Nit: Halfway to somewhere, but that somewhere ain't Lisp.
I'm under-rested and under-caffeinated, but the only thing I can think of that I'd call an intentional similarity between the two languages is the fact they're both garbage collected.
I'd agree with him, given that this statement was about programmers and Java really did open the floodgates for a diversity of programming languages to become accepted, or at least tolerated.
The Java language itself, however, is not very close to Lisp at all.
Smalltalk would be a good non-snarky answer and one with some basis in history, although Smalltalk seems to have been a much stronger influence over the JVM than the Java language.
I'm under-rested and under-caffeinated, but the only thing I can think of that I'd call an intentional similarity between the two languages is the fact they're both garbage collected.