The Gnostics and Walt Whitman

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on June 18, 2006

In December 1945, nearly 2 years before the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered, the Egyptian desert gave up a long held secret. What is now referred to as the Nag Hammadi Library is a collection of 52 texts from the early centuries of our faith. Those texts are a written witness to early Gnostic Christianity. The word Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis which means knowledge and describes a very different direction in Christian thought – a direction that was eventually deemed heretical. But as always, it’s good to remember that being branded a heretic sometimes simply means that you lost the argument.

The texts found at Nag Hammadi were written in the Coptic language, translations of even earlier Greek texts and include a collection of previously unknown Christian gospels, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of the Egyptians and the complete Gospel of Thomas. While the texts and their bindings were easily datable from between 350-400, dating the original texts is more of a challenge. Some of them will be quite early – some scholars date the Gospel of Thomas to around 140. For centuries, all that we knew about this early strand of Christian thought came from the writings of Iraneaus, the Bishop of Lyon in France in the 2^nd century. He wrote five volumes entitled The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge. From that title, you might expect a fairly slanted presentation of Gnostic thought.

One good question about this archeological treasure is “why were they buried in the first place?” As the new religion was beginning to define itself, there was great diversity of thought and interpretation. Irenaeus and like minded churchmen looked at ideas that were different from their own and said “we are right and you are wrong.” Eventually, they also had the power to make it illegal to even be in possession of one of these texts. Many of them were burned and destroyed but someone in Upper Egypt decided to hide this collection and for 1600 years they rested safely in their clay vessel.

What was in these texts that Irenaeus found so appalling? A good Gnostic is one who understands him or herself to be a spark of the divine. The work of a Gnostic is to seek to know that spark within and by so doing, to come to know God. One Gnostic teacher said this “Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, “My God, my mind, my thoughts, my soul, my body, Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate…If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.” This is the prime difference between Gnostic Christianity and orthodox Christianity according to Elaine Pagels who’s well known book The Gnostic Gospels came out in the early 80s. She said that Orthodox thought “insist(s) that a chasm separates humanity from its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the Gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God, the self and the divine are identical.” This thinking is present in how they write about Jesus. The Gnostic Jesus speaks of illusion and enlightenment not of sin and repentance. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. When the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal – even identical.” Some scholars see here an influence of Buddhist thought.

Gnostic thought was itself very diverse but there appears to have been some agreement around the understanding of the divine in “terms of a harmonious, dynamic relationship of opposites – a concept that may be akin to the Easter view of yin and yang but that remains alien to orthodox Judaism and Christianity. The implications here for the relationship between male and female in the divine and in the church are important – hence The DaVinci Code brouhaha. Ireneaus and his supporters who came to identify themselves as the guardians to the only “true faith” really weren’t interested in that!

It also has implications for the relationship between the body and the soul. As much as I appreciate much of the Gnostic teaching, their understanding of the physical vessel as something to be escaped in order to achieve enlightenment seems to me to fly in the face of their embrace of the harmony of opposites. Dualism is a helpful concept when both components are seen as necessary and life-giving to the other. Humanity is best expressed when male and female are equally valued. Humanity is best expressed when body and spirit are equally valued. The recently published Gospel of Judas portrays Judas as the only disciple to really get what Jesus is doing. His service to Jesus is to help him to escape the body that is so limiting.

The reading today from 2 Corinthians gives us this same kind of Gnostic, anti-body language. “While we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord;” “…we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” I’m going stand with a very orthodox doctrine here to refute this – the doctrine of the Incarnation. We believe that God took on human form and if a human body was a suitable vessel for true divinity, then it can no longer be thought of as evil or needing to be transcended. That’s why I decided to put Paul’s language in dynamic tension with Walt Whitman, that wonderful poet of the incarnation. If we believe that body and soul are equally sacred it should call into question many of the ways that we harm our own bodies and those of others. Being a child of God is expressed in your soul and your body.

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engrith them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,

To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly
round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do no t ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them,
and in the contact and odor of the, that please the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

If we know Jesus as Emmanuel – God with us – the one who came to live this life in a human body, in loving community with us then our being in our own skin and being with one another is also holy. What joyous good news that is!

(My thanks to Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels, 1979, Vintage Books, Random House; and also to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.)

The Divine Genogram

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on Trinity Sunday, June 11, 1006.

Dan Brown’ DaVinci Code has certainly done more for theological pondering than any mainstream theologian in recent memory. Particularly around subject of Jesus’ humanity and divinity - subjects that haven’t been given this much thought in over 1500 years. This is Trinity Sunday and the only time during the year that we are called to stop and ponder the relationships of the three-in-one God. All of the controversies about who Jesus was were and are really controversies about the nature of God.

From the 2^nd century on, theologians struggled with the implications of Jesus’ divinity. It caused all kinds of questions to be asked. “Well if Jesus is divine then which one is God?” A big problem for many answer seekers was the prevailing concept of God as unchangeable and incapable of suffering. How then could God have been fully present in Jesus as he suffered? I find that to be an intriguing and helpful question. Does God suffer? I believe that we make God suffer all the time but our treatment of one another and the rest of creation. Along these same lines, if we ask “does God suffer” shouldn’t we also ask, does God experience joy? The whole idea of the incarnation is God’s willingness to encounter humanity in the best way, to experience human suffering but also to experience human joy.

In my first year in seminary, we had to create a genogram. A genogram is a diagram of your family and relationships – kind of like a family tree but with description. Relationships are identified by connecting lines of different types that indicate strength and importance. Now in my biological family, I have my parents and their families and my sister. I also have a half sister from my mother’s second marriage, four step brothers and sisters from my father’s second marriage a half sister and brother from my father’s third marriage. My step-mother’s family provided an important grandmother figure as well as cousins and aunts and uncles. Then you add my in-laws family and their cousins that became important parts of my life and my children. We wereonly given an 8.5x14” piece of paper to do this. I worked and worked just to account for everybody and when it was done it looked like some Etch-a-Sketch gone mad. I handed it in and the teaching assistant glanced at it and did a double take. As she tried to grasp the complexity of my family, she just kept saying “Oh my!”

The doctrine of the Trinity is the kind of thing that happens when people start to try to describe God. What starts as a simple point on a piece of white paper that represents an awareness of the existence of God grows until it starts to resemble my genogram. As soon as you start to ask questions – “Who or what is God?” “What is God like?” – you get more and more dots on the paper. Sometimes, when there is more than one answer to a question, i.e. “God is merciful” or “God is just” the answers themselves complicate the picture because they appear to contradict each other. A merciful God forgives but a just God requires punishment – so which is it? Soon you have more dots and lines connecting them and arrows pointing and God starts to looked like that Etch-a-Sketch thing.

What is the point of these torturous exercises? I believe the point is why we do them. We do them because we are hungry for God. We come to God presence and table famished. C.S. Lewis said “This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth.” We seek a knowledge and experience of God because there is nothing else that can fill us. Heaven knows that we will try all sorts of other things before we give God a shot. But eventually, the more elaborate our diversions, the more dire will be our need for that which only God can give. True love and true connection. The God genogram is really less complicated than we try to make it. The lines of connection between God and every single person are of equal depth and importance. My professor Clark used to refer to God as “the ultimately related one.” Because of God’s relation to us, we have an equal relationship with each other. We may all have different fingerprints and DNA but we all have an identical faith genogram. All of the lines that connect to us are of equal strength and there’s a lot of them – one for every person on earth. The lines between us and those people we do not know personally go through God and they are as strong as those that connect us to person we love the most.

The clearest way for me to grasp the concept of the Trinity is as relationship. The Trinity exists as a community of equal relationships – God and Christ and the relationship that exists within this divine diversity. The lines of the genogram themselves – the relationships – are also God. One formula that expresses this beautifully is the triune God as Love, Lover and the Loving.

The hunger to know God particularly in this time of change is resulting in some exciting thinking. In her book Amazing Grace; A Dictionary of Faith, Kathleen Norris said this about the Trinity which resonates strongly with the work of our upcoming General Convention and just trying to survive in this world. This is what she says:

“Tension is a creative force. But polarization, which seems an abiding sin of our age, is worse than useless. It stifles creativity, whereas a healthy dose of negative capability, the ability to hold differences in tension while both affirming and denying them, enlivens both poetry and theology. In Christian history, it has sometimes meant the difference between unity and schism, offering a synthesis that provides a third way. Mystics of many religious traditions have often spoken in terms of threes, and although I have very little grasp of how science is done, I love to read about quarks, those subatomic particles that exist in threes. There is no such thing as one quark, but only three interdependent beings; I picture them dancing together at the heart of things, part of the atomic glue that holds this world together, and to the atomic scientist, at least, makes all things on earth more alike than different….

The idea of the Trinity is increasing relevant as we seek to understand the physical structure of the universe and to live together on this troubled earth. Anything that we can do to further and to heal relationships is holy work. – God, the ultimately related One, creates the relationships and then lives the example in perfect unity. We cannot will away relationships simply because they trouble us – we can only strive to be authentic and to live with honesty and love and compassion. When we do that, even if we are not completely successful, the mysterious and mystical and miraculous ways of God will do more than we can ask or imagine. Holy! Holy! Holy!