“What is Progressive Christianity? A 4-Sermon Series
Sermon 2: Progressive Christian Approaches to
Understanding Jesus”
June 8, 2008
John 14: 1-14
Rev. Jean Morrow
In the first of our 4-sermon
series on Progressive Christianity, Pastor Marcia closed by re-telling an
historical fable by Rev. James Gertmenian of Plymouth
Congregational Church in Minneapolis…the fable recounts a time, at the
beginning of time, when communities were isolated from one another around the
world…yet the small communities of people would tell their stories around the
fire…of how the moon came to be…and why the rains fell…and which spirits
visited them in their dreams. Whole
religious cultures and ways of understanding the world grew around those
campfires…each encampment developing stories quite different from the others.
And one day, members of one
clan or another set out on a journey…and met up with another clan…and by this new
and different campfire, they began to exchange their stories. The fable ended by fast-forwarding to today,
when, in a single day in many neighborhoods around the world, one might
encounter a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Moslem, a Christian, a Jew, a humanist, a traditional
Native American and who knows how many others.
The reality today is that no religion, even the most exclusive and
separatist of them, can live in complete isolation from other religions.
This leads us to some
important questions. What is the meaning
of this bewildering multiplicity of faith traditions? Does the world face an ultimate struggle in
which one religion must overcome or overpower all others? Or will history see a merger of the great
faiths…a blending…a religious stew where all blend together, but distinct
flavors can no longer be discerned? Or
should we hope for a world in which the great faiths remain strong and
distinct, but in which their engagement with each other takes on a greater
depth, a new level of maturity, a new texture of dialogue. As you might guess, I’m in favor of the last
option. But, to get there, we are going
to have to get over a major Christian hurdle: that much of Christendom
considers Christianity the one and only true faith.
Where does this notion come
from? Well, partly, to Jesus. It is reflected in several places in the text,
but no where more often quoted than John 14, “I am
the way, the truth, and the life. No one
comes to the Father but by me…” By the 3rd
century, we find Cyprian writing what is now a classic Christian formulation,
“Extra ecclesium nulla salus,” which means “outside the church there is no
salvation.” Very early in its
development, the church stopped focusing on the ministry of Jesus…and began to focus on
Jesus, particularly the meaning of his death and resurrection and the nature of
his divinity.
No place points this out more
clearly than a review of the early church creeds. Many of you grew up saying the Apostles’
Creed, which scholars believe dates to the 2nd century…do you
remember what it said about the life of Jesus?
Listen for it, “I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who
was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried…” No mention of his life and teachings.
Now listen to this excerpt
from the Nicene Creed, dated to the year 325, “For us and for our salvation he
came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and
became truly human. For our sake he was
crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.” Jesus’
ministry was about the
This may be a bit of a broad
sweeping statement, but when it comes to Jesus, Progressive Christians are
interested in rediscovering and reclaiming the ministry of Jesus and his
example of a way of life that moves us closer to how God wants us to live. Progressive Christians are interested in the very
human Jesus who live and walked and taught and healed and prayed and ate and
laughed and cried and had friends…and had enemies, and struggled and suffered
and faced his death courageously, reaffirming his confidence in God and God’s
kingdom to the end.
Progressive Christians are on
a quest to find the historical Jesus, to see him through the lens of his teachings
about the inclusive
Finding the historical Jesus
is kind of like being on an archeological dig site. At dig sites, archeologists painstakingly
sweep and dig, layer by layer through earth that gives evidence to previous
cultures. Every layer…every subtlety…is
carefully identified and marked. Every
item is carefully catalogued as the dig team moves back through time. Items are compared with previously collected
items…from the same time period…or perhaps from a similar geographic area…to
see what story or new information might emerge the culture being unearthed.
So it is with the search for
the historical Jesus. Jesus scholars
have been around since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, but in
the last 20 years, a group of scholars known as the Jesus Seminar have been
hard at work attempting to distinguish what might be at the Jesus level,
producing exciting new scholarship on the historical Jesus. There are names you are familiar with: Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan,
Stephen Patterson, Bernard Brandon Scott. Karen Armstrong and John Shelby Spong are friends of the seminar.
Their search and research is
fueled by a basic principle of historical study that people and things from the
past should be understood in the context of their own time. This principle is part of what has revolutionized
the study of the Bible. It enables us to
understand biblical authors as people of their own time writing for a
particular audience rather than channelers of
timeless divine revelation. The search
for the historical Jesus would be impossible without this principle, which
enables us to understand Jesus as a first-century Jew speaking to his fellow
Jews rather than as a divine savior teaching eternal truths to all
generations. This is not to say there
weren’t truths in Jesus’ teachings, but to fully understand the teachings, we
must look at the historical context and the original audience.
And so, the Jesus Seminar
scholars, through careful study of textual “artifacts”, have developed a
collection of studied impressions of Jesus as a figure of history.
Like the ancient texts, their
impressions share a certain fund of common knowledge about Jesus, but none is an
exact carbon copy of another.
Generally, though, Jesus
Seminar scholars agree that Jesus did not refer to himself as the Messiah, nor
did he claim to be a divine being who descended to
earth from heaven in order to die as a sacrifice for the sins of the
world. These are claims that other
people in the early church made about Jesus, not claims he made about himself.
Jesus Seminar scholar, Roy
Hoover, in the introduction to Profiles
of Jesus writes, “At the heart of Jesus’ teaching and actions was a vision
of life under the reign of God in which God’s generosity and goodness is
regarded as the model and measure of human life; it is a life marked by a
radical inclusiveness where everyone is accepted as a child of God, everyone is
valued as a full member of God’s beloved creation and everyone is liberated
both from the ethnocentric confines of traditional Judaism and from the
secularizing servitude and meagerness of their lives under the oppressive rule
of Rome. Although the Jesus Seminar scholars have differing ways of depicting
how this vision of Jesus was played out in his public activity, all agree that
a vision of life under the reign of God was of great importance to Jesus and is
a key, if not the key, to understanding Jesus’ public ministry.”
So, what would Jesus think of
the Christian claim that Christianity is the one and only true faith? Let’s finally take a look at that bewildering
text from John 14. First, Jesus speaks
of many mansions, “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places.” This has long been a favorite proof text
cited by religious universalists and pluralists,
pointing out that Jesus is insisting that there are places for people of all
faiths and backgrounds in the divine home of God.
Ironically, however, the
favorite proof text in the Bible for Christian exclusivists appears only three
verses later, when Jesus declares, “I am the way, and the truth and the
life. No one comes to the Father except
through me.” Many Christian conservatives
have used these lines to proclaim Jesus Christ as the only way to
salvation…accept Jesus or be damned to hell for all eternity.
How can these two texts, one
apparently pluralistic and the other thoroughly exclusivist, be found
back-to-back in the very same gospel lesson?
My view is that the two
verses aren’t being read in context. We
need to place the verses back into the historical context in which they were
written. The author of John is telling
the story of Jesus’ life, looking back about 70 years. In chapter 14 of this story, Jesus is very close
to the end of his life and he is trying to say goodbye to his disciples. In the previous chapter, he has predicted
that one of his disciples will betray him.
He has also said to them, “Little children, I am with you only a little
longer.” He’s explained that “Where I am
going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterward.” Then, in the gospel lesson we have in today’s
lectionary, Jesus tries to reassure his disciples and quiet their anxiety: “Do
not let your hearts be troubled…in my Father’s house there are many dwelling
places…I go to prepare a place for you…where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am
going.”
But his disciple Thomas is
not reassured. His anxiety is not
stilled. If there are many dwelling
places in the Father’s house, how’s he going to find Jesus someday among the
many mansions? Jesus may have stated
that Thomas knows the way to the place where Jesus is going, but Thomas isn’t
at all clear about this himself. And so
he says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” I believe Jesus responds pastorally,
lovingly, as he responds again, offering reassurance, attempting to calm his
disciple’s anxieties, “I am the way, and truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through
me.”
Jesus was not giving us a
dissertation on comparative religion. I
hear Jesus saying, “Thomas, Thomas, don’t be so worried. When the time comes for you to approach God,
I’ll be right there. Please, don’t
worry. I’ve shown you the way. I’ve shown you God’s way, God’s truth, God’s
life, God’s love of all creation, living and dead. When you come, I’ll be there, very close to
God. You’ll find me.”
Again, Jesus was not giving
us a dissertation on comparative religion.
He was saying goodbye to his own disciples, he was being pastoral, and
he was reassuring them that they’d meet him again…after death…before God. Yes, there are many mansions or many dwelling
places in God’s house…which implies that Jesus was likely a pluralist. Yet, his own disciples would not lose him in
all the pluralism, among the rooms, because there would be no way to come to
the Father and not find Jesus there, too.
If Jesus was a true exclusivist,
thinking that his religious way was the only way, why would he have used the
example of a religious outsider to his own tradition, a hated Samaritan, to
describe a true neighbor when Jesus had agreed with a challenging lawyer that
loving God and loving one’s neighbor were the way to eternal life? Why would Jesus have invited tax collectors
and Roman soldiers, various sinners and other marginal types to eat at his
table?
Over and over, when it comes
to people of other religious traditions, Jesus moves us from a theoretical to a
practical level. Whoever and whatever else
he was, Jesus was a person who dealt openly and concretely with people of other
traditions: like the Canaanite woman who spoke of eating the crumbs under the
master’s table, the Roman Centurion whose servant he healed, and the Samaritan
woman with whom he shares water at the well.
By Jesus own example, we are encouraged, I believe, to treat people of
other religious traditions in concrete, personal ways. Whenever possible, we must sit by their fires
and listen to their stories…and when asked, be willing to share our own.
So we find ourselves back
where we started, sitting around campfires telling stories.
To share our story, we must
know our story. And for that, I am
grateful to years and years of committed biblical scholarship to find and
reclaim the historical Jesus…this Jesus who teaches us to expect to find God
already present in the other, regardless of how alien and different their
religious beliefs and practices may be…this Jesus who teaches that “in my
Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told
you”…this Jesus who I believe can show us the way, who can teach us the truth
and who can bring us to the fullness of life.
Amen