SERMON FOR HOME AGAIN SUNDAY

SERMON SERIES: MEETING JESUS AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME

SERMON ONE: "Meeting Jesus Again"

TEXT: Mark 7: 31-37

Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”

RESOURCE: Borg, Marcus J., Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & The Heart of Contemporary Faith: New York: HarperCollins Paperback, 1994, Chapter One.

Preached by the Rev. Caroline B. Edge at Carter Memorial United Methodist Church, Needham, MA, Sept. 10, 2006.

My friends, I invite you on this Home Again Sunday to meet Jesus again. You have all met him before. In the next two months I invite you to remember what you know about Jesus. You, youth, I invite you to begin to grow in knowing Jesus in ways you could not before you reached the age of conceptualization. You, adults, may also still be hanging onto your childhood memories of Jesus; some of you – even though you are here at church – may have totally discarded those childhood beliefs about Jesus. In this sermon series, I invite you to meet Jesus again for the first time – in a new and different way. This is not just a head trip; it is also a trip of the heart to a place beyond belief to relationship.

Our guide for this adventure is Marcus J. Borg, a professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University. He is a Jesus scholar. Back in 1992 he was invited to speak to a UCC clergy conference in Northern California. They gave him the title for his lectures: Meeting Jesus Again for the first time. As he prepared his lectures, delivered them, and then later published them in a book by the same name, Borg found that title was aptly descriptive his own spiritual journey.

I have not chosen this book for this sermon series because I agree with everything Borg says nor do I expect you to. I have chosen it because I believe he gives us some handles with which to approach our understanding of Jesus in the 21st century. There is enough "controversy" in it to stimulate our intellect and challenge our faith. That is what we need to grow spiritually. There will be copies of his book for sale downstairs at the "fair" if you wish to read it yourself. Our new seminary intern, Carol Raymond who is herself from northern California, will be leading a forum at the 9:00 hour beginning next Sunday on the book. I will put my sermons complete with citations on our church website. You can access them there if you want to read them again or if you should miss one. I hope and pray that it will make for an interesting fall for us spiritually.

"Images of Jesus matter," says Borg. What we know, think, feel about Jesus effects our Christian life – how we live. "It also can make Christianity credible or incredible." If our understanding of Jesus formed when we were children can not stand up to what we learn in science in college, for example, or through deeper Bible study, which was his journey, then we are ripe for a faith crisis. And out goes the baby with the bath water!

Borg describes two widespread images of Jesus. One is Jesus as divine savior. This is what we sing about and say in our creeds. This image describes Jesus as the divinely begotten son of God who came to die for our sin. We are invited to respond to this image by believing. This is a faith description of Jesus that requires belief to accept.

Another popular image of Jesus is as teacher. If one has problems with the doctrinal image of Jesus just described, then there are the great teachings of Jesus. His moral lessons teach us how to live. The type of Christian life that flows from this image is "being good." We are to live as Jesus lived and taught – love your neighbor, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

As a Jesus scholar who for thirty years has studied the historical Jesus – that is, the real man Jesus of Nazareth, Borg declares that neither of these images is accurate images of whom the historical Jesus is, and these images focus us on believing or being good when what is really important is "a relationship with God that involves us in a journey of transformation." This is the Jesus I hope to introduce you to in the next few weeks. For some of you it will be meeting Jesus again; for others of you it will be for the first time.

Borg shares his own spiritual biography as a way of making personal this jourlney of meeting Jesus again for the first time. As we hear his story, let us retrace our own. That is the reason I have placed that blank piece of paper in the bulletin that says "Me and Jesus". There you can jot down your earliest memories of Jesus and how they have changed, if they have, over time. You can do it now or later at home.

Marcus Borg "grew up in a small town in North Dakota near the Canadian border in the 1940’s." His was a Scandinavian Lutheran family for whom church was important. He had uncles who were pastors, and the church was for him – as it was for me in the next decade in Mississippi – the center of social life. Borg and his family attended everything the church had to offer. His earliest memories of Jesus were pictures of Jesus with sheep and with children. He knew Jesus liked children. He also knew that Jesus was God’s son and had been born in a miraculous way although as a child Marcus did not know what "virgin" meant. Marcus has a nostalgic memory of his father reading the Christmas story from Luke on Christmas Eve as his family was gathered around the Christmas tree. He also knew Jesus died on a cross and that Easter was really important and that you could pray to Jesus. He remembers memorizing John 3: 16 as a preschooler. He also remembers the hymns of his childhood – great Lutheran chorales – different from the Methodist revivalist songs of my childhood. At a missionary conference he attended as a young child he remembers hearing a missionary from China. That meeting made such an impact upon him that he says, "It was clear to me in that moment that believing in Jesus, and telling others of the tidings of Jesus, were the most important things in the world." Borg describes that period in his life – many of us have similar stories – as the time of precritical naiveté. We take for granted what the authorities in our lives say about religion without asking many questions.

At some point in elementary school Marcus had his first "theological conundrum" as he calls it. It centered around the issue of God up in heaven and God in our hearts and how God could be both places at once. Because children have an anthropomorphic image of God – God like a human being – and human beings can’t be in two places at once – how could God? Marcus worked this problem out by deciding that God was mostly up in heaven although God could appear in this room if God wanted to. So his image of God evolved into one far away out there.

In his early teens, Marcus confesses that he began "to have doubts about the existence of God." Because of his religious upbringing, these thoughts brought fear and anxiety and guilt. Would he go to hell because he did not believe? He focused his prayers on asking for forgiveness for his unbelief. As an adult, Borg was able to look back on those teen years and realize that what was happening was he was experiencing a collision between the modern worldview and his childhood religious beliefs. This is an experience many of us have had. Of course, if Marcus was unsure about God, that put doubts about Jesus as the son of God in his mind too.

By the time Marcus went to a Lutheran college in the Midwest, he had long since stopped praying and feeling guilty and mostly was perplexed by religion. In a required religion course in his Junior year, he discovered the great theologians of Christianity in an intellectually stimulating environment. This course he says "provided a framework within which I could take my perplexity seriously." As a thinker, he got excited about Christian tradition intellectually.

Marcus’s spiritual journey up to this point is very similar to many of ours. Growing up, we discovered our childhood beliefs could not stand up to modern culture but nothing was put in its place. Marcus describes himself at this young adult point as a ""closet agnostic" – someone who didn’t know what to make of it all."

Then his journey takes a twist different from many of yours. For reasons he does not explain, he goes to seminary. There are several of us here who have been to seminary or are in seminary now and would probably agree with Borg’s description of his seminary education, "Seminary was tremendously illuminating; the insights flowing from theological education are immensely helpful in sorting out what it means to take the Christian life seriously." In a first-semester New Testament course he met Jesus again – this time historically rather than theologically. He learned – as we will be studying in the Wed. morning class this year – how the followers of Jesus evolved in their theological understanding of who Jesus was and fashioned the writing of the Gospels to fit their theologies. Borg began to make distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. He began so fascinated with this Jesus of history that he committed his life to the academic pursuit of the historical Jesus. During his twenties and into his thirties as he delved into the scriptures and traditions in the early church about Jesus, his own personal faith had withered to what he described as a "closet atheist" though he never shared that with anyone. The more he studied the Christian tradition, the more he realized its human origins. He loved his studies, but he did not know what to do with God.

Then Borg writes about a number of experiences that he had in his mid-thirties. He does not describe them specifically and labels them "nature mysticism." But through those experiences – events we United Methodists would call "heart-warming" - he rediscovered mystery – sacred mystery. Finally he was able to understand his child hood dilemma about God being out there and in here. He ecstatically writes, "Thus I began also to understand what it means to say that God is both everywhere present and "up in heaven," - both immanent and transcendent, as traditional Christian theology puts it. As immanent (the root means "to dwell within"), God is not somewhere else, but right here and everywhere. To speak of God as being "up in heaven" – that is, as transcendent – means that God is not to be identified with any particular thing, not even with the sum total of things. God is more than everything, and yet everything is in God."

Through these "Aha" experiences, Borg came to meet Jesus again as one he wanted to be in relationship with –trying to understand how Jesus was able to make God so central in his own life while being so grounded in the social world of his everyday life. Finally, Borg was able to put together the pre-Easter Jesus with the post-Easter Jesus. Here he writes profoundly, "The post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience. That is, the post-Easter Jesus is not just the product of early Christian belief and thought, but an element of experience." It was the experience that the apostles had on Easter and afterwards that transformed them. Later the church put form and doctrine to describe that experience of knowing Jesus in a totally new way. Borg calls it "postcritical naiveté – a state in which one can hear these stories as "true stories," even while knowing that they are not literally true." Borg adds in a footnote that this is like the Native American storyteller who always began telling his tribe’s story of creation by saying, "Now, I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true."

This is what we mean when we sing, "I serve a risen savior; he’s in the world today. I know that he is living no matter what folk may say."

Come back next week as we probe more deeply into the historical Jesus as spirit person. Amen.