Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
"Make no mistake about it - enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imaged to be true."Adyashanti
A young neighbor to my former parish visited our Sunday morning service one week and immediately asked for an appointment to come talk with me. He was clearly agitated when he walked into my office and he wasted no time getting down to what was on his mind. "Who do you think you are to have so many people in your church who are obviously homosexuals and you are telling them that it is OK with God to be gay?"
He was angry but also very upset. He had been a lifelong active church member in a Methodist church that he attended with his family, played in the bell choir and gone on mission trips. He had immersed himself in Bible study, prayer and church programs, much more so than most of his peers because he was using religion to keep a part of him safely imprisoned, hidden from the light. A toxic secret that was both killing him and keeping him within the expectations of family and church.
We talked for hours about scripture, the evolving nature of sexual mores in the Judeo-Christian faith history and how I had arrived at the conclusion shared by most of the scholarly religious world, that there was no reason to be prejudiced against gay people.
You would think that this young man who had felt imprisoned in a rigid, toxic and cruel religious lie would be jumping for joy to realize that he no longer had to pretend, that he no longer had to deny himself the opportunity of falling in love, to be who he was in a fully actualized life.
But that is not how enlightenment works. We all initially experience change, even change for the better, as a loss. A baby in the womb grows until their environment is crushing them, they are jammed into an airless space that they simply must escape, and yet they come into the world painfully and usually screaming their heads off.
The young man I met on that day never became my friend. He left my office after that first visit deeply confused, wanting to believe what I had said to him and yet unwilling to believe that all of his previous pastors, Sunday School teachers, and even his parents had either lied to him or were profoundly mistaken. He did continue to come to church. He met a very nice young man who eventually moved in with him and they attended church together until they eventually moved out of state.
He was increasingly civil during that time and I'm sure that there was some gratitude in there somewhere but for the most part, I had been to him something like a surgeon who performs open heart surgery without anesthesia. I only meant to be a liberator to him but the process of liberation had also destroyed almost everything he had formerly believed to be true and changed his relationship with everyone he had previously trusted.
I desperately want to be a good guy, a kind and loving pastor but I have never figured out how to be that while being a prophetic preacher and a liberator at the same time.
This business of enlightenment is tricky. For example, there is no one here who would want to defend the institution of slavery. We would all quickly agree that owning another person and forcing them to surrender a life-time of uncompensated labor is entirely evil. But a hundred and fifty years ago, the economy of the south was predicated on slavery as an economic system. Farmers made a huge up-front labor investment when they purchased a slave and so, in spite of the growing moral arguments against slavery, no other system had arisen to take its place.
Ending slavery not only came at the price of the most deadly war of our nation's history but it also plunged the southern states into poverty for more than a century and there are parts of the nation that you could say have never recovered. Even so, there is no one who would argue in favor of going back to that economic system.... Except maybe for an odd Nevada cattle rancher, Cliven Bundy, and maybe a Kentucky Senator named Rand Paul but when I say that their views really don't count... what I mean is... their views don't count.
No one would want to go back to the 19th century practice of slavery but you can understand why so many resisted the phenomenal suffering that change would necessarily involve.
When I leave our little gathering of very rational, reality oriented, critically thinking church members and drive by churches packed with hundreds or thousands of people who at least pretend to believe in the literal and historical truth of talking snakes and flying chariots ... who watched Noah's Ark like it was a historical documentary .... and I just can't believe that so many people would feign acceptance of what is so clearly Iron Age mythology, superstition, and magic.
They force themselves into an intellectual girdle in which they both have to defend the truth of the Bible that clearly describes the earth as being flat, while simultaneously insisting that anyone who believes that the earth is flat is just nuts. The only reason why people would continue to embrace such absurdity in a scientific age is simply this: it would cost them too much to leave the womb.
As the Buddhist teacher, Adyashanti, says so clearly, " - enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imaged to be true."
No one, once liberated from the bondage of such mythology with all of its neurotic guilt and fear and denial of reality, would ever be willing to go back into that intellectual prison. But leaving it is absolutely terrifying to those who are afraid to let go of the certainty and social connections of traditional religion.
How to be the source of that liberation in the right way, in a way that is like unlocking a cage but not like cutting off someone's legs is a skill that I have yet to master.
Still, the majority of our peers in 21st century middle-America will remain tangentially connected to a traditional church while their doubts grow.
They become more comfortable with just not going to church than they would be with trying to confront their doubts and find a faith community where their minds would be an asset rather than a liability.
People are leaving traditional churches in large numbers. The majority of churches in the United States now have fewer than 40 people in attendance on Sunday mornings. But very few of the people who are leaving will be willing to be entirely honest and say, "I just don't believe that stuff any more and I don't find what I get out of going, from either a social or moral perspective, to be with the time."
They will almost always find a way to blame the institution rather than accept personal responsibility... they will say that they don't like the music, or the preacher is boring, or the church is only interested in money... but they do not want to say to their family or church peers, "I just can't pretend to believe in fairy tales anymore."
Most of the founding fathers of the United States were not Christians. They professed a form of Deism that rejected the formal doctrinal beliefs of all religions and attempted to embrace a faith that called for greater justice and mercy. Thomas Paine predicted at that time that the revolution in government embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would naturally issue in a revolution of religion. Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and others were just certain that a time of freedom from religious superstition had finally arrived.
Their hopes were dashed by revival that we call "The Great Awakening" but there were always some who tried to rekindle an honest awakening that rejected talk about salvation in an afterlife, preferring a salvation that comes from social justice and good deeds in this life. Abraham Lincoln being one of the more notable advocates of this move.
250 years later we still see a generation more likely to go to the lake for the weekend than to go to a progressive church. Which, of course, leaves you to wonder if traditional religion was ever anything more than a kind of enlightened self-interest. If people are religious because they want to go to heaven or because they are afraid of hell, then they were always just superstitious narcissists.
If, however, you want to try to prevent warfare, fight injustice, work to end poverty and save the earth from environmental ruin, well, then, there is a substantive faith alternative for you. You can say that science deals with knowledge of what is real, what actually exists and can be known. Religion deals more with what ought to be, how we imagine the world to be better.
Healthy religion then takes the facts of science into account and marries those facts to an ardent desire to see the world improved. An unhealthy religion denies the reality of the world in favor of an imaginary world that they wished existed. I am grateful to find myself here in your company. I earnestly hope that our numbers grow and that communities like ours will arise from among the church alumni association in cities all over the world.
A tradition has grown up around here of applauding after every sermon... whether it merits applause or not. I appreciate your generosity but I feel the need to turn the tables today. I applaud you for being people who did not give up... who discarded the magic but stuck with the community to find its deeper meaning.
