My Jesus: Meditations on Gospel Texts

My Jesus is a collection of twenty-three sermons--that is to say good news twenty-three times twenty-three jets of freedom--preached in French Protestant parishes or on the radio. I say my Jesus not out of pride but with humility. For I know well that this Jesus is not the Jesus of everyone and moreover that it is not a question of imposing it on anyone. This Jesus is not the Jesus of the historians or the scholars neither the Jesus of the ecclesiastical hierarchies and other guardians of theological correctness. He certainly is disputable and impertinent but this Jesus is mine and I live from him. The sermons ask four questions that are unsettling for any preacher and congregation. How can the message of Jesus still address us today? What does Jesus teach us about God that is truly new? How should we receive the gospel of non-violence of the Sermon on the Mount? How can we remain a Church of Easter Day? It may appear that I am proposing answers to these four questions. In fact my deepest desire is that the pertinence of their challenge not be forgotten; beyond that it is up to each one to live with these difficult questions as he or she understands them. -Louis Simon This is preaching at its most basic and most profound. Most basic because all of these sermons are rooted and find their life in biblical texts about Jesus from the Gospels. Most profound because Simons sermons like good parables consistently upend our expectations and help us see Jesus--and our life in Jesus--in a whole new way. They are fresh disarming and deeply theological. -Leonora Tubbs Tisdale Clement-Muehl Professor of Homiletics Yale Divinity School Jesus renown imprisons him laments Louis Simon the author of this startling collection of freshly translated sermons. After observing the difficulty of meeting Jesus face to face Simon the preacher sighs Alas. As hard as it is to hear the Gospel afresh it breaks free again and again in these pages. Layers of religious pretension gooey piety and encrusted orthodoxies are cracked open by the piercing prose--nearly poetry--of this French preacher. -David M. Greenhaw President Eden Theological Seminary Beginners preach from the obscure texts; veterans from the more familiar ones. Louis Simon combines the best of both by making the home shores strange and obscuring the familiar so that it can become fresh again. This book of virtuoso sermons may well be the best cure for claustrophobic Christianity out there. Pick up My Jesus and start anywhere and find out why two distinguished philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur and Charles Courtney would invest their talents in making these masterpieces available to a wider audience. -Leonard Sweet Professor Drew University and George Fox University This remarkable collection of newly translated sermons comes from another time and place-Protestant France of two generations ago. Reading good sermons from outside ones context tends to jostle all the current assumptions how familiar Bible texts should be understood and preached. In sermon after sermon Louis Simon takes the familiar turns it on its head and leaves the reader nodding and whispering Just so just so. -Michael L. Lindvall Senior Minister of the Brick Presbyterian Church New York City Louis Simon is a pastor of the Reformed Church of France. Beginning in the early 1960s hundreds of students and intellectuals flocked to the parish of Massy-Palaiseau (near Paris) to hear his sermons. He later served in Montpellier where he now lives in retirement. Charles Courtney retired Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Drew Theological School regularly attended services at Massy-Palaiseau while a Fulbright student from 1962 to 1964. A specialist in phenomenology he has degrees from Monmouth (IL) College Harvard Divinity School and Northwestern University.