When I was young there was a moment – always an *exact* moment – in whatever church we were attending where there would be a scriptural reading, the minister would go on to explain what it meant and my mother would start to shake her head from side to side.  Then we’d hear it – that whisper just loud enough to be heard in the pew in front of us.  Maybe the one behind us.  That whisper, my mother’s voice, and the words “That’s not what it means.  That’s not what it means at all.”

When the Green(e)s arrived in what would become the United States they came in, unsurprisingly, through Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  Mostly Massachusetts and then settling in Rhode Island.  They were part of a group of dissenters which included Anne Hutchinson.  My mother is a descendant of those colonists, colonists who believed so strongly in freedom of religion that they made it a part of the charter establishing Rhode Island as a colony in 1661.

The Greenes also, notably, did not believe in educating women.  Their reasoning was that educating women made them difficult to control.

As soon as those words came out of my mother’s mouth we knew the current minister was about to make the same discovery.

Matthew Kelly, in Chapter 5, draws the conclusion that Jesus’s divinity is proven out by the fact that he claimed to be divine, he performed miracles, and Daniel prophesied the coming of a person like him.

In that case, I’m Elizabeth Taylor.

Miracles happen all around us, every day.  Many of them are enabled by human exploration.  The urge to discover, to fix, to cure, to create, and to connect is part of how humanity moves forward.  It isn’t unique to us in this generation.  This morning I woke up with a headache which I fixed with the help of two little blue pills.  Syntex created this little miracle drug and released for use in 1980.  Unbelievably to me, this is still available by prescription only in most of the world.  Aleve remains a staple in my cabinets for most of my aging ills and I am grateful for the fact that I have to go no further than my bathroom for relief.  It is a kind of miracle I take for granted.

These miracles are the result of education.  In many cases, the result of educating women.  In all cases, the result of educating people who had the will to tackle a problem and find an at least partial solution.

So here I am, annoyed that once again the divinity of Christ is being argued by citing the number of times he called himself divine – especially since what he called himself was “the Son of Man” – and the divinity of those words wouldn’t be written into religious canon until 3 centuries after his death.  I am also annoyed by this idea that if something is said it must be so – which is the Matthew Kelly argument for Jesus.

I try to imagine the question “what if Jesus had been born today?” but the fact is that his birth and death were such historical game changers that I can’t even begin to imagine what the world would be like today had Christianity never existed.

The 3 largest religions in the world all stem from a single man and his version of God.  The majority of our history, especially with regard to conflict over the past 2,000 years, stems from people acting out in their version of their accepted truth justified by their chosen religion.

What if we changed how we look at Jesus.  What if he was less “divine” and more educated?  What if what he was doing was taking what he had learned and teaching it to others.  What if the ability to control the wind, health, and even life & death were all parts of a science that religion has blocked out because it was focused on controlling the truth?

Some people ask “Would we have gotten to the moon as fast as we did without the unifying power of Christianity?”

But I am sitting here looking at this differently and wondering “Did it take it longer than it might have otherwise due to the power of Christianity?”

More specifically, the willingness to interpret the divine as somehow so mysterious that it should be controlled by a limited few and simply accepted by the rest of us.

Given the situation at hand during a time when the divinity question was paramount – an Emperor who needed unity to strengthen his power base and a quickly growing and spreading religion based on the life and teachings of a single individual who wasn’t on hand to clarify what he meant – was the Divinity of Jesus a truth or, possibly, more of a means to an end?

I wonder what Jesus would say….

I briefly decided, several years ago, to learn more about Reiki.  This healing touch concept was moving swiftly through the new age community and it seemed to me to have a natural – but calmer – connection to the laying on of hands so common in Christian Communities.

Most good teachers will start with a bit of history regarding their craft and this was no exception.  Except the history behind Reiki isn’t particularly clear.  In the process, I stumbled upon accounts of a young Jesus who had traveled east with his parents as a young adult where he studied with wise masters of various arts, including what would later on become known as energy healing.

The ancient world was far better traveled than many people realize, with trade routes that spread from the western tip of Europe to the eastern edge of China.  Some anthropological evidence exists to support travelers between the northwestern tip of North America (in particular what is now known as Washington State) and the northern part of Japan.  Given the gospel account of the Wise Men coming from the east to visit the young Jesus, the possibility that Jesus might have traveled eastward into what is now known as Iran, Iraq, and even Pakistan/India isn’t that far fetched.  Furthermore, we know that Christianity spread into the middle east largely unstopped for the first 600 years.  So it is possible that the “Missing Years” as the years between Jesus’s appearance at 12 and his re-appearance at 30 are often called, were years spent studying outside of what is present day Israel.  Luke 2:52 gives the only brief account of this time, saying that “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.”

Luke’s account says clearly that Jesus returned to Nazareth with his family following his time in temple – but it does not say he stayed there.

Jerusalem today is about 90 miles south of Nazareth.  Baghdad, which was not yet founded as a city but sits centrally in Iraq, is about 600 miles east of Jerusalem.  For nomadic cultures, this would be a not unheard of traveling distance and trade routes between Israel and ancient Mesopotamia, located even further East, were well established.

When Jesus asks in Matthew 15:15 “who do you think I am?” and then, to Peter’s response in Matthew 15:16 “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”  he answers ““You are blessed, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven!” we deduce his deistic nature.  But it wasn’t until the 1st Council of Nicaea in 325 AD that Jesus was formally declared to be God when the Christian idea of the Trinity was codified and the sacred writings used to form the foundation of the modern day Bible were selected.

Bart Ehrman, a biblical scholar, discusses thoroughly the issues with translation of the scriptural texts in his book “Jesus, Interrupted”.  He presents fairly solid evidence to suggest that taking the bible literally is unwise.

Much of what we know about Jesus is presented to us in the 2,000 year old texts we know as the Gospels and the New Testament.  But what if we could learn more about Jesus by understanding the possibility of his life outside of those texts? What if we opened our minds to the idea that he might have been a student of the world who traveled among the wisest of his time and learned from them?  What if what he was teaching us was that we are all children of God as he is a child of God?  What if what he was teaching was learned from centuries of being willing to connect the divine in us to the divine in the universe?

Again, no stories.

The author shares in 4th chapter, which he has labelled the 3rd chapter because he decided not to call the 1st chapter a chapter at all – thus adding to the chaos that he says Jesus will fix in this world but I think could have been helped by making the 1st chapter the actual first chapter…

…but I digress.

The author shares that he rediscovers his wife and kids after he returns from each business trip.  Which makes me wonder just how long these trips are!  And he discusses the crisis and chaos of our world today.

This chapter ends with the question “Are you ready?”

I happen to be an emergency preparedness expert.

Yes, a dyed in cotton *actual* expert on emergency preparedness – a claim which is validated in part by the government’s willingness to actually pay me for this expertise.

So the question, “Are you ready?” isn’t a new one for  me.  In fact, it’s one that gets asked a lot in my circle.

Getting ready for an emergency like a Tsunami is much different than getting ready for something like a winter storm.  First of all, one you see coming with often several days notice.  You can lay in food and other necessities, check your batteries, and be prepared to settle in with a good book.  Maybe your knitting.  The other happens in front of you like a terrible nightmare where suddenly the water drains away from your feet and you are running for the hills.  Winter storms are the stuff of romantic movies while Tsunami’s are horror stories.

Which means the question shouldn’t be “Are you ready?”  The question should be “what are you ready for?”

The author argues that the world is in chaos, crying out for order and people are looking for *something* as a solution when the solution really is *someone*.  Jesus.

Here’s the thing:  If Jesus is the solution to a world in chaos from crisis and war – why is he the excuse for so many wars?

For many years now we’ve been trying to educate people on what it means to be ready.  We break it down into three simple steps:  Find out what can happen, have a plan, and build a kit.  We do this because we are increasingly aware that the government is not enough – people have to be prepared to take care of themselves until help will arrive.  Which in many scenarios is at least 3 days and sometimes (Puerto Rico) weeks or months away.

If you live in Kansas, the likelihood you’ll be hit with a Tsunami (climate change aside) is pretty unlikely.  On the other hand, tornado’s are a fact of your life.  So you build your plans around events like tornado’s, winter storms, nuclear war, and fire.  (Sorry about the nuclear war thing – unfortunately we have a lot of science in the hands of some not very smart or good people – so it’s a risk.)  You practice how to get to a shelter or how to escape a burning house.  You keep copies of important papers and you have a plan to communicate with people who care about you.

And you have a kit. This collection of tools is intended to help you survive until help arrives.  Something to create shelter from, water, food, flashlight, portable radio, first aid kit – the list goes on depending on what your potential disaster scenario is.

Which brings me back to the connection between being ready and Jesus.  Because again, the author argues that we are all looking for something to solve the crisis of our lives and of our times when we should be looking for someone – Jesus.

But, isn’t it a greater act of love and maturity to be willing to shoulder the responsibility for ourselves and be ready – and willing – to lend a hand to help those who need it?

Which goes back to my first observation in my first blog post – maybe Jesus exists in what is the best of each of us.  If this is true, then being ready isn’t about looking toward a specific being.  It’s about being part of that being – the part that means we’re there for each other no matter what the crisis.

 

Currently I have 258 Facebook friends.

That number stays pretty consistent since I’m a “pruner” – meaning that for me my social media relationships are in a nearly constant evaluation cycle.  Do I know them in real life? Do they bring value to my world? Do I learn from them? Do I respect them?  Do I feel respected by them?  Or, almost negating most of these, am I related to them?

These aren’t the only questions but they are among the questions that I ask myself most often.

The answer doesn’t have to be yes to all of those questions but it does have to be yes to at least most of those questions.  Interestingly, this set of questions does give me political and religious diversity in my feed – which I appreciate.

These are also exactly the same rules I apply to my non-Facebook friends.

So today’s reading, which I yawned my way through because for the second day running (out of three days) the chapter had no war stories – which are an instrumental way for me to connect to a message – asks “How well do you know Jesus?”

I was 7 years old and sitting in the waiting room of a pediatricians office when I picked up a children’s Bible sitting on the table in front of me and independently read a series of Bible stories for myself for the first time.  Up until then everything I’d ever read had been prescribed for me by an adult.  Which meant that I knew about Winnie the Pooh, Dick and Jane, and a dog named Spot. Beyond that, I hadn’t yet discovered the world that would open up for me as a result of public education and a literate mother.

That book of stories put a name to the entity that I’d been aware of for as long as I can remember and that name was Jesus.

This wasn’t a matter of faith or belief for me.  It was a simple fact of existence.  That friend, whom I have always known, had a name and that name was Jesus.

There are a few people on my Facebook friends list whom I have never met face to face but who, through their writing and our interactions, I feel I know nearly as well as people I’ve known face to face for years.   I treasure them.

I unfollow and unfriend people whose online behavior is counter to what I would want in a friend I’m standing next to in real life.  I also place people in the “acquaintance” corner if I’m not yet sure I’m willing to unfriend them but I don’t want them weighing in on my timeline in areas where I don’t trust them to be thoughtful or appropriate in their actions.

The beauty of Facebook is that you often see a side of people you wouldn’t see in a face to face interaction and that exposure gives you insight into aspects of who they are that you might not ever know otherwise.

Which has me wondering:  What if Jesus used Facebook?  Would he have millions of followers, much like modern day celebrities?  What would his grammar be like?  What groups would he be a member of?  Would he be on my friends list?  Would I follow his page?  Would he be thoughtful when engaging other people with different view points?  Would he respect boundaries?  Would he share cat memes?

This is the Jesus I wish I could get to know…

 

 

What if Jesus could call a “do over”?

My nephew and I sat chatting with each other in the quiet of my “mountain house” last night.  We talked about some of the things that seemed like mistakes to other people but turned out to be really right for us.  We talked about things we wished we’d known when we were younger.  We talked about things we did almost right and, in retrospect we wish we’d understood better earlier in our respective adulthood’s.

We talked about Christianity and how being expected to embrace it the way other people embrace it turned out to be a bad approach for each of us.  He said “At some point I realized that following a God who gets mad at you for not doing things a certain way makes no sense.  Maybe that means I’m going to end up with the other guy but I’ll risk it.”

I laughed and said “It’ll be a hell of a party.  I’ll be there, as will most of my friends”

The Church is nearly 2,000 years old.  For the first 300 years or so it was loosely strung together collection of people exploring the nature of God via letters, stories, conversations, and rumors.  The Emperor Constantine most famously tried to put an end to this approach to faith by calling the first of the ecumenical councils, the Council of Nicaea, which, conveniently,  he also presided over.

The Council was, at best, an attempt to get some clarity over the “rules of Christianity” by a guy who was used to being given consistent advice on how to approach things like ruling an empire.  He had to have been frustrated.  He’d been at this Christianity business for 12 years at this point and every time he turned around he was bumping into some new “sacred” writing.  At worse, the First Council of Nicaea was an attempt to consolidate the power of this growing and highly resilient faith with lip-service to a few of the larger groups and over-riding authority to a guy who fundamentally worked for the Emperor himself.  And it was successful – Christianity as rooted in the first 7 ecumenical councils constituted a force so powerful in the known world that it became the root of law almost everywhere it ended up.  It didn’t face a true obstacle post First Council until nearly 300 years later when a young prophet in the middle east took scriptural dictation from the angel Gabriel and produced the Qur’an.

Yes, *that* Gabriel.

Martin Luther had no such divine messenger when he arrived at the church door on October 31st, 1517 with his hammer, nail, and list of 95 items best described as a Fault Letter to Christianity.

Interestingly, October 31st also marks the end of the spiritual year to Wiccans and many other pagans.  It is a time when the veil is thin and the ability to access the wisdom of ancestors is highest.  Most pagans then enter a time of reflection and preparation for the year to come.  A new beginning.

Today the majority of religion in the world stems from a one dude who produced two sons via two different wives in what is best described as the worst case of sibling rivalry since Cain met Able.

The idea of God being omniscient, regardless of which name you call him by, is pretty rooted in our perception of who he (gender neutral use) is.  Which makes me wonder if Jesus chatting up God in the Garden of Gethsemane – as described in Matthew chapter 26 – was less about the Crucifixion and more about his glimpse into the next 2,000 years of humanity’s misbehavior.

Was Jesus’s experience of humanity enough of a game changer in his perception of the possibility of us to make him doubt the effectiveness of God’s game plan?

His post crucifixion reappearance to his posse leads me to believe he wasn’t giving up on us.

But what if Jesus could call a “do over”?  What would he do differently?

 

Scattered throughout the various small towns of Pennsylvania are churches.  Drive down any mainstreet, as I periodically do the one in Coudersport, and you will see one for nearly any version of the Christian faith.  There is something timeless and sincere about each one – almost daring you to come in and feel the stories of the Pennsylvanians who came from near and far to find a connection to something greater than themselves.

Potter County has always seemed very protestant to me.  Maybe it’s because my childhood visits were filled with the hardworking farmers of the Seventh Day Baptists and Free Methodists that dot the branches of my family tree.  Maybe it’s because my mother, a protestant minister herself, had her own religious start on a hill that included milking cows and Sunday School classes.

One day, during a visit to my mother’s birthplace, I was driving through the heart of Coudersport when I noticed a Catholic church.  I’ve driven past it dozens of times before I’m sure but somehow I’d never noticed it was Catholic.  It seemed odd in the middle of deeply protestant “God’s Country” Potter County. But there it was.  A brick, 1950’s style Pennsylvania Catholic Church – right on the corner across from the McDonalds!

Mine is a different spiritual path.  Far less interested in a single truth found in a single god under the banner of a single religion, I’ve enjoyed experiencing the nature of the creator through many eyes and belief systems. Dogma has never been important to me. But I’ve loved Catholicism since a friend dragged me to her church as a teenager.

So I resolved to visit this unexpected Catholic church.

Which is how I found myself slipping in a side door on Christmas Eve.  Rustily standing up and sitting down in the rhythm of nearly two thousand years of slowly changing faith.  The church is astonishingly beautiful and I found my brief encounter with the parishioners warm and accepting.  I did a double take at a young blond haired, blue-eyed boy who looked just like my brother, his sons, and one nephew did at that age – suggesting that somewhere in this place my family tree has a branch.

Coudersport, I’d learned just a few months ago, used to have an “Italian Town”.  The tannery brought settling immigrant families in with their old world craftsmanship to work the leather that came from plentiful deer and cows.  I thought about those families as I sat and appreciated the workmanship of the sanctuary.  I wondered how they felt in their early days during Potter County’s cold and snowy winters.  Was this church a place of warm community in an otherwise alien land?

As mass ended and we exited the church we were each handed a small wrapped package.  In it, a book – Rediscover Jesus: An Invitation.

This morning, Christmas morning, I woke up to find the world blanketed in white.  Our family celebration won’t start for several hours and I still have time before wresting the turkey into the fryer – my contribution to the family table.  So I sat down with the book, not sure what I would find.  I was pleasantly surprised.

This is a storyteller’s book and the first chapter ends with the question:  When was the last time someone confused you with Jesus?

That is an excellent question.