Lead Us Not to Prey

February 3, 2002
© The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith

Blessing of the Jarecki Center

It is our destiny to wander this great earth in search of the true and the good. And it is our custom to pause and gather together, men and women and children, to enjoy the fruits of human fellowship and to gain courage and wisdom from one our common life. We ask for a blessing upon this place during the time of our sojourn here. And we will endeavor, in thought, word, and deed, to lend dignity to life; and freely return blessing for blessing, until peace, goodwill, and love, embraces all persons.

Readings: Ruth 1: 15-17, 19

And Naomi said, "See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law." But Ruth said, "Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you; for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if even death parts me from you." So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem.

Sightings 1/21/02, "Tolerance and Counter-intolerance," by Martin E. Marty

On occasion I have written of tolerance as a weak virtue. Of course, tolerance is a strong one, but it does get sentimentalized. Listen closely and you will often hear people advocating religious tolerance on these lines: "If I can get you to believe little and lightly enough, and you see me believing little and lightly enough, we can get along fine." That's what I call weak.

Strong tolerance has a different cast. For years I've borrowed the concept of "counter-intolerance" from Gabriel Marcel… [from his book, Creative Fidelity (Crossroad, 1982), XII on "The Phenomenology and the Dialectic of Tolerance."] (who) takes the position, first, that a person shows herself to be tolerant "with respect to something," not just in general. Tolerance does not merely mean support of the "other" in his opinion. "In tolerance . . . there is not only the recognition of a fact but of a right, and this recognition can become an act of guarantee. This should lead us to perceive (and this is paramount) that tolerance is ultimately the negation of a negation, a counter-intolerance; it seems difficult for tolerance to be manifested before intolerance; tolerance is not primitive; it is to action what reflection is to thought. . . . The more it is tied to a state of weakness, the less it is itself, the less it is tolerance."

On the subject of opinion and religious belief(s): "To the extent that I hold to my opinion, am aware of sticking to it, it may be -- provided that I clearly envisage the other together with the tie relating him to his opinion -- that I put myself in the other's place such that I can conceive his opinion to be worthy just because of the intense conviction with which he holds it; it may be that my awareness of my own conviction is somehow my guarantee of the worth of his. . . "
Nothing good can happen "if I claim to place at the service of God's will instruments of force which by their nature cannot fail to engender in the other the conviction that I am acting out of self-interest and in order to satisfy my desire to proselytize; or what is still more serious, that I am a servant of a God of prey whose goal it is to annex and enslave. And it is precisely here that we find the frightful betrayal. . . : I impose on the person I claim to convert, a loathsome image of the God whose interpreter I say I am."

PRAYER

O God, who in the midst of life dost bring us to an awareness of the smallness of our individual selves, grant us to know that the mark we leave will depend more on our grasp than our height, more on our vision than our weight - that our true measure lies in the depth of our affections and the endurance of our graciousness.

May our knowledge of thy presence ennoble and encourage us to magnify our humanity in spite of our obvious faults.
For serving thee we seek not immortal rewards, but that the growth and character of the human spirit shall be the mark of our salvation, visible in all our ways among our companions to the end that we shall give glory to the truth which makes us all free.

SERMON

It is wonderful to have the children up front here with us, all of us together as a community, to begin our sojourn in this new space. Human life consists of doing the same things over and over again while doing new things, too, and the juxtaposition of familiarity and novelty is inspiring!

One of the first prayers children are often taught is what is called the Lord’s Prayer, which includes the plea, "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." Surely one of the temptations of modern life is the justification religion often provides to preying upon the faith and lives of others. We do not live in a time of religious tolerance in part because we have lost an understanding of tolerance. Teach tolerance, one bumper sticker implores parents, and that is all well and good, if we had an understanding of what we were trying to teach. But you can’t teach tolerance like it is a general subject, any more than you can teach literature without reading particular written pieces.

Teaching tolerance today can be, and most is, easily misunderstood as "teach that anything and everything is allowable and okay." Tolerance used to be a cherished virtue of religious liberals, but as "the religious" in liberalism became more foggy and distant, the virtue lost its rootage in a religious point of view. Tolerance has become a code word for Martin Marty’s observation: "If we can get you to believe little and lightly enough, and you see us believing little and lightly enough, we can get along fine." No wonder, then, that the modern religious liberal religiously proclaims, "You can believe anything here," as if that is a statement of tolerance when, in fact, it is a statement that hides and obscures and makes covert rigid boundaries that often become political and ideological. It is dishonest, and betrays the very tolerance it claims to support.

It is a paradox. We think filling children with the particular religious perspective that is theirs is stamping their minds like doctrinal cookie cutters. Yet, tolerance is something that can only come about when an individual knows who he or she is, and is secure in the knowledge of God’s great and diverse creation. Spiritual freedom does not mean the mind that runs wild or the spirit that wanders aimlessly!

Take the case of John Walker Lindh, the young American man found fighting with the Taliban against the infidel of his homeland and those who held him in their bosom. I only know him from pictures and reports of his life, and the perspectives of those here who know him. "He must have been brainwashed," his mother said. "His father, Frank Lindh, called his son, ‘a sweet kid’ who was very devoted and committed to his conversation to Islam." I am sure he was a sweet kid. I am certain he is devoted and committed to his conversation to Islam. "[His father] said he was proud of [his son’] dedication to studying the Koran and thought his conversion had been good for him." The gulf and conflict is enormous, between what his parents know him to be and what the soldiers who, risking their lives in capturing him, know him to be and the widows and orphans of those from the Twin Towers know him to be. So much so, that what emerges for me is the view that here is a young man who does not know who he is; hence, does not understand or allow himself to understand the ramifications of what he has done.

There is nothing inherently evil and violent in the tradition, history, and religion of Islam, any more or less than in Judaism or Christianity. No more and no less. But here is a young man who, by all intents and purposes, has some characteristics that are typical of those who grow up in this culture. His practical needs were provided for by his parents. His educational needs were carefully attended to by his parents. He was given opportunity. He was supported in his discovering of his capacities and abilities. And when it came to his religious development his parents, apparently, gave him what the freedom to explore all kinds of faiths, to find his own way unheeded and unfettered by any religious bias.

Or, to say it another way, he had little religious guidance. The foundation of his spiritual life was in the shifting sands of the way of his parents, who, as best I can tell, are like a lot of people in this culture in that they understand religion somewhat like a commodity, the brand name of which can change as tastes change. In this view, common among social and political liberals, religion and spirituality can change with preference, taste, and circumstance. But is this evidence of tolerance or simply being lost?

Cross religious and cross cultural encounters are at least as old as the story of Ruth, and the religious idea of tolerance, and its conflict with deeply held religious convictions, is just as old. In a macabre twist on the immortal words of a gentle story, by the choices of his life, John Walker Lindh said to his Al Queda comrades: Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you; for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. If the picture of a dazed, confused, dirty and bearded young man being escorted by American troops didn’t awaken fear within the minds of parents, and especially in the minds of social and political liberal leaning parents, then I do not know what will! No one can claim to know this young man, nor his motivations for choosing the life and the kind of religious faith he has chosen. But, I can’t help seeing, in the accounts of his life and the pictures and videos of his capture and ordeal, a lost soul; a young man who does not know who he is, where he came from, the social forces and intellectual and religious ideas that formed the community and culture of his rearing. I see a lost soul, the yield of a vacuity of some sort in his religiosity, so much so that his yearning, as true and strong and deep as any individual’s yearning for the meaning and purpose of life that is a yearning for God, experienced a conversion to hatred. It is an old tale made startling because of magnitude of the results of religiously bred hatred. And it yields a deep question: Why did someone apparently raised in a household that, by the measurements of our culture, contained a liberal amount of tolerance towards all faiths, yield such unfathomable intolerance as would bring down the twin towers in New York City. It is easier, much easier to assign the blame to foreigners like Bin Laden than to ask how our culture breeds intolerance within itself.

In the tradition of liberal religion there are three qualities conceived of as virtues: reason, freedom, and tolerance. Tolerance is a religious virtue. Not a civic virtue, although it may be that; not a political or social virtue, although it may be that; and, not a personal virtue, although it may be that, too. But, a religious virtue. That somehow, when we understand what tolerance is and is not, and seek to discipline our lives by its demands, to practice it, that somehow we grow uprightly in strength and in character to the end, as said in the prayer, that we shall give glory to the truth which makes us all free. In other words, as a virtue that is true within the fabric of existence.

The story of Ruth is not the only story from the Hebrew Scriptures that has been immortalized in song, but it is the only one that Little Peggy March wrote in that rock’n’roll classic, "I love him, I love him, I love him, and where he goes I’ll follow, I’ll follow, I’ll follow/I will follow him, follow him wherever he may go/There isn't an ocean too deep/A mountain so high it can keep, keep me away/Away from my love…" The love that Ruth shows Naomi is not a loving capacity with which we are born. This kind of love, the yield of the religious virtue called tolerance, is developed if at all, by the practice of a religious perspective. It comes from an understand of human nature that sees the difference between an individual and God; between our opinions and convictions, and any kind of ultimate truth or good that is possible in existence. From this perspective on human nature, the word God includes primarily not a designation of deity as much as a recognition of what we cannot know; a God’s eye view of things. This is the theological basis of liberal religion in general and Unitarianism in particular. We do not know fully God’s will. And when we know this we know something deep about the human spirit. We yearn for a God we will not fully know. And we forget this.

Tolerance is a conversion. It is not the natural state of a human being. To tolerate someone else is to be distinct from them and to know you are not like them and they are not like you. Tolerance is to recognize the difference, not in how human beings have been created, for we all are created equal. Tolerance is arrived at because we think and believe differently. So, tolerance is the yield of spiritual growth. It is not its starting place. We first must learn, know, and understand who we are and where we came from, before we can lend dignity and recognize the rights of others. Tolerance is the second step towards love. The first is to know who I am, as Ruth had to know who she was, before she could through tolerance, see her mother-in-law’s humanity, and then love her.

I want my two children to understand other religions so that they do not wantonly or unconsciously perpetuate intolerance and hatred. But human beings do not learn religion in general, but in the particular. A little exposure to Buddhism here and Islam there will not yield a tolerant man or a woman capable of understanding genuine difference. It will yield a religiously vacuous person. It often yields a woman who, because she does not know who she is, looks upon professors at Calvin or Aquinas with a disdain at their ignorance. It often yields a man who, because he does not know who he is, finds himself captive of an exotic faith in its extreme and violent forms, and he finally does become somebody, but it is nobody that those closest to him recognize.

So when we educate our children religiously we are giving them a precious gift that has been handed to us, even by people and generations of which we are unaware. Liberal religion in general and Unitarianism in particular, comes from both the Jewish and the Christian traditions. From Judaism we have gained the recognition that each individual is made in a divine image, of a God who moves in human affairs to liberate the mind and the spirit. From Judaism we get the ultimate value of freedom. So we read the Hebrew Scriptures as stories of human liberation. From Christianity we have gained the recognition that the bonds of human fellowship, that preserve and extend this freedom to all persons, is what goes by the name of love. From Christianity we get the ultimate value of love for all persons, regardless of who they are or what they believe, because they are our neighbor. So we read the Christian Scriptures as stories of the enormous breadth of love of which we are capable by how we are created.
We also know from our Jewish and Christian heritages, and from our own experience, that religion can distort its scriptures, sayings, values, and revelations, so that they are used to enslave the mind and the spirit to extend love only to certain persons. We know the human capacity for evil and for good.

Liberal religion in general and Unitarianism in particular, is a Western religious tradition, not an Eastern one. So the individual mind, freely exercised, using reason, seeking to know everything that can be known about its word, is the highest form of the spiritual life as we know it; and prayer and the contemplative life are a means to shape the individual in his or her distinct individuality. Societal governments and religious organizations and institutions must be independent of one another, a separation between state and church, for human beings to enjoy the freedom in which we have been endowed by our Creator at our creation. How we live our life means more than what we say we believe, for our ancestors, the Puritans and Pilgrims, saw that life was a social thing and the our relationships with one another, our deeds not our creeds, our covenants not our doctrines, our character not our convictions, were and are the final measurement of the true and the good.

When I see the delight and excitement in my daughter when she discovers Shakespeare, I see the growth of her spiritual life. When the daughter of a member of the church writes me asking me about prayer and Bible study in school, trying to discern how service to the American Republic and service to the God of freedom are independent of one another, I see the growth of her spiritual life.

When I look at pictures of John Walker Lindh and read and hear how his spiritual life as he and it came to unfold, so as to contribute to the deaths of thousands, I am filled a great sadness. I am filled with a great fear for the children of this world and for the human search for the true and the good, our yearning for God. But I am filled with a resolve, too. Welling up inside of me is a determination, a dedication, a devotion, to life in the 21st century. That we, we, you and me, here and now, resolve to devote our lives to the unfolding human spirit, as it is first conceived in a child and as we shepherd its growth, that the human spirit be liberated from all that binds it to narrow thought and lifeless creed, and that it be cultivated through tolerance into bonds of true love and fellowship. That we might be free, that we might know who we are, that we might devote ourselves to unfolding in knowledge and tolerance, and, thereby, freely love all persons. AMEN.