In The Tradition of Jesus

A conversation yesterday at church reminded me of an earlier conversation I had at the Chaplain School with a very conservative and angry evangelical preacher and fellow Army Chaplain candidate. In that conversation, he mentioned that he had now heard two Unitarians preach, and neither of us had preached about Jesus, so why were we being allowed to wear the cross on our uniforms (I was not wearing one yet, but George Tyger was).

My mind works in odd ways, and sometimes it is to a challenge like that that I give my best answers, and then I spend months understanding why that answer was a good one. This was one of those moments.

I said to this young man “I am not called necessarily to preach about Jesus, but to preach like Jesus.”

I don’t know what he thought of that, because he angrily went away and we did not speak about it again. I do know that I have spent a lot of time over the last 9 months on this idea… the difference between being a worshipper of Jesus and of being someone called to live “In the Tradition of Jesus.”

I am reminded by a reading in our hymnal by the Rev. Clinton Lee Scott… “Always it is easier to pay homage to our prophets than to heed the direction of their vision”. It is easier to deify Jesus and to worship him, than to accept the challenge to try to change the world… to live with the kind of vision he did, and allow that vision to transform your life.

When Jesus preached to his gathered congregations, he did not focus on scripture (although he used scripture to illustrate his points). He did not extol people to follow the law. He did not preach a message based in fear.

When Jesus preached, he preached a gospel of love and hope based in the religious understanding of his culture. He used story, parable, and real life examples to call people to attitudes of right relationship and social justice. He challenged the powerful, and befriended the powerless. In any way he could, he tried to model his teachings in his own life and in the lives of his disciples. Sometimes he took his ministry to the streets, and in at least one occasion he performed and act of social protest in the gates of the temple itself. When his vision of the future “Realm of God” called him to sacrifice, he accepted it.

That is the vision, the example, and the hope that I feel called to follow. I say that I am a Christian, but not in the way that most Christians today mean. I am called, not to blindly venerate and follow teachings written down thousands of years ago (to become a modern day scribe or Pharisee), but to allow a heart transformed by love and compassion to embrace the wider world for Tikkun Olam… the repair of the world. I am called to make the Sermon on the Mount real, both in my preaching and in my life. I am called to the kind of deep spiritual practice and life of reflection and prayer that once called Jesus to the top of a mountain to commune with the divine. I am called to place that vision of the “Realm of God”… of the world made whole… above my own concerns, my own interests, and perhaps above my own life.

That is what I mean when I say I am a Christian.

I am not called to be a worshipper of Jesus… I am called to be a minister in the Tradition of Jesus.

Yours in Faith,

David