Lent is a forty-day period before Easter. It begins on Ash Wednesday 25 February 2009 and ends on 11 April 2009, which is the day before Easter.

Lent is a season of soul-searching and repentance. It is a season for reflection and taking stock of the direction of our lives. Lent originated in the very earliest days of the Church as a preparatory time for Easter, when the faithful rededicated themselves and when converts were instructed in the faith and prepared for baptism. By observing the forty days of Lent, the individual Christian imitates Jesus’ withdrawal into the wilderness for forty days. It is also a time when we are invited to follow Jesus along the journey that brought him to the cross. To really grasp the cost of discipleship. We call it a cost because it costs us, and often it costs us so much that we are unable to follow him.

In the spirit of soul-searching and taking stock, I embark on my attempt at a “First Time” message. This sermon series topic has eluded most of our preachers, although it is rich with possibilities – the first time I fell in love, the first time I saw the light, the first time I accepted Christ, the first time I abandoned Jesus, the first time I was tested, the first time ever I saw her face …. But I suspect most of us, like myself, do not have dramatic first time events worth talking about – our lives are peppered rather by many small day-to-day mundane happenings, all the less worth talking about.

So I was really stuck, and desperate, as this Sunday drew closer and closer, and as I wracked my brain, sat and thought, slept on it, and kept drawing blanks. All the time at the back of my mind, Marcus Borg’s book title kept popping into my mind.

Meeting Jesus Again – for the First Time.

Great title for this series, I kept thinking. But then I would have to talk about me - me and Jesus, and to be honest, I don’t really want to talk about it. All I could picture was Jesus asking me, “Who Do You Say I Am? … and me shrinking away.

I kept thinking, if I were to take up the challenge and be honest about it, I would have to talk about my doubts, my perhaps heretical views to some, and you all would find plenty of ammunition to prove that I can’t possibly be a “true Christian”. This is scarier than you think – to be responsible for stumbling a new believer, as we often like to say; to confuse the seekers of certainty; to sow doubt into people’s minds.

As I thought more, I was reminded of what Dr Gordon Wong said, in his OT class that I took several years ago, alongside first year seminary students – during his lecture on Daniel, he talked about how walking through the furnace unscathed, and the lions’ den unattacked, could have been mythological folktales and not literally true, told as stories of hope and encouragement to the Jews living under foreign rule. One visibly agitated young man jumped up and said, “Dr Wong you have shaken the very foundation on which my faith has been built! I don’t know how I am supposed to carry on.” And Gordon’s reply was, “If the foundation of your faith, young man, is built on the premise that the stories in Daniel must have literally taken place, then your foundation is weak, and you must tear it down and build your faith on a much stronger foundation.” And I thought, yes, I still have hope! I later was told that this student lodged a complaint with the Dean on Gordon’s disregard for Scripture’s authority. 

So with that encouragement, I will attempt to give this a shot and because I found my thinking through who Jesus is to me made my faith stronger, I trust it will some of you too.

Marcus Borg wrote his book for the many Christians who were raised with images of Jesus from childhood that when brought into adulthood became problematic, producing perplexity and doubt, often leading to indifference toward or rejection of the religion completely.

As I read his book, it was as if he were reading my mind.  He expressed out loud in words that which I was fearful to articulate in church lest I be labeled a heretic. I remember stepping gingerly over the edge on a few occasions during small groups in the mainstream church, only to be quickly and firmly pulled back to solid ground by well-meaning Christian friends.

But honestly, most all the doctrines about Jesus that I was taught in Sunday School and church, made less and less sense as I grew up. And eventually this Jesus I first met no longer made any sense at all. This fully God, fully man – how do I ever wrap my mind around that? God’s only Son? Saviour of our sins? Died in our place? Heavenly judge seated on the throne? These were some of what I had to believe in order to be able to claim to be Christian.

Or else Jesus is our Friend, Confidant, Buddy .. rugby buddy - do you know that the ACS rugby team (and I expect in other sports as well) prays before each game. I wonder what they pray for? Lord, help us score, help us win, make Raffles lose? I wonder. Do you know there is a Jesus management style for business even? Jesus CEP by Laurie Beth Jones. Jesus, the businessman? In fact, Ablaze is now studying a book on what Jesus would do if he were confronted with the global crisis we face today.

Popular Christianity is rife with domesticated images of Jesus – we reduce him to nothing more than our friend, buddy and business mentor. We make him smaller than he is – it makes him manageable for us. I really believe it is Jesus who needs to be saved – from us!

Even in the time of Jesus, different people had very different images of him. His disciples misunderstood him a lot and only briefly recognized him as the messiah. Many found Jesus mystifying, bewildering yet somehow amazing and strangely compelling. The Pharisees saw him as dangerous, scandalous and ultimately a threat.

Who then is Jesus to me? I asked myself again.

Well, I thought, let me read about who he is to others, then maybe I can find a Jesus that fits for me. So during the late 90s and early years of 2000, I was taking classes and reading a lot, to get to the bottom of this man. And the more I read and explored, the more I discovered that everyone seems to have their own, often quite legitimate, take on who Jesus is. Liberation theologies see Jesus as an advocate for the poor and oppressed, Jesus the freedom fighter. Conservative theologies see Jesus as the only Son of God and unless we believe that he is both fully human and fully divine then we will be doomed to hell with all other heretics and non-believers (the conventional view that Peter talked about 2 Sundays ago). Liberal theologies have a wide range of Jesus images from the radical anti-establishment rebel, to the spirit-person who embodied God but was not God.

But what about me? Who do I say he is? The answer still eluded me. And for the longest time, the question has been left unanswered. And even this morning I can’t really give any sort of complete answer, sorry to disappoint you. I cannot pin him down nor keep him in his place. He is always breaking out of my boxes, if I allow him to. If I am truly listening and truly seeking to understand his message, I will always be surprised. Somehow, I don’t think we are meant to arrive at one complete concrete picture of Jesus. When we cast our view of Jesus in stone, that’s when we begin to form doctrines and dogma out of our views, and we cut off any further communication with Jesus. We get stuck in just one way of seeing Jesus, or one way of believing in Jesus. We prevent him from showing us more of who he is, we make him a dead idol instead of our living guide.

In the end, there isn’t really any doctrine or dogma that can fully capture Jesus’ life and teachings. The mainstream church believes it has captured Jesus nicely, and that if we were to question them, or even dare to re-think them, is heresy. You may argue that thousands even millions of people subscribe to mainstream theologies, how far can they be misguided? Well, I know that living outside the doctrinal comfort zone is a hard thing to do, and it is far safer and more comfortable to stay within the lines. But I believe we must dare to step outside the box, colour outside the lines, and let Jesus reveal to us new things about who he is. He is constantly inviting us to do so if we read the scriptures carefully. Sometimes, the invitation is explicit: “Judge for yourselves what is right,” or “Who do you think was the compassionate one?” in the story of the Good Samaritan or “Consider seeing it this way” or “You have heard it told of old, but I say to you …”. Jesus is always inviting his hearers to see in radically new ways. 

In the long run, it is more important that I find a personal meaning in Jesus, even if it contradicts everything the church has ever said about him. Basically I am saying that we should not be afraid to be heretics. I am convinced that the bottomline is whether who Jesus is to us gives us that intimate bond with God or not. If our current view does not do this, then we absolutely must re-think our view.

Because people like my father, like Gene Robinson, like O Young and others who have gone before them, have dared to be heretics in the eyes of the mainstream church and have dared to question orthodoxy, they have extended and expanded God’s reach, grace, love and mercy to greater heights, breadths and depths.

So who is this Jesus to me, that I have met again, for the first time?

Although I said I do not have a complete answer, there are some impressions for me that are stronger than others. For one, Jesus is to me very much my inspirations as one with an alternative vision of community, his was an upside-down kingdom, where the last will be first, the first will be last; where a king rides on a donkey; where the Master is a servant. He shared meals with outcasts and sinners, he related with women, unclean women at that. He challenged the purity system, the political system, the authorities, the rules.

Let me put this to you. If Jesus were a member of this church today, which ministries do you think he would choose to serve in?  

So if we call our church, the Body of Christ, don’t you think we’ve got our organization chart wrong side up?

Show slide of organization chart, upside-down, with SafeHaven & SafeHands on top and the core functional areas and council at the bottom.

Shouldn’t our council members be helping to support our functional areas of cells, worship, prayer, stewardship, etc in order that we may grow to be able to serve in the real business of the church – SafeHaven’s outreach to the glbt community and SafeHands’ outreach to the marginalized, currently HIV+ prisoners, sex workers and migrant workers?

What is the use of a personal love relationship with Jesus if it is one we keep to ourselves? Someone said that standing in solidarity with the forgotten is a public display of our love. If we love Jesus and do not love our neighbour, we stand accused.

Let us end by contemplating this upside-down organization chart as I read a prayer from one of my favourite authors, Walter Brueggemann:

We would as soon you were stable and reliable.

We would as soon you were predictable and always the same toward us.

We would like to take the hammer of doctrine and take the nails of piety and nail your feet to the floor and have you stay in one place.

And then we find you moving, always surprising us always coming at us from new directions.

Always planting us and uprooting us  and tearing all things down and making all things new.

You are not the God we would have chosen had we done the choosing but we are your people and you have chosen us, in freedom. We pray for the great gift of freedom   that we may be free toward you   as you are in your world.

Give us that gift of freedom that we may move in new places in obedience and gratitude.

Thank you Jesus for you embodied freedom for all of us.  Amen.