“Jesus: Without Christmas or Easter”

“Jesus: Without Christmas or Easter”   August 25, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray

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Gospel of Thomas, saying 25    Jesus said, "Love your friends like your own soul, 2 protect them like the pupil of your eye."

It has been a crazy busy week this week. Sadly, huge portions of Brazil are on fire. The Amazon rainforest, home to the planet’s greatest bio diversity and the source of 20% of the world’s oxygen and, incredibly, it is not on fire by accident. The Trump-styled president of Brazil, Bolsonaro, is literally encouraging setting these fires to clear land for agriculture, trading a source of planetary life for short them profits.

In other insanely narcissistic news, this week, Donald Trump claimed the messianic title of “King of Israel,” and described himself as a second coming of God. Evangelicals rushed to defend the president’s blasphemous ego, explaining that he was really just very excited to learn that he gets bottomless free refills of French fries at Red Robin.

Meanwhile, responding to the incredibly stupid trade war Trump started with China, our stock market has tumbled such that I may now never get to retire. Who could have predicted that the Chinese “dictator for life” would try to wait out a president who has two years in office, provided he doesn’t get impeached sooner?

And, of course, my planned October visit to what is, an entirely new country for me, Greenland, has now been added to the list of places in the world where I end up having to apologize to everyone I meet for the crazy American president who thought that he could, 18^thcentury style, simply buy a territory that has tens of thousands of indigenous residents. A proposal to which, citizens in Puerto Rico replied, “Look, if you really want to invest in an island territory. . .”

But with all of this going on, I am going to do what only preachers can do, I am going to ignore all of that, and talk about Jesus. No really, I am. I know it may not be what you have come to expect from me but I feel strongly about adding this bit of biblical instruction to our catalogue. 

When we started our church 11 years ago, we envisioned ourselves to be distinctly different from traditional Christian Churches. 

In our mission statement, printed in each Sunday’s liturgy, we say that we are followers of the message of Jesus . . . 

Every Christian church of every ilk would claim an association with Jesus but what we were trying to emphasize was that we were rejecting the traditional church’s message about Jesus, Jesus who was the son of God, the savior who died for our sins, and sits at the right hand of God preparing to judge the world, sending some to heaven and some to hell. We wanted nothing to do with the stained glass sacramentalism of magical religion. We wanted to associate ourselves with Jesus because of the ethical teachings, the moral direction, the compassionate message of Jesus of Nazareth. 

We literally spent months, meeting every week, to hammer out these principles and to be clear about who and what we wanted to be. Sadly, it is always easier to see the absurd hypocrisy in others than it is to see in yourself. I wrote bold and very controversial articles published in local media about the obvious absurdity of the supernatural claims of virtually all churches but what was nearly invisible to me and to my peers at the time, was that we were over confident in how much we knew about the message of the historical Jesus. 

Over the years we benefited from guest lecturers, Dr. Charles Hedrick, one of the leading founders of the Jesus Seminar, and David Trobisch, one of the world’s leaders in biblical texts and historical analysis, and the famous Bishop John Shelby Spong, and I would add that the video series, Living the Questions, introduced us to many other leading scholars on the topic of the historical Jesus. 

Over the years, it simply became increasingly obvious that to claim to follow the message of Jesus is, in and of itself, a fairly preposterous claim. Jesus didn’t write anything and no eye-witnesses of his teaching wrote anything. 

The gospels in the New Testament are late first century and early second century creations in which, for the most part, Jesus is a character who is used to illustrate the beliefs of the gospel writers . . . but the connection to Jesus is dubious at best. 

Let me illustrate how this sort of thing happens:

Socrates was a public teacher in the ancient city of Athens about 500 years before Jesus. He challenged traditional values and was often ridiculed for being controversial on any number of topics. He didn’t write any books. He held no formal positions. But he attracted enough public attention to himself that, in a tragic miscarriage of justice, the city government voted to execute him. 

Years later, his best known student, Plato, decided to defend his long dead mentor’s reputation by writing two short books: the Apology, and Crito. Plato was present for Socrates’ trial and execution, so, it is likely that a great deal of what he wrote was at least based on historical facts. You couldn’t call his accounts “objective” or anything like a news report because he was a devoted fan. If a husband writes a Valentines poem to his wife describing her as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” that does not mean that he has objectively compared her appearance to beauty queens, models, and movie stars the world over… but, fellas, that shouldn’t keep you from saying it.

But, over the years, in all of the rest of Plato’s books, Socrates is the main spokesperson of all of the important ideas. This is in homage of his beloved teacher but the content of these dialogues is really all Plato and zero Socrates. 

In much the same way that, though I am deeply grateful for my late preaching professor, David Buttrick, none of you hear have ever heard me utter a single sentence that I heard in his presence. He influenced me, but he didn’t give me preaching material. 

We can point to many other historical examples of a famous person being branded with a message long after they are dead but let me just point out one more from the Bible:  The Prophet Isaiah has recorded warnings of the coming conquest of Judah by Babylon, and sermons delivered to the captive slave community in Babylon, and beautiful poetry about the return to Judah and the rebuilding of their nation. That is a preaching career of about 120 years . . . hence, there are those who suspect that this is not the work of one preacher. . . or two, or three, or four. 

So, let me get back to what we know about Jesus. The only person we know of who both wrote a part of the New Testament and was a contemporary of Jesus was Paul. Paul was a first century mystic who never met Jesus and apparently knew almost nothing about it and he assiduously avoided learning anything about the human Jesus who was, admittedly, of little interest to Paul. Paul believed that the world was coming to an end and that God was about to enter human history and usher in an entirely new existence. For Paul, Jesus was simply the agent of that eschatological transformation of time and existence. 

Paul was sufficiently well known for his travels and writing that he inspired a number of copycats and fake disciples who wrote in his name.

There are 27 little “books” or chapters and letters in the New Testament. 

Thirteen of those little books declare themselves to have been written by Paul.

Further, the book of Acts is largely written about him. It is a propaganda piece that is intended to bolster Paul’s reputation though the author adds lots of inaccurate and fairly magical elements to the Paul narrative. 

For very many, very good reasons, Biblical scholars have judged that Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus are forgeries. Still, Paul appears to have actually authored Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. 

Paul is the first writer of New Testament material. In many ways, he invented the Christian religion and preserved the name of Jesus for the generations that came after him. He was interested in basically two things about Jesus. 

The first is that he was killed on a Roman cross. The second is that he was said to have appeared in visions to followers after his death. You might say that at least for the sake of one of his arguments with the church in Corinth, that he was also interested in the Last Supper communion ritual. Otherwise, what the message of Jesus was is of no interest to Paul.

If all we knew about Jesus was from the authentic letters of Paul, we would have none of the Christmas story, none of the passion narrative, and all we would have of Easter is visionary . . . that is, no empty tomb, no physical appearances, no ascension into heaven, no great commission, none of that. 

The most reliable information from any ancient source is when they accidently tell us something that they were not trying to convey. For those who have gone so far as to doubt if Jesus was ever actually a historical person, I think that our best evidence comes from Paul’s description of his conflict, or rivalry, with the original pillars of the church, which he speaks of briefly in his letter to Galatia:

Paul is defending his claim that no one taught him about the gospel but that what he knew was revealed to him directly by God, Paul offers one apologetic note that he did visit Jerusalem and spent a couple of weeks with Peter and he met James, the brother of Jesus.  So, this little fragment tells us a lot . . . it lends credence to the historical existence of Jesus and that he had a brother named James and a close follower named Peter, or Cephas. It also indicates that after the death of Jesus, some community continued to meet in the Jesus movement and that they lived in Jerusalem. 

That may not seem like much, but, seriously, it does historically anchor the Christian movement to some reliable reality. And it makes Paul look like a bit of a narcissist to not bother to try to find out more about what Jesus actually said and taught. It is entirely likely that neither Peter nor James even knew how to write. Paul did and he had opportunity and reason to have given us some solid examples of the real teaching of Jesus but, for Paul, that visit to Jerusalem was all about Paul. 

We do have some fragments of possibly first century writings about Jesus and his teachings. I used a saying from the Gospel of Thomas as our wisdom lesson today. The Gospel of Thomas is a curious collection of sayings that has virtually no narrative to it . . . no accounts of miracles, no birth narrative, no mention of resurrection . . . just teachings, some of which are so obscure and so obviously influenced by Gnosticism as to be of little or no interest to us. 

So far as the gospels we have in the New Testament; John, the latest addition, offers no historical data and a lot of misinformation. Matthew and Luke have been aggressively edited and added onto, and Mark, the oldest of the four, is clearly written under the influence of Paul’s letters, possibly as a companion to Paul’s letters.

All of which is to say, we know almost nothing about what the historical Jesus actually taught. That is not to say that there is not a great deal of wisdom and spiritual instruction to be found in the New Testament, just like the fact that Isaiah was obviously written by more than one person, and, arguably, the second writer in Isaiah is a hundred times better than the original writer. 

But when anyone, including us, claims to be following the teachings of Jesus, they are fooling themselves. There is a Jesus you can see in the gospels who is a teacher of radical compassion. That’s the message of Jesus that I meant to elevate when we started this church. But there are churches all around here that could also claim to be following the teachings of Jesus who are deeply devoted to gospel passages that describe Jesus in divine, almost other worldly, and magical terms. 

I can disagree with those churches and their perspective on the gospel message, but in all honesty, I can affirm that most of the crazy stuff they claim to believe can be found in the New Testament…. Sometimes you have to hyperventilate and look at the text cross-eyed to see it, but most of that heaven and hell, judgment, pray for miracles stuff can be found there. 

So, I read the gospels looking for the moral teachings of an ancient Palestinian sage, and most of my peers in ministry read the gospel looking for stuff about the magic, flying, white guy who somehow ended up in Palestine. 

Depending upon your perspective, this could be good news, or it could be devastating. But the hard fact is that there is no “word of God.” There is no source of absolute truth. There is no clear, cogent, undeniable message of Jesus. There are lots of good ideas in the world. There is a lot of wisdom floating about with religions, philosophy, literature, art, and some even in music but none of it comes in a red-letter edition. 

Soren Kierkegaard was an amazing intellect who also happened to not always be right. Voltaire had amazing insights, and he was anything but perfectly insightful. I am a generally reliable resource of information and guidance except for when I am not and it is not always easy to tell when I am being illuminating and when I am screwing up royally. It should tell you something to know that if you want to look at any of my sermons from my first 30 years of preaching, you will have to send a team of archaeologists to the city landfill to try to find them because I destroyed all 

of the copies. It may also help to know that Plato also destroyed all of the manuscripts of his early work because he didn’t want anyone to see it. . . so we have that in common. Well, what do you have in common with Plato?

We were indoctrinated by our public education. We get brainwashed by religion, by the media, by peer pressure, and the manipulative marketing of advertisers. Very few of us had an independent thought in our heads during our young adult lives and sadly, many give up on thinking without ever giving it a solid try. Frankly, I believe that one of the biggest problems in America today is that most people can tell the difference between an informed opinion and an uninformed opinion. That is, education, study, the scientific method, actual research, is put on balance as being worth no more than mere gossip, and wishful thinking. Information is dismissed as being “just your opinion.”

What got Socrates killed, what probably got Jesus killed, was not that they were handing down wisdom from on high but that they kept asking hard questions. They asked people to question their assumptions. They challenged their comfortable opinions and asked them to think. And if we really want to be a better kind of church than what we grew up with, then our job has to be to provoke people to think, and think again. Or, at least that is what I think, and none of you can prove me wrong.