Jeremiah 23:1-6“Woe to the shepherds
who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the
shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and
have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to
you for your evil doings. Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all
the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold,
and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them
who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor
shall any be missing. The days are surely coming, when I will
raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal
wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days
Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by
which he will be called: “God is our righteousness.”
Luke 1: 68-79
Wonderful is the
Holy One of Israel, who has visited and set the people free, and has sounded the trumpet of new life
for the descendants of David. As
the prophets preached long ago, that we should be saved from those who would
harm, and from the hands of those
who hate us, to live by the love promised to our forebears. To remembering
the holy covenant, made with Abraham; that
being free from the grasp of enemies, we might serve God without being afraid and
do good things in God’s presence throughout every day that we live. And
you, little child, will be named the prophet of the Most High. For you will go on ahead, to prepare a new
way, so that people will know true freedom as all their errors are forgiven. This will be the outcome of God’s
yearning love, when the new dawn shall shine on the heights, to shed light on those who cower
in darkness and in the deep shadows of death, to guide our feet into the
way of peace.
******************************************************************************
Today
is generally known in the Christian year as “Christ the King” or “Reign of
Christ” Sunday. It’s the last Sunday of the current liturgical year, before we
begin a new year with the first Sunday of Advent, next week.
I
confess I don’t really like this Sunday. The language of faith in our Christian
history, became the language of empire – conquering, oppression, power,
authority. We still use words like “King, Lord, throne, kingdom, conqueror”,
and despite how we bend ourselves into pretzels explaining that we don’t really
mean those words exactly that way, language is critical to how we see ourselves
and see others. Here’s an example. Tolerance. Its root is in ‘tolerate’, and it
means ‘to put up with’ ‘to allow to continue’. When we talk about ‘religious
tolerance’ or ‘racial tolerance’, we’re still using a word which implies that
we hold power to stop those things from happening if we change our minds. But
what about the word ‘respect’? What would happen if we use the words ‘religious
respect’, or ‘racial respect’. There is a difference – one is a power word, the
other is a relationship word. Language
does matter.
There’s
a group of like-minded people within the church who are moving away from the word
‘Christian’ and rather identifying as ‘People of the Way’ – the way the original followers
of Jesus referred to themselves. How did we go from Jesus to Christ? Who was
Jesus of Nazareth? What were the core values and the grounding in which his
following developed? When did a first-century peasant known as Yeshua become
known as “Christ”. What do we know? He lived and died. He was a Jew, born in Galilee. Most of the
people he knew - colleagues, disciples, friends
- were Jews. He went to services in synagogues, preached from Jewish text; celebrated
Jewish festivals; went on pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. The gospels offer
no sense that he came to found a new religion, nor that he was an educated
rabbi. He was called ‘rabbi’ which means teacher, but that isn’t quite the same
as being one.
The challenge, according to Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, always “asks about the relationship between any and every historically reconstructed Jesus and any and every theologically accepted Christ.” The late Marcus Borg identifies Jesus as a spirit person, a teacher of wisdom, a social prophet, and almost by accident – founder of a movement. He's completely embedded in the Judaism of his time. He's not a Sadducee, nor a Pharisee, nor an Essene, nor an insurrectionist. He does argue with members of these other groups because that's what the Jews all did - argue with each other all the time...and because he has a particular view of an increasingly doctrinal faith which is rigid in law, at the loss of compassion and openness, and inclusion, which *is* the law.
He talks about God’s realm using the language of empire – since his listeners are well associated with that – but turns that upside down by describing an empire of equality. After the death of John he began to preach the realm of God as healing in the present, rather than imminent apocalypse.
There was an expectation following
Jesus’ death that the Realm of God would arrive immediately, Nothing happened,
and the followers simply went home not sure what to do. They started looking
into their own scriptures to find something which might give the experience
meaning – and found among others, the passage from Jeremiah describing the
shepherd who would rise from the line of David. Note that both shepherd and king
are mentioned. Now, Jeremiah was a prophet, but prophets didn’t predict the
future – they spoke directly to the people of the time. So while Jeremiah’s
text didn’t predict the coming of Jesus, it gave the early followers a frame
for explaining the Jesus experience. Kings were not crowned in the way we
think, but anointed to be shepherds of the people.
The resurrection narratives didn’t come along until approximately 70 years
after Jesus’ death. The Jesus followers still continued to practice their faith
– but identified as one of many small sects within Judaism. They called
themselves ‘People of the Way’ and they simply went on doing what Jesus had
taught them. In the book “How Jesus Became Christian”, author Barrie Wilson
notes what he terms the “Conventional Model of Christian origins” - a straightforward chronological line from
Jesus to church to Paul to wild success. This impression stems from the Book of
Acts, written in the late first or early second century. Yet as noted above, the
original Jesus movement continued – at least until the year 62 CE and the death
of Jesus’ brother James – within Roman-occupied Israel. The resurrection
stories were almost post-James, so the disciples didn’t have them. The Christ
Movement arose out of Paul’s travels, and the two were at odds with each other.
So little by little the original movement died off and was superseded by the
Christ movement – and the leaders of both never met each other at all.
Paul was in Damascus when he had his
conversion experience – and began reaching into the Gentile communities about five years after Jesus' death. There
were Greek-speaking communities in Greece, Turkey into Macedonia. Within that
time a church was also founded in Rome, but not by Paul.
Already there were
Christians
saying that the emperor and the state are ordained by God. By the third century,
Christians are claiming loyalty to the state, and by the fourth century and the
Emperor Constantine, Christianity is the mandated state religion with the now
Greek word “Christ” Christos, anointed one – but now set up as a King - and as the Roman empire gradually declined,
the church of Constantine became the empire.
I want to go back to the notion of
Christ and Jesus as two different persons – and revisit that definition of Jesus
as Lord. In the church today, there appear to be several phenomena – one, a
trend among the more conservative, fundamental and even reactionary practice of
Christianity towards the Christ of Empire, Christ the post-Easter Deity, the
Lord and King who supports violence as claiming and maintaining a way of life –
the NRA types who brandish a Bible and a gun and claim Christ backs them up;
the second, a more progressive Christianity which still uses that language, but
claims the words no longer hold those same meanings; and third, a movement
within and among what I will call ‘people of faith’, towards following the
teachings and way of Jesus, the pre-Easter human person. Marcus Borg, John
Shelby Spong, John Dominic Crossan, writers about the church such as Diana
Butler Bass; and those who call themselves atheists or non-theists, within the
structure of the church, such as my colleague Rev. Gretta Vosper in Toronto. It’s
a stepping back from, a stripping away of, the traditional language and
structures, to go back to the beginning – the ‘People of the Way’. It’s a
re-claiming of original principles, a re-framing in different language, what
Jesus was teaching. It says we don’t have to cling to formulae or doctrines to
live the Way.
Both Jeremiah and the Luke passage set
up this difference – woe to the poor shepherds who destroy the flocks, says
Jeremiah – and maybe you could read into that the religious leaders in power,
in any time and place - they will be replaced, says Jeremiah, by shepherds who
have all the flock at heart; Zechariah sings of the new ‘king’ who sets things
right, who prepares a new way, who teaches an alternate way of being that
rejects violence and anger but is based in love. Jesus taught that the Realm of
God was right at hand, right around the corner – and that love was the key.
For us, to reduce it to a perhaps
simplistic formula – rather than ‘Christ the King”, I’d substitute ‘God is Love’,
or even ‘Love is God’. It finally removes any barriers, and declares Love as
the key. So God, by whatever name, is present. May it be so.
Sources from the original paper “From
Christ to Jesus: Reclaiming the Way”
1.
Borg, Marcus. “Meeting Jesus Again for
the First Time”. HarperOne, 1994.
2.
Crossan, John Dominic. “Jesus: A
Revolutionary Biography”. HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.
3. Curtis,
Ken. Church History Timeline 301-600 CE.
http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/301-600/constantine-11629643.html
4. Fredriksen,
Paula. “From Jesus to Christ”. Yale University Press, 1988.
5. Meyers,
Robin R. “Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshipping Christ and
Start Following Jesus”. HarperOne, 2009.
6. Spong,
John Shelby. “This Hebrew Lord”. HarperOne, 1993,
7. Wilson,
Barrie. “How Jesus Became Christian”. Random House Canada, 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment