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By Rev. Preston K. Mears Jr.
December 5, 2004
This morning I will start by telling you the two fold conclusion of
this sermon: 1) Let it be that the ongoing formation of our personal
lives and our lives together be the every day stuff of our religion.
2) Let us be vocal and committed to the preservation of the
Constitution of the United States .
Perhaps, though, I should now start at the beginning and with a
disclaimer. I am steeped in Christian tradition, I am in my own way
with my own understanding a "Trinitarian", one who believes that the
divine is both immanent and transcendent and its meaning especially
made known through the one called Jesus. This is my framework .
Plearse understand that I use my framework to point to and to share
a larger vision and got to replace your frame of reference.
Over the last century people in Western culture, certainly in the
United States, have been losing inwardly understood religious
language. What passes for religious language is code talk by
exclusive tribal groupings to determine who is in and who is out. In
actuality, genuine religious language needs to be "inwardly
digested," easily understood and its meanings, symbols part of our
daily rhythms and conversations. In my Episcopalian tradition we
have the Book of Common Prayer. Even Latin at one time was the most
commonly available and understood language.
Religion, as a word, is generally defined as a belief in the divine
but I prefer its root meaning. The word literally means "bind
together." Binding together is not what we hear in the way
fundamentalists use their language. They use it to divide and
separate from those who are different. Fundamentalist language may
have religious roots, but today it is the opposite of "binding
together."
As was described last week, in the rising tribal religious rhetoric,
there is division in a simplistic dualism regarding good and evil (I
am good and if you aren't with me, you are evil). At the same time
the language is divisive, it is tragically unable to connect us
morally to life's issues. Recently, a lot of attention was generated
around sex being sinful, particularly, homosexuality. At the same
time, social and economic justice issues having to do with the every
day lives, work and education never got solid traction. Neither did
serious issues of morality in the arena of politics and business
ethics. Did you hear any one rant that Enron's Key Lay and his lust
for power, the political corruption of those he bought and the sheer
greed of so many was an offense to the Divine order and a perversion
of all that is good and holy? Greed is not partisan.
Focus for a moment more with me on the loss of religious language.
The majority of fundamentalist language quotes the King James
Version of the Bible. Few of us are Elizabethan scholars, don't
understand it and what we don't understand we are free to
misinterpret. Even more tragically, for those who live with a
fundamental disconnection between reality and faith, there is little
comfort when life comes hard with major pain and loss at a personal
level. I have been at the bedside of those for whom life's realities
have overwhelmed a disconnected faith. At a social level the
disconnect can mean that I can be an upstanding member of my
congregation, and, without contradiction, be an Enron executive and
cut and slash and wheel and deal and steal because my religion
exists in a different realm and it does not have to "bind together."
Indeed, I can pay it off with a tithe of the ill begotten gains!
Fundamentalism has always promoted fear and the kinds of politicized
divisions that underlie religious wars; it gains particular
credibility in fearful times. In this country, we should remember
that religious wars were a major motivator for Europeans who came to
this country. It was the back drop to a studied determination by our
constitutional framers. They said no more religious wars and that
there should be a separation of church and state. The separation was
to serve people and religious freedom. The framers sought to
encourage religion and saw it as essential to binding together a
moral and just society.
One of our members, Veroniqe Fenton, pointed out to me, that the
so-called marriage constitutional amendment if passed would be the
first one ever to restrict the freedoms of the constitution rather
than expand them. I would suggest that what passes for religion is
not religion because it restricts freedom and does not increase it,
because it divides and does not "bind together."
Something we need to remember. We need to know that there are many
people who have immersed themselves in a traditional or "orthodox"
faith deeply enough and thoughtfully enough that their religion in
them does "bind together," that it is powerfully ethical and
concerned with social justice, a daily part of their lives. And we
can and should join with them in our mutual journey and pursuit of a
more just society. There are many paths to binding together and much
work to be done.
An illustration of what I mean: One day on a bus in DC on the way to
a rally, years ago, I saw an old man needing help to climb on a bus
and I gave it and he sat in the front of the bus and he indicated
that I should sit close at hand, and so I did; there was a Baptist
Preacher there at the front of the bus also. He was Dr. King and he
asked me, me being young and wearing the clerical collar of priest,
if I knew the old man I had helped. I said I didn't and so Dr. King
introduced me to Dr. Abraham Heschel. One very Baptist preacher, one
very Jewish rabbi, both powerfully immersed in the language of the
Scriptures--and sitting in the front of that bus, I found myself in
a singular moment of peaceful determination that was as real and
palpable and as embracing as the trust of child sleeping in your
arms. Religious language binds together and any and every voice can
touch us, instruct us and lift us.
Most traditional religious language uses and depends heavily on
metaphor and much of our religious metaphors depend on an
agricultural life. Most of us are not agricultural people. As a
result, while agricultural metaphor and poetry sounds religious to
us, may sound good to us, they don't intersect with us at our core
where we live and breath deep within our psyches. And again, there
is a disconnect and a vacuum for fundamentalism to fill.
To illustrate: We just used a beautiful setting of the 23rd Psalm, a
poem that resonates with the world's religions and certainly
Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It powerfully poses our
vulnerability (shadow of death) against peace and tranquility (green
pastures, clear streams). If we were an agricultural people, we
would know in our bones that a stream of water in a semi-arid part
of the world, along with green pastures, was life itself. Drought
means death, lack of pasture means the herd animals we totally
depend on die. There is no supermarket, there is no fast food
restaurant. The beautiful, uplifting language touches us but does
not reach deep inside of us and go with us into the clogged highways
and traffic jams of our un-agricultural lives.
Think also on the religious language that permeates Lincoln's Second
Inaugural Address. The references to God and God's judgment and a
sense of balance in the over arching scheme of things is very
Biblical. We admire Lincoln's vision, but are we not uncomfortable
with Lincoln's suggestion that the length and human cost of the war
might be to balance the unjust extraction of wealth from two hundred
and fifty years of bondsman's unrequited toil? Not being an
Agricultural people, we do not have that profound, intimate sense of
how finely tuned and balanced is the fabric of all of nature and we
with it. When I gave John a copy of the Second Inaugural to read to
you, he looked at it, and exclaimed, "I had forgotten how permeated
this is with religious language!" There it is and we don't see it.
We need religious language to be a people who bind together.
I have some suggestions for us, but no easy answers. Some of you
know them. We cannot go back to prior centuries and become an
Agricultural people. However, we are a part of nature and we are
part of the environment and there we begin and there we end. We
need to study ecology, consider the eternal verities while doing our
gardening work, take the hike and pause to look at the growth and
decay happening at the same time in the woods, go to a high place,
the roof of our apartment, wherever, be very still and watch the
sunset. And then, when we come across the religious language in
Scripture, in speech, in the Second Inaugural address, don't argue
with it, just listen to it. My second suggestion is that we
individually and collectively look and listen to the religious life
of those whose piety at the end of the day was one of "binding
together."
One of the heroes of the Unitarian Church is Henry David Thoreau. We
tend to read his work for its social commentary. A great deal of his
writing, really an act of worship, is very finely crafted prose that
minutely and beautifully describes details of nature he observed at
Walden Pond. He found a sense of the transcendent in the immanent,
intimate details of nature. We can as well. Not altogether
differently, for Einstein, the use of mathematics and physics to
understand the universe was a godly act, an act of worship. And
since Einstein's theory that time is relative has been proven, then
there may be something to a notion of eternity--a possible sermon
discussion topic for the scientist's among us. Worship, like true
religion, is an act of communion, a coming together, a exploration
of a facet of life wanting to know intimately that facet and, at the
same time, knowing that the one facet is but a part of a larger
whole. It can be a good and right thing to be worshipful.
An important event back in 1962 when I was graduating from college
was the second Vatican Council Years later, I happened on the
autobiography of Pope John the 23rd, Journey of a Soul. He was a man
who immersed himself in daily Italian monastic life and became one
of the saints of last century. His daily monastic life was his
worship and at the end of it, he called the Vatican Council. When
asked why, he simply went to a window and opened it. He knew that
true religion means binding together and connecting with people,
with life.
Another saint of the last century was Ghandi, and he, as a young
man, read and immersed himself in the writings of a wide range of
religious writings. He read to hear and learn, not to argue. In time
he found his own voice, a voice that sought to bind together. There
is a parallel with both Ghandi and Lincoln. Lincoln wanted to bind
up the wounds of war and to heal the divisions of race and region.
Ghandi wanted Hindu and Muslim to be in harmony with each and for
India and Pakistan to be one country, one people. Both were
assassinated and the cynical, the greedy used and manipulated the
fears of the fundamentalist. The dividers and those restricting
religious freedom reigned. The courage to pursue religion that binds
together is a life's journey.
I have sought to have us look hard at who we are at this place and
time in terms of religious language. Indeed, I have tried to redeem
the word "religion" by bringing it back to its most basic meaning,
"binding together." In doing so, I have suggested that we appreciate
that much of the language is agricultural and we are not. I have
suggested, at the same time, that we need to listen to those who
have a voice that binds and heals. As we listen, we will grow and
find and deepen our own voice.
We have the opportunity here to listen to each other. We come from
different places and experiences. The race division is real and
profound. Growing up male is different from growing up female and my
growing up experience is different from John's. It is in our
listening together to each others voice, we discover more of what it
is to be human. Simply stated, I will discover things within myself
that I get to see in you, because of your different experience. To
do that is to risk true religion, to bind together and become more
whole within ourselves and in relationship to each other. What we
seek to do here at Davies in the days, weeks and months is truly
important.
I mentioned at the beginning, a second conclusion, of being
committed to the preservation of the Constitution. The loss of
religious language, particularly, in a fearful time, threatens our
freedom of speech, whether from pulpit or podium. Make no mistake,
there are fundamentalists in our government who would hear the
criticism in my words, judge them to be wrong and therefore evil and
tantamount to treason. At a minimum, an investigation into this
Church's tax exempt status may be considered. Not to worry too much,
though. I don't have the stature of a Julian Bond to draw undue
attention to us here. Besides, I am just a member here and my words
uncompensated by any tax deductible dollars.
I started reading a book by a law professor, Dr. Geoffrey Stone
entitled, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime. It starts in 1798
and comes forward. He notes, that the pressure on freedom of most
wars is time limited. But, when will we know the war on terror is
over? He focuses particularly on free speech and concludes in part
by quoting Chief Justice Louis Brandeis in 1927 who said, in part:
"Those who won our independence knew that fear breeds repression and
that courage is the secret of liberty." In his assessment, Dr.
Stone, having analyzed the long history of perilous times, finds
that this administration is playing up the fear factor and that
worries him.
I am not sure that Dr. Stone fully appreciates the historically
different place we are in right now with the loss of religious
language and the rise of fundamentalism. Without the voices of true
religion, I'll say it again, religion that binds together, then
faith is faint, fear prevails, and repression rises.
We need to grow in true religion within and among ourselves, we need
to strengthen our own voices and we need to protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States against the limiting of its
freedoms, so help us by all that is True and Holy, by All that binds
us together.
AMEN
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