SUNDAY 13 FEBRUARY 2005 : First Sunday in Lent
Five Foundations for a liberal / progressive Christian faith
1. Humanity
Readings for First Sunday in Lent: Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7 & Matthew 4: 1-11
During my visit to my friend Sarun in Cambodia a week and a half ago we had a day trip to a province north of Phnom Penh. When we had seen and done what we went there to see and do, my friends asked if I would like to go up ?¨the mountain?Æ. I couldn??t see any nearby mountain in that flat country, but said yes anyway, assuming it would be a gentle drive in a motorcar to admire a view. After some driving we eventually came upon ?¨the mountain?Æ ?± a hill the size, perhaps, of One Tree Hill. I then discovered that to get to the top of the hill, where there was a particularly ancient and holy pagoda, one had to climb up 809 steps. But these were not just any old steps. According to local beliefs, if you climbed the steps you ?¨made merit?Æ for yourself.
So off we set, up these merit-making steps. After a few pauses for breath, we got to what must have been about step number 350. Red-faced and panting I paused, and was keenly studied by a group of local young men and children who had accompanied us. The children had been fanning us with pieces of cardboard. The young men were carrying a long bamboo pole with some material around it. It was at that point that I decided I didn??t particularly want, or need, to make merit. But, a brainwave suggested, maybe I could help some of these local people make double merit, by allowing them to carry me the rest of the way. And so they did ?± using the long bamboo pole from which they already had a hammock strung, waiting for some unfit westerner like me to conk out and pay them the going rate to be carried the rest of the way.
All religions have at their heart an understanding that humanity is in some way or another and for some reason or other fundamentally flawed and imperfect. All religions have a variety of ways by which the human individual can ?¨make merit?Æ with or obtain forgiveness from God, however it is that religion understands God. In Christianity, the heart of the understanding about the state of humanity is found in today??s first reading, the story of what is called ?´the Fall??. The gist of the whole thing is that human beings were originally perfect; ?¨in the image of God?Æ is how the Bible describes us in our original ideal state. But from that original perfection human beings fell into a state of imperfection, a state of sin, because of a willful disobedience as expressed in the Garden of Eden story. From this state of sin, their descendants down to us need to be rescued. The rescue remedy was provided by God through the death of Jesus on the cross.
Many if not all of us here in St Lukes today have decided at some time or other in the past that this Garden of Eden story is not literally true. It is, we may have decided, part of the foundational meaning-making mythology of Christianity. Like the two creation stories in Genesis chapter 1 and 2, which we probably also have decided are not literally true, the Fall story laid the foundation for understanding our human predicament. As a meaning-making myth the Adam and Eve story captured the essential problem of human life. It tells us we are fallen sinners who are hopelessly lost. This is the definition of human life that underlies traditional Christian faith. You only need to go through the hymnbook to see how frequently this is either directly or indirectly stated. The church shaped its primary liturgical act, the Holy Communion, around the accepted process by which this state of lostness was remedied, through the death of Jesus. The death of Jesus upon the cross put us right with God in a way that nothing else could. In sung and in liturgical form, in preaching and teaching, this definition of the human state has been reinforced generation after generation for two thousand years.
As a meaning-making myth, the Fall story is itself deeply flawed, and it is wrong. What is more, it is responsible for generation after generation of people having a negative and destructive understanding of themselves and other human beings.
Perhaps the deepest problem facing this negative Biblical understanding of humanity is the fact that we, you and I, are ?¨post-Darwinian men and women?Æ.(1) We have a very different understanding of the origins of human life from that of the traditional Christian myth. We know that there never was a perfect and completed creation. We know ?± and these days we know more and more ?± that the universe is not yet finished. It is still evolving and still expanding. New galaxies continue to be formed. We know, also, that there never was a perfect man or a perfect woman who fell into sin by an act of disobedience. The Adam and Eve myth is neither true historically nor metaphorically. Human beings are emerging creatures; we are all a work in progress. We are neither perfect nor fallen; we are simply incomplete.
We cannot be rescued by a human sacrifice ?± as traditional understandings that the crucifixion of Jesus satisfies God??s wrath try to state; nor do we need to be saved from the effects of a fall that never happened, even mythologically. We cannot be restored to something that humankind has never been. Rather, we need to be empowered to grow more and more into fullness of our humanity. We need the means to go beyond our traditional limits, to take away more of our incompleteness.
As a species, homo sapiens is the winner of the evolutionary struggle. Our humanity was shaped not by a mythical fall, but by the very real evolutionary battle for survival. We have survived our biological history by our wits, and by a necessary self-centredness. The evil we human beings seem prone to is not an outcome of our fallen nature; rather, it is a manifestation of what our evolutionary history has required of us for our survival, putting self first. Without that instinct we would not have survived as a species. We cannot deny the evil that results from the instinctual self-centredness of evolution that is present in human beings. But at the same time, we must avoid allowing this apparent propensity for evil to define what our humanity is, just as we must move on from the traditional Christian denigration of human life as helpless, depraved, sinful, and in need of divine rescue ?± a viewpoint which is both historically inaccurate and psychologically damaging.
To spend one??s spiritual energy concentrating on the presumed lostness, moral depravity, or hopelessness of human beings, so easily called ?´sinners?? by traditional Christianity, is to fail to appreciate the most incredible product of the whole of the created order as we know it ?± that is, the human mind. When we look at what human beings have achieved, from great works of art to magnificent symphonies, from architectural wonders to breathtaking surgical and medical skills, we can only stand in awe of human life. A progressive or liberal Christian cannot make sense out of a religion that is based on denigrating humanity. Rather, we would look at the wonder of humanity and celebrate the incredible gift of self-conscious life that has emerged from our earliest living ancestor, which was nothing more or less than a bit of protoplasm constituting a single cell in the midst of the vast ocean.
A progressive Christian would prefer to join the psalmist in Psalm 8 in expressing wonder at humanity:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that your are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honour. [Psalm 8: 3-5]
Or perhaps we would use Shakespeare??s words as an affirmation of our faith in ourselves and our own species:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, 316
Perhaps the most important point, for Christians anyway, to make is to state the obvious ?± Christianity began with the claim that the reality of God had been experienced through the life of a particular human being. This is a great and startling claim to make. Can humanity be so evil if it is through this same humanity that God is disclosed?
Yet, we do have to acknowledge that just as goodness and creativity is part of our human story, so too evil is part of our human story. We are creatures of paradox, creatures of light and of darkness, of glory and of shame.
This reality of evil alongside the reality of goodness is born from our evolutionary history. Hundreds of thousands of years ago human life emerged into self-conscious, into the awareness both that ?¨I am?Æ and that ?¨I am destined not to be?Æ. In this awareness of one??s own life and of one??s eventual mortality, our ancestors organised their world around the self-centred and necessary virtue of their own survival, and the survival of their own kind ?± their tribe, clan, nation. This continues to happen. The evils that we do, great or small, are not the outcome of some primeval fall into sin. They are, rather, the manifestations of a humanity that is still a work in progress. We are not finished products, we are ?´becomers??; we do not live in a whole and completed world ?± the violent earthquake that caused the Boxing Day tsunami was a potent reminder that planet earth is still a work in progress, still ?´becoming??, as are we the human inhabitants of this planet.
The struggle for survival that was a key part of the human story for most of the hundreds of thousands of years of human history has left scars of self-centredness writ large upon our psyches. Humanity is beautiful and great, but humanity is also scarred and incomplete. The role of Christian religion, I would suggest, is to offer human beings a power that can lift them beyond those scars into a new level of being. The role of the church is to be the place where the disparate parts of our humanity ?± our altruism, creativity and goodness, and our self-centredness, destructiveness and evil ?± can be bound together in order to enable us to become a truer, fuller, more complete self.
The healing power that joins our disparate parts is the love that accepts us as we are, our ?´shadow?? side included, and says that every part of who we are is still ?´the image of God??. The power that can lift us beyond the scars of humanity to a new level of being is the power of love as we discover it and know it through Jesus the Christ.
One of the primary tasks of a progressive Christian faith community is to assist in the creation of wholeness ?± not goodness, but wholeness in men and women. We are not called to be good, we are called, we are invited, to be whole; to be, or at least to become more, complete. The Christ figure stands as an image, a sign, a promise even, of a new birth of a new humanity that can be ours.
I am aware of the old criticism of liberal Christianity, that in wishing to affirm humanity it fails to take evil seriously enough. There once was a liberal attitude that history and humankind was on a positive progression to a higher plane. And then Auschwitz happened, and all the other horrors of the Nazi era and World War Two. In more recent times, Cambodia and Rwanda and Bosnia, for example, remind us that evil does have to be taken very seriously as part of the whole of our humanity.
But it is a matter of emphasis. Recognising that we human beings are both light and shadow, a mixture, a paradox, we can still avoid the old negativities of the Fall mythology, and affirm a positive faith and hope in humankind. Here are some words from Matthew Fox, priest and author, theologian:
We enter a broken and torn and sinful world ?± that??s for sure. But we do not enter as blotches on existence, as sinful creatures; we burst into the world as ?¨original blessings?Æ. ?ñ Creation-centred mystics have always begun their theology with original blessing not original sin. (2)
That is how a progressive Christianity will understand humankind.
(1) I borrow this term and understanding from John S Spong in A New Christianity for a New World. p123ff
(2) Cited in Spong. op cit p147