Carter Memorial United Methodist Church

Jesus and his disciples headed out for the villages around Caesarea Philippi. As they walked, he asked, "Who do the people say I am?" "Some say 'John the Baptizer,'" they said. "Others say 'Elijah.' Still others say 'one of the prophets.'" He then asked, "And you—what are you saying about me? Who am I?" Peter gave the answer: "You are the Christ, the Messiah." Jesus warned them to keep it quiet, not to breathe a word of it to anyone. He then began explaining things to them: "It is necessary that the Son of Man proceed to an ordeal of suffering, be tried and found guilty by the elders, high priests, and religion scholars, be killed, and after three days rise up alive." He said this simply and clearly so they couldn't miss it. But Peter grabbed him in protest. Turning and seeing his disciples wavering, wondering what to believe, Jesus confronted Peter. "Peter, get out of my way! Satan, get lost! You have no idea how God works." Calling the crowd to join his disciples, he said, "Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You're not in the driver's seat; I am. Don't run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I'll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for? "If any of you are embarrassed over me and the way I'm leading you when you get around your fickle and unfocused friends, know that you'll be an even greater embarrassment to the Son of Man when he arrives in all the splendor of God, his Father, with an army of the holy angels."

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 Two.

Preached by the Reverend Caroline B. Edge at Carter Memorial United Methodist Church on September 17, 2006.

This fall I am inviting you to meet Jesus again – perhaps for the first time – in a new and different way. Our guide for this invitational sermon series is Marcus J. Borg through his book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & The Heart of Contemporary Faith. This is not a head trip; it is a trip of the heart to a place beyond belief to relationship – relationship with God.

Last week in my first sermon in this series – which you can access at our website www.carterumc.org – we met two distinct descriptions of Jesus proposed by Borg. One is the Pre-Easter Jesus. This is the man – the historical person. We will be exploring the Pre-Easter Jesus in more depth today. The other that Borg talks about is the Post-Easter Jesus – to quote Borg and what I said last week, "‘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."

For example, we have two small documents that have come down through the millennia that describe the Post-Easter Jesus. They are in our hymnal on pp. 880 and 881. They are the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed. These creeds are filled with the Church’s theological understandings of the Post-Easter Jesus. There are only two lines in each of those creeds which speak of the Pre-Easter Jesus. Quoting the Apostle’s Creed, for example, in the paragraph about Jesus, "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried."

I believe the reason that there are so few facts about the Pre-Easter Jesus in the creed – facts such as where he lived, his birth and death dates, names of his siblings, (his mother’s name is mentioned)– is because at the time these Creeds were written about 4 centuries after Jesus lived, the Church was not concerned about the Historical Jesus. They were very concerned to explain and establish orthodoxy – that is the "right" beliefs about the Post-Easter Jesus. There were lots of beliefs about the Post-Easter Jesus in those days – as we are studying in the Wednesday morning class on Lost Scriptures – and the church needed to reach an established doctrine about Jesus so that it could grow consistently. Once the struggles were over about what would be the "party line", the Church spent the next thousand years preserving those beliefs, teaching them, adapting them to new cultures, building them into cathedrals.

It was only about 200 years ago that Jesus scholars began to be interested in the man Jesus and who he really was as opposed to what the church had traditionally said about the post-Easter Jesus. When I was at state college in the ‘60’s, I read Albert Schweitzer’s path-breaking book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus. It was seminal for me as well as for the movement. Unlike Marcus Borg who grew away from God for a time the more he learned about Jesus and what the church had said about him, I found myself growing closer to God. For me it was a "Wow" rather than a rejection of Christianity. That God could reach so many through this young man Jesus’ short life made me praise God even more.

The last 100 years Jesus scholars decided they really could not peel back the onion enough to know the man Jesus so they stopped trying. Then in the 1980’s Jesus scholars renewed their interest deciding that research could indeed provide a sketch of the man Jesus. Burton L. Mack, another Jesus scholar, calls it "a softly focused characterization of the Pre-Easter Jesus."

To illustrate what Borg and Mack are talking back, a few weeks ago The Needham Times published on the front page "above the fold" a sketch created by a police artist from a description given by a person who knew the "suspect". If you have not seen the paper, you have seen police artist sketches on TV. Well, it turns out the person being described is the new editor of The Needham Times Erin Clossey. Because Erin lives in the age of recorded images, the paper ran a picture of the real Erin on an inside page. The police sketch was close in some ways and unconvincing, in my opinion, in others. One could call it a "softly focused characterization."

We, of course, have no photographs of Jesus. Nor has any contemporary artwork either on canvas or in stone been discovered. So we can not say definitively what Jesus looked like. We do have a lot of written descriptions of what he did, what he said, what happened to him. These began to be written about 40 years or so after Jesus lived. Jesus scholars have been able to peel back these documents to uncover a few things about the historical Jesus – the pre-Easter Jesus, the real person.

First of all, we know he really did live – he was a real person. Now you might say, "Dud? Of Course!" But in those first few centuries after Jesus lived there were many – underscore many – Christians – underscore Christians who believed Jesus had not been flesh and blood but was a spirit. In the cosmology in those late days of the Roman Empire for a spirit being to move about on earth was believed possible. But we know for a fact today that there was a man named Jesus called "of Nazareth" who lived a very few years – we now think his dates were about 4BC to 30 AD.

We know for a fact that Jesus of Nazareth lived in the Middle East in a town in southern Galilee called Nazareth. We know for a fact that his mother and father were named Mary and Joseph and that he had four brothers and several sisters. We know for a fact that until about age 30 he was a wood worker. We know for a fact that he was Jewish by birth and religion. It appears he was given the basic religious education that peasants in the Jewish faith received in that era. We know for a fact that Jesus was a follower of John the Baptist for a time and that after John’s death he began a teaching, preaching ministry of his own. We know for a fact that Jesus healed people. There was a time when I was younger when scholars tried to explain away all of Jesus’ healings. Now as we learn more about the Placebo effect – if you really trust the authority of your doctor and you follow their directions – you can experience healing without real drugs. We also are learning more about the power of touch to heal and the ability of some to convey that healing. We know for a fact that Jesus healed people. We know for a fact that Jesus was executed by the order of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem about 30 A.D.

Although Jesus never wrote a book as far as we know, a number of his sayings and teachings have been preserved through tradition and are in the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke and a book not in the Bible – The Gospel of Thomas discovered in Egypt in 1945. There are also lots of stories, sayings, etc. in the Gospels that have been created by followers of the Post-Easter Jesus. Remember how editions of the New Testament used to print the words of Jesus in red? Now there is a scholarly book of the Gospels that identifies the texts that those who study such things agree were most probably the words of Jesus – considerably fewer quotes than in those old "red-letter" editions of the Bible.

Besides these few facts we know about the man Jesus, what can we know about the Pre-Easter Jesus? Borg calls Jesus a "Spirit Person." By this he means Jesus was a person that was able to "live in the Spirit" and tell others about it. Throughout history there have been spirit persons – some cultures call them "holy" or Shaman. These are men and women who have been able to transcend from the physical into a spiritual reality and share their experiences in such a way that others can know the spiritual. These are the folk who see visions. They know there is something beyond this reality that we all experience. Spirit People are frequently consumed by God’s presence – like the burning bush – not consumed physically but definitely on fire. Spirit Persons are – so full of the spirit that Borg describes, "They become funnels or conduits for the power or wisdom of God to enter into this world." There is an authenticity about these persons that differentiate them from the mentally insane whose visions are really hallucinations.

In the Jewish tradition Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Elijah were certainly spirit persons. Paul the Apostle of the New Testament also had visions and was an incredible mediator of God to the Christian church.

Jesus was clearly a spirit person. He saw visions – at his baptism, in the wilderness, at the transfiguration. He practiced spiritual disciplines such as fasting and praying. He would pray for hours at a time – sometimes all night. He addressed God in an intimate way not normally used in his day. Remember in Jesus’ Jewish religion, people did not even feel they could say the name of God. He called God by a very intimate term "Abba" which is best translated "Papa" or in my culture "Daddy". Jesus spoke with authority. There was a palpable sense of his spiritualality experienced by folk who gathered around him. People could not stay away from him, he was so charismatic. He both was a healer and an exorcist. There is no doubt in the last three years of his life that Jesus had an extraordinary relationship with God.

Borg asks the all important question that you might be asking in your own mind now – if Jesus is a spirit person, what are the implications for the life of the church. Essentially, Borg says, "it affects how we see Jesus, God, and the Christian life." The image of the Pre-Easter Jesus as a man who experienced the spiritual in such an all-consuming way and was able to convey that reality and presence of the Spirit to those around him portrays a sketch – remember that police artist rendition – that suggests as Borg says, "Jesus was not simply a person who believed strongly in God, but one who knew God."

I personally since seminary if not before have been able to understand that God has revealed the God self to many, not just to Christians, but my faith statement has been "that, I believed, Jesus was the fullest revelation of God." Borg challenges me by pointing out why would it be that because I happened to be born Christian, that my religion happened to be the fullest revelation of God. Was it luck or maybe I am being a bit egocentric to support my own religious tradition.

What is empowering – and I believe, spiritually mediating about this image of the Pre-Easter Jesus as Spirit Person is that this Jesus is not one we are asked to believe in. Instead this Jesus is one we are invited to be in relationship with. God becomes not something way out there as mysterious as the creeds portray, but God is the Spirit with which we can be in relationship. What matters is not what you believe about God, but how deeply you "know" God. In the Old Testament the word "to know" was used to describe the sexual intercourse which begat children. "Abraham knew Sarah and they had Issac." We are invited to know God in that intimate of a way in which we become as we say of husband and wife – one. Do you want God to be so close in your life that you are one with God? Jesus did and invites you to be "in the Spirit" as well. Amen.