What, then, shall we believe?

2 June 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

OPENING:

If I wear an impressive clerical robe and act very priestly, can I tell you what to believe? What if I get a group of fifty together, or 500 – or what if we form a club? Then can we tell you what you believe?

When, exactly, do you give up the responsibility of speaking for yourself about your religious beliefs?

There are churches where the answer is “the minute you join this church.” The Southern Baptists have fallen to this level of authoritarianism, so that at least two local churches – University Baptist Church and First Baptist Church – have withdrawn from the Southern Baptist Convention rather than have their beliefs prescribed by someone else. There is a rumor that the entire Texas convention may withdraw from the SBC.

Within liberal religion, however – at least when it is being true to its heritage – the answer is that you never give up the responsibility to speak for your own beliefs. We must always work out for ourselves what we really believe – whether we like it or not.

What, then, shall we believe? That’s the question we gather, as always, to explore. And so

It is a sacred time, this,

and a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING:

We pray to the better angels of our nature. We pray to the spirit of all the noble souls of history under whose imagined gaze we live our lives.

We ask for help in holding lightly to yesterday’s answers. For they may not unlock tomorrow’s questions.

Yet not everything is to be outgrown:

Let us hold to what is compassionate, and helps make us a blessing to others.

Let us hold to what seems most deeply true, even if it is uncomfortable.

Let us follow that which compels us toward living out of our higher callings rather than the lower kind.

Let us hold to the fact that we are all brothers, sisters, children of God and the hope of the world.

Let us hold, in brief, to those things that are useful to us and worthy of God – useful to us and worthy of the very highest ideals we can grasp.

If we can hold just to these things, we will find our safe and proud passage through the narrows of life.

And so we pray to the angels of our better nature and the imagined presence of all the noblest souls of history. And we say “We would be one of you. We would be one of you. Be with us today and all days. Be with us.”

Amen.

SERMON: What, then, shall we believe?

In May, I finished a four-week adult education class in liberal theology with thirty or forty members and friends of the church. It was a tough course, with tough reading. I asked the class to read the original sources from liberal theologians going all the way back to the first century. I did this because when they are asked how they know these things, I didn’t want them merely to be able to say “Well, my preacher told me so.” I wanted them to be able to say “I read these things myself, and if you doubt my interpretation, let’s read them together.”

Of course, it isn’t possible to cover such a subject in only four weeks. But it is possible to get a very good feel, in just four weeks, for what the liberal style of religion is, and how it differs from the literal style that has always been its opposite.

I recorded all of these classes with some new portable digital recording equipment I bought to record the Jesus Seminar programs I do on the road. I think all of our courses should be recorded so that others can take advantage of them, so decided to start with this one. And I decided to make this sermon the final installment on those classes and recordings, by kind of summing up in half an hour two thousand years of liberal religious thought that couldn’t even be summed up in four weeks.

While the subject is complex, I think the gist of liberal religion is very simple and very clear. And if I’m right, I should be able to make it simple and clear to you here today. So if you don’t get it, it’s my fault.

Liberal religion is my own religious tradition. Others have called it “being human religiously,” or “coming to our full humanity and divinity,” it has a lot of nicknames. I think we can call it anything we like, as long as we can call it forth, and make it present in our minds, hearts, and lives.

What is it? The first distinction was drawn in the first century, between literal and liberal readings of scripture. By “liberal” I mean reading scripture symbolically, allegorically, metaphorically, rather than thinking that religious writings are to be taken literally.

A first-century Jew named Philo of Alexandria made this clear in a dozen different ways. But the distinction is also in the Bible. St. Paul said that “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6).” Every liberal in history would second that. And nearly the entire gospel of John, probably written between about 90-110, can be read as mocking literal interpretations. Over and over again, a story is told that makes sense only if taken symbolically, then those who hear it don’t get it because they can only hear it literally. Once you see the pattern, it makes reading that gospel almost funny.

1. Jesus says “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And a man answers “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” (John 3:3-4, RSV)

2. The disciples want Jesus to eat, and he says “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” So they murmur among themselves, saying “Has anyone brought him food?” (John 4:31-33)

3. Jesus says “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. His audience again murmurs “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, “I have come down from heaven?” (John 6: 41-42)

Many biblical scholars, including those of the Jesus Seminar, don’t believe Jesus said any of these words. They were written by people to help create the new religion in which they had turned the man Jesus into a god. Still, they are saying that religious teachings must be understood symbolically, not literally, and this is a basic teaching of liberal religion.

A brilliant Christian thinker in the early third century named Origen took it farther. He said there are three levels of understanding religious writings, each suited to a certain level of seriousness and maturity in the believers.

At the very surface is the literal meaning of scripture – the “body” – which he thought was childish, and not religious at all.

Next is the symbolic meaning, the metaphorical meaning, where the real religious message is to be found. This is the “soul” of religion. “the aim of the Holy Spirit,” as Origen put it, “is that we should understand that there have been woven into the visible narrative truths that, if pondered and understood inwardly, bring forth a law useful to us and worthy of God.” (Origen, On First Principles, Chapter Three #4.) This is the general teaching of liberal religion in all times and places: that we are seeking for teachings and insights into our human condition that are useful to us and worthy of the very highest ideals we can fathom. Origen described those as being “worthy of God,” but it’s easy to understand his meaning.

We want to find meanings worthy of the highest ideals, not lower-level concerns – like reciting creeds or principles spoon-fed to you by groups of people who neither know you nor what you need to believe.

Origen and many other liberal theologians would add that if it isn’t worthy of God, it isn’t really useful to us either – at least not in any religious sense. We can’t ever settle for merely joining a club, saying we believe the same as others just so we can feel like we’re part of that church, denomination or party.

And finally is the “spirit” of religion. The second level is as far as a lot of liberal religion ever carries it: learning how to understand the meanings of scriptures. But that isn’t the heart of the matter. At the final level, open only to those willing to see and work and be open to it and opened by it, is the very spirit of religion. This is the realization that religion finally isn’t about just “understanding” writings. Finally, it is about being transformed into a person living around a new kind of center. Finally, at the spiritual level, people realize that religion is about living holy lives, not merely understanding holy words.

Even eighteen centuries later, it’s hard to know how religion could be taken much more seriously than this. And Origen’s lesson on how to read religious scriptures: we are searching for those things that are useful to us, and worthy of God. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better statement about how to read religious writings. We are searching for those things that are useful to us, and worthy of the gods. Things that make us into more whole and authentic people, and are worthy of the very highest values and ideals we can know. That one lesson contains a whole graduate school education in understanding religion!

St. Augustine, writing in the early fifth century at the collapse of the Roman Empire, said that for people who read scripture literally – he compared them to children – the Bible is a kind of nest that keeps them from falling out, though it won’t do much else for them. But for others, for those who have learned the deeper meanings of these writings, the Bible is no longer a nest, but a kind of leafy orchard, where you fly about picking the finest fruits of the orchard (Augustine, Confessions, Book XII).

Where does the religious urge come from? Is it a kind of mental virus that infects weak-minded people? Is it some kind of invasion from a supernatural realm above the sky? Or is it something closer to home? 1400 years after Augustine came a great Protestant theologian named Schleiermacher, who is often called the Father of liberal theology – at least Protestant liberal theology. Religion, he said, isn’t about supernatural things. It comes from deep within us. It is the desire to become whole, to become integrated and authentic, to relate ourselves to things of the highest worth.

All of us respect those who live their lives in obedience to their quest for the highest, no matter what their religion is. We respect those who try to put themselves in harmony with what is highest, and this is the religious urge that is an inherent part of what it means to be human. Think of your own personal heroes and see if this isn’t true.

No one can become fully human without developing their spiritual capacity, Schleiermacher wrote, though it can be expressed in a thousand different ways, through a thousand different religions. There is a sense of awe, a sense of wonder at being here at all, at being a small part of such an unimaginable, immense universe. Religion – as Aristotle had said 2400 years ago – begins there, with that sense of wonder.

Every liberal theologian following Schleiermacher has been influenced by him. Some were moved to attack the supernaturalism and mythology in religion, so people wouldn’t be so easily misled by its teachings. This led to the quest for the historical Jesus – the quest to ask who that man Jesus was, what he really did, rather than what the mythic stories of the Bible say about him. That quest began in earnest in the early 19th century (with D.F. Strauss’ 1835 book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined), and is continuing with the work of the Jesus Seminar today. The ability to be very critical of religion’s teachings has always been essential. If you just accept what others tell you, you have never developed your own religion at all, and probably don’t even know what you actually believe.

Other writers went into the depths of religion, into what it meant actually to be religious. Of these, the most influential and powerful was the early 19th century Danish thinker S”ren Kierkegaard, who is my own greatest influence. He has been called the founder of existentialism, and of psychiatry. And he did link religion, philosophy and psychology.

Religion becomes quite serious here. It’s no longer about living again in some other place and time, it is asking whether we’re really living here and now. The purpose of honest religion is to help us do this. And there can be quite a penalty for not doing it: for not becoming authentic. Kierkegaard wrote of a kind of existentialist’s “Judgment Day” that is pretty sobering:

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself” (from Either/Or, in A Kierkegaard Anthology edited by Robert Bretall, Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 99)

Honesty in life, and honesty in religion, are about this quest for authenticity and the kind of existential “judgment day” that Kierkegaard meant by that “midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask.” Many people, and many religions, are afraid of this. Liberal religion is not.

The playwright Ibsen turned many of Kierkegaard’s most disturbing insights into dramatic scenes, as he did in his play “Peer Gynt.” Peer Gynt was a man who lived his life as a phony – today we would call him a sociopath. Never in his life was he true to himself. He lived only to get wealth, power and envy, but never developed, never became authentic or real.

At the end of his life of worldwide travelling, he returned home, mostly to gloat. But what awaited him was that “midnight hour” when he was confronted by all the things he had never become. The Judgment came in the form of voices that called to him as he walked through the woods:

We are the thoughts you should have thought;

Feet to run with you should have given us.

We should have soared skywards as challenging voices,

But here we must tumble like balls of grey yarn.

We are songs, you should have sung us.

A thousand times you have pinched and suppressed us.

In the depths of your heart we have lain and waited…

We were never called forth” now we poison your voice!

We are tears – you should have shed us.

We might have melted the icicles that pierced your heart…

But now the wound has closed over, and our power is gone.

We are deeds, you should have done us.

Doubts that strangle have crippled and bent us.

But on Judgment Day we shall flock to accuse you;

And woe to you then…

(Act Five, scene Four: adapted from several translations)

This isn’t a judgment day up in the sky. It doesn’t involve St. Peter or a gaggle of angels. This is the one that can ambush us when it looks back at us from our mirror and says “Who were you? Why didn’t you become yourself?”

The last major theologian we covered in this four-week course was the 20th century’s greatest theologian, Paul Tillich. He had read and was influenced by all the others, back to the first century – especially Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard. I’ll finish with Tillich two weeks from today, in my last sermon here until August. But I’ll introduce him today.

Tillich, perhaps more than any other theologian, insisted on absolute honesty. He said that our beliefs must change as the world changes and as we grow. To cling to childhood beliefs as a grown-up is to create an idolatry, he said. Even worse, it is demonic. This is the route of worshipping the key to last year’s lock. (This reference was to the morning’s children’s story.) It puts provisional teachings of a group or a church up on a pedestal. It keeps us from remaining open to life’s experiences, and keeps us from ever doing the hard personal work of trying to understand what we actually believe. Without that step, we’re living in a second-hand religion, a hand-me-down faith that may once have been somebody else’s , but isn’t what we really believe.

This is religion for the masses, and every religion, every denomination, has one. You can be a Presbyterian by just repeating their creeds and confessional teachings. But then you’ve just joined a club, not done the work of developing an honest religion of your own. You can be a Unitarian Universalist by trying to memorize those banal ‘s even principles.” Or, since few care to memorize them, you can get this little business card to carry in your pocket, so when someone asks you what you believe you can say “Wait a minute, I know I’ve got it here somewhere. These people told me what it was, hold on.” But again, you’ll have just joined a club, not found a religion. None of those “principles” came from asking any religious questions, any questions about the human condition or what might improve the world. They arose from taking a poll of “our people” and the sorts of generic things they could agree they believed. It was not a religious exercise. It was an insecure and narcissistic exercise among a tiny, marginalized group of liberals whose center was social and political, not religious.

But if you want a religion that is useful to you and worthy of God, you will have to be able to own the beliefs. They”ll have to have roots within your deepest and most honest assessment of your human condition and those beliefs and behavior needed to make you most whole, most authentic, most complete. No one can do that for you. Unless you do it yourself, it will simply not be done.

I have met people who wear T-shirts with those principles on them, who tell me they are UUs. I ask them if they really believe those things, and if so, how and why it came about. They stare at me. The truth is, too many people have no idea what they believe, and to add insult to injury, they have been going to a church that never even told them how important it is that they try to find out! They”ve been betrayed. That’s why Paul Tillich said that teaching creeds or principles in this way is demonic; it blinds people to the personal work of developing their real beliefs.

What, then, shall we believe as religious liberals? Though there isn’t a creed, there are some deep and enduring lessons to be learned from the whole history of liberal religion that we would be wise to keep. I wrote a brief list of some of these a few years ago, which I have included in the introduction to liberal religion and this church that’s on our web site. These aren’t offered as a creed, but for you to test against your own deepest values and your life experiences, to see if they don’t arise for you too – or how you would need to reword or replace them to be deeply true for you:

We believe that God loves us and wants us to love others. (Many here would prefer words like “Life,” “the Universe” etc. to the word “God,” but you can understand the meaning.)

We believe we’re a part of life and that we owe something back to the world for the gift of life. Many are searching for what that ‘s omething” is, though it need not be elaborate. As one medieval theologian put it, “If the only prayer you ever say is ‘thank you,” it will be enough.” But we are enlarged by an attitude of gratitude, and we seek to find our paths toward that way of understanding our lives.

We believe that down deep almost all religions are saying that we are precious people who need to treat everybody else as though they were precious, too.

We believe that we are supposed to live in such a way that, when we look back on our life, we can be proud, and can make those we care about proud. We believe we are to try and make this world a little better because we were here, each in our own way.

We believe that love is better than hatred, understanding is better than prejudice, and that if there is ever to be a better world, people of widely differing beliefs will have to help each other build it. This means we must learn how to communicate and cooperate with people whose beliefs differ from ours.

We believe that, down deep, most people of good will respect these ideals.

It is so important to take this both seriously and personally. Remember, we need a faith that can guide our lives in such a way that when that “midnight hour” comes, when those voices in the woods ask us who we really were and how we have spent our lives, we can answer them with our head held high.

I haven’t told you anything you didn’t already know. You know these truths at the bottom of your heart and the center of your mind, and at some level you have known them for a very long time, you know?

So that’s enough, that’s enough for this morning. In truth, it’s almost enough for a life, isn’t it?