Roger Ray, D.Min.
It happened again that a certain stranger came before Shammai and said to him:Most semesters I teach a course on Western Religions for Drury University. The course begins with Zoroastrianism and from that early Persian influence, we talk about the chain of evolution from Persia to the familiar modern religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I don't expect my students to remember very much about the seemingly exotic rituals and beliefs of Zoroastrianism but there is a core teaching that I hope will stay with them.
--"I will become a proselyte providing you teach me the whole Torah while I'm standing on one foot."
(Shammai) knocked him down with the builder's rule in his hand.
(The stranger) came before Hillel, who made him a proselyte.
He told him:
--"What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.
That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go, learn (it)!"
From the Babylonian Talmud
Zoroastrianism teaches that the good life is lived by having three things: right thoughts, right speech and right actions. I tell my classes that 2500 years of theological evolution has not added much to those three injunctions. Like the story of the first century rabbi, Hillel, who taught a gentile that the whole of the Jewish faith is summed up in a version of what appears in one form or another in all of the great religions of the world, "What is undesirable to you, don't do to anyone else."
I think that it is helpful to be able to distill our faith tradition down to very brief proverbs. Buddhism teaches detachment from greed and lust. Islam holds both chastity and charity as core values.
Judaism revolves around concepts of justice and mercy. Christianity teaches radical compassion. But you can almost describe this sort of synopsis as being little more than "bumper sticker" spirituality.
If you ask yourself the most serious question, "What is it about your religion that you desperately want to pass on to the next generation?" you know that you need to find a way to express what we hold dear in a vehicle that will be evidently valuable and worth preserving.
It was not long after we started this church that young parents began to ask the question, "Do you offer any classes for children?" When you don't have a denomination or a specific tradition, that's a lot harder to answer than you might think. I ordered samples of Sunday School material from the usual suspects: the Unitarian Universalists, the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, the Presbyterian and Methodist publishing houses and the Unity movement. What we specifically wanted to avoid was indoctrination into any one sect and what we found in the literature of what we thought would be kid-friendly denominations were all very obviously designed specifically to indoctrinate.
Denominations are dying. They have outlived their usefulness and yet no institution is ever willing to see it's self go out of existence without a fight. So each denomination's materials seemed to have the underlying purpose of making sure that the children who grow up in their churches will never leave them.... A program that has failed terribly for a couple of generations but that obvious fact has not yet affected denominational publishing houses.
Thankfully, the Center for Progressive Christianity has made a noteworthy attempt in publishing "A Joyful Path," a series of Sunday School lessons for elementary students that focuses on behaviors more than they focus on beliefs. It is not a perfect bit of curriculum but it sure is a step in the right direction.
We want to teach ethics without either using the motivational carrot of heaven or the stick of hell. Without either fear or guilt, without any thought of personal reward, we want to pass along to the next generation a healthy spirituality that can inspire them to grow into what we would call "good people." Though, for me, "good" is always influenced by what Leon Bloy meant when he said that any Christian who is not a hero is a pig.
We are not interested in creating Baptists or Episcopalians; we're not even concerned about whether they choose to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. We want to pass along the values of a healthy spiritual life, whatever that is for each of them.
We may have a valuable lesson to be learned from the church of the Reformation era when Catholics were regularly inspired by reading stories about the lives of the saints and Protestants were educated in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs. They, of course, promoted the lives of people who died defending their virginity or in evangelical zeal but we should rehearse the lives of our modern saints who gave their lives as modern prophets of justice, tolerance, mercy and peace.
Our church is adorned with images of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Archbishop Romero, Black Elk and Cesar Chavez.
Our children should know how Sojourner Truth fought to end slavery, how Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood up to the Nazis. They need to know that even in the darkest days of our history, there were thinkers like Henry David Thoreau who were able to articulate a vision for how we could all be changed.
In our day we are way too interested in tearing down leaders, focusing on their clay feet, making ourselves feel better about ourselves. But for all of the well-known faults of someone like Lyndon Johnson, our children should know how the Voters' Rights Act was passed. They should hear about when our nation waged war on poverty before we started waging war on the poor. We should tell stories about people like Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn who stood up to the powerful to speak the truth.
We should make certain that our children know the stories of modern saints like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela. And we should tell them the truth, not the white washed versions told only after they are dead. Cities that now have a Martin Luther King highway never invited King to visit their communities and usually did what they could to keep him away. He was investigated and threatened by the FBI, jailed frequently and held in contempt by many of the people who now speak of him as if they supportive of him all along.
Nelson Mandela was officially considered to be a terrorist by President Ronald Regan who resisted sanctions and divestment of apartheid South Africa. Now, nearly a generation since Mandela was released from the prison where he was tortured and forced into hard labor for 27 years, everyone speaks of him as a modern saint but we must not forget that what made him important was not just because he lead South Africa in a peaceful reconciliation of the races.
He was in prison because he had started a militant opposition to the white government. He was kept in prison only because he refused to renounce violence as a means of overthrowing that government. He was nearly blinded by his 27 years on a island prison where he worked breaking rocks in heat that was often over 110 degrees but he would not renounce violence because he refused to surrender his human right to fight for freedom.
You will not hear in his eulogies today that he was a sharp critic of the racism in America and of our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and that he was a friend to Fidel Castro in opposition of American foreign policy. But we should tell our children the truth. The path to being a prophet is not simply a matter of talking about love and forgiveness even if those are our primary goals.
Jesus was a threat to the Roman Empire.... That's why they killed him. King was a threat to American apartheid, that's why he was so often beaten and jailed. Mandela was a threat to the economic and civil oppression of the black population of South Africa and he was thought of as a terrorist before he was thought of as a saint.
Our generation makes heroes out of rock stars and professional athletes but we tend to want to tear down spiritual leaders and political reformers. We need to get over that. My New Testament professor at Vanderbilt, Daniel Patte, enjoined us to "preach the church to the church." We should tell our own stories to our children.
They were born into a world with integrated schools, integrated neighborhoods, and equal opportunity employment. We were not born into that world.... But some of us made the world change.
Our children should know that Mel and Ruth Miller turned their own home into a miniature United Nations, adopting children of color fifty years ago when doing so meant losing friends, jobs and personal safety.
Our children who have two mommies or two daddies might assume that this is normal but many of us marched in the streets and demanded equal rights for their families and have lost jobs, friends and suffered death threats for doing so. They should know that members of our church serve and sacrifice for the homeless, for the rural poor of Nicaragua. They should know that in the room where they get refreshments every week that members lead meetings on week days to help alcoholics and addicts to recover their lives.
Forgive me President Kennedy, but we both curse the darkness and light candles. Our children should know that we expect great things from them. We want them to be happy and successful. We want their lives to be full of joy and love but we are not raising them to be a generation of happy consumers. We are raising them to become heroes and to do that, we must show them how it is done.
