He stepped out into the plain
He stepped out into the plain
He stepped out alone to speak words of peace
And this is the truth of his life

He spoke the words of comfort
And he spoke the words of life
And he spoke the words of love and hope
through pain and strife

I wrote that – years and years ago. Well over twenty years. And I’ve sung it in public maybe twice. Because it’s about Jesus, and I don’t consider myself a Christian. Being clergy, I always worry that if I sing something I wrote about Jesus for other people, they’ll assume I’m trying to sell them on Christ, which I’m not, at all. Not even professionally. I worry they’ll think Unitarian Universalism is just another Christian church, when the truth is that while we have many Christians among us, and others who are Jesus curious, we also include plenty of folks who look to other theologies, other teachers, other traditions. I count myself in that group.

We even include the Jesus averse. For years in my previous congregation, every single Easter Sunday one of our longest term and most beloved members would come up to me during social hour and say, “That was a nice service. It was a little Christian for my taste, but nice.” And I would say, “Thank you, and yes, it probably did feel a little Christian. It’s Easter.” It’s the holiest day of the Christian year, so no, I’m not just doing Springtime and bunnies.

But this Easter in particular, I have been thinking more and more about Jesus, because I’m hearing his name invoked in ways I never thought I would, at least not quite so loudly, and not in those places. I’m hearing the name of Jesus coupled with the words “rain down apocalyptic destruction” on the people of Iran. I’m hearing the President of the United States tell Congress to pass a measure to restrict voting rights with the words “Do it for Jesus.” I’m hearing Franklin Graham at a fundamentalist service inside the Pentagon say, “Did you know that God also hates?”

And I have to tell you, that’s not the Jesus described in the Bible I’ve read. The Jesus in my Bible, in multiple translations, says that God is love. The Jesus in my Bible preaches forgiveness and hopefulness and renewal. The Jesus in my Bible speaks words of inclusion, not of privilege, of peace, not of violence and death.

He spoke the words of comfort
And he spoke the words of life
And he spoke the words of love and hope
through pain and strife

Give all that you have to the poor
Give all that you have to the poor
Take all you have and give it away
Give all that you have to the poor.

The four gospels each describe Jesus in their own ways, with different perspectives. But they are consistent on one crucial point – Jesus challenged people,and he wasn’t always nice about it. This is a man who walked into the temple, where merchants and money changers were plying their trades, called it a den of thieves, and overturned all the tables. And when a rich man asked him what he needed to do to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus told him, “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor.”

That’s hard. I sure haven’t done it. I don’t know many people who have, though I’ve met a few, not all of them Christian. But in telling this to a wealthy man, in Luke’s version a ruler, Jesus upended the structures of privilege and power in society. “The first,” he said, “will be last, and the last first.”

But, and this is the part so many leave out – he said the first may be last, but nobody is getting left behind. The society he sought to create, or the vision of Heaven that he held – it’s honestly hard to tell which he was preaching at any given moment, and maybe it was both – had room for everyone. Every single person. Even the wealthy prince who couldn’t quite bring himself to let go of his status.

He spoke the words of comfort
And he spoke the words of life
And he spoke the words of love and hope
through pain and strife

Love those who do not love you
Love those who do not love you
Love them, do good, expect nothing back
Love those who do not love you

Jesus challenged people, and not only the privileged and powerful. He challenged everyone, including his most ardent followers, and the most beautiful and important challenge he ever issued, I believe, was the challenge of love. If there is salvation to be found in the teachings of Jesus for a Humanist like me, I think it’s in that message of love.

And it wasn’t just “God loves you,” though he did preach that, time and again. It wasn’t just “You should love God,” although he said that too. But that’s not the hard part. It’s easy to love an amorphous divine figure that you don’t have to deal with every day. It’s even easier to feel comfort in God’s love for you, if you believe in that kind of divinity. It’s not even that hard to love your neighbor, in the abstract. It’s very hard to love someone who actively despises you. It’s hard to love someone who is trying to hurt you, and maybe succeeding. It’s hard to love someone who denies your humanity.

But that’s the power of love right there, and possibly more than any other single element of Jesus’s ministry, this is something I believe Unitarian Universalism teaches, at least as I see it, and it’s something I try to live by. Here is a saving message. Because what hatred does, is create more of itself. Somebody hates me, I turn around and hate them back, then their friends hate my friends, their children hate my children, and look where it gets us. That’s arguably why we are seeing war and genocide in the Middle East, generation after generation. That’s arguably part of the religious and cultural divide in this country right now. Instead of listening to each other, we return hatred for hatred, stone for stone.

Jesus taught differently. “Do good to those who hate you…. Expect nothing in return.” So today, when I see those same people I talked about earlier, who misappropriate the words of Jesus to justify war and oppression, I can’t find it in my heart to hate them. I don’t like them. I will not acquiesce to them. And I don’t believe that’s what Jesus meant either, when he said you should turn the other cheek. He meant don’t sink to their level. I will not stop struggling for what I believe. But also, I will not yield, I must not yield to hatred, because to hate them is to become them.

It’s hard. But it’s also hope. It’s even part of the Easter story, those words that Jesus spoke as they raised the cross, the instrument of his torture: “Forgive them. Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And the temptation after that horrific death would have been for his followers to hate the people who did it. But that isn’t what Jesus taught them, so they did their best. And as they tried to live that ideal of love in the communities they created, slowly, and sometimes agonizingly, but inevitably, they found new life.

He spoke the words of comfort
And he spoke the words of life
And he spoke the words of love and hope
through pain and strife.

The Kingdom of God is within.
The Kingdom of God is within.
The Kingdom of Heaven is in your hearts
The Kingdom of God is within.

Of course that didn’t stop people from asking for signs. Jesus told his followers again and again to stop looking for omens of the coming Kingdom of Heaven, but I don’t think he had much success, because the whole structure of the gospels is an accounting of things that supposedly happened to fulfil prophecies. This is what we in the business call a “cognitive dissonance,” and it’s part of how I separate the religion about Jesus from the teachings of Jesus. But when they asked him, to his face, “When is this Kingdom of God coming?” this is what he said – “The Kingdom of God is inside you.”

The Greek word the Bible uses here is “entos,” which can mean “inside,” or “within” or “among.” So if you look at translations over the years, different ones use all three of those words, and in each it feels like they mean very different things. Is the Kingdom of Heaven in your soul? Or is it in the community? Or does it rise up through community?

I like to think it’s all three. In the Gospel of Thomas, which is a record of sayings at least as old as Mark, Jesus says, “The Kingdom of God is inside of you and it is outside of you.” I think he believed there is something sacred within every human being. That’s why he taught love. That’s what love teaches. I also think he intended to create a community on Earth that embodies that kind of holiness and the morality love engenders. That’s why he upended structures of power and oppression.

And can we agree, by the way, that “Kingdom” is a terrible word for this? It’s the word they had, at the time, and the model of society that they had, but it also feels directly contrary to anything Jesus was trying to create. Phillip Pullman wrote about “The Republic of Heaven,” which I like better, and Unitarian Universalists echo Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when we envision “the Beloved Community.”

The gift is this: It’s already here. It’s inside you, because when you live from your true heart, you help to create that beloved community. It’s within you, whenever you give something of yourself for other people, whenever you practice love, and not just feel it, and it’s among you – in the stranger, in the neighbor, in the child, in the immigrant, even in the one with whom you have fought. The beloved community is here, on Earth, and we have only to embrace it.

He spoke the words of comfort
And he spoke the words of life
And he spoke the words of love and hope
through pain and strife

When Jesus died, that vision could have died with him, but it was too powerful. So they told the stories, and the stories grew and grew with each telling, until they were filled with miracles and wonders, and probably mixed up with ten or twelve other prophets. But the core message of love, the challenging message of justice, the vision of beloved community, remained through every telling. Words of life stayed, and for two thousand years they have been dismissed, ignored, coopted, twisted and ridiculed, even by his loudest followers, but they have endured. Without them, Jesus is just another mythic figure, and trust me, there were and are plenty to choose from. Only with those words of life does Jesus’s ministry have any power to transform, any lesson to teach, any inspiration that moves us to rebirth, renewal, and re-creation.

Easter is a celebration of resurrection, of life from death. The words of life, if we hold them, and if we live them, if we grow from them, build on them, and love with them, bring that promise to fruition – in our hearts, in our lives, and on this beloved earth.

He stepped out into the plain
He stepped out into the plain
He stepped out alone to speak words of peace
And this is the truth of his life

 

Meditation

In this season of renewal,
as the Earth warms,
and hearts learn once again to sing,
we wake and we rise.

We wake
to the holiness of this world,
the sacred within and around us.

We rise to the vision
of justice
and peace
in every nation,
in every land,
in every heart.

We wake to the need around us,
giving of ourselves
to serve one another
to feed the hungry,
to welcome all people as neighbors.

We rise to the love within us
dedicating ourselves to the practice of repair
where we have caused pain,
and to forgiveness of others
as we are able.

We wake and we rise,
to the coming dawn
of community,
of love,
of unity,
of hope.

Amen,
and blessed be.

 

 

Go with hope, this Easter.
Go with love in your heart,
courage in your soul,
and life abundant.