Mark 1:29-39
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Twenty or so years ago, as prosperity gospel churches were modeling themselves on professional sports, stadium tours, and Ponzi schemes, a smaller movement in American Christianity was striving for authenticity. I was among the followers of progressive and reconstructive Christianity who engaged in ideas from this movement, sometimes called “Emergent.”
Emergent authors like Brian McClaren wrote popular best sellers, while average Christians started reading work by scholars like John Dominic Crossan, folks who wanted to understand Jesus in context, a new wave of the historic Jesus school that has been around for a century and a half.
One interesting aspect of the Emergence movement was an emphasis on spirituality. During the last half of the 20thcentury, the culturally and politically dominant form of American Christianity, white Mainline Protestantism, had become pretty dry, civic and social and sometimes intellectual, but with little emotion or enthusiasm, except when it came to carpet color, because nothing gets us fired up quite like minutia.
As the new century dawned, some Mainline churches tried to create renewed energy and attract younger members by adding drum kits and guitars and praise music, while others, especially the emergents, dove deep into liturgy, into candles and contemplation and Taizé. Sometimes they’d even move out of and break away from the big old institutional church, forming “house churches.” They argued that this was how Christianity started, which is more or less correct.
But the problem with striving for an authentic original Christianity is that there is no such thing as original Christianity, just as there was no distinct single Judaism before 70 C.E. Never mind that it didn’t work because many of the pressures keeping people out of church are economic and political and beyond a local congregation’s control.
All of our original sources are biased at best, with Josephus, the closest thing we have to a historian of Galilee and Judea in the First Century, about as “fair and balanced” as Fox News. And even though some of the theological extremes were eliminated in the process of constructing the canon of Christian scripture, our earliest list of authorized texts, from late in the Second Century, is missing five books.
The canon of scripture we have today, called by Christians “the New Testament,” is not one single text written by one single human or revealed by one single angel on or under some mountain. It is the result of centuries of religious evolution. There are plenty of contradictions in the text, and no definitive answer when it comes to what Jesus was about and how Christ saves.
Early Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Medieval Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Enlightenment Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Modern Christianity was dynamic and diverse, just as Post-Modern Christianity is dynamic and diverse.
But one thing is pretty clear. Just as there are bottlenecks in biological evolution, there are bottlenecks in cultural and religious evolution. And Paul is the bottleneck in what would become early Christianity. Trying to see what Christianity would look like without Paul is like trying to imagine the sky Vincent Van Gogh was looking at when he painted “Starry Night.”
Of course, Paul didn’t know Jesus, and even though the gospels that were eventually accepted into the Christian canon pass through the Pauline bottleneck, the gospels don’t always align with that Pauline faith.
Scripture claims that Paul’s ministry and his approach to evangelizing the Gentiles was approved by the leaders of the actual apostolic community, by a church council led by Peter, the first leader of the community after the execution of Jesus, and by James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jesus community in Jerusalem.
And as an aside, Peter was married as was made clear in today’s first reading. There is nothing in scripture that creates a celibate priesthood. And there is nothing to indicate that James the brother of Jesus is actually James the cousin of Jesus or James the half-brother of Jesus or James the generic male relative of Jesus, so work it out for yourself but full of grace or not, Mary had other kids.
But back to Paul and today’s second reading, because if we can get past the minutia, there is a big picture there. Paul tells us that he is willing to adapt to get the message across.
If he was writing today, he might say “To the hipsters I became as a hipster in order to win hipsters. To Gen Z I spoke like Gen Z that I might share the good news. To skate punks, I appeared in a Supreme hoodie, though seriously, I cannot skate, but I was willing to look ridiculous if I could share the good news. But the skate punks were a bit cynical, and just said ‘Okay, Boomer.’”
So maybe there is no “there” there when people are trying to get to some perfect and pure revealed faith, no such thing as a singular authentic Christianity, but there is certainly a big picture message back there about the goodness of creation and the potential of people and the call to radical justice and holy mystery and love, and all of our stuff, our handbells and quirky customs, have meaning if they are in the service of that message, but our job is to live that message of love and justice and to share that message of love and justice and to do so by any means necessary, even if it involves a skateboard.
Jesus did not bring good news to the poor with an army. He didn’t defeat the violence of empire with more violence. He defeated it with good news that couldn’t be buried in a tomb.
What is our “good news”?
And I think that is both the biggest challenge we face as progressive and reconstructive Christians and the biggest gift we have to offer, especially in the United Church of Christ, for we have moved past dry and civic denominationalism, past theological formulae produced in a pre-scientific age, have abandoned creed as litmus test, and despite all that, we still see the holy, in the world around us, in this space when we pray together and come to the table, in symphonies and hip-hop and the ant and the platypus, in the story of Jesus and in our story as a Jesus-following people.
We can get buried in details, from the silliness of Robert’s Rules of Order, (God help us!) to my own favorite flavor, scholarship, but in the end, none of that matters if we are not telling a story that makes meaning of our lives, the spark that is you in a universe.
Our story is simple. God is good and God is more, more than we have constructed in our smallness of scale and our tendency to project ourselves onto every canvas. God beyond is being itself and the mysterious unfolding of creation, and while on the micro-scale life is short, and on the macro-scale we are a spectacularly destructive animal, the reality is that God is thoroughly other, necessary as Anglican priest and theologian Marilyn McCord Adams notes in her work “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God,” where she reminds us that we “need God to keep Divine composure in order to help us make good of the evils we experience.”
But our good news does not stop with God, though that is pretty good news. For people experienced a goodness that exceeded the bounds of human expectation in Jesus, something we know to be true even on this side of the Pauline bottleneck, for while Caesar Augustus is a historical footnote, Jesus continues to be a way of living in the world. And because Jesus is a way of living, it is reasonable both to declare that he lives, as we do every Easter Sunday, but also to say that no one speaks for Christ, despite the claims of popes and poobahs.
And this may be the final piece in our particular expression of the good news, the one that holds the rest together, our core belief that every claim about God and Jesus as Christ and the goodness of creation is as provisional as quantum physics, and like Schrödinger’s theoretical cat, God only dies when we try to nail God down, as to a cross in that infamous story of love defeating evil.
God seen through the lens of humans is no bigger than our canvas, and though “Starry Night” may be genius, the night time sky was so much larger still, as is our God.
Our good news is not abolition, for that story is not yet complete. It is not our rich history as footnotes in a dusty book. Our good news is life, lived out of that history, proximate history and deep history, and the deep mystery of all that is holy, in the skate park and in the assisted care facility, this day and always. Amen.