So What Would Jesus Do...Really?
Sermon by Steve Edington
April 9, 2006
This past Wednesday morning the monthly meeting of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council was held over at the Anne Marie House in Hudson, which is on the grounds of the Presentation of Mary Academy. The Anne Marie House was, for a long time, the convent where the nuns who taught at PMA lived. With that population greatly diminished the facility is largely now used by the Greater Nashua Interfaith Housing Network to provide short term housing and food for homeless families who are trying to get back on their feet after losing their home. The purpose of our gathering last Wednesday was so we could see the outcome of the efforts and contributions of a wide range of faith communities in the Nashua area that went into making this happen. I was very impressed with how the whole program is set up, with its goal of getting these families back into mainstream society as soon as possible.
Some of you may recall that one of our monthly outreach collections was on behalf of this effort. We were specifically asked to contribute to the building of a good sized fence right behind the Anne Marie house so that the children staying there would have a safe play area for themselves. There was also a wetlands issue involved, that's rather complicated to explain. but there was also an environmental component as to why the fence had to be there. If no fence was in place then permission would not be granted to open the facility. So we, our congregation here, paid for the fence with our outreach collections. In the program that was offered in the Anne Marie chapel last Wednesday, where the story of how it all came to fruition was told we in fact were specifically thanked for providing that fence. And since many of you were among those who contributed your money towards it, I figured it only right and proper that I pass those thanks along to you this morning.
A part of that morning's presentation was given over to what some of the deeper motivations were for putting this facility in place - above and beyond the clear and present need for it. Among the motivations cited was the admonition of Jesus to his listeners to feed the hungry and shelter the needy; and some of those gospel verses were cited. This was an Interfaith gathering and project. Not all present were Christians. The IFC has recently expanded to even include a local Hindu community. But for those Christians involved, their ultimate motivation for getting this facility in place, which included putting up the fence, was to do it because Jesus said this is the kind of thing you're supposed to do when it come to relating to, and caring about, your fellow men and women. Through their religious lens we built that fence for Jesus; and even if I don't totally share that perspective myself, I appreciate it. With some of the terribly disturbing things being done in the name of Jesus these days, I'm quite happy to contribute to an effort - an effort that was carried forth partly in his name - to care for the homeless.
So what would Jesus do, really? That's the question I'm posing on this Palm Sunday. This is the Sunday I've used for most of my years in the UU parish ministry to offer some of my thoughts on the meaning of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, and the one whom our Christian sisters and brothers also call the Christ. The quick and easy answer is to say we don't know, because we don't really know who Jesus - in any historical sense - was. I could just say that and get us all out of here today in a hurry. Not a chance!
What the New Testament Gospels give us is an image or a portrait of a person, whom the Gospel writers had already come to assume was a uniquely divine manifestation of God. We see this obscure quasi-historical figure through their lens. The Gospels are not biographies - certainly not in the sense that we understand biography today. They are more like theological tracts, written to establish that Jesus was also the Christ, the Son of God, and the founder of the religion that was forming in his name. It was one of his earliest followers, Saul of Tarsus - later known as St. Paul - would cast him as a Savior whose death atoned for the sins of humanity.
This is why I find myself a little bemused at the debates, discussion, and arguments that continually crop up about who Jesus "actually" was, and what he "really did", and did such and such "actually happen." Now we see some of the more orthodox Christian communions feeling they have to mount a rebuttal to Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code for what it suggests about Jesus' earthly life. Last time I checked the book was still in the Fiction column of the best seller lists. Then just this past week, a science professor at Florida State University offered a meteorological explanation of how Jesus really could have walked on the water on the Sea of Galilee - something about the conditions at that time being just right for a hidden ice floe. I'm not making this up.
Over the past couple of days we've seen stories about the discovery of a 1700 year old Gospel of Judas that purports to explain his side of the story. I thought Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber already did a pretty good job of that in Jesus Christ Superstar. According to New Testament scholar Elaine Pagels, this Gospel of Judas is but one of several texts on the life and teachings of Jesus - called the Gnostic Gospels - that were rejected as heretical when the New Testament canon was put in place. Fascinating stuff, but not where I'm going today. Then a couple years ago it was the Mel Gibson movie that was generating all the buzz about Jesus. The curious thing for me is how newstories and accounts and controversies like these always seem to surface right during the Easter Season. Have they become one more piece of our cultural media cycle? It would seem so. Well, it is all rather interesting and even tantalizing. And Dan Brown now does not have to worry if English teacher's pension will be enough for him to retire on - so good for him.
But here's the frustrating part for me. We seem to have such an obsession about who Jesus "really" was and what he "really" did, and did this or that aspect of his life "really happen," that his message almost gets lost in the shuffle. What we know of the messenger is shrouded in a veil of legend and myth and lore. And while trying to see behind that veil can be fascinating, it is the message moreso than the messenger we should be seeking to understand; especially since it is a message that transcends the bounds of any one religious faith or belief system.
Some of you may remember that a couple of months ago I used for my children's story this book I recently picked up called The Parallel Sayings of Jesus and Buddha. Personally speaking this is the kind of text that grabs my attention far more than those that speculate on who or what Jesus was. I want to read just a few lines from the introduction to this book to give us a framework for where I want to go with the rest of this sermon. It is written by Marcus Borg, a liberal Christian theologian and a professor of religion at Oregon State University. He was one of the leading scholars in the Jesus seminar which tried to determine which of the teachings of Jesus could be directly ascribed to him. I was privileged to take a summer continuing education course from Dr. Borg a few years ago through the Graduate Theological Union.
Here's Borg: "Jesus and the Buddha were teachers of a world-subverting wisdom that challenged and undermined conventional ways of seeing and believing in their time and every time...they taught a way or path of transformation...Despite language and imagery, the way taught by the Buddha and the way taught by Jesus strongly resemble one another. 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 simply borrowing from Gautama. His explanation, which I accept, is that they each had a transformative experience that put them in touch with certain timeless truths, knowledge, and wisdom that can call humanity to its more elevated self. In the Jesus stories he gets his wisdom while spending time alone in the wilderness; in the Buddha stories Gautama gets the message while sitting under a Bo tree. They each then, as their stories or legends, continue to be told, gather unto themselves a small group of followers and deliberately place themselves outside of the conventional workings and ways of life of their respective societies From that standpoint they can then question and challenge many of the assumptions and conventions by which their respective societies lived.
While Jesus came from the working class sector of his society - his father, as his story goes, was a tradesman; and while the Buddha came from the wealthy and ruling class of his society, each of them chose to primarily identify with the outcasts of their respective societies. It was largely from that sector of their respective cultures that they offered their remarkably similar messages. They each, for the most part, took their message those who had been beaten out to the edges of their society and who didn't quite fit in. They each took their messages to persons who for one reason or another were alienated from the mainstream of their society. In my Beat Face of God book I wasn't just being flip when I said I regarded Jesus as a "proto-Beat."
For all the similarities he cites between the teachings of Jesus and Buddha, the major difference between them, as Borg points out, is that Jesus took a more confrontational approach to the powers and societal structures of his day. The Jesus figure of the New Testament was more socially and politically engaged with the worldly powers of his day than was the Buddha.
Well, Marcus Borg is an academic, and I appreciate all the scholarly work he's done in giving us a better understanding of the person of Jesus. But I also take some of my cues along this line from my American folk-hero, and advocate for simple justice, Woody Guthrie. Among the hundreds upon hundreds of songs Woody cranked out during his life-time was one he simply titled Jesus Christ. Here's a couple of verses:
Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land; A hard working man and brave.
He said to the rich, "Give your money to the poor,"
But they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
When Jesus came to town all the working folks around believed what he did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed him on a cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
The last two lines, written in that same straight-on Woody Guthrie style simply say:
If Jesus was to preach what he preached in Galilee,
They would lay poor Jesus in his grave.
So, what would Jesus do, really? As I've been stressing all along here, I can only answer the question based the veiled portrait the New Testament gospels give us and what others - from academic to working class folk song writer - have taken from that portrait. Here's what I get: I don't know how he'd specifically do it if he were holding forth here and now, but the essence of the teachings of Jesus constitute a fundamental challenge to how we define and understand and pursue success and power. Borg nailed it pretty well when he said that both Jesus and Buddha taught "world-subverting wisdom."
Think about that: What world subverting wisdom would a figure like Jesus offer to our current ethos of success that equates endless, and largely mindless, acquisition with the attainment of the good life? One of the more intriguing of the Jesus stories for me is the one called The Story of the Rich Young Man. The main character in this story is a First Century Galilean version of a yuppie. He's on his way up, everything breaking his way, good career track in front of him, and he seeks out Jesus for a little advice: "You sound like a pretty smart guy, what do you think I need to be doing with my life that I'm not doing already." The answer he gets is: "Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and come join my little wandering band of hobos here." That was enough to send the guy on his way, probably wondering why he'd even bothered to raise the question to a head-case like Jesus.
I don't know if Jesus meant for the guy to take him literally or not; remember, most teachers of wisdom speak more metaphorically than they do literally. I think what Jesus was trying to say in this instance was that if you try to define success according to the conventional norms of your society you're going to come up way short. It is what you pour out from yourself, rather than what you pull into yourself that will save you, and what you'll be remembered for. I think that would be his primary challenge to us - define what you really mean by success before you pursue it.
Then there's the question of power. The Jesus figure of the New Testament challenged the whole notion of power as dominion, or of power as the means to force one's will upon another. Granted, he was no anarchist. He apparently recognized that there were realms of societal life that rightly belonged to the civil authority: Give to Caesar what is rightfully his, as he put it. He did not directly take on the established authority of his day so much as he tried to exemplify another kind of power: The power of example, the power of persuasion, the power of witness that comes by simply standing with and for the dispossessed and disenfranchised of the world - and from that vantage point speaking truth to the more worldly forms of power and authority. This was the same kind of power that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King chose to exercise. It got both of them killed, just as it did Jesus.
The Palm Sunday story (which should really be called Palm Sabbath, or Palm Passover, since there was no Sunday at that time), appears to be about a popular uprising 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 slated for execution at the time. The most intriguing piece of this story for me is the refusal of Jesus to resort to force or violence himself as well as his forbidding his followers to do so. Maybe he knew that he had his own kind of power, that would outlast his earthly life. He was certainly right about that. The Roman authorities executed numerous leaders of popular uprisings. The one we still talk about is the one who gave up his life in order to question the very legitimacy of their power itself. I can only wonder how this Jesus figure would challenge the use of power by the world's most powerful nation today. Or, as a bumper sticker I picked up last summer puts it: "Who would Jesus bomb?" I got it at a very subversive location, namely the bookstore of a Dominican monastery in Big Sur, California.
To make one more pass at Dr. Borg before I wrap this up: He points out that neither Jesus nor Buddha intended to found a religion in their respective names. Buddha taught within the framework of the Hinduism of his day, just as Jesus taught with the framework of the Judaism of his time. I'm not knowledgeable enough to speak to this 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 for those he termed "the least of these" that is done in his name would, I'm guessing, be heartening. The advocacy efforts for what our own UU principles call "justice, equity and compassion in human relations," and our striving after "the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. In these efforts I believe Jesus would see a continuation of his teachings and his efforts whether they are done in his name or not. I seriously doubt he'd care if he got credit for it as long as it got done.
At the same time - and here I'll only speak for myself rather than speculating about the mind of Jesus - it boggles my mind that the name of this simple teacher of subversive wisdom, has been appropriated by some of those who are responsible for the creating in this nation a disparity between the wealthy and the powerful, and the dispossessed such as we have seldom seen before; and who have taken us into a needlessly horrible war that is progressively alienating our country from the very world community that Jesus himself envisioned. For in so doing, they have indeed "laid Jesus Christ in his grave." (Thank you Woody Guthrie).
But, as I'll be saying next Sunday, I believe in resurrection, of a kind. I believe, as do Christians and many non-Christians alike, in keeping alive this Jewish Galilean prophet's subversive wisdom. While I no longer adhere to most of the doctrines that have come to constitute the religion about Jesus - doctrines that he never promulgated himself - I still find much that is worthy in the religion of Jesus. That's what I've tried to share a little of this morning - the religion of Jesus. I still seek ways of incarnating, of putting into flesh and blood, the subversive wisdom of this proto-Beat. Our own faith tradition has its roots in those very teachings. With whatever names we may invoke we remain a community of faith committed to carrying this wisdom forward.
Stephen D. Edington
April 9, 2006
