Who is Jesus? Part 3: What Sort of Person was He?

Do you remember the “Promise Keepers”?  It was a hyper-masculine evangelical movement in the 1990’s.  For a few glorious years the PK’s attracted lots of media attention.  That’s because they often brought in well over 50,000 people at a time to their events, which were held all over the country.  These revivals were usually in big cities, in football stadiums and it was men only!  Their message was for men, delivered by the “ultimate- man” heroes from the sports world.  Males who had lost their place in society, in the family, in the neighborhood came to these events to find out how to be real men again.  They were given a muscular Jesus who liked getting together with other men, who wanted loud rock music playing, who liked hanging out in the ultimate man cave…the football stadium.  Their model was JC, a sober, serious, and loyal fighter for the team.

  

They could be that kind of man, too, if they just kept their promise, realized their potential, to be real men on the right team.  They could be warriors just like Jesus who fought the good and manly fight.

    

By the late ‘90’s the Promise Keeper movement would fade away.

 

Maybe these mega events stopped being so popular because as some have suggested, our American culture has Attention Deficit Disorder!   Nothing lasts for very long, ‘cause we keep moving on to the next thing!  Maybe, the Promise Keeper movement faded because the hyper masculine Jesus was just too much of a reactive projection.   It was, after all, in the 90’s when women really started to enjoy a measure of equality, like never before in human history. 

 

The hyper masculine Jesus was perhaps an over the top reaction.  Maybe it didn’t capture for long the personality that most Americans perceive that Jesus the Super Star who lives in our national pantheon really has.

This is the third installment in my “who is Jesus” sermon series for this church year.  I explored with you what Americans have imagined he looked like.  I helped you hear what Americans really want Jesus to have said. 

This morning I am going to share with you another piece of the story of the Jesus who is a fixture in the American pantheon. 

     

Everybody knows what he’s like; what his personality is. 

He’s always on the side of your favorite sports team; or when at war your preferred nation.  And he roots for the underdog every time.  You know he loves to hang with the guys and he’s every stay-at-home mother’s best friend.  He’s maternal, gentle with young children, loyal, meek; even sweet.  And, he’s the big, beefy fellow you had better watch for when he gets angry.  He’s been known to kick over tables at the NY stock exchange or at the First National Bank of Too Much Greed.  He’s the head of the church, the head of the party.  He’s loyal to your favorite brands.  But everybody knows you don’t have to go to church or follow any of his endorsements to call him your best friend.  He wears a dress, and although his hair is styled by “Lady Clairol”, and we don’t talk about his sexuality, he is thoroughly a man, unless you need him to be something else… and then he bends.

Are we confused, or what?

As I shared with you before, in the early centuries of what some call the American experiment, there was little to no confusion about who Jesus was.  He was the Son of God.  His father was in charge; mighty, powerful and sovereign.  His father was just like all real fathers, [well those who were white with land and the ability to make things happen!]  Fathers were on the top of command chain as far as home and farm life, enterprise, government, church, the military, education…well, everything.

 

Jesus was just the Son who did the Father’s bidding. 

Until, he was the brother, who made all men free

. 

When he became the one on our team, he was on his way to becoming an American super hero.  But before he became a super hero, with a personality every body knows another transformation would take place.

Part of the story of how the Jesus we all know came to be, has to do with WOMEN, with what women want.  Maybe women wanted a hyper-masculine JC.  But we got over it!

For centuries, women have not been in control!  Yet, in America during the Victorian age they came to dominate home life, and church life.   They came to be seen not only as domestic goddesses, but took on, or were projected to have taken on …all moral virtue. 

They wanted a Jesus that was a different kind of brother, one who didn’t go marching away with other brothers.

Their efforts to transform Jesus led to what some call the feminization of Christianity.

 

What women wanted in Victorian America deeply influenced what we think of as Jesus’ personality to this day.

Before that, the 2^nd Great Awakening, the revival movement that swept across this nation from roughly the 1820’s – 1860’s, had already largely redefined Christianity as a religion led not by the remote, mighty and distant God, but by the Son of Man.

Predestination, and with it FEAR of God, would go out of favor.  Instead the theologies of free will and free choice made for dramatic/emotional conversions that turned hearts over to Jesus, the Sweet Savior.  Religion became not so much a matter of enlightened reason, but of emotional fervor.

And emotions were women’s territory!

      

Even within Unitarianism there was a shift from the heady, intellectual, reasonable faith of the Boston fathers to the subjective, experience based religious “freedom” like that found in the good news/joyful expression of Universalism, or the nature loving, poetry speaking, equality between the sexes, radical proponents of Transcendentalism.

It was no longer the American Christian desire to move in lock step with God’s will.  American religion became overwhelmed with the flow of emotions.  The faithful wanted to commune with Jesus their brother and friend.  Male children grew up taught the faith by mothers who valued an emotional, gentle, companion… These boys grew up to be the liberal clergy who helped fashion the Jesus women wanted.

For the revivalists, the whole point of conversion was to gain close personal relationship with Jesus.  The sons of the women who loved the sweet savior, the companion, the friend, the gentle one who would make all of society more like home…peaceful, clean, everybody fed, chores over, lessons learned…preached what their mothers wanted to hear.

     

In the late 1800’s men who had once been the guardians of virtue, increasingly came to be associated with aggression, competitiveness and guile—virtues in the business world but vices in the home.  The home became the center of Christian life and mother became the high priestess of domestic piety.  Her influence would spread to society…all through the Christian efforts to clean up and make things right, more like Jesus wanted… far beyond home life.  The temperance movement, the settlement houses, the abolitionists, the Sunday School societies, the proliferation of tracts, all came from the so-called “feminization” of Christianity.

Women were seen as morally and spiritually superior to men.  Jesus was their model,  gentle, humble, patient more of a “feeler” than a “thinker”.

In many ways, Jesus became the perfect woman in a man’s body, or at least the perfect advocate for women, in a body appealing to women.

In a time when there were rigidly distinct roles for women and for men, the personality of Jesus bridged the divide.  Liberal Christians had already soft pedaled the sharp dualism “between the sacred and the secular, divinity and humanity, the supernatural and the natural, the world and the church….”  Jesus, the brother became a woman’s best friend…

Prothero says “antebellum Protestants made him over in the light of Victorian ideals of the feminine.  …they described Jesus as pious and pure, loving and merciful, meek and humble.”

Here is what one author of a popular series of books for boys said:

“Jesus Christ was, in some respects, the most bold, energetic, decided and courageous man that ever lived; but in others he was the most flexible, submissive and yielding; and in the conceptions which many persons form of his character there is a degree of indistinctness and confusion, from want of clear ideas of the mode in which these seemingly opposite qualities come together.”

This was a book for boys…with an adult saying we don’t quite get it, how you can be both male and female in one body, but model yourself after this man Jesus anyway! 

Prothero calls this a “delicious quotation”…for its articulation of the confusion…especially during the heyday of separate-spheres ideology…"it simply did not make sense to find the masculine and the feminine cohabiting in one body."

It did not make sense to Victorians, but we’ve been working on it, so that it does make sense, ever since their time!

When the 20^th world wars came, it was important to lift up the bloody Jesus who made the ultimate sacrifice.   There have been all sorts of movements like the Promise Keepers to try to make the feminized Jesus more masculine, more appealing to men.

 

But everybody knows the churches were and are full of women.  They always have been and they still are.

Maybe they weren’t in the pulpit, but they were and are in control in one way or another.  They were at home teaching their children about Jesus, and they were in the church doing the same. 

  

Perhaps the Promise Keepers movement was the last attempt to balance out the century old feminized Jesus, with a more masculine one. 

Or maybe now we are ok with the gender blending….or with an all purpose God that everybody knows is on their side no matter what…    

It is not so much about being a “real” man or a “real” woman anymore.  It’s about being the in one body the best blend of male and female.

Maybe the reason the promise keepers really declined was because there were no women!

No women to organize, to clean up, to make good decisions, help men be more in touch with their female characteristics without going over board one way or the other!

It is no surprise to me that in UUism today when there are more women, in power, in control, in the pulpit; that there are also more UU-Christians. It is no surprise.  We women make Jesus over into what we want our husbands, our sons, our colleagues to be. 

Here’s a quote about Jesus from a (now deceased) well known female, African-American woman UU minister:

“I am profoundly move by the message of Jesus as I understand it; liberation and freedom from oppression, love and compassion, service to others, and radical inclusiveness.  His life and ministry continue to inspire me.  Here was a man who challenged the laws, customs, and social expectation of his time.  He affirmed the inherent worth and dignity of every person, even of the most marginalized in his day: women, prostitutes, the sick, and those who were scorned because they were not part of the dominant religious community.  And he affirmed peace—not passive peace but a peace in which we work proactively to bring about justice.”    

[Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley, “To Keep One’s Soul”, from Christian Voices in Unitarian Universalism.]

That’s her idea of this man Jesus.  

It is no surprise.  Age after age, we make him over into who we need him to be.  So that we can keep him in the American pantheon, as our hero…