Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
Albert Einstein - I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble minds harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Episode seven in the Star Wars movie franchise will be released in mid-December. Don't judge me, I will be among the throngs of people of a certain age who will be seeing this $200 million reenactment of one of my favorite college memories....that seems like more than inflation since in the first movie only cost $8 million but you have to bear in mind that they are using many of the same actors they used forty years ago and there is only so much that makeup and plastic surgery can accomplish... there will be a lot of computer generated imagery in this film.
I was finishing a degree in philosophy and preparing to go to seminary when the first film was released in 1977. I am my friends saw the film repeatedly and would sit and talk for hours about the religious imagery in the film... Obi Wan was a dying and rising savior, Luke, with his obviously Biblical name, was a disciple.... And the Force.... Well, the Force could be a bit troubling. On the one hand, you could say it was the Holy Spirit but the constant references to dark side and a good side of the Force made it all sound a tad eastern. No metaphor is perfect and so we continued to see a lot of what we wanted to see in the film's imagery and remained faithful fans for the subsequent films' releases that tracked the universal battle between good and evil.
My college friends and I were certainly not the only ones to see religious significance in the Star Wars saga. Unlike in the United States, in Great Britain, census forms ask citizens to identify their religion. A write-in entry was being used so often that they ended up having to add "Jedi Knight" to the religious preference form.
Ironically, what was the weakest part of the theology of the movies in those pre-seminary days is now what I find the most attractive. When, at the age of 20, I walked into that theater in Memphis, Tennessee to see the first film, I took with me a firm belief in a very specific God, who had a very specific name: YAHWEH. I believed that YAHWEH had a solitary Son and that he had primarily authored the most important and exclusively holy book in the world.
My seemingly unshakable confidence in those beliefs was soon to be undermined in the process of earning a graduate school education but the echoes and shadows of that creedal faith lingered for years. Beyond all rational thought, I held onto a belief in an invisible heavenly friend who would grant my requests if only I made my requests for the right reasons, and in the right way, and often enough, and I believed that somehow that same invisible friend would one day welcome the more vital though equally invisible part of myself into eternity when my mortal life was finished.
Even when my intellectual certainty of such things was long gone, the hope remained. Even still, some of the smartest and most academically honest people in the world, cling to the hope of some kind of eternal life.
Anyone that I would care to spend any time in conversation with has certainly given up the old concrete imagery of pearly gates and streets of gold in an exclusively Christian heaven, but still, they hold onto a hopeful belief in some kind of eternal existence. I do not want to insult that hope to take it away from anyone who either ardently believes in it or even if they simply need to believe in it to cope with personal losses of loved ones or fear of their own mortality.
I only ask that we dare to consider the possibility that our existence is, as the Psalmist says in Ps 103:
14 For God knows how we were made;What if this life is all that we are allotted? What if, as another of my favorite movies asks, "What if this is as good as it gets?" Yes, the water and star dust of my body will go on and perhaps become a part of future rivers, animals, and people, but the essence of who I am... my thoughts, feelings, loves, and memories, will cease to be. If this life is all that we have, how then should we live?
he remembers that we are dust.
15 As for mortals, their days are like grass;
they flourish like a flower of the field;
16 for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.
The founder of the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church, St. Ignatius of Loyola, was a 16th century reformer who was trying to save the Catholic Church from the Protestant Reformation through an ardent revival of classic Christian faith.
Ignatius, in his famous work, The Spiritual Exercises, flatly states that humans were created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save our souls. Ignatius designed a 40 day retreat in which retreatants were to spend their days in silent reflection on their sins and to vividly imagine how many people had gone into eternal torment for sins that were not as egregious as our own, and the only way that we could avoid spending eternity in hell was to dramatically change our lives and live for Christ, who alone could save us from this fate.
Avoiding the flames of hell involved not only a life of service and religious devotion but it also involved meticulous avoidance of almost everything that was natural for humans to do.
It was the great modern philosopher, Garrison Keillor, who observed, "You can teach a bear to ride a bicycle but it always looks uncomfortable doing it and you know he would really rather be out in the woods doing what bears do." Yes, there is no animal in the world suffers from neurotic anxiety that there is a deity in the clouds above who is fiercely concerned with how they express their sexuality or with what they eat, drink, or do.
Only humans, out of fear of death, created a belief in heaven and hell and coupled that belief with a series of guilt provoking rules about denying our animal instincts. I am certain that my mother and my Sunday School teachers never read The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius but I am convinced that the religion that they wanted to pass along was rooted in the belief that our natural instincts, if not corrected and defeated, would lead us all into eternal torment.
Pope Francis, the most famous living Jesuit, in spite of having a much more evolved view of these things, still is basically teaching the same fundamental beliefs. And we can all say, that a lot of good things have come from these beliefs. We would not want to do away with all that we were taught about morality, personal restraint and responsibility, and we certainly would not want to live in a human jungle that was ruled by nothing but our more base appetites which would turn our world into a violent and competitive living hell.
If you take away notions of eternal reward or punishment, if you remove the guilt associated with simply being human... if you, with Yoda, accept that even without a supernatural theistic person, there is a mysterious Force in the universe that unites all living things. And that this Force has both a good and a dark side, then we certainly want to avoid giving into the dark side of the Force and to try to live in harmony with one another. Then what is the best way for us to live?
What I am asking you to consider is that living in a purely unrestrained way like a naked ape, leads to one kind of suffering, but also, a full embrace of a life lived, as Ignatius and my Sunday School teachers suggested, in which you put all joy and living a fully human existence in order to avoid hell and to gain heaven, leads to a pitiful waste of the only life that we know that we will ever have. Having no theology is dangerous in one way, having a sick and largely narcissistic theology, is just as dangerous in the opposite way.
My mother firmly believed that anyone who drank a beer was an alcoholic who needed to change his ways. She was absurdly puritanical about that and many other things, and yet, we all know many people whose lives have been ruined by drug and alcohol addiction or by an unquestioned embrace of their appetites in matters of either sex or materialism.
There may be some kind of spiritual existence for us beyond our mortal lives but no one, not even Pope Francis, can assure you that there is, just as I cannot be certain that there is not. But what Frank and I, and all of you do know, is that you now have this life, and it is a gift, an opportunity, a living reality that is not to be wasted, perverted, or imprisoned by either addiction or guilt.
The beat poet, Langston Hughes, said,
"Folks, I'm telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean-
so get yourself
a little loving
in between."
