John 6 is the foundation for the orthodox meaning of Christian Eucharist.  The chapter opens with John’s version of the “feeding of the 5,000,” or “miracle of the loaves and fishes,” followed by the first of the “I Am” statements attributed to Jesus by John; John then presents an extensive argument about what . . . → Read More: 21st Century Cosmology and the Gospel of John: Part V – Bread of Life]]> John 6

John 6 is the foundation for the orthodox meaning of Christian Eucharist.  The chapter opens with John’s version of the “feeding of the 5,000,” or “miracle of the loaves and fishes,” followed by the first of the “I Am” statements attributed to Jesus by John; John then presents an extensive argument about what exactly the “bread of life” means.  This is too much for some of Jesus’ followers, many of whom “dropped out and would no longer travel with him.”  Jesus is left with “the Twelve,” which includes “Judas, son of Simon Iscariot . . . who was going to turn him in.”

A thorough discussion of Mark’s version of this story can be found in the series titled “Ordinary Time,” contained in commentary on Propers 9 through 16 of the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B.  The following excerpt sets the scene:

 John’s version of the loaves and fishes miracle differs in significant ways from the original parable as told by Mark.  The context for John’s version of Mark’s stories is “about the time for the Jewish celebration of Passover.”  This sets up a ready reference to unleavened bread, and to the legend of manna, which magically appeared every morning to supply the exiles returning from Egypt with food for the journey.  Anachronistically, it evokes Christian Eucharist.  Further, it establishes the context for the first of the declarations that define Jesus’s mythic identity: I am the bread of life; I am the light of the world; I am the good shepherd, etc.

Instead of the disciples noticing there is need for bread, (Mark 6:35-36) John’s Jesus asks, “Where are we going to get enough bread to feed this mob?”  Five Gospels translation.  The disciples discuss how much money it would cost; then Andrew says, “There’s a lad here with five loaves of barley bread and two fish.”  So “Jesus took the loaves” from the kid and magically multiplied the amount.  This is a major change from Mark’s Jesus: “Give them something to eat yourselves.”  The followers object on economic grounds (as do the ones in John’s story), but they come up with five loaves and two fish among their own provisions.  Only after his followers have come up with food to share does Mark’s Jesus bless the bread, break it, and give it to them to distribute among the crowd.

Then Jesus orders the disciples to “gather up the leftovers so that nothing goes to waste.”  The followers collect 12 baskets of scraps from the 5 barley loaves.  Nothing is said in either story about what was done with the over-abundance of food.  The point of both the original story and John’s version seems to be that there was not only enough, there was more than enough.  But in Mark’s story, the abundance comes from the willingness of people to share.  In John’s story, the abundance happens by the direct intervention of divine miracle.  That intervention, it should be noted, confiscated what was needed from a child in the crowd.  John’s Jesus did not ask the boy if he was willing to give up what he had.  Perhaps the writer assumes a kind of natural altruism in the innocence of a child.  Perhaps he was familiar with the idea that children are the ones who naturally inhabit God’s kingdom (Mark 10:14).  Whatever it might mean, that detail carries moral and theological implications about the nature of the realm of God as well as the “body of Christ.”

The next major difference is that in Mark’s original, Jesus sends his disciples ahead in the boat while he disperses the crowd.  After that, Jesus goes off alone to the mountain to pray.  But in John’s gospel, once the people had seen the miracle, “Jesus perceived that they were about to come and make him king by force, so he retreated once again to the mountain by himself.”  After he has gone, the disciples decide to row across the lake to Capernaum.  Darkness has fallen, and a strong wind has come up.  Jesus is seen walking toward the boat over the water.  The disciples are terrified.  But just as they decide to take him into the boat, they are magically transported to the shore, boat and all.  Mark has no such magical transportation.  Instead, by the time Jesus has climbed into the boat, the winds have died down.  Mark says the disciples were dumbfounded.  Then he adds parenthetically, “You see, they hadn’t understood about the loaves; they were being obstinate.”  They did not want to realize their own role in the transformation of normal life in the Empire to God’s rule.

The writer of John’s Gospel was given a major clue about the meaning of Mark’s parable, but – like the disciples that Mark constantly complaints about – John didn’t get it.  As a result, Christians have a choice about what the stories might mean. [The creators of the Revised Common Lectionary] are clear that interventionist miracle and magic is what it takes to bring about God’s Kingdom, God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion.  There is no work involved, only “belief” or – for postmodern minds – the suspension of disbelief.

John’s Jesus tells the people that they were so distracted by having bread to eat that they missed the obvious miracle (John 6:26).  Then – in an echo of what he said to his confused disciples in 4:32-34 – he tells them “Don’t work for food that spoils, but for food that lasts – food for unending life – which the Human One will give you.”  After his encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well, Jesus’ disciples plead with him to eat something; he says “I have food to eat you know nothing about . . . Doing the will of the one who sent me and completing his work – that’s my food.”  But neither his disciples, nor the “crowd” who later follow him across the sea to Capernaum understand what he means.

John’s argument seems circular to post-modern minds.  When the people ask “what do we have to do to accomplish the work God wants done?” Jesus tells them that the work is “to believe in the one whom God has sent.”  When they demand a sign (apparently not satisfied with the multiplication of loaves and fishes), he says that he himself is the sign:

        Let me tell you this: it was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven; rather it is my Father who gives you real bread from heaven . . . I am the bread of life.  Anyone who comes to me will never be hungry again, and anyone who believes in me will never again be thirsty.

Throughout Chapter 6, the people (“crowd”), the Judeans (Jesus’ hometown neighbors, the opposition in John’s local synagogue), and Jesus’ disciples all take what Jesus says literally.  Jesus says he is “the bread that came down from heaven” and the Judeans ask, “Isn’t this Jesus son of Joseph?  Don’t we know both his father and his mother?  How can he now say, ‘I’ve come down from heaven’?”  Jesus says, “For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink.  Those who feed on my flesh and drink my blood remain in me, and I in them.”  The disciples respond: “This sort of talk is hard to take.  Who can take it seriously?”

Indeed, those very words have been used as proof that Jesus was establishing cannibalism as the defining Christian ritual.  Because a literal interpretation of John’s Gospel soon became established church dogma, finding a place outside of that interpretation is challenging.  As the series from Year B makes clear, any interpretation other than the literalist tradition is precluded by the combinations of readings that comprise the Revised Common Lectionary.

One scholar who has created a theology outside the box of conventional Catholic dogma is Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox.  In The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Fox created a Christology for the third millennium that grounds Christian mysticism in modern cosmology.  Fox says that the Cosmic Christ reveals the “divine ‘I Am’ in every creature.  This is the doctrine of incarnation that leads to the return to the secular that Lloyd Geering suggests in Coming Back to Earth.    Fox asks,

        How are we the bread of life or living bread to each other? . . . The Statements that “I am bread” and “I am wine” ground our reverence for food and drink, wheat and wine, soil and vineyard, the processes of photosynthesis and all that makes things grow in an ultimate reverence. . . . In this revelation of the divinity of the bread and wine lies that part of compassion that is celebration . . . To celebrate our “I am” is to put our being before our doing or having or proving. . . . An “I am consciousness also affects our attitude toward time.  The past and future are not what exist; it is the now moment that exists most richly.  It is the divine “now” that is ours for the drinking (pp 154-155).

John’s Jesus says, “I am the life-giving bread that came down from heaven.  Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.  And the bread that I will give for the world’s life is my flesh.”  This late first-century writer may have been talking about the popular dream that God would act to restore God’s justice to a world crushed by the Roman empire.  In that apocalyptic legend, the savior of the world would be taken up to reside in heaven with God until the end of time.  Then the savior – Messiah – Son of Adam – Human One – would return to a world transformed into God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion that would last forever.  John’s Jesus speaks through the gospel from the point of view of the crucifixion.  The catalyst for the ultimate transformation from earthly injustice to eternal justice, John says, was Jesus’ own flesh and blood.

For 21st century activists, from Occupy Wall Street regulars to poets such as Drew Dellinger, theologians such as Spong, Crossan, Borg, and Fox, the way to distributive justice-compassion for all beings on the Planet is our own flesh and blood.

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Everyone knows the Sunday school lessons about the Samaritan woman at the well.  The Samaritans were the enemies of Israel, the standard story goes, so for Jesus to “convert” the enemy woman was quite an accomplishment.  To make the lesson even more pious, Jesus magically “knows” that she is not married . . . → Read More: 21st Century Cosmology and the Gospel of John: Part III – Living Water]]> John 4:1-46; Malachi 3:1-12

Everyone knows the Sunday school lessons about the Samaritan woman at the well.  The Samaritans were the enemies of Israel, the standard story goes, so for Jesus to “convert” the enemy woman was quite an accomplishment.  To make the lesson even more pious, Jesus magically “knows” that she is not married to the man she is currently living with, and [gasp!] has had five husbands before this one.  She runs away and brings all of her friends back to meet “a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” (KJV).  The standard message seems to be that Jesus, like Santa Claus, “knows when you’ve been bad or good,” and certainly this woman must have been some kind of bad to be living with a man who is not her husband, after somehow getting rid of five others.  The proof that Jesus is the Christ is his ability to see through all of our pretenses.  “The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things” (KJV).

The Sunday school interpretation of the confusing stuff in the middle about not worshiping God on the mountain or in Jerusalem skirts the edges of anti-Semitism.  God wants the real Christians to worship him, and always tell the truth.  The test for who is or is not a real Christian is clear.  “But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.  God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth” (KJV).

But the Gospel of John is not about piety.  It is an impassioned and powerful first century argument for a transformed world.  Rather than looking at the gospel in cherry-picked pieces – as the Revised Common Lectionary does in order to support orthodox Christian teaching – consider the interior plan, which only becomes apparent when the gospel is read in its own context.

Water as transformation carries the argument for two and a half chapters.  At the wedding in Cana, water is transformed into wine; Nicodemus – the expert on religion who should know this – is invited to transform himself; Jesus and his disciples baptize more people than the Baptizer; Jesus meets the enemy woman at Jacob’s well and offers transformation (living water); Jesus’ disciples don’t get it (surprise), so Jesus attempts the metaphor of food, which he defines as “doing the will of the one who sent me and completing his work” – begun by the prophets, and to be completed by Jesus’ followers; the Samaritans (unlike the pharisee Nicodemus) listen to Jesus and realize that “he really is the savior of the world”; and the sequence ends as it began: “Then he came back to Cana, Galilee, where he had turned water into wine.”

The times were changing at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second century.  Jerusalem was sacked; Temple Judaism had perforce become displaced; competition between the factions that believed Jesus to be the Messiah and those who clung to the old tradition was fierce.  Much the same as the 21st century, when – as Lloyd Geering proposes –  humanity is in the midst of the transition not from theism to atheism, but from theism to secularism.  Fundamentalists of all varieties of Abrahamic faiths – Jews, Christians, Muslims – have declared holy war on that transition.  There is a place for John’s story about Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, but only if the metaphors are reclaimed for 21st century cosmology.

John’s metaphor of water into wine, which frames the vignettes with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman at the well, represents not just “transformation,” but “transmutation.”  To follow the teachings of Jesus means that one’s life becomes something fundamentally different from what it was before.  John did not use the metaphor of the refiner’s fire, which purifies, clarifies, decontaminates, as the prophet Malachi claims God’s messenger will do (Malachi 3:1-5).  Malachi was warning the priests of Israel that the representative of God’s covenant was coming soon to “purify the descendents of Levi” who had stopped following God’s rule: “‘I will be swift to bear witness against the sorcerors, against the adulturers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien, and do not fear me,’ says the Lord” (NRSV).

John is not satisfied with cleansing and polishing.  John says, whoever believes Jesus is the Anointed One is changed (in the apostle Paul’s words “in the twinkling of an eye) – from injustice and death to justice and life: from water into wine.  For 21st century non-theists, this means a fundamental shift in mind and paradigm from fear to love; from greed to sharing; from unjust systems that are the normal consequence of civilization’s laws to distributive justice-compassion.

Just in case anyone thinks that John has made Malachi’s list irrelevant, consider the following update:  political leger demain, sex trafficking, corporate bait-and-switch tactics, union busting, blaming the poor for their plight, and hating anyone who looks, speaks, or acts different from the prevailing population.  Further, if “God” is seen as “Gaia,” we can apply the same list of atrocities carried out against people to the earth itself.  With that understanding, the wrath of God that Malachi invokes with his threat of refinement “until they present offerings in righteousness” can be seen as the consequences of misplaced dominion over earth’s resources.  Until we stop mountaintop removal, deep-sea oil extraction, “fracking” for natural gas, and unchecked pollutants pouring into the earth, the air, and the water, we can expect continuing climate change, disruptions to growing seasons, famines, floods – the mythic four horsemen of the apocalypse wreaking havoc on life as we know it.

When we experience a sustainable earth as the one that provides all life-forms with “living water,” and join the work of distributive justice-compassion (“food” the disciples knew nothng about), then we can talk about worshiping “in spirit and in truth” in the King James language, or “as [God] truly is, without regard to place” (The Complete Gospels scholars translation). Tweet

The Gospel of John is a narrative, theological proof that Jesus was the Messiah, the One Anointed – consecrated, selected – by God to establish God’s rule – God’s Kingdom – on earth.  The Pharisee Nicodemus illustrates the process by which even leaders in the Jewish communities who rejected the whole notion of . . . → Read More: 21st Century Cosmology and the Gospel of John: Part II – Nicodemus]]> John 3

The Gospel of John is a narrative, theological proof that Jesus was the Messiah, the One Anointed – consecrated, selected – by God to establish God’s rule – God’s Kingdom – on earth.  The Pharisee Nicodemus illustrates the process by which even leaders in the Jewish communities who rejected the whole notion of Jesus as the Messiah might still come to believe.  He visits Jesus during the metaphorical night of conventional thought in chapter 3.  He reappears in chapter 7 among the temple authorities who threaten to arrest Jesus (John 7:37-8:20).  In that scene, Nicodemus challenges his colleagues to abide by the Law and not pass judgment on someone without first allowing him to speak for himself and establish the facts.  The chief priests and pharisees are not happy with Nicodemus, but they allow Jesus to make his argument.  He says, “I am the light of the world,” which further enfuriates the pharisees, but they do not arrest him because “his time had not yet come.”  Nicodemus’ final appearance is with Joseph of Arimathea, who takes Jesus’ body for burial (John 19:38-42).  John writes that Joseph of Arimathea was a secret disciple of Jesus because he was afraid of the other members of the community.  Nicodemus, “the one who had first gone to him at night,” brings an inordinate amount of “myrrh and aloes weighing about seventy-five pounds” with which to wrap the body.

An uncritical Christian reading might imply that Nicodemus may still have been holding some doubt about who Jesus was.  While he did speak up for him on behalf of the Law, the contribution of all those burial spices may have signalled a sense of guilt for not “believing” Jesus was the Messiah.  Perhaps Nicodemus did it because he had a literal understanding of Jesus’ resurrection.  If Jesus is going to literally come back from the dead (like Lazarus), it might be wise to do all he can to preserve the body!  Twentieth century Scholar Raymond E. Brown argues that the “brave action of the hitherto timid Joseph and Nicodemus seems to indicate that Jesus, raised up, has begun drawing people unto himself” (The Gospel and Epistles of John, Liturgical Press, 1988).

But suppose Nicodemus’ gesture is part of John’s continuing proof.  Jesus was seriously dead. He was truly executed by the Romans as a terrorist, buried, and as orthodox creed puts it, “descended into Hell.”  Then in an act that defied all religious logic and secular expectation, God raised a crucified enemy of the state from the dead into God’s realm.  Even more subversive, and missed by most commentaries, the action the two pharisees took with Jesus’ body was an outrageous demonstration that Jesus was indeed the Anointed One.  They treated the body of an executed criminal with extravagently greater respect and care than normally due a righteous follower of the Law.

The Gospel of John is fraught with 2,000 years of Christian interpretation that insists “belief” in Jesus’ story means a free ticket to heaven after death, and “non-belief” means an instantaneous condemnation to hell.  It has been the raison d’être for the worst excesses of anti-Semitism, and the destruction of aboriginal and non-Christian societies world-wide.  It has had a greater influence on Western thought than possibly any other biblical narrative.  Reinterpreting the Gospel from the point of view of late 20th and early 21st century Biblcal scholarship requires a willingness to ignore traditional meaning – and of course begs the question: Why bother?

In a recent op-ed published by the Martinsburg (West Virginia) Journal, Sean O’Leary writes about NBA all-American Jerry West.  West came from an abusive, dysfunctional family.  He used basketball as a way to dissociate himself from the terror at home, and became “the ninth greatest professional player of all time.”  O’Leary says that while West was one of the lucky ones, most people caught in abusive situations are unable to get out.  Instead they retreat into booze, gambling, junk food, cigarettes, pain killers, and assorted drugs; and it happens more often in West Virginia than anywhere else.  “The National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease control rank West Virginia among the leading states for the prevalence of depression, anxiety-related disorders, and . . . suicide.  We’re nearly five tmes more likely to kill ourselves than we are to be killed by someone else.  And suicide combined with accidental drug overdoses (usually prescription pain killers) kills more of us than even traffic accidents.”

O’Leary calls this crisis “West Virginia’s disease of othe soul.”  It is a disease of the soul because the underlying cause of these problems is never addressed: that is, mental illness, depression, and addiction are seen as character flaws: a lack of self-discipline, a failure of resolve, or even a dearth of religious faith, “traits for which they believe people should be admonished or punished rather than treated.”  That “dearth of religious faith” goes right back to the misinterpretation of John 3:16-21.  Traditional, conservative, and fundamentalist Christians quote John 3:16 as the defining Christian statement of faith:

        For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.  He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds shouldbe reproved.  But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.  John 3:16-21 (KJV).

The standard interpretation is if you don’t believe Jesus came back from the dead, you can’t be saved.  Even with the latest translation, the same meaning seems inevitable.  Jesus explains to Nicodemus how it came about that God designated Jesus as his Anointed One:  “In the desert, Moses elevated the snake; in the same way, the Human One is destined to be elevated, so everyone who believes in him can have unending life . . . All those who do evil things hate the light and don’t come into the light – otherwise their deeds would be exposed.  But those who do what is true come into the light so the nature of their deeds will become evident: their deeds belong to God” (The Complete Gospels p. 214).

In order to reclaim this metaphor of the religious leader who came out of the darkness, in secret, to meet Jesus and ask him what he was all about, a few points about the nature of God, and what belongs to God must be understood.  Jesus tries to remind this learned pharisee of what he is supposed to know: that what comes from the spiritual realms is spirit, and what comes from human realms is human.  In order to be part of God’s realm, everyone must be reborn by God’s spirit.  Nicodemus takes this literally, and so has just about everyone else for the past 2,000 years.

In order to be “reborn from above,” God’s spirit must be understood as distributive justice-compassion.  Throughout the Bible, God acts to establish, restore, and keep God’s law: for the widow, the orphan, the slave, and even the animals that reside with God’s people.  Everyone participates in God’s demand for justice.  Whenever the people stray from justice – whether it’s refusing to annilhate the Amalekites, or tricking Uriah so the king can take his wife, or worshiping the idols of the conquerors, God withdraws his support and the people suffer famine, war, and exile.  Whenever anyone follows God’s rule of distributive justice-compassion – whether or not they belong to the original 12 tribes of Israel – God works for them: they win the battles, reap the harvests, abide in their own profitable, peaceful land.  It’s never about belief.  It is always about action: radical, outside-the-box, unconventional, anti-imperial action.

Catholic scholar Sandra Schneiders writes:

        [T]he textual Nicodemus is actually a type of the true Israelite, who progresses in faith from seeing the signs to doing the truth according to the scriptures, to finally confessing Jesus openly as the one in whom the Old Testament finds its fulfillment. . . . Nicodemus is the very type of the truly religious person, who is, on the one hand, utterly sincere and, on the other, complacent about his or her knowledge of God and God’s will.  Such people are basically closed to divine revelation . . . it is only after they have been reduced to the futility of their own ignorance that they can begin the process of coming to the Light not by argument or reasoning but by doing the truth, a process that gradually opens them to the true meaning of the scriptures.  Written That You May Believe p. 119.

So when the people of West Virginia or any state, and their governors and officials and social service agencies, refuse to deal with the underlying disease of the soul, and instead throw desperate people into jail for breaches of law, in John’s language, they are “those who refuse the son [and] will not see life; no, they remain the object of God’s wrath”:  God’s justified displeasure with and active judgment against those who do not obey God’s law.  The strength of sin, writes the apostle Paul is the law (1 Corinthians 15:56) – that is, the conventional law of social organization.  That law does not protect and support the widow, the orphan, or the stranger needing hospitality.  It supports the rich, the bully, and the political patron.

Nicodemus is the model for moving from uncritical belief to doing what God requires and ultimately arriving at the truth.  But as Jesus points out, and as Sean O’Leary laments, that spirit of truth “blows every which way like the wind; you hear the sound it makes but you can’t tell where it’s coming from or where it’s headed.”  Transformation can’t be spoon-fed; it has to come “from above.”  Until it does, O’Leary writes, “the statue of [Jerry] West that stands outside the WVU Coliseum will be as much a monument to West’s and West Virginia’s disease of the soul as it is to the athletic achievements it’s meant to celebrate.”

The Gospel of John is far more relevant to sustainable 21st century life than the 19th century anachronisms of Ayn Rand, or the demonstrably failed economic theories offered by neo-conservative presidential politicians, or fundamentalist literalist theologies – Christian or non-Christian.   “God’s rule” does not mean salvation from hell in the next life, but radical fairness on earth in this life.  Radical fairness means distributive justice-compassion in ecological, economic, environmental and social policy; it requires a radical abandonment of self-interest, even to the seemingly impossible point of loving one’s enemies.  Living under God’s rule means subverting the laws governing all aspects of society, and embracing God’s imperial rule, not Cesar’s.  Jesus’ teaching about God’s rule means not only the overthrow of the occupying Roman government of the first century, but the fulfillment or actualization of the law of Moses, and the transformation of what John Dominic Crossan calls “the normalcy of civilization” itself.

Nicodemus came out of the shadows, out of the darkness of conventional religious and political social expecation.  He later uses the law against those who wanted to discredit Jesus and arrest him.  He finally throws the law in its conventional face by treating the violated body of an executed criminal like a king. Tweet

The Complete Gospels (Polebridge Press, 2010) breaks the Gospel of John into two parts.  Based on the work of earlier scholars (R.T. Fortna, and U.C. vonWahlde), the Jesus Seminar scholars propose that this Gospel was developed from an earlier, “signs” gospel (similar to Q), which was a theological proof that Jesus was . . . → Read More: 21st Century Cosmology and the Gospel of John: Part I – Signs and Wonders]]> John 1:1 -2:25

The Complete Gospels (Polebridge Press, 2010) breaks the Gospel of John into two parts.  Based on the work of earlier scholars (R.T. Fortna, and U.C. vonWahlde), the Jesus Seminar scholars propose that this Gospel was developed from an earlier, “signs” gospel (similar to Q), which was a theological proof that Jesus was the hoped-for Messiah.  The signs were woven into a narrative which included John the Baptist, Jesus in Galilee, Jesus in Jerusalem, the culimination of Jesus’ signs (the Council’s plan; Jesus in the Temple), the prelude to Jesus’ passion, the passion narrative, Jesus’ resurrection, and the conclusion.  Jesus’ miracles include

Water into wine (2:1-11);
An official’s son healed (2:12a:4:46b-54)
A huge catch of fish (2:1-14)
Loves and fish for 5,000 (6:1-14)
Jesus walks on the sea (6:16-21)
Lazarus raised (11:1-45)
A blind man give sight (9:1-8)
A crippled man healed (5:2-9)

The problem with the proof was that the so-called Messiah, God’s own Anointed One, was murdered by the Roman authorities.  Eventually, those who persisted in believing that Jesus was the Anointed One either left the synagogues on their own volition, or were thrown out.  A savior convicted and executed as a terrorist simply did not make sense.  Paul’s arguments to the contrary either did not make the rounds, were equally dismissed as lunacy, or reinterpreted in a way that completely changed what Paul was talking about.  (See, e.g., “Reclaiming the Victory:  Easter Sunday 2011”; see also The Authentic Letters of Paul, Polebridge Press, 2010.)

What became the Gospel of John was addressed to a Greek and Hebrew-speaking community, who saw themselves “as a beleaguered but divinely vindicated minority . . . within the decade or two following the centralized Jewish decision to expel believers in Jesus from the synagogue, that is, during the last fifteen yearsor so of the first century. . . . The author, like the three other gospel writers, is anonymous and only a century later was identified with John, the son of Zebedee (and he with ‘the disciple Jesus Loved’).”  The Complete Gospels p. 207.

The gospel writer wastes no time establishing Jesus, not John the Baptist, as the Anointed One.  The Baptist himself witnesses to the first sign: “I have seen the spirit coming down upon him like a dove out of the sky; that’s the one who baptizes with the holy spirit.  I have seen this and I announce: This is the son of God.”  Within a few paragraphs, Jesus has called his disciples, and claimed even greater signs and wonders to come: “Do you believe just because I told you I saw you under the fig tree?  You’re going to see a lot more than that.”

The Gospel of John is the work of a mystic.  The writer argues for mythos, not logos, from a 1st century cosmology.  He understands the universe as heaven above – from where God rules – the earth in the middle, which belongs to God, and the realm of the dead below the earth, where God and God’s light do not exist. He brings his listeners (or readers) from the dawning of earth’s existence, when Wisdom was there and was what God was, to the genuine light that cannot be mastered no matter how great the darkness.  “The law was given through Moses,” John writes, “mercy and truth came through Jesus the Anointed One.”  That is the whole argument.  The rest is proof.

For 21st Century mystics, the Universe is far greater than anything John could have imagined.  But John’s metaphor still holds power.  John the Baptist assures everyone that he is not the One, not Elijah, and not the Prophet. The Baptist anoints with water those whose hearts are changed; God’s Anointed transforms water into wine.  Wine is a gift from God that “gladdens the heart” (Psalm 104); it is the pay-off for honoring the Lord “with the first fruits of all your produce; then . . . your vats will be bursting with wine” (Proverbs 3:9-10); it is a sign of God’s grace: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come buy and eat!  Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Isaiah 55); it is a sign of the restoration of justice:  “The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when . . . the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.  I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel . . . they shall plant their vineyards and drink their wine . . . and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God” (Amos 9:13-15).

The Gospel of John may be a last-ditch effort to preserve Jesus’ message of salvation as deliverance from injustice in this life, not a free ride to glory in the next life.  My colleague in the struggle, John Shuck, is also exploring the Gospel of John with his congregation in Elizabethton, TN. His sermon for January 8 discussed John 1:19-51:

[An] important word for John is world or cosmos.  Depending on the context, it can mean earthly existence, life, or more often than not, it is a word for what [Walter] Wink calls the “domination system.”  Jesus says, “I am not of this world.”  What does he mean?  I do not think he is saying that he is from another planet or from another place like heaven, or that he is of another spiritual incarnation or some spooky notion like that.  It means that he does not conform to the values of the dominant system.

Lest there be any doubt, when I care about Jesus or about the Gospel of John it is not because I care about heaven or hell or reincarnation or resurrected corpses or supernaturalism or any of that stuff.  I think all of that is a distortion of the original impulse of Jesus and of those who caught what he was saying and doing.   We have literalized first century symbolism and thus distorted it.

The historical Jesus and the imaginative creation by John’s Gospel  is an invitation and an exhortation to respond to the “world” by becoming a human being.  I don’t want to be anything less or more than a human being.  Being a human being means that we expose the values of “this world” for what they are—death values.

More than being a “human being” on this earth, John’s gospel calls for a transformed life: water into wine; a temple made of distributive justice-compassion, not gold and stone.  The writer follows the miracle of water-into-wine with the snapshot of Jesus clearing the Temple of the representatives of injustice – perhaps those who do not acknowledge him as the Messiah he claims to be.  “Destroy this temple and I’ll raise it in three days,” he says.  Jesus’ disciples later remembered what he had said, and applied it to the story of his death and resurrection.

But “Jesus didn’t trust himself to them, because he understood them all too well. . . he knew what people were really like” (John 2:21-25).  The writer spells it out in the first few lines:  “Although [genuine light] was in the world, and the world came to be through it, the world did not recognize it.  It came to its own place, but its own people were not receptive to it” (John 1:9-11).

In order to reclaim the Gospel of John for post-modern, secular minds, the underlying bitter feud has to be understood between John’s community of exiles from Judaism and the resurgent, synagogue-based Judaism that survived crusades, pograms, ghettos, and holocausts.  The Gospel is not anti-Semitic, nor is it the blueprint for Christian exclusionary belief.  Like Paul’s letters that laid out his world-changing Christology, it may well be a first-century attempt at crossing the barrier between what is and what can be; between rational, linear argument for change (logos) and mystical, intuitive leaps into transformational possibility (mythos).

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In the November 28, 2011 edition of The Nation, Naomi Klein proposes that deniers of climate change science are not rejecting the science; they are rejecting the order of magnitude of cultural transformation that will be required in order to slow down, stop, or reverse the process.  “This is . . . → Read More: Epiphany: More than changing light bulbs]]> Mark 6:34; Philippians 2; Romans 6

In the November 28, 2011 edition of The Nation, Naomi Klein proposes that deniers of climate change science are not rejecting the science; they are rejecting the order of magnitude of cultural transformation that will be required in order to slow down, stop, or reverse the process.  “This is a crucial point to understand: it is not opposition to the scientific facts of climate change that drives denialists but rather opposition to the real-world implications of those facts.”  She argues that progressives and those on the political left are equally in denial:  not regarding the science, but regarding the global paradigm shift in human behavior that climate change demands.  Both sides are operating from deliberate ignorance.  The right is afraid of losing global market share.  The left maintains a naive expectation that recycling, spiral light bulbs, and carbon offsets will solve the problem.

Klein offers a list of political and social solutions (reining in corporations, relocalizing production, ending the “cult of shopping,” taxing the “rich and filthy”), but ultimately what is called for is “an alternative world view to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis – this time embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy. . . . In the rocky future we have already made inevitable, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people, and a capacity for deep compassion, will be the only things standing between humanity and barbarism.  Climate change, by putting us on a firm deadline, can serve as the catalyst for precisely this profound social and ecological transformation.”

These are basic spiritual principles arising from a secular, political sensitivity that echo what Lloyd Geering calls for in a series of essays (Coming Back to Earth: From gods, to God, to Gaia).  Geering describes a spiritual and religious progression in human consciousness.  Pre-modern people lived in what might be called an enchanted world, in which everything embodied spirit.  This was followed by the so-called “axial age” when people realized there was a difference between living creatures and inanimate objects, which gave rise to the paradigm-shifting concept of one god.  Next came the equally transformational concept of incarnation:  God in Humanity – in the form of Jesus, called the Christ, God’s “anointed one.”  Most Christians stop there.  Preachers talk and believers sing about the Christ being “born in us today,” but the concept seldom connects.  We may live in a post-modern world, but most minds are still engaged in a pre-modern relationship with a personal Lord and Savior, who came to “save us from our sins” so that we can live in heaven forever.  Traditional church-goers hang on to this belief.  Many who have left the church and its dogmas far behind are also often unable to get past the tradition because it stays frozen in a childhood time.

By reclaiming language and reframing the Christian message, progressive (liberal) Christians can make a major contribution to the “alternative world view” that is necessary for the paradigm shift Naomi Klein is talking about.  Perhaps the most revolutionary concept at the top of the list is that the wisdom of the axial age was not about petty sin.  For the prophets of ancient Israel, and the heir apparent – Jesus of Nazareth – “sin” meant injustice, and God’s plan was liberation from injustice.  For the Buddha, “sin” was the human condition of suffering, brought about by attachment.  Salvation meant freedom from attachment to the past and the future; liberation was found by living in the moment.

It should be a short intellectual hop to understanding incarnation as God (the Christ, or as Matthew Fox puts it, the Buddha nature) within us.  But these concepts are far more difficult to grasp than the 10 Commandments – which may be why the story is that Moses smashed the first set out of anger that the people so easily gave up on following the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  As Lloyd Geering suggests, incarnation goes beyond the dogma of one man embodying God; incarnation means that God is manifested in humanity itself.  Perhaps most profoundly, James Loney, member of the Christian Peace Maker Team who spent six months in captivity in Iraq, learned from the late Tom Fox that “All we have is now . . . The past is a fiction and the future doesn’t exist. . .   [Tom] strained with his whole being to let go of everything – even the hope of release – and just be present to the present.”  Loney describes this experience as “what it means to be born again.  The present moment [is] the birth canal of incarnation.”

The Scholars Version of The Authentic Letters of Paul is a good place to start to reclaim traditional language.  The Scholars have expanded Paul’s original Greek word hamartia (“sin”) into a phrase that means “the corrupting seduction of power.”  In his last known letter, carried to the community his friends had founded in Rome, Paul wrote:

        How then should we respond to our changed relationship with God [as found in the life and teachings of Jesus]?  Should we continue to live as before so that God’s generous favor can become even more remarkable?  That would be ridiculous!  How can we who have “died” to the seductive power of corruption continue to live as if we were still in its grasp? . . . Don’t allow the seductive power of corruption to reign over your earthly life inducing you to submit to worldly desires.  Don’t put any part of your body at the disposal of that power as an instrument for doing wrong, but put yourselves at God’s disposal as people who have been brought to life from the dead and present your bodies to God as instruments for doing right . . . The corrupting seduction of power has a pay-off: death.  God offers a free gift: the unending life of God’s new world in solidarity with the Anointed Jesus, our Lord.  SV pp 224-225.

“Sin” is not about sex, or petty transgression.  “Sin” is about the seduction of power-over others; of the gratification of having what others cannot have.  But beyond individual greed for personal power and wealth lies the corporate, collective “sin” that results from the systems put in place by human societies – what John Dominic Crossan calls “the normalcy of civilization.”  The result of basic human need for security, food, clothing, shelter is systems that deprive outsiders of the means to survive and thrive.  That is what Paul is talking about when he says in Romans 6:22:  “But now that you have been liberated from the corrupting seduction of power and have committed yourselves to the service of God, what you gain is complete moral integrity and in the end the unending life of God’s new world.”  SV p. 225.

In Mark 6:32-34, just before Mark’s setting of the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus attempted to avoid the crowds and get a little rest, but the people found him anyway.  The writer says, “When he came ashore he saw a huge crowd and was moved by them, because they resembled sheep without a shepherd, and he started teaching them at length.”  And what did he teach them?  Instead of sending the people away to find their own food, he told the disciples, “Give them something to eat yourselves!”

In Philippians 2:1-7a, Paul writes to his friends:

        So if you know how uplifting it is to belong to the new community of the Anointed, if you know something about being motivated by love, if you know something about the spirit of fellowship and genuine compassion, then make me completely happy by sharing the same attitude, showing the same love toward one another, and being united in heart and purpose.  Don’t be always thinking about your own interests or your own importance, but with humility hold others in higher regard than you do yourselves.  Each of you should keep others’ interests in mind, not your own.  I appeal to all of you to think in the same way that the Anointed Jesus did, who although he was born in the image of God, did not regard ‘being like God’ as something to use for his own advantage, but rid himself of such vain pretension and accepted a servant’s lot.  SV p.186.

Paul says that the servant – as exemplified in Jesus, the Anointed One – has become Lord, not the Emperor.  Far from being a call to an imperial, “holy Roman empire,” Paul’s words challenge people to live the same life Jesus did, in radical abandonment of self-interest, and distributive justice-compassion.

Lloyd Geering brings humanity full circle from the enchanted world of pre-modern people living a seamless existence, not separated from the natural world, to the possibility of a re-enchanted world, in which“secular” means –once-again – earth-centered.  He concludes: “We came from the earth.  We remain creatures of the earth.  The hope of our species for a viable future depends on our mystical re-union with the earth.”

In The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Matthew Fox writes:

        It is not enough to celebrate the Cosmic Christ as “the pattern that connects” and the “bearer of coherence” as expressed in Jesus.  There is a real sense in which the Cosmic Christ is not born yet.  Even in Jesus the Cosmic Christ has yet to come to full birth, for those who say they believe in Jesus have scarcely brought forth the Cosmic Christ at all on the mass scale that Mother Earth requires.  One might speak, then, of the already born Cosmic Christ (realized eschatology) who we see only “in a mirror and darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12) and of the not-yet-born Cosmic Christ (unrealized eschatology) who is the Christ of justice, of creativity, of compassion in self and society that yearns to be born and is eager to be born in us.  “What good is it to me,” Meister Eckhart asked, “if the son of God was born to Mary 1400 years ago but is not born in my person and in my culture and in my time?” . . . The name “Christ” means “the anointed one.”  All of us are anointed ones.  We are all royal persons, creative, godly, divine, persons of beauty and of grace.  We are all Cosmic Christs, “other Christs.”  But what good is this if we do not know it? . . . We are all called, like the Cosmic Christ, to radiate the divine presence to/with/from one another.  pp. 136-137.

Literalists on the right assure the masses that believing the story guarantees an exclusive right to heaven instead of hell in the next life.  Literalists on the left assure the masses that salvation is easy – all you have to do is buy the right light bulb.  Nobody says anywhere in the Bible that it is easy to live by God’s law of distributive justice-compassion, in radical abandonment of self-interest.  But the biblical writers are very clear that the reward for doing so is profoundly satisfying, here and now.

“If you will only obey the Lord your God, by diligently observing all his commandments that I am commanding you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth; all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the Lord your God . . .”  Deuteronomy 28:1-2.

“The Lord works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed . . . But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments.”  Psalm 103.

“I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . . but let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos 5:21-24.

“Don’t react violently against the one who is evil: when someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other as well.  When someone wants to sue you for your shirt, let that person have your coat along with it.  Further, when anyone conscripts you for one mile, go an extra mile.  Give to the one who begs from you.”  Matthew 5:38-42.

“Love your enemies.”  Matthew 5:44b, Luke 6:32, 35a.Tweet

Taizé (“Tayzay”) is a tiny village hidden away in the hills of Burgundy in the eastern part of France, not far from the town of . . . → Read More: Vigil for Healing and Peace in the Spirit of Taizé]]> Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick
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This worship service combines the contemplative spirit of Taizé chant with the Celtic liturgy of the Iona Community.

Taizé (“Tayzay”) is a tiny village hidden away in the hills of Burgundy in the eastern part of France, not far from the town of Cluny.  Since 1940 it has been the home of an ecumenical community of brothers whose prayer, three times each day, is the center of their life.  Today, Taize is a place to which visitors of all ages and backgrounds come on pilgrimage to participate in international meetings of prayer and reflection.

The Iona Community, on the Island of Iona off the coast of Scotland, is a dispersed Christian ecumenical community working for peace and social justice, rebuilding of community, and the renewal of worship. The Iona Community leads daily worship in the restored Abbey church, which was originally a medieval Benedictine foundation.

Both of these communities represent places where the veil between the material and the spiritual world is thin.  You are invited into that same spirit with this liturgy.

CHINE SOUNDS

Opening Reading

The Invocation of the Graces (Carmina Gadelica)

One:    This is the joy of all joyous things,
the light of the beam of the sun
the door of the chief of hospitality
the surpassing star of guidance
the step of the deer of the hill
the step of the steed of the plain
the grace of the swan of swimming
. . .
Another:    The best hour of the day be thine
The best day of the week be thine
The best week of the year be thine
The best year in the Son of God’s domain be thine.

CHIME SOUNDS

Chalice Lighting

One:    Encircle us, Giver of Life
All:    Keep safety in, keep danger out
One:    Encircle us, Giver of Light
All:    Keep brightness in, keep darkness out
One:    Encircle us, Giver of Grace
All:    Keep peace within, keep conflict out.

All:    May you be a bright flame before us, A guiding star above us, A smooth path below us, A  loving guide behind us, Today, tonight and forever.
Mara Freeman, Kindling the Celtic Spirit

Song    Spirit of God (Iona Community)

Spirit of God, unseen as the wind
Gentle as is the dove,
Teach us the truth and help us believe,
Show us the Savior’s love.

You spoke to us long, long ago
Gave us the written word;
We read it still, needing its truth
Through it Love’s voice is heard.

Reading Isaiah 52:7

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”

Chant
Laudate omnes gentes
Laudate dominum.  (All people praise the Lord)

Silence

CHIME SOUNDS

Reading Inspired by Love and Anger (Iona Community)

Inspired by love and anger, disturbed by need and pain
Informed of God’s own bias, we ask him once again:
How long must some folk suffer? How long can few folk mind?
How long dare vain self interest turn prayer and pity blind?

From those forever victims of heartless human greed
Their cruel plight composes a litany of need:
Where are the fruits of justice? Where are the signs of peace?
When is the day when prisoners dream and find their release?

From those forever shackled to what their wealth can buy
The fear of lost advantage provokes the bitter cry
Don’t query our position!  Don’t criticise our wealth!
Don’t mention those exploited by politics and stealth!

To God, who through the prophets proclaimed a different age
We offer earth’s indifference, its agony and rage:
When will the wronged by righted?  When will the Kingdom come?
When will the world be generous to all instead of some?

God asks, Who will go for me?  Who will extend my reach?
And who, when few will listen, will prophesy and preach?
And who,when few bid welcome,will offer all they know?
And who, when few dare follow, will walk the road I show?

Amused in someone’s kitchen, asleep in someone’s boat,
Attuned to what the ancients exposed, proclaimed, and wrote,
A savior, without safety, a tradesman without tools
Has come to tip the balance with fishermen and fools.

Chant Vieni Spirito Creatore (Taizé)

Come and pray in us, Holy Spirit, Come and pray in us
Come and visit us, Holy Spirit.
Spirit come, Spirit Come

Silence

CHIME SOUNDS

Reading  Micah 6:6-8

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.

Chant Bless the Lord my Soul (Taizé)

Bless the Lord my soul, and bless God’s holy name
Bless the Lord my soul, who leads me into life.

Reading (from “118 Days: How I survived captivity in Iraq,” James Loney, Sojourners Magazine, December 2006)

Peacemakers, who are bound by brick-and-mortar conceptions of peace, inhabit not an enclosed façade, but instead a gateway that offers not only a view to the human scene, but also allows responsible dialogue with it.  This open, accessible, and overarching perspective of peace crafts – out of each of us – the will to seek the means to act. – Harmeet Singh Sooden

Tom Fox became the prophet of the present moment.  “All we have is the now,” he would say, “The past is a fiction and the future doesn’t exist.” . . . He strained with his whole being to let go of everything – even the hope of release – and just be present to the present. . . . Each day, each hour, each minute I was confronted with a choice: Withdraw, clench my heart into a fist and conserve my widow’s mite of emotional energy, or open my heart, inhabit the moment, be generous with acceptance and conversation and listening . . . This, I began to see, is what it means to be born again. The present moment is the birth canal of incarnation. – James Loney

Chant: Stay with me (Iona Community)

Stay with me, remain here with me.
Watch and pray, watch and pray

Silence

CHIME SOUNDS

Chant: Domine, Dona nobis pacem (Taizé)

Domine, Domine, dona nobis pacem

Reading (from Singing the Living Tradition, #588)

One:    Is not this the fast that I choose:
All:    To loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
One:    Isit not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see them naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
All:    Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly;
One:    If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
All:    You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.
Isaiah 58

Silence

Chant: Domine, Dona nobis pacem (Taizé)

Domine, Domine, dona nobis pacem

Reading (Singing the Living Tradition #602)

All:    If there is to be peace in the world
There must be peace in the nations
If there is to be peace in the nations
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.
Lao-Tse

Chant Live in Charity (Taizé)

Live in charity and steadfast love
Live in charity, God will dwell with you.

Reading (Singing the Living Tradition #505)

One:    Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds.  Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.
All:    Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us and to all living things.
One:    Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – toward ourselves and toward all living beings.
All:    Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.
One:    With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.
All:    Amen.   (Tich N’hat Hanh)

Chant Live in Charity (Taizé)

Live in charity and steadfast love
Live in charity, God will dwell with you.

Silence

CHIME SOUNDS

CLOSING

One:    This is the time of year, when the Universe is reaching its third trimester, and moving toward the birth of light. Just as a woman tends to nest toward the end of her pregnancy, so do we tend to draw in, to attend to our homes and those within, to yearn for the birth of light, color, and new life. Possibly, this is the time of the year when our greatest fears and sorrows are highlighted and therefore it is also the moment when we have the greatest opportunity to reach for and fulfill our true potential. As humans, we can birth new life and light into this dark world. Out of our fears and our darkness we are being invited – by the Universe, by God, by all mothers who have birthed new life, by our children who are born as light, by our prophets of time passed, by our current spiritual leaders, and by the future voices of those to come – to give into the birthing pains and bring to light a new world. This Winter, let us birth the kingdom of heaven both within and without.  (Fred Plumer, President, Progressive Christianity.org)
All:    Deep peace of the running wave to you
Deep peace of the flowing air to you
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you
Deep peace of the shining stars to you
Deep peace of the infinite peace to you. (Fiona MacLeod)

Extinguish the Chalice

One:    If here you have found freedom, take it with you into the world.  If you have found comfort, go and share it with others.  If you have dreamed dreams, help one another, that they may come true.  If you have known love, give some back to a bruised and hurting world.    (Lauralyn Bellamy)

Go in peace.

All:    Go in Peace

CHIME SOUNDS

Leave in Silence, taking peace to the world.

Of course, reading the Bible on your own can also lead to those infamous right-wing political and . . . → Read More: Bible Reading Breeds Liberals!]]> It’s official.  Independent Bible reading – without benefit of clergy or religious dogma – makes you more liberal.  Frequent Bible readers are more likely to reject the death penalty; more likely to work for social and economic justice.

Of course, reading the Bible on your own can also lead to those infamous right-wing political and moral attitudes toward guns, gays, and god, but the Baylor Religion Survey found rays of hope for peace in the 300-year war between science and religion.

Frequent Bible reading is more likely to lead to the erosion of the infamous Bush Era Patriot Act, recently endorsed by Barack Obama . . . Did he read the Bible he laid his hand on while taking the Oath of Office?
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