Should Christians Take Jesus Seriously?

I’ve been pondering about why I still despise Republicans when Jesus said we should love our enemies.  (Oops, just lost half my readers).

It’s typical of me and a lot of the Christians I know.  We’re  hard to understand.  For instance, I knew a Christian once who would tell me how much she just looovved Jesus, she wanted to climb up in his lap right now and bask in His Daddy love all day.  The only thing she didn’t want to do was to follow any of His advice.

She was okay with “love your neighbor” but, like the Pondering Pig, not so good with “and while you’re at it, love your enemy, too.”  Hah?

When I was a little pig, I thought my Daddy was the cat’s meow.   I wanted to be exactly like him when I grew up so I was interested in anything he was interested in, wanted to put same goop in my hair that he did, and whatever he told me about how to live, I figured he knew what he was talking about, and I wanted to do that.   And he wasn’t even close to God…believe me.

We Christians though, we believe Jesus is not only the son of God, he IS God.  Jeez, you would think we would have a listen.   What were you saying again, JC?  I want to know because you give really good advice, since you’re God.

But around here, it’s more like “We love you SOOO much Jesus, we will follow you anywhere.  Except when you start on that Sermon on the Mount stuff.  There, I think you’re wrong.  It’s too far out.  Sounds radical.   There, I’m sticking with Moses. “

Or we don’t even mention our opinion.  We just ignore everything he said and go right along our Christian way, getting ready for the chicken dinner.

Take this  “love your enemies” stuff.  Can you imagine what it would be like if Christians started trying it?  The pro-lifers would be inviting their pro-choice friends over for dinner (because if you really love your enemies they’re not going to stay enemies for long) and after the chicken and dumplings, we would all be sitting out on the veranda sipping our sugary ice tea and laughing about how we can’t agree with each other, and giving those pro-choicers a big hug when they go home because we love them.

Or pick your favorite enemy.  For me it’s my conservative Republican congresswoman.  She’s a convenient focus for all the things I dislike about reactionary, conservative, big corporate, lying, smearing, Bush-loving, pro-war, anti-environment  politicians.   Oh dear, what did I just say?   See?  I’m a typical Christan, just on the progressive side.

If I took Jesus seriously, I’d be inviting Congresswoman Cathy out for a picnic in the park, and inviting all my friends to meet her.  Why not?  What harm would it do?  Maybe I’d eventually learn to appreciate her, even as I disagreed with her.  Anything’s possible.

And loving your enemies is an easy one.  Wait till you hear what Jesus says to do with your money!

How To Not Understand The Bible

I have such difficulty reading the Bible. I can’t understand what the words mean. It’s like the characters are speaking in code and I don’t have the key to decipher it. Plus the words themselves keep shifting depending on which translation I read.

Case in point. This morning I was reading the passage in chapter 18 of Luke’s gospel where Jesus tells the ruler to sell everything he has and give it to the poor — then he will be cool. (In Luke’s version, by the way, the ruler is neither rich nor young.) It’s been a puzzler for generations, right? Why would Jesus ask someone to do that? OK, so I think I will have a go at it and I start by trying to read the story as if I’d never heard of it before. Right away I run into problems.

First I pick up the New Revised Standard translation and they start by having the guy ask Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”.

Well, naturally the first thing I think is, “Well, you can’t really do anything to inherit something – it’s just coming to you when your parents die. So maybe he’s worried God is going to disinherit him because he’s been so bad. If he thinks that, then he has a problem, and Jesus is going to have to set him straight about God’s love for his children – like tell him the story of the prodigal son, or the lost lamb, right?” Well, Jesus doesn’t take that route.

So then I think, “Well, maybe I should look at another translation. So I pick up the New Living Translation, and they have the guy saying something completely different: “What should I do to GET eternal life?”

In their version the ruler doesn’t think he has eternal life and he wants to know what to do to get some. He wants some nice rules, like in “How do I get from here to Topeka?” or “How do I get a discount on this?” This ruler sounds kind of simplistic and a little foggy in the brain. So Jesus will have to go easy on him. But Jesus doesn’t take this route either.

So I pick up yet a third translation (the New English Bible), and this time the ruler says “What must I do to WIN eternal life?” Now he apparently sees life as a game to be played or a war to be won and he is asking the really good teacher for a winning strategy. How can we beat the Red Sox next week so we can take the pennant?

Luke intended one of these meanings, and I’m pretty sure at least one of these is wrong. But which one?

We haven’t even started on whether the question asker is a 1) ruler – a real bigshot, like King Herod, 2) a member of the ruling class (a lesser bigshot, maybe a prince or something), or 3) a religious leader (somebody who already knows a lot and has an interest in maintaining the status quo). And we haven’t even begun to start on what eternal life might mean to him.

So I haven’t even got through the first sentence and I’m already tired. Now I have to go find a word by word translation of the original Greek. It makes me tired and I haven’t gotten anywhere. I don’t even understand the first sentence. I mean really grok it.

I don’t just want to make stuff up – I want to know this character’s motivation, why he would be desperate enough to seek a really good teacher out and ask him this serious question. I’m not even sure what he’s really asking, so how can I understand Jesus’ response, let alone apply it to my life?

By the way, the one thing every translation agrees on is that the question asker wants to either inherit, get, or win eternal life. I think most people assume eternal life means “go to heaven.” But hey, I don’t know anything. So I got out my little book called Christianity 101, which purports to explain the “eight basic Christian beliefs.”

If I can believe this book, I must conclude that Christians haven’t the slightest interest in eternal life. Neither eternal life nor heaven is mentioned in the index or anywhere on the pages I leafed through. So maybe it’s a code for something else.

Look, I’m not recommending this approach, which I could call the “can’t see the forest for the trees” approach. I’m probably a lot like this ruler guy myself and I need to learn from his sad fate — walking away disconsolately when he could be grooving at the big party in the sky after he die.

I crave joy too. I don’t really want to be walking around watching the autumn leaves fall and the little ducks quacking as they lift up their wings and fly away south. Left behind while everyone else is having a great time.

But what am I supposed to do? Pretend I understand when I don’t? Join a monastery and let somebody else take the controls? I’m stumped.

How do you ponder the imponderable?

Labels: Christianity

Baby Beatniks Seek Truth Too

And now I’ve started questioning
If anything is true…
Christopher Newton (1966)

All I want is the truth
Just give me some truth.
John Lennon

In my distress I cry to the Lord,
that he may answer me:
‘Deliver me, O Lord,
from lying lips,
from a deceitful tongue.’
Psalm 120

I’m afraid I’m making my Christian readers a little nervous here. Believe me, I am not turning my back on Jesus Christ. I am saying there was nothing in the brand of Christianity that I was served up at the age of sixteen, with its tender ritual and mindless rote prayer and comfortable satisfaction with the status quo, that could hold me.

And second, to those who say why don’t I forget about the past and just forge on ahead, I say “Forget about it? Forget about it!”. My mind teems with these images and memories. I am convinced that what I saw and felt and heard is as eternally important as that snowshoe bunny over there running down the glacier. I hope that’s clear. OK?

Now, meanwhile, back in 1959…

I wanted God in my life. I longed for Him/Her/It. But, near as I could tell, the Biblical God was not really God. For instance, I read Psalm 18 about God riding down to earth on his thundercloud with smoke coming out of his nostrils – well, what God is this? Did he create the entire universe and now is riding around shooting lightning out of a thundercloud in the hill country of Israel? How could anybody take this stuff seriously? That’s how I felt. I’m just being honest, okay? At seventeen, this was an issue about truth for me. And it’s still a valid, if sophomoric, question. Especially if you are presenting a struggling truth-seeker with a fundamentalist, every word is literally true, belief about the Book and how it works.

In a world that was full of lies and deception coming at me from every corner like arrows whizzing by – which is how I and every truth-seeker has to feel, why should I believe your version of the truth just because you say it is the real one? Coca-Cola is the real thing too, according to them.

The book Dharma Bums, which I’ve been blogging about the last few days, presented me with another option – seeking God through direct experience of him. I don’t have a copy of the book at the moment – lost or given away in my many years of wandering – but in memory at least, the book is about three guys searching for God, and God is Truth. Simplistically, that’s what Dharma means. In one episode of the book Jack and Gary Snyder (under novelistic pseudonyms) go on a crazy mountain climbing quest in the Sierras. Even at seventeen I could see climbing the mountain was really about two things — first, going on a totally great adventure with great wild friends , and second, about getting higher – higher into the pure truth and out of the smog of the world’s stupidity. A direct experience. An enlightenment. Real proof because it happened to you!

That’s what it still comes down to, guys and girls, truth is true if it happened to you. (For a modernist, I’m quite a good post-modernist). I know God is real. Not because of anything in the Bible, but because I saw him. The Bible fills in the picture because it’s about other guys who saw him.

And there are other scenes in Dharma Bums where Jack (I think this is in Dharma Bums – but maybe it’s On The Road or Subterraneans) is sitting in a library in the Santa Clara Valley day after day surrounded by the spring cherry orchards and reading the Diamond Sutra. I didn’t know what that was, but it seemed to be some kind of teaching where you didn’t have to belief in all of these stories about God riding around on his thundercloud. He was –Something Else. Unknowable. Ineffable. Something beyond understanding. Both personal and impersonal. Encompassing everything. Wow! I felt that must be the way God really is. Big.

Where was someone who could have shown me the Christian Way in its adventure and power and truth? Who was there to show me Jesus Christ in His awesome complexity?

I didn’t hear you knockin’. In fact, in all those long years from 1959 to 1968, when I encountered my first Jesus Freak, there was not one soul who defended or even spoke to me of the Christian faith with a fair understanding or true commitment. If I didn’t ask – well, who would I ask?

OK, that’s a fair question. Let’s see. At San Francisco State a few years later there was the Campus Crusade for Christ. They had a regular table outside the Student Commons, handing out tracts and stuff. At the next table over there was another group called the Young Americans For Freedom. They espoused every right-wing conservative position available in the early Sixties, from going into Viet Nam to stop the Communists to getting arch-conservative Barry Goldwater elected president. (Man, Goldwater’s looking pretty good these days! He was a man of honor.) Members of both organizations wore the same short sleeve white shirts and skinny black ties, crew cuts and they carried the same kind of bookbags. I wasn’t sure, and didn’t think about it much, but I figured maybe they were both part of the same organization. They both looked like The Enemy. I couldn’t see much difference between them, except they both wanted me to believe things that weren’t true.

I don’t remember ever being “witnessed to” by a Campus Crusade guy but if I had been, you know what I would have said? “The only thing I want to be saved from is having to spend eternity with guys like you! How dare you try to “save me,” whatever that means. You know nothing of the pain I suffer. You haven’t earned the right! Go away!”

No preaching, no witnessing, no handing out of tracts would have had the slightest effect on me. If they pointed out some eternal truth from The Bible, I could counter with an eternal truth from Bambi. They were both just books!

You know who I might have listened to? A Christian girl I was in love with. If she spoke earnestly and I could see through her life that it was true, then I would have given Jesus a fair shot.

Second best would be if I heard about Jesus from another freak. Someone I trusted would speak truth to me about his own experience. Someone I respected. Not some preacher dressed up in hippie clothes, but one of my close friends.

I wish I had known about a secret house church of dirty underground beatniks who were at war against the Great Society of lies and malice for all. In other words, people who were really following Jesus. I would have gone there in a New York minute.

Now that I think about, I STILL want to go to that church!

Planet of Joy

I know not everyone was lucky enough to be born into a family of talking pigs. But I was. I see the world’s from a dancing pig’s perspective, not a man’s. The way of the world makes little sense to me and never has. Why not clack your trotters together and come out for an encore? Why just go on and on? I wish I knew.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the holy pleasure principle. What a bad rap it gets, among my fellow Christians at least. As if every step we take should be for some higher purpose and to do Jesus’ will on earth. And the unspoken context I hear is: “whether you like it or not.” We shouldn’t live for ourselves but only to carry out God’s will. Says so right in the Bible. And then I feel guilty because I know my higher purpose is to tapdance up a storm, not starting another church of mournfulness.

You know what I think? I think God wants us to love our lives, to be happy and to get a lot of pleasure out of it. I think God gave us pleasure because it is who He is. What delight to create a whole universe! What an artist in his inspiration to create the Horsehead Nebula in perfection and then put little green squirrels on the planet Jualampa for their joy.

Church of the Dancing Pigs

I want to worship at the Church of Singing and Dancing Pigs.

I’m ready to discuss theology with Jinx the Cat.

I want to have missionary zeal like George Burns and talk it over with Gracie Allen.

I ‘m ready to go to church where laughter and sorrow are welcomed with no shame.

I gotta be silly.

God wants me to be silly! I know it! It’s the only thing I’m good at!

Someone’s got to lighten things up around here.
I want to preach like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Those guys knew how to get a message across!
I’m ready to sing praise songs around the campfire with dirty beatniks.

I want to walk around the world and never stop while I’m alive like Johnny Appleseed throwing out joy and leaving plants behind.
I want to praise God in the snow and ice and hide from the wintry blast under the bridge in exhilaration with the Holy Spirit.

I’m not going to sit bored out of my mind in a pew ever again.
I just read that Christians ought to make Paul’s pattern of thinking their own. How’m I doin’ so far?

I’m a singing and dancing pig. Can’t help it. My Daddy was one and his Uncle Foxy before him.
Today let’s practice our stand-up routines to make each other howl with laughter with no cruelty.
Let us lock up the doors of the churches that are so proper. How can we dance and sing there?
Instead let’s go to the meadow where the sky is blue straight through to heaven. Where God can see us better.
See, I’m already starting my stand-up routine.