Jesus and the UU Gestalt
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, April 5, 1998
Last Sunday I did a presentation on the life and writings of Allen Ginsberg. The actual first year anniversary of his death is today. And this Sunday my topic deals with the person of Jesus. So I guess you could say this is the second half of a two part sermon series on "Two Jewish Guys Who Had a Marked Effect Upon Western Civilization."
A few weeks ago I received an invitation to take part in a community "Good Friday" ecumenical service. I weighed in my mind whether or not to participate. The way in which I relate to the portrayal of the death of Jesus is quite different from even that of my liberal Christian friends amongst our area clergy--and I'll be speaking to that momentarily--but I did feel I could in good faith join with them in honoring what Jesus' life was all about. Then I realized that this Friday is Opening Day at Fenway Park, and I already have my tickets for that occasion. This set of circumstances presented me with the dilemma of having to forego taking part in one kind of religious observance because there is another rite of holy obligation that I have to fulfill; which is to say, my son and I will be in Boston this Friday afternoon.
As I presume, and certainly hope you know, I mean no disrespect by that towards those among my friends and colleagues who are now entering into the most sacred week of the Christian year. This is also the time of year in my own sermon schedule when I offer some of my thoughts on the person and character of Jesus of Nazareth, on how this person still fares in the larger religious perspective of my life, and of the role this person and character has played and continues to play in our ongoing Unitarian Universalist story.
The title I'm going with this year is "Jesus and the UU Gestalt." Gestalt is a word of German derivation which essentially means the way in which separate elements or parts come together to form a synthesis, or a Whole, which is greater than the sum of its parts. The goal of gestalt therapy, for example, is for the person engaged in it to achieve a healthy syntheses of the workings of one's emotions and intellect, one's past and present, one's id and ego if you will, and the like. The figure or person of Jesus is one component of the larger gestalt of my religious and spiritual life. It is not the central or driving part but a part which, due to my own personal story, cannot be left out of the gestalt without taking something away from the overall synthesis which I do not want to lose. The same goes for the gestalt of Unitarian Universalism itself.
There was a time in the history of our liberal religious movement when the person of Jesus was the linchpin of the gestalt of Unitarianism and Universalism. While that is not longer the case overall, the "big picture" of who we are would have a piece missing if Jesus were not a part of the picture at all. This is what I wish to address today. Some of what I'll be saying I've said on other occasions--on other Palm Sundays--but with new people continually coming into our community here, and we are enjoying a real "bumper crop" this year, I don't mind repeating myself at least to some extent.
For such an obscure individual, whose very identity as an actual historical figure is--at best--difficult to establish, Jesus probably has the greatest name recognition in the Western world, if not the entire world. He has also inspired countless works of art and music, like the piece we heard earlier in the service. I've never finally decided if this is despite the fact that we do not actually know who he was, or because of it.
What we have in the New Testament is a man whose identity is shielded, in a way, by a theological mask or veil placed over him by the writers of the gospels. The writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (and even their identities are open to question) were not biographers of Jesus. They were theologians of the first and second century Church who were writing, in essence, religious or theological tracts to prove that the founder of their fledgling religion, which in time came to be called "Christianity", was indeed the Messiah, the Son of God, who had come to establish God's Kingdom on Earth. It was also their audiences that determined the slant of their writings.
The Gospel of Matthew is aimed primarily at a Jewish constituency. The Gospels of Mark and Luke are looking to reach out to the Jews and Gentiles of the Middle East region. The Gospel of John is aimed more at a Greco-Roman audience. None of their writings was really any kind of sinister act on the part of the gospel writers. They were simply writing in concert with their beliefs. The idea of history or biography as some kind of an objective, research-laden, scientific enterprise was still many centuries off in the future.
Given this, there are basically two ways to approach the person of Jesus, if; that is, one wishes to approach him at all. (I know that anytime you say there are "two basic" ways of doing or looking at anything you're indulging in an oversimplification. As long as you know that I know that, I figure we're OK here.) One approach, then, is to deal with the mask or veil itself; accept it, find meaning in it, and build one's religious faith around it if one so chooses. Even this approach allows for a good deal of diversity within Christianity about what the writers of the gospels actually meant when they had Jesus doing and saying such and such. This is why we have such a proliferation of Christian denominations and such a wide range of thought and practice within Christianity from the conservative to the liberal to the radical.
The other approach is to attempt to get at who, or what, is behind the veil; to try to find the living, breathing, human being behind the theological constructs. While such attempts can never be fully successful because no "primary sources" about Jesus actually exist, that hasn't stopped them from being made. Some of these attempts are very scholarly, like those made by Thomas Jefferson and Albert Schweitzer; others have been more artistic or poetic, as in Nikos Katzanzakis' "The Last Temptation of Christ" or Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Jesus Christ Superstar"; while still others have been deliberately outrageous and hilarious, as in Monty Python's "Life of Bryan." [I thought about asking the choir to sing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" today, but figured that would be pushing the envelope just a bit far!]
Our Unitarian and Universalist forebears were among those who wanted to see behind the veil. Their idea--and Jefferson was an especially strong proponent of this view--was that true Christianity, or "practical Christianity" as many of them called it, was to be found embodied in the person behind the veil. If we can interpret the New Testament in the light of our God-given reason, so they reasoned, we will capture the true essence and the true spirit of Jesus, and we can then live our lives in accordance with that spirit.
The most recent, and scholarly, attempt at this approach of getting past the veil has been an effort begun in 1985, and still continuing, called the "Jesus Seminar." This "Seminar" is actually an ongoing conversation, through a variety of channels, by some 200 New Testament scholars, to determine what sayings of Jesus in the gospels can actually be attributed to him, which ones he might have said, and which ones are most likely editorial embellishments by the gospel writers. While 200 scholars may sound like a high number, its really rather small compared to the several thousand Biblical scholars and academics worldwide. These 200 also represented those whose interpretations of the New Testament are quite liberal to begin with. So while you could not call these 200 a representative sample of all of those who are engaged in Biblical research, they have still done some commendable work.
Their methodology for doing this is more than I can get into here, but there was a feature article on this project in our denominational magazine, UU World, back in the fall. The result of their work is a publication called The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. Perhaps one of the reasons our own UU Association has devoted some attention to this work is because these 200 scholars are trying to do what Thomas Jefferson was attempting nearly 200 years ago with his "Jefferson Bible", which was to get past the theologizing about Jesus to the locus of who he actually was and what he actually had to say, and has to say, to us. As I've said, this is a task that can never be completely successful, but one that has a lot of value nonetheless for those for whom the person of Jesus is at least a part of their religious gestalt.
My feeling is that even within our more humanistically oriented UU congregations--congregations like this one, for example--there can be an expansive enough spirit to welcome and value such an approach to the life of Jesus. I like what the Rev. Jack Mendelsohn has to say along these lines in his book Being Liberal in an Illiberal Age. Jack is getting well along in years now, but he's alive and well as ever, as are these words of his: "The Jesus portrayed in the Gospels is an elusive figure, as Albert Schweitzer so amply demonstrated. What we really seem to mean when we say the 'spirit of Jesus' is the answer to our problems is that we would try to the best of our ability to live by the moral precepts we choose to identify with Jesus... Many of my coreligionists identify with the moral goals Jesus represents to them, namely compassion, unselfishness, self-sacrifice, faithfulness, and good will. No one should be upset if I suggest that the admirable goals represented by this chosen idealization of Jesus can be duplicated in all of the world's great religions...To me the important thing about Jesus is not that he was just human, but that the human race is capable of producing him. And not him alone, but others like him. And not only in ancient times, but now."
Moving in a more personal direction for a few minutes now, as those of you who know me know, my own religious and spiritual gestalt is one in which the Jesus figure, New Testament veil and all, was front and center for about the first half of my life. Then he got moved clear out to the outer fringes of that gestalt; and now in more recent times is coming to claim a slightly larger piece of the gestalt. The problem I ran into, and still run into, with Christianity--even in some of its more enlightened modes--is in the way it emphasizes the death of Jesus more than his life. The central symbol of Christianity is the symbol of Jesus' death--the cross. Its an empty cross for the Protestants and one with Jesus on it for the Catholics, but still the same symbol.
Taking a comparative religion approach for just a moment now, this emphasis upon Jesus' death is a real anomaly amongst the religions of the world. Here's what I mean: Four of the major world religions are grounded in the life, works, and teachings of a central human figure: Judaism with Moses; Christianity with Jesus, Islam with Mohammed; and Buddhism with Gautama. In three of these faiths the death of the founding figure is relatively inconsequential. The legend of Moses (who is even less of an historical figure than Jesus) ends with him bringing the Israelites to their Promised Land, handing off a body of laws to them, and then going up a mountain to die. In the stories of Mohammed and Gautama they both live live to what were, in their days, ripe old ages, and die of old age. It is the teachings, the beliefs, and the religious practices these figures put in place which then came to form the basis of the religions that grew up in their names.
The Christian story, however, is one in which the founder dies a cruel and excruciating death at age 33. Then, in the theological veil through which this story came to be told, this horrible death of his was something he had to endure because the rest of humanity was in such a sorry state. I'll grant that the state of humanity is pretty sorry a lot of the time; but the extent to which that sorry state can be redeemed has everything to do with how we choose to live, and not with how some unfortunate soul happened to die.
It was when I came to this personal realization and conclusion that the Jesus figure got pushed out to the edge of my religious gestalt. What has brought him back a ways from the edge has been something of a re-awareness on my part that contained within the story of the life of this partly historical and partly mythological figure are some affirmations about the sacredness and holiness of life; and some clues and some teachings about how we human beings can be bearers of life in such a way that we can recover from the fallen places in which we do often find ourselves.
If how we live determines the extent to which humanity will indeed be redeemed, then a model for this kind of living can be found in the accounts of the life of Jesus--whoever he "really" may have been. What our Unitarian and Universalists forebears were trying to do was to make this story of the life of Jesus central rather than his death; not simply for the sake of the story itself but for what that story can tell us about what it means to be human in the best sense that humans can be. That is a part of our spiritual heritage we should never cease to value.
To add a quick parenthetical note here, which is also a preview, there are some ways in which I do relate to the crucifixion/resurrection narrative and myth of the New Testament. I'll speak to that next Sunday when we celebrate Easter. MY ways of relating have nothing to do with redeeming humanity, but rather with how we awaken to life again after a time of pain and loss. I'll save that for next week.
I want to finish for today by recalling a few of the words by Jack Mendelsohn I cited earlier: "To me the important thing about Jesus is not that he was just human [as he was], but that the human race is capable of producing him. And not him alone, but others like him. And not only in ancient times, but now." When Jack says "the human race is capable of producing him" he's not primarily referring to a human being named Jesus that the human race has produced; he's finding hope in the fact we human beings are capable of imagining someone who lived the kind of life that Jesus lived. Even if Jesus were nothing more that the projection of our human imaginings, that would still be a good and hopeful thing; because it means that we have contained within our minds and hearts and souls the ability to imagine good and worthy and noble and holy human things for ourselves to aspire towards.
The third verse of our closing hymn can be seen in a way as a call to such imaginings:
Create in us the splendor that dawns when hearts are kind,
That knows not race nor station as boundaries of the mind;
That learns to value beauty, in heart, or mind, or soul,
And longs to see God's children as sacred, perfect, whole.
Copyright © 1998 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
