Reflections on a Church shooting – (This one happened to be in a Liberal Church)

How many different feelings did you experience when you first heard about the shooting during the worship service and children’s play at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church? And how did those feelings modify when you found out that at least a part of the gunman’s motivation was because these liberal people had supported the creation of a culture of liberalism that had destroyed the country?

Anger, astonishment, fear, outrage, sadness, confusion? I experienced all of these. In the midst of all that emotion, I feel a need to write about this event in a way that can provide more light, not more heat. So let me set my handy flame thrower aside. To that end, I at least have to name some of the paths that I could potentially go down, but that I will not actually follow.

So, here’s what I will not do:

• I will not add to the rant about how all the right wing writers (Coulter, Savage, Hannity, O’Reilly, etc.) have created an atmosphere that encourages the “crazies” to act out violently against the enemies they have been taught to hate.
• I will not add to the very real fear that so many people have today about the danger of taking a controversial social stand. I sometimes wonder if someone will bring a gun into my liberal congregation? No, I said I wouldn’t go there either.
• I will not respond to those on the other end of the religious spectrum about how their image of a punitive (and potentially destructive) god strangely validates human acts of self-righteous destruction, though it’s mighty tempting to do just that.
• In fact, I won’t get drawn into the debates about who is to blame for this tragedy.
• Nor will I try to create a false sense of safety for myself or others by categorizing the gunman as an anomaly whose reprehensible behavior has nothing to do with other elements of society.

Itemizing how I will not add to the heat of the discussion is the easy part. A much harder task is to find something that might actually bring light to the issue.

So, I guess I’ll begin by itemizing a few statements that I believe to be true:

• Life is dangerous – life is always dangerous.
• Life’s choices always involve trade-offs, or said differently, All choices have a set of consequences that usually includes some things we like and some things we don’t like.
• Thinking clearly is hard because most, if not all, truth is paradoxical!
• All motivations for human behavior boil down to some combination of fear and love. OK, that one doesn’t seem so obvious, but I still believe it is true.

After all that casting about to find an angle, I am left with two pieces of useful perspective.

I am enormously sad for the victims and families and friends of the victims of that shooting. I join them in their grief, but I am even sadder to live in a culture that has found so many ways to encourage violence as the answer to life’s problems. I can find no evidence that violence does anything other than set the stage for more violence. Violent acts might create a temporary illusion that a person is acting from a position of strength, but that’s not true and it doesn’t last.

If what I wrote earlier is true (that fear and love are life’s primary behavioral motivators) then we have a choice between acting in a way that promotes fear or in a way that promotes love.

I see nothing in the central message of Jesus Christ that is designed to promote fear (unless you believe in a violent and punitive God) – only love. The love I have in mind is not the “nice-nice” variety. Real love is grounded in honesty, even when that honesty is energized by legitimate anger (the kind that can be expressed in words or creative action, not violence). The love Jesus brings is based in God’s deepest caring for the well being of all people, and even for the rest of creation. I hate to see suffering in people I love, even when that suffering appears to be self-generated. And I get angry in the face of systemic injustice. Such anger motivates acts of love, not violence.

I could write a whole book on the behaviors and stances that individuals and religious organizations could practice that would promote love, but that is beyond the scope of this blog. Let me say this much: The news/entertainment/political complex uses name-calling as its primary fuel. There is no way that name-calling can promote love, but there are lots of ways that it can promote fear – and, too often, violence. So let’s stop it. At least let’s stop contributing to it.

And let’s learn to listen compassionately to one another. If we only love those who are our friends, then we necessarily contribute to the vilification of our enemies. Healthy Liberal Christianity takes Jesus’ mandate to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us” very seriously. It won’t feel good like revenge is supposed to. It won’t help us pat ourselves on the back because we’re right and our enemies are wrong. But it might extract out of a violent culture a little bit of the very venom that keeps the violence going. And that is worth a lot.

Wayne
No matter who you are or where you are in life's journey, you're welcome here!
The United Church of Christ

Healthy Liberal Christianity is NOT a New Age Religion

Greetings,

Either I’ve accumulated some useful wisdom in my years or I’ve become a suspicious old curmudgeon. (OK, maybe both!) I offer here some thoughts on the latest round in the genre of “How To…” books that are enjoying such great popularity these days. This is not a book report, so proponents of these approaches to spirituality may have some legitimate gripes with my conclusions. (That’s what the comments section at the end of this blog is for, after all.

Perhaps the prime example of “the latest spiritual rage” is “The Secret” with its personal application of “The Law of Attraction.” Essentially, this law states that we can attract what we want/desire/need by means of an attitude of mind. If we have a negative attitude, we will attract negative things, but if we have a positive attitude and visualize the outcome we desire, The Universe is just waiting to give them to us. A corollary to the law according to “The Secret” is the belief that The Universe contains such abundance that if all of us learned to attract what we wanted, The Universe would be able to fill all of our orders. (And by the way, IT would accomplish this feat without creating scarcity in other areas of life and without toxifying the planet!!) While I have observed some experiential truth in “The Law of Attraction”, I’m concerned with its application.

All right, even I can hear my negative tone. Apparently, I’m violating the prime directive of “The Secret”. Regardless, I need to point out that the purpose of this approach is to achieve abundance and happiness by maintaining a positive attitude. And that is exactly where I take issue with it.

The pursuit of happiness is not a new issue, either in the political world or in the world of religion. We know from the Hebrew Scriptures that the Prophets of Israel railed against the cult of Baal. They saw the Baal worshipers as believing that proper ritual would bring people what they desired, namely a good harvest, fertile wombs, and probably improved social status. In short, it would keep them happy. Worship of the God of Israel (at least as I understand it in its healthiest manifestation), on the other hand, was not based in convincing God to take proper care of them. It was based in the trust that if they obeyed God’s Law (that, by the way, mostly had to do with the integrity of the community) they would then thrive AS A COMMUNITY! True worship of God never pitted the interests of some people against the interests of others. It all came down to how people in the community took care of each other.

If we look at a different tradition, we see that the Buddha preached detachment from stuff. Both happiness and sadness were seen to be manifestations of the desire for stuff, and even happiness itself, to the degree that people could experience it, turned out not to be satisfying. So, the Buddha taught people how to eliminate their suffering, which is not identical to teaching them how to be happy. In his culture and in ours, happiness is just one more commodity that someone is going to try to sell you.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is also not about the accumulation of the means to be happy. It’s all about how people take care of each other – about how they function as the embodiment of the Realm of God. You know, “Love one another as I have loved you.” I have preached and written elsewhere about the startling realization that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by the very things that our culture teaches us to pursue in order to be happy. I summarize those qualities as Safety, Comfort, Power, and Status.

However these varied religious traditions conceptualized God (if they did at all) health always had something to do with community and with the way people chose to relate to the rest of creation. It boiled down to a fundamental choice: Find a way to manipulate the Divine so The Universe will give you what you want, or Learn how to be a full participant in creation, relating to the rest of it as if it were an extension of yourself. In Jesus words, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

That’s my issue with so many of these popular approaches to spirituality. They’re fundamentally selfish. They foster the adolescent refrain that: “I want what I want, when I want it! And I have a right to get it, too!” Of course, if I don’t get what I’ve asked for, then I have no one to blame but myself. I must have let too many of those pesky negative feelings into my consciousness.

By the way, any religious tradition can be modified into some version of “The Secret.” American Protestant Christianity has its own (very popular) version. It’s called “The Theology of Abundance.” Its unofficial subtitle is: “How to become wealthy without guilt!”

I am not suggesting that unhappiness is any more noble or healthy or spiritual than happiness. How much happiness we have is just not the central measure of the successful life. Happiness and unhappiness are emotions that we experience as we go through life, but they are not the point of life at all!

It has always been important for communities to learn how to be healthy. Some have done it better than others. But it has never been so crucial for us to give up our focus on the desires of the individual and practice being a community – even a community of faith. The spiritual surprise in a healthy community is that individuals actually have more opportunity to differentiate and grow into their deepest identities. Individuality and Community are not opposed to each other. Selfishness and love are the opposites.

Now, with hunger and violence more rampant than ever in our world, with global warming threatening to make it difficult, if not impossible, for human (and other) life to survive on this planet, with the increasing distrust between the “Haves” and the “Have-Nots” or between groups that speak, look, believe, or worship differently, the stakes have become enormously high.

Today, the prophetic voices of many religious traditions ring loud in our ears: “Learn to be a healthy communal organism, or perish!

Will we listen and respond? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, if we insist on taking seriously “The Law of Attraction”, let’s use it to attract healthy community rather than trying to manipulate either God or The Universe to grant us personal Power, Safety, Comfort, or Status.

Wayne
“Our faith is 2000 years old, our thinking is not.” The United Church - of Christ

A Funeral Sermon

Greetings,

It’s relatively easy to engage in theological speculation around topics of interest. But, healthy Liberal Christianity is not worth much if it is not useful and well grounded in a wide variety of pastoral situations. As you know, ministers perform funerals with some regularity. Many of them are for “good deaths”: people who have lived long enough and who have experienced some level of abundance. Others are more difficult because the level of suffering of the dying person can sometimes reach intolerable levels. There may be some sense of relief that “the strife is o’er”, as the words of the hymn express it. But, then there are those deaths that are so unexpected and seem so grossly unjust that we are hard pressed to address them at all.

Last week a twenty-five year old Elmira fireman died when the truck he was driving back from a call went off the road. My attempt to come up with words for family, church, and community members, and for the firefighters who gathered from miles around feels totally inadequate to me. Still, I offer those words from that funeral service for your consideration.

Wayne

Pastoral Reflections
A Service of Celebration for Ryan T. Barker
July 12, 2008

Several years ago, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner wrote the best selling book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” The title seems appropriate for us to consider as we gather here. Millions of copies have been sold and I believe that millions of people have found some measure of comfort from Rabbi Kushner’s words.

I suspect, however, that many of those who bought the book actually misread the title. They hoped for the title to be “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.” I can relate to that desire. But this is not a new question. It’s been around for as long as humans have dealt with tragic events. And many very bright and learned people have come up with countless attempts at answering it.

At times like these, when a whole community in concert with a family join in a desperate attempt to make sense of the senseless, all those other less than adequate answers tend to flood back into our consciousness and conversation. I know you’ve heard many of these. Perhaps you’ve even tried to make them work for you.

The first one is something about trying to fathom God’s Will – as if God had something to do with selecting someone like Ryan to die at this time. Sometimes it takes the form of “Maybe God needed him in heaven more than we need him here. (No, that doesn’t work for me either.) But, I suppose the purpose of such attempts is to comfort ourselves by believing that God knows more that we do, so maybe this makes sense from God’s perspective. (Nope – still not helpful.) When those approaches don’t work, sometimes we try to convince ourselves that “he’s in a better place” – whatever that means. But whether that’s true or not, it completely misses the point of our grief.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of such comments, you know that however well-meaning they might be, they really don’t help much. Those comments might even make you angry. You know that this is not the time to be cheered up or helped to feel better. Maybe later that will happen. Suffice it to say that all attempts to answer the “Why” question, probably just make things worse.

So what do we do? Is there another approach? How do we wrap our understanding around the death of this generous and loving friend, brother, son, husband, and father?

If I have learned anything in almost four decades as a minister, often struggling with this question, it’s that trying to understand does not lead us to healing; because…, there is no belief – nothing that we can manufacture in our heads – that will take away the pain, make the loss any less enormous, or give us a way to “get over it.”

No. There is no getting over this, or any other, significant loss. Our losses become permanent parts of our experience that are integrated into our being. The only healing – if you can call it that – is a very slowly developing notion that this or any other significant loss can never be the sum total of who we are or of what we have experienced. Throughout our lives, we will continue to accumulate significant experiences – some wonderful, some difficult. Over time, we gradually find a place within us where we can create memorials to those whom we have lost. Our challenge is to make those living memorials – not tombs of death that we carry around, only to haunt us.

Again we’re faced with the question, “So what do we do?”

First of all, we can remember that we’re not alone. Jane, you and the rest of Ryan’s family are surrounded by people who care about you. They’re not here to pity you, for pity always boils down to something like – “I feel bad that this has happened to you, but I’m secretly glad it didn’t happen to me.” No, I believe that everyone here knows the personal experience of loss and grief. They have gathered in a compassionate embrace, not to pity from a distance. Pity is no relationship at all, but compassion fosters a deep human bond that helps us all find barely enough courage to take our next small step.

Secondly, we remember that while this loss is very personal, we are also intimately connected to all who grieve. So, we, here, remember the families of soldiers who have died in war. We remember the families of the 30,000 people who die each year in traffic accidents in this country alone. We remember those who are permanently wounded and those throughout our world who struggle daily with poverty and hunger. Don’t misunderstand, I am not telling you to look around to see how much worse it is for others and to count your blessings. That would be a cruel thing to do to you.

I am simply reminding all of us about how much opportunity there is for human compassion. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” He didn’t mean that there was anything particularly noble about loss and grief, or that we should be happy no matter what we have lost. His statement was simply a reminder – a recognition – that in a community whose “glue” is compassion, people connect profoundly around the reality of their human losses.

In grief, social status is irrelevant, competition is silly, and fear and hatred are wasteful. Only compassion can keep us healthy – not just as individuals, but as a family, a fire department, a congregation, and as a community. Jesus had a term for compassionate community. He called it the Kingdom of God.

Let me say finally that while there is no good answer to the question, “Why did Ryan Barker die?” there is a very good answer to the question, “Why did Ryan Barker live?” You carry the answer to that question within you – in your memories – in all you learned from knowing him and relating to him. Your challenge now, is to transform all that he has been to you into that living memorial – passing on the goodness, keeping the memories alive. The celebration of his life is not confined to this funeral service – this is just the beginning. You will continue to celebrate his life through your relationships, your acts of loving service, and your dreams.

The grief will not go away, but you may find, in time, that there emerges in you a holy compatibility between your experiences of grief and your experiences of joy. In the midst of your future celebrations, you will ever be aware of the hole in your life that his absence has created. And in the midst of your tears you will find hints of treasured memories and new, joyful experiences that will bubble up to live in harmony with your sadness.

I encourage you to share both with one another in loving compassion. Blessed is the compassionate community that mourns and celebrates together. Amen.

God Is Not a Being...

Greetings Fellow Seekers,

I would like to continue developing some of Karen Armstrong’s ideas as they relate to our search for a well grounded and healthy expression of liberal Christianity. In one of her lectures a couple of weeks ago at the Chautauqua Institution she said: “God is not a being; God is being.” This statement may address at least one of the issues that exist between liberal and conservative expressions of Christianity.

To think about this, we must begin by articulating the difference between a metaphorical and a literal reading of Scripture (and other writings, too). Fundamentalists point to the words of Jesus as being literal descriptions of God and Heaven/Hell. Liberals have sometimes had a difficult time countering that argument, largely because reading Scripture metaphorically has fallen into disrepute in our modern age. Do we water down the text when we affirm that Jesus was not actually saying that God was a male figure who lives in a celestial place called Heaven?

I would argue that we are not watering it down at all. To read metaphorically is to honor the immensity and otherness of God. To read these texts literally is to confine God to these limited human terms. According to Armstrong, even to refer to God as a “being” who exists someplace apart from creation limits who God can be. We have no words and images that could possibly do justice in describing God in any concrete way.

Human experience contributes to this paradoxical situation. Humans have had countless experiences of being in relationship with the divine, even though we have no absolute way of describing that relationship. We are left with the affirmation that the relationship is important. Jesus talks (metaphorically) about God’s care for all of creation and that God provides the means for us to exist on this planet. That human decisions, based in greed and fear, create serious social injustices is a commentary on humanity, not on God. Liberal Christianity affirms, furthermore, that God’s caring is for all of humanity, even for all of creation, and that it is not meted out to some individuals at the expense of others. I remember how furious I was several years ago in the aftermath of the Columbine school shootings. A woman being interviewed on the television stated that she had been confident all along that her children would come out safely as a result of her prayers and confidence in God. So, what did that say about God’s caring for those parents who lost children in that shooting?

If God is “a being”, then it is too easy for us to project our own fears, narrow thinking, and judgmental attitudes onto God. That said, we wonder if it makes any difference at all to relate to God if we can’t at least get some protection out of the deal. I suggest to you that it makes all the difference in the world to affirm one’s relationship to “Being”. If we see ourselves as separate, then creation becomes a hostile place and we then need to believe in the notion of a protective deity to help us through. If, on the other hand, we see ourselves as part of “the web of life” then there is a direct connection between the health and well-being of creation and our health and well-being.

Without that sense of connection, the best we can do is to generate pity for others who are worse off than we are. If, however, we are part of the web, then compassion is possible. In Karen Armstrong’s terms, our “kenosis”, which means emptying of ego, is virtually equivalent to affirming that we are all “one” through our connection to “Being”.

She goes on to say that practicing compassion involves using ritual to maintain our awareness of being connected to “Being”. Our religious rituals are not done to please God or to live up to some standard of religious behavior. Our rituals have only one purpose: to transform us from ego-based separate entities into participants in a living system that is something like a family. In the process, our capacity for real compassion increases along with our motivation to address social injustices, and in this way, our rituals help us to create healthier communities.

We live in a culture that values rugged independence, so there are few places where we can learn true compassion. I hope that Healthy Liberal Christianity offers such a place. At least that’s the kind of place that we at the Park Church are trying to become.

Wayne
“Become compassionate as your God is compassionate.” Luke 6:36

Historical Theologian, Karen Armstrong at Chautauqua Institution

Greetings readers,

I hope you missed me last week. I was away at the Chautauqua Institution, specifically to hear a series of lectures by Karen Armstrong. She has written about 20 books about various aspects of world religions and is able to put each in historical perspective. She helps us see how many religions have approached the problems of the world in somewhat different ways while affirming that they all bring a remarkably similar core value to the struggle. Her overall topic was “What is Religion?”

For those who are interested, there is a pretty complete summary of each of her five talks in The Chautauquan Daily. They can be found on line at http://www.ciweb.org/Chautauquan%20Daily/2008%20Newspapers/

The summaries are in the issues from June 25 to June 30.

Though I had read several of her books before attending her lectures, I was thrilled to be hearing her live. I was moved by the depth and breadth of her historical, theological, and psychological understanding and by the significance of her work on behalf of the world.

She began by talking about the danger of the relatively recent emphasis on “certainty” in religious belief. Certainty is a direct product of the scientific enlightenment of the last 500 years. Before that, it was rare for theologically astute people to argue about intellectual belief or historical accuracy. The emphasis was always on behavior and commitment. Dr. Armstrong made it clear that in early Christianity, when people who were being baptized made a confession about their beliefs, they were really saying “I make a life changing commitment to God”, rather than “These are the literal beliefs that I proclaim to be true.” Similarly, revelation is a life-changing embodied experience, not a divine recitation of religious facts. The purpose of creation myths, for example, is to teach us something about our relationship to the divine in life, rather than a textbook description of precisely how the world and we humans came into being. Even the “doctrine” of the Trinity is not meant to be a correct description of God, as much as it is a mystery about the various ways that the divine intersects and interpenetrates our existence.

So what? You might ask. Well, we see all the time that the demand for certainty makes it necessary that someone has to be right so the rest must be wrong. The resultant anxiety around the demand for certainty becomes the motivation for fundamentalism and for the physical and emotional violence and destructiveness that always goes with it. In short, the (impossible) quest for certainty makes the world much more dangerous, feeding religious terrorism like nothing else.

A related idea is that when too much religious energy is invested in right believing, then less is available for compassionate action. I’ll go into that idea in greater depth later, but for now, suffice it to say that most of the religions we know in the world came into being in response to chaotic, violent, and destructive cultures. They each bring a version of “The Golden Rule” in a way that transformed those cultures, at least for a while, and at least in part, into more compassion-based cultures. Each of these religions requires what is referred to as kenosis – that is, an emptying of ego – in order to make room for a more compassionate understanding of others.

(From my own research: In Luke 6: 36, we find the words, “Be compassionate as Your God is compassionate.” In Greek the word for compassion is ‘oiktirmones’, and in Hebrew the corresponding word is rahum, a word that is derived from the Hebrew word for womb. Compassion, then, is mother-love, in the sense that the womb is where the space is created (kenosis) within which new life comes into being. And the mother is forever connected to the life that has come into being in her womb.) See Isaiah 49:15

Finally for this installment of the blog, I want to tell you that Karen Armstrong was one of the recipients of a TED Prize in 2008. “The TED Prize was created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources that are generated at TED and using them to make a difference. Although the winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, that's the least of what they get. The real prize is that they are granted a WISH. A wish to change the world.” (from http://www.ted.com/index.php/pages/view/id/6)

Go to the TED site learn about the organization and to see the specifics of Karen Armstrong’s wish for the world.

I will write at a later time in more detail about how I think Healthy Liberal Christianity is consistent with Dr. Armstrong’s work.

I invite you to comment on what I have written, but even more on what Karen Armstrong is doing on behalf of the world.

Wayne

“Become compassionate as your God is compassionate.” Luke 6:36