The Flesh Made Word

an Easter Homily delivered by the Rev Dr. Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday April 16th, 2006

OPENING WORDS: from A Passion for the Possible by William Sloane Coffin

As I see it, the primary religious task these days is to try to think straight. Seeing clearly is more important even than good behavior, for redemptive action is born of vision. Religious faith, far from being a substitute for thought, makes better thinking possible.

***

“In the beginning, there was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God....And the Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” These few lines from the first chapter of John’s Gospel, like numerous other passages from that provocative Second century document, contain some of the most theologically sophisticated ideas to be found anywhere in the New Testament.

And fortunately for us, by the time the Fourth Century Church Fathers also figured out that many of these same ideas were not, strictly speaking, entirely in accordance with the emerging definition of Christian Orthodoxy, it was too late; the Fourth Gospel had already become a well-established part of the New Testament canon. And so John became the so-called “spiritual” gospel, which offers to its readers a very different perspective on the events and meaning of the ministry of Jesus than those provided by Matthew, Mark and Luke.

These first three Gospels all basically agree on what Jesus said and the things that he did, a coincidence which modern Biblical scholars now believe derives from the likelihood that the anonymous authors of Matthew and Luke both copied from Mark in the preparation of their manuscripts. But this in turn leads us to another, more important insight into the true nature of Scripture. You can’t always take everything you read in the Bible as “the Gospel Truth.” To paraphrase the words of the famous 19th-century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing: the Bible is a book written by human beings, for human beings, and in the language of human beings; and its meaning is to be found in the same manner as that of other books -- through the constant exercise of reason.

Modern Bible scholars sometimes like to distinguish between “the Jesus of History” and “the Christ of Faith.” The first is supposed to be a real person, like Shakespeare or Beethoven or Socrates, who had an actual life that we can study and learn about just like we would the study the biography of any other historical figure. The Christ of Faith, on the other hand, has more to do with one’s theological beliefs about the MEANING of that life, and especially one’s beliefs about what happened on that first Easter Sunday three days after Jesus had been arrested, crucified and killed by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago, and what that event has meant in the lives of those who call themselves Christians ever since.

But when you stop to think about these things a little more carefully, this careful distinction between faith and history doesn’t really hold up. To begin with, the idea of a “Christ of Faith” can mean just about anything or nothing. Most human beings have experiences that might be thought of as “spiritual” just in the normal course of everyday living. But whether we talk about them in terms of “Christ” or “Brahma” or “Buddha” or even simply “Nature” says a lot more about who we are and how we were taught than it does about the experience itself.

And when it comes to our knowledge of the historical Jesus, things become even more problematic. To put it in context, we have much better objective, verifiable scientific proof for both Global Warming and the “theory” of Evolution than we do tangible evidence for the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth ever even lived, much less that he said or did any of the things the New Testament says he did. When it comes to the biography of this obscure first century Jewish rabbi, there is very little that we can say for certain, or even with much confidence. We aren’t really sure precisely when he was born, or where, or even who his parents were; we don’t know what he looked like, how tall he was, what color his eyes were, whether he was right- or left-handed, and so on and so on. Many of the things he is said to have taught were also taught by other people, and many of the things he is said to have done (like walking on water or turning water into wine) quite frankly seem impossible.

What we do have is Words, in the form of a book, the New Testament, and God knows how many other books, letters, sermons, lectures, hymns, inscriptions, poems, parchment and papyri fragments, graffiti, gossip, half-remembered stories and conversations repeated and handed down from generation to generation. What we have is the memory of a life, transformed into language. The Flesh made Word: a spoken (and later written) tale which has survived long beyond that moment in time when the flesh itself has passed away, and which takes on a life of its own which is essentially immortal so long as life itself endures.

And when you DO stop to think about it, this is pretty amazing in its own right. Because these Words also have the power to change people’s lives, usually for the better (although not always). They can give people hope and comfort in times of trouble; they can help them overcome problems, teach them to be kind and generous and compassionate and forgiving; but they have also started wars, and created conflict and enmity and hatred between people as well, even though most people who actually study them find a very different message there.

These words can inspire us to think important thoughts of our own, and help us to understand our own experience of living. And we don’t necessarily have to believe or agree with every word we read or hear in order to learn something from it. Because even if it isn’t all True, someone once saw some Truth in them somewhere. And if we learn to look closely and listen carefully to the Words themselves, we just might see and hear it too.

Which brings us at last to Easter. What exactly IS the Miracle of Easter? Frederick Buechner offers us a long list of things the Resurrection isn’t, and to that list I will add one more. Resurrection is NOT Resuscitation. Resuscitation is something that physicians and firefighters try to do to a corpse. They pound on its chest, they shock it with electricity, they try to breathe new life into flesh that has already given up the ghost; and sometimes they actually succeed in their task (although not nearly so often in real life as they appear to on TV).

But even a successful resuscitation is only a temporary measure. It may give you a few more months, or a few more years; it may even give you an entire lifetime; but at some point it no longer really matters, because every living thing eventually succumbs to the fate to which all flesh is heir.

Resurrection is something different than that. Different from Memory, different from Poetry; different from the Renewal of Hope in the despairing heart, or the Rebirth of New Life from the cold earth in Spring; different even from the undying Power of the Spirit of God’s Love to transform our lives by grounding our souls in a profound sense of the Eternal (although this is perhaps a little closer than the others).

Resurrection is both Miracle and Mystery: something we will never fully understand, even when we feel we have experienced the miracle ourselves. But still we try to put the experience into words, because this is one way human beings attempt to communicate to one another the things that are most important to us. We speak, we sing, we write things down; and in doing so, our words survive us, and also potentially change the lives of people we will never see or meet ourselves.

William Willimon, a professor of Christian Ministry and Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, once wrote: “in an age of anxiety and dislocation, we think it impossible to live without ‘absolute truth.’ But what the God of Israel and the church promises us is not absolute truth reduced to propositions but the reality of the kingdom of God and eternal communion with the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. There is a sense in which we cannot know the truth without first being made truthful. Our problem with the gospel is moral before it is intellectual. We will use anything -- even intellectual discussions about the truth -- in a last-ditch attempt to keep Christ from us. So knowing the truth is a matter of being transformed, forgiven, born again before we can acknowledge the lies on which our lives our based, before we can care to entrust our lives to the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.”

Most Unitarian Universalists I suspect might feel a little uncomfortable talking about the Truth of our lives in the same kind of language used by Professor Willimon. Yet the realization that “Truth” is not merely a question of intellectual discussion or logical propositions, but rather a matter of being transformed and learning to trust, is just as important for Religious Liberals as it is for any Born-Again Christian.

And so we come on a Sunday morning, young and old, rich and poor, wise and foolish, happy and sorrowful, to a place we find empty except for our presence here. And we hear the stories, and we sing the songs, and we pray that someday we too may learn how to make the words living flesh again....

***

READING: from Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner

WE CAN SAY THAT the story of the Resurrection means simply that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare or the music of Beethoven and that their wisdom and truth will live on forever. Or we can say that the Resurrection means that the spirit of Jesus is undying, that he himself lives on among us, the way that Socrates does, for instance, in the good that he left behind him, in the lives of all who follow his great example. Or we can say that the language in which the Gospels describe the Resurrection of Jesus is the language of poetry and that, as such, it is not to be taken literally but as pointing to a truth more profound than literal. Very often, I think, this is the way that the Bible is written, and I would point to some of the stories about the birth of Jesus, for instance, as examples; but in the case of the Resurrections, this simply does not apply because there really is no story about the Resurrection in the New Testament. Except in the most fragmentary way, it is not described at all. There is no poetry about it. Instead, it is simply proclaimed as a fact. Christ is risen! In fact, the very existence of the New Testament itself proclaims it. Unless something very real indeed took place on that strange, confused morning, there would be no New Testament, no Church, no Christianity.

Yet we try to reduce it to poetry anyway: the coming of spring with the return of life to the dead earth, the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul. We try to suggest that these are the miracles that the Resurrection is all about, but they are not. In their way they are all miracles, but they are not this miracle, this central one to which the whole Christian faith points.

Unlike the chief priests and the Pharisees, who tried with soldiers and a great stone to make themselves as secure as they could against the terrible possibility of Christ’s really rising again from the dead, we are considerably more subtle. We tend in our age to say, “Of course, it was bound to happen. Nothing could stop it.” But when we are pressed to say what it was that actually did happen, what we are apt to come out with is something pretty meager: this “miracle” of truth that never dies, the “miracle” of a life so beautiful that two thousand years have left the memory of it undimmed, the “miracle” of doubt turning into faith, fear into hope. If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. Or at least I hope that I would have the courage to.