Freely Following Jesus
Wildflower Church
Austin TX Jan. 22, 2012
The reading from Mark
1:14-20…a part of the weekly lectionary, a way churches of different traditions
all read and comment on the same biblical passages each week; the UU Christian
Fellowship was one of the founding organizations who set up the current revised
common lectionary; www.commontexts.org.
Now after John was
arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God,15and
saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent,
and believe in the good news.”16As Jesus passed along the Sea of
Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for
they were fishermen.17And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will
make you fish for people.”18And immediately they left their nets and
followed him.19As he went a little farther, he saw James son of
Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets.20Immediately
he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired
men, and followed him.”
Contemporary reading
from “Christian Voices within Unitarian Universalism”
Sermon
Let’s begin with a
round of a few different voices from Unitarian Universalists, lay and clergy,
who are in the UU Christian Fellowship. I hope it telescopes right away just a
bit of the wide bandwidth of what it means to freely follow Jesus among our
faith community’s tradition, but let me say upfront that even these selected voices
present too limited a picture, as you will see. Still, they reveal encounters
of the heart and the hands as well as from the mind.
From Dave Dawson: --“I
share a desire for the freedom to test the outer limits of my Christian faith.
Within my church I am not told I am wrong, just looked at quizzically when I
say I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ…I remain a UU Christian as
a witness to those in mainline Christianity that, yes, universal salvation is
alive and well, and it is a beautiful option for those people mired in
shame-based churches.
From Anita Farber-Robertson: --“It was not,
however, going to be enough to want Jesus in my life. I was going to have to
claim him, and let him claim me. I was going to have to say, “Yes, this is my
path. You are my guide, my teacher, and my savior, for without you my soul
would get brittle, my mouth grow bitter, my heart hard.”
From Terry Burke: --“My baptism remains
central to my religious self-understanding. As part of the confession of faith
that Carl Scovel had me write, I said, “I believe that God seeks a loving,
dialogical relationship with humanity, and that the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ calls us to reflect that sacrificial love in our
lives. The cross and the faithful community proclaim that it is more important
to love than to survive and that love is stronger than death.”
From Robert Fabre:
--“So Unitarian Universalism was, for me, the pathway back to Christianity. No
doubt I wouldn’t be where I am today, wouldn’t be the person I am today,
without it. Ironically, the longer I’ve been associated with this liberal
religious community, the more conservative I’ve become on a personal level. So
now I can say, I believe that Jesus was the son of God (not God but the son of
God); I believe in the resurrection (not the resuscitation of a dead body but
the resurrection); and I believe that I am saved by grace (not because I accept
Jesus as my personal savior but because, despite my confusion and my unbelief,
despite my shortcomings and mistakes, in a mysterious way, beyond my
comprehension and explanation, God accepts me).
From Victoria Weinstein: --“Who is Jesus
Christ to me? He is both a teacher of the Way, and the Way itself. For one who
has always had a hard time grasping the concept of God, let alone developing a
working definition of God, Jesus both points me toward a definition of God and
then lives that definition. Jesus Christ is the freedom that laughs
uproariously at the things of this world, while loving me dearly for being
human enough to lust after them. He is my soul’s safety from all harm. He is
the avatar of aloneness, a compassionate and unsentimental narrator of the
soul’s exile on earth, and proof of the soul’s triumphant homecoming at the end
of the incarnational struggle. He is not afraid to put his hands anywhere to
affect healing. He mourns, and weeps, and scolds, and invites. He is life more
abundant and conqueror of the existential condition of fear.”
And From the late Marjorie
Bowens-Wheatley: Today, Jesus remains a central figure of my religious
identity. And yet I don’t often call myself a Christian because there is no
agreement on what the term Christian means, either within Unitarian
Universalism or without…There are conservative and liberal understandings of
the Jesus story and Christian witness, and none of these has any exclusive
claim on Jesus or those who seek to follow him. In my Christian witness, no
one’s soul (or spiritual salvation) is dependent on a particular ritual,
obligation, or statement of belief. There is no giant cop up in the sky
dictating who will go up and who will go down. And yet I have been moved to
tears by liturgical expressions of the story of Jesus and his work as a
mystical teacher. It’s most accurate to say that I am a nominal Christian who
has also found truth and wisdom in pre-Christian and mystical religions, earth-centered
spiritualities, religious humanism, womanism, and other theologies of
liberation. I have embraced the spiritual practice of Thai Chi and the wisdom
of Buddhist philosophy. I am a Unitarian Universalist because I do not exclude
any particular theology. As the spiritual says, there is “plenty of good room”
at the banquet table.
I would also include the
voices of the non-Christian UUs who are a part of the UU Christian Fellowship
but who love to learn with us and even worship with us. These include atheists
and agnostics and many others who do not claim to freely follow Jesus, but who
find their own spiritual lives deepened by being around those who do; and I
would include the progressive Christians who are not UUs who are a part of us
too, who like what we bring to the Christian table and are sometimes amazed to
find that what they think have been new discoveries in biblical and theological
studies have actually existed for centuries, among us.
The religious landscape
in America has changed vastly since 1945 when the UUCF began. In UUism, in
Christianity, and in UU Christianity. These UU Christian voices now are more
diverse than you would have found when the UUCF began. Surprise, surprise, they
are still changing. For a faith that roots itself in the theological belief
that revelation is not sealed and cannot be sealed, we do seem to still resist
change. I once had a church member in another congregation say “When I joined
this church I guess I thought it had always been the way it was when I joined,
and would always stay that way.” On the other hand, when we talk about ongoing
revelation as a core value of our tradition, it doesn’t mean continually
throwing the baby out with the bathwater in every successive generation, as if
that is the mark of a progressive faith. Sometimes, often, ongoing revelation means
returning to our touchstones and knowing them more fully because of where we
have been, and being touched and supported by them even more deeply and
strongly because of it.
There are four words
that I think sum up the relationship between Christianity and Unitarian
Universalism—in terms of our history and still at work now. They are:
Commonplace. Contradiction. Conundrum. And Convergence. (I have borrowed the
first three words and ideas from the Rev. Earl Holt. I updated to add the fourth, convergence.)
Once upon a time, to
speak of Christian voices in our movement would have been a commonplace thing,
as redundant as saying Methodist or Baptist Christian. It hasn’t been all that
long ago, relative to our history. In a 1936 national survey of Unitarians
only, some 92 percent of the respondents said they considered their local
church to be a Christian church. Now, of course, there were many in the
so-called Christian church then who would have argued against that. As there
are today. But, I don’t think it is spiritually healthy to let others define
you, and what is interesting is how the Unitarians saw themselves. For the
Universalists, by and large, they didn’t consider it then an issue to be
surveyed about, so integral was Christianity to their identity even though
there were movements within Universalism already working to change that.
But if we want to
really grasp the notion of how commonplace Christian is in our roots, we should
look at the statement of belief approved in 1853 by the American Unitarian
Association.
And that was from the
heretical Unitarian Liberal Christians of their time, and after Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Theodore Parker had preached their famous sermons and
Transcendentalism was rising. You might say it was approved because of those
sermons and the theological changes underway.
A couple of points to
know, though: one, there may be some among us, maybe the Trinitarian
Universalists, like myself, whom have always been a part of who we are, who resonate with
that language and those theological expressions today still; it is good to remember we never voted not to believe that statement, or another, but we only voted here and there new expressions for new times, not as official replacements that negated what came before; and second, Christians
helped to create a faith community that, even if unconsciously in some ways,
was open to others different from them; in large measure because of the kind of
Christians they were, they helped form an association where they could, and
would be, in the minority. It is not a
bad cultural place for a follower of Jesus to be.
On the Universalist
side, in the mid 1930s, they affirmed the following statement: “The bond of
fellowship in this Convention shall be a common purpose to do the will of God
as Jesus revealed it and to co-operate in establishing the kingdom for which he
lived and died. To that end, we avow our faith in God as Eternal and
All-conquering Love, in the spiritual leadership of Jesus, in the supreme worth
of every human personality, in the authority of truth known or to be known, and
in the power of men of goodwill and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and
progressively establish the Kingdom of God.”
But by 1945, coming out
of the end of the second world war and wanting to cast a vision of a new kind
of faith for a new kind of world, the Unitarians began to create common
language of purpose that did not specifically lift up God, much less anymore
Christ. In reaction to that and to preserve and promote their faith within and
without their own ranks, the Unitarian Christians, including the first
president of the later created UUA, created a national fellowship. From 1945 to
2004, the fellowship was in Massachusetts, once having its own building in
downtown Boston. A year after hiring me,
we moved the UUCF from The First Church of Christ, Unitarian, in Lancaster,
Mass, to our church in Turley.
After 1945 in many places, especially in new lay led
fellowships, Unitarian Universalism became the opposite of Christianity, and it
was considered a contradiction to be a UU Christian. Over time as Christianity
liberalized in many of its denominations, and as more and more UUs began to see
how they were a more than tradition, rather than an anti this or that
tradition, people began to see UU Christians as conundrums, puzzles. That meant
we got a lot of questions like “If you are a Christian and a UU, do you believe
in the Trinity, in the divinity of Jesus, in Hell and Heaven, etc etc? And
especially the question, wouldn’t you be more comfortable in a Christian
denomination like x, y, or z?”
Quick answers to those
conundrum questions: Christians have
always believed many things about the nature of God and Jesus and the
afterlife; UU Christians do as well. The interesting new development in UU
Christianity is that a great number of our members have been non-Christian UUs
first, and that it has been through Unitarian Universalism that they have
become Christians or Jesus followers for either the first time ever, or as
adults, so the thought of leaving for another church doesn’t appeal.
What we have morphed
into then is a UU Christianity where some places it is still commonplace to
think of UU and Christian in the same way, and where some places it is seen as
a contradiction, and where it is to many a conundrum, in large measure because
we now have the Convergent UU Christians. These fall into two categories. One
kind are those who converge different ways of primarily following Jesus or
practicing their Christian faith. We have classic UU Christians who see Jesus
as a teacher, who seek to follow his lessons. We have small c catholic UU
Christians who experience Jesus in the traditions and rituals of the church
over the centuries. And we have liberationist UU Christians who know Jesus in
the actions of healing and liberating and being with the oppressed and
marginalized and suffering. (You can read more about these types in the
pamphlet Who Are The UU Christians by the Rev. Tom Wintle on our website). More
and more UU Christians are converging these different ways of expressing their
faith. But we also now have UU Christians who are converging their Christian
faith with say Buddhism, or neo-paganism, humanism, Jewish roots, mysticism,
and also among us are those who converge the UU part of their faith with their
regular attendance and membership in a Christian community. And, to top it all
off, we do have UU Christian churches who are also affiliated with other
denominations the same as they are with the UUA. The spirit of convergence is
alive and well. And, as we often say, we don’t think Jesus, or the radical
inclusivist Paul and other early Jewish followers of Jesus, would have it any
other way. In fact UU Christianity is
like a living embodied parable told by Jesus.
Which brings me to the
final part of this sermon, tying a first century life together with our 21st
centuries lives: what is it about Jesus that keeps causing otherwise sane
people to do crazy things in their life, still, whether it be leaving their
livelihoods and putting down their fishing nets, their careers, and following someone who asks nothing of them
other then everything, who doesn’t say come follow me only if you are good, and
believe this or that, but who says come and together, in freedom, we will do
something unheard of, be fishers of people, especially the drowning and the
lost and the left behind, rebuilders of abandoned places and people, come and
we will live in a way and in a place that will be both draining and fulfilling
at the same time, where you will be asked not to hide from the crosses the
Roman Empire has erected to scare you into submission to its unjust ways but
you will be asked to pick up that cross and transform it from fear to love, to
risk your very life, in order to show the world that another way of life is
possible, in fact can be glimpsed here, now, in what we are doing, and someday
will be here for all?
Jesus’ parables
reveal perhaps the clearest picture we have of who he was and why he was so
revolutionary that he was killed; they show the kind of Jesus we are trying to
make visible in the world through our missional community back in Oklahoma in
an area of great suffering and abandonment where we are guided by the 3Rs of
relocation, redistribution, and reconciliation. So, as I began with the words of some of his
followers, to close let me end with Jesus’ words.
A favorite parable is when Jesus said, my translation, the
kingdom of God is like a woman who stole leaven and put it into three measures
of flour, until it was all corrupted. End of parable. But those few words are about
the radical fact of God changing sides, as my seminary professor Brandon Scott
puts it. Of God’s Relocation, redistribution, reconciliation. Follow Jesus and
experience God changing sides.
Jesus’ phrase “kingdom of God”, was itself a kind of internal
parable, for the kingdom, the world, the Empire as everyone knew, was Caeser’s.
The evidence was everywhere; if you needed reminders just look at your coins or
your crosses lining the roads. Caeser was Lord and Savior and was called that
and the Son of God, and what was divine, then and now, was power and honor and
property and propriety and security, being cool, popular, successful,
accomplished, affluent, and with an appealing appearance. Jesus immediately
challenges those assumptions by claiming kingdom is not Caeser’s but that of
the God who is in relationship with the poor and the conquered. Today instead of the Kingdom of God, we in the
U.S. might say the Consumer Marketplace Entertainment Empire, or just the
Empire of Me or Our Kind
In this world changing parable you see Jesus goes on to link God with leaven, something very ordinary, but also something considered unholy, not like the purity of the unleavened bread, rather something moldy that was to be kept separate and apart while preparing your meal. God, Jesus is saying, is in what others seek to shame and silence. And the main player in this God story is a woman, and as if that isn’t bad enough in the eyes of the world, she is a woman who sneaks or steals this leaven, and then foolishly puts it into enough flour to feed a feast, and what happens? It all goes bad, all becomes, in the eyes of the world, useless, to be abandoned. And that’s where the parable ends. And where it really begins to take off.
The God of this parable, as Jesus’ ministry and life also revealed, has relocated…from holiness to unholiness, from power and privilege and public status and acts to what happens in the home, out of sight is no longer out of mind, at least in God’s mind and sight; the everlasting has relocated from fullness and contentment to times and places and people of emptiness and what others see as waste; also God here even changes from being A Static Being to becoming a process, to a movement that changes and corrupts from within the dominant culture’s status quo and beliefs in what is worthy and respectable.
In this world changing parable you see Jesus goes on to link God with leaven, something very ordinary, but also something considered unholy, not like the purity of the unleavened bread, rather something moldy that was to be kept separate and apart while preparing your meal. God, Jesus is saying, is in what others seek to shame and silence. And the main player in this God story is a woman, and as if that isn’t bad enough in the eyes of the world, she is a woman who sneaks or steals this leaven, and then foolishly puts it into enough flour to feed a feast, and what happens? It all goes bad, all becomes, in the eyes of the world, useless, to be abandoned. And that’s where the parable ends. And where it really begins to take off.
The God of this parable, as Jesus’ ministry and life also revealed, has relocated…from holiness to unholiness, from power and privilege and public status and acts to what happens in the home, out of sight is no longer out of mind, at least in God’s mind and sight; the everlasting has relocated from fullness and contentment to times and places and people of emptiness and what others see as waste; also God here even changes from being A Static Being to becoming a process, to a movement that changes and corrupts from within the dominant culture’s status quo and beliefs in what is worthy and respectable.
As Jesus challenged the authorities of his time, so this
parable challenges us today, to also pick sides, to relocate, to go experience
God, and help make God visible, where the powerful and the privileged won’t go,
making visible what they seek to keep hidden in hopes of keeping the status quo
intact.
Jesus expresses the life and depth of a real freedom, a
freedom known as empowering both persons and the communities that nurture those
very persons, a freedom whose other name is responsibility, a freedom that is
the opposite of license to do what one wills, a freedom that has been the
hallmark of the free church tradition of Unitarian Universalism from its
origins in radical congregationalism that found a home on this continent. A
kind of freedom that in this world today needs to be shouted from the
mountaintops and lived in the abandoned places, especially when so many little
Emperors seek to misuse the word freedom, just as they misuse Jesus as well.
In freely following Jesus today, we can, we hope, continue,
just as the parables did and call us to, to turn our lives and the world upside
down, and inside out, and during it all marvel, in amazing grace, at what
happens next.
