IS JESUS WELCOME, TOO? by Mary Grigolia

October 22, 2000

FIRST READING

From personal correspondence with Joan Webster…

At some point, maybe when my babies started to be born, I decided I didn't want to continue with hatred towards all religions, and began again to read some Buddhism--- which seemed like such refreshing truth to me. Let's not make it all either RIGHT or WRONG, GOOD or EVIL, but let's relax, and see what is there. What a relief to get away from the condemnation, the judgements. I remember reading Merton's 7 Story Mountain and finding his comment about the different paths up the mountain to be a relief, too...this idea that of course there were different ways to be holy – different paths , maybe the same peak . The really holy person would be recognizable across all cultures, perhaps. Anyway, living in Oberlin these past 10 years, with its permission to explore many things written, and its encouragement to question and look deeper for myself, has been great fresh air for me.

So if Jesus was a mystic, and 'got it' then I could be interested in Him as a teacher. What everyone so often says He said, and what everyone puts into a Church form around him, is hard for me to stomach. I also am reminded that the Buddha supposedly said "Dont worship me....see for yourself"

I imagine that a mystical messenger or being would not be advocating worship of themselves. I do not have the screeching flight away from mention of Jesus that some UU's do, but it can be touchy... there's a short fuse to the place where I recall old betrayals, idealism preached gone sour, and people using Christianity to further their self images and agendas. I would delight in knowing there is a mystical teacher in the person of Jesus who is available....maybe it's not too late, or maybe a different path will be necessary for me.

I do not want the kids to be shamed or scared into some rule-ridden kind of Christianity here. If they eventually want to choose it, well, that's different. Right now, the name of the game looks like shame and fear.

Namaste,

Joan of the jungle

SECOND READING

From James Breech, The Silence of Jesus

Jesus does not present himself as the bearer of a truth which, if believed, will immediately remove all the complications of human existence. Jesus does not tell his listeners what to think, how to find meaning in life or how to live. Jesus does not feel sorry for the householder, neither does he pity the labourers. He sees each character in terms of what he [or she] does and describes them as such. The story grasps the responsibility of each character for his mode of being. Each is responsible in the sense that each must live out the consequences of his own mode of being human, and Jesus neither provides an abstract system for approval or disapproval, nor suggests a transcendental mechanism that will reward some and punish others. Human reality is grasped as exceptional and enigmatic. In response to [hu]man[ity]’s deep-felt religious questions, for which we [he] so urgently demand answers, Jesus remains silent.

THIRD READING

From Thich Nhat Hanh, Coming Home

We have blood ancestors but we also have spiritual ancestors. If you were born in the West there is a big chance you are a child of Jesus and that you have Jesus as your ancestor. Jesus is one of the many spiritual ancestors of Europeans. There are those who think that they don’t have anything to do with Christianity. They hate Christianity. They want to leave Christianity behind, but in the body and spirit of these people Jesus may be very present and very real. The energy, the insight, and the love of Jesus may be hiding in them.

A Buddhist is someone who considers the Buddha as one of his spiritual ancestors.. To me the Buddha is very real. I can touch him at any time I want. I can profit from his energy and insight any time I want. It is very real. He is in every cell of my body. Every time I need him I have ways to call for him and to make his energy manifest.

I do the same with my father. I know that my father is in me. My father is in every cell of my body. In me there are many healthy cells of my father. He lived more than 90 years. Every time I need him, I can always call upon him to help. I get his energy from every cell of my body.

SERMON

JORDAN

When Jordan and Troy were approaching school age, Ken and Ellen moved from their house on Cleveland’s near-west side to a Medina County farm house, complete with pond, woods, and fields. They wanted the boys to be in touch with the natural world; they wanted to nurture their spiritual openness. When he started Kindergarten, Jordan had to ride a school bus. Several weeks into the semester, he came home angry, with tears in his eyes. The kids on the bus had grilled him on where he went to church and what he believed. When they found out that he didn’t know anything about Jesus, yet alone accept him as Lord and Savior, they told him that he and his whole family were going to burn in hell forever and ever. Jordan was scared and angry. He was angry at the boys. He was afraid of going to hell. And he was angry at his parents for not preparing him. He hadn’t known what to say.

JOAN

Joan and Ed and their three boys left Oberlin for Belize last spring. They wanted their children to have the experience of living in another culture. Their boys had attended religious education classes here for several years before they left. Joan, who now calls herself Joan of the Jungle, has been corresponding via e-mail. When her boys started school, she wrote:

Religion is the biggest surprise for the kids. In David's group they described Jesus as standing in the classroom watching to see if they were being obedient, (like some ghost hovering about, telling if you are naughty or nice) and today they told him if he was being bad, then Satan was poking you, gettin all excited and stompin his feet! David said "This Satan guy must be like the opposite of Jesus, or something."

Andy was told that the big bang and evolution are totally nonsense "Would you want to think of yourself as coming from APES??" and he had to make a pizza shape circle , cut into 7 pieces, so he can show what God madeon each of the 7 days.

Eddie was asked if he thought he was made in the image of God, and he said he thought to himself, "Uh, oh, this is one of those questions where there's supposed to be one right answer, and mom wouldn't agree.”

GETTING CLEAR WITH JESUS

Both families are concerned about the fundamentalist view points their children are facing. They want their children to develop their own religious and spiritual views while they respect those of other people. Both families came up against their own religious limitations.

Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that most of us in the west grew up with Jesus in our bones. We were weaned on the idea of a personal God. Even if we weren’t raised in Christian households, we live in a society that assumes relationship with a personal God. Pollsters found that 96% of Americans say they believe in God. For one reason or another, we reject the religion of our youth. With it goes our relationship with Jesus. What do we do with the vacuum left behind? We have to make peace with our religious and spiritual roots, so they may continue to nurture us and our family, on our own terms.

Ellen had formidable resistance to looking beyond the sexism of the mainline Protestant church where she was raised. As a woman struggling with internalized sexism as well as the sexism of the system around her, she was angry and felt betrayed by the church which claimed to be based on the teachings of a man who had brought diverse people together across gender and class and ethnic divisions. The teacher Jesus had gotten lost. Was there anything worthwhile underneath the oppression?

Joan describes growing up in a non-religious household; her father had escaped the hell-fire-and-brimstone teachings of his youth. Joan attended a friend’s church and went to church camp for 6 years as an adolescent. She describes scenes of real community at the camp. She dropped out when a beloved-- and married -- young minister was caught having an affair with one of the camp counselors. Several years later, after the death of her father, her sister retreated into Fundamentalism for structure, community, and answers. For Joan, religion was a source of betrayal and loss.

TRYING AGAIN

For Ellen and Joan it took a lot of courage to revisit organized religion. For both of them, it was less threatening to come at it from Eastern teachings, which allowed them to rethink the purpose of religion, our shared spiritual expression and exploration. There are many Americans who have embraced Buddhism and other Eastern practices. A wholly new form of Buddhism is evolving in the west. Yet for many people, Buddhism or Aikido, or yoga is just a station on the road back home.

THE HISTORICAL JESUS

Perhaps you’ve seen the license plate that reads: Dear Jesus, protect me from your followers.

In the work of James Breech and other contemporary Jesus scholars, we learn that few of the words put into the mouth of Jesus are thought to have been his. Most were added later, by editors and followers, for their own reasons. To make peace with Jesus, we have to separate the historical Jesus from the creation of his followers.

Scholars agree that this historical Jesus was probably a powerful and unique story-teller. The enigmatic parables present us with conflicting moral positions and revel in the moral complexity of life.

Jesus wasn’t only a story-teller. He brought people together in defiance of local customs. He championed the rights of the poor and vilified. He was a social and religious revolutionary who preached a gospel of inclusive love. He taught that the way to know God or mystery was to look inside your own heart. Joan remembered the words of the Buddha, ‘Be ye lamps unto yourself.’ Contemporary scholars suggest that Jesus too trusted his students to draw their own conclusions. The doctrinal and ideological trappings we think of as Christianity developed after Jesus, including both the nativity and resurrection stories. Jesus never referred to himself as the Son of God. He called himself the Son of Man. The doctrine of the trinity and the teaching on the atonement through death and resurrection were added much later. Jesus was a Jewish rabbi with a compelling vision of how people could live together in peace. He told stories and practiced the art of healing.

THE LOSS OF OUR SPIRITUAL TEACHERS

When I was doing my internship for parish ministry, I commuted about 45 minutes to church every day. After spending days and days preparing for a Palm Sunday service, as I drove home at rush hour, my mind totally focused on the traffic all around me, suddenly I was filled with a deep of sense of loss. I yearned for the guidance of a spiritual teacher with vision who taught from the heart as well as from the intellect. I felt the vacuum in my life where Jesus used to be. Tears came to my eyes. I felt the consequences of not having a spiritual teacher or ancestor in my life or in the lives of most of the people I knew. Like Thich Nhat Hanh describing his relationship with his father and with the Buddha, I wanted a spiritual ancestor I could call on with every cell of my body. At one time in my life, I had thought Jesus could be that kind of presence for me. As I drove, I felt only the loss and lack.

UU’ISM TODAY

Like an adolescent who tries to prove that they are not at all like their parents, twentieth Unitarian Universalism ran as far as possible in the opposite direction from the hierarchical teachings of Protestantism and Catholicism. From the 1940s through the 1970s and early 1980s, in reaction against the power abuses that were the consequence of an all-powerful model of God, we built many congregations with no professional leadership. During this time we taught our children other religious systems, but not our own. Indeed, UU was incapable during that time of articulating what made us a religion. By defining ourselves by what we were not, we failed to provide our movement with the depth we needed to sustain our members through times of social turmoil. Although our congregations burgeoned during times of economic expansion in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s, with war and recession, our membership dropped, our young people left.

Today we are still learning the lessons of our permissive approach to religious education. We’ve learned that it’s not enough to let our children be free to decide their religious paths for themselves when they are grown. We must also teach them our own values, spiritual practices and questions. We must prepare them for making their own decisions and setting their own course while we show them how we adults relate to the dimension we call God or unity or mystery. We must show them courageously those areas where we don’t have all the answers. We must welcome them into our own spiritual questions. We must be willing to be our children’s spiritual teachers and to allow them to be ours.

WHAT TO SAY TO THE CHILDREN

We need to teach our children how to protect themselves against religious intimidation.

If you were Ellen, what would you have said to Jordan?

If you were in Joan’s place, what would you say to her boys?

As children of this culture, our children deserve to know the teachings of Jesus. We want our children to respect their classmates’ religious beliefs and practices without being susceptible to their threats and intimidation.

Unitarian Universalists have dreamed and worked to create and maintain a circle that welcomes humanists, agnostics, mystics, Buddhists, pagans, and Jews. We have worked to over-come systemic oppression among us, whether it be racism, sexism, or heterosexism. One of the last groups to be welcomed to the table is Christians. [This is strange in a religious movement that came out of two different Christian denominations, the Unitarians and the Universalists.]

In describing the unique story style of the teacher Jesus, scholar James Breech wrote that he embraced the enigmatic nature of human existence, describing each character as possessing an equally valid moral point of view. Jesus presented his listeners with complex subjective reality. Jesus trusted his listeners to come to their own conclusions. It sounds to me like Jesus would feel very much at home with Unitarian Universalists.

I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist for 15 years. It makes me sad that in those 15 years I have found few people I would call spiritual teachers in our movement. I don’t expect all my spiritual teachers to be UU’s or all UU ministers to be spiritual teachers. As a society we are undergoing a shift in how we think of religion. The shift is away from creeds and doctrines toward direct experience of that dimension beyond the individual—“That which unites us.” We are no longer content to talk about religion. We need to experience it, too. Perhaps in another five or ten years, this shortage will be filled, since there are more and more UU ministers and lay leaders studying spiritual direction and meditation from a UU point of view.

I hope that all of us find spiritual teachers who will help us find our own paths. I hope that all of us find spiritual ancestors we can call on with every cell of our bodies. And in time, may we be those spiritual teachers are children can turn to and those spiritual ancestors our children and grandchildren will reach out to, reminding them of their boundless potential, anchoring them in our particular lineage. AMEN.