When Jesus Became God October 18, 2009 First Unitarian Church South Bend, Indiana The Reverend Harold W. Beu Minister

At my first settlement as a minister in Whittier, California, I worked with a president who was an ardent humanist, a man named Jess Harvey who has since passed away. Jess was psychologist and I think it is fair to say that he was a character who had an odd way of approaching people which could be off-putting. But once people got to know him, they discovered that this man had a heart of gold and was a loyal friend. At the time, I often revised hymns, out of our old hymnal, Hymns in the Celebration of Life, which was published in 1964, three years after the merger of the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association into our present day denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association. One hymn I would revise was “Morning Has Broken” written by Eleanor Farjeon, an English Catholic back in 1931. [By the way, as far as I could tell, this song was not sung much until the folksinger Cat Stevens (now Yusef Islam) made it famous in the mid-70s. Then it seemed every church sung it, some every Sunday.] I would revise this hymn to change the words “mine” to “ours” as in “ours is the sunlight” because I wanted the congregation to enter fully into the experience of loveliness of the moment of the song of the blackbird, the beauty of the garden and so on. And then I would change “his” feet pass to “our” feet, again to get a communal experience both as a vision of an actual garden but also as a metaphor for our entering in a place of peace, wonder and beauty within us. And finally, I would change “God’s re-creation” to “Life’s re-creation”, simply because that makes sense to me, that life is ever changing and ever re-creating itself. Now, of course, these revisions remove the references to God. Thus, one could say that I made it more humanistic, which would be fair, but my true intent was to make it more meaningful for me and for a congregation with the idea that we come together to worship, meaning more than merely singing hymns, lighting our chalice and listening to sermons. Rather, I refer to worship in the sense that we come together as if we were one body, a congregation, in solidarity to express the truth of our liberal faith, to encourage hope for those who suffer, and to share our love. But one time, when I did a service in Whittier, perhaps because I was lazy or just ran out of time, I just included the hymn “Morning Has Broken” in its original form. Then something happened. Jess stopped talking to me. For we would talk for at least two or three times a week, often about church business, but also philosophy, psychology and occasionally religion. I loved our times together, and I think he did too. Finally, I called him saying, “Jess what is going on? You haven’t called me.” “That’s right. I am not happy with you,” he said with a stern voice. “Well, Jess what did I do?” “You don’t know?” this with a voice that clearly indicating that I should have known. Then I started to wonder, what was it that made him unhappy and I made an anxious inventory of our times together. I imagined the worst. I said, “No Jess, I have no idea.” “It was that song.” “What song?” “The hymn that we sung last Sunday.” I thought and said, “You mean ‘Morning Has Broken’?” “That’s right.” I was beginning to understand, but I said, “Jess, well, I just left the words as they were for a change. Was that so bad?” “Yes, because the hymns represent our congregation and when there is god talk like that, it makes me feel unsafe as an atheist.” Now, Jess was brought up as a conservative Christian and I, a Unitarian Universalist. And I find that many Unitarian Universalists who come from conservative Christian faiths are often ones who have some pain about the Christian religion and about the use of Christian symbols and words, such as God and Jesus Christ. For me, it was not such an issue. For me, it was the same as if I was reading something from the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Buddhist Sutras or the Torah. I could learn something from those religious texts and still not feel constrained or threatened by them. I can take what I want and leave the rest. And when it comes to singing, I can still love singing Christian songs, such as the Messiah that I often sing at sing-a-long events during the Christmas season. Still, I imagine that using Christian symbols and words can elicit pain for some people. Here I intend to respond to that pain and to promote the idea that there is much good that we can learn from words and deeds of the man called Jesus, a gifted teacher. For Jesus belongs to us just as much as he belongs to anyone else. And I submit that his words and deeds can inspire us to be better people, if we listen to him as teacher and not worship him as if he were god and an idol. Religion can do good for people, but it can also do harm. Generally the harm comes from people’s arrogance that makes them think that their faith is the one true faith and that no other faith is good enough. It is a human problem, one visited on almost all religions, but for today, I will focus my attention on the story of the creation of the Catholic Church which happened in the 4th Century C.E. Before that time, the Christian Church was not so much a church as a movement in which worship services were informal gatherings in homes of church members. Christians considered each other to be brothers and sisters, each contributing their respective gifts to the community. Gatherings featured readings, such as from Paul’s epistles and later the gospels and other texts. The Lord’s Supper comprised a communal meal with prayers in memory of Jesus. Services were known as agape feasts or love feasts. There is also evidence in the New Testament of women having a significant role in the early Christian church. Paul greets women in his letters and calls them co-workers and refers to one of them as “deaconess.” Even calls one of the women an Apostle. There were also a number of different sects at that time, that preached ideas such as Jesus was adopted by God, that practiced Jewish Christianity by following the Law, that identified Jesus as a spirit sent from the true God into the material world to liberate the souls trapped there and that practiced a ministry of prophecy, criticizing Christians as increasingly worldly and bishops as increasingly autocratic. Over time, though, the church would grow into an institutionalized patriarchal hierarchy with one doctrine. It also became intolerant. It took some time, but the Church would finally accept the theology of Jesus becoming God as expressed in the Nicene Creed. I am sure that many of you know it. It begins: “We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven.” Now, this creed was created at the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., under the auspices of the first Christian Emperor of the Roman Empire – Constantine. He was said to have converted when leading his soldiers on a march on Rome in 312 C.E. Over time, he created laws to Christianize the Empire, at first showing tolerance for different faiths in the Empire. But during that time, the church fathers struggled with a controversy concerning the nature of Jesus – was he a man or God or something else. A tall, courtly and greatly admired priest named Arius preached that Jesus was subordinate to God, that God preceded Jesus as the Scriptures stated, and that Jesus had come to do his father’s work. Now, Arius believed that Jesus was divine, but God had raised him up to rule by His side in Heaven and there will be none like him. These ideas were not new. Indeed, Arius had been taught these ideas by Lucian of Antioch who is now a Catholic saint. The following is from Richard Rubenstein’s book, When Jesus Became God: The struggle to define Christianity during the last days of Rome, about what followers of Arius believed: To them, Jesus was a person of such sublime moral accomplishments that God adopted him as His Son, sacrificed him to redeem humanity from sin, raised him from the dead, and granted him divine status. Because of his excellence, he became a model of righteous behavior for us. And because his merit earned the prize of immortality, the same reward was made available to other human beings, provided that they model themselves after him. From the Arian perspective, it was essential that Jesus not be God, since God, being perfect by nature, is inimitable. By contrast, Christ’s transcendent virtue, achieved by repeated acts of will, is available (at least potentially) to the rest of us. Even though we may fall short of his impeccable standards, his triumph over egoism shows us how we also may become the Sons and Daughters of God. Now, we Unitarian Universalists could probably have an affinity for Arius’ ideas. They suggest that we can use Jesus as our model to improve our behavior. In a word, one could say that this idea is optimistic. But Arius’ main opponent at the Council of Nicaea – Athanasius – had a different idea. He posited that Jesus was equal and co-eternal with God. Again from When Jesus Became God: Like the Arians, Athanasius took his monotheism seriously. He conceived of God as eternal and omnipotent, omniscient and perfect – an unchangeable Being infinitely superior to any mortal creature. For the Creator of the Universe to become human and submit to the power of other men must seem unimaginably humiliating. Yet, according to Athanasius, this was the only way to save mankind from moral and physical extinction. In order to free us from sin and death, God did the unthinkable: He descended into human flesh. Out of His infinite love for us, He became the man Jesus, who took the burden of our sins on his own frail shoulders, suffered, and died that we might gain eternal life. It is important to note here the context of the times in which Athanasius promoted his theology. The early Christian Church had grown exponentially, greater perhaps than any other religion in history. Much of that growth came from the poor, women and newly freed slaves. Thus, to be a healing force for them, Athanasius thought that Jesus needed to be something greater than a mere human, something more powerful. But there was a problem. Athanasius, through his cunning and determination helped to create a church that was intolerant of other people’s beliefs. After the Council of Nicaea, Constantine then declared that the Nicene creed to be the orthodoxy and all others as heretical. For more than a half a century, the views of Arius and Athanasius would fall in and out of favor. And there would much bloodshed accompanying those shifts in theology. Indeed, the Arian ideas tended to dominate until the Roman Empire began to fall apart. And then people turned away from the optimistic Arian view that made it possible for us to use Jesus as a model to the view of Athanasius that was better suited for the times of instability and corruption. [Does this sound familiar?] As Rubenstein said: The Arian view of the world was by now generally recognized as obsolescent. Nicene Christianity, with its majestic Christ incorporporated into the Godhead, its pessimistic view of human nature, and its bishops and saints playing dominant roles, was better suited to express the hopes and fears of Christians in an age of unpredictable change and lowered social expectations. When the Roman Empire in 381 C.E. at the Council of Constantinople finally adopted Athanasius’ doctrine – when Jesus became God – there followed a wave of violence in which houses of worship of other faiths, such as synagogues, pagan temples, heretic’s meeting places, and the homes of wealthy non-believers were destroyed. Thus, sadly, Christianity became an ideological, intolerant religion. And the problem was not so much the theology itself as the intolerance of the Catholic Church that made other doctrines “heretical” meaning not doctrines that are merely misguided, but worse – evil – and needed to be eliminated. This intolerant attitude had injured people down through the ages including Unitarian Universalists such as my friend Jess such that they would prefer never to hear the words, God, Jesus or Christ again. But alas, they, along with their intolerant Christian brothers and sisters, may overlook the wisdom of the teachings of this man called Jesus, because they are focused the theology that made him into God. I close with just one example of the teachings of Jesus that demonstrate his wisdom, the parable of the good Samaritan that I read to you earlier. We note that Jesus is confronted by a lawyer trying to test him with a question “How do I inherit eternal life?” And Jesus turns the question back to the lawyer,”How do you read the law of Moses?” And the lawyer says, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says “That is right. do this and you will live.” Then, the lawyer asks perhaps the most difficult question of all, “Who is our neighbor?” And Jesus tells the parable of the Samaritan who helps a victim of a robbery left to die on the side of the road. A Levite and a Cohen pass by the victim. These are the most respected men of the Jewish community. But a Samaritan stops to help. Now who does the Samaritan represent to the Jewish community of that time? The most despised group. It is as if you are driving on a country road in a cold winter night and your car breaks down. And you try to stop someone to help and who should pass you by, but your lawyer, your doctor or God forbid, your minister, but who does stop to help? Well, if you are a homophobe, a outrageously gay man, or if you are racist, a big black tackle from the Notre Dame football team or if you are fundamentalist Christian, a secular humanist atheist. Or it could be even someone you hate personally. Now, the Samaritan is the hero of this story because of his compassion and Jesus makes that point. But the story is more than just about the importance of compassion, for it challenges our notion of who is our neighbor. For example, if our child were to get on drugs and become homeless, I doubt that any parent here would not do everything in his or her power to save our child. But we can’t save every child, sadly. So what are to do? Remember what Jesus was responding to originally. It was the question, How do I inherit eternal life? And I believe his answer was, “It is not what you expect. It is beyond your human understanding.” In other words, sometimes people will unexpectedly act with compassion and kindness, and there is your eternal life. Jesus taught us to be open to that unexpected moment, a magical moment whether you call it God or not. But it is there where our feet pass in the garden, where the black bird sings. It is life’s recreating moment and it is ours.

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