Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

The fulcrum for today’s sermon is a book by the former Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, Lord Jonathan Sachs. The title of the book is, “Not in God’s Name: Confronting religious violence.”

The lever for today’s sermon is our own Western liberal religious traditions.

The boulder I am speaking to move is the dead rock of religious fundamentalism that is sitting on the chest and suffocating the heart and breath of our own Enlightenment religious spirit—

the bold spirit of free thinkers who threw off medieval superstitions and monarchies,

the courageous spirit of enlightened reform that lead the Puritans to believe they could create a light on a hill in the new world for the whole old world to see,

the driven spirit of the Abolitionists, largely religious people, to believe that God’s image was in all humanity and was the source of political equality.

This is the bold spirit of people who once lived by spiritual inspiration first.

People of faith have united and done the nearly impossible, with great sacrifice and deep strength, throughout history. It is time to resurrect that faith and power and to release the gigantic energy of religious faith suffocating under the weight of fundamentalist ideologies and hand-cuffed as well by our own weighty secularism.

The fulcrum point of Rabbi Lord Sach’s book is this:

We need to confront the new ideology of barbarism and bloodshed which is coming to us in the name of religion, for one, because the world is only going to become more and more religious.

This is ironic. The irony is that we will need better religion not less religion to overwhelm the challenges of flawed, false, and violent religion.

Here we might think that the dilution of secularism would work. But the world is fleeing secularism and not all in the name of benighted ignorance. Rabid atheists are at their intellectual Alamo.

A person like the new Pope takes on rock star charisma as he radiates spiritual power in the parliaments of the world, even as many of us have theological differences with the Pope’s religion.

Secular nationalism is not raising a successful flag in the ferment of the Middle East. Secular nationalism itself has given us two world wars. Secular communism gave the world the Gulag. Secular technology and science is giving us progress with no soul. Secular consumerism is leading to an earth-destroying economy that yields spirit-destroying materialism. And we feel this.

Even secular freedom and secular democracy, the great gifts of the Enlightenment, are not enough to answer the call for meaning when “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” or nothing more than “you go your way and I’ll go mine.” The desire for willing sacrifice is not stirred by moral relativism, the high call of human worth that we once felt requires loyalty and a common bond.

The battle cry of freedom in our Civil War meant more than just governmental democracy and individual freedom from slavery, it meant the triumph of a spiritual vision of our union’s moral purpose and a spiritual foundation for equality.

But our union is in fact spiritually disintegrating, the “somewhat united states,” and our notions of equality are leading to “correct” and isolating autonomy. The human family does not thrive on do your own thing, or on “whatever.”

Americans share many values in common, including respect. But reverence, service, generosity, a knowledge of something sacred, these are bonds to the common good that require a motivating reason larger than self-interest or intellectual agreement. A good spirit must rise again to replace consumer marketing and pragmatic individualism. We need to gather in a movement of spirit as we have in the past gathered and moved in common cause against shared enemies, and for higher purposes.

America is the land of great awakenings. They have been religious awakenings and have put to shame the five year plans of the old Soviet Union, the Great Leap Forward of Chinese Communism, and the mythological appeal of the Third Reich. Our religious awakenings are actually successful. Those political and economic movements, the political revolutions of Europe in 1848, and the French Revolution, actually were not.

Spiritual great awakenings meet a human spiritual need. But it isn’t just human needs for spiritual life that call for our own new religious strength and purpose. It is simple demographics.

Lord Sachs writes, the “…world will be more religious a generation from now not less…The more religious people are the more children they have. The more secular they are the fewer children they have. The indigenous populations of Europe, the most secular continent, are committing long, slow suicide. Their below-replacement birth rates mean that they will get older and fewer. Demographically.…the religious will inherit the earth.”

Within religion the most extreme anti-modern or anti-western movements will rise, he predicts. “This is happening in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.” This is because the fires burn hottest in the primal orthodoxies.

But we have primal orthodoxies of our own. One of which is our intolerance of intolerance. We can and must assert this. Another is the belief that force and violence can never be used to create religious institutions or faith—simply because a forced faith is no faith at all. This is the truth within our separation of church and state.

Tolerance, then, and spiritual free choice are two deep breaths to be taken when the stone of fundamentalism is off the human chest.

We feel that there is intolerant violence even within our own political and religious context. It is not enough to just say, “Calm down!” We must fight fire with fire. We must re-awaken our own fierceness within. We are intolerant of the violent intolerance we see from ISIS to Texas.

Now we have been afraid of what we are seeing in our world for a long time. We’ve been unnerved by our fears. We’re afraid that our way of life was not just changing but failing. Over fifty years ago the great poet W.H. Auden had poem named the “Age of Anxiety.” Those three words, “age-of-anxiety,” became a motto for our mid-century life. And what was our anxiety? One, of course, was nuclear destruction. Behind that was the lurking sense that our ideologies were not competitive with Communism, that Russia would in fact “bury” us. We also feared that our religion could not hold us together or save our civilization, having twice failed to keep Christian Europe at peace. We feared our own decadence. And now there is a face of evil in the world calling us to face that fear, those who say they will “burn” us.

The great English historian Arnold Toynbee addressed this fear. Writing in1947 he entitled his book “Civilization on Trial.” Ominous enough. He looked at what he termed “the prospects of our Western Civilization.” He had already documented extensively the rise and fall of 19 of the world’s 20 or so great civilizations. Ominous enough again.

He said there was a pattern. Social disintegration came when a “recalcitrant proletariat,” an unhappy rebellious poorer majority, could no longer be controlled by a rich elite militaristic minority.

He wrote, “We are naturally asking ourselves to-day (1947) whether this particular chapter of history is bound to repeat itself in our case. Is that pattern of decline and fall in store for us in our time, as a doom from which no civilization can hope to escape.”

His answer is an emphatic, “No!” No, we do not have to decline and fall. The creation of life that we are a part of rarely succeeds, he says, without many failures. But we can succeed. We need not commit what he calls “social suicide.” It is up to us, it is not in the stars or the hands of the Gods.

What, he asks, “shall we do to be saved?” He says three things and the remarkable thing is we have actually or are on the verge of accomplishing, 50 years later, two of the three things, and can accomplish the third.

First, he said that we must establish a “constitutional co-operative system of world government.” This is when the UN was just a gleam in the human eye. We are beyond the point of no-return about the UN.   UN Peacekeeping forces are a matter of course. The recent Paris Climate Conference was, without fanfare, a UN-called meeting. We know, all of us, that the world order requires cooperation as we have never accepted it before. This is a huge mental and spiritual shift in consciousness.

Second, he said that the economic and ideological standoff between Communism and Capitalism requires some sort of a working compromise, a blend of free-enterprise and socialism. We are no longer going to go have World War III over competing economic systems, with the rise of capitalism in Russia and a blend of systems in China, and even a Social Democrat running for President in the USA.

By and large the world has taken two of the three steps Toynbee called for us to take if we were to survive, some world system of governing and a blend of economic systems. And here is the third, in his words.

“In the life of the spirit (we must) put the secular super-structure back on to religious foundations.”

These are three ambitious undertakings, he says, and “call for the hardest work and the highest courage…and…of the three the religious one is of course in the long run, by far the most important.” His words.

Solving the first two means that we don’t lose “forever our opportunity of achieving a spiritual rebirth which cannot just be whistled for at our convenience, but will come, if it comes at all, at the unhurrying pace at which the deepest tides of spiritual creation flow.”

Now is our time to feel and to move with these deep tides.

Miraculously we have avoided the first wave of our fears in our age of anxiety. Nuclear destruction has been delayed, post-ponded, maybe averted. No world military force is imposing a Pax Romana military world order on us all. The UN has assumed center stage, along with a culture of negotiation. Nor is the world divided by an Iron Curtain any more. And so now, as Toynbee always thought, the serious business of world history is its religious business.

He says this because world history is a story of increasing unity and unity is the underlying and the transcendent teaching of the great spiritual traditions and teachings of the world.

Houston Smith says this in his history of world religions. He quotes Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes sayings, “Science makes major contributions to minor needs.” This contrasts with the mandates of religion to come up with even minor contributions to our major needs, those things that matter most. When some lone spirits such as the Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Mohamed, make their break-throughs they become not rulers but world redeemers, an order of a different magnitude.

Authentic religion, writes Huston Smith, is “the clearest opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos can pour into human existence.” What then, he writes, can rival its power to touch and inspire the deepest creative centers of (human) beings? Even George Bernard Shaw was forced, he says, to confess that religion is the only real motive force in the world.

We’ve been hypnotized into thinking it is progress. But progress towards what?

The American historian Henry Adams pointed out that 13th century France spent more as much or more national capital on their cathedrals than did 19th century America on our railroads. It was an investment of supreme importance, and they remain beautiful. Adams wondered if our mechanical dynamos can compete with the spiritual Virgin and her multiple dwellings, her Notre Dames of this and of that.

Religion is what makes people do the impossible. Our task is to have that impossible possibility be for good and not for evil. What we are here on earth to experience is our souls, and our souls grow as we learn to live through suffering and learn the lessons of love. That is what brings us closer to our own true selves, our real spirit and own common life. Some call this God.

This is our answer to death, which remains our fundamental issue. The grace of religion is to take us to that place were our souls feel at home. It is not social progress but the spiritual pilgrim’s progress that we live for.

Ultimately we all want to live for a transcendent purpose and for its will to be done, not our own. We really do want to serve a higher calling, a greater being than our own. And so humility, and love of self and other, is what makes up the higher religions and can make for a future of peace on earth and good will—something we have been singing about recently.

Each person’s individual spiritual progress toward the divine will is our call, and is what leads us to make a life. We may make the world a better place, but we surely want to become our better selves. This is the reach that brings God to earth and takes us upwards.

Now why preach this here and now? Because no one is better placed to move that lever, based on that fulcrum, to get that stone of fundamentalism and violent religion off the chest of humanity than we are here. This is a religious institution. It is connected to a larger religious force. It has tradition, strength, identity, and resources. Violence in God’s name needs an answer. Tolerance is the lever, the freedom of the spirit from state or church control is the fulcrum. The dead rock of violent fundamentalism is there to be moved. You have the resources, the traditions, the spirit, the desire, and, yes, the brains.

So be it!