Fund for Christian Ecology

My Unitarian Universalist journey back to Jesus arriving where I started and knowing the place for the first time began without my knowing it, when Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ, Superstar burst into the world. The first time I heard it, I was astounded. I played my LP over and over and over, entranced, intrigued, pulled back into the story I had rejected.

Here was a Judas who was Jesus' right_hand man, in agony about the mortal danger threatening the vision: the radical vision of love and peace and justice for even the poorest. Judas, who in the third line of the opening song speaks of stripping "the myth from the man." And he cries, "Every word you say today/Gets twisted round some other way." "Too much heaven on their minds."

And a Mary I could identify with. A Mary who understands earthly, earthy needs who does not have heaven on her mind, but only the little comfort she can offer the man she loves, tortured and alone.

And a Jesus who really was a man, whatever else he was. Here, there was no blue_eyed, spotlessly_robed always_serene Jesus. This was a Jesus who gets sarcastic with his Father: "Can you show me now that I would not be killed in vain?/Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain." A Jesus who is sad and tired, who just like the faithful apostle who is required to betray him worries that he will not have made any difference, that his message of justice, equity and compassion will fade to wisps of memory in the minds of his scattered followers.

I loved that show. (Still do.)

That was about 1970. I had been a UU for a couple of years. Intellectually, I clung proudly to my rejection of all things Christian. I probably even had the gall to sort of pity those poor souls that believed the old story. (In my defense, I was a lot younger than I am today.)

But Jesus Christ, Superstar, slipped in through a chink in my haughty armor, although I was not to realize it until quite recently, with the hindsight of 30+ years. Art often succeeds where talking does not, and Superstar roused in my soul that passion to understand the old, old story of my childhood, the story that had meant much to me.

I didn't do much about it, though, for a long time, and in fact would have denied it had you told me the musical was setting my feet on a path of re_exploration. I pretty much ignored the subject until the summer of 1983, a year after I had stopped drinking and had begun developing some spiritual tolerance. I took a New Testament class from a wonderful University of Washington professor, Michael Williams, and he opened the intellectual door. He told us that he was a Christian, and that that was irrelevant. We were going to analyze the Christian scriptures historically, textually, with attention to all the differing interpretations that have been attributed to this slim body of work. I loved that class. It freed me to pay attention to, not the Messianic promise, but to the message,: in Bernie's words, "to love our neighbors, to love even our enemies, to struggle for justice against those whose oppress and against religious dogmas that exclude rather than include."

Since then, I have remained on the path unknowingly begun by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, intentionally carried on through the good offices of Professor Williams into seminary in 1985 (oh, those feminist interpretations!), to Boise in 1988, up to now. I have evolved a stance toward "Christianity" that allows me to qualifiedly call myself a Christian to affirm that yes, there is holiness in the flesh, just as Jesus taught; to let myself be reminded of my responsibility to speak up for the poor and oppressed; to understand that "God" (Omnipresent Brain, Universal Harmony, Life That Maketh All Things New) is accessible to all. The message, not the myth.

It is a journey all Unitarian Universalists need to take, for so many of us have a knee_jerk negativity about the religion of and/or about Jesus. We in our part of Idaho are assailed daily by an ultra_conservative kind of Christianity that asserts its corner on Truth, declares its way to be the only way. As we rightly reject that position, we also have a responsibility to come to some kind of a positive position for ourselves. We may end up saying that we now reject the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, perhaps as being damaged beyond resurrection. But these words and deeds are the heritage of most of us, at least culturally. We owe it to ourselves to become acquainted with the top_notch minds who do not reject Jesus out of hand, who wrestle with him daily.

There are various ways you can go about this. You can take this fall's class based on the book The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus " a Pagan God? This book advances the startling premise that the man Jesus never existed, that the religion purporting to be unique to him is merely a continuation of the earlier "Savior_God" mystery religions: Osiris, Mithra, Dionysus. In the class, we will also consider other points of view, particularly those of well_known and widely_published scholars of the Jesus Seminars, people like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg.

For your journey of reclamation or informed rejection you might read The First Christian: a Study of St. Paul and Christian Origins, written in 1957 by renowned Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies. You might read novelist A.N. Wilson's acclaimed books, on Paul and on Jesus. You might start subscribing to Christian Century, to learn about the dizzying amount of scholarship and activity going on in the mainstream Christian world.

Or, you might sit down some weekend and listen with your heart to Jesus Christ, Superstar. And read the lyrics as you listen. You never know what might happen.

I too had a formative encounter with Jesus Christ Superstar. And mine came close in time with my first encounter with Osiris, the savior God-man of ancient Egypt. The time was 1977. I found myself alone, in a new city, enrolled in a one year practical nursing program run by the Seventh-day Adventists, the religion of my upbringing. While I had intellectually rejected Christianity back in eighth grade, I was aware that at an emotional level, the fundamentalist terror was still lurking down deep in my psyche. Intellectually, I did not want or believe Christianity to be true. But emotionally, the fear was there. What if it is?

I’m embarrassed to admit that through my adolescence, I had for far too long bought into the fundamentalist line that rock music was evil. Thus, though I was aware of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, and my church’s disapproval of it (especially because its storyline ends with the crucifixion), I had never listened to it. However, my roommate was a fan of Superstar, and I finally heard it. I was most fascinated with the Judas character and his lines such as "your followers are blind. Too much heaven on their minds." Boy was that a description of my faith of origin. Or this one: "I remember when this whole thing began. No talk of God then, we called you a man." This was probably my first exposure to the idea that Jesus may have first been regarded as a teacher, not a savior-Messiah-God. It was stimulating stuff.

At nearly the same time, a classmate shared a book she had just read entitled "Religion in Ancient History" by a biblical scholar named S.G.F. Brandon. In it, he describes humanity’s oldest written documents, the hieroglyphic texts inside the Pyramids, and their tale of Osiris, an incarnating God turned human, who suffers unjust death, but by divine intervention is resurrected, ascends to the heavenly realm, and their reigns, judges, and provides a blessed after-life to the faithful. In Brandon’s words, "Osiris emerged as the classic prototype of the saviour-god, who by his own death and resurrection can assure to his devotees a new life after death."¹ There it was. The proof I had sought. The Christ story was just a rip-off of an old Egyptian myth, a myth predating it by over 2,000 years, and predating any comparable Jewish writings by over a 1,000 years. With this powerful revelation, I completed my liberation from the tradition of my upbringing, deconstructing it, and ripping it out by the roots. The old emotional fear was gone, never to haunt me again. And within months, I had found my way to Portland First Unitarian church, where I found similarly liberated folks, there to wander in the wilderness of scientific materialism and existentialism for about 15 years, and then begin a ten year re-exploration of Christianity.

It is a fair question at this point to ask, So what? Well, as a starter, understanding the Christ story as re-telling of this ancient mythic motif allows one to experience the Christ story as at least some of the earliest Christians (especially the Christian Gnostics) experienced it. It was not seen as a historical account of Jesus of Nazareth, but as a spiritual parable about the death of the ego, through which one can then be resurrected into union with the sacred or mystical dimension. Those comfortable with the insights of Buddhism should find this approach acceptable, even inspiring. As the The Jesus Mysteries authors put it, "We hope that by understanding its true origins in the ongoing evolution of a universal human spirituality, Christianity may be able to free itself from [its] self-imposed isolation [from other faiths]."² That would be good news.

Through the work of these scholars we can "strip away the myth from the man."³ And what’s left, for me at least, is one of the most inspiring spiritual teachers of all time, one who also taught a path to union with sacred. When the Judas of Jesus Christ Superstar declares, "You've started to believe, The things they say of you. You really do believe, This talk of God is true," he gets it wrong. Jesus never believed he was in some way uniquely God, or savior, or messiah. But he did know about our need to love our neighbors, to love even our enemies, to struggle for justice against those who oppress the weak and against religious dogmas that exclude rather than include. We UUs emerged from this tradition. We can and should proudly embrace it as part of our rightful heritage. Who better to rescue Jesus from those strains of the Christian tradition that have twisted and perverted Jesus’ true teachings. May it be so.

2. Freke & Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries (2000), p. 13.

3. Judas, in "Heaven on their Minds", Jesus Christ Superstar.

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