A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
April 4, 2004
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
April 4, 2004
There is a holy day in the cycle of Christian observances that whisks past so quickly you hardly notice it. Tucked between two biggies — Palm Sunday and Easter — Good Friday doesn't even have the courtesy to come on a Sunday so you can think about it.
Although you will have a chance to reflect on it this Friday evening at half past seven in the Great Hall — in a different sort of way that this morning.
Whatever foundation in fact, that famous story, which isn't exactly history, is, after all, the invention of the earliest Christians, who were in the act of creating a myth about the founder of their new religion, the Galilean teacher they turned into a God-Man, who had died to make atonement for their sins and whom God had exalted to be Lord of all heaven and earth, and who would pretty soon return to establish his kingdom. Things had happened since his death 35 to 70 years earlier. They were writing in the aftermath of a horrific war. So that famous story of his death and resurrection was more about that war, and their struggling and suffering and hope in the shadow of that terrible war than about an event the Gospel writers never saw and a man they never knew.
Sure. There probably was a crucifixion. There were thousands of executions by crucifixion during the cruel Roman occupation of Palestine and especially during the sadistic administration of Pontius Pilate who was recalled to Rome because of his cruelty. Later there were thousands more during the Jewish-Roman War. It was in the shadow of that war that the Gospels were written.
I think it's likely that this Galilean teacher Jesus died paying a price for shaking the tree and very likely upsetting both the political and the religious establishment — which was easy because they were one. See — the Jewish temple was actually run by the an aristocratic cabal appointed by the Romans, the Herodian priesthood that was hopelessly corrupted by its accommodation to the Roman occupiers who had appointed them, and deeply resented by a large part of the Jewish population. No, "the Jews" were not responsible for the deathof Jesus — no matter what the Bible says.
But this isn't about that and I'm not going to dwell on that story. If we could find the actual historical Jesus, which we can't, and about whom we know next to nothing, I doubt he would have wanted much to do with the mythology or the church that grew up in his name. After all, Jesus' teaching was about a kingdom of God that begins within you and that flows from a person as a flood of love and forgiveness.
But there is a suffering servant, a burden-bearer, in the human soul. But Good Friday, which is five days from now, is a good time to reflect on three themes that have meaning for everyone. They are sacrifice, suffering, and redemption.
Behind all that story — there lives some fundamental truth about life, something we can feel in our bones, something that we need now if our lives and our world are going to make it and live into the future that is possible for us.
It is not that God became flesh two millennia ago in the form of Jesus and bore the sins of the world on the cross, full stop, end of story. Originally, and for millions still today, the weight of that religious idea rests almost entirely on what one man did long ago and far away, and on how to benefit from what he did so as not to face the wrath of an angry God.
That theology leaves in its wake a human family divided by a chasm as wide as the utter separation between heaven and hell, saved and lost. I mean, it imprinted on human consciousness the sense of us and them, the special chosen people and the heathen, as utterly separate.
Not all modern Christians think that way, but you could feel it in the people holding the chilling signs at the State House this past week: there was no question about whether they meant it. And if millions of more liberal Christians today see this story more as a metaphor for redemptive suffering and hope, I believe the change owes in a big way to a few centuries of Unitarians and Universalists pushing the boundaries of religious thought.
Always there were those who worried about the idea of a God of wrath who was prepared to torture his own son to death, sacrificing him just to appease his own wrath, to pay a debt to himself. To quote Carl Jung,
From a God who is a loving father, who is actually Love itself, one would expect understanding and forgiveness. So it comes as a nasty shock when this supremely good God only allows the purchase of such an act of grace through a human sacrifice, and, what is worse, through the killing of his own son. . . . This is an insufferable incongruity which modern [people] can no longer swallow, for [we] must be blind if [we do] not see the glaring light it throws on the divine character, giving the lie to all talk about love and the Summum Bonum [the ultimate Good]."1.
That reads very like the words of the early Universalists and Unitarians who encountered, and rejected, that theology!
That theology was quite the point of the famous Northampton Puritan divine, Jonathan Edwards. I'm sure you're read his famous sermon in 1741, where he declared:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathesome insect over the fire, abhors, you, and is dreadfully provoked; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are a thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venemous serpent is in ours. It is to be ascribed to nothing else but his hand, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world. And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship.
Now — I cannot accept the idea of a God so self-righteous that, again in the words of Carl Jung, he "would rather his son were slaughtered than forgive his ill-advised creatures." Nor can I accept the notion that a righteous God stands over all human activity, judging it all as inadequate and even rotten. And can you really accept a dualism that has all the goodness on one side of the equation and all the evil on the other? I would like to know how a God like that would explain earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, plagues, and disease.
No, I have to start with one Universe in which there is both light and shadow, one reality that embraces all that is. The Universe, or God, or whatever word you wish to use, comprehends all that is, not just the things we like or approve of.
I am no more interested than was Channing in worshipping a God who has his own son nailed to the cross to bear the burden of his own violence and self-righteousness.
So there you have it. We can be done with all this stuff about crosses and sacrifice and bearing the burden.
Not so fast.
Health and salvation come in embracing reality as it is. We must have our moment when, like Margaret Fuller, we decide to accept the Universe. To accept it outside ourselves, with its scars and shadow, and so forgive; and to accept it within ourselves — to acknowledge that we, each of us personally, has a shadow, that we are capable both of great good and great evil. That, given different circumstances, the person just convicted of some heinous crime could have been us. The Universe bears within itself a deep conflict, a divine conflict. Our higher instincts seem at war with our lower ones. There is a way to healing and salvation, but it is the way of forgiving, accepting, and reconciling the opposites — not the way of self-righteous denial, blame, and condemnation.
It is the way and the spiritual path pursued by Mohandus K. Gandhi, who said:
Suffering is the badge of the human race. Sacrifice is the law of life. It runs through and governs every walk of life. We can do nothing or get nothing without paying a price for it. . . . If we would secure the salvation of the community to which we belong, we must pay for it, that is, sacrifice self. . . . no matter what the risk may be.
And he said,
To make any progress we must not make speeches and organize mass meetings but be prepared for mountains of suffering.
Gandhi, of course, made many speeches and organized innumerable mass meetings. But his ultimate aim was to work healing and redemption by means of suffering, by bearing the burden. Yes, we have to shake the tree, speak our truth, exercise discernment and judgment. But that is not the whole equation: the rest of it is redemptive suffering, bearing the burden. This is the passion that drove Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and Emerson and Parker and Nelson Mandela and it's the passion that makes us true to ourselves, true to our destiny.
It is a way that has, throughout history, been pursued by multitudes of unknown and unheralded men and women in the course of their daily lives who have made the choice to bear more than their share of the burden. It is the path that makes human community possible.
But how is anyone capable of living this way? There are days, honestly, when I'd really like to have a small tactical nuclear weapon, drop a bomb somewhere. How is it possible to overcome our own insecurities, our own resentments, our own fear, our own readiness to cave in and take the easy way out of painful conflicts, or to lash out, strike out, hurt and destroy?
The great moments of our lives come quickly. They are about situations faced, choices made, deep inner intents lived out in a moment.
And those moments are preceded by longer periods of preparation and spiritual conditioning. In the traditional church year the symbol for this is Lent, when Jesus struggles alone with his own identity and purpose and intent, those quiet and often unseen moments when we reckon with our own inmost gods and demons. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is led by the Spirit into the Wilderness where he is tempted by the devil for forty days and forty nights. But who can do that? For us, the times of reckoning are not so neatly organized. There is an economic and cultural tyranny that does everything possible to keep us from the wilderness. But we have to get there. My struggles, my wilderness reckonings, and yours, come in every moment. And all the gods and demons and the Spirit are all within us, and we must reckon with them.
So it is that Adrienne Rich wrote of a woman she knew,She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.
Spiritual conditioning, cultivating this quality of consciousness in ourselves, is an activity as urgent for us as eating or sleeping. It is in our time a neglected activity. For a long time our religious movement prized its intellectual achievements, its relentless inquiry, nearly to the exclusion of this cultivation of our inner life, spiritual conditioning. But that has been changing, and dramatically. We are rediscovering arts of meditation, and finding time for reflection, reading, and other ways of nurturing an authentic spiritual life. There are many ways to do it.
When we do, we are more authentically ourselves. And within us are great powers for good or, when we lack an inward harmony, vast powers for ill.
We are often told that the words "should" and "ought" and "duty" ought to be torn out of the dictionaries of the world and deleted from our minds. But when we pop psychology to the look at things from a deeper place in ourselves, from the viewpoint of a larger Self, we see the world differently. I feel my part in the larger whole. I feel responsible to the larger Life of which I am a part. Sometimes I feel the sense of call to some task, some work. Sometimes I feel the call to break the mold of conformity and challenge things as they are, for a larger purpose. If the cause is a larger justice, the challenging of a prejudice or injustice, I know that it will not do just to lash out. I must be driven by a larger imperative, a sense of the whole, a power of healing that may have to begin by challenging the powers that be but that does so because I am driven by a vision of a larger human possibility, a greater healing.
A sacrifice is a holy offering, traditionally a burnt offering, one consumed by fire. And Norman O. Brown says, "To be alive is to be burning." To sacrifice is to be so in love with being alive, as Matt Fox puts it, "that one is willing to let go: to consume and be consumed . . . a letting go of will power and projects, in order to see creation ablaze. . . . It is not an appeasement of the gods . . . but a burning out of our own reluctances to let go."
There is an ancient Gnostic Gospel called the Acts of John, in which Jesus is telling his disciples,
Yours is this passion of humanity which I am to suffer. If you knew how to suffer, you would be able not to suffer.
So it was that Jesus said that the world we dream of, what he called the Kingdom, will only come by letting go, like a seed that must first lie darkly in the black soil underground.
There is yet so much darkness in this world and in our own inner worlds to face. There is yet so much work of healing and reconciliation to be done.
In the minutest moments of our lives, we may have to enter some of that darkness, bear some of that burden of Life's own conflicts. And who knows at what hour some larger call, some invitation to an act of greatness, may beckon any one of us?
It is to prepare us for those moments — both the minute and the great — that religion, I think, is all about.
"Duty," wrote Samuel Johnson,
means the essential allegiance of the [person] to his own proper integrity as in accord with the spiritual universe. What the consequence of following the right with loyalty may be, [duty] may not know nor ask. `There is a sweet and holy blindness in its love.'
Duty flows from fidelity to what we are, and where we find ourselves in this world. It does not flow from mere obedience to others, or to society's expectations, and it's likely to be in conflict with such obedience to external authority.
It's free because it's not compelled by some force outside yourself, but there is something commanding about it.
There are moments
and seasons
when you know that to sit around and weigh options, appoint another study commission, think it over — only corrupts the soul
deflects us from right action.
There are times when, to a spiritually authentic woman or man, there is no choice; when, if you would make the moment into the good it has the potential to be, something inward commands what must be done, and if you don't do it, you have violated that moment, and with it, your soul. Sometimes you know what it is right away; sometimes it takes time and reflection — but when you arrive at it, it commands.
And then, there may be a price to pay, and then we may learn the religious paradox of gain in loss. There was an old Stoic, of whom Plutarch says that, when he had lost his country and his family in the destruction of Megara, himself escaping hardly and naked out of the flames, he said: "I have saved all my goods, — my justice, my courage, my temperance, my prudence. I have lost nothing; for all I could call my own I had about me." In self-surrender we gain freedom by letting go what we cannot hold by any essential ownership. Only the great lack can open the great resource, the unexpected powers and fresh and higher forces that greet us from some deep place.
And so Samuel Johnson wrote, "Trust life, — life itself as a whole, as life . . . Trust it not because you can understand all it means, but because it is your life and your destiny." That faith has hands and feet, and does not expect that everything is going to turn out alright all by itself. It sees what must be suffered and sacrificed before the common good can be achieved. Always we are tried by fire that purifies. The fire is always present; our response is to decide if it is to be a fire of creation or destruction. Our highest dreams are shaped on the forge of self-surrender and suffering.4 But that is true when we don't turn away from it, but feel it, give it all our attention, and, as Margaret Fuller put it, accept the Universe, let the flame of consciousness light the dark and find its treasure.
And so let this Holy Week and Good Friday be, as well, a celebration, a humble recognition of this human quality. Christians do this by worshipping Jesus, who embodies, for them, all that is good and holy.
For us who do not narrow our gaze on just one singular savior, just one human who was also divine — for us who recognize the divinity in every one, and who see the holy everywhere —
Let us honor and celebrate the sacred, and the noble, and the good, everywhere we find it. We are ennobled when we honor what is good and just and noble in others. Let us worship every act of generosity, every act of forgiveness, every moment when the divine radiance glows in anyone anywhere.
Let honor all those who,
for the sake of us all,
have borne more than their share of the burden.
Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
From the clamour, from the conflict, the ceaseless agitation, the ceaseless demand, the noise without end: from all these we come and hesitate at a threshold.
And it beckons us, and it resounds of home, resounds f rom the heart of us, in the heart of us, and rolls through all things,
And its peace and renewing power call to us.
So let us enter the silence, the thundering silence,
the moment that is here, that is now, that is beyond time and
forever, this moment
and know its depth and heigh and breadth and majesty
and be made strong by its strength, which is the strength of Life and Being, our life, our being
and know that beyond all noise and tumult
in the midst of it and beyond it
is this moment where we are, where we gather
For this moment is always already here in its fulness
And the meaning and destiny of our lives is here
And grace and love and great peace are here
In the heart of us, in the depths of this moment where we are
in the Immensity beyond silence . . .
William Ellery Channing, 1819
How dishonorable to [God] is the supposition, that . . . God, instead of being plenteous in forgiveness, never forgives; for it seems absurd to speak of men as forgiven, when their whole punishment, or an equivalent to it, is borne by a substitute? A scheme more fitted to obscure the brightness of . . . the mercy of God, or less suited to give comfort to a guilty and troubled mind, could not, we think, be easily framed.
And again, Channing writing in 1809:
Now it is probable, that a religion, having this object, gives views of the Supreme Being, from which our moral convictions and benevolent sentiments shrink with horror, and which, if made our pattern, would convert us into monsters? It is plain, that, were a human parent to . . . bring his children into life totally depraved, and then to pursue them with endless punishment, we should charge him with a cruelty not surpassed in the annals of the world; . . . we should say that history records no darker crime.
Mohandus K. Gandhi:
Suffering is the badge of the human race. Sacrifice is the law of life. It runs through and governs every walk of life. We can do nothing or get nothing without paying a price for it.... If we would secure the salvation of the community to which we belong, we must pay for it, that is, sacrifice self.... True sacrifice lies in deriving the greatest pleasure from the deed, no matter what the risk may be. In Satyagraha there is not the remotest idea of injuring the opponent. Satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one's own person. . .
And from the Gnostic Gospel,
the Acts of John:
Yours is this passion of humanity which I am to suffer. If you knew how to suffer, you would be able not to suffer.