of "secession" by established political leaders, one has to wonder whether there is any public policy that can now effectively cauterize the pain in order to create a society with less greed a nd exploitation on one side, while still serving to build a more effective safety net for those at the bottom of America's social structure that might usher in a new era of progress, opportunity and tranquility on the other. As acrimony rises the jury is still out, I believe, on the issue of clarifying our nation's destiny and its future.

These are the signs that cause me to see a comparison between our day and the years leading up to the French Revolution. The United States in the 1990s went through a decade of enormous prosperity. More wealth was created in that decade alone than in all the history of American independence from 1776 to 1989 put together. In this single decade, massive fortunes were made, primarily in the field of technology. The world's richest man, Microsoft's Bill Gates, acquired most of his wealth in that decade alone. Almost every executive and many of the workers at Microsoft became millionaires during those ten years. Microsoft was not alone. Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Oracle and Intel were all companies born in the tech explosion of the final years of the 20th century. The inevitable tech collapse came as that decade ended and the 21st century began, but even a stock value correction of 40% on the NASDAQ still left the brilliant entrepreneurs behind thes e innovative companies with wealth beyond most people's imagining. They lived the American dream that new ideas and hard work can and will be rewarded with enormous profits. While this massive increase of wealth was going on publicly, however, the election of the pro-business, Newt Gingrich-led "Contract with America" Congress in 1994 began the task of deregulation of both business and banking rules, making it possible for this creation of wealth to be unencumbered by any sense of public responsibility. These weakened regulatory laws laid the groundwork for what we now call "the dismal decade" (2000-2010). But those years were not dismal for everyone. Statistics now reveal that while the average household in the United States making less than $100,000 a year saw their wages remain relatively stationary during this decade, the cost of health care and education, both major items in the middle class budget, skyrocketed. At the same time, however, the super-rich saw their st andard of living rise to a point that they would be the envy of most of the kings in European history. If this trend was not bad enough, in 2002 George W. Bush was elected President with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and they proceeded at once to respond to the needs of the constituencies they served. While regulations continued to be weakened on how business was done, a massive tax-cutting bill was passed by the Congress and signed into law by the President that gave 90% of the tax benefit to the wealthiest 10% of our population. All the opposition could accomplish was to add a sunset clause to the bill. These tax cuts were to expire at the end of 2010 unless renewed by the Congress. The argument was made that by taking the regulations off business and stimulating the economy with these tax cuts, business would create more wealth, allowing these tax cuts to pay for themselves in the expanding economy that would inevitably result. It was the old "tr ickle down" theory of economics at work yet again. Expanded wealth does indeed trickle down, but usually no farther than from John D. Rockefeller to Nelson Rockefeller. Adding pressure to America's financial stability during this time, this nation entered into two wars, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, both enthusiastically endorsed by the oil cartels. Not one cent of the cost of these wars was ever reflected in the national budget. The major result of these wars was a massive public debt, while the citizens of America's middle class experienced the shock of the doubling, even tripling, of the price of gasoline at the pump, another painful and serious blow to their standard of living.

Next, the now virtually unregulated banks, together with mortgage companies like Countrywide Finance, Washington Mutual, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, began to offer sub-prime financing on houses, creating in the process a housing inflation never before known. The strapped middle class leaped for these bargains. No money down and sub-prime mortgages designed to lower the total cost of the house became the norm. This practice was predicated on the dream that housing values would continue to rise and that these new owners could, whenever they chose, sell their homes at a significant profit, which in effect meant that housing was thought suddenly to have become free. It was too good to be true, and it was! Banks, lending agencies and mortgage companies then began to sell these high-risk mortgages to speculator banks around the world. The quality of those loans was hardly ever discussed. Incentives in the form of bonuses drove bank executives to stretch every dollar far beyon d its worth. Middle class people were seduced into feeling that they were finally sharing in this booming affluence.

Then came the crash in the last year of the Bush administration, as the chickens came home to roost. Countrywide Finance went into bankruptcy and was gobbled up by Bank of America. Washington Mutual went into bankruptcy and was absorbed by JPMorgan Chase. Lehman Brothers went out of business and Barclay's Bank, like a vulture, swept in to take over the assets of this once-proud symbol of American capitalism. Bear Stearns collapsed and its few remaining assets were swallowed whole, once again by JPMorgan Chase, for $2 a share. The whole financial world shuddered and governments rushed to bail the economy out with massive infusions of wealth from the average taxpayers of the world. Houses went into foreclosure by the hundreds of thousands, but no one rushed to rescue these middle class people. Indeed, they were castigated for being financially foolish. Businesses shed jobs by the millions in an effort to reclaim profitability, so unemployment rose to over 10%. None of the bonus money that had been paid to those who fueled the collapse was able to be reclaimed, but those who were left holding mortgages were broken financially — and when their jobs disappeared, they lost not only their income but their health coverage. The anger of the masses now became the anger of the bottom 90% of the American population.

When we learned of the bonuses paid out to those who developed this scheme, the anger became palpable. When the banks, which had to be saved with massive amounts of taxpayer money, recovered their liquidity and responded not by making loans to small businesses and individuals that might have saved both jobs and mortgages, but by once again proposing huge bonuses for their executives, the anger erupted. When health care reform, designed to protect the poor and the middle class, was stalled in the Senate by a massive propaganda campaign funded by the health care lobbies, pharmaceutical lobbies and right-wing political groups, leaving millions of Americans vulnerable while unemployment refused to begin to trend lower, the anger became extensive. To add insult to injury, skillful right-wing political propagandists, who are in the employ of the wealthiest American businesses, sought to turn this anger on the government, creating the "Tea Party" movement, calling any attempt to aid those who had lost homes, health care and jobs "socialist." In the now deeply vulnerable masses of America, the rising anxiety lifted hostility to audible decibels. This was when America began to feel to me like France before the French Revolution. "Let them eat cake!" is what many Americans now hear from the economic powers that be.

Am I an alarmist? I hope so! I am, however, also a student of history, and I see danger ahead. As biblical apocalypsists like to say, "those who have ears to hear, let them hear!"

I really feel the Church should stop referring to church services as "worship services." Could we not more meaningfully call them "celebration services?" Marcus Borg, when in Peterborough recently, played the part of God in a very humorous way and mimicked him as only Borg could do with his Swedish wit: "Oh that feels so good to be worshiped that way, as just last week some others attempted worship and it was not very good and I felt terrible — please keep it up as I need you to be on your knees before me, etc., etc., etc." If we agree worship is usually meant for idols, why do we keep using it in the mainline churches? To me the life of Jesus and through him, God, the ground of all Being, should be celebrated every day. It changes the whole focus, in my humble opinion.

Dear George,

Words do matter and you have put your finger on a real issue. Does God need our worship? Does God relish our praises? Our acts of self-deprecation? Can God simply not wait until the next person tells God, "How Great Thou Art?" Marcus Borg is correct. Worship meets human needs, not divine needs.

Behind our use of words there is always the context in which these words were born and in which they are and will be interpreted. This means that when the context changes, the words will inevitably become detached from the reality of their original meaning. That is what has happened to the language of faith.

A God who is defined as an external being, supernatural in power, who hands out rewards and punishment according to human deserving, is a rather primitive, childlike deity. This is nonetheless the definition underlying most forms of liturgical worship. No change will occur until this definition is raised to consciousness and dealt with. Celebration, as a substitute for the word worship, becomes no better if it is this same definition of God that is being celebrated.

If worship is to have meaning, it will be found in asserting the ultimate worth of life, love and being that are to me the primary way in which human beings experience God. If celebration is to be used, it needs to refer to the celebration of life, love and being through which people experience the Holy.

I have been twice to your church in Peterborough, George, and I think your congregation and your outstanding minister understand this better than most.

Note: I am indebted to Butch Hancock, a musician with a group called "The Flatlanders," for this bit of wisdom from West Texas:

"Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things:
One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell.
The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love."

The Paul of the middle years of his career was thoughtful, systematic and good at problem solving. In this phase of his life, he penned his letters to the Corinthians and his masterpiece, his epistle to the Romans. In the Corinthian letters, he was majestic in spelling out the meaning of love: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" and also in that epistle he wrote the fullest understanding of Jesus' resurrection that we possess. In Romans he comes as close as he ever would to systematizing the meaning of Christ in beautiful words that ring across the ages like "Nothing can separate me from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus."

The years rolled on for Paul, however, as they do for all of us and he grew mellow. He was no longer convinced that Jesus would come again in his lifetime, so he settled into long range plans and even began to contemplate his own death. In this phase of his life, which is true for most of us, he lived more in the "now" and less in the future and so relationships grew in importance for him. It was at this stage of his life that he wrote the two epistles that we consider today, Philemon and Philippians, both of which reflect the more contemplative Paul. With the completion of our consideration of Philemon and Philippians, we will have probed the seven epistles about which there is no debate as to their being the authentic work of Paul. Next we will look at those epistles that have much Pauline substance, but increasingly scholars suggest they are "pseudo-Paul," that is,written in Paul's name but not by Paul himself. They are II Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians. There are other epistles that bear the name of Paul, namely I and II Timothy and Titus, that are in a third category. Universally they are regarded as not authentic and they are actually dated later than some of the gospels, so we will look at them later. If we are trying to study the New Testament in the time sequence in which its various books are written, we will have to place Mark and perhaps Matthew ahead of these "Pastoral Epistles." For now, however, we focus on Philemon and Philippians, the epistles of the elder Paul. Both are written, according to majority opinion but certainly not the unanimous opinion of the reputable scholars, while he was imprisoned in Rome only a couple of years before his martyrdom.

Philemon is fascinating in that one wonders why it was preserved at all, and why it was placed in the collection of Paul's letters that circulated among the churches before the first gospel was written. It is so different in essential ways from every other epistle. Philemon is a personal letter of his, less than one page in length. It is addressed to an individual, not to the church community. It has to do with a request made by Paul to have a runaway slave named Onesimus, who has become Paul's valued companion and primary caregiver, be set free so he can once again be in Paul's service. Paul makes this request even as Onesimus is being returned to his master because, in the culture of that day, it was the right thing to do. Paul hopes that by obeying the law, his request to allow Onesimus to come back to him will be granted. Paul tells his friend Philemon, to whom he writes this letter, of Onesimus' conversion and of his indispensable faithfulness in Paul's service. Paul wants Onesimus pardoned so that he can freely come back to be Paul's assistant. It is hardly the kind of letter that would rank inclusion in a group of epistles written to various churches that also included the carefully reasoned argument of the Epistle to the Romans. Yet here it is.

John Knox, a top-tier 20th century Pauline scholar, offers a fascinating explanation as to why it was included. Basing his argument on an epistle written by one of the church "fathers," Ignatius, in the early years of the second century that indicates that a man named Onesimus had become the Bishop of Ephesus after Paul's death, Knox suggests that this was the same Onesimus about whom Paul was concerned in the Epistle to Philemon. The reason it might have been added to this collection of Paul's letters, says Knox, is that it contained significant material that was important to the church in Ephesus, which scholars now believe was to have been the destination of this first collection of Paul's epistles. It is an interesting speculation and worthy of being passed on, so long as it is clear that it is a speculation. There seems to be no other plausible argument as to why this private and very short letter became treasured church property.

When we move on to Philippians, we come to the most affectionate letter Paul ever wrote and also to the picture of a Paul who knows that his life is nearing its end. The Philippian congregation clearly cares for Paul emotionally and Paul clearly cares for them. He writes them as "saints" for whom he gives thanks "upon every remembrance" of them. Philippi was the first city in Europe that Paul had visited and where his first European church had been planted. The Philippians had sent him gifts in prison and they were clearly worried about both his safety and his personal well being. Paul's agenda in this letter is to thank them and comfort them about his situation. He fears he may never see them again. He promises to send Timothy to assure them of his well being. He fills the epistle with words of joy, hope and consolation. He no longer expects the return of Christ in his lifetime and so he wrestles with his own death, which he assumes to be imminent. He wonders out l oud whether it is better to depart this life to be with Christ or to persevere for the sake of his churches. He suggests that when one stands at last in the presence of Christ, this earthly life will be seen as being of no great value. "To live is Christ, to die is gain" is his conclusion. There is a deep-seated contentment in Paul that finds expression in this epistle. "I have learned," he says, "to be content in whatever state I find myself." I can do all things, he assures his readers, through Christ who strengthens me. In his conclusion, he does not go into a long ethical treatise as he does in so many of his earlier epistles, where he moves from spelling out his understanding of Christ to drawing from that the implications for those who seek to live out the Christ life. In Philippians, his ethical teaching is one verse (4:8) "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excel lence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

The most memorable passage in Philippians and one of the most mysterious and oft-quoted of all Paul's work is found in 2:5-11. It is called the "self-emptying" passage. My sense is that in these words there is a powerful affirmation that for Paul, all that we mean by God has been experienced in Christ, but when these words were translated into English, they reflected the ancient battles in which the church sought to determine how it was that Jesus could have been both human and divine. I do not think that the Jewish Paul ever thought in those categories. The way it is read today is that Christ did not grasp after the divinity that was his, but rather emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and he was, therefore, exalted by God to the status for which he was qualified. So Paul then draws his conclusion by stating that "At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow." Many scholars believe that Paul is quoting in these "self-emptying" verses an early Christian hymn. T hat may be so but I believe it also reflects Paul's vision of Jesus as "The New Adam." The first Adam did grasp after the dignity of God. The serpent's temptation in the Garden of Eden story was that if Adam would but eat the forbidden fruit, "you will be like God." The people in the Philippi church had tensions in their lives over how to worship, what to believe and how to act. Each side in each debate claimed superiority. Paul urges them to let the mind of Christ be their mind. Then he explained that Christ did not grasp after a superior status but emptied himself. It was in the fullness of his humanity that he found the freedom to give his life to others and that was how God was seen in him.

The ultimate purpose of human life is to love the face of hatred, to forgive the face of pain, to live in the face of death. In doing those things one must be free of the need of self exaltation. That is what it means to reveal the divine in the human. It was this concept that convinced Paul that the God presence has been experienced in Jesus. The pathway into divinity is through humanity. The pathway into eternity is through time. This is the closing theme in what we now believe was the final authentic letter of the Apostle Paul.

Would not the apparently regular meetings of the followers of the Way have held the major part of the oral tradition? It seems from the first chapters of Acts that they were certainly not in the synagogue (e.g. Acts 5:13), even if the gospel writers were anxious enough to keep the Jewish tradition firmly under girding the Jesus stories.

Dear Hilda,

The book of Acts is probably the least trustworthy source one can use to establish first century facts. It was probably not written before 95 C.E. and has a pro-Roman, anti-Jewish bias. The oral tradition was recalled and remembered in the synagogue where the disciples were actively engaged until excommunicated around the year 88 C.E. By the time the first gospel (Mark) was written, the Hebrew Scriptures had been wrapped around Jesus so tightly that he was proclaimed to be their fulfillment.

The tension Paul had with the people at the synagogue occurred in the Diaspora, the Jewish communities around the Gentile world. For the most part, however, the "Followers of the Way," as the disciples of Jesus were called, were members of the synagogue into a third generation.