Dar nacimiento a lo sagrado

(Traducción al español, Francisco Javier Lagunes Gaitán)

APERTURA

Este es uno de los dos periodos vacacionales religiosos oficiales del año, cuando mucha gente se despierta y debe tratar de recordar, otra vez, cómo encontrar una iglesia. Ambos periodos vacacionales, Navidad y la Pascua (domingo de resurrección), son casi festivales seculares. La Pascua es más rápidamente identificada con los conejitos de Pascua, los huevos coloridos y los conejos de chocolate que con cualquier mensaje religioso. Y como esas golosinas, las súper anunciadas vacaciones piden a gritos dulzura y nimiedades, una tarjeta de felicitación de Hallmark, nada demasiado pesado, tan solo un bombón de Pascua antes del almuerzo.

Ya que esta también es una iglesia, hemos prometido buscar aquella clase de verdad de dos filos que es capaz, tanto de confortar a los afligidos, como afligir a los cómodos.

Así que nos reunimos para ver cuán fieles podemos ser a nuestro llamado religioso, y a los complejos y ambiguos símbolos de la Pascua. Es bueno estar juntos otra vez, porque?

INVOCACIÓN

Es un Tiempo Sagrado, este
Y un Espacio Sagrado, este
Un lugar para preguntas más profundas que las respuestas,
Una vulnerabilidad más poderosa que la fuerza,
Y una paz que sobrepasa todo entendimiento,
Es un Tiempo Sagrado, este.
Iniciémoslo juntos en una canción.

CENTRAMIENTO

Ofrezcamos una plegaria de Pascua.

Dios de nuestros anhelos ocultos, encuéntranos donde hemos muerto y restáuranos. Corazón del universo, sintamos de nuevo tu pulso dentro de nosotros. Sintámonos conectados otra vez con otros, con nosotros mismos, con nuestros propios corazones y almas. Espíritu de la vida, encuentra a nuestros espíritus e insufla vida dentro de ellos. Algo en nosotros, en nuestras vidas, en nuestro mundo, murió este año. Ayúdanos a traer el milagro de la resurrección aquí, ahora. Espíritu de la vida, Dios de nuestras almas interiores, corazón del universo, escucha nuestras plegarias, tócanos en aquellos lugares en los que la vida se ha ido, para que vivamos de nuevo. Y que seamos tus ojos, tus oídos, y tus manos para alcanzar los sufrimientos de otros. Que seamos agentes de compasión y gracia en este mundo, frecuentemente demasiado severo y demasiado solitario. Ofrecemos esta plegaria con la esperanza de que incluso aquí, incluso ahora, el milagro de la resurrección pueda encontrarnos.

Amén.

SERMÓN

Por todo este mundo el día de hoy, unos mil millones de cristianos volverán a contar la misma historia, de un hijo de Dios que fue crucificado y resucitó y quien, si creemos en el relato, puede ser nuestro salvador personal.

Cualquiera que hubiera vivido en el primer siglo habría conocido una buena cantidad de historias similares sobre dioses que murieron y luego resucitaron. Conocerían la historia de Dionisio, nacido de una virgen y del gran dios celeste Zeus, cuyos seguidores se reunían anualmente para comer carne y beber sangre, que simbolizaban la carne y sangre del dios muerto y creían que les impartían su espíritu. Conocían el relato egipcio de Isis y Osiris, en el que Osiris fue asesinado, resucitó mucho después, se apareó con Isis, quien dio nacimiento al bebé Horus. Todo el mundo conocía la imagen de Isis sosteniendo al bebé Horus: fue el modelo para las imágenes cristianas de la virgen María sosteniendo al bebé Jesús. Y la gente conocía las historias de otros dioses muertos y resucitados, incluyendo a Tamuz o Adonis, y Atis.

Todas estas historias pertenecían a un género literario nacido de la antigua visión científica del mundo de hace 2000 años, en la que la bienaventuranza estaba justo arriba sobre el cielo, el infierno justo bajo la tierra, y todo el universo era un asunto local. En semejante lugarcito, los dioses podían rutinariamente tener deportivos intercambios con las hembras humanas, y los cuerpos podrían bien regresar a la vida, o flotar hacia arriba del cielo para vivir por siempre.

De esta manera, por todo el mundo mediterráneo de hace dos mil años la gente también se reunió anualmente para volver a contar estos antiguos relatos.

Pero por todo el mundo actual ?si bien en cantidades mucho menores? hay estudiosos bíblicos y religiosos que saben que éste era un mito. El mito no tenía nada que ver con el hombre Jesús, quien sin duda quedaría horrorizado por un relato que lo transformó en la figura de un salvador que habría enseñado que el reino de Dios sería una cosa sobrenatural que supuestamente él traería a los fieles.

Así que hay una clase particular de tensión implicada al trabajar con símbolos y mitos antiguos del tipo de los relatos de Pascua. Esto significa que todo aquel que predique sobre estos mitos y símbolos el día de hoy debe decidir cómo manejarlos ?cuán honestamente, cuán profundamente, cuán cuestionadoramente? además de cómo y cuánto respetarán a su audiencia. Esta es la clase de tensión que involucra predicar sobre las vacaciones populares empapadas en siglos de mito que popularmente resulta demasiado superficial para ser religioso.

El tratamiento normal que se da a estos problemas consiste en ignorar el relato ultramundano y convertir palabras tales como “resurrección” en metáforas generales. Si están entre las diecisiete personas en Austin que leen las páginas de religión del periódico dominical, habrán visto que eso fue lo que hicieron los clérigos que escribieron ayer. Bob Lively dio a “resurrección” el significado de “amor”, y dondequiera que vio al amor florecer se regocijó en el milagro de la “resurrección”. Y el obispo Greg Aymond trató el asunto con una poca más de profundidad al hacer equivaler la “resurrección” a una renovación de la esperanza. Es también lo que yo hice en la plegaria de centramiento de esta mañana. Así que no me parece que sea algo inusitado. Pienso que es una pequeña parte de lo que necesitamos hacer con esta sobresaturación de símbolos.

Pero no es suficiente. Esto reduce el mensaje de la religión a la blandura de una tarjeta de felicitación de Hallmark. Y tiene el imperialismo arrogante del que los mejores pensadores cristianos han tratado de desprenderse ?al reclamar esta experiencia humana común para el vocabulario cristiano.

¡Vaya por Dios!: en el hinduismo llegaron al mismo punto de encontrar una reconexión donde daban por perdida la posibilidad de cualquier conexión, y no necesitan la noción cristiana de “resurrección” para lograrlo. Ellos lo entendieron, dentro de la integridad orgánica del hinduismo, como que la realización de su atman ?de su alma individual? es desde luego una parte integral de Brahman ?el poder universal sustentador y creativo.

Los budistas pueden llegar a la misma clase de paz y entenderlo así de simple como un “despertar” de las ilusiones que los habían hecho más miserables hasta entonces. Y los naturalistas pueden expresar la misma experiencia de manera igualmente apropiada, aunque tal vez con menos poesía. “Siento mayor conexión con el mundo”, podrían decir. “Me sentí descolocado y desorientado, fuera de lugar, pero ahora me siento como una parte legítima de la totalidad gloriosa del mundo alrededor de mí, y me siento menos ansioso, más pleno. La vida es mejor ahora”. Así que objeto ambos tratamientos, tanto el oportunista superficial, como el de la arrogancia teológica de pretender que la “resurrección” es un concepto necesario, en vez de uno meramente cristiano.

Hay otro camino para cruzar este pantano simbólico, igual de antiguo. Exige más de nosotros, y se deshace de la capa de azúcar tradicional en que las vacaciones populares están inmersas. Pero pienso que nos podría llevar a una reflexión más seria y podría impartirnos, a nosotros y a nuestro tema, más orgullo. Se trata de hacer la distinción entre la religión de Jesús y la religión sobre Jesús. Los estudiosos se han percatado de esta distinción por mucho tiempo, pero usualmente la esconden tras algunas palabras en clave para iniciados:

  • Algunos hablan del “Jesús de la historia” contra el “Cristo de la fe”;
  • Otros hablan de “Jesús” contra “el Cristo”;
  • O del “Jesús pre-Pascua” y el “Jesús post-Pascua”.

Todas estas clases de palabras en clave se refieren al hecho de que las religiones, los mensajes del Jesús de la historia fueron salvajemente diferentes de los mensajes atribuidos al “Jesús Cristo” de la fe tradicional. Pero como es embarazoso decirlo, tanto los maestros como los predicadores religiosos han colaborado en una conspiración de silencio por muchos siglos para mantener estas distinciones tan dañinas (o provocadoras de pensamientos) lejos de tus tiernos oídos.

Ustedes saben más de la religión sobre Jesús, que es conocida sólo como cristianismo. Ofrece enseñanzas de un Jesús sobrenatural que de alguna manera fue el hijo de Dios, quien realizó sorprendentes milagros, fue asesinado, luego “se levantó” de entre los muertos, según la enigmática frase de los autores del Nuevo Testamento. La mayoría de los estudiosos bíblicos que conozco tienen claro que ningún escritor del primer siglo quiso dar a entender literalmente la resurrección de un cadáver. La interpretación generalizada sobre esta cuestión es que decir que Dios “levantó” a Jesús significa que lo que Jesús enseñó sobre el reino de Dios era correcto.

Comparto esta convicción. No fue original, pero sí profunda, tanto entonces, como ahora. Así que esta Pascua quiero traerles el mensaje de Jesús para que luego decidan por ustedes qué clase de Pascua les enorgullecería intentar y celebrar. En otras palabras, mi táctica aquí es tomar las tensiones intrínsecas a los símbolos de la Pascua y pasárselas, de manera que puedan sentir la tensión, y puedan decidir qué estilo y profundidad de “Pascua” quieren celebrar. No se preocupen: el sufrimiento, según he escuchado, puede ser terapéutico.

La religión de Jesús

La religión de Jesús fue tan diferente de las enseñanzas tradicionales del cristianismo como puedas imaginarte. Pero para entenderla, tienes que entender la clase de mundo en el que nació Jesús.

Irónicamente, la Galilea del primer siglo tenía mucho en común con nuestra sociedad actual ?más de lo que tenía en común con los EUA de hace cincuenta años. Tres siglos de invasiones, por los ejércitos de Alejandro el Magno y las subsiguientes legiones romanas, habían destruido todos los centros de culto y templos que habían dado estabilidad a una buena variedad de comunidades étnicas y religiosas. Para el primer siglo no había un centro compartido, ni una identidad colectiva. Galilea estaba llena de gente que no constituía “un pueblo”.

Las leyes sociales o las restricciones alimenticias de un grupo ?los judíos, por ejemplo? resultaban extrañas o nada atractivas para otros grupos cercanos ?los griegos, por ejemplo. Incluso el simple trato social era más difícil de lo que nos resulta a nosotros hoy. Una familia griega invita a la tuya para el equivalente del primer siglo de una barbacoa. Dado que ustedes son importantes para ellos, invierten dinero extra para comprar algo de mariscos y carne de cerdo de primera calidad. Pero como ustedes son judíos, sus leyes alimenticias les prohíben comer mariscos y carne de cerdo.

En docenas de maneras, Galilea era una tierra del caos, donde las perspectivas de llegar a formar “un pueblo” a partir de este desorden disparatado estaban en alguna parte entre escasas y nada.

En tiempos así de caóticos, parece haber dos clases de soluciones propuestas, así se propusieron aquí. La primera fue la más extrema, propuesta por Juan el Bautista. Juan pensó que la situación era imposible ya de arreglar. Ni siquiera Dios podría resolverlo, pensó él. Así que la única respuesta era que Dios iba a destruir todo el mundo, a aniquilar a todos en él ?bueno, excepto a aquellos que creyeran en lo mismo que Juan el bautista creía, desde luego? y así empezar de nuevo.

Juan contaba con una creciente y ferviente multitud que se reuniría al este del Jordán para esperar el signo del fin del mundo, cuando se suponía que actuarían contra los romanos.

Si conoces algo sobre los romanos, sabrás que esta no era una táctica muy inteligente. Ellos fueron muy eficientes, los romanos. No hubieran gastado 60 mil millones de dólares para bombardear mil millas cuadradas de montañas con la esperanza de matar a 7 u 8 civiles. En vez de esto, ellos capturaban a la cabeza del movimiento y lo mataban.

Pero el asesinato de Juan el Bautista fue devastador para sus seguidores. Significó que el mensaje de Juan, el entendimiento que Juan tenía sobre lo que era “el reino de Dios”, era erróneo. De otro modo, Dios no hubiera permitido que Juan muriera así. Tal era el pensamiento sobrenatural, o supersticioso, del primer siglo.

Juan el bautista fue mentor y maestro de Jesús. Jesús fue uno de sus seguidores. Y no mucho después del asesinato de Juan, Jesús aparece por primera vez como líder carismático, muchos de los anteriores seguidores de Juan lo siguieron.

Pero el mensaje de Jesús era muy, muy diferente. La solución de Juan había sido esperar que un ente sobrenatural arreglara el mundo por medio de destruirlo. La noción de Jesús del Reino de Dios no implicaba una acción por parte de una entidad sobrenatural. Jesús pensó que debíamos recuperar el mundo fragmentado arreglándolo.

Lo que definía todas las líneas de enemistad entre los diferentes grupos eran las reglas de identidad de cada grupo ?reglas que los hacían especiales sólo a través de convertir a los otros en inapropiados. Jesús enseñó que la gente debía desobedecer y subvertir las identidades excluyentes. Él y sus seguidores mendigaban sus alimentos diarios ?un poco de este mendigar se hizo famoso como parte del “Padre Nuestro”. “Come lo que se pone ante ti”, instruyó a sus seguidores judíos. ¡Si los griegos te ofrecen marisco o cerdo, cómelo! ¡No permitas que ninguna autodefinición, inclusive tu identidad como judío, te separe de otros!

Solo una identidad era permisible en la noción de Jesús del Reino de Dios: se nos ordenó vernos mutuamente solamente como hermanos y hermanas, como hijos de Dios. Una y otra vez él frustró a sus seguidores más supersticiosos, quienes todavía esperaban que continuara las enseñanzas de Juan el Bautista. No: el Reino de Dios no es algo que venga a la sazón. No puedes señalarlo y decir “aquí y allí”. Ya está aquí, dentro y entre ustedes. O como lo dijo él en el Evangelio de Tomás, “el reino de Dios se extiende sobre la tierra y los humanos no lo ven“. Está todo aquí ?al menos potencialmente? y nosotros no tuvimos, o no tenemos, ojos para verlo u oídos para escucharlo. ¡Cuántas veces les dijo a sus discípulos que no lo habían entendido!

No hay magia aquí, ni la intervención de nadie. Dios ya hizo su parte. La pelota está en nuestra cancha, y Dios espera que actuemos para traer el Reino de Dios a la tierra. Y lo hacemos simplemente al cambiar nuestros corazones y nuestras acciones hacia los otros. Punto. Amén. Fin del sermón, fin de la religión. Jesús nunca prometió el cielo, ni amenazó con el infierno. Él no habló de una vida después de la vida, sólo de ésta. Y él no habría dejado que la gente se quedara con la creencia de que podían esperar pasivamente que una deidad sobrenatural arreglara las cosas.

La negación de Jesús

Todos los estudiantes de las escrituras cristianas conocen esta frase que se refiere a su apóstol Pedro, quien pareció categóricamente incapaz de entender el mensaje de Jesús. Fue a Pedro, recordemos, a quien Jesús dirigió su frase más furiosa: “Quítate de mi vista, Satanás” (Mc 8:33), Pedro, como la mayoría de (o tal vez todos) los discípulos de Jesús, quería escucharlo predicar el mensaje claro y definido del fin-del-mundo de Juan el Bautista, y no quería escuchar que este emocionante reino sobrenatural de sus expectativas sería reemplazado por una clase muy terrenal de mundo en el que ellos simplemente debían convertirse en agentes activos del amor, en vez de en profetas poseedores de superioridad moral para predicar la destrucción masiva a la que solo ellos sobrevivirían.

El estudioso católico Thomas Sheehan lo ha expresado de una manera acertadamente crítica cuando dice que “Pedro continuó su negación de Jesús con la creación del cristianismo”. El cristianismo comenzó como una religión de reversión hacia la fórmula pagana de la salvación por una deidad sobrenatural que demandaba de nosotros sólo que creyéramos el relato y siguiéramos a los líderes. Esta era precisamente la imagen contra la cual Jesús predicó en su ministerio.

Pablo, el inventor del cristianismo

La mayoría de los estudiosos del Nuevo Testamento que conozco están de acuerdo en que la versión del cristianismo que terminó siendo adoptada como normativa fue desarrollada, en su forma y mensaje por Pablo. Pablo nunca conoció a Jesús, y parece no haber conocido las enseñanzas ?ya que nunca menciona ninguna? sobre la noción central de Jesús del Reino de Dios. En cambio, Pablo enseñó, más a la manera en que Juan el bautista lo hizo, que el fin del mundo estaba por llegar y que Jesús el Cristo sería la salvación de los fieles de una manera sobrenatural.

Siento, con muchos otros, que Pablo reemplazó la mundana religión de responsabilidad de Jesús, con una religión simplista sobrenatural moldeada a partir de los cultos paganos en boga, especialmente los cultos griegos del misterio ?y más particularmente del culto del mitraísmo. Y siento que la crucifixión real de Jesús no vino de los romanos, sino de Pedro, Pablo y de quienes establecieron lo que llegó a ser el cristianismo normativo.

Muchos otros se han percatado de esto, y muchos otros se han sentido furiosos y traicionados sobre esto. Uno de ellos fue el novelista griego Kazantsakis. Puede que conozcan, ya sea su libro, o la película basada en el libro de La Última Tentación de Cristo. En este libro, el autor crea una iracunda y maravillosa escena imaginaria entre Jesús y Pablo. Cuando Jesús se encuentra al inventor del cristianismo, Jesús le dice, ¡Tú! Así que tú eres el que ha inventado todas esas cosas sobre mí. ¡No son ciertas! La respuesta de Pablo es básicamente: ¡Oh! ¿Así que tú eres Jesús? Gusto en conocerte, ¿A quién le importa? Le di a la gente la religión que ellos necesitaban, y ella no te necesita.

Conozco a estudiosos paulinos que piensan que el retrato de Kazantzakis sobre Pablo es tan preciso como es posible. Incluso los defensores de Pablo (y tiene muchos) usualmente reconocen su megalomanía.

Hay incluso reacciones más extremas contra la traición de la religión de Jesús por la religión sobre Jesús. Tal vez la más famosa, y mi favorita, proviene de un libro de Dostoievski, Los hermanos Karamazov, en el capítulo titulado “El gran inquisidor” aparece Jesús en el tiempo de la inquisición, y representa esta sorprendente ?y de nuevo, iracunda? escena entre Jesús y el Gran Inquisidor, en la que Jesús no dice nada. Pienso que Dostoievski entendió perfectamente la religión de Jesús aquí, y pienso que su ira hacia la religión inventada sobre Jesús atina bastante cerca del blanco también:

“Les prometiste el pan celestial, pero ¿cómo puede este pan competir con el pan terrenal para hacer frente a la débil, ingrata, y permanentemente corrupta especie humana? Y aún cuando cientos de miles de hombres te sigan por el amor del pan celestial, ¿Qué pasará con los millones que son demasiado débiles para privarse de su pan terrenal? ¿O es que sólo los miles que son fuertes y poderosos los gratos a tu corazón, mientras que millones de otros, los débiles, que también te aman, débiles como son y que son tan numerosos como los granos de arena en la playa, servirán como objetos para los fuertes y poderosos? ¡Pero también nos preocupan los pobres! ? al convertirnos en sus amos, hemos aceptado la carga de libertad que ellos estaban demasiado atemorizados para enfrentar. ? Les diremos, sin embargo, que somos leales a ti y que reinamos sobre ellos en tu nombre. Les mentimos, dado que no intentamos permitir tu regreso. Hay tres fuerzas, solamente tres, en esta tierra que pueden derrotar y capturar de una vez por todas la conciencia de estas débiles e indisciplinadas criaturas para darles felicidad. Estas fuerzas son el milagro, el misterio y la autoridad. Pero rechazaste la primera, la segunda y la tercera de estas fuerzas y presentaste tu rechazo como un ejemplo a los hombres, ? Actuaste orgullosa y magnificentemente; desde luego, tú actuaste como Dios, pero ¿puedes esperar tanto de los hombres, de esta débil, indisciplinada e infeliz tribu, que ciertamente no son dioses? ? mañana verás rebaños obedientes, como el primer signo de mi, apresúrate a amontonar carbones en el fuego bajo de la hoguera en la que te quemaré, porque, al venir aquí, has vuelto más difícil nuestra tarea. Si alguien ha merecido alguna vez nuestro fuego, eres tú, y para mañana te habré quemado”.

El Gran Inquisidor de Dostoievski y el Pablo de Kazantsakis son importantes para leerlos y enseñarlos, porque se cuentan entre las voces educadas que no han sido parte de la conspiración del silencio. Presentan el contraste entre las enseñanzas difíciles del hombre Jesús ?la religión de Jesús?, por un lado, y las inconmensurablemente más fáciles enseñanzas del cristianismo ?la religión sobre Jesús, por el otro. Y su ira no proviene de una falta de sensibilidad religiosa, sino más bien de la abundancia de ésta. Están furiosos porque creen, como yo, que una religión menor (el cristianismo) desplazó a una religión grandiosa (la religión de Jesús). Esto nunca será repetido con excesiva frecuencia ni lo suficientemente al grano: En oposición directa a las enseñanzas de Jesús, el mito del “Cristo” condujo a la gente a un retroceso hacia la creencia pagana y primitiva en la salvación a través de la expiación vicaria por un dios salvador sobrenatural que rescataría a la gente y la exoneraría, y que tan solo exigiría a cambio su obediencia irreflexiva. Las enseñanzas de Jesús ?hasta el punto en que fueron alguna vez entendidas? resultaron demasiado difíciles. Debía haber una ruta más simple y menos dolorosa si es que el cristianismo habría de ser la fe universal que visualizaban algunos partidarios fanáticos como Pablo ?aunque, en el proceso, traicionaron todo aquello que Jesús consideró sagrado.

En el tiempo de Jesús resultaba poco comedido exigir tanto de la gente ?de gente que parece preferir el milagro, el misterio y la autoridad antes que hacerse cargo de su vida y sus circunstancias, y asumir su responsabilidad. Él fue rudo. Sus propios discípulos no lo entendieron, y Pedro, como es ampliamente conocido, no quería escuchar esto. Si la gente quiere milagro, misterio y autoridad, Jesús ciertamente no les ofreció mucho.

Él dijo que Dios hizo su parte y que ahora era su turno de actuar.

El cristianismo ?la religión sobre Jesús? es en última instancia demasiado fácil. No es digna y merecedora de alguien llamado un hijo de Dios. No es digna de aquellos que podrían considerarse gente de Dios. No es un camino espiritual que cualquier Dios que valga la pena hubiera señalado con urgencia. Fue la creación de Pablo y otros hombres, pero no de un profeta o sabio de primer orden.

Pero sí que hubo un profeta y sabio de primerísimo rango implicado en esta historia. Era un judío marginal y simple de Galilea que hemos aprendido a llamar Jesús. Él enseñó un camino estrecho, no uno amplio, y predicó un Reino de Dios que nosotros, y solo nosotros, podríamos hacer presente en la tierra tan pronto, o tan tarde, como encontremos el valor de actuar como hijos de Dios, de ver a todos los demás como hijos de Dios, y de actuar en consecuencia. Puede suceder en cualquier momento, aquí y ahora. Puede suceder en Israel, si las dos partes cambian el centro de su fe. Puede suceder en Irlanda del Norte, si ambas partes dejan de definirse a sí mismas como protestantes y católicos, y en cambio se definen sólo como hermanos y hermanas. Puede suceder en Austin, puede suceder en tu vecindario, y en tu vida.

Pero solamente si crees. No, no tienes que creer en nada sobrenatural, no tienes que creer en nada a lo que no encuentres un sentido. Tú tienes que creer que la única identidad de la que la gente adulta religiosa debería estar orgullosa es la identidad de verse a sí mismos y a los otros como hermanos y hermanas, e hijos de un Dios de amor. Sólo eso.

Hoy, hemos traducido la promesa y el mandamiento en flores, flores para que se lleven a casa y reflexionen sobre ellas*. Cositas pequeñas y frágiles de gran belleza y vulnerabilidad, tan frágiles como la paz, tan frágiles como el amor. Llévenselas a casa. Las flores están en sus manos. Así también está la esperanza de tu vida, y el futuro del mundo. Aquellas palabras difícilmente parecen adecuadas, sin embargo. Algo más poético y poderoso se requiere. Jesús lo llamó el Reino de Dios. Esto es mucho mejor, y más cercano.

La esperanza del Reino de Dios está en nuestras manos, como siempre ha estado. El sueño ha yacido sin roturar por mucho tiempo. Muchos dirían que ha muerto. Es la Pascua, y el sueño está en nuestras manos. Pensemos en resucitarlo.

~~~~~~~~~~

*Esta iglesia celebra una Comunión Floral el domingo de Pascua. Se pide a la gente que traigan una flor, que se deposita en canastas. Al final del servicio, se llevan al frente de la iglesia las canastas con flores y la gente toma una para llevarla consigo a su casa.

UNITARIOS UNIVERSALISTAS DE MÉXICO

Promovemos y vivimos la diversidad de creencias. Estamos para ayudarte a avanzar en tu propio camino espiritual, no para imponerte un camino escogido de antemano.

El movimiento religioso liberal y la institución Unitaria Universalista consiste en una gran variedad de recursos espirituales. Celebramos la sabiduría que contienen todas las religiones del mundo, la razón, la ciencia, el arte y nuestra propia intuición personal.

Reconocemos la necesidad de una comunidad, nos reunimos para aprender juntos y el reto de nuestra diversidad nos impulsa mutuamente en nuestros caminos espirituales.

Respetamos incondicional e integralmente la dignidad humana y el valor inherente a cada persona, consideramos que solamente nuestra diversidad nos hace capaces de entender plenamente lo que significa ser humanos.

Este es un grupo dedicado a explorar el estilo religioso liberal en México. Aquí el inicio, la esperanza, el sueño compartido: aceptación, igualdad, fraternidad. Aquí optamos, de manera libre, por ser cómplices en una búsqueda espiritual individual. Compañeros de asombro, concientes todos de ser parte de la trama interdependiente de todo lo que existe.

Giving Birth to the Sacred

© Davidson Loehr

31 March 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:

It’s one of the two official religious holidays of the year, when many people wake up and must try to remember, again, how to find the church. These two holidays, Christmas and Easter, are almost secular festivals. Easter is more quickly identified with Easter Bunnies, colored eggs and chocolate rabbits than with any religious message. And like these candies, the super-hyped holidays cry out for sweetness and fluff, a Hallmark greeting card, nothing too heavy, just an Easter bon-bon before lunch.

Yet this is also a church, where we promise to seek that double-edged kind of truth which can both comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

So we gather to see how faithful we can be to our religious calling, and to the complex and ambiguous symbols of Easter. It is good to be together again, for 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:

Let us offer an Easter prayer.

God of our hidden yearnings, find us where we have died and restore us. Heart of the universe, let us again feel your pulse within us. Let us feel connected again to others, to ourselves, to our own hearts and souls. Spirit of life, find our spirits and breathe life into them. Something in us, in our lives, in our world, died this year. Help us bring the miracle of resurrection here, now. Spirit of life, God of our inner souls, heart of the universe, hear our prayers, touch us in those places where life has left us, and let us live again. And let us be your eyes, your ears, and your hands to reach out to the sufferings of others. Let us be agents of compassion and grace in this often too-harsh and too-lonely world. We offer this prayer in the hope that even here, even now, the miracle of resurrection can find us. Amen.

SERMON:

All over this world today, about a billion Christians will be retelling the same story, of a son of God who was crucified and resurrected and who, if we believe in the story, can be our own personal savior.

Anyone living in the first century would have known a whole host of similar stories about gods who died and were resurrected. They knew the stories of Dionysus, born of a virgin and the great sky-god Zeus, whose followers gathered annually to eat flesh and drink blood symbolizing the flesh and blood of the dead god, and believed to impart his spirit to them. They knew the Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris, where Osiris was killed, resurrected much later, mated with Isis, who gave birth to the baby Horus. Everyone knew the image of Isis holding the baby Horus: it was the model for the Christian pictures of the virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. And the people knew the stories of other dead and resurrected gods, including Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis.

All these stories belonged to a mythic genre born into the ancient scientific worldview of 2000 years ago, where heaven was just up above the sky, hell was just below the earth, and the whole universe was a local affair. In such a small place, the gods could routinely sport with human females, and bodies might well come back to life or float up above the sky to live forever.

So all over the Mediterranean world of two thousand years ago people also gathered annually to retell these ancient stories.

But all over the world today – though in much smaller numbers – there are religious and biblical scholars who know that this was a myth. The myth had nothing to do with the man Jesus, who would undoubtedly have been appalled by a story that turned him into a savior figure and taught that the kingdom of God was a supernatural thing that he was supposed to bring to the faithful.

So there is this particular kind of tension involved in working with the ancient symbols and myths of Easter-type stories. This means that everyone who preaches on these myths and symbols today has to decide how to play them – how honest, how deep, how confrontive – as well as how and how much they will respect their audience. That’s the tension involved in preaching on popular religious holidays soaked in centuries of myth that’s popularly taken too shallow to be religious.

The normal spin put on these problems is to ignore the otherworldly story and convert words like “resurrection” into generic metaphors. If you are one of the seventeen people in Austin who read the religion pages of Saturday’s paper, you saw that’s what the clergy writing yesterday did. Bob Lively took “resurrection” to mean “love,” and everywhere he saw love flourish he rejoiced in the miracle of “resurrection.” And Bishop Greg Aymond took it a little deeper by equating “resurrection” with a renewal of hope. This is also what I did in this morning’s Centering prayer. So I don’t think it’s out of bounds. I think it’s a small part of what we need to do with these overloaded symbols.

But it isn’t enough. It reduces the message of religion to the blandness of a Hallmark greeting card. And it has that arrogant imperialism that the better Christian thinkers have been trying to grow away from – by claiming this common human experience for the Christian vocabulary.

Goodness: Hindus come to the same point of finding a reconnection where they had despaired of finding any connection, and don’t need the Christian notion of “resurrection” to deal with it. They understand it, within the organic integrity of Hinduism, as a realization that their atman – their individual soul – is indeed an integral part of Brahman – the universal creative and sustaining power.

Buddhists can come to the same kind of peace and understand it simply as “waking up” from the illusions that had until then made them more miserable. And naturalists can express the same experience just as adequately, though with perhaps less poetry. “I feel more connected to the world,” they might say. “I felt dislocated and disoriented, out of place, but now I feel myself to be a rightful part of the whole glorious world around me, and I feel less anxious, more full. Life is better now.” So I object both to the superficial pandering and the theological arrogance of pretending that “resurrection” is a necessary concept rather than merely a Christian concept.

There is another path through this symbolic swamp, just as ancient. It demands more of us, and takes off the traditional sugar coating in which popular holidays are dipped. But I think it takes us all more seriously and might do both us and the subject more proud. It is making the distinction between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. Scholars have been aware of this distinction for a long time, but they usually hide it in code words:

Some speak of the “Jesus of history” versus the “Christ of faith”; Others talk about “Jesus” versus “the Christ”; Or the “pre-Easter Jesus” and the “post-Easter Jesus” All of these sets of code words refer to the fact that the religions, the messages of the Jesus of history was wildly different from the message assigned to the “Jesus Christ” of traditional faith. But it’s rude to say this, so both teachers and preachers in religion have collaborated in a conspiracy of silence for many centuries to keep such damaging (or thought-provoking) distinctions away from your tender ears.

You know more about the religion about Jesus, which is just known as Christianity. It teaches about a supernatural Jesus who was somehow the son of God, who performed amazing miracles, was killed, then “raised up” from the dead, in the intriguing phrase of the New Testament writers. Most biblical scholars I know are clear that no first-century writer thought that meant the resuscitation of a corpse. The general take on it is that to say God “raised up” Jesus meant that what Jesus taught about the kingdom of God was correct.

I think it was too. It wasn’t original, but it was profound, both then and now. So this Easter, I want to bring Jesus’s message to you and then let you decide for yourselves what kind of an Easter you can be most proud to seek and to celebrate. In other words, my tactic here is to take the tensions inherent in the symbols of Easter and pass them on to you, so you can feel the tension, and you can decide what style and depth of “Easter” you want to celebrate. Don’t worry: suffering, I’ve heard, can be therapeutic.

The Religion of Jesus

The religion of Jesus was as different from the traditional teachings of Christianity as you can imagine. But to understand it, you have to understand the kind of world into which Jesus was born.

Ironically, first century Galilee had much in common with our own society today – more than it had in common with the America of fifty years ago. Three centuries of invasions, by the armies of Alexander the Great and later the Roman legions, had destroyed all the temple cult centers which had stabilized a fair variety of ethnic and religious communities. By the first century there was no shared center, no collective identity. Galilee was filled with people who were not “a people.”

The social or dietary laws of one group – Jews, for instance – were odd or unappealing to other groups nearby – Greeks, for instance. Even simple social intercourse was harder than it is for us today. A Greek family invites you over for the first century equivalent of a barbecue. Since you’re “company,” they spend extra money to buy some first-rate shellfish and pork to roast. But you’re Jews, and your dietary laws forbid you to eat shellfish or pork.

In dozens of ways, Galilee was a land of chaos, where the prospects of ever making “a people” out of this disparate mess were somewhere between slim and none.

In times this chaotic, there seem to be two kinds of solutions proposed, as they were proposed here. The first was the most extreme, proposed by John the Baptist. John thought the situation was too far gone for anyone to fix. Not even God could make it right, he thought. So the only answer was that God was going to destroy the whole world, annihilate everyone in it – well, except for those who believed as John the Baptist did, of course – and start over.

John had a growing and fervent crowd who would gather east of the Jordan to await the sign of the end of the world, when they were poised to act against the Romans.

If you know anything about the Romans, you know this is not s smart tactic. They were very efficient, the Romans. They wouldn’t spend sixty billion dollars to bomb a thousand square miles of mountains in the hope of killing seven or eight civilians. Instead, they just captured the head of the movement and killed him.

But the murder of John the Baptist was devastating to his followers. It means that John’s message, John’s understanding of what “the kingdom of God” was about, was wrong. Otherwise, God would not have let John die that way. That was the supernatural or superstitious thinking of the first century.

John the Baptist was Jesus’s mentor and teacher. Jesus was one of his followers. And not long after John’s murder, Jesus appears for the first time as a charismatic leader, with many of John’s former followers now following him.

But Jesus’s message was very, very different. John’s solution had been to wait for a supernatural agency to fix the world by destroying it. Jesus’s notion of the kingdom of God involved no action by a supernatural agency. Jesus taught that we must reclaim the fragmented world by fixing it.

What made all the lines of enmity between different groups were the rules of each group’s identity – rules that made them special only by making all others wrong. Jesus taught that people should disobey and subvert exclusive identities. He and his followers begged for their daily food – a bit of begging that became famous as part of “the Lord’s Prayer.” “Eat what is put before you,” he instructed his Jewish followers. If Greeks offer you shellfish or pork, eat it! Don’t let any self-definition, including your Jewish one, separate you from others.

Only one identity was to be allowed in Jesus’ notion of the kingdom of God: we were ordered to see one another merely as our brothers and sisters, as children of God. Again and again he frustrated his more superstitious followers, who still expected him to continue John’s teaching. No: the kingdom of God is not coming. You can’t point to it and say “here, there.” It is already here, within and among you. Or as he said in the Gospel of Thomas, “the kingdom of God is spread upon the earth and men don’t see it.” It’s all here – at least potentially – and we don’t or won’t have the eyes to see or the ears to hear it. How many times he told his disciples that they didn’t get it!

There is no magic here, and no supernatural agency. God has already done his part. The ball is in our court, and God is waiting for us to act to bring the kingdom of God to earth. And we do it simply by changing our hearts and our actions toward others. Period. Amen. End of sermon, end of religion. Jesus never promised heaven or threatened with hell. He didn’t talk of an afterlife, just of this one. And he would not let people get away with believing that they could wait passively for a supernatural deity to fix things.

The Denial of Jesus

All students of the Christian scriptures know this phrase refers to his apostle Peter, who seemed categorically incapable of understanding Jesus’ message. It was Peter, remember, to whom Jesus uttered his angriest phrase: Get the behind me, Satan!” Peter, like most (perhaps all) of Jesus’ disciples, wanted to hear him preach the end-of-the-world clean sweep message of John the Baptist, and did not want to hear that this exciting supernatural kingdom of their expectations was to be replaced by a very down-to-earth kind of world in which they simply had to become active agents of love rather than righteous prophets of a mass destruction which only they would survive.

Catholic scholar Thomas Sheehan has put it pointedly when he says that “Peter continued his denial of Jesus by creating Christianity.” Christianity began as a religion of reversion to the pagan formula for salvation by a supernatural deity who demanded of us only that we believe the story and follow the leaders. This was precisely the image Jesus had spent his ministry preaching against.

Paul, the Inventor of Christianity

Most of the New Testament scholars I know agree that the Christianity that came to be normative was given its shape and message by Paul. Paul never knew Jesus, seems not to have known his teachings – he never mentions any – of Jesus’ central notion of the kingdom of God. Instead, Paul taught, much as John the Baptist had, that the end of the world was coming and Jesus Christ would be the salvation of the faithful in a supernatural way.

I feel, with many others, that Paul replaced Jesus’ this-worldly religion of responsibility with a simplistic supernatural religion in the mold of pagan cults, especially Greek mystery cults – and most particularly the cult of Mediterranean Mithraism. And I feel that the real crucifixion of Jesus came not by the Romans, but by Peter, Paul and those who established what became normative Christianity.

Many others have seen this, and many others have felt betrayed and angry about it. One was the Greek novelist Kazantsakis. You may know either the book or movie of The Last Temptation of Christ by him. In this book he creates a wonderful, if angry, imaginary scene between Jesus and Paul. When Jesus meets the inventor of Christianity he says You! So you’re the one who has been making all these things up about me. They’re not true! And Paul’s response is basically Oh you’re Jesus? Nice to meet you, who cares? I gave people the religion they needed, and it doesn’t need you.

I know Pauline scholars who think Kazantsakis’ portrayal of Paul is about as accurate as it gets. Even Paul’s defenders (and he has many) usually acknowledge his megalomania.

There are even more extreme reactions against the betrayal of the religion of Jesus by the religion about Jesus. Perhaps the most famous, and my favorite, comes from Dostoevsky’s book The Brothers Karamazov, in the chapter entitled “The Grand Inquisitor.” He has Jesus come back during the Inquisition, and stages this amazing – and, again, angry – scene between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor, in which Jesus says nothing. I think Dostoevsky has nailed the religion of Jesus perfectly here, and think his anger at the religion invented about Jesus is pretty close to the mark too:

“You promised them heavenly bread, but how can that bread compete against earthly bread in dealing with the weak, ungrateful, permanently corrupt human species? And even if hundreds or thousands of men follow you for the sake of heavenly bread, what will happen to the millions who are too weak to forego their earthly bread? Or is it only the thousands of the strong and mighty who are dear to your heart, while the millions of others, the weak ones, who love you too, weak as they are, and who are as numerous as the grains of sand on the beach, are to serve as material for the strong and mighty? But we are concerned with the weak too! – by becoming their masters, we have accepted the burden of freedom that they were too frightened to face.” We shall tell them, though, that we are loyal to you and that we rule over them in your name. We shall be lying, because we do not intend to allow you to come back. “There are three forces, only three, on this earth that can overcome and capture once and for all the conscience of these feeble, undisciplined creatures, so as to give them happiness. These forces are miracle, mystery, and authority. But you rejected the first, the second, and the third of these forces and set up your rejection as an example to men.” You acted proudly and magnificently; indeed, you acted like God, but can you expect as much of men, of that weak, undisciplined, and wretched tribe, who are certainly no gods?” “tomorrow you will see obedient herds, at the first sign from me, hurry to heap coals on the fire beneath the stake at which I shall have you burned, because, by coming here, you have made our task more difficult. For if anyone has ever deserved our fire, it is you, and I shall have you burned tomorrow.”

Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” and Kazantsakis’ Paul are important to read and to teach, because they are among the educated voices that have not taken part in the conspiracy of silence. They present the contrast between the hard teachings of the man Jesus – the religion of Jesus – and the immeasurably easier teachings of Christianity – the religion about Jesus. And their anger doesn’t come from a lack of religious sensitivity, but more an abundance of it. They are angry because they believe, as I also do, that a lesser religion (Christianity) has displaced a greater religion (the religion of Jesus). It cannot be said too often or too bluntly: In direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus, the myth of the “Christ” led people back to the pagan and primitive belief in salvation through vicarious atonement by a supernatural savior-god who let people off the hook, demanding only unthinking obedience of them. Jesus’ teachings – to the extent that they were ever understood – were found to be too difficult. There must be a simpler and less painful route if Christianity were to be the universal faith visualized by such zealots as Paul – even if, in the process, it betrayed everything Jesus had considered sacred.

In Jesus’ time it was rude to demand so much of people – people who do seem to prefer miracle, mystery and authority to empowerment and responsibility. He was rude. His own disciples didn’t understand him, and Peter famously didn’t want to hear it. If people want miracle, mystery and authority, Jesus certainly didn’t offer them much.

He said God had done his part and it was their turn to act.

Christianity – the religion about Jesus – is finally too easy. It isn’t worthy of someone called a son of God. It isn’t worthy of those who would consider themselves people of God. It isn’t a spiritual path that any God worth the bother would raise up. It was the creation of Paul and other men, but not a prophet or sage of the first rank.

But there was such a first-rate prophet and sage involved in the story. He was a simple, marginal Jew from Galilee we’ve learned to call Jesus. He taught a narrow path, not a broad one, and preached a kingdom of God that we, and only we, could make present on earth as soon and as long as we find the courage to act like children of God, to see all others as children of God, and to act accordingly. It can happen any time, here and now. It can happen in Israel if both sides change the center of their faith. It can happen in Northern Ireland if both sides stop defining themselves as Protestants and Catholics, and define themselves instead only as brothers and sisters. It can happen in Austin, it can happen in your neighborhood, and in your life.

But only if you believe. No, you don’t have to believe anything supernatural, you don’t have to believe anything you can’t make sense of. You have to believe that the only identity of which grown-up religious people should be proud is the identity of seeing themselves and all others as brothers and sisters, and children of a God of love. Just that.

Today, we have translated the promise and the commandment into flowers, flowers for you to take home and reflect upon.* Fragile little things of beauty and vulnerability, as fragile as peace, as vulnerable as love. Take them home. The flowers are in your hands. So is the hope of your life, and the future of the world. Those words hardly seem adequate, though. Something more poetic and powerful is needed. Jesus called it the kingdom of God. That’s much better, and much closer.

The hope for the kingdom of God is in our hands, as it has always been. The dream has lain fallow for a long time. Many would say it has died. It is Easter, and the dream is in our hands. Let us think about resurrecting it.

————–

*This church celebrates an annual Flower Communion on Easter Sunday. People are asked to bring a flower, which they deposit in baskets. At the end of the service, the many baskets of flowers are brought to the front of the church, and people each come forward to take a flower from the baskets to take home with them.

Demythologized Christianity

© Davidson Loehr

24 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

CENTERING:

Sometimes, demythologizing religion feels like stealing stories from the gods, then denying that the gods exist, in the sky or anywhere. It’s seductively easy to stay shallow and smug if we rob life of all its unseen dimensions.

Yet to be honest, it isn’t ever that easy. For we are still faced with the awful transience of life, life which moves so quickly.

As the poet Ezra Pound has put it,

The days are not full enough

and the nights are not full enough

and life slips by like a field mouse

not [even] shaking the grass.

And so we pray, in our demythologized worlds, 

to the gods who are now harder to find,

to the spirit of life, 

love, and all that matters. 

We pray for help

that we may live slowly and move simply 

and look softly 

that we may allow emptiness 

and let the heart create for us a home. 

Amen.

SERMON:

Last week I led a Jesus Seminar program at the UU church in Oak Ridge, TN, so the notion of demythologized Christianity is very fresh. And though it’s a lot of syllables for just one word, demythologizing our religions is one of the most important and most faithful things we need to do if we want our religions to be more real, and more relevant to the lives we’re living in this 21st century.

What does it mean? Sometimes it just means taking religious messages out of their protective mythic wrappings so we can see what, if anything, they have to say to us today.

All of our Western religions were born into a kind of cradle, or manger. They were born into the worldview of their time, which was very different than the way we see our world today. Christianity was born into this kind of a manger. Two thousand years ago, it was born into what today we might call the worldview of ancient understandings, the scientific worldview of the ancient world.

Scholars call that old worldview the ‘three-story universe.” It’s probably the most intuitive, common-sense view of the universe we”ve ever had. You can still experience it just by going outside on a clear day far from the city.

Look around you and you”ll see what the ancients saw: the earth looks flat, like a pizza. Just standing there, you”re seeing farther than most people strayed from where they were born. Up above, you can see the dome of the sky. They called it the “firmament” because they thought it was made of rock. It was so heavy, the Greeks assigned their strongest god, Atlas, to hold it up. There were holes in the firmament, which light came through at night, in the patterns of the constellations. Up above the dome of the sky was where the light came from, and where the “enlightened,” “illuminated” powers and deities were presumed to live in some way.

And down beneath the earth was the place of fire and brimstone. If you doubt that, just watch a volcano erupt, and ask yourself where that stuff came from. It was a bad place, the probably home of bad forces and spirits.

We humans were the playthings of the forces of good and evil, and our prayers were for help with the one against the other.

It was quite a small universe, really just a local affair. There was us, there was Up, there was Down.

This commonsense universe is the cradle into which Christianity was born. And the fantastic things of the New Testament make a kind of sudden literal sense when you remember this old worldview. A passage says the heavens opened and a voice boomed through saying “Behold this is my beloved son in whom I am much pleased,” and you can imagine it. After all, it’s not that far. It could open, you could imagine hearing the voice. Another passage talks about Jesus descending to hell. Well, you”d imagine he”d be protected from the fire and brimstone somehow, but again – it’s just not that far. You can imagine it. Heaven is up, hell is down, we’re on the stage in the middle. Very simple and clear.

No, the world was never made that way, not now and not then. We live in a world that doesn’t have an “up” or “down.” If this sounds odd, think of that photo of the earth taken from the surface of the moon a few decades ago. Imagine you”re standing there on the moon, looking at the earth floating in black space. Then imagine that big voice booming down and asking everyone on the planet to point to heaven. Now imagine the picture, and ask yourself where they are pointing! Locally, they think they”re point up. From where you are, you see they”re pointing out; there is no “up.”

The treasures of religion were hidden up there twenty centuries ago. God was put up there above the sky. You could say that 2000 years ago they hid the message of religion up above the sky to protect and honor it.

Next week is Easter, and the Easter message is a good example. Someone dying, then coming back to life and ascending up above the sky into heaven. What could that mean in a world that isn’t made that way? How are faithful and honest people to understand it? And Christmas talks about a man born of a virgin and a sky-god. What is that to mean? Sperm from above the sky?

Leaving the messages of religion stuck in that old mythic worldview forces our faith to try and live in two different centuries at once – the old 3-story worldview of 2000 years ago, as we need its insights for our 21st century modern worldview.

What would you ask believers to believe? In the religious insights, whatever they are, or in the way people used to think the universe was put together? In the messages of religion, or in first-century science?

Today, we have to protect and honor the messages of religion by locating them in this world. If we can’t find the sacred in the here and now, we may not find it anywhere.

That’s what demythologizing is about. It is saying that to be faithful, to honor the spirit of religion in the modern world, we need to take its message out of its ancient protective mythic wrapping, take off the training wheels, and see what it has to say to us today.

You know that isn’t how religion usually works. The orthodox still try to protect their old faith by keeping it in its old mythic worldview, as though religion is just too frail, too fragile, for the light of day. It fools people who want to be fooled, and many who don’t. But it doesn’t fool all the people, and it makes some of them very angry with the hypocrisy and denial.

On the plane back from Tennessee last Monday I read a book that spoke to this in ways that surprised me. It was a book of short pieces sent in by more than 90 Irish writers (Sources: Letters from Irish People on Sustenance for the Soul, edited by Marie Heaney). The editor had written to ask them what nourished and sustained their souls, and I was quite surprised to find how few of them chose anything from their religion, and how much anger they still felt for it.

Here’s a typical response, from Martin Drury:

Having been, until my early twenties, a devout and obedient Roman Catholic, I can still recall the seismic shock (and indeed can still experience the aftershocks) of the opening up of the fault-line between orthodox religious practice and authentic spiritual experience. I deplore greatly that those who were so quick to claim me for their own church were so slow to nourish my individual spiritual self”. Those who charged themselves with my spiritual formation” gave me no map-making skills by which I could chart my journey. The [maps] I have grown to admire and trust and which I find sustaining [are those] employed by artists of all disciplines.

“My preference is for the ambiguous [maps] of literature and for the celebration of humanity rather than some remote divinity.

This man wasn’t fooled by his church, and what he is resenting here is both his church’s deceptions and its faithlessness. Faithlessness. That’s an ironic accusation against a church, but think about it. Which is more faithless: to give up on believing in another world, or to give up on believing in this one? What would religious messages have to mean if they were about this world rather than another one?

One woman who had left the church criticized it for offering a religion that was not real. And she offered as words that sustained her soul not the Bible but a few paragraphs from the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit. It had been a long time since I’d read that book, and I hadn’t remembered it talking about how some things can’t be made real. Listen for it in this Irish woman’s critique of her former church:

The Velveteen Rabbit arrived on Christmas morning. The little boy loved him – for at least two hours – but in the excitement of the day he was soon forgotten. For a long time he lived with the other toys in the cupboard – and they were a pretty mixed lot: bossy mechanical toys who were very superior, full of modern ideas and talk of technology. Even the little wooden lion who should have known better pretended that he had connections with Government. The Velveteen Rabbit felt very insignificant. The only person to be kind to him was the old Skin Horse who was very wise.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day.

“Real” is a thing that happens to you when a child loves you for a long, long, time,” answered the Skin Horse who was always truthful. He said that sometimes it hurt being real – and that it doesn’t always happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges or who have to be kept carefully.

“By the time you are REAL most of you hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are REAL you can’t be ugly – except to people who don’t understand.”

Religions are like this too. If they are too fragile, break easily, or have to be kept too carefully, you can never snuggle up to them enough to make them real. Demythologizing religions, removing their old protective wrapping to make a home for them in our own lives, isn’t the devil’s work, it’s a godsend.

Many of the Irish respondents quoted William Blake as one of those whose writings and insights fed their souls. And in Blake too they found much anger at the deceptions of traditional religion. It had been a long time since I had read any of William Blake, and I was surprised to read some of these lines:

A truth that’s told with bad intent 

beats all the lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;

Man was made for joy and woe;

and when this we rightly know

Thro’ the world we safely go.

We’re not made for heaven, he’s saying. we’re not made for a perfect place somewhere else. we’re made for this place, joy and woe intermixed. These writers were absolutely committed to focusing on this life here and now, not another one elsewhere and later. What will this need to mean next week when we ask what message faithful people are to find in the old Easter message? What should we seek new life for? our souls, our society? our religion? our churches?

Another woman brought these lines from the poet Adrienne Rich:

from Twenty-One Love Poems

At twenty, yes: 

we thought we’d live forever.

At forty-five, 

I want to know even our limits.

I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,

and somehow, each of us will help the other live,

and somewhere each of us must help the other die.

“Adrienne Rich (1929-)

Then more lines from William Blake:

Every night and every morn

some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie

when we see not thro’ the eye

which was born in a night to perish in a night”

I was struck by these last three lines:

We are led to believe a lie

when we see not thro’ the eye

which was born in a night to perish in a night”

In other words, Blake is saying don’t believe pronouncements from on high, don’t believe insights that pretend to be from gods rather than mortals who are born in a night and perish in a night. Here is this great poet of two centuries ago saying that our religion isn’t supposed to help us get to heaven after we die. What religion is supposed to do – these are more of Blake’s words – is to show us how

To see a world in a grain of sand

and a heaven in a wild flower,

hold infinity in the palm of your hand

and Eternity in an hour.

Every heresy trial would disagree with that. Refusing to believe in things you can’t make sense of has been dangerous as recently as the Taliban. Heresy trials don’t care how the heretic lived, only whether they said they believed the story of one particular religious group.

But think about this too. What kind of insecurity do such threats sound like:

— the insecurity of an eternal, omniscient deity who created the whole universe and knows what you think even when you don’t? Could a real god be that ignorant and petty?

— or the insecurity of members of a club, whose f and arrogant claim to truth might crumble if they had to admit that their story is just one among many, and that people do quite well without it?

No god worth the bother would punish people for refusing to believe old stories still left in their ancient mythic wrappings. No god worth the bother would reward us for checking our brains at the church door. Faithful people aren’t supposed to recite their group’s story unthinkingly. Faithful people are supposed to try and find faith worth living by, a way of viewing themselves and the world that can show them a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.”

We who would be faithful today find ourselves in an odd and ironic place. Through the history of our Western religions, people have been taught that the goods of their religion are only available to the faithful, the insiders, the club members.

But that’s a third thing worth thinking about, as I found all the Irish writers thinking about it. What kind of truth could that be, that is only true and only real for members of a club? Anything that’s really true – especially if it’s being presented as coming from the god who created the whole darned universe – would have to be true for everyone. Religious insights have to be available for everyone. Insecure people might get seduced by creeds, principles, confessions of faith, but not gods, and not any real religions either. Religion and truth aren’t about faking it. If Christianity, Buddhism or the others have anything to offer to our lives, it has to be available to all who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear it.

We are in a different place today than we were in ancient times. The meaning of faithfulness has changed. True faithfulness no longer means looking away from this world toward the promise of another world later and elsewhere. It means, as these Irish writers say again and again, looking away from the talk of other worlds later and elsewhere and toward the promises and challenges of this one, here and now.

This is why I think religious liberals may be the most religious people around today. At our best, we can look past the mythic wrappings and other-worldly glows, and ask whether and how this or that religion can help us become more alive and aware here and now, can help us to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower.

The Jews have a story about the day God decided he wanted to play a trick on humans. He was stumped, so as he always did when he was stumped, he called on his favorite rabbi.

“Rabbi,” said God, “I want to play a trick on people. I want to hide from them where they won’t be likely to find me, and I don’t know where to hide. What do you think: the far side of the moon, the outer reaches of the galaxy – what do you think, rabbi?”

And the rabbi replied “Oh, don’t make it so hard. Just hide in the human heart. It’s the last place they will think to look.”

So that is where God hid. And the rabbi was right, for even to this day hardly anyone thinks to look there.

There is a great irony in religion today. Many centuries ago when our Western religions were born, the prophets and sages who gave them birth tried to protect religion by hiding it up in the heavens above the sky. Today when we need our religion to be real, hiding it up out of sight is a death sentence for it. Today in order to protect it, in order to make our faith real, we must find it inside our world, inside our own hearts.

All three Western religions have seen this.

Jews, with their story of God hiding inside the human heart; Christians, through Jesus’ saying that the kingdom of God is not something that’s coming, but is rather something that is already within or among us, if only we will have the eyes to see it. and Moslems, when their Qu’ran teaches that God is closer to us than the vein in our neck. The true faithfulness we need today is not blind trust in another world, but faith in the hidden possibilities for wholeness and redemption in this one. True faithfulness is learned by opening our eyes to the glories of the world around us, and opening our hearts to find the god that is hidden there, the kingdom of God hidden within and among us, waiting to be made real in our own lives, the way the Velveteen Rabbit was finally made real.

In one sense, we are terribly alone in our demythologized world. But our poison can be our cure, for we are alone together.

We yearn together for the gift of vision that might show us

a world in a grain of sand

and heaven in a wild flower,

that might help us learn to hold infinity in our hand

and Eternity in an hour.

Yes, we know the days are not full enough

and the nights are not full enough

and life slips by like a field mouse

not even shaking the grass.

And so we end in quiet prayer to the unseen spirit of life, the unfound god 

hiding in our hearts. And we say Oh God, Oh spirit of life, help us

to live slowly,

to move simply,

to look softly,

to allow emptiness,

and to let our hearts create for us

Help us make a home, right here, within and among the undiscovered kingdom of God that lies hidden within our hearts, where it has always been hidden.

We pray for that, just that, here, now, together.

Amen.

The Morality of Abortion

© Davidson Loehr

10 March 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 WORDS:

Is life sacred? Always? Is a birth a blessed event? Always? Morality is about behavior that honors life by treating it as it deserves at its best. So is the morality of abortion. These are hard and emotionally-loaded questions we’re asking this morning. It is almost impossible to be neutral about them. But if important and emotionally-loaded questions can’t be raised in church, it’s not much of a church. We gather to ask hard questions, and dare to suggest that we and our society might need to look at these issues in an entirely new way. And that willingness is part of the reason we can say that

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.

STORY: The Girl Who Loved Hamsters

Once there was a girl who loved hamsters. She badgered and badgered her parents until they finally did two things, one good and one not too smart. They bought her a hamster cage, food, and a hamster. That was good. But they bought her two hamsters. This wasn’t smart, because two hamsters don’t stay just two for very long. Hamsters are very friendly animals. And before long, she no longer had two hamsters, she had twenty.

But this girl loved hamsters, so she saw it as a good thing. She went to her parents protesting that twenty hamsters were too many for the small cage she had, so they needed to buy her a much bigger cage. They did, and the hamsters kept doing what hamsters do. Before long, she didn’t have twenty hamsters, she had three hundred! They started buying food in ten-pound bags.

Still, the girl loved hamsters, so this was fine. But they had overgrown their cage, were running all over the house, hiding under and in the beds, crawling out from under pillows just as you were falling asleep.

“We need bigger cages, and many more of them,” she pleaded to her parents. “And a special roof in the back yard where we can keep all the cages.” The parents yielded, and soon there was a kind of tenement rising in the backyard, with cages organized into blocks with little streets between them. The girl and a couple friends pushed a wheelbarrow down between the cages, throwing food into the rapidly increasing hamster population. They began buying food in hundred-pound bags.

And it was indeed increasing rapidly. Soon there weren’t three hundred hamsters, but about fifty thousand of them! They escaped from the cages, from the yard, and were running all over town, getting into everyone’s house, hiding under everyone’s bed and under everyone’s pillows. There was a loud outcry.

A town meeting was called, but the girl was ready for them. “I really love hamsters,” she said, “but I understand you don’t want them running loose through your town. So the solution is to build a large boat, with several floors, and float it out in Town Lake for these lovely, fluffy little hamsters. Then I can take a rowboat out each day to give them food.”

Somehow, she was persuasive, and the town actually built a huge boat – it would have put Noah’s Ark to shame, it was so big. Before long there were far, far more than fifty thousand hamsters on the big boat. But now nobody could count them. They were breeding so fast they were getting crowded, and they seemed to get meaner, so that it was no longer safe to get onto the boat to play with them – not that anybody could really play with millions of hamsters anyway!

Each day, the girl who loved hamsters rowed out to the big ship in her rowboat filled with hamster food, which they were now buying by the ton, and shoveled food over the sides of the ship before rowing back to shore. Still, she loved hamsters, and loved the idea of knowing there were so many of them out there, even if she had no contact with them any more.

While no one could count the hamsters any more, everyone in town could get a sense of their growing numbers just by watching the big boat sink lower and lower into the water every day. There were millions and millions of them onboard now.

Finally, the big boat sank into Town Lake, taking all the hamsters with it. The girl was very sad, and she called another town meeting.

“The problem,” she said, “was that the boat wasn’t big enough. We need to build a bigger boat – and more boats. And we should buy our own company to make hamster food, it will be cheaper. I”ve done some research, and if we fire about five hundred public school teachers and double the class size in public schools, and stop repairing the roads quite so often, we can afford to do it. And we must do it, because I really love hamsters.”

What to do, what to do?

CENTERING:

For over a generation, America’s cultural liberals have treated abortion as a matter of individual rights, where the mother but not the baby is seen as a rights-bearing individual. Conservatives have countered by claiming rights for the baby, though the law hasn’t recognized a fetus as an individual.

That may soon change. On March 5th, this Tuesday, the Bush administration published a proposed rule designating embryos and fetuses as “children” eligible for medical benefits under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP – 67 Fed. Reg. No. 43, pp. 9936-9939). The pregnant woman herself is not considered the patient, only the embryo or fetus.

This is a brilliant and creative extension of individual rights designed to negate a pregnant woman’s individual rights by pitting her against the fetus, and putting the government only on the side of the fetus. It will be defended as a caring act by those who love children. Is it?

Or is it a cynical tactic to disempower women, to help remove them from the workplace and tie them to caring for children they do not want in an economy set up to treat the desperate children of desperate women as minimum-wage workers without any empowered choices?

Is forcing the birth of unwanted children really caring? Is caring that easy? Is it just a matter of saying we feel strongly about someone else? Or do caring and loving demand more? What would it really take to love children, and how can you tell when someone really does? These are our questions this evening, and I invite you into them.

SERMON: The Morality of Abortion

Fields like religion, ethics and morality differ from history, sociology, or anthropology in important ways. History can ask what people actually did. Sociology can study what different subgroups do, anthropology can try to discern the kinds of behaviors, good and bad, that characterize our species. They”re descriptive disciplines.

But religion, ethics and morality are our attempts to be normative. Religion, ethics and morality can ask whether the gods we’re serving or the rules we’re following are good or bad. Are we following a morality of enslavement or empowerment? Shakespeare observed that “we love not wisely, but too well.” We usually also worship not wisely but too well, and a key role of religion is to ask whether the gods we’re serving are worth serving.

With morality, we always need to ask whether it’s good or bad morality. And the only way we can answer that is to ask whether it helps people achieve their own kind of excellence and grow into their full humanity, or whether the morality being foisted on us is aimed to disempower segments of our society, to turn them into obedient things rather than empowered citizens.

Each kind of life, each species, even each individual, has certain kinds of excellence and development available to it. With lower species, it’s mostly just survival and breeding. Flies, ants, roaches and rats, jellyfish and lobsters are about self-preservation and propagation of the species: survival and breeding. Period. That’s the definition of lower forms of life, and of life reduced to its lowest possibilities.

This is the framework within we need to understand the morality of abortion. We must relate it to the larger question of whether it serves the empowerment of people toward their excellence, or the virtual enslavement of people to levels of diminished capacity where they can hope mostly just for survival and breeding. The morality of abortion is the question of whether it enslaves or empowers both the parents and the potential children.

Human life can be defined down in many ways. Totalitarian regimes can do it, whether in Stalinist Russia, the reign of the Afghan Taliban or the morality of the fundamentalist American Taliban, by curtailing individual rights and freedoms. Overbreeding can do it, by letting a concern for quantity, for the mere existence of life, trump the concern for quality, the development and empowerment of life. People kept desperately poor overbreed, have few real choices, and must obey those who have turned them into starving and desperate workers. The immoral downgrading of human life can be identified through any of these symptoms.

And now we are ready for Pope Leo XIII. By 1891, huge numbers of the world’s poor had been effectively reduced to things, to desperate creatures struggling merely for survival, who could be treated as a desperate labor force under the worst conditions. Children worked in mines by the age of eight or younger, and could look forward to no more than this until they died – usually at an early age.

The Church’s role had been immoral for centuries, conspiring with the wealthy to keep the poor desperate and overbred. And the religious argument always came down to the same passage from the Bible, one that anyone raised in a very conservative religion has heard before. It’s from Genesis, after Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, that the line occurs. “By the sweat of your brow you shall live,” the writers have God saying: By the sweat of your brow you shall live. You see, life just is nasty, brutish and short. It’s hard, it’s unfair, and that’s God’s plan, an enduring punishment for the fact that Adam and Eve preferred development over blind obedience. That line had been used for hundreds of years to keep the lower classes of people in their desperate, overbred, hopeless state.

What Pope Leo XIII did in 1891 was to use the same Bible passage to justify the opposite position, and to lay the foundation for workers” unions which the Church would support through its offices. Leo did it simply by emphasizing a different word in the sentence. “By the sweat of your brow,” he said, “you shall live!” And what, he asked, does it mean, ‘to live”? Does it mean merely to exist, to subsist at starvation level? Does it mean to live like lower animals do, or maybe like slugs or plants do? Are we promised, by this God in the Old Testament, only the absolute lowest possible quality of life? Is the mere quantity of life, the mere fact that we breathe and can move all that religion offers? Is it, to keep it in the language of theism, all that God demands, the absolute minimum quality of life?

No, said Pope Leo, it is not life like a lower animal which this God of the Old and New Testaments demands for us. It is the life of a human being. And not the absolute minimal life of a human being, either. Pope Leo’s God demanded that our labors enable us to live fully, to realize the full potential of human beings. That means time for education, time for leisure, time for relaxation with friends and family, time not only to bear life like a burden, but as well to enjoy it, to live it.

Leo contrasted humans with lower animals, which he called “brutes.” Now hear this remarkable Pope Leo’s words as he describes the “brute”:

The brute has no power of self-direction, but is governed by two chief instincts…. These instincts are self-preservation and the propagation of the species…. But with [humans] it is different indeed…. It is the mind, or the reason, which is the chief thing in us who are human beings; it is this which makes human beings human, and distinguishes them essentially and completely from the brute. (“Rerum Novarum,” in Seven Great Encyclicals, New York: Paulist Press, 1963, p. 3)

And what is the role of the Church in all of this? “Its desire is that the poor, for example, should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should better their condition in life; and for this it strives,” wrote this Pope. (p. 14) And if conditions existed which robbed humans of the possibility of living like humans rather than brutes, if people found themselves in “conditions that were repugnant to their dignity as human beings… if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex or age”in these cases there can be no question that within certain limits, it would be right to call in the help and authority of the law [to do what] is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the danger.”

And why? Why must the Church and the law do these things? Because God demands it! Demands it, because humans must be given living conditions which allow them to develop fully to the limits of their potential as educated, intelligent, creative, and joyful people. It is for that they were created, and conditions which make that impossible are not merely wrong, they are evil.

This is the theological argument which Pope Leo XIII made over a century ago, and which has changed millions of lives through the force of both its argument and its implementation by the church’s people with the church’s help. And, at the bottom, that’s the only foundation on which a solid and durable theological argument can ever stand: that God demands it.

The only other point that it is important to mention is that this new understanding, issued 111 years ago, changed the position of the Church, a position which it had held and enforced for nineteen centuries. Even traditions which have existed since the beginning of the religion can be changed, as our understanding of the fullest potential of life is expanded. In other words, the fact that things have always been done a certain way is not necessarily an argument for continuing to do them that way. And now we can bring this full circle.

Times have changed. The population of the world has doubled – twice! – since 1891, even more so since the era when the Old Testament and New Testament were written. Two thousand years ago, the world’s population has been estimated at about 200 million. It doubled three times in 1900 years, to about 1.5 billion in 1900. Then in the next sixty years it doubled again, to 3 billion by 1960. And in the next 39 years it doubled again, passing six billion by 1999. The deadly effect of overpopulation and under-education on the possibility of living like human beings has never existed the way it does today. Neither the religious scriptures of the west nor established theological traditions have yet had to address this changed situation.

What this means is that breeding is not a high calling for our species, and hasn’t been for centuries. We have too many people in the world. We don’t need more people, we need better people, and you can’t have both. You can favor quantity – the mere fact of human births – or quality.

Would you like to see what it looks like when human beings live only like animals, driven only by self-preservation and propagation of the species? Go to Mexico City. Or Chicago. Or Detroit. Or New York City. Go to the ghettos, the slums, the shantytowns of the world, and you will see the evil conditions, and the results of those evil conditions.

Do you want to see it up close, one-on-one? Look at fifteen-year-old girls pregnant with their third child, trapped in a welfare system that makes it most profitable for them to remain unmarried and unemployed. Not that there are many kinds of employment open to many of these women. With grade-school educations, what are they to do anyway? They can be prostitutes and their boyfriends can be pimps, drug pushers and drug takers, or exploited laborers living at the edge of starvation and kept there by a system which can demand of them what it chooses and give them no more than it must.

The Church’s understanding of sex arose when high breeding rates were seen as necessary for survival, when breeding was a high calling for people living at the margins.

But that was already a fundamental misunderstanding of the needs of this species. For thousands of years, humans have been able to reach their own peculiar kind of excellence through structures that favor quality of life over quantity of life, that stress development and education, not breeding.

Again: breeding is not a high calling for our species, and hasn’t been a high calling for centuries. We don’t need more people, we need better people. There are too many people in the world, and it is immoral to increase their quantity at the expense of increasing their quality.

Let’s look at some examples of abortions and consider whether the decisions were moral or immoral:

“A young woman gets pregnant and chooses an abortion. That is a completely moral choice, probably the most moral decision she can make. Why? Not because she chose it. Women’s choices aren’t any more or less moral than men’s. But because breeding is not a high calling, we don’t need more people we need better people, and she didn’t want a child. Maybe she sensed that she didn’t have the maturity, the emotional or financial means to give an unwanted child a better life than she had. But she knew she wasn’t ready. Under these circumstances, it would have been immoral to bring the child into the world.

Why not force her to carry the unwanted pregnancy to term, to make her produce a baby for older and wealthier people who want to adopt? Because it is immoral to turn a human being into breeding stock for more privileged people. Because we have too many people in the world. Because we do not need more people, we need better people, and we cannot have both more and better people.

Is it caring or cruel to suggest that more babies can be a bad thing? China has for quite awhile now been urging that their people have no more than one child. That hasn’t received good press here, but it came from the government’s realization that quantity and quality are absolutely opposed in human life, and that the only chance their people have of raising the standard of living for a population of more than billion people is to reduce their numbers to a sustainable level.

When I was in Thailand last month, one of our guides told us that the Thai government has also suggested that Thais limit their families to only two children, for the same reason. Our guide understood it as the government’s concern for the quality of life available for her people, and treated it as responsible leadership.

Let’s consider another common case.

A 20-year-old college woman gets pregnant because she and her boyfriend weren’t careful. He wants to get married and raise the child, but she doesn’t love him, doesn’t want to marry him, and doesn’t want to raise a child. She wants to prepare herself for a career that might let her bring a child into the world later, when she can better provide for the child both materially and psychologically. The abortion is probably the most moral decision she can make. That decision honors the potential of her life, and honors the potential of her future child’s life. Letting the blind fact of pregnancy overrule the higher distinctions she can make with her mind is letting quantity trump quality, letting the merest fact of a potential human life trump the greater concern for the quality of that life.

A married woman with two or three children gets pregnant, does not want another child and gets an abortion, even though the husband wants another child. That is a completely moral decision. Why? Because bringing a new human life into an already overcrowded world is only a moral decision if we honestly believe we can give it a better quality life than we have, and that takes two willing parents, not just one unless that one is going to take full care of the new life.

We have been trained to think that the mere fact of a pregnancy is a kind of moral imperative, trumping other considerations. But it is not, and hasn’t been for centuries. Breeding is not a high calling for our species. We have too many people in the world. We don’t need more people, we need better people, and those closest to the pregnancy know better than anyone whether this is the right time or place for another birth to take place.

The girl who thought she loved hamsters did not love hamsters. She did not even to have known what love is. She confused it with her selfish preoccupation with watching large numbers of desperate little bodies.

Unwanted pregnancies for which a mother is not ready to be a mother should almost always be aborted. Not because a woman has individual rights, but because it is the only moral choice available unless she consents to become a breeder for others.

I’m not trying to answer all the questions tonight, just to sketch a new and different way of understanding the morality of breeding and the morality of birth control and abortion. It is hard enough really to love hamsters. Learning how to really love humans in their highest rather than their lowest possibilities is much, much harder. And much, much more important.

The Meaning of Life

© Davidson Loehr

3 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This is the first of two connected sermons, and should be read in conjunction with the sermon “The Morality of Abortion,” delivered 10 March 2002.

OPENING:

For about 30 years, America’s cultural liberals have understood abortion as a secular matter of individual rights where the mother, but not the baby, is seen as a rights-bearing individual. Conservatives have framed it as a moral issue based on the assumption that life is sacred in and of itself and everyone has a right to it. Under Roman Catholic teaching, when push comes to shove the baby has a greater right to life, since it stands to get a bigger quantity of life.

I expect the Roe v. Wade decision to be overturned during President Bush’s term, and I think the majority of our citizens do believe abortion is primarily a moral issue.

If this is the case, America’s liberals now need to begin doing what we should have done thirty years ago. We need to reframe abortion as a moral issue rather than an issue of individual rights. And if we believe abortion is morally justified, we need to develop moral arguments for it that can be persuasive not only to us, but eventually to a majority of the voting public. I have believed this could be done since I first preached on abortion over 15 years ago.

Now, this week and next week, I will try to persuade you, and hope the picture I sketch is solid enough to begin persuading others.

To tackle such a big issue is to risk failure, and you may not be persuaded, you may decide I fail at it. Still, it is too important a subject to ignore. A new discussion must begin somewhere, and this is a good place to start.

CENTERING:

Is life sacred? Always? If so, what makes it so? Can we ever assume the authority and the right to say No to life? Through birth control, family planning, abortion, capital punishment or war? Ever? If so, how? When? Why?

These are questions more profound than answers. Let us not approach them lightly or we will do a great disservice to them and to ourselves. Let us first be humbled by the subject before us: Life.

Is life sacred? Always? If so, what makes it so? Who are we to pronounce on it, and how? We are here through the accident and gift of life. If we would deny the gift to others, how, when, and why would we do it? Let us begin by letting the questions settle in and being humbled by them, during the silence.

SERMON: The meaning of life

Aristotle said the meaning and purpose of a life was to grow into its own characteristic kind of excellence, to become an example of that particular life at its best. Each species, and each person, has its own unique potential, and the purpose of its life is to blossom into that – for the greater good of its society and world, he might add.

It’s easier said than done, though I think it’s the right answer.

But it takes a lot. It can’t be done alone. As Aristotle also knew, it takes a good community, good friends, a life that offers us the likelihood of this kind of development. Statistically, few people become what they could or should become. So many people with great gifts of art, intelligence, who never develop it, never become the one person that they and only they could become. The obstacles include poverty, toxic home life, mental illness, psychological aberrations, wars, or accidents of life.

So the primary duty of societies is to establish and nourish the conditions within which their citizens can become the best kind of people and society – in the slogan of the US Army, to become all they can be.

This simple insight into the meaning and purpose of life is something we can all agree to, but it has profound implications for all areas of living. I want to explore some of these implications this morning.

But the first thing I want to say is that we all know almost everything I’ll be saying this morning. We know that we are supposed to grow and develop our potential, to become the best sort of person we can, for ourselves and our larger world. It’s what we admire in other people, and in ourselves. We know this.

For example, think of people who breed and show dogs or horses. I was married to a woman who bred and showed a rare kind of French sheep dog called a Briard, and spent about six years attending dog shows and programs put on by breeders concerned with serving and improving their breed.

In dog shows, the breeders of each breed write the standards by which their breed is to be judged. These standards are the best that can be expected of this breed in each area. The dogs are only expected to be what they can be, not what some other breed can be. Greyhounds don’t get any extra points for being able to herd sheep, and sheep dogs get no credit for being able to retrieve a wounded pheasant. Each breed can and can’t do certain things, and the breeders say, as Aristotle did 2400 years ago, that each breed is capable of a certain distinct kind of excellence. The purpose of its life is to strive toward its own kind of excellence.

Horse breeders operate the same way. An Arabian stallion needs to have a certain scoop, or “dish,” a curve from its eyes to its nose. Its nostrils should be flared in official photos, showing an alertness and energy. Its ears should be forward; its body should conform to certain standards. The ideal is the essence of what an Arabian can be at its best, and it is that standard that judges and breeders use to guide them in breeding and training those magnificent animals.

The meaning of each creature’s life is to strive toward its own particular form of excellence. Those who care for the breed try to create the situations within which that might best happen. And they are quick to protect the animals they love from conditions that can harm them – bad food, unhealthy surroundings, cramped quarters or brutal trainers.

With our species, it’s more complicated and more demanding. Ancient writers used to describe us as being caught midway between the beasts and the gods. And the quality of human excellence – the meaning and purpose of our lives – was something available neither to the beasts nor the gods, they said.

We have a degree of consciousness, self-awareness and articulateness that is, as far as we know, not shared by any other species. In that sense, we’re at a higher stage of potential than the other animals. We stew over who we are and how we should live in ways that chimps don’t seem to. We know we will die, and that’s the ever-present background against which we live. We have high existential anxiety compared with dogs or horses.

So we expect more of ourselves than we expect of dogs, horses or chimps, and we judge ourselves failures in ways they don’t seem to care about.

Yet we’re not gods. We aren’t omniscient, omnipotent, or undying. We can articulate more than we can actualize. We can see more than we can be. We yearn for more than we can earn. We yearn for peace, love, justice, a world where the content of our character trumps the color of our skin. And these yearnings are among our noblest traits.

We fail; we fail at almost all of these. It’s a continual battle between high aspirations and low inspirations. And we are marked as human by this odd, frustrating combination. We do not respect people or governments that sell out to low and mean motives. We do not respect those who side with the stronger against the weaker. Something essential is missing in people who do that, something we think is necessary to becoming fully human.

Yet we continually fail. And our history can be seen as the struggle between a glorious vision and an often-vainglorious reality.

The meaning and purpose of human life is to live toward that level of awareness, that level of responsibility, to know the difference between fairness and greed, altruism and narcissism, between treating people as fellow children of God, and treating them merely as things, things that do not even engage our tender mercies or make Lady Justice insist that the scales be balanced and the games played fairly.

And I suggest to you that you know all of this whether you”ve ever articulated it this way or not. You know it.

If you doubt that, try this mental experiment:

Imagine that some benevolent aliens land here, are trying to assess what kind of creatures these humans are. They say “Point to the people, alive or dead, who exemplify the best your race has produced, all that you can be.”

I have a long list of candidates, you probably do to.

I would include Mahatma Gandhi who, even though his revolution in India failed, continued to live by the highest ideals he could see, rather than selling out to the lower interests all around him. This great Hindu heard and answered a higher calling, as we expect our best people to do.

I would include Martin Luther King Jr., who had a vision of Americans as children of God and inheritors of the American dream, and preached that we should, that we must, accept the responsibility to bring this kingdom of God down to earth where it belonged.

I would include Einstein, Darwin, Picasso, Mozart, Bach, Homer, Shakespeare and others as examples of the human imagination and understanding at its finest.

I would include the firemen from September 11th, who died going up the stairs that others were running down, because a sense of duty and compassion called them upward, a compelling link to the suffering of others.

And I would include whole long lists of public school teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, clerks and cops who have lived, each in their own way, to be agents of love rather than hate, understanding rather than prejudice, compassion rather than greed.

I would point to these and say here, here is what we can be, if only we will. Here is that kind of excellence that is uniquely human. Here are people who exemplify the meaning of human life, whose lives and examples I try to learn from.

Make your own list, but see if your nominees aren’t people who exemplify this very human struggle to become, and help others become, the best they can be, to establish the just society, the kingdom of God, the possibility of a true democracy, honest and responsible government, and a sense of fairness that pervades all.

Now look at some of the implications of this. Look what is required for people to become fully human, to act like children of God, to be true to the calling of a species with as much potential as ours has.

It can’t be done alone. It takes more than a village to raise a child. It takes a culture: a healthy and courageous community. Because societies and laws that oppress people – that force the game of living to be played by rules that empower the strong and cripple the weak – are societies and laws that are the enemy of our possibility of becoming human. Morally, those conditions are evil which imprison the weak within small or selfish visions imposed on them by the strong or the morally blind.

Quantity versus Quality

There is one simple rule that points toward whether we have set up rules to foster life at its highest or to frustrate it. And this too is true of many species of animals. The question to ask is whether we are exalting the quantity of life or the quality of life. The meaning of life is about rising to our highest potential quality, not just existing. Are we set up to encourage more births, or more excellence?

I’ve seen the results in dog breeding. Briards are still a fairly rare breed, because that’s the way the breeders want it. They have seen what happens to breeds that become too popular, when irresponsible breeders begin accenting quantity over quality in order to sell puppies. Irish setters are now plagued with a whole host of genetic flaws because they were so poorly overbred. German shepherds, Old English sheepdogs and others have had hip dysplasia bred into them, so their mature years will be painful and crippling. Doberman Pinschers, Rottweilers, even Pit Bulls have seen their breeds degraded through breeding for quantity rather than quality, producing lines of mean and dangerous animals.

Quantity is the value of much lower forms of life, forms that depend on breeding large numbers in order to survive. I’m thinking of insects, sparrows, rats and roaches. We seldom speak of an excellent mosquito or a really exemplary fire ant. We just note whether ants, roaches or mosquitoes are present, whether they”ve survived. And in order to survive, they must breed in sufficient quantities. Several centuries ago, and in desperate times, the same was true of humans in some places. When infant mortality was high, when few lived to adulthood, humans needed to breed in large quantities in order to have a few survive to breeding age. That, of course, hasn’t been true for a long time.

With show dogs or horses or humans, emphasizing numbers isn’t a mark of success, but of failure. For the higher and more complex an animal gets, the more we judge it by quality, by how or whether it lives up to the highest that can be expected of that kind of life.

You know this, we all know this, we just seldom speak of it this way.

Serving our daimon Some observers raise the bar of expectations for our species quite high. One of those is worth mentioning because he’s respected, and because his theories are both complex and interesting. This is psychologist James Hillman, whom some of you have read and others may have heard of.

In a book called The Soul’s Code, Hillman suggests that we have within us, from birth, a kind of spirit or “daimon” as the Greeks called it, that urged us toward a specific form of life for which we were made. I won’t follow him all the way, but I follow him part way, maybe you will too.

He cites the stories of a few exceptional people – geniuses, as we”d usually call them – because he believes that in geniuses these daimons, these fires of destiny, burn brighter than they do in most of us.

He tells the story of Manuel Manoleta (1917-1947), the Spanish bullfighter many still regard as the greatest matador who ever lived. As a young boy, Manoleta was shy, afraid, and regarded as a mama’s boy because he would hide behind his mother’s apron, and seemed generally afraid of the world. That all changed when he was eleven years old, and was suddenly interested in nothing but bulls. From that point, he was afraid of nothing. In his first bull fight, he stood his ground and suffered a groin injury, but refused help and walked out of the ring under a new kind of power and a new kind of identity. He had, as a boy, grown into the destiny to which he had been called.

Freudians might interpret his life behind a red cape as a manifestation of early neuroses, where the red cape took the place of his mother’s apron. Hillman says it’s more interesting to turn it around, and suggest that he hid as a child because he was not yet ready for the dangerous challenges for which he had been made.

Let’s take a less bloody, less macho story. The great violinist Yehudi Menuhin also saw his calling at an early age. When he was just three, he heard a great violinist play a difficult cadenza in a concert, and was transfixed. He later said that he knew from that moment that he must become a violinist. He asked his father for a violin for his fourth birthday. A relative gave the young child, instead, a toy metal violin with metal strings. But the four-year-old Menuhin threw the toy on the floor and would have nothing to do with it. His calling was to play a Stradivarius, not a toy. The fact that, at age four, he was too small to hold or play a regular violin made no difference. The young boy had received an adult’s calling, and struggled to grow into it. But the guiding spirit, the daimon, was there very early.

The word “genius” is a clue to this way of thinking. It means someone who is possessed by a spirit, or “genie,” and who serves that genie with their life. The genie gives them great powers, but it also directs their life. I’ve known a few geniuses, and this describes them better than anything else I can think of does. I don’t mean to imply some kind of supernatural mechanics, just a poetic metaphor for an intensely focused sense of purpose and destiny in a few of our most exemplary people.

Or finally, take the story of Golda Meir, the former president of Israel. As a young girl growing up in Milwaukee she was outraged – as a fourth-grade student – at a school policy requiring students to purchase their books, which she felt manifestly unfair to poorer students. This young girl organized a protest, rented a hall, and arranged for classmates to speak, adding her own unwritten speech. At the age of 11, Golda Meir was already a Labor Party Prime Minister.

These stories seem to imply that there is something in us almost like a spirit, a holy spirit, that holds our calling and destiny. We must hear it, respond, and be in an environment that can nurture this aspiration so that we may grow into our own distinctive kind of excellence. That would mean that things which thwart this development are enemies of the holy spirit. And that’s raising the idea of our calling, or the meaning of our life, to a whole new level.

To put it in God-language, it means that not only are we children of God, but that if we will listen, God has a plan for us. There is this ‘s till, small voice” inside us that we need to listen to in order to know who we need to become.

To put it in natural language, it is saying that life gives us not only our genetic packages, but also a certain style of character, a style of being, and our gifts uniquely equip us for certain callings, through which we both grow into our fullest humanity, and nourish the world around us.

Either way, it raises the question of the meaning of our lives to a higher plane, where it becomes our sacred duty to become who we were meant to become, and the sacred duty of our communities and societies to provide the kind of social and legal structures that enable and empower us to do so.

If that is so – and I think it is at least partly so – it is a new way of looking at ourselves, and at human life in general. And seen this way, the prospect of bringing new human life into the world carries with it a tremendous amount of responsibility. Now breeding isn’t a high calling for our species, only excellence is. And this, I’ll suggest, changes the whole moral structure of our views on life and death.

But this isn’t just about what I think. I want to engage you too. This week and next week I want to challenge all of us to think in a very new way about life, and about birth control and abortion.

So take these thoughts with you for a week, and turn them over. Think about the difference between forms of life where quantity is paramount, and forms where quality is paramount. And think about the implications of all this for thinking about abortion, both as individuals and as a society.

I’ll end in mid-air because we are in mid-air on this. Let yourself be stirred, even disturbed, and form your own opinions about the morality of abortion and how you would explain it to yourself, or to a city government. It isn’t supposed to be easy; after all, we are striving to serve human life, which we regard as sacred – and to serve it in the way its unique kind of sacrality demands.

But I will leave you with a teaser. One of the greatest ironies in the area of trying to find good moral arguments for abortion is the fact that the best one was developed by a Roman Catholic pope, over a century ago. I will be using an argument first and famously written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 in one of the most famous and best papal encyclicals ever written, the Rerum Novarum. No, he wasn’t writing about abortion. He was writing about the condition of labor. But he wrote about it, in this encyclical over which the Church is so proud it issued commemorative updates in 1931 and 1961, by developing an argument which said that concerns for the quality of human life must trump concerns over mere quantity of life. I’ll see you next week with my friend Pope Leo XIII and the brilliant and courageous encyclical he wrote 111 years ago.