“QUESTION BOX SERMON”
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday,
All
Some of you may know that one of my heroes of church history is a man by the name of Art Fry. Art Fry was a humble scientist at the 3M Company who invented the Post-It notes – the notepaper with a sticky side to post as reminders just about anywhere you want. Art Fry once revealed that this handy little revolution in human communication was dreamed up by him while attending church. He decided this might be a useful way for the choir to bookmark their hymnals. I refer to him as a hero of church history because he tied this invention to daydreaming in church. He said, “I don’t know if it was a dull sermon or divine inspiration, but my mind began to wonder.”
Ever since learning about Art Fry, I’ve never worried much about delivering a dull sermon. Even dull sermons may stimulate productive day-dreaming. And if people’s minds wander during one of my sermons, they have only themselves to blame if they can’t come up with an invention that will make them rich and famous. God knows I will have done my part.
For the last several years, I have used the last sermon of the church year to deliver what I’ve called my “Question Box Sermon.” The idea is to receive from you questions about anything I might have said, or anything you wish I would have addressed, and I will respond to them. Note that I did not say "answer" them. Like any sermon, I am not here to give answers but simply to reflect on questions to trigger thought among us.
In examining the questions I received, there are several preliminary observations to be made:
First, I note that most of the
questions I received had religious themes.
Nobody asked me "What is the chief export of
Second, I note with some sense of trepidation that, as a rule, people don’t ask me questions that have an answer -- or at least a verifiable answer. No one asked me "What is the square root of 1,024?" or "What year was William Ellery Channing born?" I would love to be able to do this sermon by simply reading questions and responding with "True" or "False," "Yes" or "No," and then we can sing the closing hymn. But alas, that is not to be. No, people generally wanted my view on certain questions for which there is no agreed upon answer. I'm not sure whether that makes my task easier or more difficult.
Third, some of these questions are worded in such a fashion that the author of the question has answered her or his own question, or at least provided me with a hint about the what the answer should be.
And finally, I must note that several of these questions are worthy of far more extended discussion, an entire sermon or an entire series of discussions, and I regret having to give them the short shrift this morning. I will not do them justice with the time allotted.
Following these preliminary comments, let's move on. I remind you that in this morning's reading, Lewis Thomas urges us, as a human species, to "celebrate our ignorance." It is in this spirit that I turn now to respond to your questions.
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I’ll begin by combining two questions together. The first questioner wonders about finding a balance between being rational in religion and being spiritual. The questioner says, “How do we keep the ‘spiritual awe-inspiring’ part of religion in a belief system that is based on ‘reason.’ I agree that religion must be rooted in reason, but I wonder if that sometimes blocks a spiritual connection with the unknown that is also important.”
A second questioner asks the flip side of this coin. UU surveys, the questioner points out, ask us to identify religious labels for ourselves, such as Theist, Humanist, Christian, Buddhist, Mystic, Eco-spiritual, atheist, agnostic, and so forth. Most surveys show that more UUs tend to attach themselves to the label Humanist than any other single one. My questioner observes that the leadership of the UUA tends to emphasize talk about spirituality and use of traditional religious language. “Are the UU leaders,” my questioner asks, “unconcerned with those of us who prefer a more rational than spiritual approach to Unitarianism?”
I join these questions together because, though they are each asking very different questions, it feels like they are wrestling with the same issues from different perspectives.
An appeal to reason as our guide is a foundation stone of the humanist philosophy. It is by this principle, primarily, that I can affirm the great humanist tradition that does, as the one writer says, have a substantial plurality in our denomination, and, for that matter, in All Souls.
And yet, reason guides us, but does not, and cannot, answer all questions. Reason operates, I believe, not so much to reveal what is true, but to help us avoid holding false or irrational beliefs. There are many aspects of being human that transcend what reason is designed to do. Reason can tell us what food is healthy or unhealthy, and therefore whether we should eat it. Reason cannot tell us what food gives us pleasure and satisfaction. Reason can tell us where to look for certain stars in the night sky, but it does not address why gazing at a brilliant starry night relaxes and inspires us. Reason, through science, has shown us that human beings have evolved over time from other species, but reason does not tell us the personal significance of being part of this interdependent web of existence.
There are parts to human experience that are neither rational nor irrational, but simply beyond the function of reason -- the experience of love, the experience of grief, the joy of achievement, the excitement of children, the wonder of life itself.
Both questioners, it seems to me, find some incompatibility between reason and spirituality. This is a very common dichotomy, I know, so common that I sometimes feel I must be missing something when I say I just don't see it as a dichotomy. Honoring reason and rejecting irrational beliefs does not prevent someone from seeking deeper meaning within life's mysteries. Seeking spiritual growth, finding joy in life's many mysteries does not make a person irrational. There are spiritual paths that are blatantly irrational -- contrary to reason -- that is true. But those irrational paths can be avoided by the many tests of reason.
The more significant point, it seems to me, is that all of us are different in our spiritual needs. What satisfies one person in finding meaning in life is not necessarily going to be helpful to the person sitting next to them in the pew, or in the chair next to them in the choir, or standing next to them in the kitchen, or co-teaching their class in R.E.
And even more significant than that is the existence of a religious movement that can respect those who honestly have different religious needs. That is what we are all about, it seems to me. That someone sitting next to me has different ideas is no threat to me. The only threat is when that person insists I have to agree with them. Or my insistence that they have to agree with me.
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One person asked if I can explain why intelligent people can read the Christian Bible with a literal interpretation; for example, believing that the creation story is actual history or that Jesus is the only path to salvation. How can smart people believe such ideas?
It’s a tough question, and I’m not sure I can explain it. It is true that otherwise intelligent people do hold such views. But it seems to me that many religious beliefs arise more from cultural conditioning than from rational thought.
I would like, though, to approach this question somewhat differently. I want to begin by looking at Christianity itself, before asking why people would look at it through the lens of literalism.
The center of Christianity, as taught by its founder Jesus, is the doctrine of love and compassion. When Jesus was asked, in his own version of a Question Box Sermon (more commonly called the "Sermon on the Mount"), what one must do to be saved, his answer was simply this: Love God and love your neighbor. When he elaborated on that answer, explaining what it means to "love your neighbor," he told the story of the Good Samaritan. "Loving your neighbor," this parable illustrated, means simply caring for the best interests of others, regardless of who they are or their circumstances. The center of the Christian religion is, I believe, the doctrine of love and compassion.
Though this doctrine of love exists in other religions, of course, Christianity has made it pivotal. As a consequence, Christianity has inspired much of the good works found in the world. It is the "Love Your Neighbor" principle of Christianity that founded great hospitals, distinguished schools, food banks and homeless shelters, and a vast array of services for the poor. Much of Christendom has taken the Good Samaritan story to heart. This Christian spirit is honorable, and honored, and the world is better for it.
All of which makes more curious the question I was given, why intelligent people would be attracted to literal interpretations of Biblical doctrine. A preliminary question, it seems to me, is the extent to which literal interpretations can be at odds with the central teachings of Jesus. To read the Bible as dividing humanity between the saved and the lost, between the believers and the heathens, between “us” and “them” appears to me a basic violation of the spirit of Jesus’ teachings about loving your neighbor.
My questioner is understandably puzzled about how people could accept doctrines, such as biblical creationism, that conflict with scientific conclusions, such as evolution. I share that bewilderment. There may in fact be something in the wiring of the human brain which, for many people, isolates religious thinking from other rational thought. I’m not sure.
What I do believe, though, is that a person’s specific religious beliefs are insignificant compared with their character and values. Someone who lives according to the doctrine of love as taught by Jesus has my respect, regardless of whether their theological beliefs are packaged as Mormons or Catholics or Buddhists or Pagans. Contrariwise, people who make doctrinal purity the test of religion have little in common with the religion of Jesus. Jesus had almost nothing to say about doctrine. Whenever spiritual worth is measured by what one believes about the historical truth of Genesis or the Pauline doctrine of atonement, Christianity as Jesus taught it is not being followed.
Let me be just a little more candid here. There are two myths that I accepted as a child that I rejected when I became an adult. The first myth is that to be a good person and to be accepted by God, one must subscribe to the right theological belief. As I learned more about the world and met a wide diversity of people, I found good people all around me holding religious beliefs far different from each other. I came to believe there is no identifiable correlation between the content of religious belief and the goodness and integrity of a person’s soul. There are Trinitarians who are good people, and there are Trinitarians who are not very good people. There are agnostics who are good people and agnostics who are not very good people. There are people holding specific beliefs who live good lives of loving their neighbor, and people holding the exact same theological beliefs who are judgmental and belittling of their neighbor, exhibiting not love, but contempt. I repeat, there is little or no correlation between theological belief and goodness of character.
The other myth was somewhat similar. I grew up thinking that people who are smart, who have good intelligence, are good people. Those with poor intelligence were not as good. Smart people are good; dumb people are bad. As I grew up and observed a wide range of people around me, I found again that there is no direct correlation between a person’s intelligence and the inherent goodness and integrity of a person’s soul. There are plenty of intelligent people who live selfish lives and there are plenty of not-so-intelligent people who live lives of profound integrity and compassion for others.
I now believe that the goodness of a person’s soul is something entirely separate from the theological content of religious belief and entirely separate from personal intelligence. This, I guess, is the best I can do in response to the question about how intelligent people can accept fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.
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I turn now to a question that turns the last question just a little on its head. Someone observes that we UUs are pretty good about practicing religious tolerance towards Judaism and Buddhism and Islam and other world religions, even paganism. Why is it so difficult for some of us to have the same tolerance towards Christianity?
It seems to me this is a nail upon which this questioner has hit the head. Why do so many of us seem to find it more difficult to muster up the same kind and amount of tolerance and respect toward certain brands of Christianity than we are able to hold for other world religions?
Part of the answer, I suppose, is that we live in a culture that is dominated by this one religion. For those outside the fold it is an “in your face” presence. Part of the answer is that many have at some point in life been spiritually wounded by some of the more rigid forms of Christianity, in a way we have not been wounded by the others. Part of the answer may be that for many of us, Christianity is family. We have higher expectations for family than we have for strangers, and our family has higher expectations for us. We are more easily disappointed by them, and they by us.
There are probably a number of factors we can use to answer this question of why tolerance and respect for Christianity seems to be more difficult for many of us than is tolerance and respect for other religions. However, more important than the answer to that question is coming to terms with its premise – accepting the fact that our levels of tolerance are unequal, and accepting that we are capable of some degree of intolerance. It is worth our while, I think, to devote careful reflection on that uncomfortable premise.
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The next question is a tough one, and one that begs to be addressed in a more complete sermon format. Here is what the questioner wrote:
“A question which nags at me and whose answer still leaves me unsatisfied is: How do we as UUs, without the crutches of some more traditional religions, deal with tragedy? The random horrible events that happen to us – how do we cope with these?”
I wish I had an answer. I wish you had asked me "What is the
chief export of
The questioner suggests that other religions offer easy answers to tragedy. I'm not so sure. But even if that were the case, it is true that we don't have certain answers, easy or not.
We must keep in mind, at least, that our religion is concerned about this life, far more than, or even rather than, the life hereafter. What that tells us, I think is that all of our experiences, the tender and the tragic, the holy and the horrible, are experiences that help us to better shape the world we live in, and shape our own character.
Evil, it seems to mean, is less something that happens to us than it is what happens when we give up hope, and forsake the task of taking life seriously.
This, I'm afraid, is all I can do for now with such a profound and important question.
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My last question is one which comes the closest to actually having an answer. My questioner was doing homework with their child who was studying Latin word derivatives. One such word derivation is the Latin root “Lux” for light, and when this person stumbled upon the name “Lucifer,” which is commonly used as a synonym for “the devil,” he wondered how the “Angel of Darkness” could have acquired a name that was derivative of “light.” Hence, being a religious conundrum as well, into the question box the query fell.
This is what I love about this job, by the way. Here is a question that would never have occurred to me in a million years, but not only do I get to learn some new fact (that I will probably forget by six o’clock this evening), but I can solve a puzzle for someone.
For questions like this, I get down on my knees and thank God for the internet. It seems that “Lucifer” is the Latin word for “morning star,” the bright morning light that glows from the planet Venus early in the morning. The word combines the Latin “Lux,” for “light” with the word “ferre,” meaning “to bring or carry.” The morning star carries light. Simple.
But where did the devil come into this? Lucifer was the name of the angel who rebelled against God. That was his name in heaven, before he fell from God’s kingdom. After the fall from heaven, Lucifer, the Angel of Light, took on the name Satan.
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So I draw the Question Box sermon of 2007 to a close. I hope that during the dull moments, some of you have, like Art Fry, found inspiration to invent something to make you rich and famous.
For me, I continue to find this to be an interesting and challenging format. It seems to me that the Question Box approach underscores something very important about our Unitarian religious tradition: that there is something sacred about the open and searching mind, that questions are the key to opening the door to truth, and that “seeking the truth in love” is a key element to church life at All Souls.
I close with a quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, which speak to us of the sacredness of questions and the role they play in our religious growth.
"Be patient with all the unsolved problems of your heart, and care for the questions themselves. Do not search for answers to be given to you: if given, they would be of no use, for you could not live them. For the present, live in the questions, and little by little, and almost unconsciously, you will enter the answers and live them also."
What we have been learning in our time is that we really do not understand this world, or how it works, and we comprehend our own selves least of all. And the more we learn, the more we are--or ought to be--dumbfounded.
It is the greatest fun to be bewildered. It is like a marvelous game, provided you have some way of keeping score, and this is what seems to be lacking in our time.
We are too reticent about our ignorance. Most things in the world are unsettling and bewildering, and it is a mistake to try to explain them away; they are there for marveling at and wondering at, and we should be doing more of this.
Here is a list of things, taken more or less at random, that we do not understand:
I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures of the planet – worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about; consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.
I can say that bird song is the music made by songbirds for their own pleasure, pure fun, also for ours, and it is only a piece of good fortune that the music turns out to be handy for finding mates or setting territorial markers.
I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs; the individual termite is a mobile neurine.
I can even assert out loud that we are, as a species, held together by something like affection and by something like love, and nobody can prove me wrong. I can dismiss all the evidence piling up against such an idea, all our destructiveness and cantankerousness, as error, error-proneness, built into our species to allow more flexibility of choice, and nobody can argue me out of this unless I choose to wander off to another point of view.
I am inclined to assert, unconditionally, that there is one central, universal aspect of human behavior, genetically set by our very nature, biologically governed, driving each of us along. Depending on how one looks at it, it can be defined as the urge to be useful. This urge drives society along, sets our behavior as individuals and in groups, invents our myths, writes our poetry, composes our music.
If you are looking about for really profound mysteries, essential aspects of our existence for which neither the sciences nor the humanities can provide any sort of explanation, I suggest starting with music. The professional musicologists, tremendous scholars all, for whom I have the greatest respect, haven't the ghost of an idea about what music is, or why we make it, and cannot be human without it. Nobody can explain it. It is a mystery, and thank goodness for that.
The thing to do, to get us through the short run, the years just ahead, is to celebrate our ignorance. Instead of presenting the body of human knowledge as a mountainous structure of coherent information capable of explaining everything about everything if we could only master all the details, we should be acknowledging that it is, in real life, still a very modest mound of puzzlements that do not fit together at all.
The thing to do, to get us through the short run, is to celebrate our ignorance.