May 2, 2010

Geno Sisneros

Easter 5
     Acts 11:1-18
     John 13:31-35


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Over 5 years ago when I became a card-carrying member of Progressive Christianity, I don’t think I fully appreciated how powerful my literal understandings of the bible actually were to me. I came from a Pentecostal background which is a very charismatic based Christian denomination. Pentecostals take their name from, and trace their roots back to the biblical Day of Pentecost, the day God poured out his Spirit on the first Christians. The modern day Pentecostal movement or ‘revival’ as it’s called started in the US in 1906 and over the next few decades spread around the globe. Small Pentecostal churches were the forerunners to today’s mega-Churches. 

We believed the Holy Spirit had gifted us with such talents as the ability to speak in tongues, the gift of prophecy and the power to cast out demons from possessed individuals. 

Personal salvation was our primary goal and we professed to live our lives each day in ways that ensured we received our reward in heaven tomorrow. Apocalyptic theology was at the heart of the movement and witnessing and proselytizing were shared goals but personal salvation was always the priority. We sung these words at each service,

“I’m on my way to Canaan’s Land, I’m on my way to Canaan’s Land, if you don’t go, don’t hinder me, if you don’t go don’t hinder me, I’m on my way praise the Lord I’m on my way.”

The Bible for us was the inerrant word of God and was understood literally. In many churches including my own, women were ordained ministers and held positions of leadership. For the most part, however, it was definitely a male heterosexual privileged church governed by a male heterosexual privileging god. This god was repulsed and even hostile to people outside of that norm. These ideas had their roots in literal and non-contextual readings of the bible.

So understandably when I hear today’s Gospel reading where Jesus warns his disciples that his time with them is coming to an end and where he is going they cannot go; my mind cannot help but think that place Jesus speaks of is the ‘physical heaven’. [i] This scripture conjures up images in my mind of Jesus ascending upward through the clouds and entering through the pearly gates while angels sing and trumpets sound. It’s all very magnificent and glorious imagery; the stuff movies, doctrines and creeds are made of.

This imagery still kicks in despite my having spent the past five years of my life trying to purge them from my consciousness. I decided some time ago that I could no longer accept them because for me, they were doing more harm than good. I realized that as a gay Christian, a literal interpretation of the bible was reinforcing that male heterosexual privilege that had oppressed me for most of my life. I believed the Christianity I had encountered was a toxic interpretation of what was originally intended to be ‘Good News’. So with the intent to seek out Christianity in its rawest and purest form, I began the search.

My goal was to work my way backwards, ‘Regressive Christianity’ if you will, in the hopes of eventually encountering the Christianity that was the movement started by Jesus, not the movement that became about him. I delved into scholarship and theology and I learned to question everything which was not an easy skill for me to attain. Though a stressful and at times gut-wrenching time in my life, it was and continues to be the most exciting endeavor I’ve ever undertaken. But admittedly, seeking is an ongoing process for which I underestimated the consequences. 

I am reminded today of Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” [ii]

In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, Jesus adds this disclaimer, he says, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed […]” [iii]

And disturbed I was. I begin to strip away the layers of literalism that formed my understanding of the Jesus message. This is not an easy task. In fact supporting movements, who attempt to challenge biblical literalism in the public arena, can be downright dangerous business as evidenced by opponents to St Matthew’s recent billboards.

I begin to understand Jesus not just as Jesus the wisdom teacher, not just as Jesus the prophet, but as Jesus the mystic whose goal it was to take me deeper into the mystery of life. I appealed too to science and reason which I had been taught were the enemies of Christianity. Slowly discarding the layers, I was left with a non-supernatural but mystical understanding of the Jesus message. For me, the Kingdom of Heaven was here and now, not some place up there far removed from the human grasp, not some exclusive paradise I needed to jump through purification hoops to get to. 

But alas, I’m a firm believer that you cannot extract something from the God-shaped hole in our souls and not replace it with something else. I hadn’t realized it at the time but in the process of stripping away layers of literalism, I had inadvertently stripped away my hope of heaven. My goal to achieving personal salvation was gone and I was left with an empty space where those beliefs used to reside. Indeed I was disturbed. Everything that I believed was central to my faith, gone.

During the billboard controversies, I heard many people say that it is not what we believe that is important, that it is our faith that should define and sustain us and I couldn’t disagree more. What we believe and what we don’t believe is central to our faith as I’ve just illustrated. Beliefs are intensely central to faith or billboards questioning long-held beliefs wouldn’t be so contentious. 

In my beliefs there was no longer a literal heaven. God as Jesus had revealed God to me was not a tyrant but the Ground out of which all being took root, not a personal deity who intervened in human affairs when it suited him, but the Creator and Sustainer of Life and the cosmos and of everything that was and is and is to come. I could see God as the Force working through evolution. I could see God as the Cohesion that held all matter together. I could see God as the Energy that animated life and the universe. I could see God as both hidden and revealed; all these things yet so much more and so much more mysterious.

My Pentecostal upbringing means that whether I like it or not, the potential still remains in me to invoke these literal images in my mind when I read the bible. It may always be that way. Old habits die hard especially when those habits have become part of you. The real test for me will be to see how I interpret those images in light of the mystic Jesus, in light of the Kingdom of Heaven being here and now and in light of what God requires of us today, to love one another as Jesus loved his disciples.

Seeking – it can be a profound and disturbing process. It lifts you up and drops you into the middle of unknowing and lets you linger there for awhile until you work your way out. It can be an exhausting and lonely experience but also an awesome and breathtaking one.

And just so you know, I haven’t written-off belief in an afterlife. In fact, I believe the Infinite Mystery that is God strictly prohibits me from discounting that possibility, I remain hopeful. After all, we are spirit beings, but we are spirit beings having a human experience. Sometimes I think we think it is the other way around. I believe God needs me to be more concerned with the here and now, with the human experience. God needs me to be concerned with Haiti and Chile and the AIDS epidemic and the fact that 1/3 of the world’s population doesn’t have clean drinking water or enough food to eat. My belief in heaven was keeping me focused on my own salvation, my own self-preservation; it was keeping me from being what I could be, but that’s me, that’s what I believe.

Indeed, if you believe in a literal heaven and remarkably I happen to make it in, having not based my faith on it, and we’re fortunate enough to be there together, I promise I’ll forgive you if you say, “I told you so” and I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

[i] Matthew 13:33

[ii] Matthew 7:7-8

[iii] The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 2a