It is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations ... (Luke 24:46-47)

Are you familiar with the book called "The Lost Years of Jesus"? The popularity of this book - which has also inspired a movie - indicates that many people have become fascinated with the idea that Jesus went off to India before his ministry began in Palestine. One version of the story has it that Jesus appeared in the form of a great Indian guru. Another approach suggests that Jesus and Buddha were actually the same divine being appearing in different forms. In 1977, Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, published his excellent book Turning East, in which he discussed various aspects of the Western fascination with Eastern religion and philosophy.

While the desire to believe that Jesus somehow is connected with other great religious figures like Buddha and Confucius is totally understandable, we must not let our desire to foster unity among the various religious traditions of the world blind us to the fact that there are extremely important differences between these traditions. In order to promote true unity and understanding among all nations and religions, we must pay as much attention to the salient differences between these faiths as to the exciting similarities. We do not create unity between Jesus, Buddha and others, by riding roughshod over history.

We have noted many times that the stories of Jesus reflect a paradoxical attitude toward history. On the one hand, just preceeding our text from Luke chapter 24, we read of the incident where therisen Jesus eats a fish to demonstrate that he is not simply a disembodied ghost. Luke is concerned to point out that he takes the physical world, and history, seriously. Yet, on the other hand, at the very end of his Gospel and our text (and in his continuation of the story in the book of Acts), Luke pictures Jesus as more or less vanishing into thin air as he ascends into heaven. It does make some sense that if Jesus is able to vanish into thin air at the conclusion of his ministry, he could also have used astral projection or some form of "soul travel" during the early years of his life not recorded by the evangelists, in order to make contact with other parts of the world - in order to meet Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed and others.

But Luke begins the episode we have read today by setting Jesus firmly in the specific historical context of Moses, the laws, the hymns, and the prophets of Israel! He shows Jesus offering to his disciples a specific interpretation of the uniquely Jewish concept of the Messiah, the Christ. It is not so much that historical events prove spiritual truths, or that Moses and the prophets are important because they predicted what Jesus would do - it is rather that the Christian faith simply takes history seriously enough to insist that we must not ignore the specific historical and cultural settings in which religious teachings arise. The real Jesus is the Jesus who embodies a particular interpretation of the Christ (the Messiah) as one who suffers, defeats death, and offers forgiveness of sins.

One of the fundamental differences between the so-called Western religions like Judaism and Christianity, and the Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, is that in the Western faiths we are saved from sin, whereas in the Eastern faiths we are saved from ignorance. The Western religions are usually described as "ethical-historical monotheisms," where the emphasis is on ethical behavior in the day-to-day affairs of life. The Eastern religions are, by contrast, religions of "cosmic, monistic consciousness." Their emphasis is more on knowledge than on ethics. The assumption is made that once we have clear knowledge of the spiritual oneness of all and the unreality of the material world, then ethical actions - to the degree that they matter - will automatically follow.

The main issue for Christianity, however, is that even when we know what is true and right, we often don't act accordingly. There is a problem with our will, our sinful impulses. Enlightenment alone is not enough.

The tendency to emphasize knowledge crept into the Christian tradition in the form of Gnosticism. The greek word, gnosis, means knowledge, and early on, the Christian church rejected the interpretation of Jesus as a Messiah whose main project was to bring saving knowledge. What is to be preached in the name of Jesus is not knowledge, but love and forgiveness of sins! "Repentance" is a change of mind not toward an abstract notion of cosmic consciousness but a change of mind that affects our everyday behavior in relationship to others. The grace of God as seen in Jesus is directed primarily toward helping us face the ethical challenge of promoting righteousness and justice, without falling into despair over the Herculean proportions of the task - whereas the grace of God as understood by Buddha is directed primarily at giving us mental clarity, cosmic consciousness, cosmic enlightenment (the name Buddha means "awakened" or "enlightened").

None of this is to say that Buddha is Buddha and Jesus is Jesus and never the twain shall meet. Buddhism is indeed concerned about ethical issues and Christianity is also concerned about intellectual and spiritual knowledge. But to pretend that Jesus and Buddha, that Christianity and Buddhism are essentially the same, is simplistic at best, and historically, theologically, and culturally dishonest at worst. The Jesus pictured by all the New Testament writers deals with a whole different set of issues than does the Buddha who in his own unique, historical context developed and reformed the beliefs of Hinduism.

A hymn of glory let us sing! New hymns throughout the world shall ring: Alleluia! Christ, by a road before untrod, Ascends unto the throne of God. (The Venerable Bede)

The proper way for Jesus and Buddha to meet is for those of us who represent these traditions today to enter into dialogue over the similarities and differences in our approaches to faith. Due in part to the writings and work of Shirley MacLaine, one of the growing issues that we need to discuss is the phenomenon known as trance channeling. The basic idea is that disembodied souls or spirit guides can communicate with us "from the other side," giving us knowledge of spiritual truths. Believers in trance channeling tend to suggest that Jesus himself was very much like one of these spirit guides. The problem (and point for dialogue) is that this concept of spirit guides is based on the specifically Eastern notion that mind or consciousness is more real than physical or historical reality, while the Christian tendency is to affirm - in a deliberately paradoxical way - that both the spiritual and physical worlds are equally real and important. In the texts relating to the resurrection appearances and the ascension of Jesus, there is a constant, unresolved tension between describing them as bodily events and as spiritual events. To describe Jesus, therefore, as simply a divine entity who could flit about at will to India or appear in various forms as Buddha, as Jesus, as Mohammed ... is not so much for Jesus to meet Buddha as for Jesus to surrender his identity to Buddha, to become just another "enlightened one," just another spiritual guide among many.

In other words, when Jesus is defined so completely in terms of the Buddhist worldview, Jesus ceases to exist as a unique, historical symbol, as the very thing that the New Testament writers clearly want him to be! Jesus may be more than an historical figure, but the stories about him are clearly and deliberately set in a particular historical context. Tha ascension hymn attributed to The Venerable Bede, who lived around A.D. 700, emphasizes the unique identity and role of Jesus by using the poetic image of Christ ascending "... by a road before untrod." We do not hinder religious unity by being honest about the uniqueness of Jesus, of Buddha, of Confucius.

Buddhist-Christian dialogue can be extremely helpful in clarifying issues within the Christian community. In 1980 a major theological journal devoted an entire issue to the topic of "Lutherans in Crisis over Justification by Faith." One of the points made was that the emphasis of the charismatic and pentecostal movements upon the subjective experience of "feeling the spirit" is in danger of transforming Christian faith into a Buddhist-style emphasis on spiritual knowledge, at the expense of the ethical concerns embodied in the doctrine of justification by grace through faith. In other words, Christianity is always tempted to give up its distinctive contribution to theology - the radical notion of grace as the unconditional love of God for sinners, which motivates them to do their best in an urgent yet relaxed frame of mind - and to exchange it for a more general or typical notion of "spiritual knowledge" and "spiritual feelings." Christians are tempted to enter the business of channeling esoteric knowledge (whether through spiritual entities or not is "immaterial," pun intended), and to give up on channeling grace.

This issue of the role of ethics in religion is probably the single most important point of discussion between Buddhists and Christians. Take, for example, the currently popular subject of so-called "New Age Higher Consciousness." New age awareness of the "higher self" can easily turn into a selfish preoccupation with our own ego. But instead of being an excuse for self-absorption, the search for our higher self can encourage us to find ourselves by relating to and caring about others. We can learn the difference between being self-centered and being a centered self, between selfishness and true self-love. One of the beauties of Buddhism is its doctrine of the "Middle Path," which advises us to find ourselves somewhere between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-denial.

Many people who come for pastoral counseling need more than anything else to become engaged with the world outside of themselves - to care about someone else, to get a job or make a commitment that gives them less time to worry about their personal problems and hang-ups. My grandmother understood this. She had many problems of her own, but she surmounted them by helping others and concentrating on their needs. She especially enjoyed visiting lonely shut-ins.

We discussed reincarnation on Easter Sunday, but since, together with the doctrine of Karma, the logic of reincarnation is the primary key to understanding the Buddhist/Hindu attitude toward ethics, we need to look at a few more angles on what the Indians call Karma-Samsara. One of the main appeals of this twin doctrine is that it offers to explain how life is always fair in the long run. The problem with this concept of the relationship between the "now" and the "not yet," from the Judeo-Christian perspective, is that it is too patient. By maintaining that we have virtually endless time and infinite, multiple identies through which we can work out our karma, reincarnational thinking encourages a relatively laissez faire or detached attitude toward issues of social justice and ethics. In contrast, the Christian attitude is characterized by a certain impatience, as illustrated by a cartoon I saw recently in which a little guy is looking up to heaven and saying, "Er ... in case you haven't noticed ... the meek are still getting creamed down here ..." As we have noted many times, the whole point of the Christian emphasis on grace is to keep us from giving in to despair as we struggle to make ourselves and the world all that it is meant to be.

Perhaps the greatest danger of reincarnational logic is the impression it gives that we deserve everything we experience in this life. If karma is the reason for everything that happens, then we must accept our fate without objection or resistance. The danger is that we will become "moralistic" and, for example, blame people who become sick, saying they have done wrong or have not developed enough spiritual consciousness to transcend disease. When Newsweek did its issue on "The Faces of AIDS," it quoted James Hurley, an AIDS sufferer: "There's no such thing as being an innocent or guilty victim of AIDS. That anyone has this disease is a tragedy." Diseases like AIDS remind us of the dangers of moralizing and judgmentalism. The issue must never become one of fairness - of explaining how we deserve our fate - but rather one of identifying with suffering and struggling to overcome it.

Taking language about the Devil literally may seem to be a way of dealing seriously with the reality of evil, but like the doctrine of Karma-Samsara, it tends to make us moralistic rather than ethical. We can get so wrapped up in being appalled over satanic lyrics in heavy metal rock music, for example, that we miss the real issues involved - many having to do with adolescent psychology. The music may be nothing more than an expression of the typical adolescent need to begin the process of establishing independence from ones parents (often by deliberately trying to shock them). This process has become more and more difficult in our society, which, for educational and other reasons, encourages "prolonged adolescence." Or for some people this type of music may be simply a way of blowing off steam. (Remember the tongue-in-cheek song "Fie on Goodness!" from Camelot?) For still others, an interest in satanic lyrics or movies that glorify the occult and horror, may indicate psychological problems: a poor self-image, low self-esteem, or (a subtle but major problem with many troubled young people) a fear of success. (Yes ... some people are so accustomed to failure that the prospect of doing well frightens them into deliberate sabotage of their efforts, and into outrageous glorification of everything perceived as negative and destructive!)

The overall point is that just as movies like The Exorcist can distract us (with a lot of literalistic, satanic mumbo-jumbo) from the real ethical issues in our society, so too, religion that puts more emphasis on knowledge/mind/consciousness than on ethics can lead us down the primrose path of escapism, detachment and moralism. While this criticism may sound harsh, it must be remembered that since believing in Jesus means to believe that the salvation of "all nations" is in God's hands, such criticism in no way implies that non-Christian religions are worthless and false. The criticism is intended only to foster dialogue.

We haven't said much about the religions of the Far East, but it is also important to carry on a dialogue between Jesus and Confucius. The Chinese concept of the Tao provides us with many valuable insights. It reminds us eloquently that our efforts to define God are necessarily inadequate. It recognizes the paradoxical nature of life - especially the paradox of faith as something both to be actively achieved (yin) and passively received (yang). And it emphasizes the importance of being involved in the community of humankind, in society.

The problematic element in Confucianism is that it fosters such total reverence for cultural community and traditions that ethics is reduced to little more than etiquette! Moses and the prophets were able to criticize even the most popular opinions or officials of their day on the basis of ethical principles that transcended mere cultural prejudices. It remained for Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, to make this kind of ethical thought and critisim legitimate in China.

Narrow-minded, culturally biased moralism - often masquerading under the guise of "common sense" - frequently produces the opposite of ethics. It can cause a lot of injustice and pain. In our own society I think of people who are embarrassed about medical procedures simply because of the parts of the body involved. They act as if it is virtually sinful to have certain diseases or medical problems when, in fact, the whole situation is morally neutral. I think in particular of a young man like Saul Lubaroff who suffers from Tourette's syndrome, a strange disease that causes a person to go into uncontrollable spasms of shouting obscenities and insults. How many folks will moralistically rush to judgment when they encounter Saul? I think also of the down-to-earth hard work done by skilled psychiatric social workers to rehabilitate emotionally disturbed children. They have remarkable success precisely because they avoid naive moralizing and instead help children to work through their feelings. Once the child begins to understand his or her feelings, then behavior usually improves.

Another example of the way in which moralistic attitudes are counterproductive to ethical intentions is provided in this letter to the editor of The Lutheran magazine: "I am concerned about the decision (of the Bishops) requiring pastors upon divorce to express intent or willingness to resign. I am clergy, and I am divorced. Through nine months of marital therapy my former wife and I discovered we are best friends, but for us it wasn't enough to sustain a ten-year marriage. We were completely open with my congregation ... After the divorce my relationship with my parishioners deepened. They then were able to tell me their own troubles more easily. To suggest resignation from the parish and possible removal from the clergy roll to divorcing clergy doesn't speak well of the capacity for mutual ministry in the parish. This also would cloud any marital therapy process. With one's job at stake in addition to one's marriage, decision-reaching is more difficult, and what should happen may not."

Instead of shallow moralism, the real Jesus comes to us with a message of morality under grace. He symbolizes the ongoing process of struggling with ethics and social issues. He teaches us to reject what someone once called "the stupid game of 'Bible Land' " in which we naively model our ethical judgments on what happened to characters in the Bible. Rather than simply trying to mimic the cultural mores of Bible times, we are set free by grace to "do ethics," to struggle with ethical issues as Jesus did - maintaining a sense of humor (not of passive detachment!), and using the Scriptures for guidance but not as a straightjacket. In so doing, we continue to be channels of God's grace.