“What Would Jesus Do
….If He Had Another Chance?”
A Sermon by Charles Blustein Ortman,
September 25, 2005
Remember a few years ago when “WWJD” could be seen on bracelets, necklaces, bumper stickers, billboards and just about everywhere you looked? WWJD—What Would Jesus Do? It was a very popular phrase representing a very religious as well as lucrative fad. I read an article about the young woman who started the movement. I don’t remember where I saw it, so I don’t have the exact details. But she was a youth pastor in a main-line Protestant Congregation. She came up with the idea one evening when she was working with a group of teens who were having a tough time figuring out what would be the ethical thing to do in some particular situation. “What do you think Jesus would do?” she asked offhandedly. “What would Jesus do?” The idea caught on like wild fire. The kids in her group made the first of the WWJD bracelets themselves, as a reminder to consider how Jesus might respond to the many questions they each faced in their daily lives.
Very soon afterward—I think it was the senior pastor but it might have been someone else—somebody recognized the commercial potential in the manufacturing and franchising of WWJD bracelets and all the other paraphernalia. And soon it was everywhere. The part of the story that few people know is that the Youth Pastor who started it all didn’t get a penny of the proceeds from all those sales. It was her idea and someone else in the ecclesiastical world raked in all the cash. Is that what Jesus would have done? I don’t think so. How ironic!
The idea for this morning’s sermon actually came to me last winter when I attended a session of the New Jersey Appellate Court as it heard arguments in the case of four gay couples suing the State of New Jersey for the right to marry. One of the major arguments offered by the Attorney General’s Office against the suit was that the current understanding of marriage as a male and female—others need not apply—legal contract was grounded in our cultural tradition, and specifically in religious tradition. “Not my tradition,” I thought to myself. And then it was quickly pointed out that the State of New Jersey, like the nation itself, is predominantly Christian.
“Boy, did Jesus blow it there,” I thought. He had a great opportunity to say, “Love your neighbor…and don’t worry about who your neighbor loves.” But he didn’t. I had to think, if given a second chance, what with all the homophobia that has become endemic since his day, that he’d be much clearer on that subject now.
So, there are two things I’d like to talk about with you this morning. First is the faulty theological foundation at the core of the whole WWJD movement and by extension the whole notion of God being on anyone’s side. And second, still in keeping with the first, what would Jesus have done if he was alive today and by extension, what might we do since we are alive.
First, the flawed thinking at the core of WWJD is the idea that a person should ever try to live their life by imitating someone else, or perhaps even by trying to guess what another person might do. There’s an old Hassidic story told by the great Rabbi Heschel who was trying to explain the idea of living an authentic life to one of his students. “When I die,” Heschel said, “I will not be asked by my creator why I could not have been Moses. I will be judged by how well I have been Heschel!” None of us is asked by Life to be anyone else. Life asks us to fulfill the potential that we were born with.
Our own Unitarian, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said, “It is by yourself, without ambassador, that God speaks to you. You are as one who has a private door that leads to the king’s chamber. You have learned nothing rightly that you have not learned so…the Bible is a sealed book to him [or her] who has not first heard its laws from his [or her] own soul.” And Emerson said, “Let me admonish you first of all to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of [people] and dare to love God without mediator or veil.”
As Unitarian Universalists, we tend not to believe that God or any divinely or self-appointed representative of God tells us what to do. We tend to share in the belief that goodness is a possibility in our lives and in the world, that we are called to the causes of that goodness and not just to affirm those causes but to promote them. But we are loathe to let anyone define what that might mean for each of us. Whether it be Heschel, Emerson or Jesus, we are unlikely to agree with their teachings unless what is taught is in accord with our own experience, reason and intuition. What Jesus would have done is only significant if it is in harmony with our own sense of rightness or goodness.
Role models are of value only when they lead us to our own higher or fuller or better selves. So, at best, WWJD or WWAD (what would anybody do) is of value if it enables us to know better who we are. There’s just not much potential for fulfilling our own lives if we are trying to be someone else.
But there’s a dark side to all of this, and it is that no one can authentically speak for someone else, let alone for someone who’s been dead for over 2,000 years. What would Jesus do? Well, I’ll tell you. We end up with all kinds of folks claiming all kinds of things and the trump card is, “That’s what Jesus would do! That’s what Jesus would want me to do!”
We might think that guessing what Jesus would do is a fairly harmless practice. But it can become destructive pretty quickly, especially when, for example, men use it to defend their desire for power and domination—and the use of violence—over women and children, and people of other races and cultures. If it’s done in the name of the Lord and Redeemer, how can that be held suspect?!
By extension it’s even worse to have someone as the leader of the richest, most powerful nation on the Earth, claiming to be in direct communication with God. (And, yes, our president has made that claim!) Regardless of the question, whatever kind of answer that might pop into his head must somehow be of divine origin. Not a far cry from the half human/half god pharaoh of ancient Egypt. It’s not just that God is on our side, God is our side because we are simply doing God’s bidding. We must be doing no more or no less than what Jesus would do, or we wouldn’t be doing it! At least that’s what our President and half the country seem to believe.
It might not be so appalling to merely ask the question, What would Jesus do? But when we start coming up with answers to that question, we could be in trouble and others around us could pay the price if we’re willing to believe that if we can think that Jesus would do it (whatever it might be) that gives us some kind of divine permission to do whatever we want.
So, given that any answer to the question WWJD really says much more about the person who’s answering it than it does about Jesus, and given that my title this morning is, “What Would Jesus Do…If He Had Another Chance,” the question I’m really asking, if I’m being honest is, What would Jesus do if he were Charlie Ortman? And I feel like that’s a question I can answer with integrity.
In truth I have to start by saying that I’m a very big fan of Jesus! There is much about his life and actions and teaching that I admire and wouldn’t change one bit. He was a Universalist from start to finish: “The kingdom of God within…love your neighbor as yourself.” The beatitudes, which were a part of his “Sermon on the Mount,” were an eloquently poetic call, not only for each of us to seek our truest selves, but to bless one another on that journey of seeking. His story of the “Good Samaritan” was one of the greatest invitations in all of literature, to put ourselves in responsible and loving relationship with all others, not only to think but to act on each other’s behalf. And more, in “The Good Samaritan,” Jesus directly addresses issues of ethnicity and racism.
I have very little trouble for the most part with the things Jesus said or did. Although I do think he caused some unnecessary confusion when he said things like, “No one knows the father except through the son.” If Jesus were indeed Charlie Ortman, he might have said something a little more like, “No one can find their way to holiness except through the examined life, except through the window of their own heart and soul and mind.” But this isn’t a major quibble. The discerning reader could easily come to this same understanding on their own.
The thing that Jesus would really have had to do differently if he were me though is, as I said earlier, that he’d have extended the limitations regarding loving one’s neighbor from the ethnic and racial issues that he did address, to the issue of homophobia and the persecution of gays, lesbians and transgender people. There wasn’t a single mention of homosexuality in the New Testament. This may be because there wasn’t an overabundance of homophobia in the ancient Middle East, even though there’s good evidence to suggest that there was plenty of homosexuality in the culture.
Just because it didn’t cause problems at the time though, doesn’t excuse the lack of foresight. Deities should be able to see what’s coming down the pike. He should have known better. He should have said something that would have made it clear to everyone that love is a precious gift wherever, and by whomever, it is shared. He should have said, “Judge not the object of another’s love, but judge instead your own love, its quality and capacity for transformation.” He probably wouldn’t have had to go off-message at all to make the point. The Kingdom of God is within, love one another; the message doesn’t change.
He should have said something, anything! Easy for us to say with 20/20 hindsight! What could Jesus have done though if only he’d had the foresight to see what he might have been able to prevent by having told the future generations of homophobes to just relax?
And one other thing, a slight aside that I won’t go into detail about today but that I have to mention—couldn’t he have been a bit clearer about the equality of men and women? Couldn’t he have headed St. Paul off at the pass with all of Paul’s “Man serves God and woman serves man,” stuff. Jesus could have nipped all of that right in the bud…but nothing.
Had he anticipated the future anxieties of the world, instead of being set in the world of his own human experience, in much the very same way we are, I have to think that the world would certainly be a more loving and just place.
We needn’t get overly caught up in blaming Jesus for what he couldn’t have known or for what he didn’t do. He was a great teacher. He never claimed to be God, only a seeker of goodness. Others, perhaps seeking to hide behind a cloak of divinity, bestowed him with the title. But like us, he was a person of his time, responding to his world.
And so, in the end, the question ought not be, What would Jesus do? Ours is a different time and the questions more appropriately facing us need to be, “What would I do? What would we do? What would we do in order to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person? What would we do to affirm and promote spiritual growth for ourselves and one another? What would we do to affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations? What would we do to affirm and promote the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part? What would we do to help to heal a world aching so terribly at this moment from both natural and human made disasters?”
It doesn’t matter what Jesus or anyone else might have done. It matters what we do and what we will do. For the very soulful, the very spiritual, the very religious work of building the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth is left to each of us individually and to all of us collectively.
Our Creator, should there be one and on the chance that we might meet her one day, will never ask, Why weren’t you Jesus? The question, should we meet her, would be, “How did you go about being you, and what have you done with your one precious life?” These are the questions we might ask and attempt to answer for ourselves everyday of our lives. “How are you going about being you, and what are you doing with your one precious life? Are you doing what you can to find and make meaning and hope, and are you sharing what you find with the world around you?”
In his essay, “Immortality,” Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way: “Don’t waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours or the ages that will follow it.”
So, may the work that we find, call us to our authentic selves, so that we might spend each hour of our lives well… in awe, in gratitude and in service to that Spirit of Life that holds us in being.
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