Sermon Library
“Meeting Jesus”
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
January 18, 2009
Service Theme: Epiphany II – 2009
Source: John 4: 6 – 15
Epiphany II – 2009 January 18, 2009
Meeting Jesus
John 4: 6 – 15
Gregg Anderson
The First and Foremost Purpose of Jesus
In her opening chapter of The Wisdom Jesus Cynthia Bourgeault states, “Since the mid-1980’s I’ve been a serious student of the worldwide wisdom tradition. I’ve participated in the Gurdjeiff work, in Sufism, and a bit in Vedanta and Kabbalah studies, and I’m one of the core faculty members in a wonderful new organization called the Spiritual Paths Institute in Aspen and Santa Barbara, which brings together teachers from all the great faith traditions to share insights and contemplative practice. From this wider immersion I’ve been reaffirmed in my sense that Jesus came first and foremost as a teacher of the path of inner transformation. This does not take away the Jesus you may be more familiar with – the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity – but it does add a renewed emphasis on paying attention to what he actually taught and seeing how we can begin to walk it authentically from the inside.”
Cynthia has made a profound and specific statement in this paragraph in her first chapter of The Wisdom Jesus when she states, “I have been reaffirmed in my sense that Jesus came first and foremost as a teacher of the path of inner transformation.” This sentence may seem fairly innocuous, but it is in fact, significantly significant. It affirms an instinctive, intentional, and most importantly, initial purpose of Jesus. It is ironically, a poignant distinction from the later doctrinal and orthodox definition of Jesus which developed two hundred to three hundred years after of the life and death of Jesus. What Cynthia is doing along with thousands of other religious scholars today is to discover the real Jesus during the time he lived versus the Jesus he became through doctrinal creeds and ecclesial authority many centuries after he lived.
Castles of Orthodoxy by Ron James
Today is January 18. This is the Sunday to remember Ron James. Ron James and Cynthia Bourgeault would have affirmed each other. In fact it was January, 30, in the year 2000 in which Ron James delivered one of his most memorable sermons entitled Castles of Orthodoxy. Ron stated that the history of classical orthodoxy has essentially masked and even barnacled the real essence of Jesus and Spirit. He concluded, “What is the Church? Not a castle of orthodoxy. But rather a community of the heart, gathered around Jesus to celebrate life, to ask great questions, to grow in wisdom, and to learn how to love. The letter of the law kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
Ron knew there was something much more to the life of Jesus than was traditionally taught in the Apostles and Nicene Creed. Ron knew there was something more to the life of Jesus than just believing in him for salvation and the doctrine of resurrection. Ron James wanted us to not just believe in Jesus, but to actually follow Jesus, just as Jesus asked us to. Ron said, “The more deeply we live, and the more passionately we love, and the more expansive our inner being, the closer we will be to God. Jesus taught us that much.”
Imagine Ourselves Beside the Shores of Galilee
Cynthia reminds me of a most important point which I have heard before, but have forgotten. Her particular reminding point is this - What was it about Jesus which made people fall on their knees and follow him immediately and relentlessly long before his crucifixion and proposed resurrection? This is a most important question. It has been for many years and it is significant that Cynthia reposes it for us today. We are so caught up in the post-resurrection story and mythology of Jesus’ resurrection that we forget there were actually many followers of Jesus long before such reports of virgin birth and mystical resurrection. What could this possibly mean? It means that Jesus was so engaging within himself at the time that people were compelled to follow him based on this teaching, personality, presence and persona. Surely there had to be something about this person of Jesus which attracted people to him long before any myths or stories which developed after the fact. As always, the use of the term myth does not mean fiction or something contrived. It means a story or message of great import.
Cynthia proposes, “Let’s take a wild leap and imagine ourselves beside the shores of the Sea of Galilee two thousand years ago, with absolutely no idea of how the story will turn out. A new teacher has appeared on the scene, and no one knows exactly where he came up with what he’s teaching.” “Some say, “This is the most amazing, strange, wild, true stuff I’ve ever heard.” And others say, “But wait a minute! My rabbi says that he’s breaking the law and the prophets. You’d better beware of him. He’s dangerous.”
“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks repeatedly throughout the gospels. Which really means, “Who or what in you recognizes me?” This is the crucial question. And the really key points, at this point, is that for these first disciples, the ones who first listened and said ‘yes’ to Jesus, the outcome was as yet unknown. Both crucifixion and resurrection lay ahead. How would they know that this teacher whose being was pouring into them, sometimes in spite of themselves, in the midst of the crosscurrents in their hearts, would all too soon be crucified, die, and rise again? It all lay up ahead. What caused them to say “yes” to Jesus? It must have been very different from what now, twenty centuries later, is our normal understanding of the situation. We may say “yes”
to Jesus because we know now that he is the Son of God, that he died and rose again, and that in union with him we hope to do likewise. They didn’t know this. The great question is, what and who said yes long before?
The Samaritan Woman
Cynthia said that she would like to explore this question more deeply by looking at one of the most interesting and significant people who did say yes- the Samaritan woman at the well, whose story we read in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John. To fill in a bit of the background, Samaria and Judea were adjacent Israelite kingdoms. While Samaritans and Jews were both Semitic people, descendants of the original twelve tribes of Israel, they had been at odds with each other for centuries, and Jews normally didn’t speak to Samaritans. Certainly Jewish men didn’t speak to Samaritan women. So there’s something very striking and odd in the configuration of this story to begin with. At high noon, Jesus draws up to a well in Samaria and asks a woman drawing water there for a drink of water. Here is the dialogue that ensues, found in John 4: 6 – 15:
“Jesus tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” Jesus answered he, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and flocks drank from it?’ Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty, or have to keep coming here to draw water.’”
Cynthia makes it clear, “In the gospels, all the people who encountered Jesus only by hearsay, by what somebody else believed about him, by what they’d been told, by what they hoped to get out of him; all those people left. They still leave today. The ones that remained – and still remain – are the ones who have met him in the moment: in the instantaneous, mutual recognition of hearts and in the ultimate energy that is always pouring forth from this encounter. It is indeed the wellspring.”
Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
At this point in my homily preparation, the book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time by Marcus Borg came to mind. It is an incredible title and most appropriate for the message this morning. The title alone suggests what we can do with the new research of Jesus that has been laid before us over the past fifty years. In Cynthia’s chapter entitled Jesus in Context she reminds us of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codex sixty years ago with the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, The Gospel of Mary and over forty other original texts. She also reminds us of Syriac studies which were able to scrape beneath the surface of certain later manuscripts in use among Syrian-speaking Christians in which they found a living record of oral traditions that had existed from the earliest Christian era – long before the church consolidated around its Byzantine base of orthodoxy. Further, Cynthia reminds us of the importance of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls which exposed the Essene community, a mystical Jewish sect that encamped at Qumran and undertook rigorous ascetical practices in order to prepare the Messiah’s imminent return. The importance of these writings for our understanding of Jesus is that most scholars now feel that it was in this matrix of Jewish mystical expectation and millennialist fervor that Jesus’ own sense of vocation was most immediately shaped. The discovery of these scrolls allows us to see Jesus more clearly within his own context. These are just a few monumental discoveries which allow us to really see Jesus again as if for the first time. Jesus in context is more real, more alive than Jesus in a creed.
Marcus Borg describes the traditional orthodox view of Jesus as a fideistic image which means it results as only a belief system (which is also a term used often by Ron James). The other view of Jesus, the moralistic image, sees Jesus only as a teacher. This adds another important dimension, but still does not encompass all of Jesus. Then he says, “Both [such] images, it seems are inadequate. Not only are they inaccurate as images of the historical Jesus, but they lead to incomplete images of the Christian life. That life is ultimately not about believing or about being good. Rather, as I shall claim, says Borg, it is about a relationship with God that involves us in a journey of transformation.”
Borg continues, “The understanding of the Christian life as a journey of transformation is grounded in the alternative image of Jesus that I develop in this book. This image flows out of contemporary biblical and historical scholarship. Though it may seem fresh and initially unfamiliar, it is very old, going back to the first century of the early Christian movement. Meeting this Jesus will, for many of us, be like meeting Jesus again for the first time.” (p. 3)
“Come and See”
Cynthia reminds us that Jesus was not a priest. He had nothing to do with the temple hierarchy in Jerusalem, and he kept a respectful distance from most ritual observances. His message was not one of repentance and return to the covenant. Rather, he stayed close to the perennial ground of wisdom: the transformation of human consciousness. He asked those timeless and deeply personal questions: What does it mean to die before you die? How do you go about losing your little life to find your bigger life, your true self? Is it possible to live on this planet with a generosity, abundance, fearlessness, and beauty that mirror Divine Being itself? These are the wisdom questions, and they are the entire field of Jesus’ concern.
Cynthia says, “Jesus’ response to such questions was always the same: ‘Come and see.’ In order to be able to keep him in sight, it is helpful to know where he is coming from. Within his authentic Near Eastern context he emerges as a sophisticated, fully attuned, and even cosmopolitan teacher, working in a genre that is recognized by his audience but teaching it so much more powerfully and boldly that he pulls people right up with a start. As we actually taste the flavor of what he’s teaching, we begin to see that it’s not proverbs for daily living, or ways of being virtuous. Jesus is proposing a total meltdown and recasting of human consciousness, bursting through the tiny acorn-selfhood that we arrived on the planet with into the oak tree of our fully realized personhood. Jesus pushes us toward it, teases us, taunts us, encourages us, and ultimately walks us there.”
Spiritual Paths Institute
Right after this service I am leaving for the Spiritual Paths Institute for the second semester which is entitled Transformation: Models and Maps for the Spiritual Journey. Normally, I would be looking forward to this with great expectation. But right now the timing is not the best for me. I just have too much to do here to go off to California to get transformed. And I also need just a couple days off before getting transformed. I guess this is the type of thinking that Cynthia is referring to as tiny acorn-selfhood. I have the opportunity to be engaged in a process that will undoubtedly expand this small self closer to an Oak tree awareness. I am sure once I arrive and sit with everyone tonight, I will “let go” of all the things I think I have to do and allow myself to appreciate this opportunity. And I suspect there will be “uh-huh” moments of transformation just like there always have been in the past. To transform is to take the form we have and change that form into a different form. That change can be dramatic or slight. I doubt I will come back a butterfly, but perhaps I will be able to crawl a little more lightly. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
0077 Meadowood Drive
Aspen, CO 81611
970 925 7184
http://www.aspenchapel.org