Reading

Our reading this morning is from Elaine Pagels’ 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels .Pagels, a professor at Princeton, also more recently wrote Beyond Belief, a book about the gnostic Gospel of Thomas; and she was the Ware Lecturer last year at our Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Fort Worth.
She writes:

“For nearly 2000 years, orthodox Christians have accepted the view that the apostles alone held definitive religious authority, and that their only legitimate heirs are priests and bishops, who trace their ordination back to that same apostolic succession. Even today the pope traces his -- and the primacy he claims over the rest -- to Peter himself, ‘first of the apostles,’ since he was 'first witness of the resurrection.'

“But the gnostic Christians (of the first three centuries of Christianity) rejected (the theory of resurrection and who saw Jesus first). Some gnostics called the literal view of the resurrection the 'faith of fools.' The resurrection, they insisted, was not a unique event of the past: instead, it symbolized how Christ’s presence could be experienced in the present.

“What mattered was not literal seeing, but spiritual vision. They pointed out that many who witnessed the events of Jesus’ life remained blind to their meaning. The disciples themselves often misunderstood what Jesus said." [In Mark, recognized as the earliest of the regular gospels, scholars have long been perplexed by Jesus’ insistence that the disciples don’t understand, don’t listen, doubt and even sleep when they should be holding watch, such as the story in the Garden of Gethsemene, when Jesus has his lonely vigil before being arrested and crucified].

(Pagels continues) “Those who announced that their dead master had come back physically to life mistook a spiritual truth for an actual event. But the true disciple may never have seen the earthly Jesus, having been born at the wrong time, as Paul said of himself. Yet this physical disability (not seeing Jesus) may become a spiritual advantage: such persons, like Paul, may encounter Christ first on the level of inner experience.”

So ends the reading.

EASTER PRAYER

Creative, Infinite, Unifying and Loving Spirit,
we are grateful today for this beautiful morning
and for the gift of life.

May our hearts be filled with this gratefulness
as we breathe in the beauty and glory
of another spring.

We gather today, seeking to find our best hearts,
our best selves. We wish to give back to all that we love
our deepest love and joy, the best of ourselves.

We seek guidance from the eternal spirit, the spirit of nature,
and the spirit within,
the light that resides within each of our hearts.

AMEN

SERMON

Easter is often a difficult time for many Unitarian Universalists. We can deal with the pagan traditions of eggs and bunnies and chicks and Easter baskets, but we have trouble with the Christian story, even though it brings to many of our churches one of their highest annual attendances.

Many of us have trouble with the resurrection, that Jesus rose from the dead three days after his death on the cross, and yet, that resurrection is the meaning, the point, of Easter for Christians, and it is the most holy day of the Christian liturgical year, something which draws even many UUs to church on this Sunday … perhaps for some the old Catholic pull of the C&E Christian -- Christmas and Easter.

But we would prefer to talk about spring, the resurrection of flowers and grasses, not the miracle story following Jesus’ martyred death, which also is foundational to a Christian‘s profession of faith … a belief that Jesus died on the cross, was resurrected three days later and then later ascended into heaven. This is taken without question as to be absolute literal truth in many Christian churches….

What’s happening now is that early Christian orthodoxy, including the resurrection story, especially as literal fact, is being questioned everywhere from National Public Radio, to US News and World Report, to the Christian Science Monitor.

The questioning has to do with all the new gospels that have been discovered In the last 60 years, from the Nag Hammadi scriptures, to the dead sea scrolls to the very recently released Gospel of Judas, which says that Judas was not a traitor, the one who betrayed Jesus with a kiss to the Roman authorities, but actually a martyr for Jesus, carrying out Jesus’ wish to be arrested and crucified, so that he might die to this earthly body and become spirit.

The point, to me, is not what you think about this new story of Judas, but that such a story exists, along with many, many others, including the stories of Thomas and Mary Magdalene. For, before Christianity became orthodox, even Judas had his own cult following.

Christianity was infused in the first two centuries after Jesus’ death with Gnostic believers, a spiritual philosophy that touched Greek thinkers, Jews and Christians. In seminary, my professors tried to define “Gnosticism.” It was difficult because it had been quashed, removed, from Christian thinking.

The Gnostics believed that we could gain knowledge, or gnosis, and move to a higher spiritual understanding. They had a profoundly negative view of the human body and our human selves, something, quite frankly, I believe was kept within much of Christianity, exemplified in the ideas of original sin, the corrupting power of women, such as Eve, and negative, sinful, views about sexuality.

From a Gnostic point of view, Judas would have been saving Jesus from his corporal self so that he could move on to the spiritual realm. And from a Gnostic point of view, it would have been absurd to consider that Jesus reentered the world with his corporal body intact. If he re-entered the world, he would have been resurrected in his spirit body; he would be on a higher plane.

People, whether the apostles or Mary who saw him, saw him because of their gnosis, their spiritual knowledge. It was a spiritual encounter, not a bodily one. Jesus lived on in their hearts. This was the meaning of resurrection for the Gnostics.

This is something that many, many Unitarian Universalists could understand and embrace today … a spiritual, metaphorical understanding of the resurrection - that Jesus returned to live on in our hearts, not unlike how the Buddha continues to live today in the hearts of Buddhists.

I believe we would have been Gnostics, not doubting heretics, 2000 years ago. Most of us can’t, with our reasoning and scientific minds, believe in a literal corpse rising from the dead, coming back to walk the earth, but we can imagine a metaphorical spirit living on in peoples’ minds and hearts.

Unitarians have been arguing something like this for all of our 400 years of existence and we always have been called heretics for our less than literal understanding and interpretations of the gospels.

But the truth is that before the Council of Nicea in the year 325, which set everything into orthodox stone, there were Christians, Gnostic Christians, who believed many of the same things as we do today. According to Elaine Pagels, as was referenced in our morning’s reading, the reason the Gnostic Christians’ point of view lost out was political.

The Gnostics threatened the early Christian church in two ways. First, they believed that anybody, including women, could receive gnosis, or knowledge. Some Gnostic meetings drew straws each time they met and anyone present, including women or newcomers, could fulfill any role in the worship service, including priest or bishop.

And, second, those filled with gnosis might consider themselves their own authorities, not needing authority from priests, bishops, Popes and, ultimately, Rome. They believed that they had received secret knowledge, secret knowledge from Jesus or from God.

This was a mystic tradition, and it was threatening to the early Christians in much the same way that Sufism has been seen by some over the centuries as threatening to Islam …. No one can know more or say more than the final prophet, the seal of the prophets, Mohammad, in Islam, and yet, it seems that some Sufi mystics have additional, heretical knowledge beyond Mohammad. The same was true in early Christianity.

The early Gnostics believed that they were in a secondary spiritual state, beyond the initial, first step of accepting Christ. The early church fathers who canonized the Bible and set orthodoxy, rejected these claims. They narrowed the scope of Christianity down to the original 12 apostles, Pagels says, claiming that they had seen the risen Christ first, so their word was final and authoritative.

Peter, who supposedly was the very first to see the risen Christ, would be the rock upon which the church was built, and so be the final authority. No one could come forward and know more or claim more than the first 12 apostles. What the pope would say, and all the priests and bishops ordained through apostolic succession, would rule.

Before I get into my conclusions about what this means for us today as Unitarian Universalists, I want to point out one more difference between some early Gnostics and the early orthodox Christians. First, as I’ve mentioned there was an equality experienced among the Gnostics, not acceptable to the orthodox. Mary Magdalene was seen by many as the most beloved disciple of Jesus; she was first, not Peter, even in two of the accepted gospels to see Jesus after he had left the tomb.

And second, the resurrection was not literal and corporal but spiritual and filled with secret gnosis, knowledge. But third, and finally, many of the Gnostics also had a different view of God. They felt that the God of the early orthodox Christians was a minor God. This was the old God of Judaism who created the earth that was jealous, and judgmental.

This did not fit the Gnostic view of a higher God. So this orthodox Christian God, Pagels says, was secondary to the real God, as the Gnostics understood it. The God the Gnostics knew was beyond naming, beyond anthropomorphic labels such as he or she, beyond petty earthly concerns. This God was a force, a creative and spiritual force.

This kind of God, I would argue, is the God of process theology today -- the God that is a verb and not a noun. It is the kind of God that those of us who are Unitarian Universalist and inclined toward theism might believe in, a force beyond human knowing. It is the Brahmin God of Hinduism or the Tao that cannot be named of Taoism. It is the compassionate heart of Buddhism.

This Gnostic understanding of God, a grand overwhelming unity that could not be split into threes, is something our Unitarian ancestors died for, and for which our Universalist ancestors, who believed it was sacred love, were martyred. This Gnostic vision of God is something many of us could believe in …. and early Unitarians and Universalists did believe in, but they were called heretics, just like the early Gnostics.

According to Pagels, once Christianity became orthodox, Pagan, Gnostic and heretical books were ordered burned and all their communities were ordered to disperse and become orthodox Christian. Many believe the ancient manuscripts we have found in the last 100 years were secretly stored away by monks under this proscription.

Pagels points out in Beyond Belief, that the early Christian orthodox founders weren’t trying to be mean. They wanted to create a straightforward religion that could be followed, with an identifiable leadership, a recognizable authority, so that it could become the new world religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine.

One of the premises of Unitarian Universalism is that knowledge -- revelation, as it is called in Christian theology -- is always open. We have fought against orthodox, conservative closed theology from the beginning. So, one of our tasks today is to give an analysis of what it means that we have discovered the lost gospels of the early Christian community, many of which are as old or even older than the four gospels of the sealed New Testament, and many of which purport to include the words of Jesus.

We look at this history and recognize what happened … many ideas, gospels and communities were left out of the final canon. We had thought, because of what we were told by the early Christian leaders, as Pagels has said, that this was because they were crazy, full of magic, incomprehensible or even evil. What we have learned is that these early lost texts, now found, included many things, including ideas that were challenging to a hierarchical church structure.

One, they believed that knowledge was open to all, men and women, clergy and laity, ordained and newcomer. Their’s was a universal hope of achieving gnosis, a sacred spirituality that would take us from the mundane world into the realm of spirit. Lost here in orthodox thinking, are the roles and importance of women, of course, but also something that we practice regularly in this church community, the equality between the pulpit and the pews -- the idea that knowledge is shared and universal, that it is held equally between the ordained and the laity.

This was heretical to the early Orthodox church fathers, who believed in a system of authority. The reason for a strict authority, again, was not mean or malevolent, but the fear of what would happen if all Christian thinkers all over the world were given free reign, so that no one would know who was right or what to trust.

Second, as a woman, it’s impossible to say what this orthodox approach did to potential women religious leaders. Women were ex-ed out -- demoted to second-class citizens, incapable of being priests or bishops or popes …. They are not men, as were the original 12 apostles, and so could not be leaders, a position still held today by the Catholic Church.

Mary Magdalene was even rumored to be a prostitute. Women were told by Paul not to speak in church. The social radicalism of the real Jesus, the best we can tell, was dismissed. Power and acceptance of women -- and one could argue the equal value of slaves, or the downtrodden, the sick and the poor -- all the radical inclusion that Jesus preached, ceased in favor of an imperial hierarchy.

Third, the nature of God was set into a formula -- Father, Son and Holy Ghost -- and the orthodox faith would argue forever about the nature of Jesus and that he was God on earth, making God from a Gnostic standpoint, something far less than God or Jesus ever was or would want to be. This is a profound problem.

The Gnostic view of God was universal, beyond a simple ability to define, more than any mind can easily imagine or know, something deep and eternal and nameless. The orthodox view of God, by comparison, became a ritualized formula that most people don’t even think about.

When I was talking with a friend earlier this week, one who goes occasionally to a Methodist church and an evangelical church, I suggested that Unitarian Universalists have trouble with the resurrection. “Well, what do you believe?” she asked, as if the resurrection made such perfect sense that no Christian would ever question it.

“Well,” I said, “we question whether a living being, Jesus, actually rose from the dead.” All should could reply was, “oh.” The Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that he lived, was crucified, and rose from the dead on the third day, all have become an unquestionable formula.

And I don’t mean to question anyone’s faith today. I believe faith is beautiful, and it can be as literal or metaphorical as anyone would like. I am here to question history. What if the Gnostics hadn’t been thrown out? What if Christianity could have grown up including the ideas of a higher or deeper mystical or spiritual knowledge?

What if authority didn’t have to be so rigid? What if women could have been accepted in the new orthodox faith as priests? What if Jesus -- this powerful, enigmatic, charismatic, mystical figure -- did have secret teachings? What if his teachings are deeper than our formulas? What if he was far more radical than we, even today, can comprehend? What if he meant it when he said all were loved by God?

For Unitarian Universalists, we see the religious wheel turn, slowly and surely toward the beliefs of our ancestors. We turn toward an idea of God as beyond human words to describe, to a spirit or force or power or nature which cannot be truly named. We turn toward the idea of universal love and universal salvation, to the hope that all are imbued with light and hope and resurrection.

And that for us today we could say that we are all products of light, hope, and resurrection …. We turn toward the idea that the universal arc of spirit and love -- the moral arc of the universe -- bends toward hope and perhaps toward justice, as 19th Century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker once said.

And that there is a certain dawning of spring after winter, a real, though spiritual resurrection within the mind of God and within the human spirit. We don’t have to identify ourselves as Christian, or Jewish, or even Unitarian Universalist to need this idea of resurrection -- the idea of hope and light and meaning being reborn in our living.

AMEN