News from the Kingdom of God. David Breeden

      News from the Kingdom of God

      Medtiations on The Gospel of Thomas

      Copyright © 2011 David Breeden. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Wipf & Stock

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      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

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      ISBN 13: 978-1-61097-779-1

      EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-956-3

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Part of the introduction first appeared as “A Theology of Creativity: Theo/a/poetics” in Religious Humanism, Vol. xli n. 2, Spring 2011.

      The translation included in the present book was constructed by the use of the original Coptic, consulting Michael Grondin’s Coptic/English interlinear translation, revised November 22, 2002, Copyright 1997, 2002 by Michael W. Grondin. All rights reserved. http://gospel thomas.net/xtransl.htm.

      New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author.

      For my children, as much as I can speak.

      It is not God that is worshipped but the authority that claims to speak in his name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity.

      —Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

      Foreword

      When David Breeden invited me to write a foreword to his meditations on the Gospel of Thomas, I was tempted to write, simply, read.

      If you lean toward first thought, best thought, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs for the time being and jump in now. They’ll still be here if, when you get to the end, you choose to return to this beginning.

      David’s translation and meditations speak for themselves, and they speak in a lively, direct tone appropriate to a peasant poet deeply attentive to the world that embraced him right where he was, painfully aware of its problems, convinced of its possibilities, passionate about its promise. David takes up this most gnostic gospel in part because the Church didn’t. Since its rediscovery, the text has been an important source for interpreters hoping to find in it words of Jesus uncontained by ecclesial structures and institutions that evolved over centuries to contain them as well as proclaim them. Here, they come free of the life meticulously woven in the process of weaving a Church. Here, readers encounter a poet in his poems—or, more properly, two poets engaged in the dance translation dances at its best. The Jesus of Thomas is here, but so is the translator, a poet in this case who thinks enough of another’s poems to dance them again, to invite readers to dance them again and again.

      Ernesto Cardenal, another contemporary poet who has spent a great deal of time dancing about the architecture of the words at the heart of the good news Jesus was said to proclaim, has translated the words at the beginning of that good news simply and directly: revolution now. What follows then (and David picks this up in his citation of the Epistle of James) is being about what revolution is about, always a matter of debate. As Mark reported them, as I understand them, the words were, God’s reign is now, so close you can touch it; now turn and act as though you believed it.

      Yes, a kind of dance: to turn, turn, will be our delight, till by turning, turning we come round right.

      Practice makes perfect, they say, and that folk wisdom is a good thought with which to begin. Jesus, particularly the Jesus of David Breeden’s Gospel of Thomas, is a poet who, like countless rabbis and prophets before and after, believes himself part of a community that is deeded, not creeded: there is no creed but deed. By their fruits you will know them, this poet is reputed to have said in speaking of prophets true and false, and there is a bountiful harvest here.

      Knowing it well, I think, will drive us out of our minds (a surprising outcome for a gnostic gospel, but this is good news that thrives on paradox), where, embodied, we can be about being the beloved community, a body that does justice, loves kindness, walks humbly, and knows nothing more divine.

      Steven Schroeder

      Chicago, Illinois

      Acknowledgments

      Thanks to Steven Schroeder for his foreword to this book and for his suggestions on rough drafts. Thanks to the Twitter community, where many of these sayings first and cryptically appeared. Responses from interested strangers can be illuminating. Also thanks to my congregation, who has been not only kind enough to pay me as I wrote this book but also patiently listened in sermons and classes to my ruminations as these sayings percolated in my mind. Lastly, thanks to my wife, always patient with my projects.

      Introduction

      A New Way of Seeing

      In a letter dated Sunday, 21 December 1817 to “my dear brothers,” the British poet John Keats outlined his concept of how to be a great poet, which he called “Negative Capability.” By this he meant a poet “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” For Keats the great example was Shakespeare. In a great poet, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

      For me, this idea encompasses both the writing of poetry and the way of living a consciously spiritual life.

      Uncertainties. Mysteries. Doubts.

      Irritable reaching. Fact. Reason.

      Both Keats and the Buddha thought these diminish our spirits. Jesus thought so too, at least the Jesus portrayed in the Gospel of Thomas, who is a poet, a poet teaching what Keats came to call Negative Capability.

      After all, despite all efforts to cage them, the words of Jesus have never been caught. Not in the Second Century when many of the Christian scriptures were written; not in the Twelfth Century, high-water mark of Roman Catholic Europe; not at the height of Western Imperialism in the Twentieth Century; not now. All claims to a “church universal” have proven to be so much provincial bragging. The words of Jesus have never been caged.

      Bookstore shelves have filled with titles containing the word “new” in front of the word “Christianity.” Clearly, I am not the only “tradition Christian” who has felt a lack in Christianity. Sometime in its two thousand year journey, Christianity became more interested in the story of Jesus rising from the dead—the otherworldly magic—than the hard work of living in this world. Christianity became a set of propositions to believe in—no matter how difficult that belief became—rather than a way to live a life of peace, care, and relationship. Yet, when we turn to the words of the Gospels, the red letters of the words of Jesus, isn’t it peace, care, and relationship—to the sacred and to each other—that we read about? Somehow, Christianity lost its way.

      Yet, a framework survives: metanoia, kenosis, and perichoresis—changing the mind; emptying the self; joining in the dance of the sacred. That is the process Keats imagined; it is the process The Gospel of Thomas invites us to. There is no belief; only practice.

      The Text

      Scholars