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April 2003 Sermons
April 20, 2003 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanApril 20, 2003Jesus Our Brother Kind and Good: How He AroseYou may have heard the story about the unfortunate preacher who indelicately stated to the congregation during the Easter ritual: This being Easter, we will ask Mrs. Jenson to come forward and lay an egg on the altar. Rest assured none will be called up today to perform that miracle. When I was a child I never thought much about the Christian traditions of my family or community. Easter was a time for new clothes, hats and white shoes for the ladies, dyeing eggs for Easter egg hunts, going to Sunrise services, making baskets with that slippery artificial grass in the bottom. Nor did I think much about other holiday rituals: Christmas trees, ornaments, Halloween get-ups with masks and trick-or-treating. They were just part of the things we did. Some kids will, of course, always be a bit more astute than others, like the one in this story: A bunch of young kids were enjoying eating Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies. One, remembering the candy from trick-or-treating, remarked sagely: You know, Easter tastes better than Halloween, and you don’t have to ring a lot of doorbells to get it. Sometimes there was a deeper message connected with the treats we looked forward to as children, like at Christmas and Easter, and other times there was not any such clear message, like on Halloween (at least for Protestants who had no truck with All Saints Day). Being children, we mostly focused on the fun and goodies. Most of us who are not children any longer do not think all that much about them nowadays either, regardless of religious persuasion. I had two people ask me this last week if I was making Easter baskets, and rather blasély, I responded, “Well, since I don’t have small children now, I don’t do those things. I always see them merely as children’s activities.” One woman, in her early 30s who has no children, looked a little sheepish, then told me she always decorates her house and does Easter baskets for all her family members. Apparently this is a tradition in her family, and she has never questioned whether she should continue to follow this pattern. I have to say, I am glad it is not a tradition in mine. But, it points out that every family, and certainly different cultures, can have different take on these larger holidays. As I grew up, my natural curiosity about everything led me to start asking questions about why so much of the holidays would be about things that seemed totally disconnected. I can remember some half-baked theories from my very religious family members about how these were directly related to Jesus’ dying on the cross, but they made little sense.Like most Unitarians, I am a person who needs things to make sense whenever possible. I do not do very well with inconsistencies about things that I think probably have a very good explanation. But I have learned over time that many people are quite happy to live with inconsistency, and with illogical elements in their lives, be they religious or political. One example I was hearing about again just this past week. It seems that while only about 2% of the wealthiest people in this country have to pay any estate taxes, and of that 2%, most use various sheltered trusts, and such like to avoid this estate penalty; still, something around 52% of the population thinks the estate tax should be abolished. I wondered why, and then I remembered a story I have heard repeated a number of times, practically verbatim. So I wonder only to the extent that I know now the durability of the Urban Myth. The Urban Myth is a story that gets repeated as fact by so many people that it becomes accepted truth-and usually the person telling the story claims direct knowledge. I had someone tell me that her aunt went to Las Vegas and was on an elevator with another woman when a big African-American man got on with his dog. He turned around and looked at them, then said, “sit” in his deep commanding voice, and they were so afraid they both sat down. It turned out that the man was Willie Mays, the famous baseball player, and that he was merely talking to his dog. As the story goes, he apologized and insisted on buying them dinner--or something like that anyway. Well, it was a part of the great glob of stories called Urban Myths. It did not happen. I have book purchased much later titled, Urban Myths, and many of them are disclosed, which is where I learned that the story I was told was so much baloney. The estate tax urban myth that is going around now, that I have heard repeated on radio and TV, has someone stating that he claims to know some other man who brought himself up by his bootstraps, built a prosperous business, but would have 90% of it go to the government when he dies because of the estate tax, and not to his family who should be getting it. The fact is, if he is that smart, he would hire good legal and financial advice and not leave his family to pay any estate tax, or at least very little. Further, it would be well to remember that: To whom much is given, much is expected. I believe one of the gospels also has Jesus teaching to render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, so we may have a biblical dictum being ignore here, to boot. It just goes to show that people believe a lot of things that they hear, or, that they grow up learning, regardless of the elements of truth or validity.Take for example what people believe who grow up in the traditions that revere Jesus: Christianity and Islam. What do they learn? Where do they learn it? The answer is very simple: the New Testament scriptures of the Bible. But, what do they learn there, for there is a great deal of confusion amongst the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? The only books of those in the New Testament that talk at all about Jesus’ origins and purposes. Here is an important question one should ask oneself when approaching any historical text. What do I know about my own family history of the last one hundred years? Keep in mind this question even though this past 100 years is well into the age of literacy, writing, books, recordings, and computers. Yet, when we ask this of ourselves, we find that few of us know very much with in accuracy about our great-grandparents. The reason we ask this question is to remember that truth is harder to know than it is to claim. To verify, to cross check, to ask the hard questions is an absolute requirement for any learned study. If we ask what there is besides the New Testament texts themselves that offer any corroborating evidence about the life of Jesus, most of which originated long after the death of Jesus, we come up woefully short of support even for the existence of Jesus. There is only one brief reference in the writings of the Roman Historian Flavius Josephus, a Jew, in his book Antiquities of the Jews in 93C.E., to one Jesus who was crucified by the Pilate. That is the only extra-scriptural source. And even that has been questioned for authenticity. I believe Jesus did live, that he was a real person, for it seems unlikely that so much would have been written, or survived to be written, about a person who did not exist. But, are the New Testament sources that are written about him reliable? And to that question we can only turn to the New Testament which clearly has particular aims and biases, but unfortunately a great deal of contradiction and differing accounts altogether. People have been pondering these questions about the nature Jesus’ existence for a long time; yet, it is only in the last two or three hundred years that it has been safe to ask them out loud. Note these quotes from the 19th and early 20th Centuries once people are free to question: Leo Tolstoy, a very religious man (1828-1910) I believe that Christ was a man like ourselves; to look upon him as God would seem to me the greatest of sacrileges. Joseph Lewis (1889-1968) If I had the power that the New Testament
narrative say that Jesus had, I would not cure one person of blindness,
I would make blindness impossible; I would not cure one person of
leprosy, I would abolish leprosy. Most people like the image of Jesus that shows him friend of the outcastes, children, the meek, and the lowly. Jesus our brother kind and good, as the Christmas carol goes. But how much does Jesus of the red-letter edition of the New Testament have to do with Christianity as it is now preached and practiced. Teachings like, Give up all you have and follow me, are rarely practiced. Blessed are the poor and the meek, are they really blessed by anyone? Not if the Christian-American attitude toward taxes and welfare is any gauge. Now here is a conundrum Jesus would probably have had a pithy parable for: How is it that the average person can want the very wealthiest to keep their riches (at least in their families) even when they die, but the same average people do not want the meek and the poor to get more than the barest of wages or aid in the form of welfare? How is it that the Jesus is presented purely as a man in the oldest of the four gospels, Mark? But even in Mark 15-16, in the description I read to you earlier about the death and resurrection, lends no more than mystery, not miracle to the disappearance of the body? Yet, when we read the progressively later texts in Matthew, Luke, then John, the birth, (not discussed anywhere in Mark) and the death become progressively expanded and enlarged. Laid side by side, they lack a great deal in agreement in time or events presented. Earl Doherty scholar of History and Classical Languages, a well-known Canadian Humanist writes:Christianity was allegedly born within Judaism, whose basic theological tenet was: God is One. The ultimate blasphemy for a Jew would have been to associate any man with God. Yet what did those first Christians do? They seemingly took someone regarded as a crucified criminal and turned him into the Son of God and Savior of the world. They gave him titles and roles formerly reserved for God alone. They made him pre-existent: sharing divinity with God in heaven before the world was made. Nor was this something that evolved over time. All this highly spiritual and mythological thinking is [in] the very earliest expression we find about Jesus. And yet there is a resounding silence in Paul and the other first century writers. We might call it "The Missing Equation." Nowhere does anyone state that this Son of God and Savior, this cosmic Christ they are all talking about, was the man Jesus of Nazareth, recently put to death in Judea. Nowhere is there any defense of this outlandish, blasphemous proposition, the first necessary element (presumably) in the Christian message: that a recent man was God. Such a defense would have been required even for gentile listeners. The Greeks and Romans had their own religious philosophies . . . which included the idea of a divine Son, of an intermediary between God and the world, but such spiritual concepts had never been equated with a human being. [And further on in the piece] Paul and other early writers, however, seem to speak solely of a divine Christ. He is the starting point, a kind of given, and is never identified with a recent human being. Spiritual beliefs are stated about this divine Christ and Son of God. Paul believes in a Son of God, not that anyone was the Son of God. Many modern theologians at our greatest university schools of divinity, like Princeton, Yale, Harvard, find that there is indeed more mystery than fact as they look for clues into the man Jesus. The famous Jesus Seminar, organized in 1985, under the auspices of the Westar Institute had initially thirty scholars who began work seriously to understand the historical Jesus. Eventually more than two hundred professionally trained specialists, called Fellows, joined the group. The Seminar meets twice a year to debate various New Testament points. These scholars represent a wide range of Christian and non-Christian beliefs. In 1993 the first phase results were published in a book titled, The Five Gospels: Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. The scholars of the Jesus Seminar find the puzzle only growing greater. Added to the much greater scrutiny of the New Testament over the last 200 years on all sides, the Seminar brings to the forefront the very complex nature of such texts derived not in the time of Jesus, but later with all the permutations of writers about an earlier time trying to make sense of their own present time. There seems little doubt that as questions arose in those first hundred years or so, information was added to fill in the gaps. Here are some conclusions of some of the various scholarship: Internal evidence shows us that the author of Mark could not have been the historical Mark, follower of Peter <http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/markauthor.html>. The author was not a witness nor was he the friend of a witness to the events in Jesus' life. His identity is unknown to us. The findings above have implications regarding the authorship of Matthew and Luke. Both the authors of Matthew and Luke are also unknown to us <http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/matthewluke.html>. In fact the names attached to the gospels-Mark, Matthew and Luke-are merely second century guesses. <http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/matthewluke.html> Looking next at the gospel of John, we see that it is a late and unreliable work <http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/john.html>. Next we ask ourselves the obvious question, could documents written at least close to half a century after the death of it's main character, by non-eyewitnesses, give reliable testimonies of that person's life. We ask whether the oral tradition <http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/oral.html> gives us confidence in the gospels? The answer is a resounding "No." The elapsed period between the written account and the purported events certainly allow corruption of the stories. The best we can know is that the writings within the gospels and the epistles give us little concrete agreement beyond accepting in this late First Century that Jesus Christ died for our sins (even the name is a redundancy of Aramaic and Greek meaning savior savior).Yet, how Jesus became the savior, how he arose in the sense of moving from the Jewish radical of the gospel of Mark to the Christ of Luke and John, may be just as much a matter of politics as religion. Last week I preached about theology, the study of God, and as I talked about then, the most important event in the history of Christianity after the advent of Jesus was probably the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th Century since his conversion de facto converted the entire Empire in one fell swoop. Constantine was frustrated by the many different versions of scripture, different theologies, different stories that had grown up over the roughly three hundred years since Jesus lived, and he ordered the leaders, or bishops, to a council in Nicea (in what is present day Turkey), to iron out the differences and come up with a coherent message to be taught to all the, now Christian, Roman Empire. In an odd parallel, the Jesus Seminar is trying to find out what was being discussed before the “seminar” at Nicea. A kind of reversal of the process set in place at Nicea Council in 325 C.E. (A.D.). Keep in mind that until about 450 years ago, people outside the priesthood did not read the Holy Scriptures, they were taught them. And only in the last three hundred years has wide spread literacy taken place in the western world, and has not yet taken place everywhere yet. The coherent message of Nicea was taught from the pulpits by the priests, but with the Reformation in the 16th Century that message was challenged by different groups so that today we have many more interpretations of the New Testament and Hebrew scriptures.Modern theologians are less inclined to accept the rulings of Nicea, and try to find the historical truth wherever they can, using other texts of the time, through archeology, through well-known habits and customs of people recorded down through the ages. Miracles, including the resurrection of Jesus are doubted as actual fact, and believed to be primarily metaphorical in nature. This was the method of the age and the ages before and after; that is, to use stories to make a point. To enlarge a character, person, or event to something superhuman or supernatural. To graft on over time the missing bits of the stories. This can be demonstrated in the earlier works of Homer, as well. Jesus, we Unitarians believe, was a man, a very good, a holy man for the positions he is said to have taken, positions for which he was said to die on a cross. We do not believe that Jesus was God, nor that he was born of a virgin (the virgin birth story is a much later addition which parallels the stories of holy men in other surrounding cultures). Nor do we believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. I remember as a child every Easter hearing the preacher intone Jesus’ last words on the cross before he died: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (this is not in Mark, but is in Matthew). Why would Jesus ask why God had forsaken him, especially if Jesus is God and knew why? This anguished cry sounds far more like the cry of a young man who believed he had a special mission to speak out for the poor and the disenfranchised, to face the contempt of his friends and family, to be condemned by his religion, and, there in the dying throes of his suffering feels betrayed. Jesus of the early book of Mark is certainly kind and good, he arose as the Christ in the same way that all the leaders and founders from those other miracle stories of antiquity we barely know like Gilgamesh of the Summerian stories (that are repeated later with modifications in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures), down to the Gautama the Buddha, to Mohammed, down through the ages until we get to the post-Enlightenment period of the last four hundred years, and a virtual absence of founding holy figures since then. Jesus has many of the characteristics of the holy man/savior common to that period. Some scholars report that there existed as many as 29 saviors before the advent of Jesus [in the Israel of the era]. It appear that this pre-Christian savior-god motif was borrowed . . . and attached to the events surrounding the Passion of Jesus Christ. [Some] of Jesus’ errant followers, such as Paul created an updated version of an ancient theme for the purpose of accommodating the Gentiles and converting them to the new religion. The savior-gods that have appeared in human history . . . have all or most of the following in common: Their mothers were virgins. They were born in a cave or in a stable. They worked for the salvation of humanity. They were called Saviors, Mediators, Healers, etc. They were overcome by evil powers [Jesus was tempted by the devil]. They made a descent into hell After being slain they arose from the dead and ascended into heaven. They founded religious institutions. They were commemorated by Eucharistic rites. Many of these savior-gods were believed to make a second coming to the world. Our ancestors have had to come to terms with many truths they did not want to see, as superstitions were cornered by scientific research. Does healing by a doctor of medicine mean more or less than healing by a shaman or a holy man? The answer lies in part in your own heart, and where you are more likely to turn if your appendix ruptures. We are spiritual beings, neither myth nor science changes that. We look for stories that satisfy our basic longings, yet we no longer can believe stories that fly in the face of modern knowledge and experience. Jesus of the 21st Century will more and more need to be the historical Jesus, not the mythical Jesus. Unitarian Universalists have long accepted that the search for truth, even as Jesus was searching for truth in his time, must be the way we go. To not settle for the pronouncements of religion more vested in self-preservation than in the meaning invested in the way Jesus lived. To believe that the gift of our minds, our critical thinking ability, is a gift to be used by us, not to be manipulated by others. Jesus arose for all the right reasons, in answer to prayer of the poor and the weak, in time few of us now understand or appreciate. His people, the Jews, lived under the occupation of the all-powerful Roman Empire. These weak and powerless to whom he spoke in countryside in Israel needed hope and comfort. That is what Jesus brought to them, and why his name lived on in truth and legend. Easter, named for the Germanic goddess of Spring, Oester, is associated with Jesus because rebirth is the legend that lent itself so well to the native-pagan religions within the Roman Empire about the goddess of rebirth, fertility and renewal. To overlay one story to another was the highly intelligent practice of Roman as it made Christianity the religion of all the people of the Empire. So it goes with story, myth, how they rise and fall and fade into the light of each new age. So be it. |
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