IF YOU HAD BEEN THERE
Richard P. Buchman
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
January 30, 2011

In the fall of 2005, when the Middle East seemed fairly quiet, my good friend and colleague, Harry Clark, and I decided to go to Israel. We flew from O’Hare to Newark, where we were interrogated at length by two unsmiling women. Harry whispered, “Israeli Secret Service.” They were unimpressed when we told them that we were Congregational clergyman on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. They would have preferred that we stay home. While we were being grilled, our suitcases were opened and their contents thoroughly inspected on the floor behind us. When we were cleared to check our bags with the ticket agent and go on board, we felt more secure than we had ever felt on an airplane. El Al does not fool around.

It was the trip of a lifetime. The guide whom the travel agency had assigned to us, Eitan Gronberg, had been in the business for thirty years. He knew the Bible (both testaments) every bit as well as we did, and he was refreshingly candid about what he told and showed us. “This,” he said, “is supposed to be the room where Jesus and his disciples met for the Last Supper. Unfortunately, this building is only 900 years old.” As we got to know Eitan better, we told him some Ole and Lena stories. He loved them. “Oy, dot Ole,” he would say. “Oy, dot Ole.”

I will not go into detail about what we say and learned, except to suggest that you hold on to the images, which you picked up in Sunday School of Bethlehem and Nazareth, and other places connected to the life of Jesus. The churches, which have been built at those holy places, are largely filled with “stuff.” I was going to say “junk,” but the word “junk” has recently acquired a new and most interesting meaning. I was especially disappointed by the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The spot where Jesus is said to have been born looks like a small, dirty fireplace, surrounded, of course, by stuff. Three weeks ago, in this room, we heard about the baptism of Jesus. You cannot believe what they have done to that place on the Jordan River, but you can purchase a picture of what they have done at the gift shop, along with John the Baptist t-shirts.

There were several places, however, which we found to be both beautiful and moving. One was the Episcopal version of the place where Jesus was buried. Another was the courtyard of the high priest where Peter denied Jesus three times. But we will both remember the place on the Sea of Galilee where it is said that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount. There is a church there today, but it is plain and simple and blessedly empty of “stuff.” Don’t ask me why. Heaven only knows. Our guide told us something that surprised us. Jesus, he said, probably did not stand at the top of the hill and talk to the people below him. Instead, he stood at the bottom of the hill with his back to the sea, so that the wind, coming off the sea, would carry his words up to his listeners. Harry and I would have been content to stay there for several hours.

Close your eyes and you can picture it. Now pretend that you were there. You lived nearby and you had heard about a young itinerant rabbi from Nazareth who was wandering around Galilee, healing the sick and performing mighty acts and telling the people about God. That interested you because just a few months earlier, during the period of Passover, you had, for the first time in your life, gone to Jerusalem to observe the holiday. You saw the Temple, the holiest place in your religion, a place filled with gold and silver and precious gems, things that you had never even imagined. You saw the priests who presided at the Temple services, dressed in rich and colorful robes, men who seemed to exercise great power over those who came to worship. And, of course, you saw the people who ran your country, the people who, as far as you knew, ran the whole world, the Romans. Their soldiers were everywhere. Their chariots sped through the streets, frightening your children. You heard that criminals were being executed outside of the city, and you were glad when your visit ended and you could begin your long journey home. You would never forget what you had seen and heard, but you doubted that you would return to the city about which you had been told for as long as you could remember.

And now you are back in Galilee and you have decided to hear the young man who has aroused the interest of your neighbors. You wonder what he might have to say about the poverty in which so many of your family and friends live, about the Roman occupation, about the bleak prospects which your children face. And so you walk to the spot on the Sea of Galilee where this Jesus of Nazareth is supposed to speak. You are not alone. A crowd has gathered, and you are slowed down a bit, enough so that you will miss the first few words of his sermon. You find a place from which you can see him, and this is what you hear: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

When I was in seminary, I went to chapel one morning when Professor Reinhold Niebuhr, for whom I would write my senior paper, was in charge of the service. He went to the pulpit to deliver his homily. He spoke about thirty-five or forty words, his first sentence. Then he stopped, looked at us for almost thirty seconds, and said, “I don’t think I should add anything to that.” With that, he returned to his seat and sat down.

I was sorely tempted to do the same, to stop right here and send you home wondering, wondering not about what I did but about what Jesus said. Wondering if what he said has to do with anything. The meek, for Heaven’s sake? Who are they? And whoever they are, when did they inherit anything? Remember! You’re just back from Jerusalem, where you saw the Temple and the Roman occupiers. Or, if you can’t put yourself in that position, you’ve just gone through another election in the century, in this country. The meek?

I am not, however, Reinhold Niebuhr, as you have probably noticed, and the Sunday School teachers have not finished their lessons, so I will continue and send you home instead with a couple of reflections, reflections which I hope will leave you with more questions than answers, for this is, I should not have to remind you, a Congregational church.

In my sermon on Halloween I quoted from a book by my seminary classmate Fred Buechner. Some of you told me that you appreciated what he wrote, so I will do it again. This is from the same book called “Whistling in the Dark” in a chapter called “The Beatitudes.”

“If we didn’t already know but were asked to guess the kind of people Jesus would pick out for special commendation, we might be tempted to guess one sort or another of spiritual hero – men and women of impeccable credentials morally, spiritually, humanly and every which way. If so, we would be wrong. Maybe those aren’t the ones he picked out because he thought he didn’t need the shot in the arm his commendation would give them. Maybe they’re not the ones he picked out because he didn’t happen to know any.” I love that last one.

O maybe it was because Jesus, in this first part of his Sermon on the Mount, was talking not about the world in which we live, but the Kingdom of God, where things are apparently very different from what they are here, where people who are meek are revered and honored and blessed. The first people Jesus mentioned were those whom he called the “poor in spirit.” Buechner describes the “poor in spirit” as those who have absolutely nothing to give and absolutely everything to receive, like the Prodigal Son telling his father, ‘I am not worthy to be called thy son,’ only to discovery for the first time what he had in a father.” Remember who the father in the this story represents.

You read through these twelve verses and nothing in them seems to gibe with the way things are, especially if you have recently been to Jerusalem or survived an election or watched almost anything on television. But as Jesus might have said, “I did not intend it to be easy.”

In an article on the Sermon on the Mount in the Interpreter’s Bible, Amos Wilder writes: “In the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of the first book of the New Testament appears a discourse of Jesus to which, throughout the centuries an incomparable significance has been attached… It plants a seed of permanent dissatisfaction in the soul, even in the case of the individual who professes not to understand or acknowledge the obligations indicated… The sayings compel us to confront and do homage, not to what the natural man but to what the Spirit demands. And this makes for pain, for inner division, and for fateful consequences.” Might be worth another look.

And that brings me to my second reflection. There’s an old hymn which begins, “Tell me the stories of Jesus I love to hear; things I would ask him to tell me if he were here…” Oh, no, they do not always read those verses before they begin to preach, but that is their text, their sermons are based on it, and anything that Jesus might have said pales in comparison.

I have said it before but I will say it again just in case a couple of you weren’t here: The Christian church has long insisted that Jesus was “fully God and fully man,” but having said that, the church has largely ignored the “man” part of that statement. Suggestions that Jesus might have had thoughts and emotions similar to those of other people have not been well received. Aside from this birth, death, and resurrection, the details of his life become insignificant.

But my faith is based on the teachings of the man I read about in the first three gospels. So I will send you home with this reminder. When the young lawyer approached Jesus and asked him the Big Question, “What is the secret?” “How can I be saved?” How do I find eternal life?” Jesus said nothing about himself. Instead he said words from his scriptures that he used all the time: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.” The lawyer asked, “But who is my neighbor?”

And Jesus said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers…” He told him a story. He told him the story which, along with the other story I mentioned earlier, about the Prodigal Son, pretty well sums up the essence of our faith: God’s love for us and our responsibility for others.

Those are the stories I want to hear, again, and again, lest I forget. Amen.