Today's Church in America - Part Two
Presented by Phyllis Tickle

Calvary Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee
January 26, 2003
This talk also available in audio

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I want to go quickly to the story. This was a century of assault on the story. Now, lest there be any confusion about this or any notion that I'm making this up, let me say to you that at the end of September, kind of sliding under the radar caused by 9/11, the Vatican very quietly issued a small statement through La Stampa—the Roman paper through which they make most of their announcements. The statement said that at the end of October of 2001, the Vatican would be assembling a body of scholars and theologians for the express purpose of reconsidering the Christian canon. Dr. Navarro, speaking for the pope, proclaimed that there will be no major shifts, but in view of recent scholarship, there is a feeling that certain eliminations and additions need to be made.

Now, the Vatican being what the Vatican is, ain't nothing going to happen for 50 years. But it will happen. It will happen. It will get your great grandchildren. It's the first time since the Council of Nicea that we have looked at the canonical story as a church and said, “Hmmh. There may need to be some additions here or some subtractions.” It is a serious statement, especially for mainline Protestant churches that were built on sola scriptura. It is a serious challenge; it is serious and painful. I don't think anybody enjoyed it particularly, the painful recognition of what this century of assault had been.

What's happening in Christianity and in this country cannot be assumed to be limited just to Christianity. In November of 2001, a month after the Vatican announcement, the United Congregation of Conservative Judaism, which represents slightly more than a third of the functional, practice-observant Jewry in this country, released what’s called Etz Hayim. In Hebrew that means “tree of life.” The Etz Hayim is the new pew Bible, if you will, for all of the congregations of conservative Judaism in this country; that is to say, when the Rabbi gets to going too long and you want to read something, you pull out the pew bible. It actually is the Torah and the Tanakh and then the commentary. In the commentary of the Etz Hayim, there is a considerable discussion about how in all probability there was no Exodus and there was no Moses.

Briefly, think to yourself what is Judaism without Moses or an Exodus? What is Torah, the first five books? They're the same as ours: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. What are they without Moses and the Exodus? Well, what they are is story—brilliant, wonderful, fascinating, resurgent, informing story. It's the wonder of what a people saw and understood and did. I think it was Pablo Picasso who said, "Art is the lie that tells the truth." All of a sudden we're free of the details.

Calling Moses a detail is a serious overstatement, you understand, but until that freedom came, we were scared to look lest it hadn’t happened. Now I’m beginning to get wonderful books. There’s one by Colin Humphreys from Harper San Francisco, The Miracles of the Exodus, which puts together scholarship that's been known for two hundred years. He is a physicist at Cambridge University—head of the Institute of Material Sciences—who absolutely dares to put together scholarship that's been known about Sinai; that Sinai was a volcano. Sinai was a volcano. He puts together all of that science, and can now trace the Exodus. In his book he says that we would have done this sooner, except every time a scholar tried, we got batted down. We got batted down by the church.

Look at the absolute enormous implications of the fact that we've found a dumb old bone box that supposedly contains the bones of St. James, son of Joseph, and brother of our Lord. The ossuary that came—what difference did it make? It only makes a difference after you've let go of the old story, because what we come to understand is that what we shed in this hundred years was a lot of the elaboration that the centuries have laid on the story. What happened was the sucker broke loose. Why did it break loose? It broke loose for a number of reasons. The ones we most commonly cite, 1945 and 1947, Nag Hammadi and Qumran, when all of a sudden we had the actual things.

As you probably know, for fifty years the Dead Sea Scrolls were kept locked up by the Israeli antiquities, lest they say something that would be damaging to the story. When the fifty years ran out and the Israeli antiquities had to let go of them in 1997, the first place they came was to the New York Public Library. I wasn't in the New York office that day, but I called in and my boss said, "I want you to know that there is a line five times around the block outside of the New York Public Library right now, even as we speak, waiting to go in to see the Dead Sea scrolls." Why? Presumably, not so they could all stand there and read them, but because there was a certain urge to get back to the authentic—to strip away all of this junk.

If there were a Gospel of Thomas, and there was, because it was at Nag Hammadi, what did it have to say about our Lord? What about the lost letters of Peter? Were they important? Can we touch it? Can we go back to the authentic? Over and over again, especially among young people who came into the last third of this century, you hear the words, "Let's go back to the authentic. I want my religion to be authentic. I want it to go back to what is real. I want it to get rid of the accretion of the church. I want it to get rid of the accretion of theology. I want to go back and find out what it was."

A friend of mine who's head of Morehouse Publishing says to me, "What we're doing is rapidly hastening toward the third century." I think she's absolutely right—trying to get back to what it was so we can start over. So we can once more say, "Here is our story."

Now, it's going to turn out that probably there was a James, and probably he was son of Joseph, and probably he was brother of Jesus, and isn't that cool? But what really we exposed was the vibrant beating heart of the story. Now, there's been a strong level of anti-clericism, if you will, especially since Vietnam. The interesting thing that's happening as we get back to story is that the clergy, Christian clergy especially, is being subtly but definitely redefined.

What's going to emerge, I will predict, in the next twenty-five or thirty years, is that we will see the Christian clergy became more and more analogous to what the Jewish rabbinate is. As we have pushed back for the story, we want those who engage the story. But let us have a pulpit rabbi and a Yeshiva rabbi. Let us have those who engage 24 hours a day the story. Give us those who know the story, who are in love and impassioned by the story. Then somebody else can get up and give the homily. But what we need is this. We need ongoing Christian Midrash. We need engagement. We need somebody who keeps on with story so that the story suffers several considerable knocks.

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