Who In Their Right Mind Believes This Stuff?

Have you ever asked yourself that question?

I mean, don't we all get to a point where the whole idea of religion seems a bit ridiculous? Who can buy the notion of Moses parting the Red Sea or Jesus walking on the water? What's up with this raising people from the dead jazz? And why should we bother celebrating the stories of ancient people in the first place? C'mon. Nobody celebrates Zeus or Isis or Gilgamesh anymore. Why bother with religion at all? Who believes this stuff, anyway?

The answer, of course, is about 2 billion human beings on the planet--myself among them--who call themselves Christians. Add to this some 1.3 billion Muslims, some 900 million Hindus, some 360 million Buddhists, and about 564 million others (Yes! I counted you Zoroastrians in that number too--don't want to leave anyone out!), and the 850 million atheist/agnostic/non-religious of the world are certainly in the minority.

Obviously, we have a very religious little chunk of real estate hurtling around our sun. The question, I guess, should be why?

Now I can't speak for the other 5.1 billion of you religious folks, but I know I believe, celebrate, and order my personal ethics around the faith of my childhood simply because I want to do it. That's right: I believe because there's something in me that wants the stories of my faith to be my stories. Maybe I can't even explain it, but I know that I'm in love with the story.

One of my favorite movies is the 1994 flick called "Shadowlands." It's the story of the real-life love affair between the Christian scholar and author C. S. Lewis and the American poet Joy Gresham. There's a line in the picture which always rings true to me: "We read to know we're not alone." To me, that means that the stories we embrace, whether historic fact or pure fantasy, give us some sense of meaning and some sense of connection. Something is speaking to the eternal part of us, and we want to grab on to that connection.

Of course, just a desire for connection does not necessarily lead to real faith. We may--and I suspect many do--adopt religious myth as our story because it had been our parents' story. We don't want to throw the society into which we were born under the bus, so we go along with what we were taught. We may question it, but that questioning doesn't seem polite, so we just eventually slink away from the stories and never really examine them. I've got a hunch that the churches may be filled with these sort of passive skeptics.

For my part, however, I find I really love the mythology. Now please understand: we have misused the word "myth" pretty often. I suspect you might be interpreting the word as meaning "something that isn't true but a lot of people believe it anyway." We love to say, "That's just a myth." We're really doing the word a disservice. The best explanation of "myth" I've ever heard is "Things which never were but always are." In other words, when we speak of a myth, we're talking about a story which may not be literally true, but contains within it a universal truth. Therefore, we can't ever say that something is "just a myth." That's like saying, "It was just a nuclear accident." A true myth contains an idea, a situation, or a feeling which resonates beyond time and culture.

To me, the stories of the Christian scriptures hold timeless truths. These may not be literal truths in terms of actual historic events portrayed with ruthless accuracy, but they are true all the same. Actually, the idea that every word in the Christian Bible is literally true is a fairly recent idea. For a really good discussion on this point, I'd suggest you look up a work by the wonderful Karen Armstrong called The Bible: A Biography (Or check out anything else this brilliant lady writes. If you dig religion, you need to know Karen!). It seems rather obvious to me. If you look at the book of Genesis, you'll note that there are two creation stories placed side-by-side. There are also two versions of the Great Flood story--each with details which contradict the other. In the days before Xrox, some Jewish scribe would have to sit down and copy the scrolls by hand. You would think he'd notice the contradictions. In fact, I'm quite sure he did notice them, but he just didn't care. He was copying stories, each of which had their own viewpoints and their own merits. He was not trying to write a literal history or a scientific treatise.

Let me take you through a great mythic story in the Christian New Testament and explain what I dig about it. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John each contain the story of Jesus walking on the water. You'd have to admit that this would be a pretty slick trick if Jesus could defy the laws of physics to do this. Remember, however, that these first century writers were not trying to recount literal history. They were story-tellers who had no problem with combining real people with mythic adventure. It's only us moderns who are hung up on historic accuracy. Anyway...

The story goes like this: Jesus wanted to be alone to pray, so he sends his twelve buddies ahead of him to cross the Sea of Tiberius to Capernum (or Bethsaida, depending on which version you read) by boat.  At night, a storm comes up and blows the boat far from the shore. You must know that in the first century, sailors never wanted to get too far out of sight of land. The story says that the wind was against them. "Wind" was a word which could also be translated as "spirit." So here are these guys--they're in the dark, the spirit is against them, and they are surrounded by water which, to the ancients, was a symbol for chaos. Ever been in that condition yourself? Everything's against you, and you don't know where you are?

At this point, Jesus, their teacher, friend, and guide, comes to them walking in the midst of the chaos.He's not panicked by what's going on around him. The guys in the boat freak out because they think he's a ghost. When you're in deep water and somebody else is calm, sometimes it upsets you even more. Jesus tells them not to be afraid. In Matthew's version, one of the guys, Simon Peter, refuses to believe his friend has come to the rescue and demands proof. If Jesus can walk on water, he wants to know if he can too. Jesus tells him to get out of the boat and come to him. Peter actually is able to do this, but once he takes his focus off of Jesus and considers the strong wind, he begins to sink and calls for help. Jesus reaches out his hand, saves the floundering Peter, climbs into the boat, and the storm abates.

There are probably as many interpretations of this story as there are people who have told it. Personally, I see it as a tale of encouragement when the whole world seems to be screwed up and turning against me. These elements stick out at me:

• The guys in the boat were never alone. Somebody loved them and came to them in their time of need.
• The chaos was not fatal. It was going to blow itself out. It always does. It's fear that kills.
• When Jesus was with them, the storm stopped.
• Jesus' presence brings the calm and peace because he's willing to engage with those in distress.
• When Peter loses focus on Jesus, he starts to go under.
• Focus on Jesus brings peace in the chaos because Jesus is loving, willing to engage, willing to make sacrifice for others, and totally committed to the belief that God's will is for abundant life.

So is that something we can believe in? Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!