Who do you say that I am?
Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”
The hymn we just sang says, “You are a prophet, a hero, a reformer, a friend of humankind.” Others might answer, “You are saviour,” or “the Son of God.” Others might say “an imposter” or just “A myth.” One answers the question in terms of how one sees not just Jesus, but life itself.
We consider this question on Palm Sunday, when we recall Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, the end of his journey toward fulfilling his mission and becoming who he was meant to be. And therefore it’s a good Sunday to consider who, in fact,he was. And I shall do this by first describing my journey toward an answer, and oping this will lead you toward yours.
The sermon, however, does begin not with Jesus. It begins with burnout in my eighth year of ministry.
By then The First Parish of Sudbury had renovated the sanctuary, bought a parsonage, built a church school wing, doubled its membership and trebled its budget, and - its minister was a frazzle. In October (1965) a friend called me up and said he was taking Monday off from work and would I like to hiking with him. “Thanks, Charley,” I said, “I’d love to, but it’s impossible. I’ve too much to do.” “Oh, that’s too bad,” said Charley, “I was hoping you could come with me .” “I’d love to,” says I, “But it’s out of the question.” Well, Charley kept on wheedling and I kept saying No, til I realized he wasn’t going to hang up til I said Yes. That’s how he’d recruited eighteen teachers for the Sunday School that fall.
So I said Yes and on Sunday night we drove to Pinkham Notch, stayed in the old lodge and on Monday morning started up the Boot Spur Trail. It poured rain and in half an hour Charley’s asthma kicked up and we had to head back, soaked, cold and strangely exhilerated.The buzz from that wet half-hour in the woods lasted me all week, for I had tasted life as I had not tasted it for many a moon. I was restored, but more than restored, I’d been in some way healed. From then on I knew I could always go back to the hills, as I have for over forty years, and every time returned renewed.
And this, I’d guess, has happened to most or all of you - skiing, sailing, fishing, paddling your canoe, walking the beach or woods, digging in your garden, looking out your window at the loveliness around your home or, maybe, even hiking. You too have been restored by what we call “nature.”
And so with me. As for so many hiking became my salve, my solace and my sabbath. But as the years passed I had a growing sense that there was more to this than hiking and nature.
Then it came to me. I was coming up a trail and saw ahead of me a large rock face covered with bright green, almost irridescent, moss, moist and shining. I saw that moss and it struck me that this wasn’t just nature, but something one saw through nature. Nature was the window, not the scene. And whatever that something was, I knew it had healed me on that first tramp up the Boot Spur in the rain. To that something I’d returned again and again on all those hikes.
It wasn’t just nature,I say. Nature is lovely and restoring, but nature is also wild, brutal and destructive. At every level, including ours, one species kills and eats another. Tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, blizzards, plagues, droughts - all these obliterate life. And all of us at one time or another have known natures’s supreme indifference to our survival, as did a sobered Henry David Thoreau on the peak of Mount Katahdin. And furthermore, we’re told this universe will end in a dark and icy silence.This “something” that restores us is not just nature, but something we know at times through nature.
I say, I could not name this something, but knew it; and that’s why I felt at home in those hills where the something seemed so real.
Here’s another encounter.
Six years ago Faith and I were driving through the Berkshires to an uncle’s funeral in upstate New York. I was thinking of the hopeless conflict between the Taliban, Sunnis, Shi-tes, El Kaida and our military, and it came to me, as I’m sure it has to you, that in this conflict in addition to thousands already fallen you and I could die.
It was fall and piercing my dark thoughts the colored Berkshire hills spoke again of this eternal something, which no war, no bomb, no arrogance, no human power or ignorance or rage could obliterate - in Thomas Wolfe’s words which we read this morning: “Something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.”
Now to this I add that this “something” speaks, not just through autumn leaves and hills and mountains, but also thru books, events and people.
For example, in the flow of traffic when we drive in concert with each other.
In Michael Jordan’s amazing playing when was “in the zone.”
In the passionate search of theoretical physicist’s for a unified field theory
In comedian Tony Thuma’s claim that nothing, not stars or rocks or any atom, could exist - “were they not maintained in their existence by ... some fundamental force or principle beneath all other... principles, forces and things.” (Father Joe, p. 231) And this intuition seconded by scientists like David Bohm, Fred Hoyle and Loren Eiseley.
Poet Gerard Manley Hopkin speaks of “the dearest freshness deep down things.” A canoist in the Canadian wilds writes of hearing “the dream-like hum, which seems the very frequency of the land itself, binding it all together.” And poet-professor Richard Wilbur says in the NY Times, “The universe is full of a glorious energy, an energy that takes pattern and shape.”
But I did not learn the name of this “something,” this force, flow, zone, this “dearest freshness deep down things”, unified field theory, patterned energy... until I picked up a little book, a translation of 130 sentences written five centuries before Christ. They are the only surviving teachings of a lonely Greek philosopher, ignored in his time. His name was Heraclitus and he wrote of the essential principle of life which he called the logos. L-O-G-O-S.
When I read those sentences, I knew the “something,” the guiding, energizing, healing essence which I saw through the moss on the trail and in the Berkshire hills, the something witnessed by all those people whom I quoted - this was, in fact, the logos.
Heraclitus called it “the source,” and said “...all things follow from the Logos.” Again (in the second sentence) he says,”For wisdom listen not to me, but to the Logos, and know that all is one.”
Heraclitus was the first to name this life principle. But Socrates and Plato picked up his concept and developed it. Marcus Aurelius, said a 9 a.m. worshipper, wrote of the logos. Philo, the Jew of Alexandria, said that logos was the wisdom which the Bible describes in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.
And then we come to the Christian scriptures. In the first five verses of the first chapter of the gospel of John, we find this witness to the logos, (mostly from The New English Bible.)
“In the beginning was the Word (the Logos). The Word lived with God and what God was the Word was. The Word, then, was with God from the beginning, and through the Word all things came to be; no single thing was created without him. All that came to be was alive with his life and that life was the light of all humankind. The light shines in the dark and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1: 1 - 5)
What does John say was the Word? First of all, at the beginning of time the Word was God’s word spoken out of God’s mystery into the void of potential being. God spoke creation into being. God said “Let there be light,” and there was light,. And God spoke again, and there was night and day. Again God spoke, and there was earth and sky, sun and moon and stars, seas and land, plants, birds, fish, animals, then humankind itself.
God’s speaks creation, but God speaks a second word, says John.
God spoke again into the darkness, not the darkness of space, but the darkness of human history. God spoke into the bloodstained story of human greed and cruelty. And this time God spoke a human being, a man named Yeshua, meaning “God will save,” “Eeyazoos” in Greek, Jesus in English.
God spoke a person, says John, but more than a person, a person like no other who embodied God’s creative power, who was the Logos in human form. “The word,” says John, “became flesh and lived among us full of grace and truth.”
Why ? So that light might shine in the lives of those who trusted him. As Saint Paul said “The God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness who has shined in our hearts to give us the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
Thus I, like so many other seekers, discovered the heart of Christian faith - something a thousand miles from the sweet Jesus of my childhood and a long way from the Jesus of many Christians; a Jesus who is hero, rebel, teacher, friend, prophet, reformer, and all of these because he’s more than these, namely, God’s creative word in human kind. Therefore, John’s gospel calls him the way, the truth, the life, the light.
For those of us, and not a few, who see Jesus as the Word, his teachings, healings, talking, living and dying are models for us as we make our way through a dangerous and deceptive world
Strangely perhaps to some of you, this Jesus alienates us from no one, but rather connects us to others, and certainly those who do not see Jesus and the world as we do. If Jesus is the logos focussed, the human concentration of reality’s bright rays, yet surely the logos works in all creation and in all humankind, and surely speaks to and through non-Christians as well as those with no tradition.
How could Ghandi and Thich Nhat Han and Nelson Mandela and the Tibetan priests who rally for their freedom not be part of God’s speaking to our time?
Could Buddha or Muhammed or the Torah be incarnations of the logos? I can’t say. You’d have to ask a Buddhist, Jew or Muslim. As a Christian I will not lay my doctrine on their faith.Yet surely God speaks thru the logos to them.
What might this mean to those who walk the UU way?
We are the non-traditional dish in the American religious smorgasbord. We prize individualism. We value our differences. Our first principle speaks of the “worth and dignity of every person.” We see others’ traditions as resources, not authorities. We have no scripture and no set common faith. We set ourselves apart from from other religious households and communities. And we are cautious, in some churches pathological, about the “G” word and the “J” word and and the “p” word and indeed a whole alphabet of taboo terms.
Yet we too know the power and creativity which burst forth from the mystery of life. We too know how life feels when we are driving thru traffic in concert with others, when we are playing or singing music in concert with others, when we are working, thinking and planning church business in concert with others. We too are enlivened when we live the logos, and we are moved by knowing those who live the logos.
And though we do not use that strange Greek word nor its English translation or believe in its Christian incarnation, we have our own names for this guiding, energizing, creating principle of life, this extension of mystery.
I differ in many ways from mainstream Unitarian Universalism in many ways - its individualism, its separatism and its long leaving of not just Christian tradition, but tradition itself. And yet I know the logos works through us as well as others.
I have been surprised and helped by the times I have seen Christ in the eyes of my brothers and sisters in this movement, and whether they speak my language or think my thoughts is secondary. It is the quality of our conversation, not our agreement, which is a witness to the logos.
But here I must stop because ,sadly and strangely, I find that I can say no more about this logos. While I was writing it was almost as if God was putting a hand over my eyes and saying, “Enough, enough. There is more here than can be said. It must be experienced, and no sermon can communicate the presence of this power. It must be known in life.”
Is it true, I wonder, that ultimately, our most precious sense of God’s presence is not something we lay out in words, but sometimes and that but rarely know together in a song or a prayer or silence? Are these moments of spiritual solitude part of God’s plan so that what is most deep or high be not made banal by becoming the subject for a sermon?
I don’t know. I feel as if I have walked around a mystery this morning, but, then, it is God’s work, not a preacher’s, to lead us into the center of that mystery, at least as far as we can walk. Perhaps only Jesus and his kind walk through it.
We must be satisfied on this Palm Sunday with the journey given each of us, and if we long for more, to pray for it and patiently and actively wait for it. At least so it seems to this journey man this morning.
Enough! I thank you for listening and holding my fumbling efforts in your minds and hearts.