Following Jesus | The Road to Emmaus 2003 | Luke 24:13-35

*Preached at Grace North Church May 4, 2003.*

When I was growing up, getting to heaven was easy. All you had to do was say a magical formula, commonly referred to as "The Sinner's Prayer," and you were magically awarded eternal life. The prayer goes something like this, "Jesus I know I'm a sinner. Please come into my heart and save me." Any variation on this theme would work, and it didn't matter if you were young, on your deathbed, a serial killer, or a Buddhist, anyone who prayed that prayer was instantly "saved," for now and all eternity.

Now, if you are thinking that this is just a little too easy, a little too flip, you and I are on the same wavelength, for the ideology which supports this superstition reduces soteriology to an occult ritual, folds all of Christology into the cross, and reduces every other religion on earth to demonic deception.

This all became frightfully and forcefully clear to me this Christmas as I was sitting around the table Christmas morning with my family in Alaska. We were talking about the dearness of pets, and the subject of whether or not animals could go to heaven arose. "Of course not," my sister asserted. "Why not?" I asked, enjoying the brief and unusual occurrence of theological speculation amongst my family. "Animals can't go to heaven because they can't pray THE PRAYER."

She meant the sinners prayer, of course. That magical ritual that by itself governs the eternal fate of each person on earth, and, apparently, bars the inarticulate from an afterlife of bliss. Of course, you will not be surprised if I confess that this assertion brought up a flood of feelings in me, about the arrogance of humans' assumed superiority over animals, and Christians' assumed superiority over every other faith on the planet.

I am not alone in my feelings. Recently I began teaching at the Chaplaincy Institute, and found that being known as a Christian in that, and many other alternative religious settings, is ALMOST as bad as having the Scarlet Letter sewn to one's bodice. Now, I don't think that this is a reaction born of knee-jerk aversion to the dominant culture. I myself have been terribly wounded by conservative Christianity, and many of our students have been also. And those who haven't been directly hurt by Christianity have been rightfully shocked and appalled by the xenophobic, misogynistic, misanthropic, and shudderingly hypocritical attitudes and public pronouncements coming from the Christian right.

In the light of such obvious ickyness so rampant in the Christian tradition, not to mention the undeniable criminality of our history, who on earth in their right mind would want to be a Christian?

Well, by the definition of many conservative Christians, I have to admit that I am not, in fact, one of their number. If being a Christian means blindly accepting pagan mythology grafted onto the Jesus story, the arrogant destruction of native cultures, and occult rituals enacted to obtain a selfish salvation for me and me alone, then no, I am not a Christian.

But I do follow Jesus. This week I have taken a hard look at these matters, why I am so repulsed by so much of Christianity, but so singularly drawn to this man, Jesus. I came up with several reasons for why I follow Jesus. Some of them I am more proud of than others, but it was nonetheless instructive to articulate them.

First, and foremost, I follow Jesus due to an accident of birth. Were I born in the middle east, there is a very good chance indeed that my religious creed would be, "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet." I don't disagree with that, now, but I doubt that, were I born a Muslim, my affection for Jesus would be quite as ferocious as it is. For most of us in the Western world, being born into a Christian culture is simply the luck of the draw. People in the West who are Buddhists or Hindus or Taoists, make a conscious break with Western tradition, but most of those who follow Jesus in the West do so largely by default. I find this disconcerting, in a way, because it implies that there is a great insincerity at the root of Western religiosity, but perhaps that is not really a Western phenomenon. It is, at any rate, the subject of another discussion. Suffice it to say that most of us who are Christians find ourselves in this faith because we were born here, not because we have made a conscious choice to follow Jesus over some other prophet or religious leader.

The next reason I follow Jesus is related to the first. Because I was reared in this faith the archetypes of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the ones that loom largest in my imagination. It is this mythology, this formulation that most informs my conscious and subconscious life. True, I could shake off my waking allegiance to the trinity, but when I sleep, it is undoubtedly the Christian pantheon that runs rampant in my dreams. Perhaps if I were to move to Thailand and utterly immerse myself in the Buddhist cosmology this would, in 10, 15, or 20 years begin to shift. But I suffer under the delusion that I have more important things to do than to arbitrarily reprogram my subconscious from one pantheon to another. And really, there is no point. Buddhist monks have fought and killed each other over the vagaries of doctrinal formulation just as we have, they simply haven't gotten the press that Christianity has gotten. The closet may be smaller, but there are still oodles of skeletons in there.

So where does my own choice enter in? Is there an authentic way to follow Jesus? I certainly hope so. I have staked my career, my mental health, and my personal integrity on the good bet that there is. What that looks like, exactly, is going to be different for everyone. I can only say what it looks like for me; you can decide for yourself if any of my arguments ring true.

First, I do not think it is possible for an adult in our culture to follow Jesus with integrity while still clinging to the mythologies and ideologies of one's childhood Sunday school class. Faith for children and faith for adults are very different animals. Becoming an adult involves an awful lot of disillusionment. Childhood is a time a great illusions, wonderful illusions, appropriate illusions. The safety of the home, the permanence of Mommy and Daddy, and the reality of both the Boogie Man and the Easter Bunny are all necessary formative constructs for the healthy imaginal life of children. But somewhere along the line the impracticality of a giant rabbit that visits the homes of every Christian boy and girl on Easter Eve, the undeniable vulnerability of human relationships, and the inevitability of impermanence impinges on us and the rosy bubble of childhood explodes into the rage and disillusionment of adolescence.

And this is as it should be. But traditional Christianity too often insists that, although we must mature in every other aspect of our lives, social and psychological, in our religious lives we must remain children, follow blindly, and stifle our critical thinking. To be good Christians we must remain perpetually immature, and ironically, the greater the degree to which we can willingly suspend our disbelief is the same degree to which we attain "spiritual maturity" in the eyes of most of the faithful. There is something deeply wrong about this.

Somewhere along the line, our childhood notions of who God is and what faith is all about must be transformed. Our reading today shows Jesus walking down a road with two disciples, but the Buddhists say, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" There is great wisdom in this. It is not, of course, advocating deicide, but rather relating the simple truth that any conception of Jesus or Buddha or any other manifestation of divinity that lives in our imaginations are NOT the real thing. Any image you or I can conjure, falls short of the reality, any theological formulation we can construct is by definition a lie. God is not a curiosity you can keep in a box, a concept you can define, or a beast on a leash who will do your bidding. The Tao Te Ching notes this by saying that "The Tao that can be described in words is not the eternal Tao." The Jews acknowledge this by forbidding graven images, or any pictorial representation of divinity. And the Buddhists say, "kill the Buddha, if you see him on the road." Only because anyone you see on the road is NOT the Buddha, any Tao you can describe in words is NOT the Tao, any god you can draw is NOT God. And any Jesus you believed in when you were in second grade is NOT Jesus, not by a long shot. In the Christian tradition, this precaution was articulated by Meister Eckhart, when he prayed, "God, please rid me of God for the sake of God." Our images of God must go, to make room for a more complete and expansive perception.

There are a lot of things I had to let go of about Jesus. To follow him with integrity I had to jettison most of the superstition I held on to: the virgin birth, the miracles, even the resurrection as it is literally understood. What I was left with astounded me, because it revealed the degree to which the mythology obfuscated the reality of Jesus.

I found that the Jesus I was left with was far more appealing to my adult mind, far more relevant to the difficulties I face daily, and far more difficult to follow than one who asked no more of me than the recitation of a magical formula.

I found the Jesus who is the prophet of the Kingdom of God. A gentle rabbi who discerned that God's literal presence in the temple was metonymous, that God is equally present in every corner of the earth, and in every person, no matter their estate. This Jesus made a creative leap that located the Kingdom of God not in heaven or the afterlife, nor in some future theocratic state to be bought with the sword. Instead, the Kingdom of God was present here and now, and immediately available for anyone with the eyes to see it, an imminent reality for anyone with the imagination and the courage to live "as if" it were already here. This is the Jesus who said, "Do not listen to those who tell you 'The Kingdom of God is in the Sky' for then the birds of the air will precede you. Do not listen to those who tell you, 'The Kingdom of God is in the sea,' for then the fish will get there before you do. Instead the Kingdom of God is inside you and outside of you." This is the Jesus who saw the natural world to be so immersed in divinity as to make Creature and Creator indistinguishable, and who said, "Lift the stone, there you will find me, split the wood, and there I'll be."

I also found that I believed in Jesus the egalitarian. Standing in the great Jewish tradition that promised that every mountain would be brought low, and every valley exalted, that the last would be first and the first last, Jesus decried and eschewed the evil of social stratification, and treated the lowliest beggar and the most exalted religious leader with equal respect and generosity. In his parables and his example he was forever pissing people off by refusing to buy into the caste system by which humans so tenaciously separate the "acceptable" from the "unacceptable" people. There are a few in the Christian tradition who have truly gotten this teaching. I am reminded of the Pope who knelt and kissed the feet of St. Francis. I rejoice at the stories of George Fox, founder of the Quakers, who refused to doff his cap to his betters, including Oliver Cromwell!

I was reading a training manual for dogs recently which said that dogs must have a clear hierarchy in order to feel secure, and that the pecking order they insist on was necessary for the survival of the pack in the wild. Psychologists have a name for coping mechanisms which served us as children but which do us injury as adults. It's called neurosis. We are not dogs nor pack animals in the wild. A recent episode of "Manor House" on PBS revealed that the lady of a Victorian manor would spend hours pouring over a table of nobility ranking to make sure that everyone was seated at the right place at the table; any mistake would mean social disaster and a faux pas that would never be lived down. The careful ordering of the pride of place upon which Victorian society stood or fell is a societal neurosis that requires a skilled shrink to bring its evil into the light, and nobody did that better, in my opinion, than Jesus, who insisted that the lowliest be given the place of honor at the table.

Finally, I find in a demythologized Jesus a model of integrity. I find in him a man who listened closely to his own heart, as well as the heart of God, and who lived accordingly, even when doing so meant being falsely accused, tortured, and murdered by those who were so threatened by his teaching. I do not idealize his death, nor do I romanticize the role of the martyr. I admire Jesus for honestly discerning his truth, and then living it out to the very best of his ability, regardless of the consequences.

Finally, I follow Jesus because I can't NOT follow Jesus. All my love of World Religions pales in comparison with my love for this man, whoever he is, whatever he actually taught. I am a Christian by accident of birth, yes, by archetypal default, no doubt, but most importantly, because in my heart of hearts, this man speaks with authority that I have heard from no other, this man captures my heart as no one else has. None other has so inspired me, none other has so won my affection, there are no other feet quite as beautiful as his. And since I am aware that I am a hypocrite, a sinner, and god help me a hopeless romantic, I cannot find my way on my own, and I must follow someone, so I choose to follow him.

I don't think salvation is easy. No magical formula can win heaven for you. No creed or willing suspension of disbelief will wave away, like some magic wand, the moral and existential crises of adult life in the post-modern world. No one religion is unsullied by hypocrisy or violence, just as no one religion holds the monopoly on grace or meaning or salvation. Everyone must find a way to live their spiritual lives that is uniquely theirs, and has integrity for them, and no scripture, no prince, no pope, no preacher, no poet, no theological proposition can do it for you.

But as for me, I find in Jesus the Prophet of the Kingdom of God, Jesus the egalitarian, and Jesus the man of integrity a model for my life that I can never hope to equal. But there is in the wake of such a man a clear way to be traveled. This man, I will follow into the grave, and if I am lucky, to a resurrection I barely hope for today. For did our hearts not burn within us when he explained the scriptures? Do we not perceive him in one another's faces when we break bread together? Let us pray

Jesus, I admit that I do not know who you are. Are you truly God? Are you a great prophet? Are you a rebel, a radical, or a saint? Or are you, in some ineffable way, all of these, and more that we can hardly imagine? It doesn't matter, really. For a list of the 99 names of God is mostly informative for the billions of names omitted. Help us, if we choose to follow thee, to do so for our own reasons, not for those handed to us by others, or those carried by default. For thou art a mystery too great to be grasped, but that does not relieve us of the responsibility of the grasping, and the wrestling that such true fealty entails. Give us the courage to confront our illusions, our dogma, our received wisdom, and to challenge it in the light of the things you said, and the things you did. Give us a gentle shove into an adult faith that values questions over answers, in which nothing is sacred, and all things are. Amen.

*After the sermon, I sung this song...*

The Mystery of You
By John R. Mabry

When you danced, the stars found their homes
When you laughed there fell the clattering of stones
When you tired the sky shot through with red
And the world hung on every word you said

And I don't understand you, but I don't have to
"Cause I'm so in love with the Mystery of you

You chose to dine with prostitutes, not kings
Adorned your hands with splinters, instead of rings
You healed a blind man's eyes with mud
And when you died, you fashioned voilence into love

And I don't understand you, but I don't have to
"Cause I'm so in love with the Mystery of you

Oh, and if you wore another form
I'd still thrill to thunder storms
This sun would keep me just as warm

Oh, and if I didn't know your name
I'd still cringe at coming pain
My skin still wrinkle in the rain

When you dance the stars find their homes
I hear your laughter in the clattering of stones
When you tire the sky shoots through with red
And world hangs on every word you say

And I don't understand you, but I don't have to
"Cause I'm so in love with the Mystery of you