LENT 5 — Everything You Wanted to Know About Christianity But Were Afraid to Ask?
March 28, 2004 Rev. Dr. C. DiNovo
Scriptures: Philippians 3:4b-14, John 12:1-8
The first question. Why did Jesus say, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" on the cross if he knew he was the messiah? This points to something, I haven’t even opened the other questions yet, but I’m sure there will be others around the same topic and the topic is: what was he really? Christian orthodoxy and even Christian liberality say the same thing about Jesus — that in him there was both human and divine co-mingled. He was really human and he was really somehow other than human. He was really somehow the very face of God to us. And that’s a mystery, right? No church and no theologian will ever give you the ultimate answer to that mystery. But there was something about the man. Various heresies throughout the ages, have put more emphasis on one than the other either that he was all God, (Gnosticism) he wasn’t really human at all, he didn’t really die or there is that which would be closer to reformed Judaism, I guess in the Christian world, that he was really just human. He was another in a series of prophets. We say, though, all of us that he was truly human and can you imagine any true human saying anything less than this, when tortured, when at the nth degree of their strength, when about to die? Can you imagine anyone that is human, not calling out such a question. Where are you, God? Where are you now, when I need you most? It’s a question we all call out at some point. And Jesus being human called it out as well.
Here’s another one. This was actually back from October and I haven’t got around to answering it. In the New Testament, Jesus said, "The meek shall inherit the earth." But in today’s society the weak seem to get crushed or lost in the shuffle. I’d like your interpretation of what Jesus said and how we can relate it to today. Is there really a place for the meek in today’s world? This points to the incredible culture and revolutionary character of Christianity. You may not think of yourselves as revolutionaries, but you are and this is why. Because what you say and what we say every Sunday is in direct contradiction to what our world says, particularly the world of North America and of latter day capitalism. What this world says is that you are what you do, you are what you achieve and the more you achieve and the more successful you are, the better you must be. Even those prophets of perfection that I talked about a couple of weeks ago, the Oprah Winfreys and the Dr. Phils say it’s all about pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, you can do it, you can get there, you can lose the weight, you can make something of your life. The problem is, sometimes people don’t. Sometimes we fail and sometimes we don’t win the race. And most times we don’t lose the weight. And sometimes we’re not successes and that’s the majority of the people always and it’s to those people that Jesus spoke and it’s to those people that Jesus came and we are, if we are honest with ourselves, those people. Jesus came for the humble, another translation of the word meek. He came for the meek. He came for the losers. He didn’t come for the winners. He came to be with them and for them. So, no, the world usually doesn’t have much place for the meek, but do we? Absolutely. This is the church of the meek and by church, I’m not just talking about this church, but I’m talking about the whole of the Christian church. Dorothy Day, who was a Catholic theologian and started a Catholic workers movement, said that when see the face of need in another person, you are not just seeing someone who has a face like Christ, you are seeing someone who is, indeed, Christ. That the face of need in front of you is, indeed, the risen one. So when you see the next face of need in front of you, remember those words, that in front of you is Christ. No less. No more.
Why is God always referred to as male? Not around here she’s not. God, of course, is not male or female either. God is, I like to say, transgender. God is neither or, and both and. God is all of that and more. God, first of all, is beyond our imagination and beyond anything we could posit or draw pictures of. Of all our pictures and all our analogies, they all fall short. Whatever comforts us is probably what works best in the moment. But God is certainly not male. Jesus call God "Abba", Daddy. He had a parental relationship with Daddy and it was like saying Daddy. It wasn’t Father, it was Daddy. Abba, he called him and to him he was his Daddy. To us, God appears in various guises, as I’ve just said. Christ is risen. The divine one is alive and walks among us. And nowhere does Jesus say that that face is always male. It is, of course, not. Christ appears to us both as female and male, always and ever, both of those. And in a sense, the trinity is our way of describing a God that cannot be described because the closest we can come as Christians is three descriptions — the source of all love, love incarnate, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, love’s power. Those three things. God is love. The scripture says that over and over again but we never really hear it. We hear God is male, God is this, God is that. No, God is love. Just like the face in front of you of need is Christ. That is what they are.
How do we know the Bible was written correctly? Well, it depends what you mean by correctly. It wasn’t. The Bible is a collection of stories told by humans. Christians never claim that the Bible was dictated by God. This is a collection of writings about the experience of God written by humans and it’s written over thousands of years. It is the collective wisdom of our tribal elders. That’s what it is and that’s why it is so holy. That’s why we revere it, because herein lies all of our history. Herein lies everything that could happen to you and everything that could happen to me. It’s happened at least once before to someone. And it’s all about people’s experience of God in their lives. Now, some of it’s pretty crazy. Some of it’s mythic. Some of it’s just plain history. And some of it is the most inspired word, the most beautiful words ever written. It’s all in there. It’s all in there and it was never meant to be taken literally. That is to say, it was never all meant to be taken as if the events actually happened. The story of Noah, the story of Jonah, these were stories always understood as stories told around campfires. They were told not because of their literal factual reality but because of their truth. The Bible is a book of truth and that’s different from fact. Do we all get that? Truth is different from fact. Truth is what really was happening. Fact is what happened. And the stories of Jonah and Noah are the stories of people and the trials and the tribulations they faced and how they got out of them, and some were meant to be funny and some were meant to be sad. They’re all stories about this experience of God. And they contradict each other, especially in the New Testament. So I always ask people who say that the Bible should be taken as literal fact. It’s really a question of really reading the Bible. I wish the people who say that the Bible is literal fact, would actually read it, because if they actually read it, they would discover that there are all sorts of contradictions and at the end of the day, you got to pick one or you got to pick the other if is literal fact and nobody, no fundamentalist, would want you to do that.
When you stop and think about it, weren’t we all raised to be anti-Semitic? Great question, especially after this week of anti-Semitic occurrences. We have to remember that the gospels were written by Jews. People forget that. The Gospel of John, written by a Jew. The Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke — all written by Jews. All the epistles written by Jews. Paul, you heard about it today from Philippians, a traditional observant Jew. And when you read statements that sound like they’re anti-Semitic and some of them have been used that way, throughout the bloody history of the Christian Church and it’s to our shame that they have been used that way, you are reading about an in fight. You are reading about a fight between Jews and Jewish factions about what the truth really was. That’s what you’re reading about. It’s like me going home, and I often do, and say, "Save me from Christians." Hard weeks some days. It’s like that. Of course I’m a Christian. Of course we live and breathe and have our being in the Christian church. We are proud of our Christianity. But these were little glimpses into the discussions that were happening between factions of Jews in their day. Has the church twisted this — the church general? Absolutely, yes. Have we been guilty of anti-Semitism in the Christian church? Absolutely, yes. And the latest and most glaring example is that of the movie by Mel Gibson which is really not gospel fact. The gospel does not spend two hours on the death of Jesus, it spends a very small time — the gospels all on the death of Jesus. They spend a great deal of time on his healings and his teaching. The work of Jesus is what they spend their time on. And it wasn’t the Jews that killed Jesus. Absolutely not. That’s not in the Bible. You won’t find it in the Bible. It’s not there. The Romans killed Jesus. It’s historical fact. And when you hear the rantings of John, you’re dealing with a time when the Christian sect, the small Christian Jewish sect, called Messianist, by the way, Christianity as a word did not exist back then. The Messianist Jews were being expelled from the synagogues. They were being expelled from the synagogues and hunted down and killed by the Romans. And so, of course, there was this feeling of being beleaguered, this feeling of being hunted, this feeling of being attacked, because they were and they were hitting back at those that attacked them. But, again, they never considered themselves other than Jewish. They just considered themselves the true Jews.
Once again, the question that never gets answered, what did Luther have against James? Martin Luther called James the epistle of straw and this is true of all theologians and all Christians everywhere, by the way. If you go to seminary and you get taught about the Bible, you will be taught by someone who likes this gospel better than that gospel, who likes this passage better than that passage. There are people who think, "I hate that part of the Bible. It doesn’t speak to me at all." This part of the Bible, this really speaks to me and everyone reads the Bible that way. Everyone has always read the Bible that way, even the writers of the Bible read the Bible that way. So the work of theology is to figure out what you like and what you don’t and why you do and why you don’t. That is really the work of theology where biblical studies come into play. And Martin Luther didn’t like James because James is all about what we work at to get to heaven. What we do. It’s called in protestant circles ‘works righteousness’ because very clearly in the gospels according to Jesus, it’s not what you do, it’s what God does. It has nothing to do with what you do whether we get to heaven or whether we are in heaven or not. It has to do with God working through you and through the world. Last week we talked about the prodigal son. It’s always misread. While the prodigal is still a far way off, the father runs out and throws his arms around him. The son hasn’t done anything. He could have come to murder the father. He could have come to borrow money. He hasn’t said sorry in any way, shape or form. The father runs at him, throws his arms around him. This is the love of God for us. It is the work of God through Christ for us that saves us, not what we do and in James there’s this emphasis on what we do. Okay, this was his gripe with the Catholic Church. That the Roman Catholic Church was all about what we do or don’t do and how we should do something else in order to get to heaven. It has nothing to do with that. Nothing to do with that! Jesus’ word was always that God saves you. The adulterous women, she didn’t change her ways, he just saved her anyway. He just saved her anyway. The saving, the grace, comes first. The repentance comes after the grace. Paul who was Saul and hunted down Christians was knocked off his horse by a bolt of lightning from God. Repentance came after he was saved not before. For those of us who stand here, all of us, and those of us who sit here, all of you have had an experience of incredible grace or you wouldn’t be wasting your Sunday morning. That’s why you’re here. The grace, the goodness, the love and then the way you live your life is a thank you for it. We didn’t earn it. How can we earn it? What can we do that would be so good? What can we do that could be so bad that we wouldn’t deserve it? It would be like saying Jesus has died for nothing. If there was something we could do that was so bad that Jesus’ death wouldn’t mean anything to us, means his death is worthless.
Is there a God and why do we have to suffer? Is there is a God at the lowest time of our lives? I think that for most stories of conversion and conversion is like conversation, right? You hear the other side of the conversation in conversion. For those people who start to listen and stop talking for a minute and hear God speaking to them, conversion, you usually hear that voice at the worst times of their lives. It’s usually at the worst time of their lives that they hear God’s voice. Not at the happy times. If you are joyful, what do you need God for? You got it all yourself. Everything is going ducky. It’s when things are going bad, when you suffer, that’s when you are aware of God. And God is not this blob out there. God is actually the face and the very person of Christ in your life. Yet when things get worse, that someone or something happens that makes them a little bit more bearable. When things are worse, that’s when you see your neighbour coming towards you, when you see the hand outstretched to you, that’s when you get the call. That’s when you actually see God working in the world to make things a little better and it’s very, very real. And then you start to get it, that prayers are always answered in some way, in some form. Prayers are always answered. They used to say there were no atheists in the trenches. There was a huge, huge outpouring of people after 9/11 into churches. And there was a huge, huge outpouring of people after the Second World War. All those troops that came back, came back to church. Why? Because at the worst point in their life, they had some experience of that holy moment.
When Jesus goes to heaven, how come he be white? Great question. Yeah, we have all those artists to thank. I always blame it on the Italians. I can do that because I’m part Italian. But it’s all those pictures that you see, God’s white and he’s got a beard. Nothing of that in the Bible, but it’s the renditions. It’s the pictures of the blue-eyed, blonde haired Jesus that have been plaguing us for centuries in church. And of course, Jesus wasn’t blonde-haired and blue-eyed. He was a Semite. We all get that. He looked Jewish. He was dark haired. He might have been dark skinned. He might have been black. We don’t know. There were a lot of Ethiopians in the early church. They were black. The earliest church was a black church. So Jesus was certainly far from white and far from blue eyed, but this is an image that persists. Why? Because of imperialism, because of colonialism, because of the way Christianity has been used by empire to go and beat up on people, that’s why. It’s simply racism and although you’ll see some white Jesuses around here, I do have some Semitic Jesuses in my office and I do actually have a black Jesus in my office. So, if you ever want to see other images of Jesus, look there. But even more than the pictures of Jesus, we get that he’s alive and that he might not even be ‘he’ anymore. Like I said, Jesus is real. Jesus will meet you in church, out of church, somewhere you will meet the face of Christ, you will shake Christ’s hand. Christ could be anyone. Be ready. That’s what he said, you know. Be ready to meet your Lord at any moment and it’s true, it’s real, at any moment.
One more. How much of the Bible is open to interpretation? I mean, sure the key ideas are pretty easy — be nice to others and all that jazz, but a lot of the lessons and parables of the holy book aren’t acceptable by today’s society, for example might be homosexuality or sexual practice. When do we stop listening to the Bible? Well, actually, I don’t think we should ever stop listening to the Bible and the Bible is always about interpretation. The Bible is always meant to interpreted in an interpretive community. In terms of homosexuality, we support same sex marriage in this congregation and always have in the United Church of Canada and not just in this congregation but across the country, the largest protestant denomination. Why? Because we claim it’s the most Christian way to be. It is the most biblically faithful way to be. Why? We could go through the same old arguments but I’ll tell you a couple of key passages. First of all, Jesus’ reform of the marriage laws of his day. He reformed the marriage laws of his day in favour of the rights of women. He did that in Matthew 19. We know he was a marriage reformer. We know that. We know that was the gist of his ministry. Did he ever say anything about homosexuality? Not one word! Not one word! When you think about when the Bible was written, an incredibly patriarchal time, it is astoundingly progressive, it is astoundingly feminist and open to women. Women were the earliest apostles and disciples of Jesus. Everything he said and did was counter-cultural. We know that. We’ve been through those pieces of scripture that are on the surface anti-homosexual and I can show you why. It would take another hour. What I direct anybody who has questions about that, is to the Metropolitan Community Church website. They have a whole description of all the biblical scholarship on that issue. And there is nothing anti-homosexual about the Bible. Nothing! And I will debate any fundamentalist anywhere, anytime. Put the gloves on, we’ll go to it. There is nothing. First of all, the word doesn’t even exist. Didn’t even exist. The word was invented in the nineteenth century. Homosexuality did not exist in biblical times. Every second male was having affairs with other males. It was the Grecian way. That wasn’t called homosexuality. That was just called being a mentor. That was called being a mentor in Greece. There was no such word, no such concept as somebody you could label that way. That didn’t exist. Anyway, enough. Suffice to say that for all issues of civil rights, justice and morality that what you got to listen to, and what you got to read all scripture through are the words of Christ and the actions of Christ and then you’ve got to ask yourself the most important question of all for a Christian — What would Jesus do? And also, what is Christ doing? Those two questions. What is Christ doing in our world? Where would Christ be right now? And where is Christ right now? Would Christ be supporting the war in Iraq or would Christ be calling for peace? Would Christ be burning crosses outside churches that are open to gays and lesbians or would Christ be standing with those who the prejudice is directed against? And you’ve got to ask yourself those questions about every issue of justice and morality. Always and ever, that’s the question.
Let’s pray.
Dearest God,
It is such a privilege to grapple with your holy word. It is such a wonder and a joy just to look again at your actions and your sayings. It is holy, dearest God, to hear the questions of people concerned and people searching because every seeker is on a holy path and every seeker has you walking with them. So we ask that better than me, better than any of us, better than any of us could ever do, that you answer questions, that you answer them with your presence and with your love.
In the name of that love that we call Christ. Amen.