Hilton Head Island, SC – November 25, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 8:14-22; Luke 9:57-62
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” – Luke 9:58 (RSV)
Does it seem to you like Thanksgiving came earlier this year than usual? That’s because it did. Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday of November, and the earliest date the fourth Thursday of November could be is the 22nd. This year, Thanksgiving was on the 22nd.
I note this because the first Sunday after Thanksgiving is normally the first Sunday of the liturgical season known as Advent. But because Thanksgiving inserted itself so early into this year’s calendar, this isn’t the first Sunday of Advent. But it feels like it to this old ecclesiastical warhorse, and so this morning I am going to preach a pre-Advent Advent sermon, which really will be the introduction to this year’s series of Advent sermons, called Messianic Parables.
New Testament scholars have argued among themselves for centuries about whether Jesus perceived himself as the Messiah of God. Certainly the Church has always perceived Jesus that way, but did Jesus see it that way? Whatever you may think about that, you can find support among the experts, if you look hard enough to find some of them who agree with your position.
For today, I want to begin by suggesting that without question Jesus often referred to himself as “the Son of man” (and the word “Son” is always capitalized when this expression is used, although that is in English and not in the original Greek). Whether “Son of man” meant the same as “Messiah” to Jesus is also subject to debate, and I will refrain from offering my own opinion about that. But in both our scripture readings for today, which are Matthew’s and Luke’s report of the same Gospel episode, Jesus remarked on how much he felt as though he didn’t belong in the world in which he found himself. In both Gospels Jesus made this observation quite early in his public ministry. He hadn’t been preaching and teaching and healing for more than a few months when he said these memorable words: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”
This statement was preceded by a man, in Matthew a religious scribe and in Luke simply “a man,” telling Jesus that he would follow Jesus wherever he might go. But already Jesus seems to have realized that he had no place to go, at least no place that would be a refuge for him. “The Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” Before he had barely begun his ministry, he was already in trouble with a lot of people, and he was painfully aware of that sobering reality.
To be candid, this particular sermon was prompted by a long article in Newsweek Magazine, called The Forgotten Jesus. It was written by Andrew Sullivan, who is an English columnist living in the US. He is featured in several publications on both sides of the Atlantic. His subtitle was “Christianity has been destroyed by politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists. Ignore them, and embrace him.” From these words we may conclude that Andrew Sullivan is not thrilled by the Church or by how some parts of it have involved themselves in partisan politics.
Years ago Andrew Sullivan was, by his own admission, politically quite conservative. Now he is politically quite liberal. His politics is very similar to many liberal Christians in many respects. However, he seems to believe that no one, conservative or liberal, should derive any political leanings from the teachings of Jesus, which, he insists, were utterly a-political.
Sullivan writes this: “The crisis of Christianity is perhaps best captured in the new meaning of the word ‘secular.’ It once meant belief in separating the spheres of faith and politics; it now means, for many, simply atheism. The ability to be faithful in a religious space and reasonable in a political one has atrophied before our eyes.”
We might agree with his last statement, but the purported logic by which he got to it seems highly flawed. To my knowledge, the word secular never meant the separation of faith from politics, nor has it ever connoted atheism. In his understanding, maybe it does, but not in the understanding of any Christian or non-Christian thinker who ever wrote about the meaning of either secularism or secularity of whom I am aware. From the Latin, saeculum means “worldly,” as contrasted to the “otherworldliness” of the Church. In the Roman Catholic Church there are two kinds of priests: secular and religious. Secular priests work out in the world, in other words, in parishes, while religious priests are affiliated with religious orders, like the Benedictines or Franciscans or Dominicans. Furthermore, I never read anything which suggested that the word secular had anything to do with politics per se.
But Andrew Sullivan wants to suggest that Christianity has become too closely connected to political positions. However, I suspect he is reacting personally, because he was once an active and committed Catholic. Now he has given up Catholicism, because it and other conservative religious groups engage in what he calls “furious denunciations of others, by focusing on politics rather than prayer, by concerning ourselves with the sex lives and heretical thoughts of others rather than with the constant struggle to liberate ourselves from what keeps us from God.” The fact that years ago Mr. Sullivan came out of the closet as a gay man may have added to his sense of both rage and hurt that some strands of Christianity have become so judgmental. However, not all Christians or churches are like that, and I trust that congregations like ours are not like that.
All that aside, however, is Andrew Sullivan onto a certain kind of truth when he calls Jesus “The Forgotten Jesus”? He points out some of the more radical sayings of Jesus, that we should love our enemies and give away our wealth and relinquish all power over others. Those parts of what Jesus said indeed do tend to be forgotten by nearly everyone, because they are so hard to live by. Andrew Sullivan is on a crusade against the dark aspects of politics in this article, and he seems to think that politics has thwarted the core teachings of Jesus. “What is politics if not a dangerous temptation toward controlling others rather than reforming oneself?” he asked. Well maybe, but I never would have thought to express it that way, and I suspect none of you would either.
Even though I disagreed with much of what Mr. Sullivan wrote to support his central idea of the Forgotten Jesus, I do think there is much validity in that general idea. All of us, like the man who came up to Jesus promising to follow him wherever he went, are eager to become disciples of Jesus, but we do not readily count the cost. It is very difficult to follow Jesus, because there is no refuge for us, just as there was none for Jesus. We can get killed, if not literally then certainly figuratively, by following Jesus. No wonder people tend to forget how demanding Jesus was - - - and is.
The Forgotten Messiah is the one who says to us, “If anyone would come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me” (Mt. 16:24). It is he who says, “Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Mt. 7:13-14). He is the Jesus who says, “For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mk. 8:38). That Jesus is quite easily forgotten, because his words pierce so deeply and cut so badly. Sullivan is right about that.
There is a Methodist minister named Mark Dove who comes with his wife Jenelle to our weekday classes here in the library of Beth Yam. They are up in Ohio half the year and here the other half. They just returned to the island three weeks ago.
Mark has a close friend who is also a Methodist minister. His lives in Greensboro, NC, and his name is John Cock. Mark quoted his friend as saying this: “I am a secular Christian who begins my theology in the human experience and then points to specific elements of the Christian story… I’m comfortable living in the secular. It’s my home! This world is my home – even though I often try to live in a make-believe world. It is in the real world where I experience the profound stuff such as grace, love, freedom, care, purpose, community…in all, meaningful existence.”
We discover the Forgotten Messiah in the most unlikely places: in saloons and movie theaters and sports events and horse races and rock concerts. He shows up where husbands and wives have serious marital conflicts or legislators debate same-sex marriage laws or city councils consider whether to permit a return to thinly veiled Jim Crow laws. Jesus implies hard things about hard realities, and more often than not, we like to keep him and his interfering ideas outside, where the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.
The Forgotten Messiah is strange, which is why he is so easily forgotten. The Messiah is supposed to look regal, and to act like royalty, and to maintain the appearance of a king. But Jesus was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. He didn’t look messianic, which is why so few of his contemporaries believed him to be the Messiah.
The Forgotten Messiah comes to us unobtrusively, not riding in on a warhorse. He is quiet, not loud, meek, not bold, diffident, not defiant. If Jesus behaved like the popular notion of the Messiah, he would have gathered tens of thousands of followers in his lifetime. At the end, when he slowly died on a cross, there were only a handful of people there to mourn his death, and all of them were women. Not a single male disciple had the courage to go to Golgatha.
Jesus deliberately rejected the popular notion of what the Messiah should be. People wanted raw power; in Jesus they found personal humility. They wanted a military figure; in Jesus they encountered someone who forbade violence against anyone for any reason. They wanted a monarch; they got a Mensch, a peculiar Mensch, the kind of genuine human being who defied what anyone would describe as the sort of person all people are meant by God to be. Jesus was little, and they wanted someone big; he was not forceful; he was an outsider; he came from nowhere important. A few saw him to be someone special, but almost no one, and probably none at all, saw him to be the Messiah of God. What really mattered to Jesus didn’t matter much to very many others. Only after he had been dead for fifty years or a hundred years did many people start to pay much attention to him.
When I was in high school there was a period when we had a Hymn of the Month in our church. I don’t know whether it was the minister or the organist who came up with this idea. It lasted maybe a couple of years, and then, like many other ideas, it died a quiet natural death. (Perhaps that was the beginning of how I came to know so many unfamiliar hymns. By singing those unknowns for four Sundays in a row, they became known, at least to me, who probably was subconsciously filing them away for future use in worship.)
Anyway, one of those hymns was a two-liner with easy lyrics which penetrated the heart of a high school boy who had known for several years that he wanted to become a minister when he grew up. It was so simple that it almost was like a Sunday school song, but we sang it in church, and I remember it. The words for the hymn were by Harry Lee, about whom I know nothing, and the tune was composed by Karl Harrington, and I know nothing of his background either.
My Master was so very poor,
A manger was His cradling place;So very rich my Master was,
Kings came from far to gain His grace.
My Master was so very poor,
And with the poor He broke the bread;So very rich my Master was
That multitudes by Him were fed.
My Master was so very poor,
They nailed Him naked to a cross;So very rich my Master was,
He gave His all and knew no loss.
Jesus of Nazareth is an enigma. Most of his initial followers were ordinary people, not the cream of Galilean or Judean society. Nevertheless he did manage to attract the interest and admiration of a few big shots. The Pharisee Nicodemus was one of them. Jesus didn’t emerge from a privileged background. In our geography, he wasn’t from the Upper East Side or Bryn Mawr or Hilton Head Island; he was from the South Bronx or South Philadelphia or rural Hardeeville.
How, therefore, do we perceive him, twenty centuries after he lived? Is he a rich Master, or a poor one? Is he the most memorable person in human history, or is he the Forgotten Messiah? Or is he both? Are we more inclined to sing, “All hail the power of Jesus’ name, let angels prostrate fall,” or “My Master was so very poor, a manger was his cradling place”? The former more than the latter, surely, because we all know “All hail,” and probably no one here has even heard the text of “My Master” before.
Do you perceive Jesus as great and grand and glorious, or as strange, and alien, and enigmatic? Does he fit in with your lifestyle? If you could, would you invite him to be a guest in your home, or would be you be a bit uneasy to have such a social misfit come to visit you? Despite the fact that we call ourselves Christians, are we a little ashamed of Jesus Christ? Who is the Forgotten Messiah, the one who raised Lazarus from the dead, or the one who spent most of his time with sinners and outcasts and society’s dregs? And what constitutes a proper Messiah anyway?