Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Charlotte County
"The Early Jesus Movement"
Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore October 18, 1998



Opening Words

Good Morning

Fall is finally here.
The dry weather since the hurri-couldn't,
the shorter days for the sun to cook us as it slants to the south
and the cooler air migrating down from the north
is bringing us pleasant mornings and mild evenings
to sit by the pool, with a cool drink, and watch the stars coming out.
Finally, we are reminded why we choose to live here.

How delightful it is for us to be together
as the chairs begin to fill with our seasonal residents
the social hall bustles again after the service.

Soon the fall holiday sequence begin with scary masks and trick or treat,
followed thankfully by turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie,
ending with the smell of pine, the taste of hot cider,
the twinkle of tiny lights, and the sound of carols
heralding peace on earth and good will to all.

Let us savor this moment of anticipation for it comes once a year.
Let us discover the renewing power of the subtle cycle of our seasons .
Let us appreciate the opportunity to return,

whether weekly or seasonally, to this congregation.

Everything is possible for this coming season.

Spoken and Silent Meditation

I invite you now into a time of meditative reflection.
A time to turn inward and listen to the workings of our mind
listening deeply beyond the daily noise and habitual thinking
stilling the chatter and opening to the reality beyond us
to the spirit of life in which we live, move and have our being.

Each week which passes brings untold joy and sorrow,
pleasure and pain, gain and loss, birth and death.
If we were able to feel it all, we could not bear the enormity of it all.

And in the swirl of events, some need be remembered
though they be painful to allow into our minds.
Today I ask you to remember the passing of Matthew Shepard
A 21 year old college student in Wyoming
beaten and left for dead, the victim of hate.
In the adapted words of UUA President John Buehrens:

Each hate crime is an ever louder call to continue our work to end oppression and hate and to remember that all life is sacred. As a religious voice, we [Unitarian Universalists] state strongly that violence on the basis of sexual orientation, race or gender is wrong, is evil, is reprehensible.

Our hearts go out to Matthew Shepard's friends and family, to the grieving Wyoming community, and all those who do not realize what we all lose by the death of Matthew.

While the day when

justice, equity, and compassion is the character of all people,
feels distant in times like this,
each martyr to tolerance strengthens the liberal cause.
May we all work to purify our hearts of hate and ill will.
May we have the courage to stand up for those who suffer.
May we together work to dismantle the systems of evil which oppress.

Readings (What Jesus Probably Said)

Set an example for all the world to see.

Purity and impurity is not what goes into the mouth
Purity and impurity is what comes out.

In any house that accepts you, heal their sick

share their meal --- and there is the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God comes not at some future time

You cannot point out the sign of its coming.
The Kingdom of God comes not to some special site
You cannot point out the place of its coming.
The Kingdom of God is already here, among you, now.

Forgive the debt owed by another as God forgives that owed by you.

Forgive not sevenfold but seventyfold sevenfold.

The rich get more The poor lose everything.

You buried your heart where you hid your treasure.

Only the destitute are innocent.

Love your enemy

You see the speck that is in your brother's eye,

but you do not see the beam that is your own eye.
When you take the beam out of your own eye,
then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

If someone strikes your right cheek offer your left
If someone takes your coat offer your suit
If someone forces you to go one mile offer to go another

Whosoever has ears to hear should hear.

Sermon
Jesus defines the word "enigma" for religious liberals. Because we do not accept the Trinitarian view of Jesus' divinity and see him as a great teacher, we are much more concerned with his message for humanity than we are about his immaculate birth or redemptive death. We want to know what he taught and commissioned his disciples to do.

Unfortunately, Jesus didn't leave us much to work with. Historical critical research and literary analysis of the four canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, have raised doubts about the accuracy of their accounts over the last several hundred years. The problem is the word Gospel means "good news." Gospel isn't biography though it may contain biography. It is not history though it may contain history. Gospel is good news and news needs to be updated[1]. Each author of the four canonical Gospels is telling the good news of Jesus to a specific community at a specific point in its history. That particularity shapes the content and message.

Telling the good news to our generation is John Dominic Crossan's challenge. A former Catholic monk who left his order in 1969 to marry and have scholarly independence from the Pope, Crossan is one of the foremost experts doing research on the historical Jesus and former chair of the Jesus Seminar, a gathering of scholars who took on the task of trying to discover the real Jesus hidden in the Gospels.

I was quite fortunate to be able to spend a day with him on Tuesday at our Florida Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association's fall meeting in Winter Park. Crossan, I'd guess in his early 60's, is a slender, diminutive Irish fellow with a melodious brogue. He is a gentle loving man with a wonderful disarming wit, the smile of a leprechaun, and enough charm to facilitate a delightful conversation with a challenging audience of liberally religious ministers.

The problem with recovering the historical Jesus is of course that he didn't write down his teachings. All we have of Jesus is what has been written about him by his followers years after his death. In the Bible, our earliest commentator on Jesus is Paul. If Paul had discussed the life and teachings of Jesus in his letters to the Romans or the Corinthians, we'd probably have what we need to understand Jesus. Unfortunately, This was not part of Paul's agenda. Paul cared a great deal about Jesus' death and resurrection. This was sufficient for him. It signaled the end times were at hand. If the world was about to end, there was no need to dwell on what Jesus said about living. `Believe and be saved' mattered more.

Well, the world hasn't ended. The apocalyptic approach to Jesus hasn't worked for almost 2000 years now and I doubt if it will in the 21st century either. The world continues to exist immune to revelation to the contrary.

Today we have the best potential to understand Jesus of any time, probably in history, after the passing of his original disciples. The discovery in the 1940's of scrolls from the first century have changed the face of Biblical scholarship. This new literature has helped us see that the Jesus movement was just one of many Jewish reform movements of the first century. Particularly revolutionary was the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of the sayings of Jesus which date from around 20 years after Jesus' death.

Documents which can be dated from the 50's or earlier are very important to scholars because the earliest Gospel, thought to be Mark, was written probably 20 years later.

A second important text was discovered indirectly and called Q or quelle a German word for source. A careful analysis of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, revealed Matthew and Luke must have copied from Mark. This is partly how we date the texts. The later ones absorb the earlier ones and revise them for the contemporary context. John plagerizes all three.

Strangely, Matthew and Luke share identical text that isn't in Mark. This suggested that they copied from a text which we has been lost. Undaunted, scholars have reconstructed the text from those common passages and dated it also from the 50's.

Because most biblical scholars agree that the later Gospel writers copied from the earlier ones, Crossan believes if we want to recover the historical Jesus, we must go to the earliest sources we can find. But just looking at the texts is not good enough.

Crossan's method is to understand first the historical context, as best we can, by bracketing Jesus and studying first century Jewish and Roman history, archeology and cross cultural anthropology. Through this interdisciplinary approach, we can reconstruct Jesus' world and try to understand him through first century eyes and ears. Once Crossan has a good grasp of the context, he tests it against his texts to see if they cohere.

This morning I'd like to share just a little bit of his methods and findings.

Israel before the Roman Conquest was an agrarian empire ruled by an aristocratic elite. The peasant and the aristocratic cultures rarely met except at harvest time as the higher ups collected the surplus. When the iron plow came along, the aristocrats got much wealthier but the peasants remained at subsistence levels. The only security for a peasant was the land they controlled, their family and their tribal connections.

Controlling the land is very important in peasant cultures. We find this value located in the Bible. In Leviticus (25:23) God says:

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.

You may sell everything in your home, even your body into slavery but you may not sell away your land. The land doesn't belong to the peasant -- it is sacred and belongs to God. In the worst case, if the land must be sold, in the Jubilee year it shall be returned to its original owner.

Rome operated on a very different economic scheme called commercialization. For the Romans, land wasn't a possession of God, rather it was a commodity to be traded. The way to accumulate land was, and still today is, to offer peasants loans figuring if they are in trouble this year, they will be in trouble next year. When they don't pay up, take their land as collateral. In the ancient world, being land-less took away all one's security and community identity beginning a predictable decline from free holder to tenant farmer to day laborer to beggar.

Land, food and debt are extremely important first century problems because the social dislocation of many Jewish peasants as they are borrowed off their land. The Hebrew word for these land-less peasants is the correct translation of the word "poor" as in "blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." These poor were several social rungs below the peasant class. They were lower than poor, they were the destitute.

As Crossan knows in his Irish bones, the destitute of Palestine were not confused about the source of their trouble. If someone has a boot on your neck it isn't hard to figure out who it is. The booter, on the other hand, may not be so clear about the pain and discomfort being given and their role in creating misery for others.

One of the terms Jesus used which we have a hard time understanding across 2000 years is his term, "Kingdom of God." Jesus doesn't mean it as some out of this world paradise only open to dead people. The Kingdom of God is specifically constructed as an antidote to the Kingdom of Caesar, the booter. If Jesus is God, then the Pontimus Maximus of the Roman Empire is not. To establish the Kingdom of God on earth is to disestablish the Romans.

At the center of the struggle between the Jewish and Roman ideas of divinity is the identity of God. The Roman God is a God of Power. Caesar commands legions to do his will. The Jewish God is a God of justice. Psalm 82 lays it out as the Jewish God convenes a council of the Pagan Gods and commands them:

Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
In the first century, the God of Power wins and puts the son of the God of Justice on the Cross.

There tend to be two schools of thought trying to analyze the historical Jesus. One school says pay attention to what he said. The other says pay attention to what he did. Crossan finds a happy medium between them by analyzing what Jesus said to do in commissioning his disciples. Jesus sends them out without silver, gold nor coin, without a bag to store food for the journey, without a staff for self defense, without even sandals to cover their feet. The disciples must go into the houses that accept them, heal the sick and eat with everyone who offers them food. The disciples, taking the role of the lowest of the destitute yet healing the householder peasants symbolically builds a bridge between these two groups. He gives them a uniting prayer: give us this day our daily bread, for the destitute, and: forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors, for the householder. Only the destitute can truly understand the power of the prayer for food. Only the peasants deeply understand the danger and slavery of debt in a Roman commercialized economy.

Many today miss the significance of the political content of Jesus' teaching. Crossan says we cannot understand Jesus as either religious or political. Jesus is 100% religious and 100% political. Jesus' God is the God of Justice. More than that, God IS justice. Justice IS God. The two ideas cannot be separated from each other.

Jesus is crucified not because of his philosophy but because of his program. He believed the Roman empire must be resisted. Yet Jesus wasn't a revolutionary bent on rebellion. He believed Rome must be resisted non violently by uniting the destitute and the peasant in an appeal for justice.

He wasn't successful just like many other known and unknown prophets of his time. The Jews lost three punishing wars in the next hundred years. Yet his ideas somehow took hold and grew to become the religion of Rome. The gap between what we understand of the historical Jesus and the Christian Church of Rome is enormous. In three hundred years, the man who resisted Rome paradoxically becomes the religion of Rome. In the process, the carpenter's message changed.

That story is what we will be discussing during the next four Wednesdays using the PBS video series, "From Jesus to Christ." From the very beginning there was not just one Jesus tradition but a diverse movement of followers all with different perspectives and practices.

From the very beginning, the Unitarian and Universalist faith strands begin to surface. While we cannot claim an unbroken apostolic succession from a disciple of Jesus, the ideas we cherish appeared in the early Jesus movement.

I invite you to come Wednesday afternoons at 3:30pm to explore with me roots of our religious heritage that come from the Christian tradition. While Jesus' program may be locked in the particularity of history, his message of resistance to systemic evil and non violent action speaks powerfully to us today - if we have the courage to hear him.

Copyright (c) 1998 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.


[1] John Dominic Crossan, UUA GA 98 UUCF lecture My words are largely inspired by Crossan's.