Philosophy of the New York Day Trip

I've made mistakes in life. Choosing not to live in New York City at some stretch of my twenties was not one of them. It's not that I disapprove of those who have so decided, as I probably would have done so had the opportunity presented itself within the bounds of fiscal reality. But it never did, and the reason I am left sans regret is that over the years, through trial and error, all true Jerseyans refine the delicate art of the New York day trip. When periodically undertaken, such ventures glean almost all the benefits of actually living in New York while avoiding almost all of the (mostly financial) snags.

Seven surefire principles have emerged (additions are welcome):

1. Don't go too often, but when you do, go well. If you haven't in over a year - force yourself.
2. In general, it is best to start the day in Up/Midtown and migrate south.
3. Be firm but flexible, i.e. have a well researched agenda from which you're willing to happily depart.
4. Be not ashamed of the museum audio-guide or well chosen guidebook when appropriate. (Consider my favorite.) Locals may mock... until that is, you correct them.
5. Speaking of which, be sure at some point to hang out with actual New Yorkers.
6. Allow the late night conversation with those actual New Yorkers to drift naturally toward how much they pay for rent, thereby ameliorating any sense that you spent too much.
7. Only stay overnight if you're prepared to buy brunch for those you stay with.

EXAMPLE:
Thanks to a visiting brother-in-law with up to the minute NYC music connections, I had a recent chance to put these time tested principles into action. Observe (prices are per person):

12:30pm Depart from Princeton Junction (parking $3, off peak round trip $18).
1:30pm Arrive Penn Station, coffee, relax, walk uptown ($3).
2:30pm Visit Saint Patrick's Cathedral... never gets old (FREE).
3:00pm Walk one block north to visit St. Thomas' Fifth Ave. and compare the two to depressing result (for the Protestant that is) (FREE).
3:15pm Walk around a bit more, then go to MoMA which, starting 4pm on Fridays, is (FREE).

NOTE: In an extravagant display of art world clout, MoMA installed multiple exhibits of Marcel Duchamp's most famous work on each floor. Just walk through the door marked "Men." They're even interactive.

6:00pm Pub dinner - always reasonable and not excessively priced ($20). Somewhere off the main drag of Little Italy is also a solid bet.
7:00pm Walk to the brand new Morgan Library which on Friday's 7-9pm is (FREE). Autograph manuscripts of scores of cultural titans, impressive art collection, amazing home.
8:00pm Walk to Greenwich Village for a mindblowing jazz vibraphone C.D. release party in basement of the wonderful Cornelia Street Cafe ($10 cover).
11:00pm Complete the evening at a Greenwich village watering hole ($20).
1:15am TAXI back to Penn Station ($4).
1:41am Take the "drunk train" home. Granted you are not yourself drunk (which we paragons of virtue were not), this yields free entertainment.

Total = approximately $80.

I realize that getting home at 3am is pushing the bounds of the "Day Trip," but who can afford to live by principle #7?

"Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone... By destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."

-Bendict XVI at Auschwitz

A Sermon

Below is the sermon I preached today. I forgot what hard work it is. I imagine it's a lot easier when done, as is my practice, approximately once per year... I've even heard some do it every week. The readings I chose were Acts 11:19-30, Isaiah 45:11-13,18-19; John 15:9-17.

Continue...
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It has fallen on me to preach the Sunday after the DaVinci Code movie came out. And though I'm not interested in giving the movie any more than attention than it has already has received, I thought it worth bringing up if only because of the contrast it can give us to today's reading.

The DaVinci Code is not all bad news. For some the book's fantastic claims have led to a fresh investigation of the Bible and church history, an investigation which can lead to a renewal of forgotten faith. But unfortunately it seems that for every one person who may have been inspired by the DaVinci Code to examine the truth about Christian history, there are at least two people who are interested in actually believing the lie. The situation is not entirely unlike the events that took place not far from here in 1938, when a science fiction novel about a Martian invasion called the War of the Worlds was dramatized for radio by Orson Welles. Perhaps it had something to do with the climate of tension in the years leading to WWII, but when the broadcast aired as a Halloween special in 1938, people thought the Martian invasion was real. Newspaper report that some even claimed to smell the poison gas that the broadcast said the Martians were pumping into the atmosphere, or to see the flashes of aliens tripods wreaking havoc in the distance. Police had to be called to calm the crowds that had gathered at Grover's Mill near Princeton, because that was where the broadcast said the Martians had landed. These people wanted to see the aliens. And now people are traveling all around Europe to see the where the events from the DaVinci Code "actually took place."

The War of the Worlds broadcast, for effect, was made to sound like a real newscast (which it wasn't) just as the DaVinci Code novel, for effect, claims in its first page that all its descriptions are accurate (which they are not). But such embellishments caused people both then and now to lose, perhaps to intentionally forsake, their ability to discern between fact and fiction. And though being led to a faulty belief in Martians isn't entirely harmful and can be easily corrected, a faulty belief about Christ is of much more serious consequence, and needs to be addressed.

The Bible says that "stumbling blocks must come, but woe to the one by whom they come" (Luke 17:1). And Mark Twain said, "A lie is half way round the world while the truth is still putting its boots on." So as this DaVinci Code continues to sell (as of today, over 3 years since it came out it's number 1 on the NYTimes bestseller list) and as the movie is played worldwide, lets make sure we at All Saints' Church have our boots on.

Gnosticism

One of Dan Brown's shrewdest moves was to merge his novel with the recent interest in the Gnostic Gospels. The Gnostic "Gospels" are alternate accounts of the life of Christ, written about a century after Matthew Mark Luke and John. Gnosticism is a complex phenomenon, but contrary to what the DaVinci Code tells us, Gnostics don't teach that Christ was a mere man, they teach that he couldn't have been a fully embodied man, because physical matter, the Gnostics taught - is not as Genesis teaches "very good" - physical matter is evil. So, according to the Gnostic Gospel of Judas for example, Jesus was so pure that he hailed not from little town of Bethlehem, but from the immortal realm of Barbelo. Bethlehem I guess was a bit too earthy.

Also contrary to the DaVinci Code, the Gnostic accounts don't teach that Christ was a proto-feminist. Allow me to read you the last verse from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Peter says to Christ,

"'Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.' Jesus said, 'See, I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every female (element) that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.'"

If you're interested in a Jesus who respects women however, you might consult the non-Gnostic Gospel of John, where Christ breaks social taboos to speak to a Samaritan woman in chapter four, to defend the life of an adulterous woman in chapter eight, and where the first to whom he reveals his Resurrected glory was Mary Magdalene in chapter 20.

But the power of the Gnostic Gospels is not in what they have to say, what they say as we've seen can be rather bizarre. The power of the Gnostic Gospels is that they claim to be letting you in on a secret. It's their secrecy that gives them their allure. I was listening to an interview with a popular scholar who specializes in Gnosticism, and she made a very interesting observation that I thought perfectly encapsulated the Gnostic message. She said, and she is right, that these accounts were "not meant to be read publically, but were an advanced teaching only for the few."

The fact that the Gnostic secret gospels have a selective audience is the key to understanding their difference to our public Gospel for a universal audience. In the Gnostic Gospel of Judas Jesus says to Judas "Step away from the others, and I will tell you the secrets of the kingdom of heaven..." The Gnostic gospels appeal to our pride, our desire to be in on something that no one else knows about.

"Can you keep secrets?" Sir Teabing says to Sophie in the DaVinci Code. "Can you know a thing and never tell it again?"

The Readings

"I did not speak in secret, in a land of darkness" the Lord said through Isaiah in our first reading for this morning.

The context of the Isaiah passage is that the chosen nation of Israel had been deported to Babylon, but God was now ready to announce their homecoming, to gather them back to Jerusalem. Their long exile was over, and to deliver them God had chosen a non-Jewish named Cyrus of Persia. When Isaiah told this to the people they balked, how could God use a gentile king? And the Lord responded through Isaiah to their incredulity:

"Will you question me about my children, or command me concerning the work of my hands? I made the earth and created humankind upon it; I have aroused Cyrus in righteousness, and I will make all his paths straight."

Isaiah rebukes the exclusively minded Israelites by reminding them that God's saving activity on behalf of Israel was a world-encompassing event, and God could use a Gentile King to grant Israel safe passage home if he so chose.

The oracle at Delphi was the pagan fortune telling factory of the ancient world, and they too made prophecies about Cyrus of Persia, but kept them secret - perhaps so that they could, if necessary, be reversed depending on the turn of events. But not the God of Israel.

"I did not speak in secret, in a land of darkness."

God the Father doesn't do secrets.

The book of Acts this morning both preserves and expands upon Isaiah's international insight. The context of this passage is that the Jewish Christians of Jerusalem had been scattered after the great persecution that began with the stoning of Stephen. And as they spread out into greater Palestine, Acts tells us that these Jewish Christians "spoke the word to none except Jews." But some of them decided to take a risk. "There were some of them," Acts tells us, "who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus." What happened? "And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number that believed turned to the Lord."

Some Jewish Christians took the risk to proclaim Christ to the non-Jewish Gentiles and it worked - so much so that they had to call to Jerusalem Church for some from back up from Barnabus. And later, with Paul's help, so many people came to the Lord that the pagan population of Antioch had to find a name for this strange new group of people that cared not for traditional tribal boundaries - they called them Christians.

These Christians were not like the pagan mystery cults which were so popular in ancient world, with layer upon layer of secret rituals known only to the initiated. Christians instead proclaimed a public truth, open to all the nations, and proclaimed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And the Holy Spirit doesn't do secrets.

But what about Jesus. Didn't Jesus have secrets? For example, after the transfiguration, didn't he say to a rather exclusive group of disciples, Peter James and John, "Tell no one about the vision"...?

He did. But here's the entire verse "Tell no one of the vision... until the son of man has risen from the dead" (Matt 17:9). Jesus sometimes used a strategic secrecy, perhaps to conceal his identity so that he wouldn't get killed before his appointed time. But once he was risen from the dead Jesus instructs the disciples to share the Gospel with such vigor that even if the Emperor of Rome himself commanded them to be silent, to speak. They were to proclaim Christ, even if it meant their death. As of course, for many of the disciples, it would.

One of the more powerful religious services I've ever been to was the Good Friday Service here at All Saints' this year. In it we saw the Pharisees question Jesus, and Ned stood right there and sung the words of Christ which read:

"I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together; I have said nothing secretly."

Jesus doesn't do secrets. That message was so offensive that on officer struck him for talking freshly to the high priest. Things haven't exactly changed. You're liable to get struck yourself, or at least given the evil eye, if today you suggest that Jesus Christ is not a secret. If you suggest, following Isaiah and Acts that Christ is for ALL the nations, ALL tongues tribes and nations, even that Jesus Christ is for ALL religions. Many today believe Jesus is only for Christians. People name Christianity among the Western religions. But was Jesus a westerner? Those Magi so beautifully depicted in the open icon that hangs here to celebrate Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ of to the nations - were those Magi from the West?

A further example of the Gospel's scandalously non-secretive nature is in the John 15 reading this morning, where Christ says "No longer do I call you servants, but I call you friends." A temptation with this passage is to import our understanding of friendship into this verse. To perhaps think casually of Christ as our buddy. But that would be very unwise, for this is a friendship that is carefully qualified and defined.

For example, if you said to your closest friend, "I will continue to be your friend, if you do what I command you," chances are he or she would no longer be your closest friend. But Jesus says that to us in this passage. "You are my friends if you do what I command you." This is not an ordinary friendship. By calling us friends Jesus has one particular point in mind which he makes very clear. He contrasts servants, who don't have the whole story of what the Master is up to, with friends who do.

"I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father."

"I have made known to you everything." No secrets. We are the friends of Jesus Christ because He has let us in on the truth about what this Universe is for. We know that the fuse of the Big Bang was lit with the fire of God's love - love that would go so far as to become one of us, paying for each of our sins with his own blood, and then even overcoming an enemy powerful enough to defeat even Cyrus the great King of Persia - an enemy named death, which was destroyed by Christ's glorious resurrection. And we know that we're to abide in Christ until the day where we stand before him in judgment, where we'll be either rewarded for proclaiming this truth in word and deed, or shamed for keeping in secret. Hidden. Locked up in the safety deposit box of our expertly justified timidity. We may not know everything we'd like to know, but we've been told everything we need to know. And that is enough.

Youth Sunday

What does all this have to do with Youth Sunday? It is everything to do with Youth Sunday. Because if the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not some secret, advanced teaching for a select, especially chosen few - if the Gospel is available to all, if it is a public teaching to be proclaimed to all tongues tribes and nations - then the Youth of this church are as able to access it as the adults. In fact, the youth of this church may be in a better place to access God than we adults, because often they haven't had as much time to build up the defense mechanisms that keep God out. Being young is prime time to draw close to God.

The Bible makes the point often. Certainly Mary was but a young maiden when she was called. And we don't know what the age of the disciples were when they dropped their nets for Christ, but tradition relates that the Gospel of John was written by the apostle John in his very old age, and therefore Christians assumed that he must have been but a youth when he drew near to Christ at the last supper.

And though Dan Brown has other ideas, that is why when Leonardo DaVinci painted his famous Last Supper, he depicted the Apostle John as a beardless youth. A beardless youth who was uniquely close to Christ. So no, it's not Mary Magdalene.

Right now all of us, youth and adults, are invited not to mutter a secret incantation, but to proclaim the truth about Jesus Christ in that ancient, universal and most ecumenical of Creeds. And then we're invited to draw near to him not through a secret ritual behind closed doors, but by communing with Christ in a holy feast, that has only one requirement - That you be a sinner seeking, in Christ, to be a saint. May that include us all.

Amen.

Need for Creeds

A nice way of commemorating Jaroslav Pelikan's passing might be by downloading a decent interview, where he attempts to put his formidable sense of history into engagment with an accurate representative of the American mind, Krista Tippett.

"As much as people may not like it," Pelikan explains, "to believe one thing is to disbelieve another. To say yes is also to say no."

Upon hearing the unvarnished history of the Nicene Creed, which like anything in employment for centuries will not be without its abuses, Krista playfully suggests it should be banned. Pelikan responds that her sentiment is a respectable one, is distinctly American, and traceable to Emerson (see below). The trouble with it is you do it once, you do it a little more, and then you have to teach your children something, and before you know it you have a tradition. So, "The only alternative to tradition... is bad tradition."

Seems some Africans have figured that out (witness the beautiful Maasai Creed). Wish we would.

Thanks to Lance for the heads-up to the show.

un not rewrapping

Paul Griffiths explains oh so very correctly that

"God... is neither an item in nor an aspect of the cosmos. He is the creator of all that is, seen and unseen: He who called the cosmos into being out of nothing, and He whose essence is by definition unknowable to human reason. Anything whose essence could be known to reason would by definition not be God. Reason can establish that God exists, Thomas Aquinas notes (I have some doubts, but let's allow it for the sake of the argument), but in so doing it must confess that it has no idea what it has established the existence of.

Theology does not stop there, of course. But when it says more about its formal object - God - it does so not on the basis of reason but rather on the basis of faith. What this means is a complicated matter, but one thing it means is that theology utters substantive and positive truths about God (that God is prevenient and inexhaustible love, that He was incarnate, and so forth) principally in response to God's self-revelation, God's gift of Himself. Without that gift, constructive systematic theology - the real thing, that is - cannot be done" (25).

The way to recover a sense of mystery in Christianity is not by wrapping the gift back up and pretending not to know what it is, but by continuing to unwrap that particular yet inexhaustible gift of God's self-revelation in Christ.

"There is no reason why fixed dogma should fix anything that the writer sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery" (178).

-Flannery O'Connor

Peregrinating Pragmatists

Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish... According to Professor Roger Lundin, theregoes the apostolic succession (with varying degrees of adherence) to the American "tradition of disavowing tradition, [which] worships whatever unknown gods adaptive individuals are able to fashion out of their experience alone." Lundin suggests the tradition continues in American pragmatism, that "product of the American universities of the 19th and 20th centuries, and as such... defined by the practices of the seminar and sheltered under the umbrella of tenure."

Drawing from Menand's The Metaphysical Club, Lundin explains that for the pragmatist,

"democratic participation isn't the means to an end...; it is the end. The purpose of the experiment is to keep the experiment going... and the end of all our activity is to sustain an activity that has no end beyond itself, no point beyond its own pointlessness. On these terms, a healthy conversation will never lead to a repentant turning, a decisive metanoia [repentance], but only to evermore satisfying perspectival gazing, and endless round of theoria."

Lundin's tone is charitable, but his alternative clear.

"In first-century Athens, the Apostle Paul covered similar ground with the Epicurian and Stoic philosophers. They too were masters of discourse in a world sealed off from divine intervention. Paul's response to what he discovered in skeptical Athens was simple and direct. After having offered the briefest of summaries of Jewish history and early Christian theology, he concluded, 'While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent' (metanoia).

Of course not all listened, "but a number of those who did no doubt found the rules of the game, and the direction of their conversations, changed forever."

Notice, by the way, Lundin does not say the conversation ends. It continues, even eternally... for knowing just who this "unknown God" is makes for a much more enduring conversation than was the case when it was anybody's guess.

Is Hegel a Christian?

Pardon me if your pretension detector just rose to orange, but I'm about to quote a Hegel scholar again. To recall the elementary school years, reading G.W.F. Hegel is like putting your hands into a bag of peeled grape "eyeballs" at a mock hall-o-horrors on Halloween: You spend a lot of time trying to figure out just what it is you're dealing with.

By this I mean I've spent a good bit of time this year wondering whether or not Hegel's philosophy is a Christian one. It's a touchy issue, and I've come across many attempts, even book-length ones, at addressing it; but I thought I'd pass the briefest and clearest of them along:

"Hegel is a Christian, but not an orthodox one by the Nicene Creed. He denies the precedence of the Father, from whom the Son and the Spirit proceed. He denies that lordship is the meaning of divinity, so that Christ manifests divinity only as the risen Lord. The true definition of divinity is Spirit. But Hegel is not an ancient Gnostic like Marcion or Valentinus. He does not denigrate the body as the kingdom of the devil. He affirms the incarnation and construes natures as the logos made flesh, as spirit, i.e., the infinite Christ. He is a modern, Joachimite Gnostic: world history is the story of the logos making itself flesh in the rational state and human rights... [Hegelian philosophy] is still Christian even if not orthodox. To be a heretic one must after all first be a Christian" (Clark Butler 139 and 141).

Calling someone a heretic is not pleasant business. Perhaps the blow will be softened by knowing that those weren't the words of a conservative religious authority figure, but a professor of philosophy who, in so designating Hegel, is by no means alone.

Heresy is a lot like vomit. Though not pretty at the time, it's ultimately a sign that the body is functioning properly. The fact that a given belief system loses the ability to call someone a heretic is not a sign therefore of "progress," but decline, just as a body that consumes toxins but can't expel them is not healthy, but sick. Boundaries are not necessarily bad. To recall Tom Oden, a circle without boundaries is not a circle. It's a point.

Heresy need not be the dirty word that it has become. Consider the converse of the usual case: If someone believes in the bodily resurrection, but then proceeded to call themselves a genuine Valentinian "Gnostic"... and when corrected by a real Gnostic, continued to assert that they were still in fact a Gnostic (but one who believed in the bodily resurrection) - that person would then be a Gnostic heretic. So labeling such a "Gnostic" as a heretic would both clarify Gnosticism's self-identity, and provide an important service to the person confused enough to think they could be a genuine Valentinian Gnostic while asserting the inherent goodness of the physical body.

Hegel is not, as many assume, a full-blown pantheist. But by clearly departing from the Creed he earns his status as a Christian heretic. Does this mean he cannot be learned from? The answer to that question should be obvious. If only because of his vast influence on modern thought, Hegel should be seriously engaged. Furthermore, because of Hegel's Christianity there will be many more points of contact for the orthodox Christian who reads him than there are in most 19th century philosophical alternatives.

But to use another analogy pulled from elementary school, reading Hegel is like conducting a mold experiment. Observing the growth of mold on previously consumable bread may be fascinating, but it's not nutritious. Likewise, observing what Hegel does to classical Christianity may provide insight, but the bread of life of orthodox Christianity is much more satisfying food.

In conclusion, I'd like to suggest that orthodoxy/heresy is not just a matter of personal preference. Hegel's departures had grave public consequences. He made the standard heretical move of trying to reduce faith to knowledge, trying to squeeze God into the head. And though Hegel had an extremely generous and spacious intellect, even his brain was too small for God.

Because all things for Hegel, including religion, are en route to their being understood in philosophy, Hegel unwittingly set up the victory of the Hegelian Left. Explains another professor, "By the middle of the nineteenth century, right-wing Hegelianism had disappeared. The left-wing had the field to itself. It had in effect repudiated Hegel"(241). And "left" here doesn't mean your friendly neighborhood progressive. It means Hegel's atheist interpreters who sought to de-Chrisitianize him completely, paving road via Feuerbach to that most famous left-wing Hegelians, that Old Testament prophet who lost religion, Karl Marx.

Such was Hegel's unhappy spawn. At one point Hegel informs us that "the owl of Minerva flies at dusk." This is his beautiful way of saying "hindsight 20/20," or that you don't know the true character of something until you see its full consequences - and on this point Hegel was right. So much so that his philosophy is no exception to his rule.