First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Jesus NOT for Dummies

It has been a hundred and sixty five years since Theodore Parker preached his best remembered sermon – delivered, as many sermons intended to be provocative and controversial were in those days, at an ordination service. "The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity" he called it; a title likely to raise a few hackles in itself. Decades before the civil war, at a time that most people now think of as a period of Christian consensus in American history, Parker made the startling claim that what you think about Jesus is not the point of Christianity. In fact, he said, one has only to look at the chronicle of the Christian church to see that ideas about who Jesus was, and why he is significant, have changed again and again throughout the centuries. What is heresy in one generation is doctrine in another. And there is no special reason to suppose that what the powers that be in our own generation may conclude about such questions will be any more enduring than the views of their predecessors. Clearly, the person and role of Jesus of Nazareth is one of the transient elements of Christianity, said Theodore Parker. Indeed, it was he who first articulated the distinction between the religion of Jesus, and the religion about Jesus, suggesting that the former only is what is of enduring value to humanity, and that the first to protest against the latter would have been the carpenter sage from Galilee himself.

More than a century and a half later, Parker’s thesis remains a radical proposition, that would shock not only right wing and fundamentalist Christians, but many moderates and liberals as well. Nevertheless, it is an idea that is being revisited, this time by a group of religious thinkers who have the status and credentials within mainline Christianity at least to command an audience, and perhaps to be taken seriously. A week ago Saturday, I had the opportunity to hear retired Episcopal Bishop John Spong address a conference sponsored by the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus, in conjunction with their concert celebrating the support of religious communities that are welcoming and affirming to gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people. It is easy, by the way, if you are a member of the majority culture, to assume that any church congregation would be glad to have your affiliation, and all you have to do is to choose the one that suits you best. But it’s a different story when you want to live openly as gay or lesbian partners, have your commitment celebrated by your community, or embrace a call to ministry as a GLBT person. In that case, the road to spiritual acceptance and dignity can be long, and treacherous. Only those who have known this kind of exclusion can fully understand how much it means to be genuinely welcomed into membership in a congregational covenant. But their stories of rejection and pain are poignant reminders to everyone of why our commitment to acceptance matters, crucially, and can never be taken for granted.

Bishop Spong is a genial, engaging speaker, never more so than when he is telling stories about his own evolution as a person of faith. From a southern American childhood in which he never encountered the concept of homosexuality until his college years, to a series of revelatory experiences as a young cleric in New York, he traces the growth of his awareness of sexual orientation as a facet of human diversity. This awareness tracks with his emerging commitment to justice and dignity in the context of the Christian church, as well as his perception of the church’s very deplorable history in these matters. It is a story of personal transformation through witness, relationship, and serious theological reflection; how the Bishop came to understand God’s love, God’s creativity, and God’s will, in a way that profoundly challenges the traditional interpretations of Christian orthodoxy. At the same time, and through similar processes of study and reflection, Bishop Spong has also come to a new understanding of Jesus – at least, it is new to Bishop Spong. To those of us who cut our theological teeth on the likes of Parker, it is not so revolutionary. But context is everything. That an Episcopal bishop is following the trail that our 19^th century Unitarian forbears blazed – loudly and publicly following that trail – is worthy of our notice. Moreover, he is not alone. Other scholars, notably among them Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and other participants in the Jesus Seminar – all self-identified solidly orthodox Christians – are also publishing their discovery of a historically grounded, intellectually plausible, entirely human Jesus.

It is worth our while to understand the approach these thinkers are taking. If humanists and Unitarian Universalists would have our convictions and our communities taken seriously in the marketplace of ideas, we would be well advised to be up to date on what ideas are currently being exchanged. Whenever logical analysis, reasonable probability, historical context and comparative evidence are made the criteria of anyone’s religious thinking, we should be swift to applaud, and to engage them in encouraging conversation. If we are to criticize traditional interpretations of Christianity with any degree of credibility, we need to understand the historical realities and the academic arguments that support our skepticism, as well as the sometimes surprising extent to which that skepticism is shared within the believing community. The cardboard caricature of Jesus that was offered to many mainline Protestants in the mid 20^th century, especially to children, is one the more ephemeral products of Christianity’s transient dimension; it flattens and distorts the true radical nature and power of his story. Yet this is the image by which many people – many Americans, anyway – evaluate the significance of the Christian message, and thereby underestimate both its appeal, and its enduring relevance to the human condition. By contrast, the theology of substitutionary atonement has proven remarkably durable over the centuries; this notion continues to inform both fundamentalist and evangelical understandings of what religion is for, and how it operates. What Parker was challenging in his era, and what Spong and others are questioning in our own day, are these same concepts; the one, superficial and sentimental, the other when examined closely, morally incoherent.

A couple of principles of academic discipline form the starting point for getting beyond these popular, but unhelpful, conceptions. The first basic is the recognition that all the information we have about Jesus is retrospective; no one was taking notes at the sermon on the mount, or at any other point during his living ministry. The earliest material we have is in the evangelist Paul’s letters, and Paul never met Jesus in person. The Gospels are all composed at least forty years after the crucifixion, and perhaps longer, and it is highly unlikely that any of them were written by actual disciples. Rather, they are collections of remembered stories and material that had circulated for four decades in oral form, and most significantly, they are each written with an urgent agenda. It is as if I were to compose an account of the presidency of John Kennedy, based solely on what the people in this room could collectively remember without looking anything up, for the explicit purpose of endorsing Barak Obama’s presidential campaign. The result might be a very engaging document, but it would hardly be either historically accurate, or objective. The more we know about the purposes for which the several gospels were written, the more complex, multi-valent, and fascinating I find the history of the early Christian community.

The other essential insight for understanding Jesus is the recognition of how his message relates to the political, economic and cultural setting in which he lived. Most people today grasp the notion that Jesus was not, in his own lifetime, a Christian; that he was, rather, a believing Jew, whose intention was not to inaugurate a new religion, but rather to reform and re-energize the religion he knew best, which was the Jewish tradition of the first century. In his eyes, two major forces blocked the way to the kind of spiritual awakening that he sought for his community; they were the Roman occupation of Israel -- a military and political subjugation — combined with the traditions of priestly privilege and authority that characterized the temple cult of Judaism in his era. What Parker would call the religion of Jesus arose out of his challenge to these two interlocking oppressions; his fierce insistence on the personal immediacy of god’s kingdom, with its essential compassion, equality, humility and human wholeness. Yet for centuries, the religion about Jesus has downplayed the radical nature of his life and teachings, portraying him instead as an all but passive pawn in a cosmic bargain between divine righteousness and human sin. Part of what Spong, Crossan, Borg and others have come to realize is that in order to see the Jesus of history clearly, we have to first let go of these long time theological distortions. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement, which teaches that because of his special status as God’s son, Jesus was able to suffer and die on the cross in order to protect guilty human beings from the wrath of a just god, essentially serves to make anything that Jesus said or did during his lifetime largely irrelevant. His functional importance becomes his birth and his death; the interim in between matters only as it proves the two ends. This understanding of how Christianity operates, says Spong, "…makes an ogre out of god, a victim out of Jesus, and angry people who must be eternally grateful and thus hopelessly dependent, out of us." This challenge, too, is not a new idea; more than two centuries ago, the early Universalists were making exactly the same point. In his book, A Treatise on the Atonement, the father of American Universalism, Hosea Ballou, argued that the idea of Jesus being a required sacrifice to pacify god’s wrath was neither moral nor loving, and inspired not worship but revulsion in the thoughtful mind.

There are those who would argue that the atonement understanding of Jesus’s life and death is the essence of the Christian religion, and it is that perception which has moved Bishop Spong to entitle his latest book Jesus for the Non-Religious. His purpose is to reclaim Jesus as a teacher and an example of human possibility, rather than a cosmic savior. In his resistance to a culture of domination, corruption and injustice, Jesus represents the best of the human capacity for integrity, compassion, insight and prophetic witness. It is precisely this perception which Theodore Parker suggested was the permanent substance of Christianity, and the enduring challenge to human beings, and human societies, in every age. Such a Jesus requires no virgin birth, no miraculous healings and feedings, and no resurrection to validate his message. If what he claims that human life could be like – a kingdom not of arbitrary authority, superstition, violence, and fear; not the kingdom of Cesar and his collaborationist high priests, but instead a kingdom of kinship, mercy, and equality; of god’s loving kindness for everyone – if that claim speaks to our hearts across the centuries, it needs no special effects to embroider it. It stands simply, as the story says that the captive Jesus once stood before his accusers, allowing us the space to measure the lives we have spent and the world we have made against the vision it offers. And the crucifixion follows, inevitably, to remind us that in every age such visions are costly; to pose the question of what or who are the crucified of our own time.

Eighty years ago, in the pulpit of this congregation, the humanist preacher John Dietrich made another claim about the history of Jesus that startled the orthodox understanding. It appeared to him, Dietrich said, that the evidence suggested that there probably was actually such a person as Jesus, but in fact it didn’t really matter all that much whether there was or not. For, he said, the story of Jesus and what he stood for would still be woven into our culture, and engraved on the hearts of people, no matter what its historical accuracy. Our imaginations are informed by many narratives, Dietrich suggests, some of which we know very well are not based in history at all. The character of King Arthur, the myth of Prometheus; these are shaping archetypes, despite our clarity that they were not real people. What we have to learn from Jesus is not about the history of the first century, although the history of the first century can help us illuminate the tales of Jesus that have been passed down to us. But the truths of the human condition that are presented in his name are, as Parker maintained, either true or false on their own merits; their usefulness does not depend upon whether the person who is supposed to have said them actually did, or even actually lived.

Perhaps what is truly permanent in Christianity is not so much any one story, or teaching, or doctrine, as it is this particular tension between differing visions of what Jesus was about, and what his story means. This shouldn’t surprise us; the letters and gospels that we have today are the earliest fruits of that same conflict. They were created by authors who had a point to argue, an interpretation to defend, a theory of who Jesus was and what his cryptic teachings really intended to say; what it meant to believe in him, and who could legitimately be a member of the community gathered around his memory. In every generation, some thinkers are moved to re-examine the popular, received interpretations, and to explore for themselves the provocative stories and sayings attributed to this enigmatic character. Always there are those who find the miraculous images compelling, for whom the figure of a divine savior overshadows the human wisdom and tragedy, with a promise of rescue and reward. And always there are others, more like most of us – like Dietrich and Parker and Ballou and Jefferson before us; like Borg and Crossan and Bishop Spong in our own day – who resonate with the human challenges and historical ambiguities of the story; for whom Jesus is preeminently a person like ourselves, or a person we might be like. Always there is the religion about Jesus, with its doctrines and answers, its miraculous revelations and its sacrificial atonement, and always there is the religion of Jesus; cryptic, suggestive, challenging, summoning us by the authority of a kingdom that is both now and not yet, that may or may not be realizable in this world.

Of course, the whole Jesus resurrection deal is a more recent graft upon the ancient celebrations of Oeastar, the goddess of spring. Any holiday that is defined as the first Sunday after the first Monday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox is clearly more of an earth-cycle observance than it is an historical anniversary. But it has always seemed to me that this was not an arbitrary identification. For if the history of Jesus as an individual ends in betrayal, suffering, and tragedy, with a hasty burial in a borrowed tomb, yet that is not the end of the whole story. The memory of who Jesus was, and what he represented, is too strong; the violent authority which sought to crush him succeeds only for a moment, not in the long run. Scattered and frightened after the events in Jerusalem, his followers are slowly drawn back together by a shared vision that will not let them go; by the possibilities for authentic humanity that Jesus elucidated in his teaching and in his personality, but that did not die with him. It requires no supernatural notions – no angels, no vanished corpse -- to understand the resurrection experience of Jesus’s friends and disciples. For Theodore Parker was right, and John Dietrich too. The vision of holy community that he proposed did not depend upon him; it was not his authority that made it tantalizingly near. If he had never lived at all, the words ascribed to him would still touch a longing and a hope within the human spirit; would still make our hearts rejoice as though a promise given long ago might yet be gloriously fulfilled.

The work is ours to do, each one of us, just as he said. There are no pious shortcuts; sucking up to god won’t help. No cheap grace. The kingdom is here, he said; among us, within us. We only have to open our eyes, and act like it. We are already kin; we are already responsible for one another; we are already worthy, and loved – if only we knew. It is already here, and yet we build it, day by day, gift by gift, truth by truth, one right relationship by the next. His hands and feet, his lips and fertile mind and ardent heart are dust these thousands of years; so too the fingers that held the pens of those who told the stories about him in order that we might remember. Do not look for their return; do not wait for them to come back and do for us what is our work now. It is in our lives and in our days that the vision is to be given flesh; it is in our hope for the future we might make together that the spirit that was in Jesus lives. May we celebrate that spirit at this moment of the earth’s renewing, and in our remembering of all the great souls who have inspired our humanity, whose enduring legacy of hope we are.