11/24/19 “"Looking for the Hopeful Ones” by Nancy Petty
Scripture: Luke 1:68-79; 23:33-43
When Jack McKinney and I were co-pastors his son Stephen, who at the time would have been about 10 years old, asked his father a very observant question. He asked: “Dad, why is it that when you preach you always preach about Jesus, and when Nancy preaches she always preaches about God?” Stephen, as a child, had noticed something significant about my theology.
By the time I finished seminary I was much more comfortable with God and the Hebrew scriptures than I was with Jesus and the Second Testament (or New Testament) scriptures. I could relate to the stories of the Hebrew Bible. Although I wasn’t a twin, I could identify with Jacob and Esau. I knew first hand about sibling jealousy and rivalry. Although I don’t stutter I could sympathize with Moses when he said to God, “Not me God, I stutter. I’ll take a pass this time.” The endless wandering in life’s wildernesses, the complaining, the blaming when things didn’t go my way, the lamenting of not being able to feel God’s presence—all of these things I could understand and relate to.
But when it came to Jesus and trying to understand who he was and the stories he would tell that always seemed like he was speaking in some coded language (now I know it was coded language) I just couldn’t figure it all out. Was he the Son of God or not? Was he fully human or fully divine? Did he speak of a personal salvation or a communal salvation? And then the lingering question that put me over the edge: the atonement question. Did Jesus have to die for our/my sins? So for years, I simply stayed away from Jesus and clung to my people wandering in the wilderness and blaming God for everything. That sounded just about right to me. Stephen was right, I didn’t preach about Jesus. As the pastor of a Christian church, Stephen’s question woke me up and I heard his question as a constructive criticism. Right then, I decided that it was time for me to figure out my Jesusology as well as my Christology.
From early childhood I had been drawn toward, fascinated with, committed to, and a bit perplexed by Jesus. Growing up in the church I was taught that I should be like Jesus. But in that same church I was also taught that I could never be like Jesus because Jesus was perfect. He was, after all, God’s own son. In fact, I was taught that he was God. While much of what I was taught as a child and young person was very confusing, my love of Jesus and my desire to live for Jesus was not dimmed in the slightest by questions that even the adults didn’t seem well equipped to answer. And so I journeyed on with the knowledge I had, and the knowledge I didn’t have.
Then in college and seminary came the knowledge I didn’t have. I learned more about the complexity of the Jesus narrative. As I studied Greek I learned about the complexity of translating Greek thought and words into English and how often concepts are not easily translated. And by the end of my New Testament classes in seminary, I had even more questions about Jesus and his identity and ministry and purpose. So, mostly unconsciously, I punted on Jesus and the disciples and focused on God and the Hebrew people. But as I said earlier, Stephen’s question woke me up and I realized I needed to do my work as to my own understanding of Jesus. I would take the following three years to read and study and form my own understanding of who Jesus was and is to me today.
I started that process by writing down what I had been taught as a child and youth in my home, my church and my community. Most every thing I had been taught about Jesus growing up came from scripture. Luke 1:35: “…therefore the child to be born will be holy, he will be called the Son of God.” John 4:25: “The woman said to him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming’ (who is called Christ).” John 1:41: “We have found the Messiah.” Luke 2:11:
“…to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” Luke 19:10: “For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Acts 4:12: “There is salvation in no one else, for here is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to God except through me.”
The messages from my early theological teachers were clear, plain enough, as Habakkuk instructed, for a runner to read them. Jesus: Son of God. Jesus: The Messiah. Jesus: Savior of the World. Jesus: Died for your Sins. Jesus: The Way, The Truth, The Life. Jesus: The King. Jesus: The Christ. And all of these teachings pointed to one central belief about Jesus that was required to be a Christian: you must believe that Jesus died on the cross to take away your sins, then you must repent of your sins and ask Jesus into your heart as your personal savior. Then and only then are you eligible for heaven. In short, what I was taught about Jesus was that God sent Jesus to die on a cross for my sins so that I might be saved and go to heaven. That was his purpose and his destiny per God. To be our personal Savior and keeps us from the fires of hell.
In my early faith years, this is who Jesus was to me. It was what I was taught. It is how I understood him and his purpose. But through seminary and living in an authentic community called Pullen Memorial, and through my own studies of Jesus, and might I add my relationship with Jesus, I would come to learn that much of what I had been taught was not all how Jesus understood himself. I would learn that these writings that teach us such—writings from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul—were all written looking backwards and constructed to form a specific theological position on Jesus’ life and ministry years after his death. What I had been taught through scripture were constructs of Jesus by individuals making a specific point about Jesus. John was interested in Jesus, the Messiah. Luke and Paul often focused on Jesus, the Savior—the one who came to offer us salvation from our sins. Matthew liked King Jesus, the Messiah. These were not the only portrayals of Jesus these writers offered, yet still each historian had a unique theological position they were advancing in the telling of their Jesus. And this was not limited to the biblical writers, it was true of the church fathers as well—those patriarchs who have defined Jesus for centuries. I have always wonder what we would know and understand different about Jesus if the women disciples and church mothers writings had been honored and respected and included. To be certain, we would have had a more complete understanding and theological grounding of who Jesus was and even understood himself to be.
On this Reign of Christ Sunday, it is Luke who raises for us again this question of who this Jesus really is; and invites us to answer for ourselves. In chapter 23, as Luke tells of Jesus’ crucifixion he recounts how the people and leaders scoffed at Jesus saying: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, the chosen one.” The soldiers mocked him saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” Even one of the criminals being crucified beside him derided him saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”
As I read these words and of those in Luke chapter 1, I asked myself this question: “What does it do to us to always be looking for a Messiah, a Savior?” Someone or something to save us from our ills and the ills of the world. If we are always waiting for someone else to “save” us, to be that Messiah or Savior or King who rides in on the white horse and makes all things right, what does that say about how we see ourselves as God’s people in the world today. I fear we often fall prey to this kind of theology and Jesusology. Even now, and especially now, this feeling is palpable in our country. I feel it in our anxiety. Who will save us? Who will be the new Savior? Warren, Bernie, Booker, Buttigieg, Harris or someone still unknown.
I wonder what it would mean for Christians today if we, as Jim Jarrard put in lectionary this week, “pulled off the robes that the ages have laid on Jesus.” What if we stripped Jesus of all those royal robes: messiah, savior, king, chosen one (as if there has only ever been only one chosen one) and instead gave him some new robes: dissenter, resister, social activist, lover, companion, architect of a moral movement, wisdom teacher, and freedom fighter. What if the church spent the next 500 years layering on him robes embroidered with the words immigrant, refugee, poor, black, homeless, food insecure, powerless, on welfare and Medicaid. I wonder how many people, how many Christians, would still call him their Messiah, their personal Savior, their King, their Christ if these were the robes that the church laid on him. Pulling off those robes that the ages had laid on him was the only way I could begin to preach about Jesus. It was the only way I could begin to understand him as God’s son born in the flesh. And since I pulled those old robes off and put some new ones on him I can’t stop talking about him. Where once he represented to me what was cynical about faith and a life of faith, now he represents to me all that is hopeful about faith and a life of faith. He stands as a symbol of an authentic and abundant life. He mirrors to me a life of meaning and purpose. He is my example of what it means to make sacrifices for the love of my neighbor. He is my inspiration to stand up for the poor and the marginalized and to seek justice for all. He is my strength when it comes to not giving up on believing that love is stronger than hate, that forgiving is more life-giving than holding on to hurt, and that there is more good in the world than bad.
The people of Jesus’ day didn’t understand him as the Messiah, or as the Savior of the world, or as their King. In a world corrupt with power and greed, they were simply looking for hope and they saw Jesus as the hopeful one—the one who brought good news to the poor, who proclaimed release to the captives, who gave sight to the blind, and who let the oppressed go free. In their darkness, he was the light. To a corrupt political system, he was the voice of truth. To a religious establishment that cared more about the love of power, he was the power of love. What all of the New Testament writers are trying to say with their religious words like Messiah and Savior and King of Kings and Son of God is that in Jesus the people found someone who brought them a kind of hope unlike any other they had ever experienced and it and he changed their world. That hope and that man are still changing the world today. This hope would become the “reign of Christ.”
As I have formed my Jesusology and am working on my Christology, I have come to understand and believe that the “reign of Christ” is not something that happened once ages ago, but that the “reign of Christ” is still happening whenever and wherever God’s people of today are being the hopeful ones, just as Jesus was in his day. We need to stop waiting on the Messiah and the Savior and the “reign of Christ” to ride in on a white horse and save us all. Instead, we need to be the hopeful ones that the world is looking for today—the hopeful ones God is counting on to restore justice love in a world that desperately needs it. We need to be the hopeful ones who usher in the “reign of Christ” on a daily, if not hourly basis.
Some might say that what I am suggesting is heresy. That to disrobe Jesus of these designations as messiah and savior and king and God’s only son is blasphemy. And to furthermore suggest that we might be the hopeful one that God is choosing to change the world today. Please hear me. I am not trying to sell Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary and Joseph, short. In fact, I believe such a Jesusology and a potential Christology that I am suggesting strengthens the argument that this man, fully human and fully divine, was indeed a Messiah—an anointed one—who changed the course of history unlike any other has or ever will. I do believe that it is in and through Jesus the Christ that God chose to most clearly reveal God’s self to the world. And I also believe that God continues to look for the hopeful ones who are willing, like Jesus, to embody God’s love in the world today. And in so doing, we too, just like Jesus change the world, if not save it.
Stephen McKinney asked a question about my faith that changed my life. He helped me see that my own internal conflicts about Jesus were keeping me away from seeking the Jesus who had originally captured my hope and my heart as a young Christian. So I want you all to do a little thinking this week. Where are you with Jesus? Have you done the work of reconciling this radical lover with whatever it is you were taught or not taught as a child? Are you ready to claim your own Jesusology? What would it take to get you there? I call on us all to undertake that great work, and the timing could not be better. We are soon to travel to Bethlehem, to begin the story again. Only in doing our adult Jesusology as mature, responsible Christians, with eyes open and willing to discern and receive the living spirit of the one sent to us from God, can we grow alongside that holy infant into bearers of the reign of Christ today.
What old robes will you pull off Jesus and what new ones will you lay on him?
