A lot of Episcopalians
are kinda nervous these days
because Presiding Bishop Michael
Curry
is enlisting us in something called
“the Jesus Movement.”
They say
they don’t know what he means.
But when he
has invited church leaders
to try to spell out what “the Jesus
Movement” is,
some of us have nervously shied away
from the question.
I can’t say
I’m surprised.
It was a
running joke back in my seminary
that we had an informal taboo on our preaching.
We were not
to say, “the J word.”
We could
talk about “Christ” vaguely,
meaning what Theosophists
call “the Christ principle” defined
as
“a spiritual abstraction and no living man.”
But Jesus of
Nazareth made us nervous.
This talk
about Jesus feels out of bounds.
We recently
asked a group of our Episcopal leaders
what Nevada needs that the Church
might offer.
No one
mentioned Jesus. No one said the gospel.
We talked
instead in the secular language of the world,
and Jesus is no part of that.
But today’s
Gospel lesson says, “it’s all about Jesus.”
“They looked
up and saw no one except Jesus, himself, alone.”
I want to
talk about that lesson
It can be
hard to really hear a story we’ve read so often.
So, let me
tell you another story first – a wild, fantastic, magical story
from an entirely different religious tradition.
The Ramayana is a sacred Hindu epic about Ram,
an avatar,
which is essentially an incarnation
of god.
When Ram’s
wife Siva was kidnapped by the forest monster, Humbaba.
he enlisted his friends in a bold rescue mission.
About a
thousand pages later,
after they had Siva back home safe and sound,
Ram threw a thank you party for his
comrades.
He gave each
of them a valuable ring with a precious stone.
One of his
friends was a magical talking monkey named Hanuman.
Hanuman
looked at his ring, chewed it up, and spit it in the trash.
Others said,
“Look at that foolish monkey,
ruining and discarding such a
valuable gift.”
Hanuman
answered, “Not so.
This ring was worthless to me
because it had not the name of my
Lord Ram
anywhere on it.”
The others
laughed and said,
“By that standard, you should
discard your own body.”
“Not so,”
Hanuman replied,
and he pulled open his chest to show
them,
he had carved the name of Ram on
each of his ribs.
That’s the
Jesus movement.
It’s a
religion -- not about an idea -- but about a person.
A whole way
of life flows out of our relationship with that person,
but the heart of it is the person,
Jesus.
Some of us
think we’re too sophisticated for
that personal of a faith.
Well then,
just briefly I promise, let’s talk a little philosophy.
Philosophy
begins in the basic mystery.
I notice
that I am here. You seem to be here too.
In fact,
there is a here for us to be – a universe.
We wonder:
why is there something rather than nothing?
The Big Bang
isn’t an answer. Who lit the fuse?
Western
philosophy for centuries answered that question
by talking about Being with a capital B,
the suchness of things, an impulse
to Being that creates and sustains.
Eastern
philosophy looked at the emptiness of things,
the way they seem to come from
nothing and return to nothing.
Instead of
Being they talked about, Sunyata, the
Void.
In the 20th
Century, a group of Japanese philosophers
began reading Western Theology.
They read
Karl Barth who was all about Jesus.
And these
Japanese philosophers learned something.
They said, the
universe is born from the Void because the Void
is procreative. It is personal. It
loves.
The Void is
not just nothing.
It looks a
lot like a man on a cross.
In the world
of philosophy, the hymn came true.
“In Christ,
there is no East and West.”
Both sides
of the great philosophical divide agreed that
the Source, the Destiny, and the
Meaning of the Universe
isn’t an idea, it isn’t a spiritual
abstraction,
it isn’t a cosmic order.
It’s
personal. The Source, Destiny, and Meaning of Everything
thinks, feels, cares, desires,
intends, and loves.
Christians
meet the Source, the Destiny, and the Meaning of Life itself
in Jesus.
The
disciples had two ways of understanding life,
two ways of living it, two ways of being in the world.
They had the
law and the prophets – morality and spirituality.
So, when
they saw their rabbi talking on a mountaintop
with Moses, the father of moral
religion
and Elijah, the father of Jewish
spirituality,
Peter said to Jesus, “Let’s build
three dwellings here
– one for you, one for Moses, and
one for Elijah.”
He meant it
as a compliment, to put Jesus on a par with those giants.
But Peter
had missed the point.
So, God
showed up as a “bright cloud” and thundered,
“This is my beloved Son . . ..
Listen to him.”
And the
disciples were afraid.
They were
afraid because they had rashly answered
life’s ultimate question
– the question of what really
matters
– and they had gotten it wrong.
In a multiple-choice
question,
with the answers being morality,
spirituality, and Jesus;
they’d answered, “all of
the above.”
But that
wasn’t’ God’s answer.
They’d
missed that the ultimate value of God’s own self
was right there in this human
person,
this peasant preacher who would end up a convict, this Jesus.
All of
morality and all of spirituality lead to this this glory in the dust.
The
disciples thought the terrifying cloud was the Epiphany.
So, they
fell on the ground and hid their faces.
But the real
epiphany happened next
when Jesus touched them, and said,
“Get up and do not be afraid.”
God isn’t a
terrifying cloud driving us to the dust in fear.
God is a
brother reassuring us, “Get up and do not be afraid.”
The real
epiphany was Jesus, himself.
As a
Pharisee, St. Paul practiced the moral life to perfection.
As a Mer-kobah
mystic, he achieved the most advanced
states of spiritual contemplation.
But one day
Paul, just like the disciples,
saw a light shining from Jesus
– and what he saw changed everything.
Decades
later, he looked back on his life,
all his ethical discipline, all his mystical practice, and
said,
“Whatever gains I had, these I count
as loss
because of the surpassing value of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord.”
Paul no
longer billed himself as a just man or a mystic.
He didn’t
bill himself at all.
He said, “It
is not ourselves that we proclaim.
We proclaim Christ Jesus as Lord and
ourselves as your servants
for his sake.”
Paul carved
the name of Jesus on his bones --
no deeper than his bones -- in his very heart.
Paul tossed
aside every prize he had every claimed,
every success he had ever achieved,
like Hanuman throwing away the
priceless ring, and said,
“I’d rather have Jesus.”
Paul’s faith
– our faith -- is all in the words of
another old spiritual,
“In the morning when I rise, give me
Jesus.
When I am alone, give me Jesus.
When I come to die, O when I come to
die, give me Jesus.
You can have the whole world.
You can have the whole world.
Just give me Jesus.”
