Days of Awe and Wonder
Page 2
One hundred years later, in the eighth century BCE, the mission of the prophet Isaiah began with an overwhelming experience of the other world:
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. (6:1–4)
In the Temple, the sacred place connecting the earth to the other realm, Isaiah momentarily “saw” into the other world: a vision of God upon the divine throne, surrounded by strange, unearthly six-winged creatures. But he did not simply “see” into the other world; he was, in a sense, in it, for he became a participant in the scene:
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” (6:6–7)
The image of seeing into another world is also used to describe the origin of Ezekiel’s mission as a prophet some 150 years later:
In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the river Chebar, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. (1:1)
Alternatively, prophets spoke of the Spirit descending upon them: “The Spirit of the LORD fell upon me” (Ezek. 11:5); “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me” (Isa. 61:1). The direct encounters with the world of Spirit reported by Isaiah and Ezekiel generally characterized the prophets. They spoke of knowing and being known by God, of seeing visions, of being present in the “heavenly council.”17
In Jesus’s day, the stream was not frozen in the past, but continued to flow. In the century before and after Jesus, the charismatic phenomenon continued in a number of Jewish “holy men” active primarily in Galilee.18 Known for the directness of their relationship to God and the length and effectiveness of their prayer, they were delegates of their people to the other world, mediating the power of the Spirit especially as healers and rainmakers. The two most famous, Honi the Circle-Drawer and Hanina ben Dosa, were both compared to that earlier person of the Spirit, Elijah.
They had power over demons, who recognized and feared them. Among the healings credited to Hanina, active around the middle of the first century CE, one involved a cure from a distance. He healed the son of Rabbi Gamaliel who was mortally ill with a fever, despite the fact that Hanina was in Galilee and Gamaliel’s son was in Jerusalem, some one hundred miles away.
These charismatics were known for their intimacy with God. Some were even heralded as “son of God” by a “heavenly voice”: “The whole universe is sustained on account of my son Hanina.”19 The role of intercession characteristic of the Spirit-filled tradition appears in a saying attributed to Honi the Circle-Drawer (first century BCE), which also uses the language of sonship: “Lord of the universe, thy sons have turned to me because I am as a son of the house before thee.”20 As “son of the house,” he was sought by the other “sons” as an intercessor with the world of Spirit.21
The most famous follower of Jesus in the generation after his death was also a Spirit-filled mediator. Near the middle of the first century the apostle Paul wrote about his own journey into the world of Spirit:
I know a person in Christ [Paul is referring to himself] who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. (2 Cor. 12:2–4)22
Notable is the picture of reality as having several layers, the image of entering it, the uncertainty whether the experience was “in the body” or out of it, the notion of paradise as a realm that can be entered in the present, and the ineffability of the other world, which is filled with realities that cannot be adequately described in language drawn from this world. Paul’s conversion is also best understood as a charismatic experience,23 and he was, according to Acts, a healer, a channel for power from the world of Spirit.
Thus the stream in which Jesus stood, going back through the prophets to the founder and fathers of Israel, as well as the stream that issued forth from him, centered on Spirit-filled mediators who bridged the two worlds. The stream was the source of the tradition; its literature, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, clusters around them. Indeed, in the specific sense of the term used here, the heart of the biblical tradition is “charismatic,” its origin lying in the experience of Spirit-endowed people who became radically open to the other world and whose gifts were extraordinary.
The Collision with Our Way of Seeing
Even people familiar with the Bible are often unaware how much the experience of the other world pervades it. Because the notion of another realm or dimension of reality and of people who can be mediators between the two worlds is alien to our way of seeing, we need to return to this theme as we draw this section to a close.
Those of us socialized in the modern world have grown up in a culture with a largely secularized and one-dimensional understanding of reality. Though remnants of a religious worldview remain, the dominant worldview in the modern period flows from the scientific and technological revolution of the last few centuries. For us, perceiving reality within the framework of this worldview, what is real is essentially the material, the visible world of time and space. What is real is ultimately made up of tiny bits and pieces of “stuff,” all operating in accord with laws of cause and effect, which can be known. Reality is constituted by matter and energy interacting to form the visible world. In short, there is but one world.
As we grew up, the process of learning this worldview was largely unconscious. We were not directly instructed in the subject of “worldview,” but it was the presupposition for all subjects. Moreover, we are not normally conscious of its presence or function within our minds. As a fundamental picture of reality, the modern worldview is like a map laid over reality, conditioning both our experience and understanding. We pay attention to what it says is real. The depth of this worldview in us, the taken-for-granted way in which it affects our understanding, is remarkable, even in people with a religious upbringing.24
This nonreligious one-dimensional understanding of reality makes the other world and the notion of mediation between the two worlds unreal to us. Though we may grant that unusual healings do occur, we are inclined to think that some psychosomatic explanation is possible. Though we grant that exceptional people may indeed enter a trancelike state and experience a journey into another world, we are inclined to view their experience of nonordinary reality as purely subjective, as an encounter with merely mental realities within the psyche or as hallucinations. To put it mildly, the “other world” is no longer taken for granted as an objectively real “other reality.” Indeed, within the modern framework, frequent and vivid experiences of another reality mark a person as clinically psychotic.
Even biblical scholarship in the modern period has generally not known what to do with the category of “Spirit.” Most biblical scholars work within the modern academy, whose canons of respectability include a methodology that assumes the truthfulness of the modern worldview. Typically spending eight or more years in college and graduate school and often remaining as teachers, we often measure our time in the academy in decades rather than years. Texts that report “paranormal” happenings, whether they are visions of another realm or miracles, are either largely ignored or else interpreted in such a way that they do not violate our sense of what is possible or real.25 Thus, because we do not know what to do with the world of Spirit, we tend not to give it a central place
in our historical study of the biblical tradition.
But the reality of the other world deserves to be taken seriously. Intellectually and experientially, there is much to commend it. The primary intellectual objection to it flows from a rigid application of the modern worldview’s definition of reality. Yet the modern view is but one of a large number of humanly constructed maps of reality. It is historically the most recent and impressive because of the degree of control it has given us; but it is no more an absolute map of reality than any of the previous maps. All are relative, products of particular histories and cultures; and the modern one, like its predecessors, will be superseded.
Already there are signs of its eclipse. Within the theoretical sciences, the modern worldview in its popular form has been abandoned.26 At macro and micro levels, reality behaves in strange ways that stretch the popular worldview beyond its limits. The “old map” is being left behind. Of course, this does not prove the truth of the religious worldview, but it does undermine the central reason for rejecting it. The worldview that rejects or ignores the world of Spirit is not only relative, but is itself in the process of being rejected. The alternative to a one-dimensional understanding of reality can claim most of the history of human experience in its support. People throughout the centuries, in diverse cultures, regularly experienced another realm that seemed to them more real, powerful, and fundamental than the world of our ordinary experience. Not only is there no intellectual reason to suppose the second world to be unreal, but there is much experiential evidence to suggest its reality.27
In any case, quite apart from the question of ultimate truth, it is necessary to take seriously the reality of the world of Spirit if we wish to take the central figures of the Jewish tradition seriously. To try to understand the Jewish tradition and Jesus while simultaneously dismissing the notion of another world or immediately reducing it to a merely psychological realm is to fail to see the phenomena, to fail to take seriously what these charismatic mediators experienced and reported. For many of us, this will require a temporary suspension of our disbelief. Jesus’s vivid experience of the reality of Spirit radically challenges our culture’s way of seeing reality.
* * *
Originally published in Jesus: A New Vision (1987).
Chapter 2
Faith
A JOURNEY OF TRUST
IN THE TWELFTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS Abraham is called by God to leave his homeland on a journey to a land that he did not know. Abraham is promised that he will be the father of a great nation and have many descendants, descendants as numerous as the sands of the seashore and the stars of the sky. And of course, Abraham is one of the most central figures of our tradition. In a very important sense, he is our ancestor. He is the first historical figure mentioned in the pages of the Hebrew Bible. He is the father of the Jewish people and thus the father of the three great Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We are all children and heirs of Abraham, and the promise of the text has thus been fulfilled. Abraham’s descendants are as numerous as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore.
In this sermon I want to highlight two primary characteristics of Abraham in the Bible. Abraham was a person of faith who set out on a journey in response to a call, the prompting of the voice of God. These are the central images in my sermon today: the Christian life as a journey and the role of faith in that life. Today, I want to focus your attention on what Abraham’s journey was like as a foray, a prototype of the journey of all of us.
So I turn to a journey image of the Christian life and what that might mean for us. Let me begin by noting that it’s very different from the image of the Christian life with which I grew up. I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and I’m deeply grateful for my Lutheran heritage. But one of the consequences of that Lutheran upbringing is that I thought that being a Christian was primarily about believing—about believing in the Bible, believing in Jesus, believing in God, believing in the truth of the Christian tradition. Among the reasons I thought it was about believing was because of the primacy given to faith in the Lutheran tradition, which I understood to mean belief.
It’s also because I grew up in the modern world, as all of us did, where many traditional Christian beliefs have been called into question by modern knowledge. Thus, I thought that the Christian life was about believing in a variety of things that didn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s what faith was all about. I think that’s true not just for people who grew up as Lutherans, but for many modern Christians. Moreover, it isn’t just that it was about believing, but it was about believing now for the sake of salvation later, for the sake of heaven later.
I now see the Christian life very differently. I now see it as a journey. Here I am using “journey” as a comprehensive metaphor or image for what the Christian life is like and most centrally about. This journey image is a very rich metaphor, and I invite you for a few minutes to think with me about some of the resonances of speaking of it as a journey. To be on a journey is to be in movement. Moving from place to place—there is change in such a life. A journey is a process that involves our whole being. It involves our feet as well as our minds and our heads. A journey involves following a path or a way. To be on a journey is not to be wandering aimlessly, though there may be times when it feels like that; people have gone on this journey before us, and there is a trail, a path, a way that we are called to. The journey image suggests that the Christian life is more like following a path than it is about believing things with our minds.
A journey also involves a leaving, a departing, a setting out. It involves leaving home. To go back to the Abraham story, Abraham was called to leave his homeland for a land that he did not know. Why did Abraham leave? Why was he willing to do that? Well, the texts in Genesis don’t tell us the answer to that. So I’m going to follow an ancient rabbinic mode of interpretation and speculate when the text doesn’t give us the information.
Again, I invite you to imagine with me the reasons why Abraham might have left a familiar place to begin on a journey that led he knew not where. What made him willing to leave? What was his life like that he was willing to listen to this voice that called him to go?
One possibility is that his old life had become dull. One ordinary day after another. Same ole, same ole. That feeling of measuring our life out in coffee spoons that the poet T. S. Eliot speaks about. Or perhaps his old life stank. Perhaps there was something rotten in Denmark in his own life or in the life of his society, and it smelled. Maybe it was more than just dull; perhaps Abraham felt as if he was caught in a cesspool. Or perhaps his old life was oppressive, constrained, hemmed in. Perhaps it was filled with unnecessary social misery. Maybe he felt so hemmed in that sometimes he couldn’t even breathe. Or perhaps his old life was filled with yearning, with an ache for something more. Yearning for another land, another way of being. That feeling of perhaps being full, but still hungry.
Whatever his reasons, the journey image suggests for us that the Christian life involves leaving an old way of being. And for us Christians, that journey has a direction, and essential biblical stories and themes of scripture powerfully suggest what that direction is. If we take the exodus story as an indicator of that journey, it’s a journey that leads from bondage to liberation. Or if we take the Jewish experience of exile in Babylon as the paradigm for the journey’s story, it is a journey that leads from exile and alienation to return and homecoming, from seeing ourselves as being of little or no account to seeing ourselves as the beloved of God. Or to use the sight and light metaphors that run through scripture, a journey that leads from blindness to sight, from being in the dark to being in the light. Or it’s a journey that leads from convention to compassion, from living our lives in accord with conventional values to living our lives in accord with the central biblical values of compassion and justice.
All of this is where our journey leads. The central quality of Abraham’s journey and of our own journey is that it involves faith. Abraham, in that
great eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament, is one of the heroes of faith; in fact, more verses in that chapter are spent speaking about Abraham as a hero of faith than about anybody else. Abraham is not only a person who goes on a journey; he’s a person of faith. That’s the second thing I wanted to speak about in this sermon. What is faith? How are we to understand it?
Let me begin with a quick little parenthetical remark about the etymology or origin of the Hebrew word for “faith.” The Hebrew word for faith in the Old Testament is emunah. What makes that word interesting is that it’s the sound that a baby donkey makes when it is calling for its mother. To appreciate that, you have to say emunah so it sounds like that. If you want to hear the meaning of emunah, you need to say it like soft braying. The point is that faith in the Hebrew Bible is like a baby donkey calling or crying out for its mother. There’s something kind of wonderful about that. There is an element—I don’t know if you want to say of desperation in it or not, but there certainly is an element of confidence also that the cry will be heard.
Faith has come to have four meanings in the Christian tradition. The first of these four is, I am convinced, a modern distortion, even as it is probably the most common meaning on the popular level. The other three are ancient and traditional and wonderfully complementary. You can have them all, but let me begin with the modern distortion.