Messiahs, Christs, and Religious Liberals
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, December 18, 1994
Over the years I find myself increasingly indebted to the wisdom of my colleagues in the UU ministry when it comes to gaining insight into my own life and ministry. While recently scanning a publication called First Day's Record, which is a journal written by and for UU clergy, I came across a compelling little essay by Rev. Michael Schuler. Michael is the minister of one of the larger congregations in our UU Association in Madison, Wisconsin. His piece is called From Atheism to Appreciation. I'm going to read just a small portion of it as a way of opening up my thoughts for this morning. In recalling a part of his childhood Michael writes:
There was a good deal of routine joking and logic-chopping about God at the Schuler house, but the defining moment in our religious lives arrived each year on Christmas Eve, because that was the time when we all sat down in the living room, turned on the hi-fi system, and instead of cuing up a medley of sacred carols, we laughed at the antics of Vladimir and Estragon as they patiently waited for Godot--the paternal God-figure who never appears in Samuel Beckett's famous play.Then, towards the end of his piece Michael writes:(Rev. Schuler continues)
This was not a convention that I, as a twelve year old child, resented. On the contrary, listening to "Godot" at Christmas made me feel superior to those benighted youngsters who still believed in a cosmic Sugar Daddy. Nevertheless, it doesn't surprise me that as an adult my older brother gave his life to Christ and is now active in an Assembly of God congregation. Perhaps it isn't always wise to begin the process of demythologizing too early.
I am grateful to be in a movement where belief in God is an option, (but) not an expectation; a movement in which I can be a skeptic one day and a devotee the next. I fervently hope there will always be a place in our movement not only for the theist and the atheist, but (also) for those who cannot accept "theist" and "atheist" as mutually exclusive categories.
I don't believe I've ever met Michael Schuler--it's possible that we may have exchanged greetings at a General Assembly--but I felt an immediate kind of "soul kinship" with him as I read his remarks about being a skeptic one day and a devotee the next. When I'm asked these days if I believe in God my response reflects less and less what theological constructs I may have erected for myself, and more and more just what kind of day I'm having. (So if you don't like my answer to the question on one day, then ask me again a few days later!) I also join Michael as one of those who "cannot accept 'theist' and 'atheist' as mutually exclusive categories."
But the thing that really jumped out at me in this piece is Rev. Schuler's description of his family's "observing Christmas"--in a manner of speaking--by listening to a rendition of Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot; and then how many later years his older brother became a born again, Assembly of God-type, Christian. A quick side-bar comment here: I have to say that I've heard this story a few times before. We pride ourselves, and rightly so, on providing a haven for those who need an alternative to orthodoxy. But there are occasions and circumstances where, for some, orthodoxy provides an alternative to us. It doesn't happen all that often, but it does happen. The Unitarian Universalism, particularly of the '60s and '70s did, for some people, leave a spiritual vacuum in their lives for which they sought fulfillment in other religious communities. If we are really true to our basic tenet that each person is entitled to his/her own search for truth then we have to allow for the possibility that that search may take them far from religious liberalism.
Be that as it may, reading Michael's article helped me to frame up my own stance when it comes to celebrating Christmas. It's a stance in which I find myself standing between two decidedly contrasting metaphors, sometimes embracing one and sometimes embracing the other. One metaphor is that of the two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, in Samuel Beckett's theater-of-the-absurd play Waiting for Godot, as they sit conversing under a tree at the side of a road while awaiting the arrival of a non-existent third character called Godot--who represents the non-existent God who never arrives. The other metaphor, which we've already had lifted up for us in our music this morning, is that of the Messiah Christ Child, born in a stable, and who represents the God who indeed does arrive in human form. Both metaphors, interestingly enough, are set in equally humble surroundings--a couple of wandering tramps sitting at the side of a lonely road and a traveling peasant couple in a stable behind an inn. Each metaphor, for me, is equally captivating. In coming to terms with them I feel like something of an unfaithful lover, embracing one while casting a roving eye at the other which I will also, in turn, embrace. [Actually I've never been an unfaithful lover; I'm only imagining what it would feel like, you see.] I do it for the sake of truth, you must understand; for there is truth to be found in two-timing a couple of metaphors. It's a truth I hope I can demonstrate in taking up the theme of "Messiahs, Christs, and Religious Liberals".
Last Sunday we looked at some of the words and writings of the late Joseph Campbell as I feel they offer a way of appreciating the value and power of mythology when presented and related to as mythology. The difficulty, as we saw Campbell pointing out, that reasonably enlightened and rationally minded people have with mythology is when it is presented as fact or to substantiate a religious doctrine or dogma. Campbell's phrase for this difficulty is "being stuck in the metaphor", that is to say, being stopped at the literal or verbal level of what is being described in the myth, so that its actual truth is never recognized. Recalling that, and bearing it in mind, what I'm suggesting now is that both Samuel Beckett and the writers of the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke are offering us a couple of contrasting mythologies. Each myth or story, in its own way, contains truth; and while they are contrasting, they are also--like atheist and theist-- not necessarily mutually exclusive.
In Godot, Estragon and Vladimir sit beside a road feeling they cannot go on until the arrival of the mysterious Godot to show them the way. They encounter a few other characters who claim to have some knowledge of, or relationship with, Godot, but that is as far as they get. Each of the play's two acts ends with the same bit of dialogue:
Well, shall we go? .... Yes, let's go.But then the final stage direction at the close of each act says, "They do not move." They keep waiting, waiting for Godot to come and deliver them, and show them the way. The arrival never happens. There is a part of me that responds positively to that image or story. The humanist in me knows that it is futile--as these characters well demonstrate--to wait for what Schuler calls the "cosmic Sugar Daddy" who will take us by the hand and lead us on down the road and make the journey meaningful. For better or for worse--and sometimes it is for better and sometimes for worse-- it is we human beings who are responsible for where we go, and we have to get up and make our own way. That's the message I read behind the metaphor of Vladimir and Estragon; and that is the message I embrace.
Then there is another part of me that also responds to the myth or metaphor offered in the opening chapters of the gospels of Matthew and Luke about a God who indeed does show up. (Mark and John don't do Nativities, by the way, just Matthew and Luke. So, if you don't relate to the Nativity story at all just say you have a preference for the versions by Mark and John.) There is a part of me which, while not "theistic" in the traditional sense of the term, knows or senses that I am a part of something that is greater than myself, and senses a relationship with the Larger Life that I see and feel all around me. There's a part of me that--to use words invoked here nearly every Sunday--"rejoices in the common life that makes the many One." By common life I don't just mean human life, but all of life to which we are commonly related. And there is a part of me that very much needs to understand just what that relationship to the rest of life means. Granted, I can't just sit and wait for such understanding to suddenly up and arrive. I have to get up and get on down the road myself. But in so doing I also want to travel with a certain level of awareness and understanding and enlightenment about all that I see and feel as the journey unfolds and constantly changes. I want to travel with a sense of kinship with myself, with other fellow travelers, and with the entire landscape that I see. So, while I can embrace Beckett's metaphor, I also need to look beyond it. While the accounts, which are largely mythological, of the birth, life, ministry, and death of Jesus are not central now to my religious and spiritual identity they do provide me one way to look beyond.
What I see in this myth is not the arrival of that cosmic Sugar Daddy who will fix everything for us but instead some very crucial reminders as to what it means to be human. Consider, first of all, the myth or legend itself. It's about the birth of a baby that in our world today we would call a "child at risk". It's about a (probably) teenage mother with the biological father in doubt. An older man agrees to marry the mother-to-be and to assume parenthood. The two are called Mary and Joseph, names as common and nameless actually as John and Jane Doe. They are from the peasant class in a country under imperial domination. They are ordered, by those in authority, to make a rather long and dangerous journey right at about the time of the birth, and end up having to stay in a barn when they reach their destination. And in that homeless setting, with farm animals all around, the baby is born. Then, so the myth continues, this seemingly insignificant birth takes on cosmic dimensions. The night skies light up, celestial voices are heard by nearby sheep herders, the planets align themselves in such a way as to attract the attention of distant astrologers, and the reigning monarch is so spooked by it all that he order the baby killed and the parents have to leave the country for awhile in order to avoid such a fate. It's all pretty fantastic, and fanciful, and unbelievable. As Joseph Campbell reminded us, a good myth is all that: Unbelievable in any literal fashion; fantastic, meaning it has a strong element of fantasy; and fanciful, meaning it's for children--and then, on another level, instructive for adults as well.
The instructive part is in the myth's double-edged metaphor. The theology that later came to surround this story held that the baby-child, who was given the rather common Jewish name of Jesus, and who was born under the most precarious and desperate of circumstances is also "God"--the God who arrives for humanity. I don't actually know what a statement like that means in any literal sense since I don't have a literal concept of a specific Being or Entity called "God". But let me offer a few ways in which I find it instructive nonetheless.
The first is that the image of an obscure baby who is also proclaimed to be God--or a Child of God--is a human reminder that what is often overlooked, ignored, or unseen is also of the greatest importance. It's a reminder that even those, or perhaps it's especially those, who live in the most precarious of circumstances, also deserve their chance to realize the dignity and the divinity that they possess. To be sure, at some point--when the child is no longer a child--what he or she does with such a chance becomes a matter of personal responsibility and personal ownership. But if that divine spark--as Emerson called it--is not validated at an early age, it becomes harder and harder to realize as time goes on.
Another piece of insight I gain from myth of a baby in or through whom "God" arrives, is an affirmation of the power and potentiality of human life. I find it very intriguing that at the heart of Christian theology is the affirmation of a God who arrives not as a supernatural force or power, but rather as a quite simple human being who spends his life trying to teach other human beings how to be more human. Some Christians have caught on to that very well and others haven't, but that's neither here nor there in terms of the point I'm trying to make now. What the "Child/God" metaphor suggests to me, as a religious humanist, is that all I need when it comes to finding meaning and depth and power and relatedness in my life has already been given to me. I may not have opened up the entire package I've been given yet--in fact, I know I haven't--but it's all been given. The image of a child who embodies God is a way of saying that Godot actually does arrive; but the arrival is simply, and yet also profoundly, as another fellow traveler who reminds us that we already have all we need for the journey and that we can indeed get up and move on. The metaphor of a newborn child who embodies God also recalls yet another of Joseph Campbell's words in his dialogue with Bill Moyers:
All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds are within us.
Well, this mythological child is also called "Messiah", is also called "Christ". And what, if anything, do we make of that--we religious liberals? To place these terms within the actual historical context from which the myth itself emerged, the Messiah or Christ was someone, was the Godot if you will, for whom the Jewish people were waiting. He was to be the one who would restore the power and glory they had known during the reigns of David and Solomon. The writer of the Gospel of Matthew, who was writing primarily for a Jewish audience, goes to great lengths, in fact, to trace the genealogy of Joseph directly back to King David to show that he, Joseph, was indeed of the "house and lineage of David." That is what all those "begats" are about. The expectation, then, was of someone who would transform the outer world and thereby make life more liveable and meaningful again for those who were awaiting his coming. It didn't exactly work out that way. As the story/myth goes on the God-child grows up, teaches anyone who will listen about something he called the Kingdom of God which, he told his followers, is "within you". He eventually runs afoul of the religious and political powers that be and is executed is a pretty ghastly fashion. So much for the Messiah/Christ as the restorer of a monarchy.
Like "God", the terms "Messiah" and "Christ" are not ones I use that often except for when I occasionally get going on a sermon like this one where I'm playing around with metaphors and playing one off on another. But a Messiah/Christ is not someone who in one fell swoop reconfigures the world for us suddenly making everything all right. Instead it is a person, it could be any person--or it could even be an event--that alters our personal sense of reality. A "Christ event" occurs whenever we are able see ourselves in a new light, or enabled to see new possibilities and new dreams for ourselves, and when we are then subsequently enabled us to be an agent of transformation of the larger life within which we live, move, and have our being. A Messiah is an agent of transformation; someone who shows up and then shows us what has been there all along, often allowing us to see it for the first time. In the figure of Jesus, I see a model for such a Messiah/Christ, a model that has been replicated many times over.
So what do I take, in this season, from the play by Mr. Beckett and from the stories of the Gospel writers? I am grateful to Samuel Beckett for his reminding me of the futility of passively and powerlessly waiting for someone or something to come and deliver me. And I'm grateful for the mythology of the gospels, for the manner in which I read them allows me to see what I don't have to wait for since it's already here within the life I'm living and within the larger life I share.
My hope for all of us in this season is that love and light and truth and wisdom and joy will both come to and emanate from us; that we will receive and give them; that we will find transformation in our own lives and be bearers of renewal and bearers of joy for others. As we hear the stories that are told at this time of year, may we find in them our own story as well and see our story afresh. In both the faces of children and in the beauty of the natural world, may we each and all find a renewed sense of life for ourselves. May our sense of priority in this season be that we will honor life, beginning with the life we have each been given and moving out to the life that surges all around us. The happiest of holidays to each of you.
