I don’t know why I do it; but sometimes I can’t help glancing at Billy Graham’s column in the Religion section of the paper…I guess I shouldn’t be so critical of his patriarchal theistic theology, after all he comes from an earlier post World War II generation that needed comfort in the face of the unspeakable violence of that war…an age in which the church was characterized as a “hospital for sinners.” A person had written Graham and described herself as a sinner beyond all hope, but Graham assured her that no one is without hope…I agree with that…but then he described all of humanity as fallen and indeed unworthy of hope except for the atoning sacrifice of Christ’s death on the Cross…that it took the death of God’s Son to pay the incalculable price for our abject unworthiness…This is where our theologies diverge.
If there is a so called fall…then I propose we haven’t fallen far…the Yahwist writer (one of three writers of the creation stories in Genesis) speaks of the man and the woman eating of the tree of knowledge. The Gods(plural..) remark that if that happens then humankind will become like “us”…endowed with god-like knowledge…the knowledge of good and evil…This is a story about humankind becoming conscious beings…a story of evolution…beings endowed with agency…beings called to be co-creators in the created order. Matthew Fox called this an ascent…not a fall. It is within the story of Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, out of envy, that violence enters the world…envy, and the violence envy begets, the first and last enemy, against which divinely endowed humankind must stand ….Ironically, to name humankind’s place in creation as fallen, unworthy, is to abdicate our responsibility to tend to it, to renew it, to stand against that which would undermine it…what we’re made for….so to “place it all on Jesus”…I think is to deny our true Christ-like nature…our true nature bestowed upon us in the garden in the beginning…the creation story, high mythology, teaching us about our rightful identity.
We are not creatures of the fall…but we are creatures of the new creation, people of the resurrection, people of ‘God-nature’ bestowed upon us in the beginning, affirmed by the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, who by his life and ministry reminds us of what the true human looks like…Jesus pressing us with ancient memory of who we are in truth….It is Jesus’ life that saves, not his death…God sees us through the lens of Jesus, his sons and daughters like the one we follow…Not fallen, but raised to bear God’s saving life to our world through stranger, through neighbor, through the down and out, through the poor in Spirit…To take on God knowledge is to see that the world is so very good… And to see that heaven makes its home in this beautiful place called Earth…one doesn’t have to look far to see such beauty…and one doesn’t have to look far to see the great need that is irrefutably among us as God is among us…the grand paradox of the Christian Faith….But paradox notwithstanding…it for us, tasters of the divine fruit of Grace…It is for us to go among our kin like our Galilean brother, raised for the good, bearing, as he and those who follow him did and do…bearing life saving justice and peace and nonviolence and forgiveness and mercy…To build Jerusalem no less in our own place and time is our vocation… we the raised ones bringing heaven…this call given to us in the beginning…we have the knowledge; it was given us, has raised us….Remember?
