Seeing the World Through a Religious Lens
Sermon by Steve Edington
October 10, 2004
One of the more fascinating, and at the same time deeply disturbing, books I've read in the past couple of years is one by Dr. Jessica Stern called Terror in the Name of God. I believe I made one other reference to it in a sermon about a year ago. Among Ms. Stern's various, and impressive, credentials is that of lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. The subtitle of her work, which was published two years after 9/11, is "Why Religious Militants Kill," which is the topic that is explored throughout the text itself. In preparing her book, the author interviewed a number of convicted terrorists, as well as some who have repudiated their previously held beliefs and actions, and some who are still "on the job" as it were. Her samplings range from American homegrown, and supposedly God and Christian inspired, purveyors of killing and violence to such organizations as Al Queda and Hamas. I'm going to read a short passage from her chapter on a Christian Identity type group that once occupied a 240-acre compound in rural Arkansas, and that is now largely defunct. The group is called "The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord." Acronym: CSA. This is how Dr. Stern describes their religiously inspired worldview:
"They believed that humanists, communists, socialists, and Zionists had taken over the United States government. They knew for a fact that Jews, Satan's direct descendents, were working closely with the Antichrist, whose forces included the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Illuminati, and the 'One Worlders.' They had discovered, through their intelligence channels, that the aim of this cabal was to create a world government, a clear sign that the forces of Satan were at work. The cult planned to poison residents of major cities - far more people than any modern terrorist group has killed before. They had joined forces with other right-wing groups in the hope of destroying what they called the Zionist Occupied Government." (Yes, indeed, there are some pretty crazy people out there!)
This, however, is not a sermon on religiously inspired terrorism - timely as the topic is. I'm offering, instead, this quick glance at Dr. Stern's work as an admittedly extreme - and hideous, and perverted, and deadly - example of what it means to see the world through a particular religious lens. What you and I would see as the playing out of certain national and international affairs and events - about which, I'm sure, we have our varying opinions and interpretations - the CSA people see it all, well, differently; different in such a way that makes theirs a dangerous and life threatening movement. Those who seek to make the case about the dangers involved when a religiously inspired vision becomes imposed upon the workings of the world will find plenty of ammunition for their argument in Dr. Stern's very well written and well documented book.
There are, however, other ways of seeing the world through a religious or spiritual lens that can serve the greater good of humanity and greatly enhance the quality of life on our planet itself. I could cite numerous examples in this regard, but I'll just offer one of the better known ones. It is the religiously inspired vision that Dr. Martin Luther King, and the movement he came to lead, brought to bear upon our American society in the 1950s and 60s, and that continues to call to us and challenge us to this very day. Dr. King's understanding of God was that of a Force or Power or Presence in human history that is continually calling on human beings to seek and work towards greater levels of love, justice, and peace for ourselves and for those who come after us. For Dr. King, the Hebrew prophets were the spokespersons for this God of Love, Justice, and Peace and Jesus of Nazareth was this God's earthly embodiment. Dr. King was also fond of quoting one of our Unitarian forbearers, Rev. Theodore Parker, a mid-19th century and radical for his day Unitarian minister, who said, "the arc of the universe bends slowly, but it bends toward justice," which was another way of stating King's perspective. Granted not all of his followers, and not all of those who were inspired by him, specifically shared Dr. King's theology, but this was the religious lens through which this truly remarkable human being challenged and changed the racial consciousness of this nation. It was through this religious lens that he saw a different kind of society, living under different kinds of assumptions, than the ones that predominated in his day.
So while there is a demonic side to viewing and relating to the world through a "religious grid," if you will, as Professor Stern's book quite aptly demonstrates, there is also a way of bringing a religious or spiritual consciousness to the world of people and events and history that can change the course of human history for the good - as the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King aptly demonstrates.
This is the second installment of a two part sermon series I began two weeks ago on the topic of "What's the Difference?" Those of you who were here on that Sunday may recall that I built that sermon around a couple of questions that were posed in a recent essay by one of my colleagues in the UU ministry, Rev. Davidson Loehr, minister of the UU Church in Austin, Texas. Rev. Loehr maintains that there are the two essential questions for religious liberals today in both our personal journeys of faith and in our dealings with the larger world. They are: 1) What is worth believing? And 2) Are there deep and abiding truths capable of sustaining honest spiritual quests without supernatural underpinnings? Playing off these questions I offered my "Five Things Worth Believing." One of those five, which I mentioned in passing two weeks ago, is the one I'm coming back to today. It was: "I believe this world, with all its sham and folly, with all the human imperfections and failings we visit upon it, and with all of its unhealed and un-reconciled aspects, is still worthy of our efforts - small as they may sometimes be - to make it a more humane, just, and peaceful place…the world of people and events and history is worthy of our efforts to make a difference."
I know I am not exactly breaking any new ground, or going out on a limb, in saying this. I'm guessing that most, if not all, of you in this room would give your assent to what I've just said. But I do find a need in this present moment - and this may be the case with many of you - to remind myself of this belief. I'm getting to the point - and I can speak only for myself here - where I can barely stand to watch, read about, or try to digest yet another report of yet another American or Iraqi death or act of destruction, however brought on, in a war we had absolutely no business instigating - even as those who instigated this shameful enterprise continue to mindlessly insist upon the rightness, if not the righteousness, of their actions. In the face of such deadly folly any talk about the worthiness of our efforts to make ours a more humane, just, and peaceful world sometimes seems like so much folly as well. And yet, what better time, what better time than the present, to be a person of faith? What better time to keep faith with the worthiness of believing that the failings of the present need not define the future?
I mentioned Dr. King a few minutes ago. I wonder how his world looked to him, as a young man still in his twenties, with his PhD in theology from Boston University, with his life of promise and hope before him, as he went to Birmingham, Alabama to begin his career in the ministry in the mid-1950s. How easy would it have been for him to despair of ever making a difference in his world with the crushing and deadly effects of white racism all around him and right in his face on a daily basis. And yet, perhaps he too decided: What better time to be a person of faith in the ability of the human and divine spirit to make a difference? What better time to keep faith with the worthiness of believing that the terrible human failings and evils of the present need not define, or do not have to define, the future?
I have no illusions whatever about the impact of my own small and meager efforts to bring some measure of justice and healing to our world compared to those of Dr. King. But in some of my own moments of despair, I think of all that could have driven him to despair in his day and in his time, and how he was able to summon his spiritual resources and his religiously inspired vision to move beyond despair to being a bearer of hope and promise. And I think of how our land is so markedly different because of the way in which Rev. King kept faith with his ideals, principles, values and beliefs in the face of all that could have caused him ask "What's the use in trying to make a difference?"
What do I find worth believing, then, as I look at the world of people, events, and history in which we all live and move and play out our lives? I believe we live in a world that we are called to both savor and save. Savor and save. I'm pulling those two words from a line in an address given by the Rev. Richard Gilbert at one of our denomination's General Assemblies eight years ago. Dick Gilbert was approaching his retirement from the UU ministry at that time. He'd been a wonderful pastor to his congregation in Rochester, New York for close to 30 years, and a strong advocate for social justice in his community and within our movement for those three decades as well. In the course of his talk at the '96 General Assembly he said, "I wake up every morning torn between a desire to savor the world and to save it. This makes it rather difficult to plan my day."
I'm not sure that line is original to Rev. Gilbert, but whoever said it first, it has stuck with me ever since I heard it. We're given a world and a life to savor, to drink in, to be spiritually nourished by; and we are called to bring whatever saving energies and resources we may possess to that world as well. To savor and to save: This I find worth believing in. Caveat: No single one of us can savor it all any more than any single one of us can save it all. But we are given our opportunities to do both; and a failure to respond to those opportunities would be a failure to keep faith with life itself.
It is time for a story about savoring and saving. I began my previous sermon on this subject with a reference to one of John Steinbeck's works. If you can indulge me, I have another Steinbeck related story today. And then I won't talk about him again for a while. There is a street along the harbor in Monterey, California called Cannery Row. There was a time when Cannery Row wasn't much more than a string of shacks, piers, and sardine canning factories, which is how it got its name. The name is also the title of a Steinbeck novel about that locale as it was in the 1920s and 30s. Today Cannery Row is a string of trendy touristy shops and restaurants to the point that Steinbeck would scarcely recognize his old haunt, even though there is a bust of the writer right smack in the middle of the whole scene. While I've been there numerous times, I've never been able to feel any kind of connection with the Cannery Row that Steinbeck describes while milling through a horde of tourists - and, admittedly, being a tourist myself.
So, on this particular day last summer I managed to get to Cannery Row practically at daybreak before anything was open; and I pretty much had the place to myself. Even with all the empty shops, salons, and restaurants I was able to get, while walking alone and undisturbed, a least something of a "Steinbeckian" feel for the place. As the area began to come to life I went looking for just a little more solitude and found it by getting up under a pier. I sat down on one of the pier moorings and looked out across the bay. The sun was now just high enough over the eastern hills behind Monterey to send make sparkles on the waves of the water. Then I noticed, no more than fifty yards out in the water, a large flat rock where a bunch of harbor seals were cavorting around. They were the only living creatures in my line of sight. And they were having themselves a time-sliding off and climbing back onto that rock, pushing each other around, and making these seal noises that I will not attempt to imitate. With the rising sun on the water and the seals doing their seal things it was as if the universe had decided to put on a show for a one-person audience - namely me. While I knew that wasn't quite the case it was fun, for a time anyway, to believe that it was a show just for me. So I sat and savored the moment.
The problem with me is that I can only savor something for so long before I have to go and get philosophical about it all. Could be a character flaw, I don't know. Because at some point I got to thinking, "Now, in the grand scheme of things does my life have any more worth and value, does it mean any more, than the life of one of those seals out there?" My next question was: "Am I the only person in the world who is weird enough to sit around and think such thoughts?" Weird question or not I did come up with an answer. No, in a vast, and 5 or 6 billion year old, universe my life means no more than one of those seals. Ultimately I came from the same "stuff" as they did, as did the sun and the water too for that matter, and in time I'll go back to it; and the seals and me and everything else will at some point be all in the same place from whence we all came; it is one ongoing, interdependent web after all.
The thing that got me out of this cosmic reverie, however, was yet another message that came barging into my consciousness long enough to say that whether or not your life ultimately means anymore than that of one of those seals, it means something to a certain number of other people right now, just as there are those who mean a lot to you, right now. You are a part of other people's lives, just as they are a part of yours. The things you do and say matter to them, and they in turn, matter in the larger world of people and events and history.
In those moments of reflection I got a sense - a renewed sense - of what it means for us to be creatures of both the natural world and universe, and creatures of human history and human events. We are given a natural world, a Gift from a Giver whose name and nature we will never fully know, and in certain blessed moments that world and universe is ours to savor and enjoy in whatever show it puts on for us. And we are also placed, again by a Means we can never fully know or name, into a stream of history and into a crux of human relationships in which, I believe, we are called to live in such a way that makes those relationships a little more humane, a little more just, and little more hopeful than when we were first born into them. I further believe it is what we savor, and take from, the worldly blessings of living that in turn lead us to see and believe that there is something here worth saving and passing along.
In my first "What's the Difference?" sermon I spoke of what I called the artistic consciousness, and then added: "Like the artistic consciousness, I believe that a spiritual or religious consciousness is one that allows a person to see something sacred, or something holy, or something different contained within, as well as beyond, the ordinary." Steinbeck saw that "something different" that was both within and beyond the ordinary in both the people and in the landscape he described in Cannery Row, as well as in all his other works. It was this way of seeing that made him a good humanitarian as well as an extremely gifted writer. In lifting up the lives, and pointing to an essential sacredness in the lives, of those persons whose livelihoods were being destroyed in the America of the 1930s - most notably in his signature novel The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck pricked the conscience of this nation. And his work did play a role, a not insignificant role, in the enactment of some of the New Deal social reforms of the 1930s and 40s. He had an artistic consciousness that saw both a world to be savored and lives to be saved. He savored the natural world while challenging the course and workings of human history as it played out within that world.
It is this very kind of consciousness that we attempt to cultivate here in this liberal religious community of faith and hope. In some respects, the words in the hymn "Wonders Still the World Shall Witness" do have something of a pie-in-the-sky flavor to them. But they are also a way of letting us know that the world still awaits our saving energies. So let us breathe deeply, and be nurtured by, the breath of life - and by our being so nurtured let us also be bearers of life whenever and wherever the opportunity for such presents itself.
Stephen D. Edington
October 10, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
