What Do You People Believe, Anyway?

Davidson Loehr

28 September 2008

PRAYER:

Let us be pulled into spiritual paths that leave us with a good aftertaste. There is so much religious advice around telling us how we had better get in line with this or that set of beliefs being hawked by churches and preachers who sometimes just feel too slick or mean. But their certainty is too simple, doesn?t have a good smell to it and leaves a bad aftertaste.

Let us instead be lured into paths of loving others as we love ourselves, and loving ourselves as children of God, the sons and daughters of Life?s longing for itself, stewards of only the highest ideals. Such spiritual paths are very simple, but they have an aroma and an aftertaste that is still pleasing even years later.

So much in life can be identified by the lasting taste, smell and feel it leaves with us. Let us learn to be drawn to the places that smell good – that smell like ambrosia, or the subtle scent of those angels of our better nature.

Amen.

READING:

The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind. On his way he encountered many travellers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. “What!” he said, “and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you?” “Look at our pictures, and books,? they said, “and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.” Then came in the men, and they said, “What cheer, brother? Does thy convent want gifts?” Then the Friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he brought, saying, “This way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?” (Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, p. 181)

SERMON: What Do You People Believe, Anyway?

Every religious liberal has heard some version of this question from their family or friends. It?s hard to answer questions of belief in ways that are both honest and interesting. Maybe all I can do here is let you hear how I grapple with this, hoping it might help you grapple with it too.

One way of getting into the complexities of belief today is through understanding the complexities of families today. For a couple decades at least, we’ve been used to the phrase “His, hers and ours” to describe what we learned to call “blended families.” Other siblings, parents or other relatives often become at least temporary parts of our families too, as with the family who lit our candles this morning, and as with some of your families.

And what is true of our blended families is also true of the blend of beliefs we each have. Honest religious belief can never again be the simplistic kind of white-bread thing we thought it was fifty years ago.

The things we cling to today are blended families of beliefs, borrowing from all over the world map.

In old-time religion, it might have seemed enough to recite a creed cobbled together many centuries earlier by people living in a very different world, as though that could do more than make us uncritical members of a very old club with no necessary wisdom for the modern world.

Now the lights from which we find enlightenment come in many different sizes, shapes and genders, like the lights upon our altar. Men, women, children, experiences we never expected to change our life, but did. Wisdom we’ve read in self-help books, business books, snippets of Buddhist or Christian or philosophical thought, lines from movies or songs, readings from astrology, things we heard on Oprah, comments from family, friends, therapists or preachers that stick with us – all these things are blended together into our traveling carnival family of practical wisdom, using this bit today, another tomorrow, seldom noticing that this bit and that bit may even contradict each other.

We’ve been trained to think that religion is primarily about what we believe, but defining ourselves by beliefs really doesn’t work well today.

In this more complex world of spirituality, orthodoxy is always too small for real life. It creates too many theological fights, some of them deadly, that amount to a church or preacher restricting God and life to the limits of their tastes and biases, exalting a creed written centuries ago, and sometimes getting hateful toward those in the church across the street, who don’t share the beliefs.

To exalt beliefs is to give way too much credit to theologians! I’m a theologian – I got my Ph.D. in theology – and I can tell you as an insider that you don’t want to invest too much in the spoutings of theologians. You might think that there must be some secret knowledge that theologians learn, that gives them a special kind of authority not available to normal people. But I spent seven years in graduate school, and if there had been that kind of secret knowledge, I would have found it. The truth is, theologians have no secret knowledge about life, because their courses aren’t about life. Theologians are academics, and their courses are restricted to thinking about life from the perspective of their religion. But wisdom comes from living through life experiences and being able to reflect on them in ways that shed light – and that’s not what theologians do.

Here’s an analogy. Talking to a theologian is like talking to a Buick salesman. He can tell you a lot about Buicks, but don’t trust him to tell you what the best car is, because he may not know much more about that than you do. And don’t trust him to tell you whether you need a Buick, some other kind of car, or no car at all, because he has a conflict of interest. The same is true with theologians. They can tell you about their personal religion, but not whether you need it, or whether it’s better for you than other religions or no religion. They also have a conflict of interest.

So as a theologian, I want to tell you not to worry too much about gods you can’t see, and don’t trust theologians trying to tell you about those invisible gods they can’t see either. If we live like that Roman family in the reading, we’ll have a pretty sweet-smelling religion and life.

Orthodoxies and polished belief statements are mostly like advertising brochures that often have very little to do with the lives led by the believers.

Think of the Roman family in that reading by Ralph Waldo Emerson. They were completely outside the acceptable boundaries of belief that Friar Bernard had learned, so he prayed for his God to destroy these Romans. Now that alone is incredible, disgusting, and not terribly surprising. His beliefs were making him small and dangerous, in a world that went way beyond them, the way the world usually goes way beyond the boundaries of beliefs. He was just one priest, so he didn’t have much power. But if he’d had much power, he could have been very dangerous. As we heard his disgust beginning to unfold for this generous family, he was starting to smell bad. But then his humanity trumped his theology, he realized these were cultured and caring people – lovers, even! – and his comfortable little world of beliefs was thrown out of order.

His beliefs no longer seemed so valid, because life had trumped belief. That’s how it should work. Life should always be able to trump beliefs. The Romans had a saying that we should behave as though all the truly decent people who had ever lived were watching us, and then do only what we could proudly do in front of that audience. And in this story they certainly behaved that way. Their beliefs served them and others because their religion wasn’t about beliefs – it was about behavior. If Friar Bernard’s god was watching him as the Romans believed their gods were watching them, he would have been pleased at Friar Bernard’s final frustrated wail, but not at his early arrogance of wanting those whose beliefs were outside his understanding to be destroyed.

So what do we believe, anyway? Usually when we are asked what we believe, we try to think of some polished belief statements somebody taught us, because they sound more impressive than something we could just make up. If we just make up our own words for what we believe, it seldom sounds very dramatic.

When conservatives do it, we liberals often love to pick them apart. It’s one of our favorite sports.

Someone says, “I believe in this God who created the whole universe and who loves little old me!” That’s dramatic, but pretty easy to pick apart. We can’t even imagine how vast the universe is. Billions of galaxies. We probably can’t even imagine what a billion would look like. And three thousand years ago, when the god of the Bible was first exalted by a small tribe of Hebrew people in the Middle East, they thought the whole universe was smaller than the state of Texas. I think some Texans still do.

So it’s easy fun, showing that the most dramatic conservative beliefs fall apart at second glance. On the other hand, if we try to use our own words, or slogans we hear in our highly evolved liberal groups to define ourselves by beliefs, it can get just as arrogant, and may not be very truthful. If we say we believe in deeds not creeds – what deeds can we point to that we’ve actually done, that aren’t really kind of ho-hum in the grand scheme of things?

If we say we celebrate freedom of belief – and we love the sound of that one! – how many examples can we think of involving our children, family or partner choosing beliefs that contradict ours, and actually celebrating that rather than just tolerating it? If we say we believe in fighting for justice, what examples can we think of that we’ve done that don’t just sound trivial – and justice, not just the biases of generic social or political liberals?

The trouble with using polished and rehearsed little bromides is that they will usually sound more impressive than our lives look. And religion isn’t about putting on a pious front or trying to impress anyone with our purity and righteousness. That doesnt really fool anybody, and it has a bad aroma.

When I hold myself against the highest ideals, I have to admit that I don’t look very good. I’m not out there saving the world. I don’t give a lot of time or money to really noble causes, I haven’t risked my life like soldiers have, at least not since I was a soldier many years ago. I haven’t sold everything I own and given it to the poor as Jesus asked. I can resonate with platitudes like “As long as one person isn’t free, no one is free.” They feel stirring, but I can’t think of anything I’m really doing to walk that talk that costs me much – and when I actually think about it, I don’t even agree with the statement.

You can say things like “I believe in Reason, Science, Justice, Truth, Goodness, America, Mom and apple pie,” and that sounds pretty darned swell. But how much of this has been evident in the way you lived your life during the last couple weeks?

And it gets worse. When we do something really charitable, we usually want credit for it. So then were our motives altruistic, or mostly self-centered? Jesus said to give in secret, not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, and we probably all admire that degree of humility, but we seldom have it. We hope somebody notices what we’ve done, and are not above finding some sneaky way to tell them. Now maybe I’m the only one here who’s like this, but I don’t think so.

I think there may be a lot of people here who feel that it’s about all you can do to do your work, try your best to raise your children well, and have more than a few minutes a day for quality time with your partner while keeping in touch with the people you love. You might like high-sounding rhetoric, like hearing good sermons that lift up really noble aspirations, and somewhere in both your head and heart you really mean all this as much as you know how to mean anything. But your life doesn’t look like the picture of the perfect life from a spiritual advertising brochure any more than the lives of religious conservatives do.

So maybe the question is, how do you express yourself in an authentic way?

One answer is to define ourselves not by beliefs but by behaviors, and to try and act like all the most decent people in the world were watching us.

There’s a big difference between identifying ourselves with beliefs and identifying ourselves by our behaviors. The history of religions has plenty of both, and almost all the really bad ones were those who exalted rigid beliefs above decent behavior toward those who didn’t share their beliefs, as Friar Bernard did at first.

I’ll just pick two famous examples from history, from two different religions. John Calvin was the 16th century theologian who preached the gospel of original sin and human depravity, and taught it to tens of millions of Christians who followed his Calvinist theology. It’s a horrid doctrine and terrible theology, but if anything, he was a living example of moral depravity in some of his behavior. When a brilliant and impertinent Spanish physician named Michael Servetus – this was the physician who first discovered the circulation of blood – wrote an essay on the errors of the Trinity, and sent a copy to Calvin, Calvin seethed. When Servetus then had the nerve – and bad judgment – to show up one Sunday in Calvin’s church in Geneva, Calvin had him arrested, and burned alive. Worse than that, Calvin instructed the executioners to tie Servetus in a chair, lower him into the flames, then raise him up, lower him again, so in all it took half an hour before Servetus died.

And the Ayatollah Khomeini, among other hateful acts, ordered the murder of the novelist Salman Rushdie because one of Rushdie’s novels made fun of a fundamentalist Islamic belief. These were both powerful and charismatic men, regarded by their followers as God’s agents – though not, I think, regarded so by any God worthy of the name. But their behavior put the lie to their professed beliefs, and left a terrible stench in the annals of history. There was nothing of God about either of them in these actions. Genuine gods don’t care whether people buy the stories of this or that church or charismatic preacher. They care whether you are coming more alive, finding the kind of truth that makes you more whole, how you treat others, whether you’re a blessing or a curse to the world.

The goal is authenticity, not orthodoxy. And orthodoxies often offer little more than an anesthetic for those who are afraid or unsure how to be authentic.

It’s worth believing not in slick-sounding creeds but in a sweet-smelling life. And the clues to this are all around us:

1. They’re in that Roman story. The priest defined himself by beliefs and we all knew he was too small. The Romans never even mentioned beliefs, and even in the story they smelled sweet.

2. A bigger clue, and better news, is the fact that we all knew that. We could all tell the difference between the feel and the smell of Friar Bernard’s smallness and the largesse of the Roman family as soon as we heard the story.

3. And the best news is that we act on it, and act on it naturally, easily, and often. We just ordained Jack Harris-Bonham here this morning. We didn’t do it because of his beliefs. I’m not sure what they all are, and I don’t much care. We did it because he was here for two years, as an intern then as the contract minister during my sabbatical, and we came to know his heart and mind through his actions toward others. And like the Roman family, we knew this was a decent person and a blessing to the world, whatever beliefs get him there.

So what can we say about honest religion that might be useful? One thing is that there is no secret knowledge: nothing that is necessary to us is really hidden. We can hear stories like the reading by Emerson, awful stories of arrogant men like John Calvin and the Ayatollah Khomeini, we can delight in recognizing the promise of someone like Jack Harris-Bonham and ordain him to whatever kinds of ministry his heart and the whims of the world may lead him to, and we have already shown that we have almost all the spiritual knowledge we need to be saved, and to help heal the world around us. We know the difference between the stench of bad faith inflicted on ourselves and others, and the sweet smell of a life lived pretty fully and well here and now, among one another.

Religious instruction is important, to help train the moral sense that is already a part of us. But by the time we’re in our teens or earlier, the question of what’s really worth believing and how we should behave toward one another can be distilled into one very simple piece of advice: just follow your nose.