Scripture: Matthew 7:13-23; Mark 7:1-7
I woke up this morning…with my mind stayed on Jesus. Knowing that Jesus was my announced preaching topic for this morning, I’ve been waking up for several days now with my mind stayed on Jesus—or at least with Jesus troubling my mind, hanging around, looking at me, wondering what I am going to say about him, in other words, “there” somehow, just “there”.
I also woke up this morning with my mind involved in the fact that we’ll be receiving new members this morning, an occasion that always inspires a sense of gratitude—and some questions. When people join the church, it always gives me pause—in a good way—but pause. It causes me to think about the church. I’m thinking this morning, for instance, that even though joining the church is an apparently simple, rather everyday, thing, nevertheless it’s a kind of a leap of faith for the people joining, committing themselves to this group of people, in a way placing themselves in our hands for safe keeping. I don’t know whether they feel it that way, but I do, and I always do a bit of wondering about whether we’ll be up to the task of safe keeping, but then also up to the task of living our faith a little bit unsafely.
I also woke up this morning with my mind aware that today is world communion Sunday. This is a day that began back in the 1930’s when the Presbyterians set aside a day when they encouraged all their churches to express their underlying unity by observing communion on a certain Sunday, symbolically coming to the communion table together regardless of differences. It then spread to other denominations and then to the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches, and has been for more than fifty years in some churches a symbolic way of expressing Christian unity, or at least the desire, or the hope, or the prayer of Christian unity. The idea was that there are so many things that divide Christians from each other, from race and class and nationality to the age of baptism and the frequency of communion, that we need to remember that the one thing Christians have in common is Christ, and Christ is more important than all our differences.
That approach sounded right and nice for a while. I certainly thought Christians should not be fighting about relatively minor matters of theology or church life and ought to focus more on the essentials of Christian living and recognizing our unity in Christ seemed like a good message in that context. And I certainly believed that it was important to see the spirit of Christ as breaking down barriers between people, especially national, racial, ethnic, and class barriers. And I certainly wanted Christianity not to be identified just with Western civilization, as though the two were identical, and so the nod in the direction of a more global consciousness was welcome. For a long time I bought in to the concept of World Communion Sunday.
And I still do in some ways, but not in all ways. For one thing, I’m not so sure that Christian unity is what the world needs. The world is not waiting with baited breath, nor does the world need, for Methodists and Baptists to resolve their differences, or even for Protestants and Catholics to resolve theirs. The world does not need Christian unity in that sense. What the world does need, desperately so, is for there to be unity between Christians and people of other faiths and of no particular faith. What the world needs is for Christians to transcend their Christian-ness. To strive at this point merely for Christian unity seems strangely and dangerously beside the point.
Also, I don’t believe Christ really does unite Christians. It may sound sort of nice to say that we Christians may disagree about all sorts of things but we are united by our belief in or devotion to Christ. But it’s not true, not in any meaningful sense, as I see it. Invoking the name of Christ or saying Jesus a lot may give the illusion of unity, but not the reality. Christians are not united. There are important things Christians are not united about, and those differences should not be glossed over by pretending that calling on Christ is the only thing that’s important. Should I quote scripture to support what I’m saying? Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ is ready to enter into God’s realm.” He said, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” The name of Jesus all by itself just doesn’t do the trick.
When I was applying to various churches at the time I was looking prior to coming to Sojourners, one of the churches I was in touch with asked me to respond to some questions, one of which was that theologically they were probably more God-centered than Jesus centered, and they wanted me to know that and wondered how I felt about that. I responded essentially, “Me, too. I would definitely describe myself as more God centered than Jesus centered, though Jesus is very important to me, I said. But then after all my image of Jesus was that he himself was more God centered than Jesus centered.
Having Christ occupy an important place in your journey of faith is not the same thing as saying his name a lot. In fact for some Christians focusing too much on Christ, especially focusing too much on what we are supposed to believe about Christ, actually gets in the way of being Christian. So, as you know, I am not going to ask any of our new members what they believe about Christ. That will not be what unites them to us, or us to them, here at Sojourners even, much less what unites us to other Christians.
So what do we say about Jesus here at Sojourners? I ask myself that question and almost as soon as it’s out of my mouth I know I’m not going to be able to answer it. There is nothing that “we” say about Jesus at Sojourners because every person here has a different story to tell about the role Jesus has played in his or her life and thus about the way Jesus lives in their life in the present. For some Jesus has been a constant companion along life’s journey and still is. For others Jesus has been more of a threatening presence—a kind of believe in me or else presence—and therefore the relationship may be more troubled. There are some here who are not so sure what they believe, or about what image they really do have of Jesus, and there are some here for whom Jesus simply does not play a dominant role in their own spiritual lives. We gather here under the Christian banner, but Christ does not mean the same thing to all of us. There is no single way we have of relating to Jesus here, still less any set of words or beliefs about him that we could all subscribe to.
And that’s o.k. It’s o.k. if not everyone here is very clear about who Jesus is, what they think about Jesus, or even if they think very much about Jesus. If Jesus doesn’t have a firm, settled, unchanging place in our spiritual lives, that’s not only o.k., it’s as it should be. That’s as it should be in a community where we commit ourselves to respect the various ways each of us relates to Jesus. There is not going to be agreement about that. There shouldn’t be agreement about that. It’s a good thing there is not agreement about that among us. It should keep us on our toes. It should keep us from taking Jesus for granted. And it’s also as it should be for each of us individually. Jesus will not have well-defined, firmly established place in the life of the community because we are committed to allowing and encouraging many different pictures of Jesus and many different approaches to Jesus among us. And even for each person individually it’s good for Jesus to not occupy too fixed a place in our spiritual lives, as though any one of us could think that we have him figured out, and that we have exactly the right words and titles for him, no need to think any more, no need for anything new in our relationship to Jesus.
Still, still I hear Jesus’ voice echoing in my ears from out of scripture: But who do you say that I am? And I imagine Jesus hovering near me somewhere, hanging around, wondering what I’m going to say about him. And I feel like I need to respond. Who do you, Jim Bundy, say that I am? I feel like I need to answer, even though it will only be my answer, and even though it will be just the best answer I can give right now, and not my final and forever answer, I need to answer. It is one way I have of understanding what it means to me to be a Christian: that I am engaged in an ongoing sort of way in trying sincerely to answer the question of who Jesus is for me, that I refuse to be satisfied with any dogmas or formulas that purport to capture who he is, but that I also don’t discount or discard Jesus himself in the process of discarding the dogmas about him. Just because each of our answers as to who Jesus is will be different and no answer will be final even for ourselves, much less for anyone else, doesn’t mean we can just step away from the question, put Jesus aside.
I guess it’s pretty clear that the various titles and creeds that Christians have built up around Jesus over the centuries are not so important to me. It’s not that I need to deny them or fight against them somehow. It’s just that they’re not so important to me. Which means, one of the things it means to me, is that like God, Jesus is not so easy to talk about, and like God, it would probably be better if we talked about him a little less easily, that like God his spirit may elude us but may also hold us in its grasp, or I should say, in its embrace.
Ava called my attention this week to the fact that M. Scott Peck had died, the man who wrote the book, “The Road Less Traveled”, which was on the best seller lists for umpteen years and was so successful that he had to write some sequels, “Son of the Road” or “The Road Returns” or whatever they were called. His obituary in the Washington Post noted that he had become a Christian at the age of 43 after having spent some time with Zen Buddhism and Islamic mysticism. That made it seem like he would have fit in well here at Sojourners. He is also quoted as saying that he didn’t like the “wimpy” Jesus who is always smiling and kind and gentle, who is also not the Jesus I understand myself to be following. And the title of the book he is most associated with is appropriate to what I had been thinking of trying to say about Jesus as a matter of fact when Ava showed me the obit.
Jesus is not, for me, one who will get me into heaven if I will say the right words about him. He is not one who offers himself as a least common denominator for Christians to unite around as though “praising the name of Jesus” is what really counts in the Christian life and if we just all do that everything will be ok. Jesus does hold out before me a vision of the kingdom of God, and he invites me to follow him down the road toward that realm whenever I am able and as much as I am able. It is, to use the phrase, a road less traveled. It is Jesus who gives me the little bit of vision I have as to what that realm is like, God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven. It is Jesus who invites me to take up that journey and to take it up again after I get distracted as I so often do. It is Jesus who walks with me along that road. That is part of what I want to say today about who I say Jesus is, who he is for me. Here is the rest of it, for today.
One of the many ways I have of understanding communion is that it is my recommitting myself to that journey toward the reign of God. When I take and eat at communion, I do not believe I am being told that if I eat this bread I will never again be hungry, not told that whatever I have done, I am forgiven because Christ died for me, not told that I should go home with a warm feeling in my heart, but that in renewing my relationship to Christ I am reminded of the brokenness of my life, my need for healing, all of our need for healing, reminded that God comes to me in my brokenness, sometimes in the simplest of things like bread and juice, sometimes in pieces, in whispers or glimpses or touches, and reminded that the effort to make a wounded world whole again is not so easy. I take and eat and in a certain sense my hunger is not relieved but is made more acute, a hunger for all God’s people to be one, and I commit myself again to live with that hunger, to feed that hunger and let it feed me, and not to go away content. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 2, 2005