Baptized With Spirit
John Shuck
First Presbyterian Church
Elizabethton, Tennessee
January 8th, 2012
“Let me tell you this: you’ll
see the sky split open and God’s messengers
ascending and descending on the
Human One.”
John 1:51 Scholars' Version
During the season of Winter
we are going to explore the Gospel of
John. When the Jesus Seminar
combed through the gospels to determine what sayings and deeds might have gone
back to the historical person of Jesus and what were later traditions created
by the gospel writers, they found virtually nothing in the Gospel of John that went back to the historical Jesus. That
can be deceptive. That does not mean
that John is not important. It does not
mean that John’s gospel did not capture the impulse or the spirit of the
historical Jesus. I think the gospel did
do that in its own way.
In the synoptic
gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus speaks in parable and aphorism. In John’s gospel Jesus speaks in long
discourses. In the synoptics, Jesus
speaks about the “kingdom of God.” In John,
Jesus's favorite topic seems to be himself.
But that can be deceptive too. It
isn’t Jesus for the sake of Jesus, but as a human being that we all can become.
Jesus has a mystical
quality in John. He floats through
reality. It is as though he is saying to followers and
opponents alike,
“You can’t touch this.”
“You don’t crucify me. I lay
down my own life and take it up again.”
“You are from below. I am from
above.”
“I and the Father are one.”
“Before Abraham was, I am.”
And, he promises his
followers that they will soon see that,
“I am in the Father, and that you are in me and that I am in you.”
The passage I read
today concludes with a strange image:
“Let me tell you this: you’ll
see the sky split open and God’s messengers ascending and descending on the
Human One.”
Part of our exploration
of John will be what the phrase translated here as the Human One means. A more
literal translation of the phrase in Greek is the awkward, “the son of the man.” That is Jesus’ favorite title for
himself. Not messiah or christ, not son
of god, not second person of the trinity, but “the son of the man.” The human being.
That is the phrase that
Wink discusses at length in his fascinating and important book, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man. Wink was a participant in the Jesus Seminar,
although his conclusions directed him on a different path than that of the
majority of the Fellows. Wink writes in
his book that the quest for the historical Jesus is more than an academic,
historical study. It was he says the
search for the human Jesus. That is for
a Jesus who matters. It is a search for a Jesus we can believe
in. The search is for the myth of the
human.
Wink sees in the phrase
that Jesus used for himself more than any other, “the son of the man”, the
archetypal human being. That is the human
being that we are invited and empowered to be.
Wink writes:
Lo, I tell you a mystery:
God is Human,
and we are to become,
like God. P. 257
The Gospel of John is fiction. The character Jesus in John is a product of
the imagination of the author. It is
not made up of whole cloth, of course.
Somewhere in there was a real person who did and said things. John’s Jesus is an interpretation, a
parable, a presentation, or a symbolic representation.
If what I just said
sounds scandalous and heretical it is only because we have been bullied by the church
and its dogmas, creeds, and theological sophistry. Jesus
is not the property of the church. He
is both a figure of history and a product of imaginative creation.
The author
of the Gospel of John wanted to show
us something. He saw in the person of Jesus
something empowering. He told a story
of Jesus that made sense to him and that empowered him to embrace life and not
be afraid of the powers of this world.
Another important word
for John is world or cosmos. Depending on the context, it can mean earthly
existence, life, or more often than not, it is a word for what Wink calls the “domination
system.” Jesus says, “I am not of this
world.” What does he mean? I do not think he is saying that he is from
another planet or from another place like heaven, or that he is of another
spiritual incarnation or some spooky notion like that. It means that he does not conform to the
values of the dominant system. What is this dominant system, this world?
Here is an
illustration. The late Thomas Berry,
described the values of the domination system, what the Gospel of John calls world in two sentences.
“The ideal is to take the greatest possible amount of natural
resources, process these resources, put them through the consumer economy as
quickly as possible, then on to the waste heap. This we consider as progress.”
I can’t think of a more
succinct expression of “the world” than that.
Thomas Berry encapsulated the death and insanity of industrial
civilization and its handmaiden, infinite economic growth, with those two
sentences. It is so true, I’ll read it
again:
“The ideal is to take the greatest possible amount of natural
resources, process these resources, put them through the consumer economy as
quickly as possible, then on to the waste heap. This we consider as progress.”
You wonder why “the
world” is blowing the tops off of mountains?
Over 500 in Appalachia so far and
the Cumberlands in Tennessee are next. If that isn’t enough, we will simply mine
Canada and “process“ its tar sands. It
is a foreign country. Nobody lives in Alberta. Or we’ll frack the gas. Don’t worry about what it might do to the
water. Gas is more important than water
anyway, right? If that isn’t enough to
live up to our ideals, we can start a skirmish with another middle eastern
country in hopes that that will somehow keep the oil flowing.
The "world" has to live
its ideal. In the "world", you are not a
human being. You are a consumer. You role is to consume everything in sight until
Earth is a wasteland. That is normal. That is progress. That is the domination system. That is what the author of John’s gospel
calls “the world”. Obviously, in John’s time and in Jesus’s
time, they weren’t talking about modern industrial civilization, but they were
talking about the unsustainable dominant civilization of its time, one whose mode of operation was to divide, destroy, conquer and grow.
Lest there be any
doubt, when I care about Jesus or about the Gospel
of John it is not because I care about heaven or hell or reincarnation or
resurrected corpses or supernaturalism or any of that stuff. I think all of that is a distortion of the
original impulse of Jesus and of those who caught what he was saying and
doing. We have
literalized first century symbolism and thus distorted it.
The historical Jesus
and the imaginative creation by John’s
Gospel is an invitation and an
exhortation to respond to the "world" by becoming a human being. I don’t want to be anything less or more than a human
being. Being a human being means that
we expose the values of “this world” for what they are—death values.
I respect everyone's freedom to explore their religion. My personal religion is
Earth-based. I am an Earthling. I am a
human being. From Earth I was born and to Earth I shall
return. If by chance, I am completely
wrong and the whole point of this exercise of life was to get to heaven or to
be reincarnated, then at my death, I will say to whatever supernatural magician
who offers these prizes the following:
“No thank you. I have lived my
life. There is nothing more I need. You can have your afterlife. I don’t want it.
Instead, if you have the power, provide
for my children and their children and the creatures of Earth. Give them a chance to live on Earth. Can you make it so the waters will be pure,
and the mountains covered with trees?”
To me, religion is
about being a human being. It is about
living a life that matters.
We are
going to be ordaining elders and deacons later in the service. We will ask of them to say, “Yes” to a number
of questions. Those questions for me, at least, need to be
interpreted. I see them as the willingness
to honor and to wrestle with the tradition and to serve with integrity. One of the questions I don’t have to reinterpret
in my mind when I say, “Yes” that I can regard at face value is this one:
“Will you pray for and seek to serve the people with energy,
intelligence, imagination, and love?”
Where do I wish to put
my energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?
Is it for an afterlife? Do I want
to live for that? Not me. I would argue that neither Jesus nor the
gospel writers were about that either.
No, my energy, intelligence,
imagination, and love needs to be at the service of life on Earth as it is and
for our children that they may have the opportunity to breathe clean air, grow
and eat healthy food, and drink clean water.
Part of saying “Yes” to
our descendants and saying “Yes” to Earth is to say “No” to “the world” and its
values of domination. The issue
I have with much contemporary spirituality is that it allows us to escape into
spiritualism rather than to be baptized by Spirit.
John the Baptist says that Jesus is the one
to baptize by Spirit. He is the one who
shows us what it means to be a human being.
Being a human being requires us to stand up and to resist the powers. The promise of John’s gospel is that we can
do it.
Jesus says to Nathaniel, you
think the parlor trick, the little psychic trick of me seeing you under the
tree was interesting? You ain’t seen
nothing yet.
“Let me tell you this: you’ll
see the sky split open and God’s messengers ascending and descending on the
Human One.”
That is symbolic
language of course. It has to do with the
dignity of humanity. Human beings are
not slaves, or cogs on an assembly line, or consumers, or cannon fodder.
And you stop being those things when you
start being a human being now.
When we
wake up and when we stand up and when we speak up for the dignity of life we
become transcendent. The angels ascend and descend upon us.
To recap and conclude
with something to take home:
The Gospel of John’s Jesus is a human
being. He is the archetype of Human
Being. He is the Human One. The Human One is who we really are as
opposed to what “the world” or the domination system says we are. This is not spiritually spooky stuff nor is
it elitist. It is for anyone. We can all be human in our own
contexts. It requires the choice on our end to decide to
live a life that matters.
A life that matters is
not big, or is it the same as someone else.
A life that matters is saying,
I matter.
I don’t matter more
than anyone else or any less.
I count.
I am not a
consumer.
I am not a cog on the
industrial gear.
I am not collateral
damage.
I am not a problem to
be solved.
I am not who “the world”
says I am.
I am a human
being.
I am creative.
I can live with
intention and with integrity.
I choose to be
compassionate.
I choose to be happy.
I choose to be hopeful.
I can find a way to
bring compassion, joy, and hope, into my life and into the lives of
others.
I can care about
something.
I want Earth to be here
for my descendants.
I can fight for
it.
I can expose the lies
of the powers and speak my truth.
I am baptized by Spirit.
I am a human being.
We human beings can
start a revolution.
We human beings can
change this world.
Amen.
