The Bible Is Dangerous Territory

So, most readers know my social location by now. Today you need to know my medical location. I was stung the day before I'm writing this, my left hand (the one I write with) is swollen, and both the venom and the medication I’m on to reduce the swelling may cause irritability. Like Marley’s ghost being perhaps nothing more than a bit of undigested gruel in Scrooge’s stomach, this crotchety post may simply be a product of the imbalance of my body’s chemistry.

I’ve been reading through Matthew once more and today I resisted (though I did read another chapter) simply because reading the Bible includes parts that are unintelligible or off-putting. I thought of the fun riff I did for the More Light Update (the newsletter of More Light Presbyterians) ages ago parodying the title of the Beach Boys song, “She Had Fun, Fun, Fun Till Her Daddy Took Her T-Bird Away.” It was titled, “She Had Sin, Sin, Sin Till Her Daddy Took Her Bible Away.” It was about one who, reading the Bible literally, did and said things that were just plain wrong because the Bible seemed to endorse them.

The teenage protagonist in one of my unpublished novels felt compelled to sneak out of a Bible store a copy of the first Oxford Annotated Bible because the mores of his community did not allow it to be sold to minors. He did not steal it, however—he snuck it out while placing the exact cost plus tax on the counter for the owner to find. Reading it with all its footnotes, his eyes were opened for the first time to biblical scholarship. His fundamentalist, biblical literalist upbringing was challenged by his new understanding that even the biblical writers were not writing literally, but with symbolic intent.

Nikos Kazantzakis wrote of Jesus reading a disciple’s gospel account of his birth, admonishing something like, “That’s not the way it happened.” The disciple said, “But an angel of the Lord told me this is how it was.” “Then it must be true,” Jesus said. For Kazantzakis, spiritual truth was deeper than a literal story.

All this is to say, reading the Bible requires help.

When I was a child, our Baptist preacher liked to tell a joke about someone who would open the Bible and blindly point to a verse for spiritual uplift. One day his finger pointed to, “And Judas went out and hanged himself.” Unsatisfied with this thought, he opened the Bible to a different passage, his finger pointing to, “Go thou and do likewise.”

Context is needed to understand any biblical text, but not just its location in the Bible. The writer’s social location must be taken into account, certainly, but interpreting the Bible requires more. It is best understood within a tradition, not just the tradition that preceded it, not just the tradition of its time, but the tradition of how it was interpreted since and even how it might be interpreted in the future.

What struck me when I acquired my first Greek New Testament was the discovery that, though it is the product of ancient manuscripts, it could become outdated as earlier manuscripts are discovered. This could serve as a metaphor for discovering the truth of scripture. Future generations hold the key to understanding all that a sacred text has to offer.

In the original manuscript of my book, Come Home! Reclaiming Spirituality and Community as Gay Men and Lesbians, I wrote that “not all scripture is created equal.” What I meant was that some stand the test of time, and other scriptures do not. A gay reader of my original text suggested saying so might play into the hands of anti-gay readers who believed LGBT Christians were dissing scripture. My friend advised modifying the statement.

The funny part for me is that those who opposed the full welcome of LGBT people had what is called “a canon within a canon”—in other words, they only literally read, followed, and employed the texts that they wanted to and chose to read other texts symbolically or ignore them altogether.

Thomas Jefferson famously cut out the texts of his Bible that he felt should not be there. I would like to think of him among the first of the Enlightenment’s progressive Christians, but he did “own” slaves, so I wonder how he handled the texts related to slaves as fellow members of Christ’s body.

In The Gospel of Solentiname, Ernesto Cardinal documented the conversations of campesinos and campesinas (“peasants”) about scripture. Reflecting together on sacred texts is an ancient spiritual practice utilized by Liberation theologians to empower the disenfranchised of Latin American countries. As I have found in other settings with everyday people encountering scripture, their simplicity led to profound questions and insights. I experienced that too in the years I led a weekly Bible study for LGBT people and our allies for the Lazarus Project of West Hollywood Presbyterian Church.

Reading the Bible can be a bumpy ride. With the Ethiopian eunuch reading Isaiah whom Philip asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” we may also reply, “How can I, unless someone guides me?”

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Jesus Returns

The world tried to keep Jesus at bay.

Obscurity. Poverty. Illegitimacy. Displaced. Refugee. Semitic. Subjugated by empire. Resisted by clerics. Blasphemer. Heretic. Unpatriotic. Treasonous. Arrested. Tried. Tortured. Executed. Buried.

Odds were against a comeback.

Then the church elevated Jesus beyond reach.

Born of a virgin. Sinless. Messiah. Christ. Son of God. Divinity. Savior. Ultimate sacrifice. King. Godhead. Heavenly. God’s right-hand-man. Supreme judge.

Way out of our league, beyond our capabilities, out of this world.

Sophisticates simply dismiss Jesus.

Myth. Fairy tale. Unrealistic. Idealistic. Impractical. Parochial. Unnecessary. Confining.

Yet Jesus returns.

Jesus returns again and again to every generation, to every nation, to every culture. We may fail to see him because of color, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and every other way Jesus is manifest in “the least of these” who are ignored by “the powers that be.”

The “second coming” has multiplied exponentially and yet we still miss out when we are distracted, literalistic, pessimistic, cynical, selfish, egotistical, xenophobic, or just plain stupid.

Jesus is as near to you as yourself. As near to you as another person and creature and landscape and horizon. As near to you as the deepest need, the greatest joy, the most passionate love, the most inspired art, the most enduring peace. Jesus is everywhere, if only we taste, touch, smell, listen, look, feel, think, contemplate, and breathe.

Jesus is as natural as we are. And we have as much potential to be his presence and recognize his presence in others when we make room for him in our schedules, provide for him in our economies, and allow his values to shape our policies and politics.

Move aside, headlines and headliners! Jesus returns.

According to the Gospel according to Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis’ real life friend and fictionalized protagonist: 

Christ is born, my wise Solomon, my wretched pen-pusher! Don’t go picking things over with a needle! Is He born or isn’t He? Of course He is born, don’t be daft. If you take a magnifying glass and look at your drinking water—an engineer told me this, one day—you’ll see, he said, the water’s full of little worms you couldn’t see with your naked eye. You’ll see the worms and you won’t drink. You won’t drink and you’ll curl up with thirst. Smash your glass, boss, and the little worms’ll vanish and you can drink and be refreshed!  

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Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Art Mystic

A couple of weeks ago I read about an artist whose work, in my view, parallels the mystical experience. Wil S. Hylton writes of one of James Turrell’s creations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: 

The room was devoid of boundaries, just an eternity of inky blackness, with the outline of a huge lavender rectangle floating in the distance, and beyond it, the tall plane of green light stretching toward an invisible horizon, where it dissolved into a crimson stripe. … The shapes and contours I saw were made entirely of light. 

It reminded me of the first laser light program I saw in the days before laser light shows became commercial and often tacky. It was truly a work of art on the interior “canvas” of the Los Angeles Planetarium dome, accompanied by music, ranging from classical to jazz. The colors were so intense, I cried.

The only other time I remember crying at the intensity of colors was on a visit to Petra, an ancient and abandoned city in Jordan carved in stone whose mineral composition reveals intense striations of colors. (You will remember its stone temple from the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.) I felt so sorry for one of my trip mates who was too sick to leave the bus, unable to join us being led on donkeys through a very long and winding few-feet-wide passageway between sheer stone cliffs to Petra.

Having that experience, I could understand why Zorba would wire the narrator of Zorba the Greek to come see a beautiful green stone he had discovered. Zorba, based on an actual acquaintance of the author, Nikos Kazantzakis, angers the narrator by his seeming obliviousness to the great famine he and his world are enduring on the eve of even greater disasters to come.

“To hell with beauty!” he writes, “She has no heart and does not care a jot for human suffering.” But then his anger dissipated, and he felt drawn to Zorba’s request: “Some wild bird in me was beating its wings and asking me to go. Yet I did not go. … I listened to the moderating, cold, human voice of logic.” In response, Zorba wrote, “You too could have seen a beautiful green stone at least once in your life, you poor soul, and you didn’t see it,” and the bad choice convinces Zorba there is a hell.

Hylton writes: 

The joke among Turrell’s friends is that, to see his work, you must first become hopelessly lost. … Not everyone enjoys the Turrell experience. It requires a degree of surrender. There is a certain comfort in knowing what is real and where things are; to have that comfort stripped away can be rapturous, or distressing. It can even be dangerous. 

Notably, his work is yet wheelchair accessible.

This could describe a mystical experience—becoming hopelessly lost, surrendering, having comfort and certainty stripped away, rapturous, distressing, dangerous. And yet “wheelchair accessible,” which I suggest as a metaphor for available to all.

As with the mystical experience, “a dense and impenetrable vocabulary to describe his work” is needed, like “thingness of light” and “alpha state of mind.” “Without these terms it would be nearly impossible to discuss his work,” Hylton observes.  So too with mystical experiences, for example: “thin places,” “dark night of the soul,” “interior castle,” “showings,” “mindfulness,” “oneness,” “nirvana,” “kingdom of God,”  “in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all.”

Related posts:

Seeing Things as if for the First Time

In the Company of Birds

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blog. Consider using a post or quotes for your congregation's or group's newsletter, including the blog's address: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.    

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations are its only means of support. Thank you!

Seeing Things as if for the First Time

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

In his novel Zorba the Greek, the Greek author and lifelong spiritual seeker Nikos Kazantzakis observed that poets, artists, and visionaries see things “as if for the first time.” The narrator’s friend Zorba, based on an acquaintance of the author, witnessed a rock rolling down a hill and observed in awe, “Boss, did you see that? On slopes, stones come to life again!”

Such fresh vision, without prejudice or jadedness, opens God’s commonwealth to us in the here and now. As the gay poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins observed, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

“Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” Jesus said. A teacher of children, “Ranger Rich,” helped me see a tree as if for the first time by inviting several of us to lie down beneath its branches with the tops of our heads toward the trunk and look up. I highly recommend you try this!

Mystics, too, see the world and God “as if for the first time” as they cast aside expectations and look beyond tradition to embrace imagination as spiritual artists and poets, and welcome fresh insight as spiritual children. Remember the famous story of Thomas Merton’s vision at a Louisville intersection, after a prolonged solitary retreat, that people were “walking around shining like the sun.”

Mystics, artists, poets, and children are all “progressives” in this sense.

Perhaps no mystic was so imaginative and so playfully childlike as Saint Francis, who is said to have hugged a leper and saw Jesus, preached to a tree and made it blossom, gathered the birds of the air for a sermon, befriended a wild animal and prevented it from killing villagers, called earth, wind, fire, earth, sun, and moon mother and brother and sister, recognized the dignity of those in poverty, and regarded popes, beggars, and robbers equally.

According to Kazantzakis, in his book, Saint Francis, this little saint even saw the devil differently. To his companion Brother Leo he says, “Do not lose heart, Brother Leo,” he told him, stroking his head. “Stand on your feet, and if the Tempter has straddled you, have no fears: the gates [of heaven] will open, and the two of you will enter together!”

Brother Leo exclaims, “The Tempter too! He’ll enter [the gates of heaven] too? How do you know, Brother Francis?”

To which Francis replies, “I know because of my heart, which opens and receives everything. Surely paradise must be the same.”

Enjoy a conversation led by Chris Glaser about sex "as if for the first time" this Saturday, June 11, 10-3, at First MCC Atlanta. No charge, free lunch, his books available. Open to everyone!