Jesus: Fully Human, Fully Divine

Sermon preached by the Reverend Patricia Farris

February 22, 2004

Scripture:  Psalm 99 and Luke 9:28-36

Many of you have heard me say that we United Methodists are a church organized by conferences.  This business model, if you will, comes straight from John Wesley, who regularly called his preachers together in conference to conference together.  That is to say, he drew from the ancient church model of the councils of the church—gathering together, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to pray and discuss and debate and pray some more, through it all discerning God’s leading for the church.

This is a key concept for us, and if you’re around Methodists for long, you’ll hear this word “conference” used frequently.  We use it to describe the annual meeting of our congregation, held last month.  We call that the Charge Conference, that is, the gathering together of this pastoral charge.  Our Annual Conference is the yearly gathering of clergy and laity from the region that encompasses our churches in Southern California, Hawaii, Guam and Saipan.  Every four years, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church gathers.  This is the global conference of Methodism now worldwide, 1,000 members, half clergy; half lay, meeting to discern the will of God for the governance, the budget, the worship, the theology and the mission of the whole United Methodist Church.

As a delegate to our General Conference, I will participate in that incredible process of deliberation and discernment, rather mind-boggling as it is now conducted with simultaneous translation into five languages, spanning east and west, north and south, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, urban and rural—the diversity of God’s people working out God’s will for our church in this time.

The General Conference will be larger—in size and in scope—than early church councils.  It will consider matters unheard of by the early church—a new pension plan for pastors, the church’s position on homosexuality, the expansion of our Igniting Ministry media campaign, for example.  But in the nature of its deliberating as it wrestles with theology, it will be very much like the early councils of the church, councils that shaped and set the earliest formalized theology of the Christian church:  the Council of Nicea in 325, the Council of Constantinople in 381, the Council of Ephesus in 431, the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and so forth.  As far as we can tell, those early church councils were shaped not only by prayer and the highest of intentions, but by personalities and conflicts and raucous debate, by a desire to have one’s own point of view prevail and yes, dare we say, by politics.

The church today is very much like the church of our earliest days, made up of ordinary people--beautiful and flawed, noble and prideful, self-giving and self-promoting.  Always seeking to understand and follow the God who became incarnate in Christ Jesus, our Lord, our Savior, our Redeemer.

The early councils of the church debated many things, but nothing more fervently and passionately and vociferously than the very nature of Jesus the Christ.  Was he human or was he divine?  Or was he both, and if so, how so?  How could he be both man and God?  And in the church in those times, there were factions adhering to one point of view or another, so like now.  You may not know the names of the various groups, but you may recognize views about Jesus that have carried forward to this day.

There were the Ebionites, who believed first and foremost that Jesus was a Jewish man, not divine, but valued by God in a special way.  The Ebionites taught therefore that Jewish law and ritual were to be followed and Jesus accepted as the Jewish messiah.  But the Marcionites took the opposite position.  They believed that Jesus freed people from the harsh and judgmental God of the Old Testament, that Christianity was a clean break, a brand new thing, believing that the God of Jesus, the God of love and salvation, was a completely different God from the creator God, God of anger and judgment. 

Then there were the Thomasines, who taught that the role of Jesus was to reconnect humans with the divinity that was in them from the beginning.  They rejected hierarchy, allowed great personal freedom and followed a variety of spiritual practices.  Most familiar to us, were the Gnostics, who taught that the world and our bodies, prone to decay and suffering, had been created by a lesser God and that Jesus, the incarnation of wisdom, had come to enlighten and set free the human soul.

As the early church councils met, all these various points of view, and more, were represented and all of these groups were eventually voted out and denounced as heretics.  In Christian history, we can say that heretics are the folks who lost when the vote was taken.  But the theology of the Christian church, as it was being formed by those early councils, contains strands and echoes of all their voices, of each point of view, with the dominant, majority view expressed in the hotly contested, passionately hammered-out, compromise documents known as the creeds of the church.  We refer to these creeds this morning, as we baptize a new member at 9:00 and receive new members at 10:30:
”I believe in God, Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord.”   One God, not two: One creation, always in need of redemption.  One Lord and savior, Son of God—not just an extra-special human, but incarnation of the one God.

The church came to insist that Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully divine and that understanding has been recorded in our creeds.  The heretics have been voted out, but—that doesn’t mean that the questions go away or that the mystery of it all can ever be contained in our words or our minds alone.  Fully human, fully divine: that truth contains within it an ambiguity, a tension, a mystery, that keeps Christian faith and theology wrestling and struggling and debating even to this very day.

Jesus fully human and fully divine is at the heart of the story we hear today from Luke’s gospel, the story of the Transfiguration.  The story comes at a critical point in Jesus’ life, a point of major transition as he shifts from his active ministry among them to turn his face toward Jerusalem, the place of his death and resurrection.  The human and the divine intersect.  Knowing how hard it would be for his disciples to understand this, just as it is still hard for us to fully understand this, he takes his closest disciples, Peter, James and John up a mountain apart.  They enter into prayer; they come into the presence of God in that place, in that prayer and their hearts and souls are opened to see what their eyes can barely yet believe.  Their friend and teacher, very human Jesus, is transfigured before them.  The appearance of his face changes, his clothes become dazzling white, they sense the presence of Moses and Elijah.  God perceives their fear and responds to their fear and speaks to them.  God wants them to begin to understand how this Jesus, fully human, is also fully divine.  “This is my Son,” God says, “my Chosen, listen to him.”

Jesus:  fully human, fully divine.  This knowledge will change forever how they live, how they face death, and how they begin to see beyond the grave.

All this debate about who Jesus really was is not just a historical thing, a point of arcane knowledge of interest to church historians and biblical archaeologists.  It’s on the front page again right now, in almost the same ancient form.  On the one hand we have Elaine Pagels publishing books about the Gnostic gospels and the Gospel of Thomas, emphasizing the spiritual, otherworldly side of Christ and we have The da Vinci Code and Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion,” emphasizing—in very different ways—Jesus’ humanity.  The tug-of-war goes on because, limited beings that we are, we can never fully grasp the fullness of truth that holds the two sides together, insisting that both the humanness and the divineness are equally true and equally important to who Jesus is and how we are to follow him.

Perhaps this mystery continues to come together in this world, as it did for Jesus and his first disciples, at the intersections of the secular and the sacred, the mundane and the holy, the suffering and the redemption, the spirituality and the mission.  Jesus fully divine alone could lead to a disengaged spirituality far removed from the challenges and suffering of this very real world we live in.  But Jesus fully human alone would leave us with nothing transcendent, nothing to transfigure places of suffering into possibilities of hope.

I discovered an example of where all this comes together at, of all places, a church called Transfiguration Lutheran Church in the South Bronx.  The Rev. Heidi Neumark, its pastor for twenty years, has recently published a book about ministry in that place called “Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx.”  If you don’t know New York, you may not know that the South Bronx is one of the most awful places in this country, scarred by violence, drugs and extreme poverty, environmental degradation in the form of a medical waste facility there causing obscenely high rates of childhood asthma in the neighborhood.  There are the sounds of bullets at night, new graffiti on the doors of the church nearly every day.

And yet, this pastor, and that congregation, have persevered in being a place of transformation and hope.  They worship, have prayer groups, and lots of meals together.  They sponsor art classes, poetry classes, an after school program.  They try to save kids and their families in a place described as a living hell.  Pastor Neumark took the title of her book from the prayer of Pope Pius V:  “Have mercy on your people. Lord, and give us breathing space in the midst of so many troubles.”   For Pastor Neumark, “breathing space” means time for prayer, for coffee with friends, for reading, and for connecting with people in the midst of this most demanding and potentially disheartening ministry.  It’s about nurturing her faith, her compassion, her courage, about finding air lest she drown.  Of her time at Transfiguration, she said, she wanted “to write about the heart of God in that place and what the Holy Spirit is doing there.”

In a recent TV interview, she described an amazing experience that happened on her recent book tour following the publication of her book.  She was in a bookstore, at a reading in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  A young father walked in, having come to connect with her.  This young man had grown up in the South Bronx, his father a drug addict, his mother dead of AIDS.  He got involved in a reading camp at Transfiguration Church and at some point moved away.  She hadn’t known what had become of him.  But there he was, eager to meet her again, to tell her of his wife and children and of how he, in turn, had started a reading camp so that kids could experience the same chance at new life as had he.

For those who believe, life is transfigured because Jesus is both fully human and fully divine.  Because Jesus is fully human, we can never use our religion to disengage from God’s world in vain pursuit of our own spiritual peace. As his disciples we are drawn into the deepest needs of God’s children.  Because he is fully divine, we do so knowing that transformation is possible, knowing that God is at work to bring life out of death, knowing that God in Christ works alongside us to make every precious life healthy and whole.  Because Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, we can never stop at what is, but must press on to what can be. 

Give us breathing space, Lord, in the midst of so many troubles.  Grace us to go up the mountain with you, and see your face, transfigured by the love of God.  Give us breathing space, with you in prayer, to fill our hearts with the breath of your Spirit.  And then, O Lord, in your mercy, send us back down into the midst of this world, free of fear, full of hope, transfigured by joy.

Amen.