First Reading: About and by Red Green
Second Reading: "What I Believe" by E. M. Forster
Final Reading: Kitchen Table Wisdom by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen
One State, Two State; Red State, Blue State. The red state, blue state idea is a popular, if somewhat crude concept; but it contains some truth too. At the beginning of the twenty first century Americans find themselves divided, often bitterly so, along the fault line of political and religious difference. The differences are now so sharp that in casual public contact Americans seldom speak to each other of these things. Nowhere does this division become more treacherous than in the workplace where our division over politics and religion meets our need to provide for our families and ourselves. One of the blessings in my life as a retired person who works part-time is that I have to face this problem just twice a week and if things get out of hand the consequences are less dire. However, I can't avoid this situation entirely, and the initial idea for this sermon came from one such situation that I encountered recently.
Less than a year ago on a chilly but pleasant morning I arrived at my worksite eager to take up the day's tasks. As I went through the front door, I noticed that a number of my co-workers had gathered in the reception area where they seemed all abuzz about something. As I approached I was asked: "Have you heard?" "Heard what," I asked. I was then informed that one of our colleagues had been killed that morning in a bizarre and tragic accident in which he had been run over by his own car. A deep sense of shock and sadness permeated the room. After some conversation I made my way downstairs to my little dungeon office, logged the date in my notebook, started up my computer, and then headed upstairs to make myself a cup of tea. The day had barely started and my early morning optimism had all but evaporated.
Upstairs I prepared my tea and put it in the microwave. I slumped in the chair while I waited the two minutes for the water to heat. Before the tea was ready another of my co-workers, whom I'll call George—but not necessarily to protect the innocent—appeared and asked if I'd heard the news. I replied that I had indeed. What followed was as strange and bizarre as the accidental death. The next question George put to me was what did I think Minister Bob would say about this death. Now, Minister Bob is another colleague, also retired, who now works part-time as a Christian minister. I had always been on good terms with Minister Bob and knew him to be a kind and gentle person who only occasionally went a bit too far with Christian proselytizing for my taste. So I really wasn't prepared for what followed when I said that I didn't know what he would say. Here's what George said he would say. To family and friends of the deceased, Minister Bob would be kind, consoling, and gentle; but to us he would say that because our deceased colleague was Jewish and hadn't accepted Jesus as his savior he was damned for all eternity.
I'm glad I wasn't drinking my hot tea at the moment this comment was made because I'm sure with all the sputtering I did that it would have made quite a mess. After a moment or two passed I asked, "How could Minister Bob possibly know such a thing. Aren't these matters up to God's mercy and judgment? How could any human being be so presumptuous? When I was a young Catholic boy I was taught that this kind of thing is called blasphemy. Isn't it also a bit presumptuous for you to put words in Minister Bob's mouth? And, by the way, wasn't Jesus also a Jew?
I'm sure you can sense that by this time the conversation is getting a bit heated and threatening to get out of control. I don't think George liked my questions much. He responded with, "Minister Bob's faith is firm because he has the absolute truth of God's word in the bible; and, to divert my attention, he put in a question of his own, "What do you think happens after a person dies?" I answered, "You didn't answer my questions, but I'm going to answer yours." Now, I had the sense that I was being baited with this question and that there was a certain expectation about how I would respond.
Surely what I said next must have seemed to George as if it was coming from left field, as it was intended to. "Have you ever seen the Red Green Show on public television?" "You mean that slapstick Canadian comedy with the all-male cast where they do all those ridiculous handyman projects involving huge quantities of duct tape? What's that got to do with my question?" "That's the one," I said, and "I'll tell you how it fits in: One of the segments often done on the show is called The Experts, in which a moderator puts what are supposedly viewer questions to a panel of experts played by regular members of the show's cast. Often the questions are about relationships, about which we all know men know nothing. The point is, of course, that the experts don't really know anything about the subject, but they babble on incessantly providing ridiculous, comic answers as if they know. The Experts segment is devoted to those three little words that a man can't say, "I don't know." That's the answer to your question, "I don't know, and I don't think that you or Minister Bob or anyone else truly knows the answer to your question." That ended the conversation, if not agreeably and satisfactorily, at least peacefully.
Not all Christians are so intolerant nor has Christian doctrine on life after death always been so certain. The Venerable Bede, an eighth century Christian monk known as the "Father of English History" and a Doctor of the Church gave the following speech to the English king and his leading men: "Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter's day with your thanes and counselors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly through one door of the hall, and out through the other. While he is inside, he is safe from winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing." Yes, we know nothing—some realities about human life don't change.
Doesn't the incident with George with which I began this morning remind you of our Universalist roots? When John Murray began traveling along the eastern seaboard in the late eighteenth century preaching the doctrine of Universal salvation he ushered in a strain of religious thought every bit as revolutionary as the war that was then being waged for our political independence. Later the doctrine spread beyond Universalism itself; many Unitarians accepted universal salvation. This teaching did more to free human beings from an age-old tyranny of the mind than any other I can think of. Without the threat of hell fire and damnation, individuals were no longer compelled to see themselves as the actors in a vast cosmic drama of life and death, grace and salvation, judgment and punishment; they were freed as never before to accept or reject religious teaching on its merit. They could face religious questions with an openness and an honesty only previously dreamed of. We know from our perspective two centuries later that the full freeing power of Universalism has not yet been realized. The incident with George is vivid testimony to this fact.
To those who accepted this teaching the door of religious response had been opened to admit a freely given answer of "I don't know;" and dogma and creed, however slowly, began to lose their central place in religious thought. But without dogma and creed what happens to faith? Critics would say that, pardon the expression, the road to the hell of faithlessness had been found. And I agree, the need for faith was waning. In the nineteenth century Matthew Arnold expressed the loss of faith poetically: "...The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. /But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, ..." While the ebb of faith saddened Arnold, I see this as progress. In the twentieth century Albert Einstein stated the situation as: "The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
In our own time we have seen a resurgence of the tide of blind faith. With the globalization of our world, the availability of rapid transportation and information transfer, our world has turned ever more dangerous; and religion has contributed to our precarious situation. Religion based on blind faith is by its very nature a divisive enterprise. Dogmas clash with each other and their adherents insist that those who believe other things are wrong, often backing their words with force and violence. Recently Richard Rodriguez has written that, "religion is not only something that can ennoble our humanity; religion is sometimes a dangerous preoccupation, a madness."
We have seen over and over in modern times just how dangerous this can be, how religion can turn person against person, group against group, and nation against nation in violent confrontation, examples abound from the holocaust, to the Irish "troubles," to the bombing of abortion clinics, to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Rodriguez also writes that over time and across cultures, "...what persists is the blasphemy of believing that murder is prayer." We need to break the chain of this blasphemy with a more trusting and rational approach to religion. It is frightening to contemplate the future of humanity if we do not. We must struggle every day to avoid the fate Mathew Arnold describes in the last lines of Dover Beach: "And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, /Where ignorant armies clash by night."
Just how do we break this chain of blasphemy? Well, we need do nothing new really, just follow and promote our religious heritage: our Universalist heritage inspires trust; and our Unitarian heritage inspires a search for rational knowledge. Why shouldn't we place our trust in a universe, which has given us our precious life and continues to sustain and nurture that life? In the telling of the sparrow's parable, Venerable Bede said, "This sparrow flies swiftly through one door of the hall, and out through the other. While he is inside, he is safe from winter storms ..." Trust is also related to a somewhat controversial principle in cosmology and physics called the Anthropic Principle, which points out that the physical constants in our universe are, within narrow limits, just those that make life possible. If the physics of our universe were just a little different, none of us would be here this morning for this service.
Trust, it seems to me, lets us embrace life to the full and gives us the freedom to pursue rational answers to our religious questions. Saying I don't know in response to a religious question is the start of a search for a rational answer. It also says that we can exercise the patience and time of generations to find such answers. Our fate in an afterlife doesn't depend in some critical way in how we respond to some religious question now. In the interim we can certainly hold opinions about these matters, but it's of prime importance to recognize that these answers are provisional in nature and not the formulation of some final truth. Faith is not to be abandoned, just treated with some caution. Some faith is essential. All of our science depends on the faith that there is an order in Nature that we can discover. Faith surely does have a place in religious thought it's just that I believe that it's been blinded and used to push trust and reason out of the picture.
And, yes, it's sometimes hard to distinguish between trust and faith. I'll not quibble over this. What I'm describing is more of an intuitive rather than an intellectual approach to religious life. Intuition is important in many facets of our lives including science. "I believe in intuition and inspiration..." said Albert Einstein, "At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason." But it's an intuition formed by being in touch with reality. Truth as revealed by science is also commonly misunderstood. Scientific truth is not the constantly shifting intellectual quicksand that it is often made out to be by the advocates of faith. Established scientific truth, as we know it today in physics, advances by finding a larger truth within which the older truth is embedded. I think science is a model for truth as human beings can discover it, and I include religious truth within the realm of what we can discover by an open-minded struggle within the light of reason. Trust can make such an advance in religious thought possible; while the possession of faith, an absolute truth derived from sacred books, creeds and dogma, freezes religious thought and makes such advance a near impossibility. Trust, in my opinion, opens up the potential of a vast new understanding of religion. Trust, it's a fine religious virtue; try it, you might like it.
A somewhat glib summary of my view is that I distrust faith and have faith in trust. But, I also think it's very human to try to avoid saying I don't know. We often find ourselves blurting out answers when we know we shouldn't be saying anything. Now from the handyman's corner Red Green Theology can by a careful use of the handyman's secret weapon, duct tape, give us a solution to this problem. Here it is: a piece of duct tape with the words, "I don't know" written on it. To use this handyman's solution just place the tape over your mouth and press into place. Trust me it works. As Red Green would say, "If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy."
But there are those tough questions that cry out for answers now, even though we can answer them neither scientifically nor religiously. One such question is: When does human life begin? Attempts to answer this question have led to the current controversies about stem cell research and abortion. Religious answers are poles apart on this issue. Some say that life begins at conception. In contrast we learn from the biblical book of Genesis, that life begins with the first breath, which for humans occurs after birth. Recently the psychologist, David Barash, has pointed out that conception isn't a simple process, which makes it difficult to say with precision when conception occurs.
I think you begin to answer the question of the morality of stem cell research or abortion by recognizing that one can seldom achieve the ideal of doing no harm. In order to live, to provide ourselves with food, clothing and shelter, we must do some harm to both the planet and living things on the planet. It's the way the world is made. The food chain, in which life feeds on life, is an ever-present reality of our day-to-day existence. What we must do in a moral sense, it seems to me, is to strive to minimize the harm we do. This requires us to visualize the future to some extent and to use our moral judgment to balance the harm. In the case of stem cell research this comes down to halting the potential for a life versus the potential for giving life and easing suffering for a large number of existing lives. In the matter of abortion a similar balance must be made, but on a much more personal basis. Until a more definitive answer to the question of life's beginning is available, individuals can be expected to see this moral balance differently and to give different answers. What cannot be said is whether these judgments are right or wrong in any absolute sense. Finding some approach to what seem to be life's unanswerable questions is truly one of the most vexing problems in human life.
Trust and reason, it seems to me, give us the opportunity to abandon dogmatic differences, to come together to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful in this life as best we can. Trust and reason have the power to heal warring humanity's religious differences. All we need do is be willing to trust and to develop some tolerance for each other's opinion. As for anything that may follow this life, I trust. Trust gives us the potential for a renewed religious life, to leave behind dogmatic answers about salvation of the individual in another world and to turn to this world and the betterment of the whole human community. In the end it's deeds not creeds that will save us. Or in the immortal words of Red Green, "Keep your stick on the ice; we're all in this together." May it be so.
Copyright © 2005 Merrill Milham. All Rights Reserved.