Leading up to our vacation a few weeks back, I joked with people that we were going south this year. They often responded “Oh, Florida?” And it always got a smile when I said, “No. Washington D.C.”
We had a good time seeing friends, visiting museums, reading books and generally resting, but one scene stands out to me as paradigmatic for this vacation and for our topic this morning. It was Friday night, relaxing in the Grand Hyatt piano bar, me savoring a smoky scotch blend, Susan trying a Cosmopolitan and talking and thinking about the meaning of the Gnostic Gospels. I had recently finished Elaine Pagals' book by that name, and was explaining to Susan that if it weren’t for a random miss in the censorship attempts of the early orthodox church, these remarkable writings wouldn’t be available to us now or ever.
That Friday we had just returned from an eight course Japanese meal of unparalleled culinary wonder, presented one tiny tidbit at a time, and we were dawdling for a few minutes before bedtime in the public areas of this ultra luxury hotel (for which I paid, I must add, only modestly via price line). There were other guests, notably a group of young people drinking in the sports bar on the other side of the sculpted ponds and waterfalls in this gigantic lobby. They were wearing ghetto chic and looking rather unappealing to me. I had mistaken one of them for a lady of the evening as we entered, on the basis of an aggressively cut blouse, but saw now that she was not, as she helped a drunken friend move soddenly towards the ladies room to presumably lose the rest of her supper, having started that task in the bar. Oblivious to this little drama were the blue-suited, driven convention goers, name tags hanging from their jacket pockets and cell phones sprouting out of their ears. For all of us, the Gospel reading for this morning, the story of the prodigal son, has a lesson, and I think that lesson is particularly well understood via the perspective offered by the Gnostic Gospels..
The Gnostic Gospels are a collection of early Christian and quasi-Christian writings many of which were found buried under the sand in a large earthenware urn in Nag Hammadi. They were found in 1949, but their discovery was surrounded by intrigue, mystery and scholarly and ecclesiastical infighting. They are only now becoming widely available in English and are more popularly known in part because of the success of the best selling novel The DaVinci Code, the premise of which rests speculatively on some of the assertions of these writings.
Bible historian Elaine Pagals, who has written several books about the Gnostic Gospels, suggests that besides being evidence that there were a great many dramatic differences between early Christian groups, the reason the Gnostic Gospels were suppressed was that they didn’t support the emerging orthodox theory of atonement – the theory that our need is the forgiveness of sins and that our sins are forgiven at the cost of the sacrifice of Jesus. This forgiveness, in the developing Church, was applied by the clergy via the approved rituals of baptism, confession and sacrament. She suggests, further, that, for all of their variation, the texts found at Nag Hammadi generally point to a different problem – that of separation from God - and a different goal – to achieve oneness with the Almighty. For the gnostics, this was achieved by virtue of the right knowledge leading to inspiration, insight, and the revelation of spiritual secrets. This ultimately led to oneness with God – though often by the means prescribed in the particular Gnostic book.
The orthodox canon, on the other hand, generally supported the approach of the group of Christians with whom Constantine, the emperor of Rome, was most comfortable. A group of bishops invited by him vetted the available writings and selected a set that was given the seal of approval. This set of approved books became what is now known as the New Testament. These books were selected by bishops from all over the Roman world, invited by Constantine, bishops who picked books that reinforced both the hierarchy of the nascent orthodox Church and the hierarchy of the Roman rulers. And after the choosing of these official books all unapproved writings about Jesus were sought out and destroyed. The official line was now the only line – salvation from the sins of this wretched world was needed and only achieved by the re-enactment of Jesus sacrifice under the supervision of the Church hierarchy.
As history shows, however, the idea that one does not need to go through a human hierarchy to find God was not destroyed – it was resurrected by the mystics of the monastic movement, by Quakers, by Pietists and, indeed, in their own way, by our own Anabaptist ancestors. In each generation, seekers found that they could still touch God outside of the established Church via inspirations of the Spirit.
Perhaps I could achieve such insight, sipping good scotch in moderation, spending meal time exploring sophisticated culinary achievements, sitting quietly in the piano bar, wearing a jacket and brand new $50 silk tie with Japanese designs and otherwise advertising my high level of education and cultural refinement. I don’t know about those drunken kids across the way, and I certainly doubt that people with cell phone earrings can achieve such enlightenment.
But in Luke 15:2 It says: And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." In other words, Jesus is available to the great unwashed. Which, it seems, is exactly the kind of thing that the canon and the Gnostic Gospels agree on. The Gospel isn’t only the Gospel for the well connected, the well educated or the well groomed. No. The Gospel is for slaves, women, landless laborers, foreigners, Jews and others that sophisticated Romans viewed as general low lifes. The Gnostic Gospels say that these representatives of human garbage (and believe me, the Romans treated all of them as garbage) could achieve oneness with God through knowledge, introspection and following the visions generated by Christ’s Spirit.
There were many variations within the Gnostic Gospels, some of which seem odd, incomprehensible or even scandalous. Many were influenced by other religious traditions and problems, some coming from as far as India and China via the ancient silk road. I wish I had time to read some samples. But I’m not interested this morning in getting into the details of these writings, many of which I’ve yet to read. In general, for the Gnostics, what we need is spiritual unity with God and the way we meet this need is through internal knowledge or awareness. Jesus value was in pointing us in the right direction, in revealing these secrets to us. And, as we know, this problem of how to engage the eternal is not a new one.
On our vacation in Washington we wandered among collections of eastern antiquities in the Smithsonian Institute. We saw Statues of the Buddha in various transformations, representations of various gods from Taoism, Roman statues of gods, unbelievably ancient Confucian text. In my brief study of these religions I often juxtapose them against the Gospel of Christ with which I am most familiar and in which I believe. There are times when I see foreshadowing of this Gospel, particularly in the earliest Taoist text and in the pacifism of some followers of the Buddha. At other times I am put off by the strangeness of the symbols and the beliefs.
Particularly straining to me is when a religion supports the elaborate social hierarchies of its surrounding society. It seems sacrilegious when a religion serves as an excuse to make one person better than another, or to give one person privileges or even life when another is denied. And it seems that most religions have done this. Our own Christian denominations are not pristine. The statues and idols displayed at the Smithsonian dramatically showed how religions supported and created hierarchies of human value and power.
Yet at the same time, some eastern religions have happened upon the more essential truth, the one that accepts that the displays and hierarchies and processions of so called civilized society are often obstacles to a relationship with God. They found, too, that we do not gain access to the Spirit of God by way of elaborate buildings, by use of icons, shrines, or the encasing of holy relics any of which can be sold or rented restrictively to those who have achieved sufficient wealth and status. Like the prodigal son, they discovered the ultimate meaninglessness of materialism.
Years of sermons have taught us that the groups of sinners represented Friday night Feb. 28 at the Grand Hyatt in Washington DC were all prodigal, each in their own way. My projections onto the group of young people and the busily working convention goers, very different than myself, were no different than the projections I used to bolster my own self image and my vanity. My fifty dollar tie, my leisure and my brand of scotch made me no more valuable, no more worthy, than any of their leather jackets, warm up suites, tiny cell phones or the prestigiousness of the company logo under their name. Perhaps none of the groups that night is on the road to ruin that parallel’s that of the prodigal son. But, perhaps, we all were.
Pagals says that the early Church fathers didn’t much like the gnostic goals. They were uncomfortable with the pridefulness of the idea that people can achieve oneness with God simply via self examination, insight and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. These early progenitors of the One Catholic Church were much more comfortable with the idea that our primary spiritual need is the achievement of salvation from sins. The value of Jesus was not so much in showing us the way to God, but in reconciling us to God. His value was his sacrificial death that covered our failings, our sins, our unworthiness. The idea of joining God is not seen as an immediate goal. That happens after death. We achieve a state of worthiness by the shedding of Christ’s blood and by the re-enactment of this metaphysical event in the sacraments. This and obedience to the Holy Father was what saved you. This is the ancient orthodox approach.
In today’s world there are other prescribed approaches. Indeed, the number of variations on the Christian theme begins to mirror the number of variations that were present one hundred years after Jesus walked this earth. In many of our personal histories, the emphasis was not so much on sacraments or obedience to The Pope, but on saying the right doctrinal formula – believing in the right creed, having responded to an alter call or having a particular type of emotional experience. The point is that we have to reconcile our miserable, sinning selves with an angry judgmental God who only even considers our desperate pleas because His only son died for us. But to activate the value of Jesus sacrifice, we must exhibit some set of proper behaviors – the right words, belonging to the right group, having the correct ecclesiastical status.
Which gets me back to $50 ties, ghetto chic and staying at the Grand Hyatt in Washington DC. They are status symbols. Signs of social standing among a certain class. They are class badges, telling you a myriad of things, not least of which is the group to which you belong and where you stand within that group. I will confess to you that I was not fully comfortable with the symbols that we indulged in during this vacation. Art for art’s sake is always something I can live with, but some of the restaurants that we ate in were more on the line of indulgence for the sake of conspicuous consumption. DC is currently a Republican and conservative town. It is not without truth when one says that liberals are ashamed of what they’ve earned, but conservatives are proud of what they’ve stolen. Having earned every dime I have, and being very liberal indeed, I came home with considerable shame at the indulgence of this vacation. We could have gone incognito, as we have in other vacations. I could have worn no jacket over my black turtleneck and skipped the tie. We could have searched Zagat’s for the best bargain restaurants and could have stayed at the Silver Spring Holiday Inn, taking the metro downtown to see the sights.
And the Prodigal son could have taken his inheritance and started a small deli somewhere down the street from his fathers estate, returning weekly, bringing his wife and children to join in the banquets that were provided for the family instead of shaming himself mercilessly with bad choices and short term self indulgences.
But regardless of the shameful things that we do, regardless of the reasons we do them, we have, as the Quakers are wont to say “that of God in us.” To an extent, this matches much of what the Gnostics say, but is in contrast to the Jewish scripture as it says in Psalms, Chapter 32: 1 Happy the sinner whose fault is removed, whose sin is forgiven. It is also not completely consistent with Paul’s take on the gospel. In II Corinthians 17, after saying “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” an assertion all early Christians believed, he says further, by way of explanation: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ” – Paul refers to the theory of sacrificial atonement and the commonality of this with the Psalm is that there is something wrong with us that has to be fixed by some form of payment. In the Jewish experience, the sacrifice of a perfect animal was required to get back into God’s good graces. In Paul’s experience, it was the sacrifice of God’s son – it was the payment that made it possible for us to be in touch with the Almighty. As the Gnostic Gospels show us, even one and two hundred years after Jesus death, this was but one theory, one explanation about how Jesus brought the early Christians so close to God. Just one theory. You can still follow Jesus and be a Christian, even if you don’t gravitate to this particular theory of the atonement.
Three hundred years after Jesus was here the bishops and patriarchs that had earned the approval of Constantine -- the Emperor of Rome, the marshal descendant of the people who really killed Christ -- these bishops chose the politically correct books to represent what had happened and what its most comfortable interpretation was. Now more than a thousand years later we have people telling us that we can only understand God through that book. As if the Spirit of God can be contained in a book.
But lets get back to the parable. After squandering all of his earthly possessions, the prodigal son returns to his father, begging only for a job as a hired hand. Instead, he is given full status as a son and a celebration as if he had returned from the dead. This is traditionally interpreted as the love of a parent, unselfish and unqualified. “So, son, you did some stupid things. I still love you.”
I would like to suggest , that this parable leads us to answer a gnostic question of self knowledge and understanding. This parable reflects a familiar cycle of self indulgence, self loathing, reconciliation with the self, and self acceptance. This is an internal cycle. It is a reflection of our belief that the world of material things is dangerous and dirty and can lead to shameful behavior, behavior which makes us unworthy of connection to that which is most holy and sacred. Notably, in the parable, reconciliation is not contingent on anything – no sacrifice was required.
The Gnostics point us inward. And, looking within, I’d like to suggest that the characters of the story of the prodigal son, like the characters of a dream, are all within us, all within me. I am the prodigal son. I am the forgiving father, I am the jealous brother, I am the wastrel and desperately begging loser who has squandered the gifts given to me by my birthright. I am the one to whom I must beg forgiveness. I am the one who is capable of generous love and can forgive endlessly. There is God within all of us, and it is I, myself, that create the barriers that keep me from the awareness of the presence of God, barriers of guilt, barriers of indulgence, barriers of pride, barriers of despair.
If you read the Gnostic Gospels, you will be struck by illogical sayings and incongruities that can be very strange. They do not, in my view, belong in the canon. Yet, wrongly suppressed by Constantine’s youthful Catholic Church, and miraculously returned to us, they serve to demonstrate how diverse and wide ranging the practice of the early Church really was. Like today, the early Church created their own barriers that prevented them from completely following the one who they loved, the one who demonstrated a life at one with the eternal. Each group, each individual, then and now, finds a barrier to place between themselves and God.
Yet on some things they were all unified. Whether they looked for the God within themselves, the God who was separated from them by the seven layers of heaven or the God within the orthodox Church, they found that the picture of God looked like that presented by the man Jesus. And for Jesus this picture of God looked remarkably like the forgiving father, the one who restored the wasted birthright simply because of the unfathomable love and forgiveness inherent in what is eternally holy.
For this is the message that Jesus gave us, that has been clouded and obscured by barriers people have erected over the centuries: That the Kingdom of God is among us. It is like a mustard seed. It is like a treasure found in a field. It is like a father forgiving his son. It is like these things and many more, but the main thing about it is that it is here. It is right here. God is right here. There is no chasm, not of knowledge, not of sin, not of social status, not of anything that can separate us from God. God is with us. The Kingdom of God is among us, it is around us, it is in our hearts, in the very air we breath. God is right here.
It is perhaps the simple childrens song that bests reflects the only response we can have. Come into my heart, come into my heart, come into my heart Lord Jesus.
We erect barriers between us and this simple step. We place contingencies on our access to the Spirit of God. We say that there must be proper doctrine, or that we must have certain views. We have to engage in the right baptism, take the proper communion, have the correct political views or give money to the right agencies. We have to be sufficiently contrite for the trespasses that we have made against elaborate sets of rules of conduct that we ourselves have constructed.
These things are barriers we have erected between us and the experience of the most Holy God. God has not placed these barriers here. This is what Jesus was trying to tell us and what Jesus demonstrated all along. God is not the one putting up the barriers. God is right here, available when we are able to reach out past the our own barriers.
That Friday night in Washington DC we were all prodigal. We all had erected barriers between us and that which is most holy. The cell phones, the fancy dress, the overindulgence, the putting on airs in the luxurious hotel lobby. These things were barriers of our own creation, clouding our eyes, distracting us. These barriers, incidentally, also separated us from each other. But these barriers were of our own making, because God was there. The Spirit of God, reconciling all things to that which is most Holy was present there as it is here, available to break down barriers between humans, available to break down barriers within ourselves, always available, always present.
Lets pray together
Almighty, loving and present God
we thank you for your Spirit, always available for us
We thank you for your son, through whom we reach you
We thank you for Jesus willingness to die as a consequence of his ministry
And we thank you for bring him back to us, to teach us the simple truth that you are always here.
Amen.