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Davidson Loehr
Carolyn Gremminger
January 2, 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:
Carolyn Gremminger
My name is Carolyn Gremminger and I am a member of the Worship Associates. I was raised a Roman Catholic in a Rural North Texas town. As a small child, I found much comfort in the rituals of the church and I was very devoted, taking it all very seriously and literally. The strong sure patriarchal God provided reassurance and a feeling of love and kinship in my small community.
As I grew older and was preparing to leave home for college, I became very afraid about venturing to the “Big City” of Austin. I made the choice at that time to leave the Catholic Church, as I felt they were not “serious enough” about God. I believed at that time that there really was one right way out there to follow God and I began looking for someone to tell me how to do it. It them became my mission to save myself and all others I came into contact with.
I eventually found a very rigid church. As I became more and more devout in that fundamentalist religion, I grew more and more joyless and unhappy. I did not question this. I just thought that is how one lived if one was serious about religion.
After about four years of this experience, my attachment to this form of religion deteriorated. That religion did not honor the fact that in my essence, I am an independent woman who does not only define her selfhood in relation to being a wife and a mother. The religion did not facilitate the authentic processing of difficult emotions. The final straw was when my brother came out of the closet and the only view I was offered was one of judgment and condemnation. I love my brother very much and this was not an acceptable course of action for me. To harken back to Davidson’s prior sermon, I needed to lay down this “raft.” This religion no longer supported my life. It no longer offered acceptable choices and possibilities of relating with a complex world with myriad moral dilemmas and ways of being.
So at that point, when I was about 25, I made the decision to leave “church” all together. I came to consider church to be a place where certain questions could not be asked and certain people would not be honored. I eventually got married. Looking back at that time, the “raft” that I constructed was a lifestyle of acquisition, consumption and comfort seeking.
Then, in the span of less than a year, my husband decided to leave what I thought was our happy marriage, my mother died and my beloved brother was diagnosed with cancer. My current raft was ripped apart and I felt like I was sinking. I needed a new raft to help me through this transition. I was very afraid and knew I needed community, but knew better than to go back to what I had experienced before. However, it seemed like some sort of religion, something that would facilitate a deeper relationship with life, was called for.
So here I am at First UU. I have been attending for about three years. My intention now is to be on a path of developing a more conscious and meaningful way of life. I am once again constructing a raft.
The community I have found at First UU has become a safe place for me to evolve into a new person, to grow and to heal from the hurts I mentioned earlier, and ultimately to become more than I ever could have been without this experience. I want to be able to look back on my life and be proud of the choices I have made, the work I have accomplished and the community I have helped to construct and be a part of.
The method of building the raft is emerging by becoming involved in voyagers and specifically in a covenant group, from the inspiration in the worship services and through daily spiritual practices. I am purposefully changing my worldview from the childhood belief in the story of Adam and Eve to the story of our innate Buddha nature. From the view that we have a fallen nature that we continually have to repent of to the view that we all are inherently good, and that spiritual awakening consists of realizing our essential goodness, natural wisdom and compassion.
To me, authentic religion comforts me and challenges me. It heals me and increases my capacity for love, generosity, wisdom and courage. It builds up my sense of self, while at the same time helping me to guard against self-righteousness.
I aspire to be the best friend, social worker, and community member possible. I think being a part of an authentic religious community and taking part in daily spiritual practices will empower me to become this person.
Prayer
We are nearly paralyzed by the awful scale of the earthquake and the walls of water that have killed more than 150,000 of our fellow humans. They are half a world away, but so poignantly present in our minds and hearts.
Children, families, natives and tourists washed together off the beach. Whole islands destroyed. Old and young, rich and poor, the frightened and the smug, all taken together by a disaster that neither knows nor cares, but only explodes, spreads, destroys and sinks back into the sea.
Centuries ago, an unknown poet wrote a psalm in which he identified these forces as coming from God. And of this God, he said,
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away with a flood; they are as a sleep; in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled. (Psalm 90)
Whether we assign them to God or nature, we live at the mercy of forces indifferent to us, indifferent to everything, just indifferent.
It is in this indifferent world where we make the difference that matters, by weaving those fragile webs of compassion that let us live not only amidst the indifferent forces of nature, but the compassionate forces of millions and billions of people who see, feel, care, and reach out to one another with aid, with money, with the thousand simple acts of humanity which have the power to turn hell into heaven.
As we mourn the losses in this latest tragedy, let us remember that our grief unites us with all people in all times and places who have similarly grieved. And as we move out of grief, let us work to recreate a world grounded in compassion rather than indifference. Until then, we grieve, we weep, and slowly we begin to heal.
Amen.
SERMON:
Someone sent me an essay from the British paper The Guardian on Christmas Eve, written by an Anglican priest, the Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser of Oxford. He is making a distinction between the religion of Jesus and the religions about Jesus, and he does it so well I want to share some of it with you.
Empires Prefer a Baby and the Cross to the Adult Jesus
From Constantine to Bush, power has needed to stifle a revolutionary message.
By Giles Fraser, The Guardian U.K., Friday 24 December 2004. The Rev Dr. Giles Fraser is vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford.
Every Sunday in church, Christians recite the Nicene Creed. “Who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven. And was incarnate of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary and was made man; was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried; and the third day rose again according to the Scriptures.” It’s the official summary of the Christian faith but, astonishingly, it jumps straight from birth to death, apparently indifferent to what happened in between.
Nicene Christianity is the religion of Christmas and Easter, the celebration of a Jesus who is either too young or too much in agony to shock us with his revolutionary rhetoric. The adult Christ who calls his followers to renounce wealth, power and violence is passed over in favour of the gurgling baby and the screaming victim. As such, Nicene Christianity is easily conscripted into a religion of convenience, with believers worshipping a gagged and glorified savior who has nothing to say about how we use our money or whether or not we go to war.
Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312, after which the church began to backpedal on the more radical demands of the adult Christ. From Constantine onwards, the radical Christ worshipped by the early church would be pushed to the margins of Christian history to be replaced with the infinitely more accommodating religion of the baby and the cross.
The adult Jesus described his mission as being to “preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and to set at liberty those who are oppressed”. He insisted that the social outcast be loved and cared for, and that the rich have less chance of getting into heaven than a camel has of getting through the eye of a needle. Jesus set out to destroy the imprisoning obligations of debt, speaking instead of forgiveness and the redistribution of wealth. He was accused of blasphemy for attacking the religious authorities as self-serving and hypocritical.
In contrast, the Nicene religion of the baby and the cross gives us Christianity without the politics. The nativity scene is the perfect tableau into which to place this Nicene baby, for like the much-lauded celebrity, this Christ is there to be gazed upon and adored – but not to be heard or heeded. In a similar vein, modern evangelical choruses offer wave upon wave of praise to the name of Jesus, but offer little political or economic content to trouble his adoring fans.
Like Constantine, George Bush has borrowed the language of Christianity to support and justify his military ambition. And just like that of Constantine, the Christianity of this new Rome offers another carefully edited version of the Bible. Once again, the religion that speaks of forgiving enemies and turning the other cheek is pressed into military service.
The story of Christmas, properly understood, asserts that God is not best imagined as an all-powerful despot but as a vulnerable and pathetic child. It’s a statement about the nature of divine power. But in the hands of conservative theologians, the Nicene religion of the baby and the cross is a way of distracting attention away from the teachings of Christ. It’s a form of religion that concentrates on things like belief in the virgin birth while ignoring the fact that the gospels are much more concerned about the treatment of the poor and the forgiveness of enemies.
Bush may have claimed that “Jesus Christ changed my life”, but Jesus doesn’t seem to have changed his politics. (The Guardian, 24 December 2004)
This piece is saying that normative Christianity not only has nothing to do with the message of Jesus, but that it exists to stifle that message, as its mortal enemy. And yet, he isn’t giving that evangelical religion which has nothing to do with Jesus the credit it deserves. Not theological credit; there, he is dead on in noting that it is a stark betrayal of the man Jesus. But political credit; for that religion put into the service of military power and economic greed now has more power – at least in America – than it ever has before.
It reminds me of a story from a very different field, the field of music, which I want to use as lens through which to view the rise of literalistic Christianity in America.
When he was a young man, the composer Claude Debussy earned money as a music critic.
Once, he was reviewing a new opera by Wagner, who was The Man in the 1880s, the acknowledged master of virtually every facet of music, drama and staging. Most saw him as the dawn of a new era of music. But Debussy saw something else. “Wagner,” he wrote, “is the sunset which some have mistaken for a sunrise.” Even with all the attention Wagner was getting, Debussy saw him as the end of an era; and history proved Debussy right.
This sermon is kind of a continuation of one I gave at the end of November (28 November 2004, “The Legitimate Heir to God”). It has been observed for decades that in some respects the God of Western religions has died. But that word “God,” which at its best is a symbol of our highest ideals and aspirations, has now been dragged down to the very lowest depths, used to sanction greed, economic inequity, imperialism, war and the slaughter of innocents to such a great degree that nearly the whole civilized world is ashamed of and disgusted with America, as you can read by scanning the world press stories.
I can see three logical paths from here, though I think only two are viable, and only one can work in the longer run. The path that won’t work is to abandon religion and everything it stands for, and go to war over merely political ideologies, which is a bit of what this last election looked like to me. But at its best, religion is about preserving and claiming ultimacy for the highest ideals we can articulate. And abandoning that search seems insane to me.
The second path is the one that Anglican priest wants: to try and force normative Christianity back into a path that follows the demanding and revolutionary teachings of Jesus rather than the supernatural myths created around the baby and the cross, so the religion can be used to sanction precisely the kinds of greed, unjust distribution of wealth, arrogance and war that Jesus spent his career preaching against.
This is the path that virtually all Christian scholars and moderate-to-liberal preachers wish they could take. I wish them luck, but I don’t think they can do it this time. It has simply become too painfully clear that, as that Anglican priest said, the religion of Christianity has become far easier to misuse than to use wisely and well.
But this is true of all three Western religions. I think the God of all three Western religions has become the hand puppet of the worst kind of people – and has found its most likely home among them.
Israel acts in violent and murderous ways against Palestinians, ways that the great prophets of the Bible would condemn in a heartbeat. Their God is used for little but a land grant, and a sanction for revenge and violence.
And the fundamentalists of Islam have dragged the names of Mohammad and Allah through more mud than anyone knows how to remove. They torment and kill women who show the faces God gave them. Saudi Arabia forbids women to vote. They champion a primitive and vicious patriarchy that cannot be defended as being worthy of Allah. They brag about murder and suicide bombers, and speak in terms of blood, violence and death. Mohammed would be disgusted with them. Yet it is almost impossible to find many voices of moderate or liberal Muslims to counter them, even in Austin. Once again, the God of the Bible has been turned into a barbaric and murderous hand puppet by our worst people, and no one within any of the three religions seems able to stop them.
That’s where this reminds me of that music review that Debussy wrote about a Wagner opera. These brutal, ungodly versions of Western religion are clearly holding the reins of power and the guns and bombs of violence and murder. They are all kings of their respective hills, and their arrogant spokesmen brag that this is the dawning of a new and bloody age, to be played by their rules.
But I don’t think so. I think these may be closer to sunsets than sunrises. I think these mean, selfish and arrogant perversions of the God of Western religions show instead that that symbol, that God, no longer has the power to attract enough decent and brave people to rescue it from the gutters.
In the sermon at the end of November, I mentioned that this happened after Franco finally died and his dictatorship of Spain ended. He had brought the Church into power with him, and after he died, people began removing power from the Church as well. It had proven too easy and eager an ally of low and mean motives to be trusted with our tender mercies.
And I think that is what may happen to Christianity in America. I don’t know enough about the state of religious affairs in Israel or the Muslim world to talk about them. But I’ve seen enough bad preachers and politicians here enlist Jesus and God in their greedy, imperialistic and murderous schemes to believe that the symbol of God may well lose its right to be trusted with our highest ideals.
So the third path, the one I think is most interesting ahead of us, is the chance to reclaim our highest ideals from institutional religion, and begin expressing them in ordinary language that can belong to all the people. This would reverse the authority of churches and believers, which is exactly what Jesus and the ancient Hebrew prophets also did. It would mean that we would judge the churches by how well they served our high ideals, rather than pretending that they have the moral right to judge us in the name of a God they have turned into a mercenary who fights for the interests of the wealthiest and most greedy and brutal.
This sounds like such a big task, it seems unrealistic to pretend it can be done. But it can be done. In fact, it is being done all the time. Caroline Gremminger’s Affirmation of Faith was one example of it. She left the religion of her childhood when she found that its God served low needs rather than high ones. Once she saw that, she left it because she valued higher ideals than her church did, and she knew the difference.
So do you. Every one of you who has left a former religion to find a new path has left, I’m guessing, because you too decided to hold to your high ideals rather than follow churches or priests who either couldn’t see those ideals or didn’t have the courage to follow them.
In other words, as some of the best theologians have said for centuries, the gods are symbols that we create as vehicles to carry and preserve our highest ideals. We wrap them in rituals and creeds, embed them in worship services, and trust the gods to guard the better angels of our nature. But the ideals belong to us, not the gods.
164 years ago, a great German theologian wrote that all the attributes of the gods are the things that we happen to admire, and we project them onto the gods we have created in the same way that we project noble ideals onto our race or our country. (Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 1841, translated by George Eliot. The “essence” of Christianity was the projection of our own highest ideals onto the gods we created.)
And 206 years ago another theologian who was this man’s teacher wrote that religion is a purely human invention, designed to help us become most fully human. It was, he added, our most important of human inventions, when it worked. (Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, 1799)
Every “reformation” in the history of religion, every instance of higher thinkers correcting the theological errors of lower thinkers, is an example of we who are the true owners of our highest ideals reclaiming them from misuse by those who speak for the churches.
This means that we have some serious work to do.
It means that we as a society need to do what we as individuals do when we leave an inadequate religion. We need to reclaim our high ideals, and look for more adequate ways to express them in ordinary language, rather than the jargon claimed as the private reserve of churches and preachers. That is the most important religious task I think America now faces: reclaiming our high ideals from religions that have proven unworthy to handle them, and have proven to be too cowardly to speak up for them in any effective way.
Perhaps you think this is beyond you, that you don’t know these things, that it’s presumptuous to think you might know what’s moral and right better than churches with two thousand years of tradition behind them? It’s not true.
We have had at least two things in this morning’s service that might show you otherwise. The first, which many of you have told me is your favorite part of the service, is those candles in the windows to your left. A hundred and fifty votive candles there, which you can light to mark memories, hopes, yearnings and prayers you bring here with you. The reasons you light them are your own private reasons. But I am pretty sure those candle lights stand for some of the deep, noble, and loving sentiments that come in here as parts of you. You bring the values, the concerns, the ideals, the personal and spiritual seriousness, and you mark them with those lovely flames. We provide the space and the candles; you provide the yearning, and the meaning.
The second part of today’s service that will show the quality of your religious depth and caring is the offering we will take right after the sermon: an offering which we will give entirely to help the relief efforts of the more than 150,000 victims of the tsunami waves on the other side of the world.
All of our hearts opened for those people we don’t even know as soon as we heard the tragic story start to unfold a few days ago. You don’t have to be told they are your brothers and sisters or children of God; you know it intuitively and deeply. It’s in your genes. The tender mercies that well up in us toward the suffering of all those people we don’t know – they are our tender mercies. Not God’s, not Jesus’s, not Allah’s, but ours. And the better angels of our nature that Abraham Lincoln spoke of so poetically – they are indeed the better angels of our nature. Not God’s, not Jesus’s, not Allah’s. Ours.
Claiming those noble callings is laying claim to our fullest humanity. And all the gods, all the saviors, all the angels we create are not holy in their own right. Their holiness is only on loan from us, as long as they embody our highest aspirations, our own most tender mercies toward ourselves and one another.
I want us to grow beyond thinking that religion is about bowing before an external source of authority or goodness. I want us to grow beyond thinking it is the job of priests to proclaim and believers to obey. I want us to grow into the realization that if there is ever to be an incarnation of truth, justice and compassion – an incarnation of God – that incarnation must take our shape, not the shape of gods, prophets and saviors who have been dead so long they can be turned into hand puppets by our worst preachers and politicians. Some first-rate religious thinkers have said for a long time that this is the deepest significance of the Christian myth of Jesus as an incarnation of God. They see early Christianity – unlike the religions which preceded it – as saying that the form which God’s presence must take to be effective among us can only be human form: our form. No, that’s not how literalist religions have taught it. They have taught it as a supernaturalism, which lets them use these powerful symbols to subdue the masses rather than to empower them. Literalistic religion is, as it has always been, profoundly dishonest.
The soul of honest religion is the human soul seeking its own finest form. The soul of all legitimate religion is the human spirit, aspiring to become an agent of the highest ideals: those angels of our better nature.
I first read this in the Bible. It isn’t an obscure piece; it’s the ending of the 90th Psalm, one of the best known of all Psalms – the one I quoted in the prayer. After praising God for a few verses, the psalm ends with this plea. It may strike you almost as anti-religious, but it is not. It is the most profoundly religious plea we can make. This is the plea:
” and establish the work of our hands upon us.
Yea, the work of our hands; establish thou it.”
That doesn’t mean any work of our hands. It doesn’t mean the dirty work of our hands. It means the work of the hands of those angels of our better nature, the vehicles of our highest and most sacred yearnings. We address those angels, those highest of ideals, and we ask them for the courage of our deepest convictions, saying, ” and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yea, the work of our hands, establish thou it.”
It’s a good place to start, now and always.
