a sermon given by the Rev. Frank Clarkson
on Sunday, March 12, 2006
at the First Parish in Lincoln
READINGS:
1. The first reading is from the 88:27-38)th chapter of the Gospel according to Mark (. This passage is the appointed gospel passage for the revised common lectionary, which means it’s being read in Christian churches around the world today.
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
2. The second reading is the poem “Maybe,” by Mary Oliver:
Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,
silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night.
But you know how it is
when something
different crosses
the threshold -- the uncles
mutter together,
the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.
It comes and goes
like the wind over the water –
sometimes, for days,
you don't think of it.
Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth
like a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them
miserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it –
tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was –
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer sea.
I wonder what it was like to be a follower of Jesus—to be on the road with him, or in that boat on a stormy Sea of Galilee. I wonder if the disciples saw him the way Mary Oliver imagines:
“tender and luminous and demanding . . . a thousand times more frightening than the killer sea.”
I wonder about those who heard him ask, “Who do you say that I am?” Those who heard him say he would suffer and be killed, and that his followers could expect the same. I wonder--do any of you find this Jesus frightening, challenging? I know that I do.
When I saw today’s reading from Mark, I knew I had to use it. Not because I particularly like it, certainly not because I find it comforting. No, this reading feels like a challenge, and it feels important, crucial to the Jesus story. It asks hard questions. It comes at a turning point. Jesus and his followers have been wandering about Galilee, teaching and healing, and they are as far away from Jerusalem, where the action is, where the temple is, as they ever get. And right after this encounter they will turn back toward Jerusalem, the city that kills its prophets, arriving there on what we now call Palm Sunday.
I think of Lent as a time of walking toward Jerusalem, of trying to walk with this itinerant preacher and his band of brothers and sisters. It’s a good time to explore what it means to follow Jesus—what it meant then, and what it might mean now.
One Sunday last year I told you about a sign I saw out in front of a church that said, “Read my book. There will be a test. (Signed) God.” I’m afraid that’s how I first hear this passage from Mark--that Jesus is saying, “There will be a test.”
But I want to check this. I wonder how much my gender influences how I hear these words. My family will tell you, like most men, if we’re driving somewhere, and we get lost, I hate to stop and ask for directions. I’d rather muddle around for a while and try to find my way than admit to a total stranger that I don’t know where I’m going.
For two thousand years men have run the Christian church. The church has tended to portray Jesus as an authority figure, one to be worshipped and obeyed. Is this accurate, is this how his followers saw him? I wonder--if women had been in charge, how might the story be different?
I want to touch on what I see as the three main elements in our reading from Mark—
1. The question of Jesus’ identity, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter’s response, “Your are the messiah.” It’s important to remember that the world Jesus lived in was completely different from our own. Our contemporary focus on the individual would be foreign to Jesus. In his culture, people were identified by their family and birthplace. Jesus had left his family of origin, and so his disciples were his kin. “Who do you say that I am?” was a question about Jesus’ identity and ministry, not a test for the disciples.
The Hebrew people were living in occupied territory, under the heel of the Roman empire. They were longing for a new leader, a king, to save them, and this is what the word ‘messiah’ means, anointed one. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one is divine, or the son of God, and it’s certain that Jesus did not see himself this way.
2. Jesus’ prediction of his own death and resurrection and his call to those who would follow him to “Take up your cross.” The gospels are not accurate history, and it’s difficult to sort out what Jesus may have actually said and what the early Christian community added to support their understanding of who Jesus was. Scholars disagree over whether Jesus would likely have predicted his own death. He would know that his ministry could get him in trouble, because he was challenging the existing power structure.
3. Jesus’ saying, “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Last year Roger would remind me that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet—he believed the world was going to end soon, that God’s reign was breaking in and the old order was about to be overturned. Clearly this did not happen, but we need to remember to hear Jesus’ words in that light.
So you might ask--with the huge difference in context and culture between the first century and our own, do his life and words have any meaning for us at all? Has the passage of two thousand years made Jesus irrelevant?
Bill McKibben, most widely known for his environmental writing, had a piece in Harper’s magazine last August, titled “The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong.”1 McKibben begins by citing statistics: “Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.”
Then McKibben says, “Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. . . Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor.”
Jesus is relevant today if only because of so much that gets done in his name. For two thousand years we have been telling his story, and clearly we haven’t done a very good job of it. Too often the church and the state have used Jesus to promote their own agenda, to increase their own power. For two thousand years men have been running the church, and for two hundred years men have been running this country. And where are we? A majority of Christians believe “God helps those who help themselves,” and we have a president whose foreign policy is “You are either with us or against us.” Does anyone think it might be time to listen to women for a change?
I went to a Christian seminary because I wanted to explore what Jesus’ call for me might be as a Unitarian Universalist. Some of its critics say it’s a school where the women are in charge! I met Jesus there in that community, in people trying to live out the radical message of the gospel that we belong to one another, and that love is stronger that fear.
Today I want us to try to hear and see Jesus through the perspective of several women: the poet Mary Oliver, and the two women who gave me the title for this sermon: Carter Heyward, who wrote Saving Jesus From Those Who Are Right,and Lisa Isherwood, author of Liberating Christ.
Carter was one of my teachers and mentors, and one of the first women to be ordained to the Episcopal priesthood. She has spent her life being a courageous troublemaker for justice. I was her teaching assistant one semester, and I continue to be inspired by her life and work. Lisa Isherwood’s book, Liberating Christ, is an eye-opening account of how different groups at the margins—gays and lesbians, people of color, the poor—have found in the Jesus story inspiration for their own liberation. Both books have helped me to understand and embrace the Jesus story as a source for liberation and justice.
Carter says she originally thought of her book Saving Jesus as a response to the religious right. She wanted to challenge the ways Christian fundamentalism has distorted Jesus’ message. But she came to see “those who are right” as not only the Religious Right, but “all of us whenever we assume that we know it all or that our way is the only way to think or act. Those who are right,” Carter suggests, “tend to be impatient with God, themselves, and others. They do not accept the incompleteness of God’s creation. . . . Trying to be clear and firm, Christians who are right often imagine that Jesus is an authoritarian Lord, a righteous moralist, an embattled adversary, and an obedient Son to a righteous Father.”
She emphasizes “the significant theological and ethical, pastoral and political, difference” between trying to ‘be right,’ on the one hand, and the struggle . . . for right relation on the other.” The difference between being right, and being in right relation. Think about Jesus. His concern was for those pushed to the margins—children, lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes. His saved his harshest words for the Pharisees, those most concerned with rules and regulations and doing religion right.
I would say that the First Parish, in being a church where two congregations, two denominations, came back together, has tried to care more about being in right relation than being right. I believe this is what it means to be a church, a gathered community. Carter Heyward says, “Christians are called more than anything to be faithful, not ‘right.’”
Of course this is not easy. If we take the Jesus story seriously, it will call us to reach out not only to people we like, but those we find it difficult to abide. How do we do this? Certainly not on our own. But this is how we might find our life by losing it, I think. By letting go of the desire to control. By living not only for ourselves, but for others. By taking the risk of having our beliefs challenged and changed.
Sometimes in my car I tune in fundamentalist preachers and talk show hosts, to see what they’re up to, and I can find myself shouting back at the radio. But one day, as I was doing this, it hit me—who was I to think they were any less loved by God than me? Who was I to think I was right?
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have strong opinions, and that we shouldn’t express them—I think we who are religious liberals need to be better evangelists. But we should also strive to find ways to be in relation with those we disagree with.
The church father Tertullian (about AD 200) said that to outsiders, the identifying characteristic of the early Christian community was this: See how they love one another! I suggest this is a good standard by which to judge any faith—how do they love one another? And how do they love the least among them, how do they love their enemies?
In my work toward articulating a Christianity that I could give my heart to, it was important to make a distinction between Jesus and Christ. We need to remember that Christ is not Jesus’ last name—it is a title that means messiah, anointed one. Jesus is the historical figure, the Jewish man from Nazareth who lived and died two thousand years ago. Christ is what became of Jesus after Easter, the Christian community’s understanding of God’s presence in the world. Scholars talk about the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.
Initially I identified more with Jesus than with Christ. But over time I’ve come to an understanding of Christ that is much broader than Jesus himself. I like the description of the church as the body of Christ—not the physical body of Jesus, but a gathered body of people who are connected across space and time.
For the past week and a half, I have felt myself connected to you, and it had nothing to do with the fact that I was coming here today. I’ve been walking through Lent with you, by reading daily from the Lenten booklet. I’ve been so moved by what you have shared in those pages so far, and I feel connected with you in strong and mysterious ways. This to me is an example of being part of the body of Christ.
After Jesus died, the community that gathered around him was scattered. What they experienced in Jesus’ midst should have ended. But something happened. The spirit that had lived among them, the sense of God in their midst, that somehow continued. Over time the word spread around the Mediterranean and beyond. And even as the church became more and more a hierarchical and patriarchal institution, there have always been those who have been inspired by this spirit to serve others, to live in hope rather than in fear, to expect a miracle.
The American Civil Rights Movement, which would not have happened without the black church is an example of this spirit. I think the fact that a group of Evangelical Christian leaders recently issued a statement of concern about global warming is a sign of this spirit. What if we began to see our earth, which nurtures and sustains us, and which we have so often abused and desecrated, as the body of Christ? When we liberate our idea of Christ from the historic person of Jesus, this frees us to see miracles everywhere—in South Africa in the form of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, in Calcutta in the person of Mother Teresa, and in countless people who live their lives helping others –like you who visit nursing homes and prisons, who bring meals to the sick, who reach out to those in need.
The person of Jesus inspires and informs the Christic spirit, but need not limit it. I see Jesus as one who was so full of the presence of God that even death could not contain him. The Gospel of John beautifully describes this: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5). We are called, I believe, in this time, to discover Christ in our midst--to seek and find the spirit, the light, in our world and in each other, in places where we least expect it, to be part of the ongoing story, to be part of liberating Christ,
In a minute we will say the Call to Ministry--“we go forth from the worship of God to be faithful to the vision of Jesus.” How do you understand that? To be faithful to the vision of Jesus. It’s not about being right, it’s about where and with whom we choose to stand. As people carrying forward the Jesus story, we have a responsibility to imagine and promote saving images of Jesus, and to share the good news with a world that hungers for it.
Almost five hundred years ago the mystic Teresa of Avila said “Christ has no body now but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which his compassion must look out on the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.”
This is my prayer, that we will know the presence of God, that we will see ourselves as part of the body of Christ, a spirit that can not be contained in any one person or religion, and that this sprit will abide in our hearts, and inspire us to do our part to build God’s kingdom, the beloved community, here on earth.
Amen.
1. http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptTheChristianParadox.html