"When Jesus Came to America"

READING

Stephen Prothero, Chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University, wrote his book "American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon," to explore the cultural history of Jesus in America. What he learned is that our images of Jesus are a reflection of ourselves, in all our diversity. "It is highly unlikely that Americans will ever come to any consensus about who Jesus really is," he writes, "but they have agreed for some time that Jesus really matters. In a country divided by race, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion, Jesus functions as common cultural coin . . . . "Consensus history has been out of fashion since the 1960s, and it shows no sign of coming back, but at least in this case Americans appear to have something significant in common underlying their many differences. Jesus is a major figure in American life. Though by most accounts he never set foot in the United States, he has commanded more attention and mobilized more resources than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., combined. Is this not powerful evidence for the view that the United States is a Christian country?

"The problem with this conclusion is that, for many Americans, Jesus is not a Christian at all. To be sure, the cultural authority of Jesus has been used to promote the Christian tradition. But it has also been used to reform and subvert it, both from within and without, by Americans who see the man from Nazareth as a nondoctrinal, nondenominational, non-Christian. When it came to Jesus, Thomas Jefferson, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, and Swami Vivekananda employed similar strategies. All drew sharp distinctions between the religion OF Jesus and the religion ABOUT Jesus, and all used the former to attack the latter. While other Americans loved Jesus because of Christianity, they loved him despite it. The fact that the United States is a Jesus nation does not make it a Christian one.

"Perhaps the American Jesus demonstrates that this is a multireligious country. After all, here Buddhists and Black Jews, Mormons and Muslims have all claimed to understand Christianity better than the nation's cultural and religious insiders. Mormons have claimed superior insight into Jesus based on the Book of Mormon and later revelations. Jews have said they understand Jesus better because he was a Jew. . . . These are bold claims, but it must be remembered that Jesus is the subject here, not Moses or Joseph Smith. The Buddha, though loved and worshiped in some circles, is not an American hero, and the nation does not observe his birthday. Plainly, the spotlight that shines on Jesus illuminates American Christianity far more than the country's other religions.

"The American Jesus does not demonstrate either that the United States is a Christian country or that it is a multireligious one. He demonstrates that it is both at the same time. Jesus became a major American personality because of the strength of Christianity, but he became a national celebrity only because of the power of religious dissent. Like America's Jesus himself, who was born among Protestants but now lives among Christians and non-Christians alike, the United States has developed from a Protestant country into a nation, secular by law and religious by preference, that is somehow the most Christian and the most religiously diverse on earth. As one of its people's foremost cultural artifacts, the American Jesus tells us that Christianity predominates in the United States ? that practitioners of all faiths, and no faith at all, must reckon with its central symbols. He also tells us that the public power of Christianity, while undeniable, is not absolute, that Christians do not have a monopoly, even on the central figure of their tradition."

SERMON

Everybody in America knows something about Jesus. Mormons base their faith on the claim that Jesus actually came here, founded a church, and commissioned twelve apostles to carry out his ministry in the New World land. Followers of Vedanta, American Hinduism, decorate their altars with "a striking image of divinity." "Dressed in a flowing white robe, his long hair pulled back behind his shoulders, this holy man sits, half-lotus style, eyes cast down, in meditation," writes Stephen Prothero. The picture is titled "Christ the Yogi." In it, Jesus is a Hindu.

Jesus is our spiritual everyman, everything from avatar to superstar. It hasn't always been so. The Puritans, an early wave of Christian immigrants to America, focused their attention on Hebrew scripture and their relationship with God. Jesus was a minor player in their Calvinist theology. After the American revolution and the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791, America became what Prothero calls "a spiritual marketplace," with "unprecedented religious creativity and intense religious competition." Freedom and religious fervor combined, with original results: new ideas for the new spiritual seekers.

One of these seekers was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, and especially by the Unitarian scientist and theologian, Joseph Priestley. Priestley taught that religion and science could be compatible, and that the religion of Jesus "was as simple as it was sublime," once the trappings of Christianity were eliminated. While "in the distant past, Christianity had overthrown Jesus," as in the Puritan preoccupation with the Old Testament God, "now it was time for partisans of Jesus to overthrow Christianity."

We Unitarian Universalists know what happened next. Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the New Testament, cutting away everything except the story of Jesus, edited to conform to his standards of reason and common sense. Gone were the miracles and the legends about Jesus' virgin birth and resurrection. What remained was the simple narrative of Jesus' life on earth, his sayings and stories. Jefferson had liberated Jesus from Christianity, and Jesus would never be the same.

Despite Jefferson's close ties to Unitarianism and the frequent accusation that he was one, he was primarily a free-thinker and a religious loner. What "The Jefferson Bible" has given us is evidence of his search for Jesus - not Jesus the son of God, but Jesus the moral teacher and Enlightenment philosopher. Thomas Jefferson discovered our first American Jesus, someone who reflected his values and validated his approach to religion.

Since then, Americans of all faiths and backgrounds have discovered a Jesus they can worship. This Jesus is a platform not only for Christianity, but also for our religious diversity. He is a man of limitless possibilities, the man everybody knows.

Everybody, that is, except for us. And especially me. Our church historian, Rob Briner, sent me a message after reading in the newsletter that I was planning to preach on Jesus this Sunday. He thought I would like to know that this is the first time in my nearly twelve years of ministry here in Santa Monica that the name "Jesus" appears in the title of my sermon. That observation shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. I'm no biblical preacher, but I didn't realize I had strayed that far from the texts and themes of our religious heritage. I have. Reading Prothero's "American Jesus" made me wonder why. In a country where virtually everyone else, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Mormons and Buddhists alike - have had something to say about Jesus, why have we Unitarian Universalists been so quiet? Because it's not just me who avoids the subject. Jesus has been absent from Unitarian Universalist discourse for at least a generation, probably longer. Ever since Ralph Waldo Emerson refused to serve communion and started reading Hindu scriptures instead, we have been willing to discuss almost anything but what Jesus means to us.

Thomas Jefferson made a useful distinction between the religion OF Jesus and the religion ABOUT Jesus, embracing the former and rejecting the latter. But that distinction seems to have gotten lost somewhere. It's as if we have concluded that you can't have one without the other. And so most of us, all but a handful of us, just avoid the subject altogether.

I confess, I don't have much to say about Jesus for myself. I approach the gospels the same way I read a sacred text from any religion - as an outsider, not a believer. Lifelong practice of Unitarian Universalism has led me away from religion and towards a different kind of faith. And I don't expect scripture to show me what it is. I am representative of a Unitarian Universalist perspective that seeks to find meaning in life through my own direct experience, unmediated, as Emerson would say, by rituals or authorities. Obviously I haven't rejected all rituals or authorities, since I am standing up here leading a worship service, but I don't expect any of you to discover your faith in what I have to say. I expect you to discover your faith by looking at yourselves and your lives, just as I look at mine. We are all people, equally equipped to do this work. What is good about being here is that we can do it together. If we pull in a religious text or spiritual practice in doing that work, so much the better, but it is not essential. Our tradition has always concerned itself with character and good works, less so with theology and ritual.

The life of Jesus surely offers a lot of material to teach the value of character and good works. But the religion ABOUT him, with its Nicene Creed, its heaven and hell, its crusades and its cathedrals, is just about as far from our essence as it could be. We can only imagine that Jesus might feel the same way. He may very well stand in our corner with us.

Despite the more fanciful manifestations of Jesus in American culture - Jesus visiting America on a sojourn from Galilee; Christ the Yogi as a contemplative icon; Jesus Christ Superstar and Enlightenment master; and best of all, Jesus the balloon - "a 110-foot-tall, 750-pound hot air balloon of the 'King of Kings, Lord of Lords,' [that] continues to lift off each Easter over northern California, preaching the risen Christ to citizens below;" the real power of Jesus is that we all see him first of all as a fellow human being. He was a man, who may have lived and taught as some report, or not; but it is the fact that he is human that provides such fertile ground for the imagination. It helps to remember that he doesn't belong to any one tradition, not even Christianity. He was his own person, though many have tried to claim him.

Thinking about Jesus as someone who might have cared about character and good works, as we do; who might have rejected the same aspects of religion as we have; gives us a starting place to get to know him. We can take Jesus out of religion again, see him as one of us, make the stories about him ones we want to hear.

The version of "The Loaves and Fishes" that I told earlier is one example of how to do it. Jesus feeds a crowd of five thousand because he inspires them to share their food with each other - not because he miraculously produces something out of nothing. As the boy's grandmother, one of Jesus' disciples, describes him, Jesus "had all the good things inside we would like a leader . . . to have. He was kind to those no one else valued, and he served the people rather than making money for himself, and he did deliver us in a way. He helped us find things in ourselves we didn't realize were there." This is the Jesus I would like to know.

Stephen Prothero writes that Jesus became a national icon because of the "audacious efforts of America's free-thinkers and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, who have conspired to steal Jesus away from Christianity, freeing him up to be (in St. Paul's words) "all things to all people." People make him, over and over again, according to their image of what it is to be human and holy. And so do we, when we stop to think, if only for a few moments, about what it means to know Jesus.

References used to prepare this sermon include "American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon," by Stephen Prothero (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), and "The Loaves and Fishes," by Cheryl Gibbs Binkley & Jane Mitchell McKeel, in "Jesus & His Kingdom of Equals: An Interdenominational Curriculum for 4th-7th Grades on the Life and Teaching of Jesus."