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Jesus the Human Being: A Stunning Revelation of God
From the series: Journeying With Jesus on the Road Less Traveled
Text: Ezekiel 1:26; Luke 9:55-56
Richard A. Rhem
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
February 24, 2002, Lent II
Transcription of the spoken sermon
The “Reading from the Present” is in your liturgy. You can take it home. Read it
this afternoon about five times and then you may get some hint as to what I was
trying to say this morning. It is a writing from Walter Wink, who has done a very
interesting study and has published a book now entitled, The Human Being. As
we journey on this road less traveled with Jesus in this Lenten season, the thing
that I am hopeful will come through to us is what came through in Jesus. I'm
hoping that we can see through Jesus to what came to expression in Jesus. I'm
going to try to chip away this morning at an idea that I hope will continue to
come through this Lenten season, so that you can look back at Lent 2002 and say,
“That's when Dick hammered us over the head week after week with the idea that
it was not Jesus per se, but what came through Jesus, what came to expression in
Jesus." I make that critical distinction because you see, in the Church, in the
tradition of the Church, we have come to worship Jesus as God, and that was the
farthest thing from Jesus' mind, that he should have been ever considered
anything but a human being.
The elevation of Jesus to Godhead was the creation of the ancient Church,
centuries two through five, in its creedal formulation which borrowed from the
very technical, philosophical language of the Greek philosophical tradition. Jesus
never said, "Worship me." Jesus said, "Follow me."
We can understand how that happened. We speak of incarnation, the Christmas
miracle. We speak of God being embodied in Jesus, and one of the things that
that elevation of Jesus to the status of deity has done is it has preserved over the
centuries the story itself. We can see, in retrospect, how that process took place.
But, it's very important for us to realize that it was not Jesus' intention that he be
worshiped, but that he be followed.
Now, how do you give expression to what came to expression in Jesus? They said,
"My God!" They said, "It was as though God were with us," and it was just a tiny
step to go beyond to say, "Jesus is God." But what they were trying to say was
that, in the experience of Jesus, they had the experience of the nearness of God,
© Grand Valley State University
�Jesus the Human Being: A Stunning Revelation of God
Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
of the grace of God, of the compassion of God, of the love of God. And so,
beginning in the Gospel of John, the fourth Gospel, we have this very high
doctrine of, teaching of, incarnation: famously, in John 1:14, 'The word became
flesh and dwelt among us." Or, as John says in the 14th chapter, "Jesus said, 'If
you have seen me, you have seen the father.'" Or, as Paul says in II Corinthians
4:6, "We have seen the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ." You've heard me say that over and over and over again. Jesus is our
window to God.
Now I want to make a subtle shift which is terribly important. What we have done
traditionally is we have said that God became other than God is, assuming human
nature, thereby revealing the nature of God. So, for God to become human was to
move out of deity into humanity. Now, what if we just turned that around and
said, as a matter of fact, what happened was that Jesus revealed, not the divinity
of God, but the humanness of God? What if the stunning revelation is this - that
God is human? What if Jesus, being a revelation of God, did not take Jesus
becoming something other than God is, accepting, assuming another nature
foreign and alien to God? What if the stunning revelation is that one looks at
Jesus and says, "God is human."
I can imagine all sorts of bells and whistles are going off in your minds, and all
sorts of questions being raised, but just let's think about it for a moment. We
think that we are human. But, we're not human. Now and again, here and there
we act humanely. Now and again, here and there we manage to be fully human
according to that ideal that we carry with us. But, for the most part, we are inhuman. We are people on the way. As Walter Wink says in the insert that you're
going to read five times this afternoon, we are not yet human. We're mere
promissory notes. We are mere intimations of what it would be to be human.
Therefore, as another scholar has said, that famous missing link between the
primate and the human that is always thrown up as an argument against
evolution, that missing link isn't missing at all. It is we. We are still primates in so
much of our life and human society. The stunning revelation is that God is human
and calls us to be human in the fullness of the humanity as it was manifested in
Jesus.
Now, that's something to think about. Let me give you a little background. I read
from the first chapter of Ezekiel. The phrase "son of man" in Ezekiel occurs 93
times. That is a lot. The phrase translated "son of man" is in the Hebrew, bin
Adam. Remember Adam? He was the husband of Eve. But, that really wasn't his
name. It was A-dam, a creature of the earth, a human made of humus. Bin Adam
is “a son of the human.” Now, in Ezekiel's vision, it's a marvelous vision. If you
read the insert five times this afternoon, read the first chapter of Ezekiel six
times. It's the throne vision. It's that fun vision that is celebrated in the Negro
spiritual, "The Wheel Within the Wheel." It's called the throne vision and in the
opening paragraph of the first chapter, Ezekiel says, "I saw a vision of God." It's a
vision, a vision. This vision of God comes down to the verses that we read, where
© Grand Valley State University
�Jesus the Human Being: A Stunning Revelation of God
Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
the prophet goes out of his way to say, "I don't really know how to describe what
I'm trying to describe. It seems like this. It seems like, as it were. It had the
appearance of..." Finally, he says, "It was as though this one who was revealing
himself to the prophet was human."
Now, let's go to the Gospels. What self-designation did Jesus use over and over
and over again? Son of Man. He always called himself the son of man. He never
called himself Messiah. He never called himself son of God. He called himself son
of Man. Son of man translated is bin Adam, or the Greek translation of that
Hebrew phrase. It is interesting that the early Church took all of the exalted titles
possible and attributed them to Jesus, so that the whole creedal elevation of
Jesus in the early Church was by use of titles that were exalted. The early Church
never used son of man in its creedal formulation. Why? Well, the best translation
of son of man is human being. Some translations would say mortal, or human
one, but Walter Wink, and I think he has good basis for this, said, "I think the
best translation for the phrase 'son of man' out of the Greek language would be
Human Being." So, what Jesus is doing in the Gospel, whenever he refers to
himself as the son of man, is referring to himself as a human being.
Frankly, the Church was never very comfortable with that. The Church was never
able to write any hymns or creeds that celebrated the human being, because, after
all, weren't they trying to celebrate God in Christ? Surely they were. But what was
missed was that the God in Christ was human. Far beyond the humanness that
you and I have yet achieved, for we are people on the way and lagging all along
the way, but the stunning revelation is that what came to expression in Jesus was
the humanity of God. I don't have time this morning to try to go back in those
Creation stories and the human being created in the image of God, but what I see
in this is that our calling to be like God is a calling to be fully human.
When Jesus has set his face to go to Jerusalem, and he goes through Samaria, the
Samaritans aren't happy with him because there is a jealousy, a terrible racial
violence between Jews and Samaritans, and so they are not happy at all that he is
going through Samaria to Jerusalem. The disciples recognize the resistance that
he is receiving and James and John are nicknamed in the Gospels the "sons of
thunder," no doubt with a reference to Elijah, the great Hebrew prophet. They say
to Jesus, "Let’s call down fire from heaven." Colloquially speaking, they said,
"Let's blast the brothers." I don't know how they thought they could call down fire
from heaven, but after all, Elijah did and consumed the prophets of Baal, so
maybe it would work again. Let's show them who we are.
In a good Bible with a footnote, a very well-attested reading adds Jesus' words,
"You don't know what spirit you are of, for the human being (the son of man)
has come not to destroy human life, but to heal it." Now, that, I believe, is pretty
solid biblical basis for seeing Jesus in his full humanity as a revelation of God as
human. Therefore, the call to us to be God-like is a call to be not something other
than we are, alien to our nature, but to be fully human, and the calling to us as a
© Grand Valley State University
�Jesus the Human Being: A Stunning Revelation of God
Richard A. Rhem
Page 4
community is to be humane. That is not a bad place to leave it on the threshold of
our annual meeting as we celebrate this community.
I mentioned Wednesday night to the pilgrim band that comes for Eucharist
during Lent, the irony that it is in the Bible Belt, that it is in the religious ghettos,
that it is in the places of the high concentration of conservative Christian
congregations that there is altogether a lack of humane existence, that there is
fear and divisiveness and an excluding of people left and right. To me, that's an
irony. It says to me that maybe the people who are left in the Church by and large,
in a generalization which is always dangerous, are so fearful, fearful of being
pulled into this full humane existence, fearful of that which is human, striving to
be divine, as it were, not recognizing that to be divine is to be human, if the
revelation of Jesus is the true revelation of God. It is an irony that we have the
greatest difficulty in tight Christian communities to be open to the other, to that
which breaks the mold.
I am grateful for this community. As we go into this congregational meeting, I'm
grateful for this community that inclusion here is more than a catchword, that we
have learned the inclusivity of the grace of God and that we practice it. That we
stand on our identity statement published every time we publish a liturgy, that
this is a place that is open to all, regardless, that we are open to all manner and
condition of humankind, because we celebrate God as creator who, in the creative
initiative, has brought forth a magnificent prodigality of diversity.
We have also learned here that Jesus is our window to God, but not the only
window, so that we can be open to people of other faith traditions. For, what we
have learned is that our religious formulation and structure is a human, creative,
imaginative construct. We made it in response to a vision, in our case, a vision of
Jesus who learned a vision from Ezekiel, and the whole Christian Church in all of
its forms and structures is our response to that mystery of God that came
unveiled in Jesus. We respect and honor great traditions who follow other
windows into the mystery of God that will always remain a mystery.
I am thankful that this community is open to all people, no matter where they are
on their faith journey, and to those who cannot articulate any faith at all, but
simply are seeking, and who need and desire a community of compassion that is
humane.
Tonight is the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games. It has been a wonderful
17 days, beginning with that magnificent opening ceremony. If you have watched
over these past couple of weeks, you have seen humanity at its best. Have you
seen the faces of the camera focused, and those faces so alive, so beautiful, on
bodies so trained and taut? And then, the parade of the nations, a symbol of the
global community more eloquent than any sermon I could preach.
In the exhibition of skating last night, with the pressure off, Michelle Kwan, who
was supposed to get the gold, skating gracefully and beautifully with her face wet
© Grand Valley State University
�Jesus the Human Being: A Stunning Revelation of God
Richard A. Rhem
Page 5
with tears for the gold that she missed, and the people loving her all the more. Or,
the Canadian pair and the Russian pair whose skating brought out the supposed
scandal of judging and therefore, a double gold this year, and there they were
bound hand in hand, arm in arm, body to body, the four of them in a most
magnificent display of reconciliation and peace. I'll tell you what - the human
possibility is so magnificent. Where there is love, where there is grace, where
there is humility, freedom, and openness, dear God, what we could become!
What we could become is human, by God. That's a stunning revelation.
References:
Walter Wink. The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man.
Augsburg Fortress, 2002.
© Grand Valley State University
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Richard A. Rhem Collection
Description
An account of the resource
Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rhem, Richard A.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
Contributor
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
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English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Identifier
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KII-01
Coverage
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1981-2014
Format
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audio/mp3
text/pdf
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Event
Lent II
Series
Journeying With Jesus On the Road Less Traveled
Scripture Text
Ezekiel 1:26, Luke 9:55-56
Location
The location of the interview
Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
References
Walter Wink. The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man. Augsburg Fortress, 2002.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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KII-01_RA-0-20020224
Date
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2002-02-24
Title
A name given to the resource
Jesus, the Human Being - A Stunning Revelation of God
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard A. Rhem
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Sermons
Relation
A related resource
Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/
Language
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eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
application/pdf
Description
An account of the resource
A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on February 24, 2002 entitled "Jesus, the Human Being - A Stunning Revelation of God", as part of the series "Journeying With Jesus On the Road Less Traveled", on the occasion of Lent II, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Ezekiel 1:26, Luke 9:55-56.
Humanness of God
Lent
The Son of the Man