Proclaiming the Moral Teaching of Jesus

Plenary Address to Festival of Homiletics, Atlanta, Georgia, May 14, 2025

Note: This is the formal text of my address to the wonderful Festival of Homiletics conference, which gathered over 1400 primarily mainline Protestant church leaders from around the world. I was very struck by the strong response to this message and to a workshop I offered the day before.

INTRODUCTION: PROBLEMATIZING THE QUESTION

The theme of this conference, as you know, is “Preaching to Heal the Divide.”

I want to act like an academic by immediately challenging this framework. Academics call this “problematizing the question.” That is what I must do as I begin today.

I cannot simply agree with the implicit diagnostic premise of this event that division is our primary problem and that preaching to heal the divide is the primary medicine we should offer.

Of course, I join with every other attention-paying person in recognizing that our politics does reflect bitter divisions that we tend to think of along something like left-right lines. I have experienced and often discussed with others how those divisions are filtering down into churches, friendship groups, workplaces, and families in deeply painful ways.

There are at least two ways to interpret this experience of division. One is to make the empirical move: polling and voting reveal deep and substantive divisions over issues of ideology, policy, partisan identification, and support for specific government officials or candidates. Elections reveal how closely divided we are as well. We don’t just disagree, we 50/50 (or 48/48/4) disagree. Voila, we are a divided society.

Then our next move is to acknowledge that those divisions often feel like wounds, indeed suppurating ulcers. What we need is preaching and other forms of Christian ministry that, like medicine, treats these wounds. Thus, preaching to heal the divide.

But here is another way to interpret the experience we are having. Instead of saying our main problem is division, we might say that our main problem is that part of the nation, and part of the Christian community, has been seduced by a destructive political ideology that has nothing to do with the Gospel. Does that ring any bells for you?

Most of my progressive, attention-paying friends would call the ideology that we consider alien and destructive something like White Christian Nationalism – that’s the main term of art. I usually call it Authoritarian Reactionary Christianity. Here’s my book on the subject. Insert everything you have ever heard about the patriarchal, xenophobic, racist, nativist ideology that goes by those names. That is what we are critiquing.

If the issue is that millions of our fellow Christians have been seduced by extremist right-wing ideology that they quite wrongly think is Christian, then our main problem is not division. This would mean that our main solution is not preaching to heal the divide. Our main solution would be something more like confronting this alien ideology that has established a beach-head in the heart of the American church.

Which is it, then? What is the real problem? Division, or seduction of the church by an alien ideology?

Here is a historical example quite relevant to the city and the region in which we meet. By the 1840s, the American church was deeply divided over the issue of slavery. That is a fact.

But was the main problem that division, and the main solution some kind of appeal to Christian unity? Or was the main problem the firm commitment to slavery on the part of perhaps half of American Christians? If that was the main problem, then the solution was not preaching unity. The solution was challenging slavery and slaveholder Christianity.

Let me complicate the matter even more by attempting an empathetic reading of the perspective of many of our politically conservative Christian kinfolk. I happen to know that for many of them, their diagnosis of our primary problem is not that we are divided. Instead, in a move that mirrors that of many on the progressive side, many Christian conservatives would say that our main problem is that too many progressive Christians have bought into an essentially secular liberalism that sacrifices biblical values. Therefore, their main prescription for Christian preachers is not to preach unity but to defeat cultural liberalism. And that is the project that they are undertaking at this very moment, with the considerable help of the current American government.

So, the fact of the matter is that the American church is so divided that we can’t even agree on whether division is the real problem and preaching to heal the divide is the right solution. And if we instead believe that some part of the church has been seduced by an alien ideology away from true Christianity, but we can’t agree on what part of the church has been seduced, and what the really alien ideology is, and so we can’t agree on what we are trying to defeat, then we see that we cannot agree either on a diagnosis that division is the problem or that alien ideology is the problem. Our division goes all the way down. Not even the doctors can agree on what is wrong with the patient.

Who will save us from this body of death?

I don’t have any magic solution to offer you today. But I can tell you both what I tried to practice when I was serving as interim pastor of a large purple church in this area during the first Trump term, and what I have systematized in my most recent book, The Moral Teachings of Jesus.

My solution? A relentless focus on an honest exegetical rendering of the moral teachings of Jesus. Let me now tell you about that book and what I discovered while working on it. It’s all I’ve got. Maybe it will help.

THE RADICAL MORAL MESSAGE OF JESUS

What is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God. –Lk 16:15

What I do in this book is dig into forty moral teachings of Jesus as presented in the Gospels.

The goal of the book is to bring the content of the teachings of Jesus to the center of our attention for honest engagement. The words of Jesus set the agenda. Instead of bringing my issues to the text and asking for answers, I just reflect on what he chose to talk about and what it might mean.

I do not speak about Jesus’ teachings as if I am an expert in practicing them – they are radical, and demanding, and they are challenging and even disorienting for anyone who takes them seriously. Indeed, the more I dive into these teachings, the more challenged I feel.

The need that drives the book is my sense that these actual teachings of Jesus are strangely neglected across much of the community that bears his name and proclaims its loyalty to him. It’s not that we Christians are trying and failing to obey him, it’s more like many of us have stopped even paying attention. This problem has very deep roots – I don’t hesitate to pin much of the blame on decisions made by major church traditions – Luther and Calvin, I am looking at you. But the problem seems to be very widespread in the US Christian community.

In my 2020 book After Evangelicalism, I talk about various versions of Jesus that seem to predominate in that sector of Christianity, including 1) Jesus who is only the crucified savior who died on the cross for our sins, 2) Hallmark Christmas movie Jesus, my cuddly best friend, 3) Prosperity Gospel Jesus who wants you to succeed, and 4) Vacant Jesus fillable with any content we want -- which can yield Enslaver Jesus and Nazi Jesus and Proud to be an American Jesus or whatever Jesus one might want. I don’t think this problem only exists in evangelicalism.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it seems to me that Jesus himself has become a vague cipher -- or a definite inconvenience to Christians with other agendas they seek to pursue.

I want to do something kind of basic – let Jesus’ teachings as recorded in the Gospels tell us what he believed and what he cared about. Amidst an obvious religious, moral, and political crisis in this God-haunted land, I am turning back toward Jesus.

I believe that Jesus' most important moral sayings are addressed in the book. I am going to take you on a brisk tour, so here goes.

Jesus’ most important moral teachings include:

-- the Beatitudes – where he said blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the peacemakers…he talked about a way of being that God blesses even if the world scorns.

--the Greatest Commandment – love God with all and love your neighbor as yourself.

--the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

--Love Your Enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

-- The Great Judgment – a judgment scene teaching in which how we treated the least of these is understood to be how we treated Jesus, and is the grounds for eternal judgment.

I examine key parables of moral significance, such as

--the Good Samaritan – which one proved neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? The one who showed him mercy. Go and do likewise.

--the Prodigal Son—We had to celebrate, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life, was lost and is found.

--the Rich Fool – tonight your soul shall be required of you – and the things you have prepared, whose shall they be?

--Lazarus and the Indifferent Rich Man – poor Lazarus desired to eat the scraps from the rich man’s table -- but no one gave him anything. And then they both died…

--the Pharisee and the Tax Collector—all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

--the Widow and the Unjust Judge – and will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night?

I look at Jesus' teachings about:

--the kingdom of God – that state of affairs in which God reigns and shalom and justice happen at last, which Jesus said was starting right then and there.

--Sabbath and moral law – “The Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath.” Which means religion and its moral rules are God’s provision for our good, and when they are not, they must be reconsidered.

--family – Whoever does the will of God is my brother, sister, mother. Jesus redefines family!

--religious tradition – You abandon the command of God and hold to human tradition. Stop doing that.

--self-denial – deny yourself, take up your Cross, and follow me.

--true greatness – Whoever wants to be first must be last of all.

--marriage –there is no need or obligation to marry, but “what God has joined together let no one separate.”

--children – let the little children come to me, for to such as these belongs the kingdom of God. If any of you cause one of these little ones to stumble, woe to you.

--wealth – “how hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom.” “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth but instead treasures in heaven.” “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”

-- peacemaking – “If you remember that your brother/sister has something against you, leave your gift at the altar, go be reconciled, then come and offer your gift.”

--honesty – “let your yes be yes and your no be no.”

--piety – “Go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you.” No religion for show!

--forgiving – “if you forgive others their offenses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. Be merciful, as God is merciful.”

--judging – “do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get.”

--the test of true faith – “you will know them by their fruit…Only those who do the will of my father in heaven will enter the kingdom.”

--fear – “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”

--always, love – “love one another as I have loved you.”

I also address the moral implications to be drawn from several of Jesus' most famous encounters, including:

--with the unwanted woman who anoints him at a dinner party – Your faith has saved you, go in peace.

--with the Rich Young Ruler, who went away sad because he had great wealth and was unwilling to part with it in order to follow Jesus.

--with the Samaritan woman at the well, whom Jesus treated with respect and who in turn told her whole community about who he really was.

--with the woman facing execution, whose life Jesus saved while he offered his unforgettable teaching, “let the one who is without sin cast the first stone at her.”

--and events that occur during Jesus' occupation of the Temple in the last days of his earthly life, including his cleansing the temple system that he believed extorted the poor in the name of God and leveraged religion in the interest of the Herodian dynasty. “You have turned my father’s house into a den of thieves!”

LESSONS LEARNED

I am pretty excited about the distillation offered in the conclusion, in which I felt compelled to take this less well-known saying of Jesus as paradigmatic of his moral radicalism: "What is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God" (Lk 16:15).

Jesus appears to look at God and the world almost entirely upside-down from the way most of us do -- including most of us who say we believe in God and even in him.

From Jesus’ perspective, even though we come from God our Creator, humanity is well and truly messed up. We look at the world and live our lives basically upside down, in a complete reversal of how we ought to think and live. We half-know this, but mainly deny it. This is where Jesus’ moral message begins.

Jesus suggests that if we would watch and listen to children, they could show us aspects of a better way. But we don’t watch and listen to them. We instead ignore or even mistreat them, as we train them in our own messed-up values -- so that when they grow up, they can fit in and succeed in the upside-down cultures that we have created.

Jesus understands with sympathy that humans are very needy creatures. We are not at fault in this; it is how we are made. We have daily physical needs that demand our attention. We can learn to discipline these somewhat, but they do make their demands felt. They also can create a gnawing sense of insecurity -- especially if we must wonder where we will turn to find food to eat or a place to sleep, but that sense of anxiety can afflict absolutely anyone.

Jesus further understands that we are also needy emotional, relational, and spiritual creatures. These are the more interesting needs, because they are more uniquely human, and because the way we act to meet them can take such a great variety of forms.

Trying to satisfy these needs drives many of us much of the time into patterns of behavior destructive to others and ourselves. One characteristic human pattern is an unwillingness to discipline our basic physical neediness adequately. Another characteristic pattern is a tendency to look in the wrong places to get our hyped-up needs met. Human life is in this sense a tragicomedy, in which we have a great many opportunities to watch ourselves and others flail around trying to get these needs met.

Jesus clearly sees that one of the most interesting, subtle, and destructive “needs” that humans have is for recognition. Whether we call it honor (and contrast it with shame), status (and contrast it with marginality), or visibility (and contrast it with being invisible), human beings want to be recognized, want to be important, want to be valued. We also tend to treat honor, status, and visibility as zero-sum games, with more for us being less for others and vice versa. This is part of our moral sickness, that we are so competitive about such things. What a disastrous bondage this is for humanity.

Jesus knows that humans lie – a lot. We lie to God, to self, and to others. We lie because we can’t stand the truth, can’t face the truth, and are too embarrassed and proud to move beyond our posture of self-protection. We lie to ourselves about what really matters and what secures a good life. Building our houses on sand, we find our building projects unfinished or in ruins when we die, or when our world falls apart.

Jesus saw the significance of social practices. He saw that cultures reinforce these foolish human tendencies pretty much everywhere. Unfortunate basic tendencies (weaknesses) in our messed-up human nature get reinforced again and again by broadly accepted cultural patterns.

What cultures do is teach us to build status around sinful human tendencies -- which are reinforced rather than understood as sin. We honor the wealthy as better than the poor, the powerful as better than the powerless, those who live in luxury as better than those who are dirty or without homes, the adults as better than the children, the healthy as better than the sick, the physically strong as better than the weak, the kinfolk as better than the stranger, and so on.

It is when upside-down thinking like this, in family, neighborhood, music, art, economics, education, entertainment, religion, politics, and law, all reinforce each other, that most human beings are taught and caught in patterns of valuing things that are deeply offensive to God. We have been trained away from true knowledge about ourselves, about what is real, about what matters.

Yes, that is exactly why Jesus said “what is prized by humans is an abomination to God.” Our values are completely upside down. Human culture as we have set it up is a set of interconnected and idolatrous offenses to God, against God, that are celebrated by people -- the best people – over endless generations!

Our religion was and is supposed to help –from Jesus’ very Jewish perspective, God spoke plenty clearly through the Law and the Prophets and the Wisdom writings. But we humans often make a hash out of religion too.

Speaking in the tradition of the Jewish prophets, Jesus argued that many common religious patterns are adventures in missing the point. Celebrating wealth as reward from God, exploiting the poor and blaming them for their plight, treating illness as punishment from God, cooperating with or even deifying unjust state officials and practices, honoring the high-born, focusing on minutiae rather than real human well-being, encouraging religiously prideful comparison with others, letting legalistic maneuvers reinforce sin, blessing nationalist violence and retaliation, undertaking showy acts of piety for human praise, participating in honor/shame-based reciprocity games, abandoning God’s justice and love in the name of God himself…Jesus named it all.

Again, it seems that everything we value is upside down. What we think is awesome God thinks an abomination. What we think is great, God doesn’t care about. The person we think is a nobody, God values. What we fear, God says shouldn’t bother us.

Jesus teaches that we need to be stripped down, and to return to the basics. To the root (radix). We need radical spiritual and moral surgery. This is about more than morality. It begins with a theological vision and a spiritual practice that incorporate these things that Jesus taught us:

God is all and in all. God is the source of creation and life, the ground of existence, the destiny of the creation and of each of us.

God is king. God is the only true king. God deserves our loyal service, far more than the earthly rulers whose showy pomp is a faint, idolatrous echo of the majesty of the one true king, and whose demands for loyalty God scorns. God requires and rightly deserves everything from us, his creatures.

God is love, offers love, requires love.

God wants justice, offers justice, requires justice.

God is fiercely sensitive to marginalized persons. They matter just as much to God as do the powerful ones. More, maybe. God seems radical that way but that’s only because our moral vision is so messed up. Indeed, the last, least, and lost, is where we best meet God in the world.

God wants people to give their whole - full – complete – true - pure – hearts, selves, souls, and lives to him. This is way beyond rules and obedience. It’s devotion. It’s submission. It’s love.

God wants people who are humble in heart, mournful over their sins and this screwed up world, hungry for justice, merciful and reconciling.

God wants people who will secure themselves by trusting in him rather than in foolish human strategies and schemes that are so constantly self-defeating.

Jesus’ Way of living may feel like self-denial to us, perhaps especially at the beginning, when we first hear that call. But once we have learned to see Reality rightly, have reoriented our vision, it begins to feel more natural. As the world’s illusions drop away, as the world’s upside-downness becomes clearer, we become ready to turn ourselves right-side-up. Then we are not just willing but eager to learn how to do so.

God wants a radically reoriented humanity. But that begins with a vanguard group that will radically reorient in this Godward direction and which will fearlessly choose to play by God’s rules, not by messed up human patterns. One day the will of God will be done in all the world. The “kingdom of God” is the name for a world turned right-side-up. The church is to be its first expression. But sometimes it is people not in church who see and practice Jesus’ way better than so-called Christians do.

This kingdom of God has moral dimensions that can be practiced right now. Jesus is not just teaching high ideals or impossible ethical perfectionism intended to humble us by reminding us of how sinful and imperfect we are. We are that, for sure.

But this Way is about retraining. It is a retraining into practices Jesus taught, like peacemaking, forgiveness, economic simplicity, mercy, and generosity, turning the other cheek, enemy-love, covenant fidelity, truth telling, non-judgmentalism, Good Samaritanism, standing with the vulnerable. valuing all people the same, leading by serving while not seeking human honor – it’s a lovely way of life once you are in it, but it takes training – like anything else worth doing. If it takes 10,000 repetitions to perfect a skill like hitting a baseball, why should it take less practice to follow the Way of Jesus?

Jesus teaches that God truly honors heartfelt repentance, and we sure need to repent, not just once but often. Learning to see and act in the world in a way that completely reverses prevailing cultural patterns is very difficult. Backsliding is probably inevitable. We will need to repent, a lot.

The efforts that we make to turn the world’s values upside down are likely to be met with opposition, from all centers of power – family, state, economy, religion, tradition, and culture. We feel that opposition within ourselves too. We might die in the effort to follow God this radically. But Jesus says this death, if it comes, is better than living falsely before God and hurting others as we get swept into corrupt ways of being. And so we are willing to bear that risk, because it is worth it and because Jesus tells us it goes with the territory.

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

Let me end this way.

Whether our diagnosis is that our main problem is political/social/cultural/moral division, or instead our diagnosis is that some part of the church (not our part!) has been seduced by an alien ideology and needs to be confronted for that, in both cases our frame of reference is essentially set by the left/right binary as it has existed in the United States since about 1963. This particular way of clustering ideological, political, and moral commitments and this stubbornly intransigent division along left/right lines, is really only traceable to that period of dramatic cultural upheaval we call “the 60s.” I oversimply a bit – one could tell the story with a longer angle of vision -- but it is a defensible claim to be sure.

Focusing relentlessly on the moral teachings of Jesus has the singular benefit of not fitting within the parochialism either of a recent time horizon, or a single national environment, or a two-party/two ideology binary that could be called liberal/conservative or left/right. Jesus shatters all these categories. Indeed, his moral radicalism challenges everyone on every part of our current unfortunate spectrum. I tend to think of his moral challenge not with horizontal metaphor of left vs. right but with a vertical metaphor -- either of Jesus making us queasy by turning everything we value upside down (kind of like a really scary thrill ride) or by Jesus drilling all the way down to our sick moral core as individuals and cultures. Either way, Jesus takes charge. Either way, Jesus overcomes our binaries and just maybe our self-righteous pride.

That is why I think at least one major solution to the crisis of our times is to let the moral teachings of Jesus find renewed proclamation in our churches today. May it be so.