To be a Christian at Riverside, do you have to believe Jesus was born of a virgin? As many of you know, in the 1920s, some years before he began his ministry here, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick got himself and the Presbyterians into a marvelous snarl preaching No! You do not have to believe in the virgin birth.
When Bill Moyers was interviewing Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of religions and mythic literature, he asked Campbell whether he had ever adhered to any of the traditions he studied. In a word, Have you been a believer? Campbell said he had not. Moyers pressed. Then could he say he fully knew the religions? Campbell acknowledged the void in his manner of knowing religions.
“The Ayes are 33, the Nays 29! The bill passes.” My oh my! Those were the words in the New York State Senate chamber this past week as the marriage equality bill was passed into law. Sometimes you win. What pride we share with our fellow citizens in this state today.
Pentecost is often called “the birthday of the church.” But if we are born “not of flesh, but of water and the Spirit,” (John 3:5), then this church body is a spiritual body and it simply cannot have had a natural birthday on which it was plopped into the daylight of history a blinking wet chick.
“You are doing it all wrong,” Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. “Not everything–but the main thing: your celebration of communion—why, it’s not really communion. You’re doing it all wrong. ” Are we doing it right? In his book “Rabbi Jesus”, professor Bruce Chilton argues that what we’re doing is not at all what Jesus was up to at his last supper.
A lot of people do not want their crown. They want their religion to tell them what is true and what to do. The church has often colluded with its people to persuade them that the main purpose of the church is to rain down guilt and self-reproach for ourselves, honor and glory to Thee . . . Yet I defy anyone to find one word from the gospels where Jesus himself demands such of the faithful.
Recent Comments