Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Dec. 2, 2012 Advent 1
Psalm 25:8-10
8 Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in the way. 9 He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.10 All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.
Teaching the same university class, semester after semester, can be a bit like being trapped in the movie, Groundhog Day. Most semesters I teach a class for Drury University on world religions. Every semester I get a new batch or largely Midwestern students who have grown up with the assumption that the Bible was written by the finger of God and that their evangelical Christian religion is the only true religion and that all other world religions are some kind of silly idolatry.
Many leave my class still believing that, only adding to their list of beliefs that Roger Ray is a raving heretic. For those who have the courage to look seriously at the history and evolution of religion, there can be some very painful dawning realizations. The Bible did not fall to earth, leather bound, from heaven. Clearly, ancient agricultural and earth religions influenced the development of both eastern and western religions.
Zoroastrianism obviously influenced ancient Judaism to the point that you can really talk about Judaism as two different religions. The ancient Canaanite religion before the exile, and a post-exilic faith that picked up entirely new ideas about angels, demons, the devil, heaven and hell that had not been a part of the more ancient kind of Judaism. And you can see that Judaism, Christianity and Islam influenced one another and they all borrowed traits from neighboring cultures.
Some of my students insist that religions that do not have a formal doctrine of how to go to heaven and how to avoid going to hell are not really religions.
Especially religions that do not have a concrete conception of the nature of God, such as Buddhism, some aspects of Hinduism and certainly Confucian and Taoist faiths, often are not, through a western lens, thought to really be a religion. Now, Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists and Confucians think that they have a religion but they don't pass the smell test for Western evangelicals whose primary interest is in certainty regarding the afterlife.
Of course, you can have a religion without some anthropomorphic deity in the clouds. This may come as a surprise to many evangelicals and it may not be a satisfactory religion for them, but a religion is really an expression of absolute concerns, your highest values, your most treasured truths, beliefs, even myths and rituals.
I have, for example, owned a few Honda motorcycles over the past 30 years and several people have suggested that I ditch my Japanese bikes and buy a Harley, to which I always reply, "No thanks, I don't need a Harley. I already have a religion."
I'm not seriously saying that anything can be a religion but I am saying that you can have a religion without an imaginary friend in the clouds. In fact, I prefer forms of spirituality that deal with what can be known rather than focusing too much on what cannot be known.
Some say that there is a place of eternal torment where those who are not saved will be punished in an afterlife.
I say that there are 700 people living under bridges and in the cars around Springfield, there are more than a 1000 children who have been taken from their parents in this county and placed in foster care to protect them from the people who are suppose to care for them. There are about 10,000 addicts in our area, 20,000 unemployed and half of our children are growing up in poverty...... don't waste my time with your speculations about a hell you have not seen and you do not know anything about because I can show you a hell that we know and that we can change through our action as a spiritual community.
A religion that addresses what cannot be known, cannot be seen and for which there is not a shred of proof or evidence but ignores the very real circumstances of life is not much of a religion to me.... It is a kind of spiritual anesthesia but if you put a Christian who is obsessed with how to believe the right things in order to go to heaven in a set of spiritual scales with a Buddhist who is concerned with showing compassion, leading a life of peace and self denial in the interests of others and I think that you will quickly see that there is a better case to be made for a non-theistic belief system like Buddhism being a real religion over the Christian evangelical who has little to show for their faith other than magical thinking and a lack of orientation to reality. I hope that I am not being vague about this.
One of the most difficult aspects of moving from an evangelical faith towards a more progressive faith is just this: It is the frightening move from false certainty to honest uncertainty. Fundamentalist religions of all stripes offer absolutes, they offer the security of certainty..... now, it is not an honest certainty.... In fact, in most cases, you pretty well have to assassinate your brains to keep up belief that a snake talked to Eve in the garden, that Jonah lived in a fish's stomach, that Jesus walked on water, or that Mohammed flew up to heaven on a horse or that Joseph Smith found magical golden tablets buried in the hills of New York.
The great Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, said, "There are two ways to be deceived. The first is by believing what it not true and the second is to fail to believe what is true. Honest spirituality embraces what is true and rejects what is false.... And should be at least suspicious of any truth claim that cannot be honestly known.
People will try to force themselves to believe things at a synagogue, church or mosque that would be an insult to their intelligence anywhere else. But once you give up on trying to act like you are certain about things that cannot be known then we find ourselves becoming literally dizzy with the fact that we no longer have a painted cathedral roof over our heads or a reliable floor under our feet.
So a student will insist, "If Jesus is not the only son of God how can you know that anything he said is true? How can you know what is really good and what is really evil?" And that is the rub.... You cannot abdicate from the personal responsibility for thinking and even when you try very hard, it remains entirely impossible to know anything with absolute certainty. There are things that are right in one age, in one set of circumstances that become evil in another.
We are left to existentially figure it out. We don't always arrive at the same conclusions. That is what makes some hard topics so hard. There are good and reasonable reasons to be opposed to abortion. There are good and reasonable reasons to defend a woman's right to manage her own reproductive life. There is no word from on high that resolves these issues.... Persons of conscience, persons of good will, the spiritual community, must try to grapple with these things and come up with the best possible answers we can.
Existentially, there are a few a priori truth claims from which we can function. I regard the field of ethics to revolve fundamentally around the highest value of discerning what is the greatest good for the largest number of people.
And so I tend to oppose government or economic systems that consolidate resources into the hands of a tiny elite leaving the majority of people in poverty. The relevant question for me, as a spiritual person, as a person of conscience is,
"What gives the greatest good for the largest number of people in a certain situation?" And sometimes that answer will be capitalist and sometimes it will be socialist, sometimes it will be communal.
When I was a kid the joke about communist idealists was that they didn't want to take over America because they depended upon us for food. Now, as much noise as we make about communism, we are funding our government with money borrowed from communist China. The world is not simple and we have to be able to think about the greatest good for the largest number of people without becoming too stagnant about any one way of thinking.
When it comes to religion, I am fond of the way that Karen Armstrong sums it up in her autobiography: "If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."
The Bible, for us, is a resource, it is a repository of ancient spiritual insight and wisdom, but you cannot quote scripture to prove anything or to give you certainty about modern issues of marriage, family, warfare, abortion, racism or gay rights. There is no way to avoid the hard work of figuring out what is faithful, what is ethical, what is right for us in our time and place.
We do that individually and we do that as a community, challenging, teaching and pushing one another into mature, healthy spirituality.
Institutional, rigid, doctrinal religious views can be helpful. A solid evangelical Sunday School education can encourage people to be honest, hard working, loyal to their spouse, law abiding and even generous and brave. But it can also keep women trapped in abusive relationships. Force women to have babies they are not prepared to love and care for. It can justify enslavement of minorities and oppression of gays and lesbians. It can lead people to fight unnecessary wars and to persecute those who are even slightly different in the most subtle of ways.
We believe that you can have the positive aspects of a healthy spiritual life without indulging in the abuses of a rigid, doctrinal monotheism. We believe that if we are committed to seeking the greatest good for the largest number of people, being willing to advocate for justice, to teach peace and to live lives of radical compassion that we will find ourselves in the embrace of the most holy religion imaginable.
This is not the last time you will hear me say these things but there is an old church tradition that says that the apostle John was the only one of the twelve who lived to die of old age.
It is said that he preached his last sermon to the church in Ephesus saying only these words that are found in 1 John:
7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
