Sermon
Is
that Religion I See in the Church
The Rev. Jack D. Bryant
First
Reading: Exodus 25:1-9 NRSV
The Lord said to Moses: Tell the Israelites to take for me an
offering; from all whose hearts prompt them to give you shall receive the
offering for me. This is the offering that
you shall receive from them: gold, silver,
and bronze, blue, purple, and crimson yarns and fine linen, goats’ hair, tanned
rams’ skins, fine leather, acacia wood, oil for the lamps, spices for the
anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, onyx stones and gems to be set in
the ephod and for the breastpiece. And have them make
me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them.
In accordance with all that I show you concerning the pattern of the
tabernacle and of all its furniture, so you shall make it.
Second
Reading: Genesis 11:5-9 NRSV
The Lord came down to see the city and
the tower, which mortals had built. And
the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and
there is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to
do will now be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they
will not understand one another’s speech.”
So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the
earth, and they left off building the city.
Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the
language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over
the face of all the earth.
Third
Reading: Sacred Choices – Daniel C. Maguire.
Now to define religion: Religion
is the response to the sacred. So
what is the sacred? The sacred is the
superlative of precious. It is the word
we use for that which is utterly and mysteriously precious in our
experience. Since there is no one who
finds nothing sacred, religion is all over the place. In the sacred, our experience of value goes
beyond all rational explanation. When we
talk about the sanctity of life, we are talking about this mysterious preciousness. Let me illustrate this with an example of
experiencing the sanctity of life that we can identify with.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous
philosopher of the twentieth century, wrote of how he was walking in a park in
Paris, late in his life. He met some
former students who had their three-month-old baby with them. Sartre took the smiling baby in his arms and
was overwhelmed with its literally priceless charm. He said he realized in that mystical moment
that if you took all the works of his life and put them on one side of a balancing
scale, then put this baby on the other side, his work would weigh as nothing
compared to the sacred preciousness
he held in his arms. This was a
religious experience. Now, Sartre was an
atheist. He would not explain the
sanctity of the baby’s value by talking about God, and yet he was responding to
the sacred. It was a religious moment.
Sermon
This last week I was
in St. Louis to participate in the installation of my colleague, The Rev.
Suzanne Meyer. In my absence, it was
good fortune to have the Rev. Gerald Davis fill in for me. There was only one problem. When Gerald called to tell me the title of
his sermon – “Is that Religion I See on the Public Square” – I thought, “What a
great title.” I realized I wanted to
hear what he had to say. But duty
called, and I went to St. Louis. But his
sermon title – and the sermon I heard at the installation – got me to
thinking. Tension between church and
state has been a part of our country, of our culture, since colonial times. Today we face a new wave of pressure against
the wall of separation between church and state – and we need to be concerned
about that. We need to be constantly
aware of the role of religion in the public square – not to exclude it, but to
ensure that it fulfills its proper, constructive and essential role.
But as I thought about
religion in the public square, I began to think about something that has
troubled me for several years. I began
to think about the role of religion in our churches.
And have them make me
a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them.
In accordance with all that I show you concerning the pattern of the
tabernacle and of all its furniture, so you shall make it.
The divine commandment from Exodus says
we are to make a sanctuary, a tabernacle, that the divine presence might dwell
among us. I believe that divine presence
– the religious presence – is found in the awareness of the absolute other –
that other which existed before I was born and will continue to exist after I
am gone. I’m not sure what it is, but I
have experienced it. I experienced it
right here in the music this morning.
And I have experienced it in other times and places. Those experiences have changed my life. They are the religious experiences of my
life.
Every sanctuary, every temple, every holy
place – be it a mountain or this Great Hall – is made holy by the human
awareness of that divine presence, of that absolute other. Religion, therefore, is supposed to be in the
church. But how much religion is there
in the church today? Over the last two
hundred plus years, we have spent much time and energy on the question of
religion in the public square. But while
our attention has been thus focused, what has happened to religion in the
church?
If you go back a few hundred years, you
would discover that a person’s religious affiliation was not a question of
personal belief or conscience – it was a question of geography. What you believed was dictated by where you
lived. If your prince or king or queen
changed his or her religion, you woke up the next morning with a new religious
affiliation. For the vast majority of
people, religion was a question of obedience and submission. And if you didn’t like it, there was always
the stake and a fresh supply of wood. Or
if you lived in Boston, our own religious ancestors – before they came to
understand the importance of religious freedom – would gladly have supplied you
a noose – as they did in 1660 for Mary Dyer, the Quaker martyr.
Such attitudes went deeper than just
religion. They affected every aspect of
life – especially scholarship. The
purpose of scholarship was to catalogue and confirm what was already
known. Truth was self-evident. If the facts were at odds with the truth,
then obviously the facts were wrong. But
then something remarkable happened.
Heretical ideas began to blossom.
Scholarship began to change from a process of cataloguing what we know
to one of challenging and questioning the boundaries of knowledge, and to the
assertion of individual supremacy. No
one expressed these new ideas with greater eloquence – or with greater force –
than Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists of the nineteenth
century. “Every man alone is sincere,”
said Emerson. “At the entrance of a second
person, hypocrisy begins.” And listen to
this: “Society everywhere is in a
conspiracy against the humanity of every one of its members.”
In his time and in his place those were
words of liberation. Men and women were
to be freed from the tyranny of society, from the tyranny of an oppressive
community. Most especially, people were
to be freed from the bonds of religious tyranny that king and queens and the
structures of every human society had imposed on the world. Nineteenth Century Unitarianism took up the
words of Emerson: “Nothing is truly
sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” and made them a battle cry, if not
a creed.
But times change. We worry and fret about those who challenge
the wall of separation between church and state – and we do so with legitimate
concern, because they represent the old way that Emerson challenged. They represent the forces that would have us
once again make religion a matter of submission and obedience and deny the
right of individual conscience. But in
reality, the Transcendentalist movement has triumphed – and our society and our
churches reflect that triumph.
Compulsory school prayer is gone.
Judge Moore’s stone idol was removed from the Alabama Judicial
Building. Battles, necessary battles,
will continue to be fought, but radical individualism has triumphed – a triumph
that we see in every aspect of our culture.
We have not only religious individualism, everything is individualistic.
If you want Italian and she wants Chinese
– no problem – you can purchase individual sized servings for the
microwave. Go to the pizza parlor and you
can have an individual sized pizza. More
and more people have individual phones.
And thanks to federal regulation, we now have individual phone numbers
that we can transfer from one cell phone carrier to another. No one can take my telephone number away from
me. We also have individual addresses –
that’s what the Internet has brought us.
And we practice what Emerson preached, “No law can be sacred to me,
unless it’s a law of my nature.”
If you don’t believe the last part, go
home and look through your newspaper for the most recent stories about the
growing scandal in the Mutual Fund Industry.
Or think back to the Enron scandal.
And further back there are the robber barons of the Nineteenth
Century. The Neo-Con political movement
– with its demand for the cessation of government regulation of public behavior
– stands in the mainstream of the Emersonian
Tradition - “No law can be sacred to me, unless it’s a law of my nature.” And liberals do the same thing. Both liberals and neo-cons represent the triumph
of Emerson’s radical individualism.
Neo-cons declare there can be no regulation of any aspect of public life
– hence there must be unlimited political contributions – ensuring the best
government money can buy; and no regulation of the organization of capital –
ensuring that those who see themselves as a law unto themselves will be able to
loot the public at will. But liberals
tell us we must have no regulation of private life. No one can tell me what to do. I am an isolated monad, an island unto
myself. My use of recreational drugs
affects no one. Pay no attention to the
fact that it is private drug use by white liberals that funds the destruction
of black communities. After all, “No law
can be sacred to me, unless it’s a law of my nature.”
But Emerson may have had his greatest
influence on American religion – especially that unique strand of the American
religious tradition that we call Unitarianism and Universalism – that have
merged today into Unitarian Universalism.
Most people don’t know that Emerson began
his adult life as a Unitarian Minister.
After three short years as the minister of Second Church in Boston, he
left the ministry. His resignation was
prompted by a disagreement over the practice of communion. Emerson did not want to celebrate it. The church wanted it, so he resigned. I have my own theological concerns about
communion as practiced in Emerson’s church; but I believe it is revealing that
it was the practice of communion that prompted his departure from the ministry
– revealing, because the act of communion, more than any other ritual of
orthodox Christianity – symbolizes an underlying unity of the
congregation.
Emerson wanted nothing of that. He argued instead for a religion that was
purely individualistic. The only thing
that mattered was what the individual believed.
He saw the church – as well as the larger society – as, “everywhere . .
. in a conspiracy against the humanity of every one of its members.” In the nineteenth century, words of
liberation. In the twenty-first century,
words that have led us into a dead-end of radical, individualistic
religion. Freedom, reason, and
tolerance, are not the bywords of such a religion. Such a religion is characterized by the self
and only the self. The only standard for
truth is whether the individual accepts it.
It is an approach to religion that has reduced the religious vocabulary
– the theological vocabulary – down to just four words – the first person
pronouns of I, me, my, and mine – the word “I” being the replacement for
God.
And Emerson’s influence is not limited to
Unitarians. If you listen carefully to
the television evangelists you will hear a message that is surprisingly Emersonian. God
rules the Universe, but does so at the direction of human beings. God can act only in response to human
prayer. And by making your seed faith
offering and the appropriate prayers God will give you everything you want –
wealth, power, and health. The language
of God is preserved, but it is explicitly clear that God is here to serve
people, not people to serve God. They
offer a paraphrase of Emerson’s words:
Nothing is sacred except what I want.
This has produced a civic religion in our
country as a whole and in liberal churches in particular – that isn’t
religious. A “religion” – if you will –
that is not concerned with the sacred – because to recognize and speak of the
sacred, one must be able to open oneself to a sense of communion – of
connection – with that which is the other.
Within radical religious individualism, the other is acknowledged. We even speak of walking together. But we do so only to acknowledge our
tolerance – a tolerance that reflects not a religious sensibility, but a
political toleration. Just as there are
those who want to impose religious answers to secular questions in the public
square, the incessant demand for radical religious individualism – has evolved
within the liberal church to insist on secular answers to religious
questions. With our limited vocabulary
of I, me, my, and mine, we are losing the ability to invoke the sacred. For the most part, we can speak only of
political rights. And we have reached
the point, in our society as a whole, at which, in order to determine a
person’s religion, we need no longer look to geography, as we did four hundred
years ago, or conscience, as we did a hundred years ago, we need only look to
how a person votes to have a good idea as to their religion. The exceptions to that are wonderful – and
growing increasingly rare with every passing day.
I cannot think of a better example of
this than the current controversy over abortion rights. The liberal position, the liberal rhetoric,
on abortion speaks in a political monotone.
The issue is understood as being about rights. We – and I deliberately include myself – we
say it is a constitutional question of a woman’s right to choose. That is my own political position. But why are we unable to articulate a
religious position, a theological argument, based on our experience of the
other that is called the sacred, of that other that is called the divine? If it is only a question of rights, if it is
only a question of politics, then it is a matter to be settled by majority vote
– and it is entirely appropriate for those who oppose it to sponsor a constitutional
amendment to that end – and supporters of a woman’s right to choose have no
grounds to object – except by working for the political end of turning out
votes.
A religious response would require us to
look beyond ourselves, to look beyond the words I, me, my and mine. A religious response would require us to
enter into dialogue with the other, the sacred, the divine, that which existed
before we were born, and will exist when all that we know is gone. It would require us to harken
back to the language of Jefferson who spoke not just of political rights, but
of inalienable rights derived from God.
It would require us to address the abortion issue as a religious
issue. It would require us to listen to
that description of Sartre, to think of the times when we have looked on the
face of a child and experienced the sacred and ask ourselves to find a way to
bring that experience into harmony with the woman’s right to choose.
I believe the time has come for us to
look beyond Transcendentalism. It was a
great and powerful set of ideas in its time.
But times have changed. The great
threat we face today is not that of a society that conspires against the
humanity of the individual, but of an individualism that conspires against its
own humanity. The challenge we face
today is not how to separate the individual from society, but how to reunite
individuals with society. The challenge
we face today is how to create a new communion – not the old communion that
Emerson rejected, but a communion of practice and language that can unite us in
a mutual consciousness of the sacred – a mutual consciousness that can be the
force that binds us together – because religion is – in the literal meaning of
the word’s origin – that which binds us together.
It is the great challenge we face as a
religious movement. I believe we must
preserve and protect the right to individual conscience. The problem is that Transcendentalism – which
freed us from religion as submission – has left us destitute of a common
religious vocabulary, condemning us to the same curse as the Tower of Babel.
I believe the words of liberation that we
need to hear today are those words that will call us into a community of a
shared language of reverence, a community where we will walk together, a
community that will recognize that we need not think alike in order to love
alike – but also a community that moves beyond debate – no matter how friendly
it is – to the discovery of a communion of experience – a communion of the
experience of the sacred.
Sartre took the smiling baby in his arms
and was overwhelmed with its literally priceless charm. He said he realized in that mystical moment
that if you took all the works of his life and put them on one side of a balancing
scale, then put this baby on the other side, his work would weigh as nothing
compared to the sacred preciousness
he held in his arms.
Have you had that experience? I had that experience when I held my two
infant sons in my arms for the first time.
Years later I put my feelings into words:
Blue eyed wonder;
Tiny hands and feet;
Joy of my heart, love of my life.
and these words, too,
Cartwheels, head over heels,
Elvish grin and tossled
hair,
You stole my heart.
I remember the meaning and purpose of
life every time I see a newborn baby.
I remember that life is its own purpose.
Such
experiences do not come everyday. Too
often we encounter their opposite. We
find our sense of the sacred not just disrupted, but broken and shattered by
the reality of everyday life. That’s why
I believe we need the church – a church filled with religion. In part it is to have someone who will walk
with us and comfort us through the disruptions of life, through those times
when the sacred seems gone forever. But
political, psychological, and ethical justifications and explanations aren’t
enough. We need the church – the
communion of the church – to help us know that despite all the disruptions of
our lives, that the world – as William Clebsch
described the meaning of the life of William James – is, "for all its
darkness and calamity, an eminently hospitable home for the human
spirit." We need the church to be
that place where we may discover the peace that passes understanding. We need the church to be that place where we
can hear the message of universalism that the human heart longs to hear: “That all souls are mine, saith
the Lord.” That the disruption in our
lives might be healed – if but for a moment – so that we can look around and
see in the faces of our brothers and our sisters a sacred reality that outweighs
all the works of our lives.
Amen.