“Jesus Our Brother, Kind and Good”
Aiken Unitarian Universalist Church
December 25 2011
Dr Gaye Ortiz
Sophia Fahs, in her story about the birth of Jesus in Long Ago and Many Lands, writes about the confused aftermath of the visit of the Magi:
When indoor and alone with their babe, [Mary and Joseph] (the two) could talk again. Did not the strangers know that Joseph was just a poor carpenter? And that Mary was only the daughter of a village farmer? How could their baby ever be a King?
This, then, is the old, old wonder tale about the birth of Jesus. What really happened no one can now know.
We do know, however, that this child of Mary and Joseph never became a King. Nor did he ever wish to be made a King. Jesus was a poor man by choice. When he was grown, he did not even have a home he could call his own. He was a teacher who traveled from town to town, teaching people how to live and what being good and doing right ought to mean.
Most of those who lived in that long-ago time have been forgotten, but Jesus is still remembered.
This, then, is the old, old wonder tale about the birth of Jesus. What really happened no one can now know.
We do know, however, that this child of Mary and Joseph never became a King. Nor did he ever wish to be made a King. Jesus was a poor man by choice. When he was grown, he did not even have a home he could call his own. He was a teacher who traveled from town to town, teaching people how to live and what being good and doing right ought to mean.
Most of those who lived in that long-ago time have been forgotten, but Jesus is still remembered.
[Excerpt from Sophia Fahs, “The Birth of Jesus, A Story from Palestine”; from Long Ago and Many Lands]
We all know the power of a newborn – yes, power. That might be a strange term to use for a helpless and vulnerable creature, but a baby just born is a wonder of nature, and that holds a power for many of us. Not only is it a powerful experience, but a magical moment in time when we wish the best for this new child of the universe: what will she grow up to be? Who will he look like? What a tremendous responsibility we, as parents and grandparents, realize is contained within that tiny form.
The UU minister Erik Wikstrom wrote in his blog about St Francis, who we just spoke of in relation to the Christmas crèche. Quoting from a book by Franciscan priest and poet Fr Murray Bodo, he says,
"At Christmas it was the infant Christ who was born again in human hearts, and it struck Francis that God came to earth as a baby so that we would have someone to care for. Christmas was the dearest of feasts because it meant that God was now one of us. Flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, this child we could approach without fear. We could be silly and uninhibited as we sought to make Him laugh. We could be totally ourselves because a child accepts us just as we are and screams with delight at our little performances on his behalf.
Someone to care for, someone to try and please, someone to love. God, a helpless babe… We come out of ourselves if we are aware, because we now have responsibilities for God. Not only the earth to till and creation to subdue, but now God to care for."”
It seems strange to think of God as a baby, but if you are a Christian and believe in the Trinity then it is not so far-fetched to think of the season of Advent as a time of preparing to welcome a baby God into the world. Except that the Puritans, one of the groups from which we trace our Christian heritage – were not terribly fond of the idea of celebrating the birth of the Christ child at this time of year. Did you know that during the time when Puritans ruled the English Parliament, they banned Christmas? It was replaced by a day of fasting, because the Purtians saw it as a pagan festival – and of course, they were correct about its December origins as the feast of Yule – and they called it a ‘popish’ festival that had no biblical basis. If anyone cooked meat for the Christmas feast they ran the risk of their home being raided and the meat confiscated by the Army! Ordinary Christians resented this kind of treatment, to the extent that it provoked riots in Kent.
In both England and the American colonies the Puritans attempted to ban Christmas: here, celebrating Christmas could result in a fine levied against you. Christmas was still not widely celebrated by the time the Declaration of Independence was written, and in Scotland Christmas was only recognized as a legal holiday in 1967, thanks to the dropping of objections by the Church of Scotland.
But for Unitarian Universalists today – even as we happily sing about Jesus Our Brother, Kind and Good – we may be feeling uncomfortable, not with the pagan origins of the mid-winter celebrations, but with the other Christological baggage that comes along with Christmas. The claim that Jesus was divine; the claim that he was sent to become, as an adult, a sacrifice for our sins; the claim that he is in heaven with God the Father. How do we reconcile the image of the lovely baby Jesus – as the Rev Keith Goheen calls him, “The Christ child, the star child of the Light, [who] calls forth the heart's wisdom through the power of innocence” – with the Savior/Messiah of the Gospels?
Let me begin by saying that Christianity is one of the sources for our Unitarian Universalist faith; and if you were to be transported back a hundred years to sit in a very cold Unitarian church pew, say, in Boston, you might not recognize the Unitarianism as today’s with which you are familiar. For if there is one thing about our faith, as it has developed historically, it has evolved theologically – and our ideas about Jesus are no exception to that shift. What I will attempt to do this morning is to give a series of alternative perspectives on Jesus, not just from Unitarian Universalists, but from Judeo-Christian theology as well.
According to Dr Thomas D Wintle on the website uuchristian.org:
There is a group of UUs known as ‘Classical UU Christians’
who find the dogmatism of rigid orthodoxy to be unacceptable, and pure secularism to be unsatisfying; theirs is a low-keyed Christianity that focuses on the human life and ethical teachings of Jesus. They see doctrines such as the Trinity and the Atonement as unnecessary; the Bible, interpreted with reason and modern scholarship, provides the myths and symbols and stories that enable them to speak of God and to instill moral values.
Believing that theirs is “the religion of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus,” they see the Galilean as a great teacher and the exemplar of a life of love to God and love to humankind. In the words of one layperson: “Jesus is the leader you don’t adore, but can’t ignore.“
To be a Christian, they might say, is “to follow Jesus.”
It sounds as if these UU Christians have tried to tiptoe their way through the 2000-year-old minefield of Christology! ‘Following’ Jesus – which Jesus?
In answering that, we need to go back to the Unitarians in the 18th century on both sides of the Atlantic, who were at the forefront of a sea change in how Christianity was viewed. They played a big part in the Radical Reformation, and at this time were grappling with two issues to do with authority: dissent and the established church, and the role that reason plays in revealed religion. The development of liberal religion saw the rejection of the Athanasian creed, which Unitarians rejected because it was not true to Scripture or to reason.
Then the divinity of Jesus became an issue in the early stages of liberal religion. An Irish Presbyterian minister named Thomas Emlyn produced an antitrinitarian argument that separated Jesus from God, based on evidence from Jesus’ own words in the New Testament. Emlyn argued that Jesus could not be God because Jesus appealed to a God other than himself, for example, when on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And when raising the dead, Jesus said he could do nothing on his own. Emlyn was arrested for his blasphemy, but he was the last dissenter to be imprisoned for denying the Trinity – the tide was turning.
The next century saw the Unitarian rejection of Christian doctrine, seen as having deviated over the centuries from that of the original Gospels. Thomas Jefferson – who, although admiring of Unitarians, never became one - wrote in 1822, “Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian.” (David Parke, The Epic of Unitarianism, Skinner 1957, 99) In fact, most of you will know that Jefferson compiled his own Bible, called “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”. It leaves out any mention of the miracles surrounding the birth of Jesus – no angel Gabriel, no virgin birth, no angels or shepherds or Magi (37).
Beacon Press published it as The Jefferson Bible in 1989; in his foreword, Forrest Church wrote that by Jefferson’s reading, it was Jesus’ “unusual life on earth that truly mattered” (viii).
For one famous Unitarian author, the central ideas of 19th century Unitarianism were the basis of his work: “ the belief that Jesus was a human being who exemplified a truly religious life; the rejection of materialism and the rejection of a God of stern judgment; the rejection of dogma; an inclusive rather than an exclusive religion, and an emphasis on doing good works” (Michael Timko, “Ebenezer Scrooge’s Conversion, UU World, Winter 2005, 80).
This Unitarian was, of course, Charles Dickens. Doug Muder, writing in a fable called “Ghosts of Unitarian Christmas” (UU World 2009, 22-5), imagines Dickens as a ghost of Unitarian Christmases Past who visits the central character, a young man named Ben, and tells him,
“When I wrote A Christmas Carol, I wasn’t really recapturing the lost spirit of Christmas. My Christmas wasn’t about the birth of one sect’s savior, it was about the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people. It was about compassion and friendship and family. Universal values.” To which Ben responds, “It was a Unitarian Christmas!”
Dickens wrote his own Life of Jesus, entitled The Life of Our Lord. It was not published while he lived because it was written especially for his children in 1849; it finally was published by his descendants a century later. Dickens concludes this work with a summary which sounds quite like something Muder’s fictional ghost would say:
Remember! - It is christianity TO DO GOOD always - even to those who do evil to us. It is christianity to love our neighbour as ourself, and to do to all men as we would have them Do to us. It is Christianity to be gentle, merciful, and forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a boast of them, or of our prayers or of our love of God, but always to shew that we love Him by humbly trying to do right in everything. If we do this, and remember the life and lessons of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to act up to them, we may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in Peace.
But there were other ideas at the time about who Jesus was that not only stressed, but praised, his humanity. John White Chadwick, in the 1894 book “Old and New Unitarian Belief”, defends the Jesus who is ‘only’ human, saying that using that term with any inference of contempt or disrespect is to belittle the amazing nature of humanity:
Such is man’s body, such his mind, such his affections, such his conscience, such his sense of infinite and eternal things, that within the scope of his terrestrial and immortal possibility there is room enough for all that Jesus was and did to swing with easy motion, like planets on their heavenly way. Not ‘a mere man,’ but a man, and such a man that, when we have torn veil after veil of mythological illusion and come face to face with him at length, or as nearly as may be, all our minds go out to him in gladsome recognition of his spiritual genius, and all our hearts in loving admiration of his broad humanity, his compassion for the poor and miserable, his demand for inward holiness, as well as outward homage to the moral law. (162)
In the 19th century biblical scholarship became focused on digging into the origins of Gospel accounts of Jesus. It became clear to many scholars that Mark was the earliest Gospel to be written, and that Matthew and Luke were drawing upon a common source that became know as Q (from the German word for source, Quelle).
There was a trend to strip away all additions to the story of Jesus and to get back to ‘primitive Christianity’. During the 1800s there were a number of Lives of Jesus – most by German authors, leading up to the publication in 1906 of one of the most famous, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, by Albert Schweitzer. In the US this trend influenced a Baptist minister, Walter Rauschenbusch, to publish The Social Principles of Jesus in 1916, which placed Jesus in the context of a social rights advocate who, if here today, would fight for workers and labor unions and even feminists. According to this perspective, the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount served as the primary grounding for Jesus’ teachings.
The historical trend of the twentieth century has, among other things, identified Jesus as a teacher; the focus for the biblical scholars in the 1950s was to find the original sayings of Jesus, and the Quest for the Historical Jesus movement attempted to separate these sayings from the myth built up around Jesus. In addition, redaction criticism became another focus for scholars, who explored how the authors of the Gospels interpreted Jesus through the theology of early Christian communities, such as the Greek and Jewish Christians. In the 1960s and 70s Jesus became for scholars a wandering charismatic who preached and healed, leaving his family and home and relying on support from the rural communities he visited. Liberation theology at that time suggested a picture of Jesus as rebel and liberator. The Jesus Seminar, begun by Robert Funk in 1985, is a series of meetings, with scholars who vote on the historicity of the Gospels after analysis using the latest in New Testament scholarship. The seminar’s conclusions point to Jesus being a ‘peasant sage’ who verifiably spoke only “90 out of the 1500-odd statements attributed to him by early Christian texts” (Charlotte Allen, The Human Christ, Lion, 1998, 276). The most well-known Jesus Seminar scholar, John Dominic Crossan, sees Jesus as an advocate of egalitarian, anti-patriarchal society, who breaks bread with social outcasts (279).
Then we have the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the mid-20th century, which are providing a new line of scholarship, re-situating Jesus within a Jewish context and helping to correct anti-Semitism in some Christian teachings. Jesus from this perspective follows the pattern of Hebrew prophecy, in that he taught much that fits into a Jewish ethical framework but at the same time, his appeal to divine authority is in tension with some Jewish laws and even to some extent, the Torah.
So which Jesus is laying in the manger for you? Did you ever think that it would be so complicated to consider the nature of this tiny child born in humble circumstances? Maybe the Jesus that Unitarian Universalists most identify with is none of the above…and instead, is very much like what most of us imagine each of us is, a non-conformist. Although as a congregation we are walking together in a common covenant, the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on our movement has made us UUs very proud to be individualistic, mold-breakers, not likely to follow along in any movement where we are herded like sheep. One of our most ardent social activist ministers from the 1950s, the Rev A. Powell Davies, wrote about the credo of the nonconformist – which sounds like a contradiction in terms!
He argued that Jesus very plainly demonstrated that
“he was a non-conformist--as he was bound to be, since he was a spiritual and ethical genius. He attacked prevailing views. He stated his own views clearly and emphatically. And the people who heard him recognized that they were hearing voices out of their own minds and memories. When he said that we should love and not hate, he said something that his hearers already recognized as a thought which they themselves had almost entertained. So with most else that he said. When he spoke, he was reinforced by insights that his hearers had rejected.
Religion has always been in need of non-conformists. And never more than now. The old ways are not meeting the new needs, and they cannot meet them. There must be fresh thinking, adventurous and yet deeply realistic thinking--which is only possible if the old patterns are challenged and the weary, unsufficing creeds of yesterday discarded. Yet, the non-conformist is greatly feared and misunderstood.” [http://www.dmuuc.org/Davies/CredoNonconformist.html#ixzz1hKMiN5MA]
Davies wrote these words in April of 1954, and in November of that same year another activist minister took up the theme of Jesus as non-conformist: Martin Luther King Jr used Romans 12 verse 2 as his proof text:
“And be not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind ”
[Martin Luther King, Jr, “Transformed Nonconformist” Nov 1954 http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol6/Nov1954TransformedNonconformist.pdf]
This sermon came shortly after King was installed as pastor in his Montgomery church:
The spiritual strength and moral courage of Jesus amid the temptation in the wilderness is our eternal challenge. Jesus was born at a time when the majority of people thought of the Kingdom as a political kingdom and thought of the Messiah as the one who would restore this political kingdom with all of his power and pomp and riches. And all of the temptations that Satan offered Christ were temptations to fall in line with this type of material political kingdom. In other words he was urging Christ to conform to wishes of the mob. But in the midst of such a plea we can hear Christ saying in no uncertain terms “Get thee behind me Satan.” As if to say, “I will not bow, for I have orders from an authority not of this world to build a new kind of kingdom, a kingdom that will one day rock the world, a kingdom that will shake the hinges from the gates of the Roman Empire. It will not be a kingdom political in structure and materialistic in outlook, it will be a kingdom of the spirit.
I realize that at this time this type of kingdom does not conform to the majority opinion. But I will not bow.
Who will take the attitude of Jesus and be a sincere nonconformist? Today we stand on the brink of moral and physical destruction and the great need of the hour is sincere nonconformists. Men who will stand amid a world of materialism and treat all men as brothers, men who will stand up in a world that attempts to solve its problems by war and declare that he who lives by the sword will die by the sword.
So Dr King encourages us all to be non-conformists like Jesus. Forrest Church wrote in A Chosen Faith (Beacon, 1998, 7) that “the important thing about Jesus is not his supposed miraculous birth or the claim he was resurrected from death, but rather how he lived. The power of his love, the penetrating simplicity of his teachings, and the force of his example of service on behalf of the disenfranchised and downtrodden is what is crucial. The Apostles’ Creed and other such statements of dogmatic theology entirely miss this point. They seem to suggest “if you believe in Jesus, you can live forever”, not “if you believe as Jesus, you can live well.”
We know that Jesus paid for his non-conformity with his life…so did Dr King, and so do people still all across this planet who are searching for freedom and justice. If this is the Jesus we find in the crib, a Jesus who speaks out for truth, for peace, for justice, for love, then we welcome him gladly this Christmas morning.
May it be so, Blessed Be, Amen.
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