The Jesus Captivity
Sermon by Steve Edington
March 20, 2005
Rev. Jim Wallis is a man on a mission. He's an evangelical Christian preacher, and his mission is to save Jesus. I happen to be with him all the way, and would be delighted to share this pulpit with him anytime he might want to show up. Before you go thinking I've had some sort of brain transplant over this past week just stay with me for a few minutes. This is really me up here; I have not been captured, re-programmed, and shipped back to you in an altered state. I know the case could be made that I go around in a permanently altered state, but let's leave that be.
Back to the Rev. Mr. Wallis; in addition to being a preacher he's also a committed social justice advocate and activist who sees in the person, the ministry, and the teachings of Jesus his ultimate mentor and motivator. What has his dander up is that his mentor - in his mind's eye - has been co-opted by the political and cultural Right in this country in the service of an agenda that it largely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus themselves. He does not, however, let the political and cultural Left off the hook. The error on that end of the spectrum, as Mr. Wallis sees it, is the willful ignoring of the role that religion - Christian or otherwise - can, does, and will play in the shaping of public policy in this country.
This all comes out in a book he's recently had published, in the wake of the last Presidential election, the latest of several he's written on the subject, called God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. The jacket commentary gives a pretty good idea as to where he's going with it: "While the Right in America has hijacked the language of faith, the Left hasn't done much better, largely ignoring faith and continually separating moral discourse from public policy."
I'm not going any further with Mr. Wallis' book today. There is some good sermon material in it that I'll probably be using from time to time in the weeks and months ahead. The sections titled, "When Did Jesus Become Pro-War?" "When Did Jesus Become Pro-Rich?" and "When Did Jesus Become a Selective Moralist?" look especially interesting.
Wallis, as you can see, has a lot to say about Jesus, as most evangelical Christians do. It is what he says about Jesus that distinguishes him from many of those on the religious and political right. In an appearance on The Jon Stewart Show, as the audience gave him a wary eye when he was introduced as a Christian evangelical, he got a solid round of applause when he said, "Well, Jon, I hardly think that Jesus' first two priorities would have been a capital gains tax cut and the occupation of Iraq." In a more measured vein, in an interview given following the release of this book Wallis noted, "Is God somehow an American God who has called America to lead a war on terrorism and even the President to do that? Or, as Jesus said, don't just see the log in your adversary's eye, but also the one in your eye. Just to see evil in the faces of September 11 is one thing. Anybody who can't see evil in the face of September 11 is suffering from some kind of post-modern relativism. But to say they are evil and we are good is bad theology. It is simply bad theology and it leads to bad foreign policy."
To these words I would add a hearty "Amen." It is ultimately bad theology, the bad theology that Mr. Wallis identifies, that is at base behind the very misguided foreign policy I believe we as a nation are currently pursuing.
Rev. Wallis' issue with the political and cultural Left in this country, on the other hand. is its general unwillingness to challenge such a policy - as well as various domestic policies - on theological and religious grounds. It is this kind of unwillingness, in his opinion, that has allowed the Religious Right in this country to "hijack," as he puts it, the language of faith; and, in the Christian arena - where the Religious Right almost entirely operates - the person of Jesus. This is what he regards, as do I, as the Jesus captivity.
But I'm not an evangelical Christian. Why should I care whether Jesus is being held captive to certain political and cultural interests in this country or not? Some of you may be asking the same question. My short answer is that we live in a nation whose citizenry is largely - not entirely of course, but still largely - Christian. So it behooves us, Christian or not, to take note of, and attend to, the ways in which the life and legacy of the One who is regarded as the founder of that faith are being both used and abused, especially in the public and civic arena which we all occupy. That's the short answer. But you're not getting out of here on that alone. Give me a few more minutes.
One reason we should care has to do with our Unitarian and Universalist stories. I know I'm going to cover familiar territory here for some of you. If you are one of those, bear with me, especially for the sake of those here who may not have been around this block just yet. Our liberal religious ancestors - in this faith that now bears the name Unitarian Universalist - regarded, as one of the prime tenets of their faith, the upholding of the religion of Jesus, as distinguished from the religion about Jesus. They were, that is to say, humanistically oriented Christians. Another way of stating this distinction is to note the difference between the pre-and post-Easter Jesus. There's the pre-Easter Jesus, the teacher of wisdom and love and compassion and healing; and there's the post-Easter Christ, the Divine Saviour of human beings from the taint of original sin.
The religion of Jesus, to return to that designation, was essentially a liberalized, if not radicalized, form of the Jewish faith of his day. It was largely about making the love and care of the Jewish God available to those most in need of that love and care. Jesus sets forth the agenda, so to speak, for his ministry in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Luke when he delivers a sermon in the equivalent of a synagogue of his day when he says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me and had anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, the recovery of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty those who are oppressed." While these words lend themselves to a variety of interpretations they clearly point to an identity, on the part of the one speaking them, with the outcasts of his society; with those who had been beaten out to society's margins. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus refers to those whom he feels most especially deserving of the love and justice of God as "the least of these."
In truth we do not know the real human identity of Jesus. That passage in Luke is actually drawn from a portion of ancient Jewish scripture. The New Testament Gospels are, in essence, a legendary recounting of a man whose identity remains, at best, obscure; and they should be read as such. But what this legend clearly points to, read and understood within the context of the time it portrays is, as just noted, a teacher of wisdom, of love, of justice, of compassion, and of peace. This teacher, after his earthly ministry had ended, was given the title of The Christ. In this respect, Jesus' teachings bear a certain resemblance to those of a man named Siddhartha, who in time acquired the title of The Buddha. This, in a admittedly small nutshell, is the religion of a man called Jesus.
The religion about Jesus is the doctrine and the dogma that were later affixed to his name by those who were establishing a religion in his name. How that whole process came about is the stuff of laborious divinity school courses, which is more than you want to hear or that I have time to tell. There are certain aspects of that doctrine that I can even agree with, but most of it bears very little resemblance to what Jesus is actually recorded as teaching. One quick example: You can read the teachings of Jesus in the four New Testament Gospels and find no place at all where he sets forth a doctrine of original sin. It was the later architects of the Christian faith who made this tenet the central theme of Christianity. It was these later architects who recast Jesus as the one, and the only one, who can deliver us from a condition that Jesus himself never even said we were in. Go figure that one if you can. Jesus, to be sure, was anything but shy about addressing the evils and sins of his day, both personal and social. But he never intimated that sinfulness was fundamental to, or inherent within, the human condition itself, which is what doctrine of original sin holds.
To loop all this back to the history of our faith tradition. Both Unitarian and Univeralism were originally, in part anyway, a protest against this original sin doctrine. But they were more than that. They were also attempts, by Christians, to restore the religion of Jesus, from the dogma in which our spiritual ancestors saw this religion as being mired. Thomas Jefferson called this religion of Jesus "pure Christianity" by which he meant the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
As time went by, and we evolved into the liberal religious body we have become today, even that humanistic Christian stance ceased to be central to our identity. I think that was, and is, a good thing in that it has made us more accessible to a wider range of persons who are pursuing their religious or philosophical or spiritual paths. But I think we've erred by diminishing, if not ignoring, the person of Jesus to the extent that we have. This is why I take seriously some of the things Jim Wallis is saying even though I do not share his faith stance. I am not suggesting that Unitarian Universalism again become the liberal Christian religion we originally were. That would, among other things, leave me out. And I rather do like being a UU minister.
But I believe Jesus' life and teachings, even filtered through the legends by which they have come to us, do have a legitimate and visible place in our larger liberal religious landscape. To not give them that place, as Wallis correctly maintains, is to make one of the central moral and ethical figures in Western Civilization a captive or a hostage to a religious and political agenda in this country that bears little resemblance to what Jesus was really all about. I'll offer one quick example before closing.
I said a few minutes ago that you can search the New Testament gospels and not find anyplace where Jesus enunciates a doctrine of original sin, even though later proponents of Christianity made it the core doctrine of their faith. In a similar matter today, you can search the New Testament gospels forward, backward, upsidedown, and sideways, and find no place where Jesus even mentions homosexuality. And yet, the Religious/Christian Right in this country has made the condemnation of homosexuality one of the core tenets of their agenda. It's so in the name of Christianity, even though the very founder of their faith offered no such condemnation himself. As long as they are allowed to hold Jesus in their captivity, they will continue to play this sad and sorry and destructive game.
I'm going to bring Rev. Wallis back to finish up today, and return to something he said near the end of the interview I cited earlier. He says there are two ways of bringing religion into public life. One is with the triumphalisitc attitude that God is on our side, and the other is with an attitude of humility and hope that we can be found on the side of a just and merciful God - however conceived or believed in. Here's his words:
"Lincoln got it right. We don't claim God's blessing on our politics and policies. We examine ourselves to see if we are on God's side. I think Martin Luther King did it best... He didn't shut people out; he invited everybody in to a moral discourse on politics. And he said we can do better."
Wallis goes on: "We have to ask ourselves what kind of people we want to be, what kind of nation we want to be, what kind of world do you want to leave for your children. Every major progressive social movement in our nation's history was fueled and driven in part by religion, by faith, by moral values. We have a very powerful, prophetic, and progressive religious tradition in America and around the world."
I doubt Mr. Wallis will get the chance to speak words such as these from this pulpit, as I said I'd welcome him to do. So I've said them myself. We here are a part of that larger progressive religious tradition in America of which Jim Wallis speaks, even if we're not specifically in his ball park. We must honor that tradition. Our own Purposes and Principles cite one of the sources of our living tradition as "Jewish and Christian teachings." In this spirit let us not forget the wisdom of a Jewish teacher who saw a faith in his name come into being.
Stephen D. Edington
March 20, 2005
Copyright © 2005 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
