May
15, 2016 Community Christian Church of
Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, pastor “Can Religion Still Be
Useful?”
— Archibald Macleish --
Religion is at its best when
it makes us ask hard questions of
ourselves.
It is at its worst when it deludes us into
thinking
we have all the answers for everybody else.
A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he
hates, is a sick man.
A century ago, the journalist
and scholar, H. L. Mencken was known as the “sage of Baltimore.” He is having
something of a resurrection on the internet these days as Donald Trump has
risen to the point of being the Republican nominee for President. Mencken
seemed to be almost prophetic in a satirical quip he published in the Baltimore
Sun in 1920 when he said:
“As democracy is
perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner
soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land
will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by
a downright moron.”
In 2016 it
appears that we have the potential of making Mencken look like Nostradamus
though I certainly hope that it doesn’t happen.
I have always
enjoyed the bits and pieces of satire and political wisdom I have run across
from Mencken but my recent interest has sprung from my discovery of a book he
wrote about the evolution and state of religion entitled, Treatise on the Gods.
About 25 years
ago, when I first began to teach college classes in religion at Drury
University, it was, for me, something akin to walking out of a deep fog into
bright sunshine.
I had earned both
a seminary degree and a doctorate from a top tier divinity school but it wasn’t
until I had to teach New Testament classes that I actually let that education
pierce the too comfortable assumptions that I lived with as a Christian pastor.
When I had to try to teach undergraduate students about the historical Jesus,
using books written by Marcus Borg and his peers in the Jesus Seminar, was when
I began to take my academic life into my role as a pastor, a professor, and as
just a religious person.
I had known it
for years, but I had never let myself say it simply before I had to
emphatically say it to a room full of young college students: Jesus wasn’t God. And even God wasn’t God in
the supernatural theistic way that we had been brought up to believe. I spent
the next several years retooling what I personally believed and how I viewed
what it meant to be a pastor, focusing on the ethical and transformative
message of faith while slowly dismissing all of the creedal, ritualistic, and
superstitious aspects of traditional religion.
For a long time I
was willing to assume that my professors at Vanderbilt and Harvard and the
famous writers of the Jesus Seminar were
the first generation of progressive, honest, religious academics. I was willing
to credit such writers as Borg, Spong, Armstrong, and Crossan with being unique
geniuses who had finally been able to rescue Jesus, Christianity, religion
itself, from the confused mire of magical thinking that had held it fast for
centuries.
You don’t hear me
say this often enough but, my friends, I was wrong. For the most part, the
writers we most often name in the progressive movement were not doing very much
original scholarship.
Spong, Borg,
Crossan, and Armstrong were and are certainly brilliant writers, but they are
much more in the vein of popularizers than they are original scholars. Most of
what they were saying in their books was said before, much of it a couple of
hundred years ago but certainly in the era of Tillich, Neihbur, and Bultmann,
early in the 20th century… it is just that it is hard to read and
understand Tillich, Niebuhr, and Bultmann.
But there were
contemporaries in more popular writings who were trying to tell us to come out
of the Iron Age and to take a serious look at the tenants of our faith. Our provocative
and progressive wisdom lesson today is a quote from Archibald Mcleich, an early
20th century poet. You have often heard me quote from the British
philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who literally begged the public to come to its
senses.
And, in 1930, H.
L. Mencken wrote this: What the faithful
Christian professes to believe, if put into the form of an affidavit, would be
such shocking nonsense that even bishops and archbishops would laugh at it…”
Mencken carefully
and with painful clarity, describes the evolution of religion from the roots of
primitive superstitions and the magical thinking of children and he popularly
published it for our grandparents to read when they were young adults.
Why did these
insights remain hidden in the fog of magical religious beliefs? I believe that
many such helpful and thoughtful works remained largely hidden from public view
for the same reason that Mark Twain insisted that his own critical take on
organized religion remain unpublished until fifty years had passed after his
death. The priests and pastors whose
livelihood and authority depended upon the deception obviously fought against
any enlightenment, but the public also resisted, just as they fought and are
still fighting in many quarters against Darwin’s work on human evolution.
There was a huge
revival movement in the United States following WWII and while the generation
following the war saw religion losing its footing in Europe, it became larger
than ever in the USA, empowered by radio, then TV, and finally by the sound and
video technology that made the mega church a possibility. I don’t know why
American’s reacted so differently to the loss and grief experienced in the war
than did Europeans or even the defeated Japanese and German people, but where
they became increasingly disillusioned about religion, Americans forgot their
rich heritage of religious academics and even ignored the insightful work of
pre-war journalists, essayists, poets, and novelists, and rushed back into the
embrace of magical thinking.
More than half of
Americans believe in angels. We think of
Islamic countries as being full of religious fanatics but a much larger
percentage of Americans believe in angels than does the population of Saudi
Arabia and Egypt. In fact, a much larger percentage of Americans believe in
angles than believe in global warming. Nearly half of us believe in ghosts and
in UFO’s.
And, of course,
here in Springfield, the largest church in town in populated with people who
not only believe in angels but they believe that they can speak the
unintelligible language of angels. When
a guy at a Star Trek convention speaks in Klingon, he generally knows that he
is faking….
At our local “Six
Flags over Jesus,” they are right now waving their hands in the air and
speaking gibberish and telling themselves that it is the language of
angels. And, sobering for me, when they
leave there they will return to teaching in our public schools, broadcasting
the news on our local TV stations and, some of them will take their place on
the bench of our city council.
Is it just me or
do you think that teachers, political leaders, and medical professionals should
have a basic and reliable orientation to reality? And if we are indifferent
about this, is it any wonder that we are not really doing anything about global
climate change, renewable energy, sustainable building, or mass transit…. And
we actually have lengthy battles at city council meetings about the extent to
which women can expose the underside or side of their breasts in public and one
councilman who was clearly bottle-fed, has virtual panic attacks about nipples.
He can single-handedly make our city look like a giant Darwin’s Waiting Room.
Religion, at its
root, is not about beliefs, creeds, or rituals. It is about conduct. It is a
way of life. It is a courageously philosophical search for meaning and reality.
Our faith should challenge our penchant for violence, our passive acceptance of
warfare, our indifference about the poor and the addicted who live all around
us. Our faith should make us want to
live lives that are congruent with our core values.
The fake hair and
spray-on tans of politicians becomes emblematic of the falseness and
irrationality of most of our nation’s religion. We can be better than that and
I don’t think that we should ever again settle for less.
As Mencken
discusses in some detail, when you are an infant, you cannot distinguish
between yourself and others, nor even yourself and objects like furniture and
toys. The infant assumes that her mother’s voice is her own, that the rattle in
his tiny fist is a part of him.
As soon as a
child is able to distinguish themselves from other things, they assume that all
things are sentient just like they are. Just like a dog that will bark at a
rose bush because a thorn stuck him, assuming that the rose bush meant to do
that, a child will assume that stuffed animals and dolls are actually alive and
have thoughts and feelings.
At a very early
age, children can’t tell the difference between a cartoon and a real person,
between Disney animation and a movie. All of these are precursors to a religion
based on a personification of nature, of the sky.
Ancient people
believed that the sun was a god, later they believed that it was a chariot
driven by a god, and even later, at the dawn of Jewish and Christian faith, it
was a heavenly body directed across the sky by God’s hand.
The first people
who realized that the sun was a burning mass of gas whose gravitation keeps the
earth in orbit around it were severely punished for telling the truth. When I
have published in our local paper that the stories of Noah and Jonah are not
literal history and Jesus was not really divine, the local Baptist Area
executive published a letter saying that I was not a Christian and our local
Council of Churches would not let us join even though we contribute money,
food, and volunteers to their projects.
Folks, the truth
is out there…. And it is not on the X-files. There is a modern proverb that
says, you cannot fault a child for being afraid of the dark but we can fault an
adult who is afraid of the light.
H. L. Mencken
claims that there is no difference between a magician and a priest and I know all
too well why he said that. But we can be the difference. We know that our religion is about living a
life of prophetic witness and compassionate sacrifice. Beyond all sacred texts,
sacraments, rituals, and creeds…. The truth is available to us and we will only
live in the fog if we choose it. I pray that we will not ever again be afraid
of the light.
These progressive sermons are available as
podcasts at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/progressive-faith-sermons/id419225485
