Human to Human

"Laughing Christ" by Fred Berger

My kids like to watch the online talk show, "Good Mythical Morning."  This morning my older son came downstairs and said that he'd just watched an episode that mentioned a man named Alex Mitchell.  Mitchell had some fame in his native England back in 1975.  While watching an episode of The Goodies, a British comedy troupe, he suddenly died ... apparently from laughing.  (Okay, from a rare heart condition, but it was his laughing that triggered the heart attack.)  It turns out that he wasn't the first.  There's even a Wikipedia entry -- "Death from Laughter" -- that chronicles reports of these deaths (reports of which go back as far as the 5th century BCE!).

On the other hand, it's long been said that "laughter is the best medicine," and in his famous 1985 book, Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins claimed to have "laughed himself to health," setting the stage for the modern "laughter therapy" movement.  The poet (and Unitarian!) E. E. Cummings once wrote, "the most wasted of all days is one without laughter."  As a juggler/magician/clown myself (in a previous life) I would have to concur.  It is good to laugh.  In fact, on an episode of the PBS program Nova titled, "What Makes Us Human?," one of the things lifted up was laughter.

So why does the picture above surprise so many people?  It's a picture of Jesus ... laughing.  That's not the way he is generally depicted, nor is it the way most people think of him.  Serious.  Otherworldly.  Detached yet intense.  Sorrowful.  Judgemental.  Spiritual (whatever that's supposed to look like).  These are all ways we've been taught to imagine Jesus.  But laughing?

Whatever else this Jesus was, he was a man.  Even those who affirm that he was God and man together have to agree that he was a man.  Yeshua ben Miriam.  Jesus, son of Mary.  He ate.  He slept.  (Those are both in the Bible!)  He also went to the bathroom, and bathed, and stubbed his toe, and burped, and got angry, and wept (those last two are in the Bible, too).  And if he was human, he laughed.

That might be part of the problem with thinking about Jesus laughing, that whole thinking-of-him-as-human thing.  The Jesus I was taught about in Sunday School was somehow above all of that mere-human stuff.  His hair was always neatly quaffed, his robe a brilliant white; his teeth sparkled, and despite wearing sandals in the desert his toenails were always clean.  (Maybe that's because he didn't so much walk as glide along the ground.)

Here's the thing, though -- what would such a being have to teach me?  Any lessons he could impart wouldn't be relevant to me because I live fully in this world -- the dust and dirt, blood and sweat of it.  I falter.  I fall.  I fail.  And even with the miracle of modern washing machine technology my clothes get dingy after a time.  So maybe this is one of the reasons so many people have felt the need to leave the Christian traditions -- because they intuit that this all-too-perfect God/man really has nothing to say to them ... nothing that could really apply to their own lived experiences.

And maybe that's one of the reasons he's been depicted like this.  It is likely that in the begining this gandiosity was intended to make him more relevant, more important, more trustworth.  Just as one might believe a king because he is, well, a King, so too this King of Kings should be listened to.  Yet over time this elevated status made it harder and harder to take Jesus seriously and, so, gave Christians an "out."  Perhaps if only unconsciously we were able to say, "these are good teachings, yes, profound, but not really anything I have to pay attention to because they can't be meant for me.  I'm a mere man, and he's a God-man."

Marcus Borg, Stephen Peterson, and so many others have made their careers on trying to re-introduce and reclaim the human Jesus.  (This was the intent of my first book, too -- Teacher, Guide, Companion:  Rediscovering Jesus in a Secular World.)  Because if this Jesus was a human being like me, who understood the kinds of trials I know ... then maybe his message could have meaning in my life.  Should have meaning in my life.

So it's important to me to know that Jesus laughed.  He asked his disciples to let children come to him -- and who can have a bunch of children hanging off them without laughing?  His first miracle was recorded as the turning of water into wine at a wedding.  You think he could do that without a smile on his face?  And if he could laugh, and he could cry, then maybe he could get scared, and feel alone, and worry about what to do next.  Maybe he could understand what it is to be human because he was really human too.  And when a wise human has something to say to me, something drawn directly from his own human experiences, then I don't really  have an "out."  Then it's harder for me not to listen.

One last thing -- if you are still having trouble imagining Jesus with a smile on his face, check out this collection on Pinterest.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

PS -- that bricklayer in England who died while laughing at an episode of The Goodies?  His wife wrote the group a "thank you" card, thanking them for making his last moments so enjoyable.

Twelve Little Words

I have continued to think about Marcus Borg, who died on Wednesday.  I noted in my last post that his work deeply influenced me, and I hope it was clear that this influence was both in my personal and my professional life.  I concluded by saying, "I would not be who I am today if it weren't for him."

I've been thinking about how, out of all the words of his I've read there are a dozen that were revelatory and revolutionary for me.  Of Christianity he said, "it has everything to do with taking seriously what Jesus took seriously."

Let that sink in for a minute.  To be a Christian, he is saying, has very little to do with the affirmation of certain creedal declarations.  Instead, being a Christian means "taking seriously what Jesus took seriously."  And according to the Gospel accounts, at least, he was consistently clear about what he took seriously.

In the Gospel of Luke, the 4th chapter, the story is told that after spending 40 days in the wilderness being temped by the devil, Jesus begins to preach and teach in the local synagogues.  Luke 4:14-21 gives these details:

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Proclaiming good news to the poor.  Proclaiming freedom to the prisoner and recovery of sight for the blind.  Setting the oppressed free.  Proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor.  Not a lot in there about doctrinal correctness. Not a lot about purity of belief.  He is not remembered as having said, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim that this denomination is better than that one."  Or "because he has anointed me to proclaim that some people matter more than others."  Or that, "your material success in the world is a sign of his blessings."  He doesn't even say anything about traditional vs. contemporary music in worship!

No.  He's pretty clear, and not just in this scene from Luke, either.  Re-read the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew (chapters 5, 6. and 7).  If that weren't enough, in chapter 25 Matthew depicts a now famous scene in which Jesus separates those bound from heaven from those bound for "the eternal fire."  What was his criteria?  Did you give something to eat to the hungry and something to drink to the thirsty.  Did you invite the stranger in, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner?  Again, nothing about being able to quote chapter and verse (I had to look up these references!).  Nothing about have the "right" stance on abortion or marriage equality.  If being a Christian has "everything to do with taking seriously what Jesus took seriously," then being a Christian means caring for your society's "least."  And not caring in some kind of abstract way, but in a direct, active, hands-on way.

At one point I thought that I'd given up the Christian identity I had in my childhood.  I'd become a Buddhist, an eclectic, a Unitarian Universalist.  Yet something keep tugging at me; something that hadn't let go of me even if I'd rejected it.  And it was Marcus Borg who opened my mind so that my heart could once again be touched.  "Being a Christian" didn't mean I had to get plugged back into the matrix and forget all that I had learned beyond what I'd been taught in Sunday School.  It meant, simply, looking again to the stories of Jesus -- and to the stories of the Jewish people, only in the context of which could the stories of this particular Jewish teacher make any sense.  

Yes, other people have pointed in this same direction; yes, there are other teachers.  I respect and honor them, and my heart and mind have been touched by their teachings as well.  They continue to be.  One of the great gifts of being a preacher and teacher in the Unitarian Universalist tradition is that I don't have to limit myself to only one expression of these universal truths.  But for me, in my own spiritual life, the example in the stories of Yeshua ben Miriam calls to me as does no other. 

But doesn't one have to "buy" all of the stuff that comes with the name "Christian"?  Doesn't a Christian at least have to worship Jesus as God?  Not if Borg is right.  All one needs do is "take seriously what Jesus took seriously;" all one needs to do is to look to the model Jesus offers as we try to live our own lives.  A Franciscan -- another "label" I embrace -- doesn't worship Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (known to his family and friends as "Francesco").  A Franciscan simply seeks to emulate this simple saint -- including his admonition on his death bed, "I have done what is mine to do. May Christ teach you what is yours."  The question isn't "What would Francis do?" or "What would Jesus do?"  More to the point is the question, "How will the love of God that inspired Jesus and Francis manifest itself in and through my life?  That, to me, is what makes one a Christian.  And without Marcus Borg, I would never have known that.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

R.I.P. Marcus Borg -- thanks for reintroducing me to an old friend

March 11, 1942 – January 21, 2015

The New Testament scholar and prophet of progressive Christianity, Marcus J. Borg, died yesterday at the age of 72.  I never met him, yet I wouldn't be who I am today without him.  And I know that I am not alone in having been deeply and profoundly touched by Marcus Borg's keen mind and compassionate heart without ever having any kind of direct, personal encounter.  His spirit flowed through his words, and his words reached millions.

• Jesus: A New Vision
• Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
• The God We Never Knew
• Reading the Bible Again for the First Time 
• The Heart of Christianity 
• Speaking Christian:  Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning And Power -- and How They Can Be Restored
• Evolution of the Word: The New Testament in the Order the Books Were Written 

These are just a few of the nearly two dozen books Borg wrote over the years, and through them and his prolific public speaking, he became one of the leading voices in progressive Christianity.  This is the kind of Christianity that encourages intelligent questioning, is unafraid to challenge long-standing traditions and teachings, and focuses on love and justice more than creeds and catechisms. 

As I've written in my own book -- Teacher, Guide, Companion:  rediscovering Jesus in a secular world -- after my mother died I had a "crisis of faith."  By this I mean that I suddenly found myself entertaining thoughts and having experiences that I thought I'd long left behind me.  I was rediscovering a feeling of faith, and it was a "crisis" because I had thought I'd "not only thrown out the baby with the bathwater, but [had] tossed out the tub, shut off the lights, and walked out of the house, locking the door behind [me]."  So I didn't know what to do with the experiences I was having.

Marcus Borg was one of the people who helped me to see a way to bring together my, if you will, post-Christian understanding of the world with my deeply rooted Christian identity.  He offered me, indeed, a "new vision."  And his invitation to "meet Jesus again for the first time" was incredibly exciting -- I had, of course, previous "met" Jesus in the Presbyterian and Methodist churches of my youth, but this would be the "first time" I did so with my more mature perspectives.  I had by this time studied Buddhism on and off for a couple of decades, had gone to divinity school where I focused on cross-cultural studies of spirituality, had been ordained to the Unitarian Universalist ministry, and had started serving a congregation.  I was not the same person who'd encountered Jesus before and, as Borg showed me, neither was Jesus.

I have since continued to renew my acquaintance with Jesus, who I once described in an Easter sermon as "an old friend I seem intent on forgetting."  And I have found other guides: John Spong, Dominic Crossan, Brian McLaren, Diana Butler Bass, Karen Armstrong, and Anne Lamott, to name just a few.  Still, it was Marcus Borg who opened my eyes in such a gentle yet powerful way.  I would not be who I am today if it weren't for him.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

PS:  If you're interested in learning more about progressive Christianity, I would encourage you to pick up a copy of any one of Marcus Borg's books.  You could, of course, always get a copy of my own Teacher, Guide, Companion, or the truly wonderful Christian Voices in Unitarian Universalism.  You might also want to visit ProgressiveChristianity.org or the website of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship.