Whispering
firmly, the minister said, "Denounce the devil! Let him know how little
you think of his evil!"
The
dying man said nothing so the minister repeated his order.
Still
the dying man said nothing.
After
waiting awhile, minister asked, "Why do you refuse to denounce the devil
and his evil?"
The
dying man opened his eyes and whispered, "Until I know where I'm heading,
I don't think I ought to aggravate anybody."
Well,
Unitarian Universalists don’t think anyone is going to eternal torment.Welcome
to a religious community that focuses on preparing for living rather than
preparing for an afterlife.What
we should fear is here, not in the hereafter.
So
release any concern about heaven or hell,
As we join together in the celebration
of life.
I
was thinking about them while I was in Toronto last weekend at a meeting
of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association Continuing
Education committee.While on
Queen Street, we encountered a man with a bullhorn exhorting the passers-by
to give their lives to Christ while his wife circulated little pamphlets
of Bible quotes from Indiana.He
asked us if we were saved and we said we were Unitarian Universalist ministers.He’d
never heard of us but smiled.With
a glazed look in his eyes he said, “We’re all brothers and sisters in Christ.”Then
he started singing a traditional hymn about salvation into the bullhorn
as we walked away to catch our bus.
Being
asked if we’re saved drives many of us up the wall.For
the evangelist, there is one and only one way to heaven: through a born
again relationship with God through His Resurrected Son Jesus Christ.Unitarian
Universalists believe the Christian path is one of a selection of ways
to live a good life and secure our hope for whatever may or may not happen
after death.
Those
of us who embrace the Christian path draw comfort from the Universalist
part of our heritage.Universalists
believe God’s love will, in the end, reconcile and redeem all souls.We
are all saved and have nothing to fear in death.
Being
asked, “Are you saved?” bothers us, in part, because it is designed to
stimulate our fear of death.You
may remember from my classes on Ernest Becker a couple of years ago, avoiding
our anxiety about death is a powerful driving force for humanity.Save
any clear memory of reincarnation, we have no personal experience of death.What
happens after we die could be good, could be bad, we don’t know for sure.Certainly
millions of people believe in a place called hell and a place called heaven.Maybe
they’re right and maybe we’re wrong.
Doubt
and uncertainty are terrible tormentors of the imagination.In
our darker moments, we might begin wondering if the troubles in our lives
might be a harbinger of future suffering.Many
Kerry voters are quite fearful of the future.They
fear what a second Bush administration will do, the suffering that he may
create inside and outside the United States.Their
imaginations torment them with images of more war, ecological calamity,
erosion of the middle class, and restrictions of our civil rights.They
fear a living hell as much as an eternal one.
The
fear of potential torment goes deeper to the question, “Are we worthy of
salvation?”Few if any of us are
saints who always do the right thing for the right reason.I’ve
withheld my hand from the needy.I’ve
coveted others property.With Jimmy
Carter, I’ve lusted in my heart for those I should not.I
know I’m a sinner and will continue to imperfectly live up to the wise
direction from my conscience.
This
inward focus on our anxieties about death distracts us from looking more
carefully at how the idea of salvation is used to control
and shape people’s actions.This
morning I want to bring to your attention what I believe to be the dark
side, the evil corruption of the concept of salvation.What
alerted me to its danger were suicide bombers in the Middle East.
Contrary
to the popular conception of suicide bombers being disturbed lunatics,
many, like those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center, were
well-educated, successful professionals.Their
beliefs about salvation were critical determinants of their actions.Leaders
recruiting them use Jihadic elements of Islamic thought to convince “audiences
and potential adherents that their primary concern should be salvation
in the hereafter rather than the here-and-now[st1].”Through
indoctrination, they are persuaded that their primary worldly concern should
be saving their souls on Judgment Day.
What
is particularly interesting about this justification for martyrdom is the
primary focus on personal benefits rather than the benefit to the Muslim
community.Fatwas and publications
extensively outline the spiritual payoffs for the individual contrasting
“coveting the earth” with “the enjoyment of the hereafter.”Many
of these suicide bombers rationally choose death here for the promise of
eternal life.
What
deeply concerns me are the parallels with our own fundamentalist movement
here, particularly the sects that expect the Rapture to be coming in the
near future.Many Evangelical Christians
who were an influential factor in the election believe in an imminent Apocalypse.Bill
Batt, member of this congregation, circulated by email an educational article
by Glenn
Scherer about these sects and their growing political influence. I
quote:
Ever
since the dawn of Christianity, groups of believers have searched the scriptures
for signs of the End Time and the Second Coming. Today, most of the roughly
50 million right wing fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe
in some form of End-Time theology…
Tune
in to America’s more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or 250 Christian
TV stations and you’re likely to get a heady dose of dispensationalism,
an End-Time doctrine invented in the 19th century by the Irish-Anglo theologian
John Nelson Darby.
Dispensationalists
espouse a “literal” interpretation of the Bible that offers a detailed
chronology of the impending end of the world…Believers
link that chronology to current events -- four hurricanes hitting Florida,
gay marriages in San Francisco, the September 11 attacks -- as proof that
the world is spinning out of control … The social and environmental crises
of our times, dispensationalists say, are portents of the Rapture, when
born-again Christians, living and dead, will be taken up into Heaven…On
the heels of that Rapture, nonbelievers left behind on earth will endure
seven years of unspeakable suffering called the Great Tribulation, which
will culminate in the rise of the Antichrist and the final battle of Armageddon
between God and Satan.Upon winning
that battle, Christ will send all unbelievers into the pits of Hellfire,
re-green the planet, and reign on earth in peace with His followers for
a millennium.
This
kind of thinking doesn’t translate into positive social policy.People
who are expecting to be transported to heaven have little interest in over-population
or environmental degradation.The
worse everything gets, the happier the dispensationalist is as they look
forward to being yanked up into heaven, leaving their clothes, shoes and
jewelry behind.
Even
more dangerous are the Dominionists (also known as the reconstructionists)
who believe in helping the chaos along.They
believe that Christ will only return when humanity prepares the way for
him.The first step is to Christianize
America ending the separation of church and state then moving on to conquer
the world.
Both
the Islamic and Christian fundamentalists are driven by revelation and
other worldly concerns rather than by earthly concerns.We
can’t reason with these folks about sustainability of the earth for the
seventh generation because they don’t expect their children to be here
anyway.They are not interested
in finding harmony in international relations--far from it.They
are happy to sacrifice our sons and daughters on the field of battle in
Iraq if Jesus is just around the corner.
This
kind of delusional view of salvation defines Evil for me and must be resisted
with all our might.It violates the
core value Jesus taught about loving your neighbor.It
assumes, wrongly, the assurance of salvation.If
there is a Rapture, as Garrison Keillor spoofed, it may be only the Unitarian
Universalists that God yanks up out of our socks.In
Christian theology, it is only God, in complete freedom, who can decide
who gets saved, not man.
Now
let me talk about the right wing Evangelical Christians that have a more
sensible base with whom we may actually have some shared values.Did
anyone listen to Talk of the Nation on Tuesday
on NPR?Neal Conan interviewed several
Evangelical Christians to better understand the value voters in the last
election.I found their dialogue
very enlightening.
One
of my core beliefs is to move toward my enemies rather than away from them
if at all possible.I want to understand
better their core values and the sources from which they draw those values.Liberals
have made a grave error by dismissing the evangelicals as ignorant or stupid.Many
are not.If we take each other seriously,
we may find we have common values.
One
of the speakers on Talk of the Nation mentioned a unanimous Call to Civic
Responsibility[st2]
put out by the 42 denominations that form the National Association of Evangelicals.I
immediately Googled them and found that twelve
page statement and read it with interest.
Although
we do not agree with them about theology, there are common values.To
find that common value, we must look past our different beliefs to
their intent.For example,
they revere the family as the bedrock of society.While
we may want to define family differently, adding same-sex marriage, we
also revere families and want to support them.They
are pro-life and argue it in this statement against euthanasia and abortion
partly because "they undermine the legal and cultural protections that
our society has provided for vulnerable persons."
We,
too, are interested in protecting vulnerable persons but by allowing those
measures.They are concerned about
the negative effects of biotechnology and so are many of us.They
are concerned about the destructive influence of media hyped sexuality
and violence.So are we.These
are folks who are for human rights too.They
feel commanded by Jesus to seek justice and compassion for the poor and
vulnerable.So do we, but perhaps
for broader reasons that include non-Christian sources.
Here
is a direct quote from their statement that I imagine could probably come
from the UUA:
"We
urge Christians who work in the political realm to shape wise laws pertaining
to the creation of wealth, wages, education, taxation, immigration, health
care, and social welfare that will protect those trapped in poverty and
empower the poor to improve their circumstances."
The
statement continues:
"We
further believe that care for the vulnerable should extend beyond our national
borders. American foreign policy and trade policies often have an impact
on the poor. We should try to persuade our leaders to change patterns of
trade that harm the poor and to make the reduction of global poverty a
central concern of American foreign policy. We must support policies that
encourage honesty in government, correct unfair socioeconomic structures,
generously support effective programs that empower the poor, and foster
economic development and prosperity."
These
folks also have an environmental ethic:
"God
gave the care of his earth and its species to our first parents. That responsibility
has passed into our hands. We affirm that God-given dominion is a sacred
responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation
of which we are a part. We are not the owners of creation, but its stewards,
summoned by God to "watch over and care for it" (Gen. 2:15). This implies
the principle of sustainability: our uses of the Earth must be designed
to conserve and renew the Earth rather than to deplete or destroy it."
These
are the folks we should engage.They
have a sense of social responsibility with which we can find common cause.As
we have done in ARISE, we can also find common cause with Catholics, Presbyterians,
Baptists, and Methodists.As we
have done in the Interfaith Alliance and Interfaith Impact, we can find
common cause with the Jewish community.We
will have many differences, sometimes very strong ones.But
through the engagement around shared values, we just might have some influence
on them, and they on us, that will help both of us grow more whole.
So
there is a life-affirming approach to salvation that is good, as opposed
to the life-denying approach that I’m calling evil.What
separates the two is the focus on personal salvation.Salvation
pursued for personal gain is evil and separates us from God and the
world.It tries to sort the saved
from the damned in this world and predict God’s plan.Once
this world becomes a means to an afterlife rather than an end in its self,
such faith can easily degenerate into a narcissistic death cult.
A
life affirming approach to religion helps us move beyond personal concern
and into a concern for family, neighbors and the larger community.The
next step in religion that Unitarian Universalists practice is moving from
concern for just our community to the whole world, to all life.The
core of Unitarian Universalist faith is desiring and working for the salvation
of all beings in this world before they die.
From
all my religious study, the only path to salvation that makes any sense
to me is choosing again and again to love rather than hate, to choose life
rather than death, to connect rather than to separate, to affirm rather
than deny.So I invite you to join
me in abandoning all hope or concern for personal salvation.Let
us give ourselves whole heartedly to growing into serving the cause of
love as best we can in this world and trust the ultimate end will follow
the means.
Benediction
I
close with the famous inspirational words of Universalist founder John
Murray:
Go
out into the highways and by-ways.
Give the people something of your new vision.
You
may possess a small light,
But uncover it, let it shine,
Use it in order to bring more light and understanding
To the hearts and minds of men and women.
Give
them not hell, but hope and courage;
Preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.
Copyright
©2004 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore.All
rights reserved.