BECOMING MORE HUMAN
Scriptures: Psalm 8
John 18:33 – 19:5
During Lent and Holy Week leading up to Easter we’ve focused quite a bit on what Christ has done for us and, by extension therefore, how we might respond to Christ by becoming more like him. Indeed, if you’ve been a church-goer for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard many a sermon expounding on what it means to become more Christian – more Christ-like. This morning I want to take a somewhat different tack. We’ve heard a fair amount in the news recently about humanists and humanism wanting to have a significant say in the body politic – for example, there’s a three-part documentary series that starts airing on PBS stations this Friday, May 4, called “A Brief History of Disbelief” in which Jonathan Miller – British author and film director – examines the history of doubt and faith from ancient Greece to our own era of scientific inquiry. Well, I think there are some strong affinities between humanism and a faithful Christianity. The theme of this sermon, then, is that the unique task of the Christian for our time is to discover, along with others, what it means to become more human.
Michael Novak in an article in The Christian Century expresses this thought well: “We have been taught that there are great and obvious differences between the Christian and the unbelieving humanist. In our actual experience of life, it is difficult to detect these differences. Many who call themselves atheists or agnostics are, in the way they live and according to the values their lives affirm, indistinguishable from Christians. I am not trying to suggest that such people are ‘hidden Christians’ or ‘Christians in disguise’, but the contrary: good Christians may be nothing more than good human beings in disguise.”
Now, saying this and hearing it may be initially disturbing because we are ambivalent about what we affirm when we affirm that we are human – an ambiguity which can be seen in the contrasting statements “I’m only human”, and Pilate’s enigmatic, “Behold the Man!” In the first instance “I’m only human” is used most frequently to rationalize weakness or when we have been or done less than we really would have liked. It is a statement which comes from a desire to contrast the human and the spiritual – the “human” being a lower state of existence that must be fought and transcended in order to become more spiritual. Yet, when Pilate exclaims of Jesus, “Behold the Man!”, what is being affirmed is an entirely different understanding of being human. To become a man or a woman, to have an image of Jesus as The Human Being par excellence, to realize that in Jesus the human and the spiritual are perfectly fused – all this is to become aware that there is no facile separation between the human and the spiritual. Indeed, the purpose of Christ’s coming might well be summed up as challenging all of us to become more perfectly human.
A college professor of mine at DePauw, Ray Mizer, wrote a play that he called “Dramatis Personae”, and in it there is a character called simply “the Man”, although later on in the play Christ is also referred to as “the Man”. I was in this play in college and later on produced it with youth groups, and in the discussion after a performance often there was confusion expressed about this seeming inconsistency. When I wrote to Dr. Mizer, asking him to respond to this discussion, he indicated that the ambiguity is intentional in the play in order to demonstrate that human beings have both human and divine within them to which they can respond. This reality is what gives us freedom of choice. As we respond to the good we are reaching out to both human and divine – toward becoming men and women even as the divine Christ is “the Man”.
I said at the beginning of this sermon that it is particularly important for our time that Christians learn with others what it means to become more human. To understand why this is so, bear with me through some historical facts that are, for the most part, familiar. Modern humanism began with the 15th and 16th century Renaissance and received a healthy push from the 18th century Enlightenment – periods in which discoveries in many fields indicated the unlimited growth of human potential. Continuing progress in all realms of human endeavor seemed to be the hallmark of existence. This movement culminated in the liberalism of the early part of the 20th century, when the thought that was on most people’s minds was, “every day in every way we are getting better and better.”
But then came the destructive fury of two world wars sandwiching a great depression. Auschwitz and Hiroshima and 9/11 and now Virginia Tech gave clear indication of what people were capable of doing to others. Realities of the 20th century that have hung over into the 21st of deeply entrenched racism, violence and hatred – of poverty in Third World countries that could be eradicated if we had the will, but which is largely passed over with indifference – of property values taking on more importance than people values – of the disillusionment that came with unwanted wars in Vietnam and Iraq – all of this has destroyed the old liberal optimism and has led to a deepening despair and anxiety as the old century closed out and a new one began. In theological terms, sin – both institutionalized and personal – has become more obviously real in our time than it had been for the previous five centuries. Psychologist Rollo May was certainly right when he asked in the title of his book, Whatever Happened to Sin?, and then went on to discover that it was certainly alive if not well.
Yet, how we long to go beyond despair! And it is precisely this feeling to which I am trying to appeal today. One night several years ago I was coming home with a group of young people after we had gone in to New York’s Riverside Church for a showing of the film The Pawnbroker, with a marvelous performance by Rod Steiger. If you don’t remember the movie it was about a Jewish family, all murdered during World War II except for the father who finally made his way to New York City and become the pawnbroker of the title – his life now numbed and unfeeling as a result of what happened to him and his family during the war, until a youngster trying to hold up the pawn shop gets under his skin. During the ride back one of the girls from the youth group asked the question, “Why is it that serious films – films which engage our attention – all seem to be about the dark, seamy side of human behavior? Why can’t serious films affirm the goodness and joy that are also there?” Indeed, it is hard to think of artistically good films that do take seriously such aspects of human life as joy, redemption, reconciliation – except perhaps for fantasy films like E.T. or the one Ann and I saw recently, The Last Mimsy. One recent exception to this, though, is the film Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce and the struggle to abolish the slave trade in England. That movie certainly ended up lifting up significant human values. Yet, it is an interesting commentary on our present condition that for the most part positive values are found in fantasy films. My answer to the girl who raised this question – one that I’m not completely satisfied with – was that it is only as we look realistically at the whole human condition with all its evils and degradations that we will be able to see the possibilities of positive, joyful affirmation.
My answer is incomplete because the hidden assumption behind it (and, as you know, I’m constantly saying, “test your assumptions”) is that a realistic look at where we are will help us get back to the old optimism. But the history we have just walked through rules out any return to another period of time as a viable alternative. No one has helped us see this more clearly than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose much quoted and much misunderstood phrase that “the world has come of age” means that the advent of Christ offers us the choice of becoming more truly human without the intervention of God as a problem-solver. We as women and men are to confront all the despair, anxiety, and ambiguity of our time and work out the truly human solutions. Bonhoeffer puts it this way: “To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) but to be a man (woman). It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he (or she) is but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.”
In many ways the 8th Psalm is my favorite. One of the key reasons why it is a favorite is because of the paradoxical view it takes toward being human – dismissing humans in one verse (“what are human beings that you are mindful of them…?”) and glorifying them in the next (“Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.”) To be human for the Psalmist meant to participate in both of these realities, but especially it meant to strive always to accept the responsibility God has given humans to care for all the creatures and, as the Psalmist puts it, for “the works of your hands.”
To be human, then, for the Christian means at least two things: 1) having an awareness of humanity’s limitations and weaknesses, and yet 2) having an awareness of the image of what the human is potentially in Jesus. Pontius Pilate, of all people, gives us insight into the first of these awarenesses – in fact, Pilate could well be an iconic figure for our age. He is a doubter – about himself and about what is reported to him – yet, he desires to know, “What is truth?” He sees that Jesus is “the Man” – a man who could hold authority over him – yet he fails to act on this insight because he fears the will of the majority. In the symbolic act of hand washing he feels that he has exercised his responsibility – by dismissing it. Pilate both desires and fears to know the truth – both desires and fears to act upon it – both desires and fears, in a word, to become more truly human. This is our condition – the condition with which we struggle every day of our lives.
It is a struggle, moreover, that engages us along with others from all varieties of belief. The Christian, humanist, Jew, atheist, Muslim who affirm the struggle to become more human have more in common with each other than with those who would live either a simplistic piety or a despairing nihilism. To this struggle the Christian brings a certain world-view that offers help – the key feature of which is an understanding of Jesus as the Man. Rev. Eric James, an English pastor, has summed up this point in these words: “one of the most marvelous things that Pilate said, sort of inadvertently, about Jesus was ‘Behold the Man!’, and they ought to be able to say of the Church that everything that goes on in it is helping them to become human, deeply human. I would agree that so often what the Church is doing is helping people to follow a kind of centuries-old cultus which has little relevance to being deeply human. But we’ve got to help people to be human and to live in community.”
“To live in community.” Now, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That’s been a pretty consistent theme of mine over these past few months. And it is the second key part of a Christian’s world-view: that we can become human through a supportive community which is inclusive and outreaching. A third element of the Christian’s world-view is the paradoxical nature of our world – a world of grace and absurdity, where everything is given to us in creation and yet which can contain the ultimate absurdity of the cross. Becoming more human from the standpoint of this world-view requires us to give in neither to the cheap grace which says everything will work out for the best eventually nor to the despair that comes when we see all the crucifixions that humankind is capable of committing.
What we say, what we do, who we are all contribute to or help tear down the possibility of becoming more human in a world which contains far too many de-humanizing forces. The Christian knows that to live in this realistic, honest way may well mean a crown of thorns and a lonely Via Dolorosa, yet knowing this cannot deter us. A choice opens up before us – a choice symbolized by the equivocating Pontius Pilate, wanting to know the truth and act upon it yet fearful of the consequences, a choice symbolized by the image of the one about whom others can say: “Behold the Man! Behold the Woman! Behold the Human Being, who is acting as Christ would have acted!”
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
April 29, 2007