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Jesus: our pattern for human dignity for the third millennium
Reflections on the lessons for the Last Sunday after Pentecost
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Ezekiel 34:11-17
1 Corinthians 15:20-28
Matthew 25:31-46
Psalm 95:1-7
One of the things I do in working out my own faith in and in trying to be a good priest and preacher in this congregation has to do with dismantling the strange ideas you and I seem to be carrying around from Sunday School.
So, whadddaya do?
Break the chain?
Throw out the pattern of Christian education we've been following for 150 years?The Sunday School Movement, after all, is not
all that old!Just keep on, I guess.
Give the kids coloring sheets
and picture cards and key words and ideas.
And hope for the best.
This strikes me most keenly when I hear the reading from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (15:20-28):
In fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.
But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.
The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For "God has put all things in subjection under his feet."
But when it says, "All things are put in subjection," it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him.
When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.
Jesus had to become a human being
because Adam and Eve sinned.
Right?
God waited around for a few centuries to see if human beings
could right the boat
and sail on back to the Garden of Eden.
But we only got worse.
So, finally, Jesus had to come and go through a heck of a
lot of trouble to clean up our act.
Or so I heard in Sunday School.
I admire Paul.
Deeply.
Not every one of his conclusions.
But I admire him for
his brilliance,
his political savvy,
for lots of things.
Nothing less than for his lifelong
emotional and intellectual effort to come to deeper and
deeper understanding
of what the Incarnation means:
WHAT IT MEANS THAT GOD WANTED TO BE ONE OF US.
Maybe that's the Sunday School problem:
So very many of us were given the tools
to follow Paul's lead,
But we didn't keep on honing them,
and so we remain spiritual seven-year-olds
in many ways.
STUCK!
Do you remember Winnie the
Pooh?
When Winnie was stuck in the doorway of Rabbit's house one
time he was stuck so tightly we couldn't even sigh.
And a big tear rolled down his cheek.
And Pooh thought for a minute, and made a small request
Not for still more honey.
Not to call 911.
But for a little favor:
"Would you be so kind,"
Pooh asked Rabbit,
"as to read from a Sustaining Book
such as would help and comfort
a Wedged Bear in a Great Tightness?"
I think lots of people are wedged
in a great tightness.
Between a strange kind of religion that's often hard to
understand
and harder still to embrace.
And the notion that somewhere
maybe farther down the road
there is something sustaining and comforting.
But how do I get there?
The church is much to fault for
this predicament:
We can see Paul
and see Jesus
and see many people right here with us
who have continued their search
for a mature faith in the midst of this life.
But the church keeps fostering
or at least not truly challenging
a lot of fairly damaging stuff
widely and popularly held,
when there has always been better food for God's people
right at hand.
The garden-variety Christian myth most of us walk around with is in direct contradiction with the world as we know it.
Were we created perfect?
Did we then destroy our perfection with willful sin
and fall into depravity?
Requiring God to lure us back with a bloody human sacrifice?
Is the story of humankind a sharp
fall from perfection
followed by a long slow stagger back upward?
Or, is the story more like what we
see in nature?
Darwin wrote about it.
A story of creation moving slowly upward and onward
toward newer and better places,
bigger and better ideas.
Actually, both concepts have been in mainstream Christianity from the very beginning.
People (and Sunday Schools?)
just seem to get the first theory across better
-- or maybe it has tended to stick in our minds more.
But the Christian image of a great
human journey forward
on from point-to-point
not so much toward God
as along with God
is there for the taking.
One very important theologian and philosopher you might not know much about was John Duns Scotus. That's has fancy Latin name. It means John, from the village of Duns in Scotland. He was born in the 1260s and died about 1310 or so. Scotus wrote "the Word of God is not become flesh because Adam and Eve sinned, but because from all eternity God wanted Christ to be creation's most perfect work."
Words and pictures really mater.
They change the way people see the world
and that's just as good as changing the world,
just the same thing,
the Bible says.
You won't hear me making a big
deal
about the turn of the millennium.
But the last Sunday after Pentacost
was also the last Sunday of the church year.
And we're only weeks away from a really monumental time
shift in our culture.
Maybe, now is a good time to
suggest
that a shift in the way the church,
and the way each individual,
views the way God rules over creation might be in order.
If God came to be one of us
and be united with us
because both God's journey and ours
had to come to the right place in history
to come together in a new way,
then the central figure in that union,
JESUS,
looks much better to me.
Embracing a more mature,
a more natural,
a more practical spirituality
that sees Jesus,
not as a sacrificial victim for our sins,
but as a blueprint and a pattern for human dignity
will get God's people off to a good start
on our third millennium
of God made flesh and dwelling among us.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.