This earns a big “so what” from me, as I learned in divinity school that Jesus was just one of many Jewish messianic figures of his time and place who made claims to know and to teach the ultimate truths about the Godhead. Obviously most of the other messiah-wanna-be’s didn’t make posterity, while Jesus did. And if you’re Jewish, Jesus was definitely not the messiah, who is still to come. If you’re some other religion than Christian, or no religion at all, this news would only interest you if you like to make sport of exclusivist-fundamentalist type Christians, and that’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Certainly folks have better things to do with their time. Like finding a spiritual path that brings more love, peace and goodwill into their own lives and communities, f’rinstance.

People sometimes share these stories with me with an expression like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth, as though I’ll read it and cry, “What do you meeeean!? Jesus wasn’t reeeeal?” like a 6-year old learning for the first time that the Macy’s Santa is really just an out-of-work actor with booze on his breath.

Jesus is real for me not because he’s the only man who ever claimed to be the Way, the Truth and the Life, but because he’s Jesus of Nazareth, whose life, work, words and tradition (however convoluted by now) have lasted and come down to my generation as a shining vision, a compelling discipline, and a path worth committing one’s life to walking, however imperfectly. I learned from the Rev. Peter Boullata’s sermon this morning that when early Christians referred to their religion as “the Way,” they used a word that actually means “paved path.” If it so happens that more than one ancient Jewish man believed himself to the most enlightened messenger of the Way, that seems to me evidence of the Spirit’s vitality through all of time, and something to regard with appreciation. As far as the theme of death-and-resurrection pre-dating Christianity, for heaven’s sake… even schoolchildren who study the most elementary Greek mythology know that!

Our God is a generous God. Sacred stories and beings abound.
Thanks to LMH for the link!

When I paused at “lead us not into temptation,” I said to myself, “WHAT?” For the first time it hit me: according to the traditional translation, Jesus taught us to ask God to refrain from leading us into temptation. What a weird theological statement. It’s not, “Keep us out of self-inflicted trouble,” or “Lead us away from tempting ourselves” but “Lead us not into temptation,” as though God is some Cosmic Scary Stranger who’s just waiting around the corner, rubbing His hands and offering us candy. “C’mere little girl,” He growls. “I got some caaaaandy for ya!”

Is Jesus actually suggesting that God does lead us into temptation? Maybe Jesus is saying, “God knows that we’re grabby little creatures prone to all kinds of slick justification for sin — God, in fact, gave us those qualities so that we would be hungry for knowledge, for justice and for wisdom — but those same awesome qualities can turn bad on us, so we have to ask God not to lead us there.” But still, even unpacking the phrase that many layers, it’s weird theology.

I think I need some help with various translations, here. Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew scholars, here’s your chance to step up. Help me out here.

I believe they were planted with help from the Extension Committee and quite frankly, after discussing their idea of church with the founding members, I felt that they had no idea why they were gathering to form a faith community. Their enthusiasm was all based on “offering Unitarian Universalism” to the local community — sort of like bringing a neat new product they thought was cool to the like-minded people who would find their way there to join them. Red flag #1. Who did discernment with this group of founders to determine their readiness, willingness and ability to lead a church start-up? If someone did, did they not notice that these kind people’s understanding of such an endeavor had nothing whatsoever to do with what it means to be a church? I spent all evening and most of a Sunday morning with this small band of folks and never once heard them express interest in anything other than promoting the UU principles in their wider community. Not a bad ideal, but how about the incarnational reality of the day-to-day work of becoming the beloved community, serving the congregation and the community in humility, welcoming the stranger, creating systems and programs that facilitate caring for each other, learning together, growing in faith together, worshiping together, seeking the will of the Holy together? And I mean to do all of this because they are prompted to do so by the Spirit of Love — in fact, called to this work so deeply that they could not avoid doing it if they tried — not doing it just so that they can “get” more members (that utilitarian approach to being welcoming and planning programs that is the death-wind blowing through so many religious communities).

I see that this fellowship currently has no minister (when I met them, they were gung ho on having a full-time minister within a few years), but that they include information on their former ministers (and announce the fact that they have no current clergyperson working with them) on the “Staff” page of the web site. Red flag #2. Ministers are not staff.

This post was prompted by this discussion over at Boy In the Bands. It was also prompted by the fact that I can’t seem to get my paper started for class and needed to clear my head for a bit. Thanks for stopping by. Did you bring me an iced coffee by any chance? Decaf?

P.S. I wouldn’t be sorry if we struck the phrase “like-minded people” from our list of glowingly positive reasons to affiliate with a faith community. Can we start to lovingly challenge that, please? I know it feels really good to find a group of like-minded people and to become spiritual kindred with them, but we too often rest there with nods and pleasant smiles as though this itself is the highest calling of our lives — to find people who share our world view and to hang out with them thinking about the meaning of life for a few decades before we die. My church is, for me, definitely a beloved community of like-minded people. It is also the place that challenges and makes demands on me emotionally and spiritually and practically and that holds my feet to the fire of the highest ideals of our faith tradition. In many moments, I treasure our like-mindedness. But I treasure just as much the work that is required of me and of all of us when we uncover the truth that we are also deeply differently-minded.

“What does the Lord require of thee?
To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.”
This isn’t necessarily best accomplished with a comfortable group of the “like-minded.”

We did an early reading by Marge Piercy explaining the significance of the Seder, leading to a reading of Exodus 6: 1-13.

After the Offertory, I gave a synopsis of the Plagues from Exodus 7-12, deciding at the last minute to harshly bang a gong after the naming of each plague so that as I read the next one, the resonance from the gong still rang through the words. It was upsetting and I think very effective. It certainly affected me!! The Student Minister then came forward and read Exodus 12:14-20, which was followed by a prayer.

After the Anthem, we included this reading:

READING FROM THE CONTEMPORARY
from the Forward by Gloria Steinhem: Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery, Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten, Directors of the American Anti-Slavery Group

“In wealthy nations like the United States, we may see occasional television exposes of undocumented immigrants forced to work for no play at guarded sweatshops in our cities, yet our responses still have the blame-the-victim quality of “Why don’t they escape?” After all, slavery ended in the nineteenth century.

We may read about Midwestern farm girls found chained to beds in Times Square or Tokyo, but our understanding of the Stockholm Syndrome is more likely to focus on intellectual political prisoners than young females whose will to survive is sapped by human traffickers adept at luring them with false promises, then “seasoning” them until are convinced that no one will ever accept them again. After all, slavery ended in the nineteenth century.

In developing countries, we see the abduction and auction of child slave laborers, families trapped in debt-bondage toiling in the fields, phony “adoptions” or poor children, false promises of good jobs used to lure and enslave domestic labor across borders, and even the use of the enslaved as sources of organs to be sold in a burgeoning black market. Yet many people vulnerable to these dangers continue to avert their eyes, if only because the need to survive leads to denial. After all, how could slavery exist in the same world with modern police and the United Nations?

Even by the strictest definition, slavery’s soul-murder and slow death are facts of daily life for millions of people.

Yes, most forms of slavery are now illegal, at least on paper. But some cultures normalize them by caste or debt servitude or sexual practice; others create laws but do not enforce them; may pay or supervise officials so poorly that bribery becomes a way of life; and most of the enslaved themselves are too dependent, invisible, or fearful of reprisal to speak – even supposing they would be listened to.”

— Gloria Steinhem

THE SERMON “Enslaved” Rev. Victoria Weinstein
First Parish Unitarian Church in Norwell
April 20, 2008

Moses died on April 5, did you hear? Of course I’m not speaking of the actual Moses, but of actor Charlton Heston who will always be Moses for some of us. Right in time for Pesach, or Passover, the holiday observed by Jewish families this week as it has been for thousands of years.

I went to my first Passover Seder as a kid, and I haven’t been to many since. It’s a very long meal with prayers and songs and recounts the story of the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt in (at anyone’s best guess) about fifteen hundred years before the Common Era. There’s a recitation of all the plagues (Exodus 7-12) and you get to do fun things like throwing drops of wine from your goblet onto your plate and some not-so-fun things like eating symbolic items like bitter herbs, horseradish and gefilte fish. And speaking of wine, there’s a lot of it. I went away from my first Seder thinking that it was sort of a religious drinking game, sprinkling wine on our plates as the plagues were read off (“Frogs!” “Locusts!”) and drinking four full glasses at prescribed times during the meal.

Why not celebrate your survival when you’re one of the most ancient ethnic groups in the world who have been the objects of systematic and organized efforts to annihilate you since the beginning of your history?

Jewish history is a wild history, and the Passover Seder is rowdy. It is not a synagogue observance but a family observance that happens around the dinner table. It commemorates terribly violent events and turns them into a feast of rejoicing. The songs are loud and triumphant. It reminds me of a saying I learned from a Voudon priestess, also the ancestress of slaves: “I will build my house upon the heads of my enemies.” It is no accident that the African-American people embrace the story of Exodus as their own, as have enslaved people everywhere.

What a story Exodus is. There is that portion we just heard where God is instituting the observance of Pesach and where, within 6 verses, he repeats the words “unleavened bread” or “no leaven” nine times. God doesn’t just tell the Hebrews to avoid leavened bread during this seven day festival, he demands it nine times. He’s like your mother before a long car ride when you were a kid. “Did you go to the bathroom?” “Yes, Mom, I went to the bathroom.” “Are you sure you went?” “Yes, Mom, I went.” A minute later she says, “This is a long ride and I don’t want to have to stop. You get in there and use the bathroom.” (“MA! I told you, I WENT!”)

I wonder if there’s a drinking game at a liberal yeshiva somewhere where they read Chapter 12 of Exodus and take a shot every time God says “leaven” or “unleavened?” And it’s not just God who emphasizes unleavened bread. Moses gets into it, too. In chapter 13 of Exodus, as he is reminding the Israelites of their duty to remember what God has done liberating them, he tells them that for during this observance for seven days they shall eat no leavened bread. He says it five times in four verses.

Now, you could say that this is just the style of the unknown author who recorded Exodus for posterity. But I don’t think so. I am sure that rabbis don’t think so, either, those experts at finding every nuance in every book of their Bible and debating and illuminating every possible meaning over centuries upon centuries. So in the rabbinical tradition, if I may, I would like to share my own sense of why the word “unleavened” is repeated so many times in the telling of the exodus story, and my thanks go to our student minister Misty-Dawn Shelley for suggesting the idea in the first place:

When freedom comes, there is no time to waste. When we are set free from enslavement in a literal or a spiritual or psychological sense, we must be ready to move, and to move fast, and to leave behind things that weigh us down, ready to leave behind even things that we think we need, things that will not serve us on our flight out of captivity. You heard how the Israelities first responded to Moses when he told them they were to be set free: they didn’t believe him. Slavery had broken their spirits and they weren’t ready for this news. They weren’t able to believe in the possibility of freedom.
We are all captive in some way or another. Captive to damaging ideas, limiting attitudes, family or societal expectations that stifle, responsibilities that keep us careful where we might want to be more risky, grounded where we would like to try to fly. That is the human condition. When we have an opportunity to experience liberation from limitations that bind us, it is also very human to say, “But I can’t change. I can’t leave what I’m familiar with. I’ve always baked bread this way. Just wait until this dough rises and I’ll be right with you.”

God in this story is saying, and saying, and saying again, “You don’t have time for the dough to rise. Grab what you have and go. I am making this happen NOW.”

Go. Go. The freedom train is here, get on now. God is going to send horrific plagues to kill the oppressors. God is going to open the Reed Sea and send it crashing closed after the Hebrews have crossed it and just as Pharoah’s charioteers are starting across in pursuit of them. This story is littered with corpses, is full of blood and vengeance. It is a very tough read, more action adventure film than anything we think of as “spiritual.” We don’t like the old blood-and-guts mafia don God. I understand that. I share with you the hope that if there is a divine unity underlying creation, it is characterized by Love and experienced as peace, healing and harmony – not traveling through the night as an angel of death killing the first born of the people of anywhere.

It is a tough read. Even the animals suffer. Even the land is destroyed. “The hail shattered every tree of the field.” Awful.

But yet, as I spent time these past weeks in this ancient stories, there was part of me that appreciated this enraged God. Because if there is anything holy in this world, shouldn’t it be each human being’s absolute right not to be owned by another human being? If anything enrages the great “I AM,” would it not be slavery? The Ten Commandments expressly forbid humans owning other humans, we all agree that it is an outrage. I think, therefore, that it is a good thing for the human community to keep alive a story that says when a spokesman for an oppressed people cry, “Let my people go,” you had better do it or there will be hell to pay.

There’s that old expression, “fear of the Lord” that free-thinkers don’t much use anymore. The Passover story, filled as it is with terrifying and vivid images of a divine wrath unleashed on a hard-hearted leader who insists on basing his economic might on slave labor, makes me think that a nation or a people that have lost a good, healthy “fear of the Lord” may have also lost the ability to be ashamed of themselves. Fear is the beginning of wisdom, so it says later in the Bible.

Where is our shame today, all nations who permit humans to be owned as chattel? Slaves still hold up much of the world’s economy on their broken backs.

Let me share with you some information about slavery today, provided by the United Nations, who sponsored the first International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade on March 25, 2008.

“The first annual International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade also serves as a reminder that contemporary forms of slavery – such as human trafficking, forced prostitution, child soldiers, forced and bonded labour and the use of children in the international drug trade – are still flourishing today, largely as a result of vulnerability exacerbated by poverty, discrimination and social exclusion.

• It is estimated that more than 250,000 children are currently being exploited as child soldiers in as many as 30 areas of conflict around the world. Many of the kidnapped girls who are made into child soldiers are also forced into sexual slavery.

• The International Organization for Migration estimates that annually 700,000 women, girls, men and boys are being trafficked across borders away from their homes and families and into slavery.

• An estimated 5.7 million children are victims of forced and bonded labour, also known as debt bondage, and 1.2 million children are victims of child trafficking.

• Linked to trafficking is the commercial sexual exploitation of children of whom 1 million, mainly girls, are forced into prostitution every year. These girls are sold for sex or used in child pornography in both the developed and the developing world.

“Despairingly credible comparisons of scale and suffering may be drawn with the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans in the Americas in which more than 12 million people were forcibly transported over the ocean in four hundred years. It is to our great shame that if today’s statistics are correct, and 700, 000 people are now being trafficked across borders into slavery annually, we will have equaled that total in a mere 20 years.”

And we thought the cause of abolition was settled in the nineteenth century.

That latter quote comes from Mrs. Ndioro Ndiye, the Deputy Director General International Organization of Migration (IOM). “It is to our great shame,” she says. A good word. A good word if it means that the conscience is activated, that we come out of our shells a bit and say, “If this is going on in such high numbers, where might it be going on around me? Am I willing not only to hear the stories of those trapped in systems of slavery, but am I willing to look for it, to investigate how my life, my assets, my comforts, might be tangled up in these systems? What am I consuming, wearing, eating, using and enjoying that was produced by slave labor?” Modern people should have morally progressed far enough to understand that we plague ourselves by refusing to see the Pharaohs in our midst, and to hold them accountable.

The congregation of Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts, contributed this reading to the Unitarian Universalist hymnal. It speaks of our human responsibility to do the work that the Bible story says Moses and God teamed up to do so long ago. It reads,

What sacrifices would we make for freedom today?
What would we leave?
How far would we go? How deeply would we look within ourselves?
Our ancestors had no time to await the rising of the bread.
Yet we, who have that time, what do we do to be worthy of our precious inheritance?
We were slaves in Egypt… but now we are free.
How easy it is for us to relive the days of our bondage as we sit in the warmth and comfort of our Seder.
How much harder to relieve the pain of those who live in the bitterness of slavery today.

To live enslaved must be absolutely brutal. We are lucky not to have to know the pain of it. But to be free is also to bear a burden. It is to bear a burden of responsibility, of constant moral decision-making, of self-cultivation, of obediences and obligations chosen out of respect, not out of coercion. To be free requires speaking and living the truth as best we understand it to and with other free people, sometimes trying to persuade, sometimes trying to listen more carefully in order to understand. And always, always at the end, to advocate for everyone’s liberation from every kind of enslavement.

The easiest thing is to be technically free but unconscious, entirely self-interested, pursuing only what is comfortable, only what is pleasant, mostly what is familiar, and concerned only with the well-being very small circle of family and friends. To be truly free is to recognize that we are easily lured into a smaller life and field of vision than is best for us to have. To be truly free means to rail against the self-imposed chains of ignorance and pettiness. To be truly free is not only to be free from something but free FOR something – something that magnifies our souls and beckons toward ever onward toward a shining goal. Freedom is not a gift granted us once and finally, but is a process, a calling, and is the work of our lives to embody in the certainty that, in the words attributed sometimes to Mahatma Ghandi and sometimes to that great author, Anonymous, “no one is free when others are oppressed.”
(sung:)
Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land.
Tell old Pharoah, let my people go.

But I really mention the Passion Gospel because the reader-pastor made an important and legitimate alteration to the text. It is hard to really get into the story when you get a dose of the-Jews-the-Jews-the-Jews. Sensitive Christians have been troubled about this for quite some time, but I confess I hadn’t come up with as elegant solution as I heard today. (And indeed, it was featured in the sermon.) For Jew (religious identity), he said Judean (political identity). It isn’t a euphemism: Jesus was convicted of sedition for claiming (not to play Pilate) the “Rex Judaeorum” and Judean is already used a toponomic adjective.

There’s enough of a verbal distance to help Christians hear the story without getting coopted into the long history of anti-Jewish violence by Christians, or God forbid, extending it. There’s something to be said by what Jewish friends and family would make of the Passion Gospel. (Indeed, this is the reason I name the congregation, so as to attribute this good practice.) - Scott Wells, BoyInTheBands

I attended Good Friday at the Episcopal Cathedral Church in Boston and was very touched to see these words by Bishop Krister Stendahl on the first page of the Order of Worship,

A Note Toward Repentance

As we gather beneath the Cross of Jesus, we should perhaps also be aware how among Jews and Muslims this our most holy sign has evoked and still evokes memories of the murderous Christian Crusades. And in not too distant times, it was actually during Holy Week that Jews suffered the worst pogroms. Somehow it was the story of Christ’s Passion that gave Christians the biblical sanction for acting out in heinous ways that contempt for the Jews that has marked and marred so much of Christian teaching and preaching. Even today images linger in our minds of the high priests — not to mention Judas — as looking much more Jewish than Jesus. [Mel Gibson, are you listening? - PB] How can that be? Were they not all Jews? Such simple questions should make us resolve to purge our Good Friday worship of all its potential contempt for Jews and Judaism. We do so in a mood of repentance, shamefully aware of how our story of reconciliation often was turned into its very opposite. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. — Bishop Krister Stendahl

It’s the sixth principle of our Unitarian Universalist Association. Liberty, peace and justice for everyone, and a sense of kinship between all the peoples of the world. A great idea. I’m for it. I’m for it. But how? I hear those words, which are easy to remember because they so closely echo the words of the pledge of allegiance we all learned as kids. Words that slide easily out of the mouth, with starry eyes, hand over the heart. Peace, liberty and justice for all. A tall order indeed. If you hold yourself personally responsible to fill that order, its expectations could feel a bit crushing. How are any of us supposed to bring peace, liberty or justice to the whole world, let alone all three?
The short answer is, we’re not. We can’t. But the longer answer is more complicated, and it has to do with what we can bring to the world where we are.

…

What most particularly inspires me today is that Jesus was able to have that breadth of influence without ever being on television, without access to any kind of form of communication, without ever writing a word for posterity, without a computer, with no home, no credit card, no personal secretary, and he never even traveled that far beyond his own hometown. He did all that with nothing but a heart on fire and a pair of dusty sandals to walk around in.

If we have ever thought that saving the world required more than that, friends, we have been thinking too big, very likely over-reaching ourselves.
“Since what we choose is what we are,
and what we love we yet shall be,
the goal may ever shine afar,
the will to reach it makes us free.”
We sing those words as our Doxology on most Second Sundays, when we send our financial gifts – our offering — out into the world. These words remind us that bringing about peace, liberty and justice in any way, no matter how small or how significant, require first that we choose what we shall love, and then that we strive to reach it. That striving doesn’t need to take us geographically far, just somewhere new in the heart, new in our insides.

When he was saying goodbye to his community, Jesus said, “My peace I give to you. My peace I leave with you. Not as the world gives do I give you.”

Peace. The peace of knowing who we are and what we want to work toward, not just the peace of being comfortable and unbothered. We should not confuse the latter with the former. The peace of being comfortable and unchallenged is not peace but apathy. Our sixth principle tells us that we are communally committed to the goal of peace, liberty and justice for all. Not peace, liberty and justice as the world gives — through bureaucracies, and by government administrations that create a program in one era but demolish it the next — but peace, liberty, and justice as a way of being, as a way of ordering the way we look and think about things, as a way of disciplining ourselves and setting priorities that make demands on us.

What we love we yet shall be — and we are trying to love peace, liberty and justice for all people, a global goal that we mostly pursue here in our own local community. It can be done, friends. You know, Palm Sunday is notable for many reasons, but not least of all because it’s the one time we see Jesus riding on an animal rather than walking. He walked everywhere. As I said earlier, this man who changed the entire course of history never traveled very far from his own hometown. Think about that. A person can be an agent of peace, liberty and justice by walking around where they are; by letting their hearts be aflame with passion for the contribution they might make from right from where they are.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 19th. I’ve had a lot of rage about it, especially when I think of your children in harm’s way, and all the carnage of the Iraqi people and culture. I am angry that my country has still required no sacrifice from me in order to make this war more real. I remember the monks who set themselves on fire in Vietnam to protest the war when the U.S. was fighting there, and I think, “We cannot set ourselves on fire, but we should allow our hearts and souls to catch fire. That fire is the divine presence in each of us, and it will not let us rest. And thank God for that. Nothing of worth happens without it.”

I have a colleague who is in Kenya right now, and others who have gone to Darfur, and some others who are going to train ministers in Zimbabwe this summer. And that’s all wonderful. But if we can’t go to Darfur or Zimbabwe, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create peace, liberty and justice where we are. Even the Ghandis and the Albert Schweitzers and the Mother Theresas and the Jesuses of the world all carried out their life work in very local communities. Of all of these admired people, Jesus was the least well-traveled.
…

Oh, it would be exciting to be a jet-setting savior of the world, wouldn’t it. To be a Jane Goodall flying from one country to the next inspiring people to eco-consciousness, signing books for hour upon hour for adoring fans like me. To be Paul Farmer lecturing on three continents in two days, so committed to saving poor communities from the scourge of tuberculosis and HIV that he hardly ever sees his own family, beloved of appreciative patients and mentor to dozens of brilliant doctors worldwide. So admired that he’s practically a saint to some.

But then there is this other man, who had no passport, won no awards, never got invited to an industry banquet, never published a book, didn’t have a change of clothes and never even had a wife and kids to neglect for his noble cause. A local man, a hometown boy who took long walks and talked to people, shared his deep and profound admiration for humanity and reverence for his God, and who did nothing but try to set each community’s hearts afire with the idea that we live not for ourselves
alone, but for others, and that we are not a random accident on the Earth but children of a Creator who loves us to every last hair on our heads.

What does it all mean? It means that some lives are lived on a grand scale of nobility and achievement, and that others whose hearts are just as full of passion are lived on a far smaller scale – a very local scale – and are just as noble. The point isn’t the scale, but the intensity of the fire that burns within, and how willing we are to have love lead us in the direction illumined by that fire.
What we love we yet shall be. And we can become it together, right here. That’s good news.

from “What We Love We Yet Shall Be”
The Reverend Victoria Weinstein
Palm Sunday 2008

I love this. It’s such a perfect commentary on our contemporary idea of sacrifice as compared with the old practices of penitence and deprivation that would lead to spiritual insights we seek in the Lenten season. Jesus spent forty days fasting in the desert… I think I’ll, um, refrain from buying lip gloss for forty days!

My Lenten discipline this year has been to be in a relationship that began, in an officially seriously committed way, just days before Ash Wednesday. For a long-time single, incredibly strong-willed and independent woman with extremely high expectations and a total inability to (a) hide her emotions or (b) speak her truth to any man in her life in a circumspect manner, this period has definitely been time in the wilderness wearing a hair shirt. Lent of 2008 will always be memorable as the year I gave up privacy, sole governance of my home, my sense of an inevitably solo future, my refrigerator, my schedule and social plans, and (on a happier note) the popular myth that I am far too prickly a pear for any human being to abide with in close quarters.

Not true, saith the LORD. Even when Jesus was being tempted by Satan (the Adversary), he had angels to attend to him. Lent may be about spending some time in the desert of self-denial and facing our demons, but it is also a time of feeling angel wings hovering ’round, and knowing their tender ministrations to be just as real as the awful stuff Satan is whispering into our ears.

For those who are offended by the whole idea of Lent, let me share with you that for me, penitence is not about punishment and Calvinistic ideas of existential unworthiness. The penitence we embrace during Lent is, for me, the confession of a dignified soul knowing that it can be more whole, a spirit incarnate in one human body vowing that it can receive healing and be an instrument of God’s peace, and the faith of a heart saying to itself that it deserves both to love, and to be loved, better.

No, seriously.

Today, after having attended a two-hour worship service at a local American Baptist church, I was thinking about how little they actually taught about Jesus even though the two hours were full of enthusiastic, percussion-heavy shout-outs to him. The basic assumption was that you came into the church already having established a very personal relationship with Jesus. There was no need to dwell on the Bible stories about him, to focus specifically on his sayings or actions, or to analyze him in any way.

Of course this is light years’ difference from the way we treat the J-Man in the UU church. If we mention him at all, we have to carefully set the context and explain the heck out of our analysis because we assume that either (a) people are wigged-out former Christians whose hair stands up on the backs of their necks when they hear his very name or (b) our listeners don’t give a fig about Jesus, so you’d better make this interesting and smart or (c) we have to make sure to make this clear to the unchurched, who may have no Biblical knowledge whatsoever.
The end result is that there’s very little enthusiasm involved in talking ’bout Jesus. We’re very bookish, little owls blinking behind our pages of research.

Which is all rather a shame, of course, because a good number of our UU seekers these days have lots of good feeling about Jesus and come assuming that we do, too. They’d like to learn about his spiritual philosophy beyond the basics and they don’t understand why we walk on eggshells around the Christian tradition.

Part of why we walk on eggshells, of course, is that a whole bunch of us have no acquaintance whatsoever with Unitarian and Universalist christology and assume that to be Christian — or even to talk about Christianity as an insider — means to believe that Christ died on the Cross as a human sacrifice for our sins. Which is abusive, sick nonsense, they say, and what kind of irrational, credulous ninny would put their faith in a God who makes this necessary?

Conversation over!

So I’m reading The Gospel of Judas this afternoon and I’m thinking there are so many deep ways to consider the meaning of the crucifixion of Christ. I’m so sorry that so many of my co-religionists reject the entire tradition because they can’t move beyond the orthodox treatments of this event.

I would think, in fact, that a religious humanist would potentially be very drawn to this story because it’s such an incredible tale of the human struggle. Take God the Father and what He might be doing out of the picture and it’s still a breathtaking story: one courageous itinerant preacher of healing and justice being nabbed by the authorities, brutally beaten and then crucified. A community of friends and disciples running away in horror, and shame. A reappearance of the dead man: who knows how? Communal psychotic break? Something funny in the wine? Who knows! And then a subsequent passionate re-emergence by the formerly traumatized community of friends who then proclaim that the love will overcome violence, that the world has totally misunderstood the nature and uses of power, and rushing off to spread the good news and to get decapitated for their trouble.

Fast forward to 2000 years later and the story is still going strong! Wow, what’s going on here? Are all those billions of people just crazy, nutso, just plain dumb? Wouldn’t any respectful student of the human history of meaning-making delight in digging into this story, and this figure? Doesn’t he beckon in a personal way, this cipher? Haven’t we figured out by now that purely academic study of whether Jesus was a real dude or not, or whether or not he actually said certain phrases is kind of fruitless?

I’m sorry that so many people who are secretly thirsting for living waters of Christian life are still living in the arid desert of the Jesus Seminars. I mean, it’s a great place to start reading if you’re tentative about Jesus, but I wouldn’t stay there. Current theological offerings are much richer than that, anyhow.

Someone asked me recently what I thought it meant to have a personal relationship with Jesus. For me it means (1) to seek instruction by him through studying the most reliable reports of his life and teachings and (2)to agree to be part of the “you” he was talking about when he said, “I will be with you always.” The former commitment is about being a disciple of Jesus the living man. The latter commitment is about embracing the cosmic Christ as a spirit that manifests in the world through a combination of the grace of God and human willingness to have faith in its reality. To have a personal relationship with Jesus is to say to him, “I am going to look for you today out there. I am going to try to be more influenced by you than by Madison Avenue or the Rupert Murdoch empire.”

To have a personal relationship with Jesus is to stand where he stood — even in those terrible moments under the Cross — and to ask myself, “What does this mean? How can I live with this? What am I supposed to do about it?” Even if I had no belief in a transcendent God whatsoever, I believe I would still be drawn to the Jesus event in much the same way. I ask myself now and then how we as a human community would react even today to someone who rejects the things we all tacitly agree matter most (home, family, possessions, worldly goals), who breaks down barriers of class, gender, race in an impolite and even disdainful fashion, and who dares to insist that no matter how popular they become and how amazingly they influence people for the better, they have no agenda but to bring about a new world order based on peace and love. I’m thinking the slammer, the psych ward or an assassination.

To have a personal relationship with Jesus is to sit eating peanuts with him at the kitchen table, throwing the shells on the floor and saying Man, we are still so totally not ready for you. And when he says, “Well, stop eating peanuts then and GET ready,” you sigh and brush the shells off your lap and keep trying because you think he’s the most rightest person who ever was.

P.S. I’ll be away visiting MotherBang for a few days so don’t freak if your comment doesn’t show up right away. She has a dial-up connection and I won’t be online much. — xoxo PB
P.P.S. Please don’t yell at me for suggesting that you can have Christ without God. A lot of Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in God and I am trying to do what the preacher said to do this morning, which is to bring someone the gospel today. You dooz what you canz. I personally thought Jesus was the Way way before I believed in God, so I’m living proof that theological righty-osity doesn’t matter much to the Holy Spirit.

As I had my breakfast and got ready to leave, I realized that I was filled with a feeling of thrilled anticipation to go to church ! What a wonderful feeling! I wondered if my own congregants ever felt this way: this kind of first-day-of-school excitement. I certainly hope they do on occasion.

I climbed into the car for a fairly long drive and almost popped in a tape of a sermon from the Festival of Homiletics but decided to wait to hear the word from the preacher at the church I’d be visiting.

And then it hit me: I can’t wait to go to church because I’m so psyched to hear what the preacher has to say about the Bible!

How did THAT happen?
Me, a serious Bible lover?

Well, apparently so!

I have been studying Christian and Jewish scripture formally and informally, on and off, for about twelve years now. Suddenly, in the summer of 2007, I look up and realize that the stories and characters in the Bible are real to me, and precious. I care about them. They are people with whom I have a relationship, and whose experience of the living God helps me encounter the living God, too. I honor their interpretation of their experience even as I vehemently disagree with it at times. They were, as I am, products of their time and place. Their vision, as is mine, was limited. “Now we see through a glass, darkly.”

I realized this morning that it makes so much sense that I would come to madly love the Bible. Books in general have had a tremendous influence on my life and are like food and drink to me. If you could gain weight from reading I’d be 500 lbs. by now. So it’s no surprise, duh, that The Good Book would worm its way into my heart, soul and mind and draw me into deeper engagement with not only its stories, but its spiritual power.

Duh, again. The Bible does have tremendous spiritual power. Are you kidding? All those billions of people over all those years diving into that text and looking to it to address the deepest questions of their lives? Yeah, there’s a little bit of powerful mojo there.

I knew that this morning in church we might be hearing lectionary texts about Naman from 2 Kings, or the wonderful story from Luke’s gospel where Jesus tells the disciples to shake the dust from their feet if a community doesn’t want to receive their ministry. I knew that there was a chance the preacher would talk about that bizarre moment in Luke 10 when Jesus says, “I watched Satan fall down from heaven like a flash of lightening.” What a great moment; a trippy mystical vision following all that eminently practical pastoral advice. I was downright excited.

As it turns out, the preacher preached on Psalm 30, and that was fine, too. I’ve grown to love the psalms over the years, too, although I initially thought them a bizarre, dreary collection of violence and complaint. Now I see them as a record of sacred kvetching, but also as a beautifully crafted, poetic account of one individual’s troubled and transcendent relationship with their inscrutable God. Before we had psychotherapy, people had the psalms. They are deeply healing and integrative. There isn’t one emotion I’ve ever had that the Psalmist didn’t have. There isn’t one spiritual question, doubt or ethical dilemma I’ve had that the Psalmist didn’t address.

The Bible is, for me, an ancient record of my ancestors attempt to explain the ways of God as they experienced it. I think they got a lot wrong, but I believe that they got so much right, too.

As for Jesus in the Bible, well… just when you think you know Jesus, you turn back to the Bible and realize that you don’t know him at all. I read a lot of books about religion and an awful lot of those books are about what Jesus supposedly was and what Jesus supposedly did and wanted us to do. I read a lot of theology and sociological commentary on what the Church is supposedly about and what God wants us to do, and how God may or may not exist, and all that. I read thousands and thousands of pages of this stuff every year. And yet every time I open the actual Bible and read it in whatever translation, it’s like being doused with a bucket of refreshingly cool water. Let me make this analogy: you can read about music, or you can hear it. You can read about falling in love, or you can experience it. You can look at a photograph of food in Gourmet magazine or you can taste it. If you want to get into the living God of Jewish and Christian tradition, you can read theology or you can read the Bible.

Read and taste. Read and hear. Read and experience.

And there I was thinking that that particular revelation was totally sealed. Silly me. But here’s the thing: it took a lot of work and intellectual commitment before the Bible began to reveal its beauty and power to me. I’m so glad I didn’t follow the example of all the “enlightened” people I’ve known over the years who are persuaded that only fools and fanatics bother with it.

At the end of his life, his priest refused to visit him. I know the priest, and he’s a cold, hard man. I do not doubt the man’s wife when she says the priest ignored her phone calls. She, the wife, is a child of our parish (hasn’t been to church in a couple of decades but still a child of our congregation) and she phoned me as her husband was in his last days to say, “Would you go do a blessing for him? He liked you.”

It seems that he had seen me officiate at the funerals and memorials of some of his friends and thought I was “his kind of minister.”

Of course I went to the hospital to bless him. You get that for free just for the asking, is my opinion. You don’t have to like me. Heck, you can even give me a Bronx cheer on your way to Heaven. When someone asks for a blessing at the time of death, we’re not talking about mutual admiration societies or even good relations between church and individual. We’re talking about preparing the soul for the ultimate transition. How could his own priest not be there? For one of his own faithful members? It galls me, it really does.

So anyway, we did the funeral yesterday morning and I wanted to include some of the traditional prayers and Scripture from this man’s tradition. We read from Thessalonians and the Gospel of John, lots of resurrection stuff that has nothing much to do with our tradition but has everything to do with Russian Orthodox faith. It was one of those funerals that takes place in our church but isn’t for a UU; leaving the minister with lots of liturgical and theological choices and hard decisions. I did the best I could. I read the things that I thought would have comforted and held him, had he been there. Actually he was there, in a lovely mahagony casket.

I thought I’d do something unusual and start with Sentences from the Universalist Book of Prayer. Then, reading along the night before, I found that I just loved the sentences from Psalm 90 in particular, so I thought I’d start the service in a strong, invocational way with it. You know, very triumphant and faithful and all that, before doing the welcome and pastoral piece (”we celebrate life in the midst of mortality,” and etc.).

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

Not having taken the Universalist Book of Prayer into the pulpit with me, silly me thought a Bible would suffice. And opening my Bible to Psalm 90 and beginning with diaphragmatic breathing and confident tones, I proceeded to lay it on the faithful. Here’s what happened, with my thoughts in parentheses:

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. (oh yes, this is great)
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (what beautiful stuff!)

You turn us back to dust, and say, “Turn back, you mortals.” (oh, this is deep, but it’s a funeral, we can take it)
For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night.
You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning;
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers. (wow, is this gorgeous !)

For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed. (Holy crap. What? This wasn’t in the Universalist Book of Prayer !)
You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. (Panic! panic mode! Lord, this is a SITUATION! Help me out here!)

At which point I took a huge pause because there was NO WAY IN HELL I was reading the following phrases:

For all our days pass away under your wrath; our years come to an end like a sigh.

The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Who considers the power of your anger? Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.
So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. (now THAT’S in the Universalist Book of Prayer, and I love it, and I’m so sorry I skipped it by accident. But you can see why. It’s nestled between some seriously Calvinistic stuff that to my mind, has no place in a service of the celebration of life.)

After a huge pause, which I tried to make meaningful by looking as though I was just absorbing the power of the text, I continued here:

Turn, O Lord! How long? Have compassion on your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
(I skipped this) Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil.
(and continued on here)
Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands— O prosper the work of our hands!

So, friends and pastors, the power of speed-reading, and the importance of marking up your Bible before you get into the pulpit. I’m not a fan of cutting and pasting our way through Scripture just to pick the bits we like (thank you, Thomas Jefferson) or that undergird our own personal view of God, but hell’s bells. You can’t minister to a group of 200 people grieving the loss of their beloved pal by giving them that kind of word. You just can’t. Southern Baptists can write in and slap me up if they want, but it’s moments like those when I think maybe I would rather be burned at the stake than tell a group of mourners that God is angry at them all their lives and that those lives end “like a sigh.” I mean, not without being able to add some words of explanation and interpretation.

Friends, the pulpit is a dangerous place. Ascend it with care.