Jesus Christ, Woody Guthrie, and UUs
Sermon by Steve Edington
March 28, 2010
[This sermon was preceded by the singing of Jesus Christ by Woody Guthrie; with Kathy Grossman, Dan Murphy, and Harry Purkhiser; with John Burkitt on bass.]
If that song sounds a bit familiar to some of you it's because Kathy, Dan, and Harry (along with John) did it right about this time one year ago in a service we did on some of the religious and spiritual themes found in many of the songs of Woody Guthrie. Some of the songs we used then were ones Woody wrote but did not record, or in some cases, didn't even set to music. But "Jesus Christ" is a song he did sing and record, and it appears on several albums, or CD, collections of his work.
Mr. Guthrie borrowed (to put it charitably) both the tune and even some of the words for this one from a song that had long been around in his day called "The Ballad of Jesse James." This made for an interesting bit of transposing: from Jesse James to Jesus Christ. But it worked for Woody, and give him - and us - the piece you just heard. As far as Mr. Guthrie was concerned they were both a couple of outlaws, but I wouldn't push the comparison much beyond that. Jesus, by any and all accounts, never killed anybody. (Countless numbers of people, very tragically, have been killed in his name, but that's another matter.)
To stay with Woody Guthrie for just a bit longer, working on that service one year ago led me into doing some explorations into the some of the religious and spiritual roots and strands in the life and work of this remarkable American; and I'm still at it. This is a topic that has been largely ignored by both of his biographers, which means that it's unexplored territory still waiting to be mined.
But not ignored completely, however. As I re-read the more complete, and best researched, biography of Woody - a very well written book titled Rambling Man by Ed Cray - I came across some very interesting words that were written by him during his very tragic and painful years as he gradually succumbed to the debilitating, and ultimately fatal, effects of Huntington's Chorea. It is now also referred to as Woody Guthrie's Disease, in the same way that ALS is called Lou Gehrig's Disease. While a patient at Brooklyn State Hospital, and slowing wasting away, Guthrie wrote,
"All my song flow out of Christ...Jesus Christ you are my best doctor." He couples these words with a deeply sad lament, "I pray every little passing moment to die, die, die."
I know a certain caution needs to be exercised in reading too much into these words. They were written during a very extreme, let us say, time in Woody's life. And given what I know of this amazing man's life I find little in it to suggest that he was any kind of a doctrinaire, chapter-and-verse type of Christian. And yet the person, or figure, of the Biblical Jesus did have a captivating influence on his, as the song we just heard clearly demonstrates.
Ironic as it may sound I find Woody's attraction to Christianity to be similar to his attraction, for a time, to the Communist Party. Each one provided him an avenue for comradeship and solidarity with the struggling, working class people he saw and associated with in the America of the 1930s and 40s. If Guthrie regarded the goal of communism as offering a means for a better way of life for those who were barely scratching by on the edges of life, then he was all for it. He even wrote a column, for many years in the CP American newspaper, The Daily Worker, called "Woody Sez." And if Jesus was a man who got killed for because he up for the little guy, then Woody would stand with him because, as he saw it, "If Jesus were to preach like he preached in Galilee they would lay Jesus Christ in his grave."
But as was the case with both Christianity and Communism, Woody had very little use for any kind of dogma, be it the dogma of the Communist Party or the dogma of some of the more hard-line and hard-core brands of Christianity. By most indications he was committed to the ideals of both the Communist philosophy and the basic humanistic tenets of the teachings of Christianity as set forth in the teachings of Jesus, but he could not adapt himself to a hard and fast party line with either.
For the Communist Party leaders his message was I'll show up at worker's rallies and sing my songs, but don't ask me to sit through your meetings and parrot your party line. For Christians it was, I see in your founder a working class hero, but don't ask me to attend your services and parrot your doctrines. As he put it in his autobiography Bound for Glory "I seldom worship in or around churches, but always had a deep love for people who go there."
To close on this thread, it would be a mistake to over-interpret a line that says "All my songs flow out of Christ" but it would also be a mistake to ignore or discount it. There was a very deep spirituality that flowed through the life of Woody Guthrie and found its way into his writings. But even with the numerous Christian and Biblical allusions one finds in his songs, poems, and other writings his spirituality was not really captured by any one faith or persuasion. He was much more of a Universalist, if, in fact, any label fits him at all.
Woody Guthrie's take on Jesus makes for an interesting juxtaposition with the one we heard last Sunday. Those of you who were here will recall that I led off my sermon on rock and roll by having a little fun in playing a recording of Linda Ronstat singing her version of an old country number by Wayne Raney called We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Lot Less Rock and Roll. In this song, as I suggested last Sunday, the term "Jesus" is really a kind of shorthand for all that is good, right, proper, respectable, and pious in our society--all the things, in other words, that rock and roll was seen as posing a threat to.
With Woody Guthrie, then, we get a Jesus who gets "laid in his grave" for being a radical who stood up for working class people; and in Wayne Raney we get a Jesus who embodies all that is right and proper about the status quo. Well then, who was that guy? And if his name and image are that malleable then why bother even raising the question?
While our faith traditions of Unitarianism and Universalism had their origins in liberal Protestant Christianity with the person or figure of Jesus as central to them, that is no longer the case. And many of us now embrace or follow a religious or spiritual path that is outside of a Christian context. At the same time, however, the figure of Jesus remains a predominant one in Western culture whether or not the religion that came to be founded in his name is embraced by all or not. This is why I've made it a practice to devote my sermon on Palm Sunday--as it is observed in the Christian faith--to offering my take on this strange and enigmatic figure.
The short, and most truthful, answer to the "who was Jesus (the human being)" question is "we don't know." In his book The God We Never Knew Biblical scholar Marcus Borg makes a distinction between what he calls the pre- and post-Easter Jesus. Of the pre-Easter Jesus, Dr. Borg says, "This Jesus is a figure of the past, a finite mortal being born around the year 4 BCE. In his early thirties, after one to three years of public activity, he was executed by the Roman authority. That Jesus--the flesh-and-blood Galilean Jewish peasant of the first century--is no more." I was privileged, several years ago, to study with Dr. Borg at one of the Pacific School of Religion's summer continuing education programs for ministers and lay leaders.
It was through the lens of the Gospel writers, and the authors of the New Testament epistles, that the Galilean peasant, as Borg correctly identifies him, became the post-Easter Jesus Christ for Christians. Those of us who participated in our Food for Thought Thursdays program last fall when we viewed and discussed the PBS Broadcast series "From Jesus to Christ" saw that this process of recasting Jesus from an itinerant Galilean preacher and teacher of a liberalized, if not radicalized, form of Judaism to the Savior Christ of the New Testament took about 300 years; when orthodox Christianity became defined and codified.
But as intriguing as the question "Who Was Jesus" may be, it's probably the wrong question. This, in fact, was pointed out by one of our Unitarian forebears, Rev. Theodore Parker, back in the mid-19th century. Those of you participating in our current Food for Thought Thursdays series on the Transcendentalists, being led by Bruce Taylor (Rev. Bruce Taylor I should say) have been learning about Parker; and probably already know what I'm about to say. Parker said the emphasis should be on the teaching of Jesus and not on who he may or may not have been. He urged his fellow Unitarians of his day to concentrate on what he called the religion of Jesus rather than the religion about Jesus.
The religion of Jesus is what he taught about love and compassion and justice; the religion about Jesus is the doctrines and dogmas that later became attached to his name. Parker's point was that the truth of Jesus' teachings did not rest of the personal authority of the man at all; but rather in the inherent and universal truths contained within his teachings.
Rev. Parker noted, by way of analogy, that the truths of Euclidian geometry did not rest of the personal authority of Mr. Euclid (if the Greeks used the term "Mister") but on their own inherent truth instead. And the same went for Jesus and his teachings. I think Parker's counsel is still worth heeding by UUs today. We UUs should not, in my opinion, give Jesus away to Christian orthodoxy; but rather hold up the universal nature of his teachings about what it means to live a "Godly," if you will, life of love, justice, and compassion.
To loop this back to Dr. Borg for a moment, he wrote an introduction to a book called The Parallel Sayings of Jesus and Buddha, which shows many similarities in the teachings of these two teachers of wisdom. Here's what he wrote: "Jesus and Buddha were teachers or world subverting wisdom that challenged and undermined conventional ways of seeing and believing in their time and every time...they taught a way of transformation...Despite language and imagery, the way taught by Buddha and Jesus strongly resemble each other. In their wisdom teaching I see no significant difference...How does one account for it?"
While Buddha lived some 500 years prior to Jesus, Dr. Borg discounts the idea that Jesus was somehow borrowing from him. Borg's explanation, which has overtones of Parker, is that each of these teachers and spirit guides had a transformative experience that put them in touch with certain timeless truths, knowledge, and wisdom that can call humanity to it's more elevated self.
In the Jesus stories, Jesus of Nazareth gets his wisdom while spending time alone in the wilderness where he resists the temptations of materialism as set forth by a Devil-like figure. Gautama Buddha, after renouncing his privileged upbringing also wanders off on his own and gets him message while meditating under a Bo tree. They each then, as their stories and legends came to be told, gathered a band of followers unto themselves and deliberately placed themselves outside the conventional workings of their respective societies. From that standpoint they challenged the many conventions and assumptions by which their societies lived with what Borg quire rightly calls "world subverting wisdom."
To stay with Dr. Borg for just a bit longer, he points out that for all the similarities between Jesus and Buddha, Jesus took a more confrontational approach to the powers and societal structures of his day. The Jesus figure of the New Testament made more of a frontal attack on the worldly powers of his day than did Buddha. This is why, as Woody reminded us "They laid Jesus Christ in his grave."
The world subverting wisdom of Jesus, as Borg calls it, had largely to do with power. The Jesus figure of the gospels (whoever the person behind the figure may have been) challenged the whole notion of power as dominion--or of power as the means to force one's will upon another. He was no anarchist; he apparently recognized a certain legitimacy in civil authority when he said "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's". But when he went on to say "Render unto God the things that are God's"
In making this statement think Jesus was really talking--in a metaphorical way--about another kind of power. He was talking about the power of example, the power of persuasion, the power of witness that comes simply by standing on the side of love, standing on the side of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised of this world. It was from that vantage point that Jesus offered his world subverting wisdom and spoke his truth to the more worldly forms of power and authority. This was the same kind of power that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther Kind also chose to adopt and exercise. And for their efforts, too, they were laid in their graves. But given all that has come about in the wake of their live they were anything but defeated, even in death.
The Palm Sunday story, then, appears to be about a popular uprising the Jesus' presence kicked off during the Passover celebration in Jerusalem. It so frightened the authorities that they had him killed along with a few other poor souls who were also slated for execution. The most intriguing part of this story for me is the reported refusal of Jesus to resort to any kind of force or violence himself, and forbidding his followers to do so as well. Maybe he knew that he had his own kind of power; one that would outlast his earthly life. He was right about that. The Roman authorities executed any number of leaders of popular uprisings around this same time and place. But the only one were still talking about is the one who gave up his life the question the very legitimacy of their power itself. World-subverting wisdom, indeed.
I'll make one more pass at Marcus Borg as I wrap this up. He points out, again correctly, that neither Jesus nor Buddha intended to found a new religion in their respective names. Buddha taught within the framework of the Hinduism of his day, just as Jesus taught within the framework of the Judaism of his day. They each lived and died a Hindu and a Jew respectively. I am not knowledgeable enough to speak from the Buddhist side of the aisle, but I have to wonder what Jesus would make of the religion that is now carried forth in his name.
There is much, I feel, that would gladden him. The compassion and caring done in his name to those whom he termed "the least of these" would, I'm guessing, be heartening. I think also of the advocacy efforts, whether done in Jesus' name or not, on behalf of what our UU Principles call "justice, equity, and compassion in human relations" and "the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all." He would, again, be heartened by such efforts. And I doubt seriously whether Jesus would care if they were done in his name or not--just that they got done.
At the same time, it boggles my mind that this simple teacher of subversive wisdom has been appropriated in ways that actually perpetuate cruelty and hatred. If, for example, Jesus could see the followers of a hate-monger like Rev. Fred Phelps and company holding up their "God Hates Fags" signs, and doing so as proponents of the religion that bears Jesus' name--he might well wonder if going to the cross was worth it.
Be that as it may, I do believe--as I'll be saying next Sunday--in resurrection, of a sort. I believe as to most Christians and non-Christians alike in keeping alive the Jewish Galilean prophet's subversive wisdom. While I no longer adhere to the doctrines that have come to make up the religion about Jesus--doctrines he never promulgated himself--I find much that is worthy in the religion of Jesus. That is the religion and the faith I've tried to share a bit of this morning.
As I've been suggesting throughout this sermon--what Jesus, and Buddha, and many other wise teachers of humanity have offered over the ages are but particular expressions of a larger voice, and a universal message. This is also the message contained in our closing hymn, "It Sounds Along the Ages." Let's sing in together.
Stephen Edington
March 28, 2010
