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© Davidson Loehr
23 February 2003
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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Four Part Series
In the Beginning
Original Sins and Blessings
Reconsidering the Concept of God
The Legitimate Heir to Salvation
Introduction
With every new revelation of the Homeland Security Act that appears, it seems clear that individual and civil rights are being threatened wholesale, while few seem to notice. The second section of this act, which a guest discussed with Bill Moyers a week ago on his NOW program, makes it clear that the government can declare war against not only sovereign nations without provocation, but that they can also declare war against individual citizens of this country. I know some people who scoff at this, saying only a paranoid individual would think the government would really do things like this that are characteristic of fascist governments but not democracies. Maybe. Maybe we’ll just have to differ on that.
But with or without paranoia, I’ve been thinking all week of the few famous lines written almost sixty years ago by pastor Martin Niemoller, after the fall of the Nazi movement in his Germany. He had been an outspoken critic of both Hitler and the Nazis almost from the start, and ended the war in the concentration camp at Dachau, freed by the American army shortly before he was to be executed.
In 1945, he wrote this short confession which has been quoted thousands of times, and which is beginning to appear in e-mails and critical news stories. I want to remind us of it:
Prayer
Martin Niemoller
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
For me, Niemoller’s warning applies to religion as well as it does to politics: maybe more. And the soul of his message is one Jesus put in even fewer words: We are all our brother’s and our sister’s keepers. We are all our brother’s and our sister’s keepers.
SERMON
Since I didn’t grow up in a conservative religion, most religious jargon isn’t loaded for me. So I usually think of the word “God” as a symbol for our highest ideals and values. And I think of the word “salvation” in its original meaning: as health, wholeness (it comes from the same Latin root as “salve”). For me, the terms are kind of safe and abstract.
But when I hear many of your stories about why you left the churches of your childhood, or why your family avoided churches altogether, I realize that in the real world, “salvation” had a very different meaning, and not a very positive one. It meant getting a group’s or a church’s acceptance only as long as you agreed not to think outside the lines drawn by their orthodoxy. Neither my definition of God or of salvation would have worked in those churches. That’s partly why I grew up unchurched: I didn’t respect the few churches I tried.
I can’t count the number of times I have heard Unitarians talk about how they felt when they knew they had to leave their old church. Some felt angry, some felt hurt, to realize that they couldn’t stay because they didn’t believe those things, and it wasn’t safe to say so out loud. Not that you’d be shot, but people would look at you funny if you had said you weren’t so sure about this God-stuff. They might have called you an atheist or a heretic, as though that were a bad thing. And they would have made you uncomfortable, as though you weren’t quite clean any more. So you left. It’s also why so many people – a majority of U.S. citizens – neither attend nor trust churches. The gods are the hand puppets of those who speak for them, and salvation is your reward for going along with their game.
So I suppose what I really want to talk about here isn’t salvation, but the legitimate heir to what was once called salvation. I love that phrase, and want to footnote it. It comes from my favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), the thinker on whom I wrote my dissertation. I’d rate him as one of the four best philosophers in history (Plato, Aristotle, and Kant). When people finally understand him widely, it might change the nature of philosophy, and religion, in fundamental ways. At some point during his teaching years at Cambridge, another philosopher (could have been Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, or G.E. Moore, I forget) asked him what it was that he was doing: “It’s certainly not philosophy!” Wittgenstein’s response was “Perhaps not, but it’s the legitimate heir to what was once called philosophy.” Now I want to talk for these few minutes about the legitimate heir to salvation.
There are two facets to salvation, and it’s easy to emphasize the wrong one by thinking that all we have to do is just be honest and open about what we really believe, try to fashion beliefs that are true to both our heads and our hearts, then try to live them. But that’s the easy part, the part we don’t have to worry much about. Every one of you already has your sense of questions, yearnings, your way of saying what you do and don’t believe.
The second part of this salvation business – and the most important and most fragile part – is the thing Martin Niemoller was talking about in this morning’s prayer. It is a kind of atmosphere within which it is safe to voice your beliefs, whether theological, social, moral or political, without being made to feel that you are a second-class person, or a member of The Damned. That atmosphere is what was lacking in whatever church you felt you had to leave. Why was it lacking? Because are rules in all churches, and the church that offended you probably had the wrong rules.
In theological terms, these rules can be called an orthodoxy: a set of beliefs endorsed by a group, and used as the boundaries of permissible belief for everyone in the religion. Once an orthodoxy is in place, the choices are closed, even if you hadn’t finished choosing yet. And the theological word for choosing after some group has set up an orthodoxy is heresy. It comes from a Greek verb meaning, “to choose.” So heresy is only considered bad by those who closed off the choices before you were done. When you look at it this way, heresy is the sacred thing, and orthodoxy is the blasphemy. Heresy is the Holy Spirit, alive and well, helping you find beliefs that can make you whole. Orthodoxy is a kind of groupthink that would cut you – and God – down to the group’s size.
The Greeks had a different image for orthodoxy, in their story of Procrustes. He was this man with an iron bed. He was very friendly to his visitors, always offering them that bed to sleep on. But once on it, he tied them down, then either stretched them to fit the bed or cut off whatever parts hung over. He had his iron bed, and everyone had to fit it. That’s orthodoxy.
Another image comes from the television series “Star Trek.” It’s the group known collectively as The Borg. I suspect more of you watch Star Trek than read Greek mythology, so you probably know about the Borg. They are a kind of group, or cult, that simply assimilates everyone into them, erasing individual differences and essentially giving everyone the soul of the group, the collective, the cult, the Borg.
And that word “cult” is another one referring to the biggest obstacle to finding your salvation in a church. A couple weeks ago I was invited to a lunch with Daniel McGuire, a Jesuit scholar brought to town by Planned Parenthood to talk about religious sanctions for both family planning and abortion.
During his luncheon talk, he referred to his church, the Catholic Church, as a cult. This shocked one Catholic woman there, who asked what he meant. A cult, he said, takes away your beliefs and gives you theirs. It assigns authority only to its own teachings, draws the boundaries on what it is permissible to think, and seeks to exclude those who do not conform. In that sense, he said, the Church has always been a cult, and has always been an obstacle to salvation. And he pointed out what every religion student knows: that virtually every famous religious thinker in history was a heretic in their day, because they went beyond the beliefs accepted by their group. My favorite sound byte of the day was when he defined conservatives as “worshipers of dead liberals.”
I think all these images are good ones. So think of it as an orthodoxy, a Procrustean habit of cutting you down to fit someone else’s bed, of the Borg ignoring and absorbing your soul and giving you its own impersonal soul; or think of it as a cult that limits the acceptable beliefs to those that stay within the boundaries set out by whatever people got to define the beliefs of the cult, and turn the institution into their hand-puppet. Whatever you call it, it is the mortal enemy of your ability to find salvation in that community.
Think back on the anger or pain you felt in a church that wasn’t big enough for your questions or your beliefs, and see if this doesn’t describe it. You were being cut down to something so small your soul wouldn’t fit. Once the boundaries are drawn, once the “right” beliefs and opinions have been defined, everyone else becomes a second-class citizen, and slightly unclean. I know that you know the feeling, that all of us have experienced it at some time.
The most important facet of a quest for wholeness, authenticity, integrity, salvation, is the kind of atmosphere within which all sincere beliefs are equally welcome, equally “clean.” Without that atmosphere, no community is finally safe. Then it’s like Martin Niemoller wrote about in the confession of his that I used as our prayer this morning:
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
That atmosphere was shattered, and so no one could be safe, let alone made whole or healthy.
I’m betting that none of you would have left your former church if they had been able to say “Look, we’re trying to explore what it means to be most fully alive and human, as individuals, partners, parents and citizens. Our tradition has had the habit of doing this in God-talk, or in terms of Buddha or Krishna and Brahman. But these are just ways of speaking. If you would put these common goals differently, please do. They’re only ways of talking, after all, not sacred words. And the more ways we can say it, the more likely we really know what we’re talking about. We’re enriched by a true diversity of beliefs on ultimate questions, so welcome!”
That’s the atmosphere I mean: the atmosphere or culture of the place that keeps all sincere opinions equally welcome. This doesn’t mean you have to respect those opinions, understand! Opinions have to get their respect the old-fashioned way: they have to earn it, in open dialogue. And I’m not talking about frivolous, narcissistic or sociopathic opinions – I’m remembering a church I knew where a disturbed member wanted to host a discussion group on the joys of pedophilia! But the people who hold sincere opinions have to feel welcome and “clean.”
Too often, to find yourself and your beliefs, you have to leave the community that wants to cut you down to fit their iron bed. We’ve had a couple examples of this in Austin, both involving Baptist churches. Several years ago, the minister of University Baptist Church had a story about him on the front page of the New York Times because that church ordained a gay deacon, in violation of the new orthodoxy of the Southern Baptist Convention. As a result, in order to live out their beliefs, they withdrew from the SBC.
And last year it happened again, when the First Baptist Church downtown withdrew from the SBC rather than conform to beliefs they felt were small and mean. The choices had been closed before they had finished choosing.
One of the least attractive things about human nature is our undying desire to make the world in the image of our beliefs: to turn our gods and our institutions into our hand puppets. If those beliefs are truly expansive and inclusive, that might be a good world. But they almost never are. They’re almost always partisan, following the party lines of some theology, some social ideology, some political platform. Iron beds. Iron beds, all of them. And the most abiding and mortal enemy of both the human spirit and the Holy Spirit.
Nearly all the great religious figures had to leave their communities in order to be saved, in order to find their distinctive wholeness and authenticity. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, all of them. And it’s true on a less cosmic scale, too. In the Unitarian tradition, we celebrate the courage of a Congregationalist minister named William Ellery Channing, who defined a nonsupernatural Unitarian Christianity back in 1819, and is cited as the first American-born Unitarian.
But we almost never tell the other story about Channing, one that’s really more to the point for us. And that’s that at the end of his career, he resigned from the Unitarian church he had served his whole adult life, because they drew up a creed of expected beliefs for their members. He would not be spoken for, and he could remain whole only by leaving the church he had served for decades. His church became a cult, another iron bed, and he left rather than being absorbed by the Borg.
It can happen so easily. That expansive atmosphere is so very fragile, so easily destroyed. During graduate school, I attended an unusually liberal Christian church because it was healthier than the Unitarian church a block away. They really did welcome all beliefs, and said so. They practiced an open communion, the only time in my life I took communion.
It was hard sometimes being clear about just where the boundaries were there, whether anything could be presumed about all the members. Some of the more rigid Christians were always trying to bring back confessional tests of faith. Finally, someone suggested to the board that the church say that whatever beliefs people had, we could all agree that our primary purpose was to help establish the kingdom of God.
That was a metaphor for the best kind of world, the world with the most justice, fairness, and compassion. The church was involved in social activism, and the board thought it fit. I was doing my student internship there, and I thought it fit too. After all, how could that metaphor be turned into something small and scary?
It didn’t take long to find out. It was done by a man named Dan, a student preparing for the ministry. Dan was perhaps the most dedicated and courageous social activist I’ve ever met. He marched, and was arrested with, Chicago union workers in their strikes. He and his wife learned Spanish and spent dangerous weeks in both Guatemala and Nicaragua during the 1980s when Reagan’s Contras were killing so many people there. Dan was a good, brave man. He was very active in Chicago politics, too.
So nobody saw it coming when he stood one Sunday during Prayers of the People to remind us that we all agreed we were there to help establish the kingdom of God. Then he reminded us that Tuesday was Election Day, and said, “You will either be working for or against the kingdom of God Tuesday. If you vote Democratic, you are working for the kingdom of God. Otherwise, you are an enemy of God’s kingdom. Remember that!”
Everyone was stunned. No one ever successfully confronted Dan, because he knew he was right, and right for the whole church. For my remaining three years there, the church was never quite the same. The next year a retired professor announced, during a week that he stood at the table for our monthly Communion, that Communion was a Christian sacrament, and as such was open to all Christians who had accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. That really finished it. That fragile atmosphere was shattered, and no one knew how to repair it. Some of us just left, and no longer had a church.
Don’t think this sort of thing happens only in Christian churches. It’s part of human nature, it happens everywhere. I know this first-hand, because I served a church where this liberal atmosphere necessary for the legitimate heir to salvation was shattered. There was a small group of secular humanists, about 5% of the church, who were unhappy with a style of liberal religion that used a lot of ways of talking about religious questions.
Finally, they got three of their group on the board, and one bullied the others into making him president of the board. Within a few months, he gave me a small piece of paper with a list of words I was told that I was not to use from the pulpit. The list included words like soul, spirit, God, and miracle. He insisted that I still had freedom of the pulpit, but said those words offended the humanists, and my job as a minister was to care for their feelings, so to be an adequate minister I couldn’t use those words.
Of course, I did use those words. I would be a liberal even if I were the only one in the room. An increasingly vicious fight went on for over two years. They were so sure they were right that one of them finally made a public death threat against me, in front of a board member and the church administrator. I preached the second service that morning while police were outside taking statements. That’s a cult.
I had a nine-year-old stepdaughter who said she was sick, and missed the next week of school. When she still didn’t want to return to school the following Sunday, we finally thought to ask her why she didn’t want to go to school: “I’m afraid they’ll kill me too,” she said. Since cults serve themselves rather than truth or life, they can do great harm, and cause great “collateral damage.” The attendance at that church is now about half what it was ten years ago. Once that fragile atmosphere is destroyed, it can be almost impossible to create again, even ten years later.
The most dangerous people on earth are those who think something is so simple there is only one right position, which coincidentally happens to be theirs. In religion’s orthodoxies and cults, in political systems that claim the right to arrest dissenters, or in other social, theological or cultural ideologies that work like the Borg.
The reason it is so easy for us to recognize images like Procrustes’ Iron Bed, cults, or the Borg is because all of these come from something deep within our human nature. Dangerous, but absolutely natural. We would all be most comfortable in a world where we got to prescribe some basic beliefs and values for others, just as our gods become the hand puppets of those who speak for them. We create orthodoxies at the drop of a hat: theological, political, social, even down to dress codes.
Salvation is like democracy: only eternal vigilance can make it possible. So here you are in this very liberal church. Among your questions, you may wonder what you need to do to make this a place that can provide the legitimate heir to salvation. Remember salvation has two parts. The first is that you have to bring your own questions, your own beliefs, and be willing to work on them until they feel adequate to live by, then keep working on them as long as you want to keep growing.
I don’t worry about that one. You bring your questions with you, and aren’t likely to be talked out of them, here or anywhere.
But the other one, the maintenance of that fragile atmosphere within which all sincere beliefs are equally welcome and equally “clean” – that’s where you owe something here. That’s where you owe your own vigilance, to counter that unquenchable desire we all have subtly to trim the acceptable beliefs to fit the bed in which we’ve grown so comfortable.
I think the legitimate heir to salvation is only available in healthy liberal churches. And they are only healthy if that invisible, fragile, life-giving atmosphere is preserved, within which all sincere religious, political or moral beliefs are equally welcomed into dialogue in a community of moral equals who will ultimately never agree on the best way to be saved.
And what is it? How else can it be put? I think there is something about this “legitimate heir to what was once called salvation” that is more advanced and challenging than the mere notion of salvation, even in its traditional liberal interpretations (health, wholeness, integrity, authenticity, etc.).
It goes beyond mere salvation to say that even more important than our own growth is our duty – it is a sacred duty – to preserve and maintain that fragile liberal atmosphere within which all may freely pursue their different paths to the kind of wholeness we call salvation. The Buddhists speak of the sangha, or sacred community, as one of the essential parts of enlightenment. Some very few might do it alone, but most of us need to be part of a community of seekers, people who know to regard ultimate concerns as ultimate rather than secondary, as society does. Our spiritual roots grow deep and our branches reach high only in serious soil, in a “garden” kept safe by the mutual protection of all in the community who know – as Martin Niemoller learned the hard way – that finally none can be free or safe unless all are free and safe.
There is an ancient image for the understanding of “truth” that underlies this picture: it’s the old Indian story of the blind people and the elephant. The “elephant” is life, in all its complexity and mystery. Each “blind person” is one person, or even one discipline (psychology, geology, theology, history, etc.). They can see only what the deep biases of their discipline (or their personal biography) permit. No one will ever see the whole “elephant”: it isn’t a problem that existed only because the ancients were ignorant while we are smart. And even if it were possible to see every possible view, understand all disciplines with something to say about life and the human condition, it would still be paltry. In terms of the metaphor, you can’t understand an elephant unless you are the elephant – and even then, you’d be only one “elephant”: there are so many more.
The legitimate heir to what was once called salvation exists in a pluralistic world where humility is part of the whole intellectual and spiritual enterprise and where, because of this, all sincere beliefs, investigations, perspectives and feelings must be allowed into the never-ending open discussions about life’s ultimate concerns. And they can not be welcome unless we in the spiritual community, the sangha, covenant to protect and defend that essential, life-giving, fragile atmosphere within which all sincere people and opinions are welcomed into both discussion and fellowship.
If I understand the teachings of Jesus right, he would have called this the kingdom of God. Buddha might have called it a community of the enlightened who recognize the Buddha-seeds in all others, and who protect and nurture those precious seeds.
Joseph Campbell once said that an authentic person rejuvenates the world. They really do. Imagine what an authentic community might do!
The fact that your political or religious beliefs don’t work for me should be all the proof I need that mine aren’t likely to work for you. It sounds, and is, a bit messy. But that’s the mess of people trusted with their freedom. In a church where all sincere beliefs are equally welcomed into dialogue, we can find – if not salvation, then the legitimate heir to what was once called salvation. In fact, it is the only kind of church where we can find it.
