Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

As we look around the world today we see religious forces moving front and center as the driving forces in the evolution of civilization. We see religion play a role many thought was over when secular societies and science arose and religion traditions and ideas seemed old hat or even the cause of evil. But religious thinking and religious passions explain the best and the worst of the story of our time. The story of civilization, and its goal, is to facilitate the oneness of all life on the planet. Religion, the life of the spirit, will now do the work that nations, economies, and Enlightenment Reason has only begun.

I attended a few years ago the national meeting of a youth movement called The Interfaith Youth Corps, and it is spelled c-o-r-p-s not c-o-r-e to signal their on-the-go action agenda, an agenda to create inter-faith dialogue and action, around the world, to address the problems of human life, from mosquito netting in Africa to fight malaria to social justice in the American poverty zones. Thousands of mature and brilliant young people in their 20’s and 30’s in the Interfaith Youth Corps are deeply motivated by their own religious experiences and beliefs, and just as deeply committed to authentic dialogue and collaboration with people of other or no religious faiths. The IFYC doesn’t make the headlines we see with ISIS and fundamentalist terror religious movements but they may outnumber and will outlast the inferior religious thinking and passions of Islamic as well as Christian and Jewish closed groups. We know this because love is stronger than hate, in the end; because hope is more life-giving than fear, in the end, and shared and open life with others is more necessary than isolated colonies of any truths, and always has been.

The great British historian Arnold Toynbee, who saw so much that was true and came true, predicted that religious ideas and forces would become the dominate force in the development of world civilization, more than economic theories or national interests. Because, he asserted, the unification of humanity is the natural agenda of civilization, and so religion, and I quote him, will “relegate economic and political history to a subordinate place and give religious history its primacy. For religion, after all, is the serious business of the human race.”

We can be fairly confident, he said, that religion will be the likely plane on which history comes to center itself. And suddenly and strangely it is. Transcendent values seem more vital than allegiance to economic theories. Marxism versus capitalism, for example, seems less central in the fight for the hearts and minds of people. Even the US military confesses that they cannot win the war with terrorism without the US also winning the hearts and minds of the coming generation. And we should win that because American religious thinking and passion is among the most vital and life giving the world has ever known. Our open religious spirit is much more powerful, in the end, than the shock and awe of our military alone. The military knows that and so should we.

Hence the health and well-being of our American religious life is crucial to the survival of the planet. We have mistakenly assumed that religion was the source of tribalism and conflict rather than the chosen excuse of tribalism—the use of religious language as its cover and validation. The sin then is tribalism not religion. The higher religions do not preach or teach tribalism as their ultimate truth; but all tribalisms use religion to advance their low level goals. The sin is violence, not the religious cover that is used in the service of violence. Those who know Islam know that this ISIS stuff is a thin but horrible sliver of Islamic faith, a faith of a billion people around the world. ISIS represents Islam like the Ku Klux Klan represents Christianity, which is to say, not at all.

It is rather religion that unifies, pacifies, and energizes the masses, regardless of tribe. Look at the Pope’s recent tour of South America. It is religion that teaches the value of the individual and the values of a community, and ultimately, as every rich person finds out , or does not find out, it is religious value that makes wealth livable.

Now we need to define what we mean by religion, and how it emerges as the winning dark horse in the race of civilization to fulfill the ideals of humanity and our hopes to insure the survival of the earth. We will suggest some definitions, and also what religion is not.

Recently the Free Press had an interesting graphic cartoon for its Fourth of July issue: the Statue of Liberty in a wheel chair, crippled by our political polarization. We can also place the churches of America in that infirm status as well, the shrinking numerical health of America’s institutions of religious life. We know, thanks to the recently touted Pew research, that more and more people assert that they have no religion. Some 20% now claim that they are not Christian, more than claim that they are Catholic, more than claim that they are mainline Protestant.

How does this rise in secularism, the seeming demise of religion, square with the rise in religious significance? Few, if any, of the churches we have known all our lives seem to be growing very well. We need to look at that.

But along with the Free Press cartoon, did you also notice the blood orange full moon on the weekend of the Fourth, caused by the huge smoke plume from the massive Canadian forest fires? What could remind us more of our small planet’s inter-dependent life and the strange mix of beauty with hard truths.

So it is with religion. Religion is like that moon even if our churches are like that cartoon. Religion defined begins by acknowledging that what we see spiritually, whatever it is that religion points to, is only through a haze of our own smoke. Calvin called it the pollution of our own original sin, but we could just settle for it being the distortion of our own self- interests.

The Buddhist say that the moon is not the finger that points to the moon. Nor is that pure white disc often ever fully visible. And of course religion, like the moon, is only reflected light from a sun we cannot see for half of our lives, and a sun that if we look at directly at any time we go blind like a pirate.

That orange moon then is a good metaphor for what we mean by religion: Religion is a reflection of the source of all light seen only through a human haze, some of the time, and it can be beautiful. Our religious institutions are the way we have of pointing toward the moonlight.

That is a starting metaphor of what is religion might be. But we also have to overcome two prejudices we have about religion. One is that religion is bad, and the other is that what is secular is really truer than what is religious.

Religion, we think is bad, because we see so much bad religion in the news. But you know we hear a lot of bad music on the radio too, and we don’t think music is bad. And when we hear the junior high school band play our favorite symphony we don’t dismiss the symphony, we excuse the band. We are often not seeing or hearing any true spectrum of religion on the news or in our literature. There are breakthroughs such as the moment of Black Christian forgiveness that emerged after the massacre in Charleston. Whatever you think of that, it was a pure form of Christian life. It was, as the journal Christianity Today stated, a theological response, not a psychological or political response, and we need to stop explaining away Black Forgiveness.

Years ago on my little short wave radio I heard another example of the breakthrough of higher religion. The story reported by an Englishman for the BBC in Thailand was that the Thai government’s national program to protect the forests from corporate clearances and the dangers of deforestation were failing. Even the military monarchy could not defeat the monied corporate interests that lead to the cutting down of too many trees, that is until the Buddhist monks came to the rescue. Tapping into a deeper truth than money or law, these monks and priests –using a simple and known Buddhist doctrine, the sacredness s of all living things–simple ordained the trees. They blessed them, called them holy and wrapped them in yellow, orange and red fabrics and ribbons. No one then dared to cut down holy trees! That is the kind of deeper truth that religion can muster. We need not assume that the version of religion that makes it to the deviant -focused media is what religion is.

So here’s a short additional definition, along with our orange moon metaphor: Religion is what explains what we need to know about life, and yet also expresses the mystery of what we cannot know. Hence the creation myths of religion give us stories by which we can come to know our universe and our place in it. The rituals, the strange and irrational rituals of religion express and help us know what we cannot know, the mystery of birth, evil, and death. And all along religion gives us forms of beauty and language that inspire art and literature, even the art and literature that reject religion. There is nothing more God-focused than those recent novels dedicated to atheism.

The secular movement against religion in life is always just another form of religious purification. To the Anglican Church of England in the 17th century the Puritans were crass secularists. That is why they called them the derogatory name “Puritan.” But, in fact, they were “purifying” the sacred truths of the Church of England. Seemingly secular Puritans, came up new religious truths. Similarly, the Protestant Reformation against the Roman Catholic Church was—to the people involved—a struggle between religious and so called secular ideas. Martin Luther was dangerously secular to the church, even though he thought he was just being a better Catholic. He would write a hymn and set it to a German drinking song. Horrors. We sing it today in Protestant churches. In secular literature, when say, Dostoevsky in “The Brothers Karamosov” paints a picture of the horrors of the Catholic Inquisition, he does it in the name and the spirit of the real Christian Gospel. The real Jesus, Dostoevsky sees, would hate The Inquisition. As do we, in the name of a good religion against a bad form of it.

So the secularizing of our life can more truly be seen as a deep drive to something more vital than the ill churches of our day.

America has always been a place for conceiving and engendering deep and new religious truths and promoting secular freedoms. Both the reasoned thinking and the active passions of religion and secular life have thrived in America. Here are two roots examples, and both the reasoned thinking and the passionate ideals illustrated in these true historical roots are a legacy to guide us to our future and the future of civilization world-wide.

In 1776 Mother Ann Lee brought her Shakers, the shaking Quakers, to America to get away from persecution by the established church of England. Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson had penned and was signing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.

In 1777, while Mother Ann was moving her utopian mystics safely away from community persecution into New York State, Jefferson was drafting the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom. He would express the new American idea of religious tolerance: a tolerance more radical than just diversity, freedom for all religions, but freedom also from religion, the freedom to be purely secular. Meanwhile Mother Ann and her Church of the Second Coming of Christ lived in the aura of an ecstatic belief—that Mother Ann was herself the second coming of Christ. Ecstatic belief is the other side of secular reason.

Later Jefferson would edit, with scissors, his rational version of the New Testament. He also—famously—predicted, as I am pretty sure you know, that the new America would become dominantly Unitarian, the most rational least “religious” of the religions he knew. Yet during his presidency the Shakers spread their democratic, gender-equal, agrarian successes in a dozen or more settlements in New England, and out into Ohio and Kentucky.

Neither of these two disparate visions—Mother Ann ecstatic passion for a transcendent ideal community nor Thomas Jefferson’s rational Enlightenment thinking about democratic institutions– has dominated American Society: Not Mother Ann Lee’s very religious separate community nor Thomas Jefferson’s almost secular rational ethical church. But each one represents one side of a great and ongoing debate. In that debate there is tension between the values of a multifaceted religious nation that includes radical separate societies and the values of a purely secular, rational, society.

We care about this history because the crisis of the decline of known religious life in America, including our own, troubles us individually and seems to threaten us nationally. This history, iconically represented here in Mother Ann and Thomas Jefferson, holds the clue to defining the new forms of religious life in American, and world-wide—the mystical as well as the rational, the separate communitarians and the secular religion-less religious. These news forms of religion are coming in our time and they oppose the totalitarian fundamentalist state religions that are sometimes violently filling in the spiritual gap left by failed economies and decadent religions.

Here’s a picture of good religion where we see a little bit of Mother Ann and her Shakers, and we look over the shoulder of Thomas Jefferson. We hear it in the recent inspired apocalyptic vision of Garrison Keillor’s Fourth of July vision for Lake Wobegon.

While that mysterious, multi- messaged, full moon was orange-lighting the Bay on the Fourth of July Garrison Keillor told an inspired story on his weekly radio show with the News from Lake Wobegon. In that magical way he has of going from one thing to another he suddenly had the Fourth of July parade in his small town on the edge of the prairie turn into an apocalyptic version of the rapture of saved souls all going to heaven.

In his over active imagination he had the lead majorette in the parade, dressed up as the Statue of Liberty, mistakenly step into the hem of her green gown and have what is called a wardrobe malfunction. But while newly naked except for her red underwear she carried on, and her carrying on was a mark of character and courage and devotion to the cause for which she marched—America’s Fourth of July. Soon Keillor’s imagination had the whole town gathered for an annual photograph of some 850 people each holding a color of the flag, and from the Central Building down town the annual photo was to be taken—the people as the flag. But a strange group imagination over took the people, who, remembering the devoted courage of the almost naked Lady Liberty, all wondered what would happen if they were similarly stripped of their covering clothes. Did they have her devoted courage? It didn’t matter ‘tho, as their group-mind thought that behind the clouds was a spirit that pulled them up to the heavenly places. And the twist Garrison Keillor gave to that vision was suddenly that everyone realized that they were all being saved, Lutherans, Methodists, even Episcopalians, and even some of the neighbors that people had had questions about, all, all being lifted heavenward.

This is a remarkably American version of salvation, for what Keillor did was to mix, complete, pull together, the democratic, Jeffersonian, idea of all people are created equal, with the Christian idea, like Mother Ann’s, of heavenly salvation. And so there you had it: an image of 850 mid-western largely Christian flag-forming citizens being lifted like the Second Coming of Jesus, that event the Shakers had long lived in, all being brought together into a Jeffersonian image of democratic life. Even Catholics were in that picture, and Jews, what Norwegians call “the Jewish people.” A religious secular democratic spiritual vision—part rational, part passionate ideal—and all as one valuable end of life.

In this secular democratic transcendent spiritual vision there really is a place where everyone is saved and all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children are above average. That motto of rational equality expressed in absurd passionate religious idealism.

So may it be!