“Not
from Here”
John
18:33-37
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
November
22, 2009
Christ
the King Sunday
On several recent occasions, in conversations with members of our church, I have made the statement that, even though I have been here for sixteen years, I feel like the church in that time has had three or four pastors. What I mean by that, of course, is that I have grown and changed over the years. Or, as Cindy put it one time when a member asked if I ever repeat my sermons, “He can’t, because he doesn’t believe the same thing from year to year.”
When I arrived here in 1994 I was in somewhat of a traditional theological mold. I recall that some members thought I was a little too “Jesus-y” for their taste in those days though, in some ways, I felt that was like criticizing an attorney for having too much of a grasp on the law.
As life happens, and my daughter, Katy, became ill and then died, it was as if the big bad theological wolf came along and he huffed and he puffed and he blew my house down. My theological house lay in ruins and I remember for a time you believed for me when I could not do it myself, when I was casting about and trying to find some solid theological ground on which I could stand again. Those were the years when a more progressive theology began to take shape in me. You might remember a series of infamous sermons that exploded forth from this pulpit that Angus Watkins and I shared during Lent in 2002 called “Eight Sermons Toward a Contemporary Christianity.” Luminaries like Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan, Jack Spong, and Matthew Fox were my mentors in those years.
More recently I have re-discovered John Calvin whose great gift to me this time around has been to see how great a pastoral theologian he was. He has been unfairly caricatured over the centuries as harsh and severe, both theologically and personally. But everything he wrote was for the benefit and blessing of the church and it has become evident to me that if there is a point in his theology that does not read to me as good news, then I have not searched out its meaning deeply enough. Calvin was a man of his own time as we all are people of ours, and he was not without flaw as none of us are without flaw, but if I could hook you up to a headset and play something through it as you slept at night hoping it would seep in, it would be Calvin.
Alexander Shaia has shown me the insufficiency of the quest for the historical Jesus that has defined western Christianity for most of the last two hundred years by pointing out the dead end to which such a quest leads us. All that quest can do is to lead us back into history which, while interesting, keeps us at some remove from God. Shaia insists that the design and intention of the gospels are to lead us into a living relationship with the living Christ today, in our lives, now, in the present, and his “quadratos” approach to the four gospels fosters that.
Stanley Kunitz has a line in his poem called Layers with which I much resonate, and I hope you might, too, for in the realms of God and theology, it is better to be a pilgrim than a settler. It is why Jesus at every turn would say to his disciples, “Come and see.” There is always more to discover, more to learn, more to experience. Kunitz says,
I have walked through many lives, /
some of them my own, /
and I am not who I was, /
though
some principle of being abides, from which I struggle /
not
to stray.
That principle of being for me is to
live my life as a Christian, but it is a principle I constantly am redefining
and, to my mind, enlarging. What
seems to be drawing much of my interest these
days is an esoteric rendering of the Christian story.
The word “esoteric” can be off-putting if it is taken to mean
something that is obscure or tedious or irrelevant, something far out or far off
from our daily living. But,
etymologically, it means exactly the opposite.
Coming from the Greek word esotero,
it means “further in.” Esoteric
Christianity says we need to go “further in” – within ourselves – in
order more fully to get to know and understand the Christian message and to
experience the presence of God in our lives.
“Inner Christianity” is another name for esoteric Christianity.
Jesus himself hinted at it when he said, “The
The writer of the gospel according to
John from which we read today was an esoteric theologian.
In the past couple of years, I have been able to travel a couple of times
to
Because John is not an exoteric, or
outer, gospel as Matthew, Mark, and Luke seem to be, but an esoteric, or inner,
gospel. The Christ of John is not
solely or even predominantly about the man Jesus because, in John, Jesus and the
Christ are seen as different entities. The
Christ refers to the living flame of love that guides all life and living on our
planet. It is larger than
Christianity and is available to all of humanity.
Jesus was a man who was able to hold within him in huge measure the high
energy, the divine consciousness of the Christ of God, and thus he became Jesus,
the Christ. In John’s
gospel, the story of Jesus the Christ’s life, suffering, death, and
resurrection is meant to be suggestive of the “Christ consciousness” ready
to thrive in us if we pay it heed. We,
too, can become Christ-ed.
We see intimations of this in our
gospel reading of the day in which Jesus the Christ is on trial before Pilate.
When Pilate asked if he, Jesus, was king of the Jews, Jesus answered that
his kingdom is not from this world. If
it were, he went on, his followers would have fought to keep him from being
handed over to the authorities, but, he said, “My
kingdom is not from here.” Jesus
the Christ made it clear that his kingdom is not an external kingdom based on
force but is a kingdom that resides in the hearts and consciousness of people
that is based on love. Jesus the
Christ made it clear that he had a different understanding of kingship than the
world has. This king, Christ the
King, is the sovereign not of a certain parcel of land or of a particular nation
or race, but of truth. The truth
evidenced in Jesus the Christ is not an idea, not a concept, not a formulation
or a creed, not a fact. It is a way
of being in the world in suffering and hope.
The inner meaning of the gospels has to
do with the illumination of one’s soul. If
we pay attention to the gospels, letting them wash over us and sink into us,
they will convey their message to our deepest essence, awakening and stimulating
it and us as a seed is quickened by the warming days of spring, moving us toward
a higher consciousness, toward “the same
mind that was in Christ Jesus” in the words of St. Paul, toward
participation in the kingdom of God in which Christ is king so that nothing that
is ultimately good and true and real about us ever finally is lost.
We call that resurrection.
We live in a world in which salvation
is all the time promised from outside of us…whether it be eating the right
food, buying the right product, believing in the right savior.
But Jesus the Christ reminds us that the
And, for that, on this Thanksgiving
Sunday, I say “thanks be to God!”
Amen.
Copyright
© 2009 First
Presbyterian Church