Community Christian Church
November 7, 2010 Roger Ray, Pastor
It should not surprise anyone from this part of the country, whether you are in Sunday School or a used car lot or in line at the grocery store, to be asked by a total stranger, “Do you know Jesus?” And you know, when you hear that question that the person asking you is not just taking a survey or needing directions to Jesus’ house. You know immediately that the questioner believes deeply that he or she does, in fact, not only know Jesus but they want you to know exactly what they think they know and nothing else will satisfy their evangelical lust for souls.
Such people always remind me of that Mark Twain saying about evangelical Christians, “It’s not what they don’t know that troubles me, it is what they are absolutely certain of that worries me.”
With 400 congregations meeting around Springfield this morning, all ostensibly gathered in Jesus’ name, isn’t it fair to ask what any of us actually know about Jesus?
Like many of you, I was presented with a King James Version of the Bible as soon as I was old enough to barely read it. Unlike most of my peers, I actually did read it, reading at least a chapter every day from the time I was 10 years old until I had read it through enough times that I was as familiar with its contents as any student entering seminary could be. I knew enough, at that time, to take a fairly critical view of the contents.
No one had to tell me that the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke were not written to be historical accounts. It was obvious to me that the Jesus in John’s gospel was not the same guy as was described in Matthew, Mark and Luke and I knew that every letter in the New Testament which bore the signature of Paul had not, in fact, been written by the same guy who wrote Romans, Corinthians and Galatians.
But it wasn’t until I sat under real Biblical scholars that I began to understand how the writers of the New Testament were not giving me the straight skinny on the man from Nazareth. They were, in fact, giving me a polished, gold plated, three generations later version of Jesus and that if I really wanted to know the real Jesus that I was going to have to unlearn most of what I had been taught in church and be willing to dig in to some books that were going to shake me to the roots of my toe nails.
As I have often said to you, it is much easier to worship Jesus than it is to follow his teachings but we have given up on the gold plated Jesus in favor of the more difficult task of trying to discover the Jesus who inspired people, changed their lives, in fact, changed history, and made them want to inspire others so much that they lost touch with reality in the titles and attributions they heaped upon the real message of Jesus.
What do we know about Jesus? Well, we know that he never met Paul and that we are not going to learn much about the unvarnished Jesus from the highly published apostle. And we know that the four gospels in the New Testament are finished theological products, all of which draw on sources much older than their final drafts.
The shortest and doubtlessly the oldest of the four is Mark which contains no birth narrative and no sightings of a bodily resurrected Jesus. Matthew and Luke obviously use Mark’s material and time line to craft their gospels and, because Matthew and Luke have some material in common, we conclude that they both were also copying from a shared source which scholars have named the “Q” document….. “Q” being the first letter of the German would for “source.”
Biblical scholars conclude that if we read only these passages found both in Matthew and Luke that we are looking at the edited contents of a sayings source which is much older than any of the four New Testament gospels.
When we read only these quotes from Q recorded in Matthew and Luke we encounter a Jesus who calls himself the “son of man” and not the “son of God.” We meet a Jesus who does not perform miracles but rather chides the public for demanding such signs. We get to know a Jesus who teaches radical compassion and a deep desire to be separated from the values of the world and to be devoted to the rule of God, translated variously as “the Kingdom of God” or “the Imperial rule.”
Long after Biblical scholars had hypothesized that the first writings about Jesus were probably simple collections of sayings of Jesus, much like Q or like the collected sayings of Confucius or Buddha, archaeologists found an ancient library buried in the sands of northern Africa in Egypt, was discovered. The Nag Hammadi collection included a Jesus sayings source which was attributed to Thomas.
This find in 1945 confirmed scholarly speculations that such sources existed and that they might help us to get to know the real Jesus much better. We’ve been fortunate to have one of the world’s preeminent Nag Hammadi scholars to lecture our little congregation on the contents of the Gospel of Thomas and so I have wanted to take some time for us to try to get to know the Jesus found in this text.
Of course, the sayings recorded in Thomas are not a scribe’s dictation recorded straight from the mouth of Jesus but scholars find some of the sayings to be very true to what they believe the character of Jesus to have been and so, as if listening to echoes in a canyon, these sayings get us a little closer to the person who most changed the world and pointed us all to a more spiritual way of living.
Saying #8, the first one printed in your bulletin, is the saying most scholars believe to be a direct quote from Jesus:
#8 Whoever is near me is near the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the imperial rule.
Anyone who has been outside on a cold night near a camp fire knows exactly what is symbolized in this metaphor. Fire is a source of both light and heat…. Away from the fire is darkness and cold. Jesus invites people into the light… the truth… understanding…. Into the warmth of life and away from the darkness of ignorance and the cold of death.
But anyone who has huddles by a camp fire also knows that the closer you get to the fire the greater your risk of being burned.
Paradoxically, Jesus is simultaneously calling his followers into the light of truth and closer to the danger of being rejected by the world which loves darkness. There is both invitation and risk involved in being a follower of Jesus and so the faith community which preserved this saying understood itself to have a passion for the truth which often put them at odds with the rest of the world.
The next saying gives us some insight into Jesus’ view of institutional religion:
#53 His disciples asked him, “Is circumcision beneficial or not?”
He replied, “If it were beneficial, their father would generate circumcised children from their mother. True circumcision is a matter of the spirit, and it is completely beneficial.”
Circumcision represents all of the ways in which Jews were distinguished from gentiles, and, apparently, the most important of their traditions judging from the Acts account of Paul haphazardly taking Timothy, an uncircumcised gentile, into the Temple courts.
Consistent with the Jesus of the gospels, the Jesus of Thomas has no respect for religious rules that are used to divide people. The Thomas community cherished a Jesus who united Jews and gentiles, united men and women, united the rich with the poor and who refused to people as been cast off from the community. Sadly, later generations used Jesus to divide people the way Jews had used circumcision. By the end of the first century rules had been developed about who could administer communion, how a person was to be baptized and how sinners were to be excommunicated from the church.
The real Jesus was always in opposition to the religious rules which cause us to separate ourselves…. There is no apartheid in the Kingdom of God, no division of white and black, male and female, north side or east side, Latino or Asian. Through a journey which includes forgiveness, tolerance and even love, the Jesus community always strives to unite and to work against being divided.
The next saying I’ve selected is painfully graphic:
#60 He saw a Samaritan carrying a lamb as he was entering Judea. He said to his disciples, “Why does that fellow carry around the lamb?”
They replied, “in order to kill and eat it.”
He replied, “While it is alive, he will not eat it, but only if he kills it and it becomes a carcass.”
They said, “He would not do otherwise.”
He said, “you should seek a place for yourselves in repose, lest you become a corpse and be eaten.”
Even those of us who are fond of rare meat and raw fish would not take a bite out either surf or turf while it was still living and breathing. In this saying Jesus makes it very clear….. if you don’t want to be eaten, act like you are alive, because when you do nothing, say nothing, when you appear to be a bump on a log, then the world has only one word to describe you: dinner.
I would be tempted to go off on a string of quotes from Søren Kierkegaard about the irrelevance and deadness of the church of his day but I think that everyone here could express similar thoughts without quoting the Great Dane.
We have sat through long sermons which took the challenging, almost threatening demands of the teachings of Jesus and turned them into such boring tedium that would make watching paint dry make more sense than listening to Jesus. I am guilty of sitting in church and reading e-mail on my phone, balancing my checkbook and dreaming of being somewhere else, anywhere else. But the rest of the world tries to push every church into that kind of death. The gravitational pull of the grave is strong. The world doesn’t want us to sing songs of rebellion; they want us to sing good old hymns of narcissistic nostalgia. A proverb which I learned early in the ministry teaches: People really only love a nominal Christian. It is not until you have pulled the teeth out of the words of Jesus and accepted a religion of just being a nice, quiet, passive person that anyone will admire your faith.
I have regularly brought conversations to an end when I point out to an ardent critic that they are laboring under the serious misconception that I am somehow constrained to be nice. There is nothing about our faith which suggests that we should play dead so that our critics can eat us. I have often said that I don’t have ulcers but I take as a personal challenge to cause ulcers in other people.
The government, the insurance companies, corporations which exploit the poor and destroy the environment all want the church to play dead…. Maybe feed some hungry people and make casseroles for some sick folks but don’t you dare question a decision to go to war, or to raise rates so that the poor have no health care, or to try to protect the planet rather than corporate profits.
We are not called to death…. We are not dinner for governments or corporations…. We are the conscience, the prophetic voice. They will call us arrogant, obstructionist, socialist and un-American but that’s fine with me as long as they don’t get to assume that we’re dead.
It is a hard saying, but we hear the echoes of the voice of the real Jesus where Thomas writes paradoxically:
#68a You are favored when hated and persecuted.
Any faith community which is genuinely founded on the teachings of Jesus is going to be at tension with the culture which worships war and profit. If your goal is to be liked by everyone then Jesus is not for you. If you fight to liberate slaves you make slave owners your enemy. If you fight to give women equal rights then you make insecure men the world over hate you. And if you work for the liberation and civil rights of gays and lesbians then deeply closeted homophobic religious people will hate you and write letters to the editor about you….. which I typically read as being proof of my point….. but I digress.
Finally, the Thomas community also knew Jesus to be a teacher of radical compassion. When those miners were trapped under ground for months in Chile, to survive they had to initially discipline themselves to be hungry so that they could all live. No one would have been surprised if a fight had broken out among the survivors to kill off the weak so that the strong could have the lion’s share of the food. But in this wonderful example of compassion, the strong went hungry so that the weak could eat.
Fasting, self denial, even self imposed suffering has been extolled as a spiritual virtue, especially among monastic communities. Sadly, such religious practices quickly forget that you were being called to be hungry in order to have food to share with the poor.
When I was in seminary, a group of students were discussing what we intended to give up for Lent. One young pastor volunteered that he was giving up red meat and white bread during Lent so that he could lose weight and look better in his wedding photos in May. I pointed out to him that Lenten sacrifices were supposed to help us to get closer to God, not so that we will enjoy our image in the mirror even more….. and that is one more Methodist pastor from whom I no longer receive Christmas cards.
The Jesus of the Thomas community says very plainly:
#69b Those who go hungry to fill the starving belly of another are favored.
There have been some rare instances when I have literally given my meal to a hungry person and gone without myself but I don’t think the real point of this saying is that we need to go hungry….. the real issue of compassion is that we should not tolerate hunger in other people.
It does not help our friends who gather at Bill’s Place on Thursday if I stop eating altogether. What helps them is when we gather up some food to take down there and share with them.
No one at Bill’s Place ever asks me what I had for breakfast but they always ask me what we are bringing them for lunch!
So, it is fair to ask ourselves, “do we know Jesus?” And I think that a fair answer is that we don’t know him very well but we are trying to get to know him, by leaving the darkness of religion and stepping closer to the fire of justice and compassion. We can’t sit at his feet and hear his words but we can get on our own feet and act like we are alive, going to bring liberation, and hope, and a bowl of stew to the people whose company Jesus always seemed to prefer…. And the more we do that, the better we get to know him.
By way of conclusion of this sermon which I readily admit has been more of a lecture, I would like to tell you about some plans which have been evolving among us this week. Thanksgiving is on a Thursday this year….. I’m sorry if that’s news to any of you. Since Thursday is our normal day to take lunch to Bill’s Place and Bill’s Place is closed on holidays, a few of us have decided that before we set our table at home to share the annual feast with our families, that we are going to prepare and share a Thanksgiving dinner with the homeless people who hang out along Commercial St. and who live in the stairwells and under the bridges of downtown Springfield.
I’m looking forward to this Thanksgiving more than I have in any previous year. For those who volunteer to cook and serve that morning, I’m sure that when they sit down in their own homes with family and friends that they won’t just be talking about football and politics. Having first met Jesus, as Mother Theresa used to say, in his most distressing disguise…. Our minds will be filled with the images of the poor with whom we spent the morning.
It is impossible, in the 21st century, to claim that you actually know Jesus, but I believe that if we follow in his footsteps that we will get close enough, here and there, now and then, to catch a glimpse, maybe a whiff, maybe even to feel the warmth left in a footprint of the one who always stays a bit ahead of us in the pathways which lead to justice and compassion.
