Roger Ray, pastor
Inter-Faith Sunday June 2, 2013
Christian In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets Matthew 7:12
Confucianism Do not do to others what you would not like yourself. Then there will be no resentment against you, either in the family or in the state. Analects 12:2
Buddhism Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. Udana-Varga 5,1
Hinduism This is the sum of duty; do naught onto others what you would not have them do unto you. Mahabharata 5,1517
Islam No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself. Sunnah
Judaism What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellowman. This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary. Talmud, Shabbat 3id
Taoism Regard your neighbor's gain as your gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss. Tai Shang Kan Yin P'ien
Zoroastrianism That nature alone is good which refrains from doing another whatsoever is not good for itself. Dadisten-I-dinik, 94,5
For most of my life I have heard people trying to level the religious playing field by saying, "Everyone in every religion is after the same goal." And by that, they mean, "we are all just trying to get to heaven." And while I appreciate the fact that the people who say that may be trying defuse religious rivalry, the truth is that not all people in all religions are trying to get to heaven or even believe in heaven as traditional western Christians have conceived of it.
I don't want to be crass about this..... no matter how much many of you enjoy it when I am a bit crass....
Still, forgive me for saying it just this way, but embracing a religious faith so that you can go to heaven is not terribly different from getting married for all of the free sex. I hope that most married people do have a happy and fulfilling sex life but my best guess is that one of the most absolutely certain ways to make sure that you don't have a successful sex life in marriage, is to get married for all of the free sex. I'm not expert on these things, but I suspect that once that motivation becomes clear that there are going to be a lot of nights alone on the sofa in that marriage.
I resist ascribing anthropomorphic motivations to God, but I suspect that anyone who approached religion for the entirely self-serving potential heavenly reward might be met by the Lord at the Pearly Gates and be handed a blanket and a pillow and be told to go away and sleep on a sofa somewhere else, perhaps in a place where the air-conditioning hasn't worked in, well, forever.
What has often been disturbing to the mainstream Christian west, whose only motivation to be religious at all is the hope of eternal life in heaven, is the realization that there is no mention of eternal life or heaven in the Hebrew Bible at all.... And for the most part, no such concept exists in reformed Judaism today nor is it a motivating notion in Buddhism or Confucianism and there is nothing like heaven in Hinduism that a western Christian would recognize.
As much as it may disappoint many of our local religious peers, I find it to be very doubtful that the historical Jesus ever said a word or wasted a moment thinking about any life other than the one we are experiencing right now. To quote the musician, Tim Minchin, "Isn't THIS enough? Just.. this.. world? Just this.. beautiful, complex Wonderfully unfathomable.. natural.. world? How does it so fail to hold our attention That we have to diminish it with the invention Of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?"
When religion had gone so dormant as to be almost extinct in early colonial America, there came a revival remembered now as "the Second Great Awakening" in which Methodist and Presbyterian evangelists rode their horses into the west preaching a message of fear of hell and lust for heaven and the memory of that evangelical push has haunted modern Christians, asking us to ignore what we see, feel and know in favor of the product of over active imaginations cursed by neurotic feelings of guilt.
Take away the manipulations of guilt and fear, both the threats and the unsubstantiated promises of pie in the sky in the bye and bye and what is left of religion? People who have been, for generations, held by the throat by churches that had nothing to offer but self interest and neurotic guilt are inclined to whisper, "nothing, nothing at all." It is an understandable first response considering the conditioning we've been put through.
But if you ask a couple who has been married for 20, 30, 40 or 50 years if it is their sex life that makes them stay together now, you would be lucky to walk away with your dental work intact.... It would be an insulting, obscene, and stupid question...... which is the reaction you would get from a spiritual leader in almost any of the world's religions if you asked them if going to heaven was their goal.
I had been preaching for 15 years when Drury University's religion department first asked me to teach a course entitled, "The Life and Teachings of Jesus." Preaching involves taking short passages of scripture and trying to apply that to current events and life but I am ashamed to say that prior to trying to write my first course syllabus for that class 15 years ago that I had never tried to look at the body of the teachings of Jesus as a whole.
What was the central message of Jesus? What was he about? What motivated him? What was he trying to teach? Or, perhaps, what was he trying to correct?
I am indebted to the early work of Marcus Borg for showing me first how to read the gospels by looking at the primary conflict in the gospels. Borg showed me that the teachings of Jesus were generally presented in contrast to a prevailing religious system of piety. Jesus was offering an alternative to a religion based on appeasement of God by living pure lives. Jesus, Borg says, was the teacher of radical compassion.
Piety is basically self-centered. It is a religion based on the question, "What do I have to do to keep God from punishing me and to earn divine rewards?" Compassion is other centered. Compassion asks us to feel what others feel, to understand, appreciate, sympathize, and empathize with the plight of those who hunger, who suffer violence, who are in need.
Once you understand Jesus as being the teacher, not simply of compassion as an alternative to piety, but as a teacher of a kind of radical compassion.... A sell all you own and give it to the poor kind of radical teacher.... A teacher who was willing to stand up to both a violently oppressive dominant religion and a violently occupying empire, unafraid even to die if that it what it took to both demonstrate and teach radical compassion then you become liberated from all of the dogma, creeds, beliefs and theological gymnastics that never really made any sense in the first place.
One of the books I use in my college class on Western Religions is by a Muslim scholar, Reza Aslan, who says that monotheism is the root cause of all religious conflict and wars. Once any religion decides that there can be only one God then their way of understanding that God cannot bear any rivals. Extremists then feel motivated to fight, even to kill, to defend their true religion.
He didn't get to live long enough to really flesh out where he was going, but from his Nazi prison cell, Dietrich Bonheoffer began to dream of Christianity without religion.... Without dogma, creeds, beliefs or theology.... He spoke of being Christian as a way of living.
Thomas Merton, who began his writing career as one of the most Roman Catholic of all Roman Catholic writers, progressed through his life into the realization that the life Jesus taught was all that mattered, and that the beliefs of his church and all religions needed to meet on the marvelous higher ground of the good life, the life of loving compassion.
No religion was invented by God. No religious text was written by or even inspired by God.
All of our religions, all of our sacred texts, reflect human efforts to express our highest thoughts, our greatest dreams, our most profound longings and hopes. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it frightening wrong.
There are great moral insights in all of the world's religions and each also contains reflections of our most evil and dark characteristics. It would be nice if one was right and the others were wrong so that we could just consume one entirely and never have to think again but that is not the world we live in. We have to think, struggle, grow..... we have to reject some of our old beliefs in order to make space for new insights and we have to be willing to both admit that we have been wrong and to change.
In the end, it becomes increasingly obvious that it was never about beliefs in the first place.... It was always about the life.... The life of loving generously, consciously forgiving and in showing radical compassion.
And when we look at virtually all of the religions of the world, as we see in our readings today from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism and Taoism... the heart of the Golden Rule is there. The inability to see the inherent value of other people, to feel their pain, to desire to make the world better for those who suffer..... that is hell enough isn't it?
To embrace a religion that is love and to live a life defined by compassion in a fabulous, mysterious, beautiful and complex universe, that is heaven enough for me.
