Ezekiel 2:1-5
Mark 6:1-13
Paul Haggis had an extraordinary career in Hollywood as a writer, director, and producer, and has two Emmys and two Oscars. He also spent years in the cult of Scientology, only breaking with that organization in 2009 when they supported Prop 8, a proposed ban on same-sex marriage in California, several years before the U.S. Supreme Court established marriage equality as the rule of law.
Haggis was the first high-profile defector, leading to an avalanche of other defections from Scientology, tell-all books and television series, investigative reports and full-length documentaries.
Some of us knew exactly how crazy Scientology was even before these revelations. Founded by a science fiction writer who was both a sociopath and a con artist, it continues today as a major criminal enterprise, imprisoning current members, protecting the physically violent current head of the cult, and harassing those who escape. It is hard to know if accusations that have been made against Paul Haggis are legitimate expressions of #MeToo resistance in Hollywood, or are simply more Scientology terrorism.
Scientology is a pay-to-play organization. You pay for classes and something they call auditing, and as you sink more money into the cult, the more secrets are revealed. Somewhere well north of $100,000, you might “go clear,” the basic goal of Scientology. That is when you start paying for levels in their more advanced Operating Thetan program. And it is at Operating Thetan Level III that you learn the “big secret,” not so much a secret anymore as more and more former members “go clear,” not in Scientology, but of Scientology.
The big secret is that the ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, Xenu, was worried that he might be deposed, so he used psychiatrists and their galactic version of IRS agents to round-up billions of his potential enemies. These rebels were all transported to Teegeeack, stacked around volcanoes, then blown up with hydrogen bombs. There are many details, but you really don’t need all the details. Unfortunately, this mass execution let loose the souls of the victims, called Thetans. They cling to the current inhabitants of Teegeeack, now called Earth.
Before you rush home and jump in the shower to wash off the Thetans, which totally won’t work without a six-figure investment, you should hear the good news. At Operating Thetan Level VIII, you learn that the Galactic Confederation will soon return and telepathically enslave us, but soon after that, L. Ron Hubbard, the creator of Scientology, will return and liberate us. Sort of a space opera version of the Revelation to John of Patmos, with Hubbard cast as Christ.
Now, if I am being honest, I tell this story partly out of smug satisfaction. I mean, there may be some crazy stuff in my own religious tradition, but it is mostly not that blatantly crazy, and besides, it is way older, which somehow makes all the difference.
Ezekiel might have been mentally ill, and by today’s definitions he certainly was, but at least he wasn’t a seer who claimed he could find secret treasure (for a fee) like Joseph Smith before he was visited by the angel Moroni and founded Mormonism, which is now old enough to no longer be considered a cult, despite all that crazy stuff about Native Americans.
It is pretty easy to call it a scam when money changes hands, but what about Helen Schucman, who received “inner dictation” from Jesus and wrote “A Course in Miracles,” a religion of sorts now better associated with Marianne Williamson? Schucman and her partner made money from the book, but there is no reason to doubt she believed what she said.
What if what trades hands is prestige or power instead of money? What happens when the supposed prophet starts gathering multiple lovers, as they so often do, sometimes children?
How do we know which metaphysical claims are true, draw the line between revelation and delusion? Does it matter if the claims are false if they provide meaning? When does community and meaning become something sinister, the Apostolic Socialism of the People’s Temple tipping over into the mass suicide and murder at Jonestown, 909 victims who drank the Flavor Aid, most voluntarily?
Scripture tells us the test of prophecy is whether or not it comes true, which is not really much of a test. We can look at the results in the case of more notorious cults, but it is harder to contextualize the waves of Prosperity Gospel Christians drifting away after the 2008 financial crisis, before that movement re-branded itself as Christian Nationalism. Moses is out there talking to a bush, so who am I to say there were no golden tablets under that hill in Palmyra?
Of course, I don’t believe in those tablets. Or Xenu. But I also don’t believe in some of the stuff in our story either. We know enough now to doubt a virgin birth and even understand the reasons that belief developed and was useful in that ancient context, but we cannot prove or disprove the existence of God or the timelessness of Christ.
Certain metaphysical claims are exactly that, metaphysical, not as in Aristotle’s use of the term, literally the volume after his Physics, but in the wider sense, matters beyond the empirical. In practice, God isn’t so much the abstract force that refuses our boxes, first source and constant mover, but is instead a choice, one many of us have made, of how we will see the world and respond to the world. Which does not get us closer to measuring the sum of any one religion or any one set of truth claims, nor does it in any way invalidate the reality of that metaphysical deity who is, for me, a box-breaking force on holy creativity.
In the end, the only sense I can make out of the whole mess of religion, theirs, yours, and mine, traditional, re-constructed, or deconstructed, comes not from impossible proofs, not the scriptural “did it come true,” thanks but no thanks Nostradamus, but comes from another scriptural notion, one woven into the Christian Testament. You shall know them by their fruits. You shall know them by their love. Which echoes our “practical Christianity.” Leave the unseen for the unseen.
If a belief system is self-serving, if it claims privilege for only one people, whether constructed along ethnic lines, nation-state lines, or religious lines, it is not love, and cannot be the Word of God as I understand God.
It does not matter if that belief system even takes in all of humanity, for I no longer find the claim that we as a species are of a different and divine order from the rest of life on this planet to be credible. A belief system that lays this living planet at the feet of homo sapiens is not love, and cannot be the Word of God as I understand God.
The only real and true religion, for me, is one that celebrates existence, even in the face of horrors, and draws us out from ourselves, for our selves are finite and fickle, draws us out into the world around us, not just nature, though nature is itself an encyclopedia of the holy and mysterious, but out into humanity, our neighbors in the pews and our neighbors who are broken in body and in spirit, religion that draws us out into the great human enterprise, filling sandbags, comforting the grieving, dancing at weddings, and listening to that grandchild’s clarinet recital, but oh was that note sharp!
Our scripture readings are about going out into the world, about saving those who disbelieve, but also about calling people to wholeness, the captive community in Babylon for Ezekiel and the Israelite polity in Roman-ruled Galilee in the reading from Mark.
We, because we are so aware of the religious charlatans, are willing to bind up the wounded bodies and feed the hungry bodies, but we are often hesitant, even embarrassed, to share the good news we are writing together here at the Park Church in conversation with other progressive, creative, and reconstructed Christians, as well as followers of other faith traditions, for we are a living testament.
The world is full of unclean spirits, and the only authority we need is love and the sure knowledge that God is not an intergalactic dictator and that Christ is not some wimp on a hillside and that the Spirit need not throw us to the ground in convulsions to prove our faith, for God, in all of the forms we experience that mystery, is real right now, in this world, and in this place where we gather in Their name. Amen.