Rev. Tessie Mandeville
July 8, 2007
Christ Covenant MCC
Decatur, GA 30030

The first sermon of the series - The "Left Behind" Gospels....and how they could still change the world.

It seems like any other day. The captain of the plane reports to work as usual. The passengers board the plane which is en route to Europe. But in one cataclysmic moment, passengers aboard this Boeing 747 disappear. Instantly. Nothing remains except their rumpled piles of clothes, jewelry, fillings, surgical pins, and the like. All over the world, in a flash, cars are left without drivers. Chaos continues worldwide as the event unfolds. For those “left behind,” the apocalypse has just begun.

Some of you might be familiar with this story. It is the scene in the first book of the Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. It’s a series of books with titles such as Tribulation Force, Nicolae, Assassins, The Mark, The Remnant, Armageddon and its most recent book, Glorious Appearing. These books detail what happens once the rapture occurs and tribulation begins. Some people disappear while others are “left behind” to face a terrible tribulation which is supposed to scare them into believing in Jesus Christ and finding salvation.

There are two great bumper stickers about the rapture. One reads, “In case of rapture this car will be unmanned.” The other one reads, “In case of rapture, can I have your car?!” It’s a scary series and I can vouch for his personally as one who used to read these books. They are fiction but their goal is to get people to believe “the right way” so that they will be saved.

Worship never used to involve making doctrinally acceptable claims about God. There were no creeds, no doctrines. There was simply worship and the experience of God, not beliefs. But then Christianity came along. Since Christians claimed that what ultimately mattered was a right relationship with God, a right relationship with God required belief, and belief had to be in something, rather than some kind of vague, abstract faith that things were right with the world. The only problem is that everyone claimed to be right! Everyone claimed that their views were supported by Jesus.

Christianity has a rich history of sacred stores written by people who followed Jesus but not all these stories made it into the Bible. Some sacred gospels were destroyed, or forgotten, or left behind, one way or another. It is these “left behind” gospels that we want to spend some time looking at and understanding. I think it’s safe to say that if the Bible would’ve included all the stories that were ever written, Christianity would look different today. And I suggest to you that even though the “left behind” gospels never made it into the Bible, they could still change the world.

Christianity has many early church fathers that helped shape and form it. Irenaeus was one of them and he witnessed the horrible deaths of his spiritual father and other Christians. And sometime in his 30s, he stepped in to lead the small, struggling group of Christians that survived these persecutions. His goal was to unify them with a uniform set of beliefs to provide them with community. In order to do this, he began to define what was “right” and what people should believe about God, Jesus and salvation.

Irenaeus helped construct the basic foundation of what would become orthodox Christianity. “Orthodoxy” literally means “straight-thinking” which is probably why so many of us don’t consider ourselves Orthodox Christians. We are not “straight thinking!” In order to declare that one teaching was orthodox, another teaching had to be declared as heresy, or false-teaching. Irenaeus, and other church leaders that followed him, gave instructions to congregations about which sacred writings to destroy and which ones to keep. They were the ones who interpreted the “right” meaning of the stories that were kept. The stories that were kept became the basis for the New Testament; they also became the framework for the Orthodox creeds, such as the Nicene Creed, which was our first reading. Christianity looks like it does today because Irenaeus and a group of church fathers whittled away at a rich and varied testimony until all that was left were the four gospels we know as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All the other sacred writings were left behind. Since the 4th century, Christianity came to be known as doctrines and creeds and “right beliefs.”

But I declare to you this morning that the Divine does not become real or present simply by reciting creeds or believing the Bible is infallible. The Divine becomes real when we open our very selves to the mystery in which we live and move and have our being. Faith doesn’t require well-defined beliefs or comprehensive doctrines. It only asks that we approach people with compassion and life with trust. Faith asks that we continually seek to know God.

Elaine Pagels wrote a book called Beyond Belief and in it she explores the territory of faith and belief. What she discovers is that there is a difference between the two. “Faith often includes belief,” she writes, “but it involves much more; it’s the trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope for and love.” Elaine was seeking something beyond belief when she found herself in the back of a church one morning. As a religion professor she knew a lot about doctrines and creeds, and the history of Christianity. But that morning, as she walked into the church, she walked in as a mother of a young son who was diagnosed with a fatal disease. She wasn’t seeking a creed. She wasn’t seeking a doctrine. She was seeking faith. She understood instinctively that a community of people “that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine”—had a faith to share with her.

She had always understood faith as a system of beliefs that she was expected to uphold. But as she began to participate in the church, she learned that faith came to her not in the form of belief, but in the truth of experience. She found it when she sat in the company of other people; when her “defenses fell away, exposing storms of grief and hope,” so that she could gather “new energy…to face whatever awaited [her] as constructively as possible.”

What awaited Elaine was the death of her son, four years later, and a new, personal journey of seeking God. Because she was a religion professor, she knew that there were other stories left out of the Bible. She knew there was a time before creeds and doctrines when Christians trusted their own experiences of God rather than some external teaching that told them what to believe about God.

The Gospel of Thomas is one such source. It was discovered in an Egyptian village known as Nag Hammadi, in December 1945. These teachings were viewed as subversive because they criticized orthodox Christian beliefs like the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection. But most subversive of all was they taught that Jesus was not the only Christ. In these texts, Jesus says the Christ lives in every person and with gnosis—or intuitive knowledge—one can discover their inner Christ.

In the Gospel of Thomas, there are no birth stories, no healings, no miracles, no death or resurrection. There are simply sayings of Jesus. Thomas is concerned about salvation but he doesn’t consider Jesus’ death and resurrection to be the source of salvation. In fact, in saying 70 Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” What is important about this saying is that we are not told what to believe but challenged to discover what lies within us. We are challenged by Jesus to seek within ourselves that knowledge of God. Salvation is learning the truth of our divine character. In saying 3, Jesus talks about the kingdom of God and says that “the kingdom is inside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living God.” Jesus says that truth comes from within and when we know ourselves, we will know salvation.

This gospel also teaches us that God’s light shines not only in Jesus but also in everyone. Thomas’ gospel asks us not so much to believe in Jesus as to seek to know God through one’s own divinely given capacity, since we are created in the image of God. We come from God and God is our ultimate destination.

In the gospel of Thomas, personal experience is the primary authority in faith. Thomas understood Jesus to say that we don’t have to seek outside ourselves for truth. We must seek inside ourselves and understand truth according to our experiences rather than someone else’s teachings. We have within us what we need to be saved; all God asks of us is that we bring forth what we have and use it for good.

Perhaps you can understand now why the early church fathers labeled this gospel a heresy and didn’t want it in the Bible! This gospel does not lend authority to orthodoxy. It respects the individual search for truth and meaning and doesn’t abide by a uniform set of beliefs. Imagine what Christianity would look like today if we weren’t so focused on who’s right and who’s wrong.

Most people who come into church today aren’t looking for beliefs. They are looking for faith. Elaine Pagels no longer asks a tradition to tell her what to believe because she has learned there are no simple answers and that “most of us, sooner or later, find that, at critical points in our lives, we must strike out on our own to make a path where none else exists.” And haven’t most of us discovered this also? Most of us have come to critical points in our lives as LGBT people when what our traditions taught us did not match up with our experiences of God and we had to strike out on our own and allow our experiences of God to have authority over “right beliefs.” Crises of faith have the potential to lead us to a deeper knowledge of God and to a deeper knowledge of ourselves.

Our relationships with God, our experiences of God, are much more than doctrines or creeds. They are beyond a uniform set of beliefs. At the end of her book, Elaine says, “What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions – and the communities that sustain them – is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery…They encourage those who endeavor, in Jesus’ words, to ‘seek and you shall find.’” The heart of every religious tradition lies beyond belief. If you seek faith, you may not find belief. What you may find, however, is trust: “the trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope for and love.” This faith makes no assumptions about how God will respond. This faith is only about the commitment we make to live in a certain way. The Divine doesn’t become real or present simply by reciting creeds or believing the Bible is infallible. The Divine becomes real when we open our very selves to the mystery in which we live and move and have our being. If you seek it, you will find it. It’s not the simple answer or the firm belief but the faith we hold, with trust and hope, to help us live all our days ahead in the light and love of God. Let it be so. Amen.

Copyright © 2007 by Rev. Tessie Mandeville. Permission granted for non- profit circulation with attribution of author and venue. Other rights reserved