The Fear of Jesus—A Sermon by Forrest Church

This will be my 26^th Easter sermon as your Senior Minister. I love preaching on Easter. I love the crush of expectant worshipers. I'm so delighted you're all here, even those of you who come to church only once a year, whether you need to or not. I adore the spring fashions, the soft pastels and festive bonnets. My spirits lift in tandem with the glorious brass and high-soaring chorales. And yes, I love the story, the Easter myth itself. Life rising out of its ashes, tragedy transformed into triumph, all captured in a vivid human archetype—the eternal, all-forgiving, all-renewing love of God in Jesus—not alone life after death, but love after death, a love that saves.

So why don't I feel the full measure of Easter's promise this year? It has nothing to do with the music or the weather or this wonderful congregation. The brass has sounded, the choir has sung. Spring has not quite come, but you have come—spring's harbingers—in defiance of the chill and rain, to invoke and celebrate the promise of new life. So what could possibly be wrong? Why the shadow?

For me, the shadow darkening Easter is the unbroken shadow of crucifixion, the shadow of brotherly hate, demonic certitude, and benighted faith. This shadow will not lift on cue, but lengthens instead, darkening the heart's horizon. This year, for me at least, rather than transfiguring violence into love, the passion of the prince of peace recalls instead faith's destructive power.

The problem is, religion kills. Islam kills. Christianity kills. Given the opportunity, Judiasm kills—Judiasm, which for centuries was blessed among religions for only sponsoring martyrs, not creating them. Until the last, most secular and bloody century of them all, war was almost always a religious sacrament. Moors slaughtering Christians, Christians Moors. Catholics slaughtering Protestants, Protestants, Catholics. And everyone killing the Jews. From the beginning of human history, terrorists for truth and God have raped and evicerated, drawn and quartered, slashed and burned one another as if possessed by a kind of divine dementia. The cross was not only an instrument of torture two millennia ago. It has remained an instrument of torture almost ever since, with untold nameless innocents sacrificed in Jesus's holy name—and every other holy name. I trembled this week, when the new head of Hezbollah compared a young suicide bomber to Jesus—both sacrificed themselves for their people, he said.

The ongoing war in Iraq is less a war against terrorism, than it is a war against radical Islam. Or so it is perceived throughout the Muslim world, and by the religious leaders who opportunistically seize upon the chaos there to incite yet more terror. However we explain its presence, the occupying army is Western and Christian. Our intentions are not ignoble. If under mistaken pretext, we unseated a brutal dictator. And certainly all attempts to isolate, capture, and punish Osama Bin Laden are fully justified under the ancient canons of just war. But in Iraq, reaping the wind, we have inherited the whirlwind. We have re-cocked and -triggered the retributive logic of religious enmity—the lex talionis ("an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth"). Not that we must leave the crimes of terrorists unpunished. To subdue those who have proved themselves hell-bent on terror, we must take unsentimental action. Such action, however, must be more sensitively calibrated than it has been. Otherwise we fan the fires we mean to quench.

Islam, historically, is no more violent a faith than Christianity. The Easter story itself is rife with violence, as Mel Gibson so powerfully reminds us in his vivid and, to me, disturbing movie, "The Passion of the Christ." Part of the shadow cast over my Easter this year has surely been cast by Gibson's "Passion." I emerged from the theater with one very important part of my faith severely shaken. Think about it. This isn't just the story of a tortured and crucified innocent, though indeed Jesus was as pure a martyr as exists in the long, bloody annals of religious martyrdom. No, the crucifixion of Jesus, according to Christian doctrine, is the lynch pin of a divine plan. By such a reading, God is the Deus Ex Machina of this violent story—manipulating events to ensure that Christ's vicarious sacrifice—his blood offering— will atone for our sins and thereby save us from eternal damnation. By this faithful reading, if Jesus is not murdered, we cannot be saved. Should the High Priests and Roman Officials fail to play their part in this cosmic drama, Jesus lives and our hopes die. So understood, God is not only a collaborator in Jesus's death. He writes the script and directs the drama, a melodrama drenched in blood.

Two centuries ago, Hosea Ballou, the greatest Universalist theologian and a devout liberal Christian, had this to say about the doctrine of the atonement. "The belief that the great Jehovah was offended with his creatures to that degree, that nothing but the death of Christ, or the endless misery of mankind, could appease his anger, is an idea that has done more injury to the Christian religion than the writings of all its opposers, for many centuries." Universalists have always believed that God is love. No loving God could possibly behave in as petty or brutal a fashion as does the God of Christian doctrine during Eastertide.

According to Biblical literalists, this isn't the final act of salvation history, of course. That comes with Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the holy war to end all holy wars. You think of Islam as a violent faith? Just go to your local bookstore along with about 10 million other Americans and buy Glorious Appearing, the final installment of Tim LaHaye's 12-novel series on the end times. It's set in the very near future. The Anti-Christ—satanic ruler of this world as prophesied in the Book of Revelation—is (of course) the Secretary General of the United Nations. Let me read a single passage from the final battle scene. "Men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin. Even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated." Two weeks ago the Times ran an article about "The Return of the Warrior Jesus." Whether in time for Armageddon (with 9/ll a fated signal of the cosmic drama) or merely to sanctify the next bloody chapter of the latest holy war, the Warrior Jesus—in LaHaye's words, arriving on the clouds with fire in his eyes—will soon return to save the day. One thing for sure, such a vision is designed to put the fear of God in us. One fundamentalist Christian put it this way: "A little more of the fear of God in this world isn't going to hurt us."

You think not? In my book, which is drawn directly from the library of Christian Universalism, not only will the fear of God hurt us; it also, as it always has, will entice us to hurt others. A loving God forgives and saves all Her children; a fearsome God divides His children against one another, saves a precious few and incinerates the rest. The God of radical Islam is a fearsome God; so is the God of fundamentalist Christianity. We all become at last indistinguishable from our enemies when we rise against the infidel.

So where does this leave us? How can we remove Easter from the shadow of violence? By returning, I think, to the very first Easter and pondering, not the fear of God, but instead the fear of Jesus.

Jesus entered Jerusalem with fanfare, leading a band of followers who believed that he was the messiah. Within a week he was betrayed by one of his disciples, brought before Pilate, sentenced, and crucified. His followers disbanded and went into hiding, in fear for their own lives. His chief disciple, Peter, forswore him three times rather than admitting to any knowledge of him. This is not the way the story was supposed to turn out. By ancient tradition the promised messiah, scion of David, king of the Jews, would march triumphantly into Jerusalem to be crowned. Apparently, this was the expectation of many of Jesus' Palm Sunday followers. The problem is, their expectations had nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus' gospel.

Reminding us that the world doesn't owe us a living—rather it is we who owe the world a living, our very own—Jesus' good news celebrates the gift of sacrificial love. To take his most challenging injunction, by loving our enemy we give away our entitlement to revenge; we sacrifice our pride. We also sacrifice our sense of entitlement and all the pleasures that go with vengefulness, bitterness, and hate. Forgiveness, too, requires sacrifice. We must sacrifice self‑righteousness, our preoccupation with having been wronged, and the advantage of holding another in our debt. Finally, and most important, we must sacrifice our control over everything that lies beyond our power—including our control over others, over events, and over the future. Ultimately, the courage to love requires the courage to let go. Fear accompanies us all the way to the grave, but we needn't hold its hand or accept its cold comfort. The word sacrifice means, "to render sacred."

When most believers reach out to Jesus, it is to the fully human Jesus. His are hands we can hold. When tears well in his eyes, we know our own are blessed. The fear of Jesus is just like our fear. He worries. He wonders if he has done all he could to accomplish his mission, and at the end of his life, for one dramatic moment, he fears that he has failed, that everything was for naught.

We know that Jesus struggled with fear as he hung dying on the cross. It is written all over his last words. Jesus almost never quoted Scripture, but here we find him, at the hour of his death, quoting not the comforting 23^rd Psalm but the starker 22^nd— not "I shall walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil for thou are with me" but "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Instead of the comforting words that usher in the close of the 23^rd Psalm, "My cup runneth over," Jesus moans, "I thirst."

Where, then, in this drama is the breakthrough? Where does love answer fear? It comes first when Jesus further says, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." He thinks not about his own fate but about the fate of others. He returns to the very essence of his gospel—to love our neighbor as ourself. And also to love God. Jesus completes his surrender of self by placing his life in God's hands, saying, "Father, I commend my life unto thy spirit."

When we feel that we are alone, that God is not with us— when our heart is filled with dread about life or about death— we can take to heart not the fear of God, but the saving fear of Jesus, his own sense of abandonment by God, his all-too-human thirst. We can reach out as he did, not only for help—though that is a very fine thing to do—but to help as well. Letting go, Jesus recalled his own saving truth: love your neighbor; love your enemy; God is love; and love casts out all fear.

If the faith about Jesus too often damns, the faith of Jesus—though obscured by centuries of doctrine and violence perpetuated in his name—can save us still. When his disciples asked him how they could get into the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus replied, in essence, that when we die there will be a quiz. The questions are not "Do you believe in the Trinity and that I died for your sins?" They are "Did you feed the hungry and heal the sick and clothe the naked and house the homeless and visit those in prison." As Thomas Jefferson so memorably said, "It is in our lives not our words that our religion must be read." We are not saved from our sins by believing in Jesus but by following Jesus, and every other prophet of God's love. We are also saved from our darker selves by refusing to follow any false teacher down the path of neighborly hate.

And how do we know if a teacher is false? We know by the fruits of his teachings. The word diabolic means, literally, "divisive." Anyone, however eloquent, who inspires hatred for any part of God's family, for any group of God's children, is a false teacher and serves a false God.

A century ago, many so-called modernists, declared the coming end of religion. If God was not dead yet, he soon would be, euthanized by scientific progress. Free from the grips of superstition, we would leave the horrors of religious war and ignorance behind as we marched forward into a brave new world. Then followed the most brutal century in human history. 20 million people killed in the Gulags alone, by a proudly anti-religious Soviet imperium. In retrospect, it seems that perhaps the only thing worse than believing in God is believing only in ourselves.

Out of the rubble of last century, the question that emerges is no longer, "How can we induce people to abandon their faith, in order to bring peace to the planet?" It is instead, "How can we answer to the better angels of our nature and model a saving faith, one that saves not only us but our most distant neighbor as well?" Here, the fear of God won't help us. Only the love of God will. The letter of any particular religion won't save us, but only the universal spirit. Every scripture—the Khoran, the Torah, the Gospels—contains both fonts, both letter and spirit. The letter divides us, sheep from goats, saved from damned; the spirit saves. Christianity is no better represented by Gibson's letter-driven movie or La Haye's letter-driven novels than is Islam by the savagery of Osama bin Laden's letter-driven terrorism. Look at the letters they choose to highlight. Then return to the spirit of the Gospels or the Koran, in which God is love. Jesus himself wasn't a Biblical literalist, by the way. He gets in trouble, in fact, for breaking the commandments, almost never quotes scripture, and sums up all the law and the prophets in two transcendent teachings: love to God and love to neighbor. Love is the story here, not violent death to secure eternal life.

Which brings us back to Easter. If love is the story, death itself can always be redeemed. But only by love.

Life after death isn't the heart of Easter's message. About life after death, no one knows. What Easter teaches is that there is love after death, and that our actions invest life with purpose and a meaning that abides. Drawing not from the letter of orthodox Christianity, but from the spirit of Christian Universalism, Easter breaks the shadows of violence, it doesn't perpetuate them. However violent his death may have been, on the cross itself the fear of Jesus is transfigured by the love of Jesus. Both bear life-saving witness to the divine power of love eternal.

One final word. As with the love of Jesus, our own love means nothing until we give it away. After we die, only the love we have given away during the course of our lifetimes will surely endure. But that is enough. Love is enough. Whenever his love is reborn in our hearts, Jesus saves us anew. And we save one another. With every kind word. With every gentle touch. With the gift of forgiveness. And in the quest for peace. We teach one another the Easter message. That love alone remains. The rest is dross.