And Who Do We Say You Are?

A sermon by Doug Federhart
For Spirit of the Lakes UCC
Sunday, April 20, 2008

Text : John 14:1-14

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

Contemporary Readings :

For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it

Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;

The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent,

Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;

And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)

“For the Time Being” ll. 153-157

T.S. Eliot, writing in the “Little Giddings” section of his Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning…

Quick now, here, now always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well…

Please pray with me: Loving God, source of both mystery and revelation, ambiguity and clarity, guide these words this morning, that they may help open our eyes, ears and hearts to you, that we may understand more deeply who you are, and what Christ can mean for us. Amen.

_________________________________________________

Well, here we are, with today's gospel reading, right in the thick of it!

Lucky for me – there are many rooms in the “Father's” house—because there's enough material in this text to fill quite a few of them. …But perhaps of most concern for me is this: is there a room for doubt ?

Because when I encounter this text, my first response to the apparent exclusivity of it – to the “one and only” nature of the sequences of I AM statements, is: “I don't think so.” If you are one kind of Christian, this text delights you, because it confirms your most deeply-held belief that, no matter what the question, Jesus is the answer. But if you're another kind of Christian, then this passage no doubt disturbs you on one level or another, and you hear it with a feeling of mild, to moderate, to severe discomfort. Or at the very least, you're puzzled by it. And, woe to you if you're not really Christian at all; for you, this “good news” is very bad news, indeed – unless you simply dismiss the whole thing out-of-hand, because it sounds so patently ridiculous that you don't even bother with it in the first place. (Interestingly enough, the majority of people currently on the planet probably fall in this last group…)

But if we pay any attention at all to ourselves as one of those “peoples of the book,” (along with the Muslims and the Jews), then we can't just shrug our collective shoulders and say, in the style of good old Emily Latella, “Oh, well… never mind! ”

You remember Emily – the classic SNL character Gilda Radner used to do? – that hard-of-hearing commentator who always got it all mixed up? I can just imagine opinionated old Emily responding to what she thinks she heard as this passage was read: I have the whey, the vermouth, and the wife… and she goes off on one of her rants: “What's all this I hear about whey , and vermouth ? What is that man trying to tell us, anyway? And that poor wife, who only has those ingredients to cook with? I think that's just terrible – isn't he giving her enough money for groceries, for mercy's sake? That's just wrong !” Until, of course, Jane Curtain interrupts her, and with careful enunciation makes it clear for Emily what was really said – to which, Emily sits up in her chair, gives Jane a somewhat confused and unappreciative look and says: “ Oh well, never mind !”

For this morning, I've decided I do mind, and so I'm choosing the route of not dismissing the passage, but of diving on in.

I'll make a few things very clear right from the start: first, I take not just John's gospel, but the whole of the Bible, seriously , but not literally . I suspect that here, in this place, I am not alone in this. And historically, the notion that what's there on the page has to be accepted as the literal “word of God” is a very modern way of looking at the text; probably all of you already know that biblical literalism is a strange and recent development. But personally, I don't need the Book to be either literal, or inerrant – not that that makes me somehow more enlightened than those who look there for ultimate answers; but it does make me different from them, that's for sure.

Second, I believe that in the late additions to that work, in what we often call the “new testament,” very little that is attributed to Jesus, is actually anything Jesus himself said. So all the “I am this,” and “I am that” statements that pop up a lot in John – I don't believe Jesus actually said them. But I do believe that the writer of this gospel very much did need to put those words in Jesus' mouth. So right there, maybe would be a good place to end this sermon – but again, that's a little too “Emily-like” and doesn't give us a chance to engage the questions.

And third, I do find truth here, in these very passages – albeit a very different truth than what John's author perhaps assumed I would – but more on that shortly.

Let me say a bit about where I've come from, to arrive at this point today. For about ten years, from the age of 18 to 28, I had no use for Jesus, nor for the religion that subsequently emerged after he was killed. As is the case with so many of us who have come to identify ourselves as queer, I faced what seemed to be a choice in my teenage years: either I fought to reject my emerging gay identity and stay in the church, or I integrated that identity and rejected the church. I chose the second path – though, ironically, even in those years where I had no use any more for Christianity and the church, I was often employed as a church organist; so I was never as far away from church as I felt .

It was in my late 20s – 27, to be exact – when I came face to face with the serious trouble I was in mentally, physically and emotionally around my alcohol and marijuana use, and began my life as a recovered alcoholic. I've told parts of that somewhat boring story before, here in this place and from this same spot. But one piece of it I want to share again this morning, because it has direct bearing on how I've come to understand this scripture for today. So bear with me…

Sometimes our awakening to the possibilities of living the spiritual life happen gradually; sometimes they happen suddenly. For me, the awakening was sudden: I had decided I was “ready” to take the third step of my recovery program – which reads: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood [God].” And on a summer night in 1977, after my partner John was in bed asleep, I went out to the kitchen of the house we'd built with the intention of “doing the Step.” I didn't really know how to do it, but in the A.A. “Big Book,” there are a few sentences of instruction, plus a recommended prayer that many people have found useful. So I more or less “got centered” and proceeded to write out the prayer – which, by the way, is a very old-fashioned sort of prayer, given that it was written for the book in the late 1930s, before we paid any attention to inclusive language, or expanded ideas of God.

Anyway, the prayer goes like this (several of you probably already know it): “God, I offer myself to Thee, to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will…” It goes on, but that's what I began writing in my journal. And as I did, a deep feeling of surrender began to well up in me. My eyes filled with tears, and I couldn't see to finish writing the prayer, so I reached over and turned off the kitchen light and just put my head down on my arms on the table.

And almost as soon as I did that, I became aware that the room was getting lighter – somehow, in the middle of the night, it seemed like the sun was coming up in that room. I was afraid to open my eyes, but I “knew” that the source of the light was coming from over near the doorway between our kitchen and the dining room –and it kept “growing”, getting brighter, till the whole room was aglow.

For a few seconds, I was scared – what on earth was happening? Was I having a drug-related flashback? But I'd been clean and sober then for about three months…But before the fear could really take hold, I began to feel something else entirely—that I was in the presence of some mystery beyond comprehension, yet completely emanating love. I felt nothing but love – and knew in that instant that I was thoroughly and totally accepted, and completely loved .

I have little idea as to how long the experience lasted – probably only a minute or two, five at most; but in reading and hearing about such experiences since then, one common part of them is that there is no sense of time, nor really of “self”—you feel “lifted” outside of time, and Self. And it was almost three years before I ever talked of the experience with anyone else—I simply had no context for it, nor any language that seemed to make sense—which does make sense, since these encounters are, at their core, “extra-sensory.”

From that moment forward, my life has taken a radically different course than the one I expected. The power of the experience has faded over the years, but the results have actually gotten stronger, as has my understanding of it. In recent years, I have come to speak of it in several ways: first, it was a mystical experience that came unbidden but needed; second, the “light” I felt I now recognize as the Christ Light ; an third, from that moment on, I was healed of my alcoholism and have not found it necessary to ever drink again. I won't take this time now to say more about how I “know” all this; what I will say more about in a moment is the Christ Light part of this, and how that has bearing for me in relation to understanding John's gospel.

As most of you know, that new path led me here to the Twin Cities, to attend seminary. Imagine the shock when I began my studies and realized that at a Christian seminary, there was this strange idea that you'd in fact be a Christian—and I didn't know at that point if I was or wasn't. So as we encountered first the Old Testament, and then the New, and as we went through the rigorous process of Christian Ethics and Constructive Theology (which was for me as much de constructive as it was constructive), I had to make attempts at articulating my beliefs. When I entered seminary, I had what we would call a “high” view of the human, and a low-to-nonexistent Christology; nowadays, I find myself surprised to say I have a fairly “high” Christology, and a pretty “low” view of the human. (You can't work for our state's major GLBT organization for over twelve years, and come away with a very high view of the human…I'm not criticizing, just reporting.)

I finished seminary back in 1984, leaving with an Master of Divinity degree in hand and a secret in my heart—the secret being this: that I did not believe Jesus to be any more “divine” than the rest of us, and that he was not the “be-all, end-all” in terms of Christ; in fact, I had this idea that I suspected might be heretical that through Jesus' death, the Christ Spirit he so fully embodied was somehow released—set free—to be available to all.

Well, with degree in hand and that secret at heart, I began what I assumed would be the fairly short walk to ordination. But here I am, almost twenty-five years later, still in the discernment process around that! And a big part of my ambivalence and hesitation around ordination has been this big question: am I Christian enough to be an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ ? Because it would seem fairly obvious that if I were to be authorized for that ministry, I would, in good conscience, have to be able to embrace some of our basic beliefs about Jesus and the Christ. (Now I am coming to know that, among our UCC clergy, there is a tremendous variety of understandings about the whole Jesus/Christ question, and that, in my “room of doubt,” I have a lot of very good company.)

And one of my companions in that “room of doubt” is Marcus Borg, professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University , and author of The Heart of Christianity and the bestselling Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. And, I would add, one of the seventy-six scholars who make up The Jesus Seminar, a group devoted to the improving biblical and religious literacy by (as they say) “making the scholarship of religion available and accessible to the general public.” (My kind of people!)

I want to quote a couple of sections from Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time . He writes this about his own days in seminary, where he first encountered the conclusion of nearly all biblical scholars that the gospel of John is nonhistorical, and that none of the words that gospel writer puts in Jesus' mouth were very likely actually spoken by him.

“I learned that the portrait of Jesus in John's gospel was essentially one of the Christ of faith, and not the Jesus of history. Jesus never spoke of himself as the Son of God, as one with God, as the light of the world, as the way, the truth, and the life, and so forth…

“[My} image of Jesus as divine savior…was basically drawn from the later portions of the gospel tradition—largely from John's gospel, supplemented by the birth stories in Matthew and Luke. [In Mark, the oldest of the gospels, there is no birth narrative—we jump right in at the baptism story and the beginning of Jesus' public ministry.] I saw John as containing a distorted image of Jesus, an image I had spent years trying to believe in. I would have been happy to have John excised from the New Testament.”

But as Borg continued his struggles and his scholarly inquiry, he had, in his mid-thirties, what he calls “a number of experiences of ‘nature mysticism'” that were marked by “radical amazement,” moments of transformed perception where he saw the earth as “filled with the glory of God” and shining with a radiant presence. (Those specific descriptive phrases, Borg found in the writings of Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel. ) And over time, integrating those mystical experiences, Borg began recognize that there are at least two important ways of looking at Jesus: what he calls the pre-Easter Jesus , who is Jesus as a figure of history before his death, and the post-Easter Jesus , sometimes also called the Christ of faith , which is the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience. How I wish Dr. Borg had been writing ten years earlier—it would have saved me from a lot of Christological anxiety back in 1982 and '83!

So Borg's own relationship to John's gospel changed as his own experience grew, to where he could then write:

“The anger I felt toward John when I first learned it was not an accurate portrayal of the historical Jesus has been replaced by a deep appreciation. To use the great ‘I am' statements that run throughout John to illustrate this point, why would the early Christian community out of which John's gospel comes portray Jesus as saying about himself, ‘I am the light of the world.' ‘I am the bread of life,' ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life,' if Jesus did not speak that way about himself? I now see the answer: this is how they experienced the post-Easter Jesus. For them, the post-Easter Jesus was the light that led them out of the darkness, the spiritual food that nourished them in the midst of their journey, the way that led them from death to life.

“That is, John's gospel is a powerful testimony to the reality and significance of the post-Easter Jesus, the living Christ of Christian experience. John's gospel is ‘true,' even though its account of Jesus' life story and sayings is not, by and large, historically factual.”

I incorporate these extensive passages here because they save me a lot of need to explain what it is I, too, now believe, and how I approach biblical material, particularly John's gospel.

Now: just this past week, when I was “person-ing” a table over at the Capitol during OutFront Minnesota 's justFair Lobby Day, my table-mate was our own Michael Bayley, and I shared with him that I'd be preaching today, and that I'd chosen to stick with the lectionary. We got into a brief discussion about how we reacted to this text—and Michael shared his own view that these words call us to be like Christ, to live and act with love, compassion, and with justice. (This is my paraphrasing—my apologies, Michael, if I didn't get it exactly right.)

But his words have prompted me to expand this a bit, and this is what I want to close with today—this short reflection on what my experience of the Christ has been, and continues to be.

After that first mystical event in my life, but before I really identified it as an experience of the Christ presence, I was part of starting a Dignity chapter down in Iowa —Dignity/Siouxland, which a small group of us funded in 1978. And connected with that, a radical gay priest friend who was involved, began offering a “home mass” for us a couple times a month. (Of course, he got in trouble, and the local bishop had a fit…but that's a whole other story.) But in the setting of people's living rooms, when we shared the bread and cup of the Eucharist together, I began to realize that I really felt a real “presence” there with us, a spiritual energy in the room, whenever we said those words and took those actions. And after I made the move here, and joined the Dignity/Twin Cities, which met in those days at the Newman Center on the U of M campus—well, the experience continued for me, in an even deeper way when we came forward and circled the altar there in the sanctuary, a rag-tag band of faith-filled queers standing there, as certain fundamentalists would say, “unashamed of the gospel of Christ.” But at those Friday evening rituals, which happened twice a month—again with various renegade priests officiating, again the feeling was there, and overwhelming. I had no idea I was so hungry .

So as I reflect on those beginnings, and on where my life has gone since then, what would I say now if I were walking around Lake Calhoun with Jesus, and he asked, “Who do you say that I am?”

First, before I answered him, I'd stall for time and suggest that we stop over at the marina area by the north end of the lake, and get some fish at that great little walk-up stand there…And when he persisted, I would have to say, “I think you are the Christ—that you are the fullest expression of the Christ Spirit that I have ever met—but not the last Word on the matter.”

“What makes you say that?” he would ask as he sampled some of my fries. “What do you know about the Christ Presence, anyway?”

And I would tell him of my experience in 1977, of how that Presence filled the kitchen with light that permeated my whole being, and how I was healed that night, and didn't even realized it till years later. And I would tell him of the experience at the Franciscan Retreat Center, down in Prior Lake, in 1981, when I “saw” out in moonlit woods, the web of creation—how all the tree branches and the autumn undergrowth was shining with the light of creation….

And I would tell him about traveling with numerous friends, in their last days as they died from AIDS-related illnesses, and as they became angels with one foot on earth, and the other in heaven—how they shone with an evanescent energy of being, even in their dying…

And I would confess to my own baffling times where some “better self” came forth to forgive someone who had deeply hurt me—like my own father—and with whom an entirely new relationship, free of old baggage, had miraculously emerged…or how the burden of resentment I'd felt toward an enemy had somehow evaporated, when I wasn't even working at getting rid of it…

And I would tell him that I know the Christ spirit when I gather in a circle with other people, around a simple table, be it in a kitchen or a living room or a church, to remember his particular life and his acts of amazing and nonjudgmental love—how when we take actions in remembrance of him, we ourselves are lifted outside our own petty limitations, and we become this mysterious body that can radiate love to all around us, and become (as the Psalmist describes it) a blessing to all—

And I would look up, hesitant to meet his eyes and fearing that my answers were ridiculous and inadequate. But I would find him gone—or at least, no longer there in his physical form, and I would realize that what he left behind was that very Christ light that I have so often experienced…

And I would have to admit, if that makes me a “Christian,” then that's what I am. And I would have to admit, this sounds even to my own ears, like a fairly high Christology—which is not how I ever expected to end up. I have experienced what T.S. Eliot described in those lines we heard read earlier:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

So is that where we are? Come so far around that we are back where we started? I cannot, nor should I attempt to, answer that question for our whole community. But I can say that even with my work life that now takes me away from this beloved community on most Sundays, I hear the news from afar, that the Spirit of Christ is very much alive, and well, at Spirit of the Lakes. And that, for all of us, is good news, very good news indeed.

I close with these words, again from Marcus Borg:

“Now I no longer see the Christian life as being primarily about believing. The experiences of my mid-thirties led me to realize that God is and that the central issue of the Christian life is not believing in God or believing in the Bible or believing in the Christian tradition. Rather, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit. And a Christian is one who lives out his or her relationship to God within the framework of the Christian tradition.”

Amen.

Gospel Reading

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Today, we read from John's gospel, chapter 14, verses 1-14. We have intentionally left the text in its non-inclusified form. Imagine, if you will, what this may have sounded like, and felt like, to the community who first heard it.

Contemporary Readings

Sunday, April 20, 2008

We read two excerpts from poetic works today, the first from one of our great gay saints, W.H. Auden, who wrote these lines in his long work, For the Time Being.

For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it

Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;

The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent,

Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;

And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)

“For the Time Being” ll. 153-157

And in a similar vein, come these mystical ideas from Auden's compatriot, T.S. Eliot, writing in the “Little Giddings” section of his Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning…
Quick now, here, now always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well…

Marcus J. Borg in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), p. 11.

Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951).

Op. cit., pp. 16-17.

Borg, ibid., p. 17.