A sermon by the Rev. Jack Wilkinson

Delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem

July 9, 2006

My purpose in giving this sermon is to try to repair St. Paul's damaged reputation. When I was interim minister in Little Falls, N.Y., the church I served had an historic old building, and its name was St. Paul's Universalist. Trouble was that to many of the parishioners the name was an embarrassment, which seemed to be evident to the other denominations in town, a few of whom resented the fact that when they first arrived, the name was already taken, so they were forced to choose another, while all the time there we were sitting on the name without giving it appropriate fanfare. In one sermon, I gave a valiant defense of our namesake without noticeably changing any minds, so some fifteen years later perhaps it's time to try again, in case there's some committee at UUFWS that I don't know about that's shuffling through some deck of saint cards for a name.

To put it succinctly, Paul is hated, first for being a despiser of women, and second for giving birth to a conservative – one might even say despotic – religion. Both charges are incorrect or at least grossly overstated, as I hope to show.

To begin with, let me try to put the Christian religious movement into historical perspective. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) was a German idealist philosopher of the Romantic period who divided Christianity into three historic eras, each of which he named after a different apostle and associated with a different person of the Trinity. First came the Petrine Era, named after the Apostle Peter and also associated with God the Father, which lasted from A.D. 325 to 1500 and was characterized by a multi-layered priesthood backed by imperial military might and a sorely oppressed laity that was fleeced of its money and kept in ignorance.

Second came the Pauline Era, named after St. Paul and also associated with God the Son, lasting from 1500 to 1900 and characterized by a shift of focus from priestly instruction to the reading of the Bible itself and the rise of the Damascus Road-style conversion experience.

Third came the Johanine Era, named after John the Beloved Disciple, and also associated with God the Holy Spirit, which began in 1900, some 50 years after Schelling's death, so he must have anticipated it. This era has been and will continue to be characterized by an Aquarian Age ethos, a displacement of the Holy Spirit from the Church to secular society, and such pursuits as yoga, transcendental meditation and other esoteric, New Age activities. However, it must be emphasized that between the Pauline and Johanine eras there is a long overlap and that the full fruits of Paulinism have yet to be plucked.

These are the eight apostolic virtues of St. Paul and his ministry:

First, Paul was the Apostle of Non-one-sidedness. On the Damascus Road, when he encountered the Christ Spirit in the noonday sun, he experienced a profound transformation, to which I should like to give my own interpretation, by resorting to my studies of the Eastern spiritual disciplines. Those of you who are conversant with Yoga philosophy are aware that on an axis going from the base of the spine to the crown of the head there are seven lotus flowers, each with a different number of petals and all of which are composed of a substance that is too subtle to show up on a diagnostic screen. The Anahata, or heart lotus, has twelve petals, which I take to represent the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Our natural inclination is to be alive in just one of those petals, whichever one represents our birth sign – mine, my son's, my uncle's and my great-grandfather's all being Leo. Well, when Paul confronted the Christ. his heart lotus exploded, and he became not just a one-sided being but a twelve-sided being. Suddenly he had a thinking heart, from which he could view people and issues from all possible angles. In the pursuit of converts he could become all things to all people. It was an unique state of being to which the rest of us will not attain until a future lifetime.

Second, Paul was an Apostle of Freedom. After his experience on the Damascus Road, Paul went blind for a few days. He was taken to a house in Damascus owned by the local followers of the Messiah, the very ones that he had been deputed to bring to justice before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem. However, his enemies were suddenly his friends, and he remained in Damascus for three years, during which time he took a side trip to Mt. Sinai on foot. It was a journey of several days. There he confronted the ghost of Moses, as it were, and negotiated an exchange: the replacement of the Mosaic Law by the indwelling Christ Spirit, a formula that was to prove an easy sell to Gentiles but a hard sell to Jews.

Paul says in Galatians 3:24-25, "So that the Law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian." In other words, he is saying that the Law kept us on the right track while at the same time binding us to sin or limitation. In obsessing about the Law we also obsessed about those transgressions from which the Law was designed to protect us. Through Christ, when we let go of the Law we let go of sin as well. Through Christ we turn our bondage upside-down. Now our fetters, instead of tying us tightly to the earth and things material, loosely connect us to Heaven and things spiritual. Emil Bock suggests that faith as an inward activity could not have existed before Christ entered the Earth life but that through Christ faith became a radically new human endowment, an inner power that faced down all difficulties and saw everything with fresh eyes.

Credit for Paul's third apostolic attribute was conferred on him by none other than Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), when he dubbed Paul "Apostle of Thinking." (And Schweitzer, as we all know, is Unitarian Universalism's most beloved of patron saints.) Paul firmly believed that in religion the head should be in control and master such ecstasies that might arise by the influence of the Sybiline cults. More of that later. Suffice it to say now that when I read Paul's letters I feel as if an iron hand were grasping me by my frontal lobe, and I become intellectually engaged. Though Paul was not a Gnostic as we understand the term, he had his own brand of gnosis. When UUs boast that they don't have to check their brains in the vestibule before entering the sanctuary, they have the Apostle to thank for it.

Fourth, Paul is the Apostle of Universal Salvation. As far as Paul was concerned, everyone was headed for redemption, male and female, Jew and Greek, freedman and slave, it didn't matter. A codicil to this belief is the adage "It's never too late." For example, one could be burning in the lake of fire and say, "I repent," and, poof! he'd be back at the Pearly Gates. Nobody need choose death in preference to life. Nobody is expendable. Paul is our Universalist founder, and we have every right to claim him.

Although Paul was executed by the Roman emperor Nero, his legacy of Universalism lived on. It was alive and well in Alexandria when his disciples a few generations removed – the Universalists Clement and Origen – successively became directors of the Alexandrian Academy. Origen, seeing the handwriting on the wall, as it were, started the monastic movement, and so in A.D. 325, when the Church became the Church Militant under Emperor Constantine, Christian Universalism, along with Christian virtue, went underground, and as I look at church history I see a golden thread going from Paul to Clement to Origen and on through the Benedictine and Celestine orders, through St. Frances, St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross, through John Wycliff and John Huss, until it reaches James Relly in 17th century England and becomes official. By the way, Wycliff and Huss were both burned at the stake by the Roman Church for the same two crimes: first, making the Bible accessible to their parishioners in their own language and second, letting their parishioners in on the secret that it was not necessary to pay a fee to get into Heaven.

Fifth, Paul was an Apostle of Esotericism. The Roman Church did damage to both Universalist and esoteric thinking when in the 6th century Emperor Justinian had Origen's works declared heretical and when he convened the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 551 and had the doctrine of reincarnation declared anathema. This latter cynical move was purely political, inasmuch as this long-standing esoteric spiritual truth was above reproach, and those who voted to reverse it knew full well that their reversal was a damnable lie. Their motive? If a person knows he will be born again, that knowledge frees him from the dominion of the Church, which would like him to think that he had only one chance for salvation. But then Justinian had yet another motive. The Empress Theodora wished to be apotheosized after her death, and she saw reincarnation as an obstacle to her lofty goal. The craven reversal of a fundamental truth by a Church Council or a Papal Bull has occurred more than once. In this case, however, it was so successful that I'm willing to bet that even some members of this congregation have been taken in by it.

Paul did not become an esotericist until he got to Athens. Until then in his journeys he had been able to draw a crowd and establish a congregation in Gallatia, Thessalonika, Ephesus, Cyprus and Phillipi, and later in Corinth and Rome. Yet in Athens he bombed. This audience was too sophisticated. His self-defense before the City Council on the Areopagus impressed only one man. Dionysius the Areopagite and Paul joined forces. Paul was able to convince this Pagan esotericist that Christ was the Unknown God worshiped at one of the Athenian shrines. Paul taught Dionysius Christianity, and Dionysius in turn taught Paul esoteric Paganism. Together they founded the School of Paul and Dionysius at the foot of the Areopagus, where they devised the essentials of Christian theology, which included the Catholic Mass, the Heavenly Hierarchies, the Holy Trinity, and so forth. Soon Dionysius moved the School from the Areopagus in Athens to the Montmartre in France. (Notice that both names mean "Mars Hill".) There at its relocation each successive School leader took the academic title of Dionysius. In the 4th century the School's leader was canonized as St. Denys. Then, somewhere in the 6th century the Roman Church's illiteracy campaign gained ground. In A.D 400 it had burned the library at Alexandria, and over the next few centuries, as the book burning moved westward, the School, I suspect, escaped to Ireland, where teachers and books received sanctuary under the wing of the Celtic Church. Three centuries later, in defiance of the Church's ban on learning, the Emperor

Charlemagne sent to the Emerald Isle for Sts. Columbus and Columbinus to educate his illiterate Franks.

Sixth, Paul was the Apostle of Inwardness. Pagan statues of incomparable beauty kept the Greek worshiper's attention outside in the world of nature. The Hebrew god, on the other hand, was invisible, so the worshiper's attention was dispersed but still outside. Paul split the difference. He drew the worshiper inward, then gave him a focal point, the indwelling Spirit of Christ. "Not I," said Paul, "but Christ in me." This inwardness, which was mainly of Paul's invention, is what made the monastic movement possible.

Seventh, Paul was the Apostle of Non-coercion. After his Damascus Road conversion experience Paul was never violent. Though verbally forceful at times and though he was frequently the recipient of physical abuse, he tried always to emulate the Christ, who had been usually gentle and mildly persuasive. He did not insist that his congregations support him (though he approved of such) but earned his own keep by weaving goat hair to make tent cloth, often preaching from his loom. In this respect the Church of the Petrine Era became a betrayal of his principles.

Eighth and last, Paul was the Apostle to Women. Now is the time to face up to the charges against him. In 1 Cor. 11 he told women to cover their heads in worship, which hardly makes him a misogynist. However in 1 Cor. 14:33-36 we come to a matter more serious:

As in the churches of the saints the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak but should be subordinate even as the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. What! Did the word of God originate with you, or are you the only ones it has reached?

From our latter-day perspective these words stand as a harsh indictment of the man who uttered them. I can only say that Paul's actions tend to belie his words. As disciples and congregational leaders Paul had Timothy, Titus and Aquila, but he also had Phebe, Priscilla and Thekla, and Phebe was a deaconess. Did he admonish these women to silence? Not likely. And those who spoke in tongues were nearly always women. How can one speak in tongues silently? This calls for analysis.

The admonition to silence must have worn off rather quickly, because it simply was not practical. I know I've never witnessed it in a Christian church. However, for its temporary enforcement there was justification. Up to the time of the Christian meetings organized by Paul, it had been the custom among the Jews for the men and women to meet separately, and the styles of the two meetings were distinctly different. In the women's meetings they all spoke at once and listened at

once in a coffee klatch fashion of which men are congenitally incapable. The best men can do is speak in turn. Now for us to retrospectively expect the men to adapt to the women rather than the reverse is obviously asking too much. Paul was buying time until the women could adapt to the male model and join in the business meetings.

There is, however, yet another wrinkle to this. Back then, at around the turn of time, many women, whether they were Jewish or Greek, were members of the Sybiline cults. A kind of worst-case scenario of such a cult meeting occurs in "The Bacchae" by Euripides, wherein a group of female Dionysus worshipers in a mood of extreme ecstasy rip to pieces a man who turns out to be their leader's son. These girls' night-out affairs were reminiscent of an earlier age in history when women were dominant. Awareness of this earlier age lurked in the female psyche just below the surface and recalled a situation some 1,500 to 2,000 years earlier in the eastern Mediterranean countries when women ruled both Heaven and Earth. There was a transition period in mythology when the ruling goddess, Hera, was subdued by Zeus, who made her his wife. On Earth, likewise, women experienced a change of status. It seems that the ruling sybils and pythonesses gradually lost their prophetic powers by which they had maintained their dominance over men. For a while they faked it, while their treatment of the men became more and more cruel and their ritual sacrifice of them more and more arbitrary. Finally, the men had had enough, and they revolted, and, to make a long story short, pretty soon, ding dong! all the witches were dead. Some 4,000 years ago it's easy to see why men clamped down when they did. However, at around A.D. 40 St. Paul was a transitional figure who, at one and the same time, was holding the line and bringing about a new accommodation. In short, Paul calmed the savage beast in the female breast.

While we're on the subject of women, let me push the envelope a little further. In New York City there's an old bar named McSorley's Old Ale House. I don't know what might have happened to it in the past 50 years. If it hasn't relocated or given ground to a new high-rise, it's still on the Lower East side in the vicinity of Cooper Union. The one time I went there it was a semi-ornate but dingy relic of male separatism. Yes, McSorley's was for men only. However, legend has it that one evening the actress Tallulah Bankhead breached the gender barricades of this citadel of Spartanism by disguising herself as a man, going to the bar and ordering a dry martini. I don't know the rest of the story, but I'd like to think that she got away with it.*

But to return to Paul, if the Holy Trinity is a true set of three, then it conforms to the triad of masculine, feminine and neuter, in which case God the Father is neuter, that is, a blend of masculine and feminine, which splits into a masculine God the Son and a feminine God the Mother. I maintain that Paul and Dionysius smuggled the Goddess (God the Mother) into the Holy Trinity by dressing her up in men's clothing (a la Tallulah) and pawning her off on the faithful as a masculine Holy Spirit.

Paul was the true father of the Christian Church, but he was not responsible for its later excesses, which pretty much contravene all the aforementioned eight apostolic virtues. To avoid latter-day one-sidedness, one need but return to Paul's letters and Emil Bock's interpretation of them. They are worthy of our attention.

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* Ed. note: McSorley’s hasn’t moved, and business must be brisk, for when I phoned them during lunch hour, the bartender who answered soon hollered through the din, “I can hardly hear you.” He had not heard the Bankhead story. According to the McSorley’s website - http://www.mcsorleysnewyork.com/ - McSorley’s was sued in 1969 to allow women to enter and opened its doors to women the next year – without restrooms for women.                                  –rls