“Beginning the Jesus Story” by Pat Conover

December 7, 2014

The Second Sunday of Advent

The first part of this sermon is about Christmas and the second part is about beginning the story of Jesus.

This is a bookend sermon to my sermon in which I spoke about how Easter screws up the story about what is most spiritually important concerning the death of Jesus. Taken together, Christmas and Easter, as the biggest events of the Christian year, completely skip Jesus as a grown adult who embodied, led, taught, and healed. It was grown up Jesus who gathered close followers, who pointed to the salvation importance of recognizing the Holy Spirit in our lives and relationships.

The gospels make Jesus into something more like God than a human being. This was a common claim in the time of Jesus, as witnessed by the claim of Caesar and the Sons of God named in Hebrew Scripture. Stories of Roman Gods in human form doing wild and wacky things were common. The mystery cults in the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus all had figures similar to the gospel figure of Jesus. One way to think about the Christmas stories is that they were part of the transition of Christianity from Jewish to Roman culture.

Mark portrayed Jesus as an adult with special powers. That is also how Augustus Caesar portrayed himself. He authored a brass plaque that pointed to his great deeds as an adult. Augustus named himself as Savior of the world because he brought about the Pax Romana and accomplished many things that improved the day to day lives of people. Among many things, he continued a special deal with the Jews that gave them significant day-to-day control of their lives under Jewish law.

The Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke are quite different from each other but both revolve around Jesus as special, as the Messiah who would come again with the Heavenly Hosts of Destruction to restore the Kingdom of David with Jesus ruling as Chief Judge and his twelve disciples as judges of the twelve tribes of Israel.

The Christmas and Easter stories that make Jesus somehow more than human direct attention away from Jesus as Savior, Jesus us what the Presence of God looks like in human beings. If Jesus was special then we, who are not special, cannot be expected to do the kinds of things Jesus did. We can just worship Jesus instead of following him. We can slide into the cheap grace of atonement theology in which God sacrifices himself to appease himself. When we think Jesus magically took away the punishment for our sins, it is easier to slide by our guilts and need for forgiveness.

Which brings me to the second half of my sermon.

Second Isaiah (chapters 40-55) was written two hundred years later, about 550 year before Jesus. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had finished off Judah in battle, destroyed the temple, and taken prisoners back to Babylon in two waves of exiles. Sixty-seven years later, Cyrus of Persia defeated the Babylonians, freed the Jews and similar tribes, and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and Judah. God was presented as punishing with Nebuchadnezzar and ending the punishment with Cyrus of Persia. The God of the Jews does not act only through Jews.

Second Isaiah writes for a time of freedom in the midst of very hard times. The returning exiles had kept their religion and culture alive in captivity. The exiles returned without their wealth of herds and weapons, to Jerusalem and the devastated towns of Judah. Other tribes had moved in to claim what was of value and built their own villages. They returned to a larger setting of dispersed and defeated Jewish tribes, such as Samaria and Galilee, which had not gone into exile.

In verse nine, we get a rekindling of Zionism, the restoration of Jerusalem as a mountain fortress.

At his point we could conclude that we have more of the same old, same old: Yahweh giving victory in battle as proof that the special promise of God to the Jews had been restored, a justification for ethnic cleansing in the name of being a special people. This theme continues in verse ten.

The enduring problem of Zionism, echoed via Christianity in the claims of specialness by the United States, is justification for bad behavior against enemies, justification for colonialism and slavery, justification for wars of aggression and expansion such as the war in Iraq.

But then we get the great gift of Second Isaiah: a gift of vision about what is to be hoped for in the leader of restored Judaism in Jerusalem. Verse eleven.

This is Twenty-third Psalm vision. This is the beloved community imaged in terms of caring for children and women.

Will you be angry with us forever? Must your wrath last for all generations?

The enduring good news in Second Isaiah is the vision for beloved community which can exist and increase in the midst of exile, in the midst of military and political weakness.

550 years later, we have Jesus who studied and revered the Spiritual guidance of Hebrew Scripture. He taught his close followers about a beloved community that is already present and needs no special promises, no Messiah, no Second Coming. Jesus lived and died for his vision of beloved community that could live and grow within the Roman Empire, just as it had lived and grown within the Babylonian captivity.

We can join Jesus in our expression of Beloved Community and lift it up as vision for our citizenship responsibilities and callings to contribute to a transformed United States, a United States which loves and cares for the lambs and the ewes rather than for contentious goats that boss and push and punish in competition for personal, family, and tribal advantages.

In a synagogue Jesus became literate in Hebrew, and in the Aramaic dialect of Hebrew. Assuming his interest in scriptural studies, it would be likely that Jesus went on to study in one of the two great rabbinic schools in Jerusalem, or perhaps with a single rabbi elsewhere who had studied in one of the two great schools.

Jesus taught like a Hillel rabbi as exemplified by the story of the Samaritan who helped a Jew, a story in which Temple leaders were treated as indifferent to the suffering of those in need. It was a story that responded to the question, “What must I do to be saved?” The answer of Jesus was love your neighbors and serve them with ministry. This is a story of salvation as the expansion of the beloved community. This is a story of salvation within the Roman Empire, within Judaism, before everything had been made right.

When Jesus was baptized by John, or perhaps when he heard John preach, he had an ecstatic experience of the Holy Spirit. While John the Baptist used the Jewish mikvah purity bath as a symbol of baptism, the baptism of Jesus was remembered as fiery. Jesus guided his followers to experience the Holy Spirit for themselves so that they could do works even greater than those Jesus did. After the death of Jesus, his close followers had the guidance of Jesus and the empowerment of their own ecstatic experiences. In Acts, the beginning of the church story at Pentecost is presented as such a fiery ecstatic experience.

Recognizing how much God and our Beloved Community matters to me, make me feel happy and excited. If you share any of that excitement with me I could use an Amen about now. The more we can get happy together, the more empowered we will become for the harder challenges of our callings to ministry.