Giving Birth to the Sacred

31 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

OPENING:

It’s one of the two official religious holidays of the year, when many people wake up and must try to remember, again, how to find the church. These two holidays, Christmas and Easter, are almost secular festivals. Easter is more quickly identified with Easter Bunnies, colored eggs and chocolate rabbits than with any religious message. And like these candies, the super-hyped holidays cry out for sweetness and fluff, a Hallmark greeting card, nothing too heavy, just an Easter bon-bon before lunch.

Yet this is also a church, where we promise to seek that double-edged kind of truth which can both comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

So we gather to see how faithful we can be to our religious calling, and to the complex and ambiguous symbols of Easter. It is good to be together again, for it is a sacred time, this and a sacred place, this: a place for questions more profound than answers vulnerability more powerful than strength and a peace that can pass all understanding. It is a sacred time, this: let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING:

Let us offer an Easter prayer.

God of our hidden yearnings, find us where we have died and restore us. Heart of the universe, let us again feel your pulse within us. Let us feel connected again to others, to ourselves, to our own hearts and souls. Spirit of life, find our spirits and breathe life into them. Something in us, in our lives, in our world, died this year. Help us bring the miracle of resurrection here, now. Spirit of life, God of our inner souls, heart of the universe, hear our prayers, touch us in those places where life has left us, and let us live again. And let us be your eyes, your ears, and your hands to reach out to the sufferings of others. Let us be agents of compassion and grace in this often too-harsh and too-lonely world. We offer this prayer in the hope that even here, even now, the miracle of resurrection can find us. Amen.

SERMON:

All over this world today, about a billion Christians will be retelling the same story, of a son of God who was crucified and resurrected and who, if we believe in the story, can be our own personal savior.

Anyone living in the first century would have known a whole host of similar stories about gods who died and were resurrected. They knew the stories of Dionysus, born of a virgin and the great sky-god Zeus, whose followers gathered annually to eat flesh and drink blood symbolizing the flesh and blood of the dead god, and believed to impart his spirit to them. They knew the Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris, where Osiris was killed, resurrected much later, mated with Isis, who gave birth to the baby Horus. Everyone knew the image of Isis holding the baby Horus: it was the model for the Christian pictures of the virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. And the people knew the stories of other dead and resurrected gods, including Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis.

All these stories belonged to a mythic genre born into the ancient scientific worldview of 2000 years ago, where heaven was just up above the sky, hell was just below the earth, and the whole universe was a local affair. In such a small place, the gods could routinely sport with human females, and bodies might well come back to life or float up above the sky to live forever.

So all over the Mediterranean world of two thousand years ago people also gathered annually to retell these ancient stories.

But all over the world today – though in much smaller numbers – there are religious and biblical scholars who know that this was a myth. The myth had nothing to do with the man Jesus, who would undoubtedly have been appalled by a story that turned him into a savior figure and taught that the kingdom of God was a supernatural thing that he was supposed to bring to the faithful.

So there is this particular kind of tension involved in working with the ancient symbols and myths of Easter-type stories. This means that everyone who preaches on these myths and symbols today has to decide how to play them – how honest, how deep, how confrontive – as well as how and how much they will respect their audience. That’s the tension involved in preaching on popular religious holidays soaked in centuries of myth that’s popularly taken too shallow to be religious.

The normal spin put on these problems is to ignore the otherworldly story and convert words like “resurrection” into generic metaphors. If you are one of the seventeen people in Austin who read the religion pages of Saturday’s paper, you saw that’s what the clergy writing yesterday did. Bob Lively took “resurrection” to mean “love,” and everywhere he saw love flourish he rejoiced in the miracle of “resurrection.” And Bishop Greg Aymond took it a little deeper by equating “resurrection” with a renewal of hope. This is also what I did in this morning’s Centering prayer. So I don’t think it’s out of bounds. I think it’s a small part of what we need to do with these overloaded symbols.

But it isn’t enough. It reduces the message of religion to the blandness of a Hallmark greeting card. And it has that arrogant imperialism that the better Christian thinkers have been trying to grow away from – by claiming this common human experience for the Christian vocabulary.

Goodness: Hindus come to the same point of finding a reconnection where they had despaired of finding any connection, and don’t need the Christian notion of “resurrection” to deal with it. They understand it, within the organic integrity of Hinduism, as a realization that their atman – their individual soul – is indeed an integral part of Brahman – the universal creative and sustaining power.

Buddhists can come to the same kind of peace and understand it simply as “waking up” from the illusions that had until then made them more miserable. And naturalists can express the same experience just as adequately, though with perhaps less poetry. “I feel more connected to the world,” they might say. “I felt dislocated and disoriented, out of place, but now I feel myself to be a rightful part of the whole glorious world around me, and I feel less anxious, more full. Life is better now.” So I object both to the superficial pandering and the theological arrogance of pretending that “resurrection” is a necessary concept rather than merely a Christian concept.

There is another path through this symbolic swamp, just as ancient. It demands more of us, and takes off the traditional sugar coating in which popular holidays are dipped. But I think it takes us all more seriously and might do both us and the subject more proud. It is making the distinction between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. Scholars have been aware of this distinction for a long time, but they usually hide it in code words:

Some speak of the “Jesus of history” versus the “Christ of faith”; Others talk about “Jesus” versus “the Christ”; Or the “pre-Easter Jesus” and the “post-Easter Jesus” All of these sets of code words refer to the fact that the religions, the messages of the Jesus of history was wildly different from the message assigned to the “Jesus Christ” of traditional faith. But it’s rude to say this, so both teachers and preachers in religion have collaborated in a conspiracy of silence for many centuries to keep such damaging (or thought-provoking) distinctions away from your tender ears.

You know more about the religion about Jesus, which is just known as Christianity. It teaches about a supernatural Jesus who was somehow the son of God, who performed amazing miracles, was killed, then “raised up” from the dead, in the intriguing phrase of the New Testament writers. Most biblical scholars I know are clear that no first-century writer thought that meant the resuscitation of a corpse. The general take on it is that to say God “raised up” Jesus meant that what Jesus taught about the kingdom of God was correct.

I think it was too. It wasn’t original, but it was profound, both then and now. So this Easter, I want to bring Jesus’s message to you and then let you decide for yourselves what kind of an Easter you can be most proud to seek and to celebrate. In other words, my tactic here is to take the tensions inherent in the symbols of Easter and pass them on to you, so you can feel the tension, and you can decide what style and depth of “Easter” you want to celebrate. Don’t worry: suffering, I’ve heard, can be therapeutic.

The Religion of Jesus

The religion of Jesus was as different from the traditional teachings of Christianity as you can imagine. But to understand it, you have to understand the kind of world into which Jesus was born.

Ironically, first century Galilee had much in common with our own society today – more than it had in common with the America of fifty years ago. Three centuries of invasions, by the armies of Alexander the Great and later the Roman legions, had destroyed all the temple cult centers which had stabilized a fair variety of ethnic and religious communities. By the first century there was no shared center, no collective identity. Galilee was filled with people who were not “a people.”

The social or dietary laws of one group – Jews, for instance – were odd or unappealing to other groups nearby – Greeks, for instance. Even simple social intercourse was harder than it is for us today. A Greek family invites you over for the first century equivalent of a barbecue. Since you’re “company,” they spend extra money to buy some first-rate shellfish and pork to roast. But you’re Jews, and your dietary laws forbid you to eat shellfish or pork.

In dozens of ways, Galilee was a land of chaos, where the prospects of ever making “a people” out of this disparate mess were somewhere between slim and none.

In times this chaotic, there seem to be two kinds of solutions proposed, as they were proposed here. The first was the most extreme, proposed by John the Baptist. John thought the situation was too far gone for anyone to fix. Not even God could make it right, he thought. So the only answer was that God was going to destroy the whole world, annihilate everyone in it – well, except for those who believed as John the Baptist did, of course – and start over.

John had a growing and fervent crowd who would gather east of the Jordan to await the sign of the end of the world, when they were poised to act against the Romans.

If you know anything about the Romans, you know this is not s smart tactic. They were very efficient, the Romans. They wouldn’t spend sixty billion dollars to bomb a thousand square miles of mountains in the hope of killing seven or eight civilians. Instead, they just captured the head of the movement and killed him.

But the murder of John the Baptist was devastating to his followers. It means that John’s message, John’s understanding of what “the kingdom of God” was about, was wrong. Otherwise, God would not have let John die that way. That was the supernatural or superstitious thinking of the first century.

John the Baptist was Jesus’s mentor and teacher. Jesus was one of his followers. And not long after John’s murder, Jesus appears for the first time as a charismatic leader, with many of John’s former followers now following him.

But Jesus’s message was very, very different. John’s solution had been to wait for a supernatural agency to fix the world by destroying it. Jesus’s notion of the kingdom of God involved no action by a supernatural agency. Jesus taught that we must reclaim the fragmented world by fixing it.

What made all the lines of enmity between different groups were the rules of each group’s identity – rules that made them special only by making all others wrong. Jesus taught that people should disobey and subvert exclusive identities. He and his followers begged for their daily food – a bit of begging that became famous as part of “the Lord’s Prayer.” “Eat what is put before you,” he instructed his Jewish followers. If Greeks offer you shellfish or pork, eat it! Don’t let any self-definition, including your Jewish one, separate you from others.

Only one identity was to be allowed in Jesus’ notion of the kingdom of God: we were ordered to see one another merely as our brothers and sisters, as children of God. Again and again he frustrated his more superstitious followers, who still expected him to continue John’s teaching. No: the kingdom of God is not coming. You can’t point to it and say “here, there.” It is already here, within and among you. Or as he said in the Gospel of Thomas, “the kingdom of God is spread upon the earth and men don’t see it.” It’s all here – at least potentially – and we don’t or won’t have the eyes to see or the ears to hear it. How many times he told his disciples that they didn’t get it!

There is no magic here, and no supernatural agency. God has already done his part. The ball is in our court, and God is waiting for us to act to bring the kingdom of God to earth. And we do it simply by changing our hearts and our actions toward others. Period. Amen. End of sermon, end of religion. Jesus never promised heaven or threatened with hell. He didn’t talk of an afterlife, just of this one. And he would not let people get away with believing that they could wait passively for a supernatural deity to fix things.

The Denial of Jesus

All students of the Christian scriptures know this phrase refers to his apostle Peter, who seemed categorically incapable of understanding Jesus’ message. It was Peter, remember, to whom Jesus uttered his angriest phrase: Get the behind me, Satan!” Peter, like most (perhaps all) of Jesus’ disciples, wanted to hear him preach the end-of-the-world clean sweep message of John the Baptist, and did not want to hear that this exciting supernatural kingdom of their expectations was to be replaced by a very down-to-earth kind of world in which they simply had to become active agents of love rather than righteous prophets of a mass destruction which only they would survive.

Catholic scholar Thomas Sheehan has put it pointedly when he says that “Peter continued his denial of Jesus by creating Christianity.” Christianity began as a religion of reversion to the pagan formula for salvation by a supernatural deity who demanded of us only that we believe the story and follow the leaders. This was precisely the image Jesus had spent his ministry preaching against.

Paul, the Inventor of Christianity

Most of the New Testament scholars I know agree that the Christianity that came to be normative was given its shape and message by Paul. Paul never knew Jesus, seems not to have known his teachings – he never mentions any – of Jesus’ central notion of the kingdom of God. Instead, Paul taught, much as John the Baptist had, that the end of the world was coming and Jesus Christ would be the salvation of the faithful in a supernatural way.

I feel, with many others, that Paul replaced Jesus’ this-worldly religion of responsibility with a simplistic supernatural religion in the mold of pagan cults, especially Greek mystery cults – and most particularly the cult of Mediterranean Mithraism. And I feel that the real crucifixion of Jesus came not by the Romans, but by Peter, Paul and those who established what became normative Christianity.

Many others have seen this, and many others have felt betrayed and angry about it. One was the Greek novelist Kazantsakis. You may know either the book or movie of The Last Temptation of Christ by him. In this book he creates a wonderful, if angry, imaginary scene between Jesus and Paul. When Jesus meets the inventor of Christianity he says You! So you’re the one who has been making all these things up about me. They’re not true! And Paul’s response is basically Oh you’re Jesus? Nice to meet you, who cares? I gave people the religion they needed, and it doesn’t need you.

I know Pauline scholars who think Kazantsakis’ portrayal of Paul is about as accurate as it gets. Even Paul’s defenders (and he has many) usually acknowledge his megalomania.

There are even more extreme reactions against the betrayal of the religion of Jesus by the religion about Jesus. Perhaps the most famous, and my favorite, comes from Dostoevsky’s book The Brothers Karamazov, in the chapter entitled “The Grand Inquisitor.” He has Jesus come back during the Inquisition, and stages this amazing – and, again, angry – scene between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor, in which Jesus says nothing. I think Dostoevsky has nailed the religion of Jesus perfectly here, and think his anger at the religion invented about Jesus is pretty close to the mark too:

“You promised them heavenly bread, but how can that bread compete against earthly bread in dealing with the weak, ungrateful, permanently corrupt human species? And even if hundreds or thousands of men follow you for the sake of heavenly bread, what will happen to the millions who are too weak to forego their earthly bread? Or is it only the thousands of the strong and mighty who are dear to your heart, while the millions of others, the weak ones, who love you too, weak as they are, and who are as numerous as the grains of sand on the beach, are to serve as material for the strong and mighty? But we are concerned with the weak too! – by becoming their masters, we have accepted the burden of freedom that they were too frightened to face.” We shall tell them, though, that we are loyal to you and that we rule over them in your name. We shall be lying, because we do not intend to allow you to come back. “There are three forces, only three, on this earth that can overcome and capture once and for all the conscience of these feeble, undisciplined creatures, so as to give them happiness. These forces are miracle, mystery, and authority. But you rejected the first, the second, and the third of these forces and set up your rejection as an example to men.” You acted proudly and magnificently; indeed, you acted like God, but can you expect as much of men, of that weak, undisciplined, and wretched tribe, who are certainly no gods?” “tomorrow you will see obedient herds, at the first sign from me, hurry to heap coals on the fire beneath the stake at which I shall have you burned, because, by coming here, you have made our task more difficult. For if anyone has ever deserved our fire, it is you, and I shall have you burned tomorrow.”

Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” and Kazantsakis’ Paul are important to read and to teach, because they are among the educated voices that have not taken part in the conspiracy of silence. They present the contrast between the hard teachings of the man Jesus – the religion of Jesus – and the immeasurably easier teachings of Christianity – the religion about Jesus. And their anger doesn’t come from a lack of religious sensitivity, but more an abundance of it. They are angry because they believe, as I also do, that a lesser religion (Christianity) has displaced a greater religion (the religion of Jesus). It cannot be said too often or too bluntly: In direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus, the myth of the “Christ” led people back to the pagan and primitive belief in salvation through vicarious atonement by a supernatural savior-god who let people off the hook, demanding only unthinking obedience of them. Jesus’ teachings – to the extent that they were ever understood – were found to be too difficult. There must be a simpler and less painful route if Christianity were to be the universal faith visualized by such zealots as Paul – even if, in the process, it betrayed everything Jesus had considered sacred.

In Jesus’ time it was rude to demand so much of people – people who do seem to prefer miracle, mystery and authority to empowerment and responsibility. He was rude. His own disciples didn’t understand him, and Peter famously didn’t want to hear it. If people want miracle, mystery and authority, Jesus certainly didn’t offer them much.

He said God had done his part and it was their turn to act.

Christianity – the religion about Jesus – is finally too easy. It isn’t worthy of someone called a son of God. It isn’t worthy of those who would consider themselves people of God. It isn’t a spiritual path that any God worth the bother would raise up. It was the creation of Paul and other men, but not a prophet or sage of the first rank.

But there was such a first-rate prophet and sage involved in the story. He was a simple, marginal Jew from Galilee we’ve learned to call Jesus. He taught a narrow path, not a broad one, and preached a kingdom of God that we, and only we, could make present on earth as soon and as long as we find the courage to act like children of God, to see all others as children of God, and to act accordingly. It can happen any time, here and now. It can happen in Israel if both sides change the center of their faith. It can happen in Northern Ireland if both sides stop defining themselves as Protestants and Catholics, and define themselves instead only as brothers and sisters. It can happen in Austin, it can happen in your neighborhood, and in your life.

But only if you believe. No, you don’t have to believe anything supernatural, you don’t have to believe anything you can’t make sense of. You have to believe that the only identity of which grown-up religious people should be proud is the identity of seeing themselves and all others as brothers and sisters, and children of a God of love. Just that.

Today, we have translated the promise and the commandment into flowers, flowers for you to take home and reflect upon.* Fragile little things of beauty and vulnerability, as fragile as peace, as vulnerable as love. Take them home. The flowers are in your hands. So is the hope of your life, and the future of the world. Those words hardly seem adequate, though. Something more poetic and powerful is needed. Jesus called it the kingdom of God. That’s much better, and much closer.

The hope for the kingdom of God is in our hands, as it has always been. The dream has lain fallow for a long time. Many would say it has died. It is Easter, and the dream is in our hands. Let us think about resurrecting it.

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*This church celebrates an annual Flower Communion on Easter Sunday. People are asked to bring a flower, which they deposit in baskets. At the end of the service, the many baskets of flowers are brought to the front of the church, and people each come forward to take a flower from the baskets to take home with them.