Let us be each others’ lectionary
Sometimes I’m jealous of Christians. Particularly the way they get to write sermons. For those who don’t know, many Christian preachers use what’s called the “lectionary.” There’s a specific passage from the Bible for that week that they all get to work off at the same time. They get a nugget of weird mysterious Bible text and their assignment is simply: Make this make sense.
I woke up this morning and checked my email (I know, I know). But it’s my day off, so instead of opening anything Important, I opened a substack email by Nadia Bolz-Weber, the rad Lutheran pastrix who founded the House for All Saints and Sinners in Denver. She’s written a few excellent books and you might be interested. But for my purposes, I’m gonna use her sermon as my lil lectionary piece for today.
Rev. Nadia was working off of a passage in the Bible where Jesus says that the only unforgivable sin is to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, to say it doesn’t exist. Woah, I didn’t know that. That’s like the unitarians’ whole deal, back in the day. The OG unitarians were big Bible nerds who read closely and noted that the Bible does not mention the “Trinity” as such. The 16th century Spanish theologian Michael Servetus wrote,
“For scripture deals with this subject in a mysterious and nearly incomprehensible way, especially for those who are not accustomed to the unusual manner in which it speaks about the Holy Spirit. For by ‘holy spirit’ Scripture sometimes means God himself, sometimes an angel, sometimes the spirit of a man, sometimes a kind of inspiration, or the breath of the divinity on the mind, a mental impulse, or respiration…For, in Scripture, it appears that ‘Holy Spirit’ designates not a separate being, but is the activity of God, that is to say a certain kind of energy or the inspiration of the power of God.”
Proto-unitarians often made the point that a threefold monotheistic deity doesn’t make sense. But they didn’t actually deny the existence of the holy spirit. It’s mentioned in the Bible a lot, after all. Mostly, they became focused on the divinity or lackthereof of Jesus.
But I wondered, reading Rev. Nadia’s sermon, if what unitarians were doing was blaspheming in that specific way Jesus meant. I mean, we have definitely been called heretics and non-conformists. Capital-U Unitarianism eventually spawned Humanism, a kind of official atheism. What bigger blasphemy is there than that? However, Jesus doesn’t say the only unforgivable sin is not believing in him, or in God the Father. He specifies the Holy Spirit.
I’m obviously not a believer of any of it. But I do believe that there is wisdom in many worldviews. So what could he mean here that might apply to my life? Rev. Nadia has a suggestion. She notes that Jesus’ statement comes right after a mention of Judas, who must, by extension, be forgivable.
“If Judas was considered unforgivable, by himself or his community, doesn’t that itself feels like blasphemy against the Holy Spirit whose work among us has always been that of restoration and reconciliation? Maybe that’s what Jesus was talking about here. He was calling out the religious authorities who fancied themselves gatekeepers of God’s Mercy. Jesus speaks about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit in the context of those who would have us believe that a) they themselves are of course never in need of God’s mercy and b) there is a limit to how and where and for whom God’s mercy applies to others.”
How fascinating! She’s made what I understand to be a universalist turn here, a statement about God’s universal love and forgiveness.
I am an atheist mystic, who works as a Unitarian Universalist minister. The way Unitarian and Universalist make sense to me goes something like this: The universe is one whole made of many parts, including us. Each one of us is connected to the greater Oneness of the universe, which is All. One for all, and all for one. There is something kind of trinitarian-esque in my mystic understanding of the nature of reality. There’s a lot of >1 = 1 = ∞. A lot of paradox and pluralist unity.
Sometimes people ask me if, as an atheist, I can effectively minister to the folks within the interfaith Unitarian Universalism who are believers of some kind or another. First, I wonder if ministers of other spiritualities get this kind of question. Second, I respond that I decided to become a UU minister, not a Humanist chaplain or an atheist firebrand. I’m an atheist who recognizes the legitimacy of faiths I don’t adhere to, the reality that other people experience which is different but intrinsically connected to mine. I don’t just tolerate but appreciate the wisdom of worldviews other than my own.
Rev. Nadia invites us to consider that the only unforgivable sin is to limit forgiveness. That the only intolerable is intolerance. That asserting someone else is outside the circle of belonging, actually cuts the person-who-draws-the-line off from the Wholeness and Oneness of existence. This atheist cherishes the opportunity to hear that wisdom from a Christian pastor and feels inspired by it. Let us be each others’ lectionary. Because we are each small parts of the universe, perceiving just a facet of the wholeness. If we listen to each other, we have a better chance of understanding so much more than we could alone.
May it be so.
