“Spiritual
but not Religious…” Oct. 29, 2017 Dr. Roger
Ray
Matthew 22:34-46 When
the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together,
and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher,
which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the
greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your
neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets."
Bill Nye, a.k.a. “The Science Guy”
has added his voice to the chorus of genetic scientists who insist that race is
a human construct. As he said, if someone from Papua New Guiana has a child
with someone from Sweden, their child is a human. Looked at from a perspective
of DNA, there really is no such thing as African, Asian, Native American,
Latino, Caucasian, or Eskimo. The differences among humans are subtle and
insignificant. 
I
don’t get to talk about philosophy very often and I’m sure most of you can
count your lucky stars for that but there was one philosopher that I studied in
college that didn’t make much sense to me at the time who has come to make a
lot more sense to me in recent years.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a British and Austrian philosopher who talked
about the philosophy of mind and of language. I remember my professor
explaining his existential argument by saying that if you look down at a table
that you are not seeing the same table you would see if you looked at it from
beneath it. That hardly seemed like it was worth the price of tuition but the
real point of it is, the truth of a thing depends entirely upon the perspective
from which you see it. And you know me, I’m all about evidence based faith and
I like to root my reality in scientific facts but perspective is a huge
determinant in what truth you experience.
It is true that there is,
from the perspective of science, no such thing as race. We are all humans but
if you ask a black person if there is such a thing as blackness, that is, has
growing up being identified as a black person had any influence on you? Well, their reality is not the reality that
Bill Nye is talking about. White privilege is real, minority prejudice is real,
gender discrimination is real, and while scientists may be trying to defuse the
assumptions our society has accumulated around race, the fact is, race is still
real. Maybe not from a scientific perspective, but from a lived, realized,
social perspective, it is very real.
We are all decent people
here. None of us want to be racists. All of us would like to eradicate racism
from our society and I believe that we have made progress in lots of ways but
there is a great deal more progress to take place. When the Black Lives Matter
movement began there were a lot of us, good, well-intended people, who made
stumbling and somewhat confused responses to say “all lives matter.” Even
Bernie Sanders, when he was first being confronted by Black Lives Matter
protestors, said exactly those words, “all lives matter.” Bernie is a Jewish
liberal in Washington, D.C., being in a minority is not new territory to him,
but even a seasoned, progressive liberal who had marched in Civil Rights
demonstrations back in the old days, still couldn’t see the table from the
black side of the street.
The truth is that there
has never been a time in modern American history when it wasn’t obvious that
white lives matter. We have a long history of institutionally and individually
insisting that black lives do not matter. And so the alternative needs to be
said. And those of us who believe that we are “woke” to this issue, even those
of us who are in inter-racial families, need to calm down and listen, ask more
questions than we offer opinions, and see if we can grow our way out of racism.
Not
since the days of the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 has the issue of sexual
harassment been in the news since the case of Harvey Weinstein gained media
attention. Sex scandals are not at all uncommon in the past generation but the
coercion of sex from women by powerful men has been an especially nauseating
bit of news. It is not hard to imagine that there were not a lot of applicants
of women wanting to date Harvey for his natural good looks but his use of money
and power to force himself into the lives of women has been especially
disgusting, along the lines of the whole Bill Cosby case.
Still, I have to admit
that I have a negative gut reaction to hearing people like George H. W. Bush
being lumped together with the likes of Cosby and Weinstein. When a man in his
90’s who is confined to a wheelchair gives himself permission to
inappropriately touch women who are standing close to his chair, I’m willing to
insist that the difference between a confused, sick, old man and the kind of
predator that we have seen from younger and more aggressive people in power . .
. but I am not a young woman who has been groped. I have an opinion, but this
is not a time to listen to the opinions of old, white, men. We need to listen
to women who have been victimized.
And, yes, especially as a
younger pastor, I can tell you that I have been groped by little old ladies
during my nursing home visits. There was one little lady at my former parish who
came through the greeting line at the end of the service every week and would
reach around behind me for a squeeze and after a while she started coming
through for a handful and then going to the back of the line and coming through
a second and third time. It was annoying, but I knew that she was suffering
from dementia and, folks, it is different for men. I didn’t feel objectified. I
wasn’t afraid of assault. I didn’t feel that my credibility was in question.
I am aware that men can
be sexually assaulted and I know that an alarming number of boys have suffered
the worst kinds of sexual assault and humiliation, but what I am specifically
saying here is that while there may be a huge difference between what George
Bush did and what Harvey Weinstein did, it is time for men to be quiet and
listen . . . we might learn something on this topic if we will wait to hear
what the table looks like from another perspective.
I am aware that there are
also false allegations and there are people who are trying to make their
reputations by making claims of victimization but if you lead off with that
reply, you are telling legitimate victims to remain silent because they will
not be believed. I get called into these conversations at times, especially
when the offense takes place within a family and I know how dangerous it is to
give credence to a false allegation. I know how delicate a thing that a
reputation is but our first response needs to be affirmative. We need to
believe the people who come forward with complaints before the list gets to be
as long as it was with Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein.
Weinstein even insisted
that he deserved a second chance. He has settled out of court in 8 different
cases! What does he mean by a second chance? He has had a second, third, and
fourth chance and quite a few more after that . . . and that was the reported cases.
I think we’re looking for a prison with no exit in his case.
Still, I find myself
changing the channel or skipping a podcast when this story comes on. I feel
that I have heard enough and with Congress set to shift another huge portion of
the tax burden onto the backs of the poor and middle class to give even more
tax favoritism to the super wealthy, and with our President still threatening
to get us into a nuclear exchange with North Korea and maybe even Iran, stories
about men behaving like pigs just doesn’t get to take up all of the news cycle.
But, as Winston Churchill
said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; and courage is what it
also takes to sit down and listen.” We progressives are a lot better at
speaking than we are at listening. Most of us spent most of our lives being
silenced by employers, parents, pastors, and schools. We spent most of our
education learning how to stand in line and how to color inside of the lines
and when we finally broke loose, and learned how to get out of line, how to
color without lines, we lost an appropriate sense of balance.
You
cannot accurately describe the world only from your perspective. The universe
does not revolve around your navel. We like to say that we are spiritual and
not religious. We like to say that love is our religion. And our collective
rejection of creeds, dogmas, and institutional authority has been vital to our
liberation but on this week when we observe the 500th anniversary of
Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, for
all of the freedom and independent thinking and scholarship that was born in
that Reformation, there were also an uncountable number of wars, factions,
heresies and abuses. The Catholic church was and is guilty of any number of
abuses but have you ever heard of the Assemblies of God? The Mormons?
The Church of Christ? Do you know what the Jehovah’s Witnesses have put
people through? 
I
appreciate the fact that the Unitarian Universalists have commonly taken up
this theme in many of their congregations. But it has to be more than a slogan.
In the well known passage from the 22nd chapter of Matthew that we
used as our wisdom lesson today; Jesus is reported to have said that the
greatest commandment is to love God and the second is like it, that we love one
another. I’m in no position to edit Jesus but since I’m pretty sure that
Matthew edited him, I’m going to give it a stab.
I’m going to insist that
the two commandments are really just one. Think about it, what does it mean to
love God? If you stop there, full-stop, period, just love God, that doesn’t
mean a thing. The only way to love God is to love other people.
I
can tell you that I am totally devoted to the Persian god, Ahura Mazda, but
unless you know more about Zoroastrianism than I assume you do, that isn’t
going to mean a thing to you. The only way to be sincerely spiritual, the only
way to have a faith that has substance, is to literally be on the side of love
and that will necessarily mean putting our own egos on hold now and then so
that we can listen, learn, understand, empathize, and have real compassion for
those around us.
Bill Nye is not
technically wrong, from a scientific perspective. There is no race beyond our
social constructs. And the world’s religions are all more full of balloon juice
than they are substance and yet, the social reality we are living on the under
side of the table is that there is still a lot of racism, sexual harassment is
a nightmare, and people are still fighting and dying for their own version of
an ancient religion that is still important to them.
I am proud to be among
you. I am sincerely proud of your willingness to protest, demonstrate, write,
speak, and advocate but I don’t want us to forget that love also demands that
we listen, to see the table from another perspective, and to accept that our
own views are not always either right or universal. That’s just my opinion,
I’ll let you decide if I am right.
