Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Last week, I read about the actions of the conservative majority of the Texas State Board of Education in Austin, Texas, where they are deciding upon the text books to be used in Texas schools for the next ten years. Some of the things they are doing include replacing the word, “capitalism” with the words, “free enterprise system.” They also removed the word “democratic” anytime it refers to our form of government, replacing it instead with “constitutional republic.”

We might overlook these actions as “Texas politics,” but what relates it to my sermon today is that the Board has also proposed to remove the name of Thomas Jefferson from a list of influential historic persons whose ideas have greatly influenced the Founders of our nation. Jefferson, as you know, wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence! It was his personal library which was the initial core for the Library of Congress.

Jefferson was also responsible for the unpardonable sin of creating the phrase, “separation of church and state,” to explain the meaning of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That meant he had to be removed from their approved list; because, the Texas School Board wants to emphasize the exact opposite of the intent of that phrase. They want to promote the notion, that the Founders of this nation were Judeo-Christian and that they meant for church and state to work together.

And I’m sure they were not pleased by Jefferson’s also confessing to being a “Unitarian.” He explained his actual lack of membership since there was no Unitarian church in the area: “The population of my neighborhood is too slender, and is too much divided into other sects to maintain any one preacher well. I must therefore be contented with being a Unitarian by myself.”

So what if we asked Unitarian Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers and third president of these United States, who was so ignominiously removed from textbooks in Texas, his response to the question:

“To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing to him every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.”

Jefferson then took a razor, and cut and arranged selected verses from the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He put the verses in some semblance of chronological order, then added and subtracted excerpts from one Gospel to the other so as to come up with a single best narrative. He entitled it: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, or what we know as The Jefferson Bible.
And in the Jefferson Bible, Jesus’s birth is reported, but without angels, genealogy, or prophecy. There is no mention of miracles, the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, or his resurrection. The work ends with the words: “Now, in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulcher…There laid they Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed…” which is basically taken from the ending of The Gospel of John, chapter 19.

Like Jefferson, Terry Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic and political commentator, has a huge respect for the revolutionary claims of Christianity’s Jesus. He writes, “Christian faith is for the most part performative, rather than propositional.” In other words, Jesus was about radical performance, not in proposing statements/creeds in which to believe. Eagleton goes on to describe Jesus as he sees him from a Marxist viewpoint, but also an appreciative one:

Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented <in the Gospels> as jobless, propertyless, celibate, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and the scourge of the rich and powerful.

The morality he preaches is reckless, extravagant, over the top, a scandal to actuaries, and a stumbling block to real estate agents; forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, and take no thought for tomorrow.

that Jesus would detest today’s churches, the Stars and Stripes, nationhood, sex, success, and ideologies.

We might say in response, “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, what did you like about the play?”

So how do we respond to the question of “Who is Jesus to us?” When we attempt to answer the question, our search is easier, yet harder, thanks to modern historical criticism. It discloses that:

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Albert Schweitzer’s groundbreaking work on The Quest for the Historical Jesus turned up very little that could be counted as dependable history. One of the reasons for that of course was that the first of the four gospels was not written until forty years after the death of Jesus, and it was a compilation of stories that people had told about him, which they had passed from person to person. In other words, none of the writers or redactors of the Gospels was an actual observer of the events recorded in the gospels.

That’s called “writing with an agenda.” It’s what the Texas School Board is doing. When you have an agenda, you add and subtract that which will make your case, and don’t let the facts get in the way. The writers of the Gospels each had a unique agenda: to evangelize the world, not to write an accurate historical record.

That meant they had a supernatural world view, where demons caused sickness, a handful of fishes could be multiplied to feed 5,000, a virgin could conceive and birth a child, angels were pervasive, the dead could be raised even after their bodies had begun to decompose and stink, and miracles of the healing of the sick, the deaf, the blind, the crippled, the leper could all occur. Further, the Earth did not move and was the Center of the Universe; they knew nothing about galaxies and other planetary systems. Heaven was up above us; and Hell was down below us. Believing all of that meant that when you wrote about Jesus, you did so without any critical analysis or thinking. Questions about facts, or facticity as Heidegger called it, were off the table.

As a result, the only “facts” about Jesus we can attest to with high probability and with critical reasoning support and research are these four things: one, there was an actual Jesus; two, he was baptized by John the Baptist; three, he preached a revolutionary spirituality that put him at cross purposes with the Jewish leaders of Occupied Judea; and four, he died because of what he said and did. Anything more than that, has diminishing degrees of probability, down to some things that for certain did not happen.

So who is Jesus to us? There are three things which seem to me important to say about Jesus that transcend historicity, mythology, and the institutionalizing of Jesus by churches. They are a basic part of what Jesus can be for a Unitarian:

As I mentioned last Sunday regarding the Health Care debate and reform proposals that were before the Congress and now have passed, it may well be that for most Americans, their health insurance was more than acceptable. The tragedy, however, was that 32 million Americans had none, which is an unacceptable travesty for the wealthiest nation in the world. As has been said over and over again, health care in the industrialized world is not a privilege; it’s a right. Passage of healthcare reform means now that hospitals like our own in Lee County, will have their paying patient base broadened beyond the 35% of paying patients, to as many as 95%. As we’ve heard from Jim Nathan many times, the current system is broken; something had to be done, specifically about coverage and hospital access for the poor and the uninsured. According to Jesus, a great nation is not determined by its military might, but how it treats its weakest citizens.

In Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite walking by the wounded man in the ditch did no active harm to him. They just passed by on the opposite side of the road, distancing themselves from what had to be an uncomfortable sight, and which may have entailed a certain degree of risk. Relentlessly, Jesus keeps bringing the oppressed back into our field of vision. The indictment he makes of us all when we read his story is indifference. As Elie Wiesel has written in response to the Holocaust, “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.”

On Feb. 18^th, 2001, many of us here met at Gulf Harbour Golf and Country Club for a meeting to determine whether there was interest enough to start a second Unitarian congregation in Ft. Myers. There was. And today we meet for the first time in our own facility because of you and your perseverance.

Last night, I was scanning some old material looking for a particular quote I had used before, and I came upon the presentation I made at that meeting nine plus years ago. I closed with this story of Flannery O’Connor’s that was a JFK favorite, which I’ve told several times. But I think it is especially appropriate on this occasion to retell. O’Connor tells of a time in Ireland when children would be coming home from school. Sometimes they would take a shortcut through one of the pastures or fields. When they did, inevitably they would confront one of those ancient stone or rock fences. The fences were simply too large for children their size to climb over. So what were they to do?

They took their hats and caps off and threw them over the wall. That left them no option but to find a way to get over. And the way they found they could get over was not simply by trying harder, but by working together, standing on each other’s shoulders, and extending a hand to one another. Alone, the fence was too big, but together they could scale it.

Nine years ago, I closed with this sentence: “I invite you to throw your hat over the wall by joining in to build this new liberal religious congregation in our community.”

I’m sure there are significant challenges ahead, but we’ve made it thus far. And as Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi said and made famous, “The future is now.”

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the privilege of being your minister. Thank you for being willing to take this step together. Again, we’ve thrown our caps over the wall. I can’t wait to see what the future has in store.

[1] Presented March 28, 2010 at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, located at 2756 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, meeting for the FIRST time in our own facility, with the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.