“JESUS WAS A TROUBLE MAKER:  HE’D FIT RIGHT IN HERE”

Rev. Peg Boyle Morgan
West Seattle Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
April 16, 2006  Easter Sunday

SERMON
Jesus of Nazareth was from Galilee.  What we know about his life for sure is quite limited, but include these things:  he had a mother named Mary, he was dark skinned with long hair and a beard like all the men in those days, he lived 30 some years, and he was killed by the Romans the way the Romans executed people—by crucifixion.  There is one more thing we know about Jesus:  The way he moved through his life, the way he related to people, and the way he spoke his truth had a profound affect on people. 

Now there are many stories in the Gospels about Jesus doing miraculous things, like calming a sea, healing people, walking on water, feeding multitudes--in short acting like a God.  At the heart of this sermon is a reinterpretation of those stories, and a reclaiming of Jesus as a person whom we would want to have among us, as a person who gives us much pause to reflect on our lives, much hope to find light when we find ourselves in darkness.   At the heart of this sermon is an attempt to convey the meaning of the stories written about Jesus, in contrast to the literal fundamentalist interpretation of the bible stories.  And then finally, I will to ask the question, how would Jesus respond to the problems we face today in the world.

We all have some kind of relationship with this historic man Jesus, depending upon whether we were raised in a Christian Church, or a synagogue, or another religion or no religion. We may admire him, worship him, pray to him, reject him or …think not about him.  None of us can have escaped thinking about him at some point, and about the questionable miracle stories which our modern science and the “proven” physical forces of the universe call into question.  Stories about virgin births and cosmic ascensions are hard for our postmodern scientifically oriented minds to believe.

Indeed the Christian church’s first mistake was in assuming that truth could be pinned down once and for all.  It worked for a while, and then Copernicus and Galileo challenged the church by saying that the earth was not the center of the universe which implied that God might not be so focused with earth or with humans.  Then Newton came along and indicated that the universe was all predictable in mathematical terms, which took away power from a willful God.  Darwin proposed that humans are evolving from a primate family, and never were in a perfect state in the garden of Eden—a theory which challenged the need for a Christ to redeem us and return us to that perfect state.

Freud suggested that all the theories of a Father God were just neurosis and insecurity.   Add to that, the recognition of many inconsistencies between the four Gospels, and the fact that the Jesus Seminar biblical scholars have clearly stated that many statements attributed to Jesus were not actually his words. 
Where does this leave us on this day when millions are celebrating the Easter story?  Do these facts mean that the stories about Jesus are only useless fictitious tales?  No, it does not.  I would suggest that the stories of Jesus provide us with just the transformative message we need in 2006. 

The stories were written by the early Hebrew Christians in order to convey the profound affect his life had on those who were lucky enough to walk with him.  Those people experienced a man with extraordinary loving ability, and a man who felt a calling to teach others about the values he so believed and lived.  He exuded a sense of clarity, needing neither to brag or seek praise, nor to defend himself.  He just was who he was—whole and actualized.  You’ve heard it said that God is Love.  When people experienced Jesus’ profound respect and love for all people, they experienced an immense kind of love.  And the only way the new Hebrew Christians could write about the power of this awesome man was in the way they knew God had been written about in their Hebrew Scriptures.

In their scriptures the Hebrews read stories of a powerful God who could perform miracles for people, like parting of the Red Sea, providing manna for starving people, and setting a bush on fire; and so in Christian Scriptures they wrote stories of Jesus stilling the storm on the lake, and providing loaves and fishes for a hungry crowd, and withering a fig tree.  Jesus, whose presence was powerful in ways not able to be expressed in words,… was portrayed in metaphorical stories like a powerful God.

The Hebrew people knew the power of story to express mystery.  When they wrote the stories of Jesus, they wrote them as symbolic, mythic stories to convey an essence and meaning of how Jesus affected people; they did not write them to convey a literal story.  And they wrote the books in subsections in order to teach new converts, and to add Jesus stories to their weekly Sabbath services; Jesus stories were read along with the annual cycle of stories about Jacob, Moses, Elijah and the other prophets.  There is no greater compliment that they could have given to Jesus than to interpret his story in light of the powerful stories of their earlier scriptures.

What I have explained so far is that the story of Jesus as recorded in the Bible was written to convey the powerful affect he had on those who came in contact with him, that his loving presence had such a transformative power that they wrote about Jesus in ways that attributed God-like powers to him.

 Unfortunately, this has been taken literally by fundamentalist Christians, distracting from the real message of the Jesus story.  The Easter story of the resurrection never was meant to convey that his body really went up into the sky—that was just a mirroring of the Hebrew Elijah story--but it did mean to express that Jesus came to them after his death, in their hearts and minds in ways that changed their lives.  Their lives were changed so profoundly that that they felt that they were born anew, or born again.

Jesus had this transformative effect upon people because he was so fully authentically himself, and because he was a person who loved without boundaries, who loved as Retired Episcopal Bishop Spong called it “a wasteful love, embracing love, inclusive love.  It is a love that overflows every human boundary.”

There are several stories in the Bible that depict how Jesus believed we all ought to just love each other, despite coming from different tribes.  There is the story of the Good Samaritan.  Now the Samaritans practiced an older version of the Jewish faith, and because of their differences, the Hebrews and Samaritans didn’t get along.  But when a Hebrew man was robbed and left injured on the side of the road, and passed by by his own Hebrew people, a Samaritan picked him up and paid for his care.  Jesus praised the Samaritan saying that we all ought to break the social rules, ignore our differences, and go help each other.

If Jesus were alive today, what would Jesus do about the proposed immigration law coming from the federal congressman from Colorado that would make it a felony to provide any assistance to an illegal alien?  Jesus would be a troublemaker for sure, he would provide food and water to hungry illegals, ignoring possible consequences.  While we in this room have different ideas about what immigration reform should be passed, I am clear that if I knew of an illegal alien here in Seattle who was hungry and cold, I would follow the example of Jesus.   I would defy my government in order to save my soul.  No one and no government is going to tell me that I can’t offer a cup of water and a sandwich to another human being.  No one is going to tell me that I must lose my human connection.

And there is the story in the Gospel of John (4:7)  where Jesus, tired from a long journey, he sat down by a well.  Not having a cup, when a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?" The Samaritan woman was surprised Jesus would talk to him, given that he was Hebrew, she Samaritan, for Hebrews were not supposed to associate with Samaritans.  She said to him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?"  Once again Jesus defied such cultural prejudice and divisiveness and continued conversation with her.  Jesus consistently demonstrated that he valued all people, despite differences.  He was not threatened by difference.

If Jesus were alive today, how would Jesus respond to Tim Eyeman’s attempt to get an initiative passed that would take away our new Washington State law assuring an equal, but not special, right to housing and employment to gay and lesbian people?  How would Jesus respond to such an attempt to initiative prejudice, to take away a civil right?  Jesus would be a troublemaker for sure, passing out fliers like some of our Fellowship members, fliers that encourage people not to sign his initiative because of its bigotry and divisiveness.

If Jesus were alive today, how would he deal with terrorism?  How would he feel about the actions of a President who claims to be led by his Christian faith?  Jesus would critique the underlying assumptions and requirements of the power brokers as he did in Jerusalem.  And he would call for a whole new consciousness and value system that would hold up compassion and community rather than greed and individualism.

Jesus challenged cultural rules and temple authorities, and so he was indeed a troublemaker in the eyes of the establishment.

Which reminds me of the Willie Nelson song, Jesus the Troublemaker.

I could tell the moment that I saw Him
He was nothing but the troublemaking kind
His hair was much too long
And His motley group of friends
Had nothing but rebellion on their minds.
He's rejected the establishment completely
And I know for sure He's never held a job.
He just goes from town to town
Stirring up the young folks
’Til they’re nothing but a disrespectful mob.

They arrested Him last week and found Him guilty,
And sentenced Him to die but that's no great loss.
Friday they will take Him to a place called Calvary
And hang that troublemaker to a cross.

As Jesus traveled from town to town, more and more people were abandoning the orthodoxy, and its detailed rules and prejudices in favor of a belief that we are all brothers and sisters in need of compassion during the times of grief and when our hearts fill with fear.  Their experience of Jesus caught their hearts on fire, burning with an undeniable feeling that they were a part of each other, a body of people reaching out to each other in a wider embrace.

You see I think that someone who exudes this truth by being so authentic and compassionate as Jesus was, causes others to know this mystical sense of our connection with life and with each other, …causes others to be in touch with that knowing that is already deep down in our souls where such knowledge sits waiting for us to bring it to our consciousness.

And when we do, we experience our own kind of resurrection of the spirit, we in a sense are born again—seeing life with a new perspective, sometimes just in time. 

UU minister and President of our seminary in Berkeley, Rebecca Parker, tells us in her book Proverbs of Ashes, a story of a terrible time while she still lived in Seattle, after she chose to abort a much-wanted pregnancy when her husband decided that he could not cope with parenthood, only to lose the relationship as well as the pregnancy. She writes:
Everything I most loved had slipped out of my hands. I felt there was nothing left to hold on to—not my marriage, not my child, not my faith.
I spiraled into grief and self-directed anger. One night I came to the end of my will to live. I just wanted the anguish to stop. It was a cold, clear night. I lived at the top of a hill above a lake and sometime after midnight I left my house and started walking down the hill. The water would be cold enough. I could walk into it, then swim, then let go, sink down into the darkness and go home to God. The thought was comforting. I had no second thoughts. I was set on my course.

At the bottom of the hill, I had only a small grassy rise to cross before I came to the water's edge. I crested the familiar rise and began the descent to the welcoming water when I was caught short by a barrier that hadn't been there before. It looked like a long line of oddly shaped sawhorses, laid out to the left and to the right, the width of the grassy field. In the dark I couldn't see a way to get around either end, but it looked like I could climb over the middle. I quickened my pace, impelled by the grief that wouldn't let go of me. As I got closer, the dark forms before my eyes seemed to be moving. I squinted to understand what I was seeing.

The odd bunchy shapes were a line of human beings bundled up in parkas and hats. The stick shapes weren't sawhorses. They were telescopes. It was the Seattle Astronomy Club. Before I could make my way through the line, one of them looked up from his eyeglass and, …, said with enthusiasm, "I've got it focused perfectly on Jupiter. Come, take a look." I didn't want to be rude or give away my reason for being there, so I bent down and looked through the telescope. There was Jupiter, banded red and glowing! "Isn't it great?" he said. It was great. Jupiter was beautiful through the telescope.

I couldn't kill myself in the presence of these people who had gotten up in the middle of a cold night, with their home-built Radio Shack telescopes, to look at the planets and the stars.
The beauty of the night sky, the dew wet grass at my feet, and the Seattle Astronomy Club kept me in this world.

It would be wrong to think of this moment as one in which joy triumphed over despair, good came out of bad, or love of life defeated desire for death. I did not defeat negative feelings of anguish and despair because I saw something more lovely and good. My heart was still breaking with grief, but I became able to feel more. I was able to place that grief within a larger heart, within a wider embrace that could hold sorrow and joy, loss and illumination, death and life. (Thanks to CLF spring 06 for a reminder of this story)

Rebecca was saved by human connection, by the spirit of a man whose soul was on fire with love for the universe, and who wanted to share the joy with her.  He had no idea how deeply she needed to be momentarily redirected from her grief to a soulful knowing of beauty and joy.  A miracle took place that night.  Not one that scientists would have to argue about, but one that helped one person be embraced.  A miracle that wrapped up a broken heart during that cold night air and connected her to enough of the warmth of his excitement that her soul recognized the beauty of the nighttime constellations.  It took just a moment of reaching out to a stranger, to connect her back to life.

Anytime a broken heart is reconnected back to life, it is a kind of miracle.  And my friends, I expect that on any given day when we come here on a Sunday morning, many of us come with pain in our hearts, having been banged about by our week—disappointed by news, tired by over work, scared just a little about retirement, irritated by someone we love, worried about medical conditions--and we come looking for just a little light and a little love, to shore up our courage for the next week.  Many little miracles happen here every week.

Jesus mended broken hearts as he spontaneously encountered people, and brought life back to their spirits.    He tried to change the conditions that caused hearts to break, and to help people find the inner strength to live and love and thus to have life and to have life more abundantly.  Here was a man who treated everyone, even his accusers and killers, with worth and dignity.

Because of this, he was a trouble maker to some, and a savior to others.  Because of this I bid him welcome into my heart and into this spirit filled Fellowship. On this Easter Sunday morning, may we embrace the transforming boundary breaking love of Jesus; may we be seen as troublemakers to bigoted leaders, and may we lead with an all embracing love as we live through our days, standing on the side of kindness, knowing that all of us are not that far from moments of heartbreak, when we will need to be shown a star to light our way.