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MEDITATION
You don’t know how
lucky you are this morning. Inspired by a stop last fall in Cordoba,
Spain, the birthplace of Moses Maimonides, I had initially intended
to devote my next meditation to this great 12th
century Jewish scholar. Maimonides is famous as an expert on
Talmudic law, as a physician, and as a Biblical critic who recognized
that all passages of the Hebrew Testament were not to be taken
literally. That fact seemed to me relevant to the reading that some
of you did recently in Marcus Borg’s book The
Heart of Christianity, and I thought it might
be appropriate to say a few words about this significant figure.
Fortunately I came to my
senses. That was after I had spent not a little money for some books
on Maimonides and quite a bit of time reading about him. It’s true
that he recognized that the Bible’s accounts of creation were not
to be taken literally. But in the fields of medicine and philosophy
he relied almost entirely on ancient Greek thought, while his
greatest contribution was the codification of Jewish law, which by
his time included not simply the 613 commandments given to Moses but
more than 10 times that many regulations strewn about elsewhere.
One reason I abandoned
the idea of talking about Maimonides was my realization that it made
no sense to inflict medieval Talmudic thought on you on a hot June
morning.
A second reason I changed
my mind was the receipt at Christmastime of a book by Peter Gomes,
Preacher to the University at Harvard, entitled The
Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?
I had known Peter tangentially when he was a graduate student, before
he became Peter Gomes, so to speak, and upon reading the book I
realized it was far more relevant to us at St. Paul’s than was the
thought of Maimonides. Peter Gomes is a remarkable man: an impressive
intellect and great preacher; an important member of the GLBT
community; and, of all things, what I would call a high-church
Baptist who loves contact with Anglican bishops and Victorian church
music. Indeed, if we were a rich and important parish we might stand
a chance of having him here sometime as a guest preacher.
But we’re a poor
parish, so the best I can do to acquaint you with Peter’s thinking
is to read some excerpts from his book. So here goes.
He begins by observing
that the Bible is not “an easy work. It is a complicated collection
of books, written by many hands over many years and in a wide variety
of media ….”
He goes on to warn
against idolizing this remarkable compilation, as Fundamentalists all
too often do, and he reminds us that “Jesus came into the world not
as a Bible teacher directing us back into a text, but as one who
proclaimed a realm beyond the Bible. He proclaimed his good news
against the conventional wisdom of his day, taking up with
unacceptable people and advancing dangerous, even revolutionary
ideas, nearly all of which remain to be discovered and acted upon. I
have always been persuaded,” he continues, “of the truth of the
aphorism … that ‘Christianity is not a faith that has been tried
and found wanting, but a faith that has been wanted and never
tried.’” [G.K. Chesterton.]
Gomes goes on to stress
something we easily forget: “[T]he Bible …is but the means to a
greater end, which is the good news, the glad tidings, the gospel.”
He’s telling us that the Bible is by no means an end in itself, an
object worthy of idolatry. “Jesus came preaching … but nowhere in
the Gospels is there a claim that he came preaching the New
Testament, or even Christianity.” As the blurb on the book’s dust
jacket observes, “Jesus came preaching, but the church wound up
preaching Jesus,” making not the message he brought but rather
Jesus himself the object of its attention.
That reminds me of an
observation of a great Austrian novelist [Robert Musil] I’ve been
reading recently, where the protagonist remarks that today
“theologians believe [that] theology has made advances since the
time of Christ.” That’s not only subtle and profound but also, if
you think about it for a while, hilarious. Christian theology, as I
understand it, arose to account for the experience of those who
accepted Jesus during his lifetime and after his death as the Son of
God who rose from the dead. As a college student I luxuriated in
theological speculation, which indeed can be fun. But now that I’m
more than a bit older I’ve begun to realize that theology all too
easily overwhelms and obscures what it was that Jesus taught.
Well, you
might ask, just what was it that Jesus taught? In his book Peter
Gomes refers to his predecessor at Harvard, George Buttrick, who, he
writes, was “not only a great preacher but a great teacher of
preachers. He would listen to the student sermons in his course,
comment on the structure, the gestures, the biblical analysis,
the exposition of the text, and invariably would ask, in his
quavering voice, ‘But, Mr. Jones, where’s the good news? Where’s
the good news?’ … Buttrick understood what we must now recover:
that what we call ‘the Bible’ is only the means to a deepened
understanding of what Jesus called the gospel, or glad tidings, and
that for us to understand this we have to understand afresh, or
perhaps for the first time, the radical nature of the substance of
Jesus’ preaching.”
George Buttrick preached
and Peter Gomes preaches long sermons, and if this were Memorial
Church I’d have some 20 minutes to move on to where the logic of
this meditation necessarily leads: to the Good News. What IS
the Good News that Jesus preached? You’ll be happy that I don’t
have 20 more minutes. But Gomes points in the direction a longer
sermon would take when he observes that “It still shocks some
Christians to realize that Jesus was not a Christian, that he did not
know ‘our’ Bible, and that what he preached was substantially at
odds with his biblical culture, and with ours as well.” That’s
why there are those of us who look askance at the Bible thumping
preachers who can cite chapter and verse at the drop of a hat but
seem not to know what those chapters and verses are all about.
Gomes provides a clue to
what they’re all about when he writes that the wealthy and powerful
would rather talk about Jesus than [about] what Jesus preached
because “it is easier to talk about him than it is to talk about
what he talked about. … In the … British import comedy, The Vicar
of Dibley, the vicar … is often accused by her Tory-blue Senior
Warden of preaching ‘socialist twaddle.’ ‘Why not stick to the
gospel?’ he asks; and she sweetly replies that ‘this IS the
gospel.’”
As I understand it,
that’s a message of love of God and love and acceptance of one’s
neighbor, and it’s a call to act on the implications of those
teachings. And I would like to think that we here at 220 Valley
Street have taken that message to heart in our own, admittedly
fallible and limited way, by opening our doors and our hearts to all
sorts and conditions of men and women who come to this address for
spiritual and even for physical food.
We’ve all heard the
mantra “What would Jesus do?” Peter Gomes holds that the question
is wrong. “We are not Jesus and thus are unlikely to be able to
know what he would do, or [be able] to do what he did.” That’s
true. Yet if one were to ask the not unreasonable question where
today one would be more likely to find Jesus, at St. Paul’s Church
and the Covenant Soup Kitchen, or at a meeting of the Windham Town
Council, I think the answer might be pretty obvious.
The good news Jesus
preached is indeed scandalous. It punches the complacency of the rich
and the powerful and the self-satisfied right in the gut. It calls
for a world in which soup kitchens just might not be necessary. “Thy
kingdom come,” the Lord’s Prayer says, “on earth as it is in
heaven.” Don’t let anyone tell you this is pie-in-the-sky
preaching. It is a call for action.
So is the following
collect, with which I would like to conclude this morning’s
meditation. Let us pray:
Look with pity, O Lord,
upon the people in this land who live with injustice, terror,
disease, hunger, rejection, and death as their constant companions.
Have mercy on us. Help us to eliminate cruelty to these our
neighbors. Strengthen those who spend their lives establishing equal
protection of the law and equal opportunities for all. And grant that
every one of us may enjoy a fair portion of the riches of this land;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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