Beyond Belief

Beyond Belief     

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April 22, 2018

 1 John 3:16-18                   
We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us--and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.
How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?
Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

One of my favorites among our listeners is a Jewish refugee from the Ukraine who lives and teaches in New York. Mikhail often shares his surprisingly insightful views of learning about both America and Christianity from his students. He recently sent me this clip from a student paper:

For the benefit of our podcast listeners, this paper is explaining the severe suffering imposed on Job in the Biblical story this way, “God did what he did to him out of love. It is safe to say that this is similar to the way parents treat their kids. Sometimes parents yell or beat their kids, but they might not tell you why. Eventually, when you grow up, you come to learn that they did what they did to teach you right from wrong.”

Now, this obviously provokes lots of responses, not the least of which is that this student’s parents apparently beat him without even the dignity of an explanation. The second is that this has influenced his view of God and God’s love such that the suffering of Job was not some bazaar, anthropomorphic, ego betting between God and Satan, but was, in some twisted way, for Job’s benefit.  Hard to explain killing Job’s children and employees as a loving gesture made out of concern for Job’s welfare, but this student is obviously trying to do just that.

A child psychologist was once describing his observations of an abused child through a one-way mirror looking into a hospital play room. As the child beat the doll to pieces she was shouting, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

We know that almost all child abusers were abused when they were children. It is not an excuse but there is a relationship between being a victim of abuse and justifying abusing others . . . and here is the real paradox, calling the abuse love seems to somehow make it virtuous . . . spiritual . . . noble. 

Just as the victims of child abuse have a tendency to become abusers, isn’t it obvious that victims of religious abuse are also likely to become religiously abusive? It is 2018. The telescope has been around for 400 years. We have been traveling in space for over 50 years. Still, literally billions of children will be reared in this century with the belief that God lives above the clouds, watching their every move. Even their thoughts are not hidden from the prying eyes and ears of God who knows every foul word, every vile and evil thought you have, and will surely punish you in agony for ever if you don’t stop it. 

And we wrap up this whole judgement scene in pretty Christmas wrapping paper and hand it to you telling you that the threat of eternal torment comes to you from a loving God . . . who would like to talk to you about your computer browser history and some of the movies you have downloaded on Netflix. 

We tell these lies to children when they are too young to fight back, when, even if the contradictions are so strong that they scream out inside their little skulls… they still take it in. They internalize this belief in a loving God who is a stalker, a peeping Tom, a divine voyeur who is willing to do unspeakably violent things to you for being human. Most of us know better than to take our children to see violent movies but we take them to Sunday School where they are exposed to a father who was prepared to cut his son’s heart out because the voices inside his head told him to, and images of demons, devils, and fiery torment. 

Our little MidWestern city doesn’t make it into the national news very often but when we do it is often a story like this one, taken from USA Today about the arrest of one of our very loud and annoying street preachers. This one is Aaron Brummit, but he is not the only one who draws attention to himself by trying to stop downtown revelers from enjoying themselves. Sometimes the college kids will stop and argue with him, yell at him, heap abuses on him and make fun of him, but what they do not realize is that such abuse is what he wants. Calling him abusive names is like giving Scooby Snacks to Scooby-Do. 

Because he was brought up under the threat of an abusive God who loved him very much and he, like a child pounding a doll’s head on a table while yelling, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” believes that abuse is love. I saw standing on a stool and preaching on the corner of Walnut St. and South Ave. just Friday night. And I imagine trying to engage him in conversation. If I were to tell him that “love is my religion” I suspect that he would not initially disagree. Until he could come to understand that I really mean that… that I practice my religion by being loving. 

The use of the word, “love” is an important adjective in religions whose real practice involves deception, manipulation, threats, fear, and abuse. The belief system uses adjectives that allow it to mask its abuse as being something else: piety, religious fervor, virtue, in short, a sincere Christian life. 

When, in any meaningful sense, a religion is not defined by adjectives as much as it is defined by verbs. If your religion is predicated on a God who is love, then shouldn’t your devotion, your worship, your discipleship, shouldn’t that be loving? 

Many Unitarian Churches have taken up the use of the phrase, “beyond belief” to describe what they are trying to do. You have heard me for years talking about the difference between “orthodoxy” (right beliefs) and “orthopraxy” (right behaviors). Belief systems are all about orthodoxy but that isn’t what we really want out of religious people, is it?

Over the past 20 years, I’ve spent a lot of time in Nicaragua and our teams of house builders or physicians or teachers, often share hotel space with other church groups who have come with Bibles, salvation tracks, and usually a lot of candy. I have sat in the hotel lobby listening to these eager young missionaries talking about going to the dump outside of Managua where children root through garbage for something to eat and these North American’s offer to give them candy in exchange for the opportunity to tell them about Jesus, and heaven, and hell, and the Holy Spirit, and sometimes they will throw in some Spanish hymn singing and if they are really lucky, a little demonstration of speaking in tongues.

And we can sit here, wagging our heads in disbelief that anyone could be so hypocritical, so crass, so fundamentally evil but let me tell you this: when they engaged us in conversation about what we were doing in Nicaragua, they didn’t mind that we were building houses, paying for school supplies, bringing doctors into rural neighborhoods, or making micro business loans to start small businesses, but they were mortified that we were not using this charity to save their souls. We didn’t hand out Bibles or tracks, we didn’t sing hymns, and though I have a little bit of Spanish and German vocabulary, I just can’t speak in tongues at all. 

What is obvious to us is that love must be accompanied by action. What is obvious to them is that meaningful religion must protect innocent children from the risk of going to hell… and that is an ideological bridge that is very hard to cross. 

When people ask me what I believe the future of the church will be, I have to qualify my answer with this:  we will either make the transition from beliefs to actions, or I do not believe there will be a future to the church. 

I cannot remember what this little guy’s name is but let’s call him “So-What?” I visited his school in a rural village in the mountains above Matagalpa and I stole a line from my friend, Keith Jaspers, the founder of the Rainbow Network: I said to this little class of about 20 students in a dirt floor classroom, 

“I have heard los estudiantes aqui en este comarca– the students here in this village are –son las mas intelejentes in todo el mundo– are the most intelligent in all of the world – es verdad que dice– is it true what they say?” They didn’t want to lie. They don’t see many visitors from outside of their village and certainly no Norte Americano blancosbut I prompted them, “es verdad?”And eventually they found the courage to shout back, “Si! Es verdad!”

Maybe it is true . . . it was true, at least in that moment. But I come back home and our little progressive church is so small and just down the highway there is a church that will send teams down to Matagalpa with candy and Bibles, and they have six, seven, eight thousand people attending their three campuses.

But I think of this little guy and I think, “so what?” What does having three campuses, thousands of members, eight, count-em, eight drum kits on stage in front of a choir of 400, but add all that together and kneel down by this guy making his letters in his notebook and wonder, “so what?” If your religion can’t protect him from malaria infested mosquitoes and get his bed up off the floor away from the scorpions. . . if your religion can’t drill a well in his village so that they don’t get their water from the same little pond where the cows and chickens poop, then your religion is nothing but a joke. 

Your holy writ, your doctrine of the trinity, your creeds, . . . it doesn’t matter under what liturgy you were baptized if he can get a clean drink of water and your communion ritual is nothing but an insult if this kid can get a decent piece of bread. 

Keep your Bibles and your candy and go change the world so that this kid and all of the kids who are like him can go to school, sleep safely at night, and wake up to a decent breakfast in the morning. Because religious beliefs mean nothing at all if you can’t move beyond belief to practice. 

And look folks, I’m not saying that communities of faith need to take over social services in our own city or in other nations. No matter how grand our goals are, we cannot raise enough donated dollars, or convince enough people to join teams to go solve the world’s problems. What we are doing, what we mean when we talk about our spiritual preference for the poor, is that we are practicing compassion. 

You will never hear me say anything that is more obviously true than just this:

You learn to dance by dancing, you learn to sing by singing, you learn to ride a bike by riding a bike…. It doesn’t matter what books you have read about dancing or what you believe about singing, it doesn’t matter what your grandmother believed about bicycles . . . spirituality is the same thing. You learn to show compassion by practicing compassion. You learn to forgive by forgiving. You learn to love by loving. 

In many ways, crosses, steeples, labels, denominations all get in the way. What makes our religion real is how we practice it. And by practice, we become more compassionate, more loving, people and when we vote  

We remember this guy. I don’t know who will win the next elections but when the votes are counted, and you look at this guy and wonder “so what?” I hope you have a good answer, and if you don’t, then practice some more so that you will have a better answer the next time.