Rev. Tessie Mandeville
July 15, 2007
Christ Covenant MCC
Decatur, GA 30030
The second sermon of the series - The "Left Behind" Gospels....and how they could still change the world.
Today we continue with our series, “The ‘Left Behind’ Gospels and how they could still change the world.” As we learned last week, there were many stories written about Jesus and people’s experiences of Jesus, but not all of these made it into the canonized Bible. For a variety of reasons, some of these gospels were forgotten, or lost, or “left behind.”
You might remember that last week I talked about Tim LaHaye’s books known as the Left Behind series. In these books, everyone who doesn’t believe the “right way” is left behind when the rapture occurs to face tribulation and horror. And as if the books were not disturbing enough, thanks to the wireless world, we now have the Left Behind Mobile Prophecies. This way, the series doesn’t end when you close the last book. There’s an application for cell phones which puts the prophecies in the palm of your hands. Their logo is: The truth is in your hands.
The truth is in your hands. What is truth? Who gets to decide? There is a story of a man who became sick suddenly. Complaining of chest pains, he laid in his bed. When the doctor arrived, the woman took him in to examine what now appeared to be her dead husband. After a few moments of examining the motionless man, the doctor turned and said, “I am sorry to say that your husband is dead, my dear.” But then a feeble sound of protest came from the lifeless figure in bed: “No, I’m still alive. I’m alive.” “Hold your tongue,” said the man’s wife. “The doctor knows better than you.”
It is definitely true that my doctor knows more about physical medicine than I know, but if my doctor tell me I have no pain when I have pain—or that I am dead when I am very much alive—then it’s time to get a different doctor. Who is the best authority of what you are experiencing, if not you?
Often, in any struggle over truth, or dogma, or creed, it’s the winner who gets to decide. It’s the one left standing that gives the report. It’s the ones who have more power and privilege that often gets to take their truths, generalize them, and then make them truths for everyone.
Irenaeus, an early church father that we talked about last week, was one such winner. Ultimately he and his friends created the Bible that we know today and they ordered all other writings to be burned or destroyed. But here’s the great thing: Not everyone listened to them.
Long ago in Egypt, there was a small village known as Nag Hammadi. About three miles from this village was an ancient monastery where monks lived. According to legend, these monks were ordered to burn all writings except Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But the monks defied this order and instead of burning the gospels, they buried them underneath a cliff. Trisha Yearwood, a great country singer, sings a song with the words, “But I guess some things we bury are just bound to rise again.” And that’s exactly what happened. In 1945, some peasant men were out on the hillside looking for fertilizer for their crops. They were in the Nag Hammadi village and there they discovered a large jar buried beneath the earth. And when they opened this jar, they discovered 52 ancient documents inside, with secret sayings of Jesus, probably buried by some disobedient monks.
In that jar was the Gospel of Truth. It’s kind of ironic, don’t you think, that somehow the Gospel of Truth was left out of the Bible? Scholars believe that Valentinus is the author of the Gospel of Truth. Valentinus was a sophisticated theologian, a poet, and a teacher who often relied on dreams and revelations for his understandings of Jesus. Valentinus was one of the first people to say that the Divine is manifested in masculine and feminine energies, and that these energies working together brought forth the universe. You can imagine how talking about the feminine Divine displeased Irenaeus and the other church fathers. That was a heresy if they ever heard one! Bishop Yvette Flunder was a speaker at the conference I attended over the weekend and she said, “The difference between heresy and prophecy is time.” There are many things that LGBT people and women have said for years which others considered heresy, such as “We, too, are created in the image of God. God can be both mother and father to us.” And now, after some time and the spirit of God working in people’s hearts, our heretical statements turn out to have been prophetic, truth-telling statements. Glory be to God.
The Gospel of Truth is believed to be a mystical meditation and takes its name from the opening line: “The gospel of truth is joy, to those who receive from [God] the grace of knowing [God].” And once we know God, Valentinus says, then it transforms our understanding of God and ourselves. Once we know God, then we no longer see God as petty, or harsh, or wrathful, but as loving, gracious, and peaceful.
The Gospel of Truth pictures the Holy Spirit as God’s very breath and envisions God breathing forth the entire universe of living beings. I’ve heard it said that the act of birth is God exhaling, and that the act of death is God inhaling. Isn’t that a beautiful image? God breathes us out and then breathes us back in. I offer this image to us this morning in light of the fact that several of us have lost loved ones recently, this image of our beloved ones being breathed back into the heart of God.
Valentinus offers other visions of Jesus in his gospel. He understands that many believers commonly see Jesus “nailed to the cross” as an image recalling sacrificial death. Valentinus suggests seeing him instead as “fruit on a tree” none other than the “tree of knowledge” in Paradise. But instead of destroying those who eat this fruit, this fruit, “Jesus the Christ” conveys genuine knowledge and mutual recognition. This passage reverses the fundamental biblical notion that knowledge is sin and leads to punishment of shame and sensuality. Rather, in the Gospel of Truth, the fruit of knowledge is a discovery that brings joy. It signifies that one finds God in one’s self.
And finally, the Gospel of Truth urges those who “discover God in themselves, and themselves in God” to transform this gnosis, this knowledge, into action:
Speak the truth to those who seek it,
And speak of understanding to those who have committed sin through error;
Strengthen the feet of those who have stumbled;
Extend your hands to those who are sick;
Feed those who are hungry;
Give rest to those who are weary;
And raise up those who wish to rise.
Those who care for others and do good, do the will of God.
Irenaeus was alarmed by what Valentinus and his disciples were writing and he warned people to “beware of approaching their own sacred texts in such ways.” He impressed upon them to discern the “truth” of the texts that were “obviously clear.” He didn’t want people coming up with their own interpretations of scripture. He didn’t want them having their own experiences of God—their own visions and revelations.
But when you think about it, the New Testament is full of visions and dreams. For instance, the angel Gabriel appeared to shepherds to tell them of Jesus’ birth. Later at Jesus’ baptism it is recorded that Jesus himself saw a vision when he “saw the heavens torn apart and the spirit descending like a dove upon him….” The apostle Paul claimed that Jesus, whom he had never met or seen, appeared to him in a blazing light, making him an apostle. Paul claimed that he had been “caught up into Paradise,” but said that what he had seen and heard there he could never tell, since these were “things that no mortal is allowed to speak.”
Jesus’ disciples had visions and revelations after his death. The New Testament gospels tell us that Jesus made resurrection appearances to his disciples, appearing in rooms whose doors were locked, appearing at the beach and cooking them breakfast. In these stories, Jesus defies natural laws and just shows up in their midst.
Later, it is the John the Apostle who says he was “caught up into heaven and beheld God enthroned in glory above a heavenly sea, glittering like a crystal, and heard angels intoning the secrets of what is to come.” But unlike Paul, John wrote down what he saw and heard in heaven, and this is why we have a book named “Revelations.”
Without visions and dreams and revelations, the Christian movement would not have begun. All of these people spoke from their own experiences of the Divine. And who can tell the Holy Spirit when to stop? Who’s to say that the Holy Spirit has stopped? I believe the Holy Spirit continues to be poured out on people today and people still have visions and revelations. People still have ecstatic experiences of the Divine.
Revelation wasn’t sealed with the Bible. The Spirit still guides us into all truth. Human knowledge will hopefully always grow. Truth will hopefully always be revealed and experienced in each of our bodies. This is what the Gospel of Truth speaks to: We each have the capacity to name our own truths based on our own experiences of the Divine and then we have the responsibility to live our truths. As Frederick Muir said in our first lesson: It’s not about what God is like, but what we are like given the God we believe in. We must live our truths as if they are written on our faces. The question we need to ask ourselves is this: “How does our truth make us better human beings?”
Last week I said that the word “orthodoxy” literally means “straight-thinking” or “thinking correctly.” Ivone Gebara, a liberation theologian from Brazil takes us one step further. She said that the most important thing is not “orthodoxy” but “orthopraxis:” acting correctly, with justice and mercy. And it is this acting, this thinking, and feeling, that have authority and power in our lives.
Living in truth is figuring out what we believe and then living it. We must practice what we preach. Our actions should speak louder than our words. If we want to wage peace, we must be peace. If we want more compassion in the world, we must be compassion. If we want more forgiveness in our relationships, we must be forgiveness.
We each have the capacity to name our own truths based on our own experiences of the Divine . Once we have named our truths, we have the responsibility to live our truths. As the mystic Rumi says, “You are the truth from foot to brow. Now what else is it you need to know?” Let it be so. Amen.
See www.leftbehind.com
Trisha Yearwood, The Song Remembers When, 1993.
Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief, p. 115.
Ibid., p.121.
Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief, p. 120 & Willis Barnstone & Marvin Meyer (Eds.), The Gnostic Bible, p. 240.
Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water, p. 192.
Copyright © 2007 by Rev. Tessie Mandeville. Permission granted for non- profit circulation with attribution of author and venue. Other rights reserved |
