GreggTownsley.com

The Jesus Wars 3/5/06

At The Gathering in Forest Grove, Oregon
Mark 8:27-30

I’ve been a collector of books about Jesus for I don’t know how long. It’s not a religious thing, to be sure—these last many years I’ve tried to be a bit more “worldly” than I was able to be as a Presbyterian clergyman, which is an instructive and inspirational story that I’ll save for another day—it’s been a curiosity thing between Jesus and me. And it has cost me a good deal more in books and bookshelves than any sane pastor or person should ever spend.
Truth be told, it all started with a grey Samsonite briefcase. If you’re old enough, you remember the brand. Hard plastic, about four or five inches in width, with a place for three of your initials and a combination lock too clever to be fooled with, the Samsonite company used to have a television commercial—I’m speaking some 15 or 20 years back—where a gorilla would jump up and down on one suitcase or another to prove how strong the company’s plastic products were.

I have no experience with gorillas, you understand—save seeing a short film or two about Jane Goodall or viewing a gorilla or two at the zoo—but I can tell you that Samsonite products don’t do well at all when they are tumbling from the top of a 1978 White Chevrolet station wagon, three red vinyl seats all the way back, weaving its way down Route 50 from Placerville, California on its way to Sacramento. You might call my favorite Samsonite memory an explosive one to be sure—“Honey, you’re going to get those suitcases, aren’t you?” my first wife said as clothes, camping gear and toiletries scattered themselves down a quarter mile of a very, very, very busy highway—but I digress.

When I first became a Christian—which is to say, when I first became curious about Jesus and began to follow his teachings in my own life, or try to anyway—I packed a grey briefcase of books to each church youth group meeting I was attending. I was a traveling library of sorts, that’s how important my books were to me—a mere suitcase full when I first began my Christian walk, many years later, when I was called as Associate Pastor for Youth and New Life at the First Presbyterian Church, in York, Pennsylvania, it was to my library—now significantly larger than a Samsonite briefcase—that the two other curious clerics of the church would come to research a sermon or prepare for a Bible study. I have to admit that it was a significant source of pride for me to watch the Head Pastor of the 1,800 member church I served bow his head in order to enter the youth minister’s hovel so as to search out a book, sermon outline, or other piece of information. Though I never made much of it, Dr. Galloway’s frequent groveling amidst “the stacks” in the youth ministry office was a constant source of joy and satisfaction to me. He had me beat in just about every other aspect of ministry skill or machination.

Fact is, when it comes to books about Jesus, and other related spiritual people and things, I like having or knowing what other people need to have or know when it comes to issues of faith. In my previous life, I weathered more than a few building battles over this blessing. “Can’t you just give a few books away?” “What do you need with all these books anyway?” You get the point, but the collection endured. In large part because of my curiosity and the interest of other people who want to know something more about the Christian faith, and particularly about Jesus.

Jesus holds our interest.

Fact is, for Christians and non-Christians alike, no other person in the history the world has had so extraordinary a status. And I’m not talking about mere bookshelves. Marcus Borg, one of the clearer and newer voices in the study of Jesus, and a professor at Oregon State University, details why.

“Within a few decades of his death, stories were told about his miraculous birth. By the end of the first century, he was extolled with the most exalted titles known within the religious tradition out of which he came…Within a few centuries he had become Lord of the empire which had crucified him.”

“For over a thousand years thereafter, he dominated the culture of the West: its religion and devotion, its art, music and architecture, its intellectual thought and ethical norms, even its politics. Our calendar affirms his life as a dividing point in world history. On historical grounds alone, with no convictions of faith shaping the verdict, Jesus is the most important figure in western (and perhaps human) history.”

Jesus is just that interesting.

Take your average erudite individual, spiritually minded or otherwise, who prides him or herself on his or her knowledge of history and culture, and it would be hard to imagine that person not having an opinion about Jesus. Google the Internet about Jesus—can you believe that word is now a verb?—and you come up with a little more than 24 million “hits.” Google the same question for Mohammed or Buddha—religious leaders known and appreciated in their own right and for their own, and if I may say good, reasons—and you have only a tenth as many.

What’s that about?

While we’re speaking about the media, and before you jump to any conclusions, let me share with you one of the more surprising pieces I’ve seen written about Jesus of Nazareth in recent years. From Popular Mechanics, the December 2002 issue entitled, “The Real Face of Jesus.” The cover touted a subhead that read, “Forensic Science Reveals the True Image of Jesus.” Arguing that what followed was more impressive than the latest Shroud research, the author noted that British scientists, assisted by Israeli archeologists, had re-created the “most accurate image of the most famous face in human history.”

Story goes that a retired medical artist from the University of Manchester in England, Richard Neave, has adapted the very specialized field of forensic anthropology—usually used to solve the most difficult of crimes—in order to shed light on the physical appearance of the Rabbi from Nazareth. You might be interested to know that an expert in forensic anthropology needs a working knowledge of genetics, human growth and development, primatology (the study of primates), paleoanthropology (the study of primate and human evolution), human osteology (the study of the skeleton), as well as much simpler fields—to me anyway—like nutrition and dentistry, in order to reconstruct the face of a famous personage. Over the last couple of decades, Neave has rebuilt dozens of famous faces, including Phillip the Second of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great, and King Midas of Phrygia, who in my deeper knowledge of such things—I kid of course—I thought was only a myth! “If anyone could create an accurate portrait of Jesus,” the article boasts, it would be Neave.”

If you saw the issue—it just totally my grabbed attention, I’m not a regular reader of men’s magazines, except on the newsstands, and to be frank, with two teenage girls sometimes in the house I’m more likely to be caught reading Seventeen or Young and Modern—you’ve got to know that the resulting image of Neave’s mysterious machinations was a hybrid of the retiring tenor Luciano Pavarotti and a Neanderthal man! It just didn’t appeal to me, if you know what I mean. But who am I to say? And what is it about Jesus that commands such interest and respect?

What we make of Jesus is important.

Well, what I want to argue these next few weeks together—and you’ll note in tonight’s worship folder what that we’re meeting on Sunday nights throughout Lent, pausing on Palm Sunday to evaluate where we are with our Sunday night Gatherings, and dark on Easter Sunday for family or other frivolities—is that the answer to the question “who is Jesus?” isn’t nearly as important as “what do you make of Jesus?” The answer to the question isn’t nearly as important to me, and I believe to you too, if I may suggest, as your answer. Let me tell you why.
One of the books I most value in my home library is a small, out-of-print paperback, titled One Hundred Portraits of Christ. It’s the kind of book that I imagine conservative Christians might read, and not being one, it’s sometimes hard for me to remember or imagine, but still. The author, Colonel Henry Gariepy, Editor-in-Chief of the Salvation Army’s national publications, is, in addition to being a prolific writer and busy church leader, an active devotional speaker.

Now, I don’t know the man, and I surely don’t mean any disrespect by the following comment, but having read the book, I’m certain that Gariepy is a one-way kind of guy when it comes to appreciating Jesus. Lots of religious conservatives are, and I have no problem with that, except when conservative voices—and most often in The Jesus Wars, it is the most conservative or evangelical of voices that behave this way.

Gariepy writes, “How astonishing it is that we can know Jesus” and despite the differences in our faith walks, I agree.

“We visit the great museums of the world and see the work of specialists, men [and women] who devote their lives to special fields of knowledge. One learned professor will give years to the study of mammals, another to the study of birds, another to marine life, and another to that of insects. Another will devote his [or her] life to the study of history, and yet another to astronomy. The knowledge of the naturalist, the historian, the astronomer, may in due time become outdated. But the knowledge of Jesus Christ is of infinite value and timeless. It is profitable for this world and the world to come.”

Again, I agree.

But what I want from Gariepy and others like him—and I say this out of concern for my own developing spirituality as well as yours, if I were to personally encourage you to remain honest in your own spiritual practice—is the awareness that Jesus has “10,000 faces,” if you will. I borrow here from a common Hindu mythology in order to make this point. Hindus don’t have 10,000 gods, as some Christians and other monotheists often argue. Hindus—the rich and spiritual side of the Hindu religion if I may characterize the Hindu faiths this way—believes that God has a multitude of faces.

Don’t you agree?

If we don’t allow ourselves to see all of them—and by this let me be more personal here—if we don’t allow ourselves to see your picture of Jesus, my picture of Jesus, and my neighbor’s image of Jesus, then perhaps we don’t see Jesus at all.

That’s how amazing Jesus is. And that’s how powerful the process of coming to know Jesus is, too.

The modern quest to know more about Jesus has produced many portraits of the man.

Recent years have been a busy time for the Jesus business in America, don’t you think?

Conservative churches like Henry Gariepy’s, more liberal churches like the UCC denomination and others like it, as well as scholarly academies like our seminaries and seminars, have set the world ablaze with interest in this simple man from Galilee.

Speaking of the quest for the historical Jesus, and by that I mean the Jesus of history as over against the Jesus of faith, the contemporary search for Jesus has taken on many faces in more recent years. A conservative Roman Catholic scholar, Luke Timothy Johnson, describes the movement well when he writes:

“Indeed one of the great moments in twentieth century New Testament scholarship was Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), which traced the efforts of scholars since the late eighteenth century to determine the historical character of Jesus’ ministry. The first quest was followed by a much quieter ‘Second Quest’ in the 1960s. The Jesus Seminar likes to think of itself as the vanguard of the ‘Third Quest.’”

The more recent quest to know more about the Jesus of faith and history is now quite familiar to us, given the quality of television, books and other media.

I’ve particularly appreciated the work of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, and who are perhaps the two most dominant voices in the contemporary Jesus debate. Despite their sometimes challenging conclusions—and I say that to you to give you permission to believe what you need to believe and wonder about the things you still want to wonder about—the sometimes gentle scholars of a new and progressive Christian faith have helped me to see Jesus in a new, more powerful and more personal way. And perhaps that—as I’m suggesting tonight, that struggle to personalize and incorporate, that very important and personal movement of the human spirit—is very much the point.

I grew up in the Presbyterian Church. I was baptized, as an infant, in the Woodland Avenue Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and was raised and nurtured in the Marple and Manoa Presbyterian churches in the Philadelphia suburbs. But I found Jesus in a more personal or meaningful a way when campus student movements challenged my way of thinking in high school, and again in college.

Let me pause to say that many Christian thinkers would say that it is more appropriate to affirm that Jesus found me, and in my own case—adrift in the senseless sea of adolescence, save for a book here or there, or the influence of a Christian leader or friend—that’s how it felt. Cutting through or building on the years of Sunday school, finally making some sense of the sermons, developing a hunger and a discipline for Bible study, prayer, Christian fellowship, or the other practices of a mature Christian faith happened in large part because of my personal search to make Jesus more relevant in my personal and community life. And that is the point of religious devotion, isn’t it? Not what do I know, nor what is preached, taught or told to me, but what I, and the community I belong to, do and feel and practice.

I remember a comment by a former member of staff at the Valley Community Presbyterian Church in Portland, where I last served for six years and ultimately stepped down as Pastor and Head of Staff, who told about a cartoon she had seen that sketched a little boy attempting to lead a huge Saint Bernard dog on a leash. Now, if you have a dog of any size or condition, you know how big a deal, so to speak, this is. And how painful it can be. Our sixty-five pound Australian Shepherd is a real bear to follow when she is pulling at the leash. Well, this dog was dragging the boy along behind him, obviously in a different direction from which the boy wanted to go, until at one point, the young guy braced his feet and turned to the dog, and angrily shouted, “Let’s get this straight! You are my dog. I am not your boy!”

That’s how it was for me back then. Prior to responding to Jesus in some personal way, prior to knowing Jesus in some more intimate way, prior to making sense of the prophet from Nazareth in some more faith-filled and feeling way, I was dragging Jesus around on a leash. I took Jesus to church. I took Jesus home again. I let Jesus into my checkbook. I let Jesus out again. If there was someplace where I wanted to go that I didn’t think Jesus wanted to go or something that I wanted to do that I didn’t think Jesus wanted to do, I let Jesus go his own way without me. Control has been a constant struggle in my life. But in the life of devotion—particularly Christian devotion as I’m most acquainted with it—that’s not how it is supposed to be. I know today that it’s Jesus who drags and drives me around, and not the opposite case.

Eating and Drinking with Jesus

So over these next few weeks together in Lent, and perhaps over these next many months together as a part of our Sunday night Gatherings, we’ll be conducting a search for the person or expression of God that I believe is also—at least in the Christian side of my mind—looking for us, too. We’ll visit ancient texts from the Christian scriptures that address the question that Jesus asks in tonight’s scripture reading, “Who do people say that I am?” We’ll watch pieces of a couple of films. And listen to a great many opinions, Christian and otherwise. And in the end, we’ll come to a place—God willing, don’t you know—where we can answer the question, “Who do you say that I am?” in a way that is far more personal than some of us are used to. And that’s good.

“No two people know quite the same things about Jesus or see him in quite the same way,” writes evangelical pastor Calvin Miller, in his introduction to a delightful book entitled The Book of Jesus: A Treasury of the Greatest Stories and Writings about Christ.

“The children’s Christmas carol speaks volumes about our highly individualistic vision of Jesus: “Some children see him bronzed and brown, the Lord of heaven to earth come down…Some children see him lily white, the baby Jesus born this night.” Some see him as a judge, coming to scourge the nations. Others see him primarily as a lover of children. Scholars tend to see him in scholarly ways. Poets see him more poetically. Preachers see him as a preacher, teachers as a teacher. Carpenters like remembering he was one of them.”

Miller says, “This towering Jesus, while rooted firmly in the scripture, is finished only in…individual hearts of those who believe.”

Who do you say that he is, as we eat and drink together?

There is a silly children’s story about a group of animals that might help me make a point. They decided to have a football game and the big problem was that no one could tackle the rhinoceros. One of the biggest animals in the forest, and formidable, once he got a head of steam, he was capable of horning his way each and every time to a touchdown. Sure enough, it wasn’t too long before the rhinoceros caught the ball, rambled to the goal posts and racked up an early lead. The score was seven to nothing immediately. Only by keeping the ball away from the giant mammal was the opposing team able to catch up. By the end of the fourth quarter, the opposing team tied the score seven to seven. The lion tried to warn the zebra on the final kickoff not to kick to the rhinoceros. But the zebra ignored the warning. And sure enough, the rhino caught the ball and raced toward the goal line. When suddenly, out of nowhere, the ferocious creature was brought down with a vicious tackle. When the animals un-piled, it was discovered that a centipede had made the tackle.

“That was fantastic!” congratulated the lion. Suddenly, realizing that he hadn’t seen the centipede earlier, he roared, “But where were you during the rest of the game?”

The centipede replied, “I was still putting on my shoes.”

It’s a crazy kids’ story, to be sure. But I tell it because it is capable of reminding us that though we may show up to the game late—we missed the hours of Sunday School our neighbors benefited from or suffered under, we don’t have nearly the grasp as our neighbor does on spiritual things, who seems better versed or better read—still, developing the spiritual side of our spiritual selves is akin to growing the rest of our individual adult lives. In either case, getting into the game—“better late than never,” you know—is what really matters.

I don’t know where you are with respect to Jesus, and to be frank, having cast off the denominational or creedal baggage, as it’s known in the UCC denomination, some time ago, let me say that I don’t really care, save that you find something or someone to believe in. That’s how big my view of God is, and how sincere my belief is that within each of us is a hole that needs to be filled in this way. I want you to find whatever it is that you need to light your belief fires, perhaps even with the One who still calls your name even this evening. Cast your attention upon Jesus these next few weeks of Lent, and see if it or he doesn’t make all the difference. And bring your spectacles, because we’re going to be searching for Jesus together.