In the face of this serious news, one politician in Washington was quoted as saying that he is not worried, because “God will not allow” us to destroy our planet.  Another politician responded by suggesting that such a statement was not so much an indication of great faith as it was of magical thinking.

Sadly, there’s a lot of magical thinking – or, perhaps it would be better to say, magical believing – going around in the Christian world these days.  It is probably rooted in part in the tendency of many Christians to interpret the biblical stories in a literal way, stories in which God is frequently intervening to redirect the course of human events in a particular direction.   If God does it in the Bible, why would God not do it now?

The evidence of our lives, of course, should be enough to tell us that either God has changed his operational procedures or such literal reading of the Bible is just plain wrong.   Because it is quite clear that a great deal of monstrous, destructive, and deadly human activity has gone on and that God has not made any dramatic Bible-like intervention to stop it.   Perhaps the politician who is convinced that God won’t allow us to seriously harm our environment feels that this issue will be the last straw, the line in the sand beyond which God will not allow humanity to go.

It would be nice to think so.  One of the reasons why magical believing is so popular among religious people is because it is comforting in both a nice and horrible way.  On the one hand, to believe in a God who performs magic to get us out of serious jams allows us to convince ourselves that God will rescue us when things get “really bad”, and so we don’t have to worry too much.  On the other hand, if God does not rescue us then the only way to maintain the theological integrity of magical believing is to conclude that God decided not to rescue us because we were too evil, or didn’t have enough faith, or because God wanted to teach us a really good lesson that we would never forget.  Such a conclusion is horrible in many ways, but I have known people who have found a perverse sort of comfort in believing that God simply chose not to rescue them and allow them to suffer.

Perhaps the worst problem with magical believing is that it allows human beings to escape the spiritual equivalent of adult responsibility.   Magical believing always makes God ultimately responsible for what happens to us and to our world.  Even divine inaction due to our sinfulness does, in the end, make God the ultimately responsible party.  And, if God is the ultimately responsible party, then we don’t really need to modify our behavior or change our ways.

When it comes to the current environmental crisis, we cannot afford such magical believing.  Really, we have never been able to afford it, but the problem of climate change is of an order of magnitude beyond perhaps any crisis humanity has faced in the last few centuries.  Our actions and inactions with regard to things that impact the environment have real consequences, and to throw up our hands and believe that God will simply sort it out somehow is to surrender our responsibility as human beings living on this planet.  It is to pass the buck and ultimately put the blame for whatever happens on God.

What people fail to understand over and over again is that the real, profound place of divine intervention is not out there but in here: within the human heart, mind, and spirit.  The teaching of Jesus, and that of all the great religious teachers of our history, is directed toward the transformation of the human person.  The great need is not for the world out there to be somehow magically changed; the great need is, and always has been, for us to be changed.  And we can be changed;  not by magic, but by a spiritual practice that opens us up to grace.

I am reminded of a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God;..in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God”  (Romans 8:19,21).  Here, Paul seems to assert a rather direct link between the health of the creation and the spiritual health of human beings.  Paul seemed to imagine that the salvation (or healing) of humanity would lead to the salvation (or healing) of creation – and not the other way around.

The divine intervention that that politician in Washington is hoping for has already happened.  Indeed, it is constantly happening.  But he has missed it, as so many do who keep hoping for some flashy, splashy, powerful lightening bolt moment out there instead of listening to the still, small voice on the other side of the locked door in the heart that bids us to open ourselves to God’s grace and be transformed.

As the three of us spoke and answered some of their questions, it became quite clear to me how much the three of us — Jew, Christian, and Buddhist — really do have in common.  And how we were able to acknowledge that to the students.  As the Buddhist priest talked about her meditation practice and why she finds it valuable, for example, she was careful to explain that Buddhism wasn’t the only religious tradition that valued meditation — that it was possible to find a meditative tradition in all the world’s great religions.  After I had told the students that I thought a common misconception of Christianity was that it was more about belief than practice, and that I thought it really should be seen as a way of life rather than a set of doctrines, the rabbi was able to say that he felt the same way about Judaism.  The three of us represented different traditions, but we were remarkably on the same page with respect to how our religious orientation impacts our lives and the lives of the people we know and serve.

I found it refreshing to occupy a space in which religions were not placed in opposition to each other, and I was pleased to be able to be in that space with these young people.  It reminded me about how so much of our public religious conversation is rancorous, how often those appointed to speak for religion in the media do not make an effort to bring out the shared qualities of our traditions, and often, work hard to exacerbate the differences.

There has perhaps been no other time in human history when we are so in need of a raised or ascended consciousness with respect to religion and spirituality.  To the degree that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, have a negative public image, it is in large part due to the way in which so many people make religion divisive.  An ascended consciousness would focus not on our differences but on the very real ways in which the various religious traditions function in similar ways to root people in a sense of sacred connection and  open up possibilities of inner transformation that are not only good for individuals, but good for the communities those individuals inhabit.

Traditionally, Ascension Day commemorates the end of the post-Ressurection appearances of Jesus to his followers by telling the story of his ascent, bodily, into heaven (technically, the story does not say he ascends into heaven — it actually says that he rose up off the ground and entered into a cloud, so that he could no longer be seen).   But I think the story is meant to have a more profound meaning than that.  For me, the Ascension represents the end of a “local” Christ and the beginning of a cosmic Christ.  The Ascension marks that last time that anyone saw the Risen Christ appearing in anything like a human form.  Ever since, the spirit and consciousness of Christ has been available through prayer, sacraments, and other spiritual practices that do not depend on one being at a particular place at a particular time.  In other words, the Ascension means that Christ becomes available to all.

My participation in today’s interfaith conversation reminded me that the Spirit that I experience in Christ is the Spirit of a God who has made God’s self known under many different names, in the context of many different traditions.  For me, this particular Ascension Day is a day for remembering that God is available to all, not just to the Christians.  If more of us could live in that ascended consciousness, we might be able to do much more to help the religious traditions to be seen for the powerful, transformative paths that they are.

I am deeply appreciative of the rabbi’s suggestion that scripture should inspire creativity, which is surely a God-given gift to humanity.  In an age when so many Christians seek to find only one everlasting meaning in any given biblical text and cement it in place for all time with theological superglue, it is refreshing to be reminded that such a quest for the “one, true meaning” actually works against the very nature of the biblical texts themselves.  Rabbi Bernstein likens the Torah to a prism:

Just like a prism that refracts white (really invisible) light into seven colors, the Torah itself refracts the unknowable and invisible truth into a rainbow of possibilities. It is this rainbow lens that I see when I look into the . . . Five Books of Moses . . . .

And this, I think, is not only the way in which the Torah works, but the way in which the whole of the Bible works.  The texts do not invite us to one interpretation, but instead invite us into an exploration — a spiritual journey — that requires us to synthesize in a creative way the texts, our cultural context, our inherited tradition, and our personal experiences into a fresh appreciation of divine truth.  How that synthesis happens depends just as much on who we are and what we bring as it does on the text itself.  We trust that the Spirit weaves its way into that process, but we cannot be entirely certain about where the Spirit is showing up and where our limitedness as human beings is showing up.  Just as physicists have discovered that the observer of a phenomenon is also a participant in it and can influence what is observed, so are those who delve into the Bible not merely readers but participants in that which is being read — and that participation influences which color or colors of the rainbow of possibilities the reader will see.

Very many people carry with them the rather romantic idea that it would be just wonderful to find the one, true meaning of the Bible and be done with it.  But the reality is that this is a relatively recent notion when it comes to the reading of sacred texts.  Earlier generations of humans recognized something that we often miss, which is that stories work best when they are allowed to carry a variety of meanings, including those that no one has yet thought of.   The stories of the Bible were written very much from this perspective, and, indeed, the versions we now have of those stories have been edited considerably from their original forms.  We now forbid the editing of these texts, but for centuries, there was no such taboo.  And, as such, stories were recast to encourage certain meanings to recede and others to come forward.

While we may no longer be editing the biblical stories, we should be engaging them with the same creativity as those ancient editors did, for this is how the texts truly come alive and function as the Word of God:  when they are brought into a lively dialogue with the God we have come to know in our hearts, with the selves that have been formed in our particular time and place.   For only through such a creative engagement can we truly move along in our spiritual journeys.

As the theologian James Alison points out, there is no such thing as timeless truth, because there is no such thing as timeless people.  We live embedded in time, God is revealed to us in time, and, thus, as time moves, so does our orientation to the biblical prism, and this allows us — requires us! — to discover colors in the texts that we never realized were there before.

There is certainly no denying that religion has been used as a tool in the hands of those who have done violence in the world throughout human history.  The question, for me, is whether religion is more than a tool in that violence, becoming somehow the cause of it.

I will not claim to have done any rigorous research and analysis regarding this question, but I do think that most of what seems to be religious-motivated violence in the world is, in fact, violence rooted in motives that have nothing to do with religion.  But, religion becomes a tool for framing and channeling these motives — a way, if you will, for justifying the motives in a way that makes it possible for someone to act on those motives violently.

If we look, for example, at the historic conflict in Northern Ireland, I think we see religion acting as more of a tool than a motivation.  It so happens that those who want to retain English rule in Northern Ireland also happen to to be Protestant, while those who want the territory to become a part of Northern Ireland happen to be Catholic.  There is nothing within either religion that would lead these groups of people to feel one way or the other about whether Northern Ireland is a part of Great Britain.  The violent conflict over that question was motivated not by religion but by political and nationalistic concerns that have little if anything to do with religion. However, religion became a convenient tool for both sides in the conflict.  The Protestant-Catholic distinction was convenient, as religious affiliation was a clear marker of which side a person was on.  Sadly, Protestant and Catholic religious leaders for the most part were willing to use their religious authority for the causes they believed in, allowing each side in the conflict to somehow feel that there was a divine sanction for both their points of view and their violent acts.   The conflict in Northern Ireland was not a religious war, but religion was a powerful tool used by both sides in the conflict — a conflict that was rooted not in religion, but in other concerns.

While it is rather premature to attempt much analysis of what happened in Boston, it does seem that the older Tsarnaev brother — who seems to have been the instigator of all of this — felt disconnected from the society in which he was living.  While his younger brother took the path to US citizenship and, by all accounts, had American friends and felt comfortable in American society, his older brother is quoted as having said that he had no American friends, and that he didn’t understand America.  I would venture to say that he was a young man who felt alienated, lost, unable or unwilling to connect with the people among whom he was living for reasons that are not entirely clear at this point.  It seems that into this alienated, disconnected life came someone who was committed to a radical form of Islam, and that this person offered a life that was free of alienation and that was connected, albeit with people and ideas that were very dangerous.  It seems very possible that the older brother found, through this unfortunate apostle of a twisted brand of Islam, a meaning and direction in his life that he lacked.  And in this way, religion became a tool that directed this young man toward a vision of anger, hatred, and ultimately violence.   I suspect that his crimes did not really have a religious reason behind them.  Rather, he was a lost, confused, and angry person, and, sadly, religion became a tool to channel that negativity in a terrible direction.

All of this points to the fact that religion is a powerful thing, for good or for ill.  And, that there are human beings who harness the power of religion for good or for ill.    And how a particular person harnesses that power of religion will depend very much on what sort of life that person has, independent of any religious affiliation.

For me, this underscores the tremendous responsibility that rests with religious leaders and communities.  As a Christian clergyperson, for example, I am keenly aware that within my own tradition, there are plenty of biblical texts that present God as both responding violently against some perceived evil or sin and as sanctioning or demanding that human beings act violently against some perceived evil.  When these texts are handled carelessly, they can become powerful tools to justify violent behavior if they fall into the minds and hearts of people whose personal grievances have made them disposed to resorting to violence.  The fact that so much of Christianity these days is dominated by a kind of literal reading of Scripture that encourages careless handling of these texts does not help matters.  And many other religious traditions, including Islam, face a similar challenge.

There are, however, people working in all of these traditions to understand their sacred texts in new ways, and to make it clear that a deeper investigation into the texts reveals something quite different than what first appears on a surface, casual reading.  When we see religion abused in ways that produce such violent results, those of us within faith communities are reminded of how important it is for us to work toward forms of religion that transform people in positive, life-giving ways, rather than aiding their descent into madness.  It is, after all, this sort of positive transformation that all the religious traditions see at their hearts.  We should not allow distortions of our traditions to obscure that.

We should, however, not deceive ourselves into thinking that religion, by itself, is a cause of violence.  Sadly, the roots and seeds of violence lie within humanity.  We are a species rather given to violence, and if religion were suddenly not be available as a tool to catalyze that violence, people disposed to violence would be catalyzed by something else.  Properly understood, religion has the power to help us see those seeds of violence in our own nature, to acknowledge them for what they are, and then learn to move beyond them.  And perhaps never has humanity needed that role of religion more.

Sadly, the painful struggle to find answers to a tragedy like this often becomes so intense that, lacking any real answers, people begin to make up answers that fit their own world view.  So speculations about suspects and their skin color lead to assumptions that militant Muslims must be to blame – and so a Muslim doctor gets attacked in Boston today, even though she personally had nothing to do with what happened, and there is so far no evidence to suggest that any Muslim had anything to do with these events at all.  And so an already heart-shattering and soul-piercing tragedy is compounded.

My years of ministry as a priest has put me many times in the position of accompanying people who are driven by life’s circumstances to seek answers to difficult questions about suffering.  I think that the deep human desire to make our lives meaningful – a desire that is indeed holy, and that is part and parcel of our nature as spiritual beings – leads us to conclude that there must be meaning in everything, including horrible things like violent death or sudden, tragic illness.  But as the biblical Book of Job seeks to tell us, it is often impossible to find meaning in such events in a way that allows us to answer the question, “Why?”   But over and over, I have seen people so desperately needing to answer that question that they invent a host of answers that may satisfy them at some level, but which often create more pain for others.

I have come to the conclusion that the real meaning of such events cannot come in a nice, neat, why-answering package.  Rather, the real meaning surfaces out of how we, as wounded human beings, respond to these events.  If, for example, we respond to this week’s tragedy in Boston by lashing out against those of whom we are suspicious in anger and pain; if we respond to this week’s events by becoming more fearful and guarded, then we have in some sense taken on the consciousness of those who planted those bombs in the first place.  For reasons we do not yet know, they chose to lash out violently against innocent people.  If we respond to their violence with more violence, whether verbal, spiritual, or physical, then perhaps they have gotten what they really wanted in the first place:  for all of us to live in the kind of fearful, angry place that led them into their violent plan.

If we do not respond to the Boston tragedy with spiritual skill, then the violence which we saw on that day can multiply into a myriad of violent thoughts, words, and actions, some of which we will see, but much of which will remain unseen to most of us.  Yet it will be there, raising, if you will, the quotient of violence within our society — a society that kills more people violently than any other “first world” nation on earth, and that has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world.  If our response to what happened in Boston is the multiplication of violence in all of its forms, then the meaning behind the tragedy becomes simply this:  the Boston Marathon bombings are another sign of our collective descent into more and more violence.

If, however, we respond with spiritual skill, then rather than having our hearts hardened by this horror, we can allow our hearts to break open, and we can respond by working harder to be compassionate with ourselves and one another.  We can look at the seeds in our society that give rise to the violence inherent in our culture, and the seeds in ourselves that lead us to respond with violent words and actions toward others.  If this is our response to what happened in Boston, then the meaning of that tragedy is something different:  it becomes a sign of the moment we redoubled our efforts to deepen our compassion, and it becomes a reminder to us of the need to live more compassionately so that we might contribute more peace to our society.

Our hearts go out to all the people who were injured and killed, and to their families.  That is as it should be: a natural movement of compassion toward those who have suffered so unfairly.  Let that compassion help us to expand that movement beyond that circle to include others who are caught up in violence, both as its perpetrators and victims.  Let that compassion help us expand that movement to encircle the whole of the human family not only in Boston, not only in our country, but throughout the world.

And let this tragedy that we have so clearly seen help us to see the tragedies that we usually do not see:  like the thousands upon thousands killed by gun violence in this country each year; like the 16,000 children who die in the world every day because they don’t have enough to eat; like the 14,000 who have died in Syria; like the 160,000 who died in the Iraq War; like the 300,000 who died during the conflict in Darfur.

Our culture is steeped in violence.  Our world generates thousands of victims of violence and tragedy every day.  Our world, our country, each one of us need more compassion.   There is no time like the present to begin cultivating it.  And we should not need a tragedy close to home to remind us.

I used to feel a bit sorry for Thomas, having his life as an apostle reduced to the descriptor, “doubting”, simply because he missed a meeting of the disciples and had trouble believing what they were saying about Christ having been risen.   Surely, there was more to Thomas than his doubt.  But, for most people, he is and always will be “Doubting Thomas.”  And I don’t think that title has ever been considered as an honorific, but rather, as an indication of a flaw in his character.

Over the years, however, I have come to admire Thomas and his doubt, and now I think he should wear that title boldly and proudly.  This shift in my thinking began over 20 years ago, when I happened to hear a sermon given by an Episcopal monk.  Honestly, I don’t remember a thing about that sermon (which pains me as a preacher now myself!), except for two sentences:  ”The opposite of faith is not doubt.  The opposite of faith is certainty.”

There have been many occasions when I have quoted this line to people, and it has been met with varied reactions.  Some people seem relieved to hear it, and find that it seems to open new possibilities to them.  These, I think, are people who are in touch with their doubt, and have wanted to embrace it, but have never been given permission before to do so.  Other people recoil in horror at the idea that the opposite of faith could be anything other than doubt.  These folks are people who, I suspect, are not at all in touch with their own doubt – or, if they are, are so frightened of it that they are always trying to outrun it.  These reactions, whether of relief or horror, are initial reactions, of course.  I have sometimes wondered whether and how anyone who has heard these words has been worked on by them over time.

For I have been worked on by them, and have found in them a deep truth.  I have come to see doubt in the arena of faith not as a weakness, but as a necessity.  For doubt, by its very nature, involves spaciousness.  When we have doubts about the mystery of God, the mystery of the Risen Christ, our doubts create space in which to struggle and wrestle with these very mysteries.  We ask questions, we wonder, we argue, we walk around the mystery poking and prodding.  Our doubts open up within us a space that ultimately allows us to go deeper.  Of course, this spaciousness does involve some risk, because it also creates enough space that we can walk away from the mystery, turning our backs toward it and deciding not to wrestle with it.  But, unless doubt evolves into outright disbelief in the mystery itself, we will always be aware of that mystery behind us – and it is quite likely that, in the right circumstances, we will turn around and allow ourselves to be drawn to it again, to resume our wrestling, our arguing, our wondering.  Faith, it seems to me, requires this sort of spaciousness.  Faith, by its very nature, asks us to trust a mystery we cannot completely understand.

Certainty, however, provides very little space.  Rather than opening us up to possibilities, it closes off all possibilities except the possibility about which we are certain.  When we arrive at the point of certainty, we no longer have a reason to argue, to explore, to walk around the mystery poking and prodding.  We have made up our minds about it, we have cemented our understanding, and we then vastly reduce the amount of space that we must provide to that mystery.  Having arrived at certainty, we are free to close the door and move on to other things, confident that the mystery about which we are certain is, in a sense, now a closed book.  Certainty does not ask us to trust; certainty is something we know, and once we know it, that’s the end of the matter.  There really isn’t any room for faith once certainty shows up.

Far from being someone we should pity for his doubting ways, Thomas should be our hero.  He was unwilling to close himself off by simply accepting what his friends said to him.  He insisted on holding on to the spaciousness of doubt, leaving all the possibilities open to him.  And within that space, Thomas must have wondered, argued, poked and prodded.

Of course, before too much time passed, Thomas saw the Risen Christ face to face, and his doubt was transmuted into a kind of knowing which is possible only in the context of personal encounter and experience.  We, too, shall one day encounter the mystery of God in Christ face to face.  But, until we do, we should not shrink from our doubts but use them to propel us deeper into our spiritual lives, embracing the spaciousness those doubts create and keeping ourselves open to possibility, ready to encounter the Christ wherever and however he chooses to meet us.

As with any Gospel story, there are a number of things we might take away from this one.  But I want to point to one of my take-away’s from this story.

When the man comes to Jesus with his question, Jesus’ response indicates, I think, his assumption that the man is asking the question out of what would have been the traditional religious paradigm of his time.  Jesus does not question the paradigm, or even challenge it at first.  Instead, Jesus answers the question according to that same paradigm.  In essence, Jesus says, “You know our tradition, and that tradition has set forth a set of laws that are to be followed if you wish to be in right relationship with God.”   When the man says that he has kept the tradition, Mark’s Gospel mentions that Jesus gave the man another look, and “loved him.”  I don’t think it is the case that Jesus failed to love the man as a person before this.  I think, rather, that Mark is saying that Jesus loved the fact that this man seemed to be unsatisfied with the traditional religious paradigm.   He was a man who was faithful to his tradition, who was religious in the way in which his tradition wanted him to be, and yet he yearned for something more.  Behind his statement, “I have kept all these from my youth” seems to be another question, “Is that it?  Isn’t there something more?”  It was at this moment that Jesus realized that the man was open to the possibility that there might be a different religious paradigm that might lead him to a deeper place.  And so, Jesus invites him into that new paradigm when he tells him to sell what he has, give to the poor, and then come and follow Jesus.

The man is clearly shocked by this invitation, and he goes away sad, for he is unprepared to receive it.  Of course, the Gospels don’t tell us any more about this man.  We cannot be sure what seeds Jesus’ invitation may have planted that day, and what that man might ultimately have done after he had time to consider Jesus’ invitation.   Perhaps the man eventually was able to accept what Jesus offered him, and was able to step out of his traditional religious paradigm into something new.

But just what was this new paradigm that Jesus was inviting the man into?

I think that Jesus was inviting the man out of a religious life rooted in law into a life with God rooted in relationship.   One of the fundamental criticisms Jesus made of the religion of his time was of the tendency to make the religious life one of following the rules, both ritual rules and moral rules, while forgetting the relationship with God to which those rules were meant to point.  Too often, Jesus repeatedly pointed out, the rules were used not to call people into relationship but rather to make the most vulnerable members of society feel excluded and unworthy of relationship with the divine.  It is why Jesus spent so much time with “unworthy” people, in order to teach them that they did have a relationship with God that was not dependent on rules of the larger community.

St. Paul expanded on this idea, going so far as to say that law does not have the power to bring anyone into relationship with God.  The law, Paul said, is very good at showing us how bad we are at following rules, and therefore, if our relationship with God is dependent on our following the rules, we are lost.  Thankfully, Paul says, Christ comes to change the paradigm, to free us from a religion rooted in law and invite us into relationship that is conditioned by grace, love, mercy — and that therefore is accessible to us regardless of any law.

The Christian churches have often lost sight of this fundamental insight.  We have too often resorted to imposing rules on people, and then used those rules to define whether or not a person is good.   We have sought to create ethical absolutes and then judged people by them.  We have used rules to declare which people are in good standing with God and which are not.  This is not the paradigm, or the community, that Jesus was inviting the rich man into.

Jesus was all about relationship — for him, everything came down to that.  Loving God, loving neighbor, loving self :  this was the heart of everything for Jesus, and it would be hard to find a more profoundly relational term than “love”.  To live in this new religious paradigm that Jesus represented means that our moral/ethical life flows not from obedience to an external code but rather by following the demands of love.  Jesus knew that human transformation cannot be imposed from outside, but rather must arise from within.  People can be loved into change, but can seldom be bullied into it.

If we were truly to live into this paradigm, and ask ourselves in every situation, “What does love require of me in this moment?”, I wonder how our debates over so many things would change?  I wonder how we as people would change?  I wonder how our faith communities would change?

In this season when we celebrate Resurrection, we are also celebrating God’s habit of overthrowing what we consider to be absolutes — like the absolute of death, which in the Risen Christ is shown to be no absolute at all.  In the Risen Christ, God invites us to abandon our certitudes, our black and white ways of thinking and judging, and to enter deeply into the messiness of relationship, where absolutes often don’t apply, and where questions often don’t have easy answers.  It is as hard for us as it was for the rich man in the story to give up his possessions.  But, as Jesus himself says, with God, all things are possible.

Maundy Thursday, during which we remember the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, reveals Christ making himself vulnerable by offering to us his very life through the mystery of Communion or Eucharist.   The life of Christ, the spiritual energy of the Lord, is made available to us in the blessed bread and wine.  For me, this is the true pouring out of Christ’s life for us and for the world:  that Jesus pours out his life in order to make all that he is available to us.  His willingness to make himself vulnerable in this way empowers us to similarly offer ourselves for others, embodying the “new commandment” that is also remembered on Maundy Thursday, that we should love one another as Christ loves us.

The crucifixion of Jesus, remembered on Good Friday, is the most profound example of Christ’s vulnerability.   Jesus voluntarily enters the vulnerable space created by the twisted machinations of powerful people.   In so doing, he offers up his life for us.  Not in the sense of sacrificing himself to a demanding God, but in the sense that in voluntarily stepping into that place of utmost vulnerability, Jesus shows us who we are when we are at our worst, when we live only from a place of ego and fear rather than from a place centered in God.  Jesus becomes the willing, innocent victim — an icon of all the unwilling victims human beings constantly create — in order to show us that we do not need to be run by fear, victimizing, and scapegoating.

The Resurrection shows us that by voluntarily inhabiting the vulnerable place of the victim, Jesus unleashes a power that is greater than death, and by so doing unmasks death as a paper tiger, as something which we do not have to fear.  Our lives do not have to be lived in the shadow of death and the fear which it engenders in us.  Instead, we see in the Risen Christ that God is a God of life, not death, and that ultimately nothing can take this life away from us.

In Christ, we see that when we open ourselves to vulnerability, we open ourselves to the power and life of God.  This power of God is not a power which glorifies and dominates, but a power of deep connection to our true self, to God, to other, and to all of creation, a power that leads to service and compassion, a power that is ultimately not about “me” but about “us” as a human family.

As we move through these next days and finally arrive at the celebration of Easter, may we allow Christ to lead us into vulnerability, that we may discover the deep life, power, and love of  God.

Of course, in order for there to be a resurrection, a death must first occur.  And, so, we have Palm Sunday and Good Friday which unfold the terrifying time encompassing the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus.  And it is the crucifixion of Jesus that has proven to be a rather significant stumbling block in the Christian tradition.  While the church, over the centuries, has not hesitated to put forth numerous doctrinal statements and definitions covering a  multitude of aspects of the mystery of Christ, it has not been possible to be definitive and clear about the theology that should attach to the crucifixion.  Christians, I think, came to be haunted by the death of Jesus, as we are and should be haunted by the unjust and tortuous death of any human being.  In the face of death that seems senseless and unfair, human beings have a deep longing and need to make the senseless sensible.  We cannot help ourselves asking, “Why?”  And we cannot help ourselves trying to supply an answer to give meaning.

Probably (and, in my estimation, most unfortunately) the most popular attempt to make sense of the death of Jesus has become what is known in theological circles as the theory of substitutionary atonement.  According to this theory, the ability or willingness of God to forgive human beings depends on the offering of a sacrifice.  The ancient Jewish people practiced animal sacrifice in order to obtain such forgiveness, and the theory of substitutionary atonement basically makes Jesus the sacrifice par excellence to obtain God’s forgiveness — the sacrifice that ends all sacrifices.  But this notion that God cannot or will not forgive in the absence of some sort of sacrifice is a difficult position, and raises a host of questions about God and the relationship between God and humanity that cannot easily be dealt with.   Theological libraries are littered with books that attempt to do so.

If one spends enough time exploring the dark streets and back alleys of atonement theology, it can easily start to seem that the crucifixion is the central Christian mystery, rather than the resurrection.   And, for me, we get ourselves immersed in unnecessary complexity.

The crucifixion of Jesus can be greatly simplified and clarified — and become much less a stumbling block — if we stop insisting on seeing it as a divine necessity and, instead, begin seeing it as a human tragedy.   Jesus did not die because God needed him to.  Jesus died because human beings exclude, marginalize, scapegoat, and kill those whom we cannot understand or who seem to us to be threatening in some fundamental way.   The life and being of Jesus was itself a stumbling block for ancient Jewish religious leadership and ancient Roman civil authority, and the result of the tension created by the life and teaching of Jesus was that threatened human beings in positions of power brought about his death.  They made him a victim, no doubt believing that by so doing they were serving some higher interest.   The crucifixion demonstrates a dark human tendency that has made a victim not only of Jesus, but of countless human beings over the centuries.

The recognition of the crucifixion as a human tragedy which made Jesus a victim radically transforms the role of God in that event.  Rather than being the One who demands Jesus’ death, God becomes the One who, in Jesus, becomes the victim.  In Christ, God chooses to occupy the space of the victim.   And, having become the victim, God transforms the victim space by the light of Resurrection, exposing it for what it is but also declaring its deathly power null and void.

Perhaps the fact that it is so hard for people of faith to accept the crucifixion as a human tragedy rather than as involving some divine necessity or protagonism underscores how unwilling we are to acknowledge the darker streets and back alleys of our own humanity.

The photo is intended, it seems, as a general commentary on religion, and the message is very clear:  religious leaders/authorities/institutions have “fabricated” God and manufactured a belief system to go with it, in order to manipulate people into doing their will.  The question with which viewers are left, “Who does that?”  invites, I think, the reader to conclude that all religion does that — and, thus, perhaps religion should be left behind, along with the God that it “fabricated”.

On the one hand, the image with its text offers us an important insight that we should pay attention to and never forget:  that religion, as it has been developed and practiced among many people and within many institutions, has indeed become manipulative.  The theologian James Alison, for example (and, yes, I’m on an Alison kick these days), suggests that what has come to be the traditional interpretation of the Crucifixion of Jesus, as a sacrifice required by God in order to forgive our sins, is a piece of emotional blackmail under a religious guise.  It attempts, he suggests, to impose a certain guilt on us by encouraging us to think about Jesus as having been forced to die for our sins.   And that guilt is, indeed, intended to manipulate.  There are countless other examples within the Christian tradition, certainly, of religious authorities using religion to manipulate people and impose their will.  This was, indeed, one of the principal objections voiced by Jesus about the Judaism of his time:  that the religious elite were constantly using their position and authority to manipulate others.

Recognizing the power of religion to become a tool of manipulation should make us cautious.  And when religion is conceived of primarily as being about beliefs, morals, and behaviors, the possibility of manipulation is rampant.   It seems right to me to say clearly and forcefully that authentic religion, we might say true religion, is not manipulative.  And where two or three are being manipulated, Christ is not being made manifest — though Christ might well show up to try to subvert the manipulation.

By using the term “authentic religion” or “true religion”, however, I am clearly suggesting that there is religion that is not manipulative, religion that does not correspond to what this image of Dorothy and the Wizard with its accompanying text seeks to convey.

People forget, sometimes, that the world’s religious traditions did not come into being as the result of a conspiracy of elites to gain power and control others.  While nearly every religion has suffered corruption at the hands of people who do harbor such ambitions, the kerygma or core of each of the world’s religious traditions is rooted in a real, authentic human experience — an experience so powerful that it opened up the people who had the experience in a way that they had never been opened up before, and convinced them that they had experienced that which we seek to capture in words like God, Sacred, Transcendent, Holy.   And, of course, those words are utterly incapable of describing the experience.  These experiences were not really about doctrines, beliefs, or morals, but rather, about transformation and the shifting of paradigms.  What is clear is that these experiences that gave rise to what would become religious traditions were sufficiently powerful as to utterly change the lives of those involved.  The history of all religions is full of examples of people who made tremendous sacrifices in their lives for the sake of what they had experienced.

The difficult task faced by every religious tradition, however, is the task of somehow passing on that original experience or, to be more accurate, the task of inducting people into that experience.  In the case of Christianity, for example, the task faced by the first Christians was to somehow induct people who had not personally witnessed the Risen Christ into the experience of the Risen Christ.  Everything that the church does is (or should be) about that one goal:  inducting people into the experience of the Risen Christ.  All of our traditions with respect to prayer and worship are about this very task.

Inevitably, however, the task of inducting subsequent generations into the original experience gets muddied.  Sometimes, it gets modified and shifted in appropriate ways to meet new cultures.  Often, however, it gets corrupted in various ways as it passes through various cultures and, it must be admitted, through the hands of people who are untransformed and who twist the tradition into a means of power and control — and there we are at manipulation again.

All of this is to say that God, the Sacred, the Holy, the Transcendent — is not invented.  Though, people do invent things about God that are more reflections of an untransformed human consciousness than a manifestation of the divine.  To jettison religion as nothing more than fabrication with the intent to manipulate would be folly, and would do violence to the original experience that so powerfully moved the founders of our traditions.  It would also betray the natural human movement toward the transcendent, present in every human being (I am convinced) but not always manifested in what we would call a religious way.  However, to approach religions and their representatives as if they were infallible or without error would also be folly.  The various religious traditions must always be self-critical, asking whether a given practice, teaching or belief truly serves to induct people into the original experience and, therefore, into deeper relationship and transformation.  If it does not, than it must be questioned.  And, often, we are more able to undertake this task of self-criticism when we are challenged by those outside our tradition who wonder whether we have anything real to offer, or if it really is just all made up.