THE ONE TRUE GOSPEL

I love a good sermon, and the following sermon comes closer to the spirit of the religion I was raised in (thanks, Mom and Don Smith) than the variety that seems to have become so popular these days. It gave me a lift–so I offer it here.
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by Forrest Church

April 16, 2006

This has turned out to be quite an Easter for us Unitarians. Finally, after two thousand years of desecration, poor Judas has won back his good name. With the leaking of an ancient Christian classified document, at long last the Good Judas can assume his honored place right up there beside the Good Samaritan.

If you haven’t heard about this, you will soon. Right now in fact.

Judas, you see, was the faithful disciple. The one who got it. The good guy in the black hat.

Don’t you love it when someone high on the world’s enemies list turns out to be a hero? Go ahead. Admit it. It makes you feel a little better about yourself, doesn’t it?

The Christian thought police did quite a number on Judas. Ever since we were little, we’ve been told about the fink who betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver, the traitor found swinging from a lornsome limb with a telltale coin clenched between his teeth.

Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, that unlikely radical, tried to resurrect Judas’s good name in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” giving him all the best songs, reminding us that he was the disciple with a conscience, the one who really cared about the poor, but the Christian Church, which collectively is richer than God, wouldn’t buy it.

Even Bob Dylan toed the party line. Of all people! Remember when he told us, posing a question that seemed to answer itself, that we’ll have to decide,

Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, based on hot new papyri unearthed from the sands of Egypt, it turns out that Judas did, in fact, have God on his side. The untold story has finally been revealed in “The Gospel of Judas,” a self-proclaimed “secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot . . . three days before he celebrated Passover” for the last time.

In brief, the story goes as follows. Jesus observes his disciples gathered in a circle offering up prayers to God and laughs out loud at them. Somewhat nonplussed by their master’s irreverence, they recount to him a troubling dream that each of them had the night before concerning the future.

Twelve priests lord over a great church, yet they appear to be acting in a decidedly unchristian manner. “Some sacrifice their own children, others their wives.” They sleep around. They countenance war and slaughter. They “commit a multitude of sins and deeds of lawlessness.” And yet they all invoke Jesus’ holy name.

Jesus chuckles again, “Those you have seen receiving the offerings at the altar—that is who you are, ministers of error, who on the last day will be put to shame.”

Judas breaks the uncomfortable silence. He too, it seems, has a dream to tell. “In the vision I saw myself, as the twelve disciples were stoning me and persecuting me.”

Judas is less than pleased with this prospect, until Jesus clues him in on the plan. The plan is that Judas will betray Jesus and then commit suicide. Why? Because Judas’s appointed role in salvation history is to rescue Jesus from contaminated humanity, including his blithering disciples.

This actually is interesting: Without Judas’s assistance, the Jewish and Roman authorities might have left Jesus alone and the story of Easter would be ruined for all eternity.

As it was, together Jesus and Judas beat a swift, welcome retreat from this world of sin and sadness, returning to their castle in the stars.

Reading “The Gospel of Judas” last week, I confess to experiencing a few pangs of questionable nostalgia. Thirty years ago, right before you good people rescued me, I was buried in a hundred Gnostic texts just like this one.

All the Coptic I once possessed has long since gravitated to that humbling little icon in the lower right hand corner of my brain. At the command, “Empty Trash,” it disappeared forever just as Easter might have done if Judas hadn’t been there to save the day. The only Coptic sentence I remember is this one. ANOK ANER (”I am a man”).

Without knowing much about them, we Unitarians hold a special place in our hearts for the ancient Gnostics. After all, they were persecuted for what? For honoring knowledge over faith! Gnosis, in fact, is the Greek word for knowledge.

Like the Gospel of Judas, many Gnostic texts turn the Bible inside out. The Lord and Creator is basically a thug and jailer who trapped celestial light in leaden bodies, imprisoning divine light in his gross creation. The Gnostics alone, those who, remembering where they came from, spring the lock imprisoning them in Jehovah’s charnal house make their escape, just as Jesus and Judah did.

In the Gnostic story of the Fall, the snake is the hero. He tells Adam and Eve to eat the apple, for goodness sake. It contains the knowledge of good and evil, which the Lord wants to keep from them. When they disobey God and eat the fruit, the brute imposes the death sentence, lest too they become as Gods—which in good Gnostic theology in fact we are—at least the handful of us who happen to be chosen are.

More significant to the state of today’s church than the publication of “The Gospel of Judas” is the news from Stafford, Vermont that Bill Coffin died this week. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr. was a stirring anti-war chaplain at Yale during the Viet Nam years, served New York’s Riverside Church as both prophet and pastor, and went on to lead SANE-FREEZE, witnessing and educating for nuclear disarmament. Among the many sad things about this loss is that the religious world has few prophets to spare, few truly eloquent witnesses who can speak from the heart of a living faith against the principalities and powers that so glibly and self-righteously lord over us.

We were fortunate to have Bill with us at All Souls several times over the years. He said of Unitarianism that we had a thick ethic and a thin metaphysic. That’s always been all right with me. He called me a UCC—Unitarian considering Christ.

I wish Bill were here to do this for me, but since it’s Easter, let me consider Christ. The power of his holy spirit is more present in any one of the four established Gospels than it is in a hundred Gnostic gospels put together. Gnosticism was, in its many forms, an elitist cult. It had a thick metaphysic and a thin ethic, because the world simply wasn’t worth saving. The poor, uneducated masses, who couldn’t for the life of themselves decode the cosmic mysteries, were damned from the get go. People of clay, the Gnostics called them. Only a privileged handful were wise enough to tease the truth from the puzzle of existence. These were the children of Light.

A leading secular humanist, Daniel Dennett—a well educated man to be sure—calls the modern illuminati who reject religious superstition “Brights.” By his definition, we Unitarians, most of us anyway, would qualify as “Brights.” It’s a neo-Gnostic concept. If you start to think of yourself as a “Bright,” I suggest that you pause for a moment and consider the state of your soul.

By my definition, religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are the religious animal. We know that we must die and therefore question what life means. Easter, through the witness of Jesus, both offers and demands a saving answer to this question.

I don’t, by the way, believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. But I do believe his disciples were—born again here and now to an abiding presence, even the presence of God. Christ resurrected is the church, or at least, by following the spirit of his gospel not the letter, the church could be, as promised, the body of Christ.

One thing I like about the notion of the good Judas is that it conforms perfectly to Christ’s radical, soul saving gospel. Love your neighbor. Love your enemy as yourself.

The Good Samaritan was an oxymoron too. That’s the whole point of the story. Samaritans were unclean, untouchable, anything but good. Think of it as the story of the good Islamicist Muslim, the good Jihadist, and you’ll get a sense of what Jesus was talking about.

The moral of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is this: It’s not what people believe or what sect or party they belong to that matters; it’s how they treat their neighbor—it’s how they love.

I’m not being sentimental here. If they blow up their neighbor, then the parable isn’t about them. The parable teaches that our religion can be read only in our lives, not from our words. In short, sheep that act goatish are goats not sheep. The Parable of the Good Samaritan takes our self-righteousness and cracks it to pieces like the worthless shell it is, then offers us the nut, the fruit, the seed.

The Easter story challenges our operating assumptions more radically than does the most perverse Gnostic gospel. Jesus’ life is lacking in everything the world calls success. No riches. No great vacations. No earthly power. Not to mention that the hero dies young, branded a criminal, nailed to a cross.

In light of the Easter story, almost every time the powers and principalities of Christendom cite Jesus’ authority, the disciples’ dream in “The Gospel According to Judas” comes true.

• We fight wars in the name of the Prince of Peace.

• True believers amass riches and stiff the needy in the name of him who told the rich man that, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he must sell all that he has and give it to the poor.

• Prelates and priests dedicate bejeweled altars to him who cast the money changers from the temple.

• Christian moralists feed bigotry to their followers by the silver spoonful as if it were medicine—anti-Gay bigotry, anti-Muslim bigotry—this in the name of him who taught them the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Today, in its opportunistic retelling, the gospel of Jesus reads more like a fractured fairy tale than even “The Gospel of Judas” does. We Unitarians may long ago have changed the words to Jesus’s hymn, but the potentates of Christendom have done us one better: They’ve changed its tune.

Forget about his magical birth and magical resurrection. It’s Jesus’ transformational life and all too human death that remind us to live in such a way that our lives too will prove worth dying for.

How did Jesus feel as he hung there on the cross? Not like a Gnostic who doesn’t believe in the reality of his own body. Not like a person with a plan that’s panning out the way he thought it would. “It is finished,” Jesus cries out in agony. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Jesus was not a Biblical literalist. He rarely quoted scripture. But here we find him, dying, quoting not the sweet 23rd but the piquant 22nd Psalm. Not, “I shall walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil for thou are with me,” but “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me?” Nothing here about “My cup runneth over,” those comforting words that usher in the close of the 23rd Psalm. Instead, Jesus moans, “I thirst.”

Where in this drama is the bridge from one life to the next? Jesus crosses it when he says, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” For a saving moment in the midst of his agony, he thinks not about himself, but about others, and God is with him. The bridge is love.

“How do we get to Heaven, Rabbi?” his disciples asked him once.

Jesus answer is remarkable. Not a word about theology. Nothing about belief. “Feed the hungry,” he replies. “Clothe the naked, house the homeless, heal the sick, visit those who are in prison.”

When they ask him about keeping the commandments, Jesus, who more than once broke the letter of the law to serve its spirit, tells them to “Follow the two great commandments, which sum up all the law and the prophets: Love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.”

“Who is my neighbor?” they ask.

“Whoever needs your love is your neighbor,” he replies by way of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Which means, as he says elsewere, we must love our enemies as well.

“But, how do we get to Heaven,” they ask again, for salvation, not their neighbor, is foremost on their mind.

“Don’t say, ‘Lo, here,’ or ‘Lo, there,’ for the Kingdom of Heaven is in the very midst of you,” Jesus reminds his all too human disciples, surely for the thousandth time. “Heaven is where the heart is.”

According to Jesus, we enter Heaven not when we die but as we live, through the gates of Love.

After death our bodies may literally be resurrected. Our souls may transmigrate or become part of the heavenly Pleroma. We may join our loved ones in Heaven. Or we may return the constituent parts of our being to the earth from which it came and rest in eternal peace. About life after death, no one knows.

But about lIfe before death and love after death, this we surely know. Perhaps our parents taught us this lesson, or our grandparents, or a dear and cherished friend or partner who is now departed but lives on in our heart. Like the life of Jesus, who was born again (in lying Peter and doubting Thomas and the church), our lives will prove worth dying for only if something remains to mark our sojourn here after we have gone. However you read its runes, Easter makes this promise: Love remains.

We are not perennials in the spring garden, whose death, when it comes, is only apparent, not real. That is not what the greatest story ever told is about. It’s about real death, death that could destroy all meaning, but doesn’t. Jesus really dies. And then he lives again, reborn, made new, free of all exigency, eternal, immortal. This is neither a fairy tale, nor a fractured fairy tale. It is the universal story of love conquering death.

In a rare moment of spiritual illumination the fallen, prideful poet Ezra Pound put it this way: “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.” Knowledge is dross; belief, dross; presumptions of superiority—all are dross.

Taken literally, whether from the four evangelists or from “The Gospel of Judas,” the Easter story—God killing his son to atone for our sins or sending his son to be killed for our sake—is blasphemous; and the resurrection, a cheap magic trick that has been kept alive by sleight of hand and human credulity for two millennia.

So why bother? Why not stick with spring and forget Easter. Because, taken to heart, the spirit of Easter can save even those of us who will never be able to sign our names on a doctrinal dotted line: Forgive and love your enemy. Love your neighbor as yourself. God is love. Your treasure is where your heart is. Love is divine. And love is immortal.

That, my dear friends, is the one true gospel.

Amen. I love you. Happy Easter. And may God bless us all