The Holy Heretical Spirit

19 October 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

PRAYER:

Let us trust in the Holy Spirit. That Holy Spirit within that implores us to seek life, truth and wholeness – let us trust that spirit.

When the voices within or around us say to do something wrong because everybody’s doing it and we can get away with it, let us answer that we can not get away with it, because the angels of our better nature are watching, and because we know better.

When we are in a moral dilemma and are urged to take the path of least resistance, let us remember that in the mor world and the world of character, resistance builds strength.

When tempted to cheat on life, or on those we love, let us remember that you can’t score points by cheating in life and love, because there is a spirit within us that knows better, and it may not give our soul back to us until we make it right.

And all of this is good news – the good news that we are more decent, more loving and more just than we often believe.

The saving truth is that we are being watched by something we can trust, and that something is the person we are meant to become. The person we are meant to become is inviting us into a larger life, a more healing truth, and a better world. That invitation may be our salvation. Let us take it.

Amen.

SERMON: The Holy Heretical Spirit

This morning, I’d like to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Tao te Ching, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek. I’ll try to be brief.

I’m doing a series of sermons this fall on the three most significant Unitarian thinkers and preachers of the past 200 years. Almost everyone here will feel a deep kinship with them at that level, I think, whether you care about Unitarians or not.

Mostly today I want to talk about Ralph Waldo Emerson, easily the best known of the people we claim, rightly or wrongly, as Unitarian. He spoke to the general audience of inquiring liberal minds who wanted to know how to think about Jesus, God, the Bible, religion and salvation in the 19th century.

He also has a connection to this church. In 1892, the first incarnation of this church was founded by a student of Emerson’s. And when the church reformed in the 1950s, Rev. Wheelock’s granddaughter Emily Howson was a member, and donated the seed money to let us build our social hall, which is named after her.

We need to see this complex man Emerson against the background of his even more complex times, for they were times that shaped our world today in many ways.

When the seven-member graduating class of Harvard Divinity School invited Emerson to speak in 1838, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of our country’s founding fathers, had been dead for 12 years, both dying on the 4th of July 1826, 50 years after they had signed our Declaration of Independence.

The scientific revolution was under way, and already threatening a view of the world that Christians had held for about 1800 years. Many people still believed the world was only six thousand years old, created by God in six days, and that – as Thomas Jefferson had also believed – no species had ever become extinct. But by 1803 – the year Emerson was born – a brilliant French paleontologist had assembled the skeletons of 23 extinct species of animals, and that collection had toured all over Europe, and then through the U.S. with P.T. Barnum’s circuses.

And two geologists had shown that the world was much, much older than six thousand years. Millions and millions of years, they thought, which we now believe to be billions of years. The most influential of these geologists, Charles Lyell, had just published his first volume eight years before Emerson’s address, and among the many who read it and had their worldview forever changed by it was a young naturalist named Charles Darwin. Darwin had the second volume shipped to him while he was on his voyage aboard The Beagle, where he made his detailed observations on the Galapagos Islands that led to the publication of his book Origin of the Species, 21 years after Emerson’s address.

This was the broader stage on which Emerson spoke on that hot July day. What were we to make of religion, or of Jesus, God, and all the stories in the Bible? Where were we to stand? Where was the new truth that could set us free and make us come more alive? These were Emerson’s questions, and they’re still our questions today, 170 years later.

The Unitarians of the 1830s – including William Ellery Channing, whom I talked about last month – still believed in a supernatural religion, a supernatural God and the literalness of the biblical miracles. Emerson didn’t. He took all of this psychologically. He saw religion as the development of our innate senses of the good, the true and the beautiful, and said that these senses were like a divine presence within us, or that we were all a part of God.

This is a lot like the Hindu notion that our individual soul, or atman, is part of the universal soul, or Brahman, and within a few years, the Bhagavad Gita would be the favorite religious scripture of both Emerson and his younger friend, Henry David Thoreau.

The way Emerson saw it, salvation would mean getting in touch with these deep sensitivities we have, and living out of them – living lives of truth, justice and compassion. Heaven and hell are here and now for Emerson, not elsewhere and later.

While his attacks were against Christianity, their arguments work against every Western religion. The capacity for a noble, even a holy life is born within us. It’s part of human nature, not something put in from elsewhere. That’s shown by the fact that we know the difference between good and evil, kindness and cruelty, truth and pretense, and we are, at our best, drawn to the better options. This shows the presence within us of what theologians like to call God. Emerson put it this way: “The notion of God is the individual’s own soul carried out to perfection (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 61).” “The highest revelation is that God is in every [one of us].” (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001]), p. 62)

But if that’s so, then what’s the use of figures like Jesus, Mohammad or Allah, or books like the Bible or the Koran? Well for Emerson, when these people or books can show us some wisdom that helps us come more alive, then they’re useful and probably even true for us for now. But not because Jesus or a holy scripture said them – only because these figures or books happened, in this case, to say something that also seems to be true.

It’s like saying that science books are only correct if what they say happens to be true – but it’s not true just because a science book says so. The books can be wrong. So can the prophets, so can all holy scriptures. And the way we check it out is in the real world, with our own mind and in our own heart.

In intellectual terms, what Emerson did was to convert theology into a kind of depth psychology. Religion is about our becoming all that we can be. All religions are about being all that we can be – it’s such a timeless religious truth, it’s really a pity that some advertising agency stole it for the Army. People like Jesus are examples of what all of us can become: they’re examples of our deepest human nature, not exceptions to it. Emerson said that Jesus was true to what is in you and me, and that if we are compassionate and just, then to that extent we are God. The gods are our best traits, writ large. We are the projector, they are the screen.

These were the sorts of things he said in that commencement address to the students, faculty and guest ministers at Harvard Divinity School when he was just 35 years old. He was attacked viciously for his remarks – especially by the Unitarians. The Unitarian paper called The Christian Examiner said that Emerson’s Divinity School address contained “neither good divinity nor good sense (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).” And a man named Andrews Norton, who was regarded as the most liberal Unitarian scholar alive at the time, said Emerson’s beliefs threatened civilization itself (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).

His address made him an outsider to the Unitarians. They denounced him, and closed ranks against him (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 74). It also set off a firestorm that lasted for decades. It was almost thirty years before he was invited to speak at Harvard again.

He was ordained and served as a Unitarian minister for about three years, but it didn’t agree with him, and he resigned from it. After that, he liked to say things like “Unitarianism is corpse-cold.”

He was a scathing critic of all the religion of his time. He said, “I think no [one] can go with his thoughts about him into one of our churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship had on [people] is gone, or going.”

He puzzled over people who went to church, and said “It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings. I have heard a devout person, who prized the Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, ‘On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church.'” (In fact, that person was him. It was something he wrote to his wife.)

Emerson’s vision carried him far beyond the boundaries not only of Christianity, but of theism and all religions. He had faith that we had a divine impulse within us that we could trust. He saw all gods and religions as projections of our own sense of being part of something larger than ourselves. Not all teachings of religions or about gods are good, of course. Some are foolish, or evil. But he trusted that we could generally tell the difference.

You can think of the Bible’s command, for example, that disobedient teen-agers or women who were not virgins when they married should be stoned to death.

You may have seen the YouTube videos of women being stoned to death by Muslim clerics, or read about fundamentalist cults in our country today where disobedient children were beaten to death. Jon Krakauer, the author of the book and movie Into the Wild, also wrote a powerful expose of fundamentalist Mormons called Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (on which I preached here a few years ago), in which he recounted the story of a Mormon father murdering his daughter because she was disobedient. That father later died in a Mexican prison for other violent crimes he believed God commanded him to commit. I happen to know one of that man’s daughters, a sister of the girl who was murdered. She lives in Austin. These things aren’t just happening “elsewhere” – they’re right here among us, too.

All of these punitive teachings, Emerson believed, are evil. And I agree with him. There is nothing about any real God in any of them. And we can all see this. When we’re being honest with ourselves, we can and should trust our own heads and hearts more than we trust theologians, preachers, churches or scriptures.

All of this means that the role of churches and preachers is to offer us insights, stories and teachings that can help us become more alive and whole. And the churches and preachers are to be judged by how well they do that. If they don’t, we need to keep looking for a church and minister who meet our own deepest needs, which may not be quite the same as those of the person in the next row.

You have to take the best urgings of your head and heart seriously – what Abraham Lincoln called the angels of our better nature. Then you have to find people, places and experiences that also take you seriously – where you don’t have to check your head or your heart at the door. But don’t think the real authority lies with a church or a bible or a god. All those, including the gods, are human creations. The best of them are good, in the same way the best philosophies, psychologies or literature are. But the fundamental revelation for Emerson was that we already have the spirit – a spirit that even transcends God – within us, and need to live out of that.

The Unitarians and others of the day called all this The Transcendentalist Revolt. Do you see how radical it is? Whether or not Emerson can be seen as a Unitarian – and the leading Unitarians of his time denied that he could be – he was definitely a religious liberal, and a courageous preacher of honest religion.

But honest religion is a style, not a position. When it becomes a position, a belief, a creed or orthodoxy, we need to hold lightly to it. Yesterday’s beliefs and other people’s creeds may not do it. Second-hand religion isn’t likely to give us a first-hand life. The spirit that honestly seeks truth can’t be fenced in. “Time makes ancient good uncouth,” as the poet says (James Russell Lowell) – not just out of date, but uncouth.

The movement Emerson started was called Transcendentalism. And for the Transcendentalists, time made the ancient teachings about Jesus, God and the Bible uncouth. Uncouth, because they no longer led reasonable and informed minds to truth that helped them come alive, no longer led to truth that could heal them or their world and help make them more authentic and whole.

When we look back to people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, it’s not too important to focus on their beliefs, because those may be out of date by now. But it is important to look back to that spirit that drove them beyond the comfort zone of those around them. St. Paul once said that “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (II Cor. 3:6), and this is what I think he was getting at. The spirit always moves on beyond all creeds and orthodoxies, beyond the beliefs of any person or any time and place.

This life-giving spirit is called many things. One name for it is the spirit of life; another is the spirit of heresy. People engaging in honest religion were, are and always will be heretics. Now don’t get queasy; that’s a good thing. The word heretic comes from a Greek verb meaning “to choose.” Heretics are those who choose when some small orthodoxy declares the choices closed because they – only they – have found the truth. So yet another name for the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of heresy, is the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that may never be fenced in, the Holy Spirit that is larger than all creeds, all gods, and all religions. Emerson believed it is within us all, and I think he was right.

It’s that sense of being really alive that we’ve all felt. It drives us to seek more life, and to shun things that don’t give us life. And as Emerson saw and said, it is bigger than all our religions.

You can see this spirit at every level of life. It is what makes plants turn toward the sun. It is what makes kittens, puppies and children run toward things that welcome them and run away from things that frighten them. I once saw an amoeba through a microscope, and even it was moving into the open places, moving toward food, and moving away from impurities or negative things in its environment. That’s the same spirit of life we call the Holy Spirit, operating even in puppies, plants, and amoeba.

There is a famous passage from the ancient Chinese classic the Tao te Ching that says it this way:

The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don’t know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.

And the reason it’s older than God is because it’s part of life, and part of us. It’s the energy that helps us come more alive. We want to be a part of that Tao, that way, to let it help us get around impurities and obstacles in our own lives. In our Western religions where time has indeed made much of their ancient good uncouth, many of the obstacles today are the very creeds and orthodoxies which theologians, priests and churches have frozen into little outdated idols. And the Holy Spirit hates those little linguistic idols, so it keeps bringing us these heretics, these prophets of honest religion, who will let the questions more profound than answers challenge and shatter those answers when they can no longer help us come alive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the servants of those questions more profound than answers, a servant of that spirit of life. I used the Army’s slogan earlier about being all that you can be. So I want to use the slogan from another branch of the service to close, so they won’t feel slighted. And that’s to say that this ancient and holy spirit, like a Marine Corps recruiter, is looking for a few good men and women – or a lot of them. It’s looking for us. And this is a kind of hide-and-seek where the best part of the game is definitely being found.