Sept. 25, 2016 Community Christian Church of Springfield,
MO
Roger Ray, pastor “A
Religion of Life and Joy”
“Let Religion Be To Us Life and Joy” by
Vincent Silliman
Let religion be to us life and joy.
Let it be a voice of renewing challenge
to
the best we have and may be;
let it be a call to generous action.
Let religion
be to us a dissatisfaction with things that are,
which bids us serve more
eagerly the true and the right.
Let it be the sorrow that opens for us the way
of sympathy, understanding, and service to suffering humanity.
Let religion be to
us the wonder and lure of that
which is only partly known and understood:
An
eye that glories in nature’s majesty and beauty,
and a heart that rejoices in
deeds of kindness and of courage.
Let religion be to us security and
serenity because of its truth and beauty,
and because of the enduring
worth and power of the loyalties which it engenders;
Let it be to us hope and
purpose,
and a discovering of opportunities
to express our best through daily
tasks:
Religion, uniting us with all that is
admirable in human beings
everywhere;
Holding before our eyes a prospect of the better life for
humankind,
which each may help to make actual.
For years
I have taunted Sean with my second favorite Voltaire quote in which the French
rationalist made the observation that anything that is too silly to be said is
sung. You typically don’t want to look to hard at the lyrics of either opera or
high church music but today I have taken our wisdom lesson from the words to a
Unitarian hymn.
Of
course, a great hymn, a really great hymn, starts with a great poem. I may be
stepping outside of the realm of my expertise to offer an opinion about either
great music or great poetry but for me, a great poem expresses an important
idea more succinctly than prose. A poem that has to be explained is almost like
abstract art that has to be explained…. If I can’t look at it and know what it
is trying to say, it may be an exercise in ego on the part of the artist or the
poet but, at least from my consumer vantage point, it isn’t on my list of
classics.
A great
poet or a great artist is a person who has an important insight and they are
struggling to express that insight in the most tight, succinct, and powerfully
clear way that they can.
I have
accepted the challenge of trying to write a TED talk which asks people from
various disciplines to try to distill their life’s work, the message that they
are trying, book after book, semester after semester, conference after conference
to articulate and to do it in 18 minutes. For me, this is like trying to turn
preaching into poetry.
I have
about 4000 pages of sermon material on line right now. If I were to try to sum
that up in five or six pages, what would I put in those pages?
1) The old iterations of religious faith
that were based on ancient texts, creeds, myths, traditions, and truth claims
has no future in a rational, scientific, and fact based world.
The mere
fact that there are mega-churches in major cities and all over the fly-over
portions of America that still cling to both ancient and modern myths does not
mean that such belief systems will retain any power in our lives. I must hasten
to admit that the demise of magical religious thinking has been predicted by
rationalists and humanists in the French Revolution, the American Revolution,
and in various experimental movements over the past three hundred years and the
power of the church has always managed to reassert itself and regain control of
global thinking.
The
modern emergence of Islamic fundamentalism is, in my estimation, another last
gasp of mythology based religion. It is fueled by both legitimate and
illegitimate cultural anger, but it is funded by oil revenue and that is coming
to an end both by depletion and a transfer to more renewable energy resources.
The economic bonanza enjoyed in the past century in oil producing nations in
the Middle East, Indonesia, as well as those in Central America and Russia, has
a shelf life and their day is coming in our lifetimes.
Most of
us here today will live to see the end of gas stations and the oil based
economy and the inevitable coming shift in power sources holds great danger for
the whole of the world’s population but it is going to happen whether by clever
technological advances or by more primitive environmental disasters or by mere
exhaustion of the supply; but as the global map and economy changes, so will
the religious environment that has been propped up by the rise of the role of
crude oil.
Christianity,
Judaism, and Islam are over due for a major reformation. I would love for it to
come as a result of critical thinking but if it doesn’t it will come through
economic necessity and social transformation. Either way, the best way that we
can fight radical Islamic terrorism is to put up wind generators and solar
panels. Bombing Isil, Wasabism, and Al Qaeda would be totally irrelevant if we
would just stop buying oil.
In any
event, my first point is that traditional religions rooted in ancient texts,
myths, and magic will go away because they will all be repeatedly revealed to
be not only not true but also entirely worthless in interpreting our modern
lives.
And to
sum up this point, since I mentioned that my second favorite quote from
Voltaire is that “Whatever is to silly to be said is sung,” let me conclude the
point with my favorite Voltaire quote, “Those who can persuade you to believe
in absurdities can then persuade you to commit atrocities.” Or to put it in the words of the great
comedian, George Carlin:
Governments don’t want well informed,
well educated people capable of critical thinking. That is against their
interests. They want obedient workers,
people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and
just dumb enough to passively accept it.
I hate to
have to say this but traditional religious indoctrination is the opposite of
teaching critical thinking skills. Teaching children, from an early age, to
simply believe what they are told in spite of the fact that absolutely all of
the evidence is to the contrary produces a society that has genuine and sincere
difficulty in telling fact from fiction.
One need
only give a little attention to our public political news to find all of the
evidence you could ever need to realize that a huge portion of our society will
believe the most ridiculous, false, dishonest, self-serving lies, only because
they are being told these lies by an authority figure.
I believe
that the practice of religion has done a great deal for the evolution of our
culture but we have to honestly acknowledge that it has done a great deal of
harm at the same time. Is it possible to preserve what is helpful while
discarding what has been indisputably harmful? Which leads to my second point:
2) Our generation will face a choice:
shall we abandon faith communities entirely or can we evolve into an entirely
different community that will be relevant and powerful for the future?
In 1822 Thomas Jefferson
predicted that "there is not a young man now living in the US who will not
die a Unitarian." The growing enlightenment, coupled with the
persuasiveness of the rational use of the scientific method, gave Jefferson
confidence that magical and superstitious thinking was going to expire in his
lifetime.
But it should be noted that in
Europe and Great Britain, where the devotion to traditional expressions of
Christianity has been disappearing for generations, the Unitarian movement is
shrinking even faster as more and more people choose “none” as their reply to
polls about religious affiliation. In fact, one of the fastest growing
religious identities on census questionnaires in Great Britain is “Jedi
knight.” And, just to be clear, that is not because there is a generation
hoping for flight on the Millennium Falcon, they are telling us that they think
that the question is silly.
And, if the question is will you
reinvest in a religion that believes in angels and demons, heaven and hell,
souls and spirits, a supernatural theistic god who grants wishes from the
clouds if only you ask often enough and really really really believe in
fairies, then, yes, it is embarrassingly silly. But is there another option? Is
the choice only between absurdity or nothing at all, or is there a rational,
evidence based, critical thinking version of religion that can both meet the
needs of 21st century people and help to guide us into the birth of
the real modern world, the world where everyone has healthcare, adequate food,
housing, education, and safety?
There have been ways in which
religion has been the opiate of the people, convincing them to accept violent
poverty and inhumane living situations so that they can avoid eternal
punishment and gain eternal reward.
There is
no shortage of historical examples of governments using religion as a means of
controlling their population, keeping them obediently harnessed in the plow of
supporting the wealth and power of the aristocracy. I can assure you that all
of the world’s religions did not start that way.
If there
are even shreds of truth to the Moses tradition, he was a liberator of slaves
and a slayer of slave owners. The precursor to modern Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam, the Persian religion known as Zoroastrianism, invented the concepts
of heaven and hell, not as a carrot on a stick to keep the poor in line but as
a promise that one day the universal scales of justice would be balanced and
the people who had enslaved them would spend eternity in a lake of burning
fire.
These
ancient constructs were rife with wish fulfillment dreams but they were born in
the cauldron a deep desire for a more just society. All of the great religions
of the world have been prostituted to serve the wealthy and the government but
all of them started as the exact opposite of that.
There
have always been some religious leaders who understood the role of faith as a
moral guide, that resisted wars, the advocated for the oppressed, that sought
to liberate slaves, and free people from the chains of racism, sexism,
homophobia, and poverty. You have to think of Muhammad who lived in a small
house and wore shabby clothes, not the opulent caliphs who succeeded him. You
have to think of St Francis and not the Pope. We have the examples of Gandhi,
King, and Dorothy Day to offset the more outrageous abuses of the Joel Olsteens
and Benny Hinn.
There are
no Gandhis, Kings, or Dorothy Days without a faith community. My belief is that
faith communities are to social ethics what labor unions are to the labor
movement. A group of individuals who have grand beliefs about what fair wages, safe
working conditions, the importance of health care and pension funds, remain
powerless as long as they are not organized. Once they are organized, real
change can happen.
If Gandhi
had gone on the Salt March in 1930 all alone, he would have just been a crazy
little man on a 240 mile long walk. But he wasn’t alone. He arrived at the sea
shore with 12,000 followers… which changed a crazy little man into a social
movement that freed India from colonial rule.
William
Schultz, a Unitarian minister who was the founder of Amnesty International said
that the mission of faith is to revere both the critical mind and the generous
heart. We must turn our critical thinking into compassionate action and though
I would never dispariage individual action, I am confident that we also need
collective action. Communities of faith may not survive the 21st
century but I believe that we need them.
3) Keeping the tradition of my
hermeneutical forbearers, I have a third and final point, and for that point I
will hearken back to the poem I began with today that enjoins us to let
religion be our life and our joy. I know
that joy may not be a word you often associate with religion. In fact, religion
has often made us feel guilty about anything that ever brought us joy. The
saints often seem to be suspicious of happiness, always listing sins, great and
small, and often obsessing about the small.
Our
society often seems to obsess about Puritan values while jumping off the cliff
into the abyss of excesses in drugs, pornography, greed, and gluttony. The
information superhighway, the marvel of the genus of this generation, is mostly
used for porn traffic, and social media has taken the place of being social.
We have a
dozen different drugs on the market now for erectile dysfunction and now even a
testosterone cream to make you want to take the pill!
So senior
citizen homes are now rife with STDs, some of us have thousands of social media
“friends,” but there is not much joy is there?
There is comfort. There is distraction. There is entertainment. We have
activities and diversions but I don’t see much joy. Kids have joy but we seem
to be able to beat it out of them with school, church, and the looming prospect
of work.
Several
years ago I was taking a sabbatical from church work as a Merrill Fellow at
Harvard Divinity School and I was taking a course in world religions with Diana
Eck. When we were studying Buddhism she had a monk in as a guest speaker, Ven
Lama Migmar.
It was
2004 and so we asked Lama Migmar a lot of questions about terrorism, our wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq, and through it all he was gently smiling at us. It
felt off, talking about such serious things and seeming him looking at us,
almost as if we were being silly.
Someone
finally asked him about this and he told us that monks choose to smile as a
gift to a world that is often full of violence, fear, and pain. Their joy, the
joy of the Buddha, is a gift they give to the world.
I believe
that the old forms of faith must pass away and the sooner the better because
the world needs for us to bring critical thinking and a passion for justice to
a host of issues of racism, poverty, warfare, environmental degradation,
terrorism, and disease. But, I think that we must find a way to be joyful in
the journey.
We sing
about love being our religion. We sing that all we need is love. We come from a
tradition in which we call one another brothers and sisters. We talk about our
community. But we don’t see a lot of love, fraternity, joy and I want to say
that is a non-negotiable aspect of any future that faith has. We must choose
it, even when we don’t feel it, we must choose it, work for it, nurture it,
feed it. We must exercise our strengths in tolerance, forgiveness,
reconciliation, mutual respect, discovering even the sacred in one another so
that we will have the joy to sustain us in the revolution we surely must lead.
Click here to see the videoThe
Buddha in me recognizes and bows to the Buddha in you. The Christ in me greets
the Christ that is in you. I believe in
the social justice mission of the 21st century church and I want to
be a part of it, as long as it is joyful. Without joy, I’m afraid that the
cares of this life will allow cynicism to win.
