Statement of Faith

I suppose pretty much every immigrant community ever has worried that younger generations would lose their culture and their language. There is some basis for this concern.

I mean, we can challenge the notion of an American Melting Pot. We can look at a clear history of discrimination and oppression. After all, Columbus wrote is his journal of 1498 that “From here one might send, in the name of the Holy Trinity, as many slaves as could be sold …,” beginning a long history of terror, a red, white and blue of hatred… blue cavalry hats at Sand Creek, white hoods at the lynching tree, red baseball caps chanting anti-immigrant slogans.

But in many ways, the melting pot is real, for each generation does become a little more like the dominant culture. Countless sitcoms have played with this idea, assimilation like that of an Asian-American family on the ABC comedy “Fresh Off the Boat,” or a gay couple in the suburbs on “Modern Family.” And while there may be some stains on our American record, the very fact that we have sitcoms featuring minority communities discovering new identities in our ever-changing and ever more tolerant nation tells us that there is good that we can lift up.

The tension between cultural differentiation and cultural assimilation is as old as recorded history. The Hebrews were constantly engaged in this tug of war in every generation after the collapse of the Northern Kingdom. For example, the late second Temple era that gives us the fictional Prophet Daniel is really shaped by the Hasmonean Rebellion, when Judah Maccabee, his father and brothers, rose up against both the foreign Seleucid rulers and, this is important, against those Jews who were trying to blend in, to become Hellenized like everyone else in the eastern Mediterranean.

That is the same age that gave us the Septuagint, for after the Northern Kingdom and the Babylonian Exile of the Southern Kingdom, the Diaspora was a thing, Hebrews, increasingly calling themselves Jews, were spread out across the region, were a minority in foreign lands, among foreign cultures. The Jewish population in Alexandria, a city that gave us the great Jewish thinker Philo, was so Hellenized that they could no longer read scripture in the original Hebrew, so it was translated into Greek, the lingua franca of the region. Septuagint is Latin for 70, after the legend that the Greek King of Egypt commissioned 72 Jewish scholars to individually translate their scripture into Greek.

Once Christianity morphed from a primarily rural Hebrew reform movement into an urban Gentile religion, it too lost access to scripture in the original language. It is to the Septuagint, the Greek translation, that New Testament authors refer, and it is in this translation that we find what may be the most notorious mistranslation in all of history. For the Hebrew text of Isaiah reads “and the young woman shall be with child,” which became, in the Septuagint, “and the virgin shall be with child.”

Guy Ritchie inserts this little tidbit into his jewel-heist caper “Snatch,” a movie no pastor should love, but that makes me laugh every time. Ritchie does this, no doubt, because he believes it does serious damage to Christianity. After all, if Jesus is the unblemished sacrificial lamb offered to an angry God, and that unblemished nature is only true because he didn’t have a human father to transmit original sin, then all of Christianity fails.

Right?

Well, at least it fails if you know absolutely nothing about other understandings of the cross and resurrection, and even less about biology, for the entire need for a virgin birth is based on the ancient idea that a man planted an entire baby seed in the womb of the mother, she no more than a vessel. Once folks started to figure out how reproduction actually worked, then Mary needed to be without sin too, so bada-bing, bada-boom, in 1854, Pope Pius the 9th declared she too was immaculately conceived, though by virtue of her future son. That’s some real theological magic at work.

But if you know something about science and you have the tools to think theologically, then maybe it doesn’t all fall apart. Maybe, and this might be a stretch for some, maybe God isn’t some egotistical male in the sky that demands a blood sacrifice as the only escape of punishing the entire human species for some mythical sin committed by a mythical Eve, tempted by a supernatural being to eat from a forbidden tree. Maybe, just maybe, being murdered isn’t how Jesus saves us.

You will not find the virgin birth in the United Church of Christ Statement of Faith. You won’t find a lot of things in the UCC Statement of Faith. While it refers to God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, you will not find an explicitly Trinitarian formula.

This is what it says about Jesus: “In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Savior, you have come to us and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death and reconciling the world to yourself.”

It doesn’t try to explain exactly how Jesus was God-with-Us. It doesn’t try to nail down, pun intended, what it means that Jesus is risen. And it uses an understanding of the crucifixion and resurrection known as Christus Victor, the idea that Jesus defeated sin, evil and death, rather than the bloody sacrificial atonement of so many Christians. Because, I don’t know about you, but I don’t care to be washed in the blood, and I couldn’t worship a god who worked that way, for that god would not be good.

In fact, if I was required to affirm the ancient creeds in order to be ordained as a pastor and teacher in the United Church of Christ, I would not be standing before you today. I could not do it.

I find the ancient statement of Chalcedon, that declared Jesus to be fully human and fully God, and I quote, “to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably,” to be utter and complete nonsense. What does that even mean? I like to call it the Council of Catdog, for it makes about as much sense to me as the Nickelodeon cartoon “Catdog,” featuring an animal that has the front ends of both creatures fused together, and no backend.

But here’s the thing. To be a member of the United Church of Christ, I do not need to affirm an ancient creed. We don’t have one. Our Statement of Faith is not a litmus test. It is pretty loose and pretty modern, but even it does not create a barrier for entry into the covenant community, for we have a living faith, and some of us would write a completely different statement today.

Joel speaks of a time when the young and old would dream, would be prophets, and we in the UCC try to make room for that new work of the Spirit. Jeremiah spoke of the day when we would not need the Law, for it would be written in our hearts. May that day come!

You can be in this place and not believe Mary was a virgin. You can be in this place and not believe that God is a giant bearded white male in the sky, ala William Blake. You can be in this place and not even be sure what you believe. What we ask is that you want to walk together, and that somehow, as best you are able, you align yourself with the core values of our faith trajectory, core values not found in a book of rules, but in a history of action.

More than all of the so-called fundamentalists, we take the Bible seriously, read it in context, understand it as a great story that evolves over a thousand years, and that continues to evolve through our interpretation and growing understanding. As the great great Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan puts it, “My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

Except, we aren’t, aren’t that dumb. United Church of Christ pastors are trained with eyes wide open, a healthy dose of skepticism, a passion for the real themes of scripture, justice and compassion and liberation. And that is what we bring to our congregations, what attracts people to our churches. It is the reason we were the first to understand that marriage equality was consistent with God’s justice and care for the oppressed, and while that stand cost us hundreds of small congregations, we saw a net gain in membership, for we are able to change, to learn.

How did we end up with a statement of faith that was so loose? How did we end up with a local church covenant, one we will recite together as we welcome new members, that is non-creedal? Certainly our Puritan and Congregational ancestors were at times a rigid and cranky lot, even if they were the hippies of their age. But somehow, as four Christian movements came together in the late 1950’s, we threw all of that dogmatism away and became something new.

It is as if, by getting married, the Congregational and Christian Church and the Evangelical and Reformed Church became more than the sum of their parts, transcended their individual histories to become this amazing new thing, took the passionate and prophetic work of the Congregational tradition, welded onto it the Spirit of the free Christian churches, the Pietism and biblical scholarship of the German traditions, so that we became a living example of what Jesus can do with a church, making all things new, just as Jesus worked to make new the Hebrew faith, honoring what was old and weaving in what was new in his day.

Jews worried that they would disappear into a sea of foreignness. It didn’t happen. There are Jewish-Americans and Jewish-Poles and Jewish-Argentinians. Those characters from “Fresh Off the Boat” can be Asian and American. And we can be United Church of Christ and Congregational, ancient and new all at the same time, more than the sum of our parts, living into our local covenant, our UCC Statement of Faith, living our dynamic, evolving justice-seeking faith into a world that needs it, protecting God’s great creation, speaking out for the oppressed, dancing to cosmic symphonies.

Because the hoods and hats are still out there, the lynching tree has taken a new form, and people are lonely and scared, living lives of quiet and not-so quiet desperation, trapped in a system that produces spiritual and physical death. They need some good news out there people. We must speak.