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HOMILY PREACHED ON SAINT ANDREW’S DAY & ADVENT SUNDAY November 27, 2005 There’s no way that Andrew and Peter or the Zebedee brothers would have just quit their jobs to go with this unknown, itinerate rabbi. Jesus must have spent a lot of time with them before he issued his invitation to go with him. Andrew was the first, and he, his brother and fishermen friends had obviously grown to enjoy, appreciate, and trust him and his new way of thinking. The question is how we follow Jesus in our own time, in our own situation. Many voices out there claim to speak for Jesus: radio, television, internet, this pulpit! I remind you that belief involves trust, not swallowing a thought because I — orany other "authority" — have said it. To be authentic I believe faith must be integrated with all that you are: your world view, what you feel in your gut is right and real, what you feel in your heart to be true. Following Jesus is not all intellect, but it is not anti-intellectual, either. Notice I didn’t ask "how to follow Christ." That concept has centuries of accretions on it as people tried to explain the Aramaic Jesus to Rome and the West which held different world views - and each successive generation has had to define Jesus in its own world view. I am convinced that Paul and the gospel writers laid a mantel of theism onto their experience that morphed Jesus into a character he would never recognize, and I’m not at all sure would approve of. It’s time we try to get beyond the myth of Jesus back to the real person — as best we can. As we prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth on this Advent Sunday, I invite you into a more radical — updated - notion of what it means to follow him, because he was quite a radical person, constantly breaking through religious barriers. To follow Jesus is to be as revolutionary now as he was then, digging through thick theological layers covering him in the gospels until — in the gospel of John - he’s practically buried. Listen for that theistic mantel this morning, very present in the Creed and in Eucharistic Prayer B. As I’ve studied Jesus, trying to get underneath those theistic layers, what he said and what he probably didn’t say, I’ve come to a few conclusions. First of all, Jesus was not afraid of God. The gospels record that he saw God as his loving father, not a fearful judge. That was new! You hear about "living in the fear of God." Jesus neither talked nor thought like that. Second, Jesus’ baptism was not to get rid of sin. That experience is when it dawned on him how much God loved him. At the baptism of our children and grandchildren it’s not to erase sin, but to hear how beloved we — and they - are. If Jesus was constantly tearing down barriers, are we still doing his work? That’s one way we follow him. As that theistic mantel descended, Jesus became more and more divine, so to focus on the humanity we experience in Jesus disturbs a lot of what we have been taught through the years, and can be very upsetting even to consider. It means giving up old thoughts, such as Original Sin, even the reason Jesus died. I challenge you to re-think your entire concept of religion, bring it up to date into the real world you live in. Check out your assumptions — what you think you’re supposed to believe in order to be Christian, even if it really doesn’t make any sense in terms of what we know now about life and how it works. It’s a radical change in the way we have viewed religion and God — and, therefore, how you view your self. In that spirit I quote to you from Bishop’s Spong’s new book, TheSinsof Scripture, subtitled, "Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love." Knowing that the following thoughts appear in the middle of a book you haven’t read, I ask you to simply fasten your safety belts and hang on. I will tell you that I am amazed at the way his theology reflects my own, expressed in my musical, "The Heavenly Host," as I’ve wrestled with scripture, New Testament and Old, in my own faith, and what I’ve taught you and preached here in our dozen-plus years together "This interpretation of Jesus as the sacrificed victim is a human creation, not a divine revelation. It was shaped in a first-century world by the disciples of Jesus, who drew on their Jewish liturgical symbols as a way the crucifixion of Jesus might be understood. They borrowed this understanding directly from the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, in which an innocent lamb was slaughtered to pay the price for the sins of the people. . . "We are not fallen, sinful people who deserve to be punished. We are frightened, insecure people who have achieved the enormous breakthrough into self-consciousness that marks no other creature that has yet emerged from the evolutionary cycle. We must not denigrate the human being who ate of the tree of knowledge in the Genesis story. We must learn rather to celebrate the creative leap into a higher humanity. Our sense of separation and aloneness is not a mark of our sin. It is a symbol of our glory. Our struggle to survive, which manifests itself in radical self-centeredness, is not the result of original sin. It is a sign of emerging consciousness. It should not be a source of guilt. It is a source of blessing. We do not need to be punished. We need to be called and empowered to be more deeply and fully human and to develop the godlike gift of being able to give ourselves away in the quest for an even deeper sense of what it means to live. Jesus did not die for our sins. Jesus demonstrated in an ultimate way that it is by giving that we receive and by loving that we enhance life. "Guilt, judgment, righteousness, orthodoxy, creedal purity: these are the products of a religion of control in which we hide in fear. They are attempts to build security. None of these boundary marks is life-giving. All are methods of seeking righteousness when that for which we yearn is love."* That is awesome stuff. And it is into that 21st century world of evolving nature and faith that I believe this new year is calling us. I found it unnerving and liberating. During this Advent I invite you to journey with me into new ways of thinking about Jesus and God, a journey not of anxiety but excitement, not of guilt, but joy — the kind of amazing liberation and excitement Andrew must have felt when he first met Jesus. * The Sins of Scripture by John Shelby Spong, Harper, San Francisco
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