Jesus

Scripture: Matthew 4:12-22

I would understand if you thought that the stated topic for the sermon this morning, “Jesus”, is a bit too broad. It is, of course. But I make no apologies for that, because I specifically don’t want to focus today on one particular gospel story or one saying or teaching of Jesus. I want to focus on Jesus just in himself, as whole person, not broken down into some things he said or did, and /or maybe Jesus as a symbol, as the central figure in the Christian faith. Lent calls us, I think, to reflect on the basics of our faith. Baptism does too, for that matter; it directs us to the heart of who we are and what our faith is about, and how we understand baptism speaks volumes about how we understand our faith as a whole. I’ll get back to that in a few minutes, but I begin with the admittedly very large question of what role Jesus plays in the Christian life. Why or in what way is Jesus important or central to your faith or mine or to the life of the Christian community?

Even to ask such questions may seem to some people unnecessary or even sort of argumentative or contentious, not asked in a faithful spirit. Christianity is all about Jesus, isn’t it? Why throw that into question? Except that it is a question already for some people, what role Jesus is to play in their spiritual lives, for some people outside the Christian circle, for some people who stand at the margins of the circle, not sure whether they’re just inside or just outside, and also for people who see themselves standing firmly inside the circle. Certainly at Sojourners what role Jesus plays in our spiritual lives, any of us, is not a given, which is another way of saying it is not to be taken for granted. That Jesus is not a given and is not to be taken for granted, I think it would be fair to say, is part of who we are. It’s part of our identity, part of our Christian identity. So all of this is not really a matter of raising any questions or throwing anything into question. It’s a matter of recognizing questions that are already there. And Lent invites us to pay attention to some of those basic questions. Indeed, Lent or no Lent, it would be a good thing to do, pay attention to some of those basic questions.

Of course I will not be able to speak for you or anyone else as to the place Jesus occupies in your spiritual worldview. And I don’t want to be understood as trying to say what place Jesus should occupy in anyone’s spiritual worldview, so the few brief things I have to say today will be necessarily personal. It is a testimony, not an argument or some reasoned explanation. It is not an attempt to convince or persuade, but is an attempt to put into words at least some small portion of the place Jesus occupies in this one believer’s spiritual life.

The scripture I chose for today is the first part of my testimony. It’s a story not so much about Jesus as it is about us, or rather I should say that I see it as a story about me. I identify with the disciples or the about-to-be disciples in the story. I can’t claim that I understand them, but I do wonder about them. Like I understand our Sunday School children are invited to do in the Godly Play approach to Christian education, after they hear a story they are invited to respond to it by saying, “I wonder…”, and then they fill in the blank. In this case, without the aid of a story teller to invite me to wonder, I have always wondered why the disciples just up and followed Jesus like they are described as doing. “As (Jesus) walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into sea…He said to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you fish for people.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James and John, in the boat with their father, Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.” Why, I have always wondered, would they do that? What, I wonder, is left out of the story that would have it make more sense? Is there some promise made to them that we are not told about? Did they have a particularly powerful dream the night before that told them they should say yes when this fellow comes around the next day? What exactly accounts for this if not irrational then certainly non-rational action of Peter and Andrew, James and John? I wonder.

But I did say I identified with them…in this sense: Peter and Andrew, James and John found themselves attached to Jesus and following Jesus, at least as the story tells it, for no apparent reason. The story offers no explanation. It’s a mystery. My own attachment to Jesus, such as it is, my own faltering following of Jesus also has no explanation and is a mystery. I wonder about my own relationship to Jesus, because I do have one, I wonder about that as much as I wonder about how to explain Peter, Andrew, James and John signing on with Jesus without being given a good reason, or any reason, why they should do so. In my case, the “immediately” part doesn’t apply. I didn’t immediately get up and leave my figurative boat and follow Jesus. It took me a while, quite a while, and it was a gradual process not like the one described in this scripture. But in the sense that there was no identifiable reason for it, I can identify with the first disciples. No one had convinced me that I needed to confess my belief in or allegiance to Jesus or I would be spending eternity in the wrong place. I had not grown up in a Christian church, so Jesus was not sort of planted in me, bred into me. I did not read the gospels and find that Jesus seemed to have some pacifist tendencies, just like I did, nor frankly did I find it particularly compelling that he thought we should love our neighbor since most religions and most spiritual teachers think the same. Nevertheless, there I was some forty odd years ago finding myself being drawn to Jesus and have continued through all my adult life to do something that I think I would describe as trying to follow Jesus, though I claim no special courage or constancy in doing so.

For me, this process where Jesus became a significant presence for me in my spiritual journey was all part of the process of becoming Christian. It wasn’t that I came to accept certain doctrinal or creedal statements about Jesus that led me to think of myself as Christian. It was something much more basic. And as I struggled some with various beliefs about Jesus that I thought maybe I should believe if I was going to call myself Christian, I also began to realize that while I was engaged with various questions in my mind, in the meantime Jesus had already become a significant figure in my inner life, without my having settled anything in a creedal sort of way, and I came to believe that was enough for me, for anyone really, to call themselves Christian. There is no indication that Peter and the rest of them had an established set of beliefs or that they could even describe in any kind of specific way what their relationship to Jesus consisted of. And it seems to me that can be true, is true, for many Christians.

In fact let me go a step farther. Not only is it not necessary to have a settled set of beliefs about Jesus all figured out in order to call yourself a Christian. I don’t think it’s necessary for all Christians to have Jesus front and center in their minds, in their hearts, in their faith lives. I don’t mean that to sound intentionally heretical, or antagonistic, or outrageous. To me, it’s none of those things. To me it’s a perfectly natural and understandable thing for Christians to be much more focused on God than they are upon Jesus. Jesus, after all, as best I can understand him, was focused in his spiritual life upon God, not upon himself. So in a sort of paradoxical way it may be that those people who don’t focus a lot of their spiritual energy on Jesus but who focus their soul’s attention more toward God, it may be that they are actually following Jesus more faithfully than those who would have us make a big deal out of Jesus.

What I do think though is that one of the things that makes the Christian community Christian is the presence of Christ somewhere in the core of our collective consciousness. If Christ is present at the core of the Christian community, then he doesn’t need to be an overwhelming presence in the spiritual life of every individual in the community. If Christ is present at the core of the Christian community, then there is plenty of room for each individual to engage with Jesus in all sorts of ways, or not to engage, to question who Jesus was and who Jesus is for me, to confess our difficulty with certain doctrines or with the very idea of being a Jesus person, to express our curiosity about the historical figure of Jesus without feeling we have to figure him out, to explore feelings about him, or to commit ourselves to a faith in which Jesus is central—If Christ is present at the core of the Christian community then there is space for individuals to have any or all of those kinds of relationships with Jesus. To be part of a Christian community is, in my understanding of it, not to insist that we have a set of beliefs we all subscribe to about Jesus, or anything else for that matter, but that we commit ourselves to ongoing conversations about faith and God and salvation or wholeness and Jesus, among other things. To say that Christ is present at the core of the Christian community is to say that he will be part of the conversation we have here. And so one of the many meanings baptism may have for me is not that we receive children into a community where they will be taught the right way to think about Jesus or anything else for that matter. We welcome a person, child or adult, into a conversation that is ongoing among us. Since we are a Christian church, Jesus will be part of that conversation. And we do indeed today welcome Mary and Caroline into that conversation.

Although I do not expect that Jesus will be or needs to be the primary focus of every Christian’s faith, I have said already today that Jesus, though not the only focus of my spiritual life, is very much a presence. I don’t have an accounting of why that is so, any more than we have an explanation of why those first disciples followed Jesus. But I have lived into the why of it somewhat, that is, I can give something of an accounting for why I continue to hold Jesus as an important part of my inner life, and for today let me try to say just one part of how that presence speaks to me or what it means to me.

I was reading something recently that gave me a new way of looking at one of Jesus’ parables but that at the same time put into just a few words something of what Christ means to me. The writer happened to mention, in the course of making a larger point, the parable of the Good Samaritan, which I didn’t have read this morning, trusting that you would remember the basics of it. Man gets robbed and beaten up, left by the side of the road. People pass by—minister, co-moderator—until despised Samaritan comes by and he is the one who helps, proving himself to be the neighbor to the one in the ditch. All this in answer to the question of a man who wanted to know who his neighbor was, seemingly looking for some loopholes so he wouldn’t be judged too harshly for the gaps in his own record of loving his neighbor.

Well: What the writer said in an almost off-handed comment about this story was that if there is a Christ figure in the story of the Good Samaritan, it is not the Good Samaritan. It is the man in the ditch.

For a long time I thought that the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan was that we ought to help people in need, a fairly simple point: the person in the ditch is your neighbor and we’re supposed to love our neighbor, not just hurry on by because we’re so busy and important. Of course that’s not exactly the way Jesus told the parable, but details, details…that seemed like a good point to get from the parable. Then some few years ago I came across another interpretation. A theologian who was trying to make the point that God is all about love and is not at all about power in the way we usually think of it suggested that the Good Samaritan in the story is not meant to be us, that although helping people is certainly a good thing, that our love is always going to fall short and the only one capable of the unconditional and extravagant love shown by the Good Samaritan is God, and this should not be surprising because there is almost always someone in the parables Jesus told who is supposed to make us think of God. In this case it’s the Samaritan. Not only does the despised Samaritan turn out to be our neighbor; he turns out to be God, whose very nature is the love the Samaritan showed.

Now, when I read just that very short comment that if there is a Christ figure in the parable, it is the man in the ditch, I have a third way to understand the parable. It is in fact in line with the way Jesus did tell the parable, because when Jesus asked who the neighbor was in the story, he didn’t ask his listener to put himself in the place of the people passing by and to decide whether the man in the ditch was his neighbor. He asked his listener to put himself in the place of the man lying in the ditch and decide which of his prospective helpers really was a neighbor. But what the comment suggests further is that this is the position from which God, or God in Jesus, sees the world. He suggests that God is probably not best understood as one who sits in some grand place where it is possible to get a grand overview of the world, see how things are going here and there and decide, for reasons we don’t understand, when and where and how to intervene. No, this writer was suggesting, maybe God needs to be imagined as seeing the world from the very particular perspective of the one in the ditch, hurting, wounded, totally immersed in the world’s hurt and woundedness.

It is a challenging image of God because it is so un-God-like. But I am grateful that Jesus takes me there, and it is one of the reasons I continue to try in my own human way to follow Jesus, to hold him at the center of my own spiritual life. He challenges my images of God and doesn’t let me settle in to any too easy image of God. He suggests to me, without turning it to dogma, that the holiness of human life is not to be found so much in the noble good deeds we are sometimes able to do, though they have their place, of course, but in the woundedness and the vulnerability we all share, and that God is to be found in. He calls me to see neither myself nor God primarily as a fixer of the world’s problems but to see the world as God sees it, from the perspective of those who are wounded, and to know myself to be among them. I experience Jesus as one who most often unsettles me, but also has the ability to bring me closer to God. I pray that he will continue to do both of those things. Amen.

jim Bundy
March 15, 2009