Sermon, March 27

Resurrection and Hope

On this Easter Sunday I thought I would try something a little different. It is, of course, the day that Christians celebrate the Resurrection Of Jesus. And I didn’t want to neglect that nor do I think we should.

As Universalist Unitarians we stand, however, in a sort of strange relationship to Christian holidays. We want to celebrate them, but we’re often a little unsure of what, exactly, we want to celebrate.

Christianity, of course, is founded upon the resurrection of Jesus. The Christian hope for a future of justice and peace are based on the conviction that Jesus is alive and ruling. And their hope for renewal in this life and for life after death is based on the belief that if Jesus rose from the dead; we too can experience new life now and a new form of existence in the life to come.

But today I want to look back before these events were interpreted the way they are now. I want to try to reconstruct the story of Jesus as it first emerged in their thinking; to look at the story as they may have first encountered it, and explore one of the lessons they derived from the story.

First, we first have to change the name of the hero of our tale. Jesus is the English translation of the Greek translation of the common Hebrew name, Joshua. So I’m going to call the hero of our tale Joshua; which is closer to what his friends would have called him, although they would have pronounced it slightly differently.

Now Joshua was a rabbi, but not a particularly important one. In fact he came from the sticks, from a region called Galilee, which was kind of like coming from rural Arkansas today. And the more sophisticated residents of Jerusalem regarded him as something of a hack.

Joshua was, like many others of his time, a healer and an exorcist. These two functions where closely related, since most diseases were thought to be caused by evil spirits and all healing was essentially a spiritual contest. Of course the idea that disease has spiritual roots is common to many religions, from Native American religions to Tibetan Buddhism. And the people of Joshua’s time thought no differently.

So Joshua was a country preacher and a healer and was just one of many such people. In fact, the country seemed to abound in such people. But several things seemed to have set him apart from his contemporaries, at least those in the urban centers of power.

First was his conviction that humanity could enjoy a warm, personal relationship with God. Some of this reflected his rural origins. In the backwaters of Galilee, Judaism was far more personable and warm and relaxed than the high religion of Jerusalem. But Joshua seems to have taken this warm religious mentality to a radical extreme.

His conviction that God was caring and knowable was radical in two senses. First, it challenged the fundamental attitude of many religious Jews of his time. Judaism had fallen prey to a kind of national religious neurosis that imagined God was standing over them with a club, ready to beat them if they didn’t do exactly the right thing. It was like a child with overly-demanding parents. It didn’t feel like anything it did was good enough. In contrast, Joshua proclaimed that God that was welcoming, forgiving, and understood that most of us just bumble our way through life.

I should point out here that the Jewish religion has, for the most part, recovered from that particular neurosis, while many Christians seem to have caught it.

But Joshua’s conviction was also radical in another sense. He didn’t just preach that God is love or that God is good. He insisted people could experience that love, that religion was about a real relationship with God; not just following a set of rules and hoping some distant divinity was satisfied.

The second thing that seemed to set him apart from most others was that he actually seemed to enjoy that kind of relationship with God. He seemed to experience God’s presence, to feel God’s care and love, and to be able to sense what God wanted in different circumstances. He called God Abba, or daddy, and appeared to live in the glow of a close warm relationship with God, like a child with its parent.

But even that was not that unusual. Read sometimes, Martin Buber’s, Tales of the Hasidim, the stories of seventeenth and eighteenth century Rabbis in Eastern Europe or read some of the stories about the Rabbis in the centuries around the time Joshua lived. You will see that many of the Rabbis experienced the same sense of closeness and intimacy with God as Joshua did. Indeed, many Christian mystics and sacred people from other religious traditions experience the same thing.

A third thing set Joshua apart from the bulk of his contemporaries. This was his conviction that if God is loving and accepting, then he should act the same way himself. So Joshua ate with sinners, he talked to social outcasts, and he gathered some rather disreputable people around him, accepted them and welcomed them as friends and compatriots. And he didn’t hesitate to break some religious rule if by doing so he could help someone, relieve a little suffering, give a little comfort. After all, he figured that a rule that didn’t help people was hardly the kind of rule that the God he knew would make.

All of this was okay. It probably made him a rather remarkable rabbi and the kind of pastor most people would love to have.

But then Joshua took it one step further. He challenged the religious authorities of his day. He challenged their teachings when they didn’t reflect the God he knew. He challenged their hypocrisy. He challenged their greed and their love of power. He felt strongly that they were, in fact, driving people away from, not towards God.

To him this was a crime against God and against humanity. It was a crime against God because it presented a distorted image of God; far different from the God he experienced. And it was a crime against humanity because it robbed them of the kind of relationship with God that could alter their lives.

Joshua also saw this as a crime against history. He could feel the power of his words and he sensed that his message, a message that invited everyone into a dynamic and warm relationship with God could change the world; it could transform the way people lived, and alter society itself. He saw how his message transformed people, and sometimes he even felt that the power of his message was a sign that a new world, a new spiritual order was about to break upon humanity.

Others also felt the power of his message. And Joshua grew so popular that he threatened the political structures of his small nation. And so the leaders of his country decided to get rid of him.

It didn’t help that he was born at a strange and tense time in history. The Romans who ruled his country were nervous about problems with the unruly populace; and the Jewish religious leaders saw Joshua as a threat not only to their privileged position but to fragile relations they enjoyed with the Roman rulers. It didn’t help that it was easier to get rid of him, to convince the Roman rulers that he would create the problems they feared, than to face the claims he made about God or the charges he raised against this religious elite.

So Joshua was convicted in a sham trial, held at night out of fear his followers would riot. And by the time most of his followers heard he had been arrested, he was already on his way to his execution.

And there on a hill outside the city, surrounded by a crowd of his enemies, this country Rabbi was nailed to a post (probably not a cross, but a simple upright post) and was left to die.

It was a humiliating death. He was stripped naked and hung there exposed to the crowds who mocked his nudity.

And it was an agonizing death, a death by exposure and slow asphyxiation. It was similar to what is nowadays called a Palestinian hanging, where a persons hands are tied behind their back then they are hung up by them, until the joints in their shoulders separate, and unable to breathe properly, they slowly suffocate.

And it was a death filled with despair; for in the madness and terror that accompanies such a prolonged death, he felt abandoned by the very God whose presence he had known and loved.

But here the story takes on a certain mythological dimension. As Joshua dies, the sky turned dark and the earth quaked and the dead were seen walking the streets of the city.

And what happened next is clearly beyond our ability to probe. The story says that he entered Sheol or what the Greeks called Hades. In ancient Jewish thought this was where everyone who died went. It wasn’t hell, that’s a later invention. Sheol was a place of shadows, where the dead continued to live, but as wraiths, as formless spirits. They have a sub-human existence and are sometimes described as worms. People in Sheol are a faded memory of their former selves; unable to feel or sense or love.

And there were different theories that circulated in early Christian circles about what happened there.

In one theory God decides that this just isn’t right. That Joshua did not deserve to end up in Sheol; not given the way he lived and the way he died. So after a couple of days of thinking about it, God calls down to Joshua and says, “Come up here and bring a few friends if you like.” So Joshua looks around and, being the kind of person he is, says to himself, “He didn’t say how many friends,” and invites everyone to join him. And from that point on, no one who dies goes to Sheol, but instead joins Joshua in heaven where they feast and celebrate forever.

In another theory, reflecting Jewish thought at the time, the suffering of the righteous produces spiritual fruit. And because of the way Joshua lived and died, Sheol couldn’t hold him. Something snapped in the spiritual realm and the power of death was broken. And not just for Joshua, but for everyone. And humanity can now mock the power of death and sing, “O Death, where is your victory now? O Grave, where is your string?”

And they believed that when Joshua went to heaven, he was given a special place of authority and made a ruler in the spiritual realm. Some even said that he was actually adopted by God and as a result humanity was now joined to God.

How they came to believe all this, how they felt they knew it, we can’t be sure. We do know that many claimed to have seen Joshua after his death. Many had visions of him. Others felt his presence. Some experienced a kind of spiritual quickening, a sense of spiritual power or a new connectedness to God when they called on Joshua to help them. Whatever the cause, they believed his spirit had gone into heaven where he had been given a special place of honor. And they believed that when this happened, the gap between God and humanity was bridged. The idea of a bodily resurrection, that Joshua’s battered body was taken up into heaven, developed later.

All this seems pretty mythological: a hero does battle in the spiritual realm, rescues the prisoners of the underworld, and then is divinized. But all religion contains mythological elements; if we understand that the word “mythological” does not mean “false”, but refers to the elements in religion that that try to explain what lies beyond the realm of proof, beyond the reach of human perception or human understanding.

And while we might have trouble with the idea of souls trapped in Sheol and a hero who battles to free them; most of us don’t have trouble with the idea that when we die we take on a new form of existence. In fact, the idea that we become part of the divine when we die, that we are joined to God, is a fairly common notion in many religions. In fact, much of Eastern Christianity sees the goal of history as the merging of God and humanity, and believes that we are joined to God at our deaths. Western Christianity downplays this, what with its obsession with sins, and payment for sins, and its view of the crucifixion as a legal transaction designed to satisfy the demands of an angry God.

And while some may have trouble with some of the more mythical aspects of the story; the early Christians did derive some lessons from the myth that helped them and maybe moved them to a more accurate view of God.

For one thing, they believed that Joshua’s elevation to a position of spiritual authority, his inclusion within the divine, meant that all he had experienced as a human became part of God’s experience. So they believed that God now understands experientially, what its like to be human. God knows what it’s like to smell a fresh spring morning, to enjoy a good meal, to have a crush on someone (Who can imagine Joshua never experienced that!). God knows what it feels like to rejoice in friends and family, to fight with your mother, to miss a friend.

And they believed that God now knows what it feels like to be misunderstood and slandered; to be hated and rejected. God knows what it feels like to be unjustly accused, to feel pain, or to be humiliated. And God knows what it is like to be treated cruelly, to experience the agony of death, to feel helpless and abandoned. To despair.

And some took this one step further. They claimed that Joshua was God’s son even when he lived among them, although by this they may have meant no more than that God loved him like a parent loves its own child. And for them that meant that God also knew the agony of what it meant to stand by and watch someone you love deeply, suffer. That God now knew what it felt like to see someone you love, die. That God now knows the emptiness we feel when someone we love is gone.

Most theologians would argue that God already knew these things, that God doesn’t change. They might be right. Maybe the early Christians just needed this story in order to discover this side of God. Maybe they needed to believe God had changed to be able to finally lay aside their old inadequate ideas of God. Maybe they needed this story, to be able to believe what Joshua already experienced and preached. And perhaps part of Joshua’s legacy to the world is that his death gave birth to a story that helped us to discover the God he proclaimed.

Whatever we may think about the details of the story, and that is a matter of faith, the lesson of this story is one of hope and comfort. It claims that when we weep, God weeps. And when we rejoice, God rejoices. It doesn’t say we will not suffer, that we will not experience pain and loss. It doesn’t say that we will never be humiliated or ashamed or feel unwanted or abandoned. It does say that when we hurt, God hurts with us, that we are never alone.

In the end the story carries on a theme from Joshua’s teaching. He taught that if the smallest sparrow falls, God sees it. The sparrow still falls, just as our lives may still be touched by tragedy; but as Joshua believed, even in our darkest hours, we can be strengthened and comforted by the thought of a God who is near us; A God who loves us as a parent loves a child, a God who feels our pain.

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