A Search for Jesus

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, May 16, 2010.

After a reading from “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” by Theodore Parker, 1841:

(One) instance of the transitoriness of doctrines, taught as Christian, is found in those which relate to the nature and authority of Christ.  One ancient party has told us, that he is the infinite God;  another, that he is both God and man;  a third, that he was a man, the son of Joseph and Mary, -- born as we are;  tempted like ourselves;  inspired , as we may be, if we will pay the price.  Each of the former parties believed its doctrine on this head was infallibly true, and formed the very substance of Christianity, and was one of the essential conditions of salvation, though scarce any two distinguished teachers, of ancient or modern times, agree in their expression of this truth. 

Almost every sect, that has ever been, makes Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, and not (on) the immutable truth of the doctrines themselves, or (on) the authority of God, who sent him into the world.  Yet it seems difficult to conceive any reason, why moral and religious truths should rest for their support on the personal authority of their revealer, any more than the truths of science on that of him who makes them known first or most clearly.  It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid or Archimedes.  The authority of Jesus - as of all teachers, one would naturally think - must rest on the truth of his words, and not their truth on his authority.

 

and from Matthew 5, The Beatitudes:

 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

 ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

 ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

 ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

 ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

 ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

 ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

 ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

 

A Search for Jesus

I remember one particularly odd phone call I had with my aunt who’s always been worried for my immortal soul.  This was about 25 years ago.  I announced to her I had joined a church.  She said, “Oh, honey, I’m so glad!  What kind of church - Methodist, Disciples of Christ…?”  I said, “No, actually it’s Unitarian Universalist.”  She gasped, “Oh, no!  They don’t have Jesus!”  I could just see her clutching her chest on the other end of the phone, but I didn’t know what to say.  Finally after she sputtered for a few seconds, she said, “Well, honey, we’ll pray for you.”  To which I replied, “And we’ll meditate for you…”

 

 “They don’t have Jesus.”  “Have Jesus”?  Sounds like a hostage situation. 

I suppose people have said stranger things to me about Jesus.  It’s almost always hard to know what other people mean when they invoke that name:  when they say ‘Jesus,’ do they mean a man named Jesus who lived and died in the first century?  or do they mean a powerful supernatural being called Christ who existed long before he descended to earth and then ascended back to wherever it is he rules from now?

Twenty-five years ago, I had no idea how to converse with someone who would say, “They don’t have Jesus.”  Now, of course, some of my best friends are devoutly Christian and I’ve had to come to some understanding of what that means to even be able to talk with them, not just about church stuff but about every facet of life - because religion is for them, as it should be for us, something that touches all we do and all we say and everything about who we are.

It’s been a long, long search I’ve been on and as I share some of it with you today, I hope my experience may offer some answers or help you to clarify some of your questions, whether you were raised in a church or not, whether you self-identify as Buddhist or Pagan or Humanist or Christian or whatever.  So, here’s what I’ve come to in my search for Jesus.

 

I was reared in a Disciples of Christ (Christian) church where my parents were very active as deacons and elders and Sunday school teachers.  The sanctuary of that little church was not too unlike this one:  white walls, vaulted wood ceiling, wooden pews, not too much ornamentation.  The people in the pews may have been a little more uni-dimensional - it was 1950’s white-bread America, after all.  I like this place a lot better, thank you very much. 

One of the items I remember staring at as a small child as I sat in the sanctuary was a painting that hung in a frame on the sidewall of that space.  In the center of that canvass was the figure of a man reaching out to knock on a door.  The man could have been from my neighborhood - light eyes, light skin, very Caucasian features - except that he wore his sandy blonde hair at shoulder length and he was wearing a robe and sandals - so, he wasn’t quite from my neighborhood. 

The door he was about to knock on was wooden with metal hinges and a tiny window in the middle.  The door was surrounded by what appeared to be vines with huge thorns poking out everywhere.  When I was very little, I was told this was a picture of Jesus knocking at the door to my heart, which was okay because surely Jesus looked like me - everybody else did.  But why would my heart have thorns all around it, I asked?  Because the human heart is a dark and dangerous place, the preacher said.  Which, looking back, is a bizarre thing to say to a child.  It scared me to death, and became one of those disjunctures that pushed me away from orthodoxy and sent me on my own search for truth about the real Jesus, if there was one.

So I did quit going to church when I was 13, but I continued to ask questions and to talk to people about stuff like God and Jesus and the like.  I decided I couldn’t be Christian because I didn’t believe all those things my aunt did - like that Jesus bodily rose from the dead and was now seated at the right hand of God waiting to send me and everybody like me to hell. 

When I asked so many questions, people often called me an atheist, a word they used disparagingly.  It wasn’t really until I joined a Unitarian Universalist church that I felt completely free to ask so many questions.  In that church, I felt free - even expected - to search for truth and meaning and to explore a variety of religious traditions in the company of a caring group of open-minded people who were also searching.

I learned there that Universalism began as a Christian response to the harsh Calvinism of the 18^th century, and that people here in America like John Murray and Hosea Ballou were preaching more than 200 years ago what is known as “universal salvation”: that all will be saved because God is too good to condemn people to the eternal hellfire and damnation that my aunt and so many others are so deathly afraid of themselves - and so willing to assign others to. 

Unitarianism, too, I learned, began as a Christian sect that saw Jesus as more man than God, and saw humanity as having the potential for goodness rather than being completely evil.  The Unitarian minister Theodore Parker preached a sermon 170 years ago entitled, “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity,” a sermon for which he was nearly banished from church, a sermon in which he argued that the truth of Christianity should not be based on the authority of Jesus any more than the truth of geometry ought to be based on the authority of Euclid;  it’s up to us, he said, to test both kinds of messages to see which truth holds up.

So in the histories of Unitarianism and Universalism, I’d found a version of Jesus that was human rather than divine, a version of Jesus that was natural rather than supernatural, a version of Jesus that trusted the goodness rather than the depravity of the human heart. 

Finally in my search, I was on the road to something I could hang onto.

 

When in the early 1990’s I heard about the group of scholars calling themselves the Jesus Seminar and talking about their work on the Historical Jesus, I was enthralled.  Here were people who were asking a lot of questions and seriously wanting to know something about that illusive guy whom I’d seen in the painting knocking at the door to the human heart.  I read all I could find by Seminar Fellows John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and Burton Mack.  Eventually I would go to Eden Seminary in Webster Groves and take classes with Steve Patterson, another Seminar Fellow.  And here are some of the things I learned in that long exploration.

First, it is incredibly hard to know anything for sure about the person we know as Jesus.  He lived and died among a mostly illiterate, peasant culture and was an illiterate peasant himself.  Apparently no one who actually knew him ever wrote anything down - all the sources we have that tell us anything about him were written years and years after his death by people who didn’t know him first-hand but had heard stories that had been passed down orally.  The written sources that come from those second- and later-generation followers include the four canonical gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John), and some extracanonical gospels that have been unearthed elsewhere (like the Gospel of Thomas and some 30 others, mostly in fragmentary form).  There are only a few short notations in non-Christian, pagan texts that possibly allude to the life or death of Jesus, but those are still the subject of debate concerning their meanings.

Reading the sources about Jesus can be a confusing jumble of competing ideas and grandiose claims, but it seems like the sources agree to some extent, when read from a historical-critical point of view, that Jesus was several things:

1)  he was a teacher who spoke about a “coming reign of God” that was both already here and about to come into being more fully; 

2)  he was a healer who performed miracles on people who were sick or broken; 

3)  he was a person who came back to life after his death.

Let’s take all three of those items in turn:

A teacher:  Many of the written sources purport to tell us the teachings of Jesus.  Some of these teachings come in whole sermons, and contain sayings like the Beatitudes (reading).  As you heard in these, Jesus is good at subverting the conventional wisdom about who is blessed and who is cursed, effectively critiquing and overturning the political hierarchy at work in the culture of his time.

Some of the teachings are aphorisms - short, pithy sayings like, ““Seek and you shall find, ask and it will be given.”  “The first will be last, and the last, first.”  “Judge not, that you be not judged.”

Some of the teachings are found in narratives about Jesus’ encounters with people.  Jesus was apparently someone who talked to and connected with and even sat down to eat with social outcasts like prostitutes and tax collectors and thereby incurred the wrath of the ruling religious establishment.  He seemed to continually reach across cultural boundaries, and he used the simple sharing of food and drink to model a new way of being in the world.

Some of his teachings are in the form of parables, like the Parable of the Prodigal Son and the Parable of the Mustard Seed.  These parables told stories in the vernacular of the crowds of peasants he talked to, but they had a way of opening up further questions instead of stating simple answers.  Just when listeners thought they knew where a lesson was going, the tale would turn and leave them to ask more questions.

Some of his teachings may have concerned an apocalyptic new world order that would be ushered in by a battle between cosmic forces (the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar discount such an apocalyptic world view for various reasons).  But many of his teachings concerned an already-evident Empire of God that stood over and against the powerful Empire of Rome.  This Empire of God was already here and could be accessed by those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Next, a healer and miracle worker:  the written sources make clear that people saw something miraculous happening when Jesus brought his spirit to bear on human problems - the lame walked, the blind saw, the deaf heard, the dead arose - and all this talk of things supernatural is what has driven many of us rationalists away from the Christian story in frustration and disgust.  I think it is possible to see the story now from a more modern, rationalist point of view - that Jesus’ healings were not so much physical miracles of medicine but were more socio-cultural in nature:  when he reached across strict cultural divides to welcome the outcast, to touch the untouchable, and to love the unlovable, things changed, lives were transformed, a new world and a new way of living was made evident.  We moderns might dispute whether the natural laws can be transcended;  surely, though, we would not dispute the power of love to lighten the heart and lift the downhearted and to make a real difference in people’s lives.

Now the last and perhaps the hardest item, that Jesus was a person who came back to life after dying:  This one goes against all the evidence of the natural world, that something can die a physical death and then be bodily resurrected.  I can’t imagine anything so super-natural (i.e., outside of Nature) happening, not in the same way that my aunt says she believes it did.  What I can say, though, is that I can see how Jesus might have been one of those people whose charismatic presence was so strong in life that his followers’ lives were changed and those followers’ lives continued to be changed somehow by their awareness of his life long after his death.  And I can see how their stories of him and their stories of the way their lives had changed and the repetition of his teachings over time might change the lives of some of those who heard.

We have heroes like that now:  Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Mr. Lincoln even.  Our lives have been changed because of the way they lived their lives, and because of the difference they made in other people’s lives, and because of the stories we tell each other about them.  That may not be bodily resurrection, but it’s certainly a kind of life that continues long after physical death.  Not supernatural, perhaps, but transformative and transcendent.

 

So that’s the Jesus I’ve come to understand:  a man whose life and lessons changed the lives of those who knew him and those who heard about him and those who continue to hear about him.

I still say I’m not a Christian.  My aunt still doesn’t think I have Jesus, and I don’t suppose I have the one she wishes I had - the one who was bodily resurrected and sits at the right hand of God and sends people to hell.  But because my Unitarian Universalist church expected me to learn about different religious traditions, and because I have been on a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, I do have as an example for my life: 

--  a Jesus who pointed to the possibility of overturning the death-dealing Empire of the World and announced the advent of a life-affirming Empire of Love; 

--  a Jesus who reached across cultural boundaries to welcome the outcast, to touch the untouchable, and to love the unlovable in a way that brought healing to the sick and the broken; 

--  a Jesus who somehow found such a truthful and authentic way to live that the lives around him were transformed, such a truthful and authentic way to live that lives touched by his memory continue to be transformed.

Mine is not the modern Caucasian-looking Jesus portrayed as God in the church of my childhood, but a “person of color,” a Palestinian Jew, an illiterate peasant from the 1^st century who came to realize that, though the world was ruled by an empire where life was cheap and justice nonexistent, there was yet another way to live where life was affirmed and justice possible;  a Jesus who came to realize that even though the human heart can have dark places within it, it can also be a place of wonderful openness and a source of bright light and the repository of great love.

For the freedom I have been given to conduct this search for truth and meaning, and for the fruit of such a search, I will be eternally grateful.

So may it be.