Luke 24:36-48
1 John 3:1-7
As most of you know, I am pretty firmly committed to letting God be God, beyond our human constructions of the holy, the well-intended but rickety little shacks we want to house mystery. Thinking of God along human lines of being, as rooted in time and space with will and agency like ours, can be useful, as long as we don’t confuse the limits of our own imagination with limits on God.
To that end, I routinely try to shift language, freeing God from embodied gender and socially-constructed notions of gender. On occasion, I even reverse tradition, using female pronouns or neutral pronouns. In other words, I am the MAGA-Christians’ worst nightmare, and quite proud of it.
So you may ask yourself why our reading from the first letter attributed to John was full of “He” and “Him.” And this is where we get a little nerdy, but only a little, because this text is one of the few places in scripture where we do not know the antecedents to the pronouns. The correct question in First John is “He who?” The author writes about God, then seems to shift to writing about Jesus, but there is no proper noun to signal that shift. Some and probably all of the he/him references are Jesus, and we have no reason to doubt that Jesus was biologically and socially male in that ancient patriarchal context, as much fun as it might to be to imagine otherwise, so I am hesitant to start messing with the pronouns in this passage.
The other interesting thing about this passage is that it says “we will be like him,” which leads me to believe they hadn’t gotten to a particularly high Christology yet, since the Jesus we get to after they hammered out orthodoxy, and hammered one another in the process, was barely human at all, making it incredibly hard for us to imagine that we might become like him. I have a hard enough time becoming like me, or at least the me I want to be.
“He who?” is not the only question for First John, because we might also fairly ask “We who?” And for that, I’m going to suggest we turn to the gospel reading, which comes from Luke, but is echoed in the “Great Commission” found in Matthew. That version is a command to baptize and make disciples of all nations. Luke’s version has Jesus describing his role as Messiah, commanding “that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
And this is where I land. We honestly don’t know how Jesus felt about non-Jews. A pre-rabbinic Judaism existed throughout the empire, from Babylon to Rome, and people not ethnically descended from the Israelites could be found around synagogues.
As I recently shared with you, Jesus taught and healed in a multi-cultural context. But the social movement that gathered around Jesus took uniquely Jewish forms. Did he, the rabbi executed on Golgotha, anticipate a movement made up primarily of non-Jews? For that matter, did he really anticipate any movement at all? He proclaimed the right rule of God as an in-breaking heavenly kingdom, and early Christians held on to this idea that some sort of divine intervention in creation was immanent. And either it arrived in the form of a new way of thinking about God and living in the world, or it didn’t happen at all, because the anti-Christ did not show up in 33 C.E., and wasn’t born in 1946 either, despite evidence to the contrary.
What we do know is that the gospel we received was universalist, though that word can mean many things.
Our sisters and brothers in America’s Unitarian Universalist movement have evolved quite a bit since their origins as two distinct Christian heresies. The Universalist heresy was a response to the strict Calvinism of our own religious tradition, and particularly the absurdity of predestination, the idea that God knew, and had therefore decided, who would and would not be saved. That theology left you with an evil god who created beings that the god had already destined for eternal torment. Universalist Christians took the crazy stand that a loving God would have to make salvation universally available.
A second kind of universalism also works around ideas of salvation. It is the kind of universalism that got mega-church pastor Rob Bell into trouble for his preaching and his writing, especially his bestseller “Love Wins.” The short version can be framed as a question: “What sort of loving god would damn a faithful Buddhist, born into a Buddhist culture, who lived an entire life of compassion and loving service?” Or as Bell asked in his book, “Gandhi’s in hell?”
Just as in the case of the anti-Calvinist universalism, the case of Bell’s universalism is that if God is just and loving, the person who lives a good life in their particular context must have a path to salvation. Bell pushes the idea of love and grace even further, writing near the end of the text:
“Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.”
Yeah. All that.
Taking that to the Nth degree, grace even has to be operative after death, with a God who asks, if we think of God as asking, “Are you sure? There’s still time?” like a cosmic car salesperson who just got an offer from the manager…
Though, I’m really not feeling it with an unrepentant perpetrator of domestic violence and spouse murder like O.J. Simpson. Because I am human, not God, and my particular grace is finite.
And there is yet a third operative universalism, one where some Unitarian Universalists have landed, that is a sort of pick-and-choose religiosity, one from column A, one from column B. And, true confession, I have a love/hate relationship with that form of universalism.
I hate it because it is undisciplined. I can just choose the options that make me feel good about myself, or worse still, decide that my amorphous “spiritual but not religious” gets me out of the hard work of being in community. And I love it because there are some real treasures to be found out there in other traditions.
My religion is what I do in concrete terms, not what I believe in abstraction, something I learned from Rabbinic Judaism. Though Matthew 25 has become central to my Christian faith, I have to admit that I truly learned about compassion when I learned about emptiness from the teaching of the late Zen Master Thích Nh?t H?nh.
It is not that all religions are equally true. Indeed, they cannot all be true, because they contradict one another. And in the interest of letting God be God, I refuse to buy into human constructions of misogyny and exclusion, so religions that make God a man and men more like God are just out for me. Seriously, were those people ever around men?
My universalism is less “it is all the same” and more “this is my context, and I will find the holy in it.”
The universalism in our gospel reading, like the universalism in the Great Commission, shatters the old idea that God works through and for the Jews only, but it brings a chauvinism, a hubris of its own, one that doubles back on Jews, and that leaves countless bodies in a trail of well-intentioned and often violent conversion.
You can still hear followers of Rabbinic Judaism, the form that has existed since Rome’s re-conquest of the Holy Land in 70 C.E., describe Jews as “God’s Chosen People.” I will acknowledge that the Jewish theological tradition was unique and innovative in the context of the Ancient Near East. But they believed in many gods. For me, a God who only chooses one people is no God at all.
Many Christians continue with that exclusionary theology, but with Christianity stamped on top, so that Jews will have to become Christians in the end. Then, of course, you have the toxic American ethno-nationalist Christianity in which somehow God’s favor got transferred to the United States which means more narrowly to white capitalist Christianity because we know God did not mean any of that silly sharing stuff we read last week. Just ask the preachers in the thousand dollar suits.
In the end, I’m okay with the scriptural call at the end of the gospel according to Luke and at the end of the gospel attributed to Matthew to share the good news of salvation, of liberation, with all nations. And as we’ll remind ourselves next week, with all species and all of creation in this great big mysterious and miraculous universe. Amen.