Grand Rapids, Michigan June 4, 2006

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth,

or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world,

even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.

For a thousand years in thy sight

are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

Thou carriest them away as with a flood;

they are as a sleep:

in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.

In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up;

in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.

For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.

Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength

they be fourscore years,

yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

So teach us to number our days,

that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Return, O LORD, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.

O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us,

and the years wherein we have seen evil.

Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.

And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us:

and establish thou the work of our hands upon us;

yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted [Jesus], saying, “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” [Jesus] said unto him, “What is written in the law? How readest thou?” And he answering said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.” And [Jesus] said unto him, “Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.”

Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

The world renowned curator of the Louvre has been murdered and left a bizarre set of religious symbols that point to a secret hidden in the works of Leonardo DaVinci. A Harvard Professor of Religious Symbology [that should be a clue right there; there is no such thing as a “Religious Symbologist”] is called in to investigate along with a French Police Cryptographer. They discover that the murdered curator, the Cryptographer’s grandfather, was the head of the Priory of Sion, an organization guarding the secret of the true nature and whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

A fanatical monk of the Catholic Opus Dei group has killed the leaders of the Priory of Sion because of the secret they guard. The secret is that Jesus was not divine but human, married Mary Magdalene and produced a child and a bloodline all the way down to the present day. The Cryptographer herself is in this bloodline. The early Christian Church, we are told in the fictional novel “The Da Vinci Code,” had silence the knowledge of this when Constantine called together the Church Councils in the 300’s and 400’s, giving the West the Christian orthodox doctrine of the divinity of Christ. So, the secret knowledge of who Jesus really was as a man and a husband, and the living heir to his bloodline in the Cryptographer, are what the Priory of Scion wants to protect and the evidence is Catholic Opus Dei wants to destroy. The novel is a race to see which group will triumph in this battle: the Church that wants to silence the truth or the secret, subversive society that wants to reveal the Christian Church’s conspiracy against the real truth.

All the clamor from religious quarters is really curious because it is a fictional work. I think the first truth that Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” book and movie has revealed is that the world has gone mad, simply mad.

Madness has gripped our world. Jim Frey writes a personable memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” which the public receives as truth but is in fact fiction, and Dan Brown writes “The DaVinci Code,” a fictional piece the public receives as truth. We can’t tell fact from fiction, and ignorance replaces education as the means to interpret the world. Conspiracy becomes the chief means to interpret what is spiritual. Mutilation and murder confirm faithfulness. Conjecture supplants historical knowledge. Fabrication substitutes for study. Magic trumps science. Secrecy is venerated, and even becomes a city’s slogan. Symbols become mere signs, and the most powerful religious institution on earth for millennia is crying the victim. Truth can be entrusted to a secreted, select few. Being somewhere close to the same vicinity as truth is synonymous with being true.

And religion is shepherding the world’s madness, which is a familiar role historically for religion. That’s what is true about Dan Brown’s book and Opie’s movie.

The author of the book, Dan Brown, has never presented himself either as a Biblical scholar or an expert on Christian history, but a fiction writer. The director of the movie, Ron Howard, has also never presented himself either as a Biblical scholar or an expert on Christian history, and when he made the movie Splash, in 1984 few if any spent energy arguing about its accuracy.

So, why all the protest? Why the fear?

There are inaccuracies and fictions in “The Da Vinci Code,” as befits a work of fiction. It’s just that the general public’s ignorance of religion and early Christianity easily leads to mistaking the fictions in the book for truths.

Jesus’ life was not “recorded by thousands of followers across the land” as stated in the book and movie, as he was a local peasant who had a handful of followers at best

There were not 80 Gospels considered for the New Testament as stated, but a number closer to 22

Jesus’ nature as human and divine was a centuries long conflict from his death until the 300’s and 400’s when the Church Councils decided how Jesus was to be considered by all Christians

Mary Magdalene was not pregnant at the crucifixion and no Biblical scholar holds to Jesus being married

The Roman Emperor Constantine did drive Christianity to consolidate its diverse beliefs and practices into a conforming doctrine in the middle 300’s, and by this produced the orthodoxy we today call Christianity. Christianity before him had argued for 150 years previous as to which books were to be considered authoritative.

But, the protest that the inaccuracies of fiction are being put forward as truths is just as inaccurate. So, why the fear that the public will take them as truths?

Is it because of the general public’s ignorance of religion in general and Christianity and Christian history in particular? Who has not been doing their job in terms of educating people about Christianity? Or, better still, who in Christianity benefits when people of faith are ignorant of their faith’s history, and who benefits by keeping people in general ignorant of the breadth of Western religious history?

Ignorance begets fear, and the frightening prospects of the Professor of Symbology’s remark at the end of the movie. He declares earnestly - I hear it ironically and tragically - that what is most important is what you believe is true. Horror of horrors, absolute subjectivism! The return on this modern madness is that the human capacity to believe is all there is to validity.

Believe Jesus is God and it must be so?

Believe human beings can know ultimate truth like a god, and it must be so?

Believe that all of existence is mirrored in the religious belief I hold, and it must be so?

Believe real truth is a secret, and this is so?

Believe that education, which always produces diverse interpretations and viewpoints and ideas and opinions, is an evil and this is so?

Believe that the Church holds all the truth that is, or is needed by all people everywhere, and it must be so?

Believe there is only one legitimate way to understand the past, and it must be so?

Believe the Bible isn’t a document written by human beings, and it must be so? Believe that the books included weren’t the product of biased, partial, incomplete, narrow human decisions, and it must be so?

Believe that Christianity is a special faith because it hasn’t changed it beliefs and doctrines and faith since Jesus, and it must be so?

It is arrogance and hubris that drives fear! That is the truth that “The Da Vinci Code” and its cottage industry reveal!

The capacity to believe doesn’t make valid whatever we hold as true, but holding it does yields the excesses of belief. Ignorance isn’t faithfulness, but holding that it is, is only the pathway to a distortion of truth.

There was an enormously diverse understanding of what it meant to be a follower of Christ, for three centuries after his death. This diversity was destroyed by the creation of orthodoxy and the demand of conformity to it, a demand punishable by death. There were at least 22 other “gospels” vying for inclusion in the New Testament when the Bible was sealed as authoritative in the latter 4^{th century and early 5th. The four Gospels chosen to represent Christianity were chosen for several reasons, but the primary one was that they reflected the nature of the views decided upon as orthodox and true belief. Other faiths were and are denied when one belief is held aloft as being God’s.}

But if you have never heard this before today, or had never considered it before reading a work of fiction, what truth does that reveal? The madness of our time is that ignorance is held as the healthiest form of belief, and education the enemy of faith!

The fear behind the protests of the book and the movie is the fear that human beings might come to know what a friend of mine calls, “the falsity of Truth.” (Conversation with Dr. Gregory Schmidt, 6/1/06) When you are educated about religion and its history, about Christianity and Judaism and about their development, you learn of the diversity of thought and belief that have always existed, and continue to exist. You know about the “falsity of Truth”: that there is only one true way to experience God, and either the Church possesses it or it is a secret that must be protected.

There is a battle being waged today but it’s not a conspiratorial battle between those who would silence the truth and those who protect its secret for the world. That’s the “falsity of Truth” at work. The battle is between civilization as we have been given it, and the barbaric nature of religious totalitarianism, disguising “the falsity of Truth.” The spiritual life is not about possessing “the Truth,” not about searching for “the Truth,” not about arriving at and holding “the Truth,” and not about conspiracies to hide “the real Truth.” The spiritual life is about relationships. It is not about holding “the Truth,” but, simply put, about holding your neighbor’s hand. The fear prevalent in organized religions today is that you shall know the “falsity of truth,” and shall be set free. The fear is the fear of freedom, and the essential equality in which all souls are made. The fear is you might experience God in your own direct and distinctive way, without the church even, or maybe outside of the church and the death grip of religion!

At our high school son’s track meet last Memorial Day weekend, in-between events, I was reading Garry Wills’ book, “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” a portion of which deals with the American public cemetery movement of the 19th century, which involved the Gettysburg National Cemetery. A man looking over my shoulder inquired of my response to the book, noting he couldn’t get into it. I responded enthusiastically to the revolution that occurred in America’s cemeteries and symbolized by Lincoln in his words. “Think of it,” I said. “Prior to our democratic sense of humanity, people were either buried on their private property or next to their particular church, dividing all of humanity. But in the 19th century we changed that, and started public cemeteries in the woods on the outskirts of cities, so that all souls of all different beliefs and, eventually today, all different kinds of diversities could be buried alongside of one another. A kind of Republic of God, God welcoming and receiving all, an idea of the equality of divine love we struggle unsuccessfully to build here. A wider view of divine mercy and our need to be free in this life to learn it and live it! A democracy of the Spirit, and a Republic of God! What a thoroughly progressive and wonderfully modern idea.”

But while he might grudgingly concede political equality in this life, he would never relent to a divine equality in the next: “Only those that believe rightly are received by God,” was his stern rebuke. “That is God’s truth given to man once and for all.”

I think that what is true in Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” is what this fictional work has revealed about human life in our particular time in history. Madness threatens to consume heart and mind. Last century’s madness was political totalitarianism, but this century’s is religious totalitarianism disguised in “the falsity of Truth” and the fear of the sufficiency of the individual’s own spiritual self-possession. But madness is not new. History reveals other times when religious madness gripped humanity. And we survived because someone publicly declared it, and a path beyond the madness was walked by a community of freedom and faith.

Jesus, whether a bachelor or a Dad, engaged the religious madness of his time. Like ours, it involved the lust to experience God. In his time, though, the thought was that experiencing God was something that could only be done in the afterlife.

In our time, though, the knowledge and experience of God has to be found in the brief span of fourscore years or so, and that gives a frenetic and desperate quality to our search, which makes moderns vulnerable to hoaxes and charmed by conspiracies or by busting them.

But our frenetic, desperate yearning, our lust for meaning in our life, which the ancients would call the longing for a knowledge and experience of God, is no less intense. And ours has a mean-spirited, corrupt, and malicious quality to it, which the arrogance yields. We think human beings can possess a pure, absolute, untarnished view divested of human egotism. We think falsely that human beings can possess God’s truth. Steal it from the Lord, or build towers into God’s heaven. And we will kill all those who don’t recognize “the Truth” as we’ve claim to have gotten it.

But the falsity of truth is, I think, the only antidote to our particular kind of madness. And it is summed up best by the words used by another to address the madness of his culture and his time. He lived and died to heal this human madness, and bequeathed it to all times, to all spiritual heirs with eyes to see it and ears to hear it, those who would not make him into a religion or any bloodline into an idol, but seek to walk together a holy path. It is a path unlike others that conceal to a greater extent, and others liberate to a lesser one. It is a holy path to be walked by human beings together:

And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, “Master, what shall I do to [live faithfully and fully in this] life?” He said unto him, “What is written in the [past]? How readest thou?” And he answering said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.” And he said unto him, “Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.”

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

AMEN.