Demythologized Christianity

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.