by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

This morning may we be reminded once again

That we are not isolated beings

But connected, in mystery and miracle

To the universe,

To this community,

And to one another.

Come now, and let us worship together!

Some of you know that I spoke at the Multnomah Bible College yesterday at their symposium—it was entitled “Building Beloved Community: Calling for an End to the Culture Wars.”  I had accepted the invitation casually, and then as the time of the conference drew near, I began to think: “The Multnomah Bible College—who are these folks, anyway?” So I gave a call to the organizer, a Dr. Paul Metzger, who is a professor at the College. I asked Dr. Metzger, “Tell me, what are the students like at the Multnomah Bible College?  What are their basic beliefs and their religious orientation?”

“Well, there are various beliefs,” he said.

“Well, there must be some patterns,” I answered.  “I need to know who my audience is.  Look, let’s start with salvation.  What do most of the students and faculty believe about salvation?”

“Well,” Dr. Metzger responded, “I would say that pretty much all of them would say that if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior, you would be saved. Of course there is some question about those people who have never heard of Jesus, whether they would be damned.”  I paused. 

“Now let me get this straight,” I said. “Let’s take someone like Gandhi.  Gandhi was very well informed about Christianity and he knew all about Jesus. And yet he decided to remain a Hindu. Are you saying that Gandhi is in Hell?”  There was silence on the other end of the phone for a few seconds, then a hesitant answer.

“Well, I would have to say that, yes, Gandhi did remove himself from God,” Metzger answered.

“So you are saying that Gandhi is in Hell . . . you don’t really believe that, do you?”  And the conversation went downhill from there. Homosexuality—it’s a sin. Abortion—it’s a sin. So I said to Dr. Metzger, “I am concerned about how I am supposed to bridge the cultural divide.  This cultural divide is huge!”

“Well, there is one thing that we can surely come together on,” said Dr. Metzger. 

“What would that be?”  I asked. 

“Well, poverty. We both care about helping poor people.”

“Let me ask you this, then,” I said.  “Would most of the folks at the Multnomah Bible College be supportive of Mr. Bush and his policies? 

“Yes,” he said, “I think you could safely say that.

“Well, then, wouldn’t that be just a bit of a . . . contradiction?” I answered.

“I’ll have to agree with you there,” said Metzger.  And then he asked, “Look, are you still going to speak?  Your name is in the program.”

“Yes,” I said, “I am going to speak, but it will be hard for me to speak, and I will have to say why it is so hard.”  He seemed relieved that I would at least show up, and we ended the conversation amicably. 

Since that time I was awakened in the middle of the night on two different occasions and both times got up and wrote a speech—and then I tore up both copies.  I tried a third time.  And that was the speech I finally gave yesterday.  This speech was not just a rhetorical challenge, you see, but it was a spiritual challenge.  I was challenged to be loving and compassionate and open-minded toward the very people who are the strongest supporters of the present administration in Washington, one that has trashed everything I have ever worked for in my life.  You’ve got to understand that I am a fighter by nature, and now I was being asked walk into the enemy camp, and to be nice. 

Why was this so hard for me?  Where were the anger and the fear coming from?  I needed to look inside myself and try to find out. First of all, I found the wounds from two childhood religions, Catholic and Southern Baptist, both of whom told me when I was just a child that I was going to hell if I didn’t sign up with them. And then there was the way I was rejected as a sinner by the Baptists when I got a divorce.  I shared those personal wounds with the Bible College yesterday—not in an angry way, but I shared my pain, my hurt.  I came from the heart.

But there’s more than my personal pain here.  I can’t talk about these issues in some cool, cerebral way, some emotionally detached way. You see, a person’s theology is not just some nice idea that he or she holds in a vacuum.  A person’s theology determines how that person treats others—maybe others of a different skin color.  It determines how that person makes ethical decisions.  It determines that person’s politics. For example, if one believes that gays and lesbians are sinners, then that sets up a context, a cultural milieu in which God Himself disapproves of gays and lesbians, sanctioning from Heaven itself the violence that might be done to them, the perpetrators then left unhindered by “good people.”  It’s that context that strung Matthew Sheppard out on a fence to die in Laramie, Wyoming, strung out very like Jesus hanging on the cross. So yes, it was hard for me to speak. I told them that yesterday. I reminded them of Ballot Measure 9, designed to remove civil liberties from gays and lesbians, a ballot measure so strongly supported by Christians in Oregon. I told them how gays and lesbians from my church were frightened by the hate and violence during that time, and how sometimes they would come through the line to greet me after the sermon, and I would hold them weeping in my arms.  I said, “You hurt them. And when you hurt my people, you hurt me.”

But this conference was about healing.  So how could we come together?  I decided that the best preparation was for me to reread the gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—to remind myself of the words of Jesus, because Jesus is what I have in common with the Multnomah Bible College. I love Jesus and so do they.  But the question is, who is this Jesus that we both love? So I entitled my speech “Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up!”   More about this later.

Today I want to explore with you the dangers of ideology—not just religious ideology, but any kind of ideology.  We can all fall into a kind of narrowness of thinking—that’s true of the left as well as the right. There are some publications on the left, for example, that I will not read, just because they are so predictable.  Ideology is a predictable way of looking at a given subject matter.  It brooks no dissent. It is not open to doubt or correction.  We must understand that any idea or concept is merely an arbitrary way of viewing a problem or situation. A concept is a tool for understanding—it is not truth itself.  But the temptation is to reify a given concept—that is to say to treat an abstract idea as though it were something concrete or real. 

We do this because we want to make sense of our world.  We want to move from confusion and chaos of this world to some container of wisdom that will somehow make our lives have meaning and purpose. And so we may become a true believer, one who gives full and unquestioning allegiance to a nation, a religious belief, or a political ideal. We are especially vulnerable to adopting a ruling ideology when we are feeling frightened or weak or when our life seems to spin out of control or is yawning before us with no meaning.

Writer Susan Griffin, in her essay “The Way of All Ideology” speaks of what happens to an individual who denies self and embraces an idea:  “I can be angry. I can hate. I can rage. But the moment I have defined another being as my enemy, I lose part of myself, the complexity and the subtlety of my vision.  I begin to exist in a closed system.  When anything goes wrong, I blame my enemy.  If I wake troubled, my enemy had led me to this feeling.  Slowly all the power in my life begins to be located outside and my whole being is defined in relation to this outside force, which becomes daily more monstrous, more evil, more laden with all the qualities in myself I no longer wish to own.  The quality of my thought, then, is diminished.  My imagination grows small.  My self seems meager.  For my enemy has stolen all these.”

Way back in 1951 a longshoreman named Eric Hoffer, a self-taught intellectual and writer, published a book called The True Believer. It is a classic statement of the making of an ideologue. Hoffer points out that, more than anything else, people need hope in their lives.  They need meaning.  He believes that as the cultural patterns that have held people weaken, people become fearful, and conditions become ripe for the rise of a mass movement and the establishment of a new form of unity. The rise of the Nazi party is an obvious example. The relief of the true believer does not come from new strength and wisdom but from a sense of deliverance from the burdens of an autonomous existence, says Hoffer. The success of any given movement may be judged not by the rightness of its principles but by how much refuge it offers from the emptiness and anxiety of an individual existence.  The viability of a movement depends upon not the truth of its doctrine, but rather by its organizational machine—that is, how easily are people drawn in, and kept in.

I see wisdom in his words for our day.  As I look upon our contemporary scene, I see technology changing our lives at an alarmingly rapid rate, including biotechnology, which is fussing around with the very nature of life itself.  I see family structures breaking apart and coming together in new forms.  I see women and minority groups claiming their power and dignity and demanding the equality promised them by the radical freedom articulated by our founders.  All of this change is unnerving and unsettling.  It is easy to see why fundamentalist religion has taken hold so powerfully in this country. And it is easy to see how the Religious Right has become so influential in American life and politics.  Its organizational machine is formidable indeed, and it has struck a strong chord of fear.   

Hoffer also comments on the relationship of violence to fanaticism.  Violence intensifies, invigorates the faith of the true believers and the more blood they shed, the more they need to believe that their principles are absolutes.  Only the self righteousness that comes with absolute truth can absolve them of the spilling of blood.  Think Crusades.  Think “Divine Right” of the first settlers in this country.

Let me go back for a moment now to my speech at the Multnomah Bible College.  What was so terrifying for me in taking on this task is that I was afraid that I might dehumanize the Bible College folks, might make them into the “other,” the “not me.”  And I knew that that would be a spiritual trap, that it would negate any good I might bring to the conversation.  So where could I find a heart big enough, loving enough, compassionate enough to be with them yesterday without my body armor, just a human being struggling to make my life meaningful, just as they were.  That’s why I began my talk, “I’m one of you.  I grew up Southern Baptist.” And that’s why I confessed my woundedness to them.  And that’s why I talked about Jesus.  I know I touched a few hearts, and I know I was touched by the other presenters, so the experience that I dreaded turned out to be a blessing—not just in being there in that setting, but in the self-examination I was forced to do, and in the thinking I did about our own faith.  Are we “true believers”?

Well, I am aware that I have given myself to something larger than myself. Furthermore, I have often suggested to you that this is the way of freedom and light and peace.  So how am I, how are we, different from Eric Hoffer’s true believer?  I think there is a difference.  As Unitarian Universalists we give ourselves over to relationship with the Holy.  We know that revelation is not sealed, that truth is ever evolving, and so we wish to learn and grow.  We obey no authority higher than the dictates of our own conscience.  We refuse to suppress our creativity, our imagination, and our rational minds to follow any individual or adhere to any doctrine.

Furthermore, we choose not to escape an autonomous existence, not to escape our individuality, but in fact to develop that individuality as deeply and richly as we possibly can.  Yes, we do find meaning in commitment and in community, yes, we do find meaning in group activities here at church—everything from choirs to peace marches—but we ask ourselves, to what end is this organization given? What is our mission? Am I contributing to the greater good?  In this group am I respected as an individual, or am I required to conform to structures or beliefs which are alien to my nature? 

I stand before you today saying unequivocally—quoting Jesus of the scriptures, which I have been reading, as you know—that you must lose your life in order to find it.  But this statement is not true because Jesus said it—rather, Jesus said it because it is true.  In other words, truth comes to us not through authority, but through the Divine Spark within each one of us, through that intuitive knowing within each one of us.  And if we lose ourselves, we do not lose ourselves to a movement, to an idea, to specious nationalism, nor to any construct that would impose upon us a truth that is not our own.

We lose ourselves, I hope, to the Spirit, in whatever manifestation we are led. We judge the rightness of our motives and actions by the fruits thereof. Are we serving the greater good? Is the world a more loving place because we are in it?  Is kindness a greater virtue to us than being right? Are we growing in our ability to forgive ourselves and others? We walk this road of life, and it is lonely, save for those who walk with us. These friends in the faith help us by their affirming presence to unfold and to become true—not to another and not to an idea—but at the ground, at the root, true to ourselves and to our God.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we pray for peace in our hearts this day.  We pray that we might be able to stretch ourselves to reach out beyond what is comfortable, to venture into new worlds.  We are thankful for our free faith.  May we be true to it, and true to the leadings of our heart, for we know the heart has but one message—live with more compassion, more love, with each passing day.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

And now as you leave this holy place, know that you carry all the truth, all the wisdom you need, in your own person—trust the Divine Presence within.  Go in love, and go in peace.  Amen.