Marcus speaks at All Saint’s Church of Pasadena Lent event.
He opens with a Celtic Irish Christian Prayer “Christ as a light illumen and guide me, Christ as a shield overshadow me, Christ under me Christ over me, Christ beside me on my left and my right. This day be within and without me lowly and meek yet all powerful, be in the heart of each who speaks unto me, be in the heart of each to whom I speak. This day be within and without me lowly and meek yet all powerful. Christ as a light Christ as a shield, Christ beside me on my left and my right. In your name ‘O Christ our body and our blood our life and our nourishment. Amen.”
Memories Conversions and Convictions
The inspiration for this talk came when Marcus was invited to preach in his home congregation on the Sunday of his seventieth birthday which always happens to fall within Lent which is a season dominated by death and mortality. Lent begins on ash Wednesday with a solemn reminder of our mortality, ashes placed on our foreheads in the shape of a cross with the words “thou art dust into dust” spoken over us, echoing language of the burial service.
The combination of Lent and his seventieth birthday led Marcus to contemplate his own life leading to the triad of Memories, Conversions and Convictions. Seventy may be the new sixty but it is gettin’ up there. Marcus references a reflection of a similarly aged man that ‘half of American men who reach seventy do not reach eighty, one has a better chance in combat quite frankly.’ Instead of this leading Marcus down a path of morbidity it got Marcus thinking about convictions.
By Convictions Marcus means foundational ways of seeing things, of seeing what is real, of seeing what matters. Convictions are foundational ways of seeing that are not easily shaken. Being seventy does not make one wise, one can still be an opinionated old fool. At the same time, if we’re not going to speak about what we really think when we’re seventy then when?
Conversions are major changes but not every change is a conversion. Examples of major changes could be divorce or loss of a job but those in and of themselves are not intrinsically conversions though they might become the occasion for a conversion. A Conversion is a major change in how we see our lives, more broadly perhaps in what we think life is about.
Memories particularly of childhood and the particular understandings we absorbed from our time, place and location are important in how they shape our convictions.
Marcus suggests this framework of Memories, Convictions and Conversions when thinking about our own lives, and encourages engaging with others in conversations about that.
Memories
Think back to the end of childhood weather that is eight or twelve for you. What was your understanding of Christianity then? What had you absorbed, internalized or assimilated? Even if you grew up outside the church, it is hard to imagine growing up in America without developing some impression of Christianity by age twelve or so. Marcus reflects back to his twelve year old self and how he would have answered the questions, ‘what’s the heart of the Christian gospel? what’s central to being Christian, in a sentence?’ The twelve year old Marcus would have answered, ‘Jesus died to pay for our sins, so that we can be be forgiven, so that we can go to heaven if we believe in him.’ If you could have convinced a twelve year old Marcus that there was no afterlife, he could not have given any reason for you to be Christian, that’s how central the notion of going to heaven was. Sin and forgiveness was central to his life with God. Jesus’s role in all of this is that he died to pay for our sins, he died to pay the debt that we owed to God. The fourth element was believing in all of this, including that Jesus died to pay for our sins and that Christianity is the only way. Marcus believes this way of thinking of Christianity is the common or majority way of thinking of Christianity of the recent past. This way of thinking continues to be at the heart of conservative Christianity of today and is also fairly wide spread among mainline Christians. This is the default position for many people, what they perhaps think they should believe. This also effect how they understand Christian language. For example hearing the word sacrifice sounds like ‘Jesus dying to pay for our sins.’
The repetitive asking for mercy found in our liturgies enforces the idea of a punitive god who can and will punish us for our sins unless we believe the right things and live in the right way. That understanding of Christianity is very wide spread.
Conversions
Marcus no longer believes any of that
Negative Convictions
Marcus is an agnostic about what happens after death in the most precise sense of the word agnostic. Marcus does not know what happens after death. Of course there are many different beliefs about what happens after death but believing and knowing are very different. One can believe that the world is flat but that is very unrelated to whether it is true or not. If there is an afterlife Marcus can’t and won’t believe that only Christians are eligible for it. This is grounded in Marcus’s belief that Christianity doesn’t have a monopoly on god or goodness.
When sin and forgiveness are centralized in our relationship with god it greatly impoverishes what the Christian life is about. As if the primary issue is we’ve been bad. This view ignores the images of the human conditions as something that we need rescue and deliverance from. In the exodus story the problem is not that the Hebrew slaves are slaves because they’ve been bad. If Moses had told the slaves “My children, I have good news for you your sins are forgiven” the slaves would have laughed and replied that their problem wasn’t that they had sinned but that they were in bondage to the power that rules our world. If the problem is bondage the solution is not forgiveness but liberation. The human condition is also explained as exile. The solution to exile is a journey back home.
An aside, one of Marcus’s Buddhist friends once remarked “you Christians must be very bad people, you’re always confessing your sins and asking for mercy.” To quote an evangelical colleague ” Christianity is in the sin management business.”
Seeing Jesus as payment for our sins profoundly limits and distorts what Jesus was about, almost to the point of betrayal.
Believing is much overrated, you can believe all the right things as still be mean. Believing has very little trans formative power. Marcus no longer believes much of what he believed in his youth and yet he is a more wholehearted Christian now.
Positive Convictions
God is Real. For Marcus it is no longer a matter of believing in a being that may or may not exist. Marcus’s conviction comes from a series of experiences beginning in his thirties.
Jesus is the decisive revelation of what can be seen of god in a human life. This is what it means to speak of him in the word become flesh or incarnate. This has been the status of Jesus from the very beginning of Christianity. Finding the decisive revelation of god in a person is one of the defining qualities of Christianity.
Sometimes the bible is wrong. Marcus wishes every American Christian knew this. At least fifty percent of American Christians would vehemently deny it because they belong to churches mostly independent protestant churches that speak of the infallibility of the bible. Thus if the bible says something is wrong that settles is. Much of the conflict in American Christianity has been generated by the conscious acceptance that the bible is always right or the unconscious acceptance that if the bible says something is wrong that’s pretty important. For example there are many passages in the bible where god commands the slaughter of men, women and children. The book of revelations is one of the most violent parts of the bible in which god will condemn the vast majority of the world to hell forever. There are passages that endorse of condone slavery, was slavery ever consistent with the will of god? There are passages that speak of the subordination of women to men. Early followers of Jesus expected the second coming to occur within their generation, they were wrong. None of this is meant to trash the bible just that the bible tells us what our spiritual ancestors in these two ancient communities thought. It tells us about their experiences of the sacred and what they thought life with god was about. It includes the richness of their perceptions and their limited vision and how provincial they were.
Jesus is the norm of the bible. Jesus is the standard by which the rest of bible is to be judged. Marcus grew up hearing that the bible is the word of god and Jesus is the word of god. As a child it never occurred to Marcus that the word of god as found in Jesus and the word of god as found in the bible might conflict with each other, sometimes they are. Orthodox Christian teaching from the very beginning has been whenever there is a conflict between the two go with Jesus.
The Christian life is not very much about the next life. It can and for many people does help people find the courage to face death without a huge amount of anxiety. The idea that the one who has buoyed us up in life will continue to buoy us up in death. Christianity is really about transformation in this life. It is a twofold transformation, one is of ourselves from bondage to liberation to the freedom of the children on god, from exile to re-connection. Secondly a transformation of this world into a world of greater social compassion meaning a world of justice and the end of violence. That is the dream of god in the bible and to be Christian is to participate in that twofold transformation.