The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
January 11, 2009

1 Epiphany – B
Isaiah 42:1-9
Acts 10:34-43
Mark 1:7-11

Several years ago, Thomas Reeves wrote a book entitled The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity. About the same time a rabbi wrote a book entitled Why Should Jews Survive? I have not read either book, but I did read a review which gave me an idea of what the books were about. According to the review, the thesis of both books was that some people in the churches and synagogues of modern America are falling all over each other to disassociate themselves and their churches from the belief that the Scriptures are God’s chosen instrument for delivering a divine revelation to human beings. And this, argues Reeves, is the reason the churches are emptying fast. Committing suicide, he says.

All the Gospels affirm, as Mark does this morning, that when Jesus was baptized the Spirit of God descended upon him like a dove and that a voice from heaven said that the one upon whom the Spirit descended is God’s Son, the Chosen One of God in whom God delights. And many today, Reeves argues, see this as an “old-fashioned Christianity” that “repels potential churchgoers,” and they insist that the way to get people back to church is to drop the old-fashioned Christianity that sees Jesus as Savior, and to preach, instead, a Jesus who is more like what the prevailing culture wants.

But the facts point to exactly the opposite conclusion, says Reeves, because the churches that are declining (and that have been declining for the past 30 or 40 years) are those who simply echo and endorse the latest agendas of our culture, while the churches that are growing are those who speak a word from God that comes from Scripture to all human culture.

What do you think? “Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks Peter in long-ago Judea. And the question persists today.

If the Bible does not tell us about God, if the Bible is just one book among many that tells us interesting things about ancient Judea, but do not bring us a divine word of judgment and hope and salvation from the Creator of the world himself, then why should Jews survive? And why should Methodists and Presbyterians and Lutherans survive? And why should Episcopalians survive?

Reeves argues that there is no reason that Methodists or Presbyterians or Lutherans or Roman Catholics or Episcopalians should survive if we do not proclaim the word of divine revelation heard in this morning’s Gospel reading – that the man Jesus, on whom the Scriptures claim the Spirit descended, is the Son of heaven, the Chosen of God himself, with whom God is well pleased, and that if Jesus is something less than that, then we would do the world a service by just going out of business.

The questions raised by all this are not new. For more than 200 years now, scholars have studied the Scriptures as historical and literary documents, documents that reflect certain realities about both their human authors and the historical periods in which they lived. They have been asking, ”Just who was this man Jesus the New Testament speaks about?” In 1906, Albert Schweitzer called this “the quest for the historical Jesus.” The quest persists in our own day, in my lifetime and yours.

During this period, those who were for a time called “liberation theologians” have argued that essentially Jesus was a political revolutionary, and they proclaimed a Jesus who would justify political revolution to overcome political oppression. They claim that Jesus was essentially a counter-cultural charismatic whose purpose was to make the world a better place in which to live.

Others (Elizabeth-Schussler Fiorenza, for instance) claim that Jesus was a first-century feminist who called his disciples to an egalitarianism that gave equal status to women. Another (Barbara Thiering) contends that Jesus was a member of the Qumran community who married Mary Magdalene, had two sons and a daughter, divorced Mary and married someone else, and died in his sixties.

Still another, Burton Mack, whose conclusions were outlined in an Atlantic Monthly article entitled “The Search for a No-Frills Jesus,” argues that all we can really know about Jesus is that he was a wandering teacher – a kind of first-century hippie who roamed Galilee sharing his wisdom with others – and that the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection were theological fluff added by the Gospel writers to make Jesus into something more than he actually was.

The academics who study the Scriptures critically have sometimes described what they do as de-constructing, or de-mythologizing, the Bible. Much of what they do really is important and necessary work, because it is important to gain as complete an understanding as possible of who the historical Jesus was.

Sometimes, of course, their work leads to caricature. Consider the exegesis of the stop sign on the internet a few years ago. What do you do if you’re traveling to work and you see a stop sign? It all depends on how you exegete, or interpret, the stop sign:

“A scholar from the Jesus Seminar concludes that the passage ‘STOP’ wasn’t actually uttered by Jesus himself, but comes from a period of history when the Church was first confronted by traffic in its parking lot.

“A post modernist from Harvard Divinity School deconstructs the sign – knocks it over with his car – ending forever the tyranny of the north-south traffic over the east-west traffic.

“When confronted with a stop sign, an orthodox Jew does one of two things: either he takes another route to work that doesn’t have a stop sign, so that he doesn’t run the risk of disobeying the law; or he thanks God, who has given us the commandment to stop, waits three seconds according to his watch, and then proceeds. A pharisee does the same thing as an orthodox Jew, except that he waits 10 seconds.

“A fundamentalist, taking the text literally, stops at the stop sign, and then waits for it to tell him to go. The average Episcopalian doesn’t bother to read the sign, but he’ll stop if the car in front of him does.”

One popular writer in the 1950s (Barton) saw Jesus as the world’s best salesman, a kind of first-century Dale Carnegie who teaches us how to win friends and influence people. Others, more recent, see Jesus as an insurance policy, a kind of personal warranty of the good life: Believe in Jesus and prosperity is sure to follow.

Still others have begun to see Jesus as essentially a first-century therapist. A book written by Marsha Witten examines sermons on the Prodigal Son from a number of Baptist and Presbyterian pastors. In her study, Witten found that the language of secular, psychological therapy was much more in evidence in those sermons than was the language of theology or Scripture. Jesus, for the preachers she studied, was the Jesus who always affirms, blesses, supports, cares, and welcomes, never the Jesus who criticizes, judges, calls, or demands.

Jesus as therapist is “well-suited to the religious yearnings of affluent, reasonably well-situated people,” William Willimon says. “People who are reasonably healthy, happy enough, and relatively affluent and secure, don’t really need a [god] who makes changes, disturbs, and disrupts [things]. So we get a [Jesus] who always blesses, affirms, and embraces us just as we are.”

There is truth in all this, and the truth is that we human beings always have a tendency to make God and Jesus over in our own image, a tendency to see Jesus as we want him to be rather than as the Scriptures say he is. And if, as Willimon says, we are relatively successful, affluent, well situated people, then we are not given to seeing Jesus as Savior. After all, as long as we can do it all for ourselves, what do we need a savior for?

So in Jesus, many of us reasonably well-situated people are not getting much of a god. Our “god” is our good friend, a pal, the one who brings out the best in us and doesn’t judge us – because deep down we believe we are really basically good and not capable of real evil. So God, for us, is the one who affirms us as we are, the one we look to to give us what our hearts desire, a God who is just right for a consumer society, another way of getting what we want.

As one person put it to a friend, ”I went to church when I was a kid, but I grew out of it.” “Grew out of it?” his friend asked. “Yeah,” he said, ”the way I see it, religion is sort of like training wheels, sort of like moral training wheels. [Like a kid learning to ride a bike,] you need religion when you are young, before you are on your own, before you know what you are doing. But when you get more confidence, you are able to take them off so you can ride alone. That’s the way I look at religion and God.”

But who is God for those who are not reasonably well-situated? What about those who are at the end of their ropes? What about those in Jesus’ day who were not able to do life on their own, those who clutched at the hem of his garment as he passed by? What about them?

What about the wretched of the earth who have no resources of their own, those who have no advocate? What about those who find themselves at the end of their rope in the emergency room at three o’clock in the morning, when all the influence and power and prosperity and confidence in the world cannot help you, what then? What kind of Jesus speaks to you then?

When you’re at the end of your rope, religion as training wheels is no help. When you’re at the end of your rope, the only Jesus who can help is the one we hear about this morning, the one who is Lord of all, the one anointed by God with the Holy Spirit and power, the one who opens the eyes of the blind and brings captives out of prison and makes all things new, the one who brings the good news of peace, the one raised to life by God on the third day, the one whom God chose in advance and designated as judge of the living and the dead, the one who offers forgiveness of sins and walked the way of the Cross for our sake for no reason except his love for a world at the end of its rope.

When we are at the end of our ropes, Jesus as teacher is not enough. And Jesus as therapist is impotent. And Jesus the winner of friends and influencer of people is just silly. As Monika Helwig, the Roman Catholic theologian says, ”If it won’t play in the cancer ward or in a shoddy nursing home for the elderly, then whatever it is, it is not gospel.” And maybe that’s why, in his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus assures us that we are blessed when we are at the ends of our ropes, because “with less of you there is more of God and his rule.” That’s how Eugene Peterson translates Jesus’ sermon: “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you, [because] only then can you be embraced by the One [who is] most dear to you.”

When we are at the end of our ropes, the only Jesus who counts for anything, the only Jesus who means anything, is the One who offers us not religion, but faith, trust in God. The only Jesus who counts then is the One who is Lord and Savior. This gospel, this good news, is the only unique thing the Church has to offer the world.

If all the Church has to offer the world is a pale copy of what the prevailing culture does better than we do, then why should Episcopalians or Lutherans or Presbyterians or Roman Catholics or any of the rest of us survive? If all the Church has to offer the world is a pale copy of what the culture does better than we do, then why should people be enticed back to church? Insurance policies and teaching and therapy can be obtained in lots of other places, often in better quality and at a better price. If all the Church has to offer is a pale copy of what the culture is, then wouldn’t we really do the world a favor if we simply went out of business?

The truth is that we human beings do have a way of seeing Jesus in our own image. We carry that tendency in our DNA. As the wonderful Christmas carol puts it:

Some children see Him lily white,
The baby Jesus born this night.
Some children see Him lily white,
with tresses soft and fair.

Some children see Him bronzed and brown,
the Lord of heaven to earth come down.
Some children see Him bronzed and brown,
with dark and heavy hair.

Some children see Him almond-eyed,
this Savior whom we kneel beside.
Some children see Him almond-eyed,
with skin of yellow hue.

Some children see Him dark as they,
sweet Mary's son to whom we pray;
Some children see Him dark as they,
and ah! they love him, too!

The children in each different place
will see the baby Jesus' face
like theirs....

To see Jesus’ face like our own is as natural as the day is long. Jesus was a teacher. Jesus was a therapist, a healer. Jesus did offer assurance of the good life. Jesus did challenge the political powers.

But Jesus was more than all that. He was also the Lord of heaven to earth come down, the Savior whom we kneel beside, sweet Mary's son to whom we pray.

And that’s why the last verse of this carol is essential. It sums up what the Church really has to offer the world, and why we should survive, and why we will stay in business:

The children in each different place
will see the baby Jesus' face
like theirs, but bright with heavenly grace,
and filled with holy light.

O lay aside each earthly thing.
And with thy heart as offering
come worship now the infant King.
'Tis love that's born tonight!

‘Tis love, and faith, that was born at Christmas – a love and a faith who does overturn the powers of this world and free the oppressed and open the eyes of the blind and heal the sick and strengthen the downtrodden. But more than that: The love and faith who was born at Christmas was a love and a faith who was baptized by John in the Jordan. and a love and a faith who was good and strong and powerful, even at the end of his rope, a love and a faith who offers life even in the emergency room at three o’clock in the morning, a love and a faith who walked all the way to Calvary with the assurance of God’s favor. He was a love and a faith who laid down his own life for his friends, and who was raised by God on the third day, a love and a faith who can save regardless of circumstance and culture. That’s the love and faith who was born of Mary, and of God, at Christmas, and who beckons us to follow.

That’s good news. It’s news that only God has to offer, and God’s Church is the place where we hear it.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.