In the Spirit of Jesus
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Sunday, January 27, 2008
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
“The Jesus that emerges from the myth-cleansing process is not in any way a diminished figure,
with his majesty and mystery stripped from him. He is in the most crucial ways a far more challenging, unnerving, and revolutionary guide and teacher than anything pious legend has made of him.”
– Andrew Harvey
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is from a book about Jesus called Son of Man written by Andrew Harvey. Mr. Harvey is a Christian mystic who was born in India and educated at Oxford, where he was a fellow at All Souls College. He has studied the mystic traditions of several world religions, and is co-author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Here is an excerpt from his book about Jesus:
Many Christians are frightened of the new historical criticism that has totally revolutionized our vision of the historical Jesus. It is forensic, it’s fiercely skeptical, and its methods have challenged many of the most cherished myths and legends of the Christian faith such as the virgin birth, the last supper, and the historical accuracy of the gospels. But this is not a disaster. It can be seen as a liberation – a liberation from manipulation and religious superstition ... a freeing up of a wholly new vision of Jesus himself, and a new relationship to him. The Jesus that emerges from the myth-cleansing process of the best of the modern explorers of this field is not in any way a diminished figure, with his majesty and mystery stripped from him. He is in most crucial ways a far more challenging, unnerving, and revolutionary guide and teacher than anything pious legend has made of him.
2. Our second reading is the parable of the Good Samaritan, which you’ve probably heard dozens of times, but it is one of Jesus’ parables that, no matter how familiar, is still good to read and hear again, like a great poem. It appears only in the Gospel of Luke – it’s part of a large group of stories and sayings that are unique to Luke; and although there is a lot of scholarly debate about which of the words attributed to Jesus in the gospels are words that the real Jesus actually said, there is no debate about this parable: it’s his. Here it is, from Luke, chapter 10:25-37.
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus with a question:
“Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law?” Jesus replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered: “'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind' ; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
But the legal expert wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “But who is my neighbor?”
In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.
He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. 'Look after him,' he said, 'and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.'
“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
I will add to this parable two more relevant verses from Luke – from 17:20-21:
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed. People are not going to be able to say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘Over there!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
The title of this sermon is, of course, the second line of the covenant most of us join in saying
near the beginning of every Sunday service – I say “most of us” because I try to make a point
of inviting you to join me in saying it, “if you wish.”
Because we don’t want anyone here to feel lassoed into something.
But the covenant is important to us because it’s what brought us together:
it was adopted in 1942 when the members of the Congregational church up the hill
and the members of the Unitarian church which met here
decided to join forces and become The First Parish in Lincoln.
They had spent six years talking about whether they all believed enough of the same stuff
to really go through with it,
and in the end they felt this covenant was spacious enough
to give everyone the spiritual elbow room they needed to become one church.
It was actually written in 1880 by the Reverend Charles Gordon Ames.
He was first ordained as a Freewill Baptist minister, but after a few years,
he saw the light – depending on your point of view –
and became a leader in the transcendentalist movement and a Unitarian minister.
His covenant was distilled from the richness and diversity of his hybrid religious faith –
it gave him the spiritual wherewithal to write a single sentence that included
a commitment to truth, to the spirit of Jesus, to the worship of God, and the service of all.
He was a hybrid, and so is this church: the Ames Covenant was the midwife at our birth.
But – we don’t all believe in God, and we’re not all on the same page about Jesus, either.
One of the questions at our Question Box service three Sundays ago was:
what do the words “in the spirit of Jesus” mean to you?
What do you understand them to mean?
It’s a very free-floating phrase, when you think about it.
It’s meant to evoke the things Jesus stood for:
justice, compassion, forgiveness, inclusiveness, service, love of God and of neighbor –
things most of us could easily take up without any reference to Jesus himself.
But I know there are some of us who can’t say the words “in the spirit of Jesus.”
The extravagant claims that some Christians make about Jesus have ruined him for them.
And I think that’s a real shame.
Because as Andrew Harvey says in this morning’s first reading,
modern biblical scholars are “freeing up a wholly new vision” of who Jesus really was.
And the historical figure rising up and stepping away from the old doctrines
is “a far more challenging, unnerving, and revolutionary guide and teacher
than anything pious legend has made of him.”
It’s an exciting time for the church because we are re-claiming the original spirit of Jesus
by grounding his spirit in who he really was and in what he really said.
and we have a lot to learn from his humility, his fearlessness
and his analysis of the social situation of his time.
He went after the establishment of his day – both church and state –
because of their disgraceful neglect of the poor and the disadvantaged
who were well over half the population –
and that’s why they arrested him and then killed him.
He was not a superman.
He could not climb down off the cross and save himself.
We can never know for sure who he thought he was,
but we do know that if he thought of himself as a son of God,
it was because he thought that we are all sons and daughters of God, every one of us.
He did not think of himself in inflated or exclusive terms.
His power to heal was a gift, but others, both in his time and since, have had similar gifts.
He never intended to start a church, he never intended to found a new religion.
He was a Jew who criticized his own religion as one who loved and honored it.
He knew how to make things simple for people.
There were 630 commandments in the Jewish tradition,
and when someone would ask him which ones really mattered,
he would boil them down to six, and sometimes to just two.
He was a great storyteller.
He used parables to make a point – sometimes a very sharp point.
But his teaching method was Socratic:
he would tell a story and then ask you a question:
what do you think it means?
He wanted us to come up with our own answers.
He tells the parable of the Good Samaritan because a lawyer asks him a question.
The lawyer has correctly named the two most important commandments –
to love God with all your heart, mind and soul and to love your neighbor as yourself –
but he wants to pin down the concept of neighbor, so he asks: just “who is my neighbor?”
He was probably hoping for a more limited answer than the one he got.
Jesus begins by telling us about a man who is beaten and robbed on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho.
The muggers take his money and his clothes and leave him half-dead by the side of the road.
We know nothing about his race, his religion, or his status in life – he could be any one of us.
You know what happens next.
A priest comes down the road and he sees the man lying there, but he passes by on the other side.
Then comes a Levite – Levites were temple assistants – and he, too, sees the man.
But like the priest, he gives him a wide berth.
I can feel Jesus sticking it to organized religion here.
He thought the church never did enough to help people in trouble.
But he didn’t want us to think of the priest and the Levite as terrible people.
He wanted us to identify not only with the victim, but with the people who passed him by.
Put yourself in their place.
You’re on the road, you’re by yourself,
and you see a half-naked man bloody and lying by the side of the road...
he could be drunk, he could have a disease, he could be dead.
He could even be bait, an accomplice of robbers laying in wait to jump you.
So you walk by on the other side.
You tell yourself you’ll report it to the police when you get to the next town.
They’ll take care of it.
We’ve all done something like this.
But meanwhile, the man is still lying there – and now, Jesus tells us, along comes a Samaritan.
The crowd, on hearing this, would have gasped.
Samaritans were social outcasts and religious heretics – they were a hated minority.
For a Samaritan to help the man, he would have to step across a social and religious boundary.
But when he sees the man lying there he goes right to him,
bandages his wounds, takes him to an inn, and pays the innkeeper for his care and keep.
Before he leaves, he promises that he’ll return to pay for any extra expenses.
So Jesus asks the lawyer: “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor” to that man?
The lawyer says, “The one who had mercy on him.”
And Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”
But Jesus knows that what the Samaritan did is not easily matched.
To help that man he not only had to cross over boundaries of class and religion,
he had put his own journey on hold, he risked danger to himself,
he spent two days’ wages for a stranger’s care, and he promised to follow up.
How often would or could any of us go and do likewise?
What Jesus wants most here is for our concept of neighbor to have no boundaries.
Our neighbor is the person next door and a homeless person in Boston and a family in Darfur.
He wants us to understand that we’re all children of the same God, all in this together.
The one who stops to help you may be as different from you as the night is from the day.
The one who stops to help you could even be an evangelical Christian!
The real Jesus sometimes set the bar high, but he also gave a lot of very down-to-earth advice.
In the third chapter of Luke, people ask him how to be good.
He tells them: if you have two coats, share one of them with someone who has none.
If you have more food than you need, give some of it away.
It didn’t matter to him who you were – he was comfortable with most anyone.
People hated tax collectors because some of them were crooked – they demanded more than you owed.
But Jesus invited a tax collector – Matthew – to be one of his disciples.
As a result, tax collectors would show up in the crowds who came to hear him,
and in Luke they ask him how they should conduct themselves.
“Collect no more than is appointed you,” Jesus tells them.
In other words, just do the right thing.
Roman soldiers – the occupying army – also came to him and asked: how should we behave?
He said, “Rob no one by violence or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.”
So we’re not up there with lofty platitudes that no one could ever live up to.
We’re right down on the ground, in the real world, where people live every day.
Some people back then, like some people today, were obsessed about the “end times.”
They thought the end was near.
But in Luke, when Jesus is asked when it’s going to happen, he says,
“The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed.
People are not going to be able to say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘Over there!’
For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
It is present when we make it so.
And we make it so when we reach out to one another in love.
Last spring, when I was on sabbatical in Santa Cruz, California,
one of the local controversies in San Francisco was over high school dress codes.
The schools wouldn’t allow symbols, images, or logos of any kind on your clothes.
In some schools, there were even certain colors you weren’t allowed to wear.
Red and blue were gang colors – and depending on who else was nearby,
one of those colors could be dangerous to have on –
you could be shot just for wearing blue by someone who wore red.
A high school drop-out named Elvia Bautista lost a brother that way, when he was sixteen.
He wore blue; his killer wore red.
When she visits his grave,
she puts flowers on the graves of the boys who wore red as well as those who wore blue.
She explains: “Everyone deserves flowers on their grave.”
That is the spirit of Jesus.
Who is my neighbor?
The one who had mercy – whether you bring bandages or flowers.
Amen.
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