Something to do with Jesus

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

I’ve been leading a class for the past six weeks or so on a book called the Wisdom Jesus.  It puts forward an image of Jesus as a teacher of the way of inner transformation that leads to higher consciousness.   A lot of people have responded very positively to this book, and the attendance at these classes has been the highest of any I’ve done at St. John’s.   We’re now in part 3, which presents contemporary approaches to ancient wisdom practices—some things you can actually do to follow in the way that Jesus taught.   And we’ve been spending a good part of each class doing these practices—not just talking, for instance, about Centering Prayer meditation, but practicing a twenty minute period of silent meditation together, and then having a conversation about our experience.

Last Sunday we did a form of Lectio Divina, a traditional way of slowly and sensitively digesting the scriptures.   And through the week as I was preparing to teach the class, I came back a few times to the problem of which scripture to pick for us to read.  I thought in passing about some personal favorites, but I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on making this decision, so, finally, I decided the best thing would be to just go to the Lectionary Page and write down the chapter and verse numbers of the Gospel lesson for the following Sunday, and read that. 

So that’s what we did.  We sat and meditated for a few minutes and then a volunteer read aloud the same verses from John that I just read to you this morning.  Now keep in mind, this group has been buzzing with enthusiasm for weeks about a portrait of a Jesus who is not exclusive, one who teaches a wisdom that is quite compatible with that of other traditions.  This is a Jesus who does not appeal to an external, dogmatic authority, but to our own inner capacity to recognize the truth.  But here we have one of those Gospel passages that seems, on the surface at least, to defy every attempt to make it universal.  So I have to admit I was a little nervous about how this was going to go. 

As it turned out, I need not have worried.  As we listened to the reading a first and then a second time, we did hit the uncomfortable verses.  And we could have seized up, and forgotten to listen to the rest of the reading because we were stuck, back arguing with verse 18.  But we stayed with it.  We stayed still and kept breathing, and trying to hear what the passage might be trying to tell us.  And when we started sharing what we’d found, it turned out there was a lot.  There was a lot in this passage that spoke to people’s hearts, that stirred their love and their longing for God.  So it is in that spirit of the faith that if we keep working, and look deeper, we will find there is more to these texts than at first meets the eye, I want to circle back now and take another look at the things about this reading that are hard to hear and hard to understand. 

 

After all, Jesus himself introduces this saying by telling us it will be a tough one to swallow.  He does this when he brings up the serpent in the wilderness.  As we heard in the reading from Numbers, Moses makes a bronze serpent as a kind of medicine that heals by making you look at the thing you are most afraid to see.   And Jesus says things in this passage that we don’t want to look at, things that might turn and bite us with a poisonous sting.  First he gives this incredible that about the grace of God, who loved the world so much, and who sent his Son not to judge the world but to save it.  But then he starts to talk about condemnation.  “Those who believe in him are not condemned,” it says, “but those who do not believe are condemned already.”  I quoted this passage at a talk I gave last fall, at an interfaith panel on peace and nonviolence, in order to illustrate a paradox that has been at the heart of the Christian religion throughout its history, and when I read those words, the Muslim Imam who was also on the panel winced and shook his head.    

Now some might say, “who cares?”  To them this passage is simple to understand: our religion has the right beliefs, and everyone else’s has the wrong ones.  We will be saved, they will be condemned, and its just too bad for them.  But a brief look back at our history tells us all we need to know about the poisonous snakes that lie along that path—wars of conquest and wars of religion, witch trials and inquisitions, pogroms, and genocides.  In a world of religious pluralism, especially in a place like California, where Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus, and Buddhists and Sikhs, Neo-pagans and Atheists all live side-by-side, this interpretation has lost its credibility—especially for the young, who have no memory of life in an ethnically and religiously homogenous community, and no desire to go back there. 

Because it’s no longer credible to say that the Christian church is in sole possession of the truth, even about religion.   We know too much about the world’s other faiths to continue to pretend that they are all false and misleading paths that take people to hell.  Even if their practices and doctrines seem alien to us, we can’t ignore the evidence of their saints.  People hear the Dalai Lama say “my religion is kindness” and they compare it with the self-righteous sectarian contempt preached in so many churches every Sunday.  Needless to say, it's not a favorable comparison.  So if we believe that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, who came into the world not to condemn it, but that the world might be saved through him (and I take my stand on the position that the world needs, more than ever, people who believe this), we have to start see how that might be true exactly because it doesn’t require that everyone convert to Christianity.

That means having a different kind of faith, one that is broader than we’ve had before, but also deeper.  It means having an imagination of what God is doing in the world in Christ that is no longer limited to what happens in churches, or with people who profess the Christian faith.   And it means embracing a new kind of Christian discipleship, one that is less defined by our belonging within the rigid boundaries an exclusive social group, where people think and act and look more or less the same.  It means being less concerned with believing the right things, and more with doing what Christ is asking of us to help him save the world.

I think that’s actually more in line with what the Gospel means by “believing,” anyway.  The Greek word that our Bibles translate as “believing in” Jesus doesn’t just mean “accepting as true certain ideas about him.”  It means to put our trust in him, to trust him enough to let him change the way we live.  Believing in Jesus means following his lead, doing the things he said to do.  And today’s text emphasizes that point very strongly.  “The light has come into the world,” it says—not into the church, you notice, or into the hearts of Christians—“and the people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”  “But those who do what is true, come to the light (they come out into the world), so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”   The truth, says the Gospel, the truth that really matters, is not something that you think, or something that you say, it’s something that you do.

Fundamentals

Genesis 32:22-31
Psalm 17: 1-7, 16
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:13-21

Last Saturday my family and I arrived at my sister-in-law Cathy’s house near Washington, DC after a long day’s drive from the beach in North Carolina.  Cathy and her family had left the same beach house we did a couple of hours before us and on the ride home had turned on the radio to get caught up on the news.   After we had unloaded our bags and were having a drink and a snack in the kitchen, she asked if we’d heard about the terrorist attack in Norway.  She stole the subtlest of glances at me out of the corner of her eye and said that it was being reported that the perpetrator was a “fundamentalist Christian.”  I said something like “I wonder what fundamentals of Christianity he thought he was observing?”   Which is pretty typical of how I handle such situations.  

 Actually, I’ve gotten so tired of practicing that kind of rhetorical jujitsu that I often don’t even bother anymore.   Earlier in the week, Meg’s stepbrother had announced at the dinner table that he could never espouse a religion that would tell him what books he couldn’t read or whom he had to kill.  This was followed by an uncomfortable silence.  I don’t know whether anyone at the table besides me thought that I was supposed to field that remark.  But what could I say, “Well, me neither”?  I should think that would be pretty obvious to anyone who knows me.  So I didn’t say anything. 

Christian identity can be a burden in today’s world, because of the prejudice that non-Christians hold against the church and its members, but also because of those Christians who insist on confirming the stereotype.  We can end up feeling a little like St. Paul, who writes in the Letter to the Romans about “the great sorrow and unceasing anguish” he bears in his heart over the refusal of his fellow Israelites to accept that Jesus is the resurrected Messiah.  When it came to the violence in Norway, I guess I felt compelled to make sure Cathy understood that Anders Behring Breivik and I do not share the same faith.   

When Monday came and I was back home and doing a little catching up on the news myself I found that the national spokesmen for the Christian right had been making the same argument.  Breivik cannot be a Christian, said Pat Buchanan and Bill O’Reilly and Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, because no follower of Jesus can be a mass murderer.   Like I might have done, they pointed out that being Christian is not a racial, or national, or even a religious identity.  It has something to do with following Jesus, with living as he lived and believing as he believed, or at least trying to.  Like me, those conservative pundits resented the failure of the media to make that distinction. 

So I got to enjoy the novel experience of agreeing with those fellows.  Or so it seemed for a moment.  But then they went on to say that while they reject Breivik’s methods, and disown him as a Christian, they find his social and historical analysis “accurate.”   They had read the massive manifesto that he posted on the internet the morning of his crimes and concluded that he is right about many things.  He is right that Western civilization is facing an existential threat from Islam, which commands its followers to conquer and kill infidels in the name of Allah.  He is right that Muslim immigrants into Europe and America are the advance scouts in this holy war.  He is right that they are being given aid and comfort by liberals, whose insidious doctrine of multiculturalism has muddled our thinking and sapped our will to resist.

Now I don’t intend to minimize the real problems of mass immigration.  There can be no doubt about the real social and economic stresses it is causing in North American and Western Europe.  But I can’t agree that demonizing the immigrants, or those who call for their acceptance, is the remedy.  So I’d like to counter Anders Behring Breivik with a little historical and social analysis of my own.  As I see it, the problem of Muslim immigration is but one part of a larger historical process.  In an earlier phase of history, the nations of the “West” expanded outward in a great thrust to colonize and “Christianize” the world.  In a more recent period that expansion has taken on a different form, called “economic globalization.”  Western governments and corporations have used the ideology and institutions of capitalism to integrate the resources and appetites of the entire world into a single cultural and commercial system.

But the idea that somehow this process would be an endless one-directional movement of values  and culture (and people) from “the West” to the rest of the world has proven to be a pipe dream.  What we are seeing now is this fantasy collapsing under the weight of the facts.    One of the facts that we have to reckon with is that is impossible to have a free market of money, goods and services, and information flowing all over the world while confining the labor market within national boundaries.  It’s just not sustainable to have one population living in wealth and security on one side of the Rio Grande or the Mediterranean Sea while another population lives on the other side in deepening violence and poverty.  Globalization has promised a free, prosperous, and democratic world for all.  In large measure it has failed to deliver it.  But that’s how most people want to live—even, as events in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and elsewhere have shown, Muslims.  If they are denied those things on one side of the water, they will cross it to get them.

And so what we see happening now is a colossal failure of nerve.  The globalized capitalist economy that was supposed to deliver a new world order of endless peace and unlimited prosperity suddenly appears unable to provide basic employment and material security even to citizens of the homelands.  The dream of infinite abundance shattered, many have now swung to the opposite pole.  Haunted by the specter of scarcity, they say that now there is not enough to go around; not enough money, not enough jobs, not enough rights.  From the one interconnected world of globalization, people are retreating to the old tribal identities—this is a Christian nation, an English-speaking country.  You don’t belong.  Get out.  This is all quite ordinary, very understandable, completely human.  It’s just not very Christian. 

When Jesus’ disciples were trying to understand how they were supposed to carry on his work in a frightening and confusing world, one of the stories they loved most to remember was how they found themselves in a deserted place late one day, with a large crowd of uninvited guests; uninvited, and from their point of view unwanted, although Jesus seemed to care about them and cured their sick.  The disciples went to Jesus and asked him to make them go away to fend for themselves.  And what did Jesus say?—“you give them something to eat.”  They protested.  All they had was five loaves and two fish, hardly enough for them, let alone for five thousand men and their assorted women and children.  But Jesus said, “Bring your five loaves and your two fish here to me.”

This is a story of the triumph of generosity and compassion over the fear of scarcity.  When the instinct of the disciples was to draw tight the inner circle and keep what they had to themselves, Jesus sent them out into the crowd as sharers of the hospitality of God.    As the world falls into the grip of anxiety that there is not enough to go around, as people start hoarding precious metals and cutting pensions for seniors and the disabled, nothing is needed more desperately than the confidence of Jesus.  The need is seemingly endless, our resources suddenly seem far too few, but if we are disciples of Jesus our plan of action must be to do as he did, to include everyone, to take, to bless, to break and to share away what we have.  What happens next is up to God, but the Gospel tells us there was more than enough.  Trusting in God’s abundance, sharing with compassion and confidence, the disciples ended up with more than they started out with.  No one got rich, but everyone got fed.