Readings
Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision

The historical Jesus is of interest for many reasons. Not least of these is his towering cultural significance in the nearly two thousand years since his death. No other figure in the history of the West has been accorded such extraordinary status.

Within a few decades of his death, stories were told about his miraculous birth. By the end of the first century, he was extolled with the most exalted titles known within the religious tradition out of which he came: Son of God, one with the Father, the Word become Flesh, the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, the one who would come again as cosmic Judge and Lord. Within a few centuries, he had become Lord of the empire which had crucified him.

For over a thousand years thereafter, he dominated the culture of the West: its religion and devotion, its art, music and architecture, its intellectual thought and ethical norms, even its politics. Our calendar [itself] affirms his life as a dividing point in world history.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer:

With the rise of Hitler, I came to realize that the Church could not be counted upon to withstand the state or the culture in which it held a privileged position.. . . . Something within me died, and I thought "What is left"? As I looked about me, I realized only a few small sects, like the Unitarians and the Quakers, were the only hope - they and the new modern spirit of humanism which might rekindle the true spirit of Jesus.

Re-Encountering Jesus
by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, December 5, 2004

I am one of those people who has a strong, even rigid, commitment to keeping holidays in the time and season in which they belong. And so during summer vacation, for instance, I am never, ever tempted to walk into one of those year-around Christmas Shops, and I tend to be very audible with my 'Bah, humbug!'s when stores start to put up their Christmas displays in November and even October. I hold it off as long as I can; but once we turn the corner into December, it seems more or less fair to recognize the inevitable: the Christmas season in fact is here.

For traditional Christians, that season has nothing to do with how many shopping days are left in December, but instead with the liturgy and customs around Advent, the four weeks before Christmas day. I have to admit that I hardly remember Advent as a Catholic child - it was unfortunately no real competition with Santa Claus. But I came to love it as a young adult, in the way it was honored among my friends who lived and worked with the poor in Catholic Worker communities. When we sat down together before meals in December, the Advent candles were lighted, a passage from one of the gospels would be read, and there were thoughtful, faith-filled reflections from all who wanted to speak, focused on what it really means to prepare oneself to receive Jesus at his birth.

As a religious community, Unitarian Universalists have lost the practice of Advent. I'm sure this is because of our uncertainty about where we fit into the whole story of Christmas, individually in our own spiritual beliefs and collectively, as a denomination that is not considered Christian. But at this time of year I often find myself wishing that we would not be so ambivalent about Jesus and about our own right to celebrate his birth, his life and his teachings.

Advent is a lovely prelude to the winter, a time of waiting and expectancy, of self-examination and spiritual reflection. It can be a profound spiritual practice, to not only turn one's attention to a spiritual guide like Jesus, but toward our own readiness, our own will and intention in our halting efforts to follow that guide.

Earlier this year an issue of our denominational magazine, the UU World, included an article by Erik Wikstrom, a UU minister who continues to consider himself a Christian. In it, Wikstrom wrote about his long search for an understanding of Jesus that would let him lay claim to his faith without getting bogged down in the trappings of orthodoxy that simply didn't make any sense to him. It's a struggle with which many UUs are familiar, but one many of us also seem to have given up on.

Wikstrom writes, "We turn for spiritual sustenance to Sufi poetry, Buddhist sutras, Wiccan chants, or the mysteries of chaos theory rather than to the Bible, as if Christianity were uniquely irredeemable. We are willing - even eager - to listen to the teachings of Tibetan lamas, Hindu avatars, and Mexican shamans, yet hesitant - even resistant - to open ourselves to the wisdom of the Hebrew prophets or the Christian gospels. When it comes to Christianity, many of us have not only thrown out the baby with the bathwater, but also have tossed out the tub, shut off the lights, and walked out of the house, locking the door behind us."

The spiritual path many of us choose for ourselves includes some twists and turns that take us back toward that locked house. That doesn't necessarily mean we will again consider ourselves Christians, if ever we did. But it means we're ready to set aside our reactivity to orthodoxies we've rejected, so we can see for ourselves what meaning there might be in the teachings and example of Jesus. This Advent season seems a good time to lift up the question: What does it mean to re-encounter Jesus, as Unitarian Universalists?

Most of us know that until well into this century, both Unitarians and Universalists called themselves Christians. Our most famous theologians were Christians, although maverick ones, including those like Thoreau and Emerson who tended toward the more mystical beliefs of Transcendentalism.

It's true that these forbears of ours were often seen by the rest of the world as heretics, but not because they disavowed Christianity. They were seen as heretics because they wanted to radically re-own Christianity. They kept trying to get back to the roots of what Jesus of Nazareth was about, and separate him from the enormous baggage of religion that had piled up around him.

The word "heresy" comes from a Greek word meaning simply "to choose". Within orthodox religious circles, choosing is precisely the thing one isn't supposed to do -- and our UU ancestors were incorrigible choosers. The Unitarians were considered heretics because of their choice to reject the divinity of Jesus. They pointed out that Jesus himself never claimed to be God or co-equal with God; the well-known statements like "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life", or "I and the Father are one", came much later. So the Unitarians decided that the Trinitarian God was a human invention - one they chose to reject.

The Universalists were considered heretics because they rejected the god of vengeance who would condemn human beings to hell after death. In their reading of scripture, the God Jesus taught was one of love and forgiveness, not punishment and terror. The Universalists decided that hell and damnation were human inventions - ones they chose to reject.

We're living centuries after these central tenets of our faith were first proclaimed, and a lot has changed - as one would hope and expect. But the echo of those original teachings is still sounding among us. It shapes our understanding of God as an unfolding Mystery, something that no single religion can own. It shapes our understanding of human nature, as something complex and tender and full of possibility, and of the world, as a place of wonder and goodness as well as danger and sorrow.

And the echo of our Unitarian ancestors' voices also shapes how we know and understand Jesus - which is still quite different from what is taught within the halls of most traditional Christian churches. The orthodox teaching is that Jesus was the son of God, co-equal with God and part of the Trinity. He took the shape of a human body in order to become a willing sacrifice, paying for human sinfulness by his agonizing death. He literally rose from the dead after three days, conquering death and showing us the way to do the same if we believe and accept that through him is the way to God.

These central tenets of orthodox Christianity are difficult for those of us outside that fold, because they challenge what we consider reasonably possible in our world as we know it. For many of us, as we felt ourselves growing away from that tradition, the only response that seemed possible was the one described by Erik Wikstrom: we simply threw all of it out, locked the house and walked away. But for those who wonder whether we still have some partial ownership in that house after all these years, the question we have to wrestle with is the heretic's question: How many of these doctrines are in fact essential to the Christian path?

The answer our ancestors came up with was: none. None of these difficult doctrines have to do with the essence of Christianity, if what we understand by that essence is what we actually learn from Jesus himself. Those hard teachings that challenge our logic are the accumulated layers left by many centuries of doctrinal wars, and they have very little to do with the itinerate preacher from Galilee. Modern-day biblical scholars sound uncannily like the Unitarians of two centuries ago in what they say they now know: that Jesus himself never said he was God, never imagined the concept of the Trinity, thought of himself as a devout if reform-minded Jew, had no intention of founding a new religion, and did not see his own death as a saving act for the rest of the world.

That may be reassuring to us, but parsing out all the things Jesus did not really say or do still feels like tossing out babies and bathwater. What about the other side of the equation: within the limits of the sketchy accounts we have, what was it that Jesus did believe and teach? More specifically, what is it in his teachings and life that continues to be compelling even for so many who do not choose to call ourselves Christians?

First, in what we like to think of as the best tradition of Unitarian Universalism, Jesus stood for unrelenting challenge to the orthodoxies of his day. He believed it was possible to be a devout Jew while pushing against some of the central laws of Judaism. For instance, within a culture deeply preoccupied with cleanliness and defilement, Jesus was amazingly unconcerned about who he touched or what company he kept. He taught that the only real corruption, the only evils worth worrying about, came from the human heart, from choices human beings made about how they dealt with each other. To prove his point he hung out with prostitutes, lepers and tax collectors, sharing their food and their homes.

Jesus preached an immediate access to God, unmediated by priests or leaders, by rituals or temples. When he gave an example of how to pray, he didn't address his words to a distant entity with a name we were never supposed to speak. Jesus taught that in prayer, God should be addressed as abba. It's an Aramaic word that's usually translated as "father", but some biblical scholars say that it would be rendered more accurately as "papa". The great God of the Universe and Lord of Creation, the Mystery housed in the temple and surrounded by layers of protocol and ritual, should be addressed as "Papa".

This radical intimacy came with an equally radical vision of the Kingdom of God. Jesus was born into a time and place profoundly steeped in thoughts of apocalypse. It was a rough time to be alive, especially if you were a Jew, and talk of the end of the world was all over the place, along with visions of what it would be like when God finally marched in to set things straight.

But the message Jesus preached was, "the Kingdom of God is within you", sometimes translated as "the Kingdom of God is among you." He taught a powerful new responsibility borne by each person willing to accept it: namely, the responsibility to live out the Kingdom of God now, here, immediately. It was no "pie in the sky" future; it was an event unfolding in the present precisely to the degree human beings were willing to see it, grasp it and begin to live it.

The Kingdom of God consisted in living out right relationship, love in practice, justice worked out with those who are the least among us. Jesus believed that all the law, all the prophets, all the centuries of Jewish wisdom, pointed above all to the teaching to love God, and to love each other. Or perhaps better said, to love God by loving each other.

Contrary to what most of us believe because of the kind of Christianity we were taught, Jesus was not preoccupied with sin. He had a simple solution to the problem of sinfulness: forgiveness. Forgiveness of each other, forgiveness of ourselves, and the faith to assume forgiveness by God. Based on what we know about what he said, Jesus wasn't nearly as focused on sin as he was on fear: the fear of breaking the law, the fear of death, the fear of sinfulness, the fear of God, the fear of love, the fearfulness that makes people cling to things that offer an illusion of security. Jesus wanted to free people not from sin, but from fear.

When we go back to his core teachings, and when we learn enough about the bible and its history to see the theological overlays and separate them out, then we can begin to choose for ourselves what holds power and meaning for us. This is what it means to be a heretical Christian, that is, a Christian who chooses. And this is the way many Unitarian Universalists choose to be Christian while rooted firmly in the UU fold. They continue to think of themselves as Christians not because of what they believe but because of how they try to live: as disciples of Jesus and followers of his teachings.

The writer Maya Angelou once said, "I'm startled or taken aback when people tell me they're Christians. My first response is the question, "Already?" It seems to me a lifelong endeavor to try to live the life of a Christian." Most of us within the UU fold would concur. That's what it means, after all, to be a disciple: someone who tries to follow the teachings of a master and spread them to others. It's also related to the word "discipline", as in choosing a religious discipline by which we seek to live our lives. It makes much more sense to see our spiritual lives the way Maya Angelou does, because it's how we see every other dimension of our lives: something that unfolds, develops and matures. We learn something because we practice it. We learn how to be people of spirit, people of integrity, people of faith, by practicing the religious teachings that take us deeper toward the sort of people we want to be.

In this understanding of what it means to be a Christian, traditional doctrine is turned upside-down, in a sense. Instead of seeing Jesus as God, infinitely beyond our grasp, we see him as more human than most of us have yet managed - more fully aware of what it is to be a person and of what we're capable in our lives.

That's the Jesus for whom I want to prepare a welcome, this Advent season. I know that he is composed partly of longing and projection, partly of myth and story. But at the heart of it all was a human being, born into a hard life, who took what he was given and found within it a pathway to extraordinary spiritual awakening. The Advent candles aren't lighted for him, after all, but for us: to help us find within our own hearts the doors of compassion, and awakening. May it be so: AMEN.