This is the story of a come-outer – those of you who are lifelong UUs or who came from a non-Christian tradition may have a different story. The earliest image I have of Jesus is a cut-out figure on flannel board.  Did any of you listen to Bible stories illustrated on flannel board as a kid?  Flannel board was the predecessor of velcro or maybe of the Power Point Presentation:  a way of sticking pictures up on a special easel to illustrate a story.   The most vivid memory of them were in Bible class in my private Episcopal elementary school; my aunt Coles was the teacher. Jesus was always a kindly figure in white robes, usually depicted with his hands open.  He came in several sizes, depending on the perspective of the picture.  When he was preaching to the crowds in the loaves and fishes story, he was small indeed.  When he was calming the waters on the Sea of Galilee, he was large and reassuring.

            My Aunt Coles was a natural as a Bible teacher, because she was the best storyteller in the family.  She had a great sense of timing and character.  She was no theologian, though, and what I think I got from my early exposure to Jesus was that Jesus wanted us to love one another, to do unto others as we have them do unto us, and to believe in him.  In the stories, Jesus was always performing miracles so that people would believe in him.  Later, when I got into catechism class, it was explained to me that if we really really believed in Jesus, the greatest miracle of all would happen: we would not die, but have eternal life.  I spent a lot of my adolescence trying to really really believe in Jesus, because I thought that was a good deal.

            Of course there were other things to believe in as well, like the laws of science, and the justice of the civil rights movement, which was sweeping the segregated south as I was growing up, and the injustice of the War in Vietnam, and as I grew into my teens, these seemed a lot more appealing to me than what I had learned in catechism class, and what was enshrined in the Nicene Creed we said in church every Sunday. 

            As it was presented to me, this Christianity thing was an all-or-nothing proposition.  Jesus was the son of God, begotten, not made, born of a virgin, and suffered death upon the cross, or he was nothing.  If he was just a great teacher, if he was just a spiritually inspired person, if he was just a person of special grace and insight, why bother?

            So when I decided that I couldn’t say that creed anymore, I pretty much left Jesus behind.  If I couldn’t accept him as the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, I supposed that he had little relevance for me.

            And I think a lot of my generation of liberals felt the same.   And this attitude persists to this day.  I had a conversation last weekend with John Buehrens, my colleague in Needham who is the immediate past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association.  John is no shrinking violet when it comes to politics: he has helped found something called the Clergy Network for National Leadership Change and he gave an impassioned sermon to the New Massachusetts Universalist Convention last Saturday on the sins of the present administration.  Privately, what he told me was that he was appalled at how little the Kerry campaign seemed to be concerned with religious issues; his daughter is working in the campaign, and he said there is no senior policy person who has any contacts among progressive religious figures.  It is as if they are ceding all of Christianity to the Republicans.

            There is, of course, a vast distinction between political liberals and religious liberals, and we must never confuse the two, but I think that both types of liberals in this day have a dangerous tendency to let Jesus be defined and captivated by the conservative elements.  In a sense, we allow Jesus to be who they say he is, and he is much more complex than that.  

            The costs of this attitude are enormous, for the teachings of Jesus are in fact some of the earliest expressions of liberal values: acceptance of others, making peace, turning the other cheek, a preferential option for the poor, standing up to structures of oppression, not being bound by custom, loving one’s enemies, treating the other as you would want to be treated.  These are bedrock liberal values, folks, and to deny their source in the teachings of Jesus is to cut them off from their roots.

     How have we come to this?  How have we been led to throw the baby out with the bathwater?  With most subjects we are willing to be nuanced, to look for partial truths and accept ambiguity and paradox, but many of us become rigid when it comes to Jesus – if we can’t buy the whole orthodox line, we want nothing to do with him. 

     I think I discovered the historical roots of this all-or nothing attitude in reading Elaine Pagels’ new book, Beyond Belief.  This book concentrates on two things: the interplay between the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John, and the period at the end of the second century of the Common Era when the whole notion of an orthodoxy began to take hold in the Jesus movement, and it took hold through the actions and writings of a Bishop named Irenaeus, who was in Lyons, France from about 175 through 202 CE.

     As to the Gospel of Thomas, some of you may be familiar with it and some of you may not.  It is the most important in a set of Gnostic texts found at the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. 

     I should say that I have a familial pride in these texts, for it was my cousin James Robinson who was most instrumental in arranging for them to be published and translated in the 1970's.

     Now I hope you will indulge me if we take a little trip in early church history, for I think it will pay off.  I have included a little timeline in your order of service, and you can see from that that St. Paul’s writings were the earliest writings about Jesus, and the four Gospels which are include in the Bible – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, we call them “canonical” – were all written about 50 years after Jesus was executed. 

     We can’t be sure when the Gospel of Thomas was composed, but some scholars think it was quite early, perhaps earlier than the four canonical Gospels.  In form, Thomas is not at all like the other four.  It doesn’t have a beginning, middle or end – in fact there is no story there at all.  It is only a collection of sayings.  Many scholars think that a collection of Jesus’ sayings was probably circulating in oral tradition right after his death, and it stands to reason that some of these sayings would be written down eventually. 

     So Thomas might be a primitive version of some of the material that later makes it into the four canonical gospels.

     Elaine Pagels advances the idea in this new book that the Gospel of Thomas was written at least before the Gospel according to John, and – here is the kicker –  that John was written in response to Thomas.

     You see, Thomas not only does not have any narrative, it does not have any exclusionary theology.  It does not demand belief in Jesus, and it specifically does not demand belief in Jesus as divine.   Thomas’s Jesus does not promise life everlasting, but indicates that the Kingdom he is talking about is one inside all of us.  Here is Thomas verse 3:

3 Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the <FATHER'S kingdom is within you and it is outside you.”

    Now if you read the Gospel of John after reading Matthew Mark and Luke, it is obvious that John is the most polemical – the author doesn’t just narrate what happened, but also makes arguments about why it happened.  Pagels shows that the invisible debating opponent against whom John is sparring is likely Thomas.  The disciple Thomas, who might be taken to be the author of the Gospel of Thomas, is put down at several places in John’s Gospel, as the doubting one, the one whose belief is not strong enough.  Because of this, we use the phrase “doubting Thomas” to refer to a skeptic.

     Now earlier we read several verses from the Gospel of Thomas, and the verses all had one word in common.  What was that word?  It was light.  In Thomas, Jesus uses the word light a lot to refer to spiritual energy. 

     Both Thomas and John could be described as Neo-Platonists, that is, like Plato five hundred years before them, they believed that the world of forms and ideas and spirit was more real than the world of things you can see and taste and touch.  The Greek word logos can mean reason or word or plan, and Plato held that logos was supremely embodied in God, but that each human had a seed of logos or spermatikos logos which responded to the logos of God. 

     John uses light as a metaphor for the logos in the famous opening of the Gospel: