“Jesus: American Idol”

Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

March 27, 2005

            It's Easter morning, and all across this country and all over this world people talking about Jesus.  

            Of course, it really doesn't matter very much that it's Easter. In this country, you can hear people talking about Jesus any day of the week.

            I think it's even arguable that Jesus may be the most talked about name in America, and not only on Sunday mornings, and not only when people slam a car door on some part of their anatomy.

            If you stop and think about it, it's rather amazing. It's rather amazing that in an age of instantaneous celebrity, when individuals rise and fall from anonymity to notoriety to has-been-ity not in fifteen minutes, as Andy Warhol suggested, but seemingly in fifteen seconds with the help of a clip on CNN, that one of the people who is still talked about most in America is a Palestinian Jew, an itinerant healer and teacher who was born more than 2,000 years ago, whose participation in public life lasted three years at most, and who, to the best of our knowledge, never wrote down anything.

            Not only is Jesus part of the religious life of many Americans, since three out of four Americans call themselves Christians and two out of three Americans believe Jesus was divine, but Jesus is a part of cultural life in the United States. In 1966, when John Lennon wanted to express how popular the Beatles were in the United States, the most hyperbolic statement he could make was that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” At the Iowa State Fair in 1999, champion butter sculptor Norma “Duffy” Lyon took a ton of butter and sculpted a rendition of the Last Supper. A few years ago, it became very popular for children and teenagers of all faiths to wear bracelets with the initials “WWJD” printed on them, standing for “What would Jesus do?” and most adults thought this was great, never mind that the Bible tells us that Jesus didn’t get along with his brothers and sisters, hated his parents, didn’t work, didn’t care about making money, lived on other people’s handouts, was homeless, made fun of people in authority, flagrantly ignored their rules, and didn’t even wash before meals.

            Even more significantly, Jesus has always played a large role in this country’s political life. Throughout American history, when the country has dealt with any controversial issue, Christians and non-Christians alike have also asked, “What would Jesus do?” They have asked what Jesus would do about slavery, about women’s suffrage, about labor struggles, about civil rights, about abortion, most recently about same-sex marriage, and about every war this country has ever fought, from the American Revolution to the War in Iraq, and it has not been unusual for those on both sides of an issue to appeal to the life and teachings of Jesus and claim Jesus as being on their side. I find it both ironic and slightly disturbing that both proponents of slavery in the 19^th century and proponents of same-sex marriage in the 21^st century have used the same argument in support of their cause: “Jesus didn’t say anything about it.”

            As the historian Richard Wightman Fox says in his recent book Jesus in America, the role that Jesus has played in our history has not only been as a personal savior, but also as a cultural hero and even a national obsession.           

            And I want to suggest for your consideration this Easter morning that this may pose a problem for us as Unitarian Universalists. Why? Even though our roots are in liberal Protestantism, Jesus doesn’t play as prominent a role in our tradition as he once did, and he certainly doesn’t play as prominent a role in our tradition as he does in most other religious traditions in this country, so I suspect that many of may not feel confident in talking about Jesus, his life, his teachings, and what they may mean for the common life we share.

            When other people start to talk about Jesus, in our families, at our workplaces, in our communities, or in the media, I suspect that some of us may not know quite what to say or quite how to respond. I suspect that we may feel like we do when everybody else is talking about a TV show or a movie that we didn’t get a chance to see, or only saw a long time ago and only in black and white and can’t quite remember the details, so we have a hard time participating in the conversation.

            Besides making us feel left out, I want to suggest the bigger problem this poses for us is that our unfamiliarity with Jesus or lack of confidence in talking about Jesus makes it easier for those whose values are very different from ours to claim Jesus all for themselves and to provide the only answer when people ask, as they have and will, “What would Jesus do?”

            So I want to try to help fix that problem this morning. I want to try to help fix that problem this morning by talking about a liberal religious understanding of Jesus that is both biblically based and informed by the most recent academic scholarship.

To make it easy, I want to suggest that there are only three things that all of us need to know about Jesus, three things about his life, his ministry, and his teachings that all of us as Unitarian Universalists need to know if we are to be able to give our own answer to the question, “What would Jesus do?”

            What are these three things?

            I believe the first and the most important thing we need to know about Jesus, the one thing we need to know if we don’t know anything else about him, is this: Jesus practiced and preached a gospel of radically inclusive, unconditional love. Let me repeat that: Jesus practiced and preached a gospel of radically inclusive, unconditional love.  What do I mean by “radically inclusive, unconditional love?” In the simplest of language, Jesus loved everybody, no matter what, and Jesus taught that everybody should love everybody, no matter what.

            If you are a parent and wonder what you should teach your child about Jesus, if you wonder how you should teach your child to respond to other children who mimic their parents or Sunday school teachers and say that anybody who doesn't "believe in Jesus" is going to hell, I want to suggest that you should teach your child to say, "At my church we learned that Jesus loved everybody, no matter what, and Jesus taught that everybody should love everybody, no matter what."

            If you wonder how you should respond yourself when other adults use Jesus or anything from the Hebrew or Christian scriptures to support hateful, divisive, judgmental, or holier-than-thou opinions about the way things should be, I want to suggest your response should be, "Jesus loved everybody, no matter what, and Jesus taught that everybody should love everybody, no matter what."

            When many people talk about Jesus today, all they talk about is sin and judgment, but it’s important to remember that Jesus’ primary message was not about sin and judgment, especially judgment of others. On the contrary, he warned his listeners not to judge one another, to focus on their own faults before focusing on their neighbor’s faults, to pull the logs out of their own eyes before worrying about the specks in their neighbors’ eyes, and never to cast the first stone, but most of all, as I’ve said, he practiced and preached a gospel of radically inclusive, unconditional love.

            How do we know this about Jesus? Like the old hymn says, because the Bible tells us so.

            One of the interesting things about American religious life is that while the majority of Americans call themselves Christians and the majority of these Christians identify the Jesus who is described in Christian scripture as their personal savior, studies show that very few Americans actually read the Bible regularly. In other words, many people in this country base their fundamental values - - and believe all of us should base our fundamental values - - on a book they don’t actually bother to read, which seems to make those who us who try to set up a new DVD player without reading the instruction manual seem not quite so stupid.

            If you do actually sit down and read the Bible, as I do at least once a year in preparation for my Easter sermon, especially if you read anything from the synoptic gospels - - the Gospels of Mark, Luke, or Matthew, the parts of the Christian Scripture that scholars say present the most accurate portrait of the things the historical Jesus mostly likely did and said rather than the things members of the early Christian communities attributed to him decades after he died - -  what surprises you, what strikes you, what leaps up off the page at you, is a Jesus who again and again and again shows great concern and compassion for everybody, but especially for anyone who is marginalized or outcast or scorned, anyone who is not highly valued by society. Jesus expresses his greatest concern for women, for children, for hated minorities (such as the Samaritans), and especially for the poor. And in every encounter he has with any individual from one of these groups, he treats the person not with pity, but with dignity and respect. Ignoring the social customs of his time that specified who could interact with whom, Jesus shatters social barriers, putting compassion for all above any other social good.

And in his interactions with those who are marginalized, outcast, or scorned by the rest of society, never once, not even one single time, does he condemn any of these  people for their sins or anything else. Not once. He never tells them their situation in life is their own fault.  He never tells them to be more responsible. He never tells them to work harder or to save their money so they might make something of themselves. Neither does he ask them to believe in him. Instead, he offers them his radically inclusive, unconditional love.

            Jesus’ radically inclusive, unconditional love not only led him to act compassionately toward those least valued by society, it also led him to talk about the possibility of a whole new world in which all people would be treated with compassion, a world in which all people would live freely and fully, and he called this world, “the Kingdom of God.” When he spoke of the Kingdom of God, he wasn't talking about heaven. He wasn’t talking about pie in the sky when you die. "The Kingdom of God is among you," he said, meaning that such a world was possible if only all people would practice the radically inclusive, unconditional love that he preached.

            If the first and most important thing we need to know about Jesus was his gospel of a radically inclusive, unconditional love, I want to suggest that the second thing we need to know about Jesus is what he understood to be the biggest problem threat to the Kingdom of God, what prevented the Kingdom of God from becoming a reality.

            What did Jesus understand the biggest threat to be to the Kingdom of God?

            I’ll give you hint. It didn’t have anything to do with sex. If you actually sit down and read the Bible, it makes you wonder how so many Christians have gotten so hung up on sex. Except for a few very explicit condemnations of adultery, never once in the Bible does Jesus tell Peter about what he can or can’t do with his . . .

            In the gospels, Jesus railed again anything that oppressed the human spirit, anything that oppressed or dominated or exploited the human spirit, anything that kept human beings from living freely and fully.

            And in the world in which Jesus lived, which in many ways is not unlike the world in which we live, the thing that most oppressed the human spirit was exploitive human relationships.

Jesus lived in a society that put Roman above Jew, men above women, adults above children, and most of all, rich above poor and did a good job of keeping everybody firmly in their place, and Jesus saw that it was such a society that was the cause of much of the suffering that he witnessed during his life.

            How do we know this? Because the Bible tell us so. If you actually read the Bible, you discover that Jesus’ harshest criticism, his strongest rebukes, are for the political and economic elites as well as the religious elites who provide the justification for such a society.

            Jesus, like many of the Jewish prophets who came before him, is especially critical of economic exploitation. In all of the Christian scripture, Jesus says more about money than anything else. In all of the Christian Scripture, one of every sixteen verses is about money. In the first three gospels, the synoptic gospels that I mentioned before, it is one out of ten verses. In the Gospel of Luke, it is one in seven. Many of these verses explicitly link the relationship between wealth, poverty, and oppression, though you would never know this listening to most of the people who talk about bringing Christian values back to public life in this country.

            If the first and most important thing we need to know is that Jesus practiced and preached a gospel of radically inclusive, unconditional love, and the second thing we need to know is that Jesus saw exploitive human relationships as the greatest threat to the Kingdom of God, I want to suggest that the third thing we need to know about Jesus is how he thought it would be possible to bring about the Kingdom of God.

            How did Jesus think it was possible to bring about the Kingdom of God?

            I’ll give you two hints. It didn’t have anything to do with sex. Neither did it have anything to do with violence, which is probably why we’ll never see a miniseries about the life of Jesus on the Fox Network.

            Jesus did not advocate violence, but neither, contrary to what some people say,  did he advocate passivity. Instead, Jesus advocated active, non-violent resistance to oppression.

            How do we know this? The Bible tells us so.

             One of the most well-known verses from Christian scripture is Jesus’ admonition to not react violently to one who is evil. “When someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other as well,” he says.

            At first, this verse seems to advocate for passivity, that is, until you take a closer look at it. Try to picture this in your mind. To hit the right cheek with a fist would require the left hand, but in first century Jewish society, the left hand was only used for certain, unclean tasks. The only possible way to hit the right cheek with the right hand was a backhanded blow. As the biblical scholar Walter Wink points out, in Jesus' time, a backhanded blow was not a blow to injure, but to insult, humiliate, or degrade. It was not administered to an equal, but to an inferior: Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; Romans, Jews. The point was to put somebody back in their place.

            However, by turning one's cheek, one makes it impossible for an attacker to hit again. It is an act of defiance, a way of saying, "I am a human being, just like you. I am your equal. I won't take it anymore."

            When large number of people begin behaving like this, the results, Wink suggests, the result is social revolution, not unlike the non-violent social revolution that Gandhi inspired in India, nor unlike the non-violent social revolution that Martin Luther King, Jr. led in this country.

            It is most likely because Jesus posed the threat of beginning such a revolution, which would have threatened the privileges of the political, economic, and religious elites of his time, that he was executed, not to die for the sins of humanity.

So I want to suggest that these are the three most important things we need to know about Jesus: First and most importantly, Jesus practiced and preached a gospel of radically inclusive, unconditional love and talked of the possibility of a world in which all people would be treated with compassion. Second, he believed the greatest obstacle to bringing about such a world was exploitive human relationships, especially exploitive economic relationships; and third, he believe the best way to bring about such a world was through non-violent, active resistance to oppression.

With this understanding, I believe that any one of us could participate in a discussion about what Jesus would do any many situations.

We could ask, if Jesus were alive today, who would he be most concerned about? Just as he was most concerned with those who were marginalized and outcast and scorned in his own society, wouldn’t he be most concerned about those who are most marginalized, outcast, and scorned in our own? The working poor, the unemployed, the homeless, the mentally ill, the drug addicted, sex offenders, illegal immigrants, the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay?

We could ask, if Jesus were alive today, who would he reserve his harshest criticism for? Wouldn’t it be for the political and economic elites in this country who do everything they can to maintain their power and privilege, creating an ever widening gap between the haves and the have-nots in this country and in this world, creating a situation right here in South King County in which one out of ten our neighbors has to decide every month between buying food, paying rent, or buying medicine, because they don’t have enough money for all three? Wouldn’t it be for religious hypocrites who make speeches about the sanctity of life while supporting laws that lead to 30,000 gun-related deaths every year in this country and contributing so little foreign aid that 30,000 children around the world continue to die every day from preventable diseases.

We could ask, if Jesus were alive today, how would he suggest we solve the problems that we face as a country and as a world? Would it be through violence, through war, and through torture? Or would Jesus find another way?

During this Easter season, during this season when we affirm that the transforming power of love is ultimately stronger than any other power we know, during this season when we affirm the possibility of a new life for all of us if we will only learn to open our hearts to one another, I say let us not be afraid to give our own answer to the question, “What would Jesus do?” and let us continue to work toward the world he hoped for us all. 

So may it be. Amen.