© Hannah Wells
14 December 2003
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
PRAYER
Perhaps it is no accident that the birth of a prophet is celebrated at the coldest and darkest time of the year.
May we draw closer to the ones we love in ways that surprise us. In the midst of cold rain, the wind, and shorter days, may we find ourselves astonished by the beauty that surrounds us this season.
May we find the courage to give the gifts that only our hearts can afford. May we find ourselves making longer eye contact when we speak to each other, may our embraces linger longer, may we find more ways to speak our truth in love, and not judgement.
If you are lonely, may you find ways to reach out to what each of us needs: a closeness of human spirit that reminds us we are never alone. If you are not lonely, may you remember that you have a gift to give to so many of us who need it.
In the midst of the busy-ness, of all that goes into the creation of a sacred time, may we find a few precious moments when we see that so much of what we do are only parts of a whole. The whole is the gift of life, made up of presents we can find if we can learn to live in the present.
May we make the present a present to ourselves and each other – but not just this time of year, not only at Christmas time. May we see the opportunities each day of the year, to forgive, to see our failings as only parts of a whole – may we see that our failings are no match for our blessings, to all that we have.
May we all become aware of how truly lucky we are.
Amen.
SERMON:
The Difference Between Loving Jesus and Rejecting Christianity
I am no Jesus scholar, no Biblical scholar, and I am of a liberal, religious faith that gives Jesus a marginal status, at best. It wasn’t always like that, but nowadays it is rare to meet UUs who say Jesus plays a central role in their lives. Many of us are here because it is a haven from the broken record we have heard about Jesus in other Protestant faiths. Some of us had to grow up with a saccharin version of Jesus shoved down our throats until the mere mention of Jesus made us queasy. We didn’t buy it then, and we don’t buy it now.
Why bring up Jesus in a liberal church? Aren’t we over it? Didn’t we conclude we were better off without the man, didn’t we deposit him into a corner of irrelevance? Didn’t we establish that the early church manipulated the Bible to make Jesus a tool of propaganda for its own motives? Didn’t we call him a phony and free ourselves of the baloney? Aren’t there more modern things to think about, to learn about?
I’m not talking about Jesus today because it’s Christmastime, though I admit it seemed like a good excuse. Talking about Jesus only at Christmastime or Easter is like bringing up Martin Luther King once a year for Black History Month. Men such as these are relevant to our lives year round. And to be honest, I bring you this topic today with some trepidation. Many of you have discarded Jesus as useless to your spiritual life, and I don’t blame you. Jesus has been manipulated by some of the most hateful fundamentalist Christian enterprises. He is perhaps the most misrepresented figure in human history. Why burden our selves with the task of saving face for Jesus?
I bring you Jesus today because I have some good news. Jesus is no longer a Christian thing. Jesus is no more Christian than God is Unitarian Universalist. Many scholars today don’t see enough concrete historical evidence that heads in the direction of any kind of conclusive picture of Jesus. There is a lot more space given to alternative interpretations.
About the only thing most of the Jesus Seminar scholars agree on, including Davidson, is that someone lived about that time who taught things that are reflected in many of the sayings that are attributed to Jesus. As Davidson has put it, “it seems to make the most sense to say that these things were either taught by Jesus, or some other guy named Jesus.”
Since what can be proven about Jesus doesn’t go far beyond this, theories about Jesus run across the board. One scholar says the man is a composite of ancient myths who never really existed, while another suggests that Jesus survived the execution, escaped to Europe, and died of old age in Rome!
So this is fertile ground for amateurs, because we can accept almost any story about the man Jesus, and find some very well-educated Biblical scholars who will back us up. Maybe you don’t think it’s worthwhile to wonder about the life of Jesus – I tend to agree, insofar that what really interests me about Jesus isn’t the fine points of how or where he died. What I find worth my time to look into are the teachings attributed to him. These teachings remain, regardless of what truth we can decipher about the teacher. I want to convince you that it is worth considering some of the teachings that either came from “Jesus or some other guy named Jesus.”
Biblical scholarship has been influenced enough by a liberal perspective that it can start to feel at home in a liberal faith such as this one. In other words, studying what goodness and value the Bible has to offer has become an intellectual and spiritual pursuit worthy of our attention. There are no obligations to believe anything in order to consider Jesus. If you are interested in cracking open the New Testament, there is no longer a pretense that you accept Christ as your personal savior, or think Jesus is the son of God, or any of those dogmatics.
But if Jesus is not an historical puzzle to be solved, what is he then? What’s the point? Think of yourself as Alice and Jesus is the rabbit hole. You can only find out once you take the plunge. It’s an issue of personal choice, a matter of free will – thou may or thou may not choose to give Jesus a chance. The tradition of this church respects your decision either way. You can say, thanks, but no thanks.
But if you say yes, I want to know more, just be forewarned that you have to be willing to wade through a swamp in order to get to the valley where the good stuff grows. Or think of Jesus as a cosmic Santa Claus who has left behind many presents. Only some of them are truly gifts. There are many presents that once unwrapped and unpacked are not worth keeping around. A disappointing present is easy to spot and there are lots of them in the Gospels. Once we clear away the clutter, what’s left?
If you’re willing to consider possible meanings in the context of story, there’s a lot left. This is key to understand when we think about Jesus. Since next to nothing is grounded in historical fact, you have to be willing to engage the art of learning from parables.
The prevailing attitude towards the parables of Jesus in Biblical scholarship is more good news. In the past, scholars were content to conclude that the parables are allegorical, which means they are example stories for how one should behave in order to please God. But now scholars don’t think it’s that simple.
The current treatment of parables is cause for more celebration for the liberal church. Why? Because we’ve moved beyond trying to solve historical puzzles of Jesus – since so little can really be proven, we’ve moved on to the far worthier task of discovering the deeper meanings held in Jesus’ parables. These discoveries can have a profound impact on the way we live our lives, and that’s what we’re interested in. Spiritually speaking, we are interested in the knowledge that helps us to live our lives with as much honesty and integrity as possible. In the midst of our freedom of belief, the liberal church seeks the highest of moral standards, and of all people, Jesus can be one of the spiritual teachers who helps us figure out what those moral standards should be. And it has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with Christianity.
Biblical scholars today think of parables as far more complex than just stories of symbolism. Parables are actually designed to challenge our most basic assumptions about what we think we know is true about life. Parables put our most dearly prized notions of justice on its head. What we thought we knew for sure, Jesus says think again. If Jesus is saying that the very foundation we live our lives on is one that is false and mistaken, I think that’s a challenge we should take on. How often do we really question our most basic assumptions about life?
Take the Good Samaritan. During the time this parable was told, Jews hated Samaritans. There was no such thing as a good Samaritan because they were considered to be untouchable. Yet in this parable it is a Samaritan who saves a beaten up Jew on the side of the road. What’s being turned on its head here are our ideas about where help can come from. We want help to come from our own people, the people we think are good and we think we can trust. But this parable says no – we don’t find what we most need in the safety of familiarity. We will receive our most precious gifts from the places we least expect, from sources we have long dismissed as unworthy of us. To find the divine we have to venture beyond our comfort zones, we have to be open to the unknown, to be open to what we don’t understand. This takes courage and a radically open heart. And again it is a matter of free will – we have to decide for ourselves whether or not to be open to foreign possibilities, to possibilities that frighten us.
A lot of us think we have right and wrong figured out. We are secure in our beliefs about justice. But again, Jesus offers teachings that can turn these beliefs inside out. One challenge that is laced throughout his parables is the notion of radical forgiveness. The notions of ‘loving your enemies’ and ‘turning the other cheek’ don’t appeal to most modern sensibilities of justice. I don’t think most of us seek revenge when opportunities present themselves, but nor do we pass up opportunities to prove that we are “right,” to say, “I told you so.”
Personal conflicts are a part of life – they come up with the people we work with, they especially come up with the people we love, with our daughters and sons, with our siblings, with our mates. And here, Jesus is worth bringing up at Christmastime. Did you know that there are more homicides on Christmas Day than any other day of the year? The big family holidays can become a hornets’ nest if people are holding tightly to resentments, to anger. Sometimes Christmas is the last straw – people may not get killed, but probably all of us can remember a Christmas ruined by a big family fight.
The parable that probably most exemplifies the notion of radical forgiveness is of course the Prodigal Son. The father in that story didn’t have to think for a split second whether or not he would forgive his son. It was a given. Let’s look at that word, ‘forgiveness.’ It’s interesting that at its root is the word ‘give.’
Last week you heard Davidson talk about what is most irritating about Christmas – all the phony baloney, the glitter, the aggressive merchant marketing that bombards us. Despite this, Christmas is still about giving presents. Underlying it all is the currency of money that affords the material items, the wrapping paper, the decorations. To think of Christmas as a largely commercial affair is indeed a cold feeling. When we give presents to our family members out of a sense of obligation it is a cold currency that underlies it all.
The other cold currency that can be present at Christmastime has nothing to do with material items. It is the resentments and anger we harbor toward family members that we have a bone to pick with. Perhaps we are disappointed by someone or unhappy with the decisions they make in their lives. Perhaps we feel wronged or hurt and we desire justice to be done to put the matter to rest. We can hold a sense of justice in very high regard in our hearts. We think it’s what we want – to prove someone is wrong, to show we are right. But this is a cold currency we exchange at Christmastime when we allow self-righteousness to creep into the festivities.
I love Christmas and believe that we can rise above all that. We can rise above it when we exchange another kind of gift – the gifts of compassion and forgiveness. It is a totally different kind of currency which transcends all that is material and insincere about Christmas. It is a warm currency that all of us need and hope for. Because there is no relief like that of being forgiven for our inevitable human failings. And there is no release like finally forgiving someone. It is this release from our anger and resentment towards another person that is actually the greatest gift we can give ourselves. These are the gifts we need to give and receive at Christmas. Because the things we remember aren’t things.
The best Christmases are the ones where animosity is put to rest in a family. Where the gift of a higher consciousness finally breaks into our hearts and we realize that we don’t have to hurt anymore – we don’t have to hurt or be hurt. To let go of our self-righteous sense of justice can be very difficult – it takes radical forgiveness.
I think we can learn about this radical forgiveness from the parables attributed to Jesus. You may not buy this version of Jesus I’m trying to sell to you this morning, either. You may not buy that the Kingdom of God is within you and among you, and that you can choose to make the Kingdom of God a part of your Christmas. Davidson is fond of saying that the bottom line of Jesus is that we bring about the Kingdom of God when we treat each other like children of God, end of story, end of religion. But how do we know we are doing this? To treat each other like children of God is to give this compassion and forgiveness to each other, like the father did in the Prodigal Son. We must offer this compassion and forgiveness to ourselves as well. It is the only means of being able to give it to the people we love. These are acts, not ideas.
There is another reason to buy this version of Jesus besides what it can do for your Christmas. There is a very ugly and destructive version of Jesus that has been on sale for centuries, the Jesus of so many of the Fundamentalist Christians. The Jesus of brittle piety and harsh judgement – the Jesus who threatens damnation and suffering at the hands of God. I don’t buy that version of Jesus, and I think it’s hard to respect the people who do. But I think it’s important for religious liberals to take it a step further.
It’s not enough to say those people are out of their minds, or crippled by their ignorance and fear. The Jesus I love begs me to take a stand. We UUs are often accused of basing our beliefs on what we are not. We are not dogmatic, we are not exclusive, we are not narrow-minded. But what ARE we? And sometimes, we childishly resort to Christian-bashing to reassure ourselves of what we are not. But this finger-pointing doesn’t amount to much more than self-righteousness. It doesn’t say anything about us or what we really believe.
To be confident of and intimate with the version of Jesus we know to be loving and compassionate is a much more powerful tool to disarm the hateful version of Jesus that so many Christian fundamentalists believe in. In other words, we denounce and reject this type of hateful Christianity by loving the Jesus who taught radical love and compassion. It is a much more solid argument to stand on than simply saying many fundamentalist Christians are wrong and stupid. Rejecting Christianity becomes irrelevant when we find a version of Jesus worthy of our reverence and love. Then we can say, no, that’s not what the Bible says – THIS is what it says. THIS is the correct interpretation of the Gospel that is worthy of Jesus – these teachings are liberating, not intolerant. It is much firmer ground to stand on than any kind of self-righteous superiority on our part.
As you can tell by now, I’m a big fan of Jesus. I never gave him a thought growing up UU – if anything, I was quite suspicious of the man and believed what I heard from other UUs, that he was a waste of time. It wasn’t until Seminary, when I worked intimately with the homeless, that I finally understood what Jesus was really about. I embodied his teaching of compassion when I learned to massage homeless people in San Francisco. When I laid my hands on the people who are so marginalized in our society, I finally understood where the holy lies – it’s when compassion becomes an act and not just an idea.
My prayer for us all this Christmas is that we see the opportunities to put compassion and forgiveness into action. That we take advantage of our free will and trust that the unknown has something to teach us and contains the best gifts of the season. In the end, Jesus actually has very little to do with it. In the end, Jesus is only the messenger. And rather than what some of the Christian Fundamentalists do, who eat the menu, we can choose to eat the meal. It is a beautiful gift we can to choose to open for ourselves. It’s a beautiful gift we can choose to share with others.
Don’t eat the menu this Christmas – eat the meal. It’s food for the spirit, nourishing at Christmas and every other day of the year.
