During Lent, the people of Saint Matthias Episcopal Church in Whittier kept their hearts so firmly fixed on Jesus Christ that they took their eye off the ball.
On Thursday evening, I was the final speaker in a five-week series on aspects of our Lord’s life and teaching. Only on arriving for a delicious potluck at 6 p.m. did I realize that the event coincided with the Dodger-Diamondback season opener. I reckoned the healthy attendance purely as a gesture of respect for the Risen One.
The Rev. Carole Horton-Howe, the devoted rector, formed at St. Matthias for ordained ministry, asked me to discuss how my conception of Christ shifted with my vocation, beginning with layperson, ending, for now, as bishop.
I talked first about the historical Jesus, thought to have been an artisan, with Joseph, working on Herod Antipas’ projects at Sephhoris, near Nazareth. These days pilgrims — such as the Rev. Jeannie Martz and Rocky Covill, Kathy’s and my companions in 2023, both aboard Thursday evening — can walk along excavated first century streets. I also talked about the companion who rides in the car with me, a stuffed doll with a deacon’s stole and perpetual smile, inviting the frankest possible prayers and conversations.
“But these first two Jesuses aren’t for everybody,” I said. “For some, the idea of an infinitely patient companion is as unhelpfully sentimental as thinking that we’ve come home from Sephhoris with a molecule of Jesus’s DNA on the bottom of our shoes. For many devoted Christians, these expressions of Christ are beside the point.
“In our world of injustice and oppression, what matters most to many of us are Jesus’s eternal values of love and justice. A person may or may not believe in the virgin birth or the bodily Resurrection. We may not be able to unpack the parables or invest all of our faith in stories of miraculous healing. All we may really need to hear are our Lord’s words in Matthew 7:12: ‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.’
Twenty-one words. Shortest sermon ever. Jesus, who was a brilliant Bible scholar, saying that every dit and twiddle of the Hebrew Bible he knew, every name and narrative, every slaughter and miracle — it all added up to the golden rule. If you want to be treated kindly, be kind. If you want to receive love, give love. If you want to be safe, make others feel safe. If you don’t want to be alone, then lay waste to someone’s loneliness.”