Third Sunday of Easter
April 10, 2016
“Jesus is the Christ – And So Are You!”
Readings: Acts 9:1-20, Revelation 5:11-14, John 21:1-19
- THIS IS A ‘COMPARATIVE SERMON’
- What I would like to attempt this morning, on this the first time in 41 years that I have the privilege of presiding at the Eucharist, is what you might call a “comparative sermon.”
- Over the past 20 years or so, many Christian theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, have come to realize that what is true of every human being is also true of theology, or of every religious community: we come to understand ourselves through dialogue with others who are different from us.
- So all theology – which is the effort to make sense of what we say we believe – needs to be comparative theology – or dialogical theology.
- We can deepen or clarify what we believe, or what we experience as religious believers, by entering into a comparative conversation – a dialogue, with what others experience and believe in other traditions. We can understand and appreciate Jesus by understanding and appreciating Buddha, or Muhammad, or Lao-tzu, or Krishna.
- My principal conversation partner as a comparative theologian – or a “comparative Christian” – has been Buddha and Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism.
- So I’d like to reflect with you this morning on how Buddhism might help us unpack and feel the meaning of our readings and the meaning of our breaking bread together this morning.
- TIBETAN BUDDHISTS STRESS THE IMPORTANCE (NECESSITY!) OF AN ‘OTHER’ WHO BECOMES ONESELF
- One of the central teachings of Tibetan Buddhism is the importance, really the necessity, of teachers – but teachers who are more than teachers. They are what contemporary Buddhist scholars call benefactors – Spiritual Benefactors.
- Spiritual Benefactors do two things:
- They very concretely, in their particular lives and images, embody enlightenment; they show what it is like to wake up to what we really are; they prove that waking up is possible for all of us.
- But these spiritual benefactors also lovingly relate to and commune with their devotees. Tibetan Buddhist meditators are invited to visualize and to enter into a very real relationship of love and devotion with their Spiritual Benefactor – a relationship of trust and love in which they both love and are loved by their Benefactor. The Spiritual Benefactor is usually Buddha – but it can also be Tara, a female embodiment of enlightenment and love.
- But there is a further, and very important, step in this Tibetan practice: after receiving the love from the benefactor, the devotee is asked to let go, or to drop, the image of the benefactor as other and opens oneself to the realization that the benefactor is one with one’s very self.
- There is a fusion, a communing in which one realizes that there is no real difference between the Buddha (or Tara) and oneself. The Buddha is living in oneself and in all human and sentient beings.
- I do believe that this understanding of the role of the Buddha as spiritual benefactor can help us grasp the role of Jesus for Peter and for Paul in today’s readings.
- STORIES OF PETER AND PAUL: JESUS IS THE OTHER WHO BECOMES THE SELF
- Our first and third readings this morning are two of the many stories that the first Jesus-followers told about how they continued to experience Jesus’ presence even though the Romans had executed him – stories which we may not have to take literally, but we do want to take seriously.
- Peter
- The story of Peter in John’s Gospel illustrates, I think, that Jesus was for him what Buddhists would call a Spiritual Benefactor. Peter, sounding a bit like a guy from Wisconsin, declares in the midst of his troubles, “Let’s go fishing.” And then there is this deeply personal encounter with Jesus in which Jesus, subtley but powerfully, forgives Peter’s threefold denial by asking, three times, for his love. The intensity of their love for each other is palpable and beautiful.
- (By the way, such an intense love relationship is perhaps even more palpable in the story of the earlier, the first, encounter of the risen Jesus with Mary Magdalene, who New Testament scholars tell us ranked with, maybe above, Peter among the leaders of the very first community of Jesus-followers. Her role was subsequently diminished by the male writers of the NT.)
- In this loving relationship between Peter and Jesus (or Mary and Jesus), we see the central place of what Buddhists would call a Spiritual Benefactor. Christianity is a religion that takes its origins and its continued meaning from a particular, historical human being, a Jew who lived during the horrible days of the Roman occupation of Israel.
- In this man, Christians see what can happen to a human being when he or she fully trusts the holy, loving Mystery which Jesus called Abba-God. To meet and to know this Jesus is to meet and know this Holy Mystery. That’s why they eventually called him the Son of God. To see how he trusted this loving Holy Mystery enabled them to trust this Mystery as well.
- For a Buddhist, the story of Peter and Jesus in today’s Gospel is a beautiful and powerful visualization for meditation on the love our Spiritual Benefactors have for us.
- Paul
- But then, there is the story of Paul and his transformation. (Better call it a “transformation” rather than the usual “conversion,” which implies that Paul left his Jewish religion. He definitely did not.)
- What is noteworthy in this story is that Paul was transformed by Jesus without ever having met the historical Jesus as Peter and Mary Magdalene had. Yes, the story has him talking with Jesus, but note that it is a transformed Jesus – a Jesus no longer limited to his physical body. When Jesus tells Paul that “you are persecuting me,” that “me” is the community of his followers. Jesus is now to be found living within and as his followers.
- For the rest of his life – as we see in his epistles – Paul would unpack and deepen this original experience of the Jesus now living in his followers. For Paul, the historical Jesus (whom he hardly mentions in his letters) is now understood as Jesus the Christ, the risen Christ who assumes a mystical body in the women and men who also experience him as Paul did.
- For Paul, a Christian is best described as someone who “is in Christ Jesus.” That phrase – en Cristo einai, to be in Christ – comes up some 70 times in his epistles.
- This is how Richard Rohr puts it in his meditation for this past Thursday: With the phrase “in Christ,” Paul is “… trying to describe this larger life in which we are participating. He speaks of belonging to Christ, of being possessed by Christ, captured by Christ, apprehended by Christ. He says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). Paul speaks of being clothed by Christ. He tells us to put on Christ.”
- What this means is, I think, what Tibetan Buddhists are getting at when they call upon meditators to let go of all external images of the Spiritual Benefactor and open themselves to the reality that “you are the Buddha” – or “you are the Christ, the Christ is you.” As Paul told the Galatians, “It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, as me.” (Gal 2:20)
- JESUS IS THE CHRIST – AND SO ARE YOU/WE
- So I think we can sum up in one sentence what these two readings, with a little help from Buddhism, are telling us: “Don’t forget that Jesus is the Christ – and so are you – so are we!”
- The story of Peter affirms that Christian faith is built on a relationship with Jesus as a particular human being who embodies the reality and the love of the Mystery called God. But Paul reminds us that this historical Jesus, in the experience of his followers after his death, became the mystical Christ – the Christ as a real, living presence and energy that can knock us off the horse of the image we have of ourselves and transform us.
Jesus becomes the Christ and the Christ becomes and lives in us. Or, as Rohr puts it even more boldly: “To be a Christian is to objectively know that we share the same identity that Jesus enjoyed as both human and divine….” (April 6, 2016)
- If we focus only on Jesus and forget the Christ, there is the danger that our main concern is to worship Jesus and extol him above all others, while forgetting that we are called to follow him and to be him.
- To state this more personally and experientially: “To be in Christ” means that what we really are is much more than what we think we are. Our “little selves” are really manifestations of a “bigger Self,” which Christians call Christ and Buddhists call Buddha.
- And this holy Mystery called Christ sustains us, holds us, strengthens us in everything that we have to deal with in life. It is a resource we can draw on, no matter what. We are never just by ourselves, never just “little old me.” We are also Christ.
- But this Christ-presence that is us, as we see it in the historical Jesus, also calls us out of ourselves in compassion for others, especially for those who have been pushed aside.
- This living Christ grounds us in Love and calls us forth to love; it grounds us in internal peace and calls us to social action.
- It is this Mystery of Jesus the Christ living in us that we now make real, and experience again, as we break bread and share the cup around his table.