Editor’s Note: Rev. Mark Rutledge intrepidly reports from a day in the future in which liberal church leaders finally step forward with their true, fact-based beliefs about the Resurrection — and pay the price.

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By Mark Rutledge

Dateline, Durham, NC

Five years after launching a major national campaign to combat widespread belief that the bodily resurrection of Jesus was a supernatural miracle, hundreds of once respected church leaders gathered to assess preliminary results. As one spokesperson said,

“Just like with the successful stop smoking campaign, we thought once people were exposed to the truth they would come around, but, boy, were we surprised!”

Ministers and scholars from a cross section of churches spoke of mass rebellion as they expounded to parishioners their best arguments that Jesus’s resurrection was not a literal or historical kind of event that could have been captured on a camcorder. Many worshippers accused their leaders of fraud when they exhorted,

“Ask what it means, not if it happened!”

One liberal Christian minister who suffered the consequences of telling the truth (and is now working as a grocery bagger at Kroger’s) said he was pelted by small plastic replicas of empty tombs thrown by angry church members.

But one scholar reported that after a wilderness religious re-education camp, three former strong literal believers changed their minds after seven days of enforced fasting and listening for eighteen hours a day to enlightened lectures on metaphorical narratives. He was given the highly coveted truth-telling award at the closing banquet where his success story was celebrated.

However, many other scholars said that they had been ousted from their positions in seminaries and forcibly relocated to philosophy or religious studies departments.

The reaction in churches was even more discouraging, according to most ministers. A conservative pastor who converted to the liberal cause and attempted to preach that Jesus’s resurrection is a profound religious symbol was shunned by his colleagues and stripped of his ordination credentials.

Liberal ministers did not fare much better even when they preached that Jesus really rose into our hearts, and still lives as a spiritual presence. But a few free-thinking church members did change their minds. One of them said,

“I became convinced that there is no way this guy Jesus could actually have come back to life”

But there were not enough members like that to sustain church budgets, resulting in mass closings of churches. Now, many formerly respected clergy are sleeping in homeless shelters. But in spite of such hardship most hold on to their progressive faith.

“It isn’t necessary to interpret the resurrection stories supernaturally,”

said one unemployed mainline pastor from his sleeping bag under a bridge.

Hundreds of small churches, now empty, have become museums containing relics of bygone days of spiritual nostalgia, while a number of larger ones have been successfully converted to sports bars.

Yet other churches, whose orthodox ministers did not join the campaign, have benefited from it and report huge growing memberships as true believers flock to hear sermons about the One who literally and factually rose from the dead in real space and time on Easter morning.

The assembly ended with pledges by the remaining ministers to redouble their efforts to educate their church members from clinging to illusions that a first century Jew was really killed and then was miraculously resuscitated. As they exited the assembly hall singing a revised version of “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” some could be heard saying,

“We will continue to tell the truth, even if it means going down with our ship”

Meanwhile, in other news, a Las Vegas housewife reported seeing Elvis at a gas station on the Strip, and hundreds of pilgrims are making their way to the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where a man is displaying a face of the Virgin Mary which suddenly appeared on the taco he was going to have for lunch.

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Bio: During the past 52 years, Mark Rutledge has been a United Church of Christ campus minister on five different university campuses in California, Iowa, Illinois, New Mexico and now in North Carolina at Duke University. He attended Oberlin College and the University of California at Berkeley and received an M.Div. from Pacific School of Religion and a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Northern Illinois University. He is a member of the Clergy Project, an Associate Member of the Jesus Seminar and was “Rick” in the Dennett-LaScola study of non-believing Preachers.

photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/24517884@N04/6965422840/”>marion joy</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>cc</a>