If you're familiar with services at this Society, you may have noticed that this service has mentioned Jesus a lot more than usual. Though this congregation began as a Christian one, only some of us would now identify ourselves as Christians. Though "Jewish and Christian teachings" are one of the sources of our living tradition, there are many others, and we tend to spend more time talking about the others.
When we do talk about Jesus, we see him primarily as a teacher of ethics, as in the children's version of the parable of the good Samaritan we read earlier. Douglas Adams may have given the briefest formulation of Jesus' ethical message in the prologue to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where his narrator explains that the story begins "nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change". Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, love your neighbor as yourself, go out of your way to help someone even if they're from the wrong ethnic group -- these are all messages that mean something to us today, and challenge us today.
The other stuff? Changing water to wine? Tain't necessarily so. Walking on water? Tain't necessarily so. Raising Lazarus from the dead? Tain't necessarily so. Son of God? Well, aren't we all children of God? One of the three aspects of God Almighty himself? Well, that's what the whole Unitarian thing was about in the first place, wasn't it. Tain't necessarily so. Sportin' Life in Porgy and Bess is just laying out the "modern" Christian theology if you take him at his word -- the specific stories tain't necessarily so, but the ethical teachings are valid: "To get into Hebben don't snap for a sebben, live clean, don't have no fault." Of course Sportin' Life is a gambler, a womanizer, and a drug dealer, so the Gershwins are probably not putting him forth as an expert on Jesus' ethics or any kind of ethics. But Sportin' Life isn't the only advocate of jettisoning the baggage and getting back to Jesus' simple message.
Remember that the historical record tells us almost nothing about Jesus of Nazareth. It does say that a few decades after he is presumed to have lived, there were small groups of Christians in many of the major cities of the Roman Empire. The oldest Christian writings we have are the letters of St. Paul to some of these groups, letters that form part of our New Testament. The Gospels, the four books that tell the story of Jesus' life and death, were written a bit later, from around 65 A.D. for Mark to around 100 A.D. for John. A few centuries later, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, became the largest single institution in Europe through the Middle Ages, was carried around the world with European colonialism, and finally split into the thousands of Christian denominations and organizations we see today.
Each of these versions of Christianity, it seems to me, claims to be preserving the original message of Jesus and the original spirit of those first Christian communities. The Catholic Church, of course, says that both that message and that spirit were passed straight down to them -- that they are the Church founded by Jesus' own disciple St. Peter. Martin Luther taught that institutional Catholicism had gone astray, and that the original message and spirit could be found by reading the Bible. The Disciples of Christ call themselves "the people of the Lord's Table", reenacting the Last Supper every week. Mary Baker Eddy claimed to have rediscovered the principles that made Jesus' healing miracles possible. Pentecostals speak in tongues like the apostles in the Book of Acts. The Book of Mormon includes what it says are further original teachings of Jesus, delivered to the American descendents of the lost tribes of Israel, after his resurrection. (Tain't necessarily so.)
Even among Unitarian Universalists, you will hear the notion that we are preserving what Jesus really meant, and that everyone else has it wrong. Thomas Jefferson compiled an edition of the Gospels without the supernatural parts, which he argued were added in later. With the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels and other writings that didn't make it into the canon, we are more aware that what we now know as the New Testament was constructed centuries after Jesus' time, and that St. Paul was at least as important as Jesus in deciding what Christianity became. Some UU's, I think, envision those early Christian communities as modern feminist utopias with full gender equality, later crushed by the misogynist Paul and the institutional Church. Tain't necessarily so, neither.
In fact, this last version of the story just might have it exactly backwards. We had a reading earlier from Robert Wright's new book The Evolution of God, which looks at religion from a materialist, sociological perspective, but without the hostile, dismissive attitude of the "new atheists" like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Religions are social organisms, says Wright, and like biological organisms they evolve. Attributes, like defining stories, beliefs, and practices, survive into future generations when they lead to success and not when they lead to failure. Success for a social organism, like for a biological organism, is defined to be survival.
Unlike many evolutionary theorists, Wright sees progress when he looks at evolution, and he defines that progress as expansion of the circle of "nonzero-sumness". In a zero-sum game like chess, any gain for me is a loss for you and vice versa, but there are nonzero-sum activities like trade where we can both gain or both lose. In biology, large organisms may have originated in nonzero-sum cooperation among individual cells, and social organizations likewise originate and grow through nonzero-sum cooperation among their individual members. Cooperating with others requires moral imagination and understanding of their perspective, and religion can encourage that. Love thy neighbor as thyself, or at least recognize something like yourself in your neighbor with which you can cooperate.
Perhaps the part of Jesus' message that strikes us as most important today is that anyone, even a Samaritan, is your neighbor and a fellow child of God. If we are going to overcome the problems of global resource constraint, global climate change, global poverty, and global warfare, we will need to work together as a planet at the cost of the short-term welfare of some of us. Religious ideas sometimes work towards global unity, and sometimes work against it, but Wright sees an overall positive trend in which St. Paul's message that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek" was a major step forward.
But was that message from Jesus or from Paul? Wright suggests that we can get the best picture of the historical Jesus by looking at the earliest written gospel, the book of Mark. That Jesus is mostly an apocalyptic preacher, and his message is that the Kingdom of Heaven is coming soon and that you must believe in him to be saved. In the passage from Mark that we read, he is actually something of a jerk by modern standards -- he likens the foreign woman to a dog and helps her only when she accepts this status from him. The Sermon on the Mount and the Good Samaritan story are in later gospels, and the "God is Love" piece we read for our meditation was in the last one, the book of John.
Wright's theory is that what we now think of as the central moral message of Christianity is an overlay upon the original preaching of Jesus. We know that the Mediterranean in the late Roman period was a hotbed of religious cults, Christian and otherwise, and that one of these cults, under Paul's leadership, became a world religion. Why his cult and not one of the others? Paul, says Wright, was a cosmopolitan, a man of the world. He dealt in tents, the infrastructure for the international travel of the day. He was literally a citizen of Rome and knew people across the Empire -- he could link the individual congregations into a common organization. And many of the beliefs and practices that he stressed in his letters were particularly conducive to a successful world religion. If each congregation considers a visiting leader or a new arrival from another congregation to be a brother or sister in Christ, international travel becomes easier for Christians and being a Christian pays off. If another cult requires adult circumcision and Paul's doesn't, this helps Paul to get converts. The idea that Christ's moral teaching supersedes Jewish law (which is all over Matthew and Luke) was among other things a good marketing strategy. That's not to say that it was adopted for that reason (how could we ever know that?) but perhaps if Paul's cult didn't adopt it, another one would have, and succeeded in its place.
Maybe Wright has this all wrong, or the historical truth doesn't matter that much after all. But I think there's a reason why all these modern groups identify, or want to identify, with those first Christian communities -- the small band that knew Jesus himself, the persecuted cells hiding in the catacombs near Rome, the slaves using the temporary freedom of the Roman Saturnalia to celebrate the birth of their Savior together. To use vocabulary from the sixties and seventies, these were all "intensional communities". Each member of them was brother or sister to each of the others, and each would risk anything for any of the others. And they were in possession of a great truth, an important truth, that the rest of the world didn't have. They were the salt of the earth, without which the world would have no taste, and the light of the world.
Throughout the history of Christianity people have formed small intensional communities in imitation of the early Christians. St. Francis of Assisi, from whom we took our opening words and opening hymn today, left a comfortable life as the son of a prosperous merchant to live with beggars and lepers and commune with nature. Monks from the order he founded, and monks and nuns from other orders, band together in communities, sometimes self-sufficient ones, to work and pray. Across America from Brook Farm to Florence to Lancaster County to New Harmony to Amana to Salt Lake City, religiously based groups formed utopian communities, often rather short-lived ones. Even the hippie movement of the 1960's included a significant block of Christian apocalyptics, called the "Jesus people".
One of those very utopian communities, as Sarah Metcalf reminded us earlier this summer, was an ancestor of this Society -- the Northampton Association for Education and Industry. Along with a desire for commmunity, the other major impetus for their founding particularly resonates with us today. Like us, they thought slavery was a great evil, and wherever they looked in the newly integrated national economy of the 1850's they found complicity with slavery. They hoped to produce silk and beet sugar with free labor, and thus avoid this complicity. Furthermore, they hoped to change the world by creating an example. If you are the light of the world, Jesus says in Matthew, do not put that light under a bushel, but on a stand.
Sarah invited us to imagine how we, in this Society, might become that kind of utopian commmunity. Certainly most of us, perhaps all of us, are complicit with evil, though perhaps not evil on the scale of slavery. We participate in an American economy that uses far more than its share of the earth's resources and contributes far more than its share to climate change and other environmental degradation. Our money is invested in corporations that pursue profit with little regard for the welfare of their workers or of the environment. We were reminded this week that even when we shop at Whole Foods, we support its CEO's lobbying against the reforms to health insurance and labor law that we may well support. Finally, we get our news and entertainment from corporate media that insert their own messages for their own ends.
Could we imagine breaking all these connections to the world and its evils? That would be a very radical thing to do. The Jesus of the gospels was that kind of radical -- in Matthew chapter 10 he tells his disciples to go out into the world taking nothing with them, relying on the kindness of the strangers they serve. St. Francis read those verses of Matthew and became that kind of radical. Well, some would say that anyone who believes as I do in gay marriage, abortion on demand, single-payer health care, and the Employee Free Choice Act is a radical, but I'm not that kind of radical. I have a job, a mortgage, a wife, and a daughter in college. I will admit to being comfortable and privileged, but I'm not about to throw all my responsibilities and all my privileges away.
What I am, and what I dare say most of us in this Society are, is a liberal. I am part of the system, though I try to make the system better as best I can. I give money to good causes, work to make UMass the best university I can make it, work for political candidates I think will make the country better, and give time and money to this Society. I am much more like our forbears in Northampton, I think, than the ones in Florence. They separated from the First Church because they wanted a different minister with a different theology, but they don't seem to have been very radical otherwise. They led their lives, worked at their jobs, raised their children, and were complicit in all the evils and all the virtues of their society, as far as we know.
Is being a liberal good enough, in the face of all the problems of our society? There's really a very good argument that it isn't, that the only moral response to those problems is to separate from normal society, either as an example of how to change that society or to devote one's whole life to working for change. I admire the people who do that, and if we can provide support for them I want to do that. But there's the job, and the mortgage, and the tuition. Many of us are here at this Society exactly because we have families and we want our families to be part of a larger group that shares our values. Can you be a radical and still support and protect a family? Some of us have no choice, I suppose -- even with legal gay marriage, I would still call it a radical act to raise a family in this country with two mothers or two fathers, and I admire that radicalism and want to support it. What other sort of radicals do we have here today? Any locovores, who get most of their food locally? Has anyone killed their television, as the bumper stickers advise? Anyone off the grid?
I ended my sermon last summer by looking forward to this congregation's defining its mission in a mission statement. We've now got our first one, and it's written in very small type at the top of your order of meeting. Our mission, it says, is to "build a caring community where chlldren and adults can safely learn and grow". Is that a radical or a liberal mission?We want to be safe, it seems, which doesn't sound very radical. But it goes on to say that in this caring community we are "supported and challenged on life's journeys, called to service and to our higher selves, and inspired to better our world". Definitely some potential for radicalism there, if that call is to radical service or our higher selves are radical selves. "Supported and challenged" -- I'll tell you what that means to me. I think we need to support each other in the radical things we do as part of our liberal lives. And we need to challenge one another's balance between liberal and radical, whether by demonstrating that a particular kind of radicalism is possible, or through the free exchange of ideas. If Robert Wright is right, St. Paul took a radical faith and changed it so it could be lived by ordinary people around the world, maybe even people like us. Was that, in the end, a good thing?
Last modified 18 August 2009