Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

When I was first in Seminary in New York City in the 1960’s we were all excitedly reading a book by a Harvard theologian called “The Secular City.” It celebrated secular values and reminded us that in the modern world we just could not expect to have religious values in daily life as folks had once upon a time. We could not, said the author, expect to have I-Thou relationships, holy encounters, in the crowded elevator going to work in our corporate towers. In those hippie days we believed the church would and should fade away and that liberated secular values, love and freedom, informed by something spiritual, would take over.

The author of the book, Harvey Cox, went on to have a great career at Harvard, but he spent his academic life disowning and apologizing for the book because it was so mistaken. The future, as it turned out, was to be like the girl with kaleidescope eyes—full of religious phenomena. We should have known. Most of us had read J.D. Salinger’s stories, including Franny and Zooey and the story of the young girl at her Yale College weekend barricading herself in the lavatory fervently reciting the Russian monk’s “Jesus Prayer” to herself, because she was, as were we all, desperately seeking religious and spiritual meaning and life.

As our world seems to be dividing into the Holy City and the Secular City we here in this kind of religious institution have a crucial role to play, the role of both/and not either/or. Both Holy and Secular.

To incorporate the values of secular and scientific reason as well as sacred and metaphysical belief we need to talk, need a new kind of willingness to talk about religion.

There are two things people are surprisingly shy, reluctant, to talk about. One is falling in love—that peak experience of heaven and hell. The other is religion, another kind of heaven and hell experience, that long journey of doubt, faith, and sometimes ecstasy.

Interestingly both love and religion have huge components of music. Love songs and operas, hymns and anthems make up in musical expression what most often is left out in personal conversation. It might be easier of we sang to each other about love and religion than to try to talk. While we don’t talk much personally about love and religion there are, of course, major academic places for the study of these two crucial polarities of our life. Psychology and theology have their respective intellectual and professional pyramids. But daily personal normal talk, reminiscences and hopes about these topics doesn’t often happen. Today I’m picking religion, although I do a workshop for couples on romantic love as well.

Now in Belfast last Thanksgiving the local minister’s association held a town-wide potluck supper up at the high school called Season of Gratitude. This was a Lincoln -inspired event because it was Abraham Lincoln who instituted a national Thanksgiving Day as the third national holiday after Washington’s birthday and the Fourth of July. You can see how this was a somewhat secular and yet a somewhat religious or sacred happening.

We asked people at their tables in the high school gym to talk about the things that they were thankful for—and people did, and people enjoyed the depth of stories shared. It was a meaningful, almost spiritual process stemming from that ancient and deep ritual experience, the blessing of expressed gratitude. People were in fact giving thanks. That is one of the first reflexes in the anthropology of religion—it’s what Noah does when his ark lands on dry ground. What helped work at this event was that we were free to talk about thanksgiving and gratitude without being in a church. There was no paraphernalia of dogma or belief, no hierarchy of clergy to give or withhold seals of approval.

It is a good thing to talk about religion and religious beliefs and experiences, both personally and publically. If we don’t have a culture of meaningful religious conversation we will have a society of meaningless talk and dangerous religious extremism road-blocking our politics and endangering our world. We cannot let the uneducated control our religious conversation nor should we let the highly-educated intimate us into being shy to talk about faith matters. It is the absence of quality religious talk in our private lives and the public square that allows the vacuum to be filled by uninformed and narrow versions of religious talk.

And we need each other’s religious experience and spiritual life to enrich our own. Religion is not the most private part of life, just the most intense. It is of private value and public worth. We have misinterpreted the First Amendment against the establishment of religion. We have over-estimated science and technology talk leaving little public intelligence to guide us in our market places or on the battle fields of our congested global village. In a world of multiple religious expressions no one religious expression becomes offensive. It is only when no one speaks that it becomes offensive for anyone to speak.

There is relevance to our security and wellbeing in this call for open religious awareness as I read recently in an essay in the weekend Wall Street Journal by the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, a man named Lord Jonathan Sacks. Now I bet you didn’t know that there was such a person as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation of the British Commonwealth! The only reason I knew was that I had a colleague once, a woman Rabbi, who moved to England and married the Chief Rabbi. I don’t know if Rabbi Sachs was that man.

The Western world should not be surprised, Rabbi Sachs wrote, that we have been blind-sided by the rise of Islamic State, the attacks by al Qaeda, or even the staying power of the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan who dumb-founded the Russians now perhaps the US. We would not be surprised if we would just take off our religious blinders, is his point. But we have been surprised because we have a secular blind spot. He says, “Ever since the rise of modern science, intellectuals have been convinced that faith is in intensive care, about to die or at least rendered harmless by exclusion from the public square.”

Now a huge portion of the world, including 1.6 billion Muslims, do not have the secular tradition of the Enlightenment revolution that we have. Of course the Arabs themselves were the keepers of culture for centuries when Europe was in the Dark Ages. It is significant that the new Pope, Pope Francis, lectured the US and the UN to not impose a secular western world view on the developing world.

We Americans should by now know how not to dismiss the religious values of First World peoples. I’m reading Dr. Lynn Parsons book on the history of faith in four centuries here on this peninsula. He points out how it was that the European priests simply could not see the religion of the Native Americans. Father Pierre Biard wrote in 1611, “The savages have no definite religion…no faith, no law, and no king.” Dr. Parsons tells us how we do, or should, know better. What they did not have was sacred texts, like ours, a hierarchical authority system, like ours, or a single god, at least as far as our forbearers could see. But of course as we missed their reverence for the earth and the mysteries of nature so they must have marveled at our religious ignorance.

We need to look to the international failure of our political and intelligence institutions for missing what Lord Sachs calls the religious counter revolutions in the face of the failure of secular revolutions to provide people with life and meaning.

One thing that stops us from seeing the religious counter revolutions is that we Enlightenment elites have a very snotty and ignorant attitude toward the religious life of our own conservative evangelicals, our own non-secular counter-revolutionaries. We characterize them as only anti-Darwinian anti-intellectual cultural rubes. We fail then to notice the genuine, and indeed sharable, religious impulse in them that drives their love of family, their modesty and devoutness, and their legitimate mistrust of political and religious institutions as they exist now, including schools, government, churches, and the media. We dismiss their metaphysical and their emotion spiritual life.

I’ve spent decades of my professional and personal religious life watching evangelical churches and thinkers—yes, thinkers,–take over the center of our society because we were just “too smart” to know how to talk with them or even to listen or respect them. We are so wedded to our own hygienic secular rationalizations that we have become contemptuous of other religious passions and of inspired religious beliefs, especially if they are Old Age not New Age.

Lord Sachs points out that our inability to understand a full spectrum of religion means that we are now dumbfounded by the rise of extremist religious violence. As knee-jerk enlightened rationalist he names three false ideas that we have simply because we don’t know how to look at religions closely. One, we assume that religion itself causes violence. Two, that religion is now just being used to brainwash and manipulate the lost and the deluded. Three, our religion is good and theirs is bad. All three ideas are incorrect he writes.

One. Religion does not cause violence and most of the wars in the last centuries have had secular causes. Two. Religious warriors are not being manipulated, they are true believers willing to sacrifice. Three. Only in-group pride can make us think that our religion is true and others are not. What Lord Sachs offers then is religious, even theological, education and knowledge. What I called religious literacy in the church newsletter recently.

Religious education begins with a willingness to talk about religion and assumes the axiom that human beings are the “meaning-seeking animal.” Sachs reminds us that science is only about how things happen, not why; and technologies are about the power to make things happen but not their purposes, and liberal democracies are only about the equal freedom to choose, but not about the principles to guide us as to what to choose. The benefit, and the blinder, of democracy is freedom for the whole map, but no compass.

Meaning, that is our instrument for guidance, the compass needle. Meaning is the language of religion and religion is the source of meaning in art and literature. Culture, said Paul Tillich, the theologian, is the form of religion, and religion is the substance of culture. The meaningful stuff of religion flows into our culture so we can see and know it. Religion and culture flow into each other, and history, now as a part of culture, is bringing religion to the forefront of our lives.

Lord Sachs easily shows us the commonalities of the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We in this UU tradition can add the nature faiths of Celtic and Wiccan spiritualities , the non-theistic faiths of Buddhism and inspired humanism. We must, Lord Sachs concludes, raise up a generation of people within the faiths he knows but is open to others, who are taught that “it is not piety but sacrilege to kill in the name of the God of life, (to) hate in the name of God of love, (to) wage war in the name of the God of Peace, and (to) practice cruelty in the name of the God of Compassion.”

To enlarge this conversation and raise up this generation we need to be willing and able to talk about religion itself and the religious beliefs and feelings that we have.

Rabbi Sachs adds, “As one who values market economics and liberal democratic politics I fear that the West doesn’t fully understand the power of the forces that oppose it. Passions are at play that run deeper and stronger than any calculation of interests. Reason alone will not win this battle. Nor will invocations of words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy.’ ”

As the historian Arnold Toynbee says, religion is ultimately always about the oneness of life. Science and technology, their successes and their failures, have brought us to the brink of our own now desperate need to know how to be one, at one within ourselves, at one with our neighbors, and at one with the stranger and the other, and, finally, at one with nature.

There are gifts in music for this conversation. Recall that both falling in love and having religious feelings and thoughts have great components of music and song to express them. Music can express what words alone cannot express. There is an ineffable quality to spiritual life, both in love and in religion. Our conversation will led us to song and musical sound at some point. Music can bridge our shyness. Worshippers have always had songs on their lips and in their hearts.

We know that Lady Justice should be blindfolded as she holds the scales of law and ethics. But religion cannot be gagged if it is to be religion. That is why our constitution is so important, the First Amendment’s freedom of religion, freedom of religion from the state. The First Amendment was just to tell the Congregationalists in New England and the Episcopalians in Virginia that they were not in charge of the state. And to remind the Church of England that we here were free of state religion. Ours might be secular cities, but they would be set on the hill because we could be holy people. The words “the separation of church and state” do not appear in the Constitution.

Religion is, by its cultural nature, impelled to give rise to speech, to the sounds not of silence but of words. Our Constitution says that religion cannot speak for the nation nor can the nation speak in a religious voice. The government cannot gag the religious voice, but we do should not gag ourselves personally or publically. Religion, in its freedom, can and must speak to the nation, to the world. To do that we must be speaking with each other. Religion is the serious business of humankind, says Toynbee. Religion is the ultimate category of meaning. A secular society without a sense of meaning is ultimately a meaningless society. Our American experiment requires that we be informed citizens and to speak up. It also, the Founders knew, requires us to be virtuous. Virtue is not born in silence alone, but in the words of our mouths as well as the meditations of our hearts.

So may it be.