I really enjoy your writings and learn a lot. I do not at all want to put a dampener on your gifts. But I am puzzled by two things in this sermon. First your take on hierarchies, second your difficulty with Jesus’ teaching on divorce.
I understand why hierarchies are unfashionable. They have been used to artificially create divisions of ‘value’ between human beings, who in truth, are not better or worse than each other. We are all loved by God and made in the image and likeness of God.
In his ministry Jesus himself very cleverly challenges those artificial hierarchies in his critique of the scribes and pharisees for their artificial distinctions (how wide are your phylacteries). In doing so Jesus elevates the ‘lowest’ and says we must be like children. He reminds us all of the truth that each one of us is unique, beloved and no better or worse than another. This is why Jesus was so counter cultural.
But in our world that trend towards throwing hierarchies out may not serve us as well as we hope. It may even have gone too far.
Surely we cannot really be Christian without believing that there is better and worse? Indeed in your sermon you use hierarchies in your argument, in the paragraph beginning ‘The Hebrews passage lifts human beings to an honor higher than the angels’.
Being in hierarchy (God is surely ‘higher’ than me? As well as being within me and all around me and in everything and everybody as the creator of all) is how reality works, isn’t it, at least at some level?
It is a good thing to challenge false hierarchies but misleading to pretend they do not exist in the fabric of reality as created by God.
Also the passage on divorce. I think that this needs to be understood in its historical and cultural context. Jesus was speaking to a people where divorce was easy, for men. It would have been easy for women too I guess if they had economic parity with men, but they did not. Women depended utterly on men for their survival. The community rule of easy divorce gave men an unfair advantage over women. Jesus calls out this behaviour and restores women to their rightful place as equal partners with men.
I get the desire for viewing life as a lovely, loving web of loving connectedness. Indeed, we are all connected, we all live in the web of the world and of all worlds. The drive for connectedness was built into our DNA I believe (by God) because God is relational (the mystery of the Trinity).
But the Christian story is about how difficult that connectedness has been, since the very beginning when Cain gave in to what God told him was the evil that lurked at his door and killed his brother. Like so much else that exists in the real world, divorce is a function of our imperfection. A Christian might say 'of our fallen state'. If we were already perfect would there be divorce? Are people who get divorced any worse than those who stay together? No! And too often those who are divorced endure the censure of others. In my reading of this passage Jesus does not censure those who are divorced he censures unjust rule.
We are not God, or angels, we are creatures, redeemed by God becoming a creature, whose destiny is communion in heaven. But I think that we do not make it easier to get there if we pretend that hierarchies are not built into the nature of the world or that evil does not exist. Solzhenitsyn said the line between good and evil goes ‘right through every human heart’. It appears at the very beginning of the human story in the bible.
To pretend it is easy and we can easily be all blissfully connected in loving webs of love is not helpful. Because it begs, without facing, the question of well if it was that easy why isn’t it real?
What a great insight, seeing the Great Web of Being lurking unrecognized in our inherited thought world. You've given us a fresh construct in laying out Belonging - that is, profound unity - in our relations with all things, not only with other humans. (My conceptual framework distinguishes the transactional from the relational; I see that distinction permeating both the First [Old] and the New Testament. I wrote a brief piece, "God's Way with Us: The Promise Precedes the Pact," to flesh it out.) - Proofreader's nitpicks: "we humans" in two places should be "us humans": "between us humans" and "belongs to us humans." Drop "humans" from each sentence and you'll say, "Of course. . . ."
Following up on the Mystical subtext in the Bible, with some points I should maybe clarify --
When you read the "Mystical Creation" narratives in the Bible (Genesis ONE, John's Prologue, and others), what you are seeing, coded into mythological narrative, is pure, sacred Mysticism -- i.e., Neoplatonic, Mystical theology and its "Blueprint for Thriving" -- a unitive (embracing), all-encompassing, and AFFIRMING love story between God and Creation, and especially between God and humans. We were designed and meant to live in a loving, interwoven, healing pattern, made known to us by our universally Mystically-encoded (made in His image") souls. We were designed to live in interconnected harmony, love, health, justice, and equality.
When Jesus invited people to enter into his sacred fellowship, he offered them a chance to re-join the Original Mystical Creation-Community (Eden), to re-align their own souls with His Original One (Unitive/interwoven) Creation and thereby heal their wounded, confused lives that were suffering from the pain that human greed, cruelty, injustice, disharmony, inequality, and power-lust had invariably (and logically) unleashed within God's Creation. Jesus offered both Wisdom-lessons from His own Mystically-imprinted human-embodied Soul and then direct Mystical access through Him (as Divine Logos/Word), to the pure, Eternal flow of God's Loving Eden-Creation that had been "forgotten (or "lost" due to "sin").
None of this "Mysticism-as-Biblical-foundation-of-the-Bible" is new or radical information. It was affirmed by the early Christians and well-known in both Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Church traditions. Christian theology is based upon it. Words like "transcendent" and "Union with God" refer to it. "I AM THAT I AM" roars it to the whole universe. John's Prologue blatantly invoked well-known Neoplatonic theology. The Creeds enshrined it as a fundamental Christian belief. It is everywhere in the New Testament, the "bones" holding and giving shape to the narratives in the texts. It is the lifeblood, the fountain of Love, in the entire Bible.
And the popular trope of "Neoplatonism is dualistic (anti-world)" is a complete lie and entirely misses the Mystical non-dualistic Revelation and teachings it offers. This is a lie that has damaged the potential healing, justice, equality, and joy offered by so many of the nuanced, egalitarian, Creation -affirming, multi-layered Biblical texts.
I'm in agreement about the misuse of these texts. "Ezer" is a word used positively about one other Biblical person: God. Not sure, but I think you are reading into the meaning of "subject" in Hebrews. I do think the Creation account has God giving humans responsibility for the care of creation, i.e., "putting us in charge". The Episcopalian (I'm "Evangelical Catholic", a.k.a. "Lutheran") sermon I heard this Sunday did a good job linking the two Gospel stories using their respective historical contexts. (Consider Herod's recent divorce and re-marriage.) The end result was a stark statement of God's perfect intention for a perfect marriage contra what was provided out of Israel's "hardness of heart" and a little child having nothing to bring, no claim on God, but utterly reliant upon God's graciousness (and feeling safe within it). Tho' the stories began unrelated, this is how they stand together in the Gospel
I write about this idea of hierarchy in my substack, Glimpsing Integral. You veer near the problem of equating growth hierarchies (good) with power hierarchies (sometimes bad). This is described in my post "That Hierarchy Thing," https://glimpsint.substack.com/p/112-that-hierarchy-thing. While the idea can be tricky, it is liberating to see that everyone is on a journey (growth hierarchy), and when we understand their "location," judgment falls away, making love and acceptance more natural. I like your substituting "web of belonging" for "chain of being." It better captures the developmental unfolding of wider welcoming of the other as we mature.
"We've been taught to read [the Bible] as a hierarchical text..."
The "great chain of being" refers to Mysticism, specifically Neo-platonism, and today's quote about the hierarchical interpretation forced upon Christians is precisely about the Church's long and deliberate warping of the originally sacred Neoplatonic Mystical Revelation. This Mysticism was coded into several passages in the Bible, including the Creation story in Genesis 1 and the triumphant "New Creation" story in John's Prologue, "In the Beginning was the Word (Logos)..." Jesus Christ was the Word, the Divine Template of God's Loving Power/Energy in a timeless pre-Creation, non-dualistic Unity in God. All the passages for today's reading fit into this Mysticism.
A quick encapsulation of Biblical Neoplatonic theology within its mythological presentation:
Before Adam was "made male" , he was "Template-Human", Perfect Ideal Human in divine-planning stage, UN-gendered,, unembodied,, outside of/"before" time, space, and matter, "above angels" because this Original Human was ensouled with the Divine Image of God (Soul Memory/Knowledge and channel of direct connection ("chain back") to God,) in an eternal, timeless sharing (Union in) the Original Mystical direct connection to the Christ-Logos and God. "Male-and-then-female" was a TIME/MATTER/BODY development that flowed out of (was more dualistic /"lesser"than" ) the original, "divinized Higher Soul's Human template.
Jesus taught the CORRECT Mystical message, which was absolutely egalitarian. He praised, and told people to identify with, the lowest and least, as "sisters and brothers"(no parental male dominant heads of family/estates) because in the Christ-Logos there is no hierarchy, no status to preserve and defend. All is One in absolute non-dualistic Unity. When Jesus was elevated to heaven, he completed the "restoration of all human experience (including sorrow, despair, abandonment and death) to Divine non-dualistic Unity/Glory" that people felt (or were told) was lacking, with Jesus (and via him, all humanity)-flowing into-Christ (Divine Eternal non-dualistic Mystical Logos-Union in God) , thus triumphing as the completed-direct-access-to the Original Logos channel, "re-grafted into" (or returned to) the human experience.
I'm absolutely convinced that the original Christians understood Jesus's Mystical Message as demanding an egalitarian community , with women equal to men and no hierarchies. But even within the Gospels, His message started getting high-jacked to reinsert male dominance (remember Mary Magdalen?...). As soon as the Church could organize, it placed ITSELF between humans and Christ, demanding that a human (male...) chain link be inserted, even though Jesus insisted the Temple COULD NOT and MUST NOT stand between God and human souls. Churches were only there to facilitate Jesus-Christ's connection to people, not usurp it for their own power and self-glory..
I also strongly believe Jesus was attempting to re-introduce the ancient Jewish Temple's proto-platonic Mysticism (in which he identified as both direct sacred Channel and Exemplar) to the Jewish people -- the Mysticism of Genesis, Moses and others -- bringing it out from "under the bushel," -- possibly hidden from the masses (post-Moses) by Temple authorities (until Philo and Jesus). That's why there's a glorious song of Creation as the Prologue of John's Gospel , and why so many other New Testament passages reflect Neoplatonic Mystical Revelation/teachings. It wasn't a "Hellenistic contamination" of Jewish texts. It was an ancient , sacred Jewish teaching.. (Jewish priests may have been the source and inspiration of Plato's version.) That's why Neoplatonism was the official "high christology" of the early church,, and the source of the early Creeds. It was celebrated as a LIBERATING Mystical Path until it was turned into a hierarchical structure-- a betrayal of Jesus's entire message and authority.
Don't blame Neoplatonism for the twisted interpretations of it that were created by the Church hierarchies to protect their power. The Mystical Revelation and its AUTHENTIC teachings are egalitarian, non-dualistic, beautiful, and awe-inspiring. I attest to that from direct, personal Mystical experience.
But you must examine these mystical Truths in your own heart, with Spirit as your guide.
Yep, that was where I headed with the sermon this week, focusing on the Hebrews passage. Jesus comes to lift us into the Image of God, and took some (I hope) subtle shots at Christian nationalism as practiced today.
It's good you didn't bypass the lectionary texts, as I think you may have initiated/fueled a needful scripture reclamation project.
I really enjoy your writings and learn a lot. I do not at all want to put a dampener on your gifts. But I am puzzled by two things in this sermon. First your take on hierarchies, second your difficulty with Jesus’ teaching on divorce.
I understand why hierarchies are unfashionable. They have been used to artificially create divisions of ‘value’ between human beings, who in truth, are not better or worse than each other. We are all loved by God and made in the image and likeness of God.
In his ministry Jesus himself very cleverly challenges those artificial hierarchies in his critique of the scribes and pharisees for their artificial distinctions (how wide are your phylacteries). In doing so Jesus elevates the ‘lowest’ and says we must be like children. He reminds us all of the truth that each one of us is unique, beloved and no better or worse than another. This is why Jesus was so counter cultural.
But in our world that trend towards throwing hierarchies out may not serve us as well as we hope. It may even have gone too far.
Surely we cannot really be Christian without believing that there is better and worse? Indeed in your sermon you use hierarchies in your argument, in the paragraph beginning ‘The Hebrews passage lifts human beings to an honor higher than the angels’.
Being in hierarchy (God is surely ‘higher’ than me? As well as being within me and all around me and in everything and everybody as the creator of all) is how reality works, isn’t it, at least at some level?
It is a good thing to challenge false hierarchies but misleading to pretend they do not exist in the fabric of reality as created by God.
Also the passage on divorce. I think that this needs to be understood in its historical and cultural context. Jesus was speaking to a people where divorce was easy, for men. It would have been easy for women too I guess if they had economic parity with men, but they did not. Women depended utterly on men for their survival. The community rule of easy divorce gave men an unfair advantage over women. Jesus calls out this behaviour and restores women to their rightful place as equal partners with men.
I get the desire for viewing life as a lovely, loving web of loving connectedness. Indeed, we are all connected, we all live in the web of the world and of all worlds. The drive for connectedness was built into our DNA I believe (by God) because God is relational (the mystery of the Trinity).
But the Christian story is about how difficult that connectedness has been, since the very beginning when Cain gave in to what God told him was the evil that lurked at his door and killed his brother. Like so much else that exists in the real world, divorce is a function of our imperfection. A Christian might say 'of our fallen state'. If we were already perfect would there be divorce? Are people who get divorced any worse than those who stay together? No! And too often those who are divorced endure the censure of others. In my reading of this passage Jesus does not censure those who are divorced he censures unjust rule.
We are not God, or angels, we are creatures, redeemed by God becoming a creature, whose destiny is communion in heaven. But I think that we do not make it easier to get there if we pretend that hierarchies are not built into the nature of the world or that evil does not exist. Solzhenitsyn said the line between good and evil goes ‘right through every human heart’. It appears at the very beginning of the human story in the bible.
To pretend it is easy and we can easily be all blissfully connected in loving webs of love is not helpful. Because it begs, without facing, the question of well if it was that easy why isn’t it real?
What a great insight, seeing the Great Web of Being lurking unrecognized in our inherited thought world. You've given us a fresh construct in laying out Belonging - that is, profound unity - in our relations with all things, not only with other humans. (My conceptual framework distinguishes the transactional from the relational; I see that distinction permeating both the First [Old] and the New Testament. I wrote a brief piece, "God's Way with Us: The Promise Precedes the Pact," to flesh it out.) - Proofreader's nitpicks: "we humans" in two places should be "us humans": "between us humans" and "belongs to us humans." Drop "humans" from each sentence and you'll say, "Of course. . . ."
Following up on the Mystical subtext in the Bible, with some points I should maybe clarify --
When you read the "Mystical Creation" narratives in the Bible (Genesis ONE, John's Prologue, and others), what you are seeing, coded into mythological narrative, is pure, sacred Mysticism -- i.e., Neoplatonic, Mystical theology and its "Blueprint for Thriving" -- a unitive (embracing), all-encompassing, and AFFIRMING love story between God and Creation, and especially between God and humans. We were designed and meant to live in a loving, interwoven, healing pattern, made known to us by our universally Mystically-encoded (made in His image") souls. We were designed to live in interconnected harmony, love, health, justice, and equality.
When Jesus invited people to enter into his sacred fellowship, he offered them a chance to re-join the Original Mystical Creation-Community (Eden), to re-align their own souls with His Original One (Unitive/interwoven) Creation and thereby heal their wounded, confused lives that were suffering from the pain that human greed, cruelty, injustice, disharmony, inequality, and power-lust had invariably (and logically) unleashed within God's Creation. Jesus offered both Wisdom-lessons from His own Mystically-imprinted human-embodied Soul and then direct Mystical access through Him (as Divine Logos/Word), to the pure, Eternal flow of God's Loving Eden-Creation that had been "forgotten (or "lost" due to "sin").
None of this "Mysticism-as-Biblical-foundation-of-the-Bible" is new or radical information. It was affirmed by the early Christians and well-known in both Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Church traditions. Christian theology is based upon it. Words like "transcendent" and "Union with God" refer to it. "I AM THAT I AM" roars it to the whole universe. John's Prologue blatantly invoked well-known Neoplatonic theology. The Creeds enshrined it as a fundamental Christian belief. It is everywhere in the New Testament, the "bones" holding and giving shape to the narratives in the texts. It is the lifeblood, the fountain of Love, in the entire Bible.
And the popular trope of "Neoplatonism is dualistic (anti-world)" is a complete lie and entirely misses the Mystical non-dualistic Revelation and teachings it offers. This is a lie that has damaged the potential healing, justice, equality, and joy offered by so many of the nuanced, egalitarian, Creation -affirming, multi-layered Biblical texts.
Thanks for this new interpretation of these passages!
No hierarchy!
I'm in agreement about the misuse of these texts. "Ezer" is a word used positively about one other Biblical person: God. Not sure, but I think you are reading into the meaning of "subject" in Hebrews. I do think the Creation account has God giving humans responsibility for the care of creation, i.e., "putting us in charge". The Episcopalian (I'm "Evangelical Catholic", a.k.a. "Lutheran") sermon I heard this Sunday did a good job linking the two Gospel stories using their respective historical contexts. (Consider Herod's recent divorce and re-marriage.) The end result was a stark statement of God's perfect intention for a perfect marriage contra what was provided out of Israel's "hardness of heart" and a little child having nothing to bring, no claim on God, but utterly reliant upon God's graciousness (and feeling safe within it). Tho' the stories began unrelated, this is how they stand together in the Gospel
I write about this idea of hierarchy in my substack, Glimpsing Integral. You veer near the problem of equating growth hierarchies (good) with power hierarchies (sometimes bad). This is described in my post "That Hierarchy Thing," https://glimpsint.substack.com/p/112-that-hierarchy-thing. While the idea can be tricky, it is liberating to see that everyone is on a journey (growth hierarchy), and when we understand their "location," judgment falls away, making love and acceptance more natural. I like your substituting "web of belonging" for "chain of being." It better captures the developmental unfolding of wider welcoming of the other as we mature.
Yes, yes, and yes. Thank you, Diana.
A beautiful and timely message!
"We've been taught to read [the Bible] as a hierarchical text..."
The "great chain of being" refers to Mysticism, specifically Neo-platonism, and today's quote about the hierarchical interpretation forced upon Christians is precisely about the Church's long and deliberate warping of the originally sacred Neoplatonic Mystical Revelation. This Mysticism was coded into several passages in the Bible, including the Creation story in Genesis 1 and the triumphant "New Creation" story in John's Prologue, "In the Beginning was the Word (Logos)..." Jesus Christ was the Word, the Divine Template of God's Loving Power/Energy in a timeless pre-Creation, non-dualistic Unity in God. All the passages for today's reading fit into this Mysticism.
A quick encapsulation of Biblical Neoplatonic theology within its mythological presentation:
Before Adam was "made male" , he was "Template-Human", Perfect Ideal Human in divine-planning stage, UN-gendered,, unembodied,, outside of/"before" time, space, and matter, "above angels" because this Original Human was ensouled with the Divine Image of God (Soul Memory/Knowledge and channel of direct connection ("chain back") to God,) in an eternal, timeless sharing (Union in) the Original Mystical direct connection to the Christ-Logos and God. "Male-and-then-female" was a TIME/MATTER/BODY development that flowed out of (was more dualistic /"lesser"than" ) the original, "divinized Higher Soul's Human template.
Jesus taught the CORRECT Mystical message, which was absolutely egalitarian. He praised, and told people to identify with, the lowest and least, as "sisters and brothers"(no parental male dominant heads of family/estates) because in the Christ-Logos there is no hierarchy, no status to preserve and defend. All is One in absolute non-dualistic Unity. When Jesus was elevated to heaven, he completed the "restoration of all human experience (including sorrow, despair, abandonment and death) to Divine non-dualistic Unity/Glory" that people felt (or were told) was lacking, with Jesus (and via him, all humanity)-flowing into-Christ (Divine Eternal non-dualistic Mystical Logos-Union in God) , thus triumphing as the completed-direct-access-to the Original Logos channel, "re-grafted into" (or returned to) the human experience.
I'm absolutely convinced that the original Christians understood Jesus's Mystical Message as demanding an egalitarian community , with women equal to men and no hierarchies. But even within the Gospels, His message started getting high-jacked to reinsert male dominance (remember Mary Magdalen?...). As soon as the Church could organize, it placed ITSELF between humans and Christ, demanding that a human (male...) chain link be inserted, even though Jesus insisted the Temple COULD NOT and MUST NOT stand between God and human souls. Churches were only there to facilitate Jesus-Christ's connection to people, not usurp it for their own power and self-glory..
I also strongly believe Jesus was attempting to re-introduce the ancient Jewish Temple's proto-platonic Mysticism (in which he identified as both direct sacred Channel and Exemplar) to the Jewish people -- the Mysticism of Genesis, Moses and others -- bringing it out from "under the bushel," -- possibly hidden from the masses (post-Moses) by Temple authorities (until Philo and Jesus). That's why there's a glorious song of Creation as the Prologue of John's Gospel , and why so many other New Testament passages reflect Neoplatonic Mystical Revelation/teachings. It wasn't a "Hellenistic contamination" of Jewish texts. It was an ancient , sacred Jewish teaching.. (Jewish priests may have been the source and inspiration of Plato's version.) That's why Neoplatonism was the official "high christology" of the early church,, and the source of the early Creeds. It was celebrated as a LIBERATING Mystical Path until it was turned into a hierarchical structure-- a betrayal of Jesus's entire message and authority.
Don't blame Neoplatonism for the twisted interpretations of it that were created by the Church hierarchies to protect their power. The Mystical Revelation and its AUTHENTIC teachings are egalitarian, non-dualistic, beautiful, and awe-inspiring. I attest to that from direct, personal Mystical experience.
But you must examine these mystical Truths in your own heart, with Spirit as your guide.
I agree with all you have written. Barb Bambrick
This was a wonderful insight into today’s readings . Thank you so much.
Yes! Thank you! This a a time for unity and connection.
Nancy Bradley
I was blessed to be able to hear Diana's excellent sermon in person at National Avenue along with her riveting presentation on Christian Nationalism.
Yep, that was where I headed with the sermon this week, focusing on the Hebrews passage. Jesus comes to lift us into the Image of God, and took some (I hope) subtle shots at Christian nationalism as practiced today.
Wonderful 👏