THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
THE KINGDOM IS STILL IN YOUR MIDST
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached Easter Sunday, April 15, 2001,
at the First Unitarian Church of HonoluluWho was this Jeshua ben Joseph? For that's what he would have been called almost 2,000 years ago. Nobody in his lifetime ever called him "Jesus." That's a Latinized version of a Greek version of a Hebrew name. In the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, at least, whenever Jesus is asked who he is he ducks the question, and then he responds, "And you will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory," what has come to be called the "second coming." There are those who believe that Jesus expected that event to happen somewhere in the midst of the confrontation that went down in Jerusalem that year. There are those who believe that it was something expected to happen sometime in the immediate future. And, when it didn't, it was one of the major crises of the early church.
At Christmas time I described to you the chaos that was going on in first century Judea. The zealots who had rebelled against the taxes of Rome were terribly upset that Herod had been put on the throne. Herod wasn't even Jewish, and when he did bother to marry a Jewish lady he later killed her. They were not happy with him. They were not happy with the high priest that he had put in charge of the temple, a high priest who was of the wrong caste, with the wrong genealogy, and simply didn't follow the ancient ways. And you can believe they were unhappy with those sweet Romans.
On a previous Easter morning I have suggested to you that the first century church understood something more than, or other than, merely a dead body getting up out of the grave when they said "resurrection." That sermon, The Empty Tomb, is available if you're interested. It's all right there in the New Testament. The story indeed grew until today all around Honolulu and throughout Christendom there will be sermons preached quoting St. Paul, "If Jesus was not raised from the dead, then is our hope vain." Few will go and read in First Corinthians what Paul understood as the resurrection. The stories continue to be told as if this was a cadaver revivified and walking around. Something both different from, and much more profound than that was celebrated by the first century church.
Everything that we have in that text called the New Testament is filtered through two controversies that tore apart and almost destroyed the first century church. That first controversy was whether or not you had to be circumcised and obey all of the Jewish Law before you could be a Christian. It's called the Judaizer conflict. Is Christianity, is the teaching and the implications of this man's life and work only available to those who also first become Jews? Or is this a universal message that transcends all of ancient Judaism?
You can imagine those Jewish Christians in Jerusalem with their commitment to the ancient traditions. This was why they had started this revolution. That's why those zealots were so zealous! They wanted the ancient traditions, the teachings of their fathers, to come back into the central place in the lives of the people. Then to watch those Greek Christians out there accepted into Christianity without having to pay any attention to any of that must have ticked them off something awful! And yet, so many of the early church apostles, not just St. Paul, went out into that Hellenistic Roman world and translated the arcane language of Jewish apocalypticism into a religious vocabulary that could be heard by ordinary Greeks and Romans. It was not until the final destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. that the controversy finally disappeared. The Romans took care of it by eliminating Jerusalem Christianity.
The second controversy that filters what we know about Jesus is that expectation of the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory. Throughout the New Testament the expectation is that it's going to happen next Thursday, or maybe Friday or Saturday, but soon! And Jesus is reported to have said, "There are some here who will not die before they see the Son of Man coming with power." As 80, 90, 100 A.D. arrived and it had not happened, there was a major controversy within Christianity. Indeed, many scholars are of the opinion that the form in which we have our gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is the result of trying to somehow find a way to get beyond that faith threatening disappointment. The last of those who had been there when Jesus taught were dying off and the Son of Man had not yet come in power.
Jesus and his followers, as they came into Jerusalem that week, intended to precipitate something. You know they did because they went to Jerusalem at the tensest possible moment when thousands of Jews would come into Jerusalem for Passover Week. And they didn't come and stay at an inn somewhere and sort of, from the outside edges, participate in the traditional Passover. He enters on a donkey with people yelling "Hosanna" like a king is coming in. You've got to know that made Herod rather nervous. You've got to know that Pontius Pilate was going, "Oh, no, what have we got going on this time?" And you've got to know that the high priest was scared to death. Another one of those idiots had come into town ready to start a revolution that was going to result in the Roman soldiers having to kill, oh, four, five, six thousand of his people before they got the clown out of town.
And does he come in and quietly wait for things to happen? No, he walks into the temple and picks up a piece of rope and chases all the money changers out of the temple. Then he comes back day after day, and stands there on the temple steps, essentially telling the people who have come to hear him that everything that's going on inside the temple is wrong.
If there was ever anybody who deserved to be arrested for inciting to riot, it was Jeshua bar Joseph. The Zealots, as I have said, were anxious to be rid of the high priest and the Herodian king and the representative of the Roman empire. The Sanhedrin, the board of trustees of the Jerusalem temple, was trying very hard to keep a lid on things to preserve the heritage of Judaism from finally being wiped out by these Romans. They knew that if they couldn't keep a lid on this stuff it would eventually happen. And, in fact, it did. In 68 A.D., finally the Romans said, "Enough is enough" and they came in and by 70 A.D. had completely destroyed the temple. Finally, they had to come back in 133 A.D., and really finish the job; plowing the place under and issuing an edict that any Jew that came within eyesight of Jerusalem was to be killed on sight. That's how hard to govern those doggoned Jews were.
The Essenes, sitting out there on the edge of the desert in the Qumran communities, were enthusiastically looking forward to that demise. They were expecting, indeed, not just the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory, but angelic soldiers to overthrow the Roman Empire. They expected history, as it was then known, to be brought to a halt; and the Kingdom of God to be inaugurated on earth from heaven above. And they were loving the anticipation of that event.
And what of Jesus? It seems to me that, from those pieces of the story that appear to have some historical validity, it appears that all three of those factions were upset with Jesus. The Sanhedrin, just because he was attracting Roman attention and that they didn't want. The zealots because he refused to launch the revolution. In one poignant story in the Gospel, Jesus mentions needing some swords, and Peter says, "Well, here we've got two." And Jesus said, "That's enough." Not exactly overwhelming firepower. The Qumran community, of course. also expecting and wanting the entry of angelic warriors into human history to put Zion back at the top of the heap, were unhappy with his gentle message. What he said to all of them was that "the kingdom of God is blossoming in your midst, even now." Not something waiting to happen sometime in the future, not some nice housebroken form of religious piety that goes on on your insides separately, personally, individually. Not the ritual events before the altar in the temple, but in your midst, in the transactions and relationships of the commonest, ordinariest, everyday moments of your lives.
The Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory. There are three possibilities. The first is: He was wrong. Albert Schweitzer believes that's the correct interpretation. In two fascinating books he wrote about Jesus' understanding of his own mission and message. He concluded that Jesus expected, as he hung there on the cross, the sky would open up and out of those clouds would come angelic warriors. The apocalyptic Messiah predicted by some of those especially crazy prophets of the Old Testament, would come in all of its Cecil B. DeMille power. And it didn't happen.
There are those who believe the second possibility which is that it is still to be expected. It will come any day. The books and the movie due out shortly about the left-behind, is all about that still-nurtured nostalgia, hope, conviction; that one of these days the Son of Man is indeed coming on those clouds of glory.
There is a third possibility and that is that it has happened and is happening. These days people do not understand poetic and mythic metaphor. Both believers and unbelievers look at these stories and say they're either literally true, as if someone had stood there with a video camera and videotaped them, or they are false. Yet, in all of our religious traditions, the religious geniuses have been poets, not prosaists.
I have a suggestion, this morning. The suggestion is that Jesus was right: the Kingdom of Heaven is that way of being in the world that sees one another as expressions of that same depth of being we point to and say, "God." Call it "spirit of life," if you like; or "the interconnected web of being of which we are a part." But, whatever it is called, when we permit that way of being in the world to happen, the Kingdom of Heaven is in our midst.
Not outside history, after it's been brought to a halt by UFO's or aliens or even angelic warriors.
Not within you in some personalistic privatism where we can be quietly spiritual on our own. Never having any expectations that we have to take that into the relationships with those cantankerous people who seem to be always out there around us.
Not over against the political powers-that-be of the day or even despite them, but somehow transcending them.
Not temple, not Herodian king, not Roman Empire (and we'd probably better be happy about that because if you were looking with first century eyes at the world today, you might well identify the U.S. of A as the equivalent of the Roman Empire).
The Kingdom of God comes in our midst in the very act and process of being community together. It comes in those moments when we transcend our own selfishness, transcend our own jealousy, transcend our own self-indulgence and anger and bitterness and permit one another to be the rich and wonderful gift they can be. When we permit ourselves to be fully present to those with whom we share life, Then is the Kingdom blossoming in our midst.
There is an interesting Aramaic pun caught in that image of the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory. It's a quote directly out of the Book of Daniel and Daniel understood the pun wonderfully, for the Son of Man is a most curious image. In the Aramaic language there is a circumlocution for talking about oneself. We have a similar circumlocution in English. You say to one another, "One might go to the store or one might not," referring sometimes to yourself, sometimes to somebody in general, or suggesting that maybe somebody should hear you and be that one. In Aramaic that expression is "the son of man.." And Jesus plays the pun for all it's worth. Sometimes, indeed, he's pointing to himself; sometimes he is pointing on out there somewhere, and I think always he is pointing right here in our midst.
What do we do, as a religious community, with the crazies that insist upon behaving somewhat bizarrely in our midst and scare us and we want somebody to make them go away?
There was a highly controversial piece of art a few years ago called "Christ Piss." It is a cross in a jar of urine; a jarring, maybe even blasphemous image. When I first saw it after reading about the controversy going on, I said to myself, "Yes, he understands." For it is not only the pretty, the nice, the proper that belongs in our midst, understood as and treated as a part of the Kingdom of Heaven. But even that drug addict, even that psychotic crazy person that drives us nuts, even the ugliness is a part of that Kingdom of Heaven. And unless and until we can manage to make our minds large enough to embrace the full humanity that surrounds us, then the Kingdom of Heaven has not come. But in those moments, in those times when we are able to transcend our own self-centeredness, our own anger and bitterness, our own frustration and self-indulgence, and be fully present to and open to the other; in those moments the Kingdom of Heaven is already in our midst, growing like a lump of leaven, and is indeed a pearl of great price.
When those moments happen, it does sometimes feel almost like something coming on the clouds of glory. Then, we forget it, or we misunderstand it, or dismiss it because, "oh, well, that was rather ordinary and trivial, actually." Still, it could be that the Kingdom of Heaven is indeed in our midst and is the most ordinary, trivial Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory.