Meditation: by Bill Holm a poem entitled “New Religion”
This morning no sound but the loud
breathing of the sea. Suppose that under
all that salt water lived the god
that humans have spent ten thousand years
trawling the heavens for.
We caught the wrong metaphor.
Real space is wet and underneath,
the church of shark and whale and cod.
The noise of those vast lungs
exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.
Heaven's not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.
Reading: by the sociologist Christian Smith from Moral Believing Animals. (This passage was quoted in the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt.) Here he tells a story, the story of Western society as told from the liberal progressive perspective.
Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. These traditional societies were reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditionalism… But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies. While modern social conditions hold the potential to maximize the individual freedom and pleasure of all, there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and repression. This struggle for the good society in which individuals are equal and free to pursue their self-defined happiness is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.
Reading: by the clinical psychologist Drew Westen from The Political Brain. (This passage was also quoted in the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt,) Here he offers the story of Western society as told in the socially conservative speeches of Ronald Reagan:
Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way…. Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardworking Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. Instead of punishing criminals, they tried to “understand” them. Instead of worrying about the victims of crime, they worried about the rights of criminals…. Instead of adhering to traditional American values of family, fidelity, and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex, and the gay lifestyle… and they encouraged a feminist agenda that undermined traditional family roles… Instead of projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform, burned our flag, and chose negotiation and multilateralism… Then Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.
Reading: A Story from China: “The Missing Axe” (from Favorite Folktales from Around the World, edited by Jane Yolen, p.412)
[Once upon a time, a] man whose axe was missing suspected his neighbor’s son. The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and spoke like a thief. But the man found his axe while he was digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor’s son, the boy walked, looked, and spoke like any other child.
Doing the Right Thing
A Sermon Delivered on October 6, 2013
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Those of you who come to church regularly and who have heard me preach in the past know that I try to offer a balanced and reasonable perspective from the pulpit. When addressing controversial issues, I try to acknowledge both sides of any argument.
For me, this is more than a rhetorical device. It is expression of faith. I don’t believe humanity can be neatly divided into opposing factions: those who are right, and those who are wrong, those who are evil and those who are good.
Unitarian Universalists say, we affirm the “inherent worth and dignity of every person.” This idea is a modern rendition of a much older religious notion – the notion that we are all God’s children. All human beings, men and women, black, brown, red, yellow, white, gay and straight, young and old, conservative and liberal – all of us are made in God’s image. Each of us carries a seed of divinity within, the world-soul exists within the individual-soul, Buddha nature is an integral aspect of human nature.
God loves all of us. And every single one of us, from the day we are born, long to be loved. Each of us wants to be treated kindly and fairly. Every one of us is endowed with an instinct for kindness, and justice, and love.
This profound religious idea, which exists in all the world’s great religious teachings, found particular expression in the words of our Universalist forebears. Historically, you recall, Universalists preached universal salvation. They said that because God is good and because God is love, none of us will be condemned to eternal hell-fire.
In the 1700s, hell-fire and damnation was the message preached from most Christian pulpits. People, at the time, thought the threat of damnation was an important way to persuade believers to lead morally upright lives. Without the fear of hell, the reasoning went, people would have no incentive to resist their sinful urges. Without the fear of hell, society would succumb to anarchy and immorality.
Our Universalist ancestors respectfully disagreed. They said that humans, in their deepest being, long to do good. Our very existence is an expression of love. Human happiness is most reliably found when we do the right thing.
My faith is grounded in the conviction that deep down each of us and all of us want to serve a common good. That’s why I am a big believer in the value cooperation and compromise. That’s what I preach from the pulpit. That’s what I believe.
* * *
But I have to tell you – sometimes I have a hard time practicing what I preach. Especially in a week like this, when the government itself has been shut down because of irreconcilable differences between our two political parties.
How is cooperation or compromise conceivable when the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, says we are locked in an epic battle? He claims he doesn’t want this battle. He says, “The American people don’t want their government shut down, and neither do I.”
But the Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid, dismisses the Republicans’ proposed resolutions as “kid’s stuff,” “one cockamamie, can’t-pass idea after another.” Reid accuses Boehner of being dragged around by a tribe of rogue “banana Republicans.”
And president Obama says he will not negotiate.
And while our political leaders are stuck in a stalemate, hundreds of thousands of federal worker aren’t being paid. Half of all civilian military workers, that’s 400,000 people, were furloughed. Nine out of ten Internal Revenue Service employees, over 85,000 men and women, were told to stay home. More than half of the people working for the Department of Health and Human services, over 40,000 people, are not being paid.
A good portion of the stalemate hinges on so-called Obamacare, a duly passed law that Democrats and the president staunchly support, for the sake of millions of American who need health care. The same law that a Republican representative from Indiana condemns as “one of the most insidious laws known to man.”
The shutdown is costing the still shaky US economy a billion dollars a day in lost wages for federal workers. But according to experts, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The total economic impact is easily ten times bigger.
The entire country, it seems, is irreconcilably divided. Each side blaming the other for the trouble we are in. Each side digging in its heals, refusing to budge. And truth be told – I am not immune to this dynamic. I myself see one of our political parties as right, and the other as wrong. I look at the news, and clearly see who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And I blame the bad guys.
* * *
Two weeks ago Dave Sharpe, the chair of our board of trustees, talked about how church is a team sport. It’s a metaphor he found described in a book by the same title. According to the metaphor, the minister of a church is the coach. Other program staff, like our Director of Religious Education and our planned Membership Coordinator, are assistant coaches. And our committee leaders are trainers, who organize our activities. But all of us are players. (After the service today, over a cup of coffee or tea, I hope you check out the displays in fellowship hall. Ideally the information will help you figure out which position you would like to play.)
Jonathan Haidt uses the same “team metaphor” to describe an essential aspect of religion. In a chapter entitled “Religion Is a Team Sport,” he writes, “a college football game is a superb analogy for religion.” Like religion, “college football is an extravagant, costly, wasteful, institution that impairs people’s ability to think rationally while leaving a long trail of victims (including the players themselves, plus the many fans who suffer alcohol-related injuries).” From a sociological perspective, a rousing football game does just what a religious rite is supposed to do: it flips a switch in people’s minds that makes them feel, for a few hours, that the are not isolated individuals, but “simply a part of a whole.”
Jonathan Haidt has a word for the sense of community created in such gathering that often involves thousands upon thousands of fans at tailgate parties, with lots of eating and drinking, and socializing and mingling leading up to the game, which then morphs into routines of massive chanting and cheering and singing. He calls it a “hive” mentality. The college rituals surrounding football games flip a “hive” switch in students’ minds, which ideally makes them feel deeply connected to the school, strengthening the school spirit, and ideally attracting better students and alumni support.
Like college football games, “religions are social facts.” Religion cannot be understood as a phenomenon among lone individuals any more than hivishness can be understood by observing a single bee.
Sometimes we may imagine that religion is above all concerned with what each of us believe about God, the universe, heaven and hell. Some of us hold beliefs that are scientifically sound. For others they involve supernatural scenarios - angels and demons and miracle healings.
But more important than our individual beliefs is the role religion plays both in strengthening the bonds of community and deepening our moral sensibilities.
Jonathan Haidt writes,
“If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you’re bound to misunderstand it… But if you [consider the insights of sociology and evolutionary theory] you get a very different picture. You see that religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years. That binding usually involves some blinding – once a person, a book, or principle is declared sacred, then devotees can no longer question it or think clearly about it.” (p. 317)
The stories we tell deepen our sense of community. They describe what it is we hold sacred. Our stories provide the framework for our sense of meaning and morality. They teach us right and wrong.
The stories we tell to make sense of our lives are not created in a vacuum. They are shaped by the stories we heard when we were children, the stories our elders told – whether fairy tales or family lore, or political morality tales that involved “evil empires,” or the discovery of our own God-given continent, a Promised Land for the Pilgrims. Or maybe stories about human progress and perfection, and a free and just society based on the self-evident truth that all men and women are created equal.
The stories we tell are expressions of the ideology we embrace. But we don’t simply embrace whatever stories and ideologies surround us. We don’t simply soak up the ideas of our environment. Some of us are genetically and neurologically inclined to enjoy novelty and diversity. Others are more sensitive to perceived threats and dangers. Thus we tend to gravitate toward those stories and life narratives that resonate with us.
Intuitively and unconsciously we are drawn to the grand narratives of either the left or the right. Once we join a religious or political team we get caught up in its moral matrix. We see confirmation of our own grand narrative everywhere, and it’s difficult – almost impossible – for someone outside our moral matrix to convince us that we are wrong. It is almost impossible for us to see from outside our own particular moral point of view.
From our vantage point – when we lose our axe, and watch our neighbor’s son go by, we can’t help but see him walk like a thief, look like a thief, and speak like a thief. And no matter what the boy says, it will sound like the words of a liar and a cheat. It will sound like someone, stubbornly digging in his heals, unwilling to budge, unwilling to take responsibility for his actions and errors.
Liberals often think moral persuasion is a matter of making a rational argument. As if we arrive at our sense of right and wrong through our powers of reason. But in fact our moral sensibilities are buried much deeper in our psyche than our intellectual ability to engage in critical thought. Our moral sense is a gut-level instinct.
Research has shown that when confronted with moral dilemmas, we make our decisions in the blink of an eye. Our moral intuitions arise instantaneously within us. We immediately have a feeling of what is right and what is wrong. Coming up with reasons for our decisions is a much slower process. Our moral arguments, more often than not, are justifications we struggle to come up with after the fact.
Morality both binds and blinds us, Jonathan Haidt writes. “It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.” (p. 366)
This is a tragedy, because we need more than one perspective in order to overcome the challenges that confront us. We need both liberals and conservatives. Haidt imagines them as yin and yang – two energies at work in the world that stand in stark contrast, and both of which are needed, each of which needs to be continually checked and balanced by the other. As John Stuart Mill put it, both are “necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”
If we allow our differences to divide us, we will all lose. As Lao-Tzu wrote in the Tao te Ching:
There is no worse disaster than misunderstanding your enemy;
To do so endangers all of [our] treasures;
So when two well matched forces oppose each other,
The [one] who maintains compassion will win.
To do so endangers all of [our] treasures;
So when two well matched forces oppose each other,
The [one] who maintains compassion will win.
Compassion is difficult when we feel so clearly right, and others seem so clearly wrong. And yet compassion is the path of religion at its best.
This is what the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou meant when he said, “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.”
May all our efforts to confront wrong
And to do right
Be guided by the spirit of love.
Amen.
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