The Scandalous Gospel...

Just when I thought that there were no Tolstoyan Christians left in leadership positions in America I came across this book by Peter J. Gomes, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What's So Good About The Good News? Don't get me wrong - Gomes doesn't cite Tolstoy's intricate and exhausting analyses of the gospels but he starts where Tolstoy ended - with the Sermon on the Mount.

Gomes is not afraid to challenge the televangelists who lead the mega churches of prosperity, advocate the assassination of heads of state, and promote homophobia. Gomes ably separates what have become popular positions of denominations and churches from the actual words and meaning of the gospels. He titles Chapter Two - An Offending Gospel - and tells the story of a guest sermon he gave on the Sunday following the reelection of George Bush. He says that it started simply enough with the "gospel lectionary appointed for the day and heard by Episcopalians throughout North America on this All Saints Sunday."

He describes "the usual haze of familiarity" covering the faces of the congregation used to hearing the same verses over and over again, "the scriptural equivalent of white sound or ambient noise." According to Gomes, "people began to sit up and take notice" as the lesson went on with the verses one of his friends calls the "Woebetudes":

"But how terrible for you who are rich now; you have had your easy life;
How terrible for you who are full now; you will go hungry!
How terrible for you who laugh now; you will mourn and weep!
How terrible when all men speak well of you, because their ancestors said the very same things to the false prophets."

According to Gomes "the gospel message in Luke is simply that knowing this, we now have a chance to do something about it before it is too late. Thus, in the verses that follow... Jesus tells us to love our enemies, practice the Golden Rule, love those beyond our comfort zone, and be merciful to others as we hope God will be merciful to us."

Apparently the "niceties of this bit of exegesis were lost" among the "blue" and "red" members of the congregation - illustrating what he means by an "offending" gospel!

"Most people do not go to church to be confronted with the gap between what they believe and practice and what their faith teaches and requires...religious people are often cultural conservatives, and (they) take comfort in religion, (because) that religion is seen to confirm the status quo. When a member of the congregation says to the preacher at the door of a church on Sunday, 'That was a first-rate sermon,' he or she is saying that the preacher said all the things with which the person agreed, but only half as well..."

"In warning my preaching students of this dilemma, that people crave confirmation rather than confrontation in preaching, I remind them of how badly Jesus' first sermon went."

I felt both confirmed and confronted - reading a minister interpreting the gospels more like my heart and soul feel - knowing that I am unable to live up to this gospel.

In his penultimate chapter titled "A Gospel of Hope" Gomes draws a significant distinction between optimism and hope.

Optimism - as defined by Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary" is "The doctrine, or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong...an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death." Further he uses Voltaire's definition from Candide - the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong."

He contrasts this with Emily Dickinson's lines about hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.

Gomes likes these images - it "offers an elusive, fleeting clarity, vividly vague, as it were, that endures in the most intimate of spaces and never gives up. Hope, in her view, is not a policy or doctrine or a form of nostalgia either theological or secular. ...There is something fragile about it and yet it abides, however precariously, at the very center of our being - the "thing with feathers."

Those of you - who like me are tired of hearing the rhetoric of torture from those loudly proclaiming themselves to be Christians who speak directly to God will find this a truly hopeful read.