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Sign up on Substack to receive posts directly. During a staff meet at church once I asked my colleagues how they would feel if they were congregants on a Sunday morning and heard the story of Apollonius. The historical record of 15–100 CE describes Apollonius of Tyana as a famous Roman teacher and leader. He tried to reform Roman worship practices, he resurrected a child in an upper room, cast out demons, and lived very simply. Eventually Roman authorities arrested Apollonius. During his trial, Apollonius ascended in a cloud. He then taught from the heavens. In other words, a contemporary of Jesus (if he was an historical figure) had a story with a striking number of similarities with the story of Jesus. The staff was quiet until one person said, “I wouldn’t want to go to that church.” In other words, please do not tell stories that undermine the primacy and specialness of Christ, do not weaken the foundation on which we lay grasping.  I understood that. I understood quickly in parish ministry how many people needed church, particularly worship, to be the one part of life that does not change. This contrasted with my understanding of communal faith life as being one in which we practiced change and deepened our resilience in the face of change. But I did not understand wanting a god who is so narrow and, frankly, boring. Do people really want a divinity who is so uncreative and non-creating that they could only come up with one worldly intervention and then would be petulant if everyone did not understand that intervention in the exact same way? Not even the committee that decided on which of the many gospels that became canon felt that way: God moves differently across Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Christian tradition itself tells us that we cannot have one testament to the divine.  In a few weeks I’ll be co-teaching a class on the prophetic imagination and poetry, with Rev. Ash Temin at The BTS Center. It will be online and have a special event with real, live poets. Details here.
Even though I am currently outside of church, I still love the Bible. I know it is full of horrors and cruelty, just like humanity ourselves. For me, that is an invitation to learn not about holy absolutes but human choices. I did decide to preach on Apollonius, right at the end of an Easter season—after Jesus’s own resurrection and ascension story. I suggested that the presence of Apollonius’s stories helps us to stay nimble and continue to refine again and again what we know of the holy, to gain clarity about the nature of the divine. Both stories describe divine power as supernatural, as capable of bending or ignoring the laws of land and physics as we know them. Sure, Jesus looked like a regular right-on community-oriented guy. But wait, no, that capacity came from something more than simple human will. Jesus was special, tapped into specialness. So the walking, talking, teaching, feeding, resting, and resisting were special, too. The Jesus story asks us to do counter-cultural and counterintuitive things: kindness to strangers and generosity of purse. They assert that humans need the power of God, a power of that magnitude, to help us transcend the power mongering and machinations of human society. The cruelties of this day, be they at home or abroad, in nature preserves or cities, certainly cry out for a powerful response. But it won’t be God, however interestingly and specifically any of us have defined that word. It will be from those who have the capacity to imagine a different outcome and a different way than the attention economy oligarchic hellscape we have allowed to emerge. Reference Valantasis, Richard, Bleyle, Douglas K., and Haugh, Dennis C. 2009. The Gospels and Christian Life in History and Practice. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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