Jesus: His Life and His Death
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington
March 24, 2002
READING
(From Proverbs of Ashes by Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock)
At the center of western Christianity is the story of the cross, which claims God the Father required the death of his Son to save the world. We believe this theological claim sanctions violence. We seek a different theological vision. What words tell truth? What balms heal? What proverbs kindle the fires of passion and joy? What spirituality stirs the hunger for justice? . . .
We have sifted the inheritance of pain and violence that has marked our lives and embraced the kindness watching for us, this side of the ground. In our efforts to cleave to life, we have found the presence of God. . .
Western Christianity claims we are saved by the execution [of Jesus], that violence and terror reveal the grace of God. This claim isolates Jesus as violence isolates its victims. When the claims of violence are made singular, solitary, unprecedented in their pain, the power of violence remains. . .
Love encompasses life. Like an arc of fire across the night sky, Presence blesses those who await it. In sensing Presence, we embrace a passion for life. Love is a seal upon the heart, a hunger to create, to honor life, to protect it, and to see it flourish. This passion for life burns fiercely and cannot be quenched by many waters. It is as strong as violence and death. As we see more into the luminous depths, we draw closer to that astonishing fire at the heart of things . . .
SERMON
Over the past year or so I have tried to become more involved and more visible in some of the interfaith activities that take place in our community. I have been trying to do a better job of attending the monthly meetings of the Nashua Interfaith Council even though they take place at 7:30 in the morning. I was pleased to take part in the community Thanksgiving service last November, and before that the interfaith service that was held at the City Hall plaza after the September 11 attacks.
The one that catches me up short, however, is when I get asked, as I do, to participate in an ecumenical Good Friday service. Its not that Good Friday is a definitively Christian observance, in a way unlike the other two I just mentioned, that holds me back. There is much about the life and teachings of Jesus that I can affirm and relate to. But I struggle with how his death is treated, even by mainline Christianity. I trust you know by now that I mean no disrespect towards my friends and colleagues who are now entering the most sacred week on the Christian calendar in saying this. After all, this is the Sunday I've come to use, on an annual basis, for sharing some of my views and perspectives on the life and ministry of Jesus; and what that life and ministry continue to me to mean as a liberal religious humanist.
When I say I struggle with how Christianity treats the death of Jesus, it's not that I'm looking for a way to return to doctrinal Christianity. I feel safe in saying I've passed that point. But story and image of Jesus' death remains strong in our culture at large, and holds a certain power that goes beyond the parameters of Christian belief and practice itself. And the message behind this image, that there is some kind of virtue and goodness to be found in suffering and death, is, I feel, a troubling one. It is, in fact, the dangers of the doctrine of redemptive suffering and redemptive death that Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker address in their recently published book Proverbs of Ashes. This is a stunning piece of work. I read several paragraphs from it a few minutes ago. A short portion of the book appeared in the latest issue of our denominational publication UU World. Some of you may have had a chance to read it.
A little bit about the authors: Rebecca Parker, whom I do have the honor and pleasure of knowing, is the President of our Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley, California, the Starr King School for the Ministry. She was originally ordained into the ministry of the United Methodist Church, as was her father before her, and she still holds ministerial standing with that denomination as well as our UU Association. Rita Brock is a religious scholar with one book published prior to this one, and is currently a research associate at the Harvard Divinity School. While her first and last names may not indicate such, Ms. Brock is Asian-American. She takes her middle name of Nakashima from her Japanese mother. Some of what she writes about in this book has to do with the suppression or denial of her Asian ancestry on the one hand, and her finding ways of affirming it on the other, as a primarily Westernized woman. I'll be focusing more on Dr. Parker's portions of this book today, but plan to make use of Ms. Brock's insights in future sermons.
Before delving into a least a part of this book this morning though, I need to take a few steps back to get a running start at it, so to speak. As most of you know the religious tradition in which I was raised was evangelical Baptist. I may have traveled a long way from that, but I do not feel that anyone ever completely walks away from the faith in which he or she was raised. This is a point that Brock and Parker themselves make. Since the figure of Jesus was absolutely central to all that originally shaped my religious and spiritual consciousness, he remains a figure I relate to in some ways and struggle with in others. Proverbs of Ashes has given me a better insight into some of those struggles.
I use the term "figure of Jesus" deliberately. We do not, and cannot, know for sure the person behind the figure. In fact, the greatest enigma and paradox about this figure/person is that while Jesus probably has the greatest name-recognition factor in the world, we really do not know who he was in a strict historical sense. We have the portrait, or image, of him that the authors of the New Testament gospels have produced. Unlike some of the more radical critiques of the Christian faith, I do not believe that Jesus was made up, or created out of whole cloth, by the 1st and 2nd century Church. But the New Testament was written by persons who were convinced that this itinerant Jewish preacher and teacher, who apparently drew a large following unto himself from the peasant class of his society by proclaiming an approaching "Kingdom of God," was also God himself, the Messiah, and the One whose death would redeem the fallen state of humanity.
The New Testament is essentially a recasting of a hidden-from-history individual, with the rather common name of Jesus, as The Christ, The Redeemer, as the One whom God used to save humanity. There was nothing deliberately deceptive about all this, as I see it. The gospel writers did not consider themselves to be biographers of Jesus in the sense we understand biography today. They were theologians, and they were offering their theological "take," if you will, on the life of Jesus as a religion in his name began to take shape in the first and second centuries of our Common Era. There were actually a variety of interpretations of the life and death of Jesus circulating at that time. What we have in the New Testament is the version that "won out" as it were. What the gospel writers, as well as Paul and the other New Testament authors, have given us then is a legend. Like most legends it is open to a variety of interpretations; which is why we have so many forms and variations of Christianity. These forms and variations range from those who take this legend as literal, historical truth to those who read in a more symbolic or metaphorical way, to all kinds of other readings in between.
But central to the story or legend, on whatever level it is read, is that of a person who at the behest of God, takes the sins and sufferings of the world upon himself. He does this by means of an agonizing and excruciating death, administered by one of the more ghastly forms of capital punishment the human mind has devised. The central symbol in all of Western Christianity, in fact, is the instrument of this type of punishment--that is to say, the cross. And this gets us into to the first portion of Brock and Parker's book which they title "Lent."
In this section Rebecca Parker describes her early years in the Methodist ministry in a small town in the State of Washington. It is not easy reading; in fact it is quite painful. In writing about that period in her life, Rebecca recounts a conversation with a woman ministerial colleague of hers named Pat. A woman in Pat's congregation had been killed by her husband after enduring years of abuse at his hand. Pat had counseled her parishioner to get help, or to seek shelter, or just plain get herself out of such a destructive relationship. The woman kept going back to her husband, however. Her rationale was that since Jesus did not turn away from the suffering God willed for him, neither should she turn away from her suffering at the hand of her husband. There must be a reason for all this, she felt. Perhaps she would find some redemption in her sacrifice. All she did instead was lose her life. As Rev. Pat put it in her conversation with Rev. Rebecca about this incident: "I know the husband is the one responsible. He killed her. But I cannot escape feeling that he wouldn't have had that chance if the church hadn't told [his wife] that your life is only valuable if you give it away."
Rev. Parker then goes on to say that in her sermons for the Lenten season that year she spoke to this issue of how the stories of the suffering and death of Jesus should not and cannot be used in ways that appear to offer some kind of sanction of abuse and suffering. She even went so far as to question the whole theology of a God who would require the horrific suffering and death of his son because of the supposedly hopelessly fallen state of humanity. As she put it: "We will not say that we are grateful that someone was tortured and murdered on our behalf." In the wake of these sermons, Rebecca continues in her story, some of the women members of her congregation objected to where she was going with them. As she pressed them a little as to where their objections were coming from, some deeper truths came out. The ones who were most troubled by Rev. Parker's sermons were the ones who had been silently enduring abuse themselves--some physical, some emotional, some psychological. Their way of coping with it was it was to tell themselves that it was just part of their "cross to bear" even as Jesus has borne his cross. As they began to tell their stories, first to Rebecca and then to one another, these women began to see the terrible effect such a rationale was having on their lives, and this gave them a strength they'd previously not known.
The point is not that the stories of Jesus' suffering and death caused the abuse these women were experiencing, because they did not. The ones responsible for the abuse were the ones inflicting it--men who, in some cases, had internalized, and then externalized, abuse that had been inflicted upon them. But it was the image of a suffering savior--the central image of their religion--that provided the model these women used for coping with the abuse, rather than a model for saying "no" to it. If Jesus had to suffer and die for the sins of the world, well maybe I'm having to suffer for my sins as well. Or, if Jesus suffered for the sins of humanity, then perhaps it is my lot to suffer on behalf of my family, especially since I don't want to create problems for them. These were the rationales and coping mechanisms these women used. This is, in part, the story Rebecca Parker tells in her opening chapter in this book.
So where does this leave us? For persons for whom the figure of Jesus does not fare in their religious upbringing--and I'm aware that we have a number of such persons in this congregation--there is probably no great challenge or problem here. But there is the issue of what one does with a tradition that in certain crucial respects just doesn't work anymore, but still remains a part of who you are. Reading this book, and I've only had time to share a small part of it with you today, reinforced my own decision to disavow the whole notion of Jesus as the son God sent to suffer and die on my behalf. At the same time I have no need or desire to completely slice off the part of my life when Jesus was the central figure; which, I guess, is why I still do sermons like this on Palm Sunday. When it come to my own Christian roots and my ongoing exploration as how to still relate to them, and knowing that I cannot just eviscerate the first half of my life, in the words of the song I "Take what I need and leave the rest."
My taking this kind of an approach was actually reinforced in an interview with the authors of our text for today that accompanied the portions of Proverbs of Ashes that appeared in the UU World. At one point in the interview Rebecca Parker, in speaking of her own journey to UUism says, "One of the important things about Unitarian Universalism is that it provides a space that holds people in those experiences of religious impasse or opens a space beyond that religious impasse." And then Brock replies, "(That) is also a dangerous space. We make a point in the book of saying that when you hit that impasse and you're carrying a tradition, you can't just walk away from it." I'll speak to this matter of a religious impasse, and getting past it, more fully in a sermon next month.
I do find it interesting that Rev. Parker has retained her ordination status as a United Methodist even as she also became a UU minister. (You are allowed to do that in our denomination.) While I felt no need to do the same with my former American Baptist ordination standing, I still understand and respect the point Rebecca is making. She's expressing a need for some continuity with her religious past even as she also breaks with that past in certain significant ways.
The humanism that I have come to is, by virtue of who I am actually, a "post-Christian" humanism. It is not a complete repudiation of Christianity, but rather a humanism I've come to after a journey through Christianity, and after that journey reached its limits, or hit an impasse. Mine is a humanism, then, that remains informed, in certain ways, by Christianity--among many other things by now. With that in mind let me quickly move to the final part of this sermon by saying how, in this post-Christian humanist phase of my life that I've been moving through for about the last 25 years, I still relate to the life, and the death, of Jesus. I'll save the resurrection part for next Sunday.
My take on Jesus has actually something of a Buddhist flavor to it, in that I've come to see Jesus as an "awakener" of people's spirits rather than as a mediator between human beings and a Deity. I see Jesus, whoever the historical person from whom his New Testament image is drawn may have been, as someone who tried to put human beings in touch with their "divine spark" as Ralph Waldo Emerson, many centuries later, came to call it. He was someone who called people to their own Buddha nature, or Christ nature, or whatever you may wish to label that impulse that calls us to our greater, stronger, and more empowered selves.
Within the gospel legends there are numerous passages and stories that lend themselves to this kind of interpretation. In many of the accounts of Jesus healing someone, when the person who was healed tried to thank Jesus, he would actually put them off by saying "Your faith has made you whole." You, in other words he was saying, have the power to affect your own wholeness and healing--in whatever ways you experience wholeness and healing. When asked about the nature of this "Kingdom of God" that he so often referred to, there are several instances where Jesus is recorded as saying "The Kingdom of God (or the 'Realm of the Sacred' to recast the language a little) is within you." All you need, in other words, you already have; it is there for your discovery. Jesus' ministry was largely to and with the dispossessed and powerless people of his day, and to them he said, "Blessed are you..." His ministry was about empowering people who felt disconnected or separated from whatever personal power or resources they had.
This finally gets me to the meaning of Jesus' death, as I've come to see it. I view his death in the same manner that I view the deaths of persons like Mahatma Ghandi or Martin Luther King or those six nuns who were killed by an El Salvadorian death squad in the late 1970s for their work with the peasants of that poor country. It is the price, the terrible price, that is sometimes paid by those who seek to strengthen the human spirit, especially among persons for whom that spirit has been diminished or seemingly destroyed. To be an agent of empowerment, as were all the persons I've just mentioned, including Jesus, is to also be a danger to those who unjustly hold power over others.
An awakened human spirit is a scary thing to those who seek to stifle or suppress that spirit; and those who bring about such awakenings sometimes find their very lives stifled as well. Such, I believe, was the case with Jesus and his being put to death. The death of Jesus does demonstrate to us the fallen and unhealed side of humanity. But rather than calling us to give thanks for such suffering and violence, or to endure suffering and violence ourselves, it calls us to stand against these things instead. It should call us to our strengths rather than our weaknesses, and to our power rather than our acquiescence. In this sense, Good Friday does hold meaning for me.
While Proverbs of Ashes is in many places a hard and painful book to read, I'm blessed in knowing one of the authors as a very life-loving, life-affirming, life-embracing person. And I'm sure this is the case with both of them. So I want to leave you this morning with the words they leave for their readers in the concluding section of their book which they call Postlude: Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock:
"Let us say that life shows us the face of God only in fleeting glimpses, by the light of night fires, in dancing shadows, in departing ghosts, and in recollections of steady love. Let us say this is enough, enough for us to run with perseverance the race that is set before us, enough for us to stand against violence, enough for us to hold each other in benediction and blessing."
