The Honored and the Scorned

July 19, 2026

Excerpts from Thunder Perfect Mind and Romans 8:18-25

I invite you now as you're so moved to let yourself take some deeper breaths. Letting yourself arrive, tuning in to whatever message the spirit has for each of us today. Breathing in peace, breathing out worry. Breathing in hope, breathing out despair. Letting go of whatever is not ours to hold.

And I invite you to join me in a spirit of prayer. God of all time and of this time, God of many faces, present in all places. God who is our name for mystery, for love, for what binds us together. Make yourself known here today and let us hear whatever we need to. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

He was digging. That's how it all started. It turns out digging for fertilizer in the desert. Digger digging for what would bring him a good harvest. Digging in what ended up being something like digging for destiny. In 1945, on the bank of the Nile River, a local farmer digging deep discovered a jar, and in that jar were a whole bunch of yet uncovered early Christian texts. These writings are now known as the Nag Hammadi Library, and we will draw from some of these for this summer series, including this piece called The Thunder Perfect Mind, a 2,000-year-old poem surviving time and efforts to hide it forever, remaining in only a single Coptic manuscript.

If you are familiar with the Gospel of John, this text rhymes with it in a way. It's infused with "I ams." "I am the knowledge of my inquiry and the finding." Lots of "I ams," which is very resonant with John. "I am the one, I am peace, I am an alien and a citizen, I am the substance and the one who has no substance."

There is of course much debate about the reasons we have the Bible as we know it, but because history is generally written by the victors, by the winners, by the ones who silenced the dissenters, we continue to quite literally put the pieces back together, building on written accounts, fragments still being uncovered, and agendas now unhidden. Historians have come to understand that there were hundreds of texts circulating around the first 300 years before the empire got its grip on the whole thing and began to narrow it.

Now there are lots of reasons why certain texts were included—the reasons the ones we have were included were to preserve a power structure. It centers only male voices, it preserves the idea of male apostolic succession, and as I mentioned, it makes authority not something that's internal—you don't have internal wisdom—it's all about external. God is out there; everything is external. So those are just some of the reasons.

Renowned historian Elaine Pagels calls this time a "riot of pluralism," which meant myriad expressions of the Jesus way, with some groups emphasizing different aspects of the teachings going around. But most everyone was meeting in small groups and in house churches. A through line with all of them was loving and living as something counter to the world around them, but they did that in different ways. Formerly enslaved people shared meals with the rich and resourced, and as we read in Galatians, gender binaries were sought to be undone as much as they could have been in the first-century context. In the new power structure, there was a place at the table for all, even women and those previously labeled unclean, supporting family groups beyond just the father-led patriarchal paradigm.

As we have remembered together before, the empire's good news is that the elite ruled over the rest of the world with an iron fist. That was how they ruled. And in the Jesus way, there's a different kind of evangelion—that's the word "good news"—and that is that there's no hierarchy of human worth. And that right there, you know, is still radical.

As scholar Karen King notes of this text to the community in Rome that you heard from earlier, in the Roman Empire, Augustus declared himself a god and later his son Julius too. So for ordinary people to see themselves and to claim themselves as children of God, that was audacious and preposterous. And you know what? Even now too, it still feels a little that way to call ourselves children of God. She goes on, again referring to the time and the context of this letter: an alternative community to the destructive ways of life created by the larger culture. It was, and I believe still is, we are called to be that countercultural group together—that kingdom of heaven at hand, regardless of what they say. Everyone belongs.

But that idea just about undid the male bishops who met in the year 367 to really crack down on the messiness of this new movement. They did not like that, and Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria ordered all the unapproved texts to be eliminated, torn up, burned, banished from history. And clearly, there were some rogues who hid them in jars instead of following the directions. Some historians call that the most important event in the East in the 4th century—that moment when it starts to get narrowed down to only 27. He sent out this festal letter that circulated among all the Jesus groups informing them that things really needed to settle down and now it's time to get serious. Just these 27 were to be included. And not on his list were most of the non-narrative writings.

One of the things you'll notice about the poem that Beth read—it's really strange, right? It's really strange, very different than "boys gather around and let me tell you a story about a fisherman." This poem and many of the things that weren't included were kind of like higher-level teachings, just a little bit different.

So after having decades studying these, I now find myself pondering the story for all ages about this primitive human impulse to sort of hide or cover up, deny what doesn't fit, what we don't like or makes us uncomfortable. Or in the spiritual sense, to cover our shadow, to block out what challenges our way of thinking or our predisposed ideas of what should be. Instead of integrating what is hard, what is scorned, we try to deny it or hide it. And in my experience, that usually does not end well. 

Are you with me? 

So in a cosmic sense, here's what I'm wondering: if the Christian church universal did this too, hiding, trying to hide the shadow. Look at all the problems that have come out from trying to do that. When you narrowed it, and the councils of men moved it, cutting out part of the story, part of the text, part of the body, part of the thinking, I think they actually wounded some of our core stories, which then built a spiritual structure with faulty scaffolding, if that makes sense.

But now we get to be alive for the repair. And because since these discoveries in 1945, since that clay jar, the uncovering keeps happening—these old texts being found in new discoveries and old manuscripts continue to become unveiled. Many spiritual practitioners across a variety of traditions are calling this time a "time of truth," and this means the truth can no longer be hidden. And you'll notice whatever isn't real is falling away in many parts of our life.

We can't hide the shadow forever. Rather, the pain must be transmuted, the hurt needs to be composted, the truth must be told so we can be set free. Whether this is about the church or our nation-state or our lives, I think spiritually speaking, something new is being born. And I loved that we got this text from Paul about the whole creation groaning in labor pains. It's not yet into view, and we're watching the old way die, right? Falling away—it's not working anymore. True leaders don't dominate; they can try, but that's not a true leader. What we had wasn't really working, not for the earth and not for most of us. And now we're alive for this hard and important truth-telling.

And so, instead of removing plaques at many of our historical sites where tragedies occurred, how can we add to them? Integrate, heal, instead of continuing to deny the shadow. Instead of trying to eliminate or tear up or banish what we don't like, how do we honor it, integrate, balance, and be made whole? What does this look like for us individually, communally, nationally, globally to hold space for both the honored and the scorned? The parts of our history, our lives.

As Richard Rohr writes, "In its enthusiasm for the divine light, Christian theology has not always done justice to the divine darkness." Then we try to live up to the standards of a God that is purely light, and then we can't handle the dark within us and around us. And because we can't handle it, we suppress it. So the question for us now is: what needs to be welcomed in, uncovered, dug up, integrated, or known in our lives? How can we bring together our shadow and our light?

I think maybe part of what Paul is speaking to is the pain that comes from old ways of being falling away. And for us right now, that is about getting free and allowing the hard integration that is needed from the truth. Getting free can be painful in places; liberation takes work, but it's the most important work of our lives.

Jesus' teachings offer freedom from the illusions presented by the empire—illusions that some matter more than others, that we are separate, and that the earth is ours to use up. Here we remember something else: we are bound together, all of us, and all of creation bound to one another, to the trees, to hope, to goodness that we call God. We live with the knowledge of this goodness, that creation itself is set free from the old ideas that decay our minds, bodies, hearts, and souls.

Let us see that this season of human arrogance and of casting out what are shadows—the things that we believe do not belong—is over. The time of hiding what doesn't fit is done. The age of covering our shadows is coming to an end. Thanks be to God for that. 

Let us continue to dig, on our own and together, uncovering our true selves on our journey toward healing and wholeness—the most important treasure there is to discover. 

May it be so. Amen.