A LITTLE GOOD NEWS ON A SUNDAY MORNING

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Neighborhood Sunday, October 1st, 2006

“We know how to create spaces that invite the intellect to show up.... We know how to create spaces that invite the emotions into play.... We know how to create spaces that invite the ego to put in an appearance.... But we know very little about creating spaces that invite the soul to make itself known, [and to do its work in our midst]” --Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

A minister was standing at the door one Sunday, shaking hands as people left the church, when an excited little boy came running up to him and exclaimed “Reverend, when I grow up I’m going to come back here and give you a whole bunch of money!”

“Well, that’s very generous of you!” the startled minister replied. “What makes you want to do that?”

“I dunno,” said the little boy. “I guess it’s ’cause yesterday I heard my daddy tell the neighbors that you’re the poorest preacher we’ve ever had....”

OK, I don’t really know what your neighbors may have been saying about me, but I do want reassure you that whatever it is, good or bad, it’s probably only half-true. Of course, that’s kinda to be expected. We live our lives by half-truths much of the time; in many cases, it’s the best that we can do. Even when we know our own minds well enough to speak and live our own Truth with confidence, the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s place, to truly know and understand what’s on their minds (no matter how much empathy or compassion we maybefeeling), is at best an act of careful, two-way communication combined with no small degree of imagination and even outright projection.

It’s not that Truth itself changes, or that “The Truth” is in some way different for each of us. Rather, it is simply that our UNDERSTANDING of Truth (and for that matter, of one another), is always both limited, and evolving. Socrates famously declared that the reason the Oracle at Delphi considered him to be the wisest man in Athens was that he “knew that [he] knew nothing.” A certain degree of intellectual humility is, and has always been, the gateway to True Wisdom.

But just because we’re born knowing nothing doesn’t mean we have to stay that way. We all come into this world pretty much in the same condition: naked and ignorant of everything except the instinctive hunger of our own appetites. And yet even before we have drawn our first breath, “accidents of birth” begin to differentiate between “winners” and “losers,” (or perhaps more kindly and gently, between the fortunate and the less-fortunate).

Some of us are lucky enough to have been born with certain tangible (and intangible) advantages: good health; good genes; loving, prosperous, well-educated parents; American citizenship...the list is virtually unlimited once we have learned how to count our blessings. And others are born, through no fault of their own, into poverty, or with poor health, or any number of countless other afflictions which have tormented humanity from time immemorial.

And I guess the point I’m trying to make is that while good fortune is certainly nothing to be ashamed of, it’s nothing really to be especially proud of either. And yet so often when it comes to “keeping score,” we have a hard time distinguishing between the privileges of birth and the accomplishments of life, because the presence or absence of the former makes the achievements of the latter seem either absurdly easy or impossibly hard.

And yes, it’s true, that’s just the way the world is; and there’s not that much that any one of us can really do to change it. But if we are Wise, our understanding of THIS Truth can prevent us from making the terrible mistake of measuring our SELF-worth by our net worth, and teach us instead to measure our wealth according to the things we TRULY value. The Scripture tells us “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” But it seems to me that the other half of this proposition is also true: that if we simply find the courage to follow our hearts, we will discover something truly worthy of being treasured there at the end of that rainbow.

In any event, I promised you all a little “good news” this morning, and I certainly don’t intend to disappoint you. And I’m also sure that many of you here today already know that the English word “gospel” is derived from the Greek word euangelion (which is also the root of the word “evangelist”), and means, literally “a good message” or “Good News.” Yet if you were to walk up to random people on the street and ask them point blank “What IS the ‘good news’ of the Gospel?” I’ll bet you a dozen Dunkin Donuts to a day-old bran muffin that the answer you would hear most frequently (assuming you get an answer at all) would be some variation of John 3:16 -- “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

And yet, what would probably be overlooked in that conversation -- the other half of the truth, if you will -- is the fact that this well-known chapter and verse is something that one evangelist (John) had to say ABOUT Jesus, and not something that was actually ever said by Jesus himself. If you want to know what Jesus had to say on the subject, you’ll have to look at the Gospels of the other three evangelists, all three of whom tell a slightly different story in pretty much the same way (probably, my Bible professors used to tell me, because two of them were copying off of the third one’s paper).

But for Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Good News begins with the a quotation from the prophet Isaiah [40:3]: “Behold, I am sending my messenger before you, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” This is then followed by the story of John the Baptist, dressed in camel’s hair and a leather belt, surviving on locusts and wild honey, and baptizing sinners in the River Jordan. Jesus comes to be baptized, has a vision of a dove descending and hears a voice from “the heavens” quoting the Second Psalm (a story that gets more and more elaborate in each retelling, and is worthy of an entire sermon in its own right some other day), and then immediately goes out into the wilderness to fast and pray for forty days while he tries to figure out what this vision means. Jesus returns from the desert to proclaim his new message, and then afterwards calls his first two disciples, the fishermen Simon and his brother Andrew, with the same invitation he basically made to all his disciples: “stop what you’re doing, and follow me, and I will make you something different.”

But it’s the content of this “good message from the wilderness” that I want to focus on today. Mark puts it this way: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” [Mk 1:15] Matthew’s version is even simpler: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” [Mt 4:17] And we’ll get to what Luke has to say in just a second. But first I just want to point out that the language of this proclamation is so familiar to us now, and so burdened by 2000 years worth of theological commentary, that it’s easy to lose sight of what it might have meant to the people who were hearing it for the first time...when it was just a few words from the lips of a homeless (and I imagine rather scruffy after forty days fasting in the wilderness) carpenter’s son, back before there was any such thing as “Christianity.”

Those of you who attend services here regularly know that I don’t usually spend this much time interpreting passages from the Bible. But I did spend an awful lot of time in school learning how to do it properly, so from time to time I think it’s only proper that I should share some of that learning with you. And in this case, there are really only five key “loaded” words that I would quickly like to disarm, so that you can safely turn them over a little in your own minds. The word “Gospel” we already know in Greek is “euangelion,” or “good news.” The word basileia or “kingdom” (as in Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven) doesn’t really refer to a specific place; rather it’s a reference to the “reign” or “rule” of God; while the word “time” (kairos as opposed to the more familiar chronos) basically refers to a season or a specific period of time with special characteristics that distinguish it from other times. So the first part of the Good News is easy: the season has come for us to remember that G-d (or the spiritual, heavenly force within the Universe which gives us life and created all that is) is always near at hand, and still in charge of everything we see.

It’s the second part that sometimes feels a little uncomfortable to rational and scientific Unitarians and Universalists. Metanoeite kai Pisteuete -- “Repent and Believe.” Two imperative verbs with very intimidating connotations, especially if you don’t particularly believe that you have anything in particular to repent about. But when we strip away all the fire and brimstone, the Good News itself is actually a lot more palatable and easy to swallow. The word metanoia basically means to “transform one’s mind.” It’s analogous to the more familiar word metamorphosis or a “transformation of shape” -- such as a caterpillar being transformed into a butterfly. Likewise, the word pisteuo doesn’t so much mean “believe” as it does “trust” or “have confidence in.” Its corresponding noun, pistis, is the Greek word generally translated into English as “Faith.” And Faith, properly understood, is not so much “belief without evidence” as it is the confidence to Trust the Truth of things we know are true, but can’t necessarily prove objectively. Or to put it another way, Faith is the ability to live our own Truth -- half-truth that it is -- both confidently and humbly, knowing that there is more to life than meets the eye, and wise enough to accept our own unavoidable limitations and ignorance for what they are. And once we get our minds around this idea, it has the power to transform our whole lives, and open up an entire universe of new possibilities.

Which brings us at last to the Gospel of Luke. Luke’s “Good News” is much more elaborate than Matthew’s or Mark’s. Luke shows Jesus going to the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth, and reading another passage from the Prophet Isaiah [61: 1-2]: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And then he returns the scroll to the attendant, and says “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Now obviously, there’s a lot going on in that passage. But it all boils down to this notion of “The Year of the Lord’s Favor.” Some scholars see this as merely another reference to kairos: a season when the prophecies of old will finally be fulfilled, right before our very eyes. But others (myself included) feel that it is more likely a reference to the “Year of Jubilee” described in the book of Leviticus.

According to Levitical law, every seventh year was to be a “sabbatical” year, during which the land was to lie fallow, and all personal debts were to be forgiven. And every 50 years -- after seven cycles of sabbatical years -- came the year of Jubilee, when those who had sold themselves and their families into slavery in order to escape poverty and starvation would be set free, and all agricultural land which had been bought and sold in the past half-century would revert to the family of its original owner.

The reason for this practice was that the ancient Israelites believed that the land itself belonged to G-d, and that human beings were merely sojourners here on Earth. And thus land could neither be bought or sold; only the right to harvest what it produced for a certain number of seasons.

And likewise, human beings (or at least other Israelites) could not be bought or sold either; it was only their labor which was for sale, in exchange for adequate food and shelter. And every fifty years -- basically, once a generation -- society cleared the books, so that everyone could enjoy a fresh start....

Sounds like a pretty radical concept, doesn’t it?

And it was in Jesus’s own time as well.

But here’s the good news...

You don’t have to believe that something is truly possible in order to believe that it’s a good idea, and to live your own life according to that Truth.

You don’t even have to believe in God to believe that if there were a God, She would want us all to treat one another a certain way -- more frolicking, and less keeping score -- and to live your own life according to THAT Truth.

And it doesn’t really matter whether you were born rich or poor, or somewhere in between; it doesn’t matter how smart you are, or what you look like; how much you have accomplished with your life, or how much you have failed to accomplish...we all still live in that same “middle place” between finding the courage to follow the Truth we THINK we know, and the humility to acknowledge the many truths we will NEVER know, no matter how hard we may try to understand them, or attempt to ignore them.

Because life itself is nothing but an unexpected and undeserved gift from the Universe. And as I’ve said here many times before, no matter how great or how small that gift may seem, the only appropriate response to our good fortune is one of gratitude combined with generosity, and well-seasoned with liberal amounts of compassion, understanding and forgiveness.

And once we manage to “transform our minds” and our hearts and our souls so that we can live our lives trusting this Great Truth, then the real Good News becomes as plain as the noses on our faces: that in the eyes of our Creator, we are ALL children of G-d and brothers and sisters to one another, every one of us possessing inherent worth and dignity, and bound together in an interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part....


READING: “Snake” by Anne Herbert (from Co-Evolution Quarterly)

IN THE BEGINNING God didn't just make one or two people, he made a bunch of us. Because he wanted us to have a lot of fun and he said you can't really have fun unless there's a whole gang of you. So he put us all in this sort of playground park place called Eden and told us to enjoy.

At first we did have fun just like he expected. We played all the time. We rolled down the hills, waded in the streams, climbed the trees, swung on the vines, ran in the meadows, frolicked in the woods, hid in the forest, and acted silly. We laughed a lot.

Then one day this snake told us that we weren't having real fun because we weren't keeping score. Back then, we didn't know what score was. When he explained it, we still couldn't see the fun. But he said that we should give an apple to the person who was best at playing and we'd never know who was best unless we kept score. We could all see the fun of that. We were all sure we were best.

It was different after that. We yelled a lot. We had to make up new scoring rules for most of the games we played. Other games, like frolicking, we stopped playing because they were too hard to score. By the time God found out about our new fun, we were only spending about forty-five minutes a day in actual playing and rest of the time working out the score. God was wroth about that - very, very wroth. He said we couldn't use the garden any more because we weren't having any fun. We said we were having lots of fun and we were. He shouldn't have got upset just because it wasn't exactly the kind of fun he had in mind.

He wouldn't listen. He kicked us out and said we couldn't come back until we stopped keeping score. To rub it in (to get our attention, he said), he told us that we were all going to die anyway and our scores wouldn't mean anything.

He was wrong. My cumulative all-game score is now 16,548, and that means a lot to me. If I can raise it to 20,000 before I die I'll know I've accomplished something. Even if I can't my life has a great deal of meaning because I've taught my children to score high and they'll all be able to reach 20,000 or even 30,000 I know.

Really, it was life in Eden that didn't mean anything. Fun is great in its place, but without scoring there's no reason for it. God has a very superficial view of life and I'm glad my children are being raised away from his influence. We were lucky to get out. We're all very grateful to the snake.