Hope for and Participation in a Better World

December 15, 2019  Isaiah 2:2-4 and Mark 1:1-10

Isaiah presents to us a vision of what God wants for the world.
All the people of the world will come to God,
and Isaiah speaks of everyone coming to Jerusalem,
For if God had a house it seemed that it would be in Jerusalem.
Everyone will learn God’s ways
and God will arbitrate all disputes.
Because God will settle all disputes, and there will be justice for all,
there will be no need for war or the weapons of war.

John the Baptist twists the vision of Isaiah a bit.
Isaiah says God is going to bring all people together, in peace, in Jerusalem.
John the Baptist says that God is coming to judge the world
make war against evil and destroy all the hurtful evil people in it.
That’s how we will get justice.

This is contrary to Isaiah’s vision in which all people will be saved.
Isaiah was what we call a Universalist.
All people who responded to God would be saved.
If you didn’t respond,
you were simply excluded from all the good things of life.

[This is the same message as everybody’s favorite in the Gospel of John 3:
“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him may not perish
but may have eternal life.
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Those who believe in him are not condemned;
but those who do not believe are condemned already....
This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world,
and people loved darkness rather than light....”]

[I should note that the Gospel writer John was not the same as the Baptist.
There is yet another John, writer of the Revelation at the end of the Bible.]
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Here is what many scholars now think happened:
Jesus became a disciple of John the Baptist but for a short time.
John preached that God was coming in the future to judge all people.
The only escape was to commit to God,
and show that commitment through baptism.
Jesus joined John by being baptized.

Have you ever noticed that Jesus didn’t baptize anyone?
This is puzzling because one definition of a sacrament
is that it is an action instituted by Jesus.
But Jesus didn’t do it; John did.

Jesus didn’t baptize because he abandoned the teachings of John.
Jesus didn’t demand of people that they repent the way John did.
Jesus didn’t ask people to repent or to change
because his message was different.
Jesus preached that “The kingdom of God has come near;
He probably didn’t say “repent, and believe in the good news.”
I think the word “repent” was added here to connect him to John.

So John said that God was coming soon.
But Jesus said: “the kingdom of God has come near.”
Or he says the kingdom is in your midst or among you,
or he tells parables about the Kingdom
comparing it to various things in nature
or the ways people can treat each other with kindness or mercy.
Live as if the Kingdom were here now,
as if God and not the Romans were in charge, now.
God is ready to intervene in our lives anytime.
Jesus appears not to have worried much about the future.
Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God was a lot like Isaiah’s.
People living under the rule of God in peace.
People gathering around a table, sharing the gifts of God.

Jesus had been a disciple of John, but left John and started his own group.
He only asked fishermen to become fishers of people, not to be baptized.

What happened?
The gospel writers conflated or meshed
the messages of John the Baptist and Jesus.
The result was adding new endings to some of Jesus’ parables
that put into his mouth the ideas
about God coming to judge in the future;
ideas that really belonged to John.
Between the time that Jesus was crucified and the gospels were written
the followers of Jesus experienced frightful, destructive times
in which many thousands died at the hands of the Romans.
Jerusalem was destroyed and many who were not killed
fled elsewhere for their lives.

The experience of this devastation meant that the new Christians
saw everything differently.
Jesus’ message of living the love and peace of the Kingdom
now looked – weak.
So – The gospel writers included in their narratives about Jesus
speeches attributed to him that sound like John

Things like “Two will be in the field; one will be taken; the other left.
Two women will be grinding meal together;
one will be taken and one will be left.”
The stories about Jesus coming again are mostly a message of FEAR.

Many scholars do not think that these are the words of Jesus,
but that the early church wrote them
searching for ways to deal with their dire situation after Jesus had died.
Jesus was gone and had left his followers with teachings
to live in the Kingdom of God now, as if God ruled the world.
We all know how hard that is to do.

One way to express the hope of that better world to come,
was to say that Jesus, because he was the Christ, would come again.
But in the story of the first coming of Jesus, we still find
peacemaking and non-violent resistance to the powers that be.
Jesus’ message wasn’t entirely lost,
but something had gone terribly wrong with the Christian vision
and we are still suffering from it.
Christmas is not about John’s message
of judgment, punishment, and destruction.
Christmas recalls Isaiah’s vision of right living under God.
Christmas is about Jesus’ vision of a better world growing out of our hearts
in communities of trust where people share a meal around a table.
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A better world for all is not a perfect world.
A perfect world is not what life is about.
If we think of all the issues before us, we can find solutions
if we hold to a simple, common vision of a better world,
but with compromises.
So for example, In a perfect world there would be no war,
but this is not a perfect world.
Therefore, we need to be careful what wars we get into,
and we need to restrain ourselves when we go to war,
which is now a stated goal of our military
even though such restraint fails again and again.

Another example. In a perfect world, it is logical to think
that there would be no homosexuality or transsexual changes.
There would be only people who know themselves clearly
as men and women, who are attracted to each other.
But this is not a perfect world, and so we have to find ways
to live with the reality that a small percentage of God’s children
are differently oriented in their sexuality.
It used to be that almost no one would admit to that reality,
but now we mostly all do.

Another example. In a perfect world there would be no abortions,
and no unwanted children, – but this is not a perfect world.
We need to improve the abilities of parents
to raise and educate their children.
We need to help people reproduce responsibly,
And some abortions will be allowed, because it is not a perfect world.

You get the idea.
The question always before us is
How will we live with the realities God seems to have given us?
Only God could bring a perfect world.
The better world is our responsibility.
There are no absolutes.
Only difficult ethical decisions on a case by case basis.

The better world is possible because
we have been given the abilities to make a better life for everyone.
The better world will require hard work, difficult conversations,
compromise, and continual modifications
of laws and policies until we get things not right, but better.
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In order to have a better world, we need a vision of a perfect world.
Sadly I see that there are many people in our country and elsewhere
who have no vision for a better world
or they don’t want a better world, except for themselves.
Or they only want to tear down the world we have carefully built
to improve the lives of as many as possible as much as possible.
“Let those who have ears, hear,” as Jesus used to say.

Dominic Crossan, a great student of the historical Jesus, has in retirement
traveled all over the Biblical world, and he discovered something.
He says: “We know that the prophets and Jesus had a goal and vision
for life that can be summarized as ‘justice’.”
They spoke of the household of God and the Kingdom of God,
where God rules by justice for the poor and oppressed.
But all of the temples, and monuments, and tombstones of ancient Rome
tell us that their goal and vision for life,
that the purpose of their empire was VICTORY.
It was winning. Nothing else, If you won, you had achieved the ultimate.
That was the purpose of life in the Roman Empire.

The vision of Isaiah, and the vision of Jesus is for justice
for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry and thirsty.
Jesus tells us how to get there.
He says:  Live now the way you hope things will be in the future.
The Empire of God is in your midst; it is among you.
Make the future present just as we have made the past present
in our celebration of the birth of Jesus.
When we see Jesus in the poor, sick, in prison, or hungry and thirsty,
that’s when the Kingdom of God comes near to us.
In Christmas we celebrate the birth of a king born into poverty,
forced to be a refugee, a member of an oppressed people.
In Christmas we proclaim a king who does not command,
who does not lead armies or make war, but is the prince of peace.
How best should we observe his birth?

The Forgotten Creed -- About a book by Stephen Patterson

Galatians 3:27-28

As many of you as were baptized into Christ 
have clothed yourselves with Christ. 
There is no longer Jew or Greek, 
there is no longer slave or free, 
there is no longer male and female; 
for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 

Mark 7:24-30 – The Syrophoenician Woman’s Faith

Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre 
(in what is now Lebanon, 25 miles north of the Sea of Galilee). 
He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. 
Yet he could not escape notice, 
but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit 
immediately heard about him, 
and she came and bowed down at his feet. 
The woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. 
She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 
He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, 
for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 
But she answered him, 
“Yes, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 
Then he said to her, “For saying that, 
you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” 
So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Sermon:

In November I preached from this same passage in Galatians, 
which says that in the Spirit, there is no longer Jew or Greek, 
no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.
I said that this is one of the fiercest expressions
of the Good News to be found in the Bible.
Paul proclaims here that Jews are freed from obedience to the law
and the arrogance and separatism of tribalism.
This means that religion is not defined by sacred books 
or the claims of temple or church authorities, 
or by the power of kings or political leaders.
This was revolutionary in the history of the world.
I learned this in seminary from a commentary on Galatians written in 1921, 
By Ernest DeWitt Burton, and I will read it again:

“Religion, Paul says, is not conformity to statutes, 
but a spiritual relation to God 
expressed by the word ‘faith,’ 
and an ethical attitude toward others, 
summed up in the word ‘love’.  
Morality, Paul affirms, is not achieved by keeping rules, 
but by living in fellowship with the Spirit of God 
and in consequent love towards people, 
issuing in conduct that makes for their welfare....  
Paul makes religion personal rather than ecclesiastical, 
and he makes morality a social relation grounded in religion... 
This is not today the real creed of any great part of Christendom.”
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But – I just read a book by a Bible scholar I know, Stephen Patterson, 
called The Forgotten Creed.
He is speaking of these very words from Galatians.
He says that right there hiding in plain sight
is the first creed or statement of what the early Christians believed.
Re-building the text, he thinks it was used in baptism and read originally:

“We are all children of God in the Spirit.
There is no Jew or Greek,
there is no slave or free, 
there is no male and female;
for we are all one in the Spirit.”

The Apostles’ Creed we use tells us 
what to believe about God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
It was written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
The Apostles didn’t know it.
Every phrase in it is there because 
of an argument in the church in the 200 years after Jesus.

But this earlier, forgotten creed is simpler and easier to remember:
No Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female.
This forgotten creed doesn’t mention Jesus or God.
It is about peoples’ lives.
It is about life and death.
It’s about the difference Jesus made in the lives of his earliest followers,
It’s about us and how we should relate to each other.
It’s about people, our differences, and what we do about it.

First, it’s about the different races and ethnic groups people belong to.
We know a lot about that.
It’s about slaves and free people.
That sounds more like history than anything we know about first hand,
but maybe not because it is about class.
It’s about male and female.
We know a lot about that!

The book subtitle is: Christianity’s Original Struggle 
against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism

This first creed opposes the blessing Jewish men recited to have been born
“A Jew and not a Gentile, a man and not a woman, 
a free man and not a slave.”
Foreigners, slaves, and women were most contemptible everywhere.
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Think about NO JEW OR GREEK

Everyone thought that “the other,” foreigners, were barbarians.
Patterson writes “Jews othered non-Jews, Greeks othered non-Greeks, 
Romans othered non-Romans.”

The “others” were often thought to be dirty, stupid, 
idolators and sexual deviants.
Patterson tells a lot that I did not know
about the hatred between Jew and Greek in the ancient world.
About the time of Paul’s vision of Jesus,
mobs of Greeks had killed thousands of Jews in riots 
in Alexandria Egypt.
Three years later thousands were killed in riots in Antioch, Syria
where Paul would in a few years debate Peter
about whether or not Greeks could become Christians.
(close to where Russia has set up their major base in the last few years).

There is always contempt, fear, and loathing of the Other.
Today the Other is Black, Muslim, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Asian.
And we rich, white, North Americans are Other to them.
The stories of riots in Alexandria and Antioch sound a lot like the riots
against Blacks in NYC during the Civil War, 
Tulsa, OK in 1919, 
and the Black towns burned to the ground 
by good citizens in the South,
and the riots against Mexicans in LA during WWII.
We should be thankful that there is as little killing of each other 
as there is today.

Paul offered something new: table fellowship of Greeks with Jews,
in communities of reconciliation gathered around 
the memory of a Jew, Jesus.
It’s difficult for us to understand that Paul was a Jew 
who never intended to start a new religion.
His question was never “How can I, a miserable sinner, be saved?” but
“How can Gentiles be included in the promises of God?”
Everything he wrote was argument about the inclusion of Gentiles
in the promises of God, not doctrines for us. 
Patterson says Paul “became convinced that the spirit of the person 
who had taught – love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you,
turn the other cheek –  
lived on and had come to in habit him, to direct him, to control him.”
All the words in the New Testament against the Jews 
were put there in the next 100 years 
when Paul’s churches had become mostly Greek churches 
With the beliefs we have inherited.

Think about NO SLAVE OR FREE

Slavery was so common in the first century 
that it is not mentioned as such in the gospels.
But everyone called a “servant” was a slave.
Slaves were “servi.”
If you weren’t a slave, you sold your labor on a daily basis, 
and may have lived worse than a slave 
who may have been fed and housed.
In such a system what must it have meant for Jesus to say 
that we should be slaves of all.

Romans called slaves “bodies” and “things”
Many thought slaves were not people, not human,
because if slaves were human you couldn’t treat them as animals. 
Most slaves were people captured rather than killed in war.
We might picture slaves as Black, 
but that was just a convenience of the past few hundred years
so they would be visibly different to whites.
But in Rome you could be white and be nothing more than a slave, 
told what to do, abused by your owner, sold to another.

A lot of what is said about slaves in the gospels makes sense
only if the gospel writers were slaveowners!
Some Biblical scholars think Jesus was a slave.
There is no evidence that Jesus or Paul thought 
that there should be no slaves!
Slavery was so normal it wasn’t talked about.
But early Christians who must have known this forgotten creed
formed “common funds” in their churches
from which they would buy the freedom of one of their own.
We know this from writings describing the practice, in passing.

We think we do not know slavery, but we do.
Writers are more and more drawing parallels 
between the prisoners of our legal system to slaves of old.
In the US prisoners work to help pay for their incarceration.
We have the largest number of prisoners in the world, and
when a prisoner is released, his or her life is severely limited, 
like slaves of the past.
Whenever we speak of class distinctions or differences,
we are speaking of the same social and economic issues 
of slavery in the ancient world.
Slavery was the primary class division of the ancient world.
Poverty is the equivalent today.
To be poor is to be like a slave.

Think about NO MALE OR FEMALE 

We are caught up in the struggle of women to be equal to men
and to end male dominance in social, business, and political life.
Paul would have understood the Me Too movement,
because he made many women to be ministers of his churches.
An analysis of the names of all the women in his letters says that it is so.
Patterson argues that Phoebe mentioned in his letter to the Romans 
was his boss.

This helps unravel the mystery at the end of the Gospel of Thomas.
Thomas is the gospel found 70 years ago in Egypt, 
which shows a different kind of Jesus community, 
based on Jesus’ teachings, not his death and resurrection. 

Here is the last verse of the gospel of Thomas:
Simon Peter said to Jesus and the other followers: 
“Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of life.”
Jesus said: “Look, I will draw her in so as to make her male, 
so that she too may become a living male spirit, similar to you.”
“Every woman who makes herself male 
will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

What on earth does that mean?
Patterson explains that in ancient Greece women were not thought to have
soul or mind which were believed to be masculine.
The Greeks argued that women, therefore, could not be leaders, or Guardians.

Socrates disagreed. 
He said women too had THUMOS, 
the courage, presence of mind, spirit, and spunk 
to speak up and articulate ideas and reasoned proposals.
Until the time of Jesus, most thought THUMOS was the property of men,
but in Thomas, Jesus taught that women had “living spirit” like men.

Patterson says that this meant that 
“Women have the same inner makeup as men do. 
The spirit, the divine element breathed into Adam at the dawn of creation,
can reside in women and in men. 
Mary, it turns out has the same male power, the same THUMOS as Peter.”

Women, not Peter, figure as the real leaders of the Jesus movement 
in our scriptures. 
The the woman at the well, women at the tomb, the women in Paul’s letters,
they are the grassroots leaders of the early church.

There are many other stories of the prowess and bravery of women leaders 
in the early church, but they didn’t make it into the Bible.
Some of these stories are strange, 
and to read about sexuality in the Roman world can be shocking.
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So, I gave you the story from Mark of the Syrophoenicean woman.
She is a Greek, a slave, and a woman.
She illustrates the forgotten creed.

But Jesus treats her as men treated women 
and as Jews treated Greeks and slaves,
and she calls him on it.
She has THUMOS and Jesus himself is changed by this woman. 
[Another blogger pointed this out to me.]
Until this time Jesus has only reached out to Jews, but now
Jesus realizes that Gentiles don’t have to wait for his message.
Now Jesus sees that bigotry, slavery, and sexism 
are all tied together and are wrong.
This may be the moment of the creation of the “forgotten creed!”
In Mark, after this incident he travels through Greek territory teaching,
healing, and feeding multitudes.

END:
This forgotten creed hasn’t really been forgotten.
I became a Presbyterian because the Confession of 1967
had the theme of reconciliation as the core of the gospel,
the same as the forgotten creed in Galatians.
I put some of those words in the call to worship and prayer of confession
this morning.

We should know after 2000 years:
There is no black or white or brown or yellow or privileged.
There is no Jew or Muslim or atheist or Sikh or Hindu or Buddhist.
There is no rich or poor, blue or white collar; low, middle, or upper class.
There is no immigrant or illegal; no superior or more entitled male.

“We are all children of God in the Spirit.
There is no Jew or Greek,
there is no slave or free, 
there is no male and female;
for we are all one in the Spirit.”