So What’s the Point?

Joan Beal

Think for a moment about why you actually come to church some, many, or most Sundays.

Here are some possibilities:

I have always gone to church.  I am loyal to this church.  I came here with my family and it is a part of my life.

I come for my friends and the comfort I find in this church community.

I come because I see this church doing good in the world and I want to be part of that.

I come because I want my children to have some kind of religious education.

I come to sing in the choir.

I come because I am basically an atheist, but can’t seem to break the churchgoing habit.

Chances are, one or more of these fits you at least to some degree.  Here is another possibility …I come because I am afraid. I don’t want to be damned and I know I need to be saved. So I come to church.

Pretty unlikely.   If you’re here in this church, totally unlikely.

However, depending on where you started, you may have begun your earliest church experience with that belief clouding your consciousness.  As high school students, many of us read, in American literature classes, Jonathan Edwards famous sermon about humans being like spiders dangling over an eternal fiery pit, by a thread, in the hand of an angry God.  Not many of us were subjected to that variety of preaching even way back in our early days, but sometimes, in some churches, it came close.   My brother-in-law Tim tells of a time when he was 7 years old, during the peak of the Cold War and anti-communist hysteria, when he was in a parochial school.  One of the nuns challenged the class of second graders with this dilemma:  If the communists come and take over our country, they will ask everyone to renounce God or be killed. She singled Tim out and said, “What will you do, Tim, will you choose to be killed, or will you deny Jesus and spend eternity in hell?” Tim said he sat there speechless and in despair that he might actually some day have to make that choice.  The threat of damnation is not that far in the past for many of us.

The fact that we rejected damnation and believed in universal salvation is only part of the reason that Unitarians and Universalists were at times, considered heretics.  An old history of Norway, quotes a Baptist from the early 1800’s,  saying that Norway and the surrounding area were notable  as a “stronghold of error” for their universalist beliefs.

Most churches today don’t emphasize hell, and punishment.  The Universalist message mostly won out in mainstream religions, but we are still distinctive today in the underlying assumption in the statement at the beginning of our hymnal, where, under our purposes and principles, it says “The living tradition we share draws from many sources:” and then goes on to list them. You can look in your hymnal if you like, about 5 pages in.  This statement affirms that we are really creating our own (and, in the sense of our own) sacred, holy, God, spirit, soul. For me, this means that maybe there’s something out there that explains the mystery of this life, or maybe not…..but, together, we UU human beings are agreeing to create our religion, and honor our myths, together, as we go. And I don’t mean myths flippantly….look at those sources…we aren’t just deciding to make a purple crystal into a god, or saying the word tyrannosaurus often enough to create a change in the natural order.  Those sources are powerful forerunners.    And what we believe does determine what kind of world we are creating.

In the book Sapiens, from which I chose the reading, Yuval Harari tells us that, despite the words in the Declaration of Independence, there really is no biological or scientific basis for human rights, for equality, for liberty, for a soul, for the economic system of capitalism or communism, for religious beliefs.  All these concepts are imagined orders, not objectively true, but which we choose, in our cultures, to believe. They, for better, and sometimes for worse, create a stable social order.  Religion, according to Harari, gives legitimacy to fragile social orders and, again, for better or worse, is a unifier for humankind.

So here’s one of my main reasons for getting to church on Sunday, one which I didn’t mention in my list of choices.  I want my religion to be the winner in the social order creation contest.  I want our God/goddess/spirit of creation/ spirit of life /etc. to influence how our social order gets formed. I want it to be Unitarian Universalism which unifies humankind, even if it’s not called Unitarian Universalism.    Dream big and take over the world.  While I can go to the woods or sea alone and feel in touch with my own idea of spirituality, or I can read and write about religion or God alone, I can’t create a religious life alone, or just with ACLU friends, or environmental friends, or with human rights activist friends.  It has to be bigger and more inclusive than that.  So here I am with you. We are small in number but there are lots more of us out there and we can only do this together.

It’s not like this hasn’t been done before.

Gods get created.  The Jahweh of the Old Testament was fierce.  As Steven Pinker, says in his book, The Better Angels of our Nature, Why violence has Declined, “The Bible depicts a world that seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.”  Matthew White, who calls himself an atrocitologist, keeps a database of the estimated death tolls and atrocities from history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides.  He counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are listed in the Bible.  The victims of the Flood add another 20 million or so to the total.  The good news is that, of course, most of it never happened.  There is no archaeological evidence for these conquests, slaughters, inundations, etc.  As we (we being the vast majority of people who are not literal interpreters of the Bible) know, the Hebrew Bible was  compiled over probably half a millennium from various writers, at various time periods, with various agendas.  However, it portrayed a God that unified a kingdom, and reflected the warlike values that kept the inhabitants in line.  As Steven Pinker goes on to say, he is not impugning the billions of people who revere the Bible today…it has been reinterpreted,  selectively ignored,  and  expanded by the addition of less violent texts.  Despite some lingering holdouts for a God of vengeance and punishment, humans have recreated the fierce Jahweh into a less bloodthirsty, more reasonable being. But the original Jahweh did his job in his time.

And then there are the Christians.  The wrathful deity of the Old Testament has become softer and more compassionate as Jesus, the Prince of Peace.  Though Jesus is quoted as saying that he came to bring not peace, but a sword, the New Testament does not mention that he planned to do anything with it.  However, while Jesus himself is the messenger of love your enemies and turn the other cheek, over the centuries his followers built up around him a culture and acceptance of torture and brutality.  The unifying principle of accepting Jesus, the Prince of Peace, as God, was often enforced by aggrandizing the martyrdom of the saints, and of Jesus himself.  Let’s look at St. George, the patron saint of England, the Republic of Georgia, the Crusades, and the Boy scouts.  He got to be tortured many times because God kept resuscitating him.  He was seated astride a sharp blade with weights on his legs, roasted on a fire, pierced through the feet, crushed by a spiked wheel, had sixty nails hammered into his head, had the fat rendered out of his back with candles, and was sawn in half.  We smile nervously because it’s almost like a Saturday night live sketch that you are uncomfortable about laughing at.  The good news, again, is that it didn’t happen…not that torture, sadism and grotesque punishments were uncommon.  The price of unifying the social order through religion at that time, often included executing extreme pain and death on people under the supposed auspices of God, in Jesus name,  the same Jesus who himself suffered a barbarous crucifixion.  In my Catholic childhood, this crucifixion was memorialized all around me…right above the congregation was the bleeding, suffering Christ on the cross, the 14 stations of the cross around the walls, with Jesus being whipped, crowned with thorns, staggering, dying.  Statues of Christ holding up his bleeding hands.  Go into an old church in Europe and you may see stained glass windows of St. Sebastian pierced by numerous arrows, St. Lucy holding a plate with her eyes on it, St. John the Baptist’s head on a platter.  These were models for us of what people do for God.  If religion helps to unify the social order, the God that was created in early Christianity by the hierarchy of the social order, gave out a message about what he required and what you might expect from other human beings.

And again, there were in those times, as well as now, people who revere Jesus and see him and the religion of Christianity as one of love and justice. They often came in second place in the competition for who would reinforce the social order.

But God and Jesus keep getting recreated.

Our Unitarian and Universalist predecessors had their hands in the recreation… take a minute and look around at the stained glass windows in this church…agrarian scenes, caring for animals and people, seeking knowledge.  Not a single weapon, drop of blood or dismembered body part.  Unitarians and Universalists, along with Quakers and other more liberally theological people, not only moved the vision of God along a new path, but also showed that what we believe helps to create the social order, particularly when we act on our beliefs.  If your belief says that God is loving and we are all worthy, then you are unlikely to torture people to get them to accept your vision.

Other Jesuses are possible. The poem by Countee Cullen in this morning’s readings, is a request for a Jesus that is Black that will be even more believable to people who suffer.  Liberation theologians reenvisioned Jesus’ message as a ministry to the poor of the world, that Jesus had a preference for the poor.

God evolves in other religions.  There is only one Allah in the Muslim tradition, but what Muslims believe about how Islam will unify mankind is already a question in which the whole world has a stake.

But back to us.  I am not so naïve to really believe that any one religion or even a few religions would truly unify the whole world.  And who would want that?  What would be the balance between unity and diversity? And the change that’s always happening.  A cornerstone of our religion is that change in our beliefs is inevitable…. That revelation is not sealed.

We don’t claim as fact, as Harari says, a “belief founded on a superhuman order which is beyond human agreement.” We recognize the mystery and its unsolvability.  But I think we can claim a belief which, as it is founded on human agreement, has the potential to create a world which would foster cooperation, justice, and compassion.  We are always creating new ideas of God and what’s more, we usually welcome them.

I realize that this sounds more than a little like evangelizing.  And it kind of is.  But we are not saying that we have the one answer or that you must toe some particular line to join us.  I keep going back to a workshop that I attended at one of our General Assemblies, where the speakers were a UU minister, who is also a Jew and member of the local synagogue, a Muslim scholar, member of a mosque, a UU and also a teacher at the UU divinity school, and the then president of Starr King, who is also an ordained Methodist minister.  We don’t always look diverse in our individual churches, but we really can include a diversity of views, given a basic acceptance of the statements in our purposes and principles.  If, as Harari says, religions reinforce the social order, putting some laws above human caprice, wouldn’t a religion that had, as its creed, an acceptance of diverse views help create a great world?

My 4 year old grandson often sings while he plays with toys.  One day I heard him singing a bunch of random things….spiders crawling on walls, ABC’s, friends coming over.  Suddenly, in the midst of it, he was singing, “Open minds, we are open minds,” a little unusual for a 4 year old. Who can guess where that came from?   I asked and sure enough, he said it came from church… the children’s chalice lighting “We are Unitarian Universalists, the church of open minds, loving hearts and helping hands.”  When I told my own son, his father, about the song, my son said, somewhat facetiously, “Ah, yes, let the brainwashing begin.”  Okay, so we brainwash our children to have open minds.  We also brainwash them to be skeptical, helpful, just, joyful, scientific, democratic and to care for the earth.   At least I hope so.  Our superhuman order at work…this is what our god or goddess or transcendent mystery (or insert your own word) wants of us.  And sometimes we must lead with example and sometimes we must put it right out on the table and make a kind of rule about it. Yes, we will have open minds, yes we will have loving hearts.

I do come to church to be religious…to be joined with others in considering the mystery and in deciding to believe that, yes, people are basically good, we are all worthy, the world can be just. My story of God demands these beliefs.   I know there’s no real hard evidence for that, but I also know that it’s more likely to be true if I believe it to be true and act accordingly, and even more likely to become true if a whole bunch of us say together that we believe it and act accordingly, and even more likely to happen if a whole bunch of us say it, do it, and promote the idea to others.   And we do need to say it and to promote it if we are going to take over the world with our religion….just joking, sort of.

We are standing in our own circle of horizon, much like our circle of the four directions.  A step in any direction changes our horizon.  We can step our way through the world continually making new circles, with new horizons.  Considering the vast spaces out in the world, those of us within this small circle of space today are really quite numerous.   When we are here in this space, our own small circle, we have the opportunity to choose from an infinite number of possibilities about what we want to imagine, create, and honor as holy. By being together on Sundays and in all the other ways we act on the beliefs we create, we hold the possibility of creating a social order that looks like what we believe. That’s one, not the only, but one of the important reasons that I am here most Sundays.  For me, that’s the point.