What Rough Beast?

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield 
	December 19, 1999

The title of this week's talk - it won't really be a sermon because we
have to get downstairs for the pageant in a few minutes - is taken
from last week's reading, "The Second Coming" by W.B.  Yeats:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches toward
Bethlehem to be born?

But maybe before we can deal with the Second Coming, we have to deal
with the first.  Put another way, who or what is this creature whose
birth we celebrate this week?  It seems that as we reach the windup of
the second millennium, we don't know what to make of Jesus anymore
than his contemporaries did.  I think it's particularly hard for
religious liberals to make up our minds about him, and among that
group, its particularly hard for those of us who grew up in an
orthodox Christian faith, as I did, and as many of you did.  We're
come-outers, and when we came out, we identified the shell that we had
come out of as Christianity, and Jesus was therefore part of all that
which is behind us.  Over the years in a thousand ways we have
affirmed our decision to leave our childhood religion, and thus we
have created barriers and bulwarks and redoubts against any expected
re-invasion from the Jesus quarter.

This came home to me this past week when I attended a monthly meeting
of the Wakefield Clergy Association.  It happened that our overtly
non-Christian member, Rabbi Rosansky, was not present at the meeting,
and whether by coincidence or not, several topics came up in which the
others in attendance kind of assumed an attitude of "we Christians."
The subject turned to the planning of an annual event in January
called "Christian Unity Day," at which it apparently has been the
custom to do a sort of round-robin pulpit exchange, with each minister
going to some neighboring church to preach.  The others had discussed
this for about five minutes and finally one of them realized that I
wasn't saying anything, and asked me directly, "well, your people, do
you think they'd be interested in this sort of thing?"  I gulped; I
had made up my mind that we probably wouldn't, but what I heard myself
saying was, "well, by your lights most of the people in my
congregation wouldn't count as Christians and I wouldn't either."  The
minister who had asked me said, "well, in that case I don't think we
would want you in my pulpit."

I felt badly and felt a bit snubbed, but realized that I had set
myself up for it; indeed, I had virtually invited it.  In my anxiety
over the "Christianization" of the group in the absence of our Jewish
member, I think I had felt it necessary at that moment to put myself
on the outside in solidarity with her.

Yet I think I gave away the store.  What I gave away, in fact, was
Jesus.  For the orthodox don't own Jesus; we own Jesus as much as
anyone else does.  Our Unitarian forebears such as Channing fought
hard to retain acceptance as followers of Jesus even as they rejected
much of the doctrinal overlay that the Protestant and Catholic
Churches had imposed on Jesus' message, such as the doctrine of the
Trinity, the virgin birth, etc.

What I'd like to do this morning in the brief time we have is to
suggest three approaches to the question of Jesus.  Believing, as I've
said before, that the foundation of our religion is the proposition
that some questions are too important to have only one right answer,
I'm not going to try to say which of these approaches is the right
one.  Obviously I can in this short time merely scratch the surface of
such a profound and complex question as how we relate to Jesus.  But I
offer all three to you, in the hopes that one or more might be helpful
to you in sorting out how you feel about this most enigmatic figure of
our collective history, to answer for yourself the question Jesus asks
his disciples in Luke 9:20, "Who do you say I am?"

The first Jesus is the personal guide and friend.  Millions of
Americans and people around the world relate first to Jesus as the
closest person to them in their lives.  I saw a bumper sticker in
Harvard Square this week that said, "Jesus loves you; everyone else
thinks you're a jerk."  Many would call this Jesus their Savior, but I
think that the most important thing we can get out of such a personal
Jesus is not salvation but forgiveness.  For people who grew up in
households where they were always being judged harshly, for any of us
at times when we have trouble forgiving ourselves, when we are
struggling under a burden of guilt and humiliation and despair, a
personal Jesus can be the balm in Gilead, a healing uplifting presence
in our lives.

To many of you, this Jesus belongs to the realm of the tooth fairy or
the imaginary friends you had as a kid.  The fact that you don't
believe in the literal existence of this Jesus prevents you from
realizing his benefits.  You need to have things logical in your life,
and you can't pray to, can't call on a being whom you don't believe to
exist.  Well, I am this way myself, but I'm gradually beginning to
suspect that my mind is getting in the way of what my heart needs.

The second Jesus is more acceptable to my mind, which is the Jesus of
modern Biblical scholarship.  When the scholars try to strip away the
layers of ideology imposed by the special pleaders in the nascent
Christian movement towards the end of the first century, the picture
of Jesus that emerges is of the leader of a ragtag band of activists
operating around the northern edge of the Sea of Galilee.  They were
basically wandering mendicants; they would go from house to house
without carrying any money or food, would seek to be invited in,
whereupon they would proclaim the Kingdom of God.  They brought this
message ot Jews, but they also brought it to non-Jews.  Out of this
picture of the way Jesus actually lived and worked, liberation
theology constructs a whole ethic which espouses a radical preference
for the poor and oppressed, an anti-establishment bias which is
congruent with political liberalism.  This Jesus challenges us in our
middle-class comforts not to flag in our efforts at social justice so
long as there is inequality and oppression in the world.

A third concept of Jesus is found in the peculiar merging of
Universalism and process theology of Albert Ziegler.  Let me read you
two paragraphs fom the conclusion of his Foundations of Faith.

"Man [sic] was not created perfect to fall in sin.  He was and is
created innocent, and by the spirit of God in him moves toward virtue.
Salvation is not restoration to a former state, but a steady growth
toward wholeness.  It is not a static condition; it is a process of
growth, of improvement.  Man is not evil, in the sense that he enjoys
the fruits of wrongdoing; nor is he helpless to do right.  His only
desire is to do good, but he must do it as he sees it to be.  He sins,
i.e.  does wrong, does less than the best, because he himself is
incomplete.  He is in the process of being created by the divine
spirit in him.  He never was perfect, but is being perfected, as a
species, as individuals in the species.

In this system, the theological concept, Christ, takes on a different
and, for us, more persuasive character.  Christ is not something that
happened to one man, or was true of only one man; it is the divine
good in and for every person.  It is the divien image in which God is
making every person.  The creative Word is being spoken by God
throughout all the history of man.  When the Word has been spoken it
will be Christ.  Christliness was seen in Jesus, as it was seen in
Moses, Gautama, Mohammed, Gandhi and others.  It is seen in every
person in some degree, because people do not differ n their basic
naturebut only in the degree to which that nature has matured.  There
is a Christliness that beckons on each of us, and a seed in each of
us.  Christ is not that which has been, but that which will be in
every life; it is each of us perfected; no less ourselves but more
clearly ourselves for the perfecting.

This then, is my Christmas present to you.  As you come here on
Christmas Eve to sing the old carols and hear the old stories, may you
find a way to take some facet of Jesus into your heart and genuinely
express appreciation for the life that came into being two millenia
ago and in some sense continues among us today.

Amen.