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<\/a>I want to welcome you to the conversations of the second Christ Path Seminar \u2013 Cosmic Christ and the Historical Jesus.<\/p>\n
As we enter these conversations, Andrew and I both feel the time has come to urge more and more people who want to follow a Jesus path, whether singly or in tandem with other paths, to really wake up<\/em>, because time is running out for our planet as we know it and our species as we know it.<\/p>\n These are serious times \u2013 but not lugubrious times; play and celebration and prayer all play a part in strengthening the heart so that we can do our work together.<\/p>\n We live in a marvelous time when 250 years of exploration about \u201cwho is the historical Jesus\u201d has really come to a crescendo. Whether we\u2019re reading Bruce Chilton or Marcus Borg or John Dominic Crossan or others, it\u2019s marvelous to have this nourishment in front of us, and we must not take it for granted; we have to start running with it.<\/p>\n So the assignment I was given by Andrew in beginning these conversations was to talk about Jesus as a revolutionary. And I worked hard on this; I went back and read a lot of these scripture scholars\u2026and then I realized that something was bothering me, deep down.<\/p>\n And what was bothering me was \u2013 frankly, I\u2019m not all that interested in Jesus as a revolutionary!<\/em> I\u2019m much more interested in seeing each of you<\/em> as a revolutionary.<\/p>\n After all, Jesus did his thing 2,000 years ago \u2013 but what are we doing? And what have we been doing for the past 1,900 years?<\/p>\n I am reminded of Gandhi\u2019s answer to Howard Thurman in 1935, when Thurman and his wife went to India. Thurman asked Gandhi, \u201cWhat is the biggest obstacle to Christianity in India?\u201d And Gandhi said, \u201cChristians.\u201d So here we are\u2026<\/p>\n Now this word revolutionary<\/em> of course has different meanings to different people, and I\u2019d like to give a couple of synonyms for it.<\/p>\n One is prophet<\/em>. I think that every prophet is disturbing things, that\u2019s the nature of the beast. And the truth is that every one of us is called to be a prophet. We cannot expect Jesus to do it all, or Nelson Mandela to do it all, or Dr. King to do it all. We\u2019re all here to do it in our own fashion.<\/p>\n What is the primary work of the prophet? According to Rabbi Heschel, who both lived it and wrote the classic scholarly work on the prophets, the Number One job of the prophet is to interfere<\/em>. And that is one reason why prophets do not always win elections or polls.<\/p>\n Another way to talk of this revolutionary dimension to the Jesus teaching and story and person is a phrase I picked up years ago in France about living on the margins \u2013 sur la marge<\/em>. Living on the margin, teaching on the margin \u2013 Jesus lived on the margin. He was on the lam for most of his adult life. As Chilton points out, this is why, in the Gospels, first he\u2019s here and then he pops up over here. And of course people who are used to reading comfortable stories ask \u201cWell, how did he get from there to there?\u201d That\u2019s the whole point \u2013 <\/em>you\u2019re not supposed to know! He was running for most of his adult public life.<\/p>\n So the question, \u201cWas Jesus a revolutionary?\u201d is very easy to answer: Yes! That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n So what I want to do first is to talk about ourselves: what are we in revolt about? What are we interfering about, what are we called to interfere about in our times? How are we going about it? Later, I want to get more specifically into the Jesus story, because that is where we get our inspiration, our strength, our modeling.<\/p>\n But I really think it\u2019s important to begin with us<\/em>, because you can spend a whole lifetime in the first century, studying all these marvelous texts, and just die never having disturbed anyone at all or any of the power forces that need disturbing at this time in history very, very badly.<\/p>\n In other words, we can get wrapped up in Jesus talk, and Jesus studies, and Biblical studies, and never get the point.<\/em> And that is that we are here to incarnate the justice and compassion that Jesus was about, and all the great ones out of his tradition and so many other traditions really were about.<\/p>\n After all, there was a reason why the Emperor\u2019s man in Jerusalem and Caiaphas the High Priest of the Temple got together to hang this guy \u2013 crucify him. There was a reason why \u2013 and it was not because he was busy reading a lot of good books and studying the scriptures in pious tones.<\/p>\n He was disturbing the peace, he was interfering. That\u2019s part of the story.<\/p>\n It has been sentimentalized, turned into an \u201coh, my sins hung Jesus on the cross\u201d kind of thing, but that\u2019s not the story. That\u2019s a distortion of the story that empires since the Roman Empire have all invested in, because that\u2019s how you mute, tamp down, the real story that Jesus, coming out of the prophetic wisdom tradition of Israel, was living, breathing, teaching, and even dying for.<\/p>\n Now, I\u2019ve been in Rome and I\u2019ve seen the catacombs and the burial places of the early Christian martyrs. But the truth is, no one has been martyred in Rome for religion\u2019s sake for 1700 years. So I want to look in my next posts at the injustices that modern prophets are interfering with, and ask \u2013 are we waking up and doing what we can do? And if not, how can we begin?<\/p>\n _______________________________________________________<\/p>\n To register for the \u201cCosmic Christ and Youth: The Occupy Generation,\u201d the next Christ Path Seminar weekend taking place 10\/11-13,\u00a0 featuring Adam Bucko as guest speaker, and based on Matthew Fox\u2019s and Adam Bucko\u2019s groundbreaking book, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation<\/a>,\u00a0 see http:\/\/www.christpathseminar.org\/ai1ec_event\/cosmic-christ-and-youth-the-occupy-generation\/?instance_id=99<\/a><\/p>\n To order the complete 12-DVD set of recordings from the first Christ Path Seminar weekend, \u201cCosmic Christ and the New Humanity\u201d\u2013 including Dr. Fox\u2019s delivery of the Saturday afternoon lecture from which this post is clipped, see http:\/\/www.christpathseminar.org\/participate-by-dvd\/<\/a><\/p>\n