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A DIFFERENT DRUM

by the Reverend John Parker Manwell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 8th of April 2001
Passion Sunday

He must have known it was risky, leading his rag-tag little group into Jerusalem at Passover, when Jews from all far and near crowded into the city. His reputation had gone before him. He did not play by all the rules. He did not always respect the religious establishment. He lived to the beat of a different drum. But he was determined. Perhaps we can never know what he was thinking. But he makes us think. To what drumbeat do we live our lives?

Today is what, when I was growing up, we called Palm Sunday. The theme was Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, as the crowds waved palm fronds, and spread them in Jesus' path.

Nowadays, though, we call it Palm/Passion Sunday, to encourage us not to jump too quickly to the joy of Easter. It invites us to pause, at least, for Good Friday, and reflect on Jesus' "passion." For me this has a double meaning: I can't separate the passion of Jesus' death from the passion of his life. It makes me ask, what's the central passion of my life? Would I risk death for it? And what was it that was most important to Jesus? Did he intend to atone for your sin and mine, as traditional theology tells us? If not, what's left?

Certainly, the gospels put an awareness of his coming death in Jesus' mind, often coupled with an expectation of his resurrection in 3 days. He speaks of it often. And his disciples, we're told, just don't "get it."

Coming into Jerusalem at Passover, on that first Palm Sunday, Jesus is greeted by hosannas. His followers have dreamed of his entering as a king, on a great horse, but he enters on a donkey. He tells them to make provision for the Passover meal. They find an upper room. They gather, in a scene portrayed before you on our great Tiffany mosaicsuch a lightning rod for our feelings about Christianity as we have known it. Jesus says that one of the disciples will betray him.

But even as they ask each other which one could it be, they turn to arguing over which one of them is the greatest. Jesus reminds them once again that in God's kingdom, it's not the one who serves that is the great, but the one who is served. "Simon, Simon," he says, "I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail," that you "may strengthen your brothers." Simon Peter swears that he is ready to go with Jesus to prison, even to his death. "This very day, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times," Jesus says. No! swears Peter, and the others chime in, too. Yet that very night, at the breaking of dawn, after Judas has betrayed Jesus, Peter, too, denies him. As the cock crows after the third denial, Peter remembers his promiseand weeps. Not long after, as Jesus hangs dying on the cross, the disciples begin to scatter.

No, they don't get it. They don't hear the drum that Jesus hears. But do we? And if we do, have we the courage to follow? How, after all, could Jesuscould anyonego willingly to the cross? What sort of man was this?

Today, scholars discount much of the gospels as legend, especially the stories about Jesus' death and resurrection. Their resulting portraits differ. But they all portray a larger-than-life figure who cared little for the conventions and values of his time. He lived his life to a different drum. He preached a kingdom not of this worldwhere the last shall be first, the poor are blessed, and there's a place for everyone at the table.

People found his very presence healing. He preached and lived from radical egalitarian ideas. He had a gut-level empathy with ordinary folk. He freely sat at table with the outcasts of his society, even preferred such company. Above all, whether alone in prayer, or surrounded by crowds, he seemed always in intimate touch with the God whom he knew as "Abba," or "papa." Not surprisingly, he was also a man of extraordinary clarity and courage.

Listen to Jesus Seminar scholar Marcus Borg, who stresses Jesus' intimacy with the life of the Spirit, a realm whose reality the modern world denies:

[W]hat can be known about Jesus is a vivid witness to the reality of the Spirit. Most generations...took the reality of Spirit for granted. We do not ... because of the pervasive effect of the modern image of reality upon the psyches of believers and nonbelievers alike.

Jesus' experience of a world of Spirit challenges the modern worldview ... What he was like reminds us that there have been figures in every culture who experienced the "other world," and that it is only we in the modern period who have grown to doubt its reality.... [Jesus'] life powerfully suggests that the Spirit is "real."

The world of the Spirit is not a place, but a world of inward religious experience. This was the realm of the different drum to which Jesus lived his life. It's the realm of deep connection with others, with life itself and the universe. For Jesus, it was so direct a connection that his followers would identify his very being with it, and in time, they would call him the Son of God.

For Marcus Borg, the experience of Spirit has two key dimensions. The first is a dying to self. Think about the great exemplars across the ages. Which of them has been truly selfless? St. Francis, perhaps? Mother Teresa? Most of them have revealed flaws not unlike our own. Often, the greater the virtue, the greater the flaws. But whatever his historical character, people have worshipped Jesus across the ages as someone truly flawless, as all of us long to be. Fully human in the sense of knowing temptation, and pain, and deathbut perfect in his incarnation of divine vision, empathy, and self-giving. As Theodore Parker said, whatever the historical truth of Jesus' life, even if he never lived, we would intuitively recognize the timeless value of these virtues.

The second dimension of the Spirit is compassion. All of us, some of the time, feel and live from compassionbut the more we have died to self, the more fully we can embody compassion. It seems a commonplace virtue today, almost trite to mention, yet it was Jesus who made it the main thing, and lived from it, in an age when cruelty was even more a way of life than it is now; when crucifixion was an everyday Roman practice; when whole peoples, in defeat, became objects of slavery or massacre. Jesus did not invent compassion, but he lifted it up and put it at the center of his gospel.

This life in the spirit, Borg says, draws us away from the world of pride and possessions, power and popularity. It draws us away from our fears, which keep us preoccupied with ever more security. In releasing us from our self-centeredness, it opens us to a growing empathy for others, to compassionnot just as something we "ought" to do, as an act of will, but to a gut-level identification.

Jesus is then an exemplar of both letting go of self, and of compassion. The source of these virtues for him is not thin air but his transparent openness to the Spirit. And for that, too, he is an exemplar. He models for us the ultimate ability to listen. At a ministers seminar on Friday, I was struck by a colleague's image of a God who whispers. I thought of Elijah on the mountaintop, listening for that "still, small voice." I thought of Jesus retreating, almost daily, to some quiet place to pray. And I was reminded of the obvious, that although our words can help us in surfacing our hopes and fears, an inward quietness is critical to all prayer and meditation. In the end, the most fruitful part is listening. Listening, at some place deep within us where we have let go of all that preoccupies us, and can cross over into the realm of the Spirit, and hear a different drum.

Jesus was a deep listener. The gospels are filled with stories of his intuitive understanding of others. No story, historical or envisioned, captures this better, for me, than the story of his encounter at the well with a Samaritan woman who was there alone because in the failures of her life, she felt rejected by the others. Despite their ethnic differencesJews in those days shunned SamaritansJesus seems already to understand what her life has been like. Afterwards, as she returns in excitement to her village, she cries out, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!"

Why was Jesus willing to die? Traditional Christian theology developed the doctrine of the atonement. The Church would teach that God, whose anger at human sin was first reflected in the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and later in the Great Floodthis God, who had promised that he would never again destroy the earth was once more angry with humanity. God sent Jesus, proclaimed by the Church as God's only son, to the cross to die for human sin. God was so offended, and human sin was so great, that only the death of part of the Godhead itself could atone.

Yet the Church was never monolithiceast and west would split as the first millennium ended, and halfway through the second, the Protestant Reformation would break it into a thousand pieces. It is no coincidence that Protestantism would remove the body of Jesus from its cross, and center its worship not on Jesus' death, but on the spoken Word. Calvin and Luther did not reject the idea of atonement, but shifted their focus much more to Jesus' life and teachings.

Universalists went much further. They could not accept that God would send anyone to the cross to die for the sins of others, much less someone as innocent and precious as Jesus. Their God was not an angry, punishing one, but a God of forgiveness and love, much too good to damn anyone to eternal punishment. By 1804, Hosea Ballou would proclaim in his famous Treatise on Atonement that "the atonement by Christ was the effect and not the cause of God's love to man." "[A]tonement and reconciliation are the same ... a renewal of love."

Why was Jesus willing to die? I hear in Ballou the echo here of Jesus' words in John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. . . ." I cannot imagine him saying to Pilate, "OK, if you insist, I'll go back to my carpentry."

I would not wrap Jesus' death in a convoluted theology of atonement. For me it's simple: Jesus, being so intimate with God, died willingly, to demonstrate the love he felt for all humanity. As he dies, Luke has him looking down, and saying, "Forgive them, Father, for they do not know what they are doing." Historic or not, these words surely sum up Jesus' understanding of the divine message for you and me, and all the world.

Mainline Christianity has not yet abandoned traditional doctrine, but even now there is dialogue among theologians who find the old ideas simply foreign to the modern world.

For me, the Universalists had it right. The loving God I know never gives up on us, would never condemn us to eternal punishment. God condemns injustice and human wrong, but is always there, whispering to us, if we will but listen, deep within. And always, no matter how wasted our lives, we have within us the possibility of responding to this love by reflecting it to others.

I hope that someday I shall learn to convey this message just as well in words that do not use the language of God. For now the best I can do is to share with you a story. It's a story that speaks to our human longing to feel known and cared about, and to find the love we have to give and convey it, simply in who we are and how we live. It's a story told by colleague Sara Oelberg in the current First Days Record. She had grown up, she says, in a staunchly humanist family. She recalls hospital chaplaincy experience, in her mid-50s:

Nothing in my previous religious experiences prepared me for what I was expected to do namely to be with people in times of illness, impending death, or loss of loved ones. How? Everybodys answer seemed to bepray ... My first ... [encounter] with personal prayer [was] both disastrous and miraculous. [My patient] was a woman undergoing a very difficult and risky last-hope treatment for cancer. She was very religious, and seemed to be praying all the time, curled up in bed in a fetal position, mumbling over her rosary beads. Her piety frightened me, and when she asked me directly to pray for her one day, I nearly panicked. But she insisted it would do her great good, so I tried. Haltingly, sonorously, I tried to find words of comfort. The sound of my voice, and knowing how miserably I was doing, depressed and scared me, and I started crying. Unable to continue, I squeezed her hand, and fled the room. I was so ashamed I went to apologize the next day. Surprisingly, she was sitting up and actually smiling. I started to tell her how sorry I was, but she interrupted me to thank me for the wonderful prayer I gave! I had criedcried for and with herand no one had ever cared enough about her to do that before, she said.

We have this capacity for love, the same capacity that Jesus hadif we can let go of our fears and self-absorption, and let ourselves simply be present to each other.

Sometimes all we have to do is show up. Sometimes, we must risk our lives, as when we show our care for someone who is unpopular or rejected or in danger. The Chicken Soup books and the Internet are filled with stories that show the power of one person who, just by being present and caring, saves another from despair and sometimes intended suicide.

Now, Jesus is gone. Yet he continues to live for those who seek him out, in memory and story. His life has inspired hosts of others across the centuries, saints and martyrs and simple folk alike; people like you and me; people who, no matter flawed, have the power to inspire others, in their lives or in their deathsor both. And there are saints and martyrs and simple followers in all traditions who have equal power to inspire. Our broad-based faith encourages us to look for strength in all of themand to follow.

But first we have to listen for a different drum. Do we dare?