Proper 4 A

“Be doers of the word,” we read in James, “and not merely hearers.” That well-known verse from James summarises what we get here in Matthew at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

I spent last summer writing a course called “Introduction to Christianity as a way of life”. It ran for two months in the autumn. If I had the energy, I would lay it on again this year, but there is just too much going on right now. I think I will recruit someone else to run it.

The course was motivated not just because of my growing conviction that Christianity is far more than a set of beliefs. The motivation also came from a concrete experience early in my ministry. Here’s the story: Mike Sugano and his wife became members of the first church I served, in Chicago. They’d come to St James as many other young adults had, as something like refugees from the narrowness of an otherwise thriving, large evangelical church, looking for something more solid to bite on and for more social action. Mike had literally been converted on a streetcorner. When he and his wife divorced, he naturally found much of his emotional support in his family and in the Chicago Japanese community—Mike worked for a family firm, and he was the only Christian there. So it was no surprise to me when he started attending the Chicago Buddhist temple. Gyomay Kubose, along with his son a friend of mine, was the founder of this community and the leader there.

It was good for Mike to return to his roots. What bothered me was something he said when he came to me one day, and, sitting in my office, explained to me how important this was and what it meant to him. Christianity, he said, was a way of believing, while Buddhism was a way of life. I winced. That wasn't the way it was supposed to be. But that, by and large, was the way it was. And I recognised this as coming from Kubose, too, as Kubose had his arguments with Buddhists who practised a merely cultural form of Buddhism, attending temple and reciting sutras, the kind of religious practice Jesus is complaining about here in those who attempt to ingratiate themselves by crying “Lord! Lord!” Buddhism needs to be a personal, disciplined way of life, Kubose would say, and that is what he taught. But I would argue the same for Christianity.

I could see very clearly what Mike meant. The problem is spelled out right here in this Sunday’s gospel reading, Matthew 7.21-29. Mike had come to us from a Christian community in which “belief” was all important, and in which backsliding seemed to be the greatest sin (one did not dare to doubt these beliefs, therefore). And he had come into a community whose young pastor hadn’t quite got his bearings yet, and a mainline Presbyterian church that was itself only beginning to discover its convictions and its commitment to act on them. We were learning together. In general, I thought, Mike was right about Christianity. Christianity was pretty much being practiced as a set of things to believe in. If you accepted them, you were in. If not, you were out. Liberals, to the great annoyance of the evangelicals, bonded together in the exhilarating freedom of doubt, but often without the further pursuit of taking the next step toward understanding, and without the concomitant commitment to growing in discipleship, or action. The mainline church did not easily find the strength to rise from the miasmal swamp of rummage sales and pot-luck suppers and meetings dominated by concern for membership decline. In any case, belief can’t just be faith seeking understanding, even if, against the odds, it should get that far. Faith needs to grow in understanding, but it also needs fulfillment in action, in discipleship, as a way of life, or it is no faith at all. This option just wasn’t being made available to people, generally, in American mainline Christianity. The practice of Christianity actually seemed to mitigate against what it had to offer people. Sadly, Mike was largely correct. I couldn’t argue against him. The Christianity he knew was a way of belief, not a way of life.

So I was determined from that moment on to explore this whole business of Christianity as the way of life that was itself the foundation of what we professed as belief. The heart of Christianity, for me, is an act, not a set of words. It is that act explicated in the biblical idea of pouring out the self for others (or for God, which is the same thing), which is a new way of life different from a life that is ego-dominated and clings for its security to the false god Mammon. This new way of life is symbolised most perspicuously by the cross. It is an act that demands an Exodus-like departure from social/political structures that are inauthentic, oppressive or crippling, and often requires actual re-location. It is an act that responds to being “called out”. The “ekklesia” therefore (the assembly of those who have been called out) is the community that acts, and the new life in Christ we discover in the way of the cross involves a discovery of new, deeper identity more original than before, an identity formation that is practised as an experience of individuation, but an identity that is fundamentally social. The way of the cross leads to that community of three crosses that expresses the crucifixion not as death in isolation but as life in community, and richly so, in contrast to those who did a runner. The end of the process, “salvation”, is no other worldly affair, nor is it an individual affair. The idea of taking Jesus Christ as one’s personal saviour mocks the invitation to become fundamentally and inextricably engaged with the world around us. Salvation is life together. The cross, therefore, becomes a way of life, resurrection, a re-defining of life and death. The Christian life includes this readiness to empty oneself, to “die”, as it were, without fear of letting go. Those who seek to save their lives will lose them, Jesus says. Ordinary piety never seems to grasp this, and prefers to focus on the promise that, if we believe as we are told, death doesn’t really happen. It is amazing how what goes contrary to Christianity’s fundamental message can become its central orthodoxy.

Too many churches put the emphasis on believing in the symbols and the metaphors on a literal level, symbols and metaphors that are meant to release the Christian from an old way of life and propel us into the way of the cross. An awful lot of Christian orthodoxy still clings to the old securities, too anxious to let go of the ego. Our common human fears are too strong to allow us to respond to the invitation Jesus is giving to live as he lived and do what he did, without fear of death. Churches that fear to proclaim the gospel in this way are churches that have built their houses on sand. They comfort us by saying we don’t have to fear death because death, for Christians, isn’t real. But comfort is cruel if it is a lie. The story of death overcome in scripture is the story of life that lives on a stronger foundation than the anxiety of its on non-being.

On judgement day (to use a compelling poetic image central to biblical literature), Jesus will say he doesn’t know those who attempt to ingratiate themselves to him by calling out “Lord! Lord!” “Knowing” in biblical languages is no mere intellectual affair of the mind. It is an engagement of the whole person, as in the physical act of love making. The late OT scholar Bob Boling used to say it was the Hebrew Hokey Pokey: you put your whole self in. The threat of rejection may seem cruel, until we realize tht this is simply telling, in story form, the condition that exists when the nominal Christian has never truly known Jesus through the life experience of doing, through discipleship, through taking this leap beyond the boundaries of ordinary securities to live without fear engaged with the prayers of the world around you. That’s what it means to know Jesus. And if you don’t know Jesus, well, you don’t know Jesus. All the classic spiritual disciplines are here to introduce us, but for some reason we just haven’t found it important to practise them.

The Sermon on the Mount concludes with the observation that Jesus teaches with authority, not as the scribes. The Greek word for authority, "exousia", is usually translated as "power". It is related to the word for "being", and means power or authority in terms of the freedom to do or create according to one's own autonomous being. The plural form, "powers", relates to governmental authority. The authority of Jesus as the power to act is thus distinguished from the authority of the scribes, whose role is to preserve every jot and tittle of what has been received from the past. What the scribes offer is a kind of paint-by-the-numbers form of discipleship, in which the best disciples are those who do not paint outside the lines. Such mind-numbing pedagogy abhors the kind of self-assurance that can say, "You have heard it said. . . . but I say unto you".

By contrast, Jesus teaches by inviting his disciples to learn through doing, and he promises that they will do even greater things than he does. What disciples do is critical, not what they repeat or what they believe of what has been received. They will be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.

Proper 3 A

Our reading for this Sunday concludes a section of the Sermon on the Mount focussing on hypocrisy which needs a brief overview in order to open up the “not to worry” business at the end of chapter 6. The section begins with a critique of the hypocritical giving that is more motivated by concern for the reputation of the giver than it is by any concern for those in need. Giving should be done in total secrecy: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” J. J. Hunsecker, the corrupt, duplicitous gossip columnist played by Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success, has an endearingly cynical variation on this: “My right hand hasn't seen my left hand in thirty years.”

Prayer can be equally hypocritical, done for show as the Gentiles do, heaping up phrases that, however poetic and artfully crafted, are empty. The model of prayer given here is not just prayer that is private, but prayer that seeks, primarily, to transform the life of the one praying, as opposed to seeking to manipulate the will of the deity.

Instruction on fasting follows a similar concern about hypocrisy. Fasting should not be done as a public display. Those who do fast in this way have already received their reward, Jesus says. I presume this means they have achieved the kind of recognition they have desired by drawing attention to themselves in a way that builds a public reputation. Fasting in secret ensures that the relationship will be between the one who fasts and God alone. The “reward” that comes from the Father then is that close relationship itself that makes possible the transformed heart, the proper intention of fasting, and a reward similar to the fruit of prayer in the will of God being done in the faithful disciple.

The next bit, concerning the storing up of earthly treasure, extends this exploration of hypocrisy to our relationship with material things and exposes the root of hypocrisy in the anxiety for the security of the self. The common wisdom is that the self will be made secure by the accumulation of things. Along with prayers and fasting that focus on the self, we engage in shopping therapy. The need to prevail that drives our game-theory economy and brings super bonuses to City executives reveals the raw spiritual nerve of hypocrisy. The focus on the self, the need to succeed and dominate one’s world, the fear of failure, the fear of death, all this interprets the life that finds its security in building up worldly treasure.

So when we come to this Sunday’s gospel reading, Matthew 6.25-34, we see the observation that one cannot serve two masters, God and Mammon, in the light of this warning against hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is defined as existential anxiety dressed in the clothing of the classic spiritual disciples. It won’t wash, though it probably defines the way an awful lot of Christians practise their faith. You can’t pursue a life of faith with the goal of security for the self. That’s what the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount teaches.

Our reading is a summary of the concerns that have come before. Hypocrisy as a form of human behaviour is like irony in literature—saying or doing one thing and meaning another. Here in this Sunday’s reading the story of hypocrisy hints at an undercurrent of social criticism. That Solomon in all this glory was not clothed as magnificently as the lilies of the field is no simple comparison between manufactured and natural beauty. This is what we know about Solomon:

1 Kings 4.22: Solomon’s provision for one day was thirty cors of choice flour, and sixty cors of meal, ten fat oxen, and twenty pasture-fed cattle, one hundred sheep, besides deer, gazelles, roebucks and fatted fowl.

How about that for a cure of existential anxiety? And at what human cost did Solomon live in such luxury? Read on:

1 Kings 9.15: This is the account of the forced labour that King Solomon conscripted to build the House of the Lord . . . . and whatever [he] desired to build, in Jerusalem, in Lebanon and in all the land of his dominion. All the people who were left of the Ammorites, the Hitites, the Perissites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, who were not of the people of Israel—their descendeants who were left in the land, whom Israel were unable to destroy completely—these Solomon conscripted for slave labour and so they are to this day.

So “Solomon in all his glory” is no ordinary citation of your standard manufactured, as opposed to natural beauty. Solomon comes laden with all the prophetic critique of his reign implied in the Deuteronomic history of 1 Kings.

Moreover, this Sermon on the Mount is revisionist wisdom literature, still following here, I think, the spirit of “You have heard it said to those of ancient times . . . . But I say to you. . . ” Solomon was noted for his wisdom as well as his wealth (1 Kings 4.29: “God gave Solomon very great wisdom . . ..so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed all the wisdom of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt”). IN contrast to the observations of natural history and human behaviour, the kind of lore that was the substance of aristocratic education throughout the ancient Near East, the wisdom of Jesus will not necessarily enable you to rule or even get a job. What Jesus offers is something far more fundamental: the wisdom of a godly life. In contrast, the entire cultural foundation of Solomon’s world, and ours, looks like hypocrisy.

The Gentiles, says Jesus, seek the kind of wisdom that enables them to pile up earthly treasure, food, drink, clothing, things, in the manner of Solomon. This only leads to further anxiety, and, ultimately, to the kind of defeat and exile described in the Deuteronomic history as it unfolds from the story of Solomon to the end of 2 Kings.

The true voice of wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount is defined by the voices of those who are celebrated in the Beatitudes that set the foundation of the Sermon on the Mount. In the Beatitudes, it is the meek who will inherit the earth (this verse is actually paired with the teaching here on possessions in the chiastic structure of the Sermon on the Mount). This verse of the Beatitudes is quoting Psalm 37.11, “The meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace” where the word for “meek” in Hebrew is “anawim”, the poor, the weak, the afflicted—the word Jesus would have used in in the Beatitudes in its Aramaic form. Those who will inherit the kingdom are the “poor in spirit”, more properly those who are “crushed” in spirit, those who are forced to beg—the opposite of the Solomons of this world who inhabit lists like the Fortune 500.

Probably the most important development of this line of thinking has been in Korean Minjung theology that emerged in South Korea in the 1970s, and, according to its authors, is "a development of the political hermeneutics of the Gospel in terms of the Korean reality," not easily exported as its contextualisation arises from specific Korean experiences of suffering. But a Korean hymn we will be singing this Sunday opens up its story for the ordinary British Christian:

Look and learn from the birds of the air,
Flying high above worry and fear;
Neither sowing nor harvesting seed,
Yet they're given whatever they need.
If the God of earth and heaven cares for birds such as this,
Won't he care much more for you when you put your trust in him?

Look and learn from the flowers of the field,
Bringing beauty and colour to life;
Neither sewing nor tailoring cloth,
Yet they're dressed in the finest attire.
If the God of earth and heaven
Cares for flowers as much as this,
Won't he care much more for you when you put your trust in Him?

What God wants should be our will;
Where God calls should be our goal.
When we seek the kingdom first,
All we've lost is ours again.
Let's be done with anxious thoughts,
Set aside tomorrow's cares,
Live each day that God provides putting all your trust in him.

Words: Nah Young Soo.

Another lovely song, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God” can lead disastrously in the wrong direction. Like the anthems of a lot of contemporary piety, it seems to encourage the practice of praying for a wish list and a model of faith that is geared to health and wealth. Keep in mind what happens if we reverse the terms of the hymn. If we seek first “all these things”—will the kingdom of God be added unto us? What exactly is our attitude to “all these things” to be? The key is that seeking first the kingdom of God creates a proper understanding of what actually is needed in a life that is not centred on the self and its security, but on God.

Trinity A

When I was a school governor in Birmingham I went with the kids on a tour of the Central Mosque. Our guide made it clear that Moslems didn’t believe in three gods, but one. I would imagine that the Trinity does look very odd from the outside. Sometimes it looks odd from inside Christianity as well. I have a Lego image of the Trinity ordered from The Brick Testament (http://www.thebricktestament.com/), three plastic figures legoed onto a plastic stand: an old white-bearded man in a robe, a young bearded man and a third figure looking like Casper the ghost. I’ve never been able to figure out if The Brick Testament takes this seriously or thinks it is a joke.

There are all sorts of ways to think about the Trinity and I have probably preached on them all over the years. What interests me at the moment as Trinity Sunday looms on the horizon is the immanence of God in what Paul (2 Corinthians 13.14) calls the fellowship (koinonia) of the Holy Spirit.

The third person of the Trinity is not an objective thing capable of representation in Lego. It is a dimension of the faithful community as subject in its experience of God’s presence. It is the godliness of the faithful community—the community that proclaims its devotion in service as well as hymn singing. Its prayers are never separated from its compassion for the broken and excluded. Its common life is shaped by God’s presence in its faithfulness.

Though this concept of God’s presence in the faithful community is a Christian concept, it is deeply embedded in the Jewish idea of God “tenting” with the people of God, God living in the midst of the sojourning community as shekinah (שכינה). The presence is a dynamic presence. Without getting gnostic about it, God always feels a bit out of place in the world, as do those faithful disciples who are in the world but not, as the Gospel of John says, of the world. The fellowship of the Holy Spirit is a dynamic fellowship that finds its proper location in the world, engaged in specific locations and concrete historical moments as a matter of vocation, but being there in ways that drive toward re-location and new moments of history.

I was visiting a friend here in Wales and wanted to move from where I was sitting, and he used this quaint Welsh expression: "Stay where you're to!" The church is dead if it stays where it is to. It's whole reason for being where it is in the world, as a matter of vocation, is to move on. The model is Exodus and Exile, personal, social, political and institutional transformation. The church dedicated to preserving its past in formaldehyde is not Trinitarian.

Then there is the second person of the Trinity. This is “the Son”—but it is not simply “Jesus”, however much we want to identify the Son with the historical figure of Jesus. The mystery of the second person of the Trinity interprets all discipleship that embodies the life of Christ as its own. Trinitarian theology thus reminds us of the agenda of the biblical Jesus in calling his disciples to do what he did in mediating God to the world. “As the Father sent me,” he says in the Gospel of John, “I send you.” In John we are born again as sons and daughters of God (John 1.10-12). In Mark and in Paul we are witnesses to the resurrection through our own death and rebirth in conversion. The agenda of discipleship is to embody Christ in daily life and thus embody God just as the Messiah does. The mystery of the incarnation, at the end of the day, is the mystery of our own conversion. In faith, we come off our perches as servants and lovers down into an ordinary world that is by turns exhilarating and painful. We put flesh on the Word in our discipleship. The incarnation isn’t just about Christmas. It’s about us, and it’s about every day in the real world.

So the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, lived out in discipleship, is, communally, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. God permeates human experience, wherever we let God in, in a process that transforms people and communities in ways that transform the world. Maybe that’s the difference between Christianity and Islam. I don’t know.

The love of God is that funny kind of love that is full of desire but is nevertheless not possessive or demanding. It is self-emptying. Christ “emptied himself” (kenosis, Philippians 2.7). It’s like wine being poured out at the Eucharistic feast, like costly perfume being poured out by the woman on Jesus himself (Mark 14.3), like the suffering servant who pours himself out to be numbered among the transgressors (Isaiah 53.12). The dynamic of the love of God is the dynamic of movement, of sending, the vocation of the Son kneeling in prayer in Gethsemane and the vocation of the community in the time of Wilberforce and in the time of Oscar Romero. What shall we do? Where will we stand? The idea of the Trinity is thus tied up with the vocation of the Christian to mediate and to embody the reconciling, justice-creating presence of God in the world.

The Trinitarian community recognizes God’s utter transcendence insofar as it is a community that lives unsettled, in hope. “You made us for yourself,” Augustine prayed, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This prayer isn’t about the stress of life finding peace at last in death. Theologian Joe Sittler once said “Heaven is a metaphor for life with God”, and that life is a fellowship we strive toward here and now in the path of discipleship, isn’t it? As my wife likes to say, “Don’t give until it hurts; give until it feels good.” We know when we have arrived even if we know we can’t stay there long. The triangular diagram o f the Trinity illustrates this fundamental energy of tension and propulsion between transcendence and immanence, like the traffic of angels on Jacob’s ladder.

The Trinity is critical for Christian orthodoxy because it is critical for Christian orthopraxis, discipleship. We are commissioned in the name of the Trinity in baptism to this way of life, a way of life that makes the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit real in the world. Notice, for instance, that prior to the blessing Paul gives he is pressing home the way Christians ought to be living. “Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith”, he says (2 Corinthians 13.5).

A final note on the lesson from Matthew for this Sunday: I don’t think the Trinitarian formula for baptism is original with Matthew. For one thing, t seems too early for the community to be baptising in the name of the Trinity as shorthand for orthodox Christian community. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, baptism itself just isn’t an important motif in Matthew, as it had been in Mark, for instance. If you take this bit out as something that had been added later, what you get is much more naturally a conclusion for a gospel that has been about instruction. Make disciples, passing on all I have taught you. Nevertheless, the immanence of God is present in human life in the assurance that, as we witness to continuing generation, God as Emmanuel is with us.

Pentecost A

In John 20 Jesus breathes the gift of abundant life into his disciples as God imparted life into Adam—in Greek this is a pun, since “breath” and “spirit” are the same word. Jesus is giving them the gift of his own life, which they will live as they are sent even as the Father has sent Jesus.

But all this happens on the eve of Easter itself, as if, for John, Easter resurrection and Pentecost commissioning were the same thing. Luke puts the gift of the spirit on the Jewish Holiday of Pentecost (Shavu’ot, the Feast of Weeks, 50 days after Passover). Why? Perhaps it was to legitimate within the Jewish community what the Book of Acts shows to be essentially a Gentile phenomenon. In any case, the gift of the Spirit in Luke/Acts, with glossolalia and so on, is very different from the gift of the "Paraclete" in John, the continuing presence of Christ in the life of faithful discipleship--very different from the kind of charismatic experience we get in Luke.

Acts is largely a hagiographic account of the growth of the church through the Gentile community, a story in which the experience of charismatic phenomena plays a major role. Looking back through Luke’s gospel with a concordance in hand, readers can see that Luke inserts “spirit” wherever he can, to give the sense that the Jesus movement was spirit-driven from the start.

It has always seemed to me that the dominance of charismatic experience in Acts hints that such experience was already a feature of the Gentile community before Christianity arrived. My grandfather’s cousin Arthur Hays taught church history at McCormick Theological Seminary. I heard he used to open every semester’s lectures with the observation that “Christianity never entered an empty world.” There has always been a pre-existing culture in which the faith would exfoliate in new and unexpected ways. The history of Christianity’s rich diversity is keyed to such cultural transformation. If anyone has ever written anything about charismatic experience present in the pre-Christian-Gentile community I haven’t seen it. It was there in the temple oracles and surely present in some of the new religious movements sweeping through the Near East in those days.

Paul, who himself became a champion of Gentile Christianity, seems to have had personal experience of charismatic phenomena early in his career, certainly on the road to Damascus. Nevertheless, the Corinthian letters show him struggling to channel the early church’s enthusiasm in a constructive direction. The dominance of spiritual phenomena in the life of the community threatened to turn a young Christianity into a cult of personal ecstatic experience. Paul mad it clear that the spirit brings us together in community, as the body of Christ.

I have always thought Luke places the birth of charismatic experience at the Jewish Pentecost festival because he wants to align the Gentile experience with Jewish sources. One of these sources would be the Pentecost holiday itself, which celebrated the gift of Torah to Moses on Mt Sinai with much the same “Pentecostal” enthusiasm we get in later Christianity. We haven’t yet understood “Torah” if we merely translate it as “Law”. Torah came as the gift of a way of life that was new and liberating and overwhelmingly an experience of grace. Just look at the enthusiastic abandon of contemporary Lubavitcher communities celebrating Savu’ot. The importance of making the connection between “spirit” and “law” that generates and shapes community is seen in the way the Pentecost story evolves here in the second chapter of Acts. The people draw together as a new community, sharing life in common, living as the body of Christ, as it were, and as a community of Torah. There’s more of this in Acts 4. However the Gentiles appropriated Christianity in their own cultural expectations of ecstatic experience, Jewish roots determined that the result would be community-building, so that Paul could speak of “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit”.

The second important source in Jewish tradition for charismatic experience is in the prophetic tradition, and in particular in prophetic tradition connected to the “last days”. Luke couples his Pentecost story with the prophet Joel, whose young men shall have visions and whose old men will dream. What these dreams and visions constituted was the constant prophetic dream of the day of the Lord, an idealistic and utopian projection of a world of justice coming soon. Such overwhelming visions have throughout history often been accompanied by charismatic phenomena. Indeed, the recent grip the Christian right has held on White House policy has gone hand-in-hand with apocalyptic visions of the last days, accompanied by White House prayer services that look like Pentecostal camp meetings. Joel, the prophet who encourages us to beat our plough shares back into spears and our pruning hooks into swords, would feel very much at home here. Luke doesn’t pick up the militant side of Joel, but the last-days-ism certainly plays strongly in early Christianity, and continues to today in churches for which charismatic experience remains important.

In my tradition, in the tradition of the Reformed churches, the spirit has a stronger emphasis on binding together than in experiencing ecstasy. All authority is corporate, for instance, and seeking out the common will of God together among the elders or at a church meeting can be (or should be) a profound spiritual experience. Our experience of the spirit is embedding on our connectedness and concern for others in our community and in the world, not only as the pattern of our governance but also in the motivation of our prayers and our concern for social justice. Scripture reading in the Reformed tradition, moreover, is a profoundly spiritual experience. Calvin’s introduction to his commentary on the Psalms is a classic instance of understanding how the Spirit is at work as we read, opening our hearts to the experience until it is as if we are being read by the Scriptures and our lives are being transformed by the experience. Lest this becomes a mere emotional exercise, the Reformed tradition emphasizes rigorous, almost academic discipline to the study of the Bible in order to give proper weight to the text over our own feelings and imaginings. Because the result can look a bit dry, we in the Reformed tradition often forget that we have our own spirituality. But we do, and it is central to almost every practice.

Ascension Sunday A

Stephanie Flanders was explaining on Newsnight the parlous state of the economy, and its possible recovery, with a series of letter-shaped graphs. A sharp recovery would look like a “V” and something smoother would look like a “U”, while a “W” would represent a second collapse and a second recovery.

At the ascension we get the second half of the “V”. The incarnation is the first half. For some reason people find the ascension part of the story harder to swallow today, but the truth is both members of the biblical “V” are myths, both telling us something significant about the Jesus event, and both difficult for the honest 21^st century Christian to swallow.

There are certain things you just aren’t allowed to say in the church, and this is one of them. John Hick and some of his friends at the University of Birmingham wrote a book called The Myth of God Incarnate, and then took up a position teaching at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. The pin heads in the local Presbytery gave him immense flack—I can’t remember the whole story, except for how sad I felt for my home denomination. Hick’s opponents were no doubt the same reactionaries who became so heated over the Angela Davies affair and Presbyterian participation in the Sophia conference and continue to raise a storm over homosexuality issues. Hick later wrote a stronger challenge to the small-mindedness of the church, The Metaphor of God Incarnate, in which he outlines the grief the know-nothing had given him.

In order to speak about the ascension we need to look at the nature of myth. What we might call Primary Myth is a creation of the community involving deep-seated archetypes and traditions. Stories accumulate and re-iterate themes that seem to spring out nowhere, or everywhere.

Thomas Thompson, for instance, in The Messiah Myth: The Near Easter Roots of Jesus and David, writes,

Before asking whether episodes and scenes that structure the story of Jesus’ life are based on events, we need to look at the function of stories in antiquity. The story of Jesus’ birth and baptism, of his teaching and miracle working, of his suffering and crucifixion—as well as his resurrection—fulfill a clearly defined, coherent function. Together, they embody a well defined tradition of discussion that formed the Judaism to which the gospels belonged.

A second level of myth-making we could call Creative Myth, authored myth, in which a specific and identifiable writer is responsible for the story—Isaiah, Malachi, Mark, Luke, D. H. Lawrence or John Updike. Here we might have, for instance, prophecies of cosmic judgement and the final inauguration of God’s kingdom in self-consciously mythic language, extravagant hyperbole, vivid imagery. The function of the rhetoric is to project intentionality and hope. Rarely were the visions “successful” in terms of historical validation, but this does not imply they were failed prophecies. The way the story is told creates motivation and vision. The relevance of historical truth is beside the point.

A third level of myth is secondary to both of these levels of myth-making, and I would therefore cal it Secondary Myth, and that is the point of reception when the story ceases to be supple and alive and becomes institutionalised and literal. Primary, naive myth, of course, also has this of belief about it, but emains supple and inventive. On this level myth is no longer generative or supple, but rigid. It becomes literalised, set and dogmatic. This is what happens when myth becomes theology and the property of groups like The Presbyterian Lay Committee in my home country or, here in the UK, the Reform movement among the Anglicans that thrives on bating Rowan Williams.

A fourth level of myth is what scholars call Broken Myth, myth that can no longer be believed because the frame in which we see the world has moved on from, say, a Ptolemaic understanding to an Einsteinian understanding. You can still cross the Atlantic guided by Ptolemaic stars, but you can’t get to the moon that way. This is the level at which we throw out the ascension story as no longer workable. We no longer live in a world where verticality has value or hierarchy or absolute truth retain any hold on us. We live in the Richard Dawkin’s world where myths are no longer “true”.

But of course asking a myth to have historical or scientific validity is to miss the point. It’s not that ealier cultures once considered the myths that animated them to be “true” in the sense that we hold things to be true, since truth as we understand it simply didn’t exist in those days, any more than it has any determinant function in the work of poets and novelists and screenwriters today. So there needs to be a fifth level of myth, what Paul Ricoeur calls “the second naïveté”. And that is the capacity to pass through the work of historical-critical understanding to re-appropriate the original energy with which Isaiah wrote, or a contemporary poet writes today.

It is curious that Luke is the only gospel to give us an ascension story, and it is unfortunate that “Ascension day” in the church calendar, more beloved in high church circles than my own tradition, takes the story so mechanically from there. Surely in Luke/Acts the narrative of the ascension is a conscious midrash on what is more nuanced in the other gospels, as when in John we read of Jesus being “lifted up”, or in his story of the call of Peter. We also get the story in that hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2, evidence, I think, that an earlier strata of Christian tradition was thinking more poetically than later generations. It proved too easy for orthodoxy to fall in with the Lukan story, and lose this subtlety of thought in the interest of a dogmatic conformity that could be more easily managed by the increasingly rigid institutional structures of the church.