hEyOkA mAgAzInE. CONFESSIONS OF A LAPSED THEIST

It was true. No divine voice had whispered in my ear, nor had a burning bush appeared to me, although I had seen some pretty other worldly things at various singles bars. So what had prompted me into the ministry, against all reason?

Martin Luther warned us to distinguish between a genuine revelation and what may simply be a bit of undigested carrot. And William Combes, an interior Salish spirit dancer who struggles on the edge of oblivion on Vancouver's skid row, told me once that one should never talk about the sacred lest it lose its power. So I won't try to explain what I was feeling back then, except to say that it was something authentic.

Since spiritual impulses have never been that important in the life of organized Christianity, and certainly not among its clergy, my fuzzy sense of calling didn't impede my entry into the ranks of United Church ministry; on the contrary, it actually helped my advancement as a pastor, since, to quote one of the worried bureaucrats who eventually helped expel me from that church, “When you put God first, you're being pastorally incompetent.” Hmm.

The stark truth is that, what caused me to eventually return to my roots, so to speak, and embrace agnosticism again, was the experience of living and working within a mainstream Christian church.

It took a number of years for the mask to slip, and for the thing behind the appearance to step forward. During those confused years, I was a lot like a pesty germ in a system, irritating the host and causing it to gather its army of antibodies against my dangerous example. For my scandal was simply to take everything in Christianity at face value, and try to put into practice what Jesus talked about.

Ah, the naïve idiot, I can hear you thinking. But idiots always have been one of the more subversive and necessary characters in our western culture, de-assembling all the arrangements with their simple questions and simpler actions: people like Jesus himself.

Much to the alarm of some of my older parishioners, I often referred to Jesus as a humanist. The guy broke all the sabbath rules, tackled the religious hypocrites and even said that man was more important than religion. The one time he ever went into a church, he ended up trashing the place. And, despite what the Vatican will tell you, most of the Gospels portray him as simply a man who continually spoke about and lived something he called “the kingdom of heaven”.

Recent Biblical scholarship, particularly the “Historical Jesus” seminar at the University of Chicago, suggests that barely 12 percent of Jesus' words in scripture were likely spoken by him; and of that 12 percent, most of it is talking about this “kingdom of heaven” thing. So what is it?

Jesus referred to it most clearly on two occasions, in simple parables that the Jesus Seminar folks regard as genuine words from his mouth: namely, when he compared the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed, and to yeast in dough.

These are both pretty alarming and unusual metaphors for a supposedly “devout” Jew to have used. For one thing, the mustard seed and yeast are both explicitly anti-establishment and even anti-religious symbols. The mustard seed, though tiny, yields a noxious, weed-like plant that rapidly takes over and kills all the other vegetation, kind of like an AIDS virus. Jesus' peasant listeners would have hated the mustard plant as the number one enemy of their crop, and yet it's the symbol he used for the new social order he called heaven's kingdom: something that takes over everything.

Yeast was a sign of corruption and impurity in the Judaism of two millenia ago, in contrast to the sterile and unchanging unleavened bread used in religious practice. Yet in referring to it, Jesus said it was like heaven's kingdom because it worked through the entire loaf organically, making it alive, transforming it in secret and hidden ways, and causing the bread to be born. Bread and fish, shared around a common table, was for nearly three centuries Christianity's sole public symbol.

So what this odd homeless man is portraying, and offering, is what in his native language of Aramaic was termed “a realm of eternity”, which the Greeks translated into “kingdom of the heavens”, basilea tou theo, or “fortress of the gods”. The Aramaic term was closer to Jesus' description, which was simply this: a new realm is present on the earth, parallel but hidden, and made manifest in direct human interaction, without mediator or hierarchy.

In effect, this new realm has mixed up all the social and political arrangements, like a subversive yeast, and made every person equal within a new body, like freshly baked bread.

Holy shit, I realized one day: this Jesus was not just a social revolutionary, but an agnostic humanist as well, since the one thing that religion cannot abide is unmediated equality, for such a joining of heaven and earth sweeps away all the distinctions of “saved” and “fallen” in favour of a single dignity of mankind.

Of course, this knowing created something of a dilemma for me, there in my pulpit. For who was I to interpret such a wonderful and simple reality for anyone else? How could I “pray” for anybody, as if I had a better insight into truth, or more power, than another? None of that hierarchy of religious experts is present in the world Jesus envisioned.

Fortunately, my dilemma was resolved when the United Church terminated me with extreme prejudice. Like Colonel Kurtz, I had realized the monstrous lie that I was a part of.

What Emperor likes having his nudity pointed out? It makes him go, well, you know, a bit funny in the head. He starts dispatching assassins and press releases.

The truth of who and what he actually is cannot ever be spoken, for he has become as unchanging as the unleavened bread: infallible, all-knowing, and merciless in his wrath.

As such a monarch, the Christian church can kill with impunity while quoting the man from Nazareth. It can starve and beat children to death for generations, and escape all judgement. It can bury their little bodies in secret and issue verbal apologies and a few dollars to the relatives. And it can destroy the life and good name of anyone from its ranks who dares to speak of these crimes.

Being such a one, I had to learn the hard way that when we remove divinity from the human person and assign it to another dimension, we are precipitating mass murder, and our own ending. Such a fate is what Jesus, and so many others, have tried so hard to prevent. He wept blood, according to some, the night before he was arrested and tortured to death, much like the tears that come when you know that maybe we all are doomed, that none of our words will stop the gentle flesh from being ripped or the innocent hearts from being violated yet again.

A German clergyman had the same kind of change as me years ago, during the Hitler nightmare, when he came to see his commonality with everyone. Wolf-Dieter Zimmerman, a member of the banned Confessing Church movement that worked in the anti-Nazi resistance, had this to say shortly before he died in 1982:

“As a Christian, I had come to see myself as being a special kind of person, set apart from humanity by our unique revelation. And yet under the conditions of dictatorship, forced to work with many different people, Communists, Catholics, Jews, I learned that what mattered was not our unique confession but the power of a single act, performed for any person, no matter how unworthy. Faced with exposure and death at every moment, I saw myself as the same as all of my fellow resistance workers, whether Christian or not, and in that shared danger and struggle, something new was born in me. I became not a special person anymore, but a common man, which is all the divinity that was ever necessary.”

This is the yeast Jesus tasted, the subversive seed that threatens to make the body alive and growing once more, transforming all it touches into the common loaf that all can feed from, that costs nothing, that was here from the beginning and somehow stolen from us. And there it sits patiently in our most broken part, ever eternal, waiting for the right soil and the receptive heart and willing hand, to bring life again.

I didn't learn any of this in the church, as an official Christian; I realized after much loss that I had known it all along, and had been made to forget it. I think that knowing is in all of us, and that to be fully human is to remember that there is no authority over us, save truth; that “mine” and “yours” are fantasy; and that compassion is the beginning and end of divinity on earth.

There's a lot of wisdom in that little bit of yeast. And just think: without it, we wouldn't have beer!

... and on this radio program: "Hidden from History", every Monday from 1-2 pm (PST) on CFRO 102.7 FM (www.coopradio.org) (Vancouver)

"When the desire for Truth and Virtue becomes the only bias in our mind, only then can we know in ourselves what is right."
Peter Annett, Humanist and dissident, 1769 (jailed and persecuted by the Church of England for his questioning of the Bible and the church)