This sermon was presented by Shirley Rickett on 25 October, 2015.
Imagine yourself in a
cave. It is deep in the womb of the
earth. It is so completely dark you cannot see your hand in front of you. Then
the torches arrive and you begin your charcoal sketches on the walls of the cave.
It is spirit that guides your hand, the hand of the artist. The walls offer a
shoulder to an animal, a ripple for running legs.
Some years ago, my spouse
and I watched a 3-D documentary directed by Werner Herzog: The Cave
of Forgotten Dreams. It was one of
the most mesmerizing pieces of film and art I have ever witnessed. The artists created magnificent cave art
35,000 years ago in the Chauvet cave in southern France. The people were Cro Magnum humans of the Bear
Clan. Not the amusing Disney creatures
of the Ice Age but people we have much more in common with than we may like to
think.
Artist, John Robinson,
who specializes in rock art said, “The Bear Clan couldn’t have survived without
possessing a sophisticated language, let alone have created art.” (The Art
of the Chauvet Cave: Ice Age Paleolithic
Cave Paintings, Bradshaw Foundation, “Return to the Chauvet Cave,”
online). Robinson, one of the few people
allowed in the cave to study the art in Chauvet, was astonished at the beauty
of line, the energy and detail. In the
film, archaeologists and linguists explain that humans of this time believed
that there was only one language shared with trees, grass, wind sky, water. In
other words humans were not separated from what surrounded them. Much like indigenous peoples of the world, they
were a part of it all: one language, one
spirit, one all.
A few years ago I
attended a workshop held by John Phillip Santos. His book, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, was a National Book
Award Finalist. The workshop was on the
genre Memoir, which in recent years had been booming. He spoke about how
something was happening. He didn’t believe the recent rush to Ancestry.com and the
Genome Project was accidental. He cited at least three books that discussed how
our DNA could be changed based on the newest technologies. He believed the heightened interest in
ancestry and memoir was a kind of unconscious collective movement in response
to advances in technology that is moving faster than the time needed to know
and understand what that may mean, ethically and morally. Modern science tells
us that the history of the human race lies in the DNA of each of us. If DNA is changed in us, who or what will we
be?
I begin here on the long, strange, trip to
make a point about UUism. Human beings evolved and adapted and we share the
history of ourselves, our species, in our DNA.
Just to touch that time and people through art gives me goose bumps. It
was long before Christianity of course, but the quality of art speaks to us
today, and illuminates the seventh principle, “respect for the interdependent web
of all existence of which we are all a part.”
Now imagine the time is
100 years or more before the birth of Christ.
Near Qumran, “white-robed ‘spiritual-seekers’ had walked out of major
cities of the fertile crescent to gather into small communities” in the most remote
parts of the desert. (The Essene Book
of Days, 2002, p. 7). Professor L. Michael White has said that: “It has been sometimes suggested that Jesus,
himself, or maybe John the Baptist were members of this group.” (“A Portrait of
Jesus’ World—The Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” online). This group known
as the Essenes had abandoned Jerusalem in protest over how the temple was run.
(White)
The Essenes, mentioned in
the Bible in the company of the Sadducees and Pharisees, were only a few of the
diverse, early Christian groups present around the time Jesus was born. We know more about the Essenes because of the
scrolls they hid nearly 2000 years ago in several caves on a rugged cliff on
the banks of the Dead Sea. They were first discovered around 1947. Both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the books known
as Nag Hammadi first discovered in 1945, were found by accident, and both took
years to come to the eyes of scholars due to theft, antiquities dealers, and the black market, until they finally attracted
the attention of the Egyptian, Palestinian and Israeli governments. (Pagels, p.
xv)l
Elaine Pagels is a scholar of the history of
Christianity. Her book, The Gnostic Gospels, is a fascinating
look into one of the Christian groups around the time of Jesus that allows us
to understand origins of ideas other than orthodox we know today, and to consider
diverse ways of thinking on words Jesus
said, may have said, or that were hidden from those who would destroy them. Her
thesis is to show how gnostic forms of Christianity interact with orthodoxy and
what that tells us about the origins of Christianity itself, (Pagels, p. xxxiv). She says at the end of her
introduction, “By investigating the texts from Nag Hammadi, together with
sources known for well over a thousand years from orthodox tradition, we can see how politics and religion coincide
in the development of Christianity.” (Pagels, p. xxxvi)l
Briefly, here are three religious
liberal ideas from the Gnostics:
They questioned if suffering, labor, and
death derive from human sin.
They
celebrated God the Father and the Mother. Women were considered equal and
participated in their services and worship.
Christ’s resurrection was considered
symbolic, rather than literal.
In the town of Naj
‘Hammadi, December, 1945, an Arab peasant stumbled on 13 papyrus books bound in
leather. An excited Professor Gilles Quispel,
distinguished historian of religion at Utrecht in the Netherlands, flew to
Egypt in the spring of 1955. He deciphered
some codices from Nag Hammadi and was startled to read: “These are the secret words which the living
Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down.” This was a newly found text of codices that
had finally made its way to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Did Jesus have a twin
brother? Could this be an authentic record of Jesus’ sayings? “What Quispel held in his hand, the Gospel of
Thomas, was only one of the fifty-two texts discovered at Nag Hammadi…” (Pagels,
p. xiv) In the same volume, the Gospel
of Phillip stated,
… the companion of the [Savior is] Mary
Magdalene.
[But
Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples,
and used to kiss her [often] on her
[mouth]. The rest
of [the disciples were offended] … They said
to him,
“Why do you love her more than all of
us? The Savior
answered and said to them, “Why do I not love
you
as (I love) her?” (Pagels, p. xv)
This is Pagels: “Other sayings in this collection criticize
common Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection,
as naïve misunderstandings. Bound together with these gospels is the Apocryphon, literally, ‘secret book’ of
John, which opens with an offer to reveal ‘the mysteries [and the] things
hidden in silence’ which Jesus taught to his disciple John.” (Pagels, xv, xvi)
Quispel and others first
published the Gospel of Thomas and they suggested the date of c A.D. 140. Some thought
that since these gospels were considered heretical that they must have been
written later than the gospels of the New Testament, which were dated c.
60-110. Professor Helmut Koester of
Harvard University, “has suggested that the collection of writings in the Gospel of Thomas, although compiled c.
140, may include some traditions even older than the gospels of the New Testament,
‘possibly as early as the second half of the first century’ (50-100)—as early
as, or earlier, than Mark, Mathew, Luke, and John.” (Pagels, xvi, xvii)
Some of the texts that
describe the origin of the human race, that is, the Garden of Eden story is
quite different from the Old Testament. The
story is told from the point of view of the serpent! “Here,” Pagels says, “the
serpent, long known to appear in gnostic
literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam and Eve to partake
of knowledge while ‘the Lord’ threatens them with death, trying jealously to
prevent them from attaining knowledge, and expelling them from Paradise when
they achieve it.” Another text,
entitled, Thunder, Perfect Mind, provides this poem in a feminine voice of
divine power:
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and scorned one.
I
am the whore and the holy one,
I am the wife and the virgin …
I am the barren one,
And many are her sons …
I am the silence that is incomprehensible …
I am the utterance of my name.
(Pagels,
p. xvii)
Pagels asks the obvious
questions, “ … why were these texts buried and why have they remained virtually
unknown for nearly 2,000 years? She
answers with: “The Nag Hammadi texts,
and others like them, which circulated
at the beginning of the Christian era, were denounced as heresy by
orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century. We have long known that many early followers
of Christ were condemned by other Christians as heretics.” ( Pagels,
xviii)
Bishop Irenaeus who
supervised the church in Lyons, c. 180 wrote five volumes of condemnation that
began a campaign against heresy, the action in itself an admission of the
Gnostic Gospels persuasive power, says Pagels, yet the bishops prevailed. Emperor Constantine’s conversion and the
official recognition of Christianity as an approved religion in the fourth century
saw Christian bishops in power who were formerly victimized by police. Copies of banned books were burned and
destroyed. Possibly a monk from a nearby
monastery hid the Nag Hammadi books in jars where they remained almost 1,600
years. (Pagels, p. xix)
Why are all of these
stories important to the history of Unitarian Universalism ? Two
things: The unorthodox and unincluded texts from the Dead Sea scrolls and the Nag
Hammadi books carry again and again signs of liberal religion thinking. Second: UUs tend to lean toward metaphor opposed to
the literal translation of words said to be church law. In religious discussions this was important
historically and seems to be just as important today. In some cases, people’s
lives depend on their ideas and beliefs, then and now.
Pagels tells us that the
writings are unmistakably related to Jewish heritage and many tell secrets
about Jesus. These Christians are called
gnostics from the Greek work gnosis. “For those who claim to know nothing about
ultimate reality are called agnostic (literally, “not-knowing.”) And the person
who does claim to know such things is called gnostic,” or ‘knowing.’ “The Greek
language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge ,” such as
‘he knows me,’ she knows math.’ The gnostics use the term to indicate insight because
gnosis includes an intuitive process of knowing oneself. “And to know oneself,
they claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny … To know oneself at
the deepest level means to know god, this is the secret of gnosis.” (Pagels, p.
xix)
A gnostic teacher,
Monoimus said:
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 joy, love, hate … If you carefully
investigate these
matters you will find him in yourself. (Pagels, p. xx)
This and other passages
struck me as similar statements UUs make when we speak about who we are: Everyone must find her own path. Everyone is free to seek what is inside of
him, to use what experiences she brings to a sacred space to find the Beloved. In other words, liberal religion.
Pagels reasons that what
was found at Nag Hammadi shows striking differences between the New Testament
and the references the gnostic texts made to it, and to the Old Testament
scriptures, and the letters of Paul.
Briefly the differences are, 1, Orthodox Jews and Christians insist a
chasm exists between humanity and the creator. The gnostics contradict this
idea with this: self knowledge is
knowledge of God and the self and divine are identical. 2, The ‘living Jesus’ of the gnostic texts
speaks of illusion and enlightenment versus sin and repentence. Instead of a
saving us from our sin, Jesus comes as a guide and spiritual master. 3.
Orthodox Christians believe Jesus, Son of God, is forever distinct from
the humanity he came to save. The
gnostic Gospel of Thomas says that Jesus sees and recognizes Thomas, and says
to him that they both came from the same source: “Jesus said, ‘I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk
from the bubbling stream which I have measured out’ …” (Pagels, p. xx).
The Gnostics stayed close
to the Greek tradition, and for that matter to Buddhist and Hindu traditions. The British scholar of Buddhism, Edward
Conze, points out that Thomas Christians (those who knew the Gospel of Thomas)
were in contact with Buddhists in South India and knew that influence. Gnosticism flourished from A.D. 80 through
200 as trade routes between the Greco-Roman world and the Far East opened up.
(Pagels, xxi) Unitarian Universalists draw on East and West religious thought as they do among
other world religions as sources.
Gnostic ideas, writings, and
practices were too “creative,” “inventive” to withstand the Nicene Council and
the organization and authority of orthodox Christianity. Elaine Pagels says that the fifty-two
writings discovered at Nag Hammadi gives only a glimpse of the complexity of
the early Christian movement.” (xxxv) She concludes that
… the Nag Hammadi discoveries give us a new
perspective …
we can understand why certain creative
persons throughout the ages,
from Valentinus and Heracleon to Blake,
Rembrandt, Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, found themselves at
the edges of ortho-
doxy.
All were fascinated by the figure of Christ—his birth, life,
teachings, death, and resurrection: all returned constantly to
Christian symbols to express their own
experience. And yet
they found themselves in revolt against
orthodox institutions.
(Pagels,
p. 150)
This paper serves only as
a brief examination of the diverse early Christian movements and signs of liberal,
religious thought, which were the reasons many early Christian groups were
condemned as heretics. Part II will
begin with the Nicene Council and cover one particular figure, Michael
Servetus, who lived in the Middle Ages.
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