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            It’s a privilege to be asked to speak to you today.  This sermon on the Historical Jesus in an outgrowth of a class that I taught this fall exploring the Historical Jesus; inspired in part by the urging or Jim Hodges after hearing my sermon on the Apostle Paul.  He correctly perceived that I needed more information about the current level of scholarship on the Historical Jesus. To him I owe a debt of gratitude for the books he lent me and the sources he recommended.  The participants in the class also inspired me with their demanding questions and insightful comments.  I want to thank Joe Maciejko and Ellen Kelley for helping edit today’s sermon and participating in the liturgy.

 

            When I was a young mother, I thought that it was important for my children to be well versed in the Bible stories about Jesus, not for their theological importance, but because I thought that to live in our culture they needed to be Bible literate.  So I decided that one of the best ways that I could introduce them to the stories about Jesus’ birth was to buy a crèche set, complete with the Holy Family, shepherds, sheep, wise men, and camels; also included was a banner on top of the barn announcing, ‘The Prince of Peace.’  When my oldest daughter was four, she started the game of ‘Hiding Baby Jesus.’  This consisted of her hiding baby Jesus in not so obvious places, until I, out of exasperation would demand that she replace Him on the manger bed.  What started out as a childhood prank turned into a major theological battle in our household.  All through elementary school, junior high, senior high and college, and even to this day, when Jane gets home for the holiday season, I trot out the crèche set, and Jane hides baby Jesus.  What is going on here?  From the very beginning of my attempts at spiritual guidance of my children, it appears that they were rebelling against what I thought were sacred Bible stories about Jesus’ birth.  With Jane, it started out as a game, but quickly morphed into her personal statement of rebellion about being told stories that made no sense to her. A skeptic from the very beginning!

 

            In readings for my Historical Jesus class, John Shelby Spong, in Why Christianity Must Change or Die, points out that all of the Bible stories about Jesus’ birth are myths. We actually know nothing historically accurate about Jesus’ birth except that he was born around 3-4 B.C.E.; this from an independent source, the Jewish historian Josephus. Most believers have never been told that there are no camels in the biblical story of the wise men, and no stable or stable animals, in the story of Jesus’ birth. The gospel writers created fictional stories about Jesus’ birth in order to place him in the historical context necessary to fulfill prophecies found in the Old Testament. The census taking in Bethlehem was not the record of any real journey; it was necessary to move the Holy Family from Nazareth to Bethlehem where it was prophesized that the Messiah would be born.  Matthew took the virgin concept out of a mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14; the Hebrew ‘almah, which could be translated as a young woman about to be married rather than a virgin, was included in Matthew’s text and has created theological debate for centuries.(Matt. 1:18-25), this ‘virgin’ mistranslation was perpetuated by Luke.  The wise men (Matt. 2:1-12) are based on Isaiah 60.  The star was lifted out of the Balaam-Balak story in Numbers 22-24 and out of other popular episodes in the oral tradition of the Jews.  The shepherds were suggested by the association of Bethlehem with David, the shepherd boy who became king (Luke 2:1-20).  The song of Mary (Luke 1:46-55) was adopted from the song of Hannah in the book of Samuel (I Sam.  2:1-10). The story of the pregnant Mary’s visit to the pregnant Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-45) was an adaptation of the story of Rebekah, pregnant with Esau and Jacob (Gen. 25:19-26).  The whole character of Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, was drawn and shaped by the ancient story of the patriarch Joseph from Genesis 37-50 (Matt. 1,2).  On and on we could go with this analysis.  The stories were designed to be understood as myths placing Jesus’ birth solidly within the Jewish midrashic tradition, not literal biography.

 

For me, the Bible is not the word of God in any literal sense.  The Gospels are not inerrant works, divinely authored. They were written by communities of faith, and they express the biases of those communities.  They reveal changing, evolving theological perspectives.  They are not the words of eyewitnesses, as so often has been claimed.  Most eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus were long dead before the Gospels entered history.  The Gospels were also shaped by the events of their own times, perhaps even more dramatically than they were by the events of the time in which Jesus actually lived.

 

            So why would people coming after Jesus create these marvelous/miraculous stories of his birth?  What impulse drove them to myth making about his birth and ministry?  If they were looking for a Messiah, what manner of man was this to be?  In order to find those answers, we have to explore Jewish literature written centuries earlier in order to understand what the people of Jesus’ day were looking for in him. In Jewish literature, I Sam. 9:15-10:13, we learn that Samuel, disappointed with Saul, in an act of treasonous civil disobedience anointed the youthful David to be his successor.  This new king was called “the son of God” in the Psalms: “You are my son; today I have begotten you.”  This royal son of God was said to reign on God’s right hand and was sometimes called the “son of man or messiah”.  Like all human words, messiah took on new meanings as it journeyed through history.  When the royal family of the House of David was destroyed in the conquest of Judah by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE, the term messiah was set free to enter the fantasies, the hopes and the dreams of the Jews.  It was then transformed into standing as a symbol for the ideal king who would on some future day come to restore the fortunes of Israel.  That is how the concept of “messiah” entered the Jewish faith story.

 

            Let’s look for a moment at some of the early images of the messiah.  For some Jews, the messiah was simply a white knight who would conquer the enemies of the Jews and restore the grandeur of the throne of David.  For later followers of Jesus, the messiah was a divine being who would come at the end of the world to establish the reign of God.  For still others, he was a mythical servant who would absorb the pain and suffering of the world, creating in the process a new human wholeness. And for some he was to be The Prince of Peace, creating on earth a more just society through extending an ethic of mercy and inclusiveness toward all. Even these images did not exhaust the possibilities.  The heroes of the Jewish past began to be magnified in order to expand the range of messianic ideas—a new and greater Moses, a new and greater Elijah, one who fulfilled the scriptures, one who was understood against the symbols of ongoing Jewish worship.  There was a veritable explosion of images so that when the earliest Christians affirmed that Jesus was messiah, people heard many things according to how they understood messiah.  So it is today, that we have almost as many images of Jesus as we have theologians writing.

 

           

  For me one of the most compelling images of Jesus is The Prince of Peace; I am curious about when in the development of Christian theology did Jesus get designated as such?  We have to go back to the Old Testament and hear the prophecy of Isaiah about a Messiah who is also to be The Prince of Peace.

 

            Isaiah 9: 6 “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The might God, the Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”

 

Again in Isaiah we hear a Messiah described that epitomizes the attributes of a peace maker:

 

            Isaiah 11:1-5 “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots; And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord; And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord; and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears; But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity the meek of the earth; and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.  And the righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and the faithfulness the girdle of his reins, The Wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”

 

We hear in the birth stories the echoes of this Messiah as the Peacemaker:

 

            Luke 2:13-14 “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

 

And in a radically new ethic that is attributed to Jesus by the gospel writer Matthew we hear:

 

            Matthew 5:9 “Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God.”

 

            Rev. Gretchen Wood argues in her sermon about Jesus that He is one of the largest projection screens in our current world.  Quoting Rev. Woods, “Because Jesus cannot factually protect himself from the projections of those who use his story for their own ends, we find every possible interpretation of what he might have had in mind.  What we ‘get’ from Jesus probably says volumes more about ourselves than it does about the man or his message.”  Our projection of him as The Prince of Peace has inspired some of the most beautiful poetry, art, and music the world has ever seen.  Who has not be inspired by Handel’s “Messiah”, which emphasizes the idea of Jesus as “The Prince of Peace?”  The text is actually taken from the Hebrew scripture, rather than any message of Jesus.  But what is important here is that people living in times following the life of Jesus believed that he held the promise of peace; and some people living today still believe that through him the world can be made a more just place for all.

 

            If we ultimately see in Jesus what we hope that he might represent, then I am content to let him represent my own desires for peace in this world.  My life has witnessed the turbulence of the Civil Rights Movement, the chaos on a college campus during the Vietnam War, the anxiety of sending a nephew to fight in Kuwait, and the desperation of our current war in Iraq.  My involvement in war has only been from a distance, but that doesn’t diminish my longing for other ways of settling conflicts in the world, just as I assume that many of you have these same longings for peace from watching the news or from reading our newspapers.  From the very beginning of my experience with Jesus’ birth stories, I thought the whole truth of his coming was summed up in the angel’s declaration that Jesus was to bring: “on earth peace, good will toward men.”  I also thought the beatitude: “Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called Children of God.”, summed up all one needed to know about Christian ethics.  These scriptures about Jesus coming to bring peace, and subsequently, preaching about peacemaking in this world seemed to resonate with the truth of my experience—that is, longing for a sustained global peace.

 

            This homily still begs the question about exactly how we are to go about peacemaking in our complex post-modern world.  We might again look to scripture for some practical guidance. Are the words of Micah enough to guide our ethical decision making?  Micah 6:8 “He has showed you, O man, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”  In some ways, yes, there is some practical advice, that if followed, I do believe will lead to a greater degree of peace in our world.  We are exhorted to remember how basic behaving in a just manner toward all people is in creating peace. 

• Think of the ways a more economically just world, one that ameliorated the grinding effects of poverty on people, families, and communities, would go toward creating peace. Think of the justice that ‘might roll down like a mighty stream’ if we had a World Court that could successfully prosecute purveyors of genocide. 
• Think of the ways in which a world that loved mercy might behave toward those who are least among us—those that suffer from diseases such as malaria, HIV-AIDS, yellow-fever, and polio. 
• Think of the ways that mercy could be shown to those who are in prison, who suffer from addictions and mental illness. 
• Think of what it might truly mean to walk humbly with your God.  To me this means you are humble in the presence of all names for god, that you honor other’s religious traditions, and that you walk with God, co-creating peace in this world, rather than relying on religious pronouncements of those purporting to be acting in the name of God.
• Think of the heroes that we honor each year with the Nobel Peace Prize and the Pacem in Terris Award for the work they do ‘to act justly and love mercy’.  The Diocese of Davenport just presented Don Mosley with the Pacem in Terris award for launching Habitat for Humanity in the 1970’s.  Mosley was also instrumental in establishing and raising fund for housing program sin Africa, Central America and the Middle East, as well as around the United States. To me, these are the modern peacemakers held up for veneration in the beatitudes.

 

            We are often asked in the popular Christian culture to consider, “What would Jesus do?”  We might assume that Jesus, a Jew, well versed in Hebrew scripture, would concur with the prophet Micah—act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. Of course, these are the fundamental guidelines of peacemaking. However, it seems to me that we should expand our concept of peacemaking from the individual action to the collective will by asking the question, “How can we best use our collective energies to further the greater good of all?”  Rather than trotting out the old crèche set, retelling the mythic birth stories that grow more implausible each century, can’t we do more to honor the Historical Jesus?  The real question is, “What do our children, and my children, now young adults, need to know about the possibilities that Jesus holds for real peacemaking in our world?”  Nevertheless, this holiday season I will once again dig out the crèche set and put it in a place of honor on the dining room buffet. It is with a good deal of ambivalence that I do this; I know that no one in the household really attaches much meaning to the stories being represented.  But the truth of my experience calls me to long for peacemakers in this world, and if the crèche set helps me be mindful of my longings for peace, so be it.

What does the truth of your experience call you to long for? Are their other hero stories, that of Abraham, Moses, Mohammed, the Buddha, Zarathrustra, or Hare Krishna, that hold more truths to your longings? Jesus, represented as The Prince of Peace, has inspired people through the ages to work for the greater good of all.  As we approach this holiday season, and we are once again flooded with songs and images of Jesus’ birth, I will approach the myths with a sense of reverence for what I prize the most in this world, a continuous stream of Princes and Princesses of Peace, who work tirelessly  in our times.  As you approach the holiday season, what do you long for most?  I hope that your longings are supported by the hero/birth stories, but more importantly, I hope that you will be inspired to act on your longings in this world—act for justice, for mercy, and for peace in our lives together and in the larger world.