When I attended a Christian seminary in Dallas we often heard people speak about  the “Easter Event” around this time of year.  It was an even bigger event in the Southern Methodists’ calendar than the Dallas Cowboys’ play offs.  Still I always had a hunch that many of my fellow students would not know honestly how to describe any bodily resurrection of Jesus to those of us who are burdened by scientific facts. For them regardless of any explanations, there is this agreement:  the anniversary of Jesus the Christ’s resurrection is what reminds us annually of the hope and meaning of the Christian faith.  Since he did rise to Heaven, there to enjoy eternal life with God so can we, if we believe it.  However, for me this supernatural act is not necessary for my admiration of Jesus they call their Savior  and any hope for eternal life is nice but beside the point.  I prefer to call him the Rabbi Jesus.  So I am proposing the question, just as rabbis are so likely to do: can we look to the words and actions of Jesus as they have come down to us through two millennia, as the way of guiding us to making moral decisions today?

Speaking of making moral decisions, I heard the president of California Polytechnic University of  Pomona tell this story a while back. It seems that there was a test given at the university, ten questions. Two of the students who took the test, each missed one question. The problem was, one student got an A on that test, while the other got an F.  When the president heard about such terrible injustice he called the professor into his office. Why  did one student get an A after missing one question, the other and F?  Here is how the professor explained it.  Both students missed question number 5.  The one who received an A simply wrote, “I don’t know.”  The one who received an F wrote, “I don’t know either.”  So much for moral choices at the university.

I had the privilege of spending a semester studying religion at Harvard Divinity School back in 1983. Harvard College was founded in 1636 as the school for training ministers, and went through several decades in the eighteen and 1900s as the school for training future ministers, Unitarian ministers in particular. But by the time I went there what was then Harvard College has morphed into a modern super-wealthy research University, turning out captains of industry, powerful politicians and major stockholders in the capitalist status quo. The exception is the now ecumenical Divinity School which I like to think still has the Unitarian influence lurking about its halls and library.

As a springboard for the question about turning to Jesus as a moral arbiter, I am calling on the wisdom and experience of a professor at Harvard University  named Harvey Cox who has published a book called When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today.  He tells us that Jesus had disappeared from Harvard since a course was last offered with his name in the title in 1912.  Cox, a professor of religion, tells us that in the 80s the faculty became aware of the resurgence of religious ideologies along with the conflicts around widely differing faiths and moral crises.  Campus wide and world wide. The students were being equipped with a good background of humanities and the sciences, experts on facts but unfamiliar with values. The faculty looked at the behavior of some of the graduates and was embarrassed: why were so many well-educated people graduates of Harvard, leaving those hallowed halls, establishing careers,  and then becoming involved with what might be called unethical behavior, going out in the world and making  wrong, unprincipled choices?

It was then that they decided to introduce a program called Moral Reasoning into the undergraduate curriculum and asked Cox to teach a course on Jesus. From those experiences, and his amazing responses from teaching students from all over the world, and totally different backgrounds, he wrote his book about the return of Jesus to the campus. He tells us that the interest was so great they had to move to a much larger auditorium (in the ROTC barracks) and it was the most exciting and rewarding experience of his teaching career.

Here’s what Dr. Harvey Cox wanted  to teach those students and the world: To begin with, the Christian church does not have a monopoly on Jesus or his teachings. He is not owned by any denomination or interest group, Christian or otherwise.  As a Rabbi, he taught by asking questions and telling stories. Very often I have noticed his stories leave you wondering; like a Rabbi or a Zen Buddhist priest, he delivers more questions and no final answers. Jesus gently forces people to look at life differently and to live it differently. His moral decisions live on, although elusive— he is a persistent one, that rabbi just won’t go away.  He didn’t publish, but he didn’t perish either, in spite of the 20 centuries in between, and the attempts by princes and principalities to ignore or distort his messages.

I think Jesus, whether called Christ or teacher, belongs to the world, even to  non-believers, maybe especially to us  because we do not consider Jesus to be the Son of God,  a part of a God-headed trinity, but as a radical reformer whose life offers us an ethical model. I consider him among the prophets; however he was still a human being who was born, suffered, walked on this earth, and died as the rest of us die and lies buried here on this earth somewhere.  Still, there are so many mysteries surrounding him, questions we will never have the answer to, truths and untruths that Biblical scholars are pointing out and discovering everyday.  I as one religious liberal am still haunted and motivated by what he taught, or tried to teach us. The gospels depict him with many different aspects, some confusing and mystifying but  for me, he is still there as a guiding presence in so many ways, to help me decide what I should do—what is right and what is not right.

However, you can’t help but ask how relevant is that prophetic rabbi today? What business does he have to be a moral arbiter in this modern, complex time?  He lived in an era when the world was deemed flat, scientific reporting was unheard of, people told stories of miracles as a way to hype a hero, and Jesus’ only Bible was the Jewish Testament.   How will his ancient warnings help us to answer questions he never dreamed of?  Should we have prayer in schools, when is an abortion the right thing to do, how about teenage pregnancies, death with dignity, and gay marriages? Is there a way to confront countries including our own about nuclear proliferation?  We are caught up in a proliferation of facts and conflicting facts, ideas and stories, by those who scream obscene invectives and those who keep too silent—we are surrounded everyday by their dissonance and their apathy.

So what is our story, what moral ideals lead us?  Where are we coming from in the moral landscape? My answer is this guiding  principle from our Unitarian Universalist principles—we affirm and promote the worth and dignity of every person.

How alike is the injunction of Jesus—to love our neighbors as ourselves. Whether you use that principle as your guide, or Jesus’ charge to his followers to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, visit the sick and those in prison, what it takes to follow it is moral courage.  Moral risk taking. Since I was a child, I have always been interested in the Big Questions and those are some of the answers to those big questions.  Once we seriously grapple with nagging moral issues, questioning  what is the right thing to do, from Jesus’ teachings or anyone else’s, how do we summon the moral fiber to do so?

The question WWJD “What would Jesus do?” has produced a plethora of prattle and some responses too silly to even mention today. I for one don’t find them very helpful because the answers come from people who are supposedly trying to save me— I don’t know from what. We have to remember as those folks do not, that Jesus was a rabbi and as a rabbi he only posed more questions and told more stories, often leaving it up to the listener to draw his or her personal answers. To answer, what would he do today is not as easy as some say; it requires a giant step that is not informed by either biblical scholarship, or any religious doctrines.  Making moral decisions calls us to look again at the evidence and the outcomes, the stories of other altruistic thinkers, and all human experience,  going beyond simple or cynical answers. That calls us to weigh all the facts, be willing to be mistaken, and from that perhaps find answers to our ethical dilemmas.  Or perhaps only find more questions or complicated and uncertain answers.  We may find it impossible to give any definitive answers at this moment, and perhaps for always. When signed up for this course, to draw an incomplete is a good grade.

Let’s look for an all-too-brief moment, at Jesus’ masterpiece: The Sermon on the Mount.  It is likely that people from all religious backgrounds or none have heard of it.  It covers three full chapters in the Gospel according to Matthew.  Those of us who may have dismissed his miraculous healings, his turning a few loaves and fishes into enough food to feed the multitudes or water into wine, know that when we go to the Sermon on the Mount we are going to the essence of his moral teachings.

Scholars remind us that the Sermon on the Mount is not a code of ethics for individuals, it is meant for a community.  It cannot be lifted from the rest of the Jesus story as a kind of handy moral guidebook. But then what is it? Although it is a description of how people would live when the reign of God had come into its fullness, it was also, then and now, an invitation to his hearers not to wait, but to begin living as though that time had already come. In the here and now.  Jesus exhorted his listeners not just to wait and pray, but also to start living with these principles right now.

The Beatitudes, let’s look at those words again.  This time I would like to quote from Harvey Cox who describes those so clearly: 

The words Jesus spoke are the most luminous, most quoted, most analyzed, most contested, most influential moral and religious discourse in all of human history.  This may sound like an overstatement, but it is not.  Jesus told the old story in his new way on many occasions.  But on this mountain in Palestine, he gave it its most sequential and most systematic expression. It was his Fifth Symphony, his Mona Lisa, his masterpiece.

The Beatitudes are his congratulations to his hearers that they have found favor with God, not only that they will be blessed, but that they are already.  For them there was good news. I don’t know about you, but when I grew up in the Congregational Church in Massachusetts, we were required to memorize those.  What our Sunday School teacher never told us about, probably she didn’t know either, was the rest of the sermon—the curses or woes.  The bad news follows:

But alas for you who are rich; you have had your time of happiness. Alas for you who are well fed now; you will go hungry. Alas for you who laugh now; you will mourn and weep. Alas for you when all speak well of you; that is how their fathers treated the false prophets.  (The Gospel of Luke 6:24)
 
By the way, I have often wondered what he meant by “poor in spirit”—in the Gospel of Luke, the words poor in spirit do not appear, just poor.  Was that added later to make the rich people feel better?  One interpretation is that “Poor in spirit” does not mean resigned, patient or giving in. It can mean dispirited or even crushed. Poor people feel weak.  They see themselves as subject to powerful forces beyond their control, and too often blame themselves for the wretched conditions they are in.

I am sure these words of congratulations to his followers that day are off-putting and maybe even frightening to a lot of people who read the Bible and call themselves among the reborn and chosen.  How many of us these days could live up to those blessings?  We would be better off spiritually to be poor?  That would be un-American in our Capitalist society. Humbug.  To be peacemakers? Maybe, just as soon as we get rid of weapons of mass destruction, remove a dictator, or bring democracy to a mid-eastern country, even though, woops, they’re not quite ready for it.  To hunger and thirst to see right prevail? Well, yes, our version of the right. What did Jesus know about what is right today?  Perhaps we could have pure hearts or show mercy, but we live in tough times when mercy is for wimps or bleeding heart liberals.  Oh well.  Maybe later. Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Heaven can still be ours, especially if we waffle a little.

Most of us know the line best that tells us: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Here is one fine example of how we cannot in any good faith, separate politics from religion. We sing on Christmas Eve, about the birth of the Prince of Peace.  Peace on earth, goodwill to men. Meanwhile, missiles are called “peace keepers.” On the Air Force base near Harvard, one could find this proclamation:  “Peace is our business.”  We are reminded that Jesus’ words were a direct challenge to the ruling Roman ideology.  This blessing was a taunt hurled at the foreign rulers of his homeland and their domestic supporters. The empire’s main claim to fame and legitimacy was that Rome and Rome alone was the peacemaker.

It has been a demanding decree, to be a true peacemaker, no wonder it has been so often dismissed or at best re-interpreted over the centuries.  Not many of the faithful were expected to follow those words of his Sermon on the Mount, nor did they summon the moral courage to do that. The words he said in the Beatitudes or the woes that follow continue to rattle my cage, and I am sure many others are bewildered and shaken by that call to conscience.  We of liberal faith can pick and choose what moral examples to follow and although that sermon has great historical and literary meaning, does it still apply? Could the Beatitudes of Jesus help us to make moral decisions? I leave that up to you to choose how you will be blessed, or not blessed, because, in case you didn’t know, I can only suggest possibilities to us. As I bring you the Good News of the Gospels, and the not-so-Good News for your consideration. I am pretty sure that true Christians will always be a minority.  True Christendom has never existed. As Mark Twain said, “Christianity would be a great religion if it were ever tried.”

I know one way we are following Jesus as a moral decision maker, whether we acknowledge that or not, that is our choice  to be inclusive in our choices and behavior, what I have called “radical hospitality”.  We are about welcoming all people.  And so this rabbi speaks to us just as he spoke to those others of his time: women of easy virtue, tax collectors, non-Jews, the poor, the sick in heart and body.

And meanwhile, the need to craft our personal stories, and personal questions also march on, amidst the exhortation from the Rabbi Jesus to choose not to wait and pray but start living right, right now.  Not to wait for the kingdom of God or some moral utopia to happen.  After the wars and conflicts and burnings and oppressions of centuries, Jesus’ teaching us not to return evil with evil has been ignored, rejected, even reviled. And yet we can look to one signal example from the 20th century who took his radical teaching and transformed it, using the Rabbis strategy of non-violence, to bring about a powerful social movement.

You can guess who that person was—Mahatma Gandhi, who was not a Christian. Their similarities are striking—they both grew up poor and in empires that mistreated them. They both drew on the traditions of their own religion, Hindu and Jewish, but they both looked at them again in the light of the injustices of their day.  Gandhi looked at the power of truth, satyagraha, and Jesus as the power of God’s love and justice. They made enemies from their leaders and dictators and even their fellow believers. They were called irresponsible rabble-rousers and meek compromisers. What we especially need to note is that Gandhi was decisively influenced by Jesus, and especially by the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ teaching on non-violent resistance. Some missionaries tried to convert him, but he turned them down saying that he loved Christ, but that Christianity had gone wrong when if became “the religion of kings.”
           
To be a follower of the Rabbi from Nazareth, or the Great Guru of India, or the African American leader of our civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, and all his modern disciples, takes moral courage, empathy, and a risky leap into the consequences of public opinion.  The Sermon on the Mount, is the quintessential Jesus and very difficult for us in this 21st century USA.  But the moral wisdom to be found there won’t go away; it persists in our consciousness and even in our religious faith.  Professor Cox tells us that Jesus came back to Harvard after a lapse of 70 years, but he never left, he was always there. I like to think that Jesus the Rabbi, although we do not profess of his son hood to God as part of the Trinity, has never left here, either. He visits us with his life and the towering message he puts forth echoes down to us through the millennia from that mountain top in Palestine. Call it lofty idealism, yes, but those of us, even those of us who are scientific rationalists and skeptics and secularists, those who have ears, let us hear and listen up.  He has spoken and he speaks and not just in the season of Easter. He is a persistent one—his light and our lights need  not be kept under a bushel basket –we’ll let it shine!  That Rabbi won’t go away so invite him in too.

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