I had the distinct pleasure of helping out with Vacation Bible School at the church in Garden City a couple of weeks ago, where they were also doing Pandamania, and it got me thinking a lot about panda bears. Of course, before I get started, I have to tell you my favorite panda joke. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m going to talk about, so just bear with me. (No pun intended.)
So a panda walks into a café and orders a sandwich. After finishing his lunch, he proceeds to fire a gun with abandon, recklessly injuring several patrons and frightening others. As he goes for the door, the manager stops him and asks him why he was so senseless to use this gun in his restaurant.
“I’m a panda,” says the panda. Then he tosses a poorly-punctuated wildlife manual at the manager. “Look it up,” he says.
The manager finds the proper page and reads it. It says, “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
Punctuation... very important. Well, pandas aren’t really like that. Anyway, I got to thinking, with all these pandas around, what could a panda bear possibly teach us about God and ourselves? I knew research was in order, so I went to that bastion of collected world knowledge known as Wikipedia. It told me that panda bears live in a very small area in China (the People’s Republic, that is) and that they are an endangered species. Right away I learned something: Life is Precious. That’s a good one. It also told me that, while pandas are carnivores, 99% of their diet is actually bamboo. Lesson? Eat Your Veggies.
If I was going to have a deeper religious experience, I needed to dig a bit more.
China, as you may know, is a huge country populated with over a thousand million people. There are, like here in the U.S., a variety of religious beliefs being practiced. Buddhism and Taoism are tied for number one, followed trailingly by Christianity and a bunch of others. In addition, China is home to a system of philosophical beliefs known as Confucianism. So it is possible our pandas, were they interested in more than their bamboo, could adhere to any one of these, or an odd combination of them all. What can we learn from these pandas? Let’s find out. And to do that, I have three pandas I want to introduce to you. Now, I will say that their beliefs are, indeed, different from ours, and none of them do specifically have a belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, but, like Gamaliel pointed out in our scripture today, we must keep an open ear for God’s message to the world, even if it means listening to something we don’t necessarily believe in or even think is just plain wrong. All right? Good. And now… the pandas!
Our first panda is a follower of Confucius, that venerable man of Chinese wisdom who many of us know through bad “Confucius says” jokes. You know. “Confucius says man who run in front of car get tired; man who run behind car get exhausted.” Confucius wrote and lived around 500 years before Christ. His teachings were not codified until 220 years before Christ, when the Han dynasty came to power in China. Confucianism is based on a code of ethics whose most important elements are Humanity, the idea of treating people like you want to be treated, and Righteousness, the idea of doing what is right even if it conflicts with your personal interests. Now those are some core values we Christians can get behind! In speaking about Humanity, Confucius says this, and I quote: “What one does not wish for oneself, one ought not to do to anyone else; what one recognises as desirable for oneself, one ought to be willing to grant to others.” Sound familiar? If not, let me read you this: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” That’s Matthew 7 verse 12, the words of Jesus. The Golden Rule.
Now the nature of Righteousness, according to Confucius, is to have one’s heart be in “kindly sympathy” with all things. It’s selfless living. Living to serve others is what Jesus was and is all about. And “blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Humanity and Righteousness can be summed up by one of the all-time greatest commandments, the first of which is to love the Lord your God, but the second is this: Love Your Neighbor. Treat your neighbor how you want to be treated. Be selfless with your neighbor. So, let me ask you, and you don’t have to answer aloud: How have you loved your neighbor today? Better still, how have you hated your neighbor? Who got under your skin? Who caused you grief? How did you disenfranchise or take from your neighbor? Confucius says treat your neighbor with love and respect, dignity and compassion. Jesus goes further and says this is one of the two most important commandments from God in heaven. Humanity. Righteousness. Love your neighbor.
Around the same time as Confucius was writing and living in China, Siddhartha Gautama was writing and living in northeastern India, which brings us to our second panda, a follower of The Buddha. So, I gotta ask you, how does a Buddhist order a pizza? He says, “Make me one with everything.” Gautama’s teachings started migrating to China sometime around 250 years before Christ, so around the same time as Confucianism was being organized into practice. The practicing Buddhist strives to achieve peace and harmony with this world and the next, becoming one with everything, and achieving what is called “enlightenment.” The way I think of it, it’s not “light” like a lamp, but more like “not heavy.” It can be interpreted either way. The foundation of Buddhist tradition and practice is embodied in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, representing the enlightened teacher; the Dharma, or the teachings on the path to enlightenment; and the Sangha, or the enlightenment-seeking community. And doesn’t that all sound familiar as well? As followers of Christ, we are following our own, different sort of light. And we are told (in Psalm 55:22) to “cast [our] cares on the Lord,” thereby “enlightening” ourselves, unburdening ourselves. Then there are the Three Jewels: our teacher is Jesus, the rabbi, the shepherd leading the way; our Dharma is the Scriptures, the truth, the word on paper; and our Sangha is the community of life, us, the followers of Christ. The way (Jesus), the truth (Scripture), and the life (us).
Did you catch that? WE are the life. This community of believers (not just here at MIPC, but all over the world). We are the manifestation of Christ’s teachings in the world. The words on the page aren’t enough. When the Spirit works, it works through us. We are, each one of us is, the life of the Church, capital C. If we are unmotivated, lazy, careless, then so is the Church. And what a dangerous thing for the Church to become: lifeless! How have you been part of the life of this community, this church? When have you felt lifeless? unmotivated? lazy? Have you ignored the Spirit trying to blow through you, work through you, move through you? Cast your cares on the Lord. Enlighten yourself. Become the life.
The last panda I want to introduce to you is a believer in the Tao, or the Way. Already this should ring some bells, right? I tried to find a joke about Taoism, but I couldn’t. Oh well. Taoism was founded in China sometime three to six hundred years before Christ, so sometime around Buddhism and Confucianism. Traditionally, Taoism is said to have been founded by the sage Lao Tzu, and his teachings are written as a series of densely-composed, difficult to interpret poems, bound together in the Tao Te Ching (or translated one way, “The Great Book of the Way and the Virtue”).
One of the major principles of Taoism is embodied in the symbol yin-yang. The yin-yang illustrates how opposites must exist to make a complete whole. The first part of Genesis, where God creates the universe, is full of opposites: light and darkness, sky and earth, land and water, male and female. Light and darkness also play a huge part in the opening of John’s gospel: “The light shines in darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” Yin is the black section, meaning literally “shady side,” and yang is the white section, meaning “sunny side.” One can’t exist without the other. Opposites color our world; otherwise, everything would be bland, uninteresting. God purposely created the world with opposites to give us harmony, variety, choice. Those who try to make our world one color, however they try, are going against the fundamentals of nature set in motion by God. Light and darkness. Yin and yang.
Taoists have Three Jewels, like the Buddhists, but they’re different. These Jewels, or Treasures, have to do with important virtues. They are roughly translated as follows: one, compassion or kindness; two, moderation or simplicity; and three, humility or modesty. How would you describe Christ? Compassionate? Humble? One who lived simply, moderately, free from the day-to-day distractions of human life? All of these virtues relate to the fundamental task of finding the Tao, or the Way. So I’ll say it again: the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus is the way, and the way is the way whether you’re here or in China. He told us he was the way! No need to look for it. The hard part, of course, is following the way. Walking the path. So how do we walk in the footsteps of Jesus? With kindness, leading a simple life, and acting with humility. Kindness, simplicity, humility.
How connected is the Tao to our beliefs? Listen to this excerpt and judge for yourselves. This is from the 25th chapter of the Tao Te Ching.
“There was something undefined and complete coming into existence before Heaven and Earth. / How still it was and formless, standing alone, and undergoing no change, reaching everywhere and in no danger of being exhausted! / It may be regarded as the Mother of all things.
“I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of the Tao (the Way). / Making an effort to give it a name / I call it the Great.”
The Great I Am, perhaps? Echoes of that first bit of Genesis again. You can really just feel that connection. The Tao also says “Where the Mystery is deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful.” The mystery of our faith IS deep: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. And how subtle and wonderful is the gate of that mystery: the promise of everlasting life! A gift of water that will never make us thirst again!
There is an excellent book put together by Richard Grossman called The Tao of Emerson. In it is the first English translation of the Tao Te Ching, done in 1891, printed opposite collected quotes from essays and writings by the great philosopher and sometime minister Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is safe to say that Emerson never read the Tao Te Ching since he died before its English publication, but clear to see on reading these writings side-by-side that these philosophies are, in fact, universal and applicable. The epigraph in and inspiration for Grossman’s book is a quote from Emerson’s essay Representative Men: “All philosophy, of East and West, has the same centripetence;” that is, the same tendency to move towards the essence of all things.
And that, I suppose, is the point. God’s message is for everyone. A great example is the Wise Men, the Magi who visited young Jesus. This is from a commentary on that passage: “The reader must identify with the pagan Magi rather than with Herod or Jerusalem’s religious elite, and hence are compelled to recognize God’s interest in the mission to the Gentiles.” [IVP New Testament Commentary on Mt 2:1-12, InterVarsity Press, accessed online at BibleGateway.com.] God wants his message to reach everyone, and who’s to say he didn’t plant seeds in other parts of the world than just the Middle East?
Let’s be honest. The world of the Bible did not exist in a vacuum; trade was a vital part of the Roman empire, and there was a busy trade route that lead from Roman-occupied Israel all the way through India and into China. Who’s to say how much Jesus and his associates knew of other religions and philosophies, and how much they may have drawn inspiration and connections from them? And where do you think those Wise Men came from, anyway? “We three kings of ORIENT are.” They felt a force bigger than themselves pulling at them, didn’t they? Perhaps they felt that righteousness, or saw the Way, or heard the call of oneness with God.
We clearly don’t exist in a vacuum today. There is so much crossover between different belief systems, sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart. Everyone is on a constant search for the truth. The thing is, after centuries of translation and retranslation and interpretation and misinterpretation, we have no real way of knowing what is truly God’s way. There are doubts. I tend to think, and you are more than welcome to disagree, that the truth, the very truth each of us seeks, lies somewhere in the middle; that our Lord is so omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent that he chose to present himself to different people at different times in different ways; that different cultures had very different ways of themselves interpreting their connection to God. There are certainly wrong interpretations out there, but it is not for us to judge. We are called to “walk humbly with our God.” And, if we walk that way, and others see us and want to walk that way, too, then I guess we did some good, and maybe we have come just that much closer to the truth ourselves. And that much closer to God.
But if we remain closed to the possibility that God is sending us a new message, and it’s something totally different than we expect or are willing to hear, where are we? Gamaliel had the right idea in our Acts reading. If something lasts, it must go with God in some way. If it fails, it was never meant to be. Like the Shaker movement. Or the Mets’ postseason chances.
The Bible is filled with people who didn’t listen to God’s message. Why do you think Moses had such a tough time? Or Isaiah? Or Jesus? If we are to grow in the message God is sending us, we need to keep our eyes and ears open to it. More importantly, we need to keep our hearts open to it.
Recently, at Pastor Twyla’s suggestion, I read a book by Christopher Moore called Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, which seeks to fill in the blanks about Jesus’ life, especially that huge gap between being born and starting his ministry. It is entirely fictional (except for the elements actually pulled from the Bible and historical sources) and fairly irreverent, certainly only for those with a generous sense of humor. A book like this, while intended to be funny, also engenders conversation; what did happen in those intervening years? What was the world like for the Jews and early Christians in the first century? Moore postulates that Jesus and his pal Biff (actually Levi; Biff is a nickname) traveled east to find the Wise Men during the years left out of the Bible. In that time, Jesus would have been exposed to the beliefs we’re discussing today. In fact, Lamb suggests that Jesus might have learned some of those basic tenets that make our religion what it is: about compassion, about humanity, about righteousness, about the Spirit, about oneness.
It’s hard to say whether or not there is any truth to what is written in Lamb. It is well-researched, but we must remember above all it is a work of fiction, meant to be used for entertainment and sparking discussion, nothing more. We may never know what truly happened in that time, or what young Jesus did in those years we’re missing. But we cannot overlook the basic similarities between the world religions, between our beliefs and those... of pandas.
You thought I forgot, didn’t you? This is supposed to be about pandas, right? Well, here we are. Three pandas later, what have we learned? To open our eyes and ears to God’s message in the world. That we have more in common with other religions and philosophies than we think. To be unafraid of the discourse involved in discerning God’s will in the world. God’s message is for everyone and can come from places we would never have expected. From Taoism, we learn the importance of compassion, simplicity, and humility, and the Way is the Way no matter where you are. From Buddhism, we learn that we are the life, the community, and that we must cast our burdens on the Lord to become enlightened. From Confucianism, we learn that one of the greatest commandments from our Lord is universal: love your neighbor, respect humanity, and live righteously, selflessly. And by sifting through all of the wisdom passed down through all generations in every place, maybe, just maybe, we can become that much closer with God.
Would you pray with me please? [Adapted from Ps 96:1-3]
O Lord, we sing to you a new song;
We sing to you, all the earth.
We sing your song and praise your name;
We proclaim your salvation day after day.
We declare your glory among the nations,
And your marvelous deeds among all peoples.
We sing a new song to you, Lord;
May it be pleasing to you. Amen.