“Sacred People”
A while
back I gave a sermon entitled, “Sacred Times” in which I discussed the
possibility that there are times when the divine draws closer to us and even touches
the human dimension.
The
idea of sacred times is actually one three similar concepts that are shared by
religions all over the world. The other
two sacred dimensions are “sacred space” and “sacred people”.
Today,
as we approach Easter, as much of the world anticipates their celebration of
the passion of Jesus, it seems appropriate to look at the idea of sacred
people.
Let
me start by saying that by the term, “sacred people” I don’t mean some divine
figures that have come to earth like we find in Greek mythology or the many divine
and semi-divine beings that appear in other popular myths and legends
throughout the world.
No,
the idea of sacred people is like the idea of sacred times; it is the belief
that certain people stand closer to the divine, that they live lives that are more
in harmony with the divine than is the common case. It is the notion that in some ways these people act as conduits
or channels for the divine. Sacred
people are those through whom the divine acts or communicates to us.
But
once we say that we have a problem. To
accept the fact that there are such people seems distinctly undemocratic. Aren’t we all spiritual equals? Don’t we all
have the same spiritual capacity, the same ability to soar beyond the bounds of
our mundane lives and touch the Mystery of Existence? “Why shouldn’t we have a direct relationship
to God,” asks Emerson in his essay on nature. Why depend on others when you can
depend on yourselves, he goes on to assert.
But to
say that we are all equal is not to
say that we are all the same; that we are all equipped with the same capacities.
Equality has to do with people’s inherent worth, but equality of worth not does
not diminish our differences. To
complain that I do not have the same spiritual capacity as the Buddha or
Mohammed or Jesus or the Bal Shem Tov or
Lao Tsu or Black Elk, would be like complaining that I don’t have as good a three
point shot in basketball as some pro-player or that IBM didn’t offer me a
position as their new CEO.
We
are equal but different. Different in
every capacity and that includes the spiritual.
And
that means that in the realm of spiritual things most people are learners and
not teachers. We are followers, not
trail blazers. We are disciples,
sitting at the feet of the masters.
This
is distinctly a distinctly un-American admission. Most American children dream of being President some day (I still
do sometimes and sometimes I really think I could do a better job). Every teenage boy with a guitar dreams of
being a rock-star. Every teenage girl
in the drama club dreams of life on the big screen. For Americans it sometimes seems as if reaching the highest peak
were the only measure of success, the only worthwhile possibility.
Is
it any wonder that people suffering with delusions of grandeur think they are
Jesus or Napoleon? Who imagines they
are Henry the cashier at the local five and dime. What good American wants to be a follower?
To
see ourselves as followers is un-American for another reason. We are suspicious of authority. And certainly we were right when we cast off the shackles of corrupt and
self-serving religious authorities. And
we are right to reject any limit on our
right and ability to question or critique the faith that others declare to us.
We
are also correct to think that it is foolish to submit to any form of religious
authoritarianism, whether it be surrender to the authority of the Bible or the
authority of a pope or the authority of a local preacher.
But it
might be a different kind of foolishness if we were to insist that we have no
need of a teacher, that we no longer require the wisdom of the ages, that we
have nothing to learn from the insights of great thinkers. It may be foolhardy if we were to imagine that
no one has ever seen truth more clearly than we can and that no one has looked
further than we have into the Mystery that is God.
Every
religion has its sacred person or persons.
Every religion recognizes religious geniuses, and sits at their feet to
learn. Christianity has Jesus, Islam
has Mohammed, Judaism has Moses, Buddhism has the Buddha, and Taoism has Lao
Tzu.
Of
course it would be nice if religions stopped at recognizing their genius, if
they were content to just learn from these teachers. But they don’t. Instead,
over time religions transform these sacred people, these people who were so in
touch with the divine, and who still today offer to open our hearts and
minds. Some are divinized, others are granted
a kind of authority, a sort of infallibility that challenges our ability to
hear them or appreciate their humanity.
Look
for instance, at the Buddha and Jesus.
Both begin as men. Remarkable
men, to be sure. Men who attract great
attention, who seem to speak to people’s hearts, who seem uniquely in touch
with the spiritual world. Stories about
the Buddha tell us that everywhere he went he exuded a joy and a peace that convinced
those who met him that he was, indeed, enlightened, that he had found the way to
escape the endless cycle of suffering and rebirth.
In a
similar fashion, the gospels tell us that everywhere Jesus goes, people were astounded
by his words and his presence; that through him they discovered themselves and a
new way to experience the divine.
We
could almost say the same about Mohammed, except it wasn’t his person that
astonished people; it was the Koran that he wrote. Arabic speakers tell us that the language of the Koran is so
beautiful and so moving and so profound, that those who hear it come to believe
that it is the very words of God.
As I
said, it would be nice if religion had stopped there, if they contented
themselves with listening to and learning from those who stood closer to the
divine, but they didn’t. In the case of
Jesus and the Buddha legends grow up around them, stories about miraculous births
and miraculous deeds. And as the literature
about them develops and religions grow up around them, both figures go from being
spiritual masters to being heavenly intercessors to finally being divine.
Sometimes
it’s hard to go back before these developments and find the real person. Somehow these sacred people, these
individuals who were so in touch with the divine, get lost beneath the increasing
layers of tradition and religious belief.
But
even stripping away the accumulations of the centuries, rejecting the doctrines
and speculations about these people and returning to the most ancient texts, to
the most original sources about them, doesn’t help us to find them.
For
instance, the texts about the Buddha, the collections of his teachings; were
not written for centuries after his death.
And in the long stretch of history between his death and the books that
finally emerged, the legends and stories that sprang up about him were mixed
with his real life story so that it is impossible to establish more than a
general outline of his life. Even more
confusing, the teachings of people who lived after him are attributed to him; so
that it is nearly impossible to discover what he himself taught.
The
same is true for the figure of Jesus. Even
if we go back to the gospels, written only a generation or two after Jesus
lived, we don’t have a straightforward historical record of what Jesus said and
did. What we have are stories that have
been edited, elaborated, changed and designed to prove a point; but not the point Jesus tried to make. No, the stories are intended to prove the
point the authors of the gospels are trying to make. And sayings are attributed to Jesus that are not always his words;
they are words the authors placed on Jesus’ lips to make their point.
The
gospels are polemical documents, that is they make a case, they argue for a
particular way of understanding Jesus.
They were written in the midst of religious controversies to support and
defend their authors’ viewpoint. They do not give us an accurate account of Jesus
and his teaching. And to find the real Jesus
within the gospels, to discover what he really said and did, is almost
impossible.
Let’s
be clear. There are two people called Jesus
of Nazareth. There is the man who
opened the eyes and hearts of countless people, who seemed to echo the very
thoughts of God; who inspired humanity to raise itself up out of the muck of
selfishness and cruelty. And then there
is the Jesus of doctrine, who has time and again divided people, and inspired self-righteousness
and intolerance and cruelty and war. But
let me be very clear and say it again; these are two different people, the
Jesus of history and the Jesus of doctrine.
Should we cast out the one because of the sins committed in
the name of the other? Should we cut
ourselves off from a spiritual giant who inspired people like Mahatma Gandhi and
Martin Luther King and countless others, because we don’t like his alter
ego?
To
abandon the real Jesus would be easier than wrestling with the gospels to try
to discover him. And, I suspect, it
would be easier than wrestling with some of our own feelings, with the anger
and hurt of those who have suffered because of the Jesus of doctrine.
And the truth is, discovering the Jesus of history is
probably impossible. Scholars have been
trying it for years, and they never agree on what they find beyond the basic
truths that he was a Rabbi and a healer (a common thing in those days) and had
an enormous, life-changing effect on his contemporaries. They also agree that the authorities felt
threatened enough by him to kill him, threatened enough to kill him in a brutal
and humiliating form of death by torture.
So what do we do with Jesus? Spend years in graduate school and decades poring over texts and
scholarly articles until we form an idea of who he was?
I
think there is an easier way for us to approach Jesus Let me suggest this simple formula. Whenever a story in the gospels seems designed to prove some
doctrine, ignore it. Focus instead on
his teaching; his teaching about how to live, about how to treat others. Focus on his teaching about how to love and on
his example of love for others. Focus
on his understanding of God as a loving parent (you don’t have to say “father”), and his understanding of how the world is
supposed to be. Focus on his insistence
that religion be inclusive and his rejection of religion that is exclusive,
hypocritical or obsessive.
There is so much in the gospels to learn without having to get
involved with those parts of the books where a later generation of Christians
is trying to score some theological points.
And we don’t need to involve ourselves with doctrinal
questions. In those areas I prefer to
remain agnostic. Was Jesus God? I don’t know. I just know that when people encountered him they felt that they
had encountered something divine. How
that worked and what that means, I haven’t a clue. And neither did the first Christians. They were all over the field on that one; some believed he was a
human being who was really in touch with the divine, while others claimed to he was the creator of the universe made
flesh.
And do
we need to know that? I drive my car
and I don’t know how it works. And we could
listen to Jesus without having to know exactly how the dynamic of his relationship
to the divine worked. And I’m not sure
anyone can know how that relationship worked.
But let me also warn you that even limiting your reading to
his teaching will still present some problems unless you recognize Jesus’
humanity, something Christianity doesn’t do and it gets them into all sorts of
trouble.
He
was a man of his times and there were limits to his thought. For instance, he calls God “Father”, and
doesn’t seem to be quite as up on his feminist theology as we might like. We don’t have to copy him. Besides, the word he uses, Abba, isn’t “Father”; it’s the
equivalent of our word, “Daddy.” His use of the word is intended to show that it
is possible for humans to enjoy an intimate and warm relationship with the
divine. Now there’s a radical notion if
you think about it.
And Jesus does think the world is about to end; that God is
about to burst upon the scene and overturn the existing world order; so that
the last become first and the first last; the rich are cast down and the poor
are lifted up. But virtually every Jew at
that time thought the world was about to end; and he was a child of his
age. The difference was, for Jesus it
wasn’t the snooty, self-righteous religious people who would be rewarded; it
was the humble and the outcasts and all those for whom the world just didn’t
seem to have a place. And in that
difference, Jesus saw something of the heart of God, the divine preference for
the poor.
The
world didn’t end, as you may have noticed, and all the prognosticators of the
imminent apocalypse simply fail to see Jesus as a person of his time, a time
when everyone expected the world to end.
At the same time, his belief that God was on the side of the oppressed
has changed the world and continues to challenge the world to this day.
Jesus also believed the world was going to end with fire and
judgment; something we Universalists have problems with. But again, there was a difference. Jesus did not preach that those who failed
to follow every religious or moral rule went to hell. He preached judgment against those who could have done good, who
could have eased or prevented human suffering, but refused to. We may not like the idea of judgment, but he
grew up in a religious atmosphere that expected it, and like every other
spiritual leader, he didn’t entirely escape the theological nexus in which he
was raised.
In the fall I raised the question, what do we do about
Jesus? And sometimes as I sit here my
eyes go to that declaration on the wall over there that speaks of the spiritual
authority of Jesus. It doesn’t have to
be a statement about the Jesus of doctrine.
It could be about Jesus the spiritual teacher, Jesus the sacred
person. And sometimes I wonder why we
are so hesitant to speak of him. I
think in part it’s because it’s so hard to separate the Jesus of doctrine, and
even the Jesus the gospel writers create, from Jesus the man, Jesus the sacred
person; Jesus as someone uniquely in touch with the divine and someone who has so
much to give us.
The declaration tells us that our predecessors were not hesitant
to speak about him. They were not
afraid to sit at his feet and learn.
And they did that without rejecting the teachings of other sacred people
or confusing the real Jesus with the Jesus of doctrine. Are we robbing ourselves when we fail to do
the same?