The Miracle of Jefferson's Bible

July 9, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INTRODUCTION

Back in the days not long ago when the craze was for young born-again Christians to wear those “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets, some Unitarian Universalist teens started wearing them, too, saying that the initials on their bracelets stood for “What would Jefferson do?”

I submit for your consideration the idea that Jefferson himself would have hoped that response to “What would Jefferson do?” would be very nearly identical to response to “What would Jesus do?”

We Unitarian Universalists sometimes like to claim Thomas Jefferson as one of us. And, I think we can say he was a Unitarian. He was never an official member of a Unitarian church in Charlottesville, his home, because it was a very small town, and there weren’t enough people there who shared his liberal religious views to organize a church. (That sounds familiar to me?) But we do know that while he was vice-president of the United States, he attended Unitarian and Universalist church services in Philadelphia, and he called himself a Unitarian in letters he wrote to various friends, including John Adams (another of our Unitarian U.S. presidents.)

So -I proudly call Thomas Jefferson a Unitarian, too, but just as Jefferson called himself a Unitarian, he also called himself a Christian. He wrote to the famous Universalist minister, Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was also signer of the Declaration of Independence, saying: “I am a Christian, in the only sense [Jesus] wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others?.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote in an angry letter to another of his friends: “I am a real Christian.” [Some] “call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said or saw.”

I think Thomas Jefferson’s religious views might be quite consistent with those of many members of the UU Christian Fellowship, which you probably know is a modern-day organization affiliated with the UUA, the Unitarian Universalist Association.

We know that Jefferson wasn’t perfect. His inconsistencies pertaining to matters of race and, in particular the issue of slavery, have somewhat tarnished his image, of late. Perhaps Jesus was perfect. Thomas Jefferson thought he was, that Jesus was. Unfortunately for Jefferson, the historical record and DNA evidence on him is available, and so we know he was just an imperfect human being.

But, perhaps we could all do worse than to ask ourselves – as we make our decisions at the supermarket, at the mall, at the auto dealership, in the voting booth – we could all do a lot worse than to ask ourselves “What would Jefferson do?”

SERMON

A few months ago, there was a short article in the “Religion” section of The Dallas Morning News, “one in an occasional series on the spiritual lives of historical figures?, the column said. This one was about Thomas Jefferson and specifically, the little book he complied that has come to be called The Jefferson Bible.

I was delighted to see the article because a copy of The Jefferson Bible was the first purchases I ever made from Beacon Press, the publishing house of our Unitarian Universalist Association. I’ve always liked American history, especially the early periods up through the Civil War, and I now love the fact that both the Unitarian and the Universalist streams of our modern UU faith flowed so abundantly throughout the early American landscape, helping to water the fields from which sprang the fragrant blossoms of liberty and justice.

And I happen to pretty much agree with Thomas Jefferson’s take on Jesus of Nazareth, so, of course, I’m going to like Jefferson’s Bible – and many UUs seem to like it.

As I said in my Offertory words, Jefferson was raised an Anglican, but as a student at William and Mary College, he was introduced to philosophy and church history, and was influenced by the English deists who put forth the notion of a Creator God who set the world in motion, and then stepped back, to interfere no more in its workings. But Jefferson did not remain a deist throughout his life.

During his tenure as John Adams’ vice-president, (1797-1801) he became quite friendly with Dr. Benjamin Rush, a medical doctor and out-spoken Universalist. He and Jefferson had what Jefferson described as many “delightful conversations?, about the Christian religion.

Around this same time, (1796) Joseph Priestly, the English clergyman and scientist who you may remember as having discovered oxygen, came to Philadelphia and established the first church in America to be founded as a Unitarian church from its beginning.

Priestly had been a Unitarian clergyman back in England, and when his home and laboratory were burned to the ground, at least partly because of his unorthodox religious views, Priestly was invited by Benjamin Franklin to come find safe haven in the United States, in Philadelphia, and he did.

Thomas Jefferson visited Joseph Priestley’s Unitarian church and heard him preach. It’s possible that Jefferson may have had a similar reaction to what I’ve heard described many times by many of us when we talk about our first visit to a UU church. That he couldn’t quite believe someone was actually up in a pulpit preaching the unconventional notions, considered blasphemous by most, that he had come to believe on his own! Jefferson developed quite a friendship with Joseph Priestly, and their conversations and correspondence solidified Jefferson’s Unitarian views, and in fact, caused him to re-examine the value of Christianity, from which he had by then become alienated and removed.

Always a free-thinker and one who came to his conclusions based on evidence and the careful reasoning of his own mind, under the influence of Priestly and Rush, the Unitarian and the Universalist, Jefferson turned his attentions again to the New Testament Gospels he had, of course, studied as a youth. “To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; (Jefferson wrote to Rush), but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.”

Jefferson had come to believe that Jesus exhibited (quote) “the most benevolent, and the most eloquent and sublime character that has ever been exhibited to man” whose “system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has ever been taught”, (unquote) but Jefferson rejected as contrary to evidence and reason, and to the very intentions of Jesus himself, any belief in Jesus’ divinity.

Like Priestly and other Unitarians before him, Jefferson thought that the Gospel texts had been corrupted in transmission, both naturally by time and human error and intentionally by those in the early Christian church who had sought to increase their power and status by making the new religion more popular to non-Jewish converts by grafting onto it elements of Greek sophistry and Roman mysticism. Jefferson proposed to purify the Gospels of Jesus by ridding them of those things he saw as corruptions, although he did not actually complete this task until well into his life in the year 1820, at the age of 77, some 6 years before his death.

And, how did he finally do that? There is a Garrison Keillor joke you may have heard about the notice posted for am adult r.e. class in a Unitarian Church that said, “Bible Study Begins Next Week. Bring your Bibles – and your scissors.” Well, that’s literally what Thomas Jefferson did!

Using two copies each of Greek, Latin, French and English translations of the four Gospels, Jefferson took a razor and physically cut from the pages any references to supernatural occurrences – no virgin birth, no angels in the sky, at the beginning. No walking on water or feeding the multitudes in the middle. And, certainly most disturbing of all for orthodox Christians, no resurrection at the end.

And then, Jefferson pasted into a blank book those parts of the story he thought could be true. He left in what seemed to him to be the plausible facts about Jesus’ life. He also combined the 4 narratives into a single chronological story. He, of course, left in all the sayings and moral teachings he believed Jesus had said. Jefferson described this work (and these are his words, not mine) as separating “diamonds from the dunghill?.

And what did Jefferson leave himself and us with after all his snipping and pasting? I return to the Dallas Morning News article I mentioned at the beginning which quotes Catholic author and historian Garry Wills (with whom I frequently agree) as saying that although Jefferson’s Gospel tells the tale of “a good man, a very good man, perhaps the best of good men,” this Jesus is “boring, utterly without mystery”, “shorn of his paradoxes and left with platitudes.”

I beg to differ with Garry Wills and to agree with Thomas Jefferson. If, in his religious searching, Gary Wills has come to believe in Jesus the Christ, born of the virgin Mary, risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, neither Jefferson nor I would try to change his mind – or yours, should those be your beliefs. Jefferson said, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

I believe that this pulpit is different from others in that my job up here is not to try to convince you of anything. You are the authority when it comes to your own religious beliefs. Religion is different from science in that we cannot know, we will not know, in this life at least, what is “true” and what is not. “For now we see through a glass darkly?.

So I am here only to share with you my perspective, and you may use it to inform your own, in some way, if you wish, so, this is what I think: I do not find Jefferson’s human Jesus “boring, without mystery?, “shorn of his paradoxes and left with platitudes.”

I personally have no need of supernatural beings when miracles are all around me. To me, nothing could be more miraculous than the natural world. No revelation from God could be more astonishing than the reasonable and demonstrative fact that an ordinary human mind, or minds, somehow devised the radical and elegant prescriptions for living that have been passed down to us as the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Seek always justice. Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. The truly valuable things in life are not material things. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Treat the least among you as if he or she were the messiah. Look around you, for the Kingdom of God is at hand if only you have eyes to see it. Platitudes? No, I don’t think so.

Thomas Jefferson also knew how much easier it is to espouse a religion about Jesus than it is to live out the religion of Jesus. And the miracle, my friends, what I see as the miracle, anyway, is the religion of Jesus. A description of a way of living that puts others ahead of self, peacemaking ahead of violence, compassion and forgiveness ahead of self-righteousness and revenge.

Now, I don’t always live my life that way. Neither did Thomas Jefferson. But, I find that by looking at Jesus as Thomas Jefferson did in his Bible, as a human being, but an extraordinary human being with a visionary message delivered with powerful eloquence, I, just like Jefferson before me, can now reclaim a part of my religious past – no longer to be throwing out a beautiful baby with the implausible bathwater I still can’t swallow – to mix a metaphor or two.

And, just like Jefferson, late in my life, I am coming to appreciate anew those figurative diamonds he literally cut and pasted into this little document to serve as a description of the beautiful way of living in harmony with all of creation that Jesus spoke about.

And, so this morning I am moved to say: Thank you, Jesus! And thank you, Thomas Jefferson. And Benjamin Rush and Joseph Priestly and all the rest of you brave and noble and reasonable Unitarians and Universalists down through the centuries. Your clear and compassionate thinking is the miracle. You are the miracles. We are all the miracles.

Amen.

Scottie McIntyre Johnson 2006