WWJD?

Davidson Loehr

4 September 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This service followed the devastation of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, in which thousands are feared dead. At the same time, gasoline prices in Austin rose above $3.00 a gallon.

PRAYER:

We gather in this safe little room, in a world with so much death. It overwhelms us, all the death.

In the foreground are the thousands of deaths from the hurricane in New Orleans, and the survivors who are beginning to arrive in Austin for an indefinite stay. We read that the levees failed partly because over 40% of the funds requested for them were diverted to the war in Iraq.

The ironies abound. An illegal invasion of Iraq to liberate them from their oil, while a hurricane wipes out 20-25% of our own capacity for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has offered to send inexpensive oil to help with our oil shortage, shortly after one of America’s official Christian ministers urged our government to murder him – and the State Department is balking at accepting Chavez’s offer, for fear they may lose face.

So the games continue: the games of politics, one-up-manship, command and control, the illegal war. And the games and political intrigue can almost blind us to all the death.

But we are not blind, and our hearts hurt when we try to wrap them around so many dead brothers and sisters, in Louisiana or Iraq, so many crying, angry and grieving families, in New Orleans or Baghdad. At the moment of grief, the cause of death pales beside the awful reality of death, and of lives of survivors changing in unknown ways as they struggle on. And as we struggle on. My mind called on the words of an earlier preacher, John Donne:

No man is an island, entire of itself;

every [one] is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

as well as if a promontory were,

as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were;

any one’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in Humankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls:

It tolls for thee.

We are surrounded by death this morning, near and far, from causes we can not easily control. This morning, we do not need to solve these problems. We only need to be aware of them, to feel them, to let our hearts and minds reach out to feel that we are all connected, and the loss of so many of our connections diminishes our own souls, our dearest world. We need each other.

Let us be gentle with one another as we begin to grieve our way through the death, all the death. Amen.

SERMON: WWJD?

You’ve never paid so much for gasoline in your whole life, and the prices promise to keep rising, as we’ve lost 20-25% of our ability to produce oil because of the hurricane damage in New Orleans and at its many offshore drilling rigs – and now Saudi Arabia is admitting that it can’t increase its oil production. So some of the rants of people claiming that the world is running out of enough oil no longer seem like rants.

We’ve suffered the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, with a death toll in the thousands and perhaps tens of thousands before it is through. And one factor in the levees that failed in New Orleans was the fact that tens of millions of dollars had been diverted to fund the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the war we now know to be based on contrived lies manufactured to serve the imperialistic agenda of the neo-conservatives who have taken over America.

The religious and political right are wrong about almost everything they say: on religion, the economy, sanctioning torture, killing over 100,000 of our brothers and sisters in Iraq – everything. And the religious and political left seem either too blind or too gutless to say or do anything that matters, as they have endorsed the war, the transfer of America’s wealth to the greediest of our individuals and corporations. Right now, it seems the platform of the Democratic party can only be “Wouldn’t you rather be robbed by Democrats?” And I’m not sure people would.

Asking what Jesus would do seems ridiculous and redundant!

Instead, I’m reminded of words from the great American philosopher Lily Tomlin, when she said “No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up!”

Many Christians, including all the Christian ministers in town that I know – several of whom have preached here during our January Round Robin – are troubled and embarrassed by the way their religion has been hijacked, both by politicians and preachers.

And the voices from the religious right are never asking WWJD. They are so busy telling you who God hates or wants dead, that you realize this god of theirs really is a god of hate rather than love. And the reason they can’t ask WWJD is because you just can’t turn Jesus into a bigot, or a prophet of hate, or an ally of the rich against the poor.

In fact, when you hear people today asking WWJD, or putting WWJD bumper stickers on their cars, it’s almost always to criticize the direction in which our country is being led: “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” “Who Would Jesus Hate?” They’re rhetorical questions. Jesus wouldn’t bomb anybody. And the people he would be most likely to hate today are the Christians who have created such an ignorant, bigoted and hateful religion in his name.

Ironically, they are a persuasive argument for Unintelligent Design. For no intelligent designer would have designed people so willfully ignorant of science, sexuality or simple human decency. And no Christian deity would have permitted the most vocal Christians of today to drag Christianity into such foul gutters, in the name of Jesus.

This subject of Jesus is a little more poignant for me today because my friend Robert Funk, the biblical scholar and founder of the Jesus Seminar 20 years ago, is at home under hospice care this weekend, dying. (I learned Sunday night that Bob had died around 1 a.m. Sunday.) I’ve been a Fellow in the Seminar since 1991, have given a keynote address to the group at Bob’s request, and taught an adult Jesus Seminar program nearly twenty times in seven or eight states.

The Jesus Seminar is the only real group of scholars I know of that has cared to ask what Jesus really said or did, and what he might say about how we are living in America today.

Most in the religious and political left don’t seem to know enough about Jesus to ask what he said or would do. And those in the religious right don’t dare ask, because they know they and their ministers aren’t serving the teachings of Jesus at all, and he would hate what they’ve done in his name. So they just talk about their God, and who he would bomb, hate or want killed.

But Jesus was not a Christian, and he didn’t quote the Bible. He didn’t even think it was particularly authoritative. Jesus was a liberal Jew. He has become the most famous religious liberal of the first century.

But even though conservatives are people who worship dead liberals, you don’t hear them asking WWJD because Jesus was a liberal, and Jesus would hate the religion they’ve constructed around his name but not around his teachings.

The religion of Jesus has always been the enemy of the religions about Jesus: the supernatural religion of the baby and the cross; the religion of the gagged and crucified savior who is not allowed to speak. But when he was alive, Jesus the liberal Jew did speak. Here are some of the things he said:

Start with the list of beatitudes we read together earlier (Reading 640). These read like a translation by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar:

Blessed are you poor. The realm of God is yours.

Blessed are you who hunger today. You shall be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep today. You shall laugh.

Blessed are the humble. They will inherit the earth.

Blessed are the merciful. They will find mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers. They will be ranked as children of God.

Think of the direction America has been taking for the past quarter century. Think of our illegal invasion of Iraq, where we have killed over 100,000 people who look a lot more like Jesus than they look like most of us. Think of the fact that we have a higher percentage of our citizens without health care than any other developed nation besides Africa. Or that about 18,000 Americans die each year because of inadequate health care, or of a dozen other things from the news of the past years, and ask whose side you think Jesus would be on.

Jesus said a tree is known by its fruits. What kind of a tree do you think he would say America has become?

He said “What good does it do if you love those who love you? Even the worst of people do that. No, you should love even your enemies.” Is this Jesus on the side of the religious right, or the religious and secular left?

He told a rich lawyer to sell all he had and give it to the poor. What do you think Jesus would say about the economic priorities of the Christian right, when men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson preach that there should be no taxation of the rich, no welfare, no social security, no medicare, and no public education? And that’s not even counting Falwell’s proclamation that we should “hunt down terrorists and blow them away in the name of the Lord,” or Robertson’s that we should send assassins into Venezuala to murder their president Hugo Chavez because Chavez, unlike American preachers or politicians, has had the courage to stand up the bullying imperialism of the US.

And when a group of self-righteous people asked him how the quality of their faith was to be judged, he said it would be judged by what they had done to “the least of these” among the people around them.

We live in a time when official Christianity has become the mortal enemy of everything Jesus held to be sacred. We live in a time, and in a state, where the governor can go to the Cavalry Christian Academy in Ft. Worth to sign a bill prohibiting the marriage of homosexuals who love each other: a time when he and the leaders of that Christian academy can wrap these bigoted and hateful actions in the mantle of popular politics and religion. It is a time when those who make their living by pandering to the worst among us have hijacked the name of the man Jesus who lived and died serving the least among us.

Unlike the Christian moralists of today, Jesus ate and drank, was called a glutton and a drunkard. He associated with prostitutes and tax collectors – whom those who wrote the gospels seemed to feel belonged lumped together. He constantly disagreed with the priests of his time, as he would disagree with the priests of all times.

For these are the things that prophets do, and Jesus was a prophet. The religion of the prophets is as far above the religion of the priests as the religion of Jesus is above the religion about him.

No, he wasn’t in our camp either. He was not a feminist, though some liberals have tried to make him into one. He would have given women fewer rights to divorce than they already had, and would certainly have considered abortion to be murder. And even though feminists often make much of the fact that Martha and Mary – or at least Mary – were his students, they sat at his feet, not up with him as his male followers did. Jesus would not vote a Democratic ticket today – or a Republican ticket. He was a prophet, and they are a scary bunch.

What’s that mean? A prophet is someone trying to speak to the issues of their times from what you could call a God’s-eye view.

What’s that mean? It means from the highest moral and ethical perspective we know how to see and say, nothing less. It means speaking on behalf of ultimate values, to confront those who would enslave us in the name of greedy, bigoted, imperialistic or hateful values.

As the scholars of the Jesus Seminar and many Jewish scholars have said, Jesus belongs in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. He sounds like them. He feels like them. Centuries earlier, the Hebrew prophet Amos, a shepherd, came into town to rail at the politicians for selling the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes, and to rail against the priests for sanctioning it. Sound political? Prophets are political.

Jesus was political. He turned over the tables of the money-changers in the big temple in Jerusalem. These were the people converting the foreign currencies of those who came from out of the area, so they could buy animals for the sacrifices done in the temple. The temple made a lot of money from the poor in this way, and the priests profited, as did the politicians. That isn’t what God is about, Jesus said. It isn’t what God wants. Jesus was attacking the habits of exalting profits over people, and the superstitious religion used to keep people frightened and obedient.

In the first century Jerusalem, Jesus was the most famous liberal alive. Today’s religious conservatives, and the political conservatives they serve, are not being true to either the letter or the spirit of the teachings of Jesus. Not by a mile.

Now if you have a feel for the kind of message the man Jesus spent his short ministry preaching and teaching, where do you find that voice, and those allegiances, today?

United States of Shame

by Maureen Dowd

Published: September 3, 2005

1. “When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

“When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans – most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line [Friday] while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first – they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.”

(Maureen Dowd, “United States of Shame,” NY Times September 3, 2005.)

2. “I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it’s in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich.”

— Congressman Charles B. Rangel – 09/02/05

3. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed–those who are cold and not clothed.”

(President Dwight W. Eisenhower)

4. And speaking of the tragedy in New Orleans, another voice said, “…it is the POOR, the MOST VULNERABLE, who are the first to suffer. The wealthy built their homes on higher ground, had better information, more insurance, and more avenues of escape. So whether it is in facing the rising waters in Bangladesh or Malaysia or Lousiana and Missippi, it’s going to be “the least among us” who will suffer most immediately.

– Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun Magazine.

Most of these voices are liberal; that’s the state of social criticism today. But not all of them are. Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of World War II, a five-star general, and a two-term Republican president. It isn’t about liberal or conservative. It’s about decent or indecent, moral or immoral, honest or dishonest, compassionate or brutal.

And it really isn’t about Jesus, either. It is about wisdom, about being most fully humane and most fully human. And every religious prophet and sage worthy of the name has been trying to teach us how to do this since human history began.

You can find that quality of wisdom in many of those who came before Jesus: like Lao Tzu, Confucius, and the Buddha.

Lao Tzu wrote about the Tao, the Way:

When the Way is forgotten, duty and justice appear;

Then knowledge and wisdom are born, along with hypocrisy.

When a nation falls to chaos, then loyalty and patriotism are born.

Weapons of war are instruments of fear, and are abhorred by those who follow the Tao. The leader who follows the natural way does not abide them.

To rejoice in victory is to delight in killing; to delight in killing is to have no decent self.

Confucius had many sayings, including the saying that “To see what is right, and not to do it, is a lack of courage or of principle.” This is like Martin Luther King Jr.’s saying that we begin to die on the day when we fail to do what is right.

And the Buddha told a story about violence and war that is as good as any ever told.

One day a bandit came up to the Buddha, waving his sword. “I am the most powerful warrior in all the world,” he announced, “and I am going to prove it by killing you.”

“Ah well,” said the Buddha, “if you are so powerful, then you can grant me two final wishes.”

“Be quick about it,” snarled the bandit. “I’ve got places to go and people to kill!”

The Buddha pointed to a small sapling tree nearby, and said, “Cut off the smallest branch on that tree.”

“Hah!” yelled the bandit, and with one quick swipe of his sword it was done. “And what is your final wish, you old fool?”

The Buddha picked up the small branch, handed it to the bandit, and said, “Now put it back.”

It is said that the bandit achieved enlightenment then and there.

It isn’t just about what Jesus would do. It’s about what we should do. And we should try to follow the wisest and most morally demanding teachings we can find. They are our best hope for becoming most fully human, even though they demand a lot of us.

There is no evidence that Jesus ever heard of Lao Tzu, Confucius or the Buddha, who all lived about five hundred years earlier. But if he heard teachings and stories like these, I know what Jesus would do. He would say, “I’m with those guys!”

Then he would look at us – at you and at me – and he would say, “And you – who are you with?”