The Legitimate Heir to God

28 November 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

In thinking about this service, which deals with learning how to express our beliefs in ordinary language rather than the language owned by religions, I thought back to the first time I had to do this.

It was over 20 years ago, during my ministerial internship at a vibrant and exciting Christian church in south Chicago. My first turn to preach was coming up (the church had three interns, so we each got to preach only twice a year). The minister said I was responsible for writing not only a sermon, but also a prayer.

I’d never written a prayer, and tried to get out of it. “No,” he said, “and this will be tougher for you than for the others, since you’re a Unitarian. You have to offer a prayer on behalf of this Christian congregation, to connect them with their own spiritual depths, and the source of life – by whatever name you call it. And it must have the integrity of coming from an honest place within you, as well.”

It was a tough assignment, and the first prayer I ever wrote. This sermon topic reminded me of it, so now I offer it to you, twenty-odd years after it was first written:

Prayer

We pray not to something, but from something, to which we must give voice;

not to escape from our life, but to focus it;

not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are,

and admit who we are not;

that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness.

We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people, those experiences, and those transformations

that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes

with an open heart, an honest soul,

and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

AMEN.

SERMON: The Legitimate Heir to Christianity

The Buddhists tell a wonderful story which they say goes all the way back to the Buddha. It sounds simple, even funny, like a child’s tale. But it’s one of the most revolutionary stories ever told. You’ve probably heard it before:

A man was on a small island when a flash flood came up, surrounding him with a deadly rushing river on all sides. He might have drowned or starved, but was lucky enough to find a raft left there by someone else. He found a long pole, and rode the raft to safety on the other side. He was so grateful to the raft for saving him that he put it on his back and carried it there for the rest of his life. The Buddha asked whether that is the right way to use a raft, and said No.

The raft worked once, now put it down and go on your way. Because your next passage may not need a raft at all, but a vehicle of a very different kind. And we must be prepared to change vehicles – including our beliefs about ourselves, about relationships, about work, about our nation, or about God – if we are going to use beliefs wisely rather than foolishly. For beliefs are only useful if they help us through the transitions we are facing, not if we are carrying them on our backs, or sticking with them because they were prescribed by someone authoritative.

This is really one of the most radical and empowering stories ever written. It encourages heresy; it sanctions experimentation, and it endorses change. It trusts us more than our religions, trusts us to know what kind of a vehicle we might need at any point, trusts us to change vehicles – and grants us the authority to do so.

When you apply this to religion, it could get you burned at the stake in most times and places. But it’s profound and wise. Sometimes even our religions become like rafts that must be put down as we search for their legitimate heir. A legitimate heir is one that can carry us through tough transitions with integrity and hope.

For instance, the more our current administration claims it’s being guided by God, the more warlike, greedy and imperialistic it becomes. If you take them at their word, they are Christians – or at least people who believe in God, since they mention God a lot more than they mention Jesus. And if that is how the word “God” is being defined and used in our society, then we need a different way of talking about what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. We need a legitimate heir to it, and fast!

This topic came up from a couple directions. The first is just looking around at the way the very worst kind of religion has now gained a potentially dangerous degree of political power. Also, I am trying to write a new nine-hour program on this question to teach at SUUSI, the large Unitarian summer camp in Blacksburg, Virginia next July. So I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and this sermon is the first result – there will be more as the year goes on.

Still: why would anyone suggest such a thing as the legitimate heir to Christianity or God? On the surface, it just sounds rude. While America was never founded as a Christian nation, Christianity has still been the dominant religion here since we began. So whether we are Christians or not, our whole society is shot through with the symbols and myths of that religion, for both good and bad.

The words to the song “Blowin’ in the Wind” that we sang this morning were a protest song, and part of the message was that whatever was carrying our notions of decency, civility, and peaceful behavior – whatever the vehicles of our nobler aspirations were, they were failing. We needed a legitimate heir to the culture that said yes to an immoral war and no to decent treatment of even our own people. That’s really the message this morning as well.

Cultures look to their religions, when they are healthy, to carry deep and healthy assessments of the human condition. Religions, at their best, have produced some of our species’ finest outcries against the injustices of the powerful against the powerless, those who control money over those who earn it and the rest. When people like MLK Jr. refer to their religion as an aid in unjust times, those are the passages they refer to, not the other, inhumane, even murderous and embarrassing passages.

History shows us that all gods die, though the great ones die more slowly, and can linger in a moribund state for centuries. They can die in several ways. They can die when the cosmology supporting them collapses. They can die when they no longer inspire passion or affection in people’s hearts. — And they can die when their stories and symbols are more easily hijacked by preachers and politicians of low and mean purpose than by those of high and noble purpose.

And all these things have happened during the past couple centuries to the primary God of our American culture.

But back to my question: Why does the God of Western religions need an heir, and what does it mean to be a “legitimate” heir?

One measure is political: the degree to which only the very lowest forms of Christianity have attracted and been attracted to the political and military power in our time. Pat Robertson has said that a democracy is a terrible form of government unless it is run by his kind of Christians – the kind that will not tax the rich, will not support social services, welfare or public education, and so on. And the Rev. Jerry Falwell said during a television interview a couple weeks ago that we should hunt down terrorists and blow them away in the name of the Lord.

Jesus would detest these men. Don’t be shocked, that’s not a bit overstated. Heck, Jesus called Peter Satan, and that was just because Peter didn’t understand him! Peter wasn’t even offering to blow people away in the name of God. Jesus would detest these men, and the low and hateful religion they sell.

The God of people like Robertson and Falwell – and a growing number of other bad preachers – is not a God worth serving, and has nothing to do with the far higher teachings of a Jesus who instructed people to love one another and not to judge one another, and who said that whatever we did to the least among us we did to him. The God Jerry Falwell worships is little more than his own bigotries, writ large and nasty. And ironically, the fact that he can proudly chant such hateful and murderous advice while holding a bible shows that he doesn’t really believe in the God of Jesus for one second, and knows that nothing will happen to him for insulting the very idea of God with his smallness. That’s the measure of a religion whose God has died. And when gods die, their corpses almost always become hand puppets for the worst kind of charlatans and demagogues. Conversely, and importantly, when a God can become the hand puppet of low-level charlatans and demagogues like these men, it is a sign that that God is dying.

This has happened before. When Franco (Francisco Franco Bahamonde, 1892-1975) established his fascist dictatorship in Spain, he brought the Catholic Church into power with him – but, again, just the low and mean parts that oppressed women, the poor and the different. But when Franco’s reign finally ended, so did the power of the Church. People had seen that it became the willing toady of the worst kind of people all too eagerly, and they didn’t trust it with their hearts or minds. In some ways, Spain now has a more liberal set of abortion laws than our own country does. When a court grants permission for a third trimester abortion, for instance, the country pays for it. That’s a sign of the Church losing authority in people’s minds and hearts, and it happened because the religion seemed like far too natural a bedmate for fascism.

Now in our own country, the phrase “Christo-fascism” is beginning to appear in more and more places — Google it, and you’ll find an increasing number of hits, over 300 now. Some feel it is happening here. I’m one of them. And once again, the religion seems more available as a tool for the rich, greedy, powerful and mean than for the poor, for whom Jesus spoke. Jesus didn’t think rich people could even get in to heaven. Now they own it, and the tickets so expensive the poor can’t afford them. You can hardly betray Jesus more fundamentally than that!

A second reason the raft won’t float is scientific. It’s that the symbols and myths of Christianity lost their footing in the real world more than two centuries ago, as the best Christian thinkers have pointed out for at least that long.

Western religions were grounded on the idea of a male God who was a being. He walked, talked, saw and heard, planned, rewarded and punished. To do these things, he had to live somewhere, and eventually they assigned him to heaven, which they believed was right above the sky.

But during the past couple centuries; we have realized there is nothing above the sky but endless space. God lost a place to live. And that means – though few people want to take it this far – that we lost the kind of God who could do human-type things like seeing, hearing, or loving. We haven’t seen through this revolution yet, but it is a profound one.

If somebody tells you that God wants you to do something, you should be asking how you could check that out for yourself, independently. If there is not a way – and it’s not clear how there could be a way – then the command doesn’t come from God. It’s the command of those who have turned the corpse of this God into their hand puppet to serve their agenda – often at your expense.

Now, we could go on listing all the logical or scientific or common-sense reasons that the myths and symbols of Christianity are anachronistic, but it wouldn’t achieve much. Because religions aren’t primarily vehicles of truth about the world. Primarily, they are like the rafts in that Buddhist story. Rafts to carry us across certain kinds of human dilemmas, with honest insights into the human condition and wisdom to help us live wisely and well.

It’s true that once we’ve been helped by a religion we tend to carry that raft around on our backs from then on, whether it’s the right vehicle for us or not. But it’s more true that we need some kind of a vehicle for our hopes, dreams, yearnings and tender mercies. And the very best stories and teachings of Christianity honor those, even if its loudest and most powerful preachers and adherents do not.

So it isn’t enough to set the raft down. A legitimate heir to God would have to carry our yearnings and help us to live more wisely and well.

Religions, like their gods, lose their roots in the hearts and minds of people when they are no longer seen as having the power to resist being dragged down by the lowest kind of preachers, politicians and media. But neither morality nor ethics rely on religion as their vehicles – and that’s good news. Across Europe, for instance, religion has lost its power of persuasion. Only about one or two percent of the English and French attend church, and it’s only a few points higher in Germany. And as a nation, Japan is officially secular. Even closer to home, so is Canada, whose ties with Catholicism are little more than ornamental. Yet these cultures have moral standards at least as high as ours, both as individuals and as society.

To take just a couple examples, they all have lower infant mortality rates and higher educational standards than we do. They all have far fewer citizens without basic health insurance than we do, and they all have higher standards of living for their citizens over age 65 than we do. And in Germany and the Netherlands, all citizens who want it are given a free college education, because the government believes that informed citizens able to think are preferable to ignorant citizens who just obey.

Don’t think of these as merely “political” values. These are profoundly religious values. They show the souls of these nations. They show how these nations regard others, how they treat their own weakest members, whether their “pro-life” stance is dishonest rhetoric or healthy governmental programs to serve the life of their people throughout their lives. These are religious values, nothing less. If the tree is known by its fruits, as Jesus said, than America is the least religious and compassionate country in the developed world!

So. We look outward to a world of countries that are more moral and ethical than we are, though far less religious. Some say this means that religion is bad. I don’t agree, but I say it means that bad religion should be dropped like a hot raft.

I want us, both individually and collectively, to develop a more adequate religion, and a more adequate sense of compassion and responsibility toward others that our national policies show us to have. It can happen within Christianity or any other religion if that religion can be raised to its higher levels of aspiration rather than sinking to its lower ones. It can also be done without any organized religion. Well, that’s a good thing, because nobody has a more disorganized religion than Unitarians.

But however it is done and wherever it is done, it needs to inspire us, and needs to inspire our nation to change its direction from a greedy, selfish, imperialistic nation that is now disliked or detested by most other countries in the world.

Here are seven things the legitimate heir to God will have to have, I think:

1. It must be reality-based, consistent with the findings of our best contemporary sciences. Pretending the Grand Canyon is only six thousand years old is an insult to the intelligence of an attentive twelve-year-old, and not worthy of us. If you can’t serve truth, you can’t serve God. And ignorant ideology does not trump truth, except under fascism.

2. The legitimate heir to God must be inclusive and expansive. The Greeks made the best picture of this that I know. They pictured the completed human being as a series of concentric circles. In the center was just the individual. Next were the relationships that expanded the individual’s awareness, compassion and responsibility. Next, the relations with other friends, other citizens, and society. Then the world, all of history, and all the high ideals often associated with gods, but which the Greeks of 2400 years ago associated with our own fuller humanity.

3. Liberals may not like this next one: the legitimate heir to God must be compelling, even commanding. Conservative Christians speak of the need to feel “convicted” before we can see the light, and this is true. We must not only hear of higher possibilities, but also be awakened, “convicted” and converted by them.

4. It must be – in Origen’s wonderful 3rd century phrase – both “useful to us, and worthy of God.” “God,” here, means the highest set of demands we can articulate, the highest ideals, the most inclusive attitude, and the most demanding kind of life. The way, as Jesus and many others have said, is very narrow, and not many enter it.

5. It must be the biggest, most inclusive, most compassionate framework we can imagine – otherwise, it wouldn’t be worthy of the name “God,” let alone God’s legitimate heir. And it must be both more accepting and more demanding of us than psychology, politics, religion or nationalism can be. Why must it be bigger? Because in a pluralistic world where people hold many conflicting beliefs, you either need a larger God, or a larger army. The path of nationalism and imperialism is always to go for the army; the path of honest religion is always to try and articulate a larger concept of God – by whatever name it’s called forth.

6. But it must give us life. That’s the mark of a God. The basic covenant people make with their gods is always the same, and it’s very simple. We say, “I’ll serve you heart, mind and body, I’ll give my life into your service.” Then whatever we have made into our God must give us a life worth living. If it can’t do that, it isn’t a real god, but a phony, or a hand puppet.

7. We need a bigger vehicle than the raft our society is offering us under the banner of approved Christianity or the God sanctioned by our loudest and worst preachers, politicians and media. We need a larger vehicle for the wisdom which has helped the great religions to endure in the hearts and minds of countless generations of people who are trying to grow into their full humanity, trying to grow into children of God, to realize their Buddha nature, to understand that atman really is one with Brahman, to incarnate the rhythms and rules of the Tao, and act out of that infinite and eternal identity rather than something lesser.

All of these are saying about the same thing, in the jargon of their individual religions. In a pluralistic world, however, jargon just separates us. We need to be brought together, and that means we need to be able to say what we actually believe, in ordinary language so people in other religions can understand us, and can realize that we’re not so different after all.

And the more we can put these things in ordinary language, the easier it will be to communicate with people of good character, no matter what their religion is. Because these are the goals of all decent religion. So this rebirth can happen within any existing religion. But it can also happen in ordinary language, without any religious beliefs attached at all.

I’m buying something for the church through my Minister’s Discretionary Fund that I hope will help us begin generating discussions of the things we believe, and help us create a church culture where high ideals are felt to be commanding to us.

I solicited some people I don’t think we’ve solicited for special donations before, in order to raise a little over two thousand dollars. We have enough promised, have collected almost all of it, and this week we’ll be ordering a new and powerful projector that can project VHS, DVD or from a computer, and a large screen.

I have a series of videotapes of the six-hour program Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers did almost twenty years ago, and have bought the DVD of the movie “The Corporation” for showing here and in other churches.

But I hope we will have Friday movie nights here, as many Fridays as we can get groups to organize. Movies on the economy, social criticism; anti-war movies, but also contemporary movies with powerful human themes that are worth exploring, as well as family movies meant to include children, but with themes that are uplifting and educational.

That’s enough for now. The subject of finding the next step, the legitimate heir to what was once called God, is one of the biggest and most important steps people can take. And it is taken, like so many things, step, by step, by step.

But spend some time with this, will you? Spend some time asking what you really believe, what beliefs you think might guide you better than the pronouncements about God you’re hearing – and will be hearing more of from our worst preachers, politicians and pundits.

We say we’re all in this together. But first, we must all be in this search for beliefs worth living by that we can live with. It’s your move. It’s our move. Like always.