About a year ago I had an interesting conversation with some friends regarding the book of Jonah. They had attended a sermon called ‘Jonah: God’s Truth or Fish Story?” I’ll leave you to guess which side the pastor took.
 
I happen to think that it is more likely that the book of Jonah is a work of imaginative fiction: my friends do not. In fairness to the other ‘side’ of the argument, I cannot say with absolute certainty that the events described in the book never happened, just that it seems pretty unlikely. And probably not for the reasons you are thinking.
 
If you aren’t familiar with the book of Jonah, I highly recommend it. It is very short, and easily one of the most intriguing books of the Bible. A prophet is told by God to go preach disaster to the citizens of a great city unless they repent; they do, and the prophet sulks about it because he really wanted God to wipe them out, since he didn’t like them very much--the reason being that they are Israel's arch-enemies (and real-life conquerors). In fact, Jonah was so reluctant to take the assignment in the first place because he was afraid they'd repent, and God, being merciful, would let them off, a motivating factor of Jonah's that is buried in the last chapter of the book. Instead, without fully explaining itself, the narrative races ahead from the opening sentence with one strange development after another. The book opens with God's command to go preach to the city. Jonah refuses God's assignment and runs away aboard a ship bound for the opposite end of the known world (the only prophet in the Bible to outright refuse God's call) whereupon God sends a storm at sea to the stubborn prophet, the sailors throw Jonah overboard at his own request, he is swallowed by a large fish, prays to God from within the fish, is vomited up on dry land, God repeats his orders, and Jonah decides to take him up on it this time. All this may be crazy enough, but I want to get to what really makes the book interesting as we go along.
 
First, though, I want to discuss something about bias. I have found more and more as I age that so much depends on our assumptions, and that these depend on the way our minds work. Some of us have very little sense of wonder, or appreciation for strange things, which greatly colors out approach to religious matters. Is it not just a little bizarre that a small tribe of people halfway around the world whose outlook and survivalist attitude were so very parochial became the religious ancestors of so many North Americans twenty centuries later? Or that the book that came about because some 60 authors wrote letters, histories, poetry, lists of accomplishments, genealogies, and so on, became such an important heritage to a people they never knew existed in a very different culture, used for very different ends?  The historical twists and turns involved in the history of our religious heritage are staggering--and extremely interesting--and yet these things are usually presented in Sunday school as if they are no big deal at all. The certified ‘miracles’ are considered extraordinary (but only as demonstrations of God's power, not because some of them are pretty odd to begin with), but the way our religion developed is not of interest at all. It just happened because God wanted it that way, and if God wanted it that way it must be pretty bland.
 
Well…
 
It occurs to me that perhaps God has a pretty big imagination. And perhaps, quite a sense of humor. Taking the obvious and making it obscure, playing up something so incredibly dull and making it into something amazing takes a sense of humor. But many of us don’t have one, and we find, particularly in matters of the sacred that the world is composed of dry facts, and that the sheer weirdness of them ought to be concealed, if it occurs to us that they are weird to begin with. After all, they are in the Bible. Which, by definition, is not weird. And so on.
 
Read this way, the book of Jonah is probably going to lose most of its zing as well. Instead of a gripping tale, full of twists and turns and the funniest human comedy, we are treated to the front page of the Times (a comparison which is not really fair to the Times). Who, what, where, when. He gets swallowed by a whale. Fine, draw a whale, kids. Three days go by. He’s still alive. Yay. A miracle. Remember to trust God, kids, if you are ever swallowed by a fish. But the imagination and the humor  of the book and the swaggering humanity that makes Jonah so stubborn and ridiculous is missing--it's like the book of Jonah from concentrate.
 
When my friends asked me why I thought the events described in the book might not have actually happened, I tried to explain why a fictional narrative could actually be a valid container for some important truth. But in order to see it that way, many of us have to overcome a pretty big prejudice. A prejudice against art.
 
I was in an acting class once, and the teacher asked us to go around the circle and give our definition of acting. To a person, everyone responded with some variation of ‘pretending’ or ‘faking it’ or ‘lying.’

I was the only one with a different answer. I said something along the lines of ‘truth inside of fiction.’ A few ooohs and other indications that I had said something ‘profound.’ I was sad that nobody else seemed to think that the core of drama, of fiction, or artistic enterprise, was that there is something true about human beings that the creator is trying to get across. Sure, the person pretending to be character X does not really believe he is character X, and neither does the audience, which is why he is not lying to us, since no one is being deceived. We accept this ‘pretending.’ But if it is not simply a way for us to occupy our minds for a while with trivia, it should have, beneath its surface, something of truth in it. A rather important truth, hopefully. It should have something that benefits us for having witnessed it, which perhaps makes us better human beings for having experienced what we have seen and thought what we have thought and shared it with others. Unfortunately, so many of us never see around that mental corner, and are always suspicious that the arts are just phony and useless. Obviously such a person would never allow that God might have used an author’s imagination to convey something of his truth, since it is believed that truth cannot possibly travel in such a container. Instead we are given two options—either the book is a historical record of things that ‘actually happened’ or they are lies. A person who has never seriously considered a third option will understandably have trouble swallowing the proposition that the book is anything other than a news account--if he is a believer. Some Christian authors have recently been at the receiving end of this mental quirk of humanity. The first question the author of the popular book “The Shack” gets is “was there a real Mackenzie Phillips?" People want to know whether Brian McLaren knows a real live Dan Poole. I get the sense that there is disappointment on the part of the questioner when it is revealed that these are fictional characters. Somehow, the expectation is that a real live person is just that—real. But a fictional one is not--which somehow makes them less important. The same speech given by a person who never existed suddenly isn't worth listening to, once for discover somebody else wrote the words (if you prick an author, does he/she not bleed?). Strange then, that, when it comes to the best sellers, histories are not on them. Fiction gets our attention. Fact doesn’t. But when it comes to religious matters we are too embarrassed by this to admit. And so we account for the psychological dilemma this creates by pretending one is the other—or at least hoping.
 
I, on the other hand, want to know why God couldn’t use an author just as easily as he could use a fish. It seems to me very limited to think that that is impossible. And yet, from a very young age, we learn to distinguish ‘fact’ from ‘fiction.’ For a while we like to spin yarns, then to hear them from adults and gleefully expose their stories by telling them ‘that’s not real!” This is an important part of growing up, but unfortunately, it seems that ever after we have little appreciation for things that didn’t actually happen, but which might, if we have the strength of vision. That is why there are so few innovators per 1000 human beings. Seeing things as they are will leave them that way.
 
There is at least one fellow in the Bible who we know without doubt used fiction to get at the Truth—one Jesus Christ, who was constantly teaching in Parables. The gospel writer Mark doesn’t seem to understand why any better than many of us—he thinks they are simply a secret code for things Jesus couldn’t discuss openly (an end-run around the obvious). The kingdom of heaven isn’t really a mustard seed, nor are there two brothers asked to work the Father’s vineyard. Jesus used these stories to make a point. He couldn’t really describe the kingdom of heaven to us because it was bigger than description would allow, and his point wasn’t to tell us what was or what had already happened to somebody else, but what could happen to us if we have the desire to see it. That requires a bit of imagination.
 
Fine, said my friend. But we know Jesus’ stories are stories. Jonah doesn’t say it is a work of fiction.
 
Well, excuse Mr. Jonah for not having a Dewey decimal number on his book’s spine—say, in the 800s, for literature. We should probably further excuse the rest of the biblical writers for mixing history with a bit of imagination, and not having the research ethics to make sure that when they told their tales that they were consistent with how some of the other writers were telling the same tale. If it happened, it had to happen only one way, right?
 
Allowing for some imaginative license on Jonah’s part clears up this difficulty. I suspect he would be very bemused at the way so many literal minded people are mis-categorizing his drama. Kind of the way that people misinterpret the movie Amadeus.
 
Now, Amadeus happens to be a great drama, a great movie. The best movie not really about a composer that was ever made, in my opinion. True, Mozart and Salieri are both historical characters. So are the other characters in the movie. And many of the events in the movie may have happened in roughly the same way as they are recounted on the screen. But that is actually beside the point. I've heard people talk about what this movie is about and what it is about is exactly what didn't happen in real life--the part the author made up, or at least exaggerated considerably.

The movie is really a made-up drama about a jealous composer (Salieri) and the lengths to which his anger and jealousy take him--including murdering Mozart (for which we not only have no historical evidence, we have plenty to suggest far more plausible alternatives). It is a psychological thrill to watch. And, since the playwright did his homework, most of the details in each scene are accurate as far as what we think we know about Mozart. The crazy laugh, for example, which was observed by several witnesses. But the arc of the plot itself is fabricated. Salieri’s jealousy is exaggerated by several factors, historically accurate facts are distorted in their interpretation in order to serve the plot, and the black masked man who scares Mozart into writing his own Mass for the Dead, though he has some basis in historical reality, is definitely somebody else if he is at all--not Salieri in disguise. And yet nearly everybody 'knows' what they know about Mozart because of this movie. And what they know is from somebody’s great imagination. And they think it is history instead.
 
This is so typically human; to be captured by a great story, when dry facts would not go down in the first place, and then to deny that it was anything other than fact that got your attention. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
 
When it comes to human psychology there is no end of opportunity for amusement. Something my friends said next illustrated this very well. Naturally, my conversationalists wanted to know why I thought Jonah was not ‘real’—they expected an attack rather than a defense or an attempt to expand the possibilities rather than assume, as the preacher had, that Jonah must be all one or the other--all fact or all hogwash. Did you know, said one of them, that scientists have found that people can actually stay alive in whales for several days? Apparently the whales don’t start to digest something until it is dead, they said. (Note: the book doesn't tell us what kind of large fish it was, and the story they are referring to is probably bogus)
 
It is curious that many of the same people who stand up for the ‘literal, historical truth’ of the bible, which of course includes the miracles as is, nonetheless find a need to gather scientific evidence to support them.

Do we want things both ways? Of course. It’s just that, as I pointed out to my fellows on the phone, a finding like that does one small thing to the story.
 
It’s not a miracle anymore.
 
If surviving in a whale for three days would happen to anybody, under any circumstances, there is nothing positively divine—in the assumed sense that God interrupted the normal flow of things in order to make a unique demonstration of his power—about the whale part. Except maybe that it was a miracle that the fish happened to be swimming by when the sailors threw Jonah in, or that he got spit up on the beach three days later. Choose your miracle.
 
My friend probably pointed this out because it was assumed that the first thing I would dismiss as fiction was the fish part. This is how a non-creative mind sees the issue. If something happened, it happened. If it didn’t, there is some reason to disbelieve it, such as the fact that it is too unbelievable to have happened and therefore did not. The miracle is a good candidate for doubt under this rubric.
 
But the fish episode isn’t the craziest thing that happens in the book of Jonah, at least for me. It is what happens after the prophet reaches his destination. God tells Jonah to go preach to a place called Nineveh. Nineveh isn’t just some town. It is the capital of the Assyrian empire. These are Israel’s arch-enemies. Not in the sense that they are rivals. Israel is a backwater confederation of tribes by contrast with Assyria, just struggling to exist. They are in danger of being swallowed by the Assyrian fish, forced to become part of a larger empire.
 
Because that much is history, it might not get your attention. The principal actors are no longer relevant to us today. But let’s suppose one of us were told to go preach to our enemies. Several years ago, in discussing this to someone else, I imagined the closest equivalent to Jonah's situation would be if we are told to go preach to Al Qaeda.
 
Yes, that crazy. Although, on further reflection, it would seem like a closer match if one of them were to preach to us. The reason is that we are a rich nation, and New York is the economic seat of a world power. Afghanistan, for all the trouble they are able to make, is not nearly in such a position of power. And so, to make things unflinchingly honest, we would have to play the part of the Assyrians.
 
So Jonah goes to New York, or Nineveh, and tells those guys they better repent or get nailed by God. Just the kind of thing that ought to give Jonah smug satisfaction. Odd, then, that he spent the first part of the book avoiding the assignment, and the later part complaining about it. But then the really nutty thing happens.
 
They repent.
 
Honestly, if you were the seat of a great empire, and some dude from a little jerkwater country down south shows up in the middle of town shouting about how everybody in the city had better repent to some god probably nobody’s even heard of, would you take him seriously?
 
This probably requires an even bigger leap than if somebody who has been trained to take literally every word of the Bible, and who would have, heretofore regarding me as a heretic for even suggesting that something in the Bible might be fiction (having a heaping helping of the whole ‘fiction is just the opposite of truth’ idea running around in their system) suddenly says to me “you know, I think I see what you’re saying. It’s changed my way of thinking. I am going to consider what you’ve said rather than using it to attack you and therefore build even more siege works around my own already calcified ideas.”
 
In other words, you almost have to stop being human to have everybody, from the king on down (the king has to order this, remember? The most powerful guy in the region has to let this Jonah guy affect policy, interrupt commerce and God knows what else) to put on sackcloth and petition the God of Israel for a reprieve. Here the book of Jonah just assumes that there is nothing bizarre about this, since God is God, after all,--or perhaps, it does indeed, and it is only modern believers who fail to notice the strangeness of the situation, since we are so used to being the center of the religious universe. Maybe the writer was silently  trying to make the point (was it so obvious to him?) that even those heathen Ninevites would repent of their evil sooner than the stubborn Israelites--a pretty good rebuke to your countrymen, is it not? You turkeys won't listen, even though your sworn enemies will! And they don't just repent, even the cattle go around wearing sackcloth--another detail that you have to have a sense of humor and a wild imagination to appreciate. How many historians would have included a detail like that?
 
Unfortunately for Israel, the Assyrians got over their repentance and conquered the smaller nation. And God let them off without a scratch (at least for a while). That much is history. It is rather odd that Yahweh planned to wipe out Nineveh for their wicked ways and then decided to ignore their venial transgression of decimating his chosen people.  As it happens, the Assyrians did get theirs in the end—612 B.C., actually.
 
Comparisons with the other books in the hall of the Minor Prophets, as well as historical accounts, can make Jonah seem like a lot of wishful thinking—but, unlike the others, Jonah has a much more countercultural message. Even the powerful Assyrians can be part of God’s purpose, not just for reasons of geopolitical expediency, but as beneficiaries of God’s love. Jonah, playing the part of the average good, decent Israelite, who loves his country, finds this infuriating. He explodes in anger against God (another theme many people do not realize is in the Bible—quite a lot) for being so forgiving, especially to his country’s enemies, and for allowing the Assyrians to repent and be spared. In the end, God’s ways are inexplicable, and He chides Jonah for basking in the benefits without thanks and then complaining when they aren’t there.
 
Which is one of the themes of the book. Jonah has to expand his world a little, because there isn’t any room in his cosmology for what God has planned. Similarly, I told my friends, we are missing the point of the book of Jonah if we insist that it has to be a certain kind of literature, and that alone. We, too, are insisting that God work within the framework that we allow. We’re a lot like that stubborn Jonah.
 
Persons who insist that the book of Jonah is only imaginative literature are capable of missing that point too. A pastor I knew once insisted that Jonah was entirely fictional, but unfortunately, was a bit sloppy in his regard for provable facts. He believed that the city of Nineveh was itself a fictional creation, though we know that it did really exist. There is no reason, of course, an author couldn’t have set a fictional story in a real city; plenty of novels are set in New York. (the basis for his claim was that the book says that Nineveh was so large that it would take three days to get across, which would have made it impossibly large, and therefore must be entirely made-up. I’ve never tried to hike a large city, so I don’t know whether that is really so much of an exaggeration, but the entire book’s genre should not rest on the truth of that single claim. There are also plenty of arguments about this detail; perhaps, goes one, the translation should read that a visit 'required three days' in order to walk everywhere, not merely to get across the city. When we are trying to win arguments we sometimes let too much rest on a small and potentially mistranslated phrase.)
 
As to the 'whale'—who knows that the author of the book didn’t hear of an instance where a sailor was known (or 'known') to be swallowed by a whale and lived several days to tell about it. Perhaps he wove that incident into his tale. Sometimes the authors with the greatest imaginations also do the most research--or just keep their ears open. (They also had rumors and fish stories in those days, too!)
 
Jonah (like the movie 'Amadeus') may actually be some combination of fact and fiction, in an alchemy that we will never know. Either way, it is a great story, full of drama and the unexpected. Jonah is a real character in every sense of the word. His dialogue with God is vastly more honest than most of us ever dare. And he foreshadows another of God’s mouthpieces who preached limitless forgiveness, underscoring the conundrum of how to behave in such an unforgiving world if we want to survive.
 
Finally, Jonah has a lot to say to us. Whether the events of his book actually took place is, in the end, beside the point. If the book is merely a recitation of what happened to somebody a long time ago, then we can only be jealous about how much more interesting things were back then. But of all the prophets and preachers who lay on their sides, or saw visions of figs, or recorded scrupulously which days they saw their visions, and what the king thought of their literature, the prophet we remember best was Jonah. We remember his little book because it stirs our imagination. Surely God can make something good come out of that. As to tacking on a moral at the end, whether it be as thunderously obvious as 'do what God says the first time!' or as brave as 'God shows mercy even to our enemies'--well, how daring are you?
 

At our Ash Wednesday service this year, the scripture reading (Matt 6:1-8,16-18), in which Jesus excoriates those who do good works mainly for show, was be followed by a drama, in which Kristen and I will be delivered the text of Mark Twain's "Letter from the Recording Angel":

Last summer I came across a short essay by Mark Twain tucked away in the back of the book entitled “Letter from the Recording Angel.” It has all the usual Twain hallmarks—it is funny, laced with sometimes vicious sarcasm, filled with colorful expressions, and is, in essence, an outcry against the uncompassionate powerful, something that Twain returned to again and again in his writings. It is also a lampoon of religious phoniness, which is why, when I read it, my mind immediately went to the scripture reading for Ash Wednesday, in which Jesus excoriates those who try to impress God and man by impressive shows of piety, thinking that they can make whatever concern for the poor they actually have into a way to good public relations.

The reason this essay was in the back of the book is because Twain never published it, and there is a good reason for that. The letter is being sent from the office of the recording angel to a man named Andrew Langdon, a coal dealer from Buffalo, New York. I Googled him a while back, and it turns out there really was a person named Andrew Langdon who was a coal dealer from Buffalo, New York, and was a contemporary of Twain’s. I’m guessing that Twain didn’t want to get sued if he published the essay.

My wife Kristen was doing some online research for a children's sermon the other day. The subject was to be Jacob's dream, in which he saw a ladder to heaven and angels ascending and descending on it. "Surely," he thought, "the Lord is in this place."

Somebody had posted an example of a children's sermon which basically used Jacob as an excuse to talk about what they thought really mattered which was that we have to believe in Jesus. Jesus, they went on, is the only way we can get to heaven. It reminded me of an incident when Kristen was giving another children's sermon which involved some characters from the Hebrew Bible--say, Pharoah and Moses, or something--and asked a child a question about it. Something like which character was doing God's will; and the child answered "Jesus!" To which my wife responded that "Jesus isn't in this one." I thought, boy have we got our kids drilled good. They know that in Sunday school you don't have to pay attention to the question because the answer is always Jesus.

Could you imagine any other subject getting away with that? What's two plus two? Jesus. What year did the civil war end? Jesus. Who is buried in Grant's tomb? Jesus.

I mean, I know the The kids were only four, but really. And I'm pretty sure the persons who posted the children's sermon in question weren't four. Physically, anyway. Whether they were still four theologically is a good question. One of the reasons I think we lose a lot of kids from our midst as a church is that they eventually grow up and we don't.

Even the less sophisticated believers among us ought to be able to memorize more than one answer. Particularly for those times, like the entire Old Testament, when "Jesus isn't in this one." Unless you think that God did a lousy job writing his book because he didn't introduce the main character until three-quarters of the way through the book. The persons responsible for making everything about Jesus no matter what the topic evidently think so, though they wouldn't say that in so many words. Instead, they just twist the story around so that whatever it was about originally it is now about Jesus. If it were a song it wouldn't matter what key it was in because it would end up in C major. Partially because the player didn't know how to play in any other keys. Some days I want to sympathize with this.

Some of the New Testament writers didn't, however. The author of Hebrews complains about people who are still too busy gorging on spiritual milk to be ready for solid food. He calls them 'infants.' Paul takes up the same charge. This is the same Paul who writes those long sentences the rest of us have a hard time with and tries to explain difficult spiritual concepts by making them more difficult, sometimes. He wrote a lot about Jesus, though he also "wasted" a lot of ink on other topics like trying to get church members to get along with each other. Paul, whose life and thinking and theology are rather complicated and who didn't shy away from the complication, even though he recognized the importance, at times, of simple slogans or of crystallizing you message into one basic element. He managed, somehow, to do more to get Christianity going than perhaps anyone else. And he didn't leave his brain at the door, which is one effect of thinking that everything in the bible is about Jesus and getting to heaven. It shuts your brain off. We had a girl in high school who thought the moral lesson to be drawn from every single thing we ever read in English lit was to "work hard and you'll succeed." Sometimes her moral had a very strained relationship with the text. Yet, for some reason this was so important to her that she didn't seem to care what the author was actually saying. Which meant, in the long run, that she wasn't going to be able to learn anything, since learning implies listening, and if you twist every encounter into an excuse to bleat about your favorite topic you aren't going to grow much.

I'm not suggesting that Jesus and getting to heaven aren't important, just that, as it happens, Jesus didn't talk much at all about the getting to heaven part, and, outside the gospel of John, not very much about himself, either. He just wasn't a one-note type of guy. Too bad sometimes he gets turned into one. I wonder if his Father feels the same way.


There are, I fear, some theological (and, hiding behind that, social) repercussions about this. We have, in Christianity, a concept known as the Trinity. A 3-part God. Not that figuring out how this works hasn't given us some trouble by way of, at best, vigorous debate.... (and at worst, the usual bloodletting.) Besides Jesus there are two other aspects of the Godhead. But sometimes Jesus gets all the press and I think I know why. If we talked about God more, we'd have to share him. Jews believe in that same God, and so do Muslims, despite what our extreme fringe says about that not being the case. (Allah translates into 'the God' as in the only one around which sounds like the same one, doesn't it?) God is the creator--of everything. Not that that gave the ancient Hebrews any trouble making him into a tribal God, but then, at that time, he pretty much was one. The nations around them weren't trying to horn in on their God and they had him pretty much all to themselves. It wasn't an easy relationship--this God tended to change costumes (pillar of fire, still small voice, professional wrestler) and was frequently not visible at all, which, again, caused problems for the less sophisticated believers, who preferred the kind of god that you can see.

If that causes us problems, the Holy Spirit compounds them. There isn't much in the Bible about this spirit, comparatively, and when discussed this Spirit seems even more nebulous. Worse still, the Spirit is supposed to be at work among us today, which pretty much makes him or her an unregulated free agent. Jesus, having completed his mission, looked like us, walked like us, and has told us lots of neat stories we can ignore. And there are pleasant bible verses about him for those who like things spelled out, recipe style. Because religions tend to look backwards, Jesus is a more comfortable choice for veneration than a God which is still being defined in and among us today. He is a closed system; the rest is commentary, and the orthodox commentary will be sure not to challenge the shape of the narrative in any way.

I understand how recipes work. I am not a very sophisticated cook so I like to know exactly how much of everything to put into the pot; I'm not comfortable enough to free-lance unless I really know a spice. Someday maybe I'll grow up a little, culinarily speaking.

I hope the Jacob's-ladder-means-if-you-believe-in-Jesus-you'll-go-to-heaven people do, too. I don't really know much about their theology but I'm guessing that if they can take Jacob's encounter with God and turn it into a Jesus/heaven thing they can do that to anything.  And, as unimaginative as that is, we could leave people and their narrow thoughtlessness alone except that it probably translates into people problems as well. I've a hunch that behind that narrative deafness is a lack of respect for any human beings who don't fit in their box either, and that is worth the trouble to rebuke. Ask any Jews you know if they don't get a little uncomfortable around Christians who try to write over the Hebrew scriptures so that what's left doesn't really have anything to do with the Hebrew scriptures anymore.

I hope I'm not being presumptuous here but there is plenty to go around. I probably learned mine from just such a religious environment. The kind that says we've got it all figured out and those other people are our enemies. And God isn't judging them fast enough so let's help him a little.

All of that might just be lurking beneath the surface of a lesson that assumes that everything is about believing in Jesus, a lesson, it seems, that you can't repeat too many times. (Ok, says the bored kid in the third row. I believe in Jesus. I'm going to heaven. Now what?) Now I'm not suggesting we don't teach out kids about Jesus--that's kind of why we're here. And young children won't have developed any kind of theological sophistication, but you know what you can do in such a case? Talk about Jacob's Ladder. Tell them about Jacob and his relationship with God and his brother Esau and things that are actually in the story. It's not rocket science. Just engage the text. Don't make everything into the same story week after week.

(Say, while we're being presumptuous, I note that the hymn we are singing to go with this lesson is called 'We are Climbing Jacob's Ladder.' Not to be picky, but even Jacob didn't get to climb the ladder, that role being reserved for the angels. Some position we've carved out for ourselves, isn't it?)

The musical equivalent of this is what we call establishing the key--the central pitch at the heart of every tonal composition, and the relationships that define it. Notice I included relationships between the various notes. They are, in fact, strong pointers to that central pitch, and using them as part of the system they were designed for is a good way to point to that tonal center without having to harp on the same pitch all the time. Gifted composers know this. They know that you can actually go away from the central pitch in a way that defines its role all the more strongly and makes the eventual return to that pitch more rewarding. Less gifted composers don't understand this. I remember listening in a music class once to a symphony by a guy named Sammartini (don't recognize him? no wonder). The way Sammartini showed us where the musical center of gravity was for his symphony was to bang on the central chord three times right at the beginning. It didn't get him admission to the composer's hall of fame, that's for sure. It also bores your ears pretty fast. What Sammartini shows us is that there are other ways to show what is important than by reducing everything to one simple keynote and ignoring the rest. Because, in the end, everything points to that keynote, if you have ears to hear it. And that everything isn't nothing. It is a rich and vibrant tradition. It is admonitions to love our neighbor and live in expectation of the kingdom. It is thought provoking and perplexing stories that Jesus told (not the 'stories about Jesus I love to hear' as the old hymn goes, but the stories he told which are about more than the cult of celebrity). It is also the traditions of people whose ways are different than ours, but through whom God worked just as mightily. God--the creator of all. Don't tell me he created the entire scale just so he could bang on one note all the time.

I would suggest the same track for Christian educators. If you really think you need to hit the same lesson every week and make every story in the bible that is not about Jesus about Jesus, you must think your kids have a really short memory. If they have to be reminded about Jesus that often, well, I imagine God'll let them in anyway. But for the rest of us, it really wouldn't hurt to expand the arsenal a little. Show the thinking ones in the bunch that there really is room for them at God's table, too--the ones who will be leading the church--or something else, depending on whether they feel relevant--in the coming years. And early elementary school really isn't too early to start.

Some people I know have been debating recently whether the pulpit is a good place for education or whether it needs to be a place of ‘persuasion.’ In context, this is probably not an issue that needs to be worried over too much, since the participants are fairly educated, and presumably value learning to the extent that they are not willing to check their brains at the door just because we are talking about church. I have heard from people before who have taken a much more exclusive approach, however, setting education over and against whatever is legitimate in their theological view. In other words, education is to be driven away at all costs because it only gets in the way of any real understanding of God, which is often considered a feeling you get in your heart rather than something that involves your head. (Apparently God subcontracted the thinking parts of ourselves to some of his lesser angels…)

One of the discussion participants used the phrase “turn[ing] the pulpit into a classroom,” which has the kind of boundary-setting ring to it that was probably used by many of our Methodist forebears to justify the complete lack of any educational content whatever. They read the Bible and that was just good enough for them, thank you very much. No other learning necessary, or wanted. Not that 19^th century itinerant preachers had a monopoly on this trait. Warding off anything tainted by education is a talent shared by many a denomination, and goes back to several of the early church fathers as well.

I’d like to imagine that we are all sophisticated enough in this university town that we don’t mind when our pastor gives us some context for the scripture he is explaining, before exhorting us to do whatever it is we are being exhorted to do. And I’m not unaware of the ineffectiveness, not to say boredom, of giving out all exposition and no development. But this subtle distinction has not always been made by writers of the church, who forget Paul’s admonition that we ‘also worship with [our] mind[s]' (1 Cor 14:15) and have instead made it a great enemy.

As it happens, I have been working my way through a volume on the Middle Ages, and the day before the discussion reached me had just read a chapter on the Crusades. Giving that I had that very disastrous  historical event in my mind at the time, I couldn’t help making the connection with what happens when a sermon is all persuasion and no education, because it was that very thing that helped to launch the Crusades. What follows is an extreme example of this tendency to tell your people what to do without letting them—indeed, encouraging them to know why. Or at least to ask. For that is one of the tendencies of education—not the mere learning of facts, but the understanding of contexts, the asking of questions, the comprehension of alternatives, the seeking of solutions for problems which have them, and the wisdom not to make things worse. To allow dialogue.

A speaker whose motives are pure persuasion—a demagogue—appeals to us directly, as we are, flattering us that we can be our own judge on the merits, and then stacks his case so that there is only one answer toward which our conceit will lead us. This is what Pope Urban did. All of the demonstrably provable statements below are greatly exaggerated and there is a nice piece of flattery at the end:

“From the confines of Jerusalem…a grievous report has gone forth that an accursed race, wholly alienated from God, has violently invaded the lands of these Christians, and has depopulated them by pillage and fire.  They have led away a part of the captives into their own country, and a part they have killed by cruel tortures. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanliness….On whom, then, rests the labor of avenging these wrongs, and of recovering this territory, if not upon you—you upon whom, above all others, God has conferred remarkable glory in arms, great bravery, and strength to humble the heads of those who resist you?” Urban continued by telling his countrymen that France was too small to hold them, that Jerusalem was a paradise, and that they would surely go to eternal glory for their participation.

What happened next was idiocy on a grand scale. Apparently Urban had gotten the crowd so riled up he couldn’t control them anymore. Running entirely on good vibes, the multitude wanted to go right out and kill people for God. So even though he had told them to leave in August of that year, they couldn’t wait. Passion overcame planning. Some groups left as early as March, not bothering to consider that when large groups of persons have to cross all of Europe, some questions might need to be considered, such as:  How do you feed all of those people? Would it help to send warning to the cities along the way so they could provide food and lodging, and perhaps join you? Are all of those women and children going with you really fit to cross the entire continent, and what are they going to do when you get there?

That last question mostly did not have to be faced because thousands died along the way precisely because of the lack of provisions. Desperation drove the inexperienced volunteer army to begin sacking German towns (hey, wait, guys! They’re on the same team!) More Christians wound up getting killed by other Christians during that first Crusade than the ‘evil infidel.’

Eventually (though one wonders how) the horde made it to the gates of Jerusalem after the nervous ruler of Constantinople helped out with money and supplies (he had reason to be nervous; a later Crusade decided not to bother with Jerusalem and just wiped out this rich capital of Eastern Christianity).  By that time, the city had been recaptured from the persecuting Turks by the Fatamids, who had previously shown respect to the Christians in their midst. Although the Crusader's beef was with the Turks, they went ahead and wiped out the Fatamids anyway. The once largely tolerant Muslim world had to rethink their positions about living peaceably with Christians after that.

This was the high point of the Crusades. Later charges never made it to Jerusalem at all, some getting destroyed on the way, which caused lots of despair from the faithful, who were convinced God wanted them to do this thing.

Like I said, this is an extreme example. In the long history of people doing stupid and cruel things, the Crusades have got to be pretty high on the list. I couldn’t help making the connection, however, given that I read about them right around the time I was thinking about the issue of persuasion and education. I am aware of the long tradition of ‘being persuaded’ and the value it holds in our hymns and our evangelism, but like all the works of man it clearly has a dark side. And there is this uncomfortable thought:  persuasion rests so fully on the virtuosity of the speaker that we should wonder at its integrity.  History is full of moments where a persuasive speaker caused a pivotal moment: a key conversion, a moment of dedication to a noble purpose. But these are usually of individuals, and smart ones at that.  And the results have not been so destructive.  Were these speakers appealing to the head as well as the heart? Allowing a decision based on the knowledge possessed by the individual, and freely shared by the one trying to persuade?  Unfortunately, the goal of persuasion is to meet the recipient where they are, and the tools used will be determined by those targeted. A shared cultural understanding, a shared intelligence will mean that the one being prevailed upon will have outside sources to consult.

I think that a more educated mob would have behaved differently toward Urban, and would have ultimately been far less destructive, particularly to themselves. They would have also been far more difficult to persuade.

On the other hand, people who don’t know how to think for themselves will believe anything its leaders tell them, particularly if it colludes with their natural instincts for dominance and acquisition. The uneducated mob knew very little about Muslims. They could easily believe that somehow these foul people polluted the holy city with their mere presence. They could be told that their barbarous code honored nothing but bloodlust or that they sanctioned all manner of hideous deeds and they had no way to verify, and no desire to find out first. It didn’t seem to occur to them that those ‘other’ people might be running Jerusalem with skill and competence, and treating its inhabitants, including Christians, with respect, and allowing them freedom to practice their religion as their consciences dictated. Or that there were some Muslims who treated them like enemies and others who treated them like friends.

They didn’t know that, and didn’t need too. They had been persuaded. Victims of very little knowledge about their enemy, they naturally believed the worst. But a little knowledge of their own theological background might have also helped things. Most people were illiterate in the 10^th century, but at least would have heard the scriptures in church. What if somebody had the guts to cry out, “I thought Jesus said we were supposed to love our enemies”?

No—that idea was never very popular.  Still, education, besides giving us the ability to understand our ‘others’ and causing us to consider whether we are in all ways unquestionably superior to them, also might cause us to reflect on things from our own writers and thinkers whom a persuasive speaker has chosen to leave out of his own, necessarily one-sided speech. It provides a necessary check against hasty action by making us ask questions about what we intend to accomplish and whether it is really a good thing to accomplish it. It also underscores the importance of good execution, of planning ahead, of thinking things through.  Allied with wisdom it makes us consider how long a journey may be needed to get to our goal, rather than letting our enthusiasm ‘shorten’ it for us.

Lastly, education is articulate. Not in the sense that a polished speaker is eloquent, but in that it tends to concern itself with all of those details that people who are led by passion leave out. It wants to know what and it wants to know why. People who are only trying to persuade find this a bother because it makes their job more difficult. Our religious history is filled with persons who have entered on any number of disastrous and ultimately spiritually crushing undertakings because someone persuaded them to do it; it seemed good at the time; no one thought any differently. The product of an educated society is that someone almost necessarily thinks differently, not to be a pain in the backside, but because each question is worth exploring before you come to a conclusion, and someone with a case to present is automatically going to leave out half the evidence. At least then when you are persuaded you will consider the cost (as when Jesus complained of the same tendency to base your discipleship on enthusiasm rather than real commitment (Luke 14:28-33)).

So, have I persuaded you that we need both persuasion and education from our pulpits? That’s the irony lurking behind this whole essay. As we can see from the example above, persuasion can be dangerous, particularly when it is that effective.  But it is hardly unnecessary. It is, I submit, part of a well balanced rhetorical diet. In some respects, the act of trying to persuade is in itself a bow to the mental capacity of your audience. It assumes that some action is necessary to win them over to your side, and that that action will include appealing to their minds, rather than simply telling them to believe what you tell them. But as we’ve seen, persuasion can also be a counterfeit. When it goes its own way, outside the fellowship of other wholesome helps to grow whole persons, in body, mind, and spirit, rather than simply to exploit their current state for your own end, it can lead to fantastic cruelty.

Pope Urban did spend much of 1095 trying to muster support from other leaders—perhaps his mode of rhetoric when he spoke to these muckety-mucks was a little heavier on the facts of the matter and less cleverly devised to push a mob’s buttons. For he knew who he was speaking to that day in France. His job was to muster an army. He wanted it done, and he knew how to do it. And his flock responded the way he knew they would.

That is, while he could still control them.

michael@pianonoise.com