The Danger in Handling Sacred Things

29 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Don Smith

The theme for today’s service was generated from an idea that I have pondered for a long time now. Being aware that the history of our religious tradition is one that has had a series of orthodoxies, and that those orthodoxies have always excluded certain persons or views, I wondered whether there could be an orthodoxy that is more inclusive and, if so, what form that orthodoxy would take. By that I mean to say “Around what center could all of humanity gather, and agree that the center is more important than any one radius that might extend from it.”

I believe that it’s important to identify what it is that brings us together and keeps us together. I believe that if we remain focused on that, then we can deal openly and honestly with each other–even when we disagree. Many ideas are tossed about that can be both attractive and seductive, but are not, in the long run, healthful or life giving. They do nothing to build one up, to make one a better person, or add to one’s life.

In fact they can drain our energy and leave us more cynical. We may exercise freedom of belief, but we are not protected against the negative impact of bad belief systems. And so we need to be very critical of what things we believe; to demand that the beliefs and ideas serve us, and not just that we serve them.

I’ll be speaking to you again in a month or so, during a service on Transcendentalism, and will try to express something more of my personal religious beliefs at that time. But today I wish to speak about what I would have our community be, and the best way I can think of to do that is to tell a little of my own history with this church; from what tradition I came, why I left that tradition, and what I found here. It will probably be a familiar story to most of you.

I was brought up in the Church of Christ. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Church of Christ I would only say this: it is as fundamental as fundamentalism can be, and as narrow in its teachings as any church could ever be. It is a church that insists on both orthopraxy and orthodoxy. One must do what is right and one must do it for the right reasons. My parents are both simple, loving, G’d-fearing people who believe with complete earnestness all the things that they taught me. I respect them more than I can say, even though I disagree with them totally when it comes to matters of theology. I know that their love and respect for me is equally strong, even though they no doubt wonder how this tree-hugging, gay, agnostic could be the product of the upbringing they provided.

It was at about the age of twelve that I began to think that I didn’t believe the theology that I had been spoon-fed from the cradle onward, and by the time I left for college I was certain of the fact. I never rejected or abandoned the orthopraxy that I had been taught, but only the orthodoxy. I rejected all Religion – with a capital R, meaning organized religion – but I don’t guess I ever lost sight of the values that my religious upbringing had instilled in me. Those values have served me well in life and I embrace them wholeheartedly.

I know that many of you have heard this more times than you care to remember, but when I came to this church it was for one reason and one reason only: to do t’ai chi. But once I got here I began to get to know the people, and I began to read the postings on the bulletin board-became aware of the diversity of thought and beliefs that were embraced here. I attended a class on Sunday mornings for ten weeks that compared Taoism with UUism, and I became curious to know what a service here would be like. I attended a service and was moved in a way that’s hard for me to explain, but the feeling produced was one of keen awareness. Awareness of the organic whole of which we are all a part, and a feeling of belonging. I continued to come and to explore what this church has to offer. The more I explored the more deeply I was drawn into this community.

A community of tolerance and acceptance, of support and encouragement, of thoughts that challenge, and challenges to thought. This is the community of which I partake, and this is the community that I wish to help build up, maintain, and see flourish.

PRAYER

Let us pray that the prayers of those who love us best will be answered.

Out best friends pray that we will be people of good character. They hope we will hold ourselves to high standards, and welcome constructive criticism when we stray.

Let us hope their prayers are answered.

Those who care about what is best in us pray that we will honor what is best in us. They hope we will listen to the angels of our better nature, not the angels of our lesser selves.

Let us hope their prayers are answered.

And those close to us know, as we know, that what we really believe, the gods we really serve, will be judged by our actions – not our words, but our actions, whether noble or ignoble, loving or mean. And they hope and pray, those who love us best, that we will serve, and be defined by, those angels of our better nature. That’s how we know they love us best. Let us pray that their prayers are answered.

Amen.

SERMON: The Danger in Handling Sacred Things

My favorite philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once cautioned a student not to get too familiar with sacred things, to grant them a respectful distance. In part, it’s because of the great power of sacred things, the great spirit in them – and the fact that while you think you’re playing with them, they may take your measure.

I was reminded of this again by this sermon topic, combined with two events in the news the past weeks. Sermon topics can be planned carefully in advance, but then sometimes current events will intervene, which must be addressed. Then the sermon topic modulates to a key in which thought about the topic and the current events can both be addressed. That’s what happened this week.

The first was the super-hyped release of Mel Gibson’s move on his peculiar version of the Passion. The second was President Bush’s equally embarrassing move to write discrimination and bigotry into an American Constitution revered the world over for its inclusive freedoms. And all these things have to do with the high cost of using sacred and noble words, words like God, country, justice, truth and love, in low, mean or inadequate ways.

As several movie reviewers have observed, Mel Gibson has made a movie about his own personal obsession with suffering. Most of his most famous roles – Braveheart, Payback, Lethal Weapon – are obsessed with Mel Gibson’s suffering in order to save people. His other obsession is with his very idiosyncratic version of Christianity. He’s described kindly as a “traditional” Catholic. That means he rejects Vatican II and all advances in Catholic thinking of the past forty years: like the kinder and more inclusive attitude toward Jews and people of other religions, or translating the Mass into English so believers could understand it. He is against all of that, and I understand he has built a church near his home where he has hired a minister to preach religion the way he likes it.

In a way, his movie raises him to the height of what must be his greatest fantasy, for he has now cast Jesus Christ to play Mel Gibson. But as more and more religious writers are beginning to note, it is a willfully ignorant and embarrassingly narrow vision of Christianity. He is very obsessed with picturing the goriest details of a torture that did not come from the bible but from a secular book by a Catholic mystic, where she described the awful Jews and the horrendous wounds inflicted on Jesus.

He has his right to play with religious symbols and religious stories. But he doesn’t have a right to have his playing respected. That depends on how well he handles the religious symbols and stories he plays with, whether he gives them a high or a low meaning. And like Wittgenstein said, it’s dangerous to get too close to sacred things.

Because picking up religious symbols is a little like a violinist picking up a Stradivarius: the instrument will take the measure of you, will let all with ears to hear know that you had no business handling something this fine.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd saw the movie in a theater not even one-quarter full, and wrote an over-the-top review of this over-the-top movie. She said it was like one of the “spaghetti westerns” directed by Sergio Leone in the 1960s and 70s that made Clint Eastwood famous. She described Gibson’s film as a “spaghetti crucifixion,” and suggested its name could have been “A Fistful of Nails.”

I suspect, when the dust created by Gibson’s own PR crew to stir up controversy around the movie settles, it will disappear quickly from memory, as a very bad movie with an embarrassing, even silly, reduction of Christianity to his own fascination with physical suffering – suffering he has endured only as a movie actor, with lots of special effect and make-up teams so he would feel no pain.

Mel Gibson’s simplistic and sensationalistic treatment of Christianity is of the same kind as President Bush’s treatment of America in his new political move toward a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriages. It is also, like Gibson’s, an act showing no awareness of any advances in thinking over the past forty years. Though, unlike Gibson’s, it’s a thoroughly political move.

Then to see and hear Christians, and Christian ministers, coming forward to say their God hates gays and lesbians – that is even lower than a spaghetti crucifixion. It’s a betrayal, even a crucifixion, of the spirit of Jesus, and the highest spirit that has been served by the best Christians of history. It is a pornographic insult to the spirit of Jesus, and to the compassionate spirits of millions of good Christians.

Some people don’t like to hear things like this in church. They just want uppers, happy pills. Some think that being religious means always saying only nice things about even very bad behaviors and the people who do them. Some think being religious means never judging anyone.

That’s not how it is in the Bible. The prophets in the Hebrew scriptures were always angry. They saw the rich selling the poor for a pair of shoes, and they were outraged and said that God was outraged. They were angry whenever one kind of person thought his kind was superior to other kinds.

Orthodoxy means right beliefs. To claim to have right religious or patriotic belief, we have to let the high symbols of religion or nationalism raise our sights to their level, not drag them down to ours.

America has gone through low points in our history where many citizens – perhaps even a majority – have discriminated against blacks, women, Irish, Italians, Catholics, Jews, gays, lesbians and others. We have often taken the counsel of the angels of our lesser natures. We look back on these times with some shame because they degraded our high ideals, and the spirit of those high ideals judged our behaviors as low and mean. We played with high ideals in low and mean ways, and took our measure in ways we cannot, in retrospect, be proud of.

We’re talking about character. That’s what the word “orthopraxy” really means: behaving in ways worthy of people of character. And when we speak about character, we value the same things humans in all times and places have cared about: honesty, integrity, responsibility, authenticity, and moral courage. We don’t approve of those who side with the stronger against the weaker, or who use others as “things” to serve their own personal hungers or ideological agendas.

Questions of character aren’t fancy. They’re very ordinary sorts of questions that extend our horizons beyond the biases of our little in-groups to reconnect us, through our common humanity, with all people. And in our efforts to live like people of character, some of the best teachers we have are our highest ideals, whether religious, civic or personal. Words like God, country, love, justice, and truth – these are the words that can both take our measure and build our character.

In the 3rd century, there was a brilliant Christian thinker, and some of the things he said remain among my very favorites. One was his instruction in how to read a religious scripture – how to handle sacred objects. We must search for two things at the same time, he said. We must seek for what is useful to us, and worthy of God. Nothing less.

That is the cost of using holy words. It is like picking up a Stradivarius: it will take the measure of us.

This isn’t the way much nationalistic or religious language is really used, though, is it? Mostly it’s dragged down to the level of spaghetti crucifixions or a fistful of bigots. It has always happened that way. It made the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures angry. It made Jesus angry. Now it’s our turn to deal with it in our own time. In every time and place, people of character must rise to protest the dirtying and demeaning of our highest ideals. Those ideals are the most sacred property of our culture. They’re the angels of our better natures, the tools we need to help mold people of high character.

I don’t think Jesus would take Mel Gibson’s picture seriously enough to get angry. But I do agree that it might make him throw up. And if you’re going to be a Christian, I don’t think you should behave in ways that would make Jesus throw up.

Being religious isn’t just about being sweet and forgiving, any more than being a responsible citizen is about waving a flag or supporting highly questionable wars or policies.

Religion, citizenship and love aren’t about making it easier on ourselves. They’re about raising the standards, playing by more demanding rules than we had to when we weren’t claiming to be religious, loving or patriotic.

In the Hebrew scriptures, all Jews were the sons and daughters of God. He was their father, they were his children. It was their covenant with God. They would be his chosen people and he would be their God. But if you read the Bible, you see this did not mean God let them off the hook. It meant he held them to higher standards than he held anyone else.

When you pick up sacred teachings, they take your measure. You may think you can make a movie like a spaghetti crucifixion to reduce a noble and complex religion to your private obsessions, but you can’t. You’ve violated something sacred, and you’ll eventually be exposed for it, because it is our job, the job of all believers, all citizens, all who believe in justice, truth and love to expose those who degrade our noblest ideals.

Wittgenstein was right, I think. We should be very careful of claiming too much familiarity with sacred things. Because they are not trinkets, and we may not use them however we please. They have a kind of spirit about them, and when we dishonor that spirit, others who see and understand it judge us for demeaning something we didn’t have the right to demean.

Don’t get me wrong. I think we should try to define ourselves by the light of our highest ideals, our noblest words: God, country, truth, justice, love and the rest of them. Holding a religious belief means we want to be judged by the highest standards, nothing less.

The poet Rilke once said that we are blessed by the ideals we pursue with a good heart. We become what we worship, which is both the hope of following high ideals, and the danger of worshiping unworthy ideals or simplistic religious or national identities.

And if orthodoxy means holding the right beliefs, we should want to be orthodox in the highest sense. We just have to be sure they are the highest beliefs, not the lowest. We need to keep asking, when we find something that suits us, whether it is also worthy of God.

For that is what is demanded of those who would handle sacred things. Nothing less.