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When Church Scandals Affect All
of Religion Sunday, April 14, 2002
Readings: God will render to every one according to his works; to
those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality,
he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not
obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. There
will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil…
but glory and honor and peace for every one who does good… For
God shows no partiality. For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous
before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified… But if you call yourself a Jew [that is, a man of God]
and rely upon the law and boast of your relation to God and know his
will and approve what is excellent, because you are instructed in the
law, and if you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light
to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher
of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth
– you then who teach others, will you not teach yourself? While
you preach against stealing, do you steal? For he is not a real Jew [a man of God] who is one outwardly…
He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of
the heart, spiritual and not literal… The Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What
if some were unfaithful? Does their unfaithfulness nullify the faithfulness
of God? By no means!… But now the righteousness of God has been
manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear
witness to it… Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory
of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift… So here’s the dilemma: Are you justified by doing good, by righteousness? Is that the measurement of living a meaningful life? The problem with that is that all human beings fall short of doing good, sometimes in our lives terribly so, inflicting all kinds of pain and suffering on other human beings. So, if we are justified by doing good, we’re in deep trouble because we are all unfaithful to good! So, are we justified by grace, by God’s eternal faithfulness,
such that our falling short does not ultimately condemn our lives to
meaninglessness? Is there a spirit within existence that, despite our
shortcomings, still thrives for the generations that follow so that
our shortcomings do not impede the availability of the spirit for them.
But, if this is the case, when we do an evil thing, shouldn’t we
be held accountable in some way?
Various Excerpts from The second reading this morning is a compilation of
various excerpts from a newspaper article in USA Today. These are witnesses
to the crisis in the Catholic Church of clergy sexual abuse of children;
witnesses, in that they are Catholics commenting upon the issue within
their church. Let us then listen to the words that bear witness to the
religious issue that is at stake: The leading Cardinal in America faces public demands to
resign for failure to protect young victims, remove offending priests
and assure believers that leadership could be trusted. Boston’s
Cardinal Bernard Law has acknowledged keeping sex-offender priests on
parish duty for decades. "What was he thinking? Were they hanging
on to questionable men because of the shortage of priests? The bishops
need to focus less on damage control and more on coming clean with parishioners,"
said Becky Kroeger, 28, of Arlington, Va. Maria Leib, 31, of Loretto, Pa., pains for those wounded
by the abuse scandal yet insists on a longer view. "The Catholic
Church has weathered all sorts of storms across the centuries and it
will continue to weather these for centuries to come. It is made up
of human beings and we are all sinful creatures." Austin Hunt, a priest from Liverpool, England, insists
that corruption can be found in every history, land and faith, and that
such clergy are still "incredibly few, incredibly small in proportion
to the whole. Catholics are taught even if the priest is not pure, the
sacrament is always pure." Dennis Taylor of Billings, Mont., no longer goes to the
Catholic Church. But Taylor, 56, expressed a view that may be held by
other former churchgoers. He’s "embarrassed for the church,
for the hypocrisy and the cover-up" by " one of the largest,
most enduring and successful organizations with a big bureaucracy, in
the history of the world. You would think they would have found a way
to protect vulnerable parishioners from this type of behavior from those
who are trusted the most." "The time has come for some changes," says one
woman. "Everyone knows now that this is never going to be
hushed up again," says one person, " that they can’t
bury these mistakes anymore. Now it’s time for the laity to step
up and demand that the princes of the church deal with this issue clearly
and properly and be accountable to us." Nelia Sering, 45, of Falls Church, says, "People can’t blame the Catholic religion for a few priests who have done wrong. But church leaders can’t hide behind their faith." SERMONHymn singing may be one of the most important things we do on Sunday
morning, but its meaning often lies dormant. There is a joke among Unitarians
that we are poor at hymn singing because we are always reading a line
ahead to see whether or not we agree with the words! But singing hymns
is like singing basic revelations our religious perspective stands for.
The morning hymn contains the line, "New occasions teach new duties,
time makes ancient truth uncouth." Poet and Unitarian James Russell
Lowell wrote those lines at a time when slavery was legal in this country.
But it is not now. So the meaning of singing these lines has changed.
They now comprise a metaphor signaling that the basis of human understanding
is not the "slavery of old, established ways and interpretations,"
but the liberation of human experience. We represent that it is the very
authority of individual experience that gives truth its progressive thrust
in sometimes exploding what we thought traditionally was true. All religious traditions represent revelations, that is, wisdoms and
truisms about authority and individual experience, and the place of the
past and the place of the future in the meaning of human existence. Both
will permeate what we will talk about and think upon this morning, although
their meanings might lie dormant. This morning we are focusing on the religious dimension of a particular
set of immediate events: the revelations of the sexual abuse by clergy,
most specifically priests in the Catholic Church, which have come to light
through the heinous acts of a minority of priests within the Boston and
other American dioceses; and the Church’s role in covering up these
acts by reassigning these priests, within other dioceses, to other churches
for years, perpetuating the openings for abuse. The issue of clergy abuse is not confined to the Catholic Church any
more than adults abusing children is confined to the clergy. We’d
like to think we have a handle on this kind of behavior such that we can
identify those institutions and situations that accommodate these people,
but I think that is hubris of the most insidious kind. But there are real
religious issues involved in this crisis and that’s why it is so
disruptive and destructive to both the Catholic Church in particular and
religion in general. It is an emotionally charged topic, I know. So let
me first outline the way I will not approach it. I will not talk about
this issue from a psychological analysis of either abuser or the abused,
because I have no expertise to do so. I will not talk about this issue
from the sociological dimension of its affect upon society. I will not
talk about this issue from the legal dimension of law and punishment,
and responding to those adults who prey on children (Frankly, my personal
opinion is that all abuse instances should be referred to legal authorities
for possible prosecution, that convicted abusers should serve more time
than those who commit any other crime, and that those who were complicit
in assigning them knowing they were abusers should also be prosecuted).
I will not talk about this issue from the psychiatric dimension of treatment
or illness. And I will not talk about this issue from the philosophical
dimension of ethics and morals, either by the individual clergy or by
the institution of the church, because I think that morality and ethics
are a secondary yield of religion and not synonymous with it. That’s
part of the meaning of the reading from Paul. Religion is about the experience of something imminent and immediate,
and something timeless, both at the same time. The 20th century’s
greatest theologian, Paul Tillich, said that thinking about religion is
about correlating an analysis of the immediate situation, with the timeless
truths a tradition represents. Our religious perspective represents the
primacy of individual experience over the accumulated wisdom of tradition:
"New occasions teach new duties; the slave where’er he cowers
feels the soul within him climb, when a deed is done for freedom."
And, our religious perspective represents time as something whose fulfillment
lies in tomorrow: "A freedom that reveres the past, but trusts the
dawning future more." So, let’s start by "revering the
past," by recalling it and seeking to understand it so that we might
be able to trust the future more. As Unitarians, we have been chided as those kinds of people that have
authority issues. We do! We don’t like to be told by a church institution
that represents or interprets past revelations, what we have to believe
theologically. Instead we hold to the primacy of individual experience
and the authority derived from what we as individuals have come to know.
We can quote the Hebrew scriptures to confirm this: "What does the
Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly
with your God?" We can quote the Christian scriptural account of
Jesus’ words to confirm this: "The Kingdom of God lies within."
But our revering of past calls us to understand how the Christian Church
took a monumental turn on the issue of authority at the first major Church
Council in 325, convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine in order to
fabricate the singular and permanent and theologically binding form of
what we call today Christianity. Church doctrine was formally adopted
and, from that moment on, enforced by the Christian Church as the only
standard form and representation of Christianity. Up until that time,
what formed an essential ingredient of a person’s faith was not only
beliefs that held some kind of quasi-legitimacy within the general Christian
world, but most importantly, one’s own experience. It was the initial
vitality of the faith Jesus spoke of. The Kingdom of God is within. It
is at hand. It is immediate. It is contained in your experience, especially
when it overturns the accumulated wisdom of tradition. The individual
is not God, and therefore does not possess an authority appropriate to
a divine size. But, you and I have our experiences and our attempts to
create meaning from them and, thus, as individuals we possess a great
deal of authority. When the first major Christian Church Councils occurred,
at Nicea beginning in 325, this locus of authority was dismissed when
certain beliefs were codified as the only authoritative version of Christian
beliefs, certain texts were codified as the only authoritative written
accounts of the human/divine encounter, Jesus was made the only authoritative
version of God’s salvific activity in history, and the role of the
Church became to enforce this official and authoritative version of Christianity
and smothering the impact and meaning of an individual’s differing
and diverse experiences. That’s the issue of authority. We have a deep suspicion of religious
institutions because we know, from Western religious history and our own
experience, that all human institutions tend toward the consolidation
of authority within the institution and away from the individual’s
experience. Even ours!, which lays a particular burden upon us to be prophetic
within our own institutions! We know the way people in whom we have invested
authority, will gravitate towards closing doors when making decisions.
We know the way people in whom we have invested authority will gravitate
towards cutting off communication with the people who have given them
authority and power, saying, even, that it is in the best interests of
the general populace not to know the decisions that have been made. In
other words we know the way that people in power in institutions, particularly
religious ones, move away from their own accountability and towards the
self-interest of their own survival. And we know the way that people in
power in religious institutions justify that as being the way God intended
it to be. Believe what a representative of the church tells you to believe,
instead of an individual’s experience even if that individual is
you. Except now we have been reminded of some of the horrible things that
can happen behind closed doors. Oppressions of the spirit can happen behind
closed doors. Oppressions of all kinds have always happened when the authority
of tradition and the institution of the church are held in such esteem
that the experience of individuals is destroyed. It will tempt fallible
men, leading fallible institutions, to announce that one category of human
being, a religious leader, is higher in authority than another, a child
or an adult who remembers his experience as a child. When tradition is
prized over individual experience men and women are tempted to conceal
and not disclose. They will close doors to others, and the distrust generated
will rob human beings of what is our divine inheritance: freedom. Jesus
pronounced a judgment on the closed doors of religious institutional distrust:
"It is written that my house shall be called a house of prayer for
all people, but you have made it a den of thieves." Let’s revere the past some more by listening to it and trying to
understand it. Early in the history of the Christian Church, in 250 ACE, the issue of
whether salvation was by works or grace was first dealt with institutionally.
Cyprian of Carthage claimed that religious leaders had to be pure in order
to lead worship, because a religious community is the community of the
pure, the saints, and the pure have to be led by the pure. Salvation by
works creates a community of the saved. This had become the understanding
of the church particularly as it became exclusively Gentile and lost its
roots in Jesus’ reinterpretation of Judaism through Paul. But Stephen
of Rome differed from Cyprian, claiming a new form of community was to
unfold, the community not of saints but of sinners, and seeking to make
manifest in communal relationships the grace that came from God and not
from an institution purified from the intrusions of outsiders, new people,
the impure. Instead, a religious community need welcome all, so it can’t
rely on the purity of its leader or the purity of its membership for the
capacity to manifest the sacred. As a religious leader I can tell you
I am not pure, and if you doubt that, ask my wife, my children, the other
churches I’ve served, or my friends from college. I’ll even
give you my mother’s email address! And I’ll bet you aren’t
pure either! No individual or community is. Said theologically, we all
fall short of the glory of God. But this early crisis in the Christian
Church came about because the aim of the community, in the over the two
hundred years since Jesus’ death, had become to preserve what they
thought was the revelation that had already been given. The crisis occurred
because Stephen maintained that a community of saints did more than revere
the past, it worshipped the past. It located the appearance of ultimate
meaning in the past! So Stephen pronounced a new form of fellowship. But
what the Christianity from that time to our own still refuses to see is
that it takes the new dawn of the future, in the form of the possibility
of a new community, and makes it serve a worshipping of the past. When people in religious community maintain that the aim of that community
is to preserve the past at the expense of the future; when institutions
don’t change, or ever so slightly as if not to change at all, they
die. And they die because they serve their own perpetuation at the expense
of the true. They become idols to themselves. I’ve seen it, too many
times to count! Religious communities that worship the past lose the faith
they may have represented at some time. They mistakenly think some part
of humanity, those in their community, are somehow pure, and thereby in
their community need be protected from the intrusion of others. And the
dawning of the future and the unfolding of creation cease. All because
ultimate meaning is located in the past; so the aim and purpose of religious
fellowship becomes to protect its purity against the disintegration of
change! Adult survivors of child sexual abuse often say that their abuser robbed
them of their childhood. I do not know that from my experience but I would
not doubt the authority and veracity of that claim. My religious perspective
affirms the primacy of individual experience over the accumulated wisdom
of tradition, as much as tradition is important to me. And I am an
institutionalist,
but I know, too, that institutions must change, and the church, religious
community, is chief among those that must lead the way as an example of
how humanity can change. As human beings I realize that many of us want
someone more religious than I am to tell me how to lead my life properly
even and maybe especially when my own experience weighs upon my ability
to understand it. But I know I must be true to myself over my uncertainties.
And I want my church, of all things, never to change, but I know, too,
that those human creations that don’t change lose their vitality
and their relevance and their capacity to meet human need. There is another
line from one of our hymns that rings true: "Revelation is not sealed."
It is not sealed in a book, nor in an institution that seals itself away.
Cardinal Bernard Law, the head of the Boston Catholic Diocese, where the
disclosures of the abuse of children by priests have formed the focus
of this crisis, is caught in the dilemma of human existence. Between the
desire to look to the past for authority over the authority of individual
experience. Between the temptation to want a religious community never
to change, over the truth that revelation is not sealed. I think these
are part of the reasons for reassigning priests after adults have come
forwarded claiming sexual abuse when they were children. A religious institution that worships the past robs itself and its children of the future. A religious community that sacrifices individuals to the perpetuation of its own institutional survival thwarts the soul’s unfolding climb. The Catholic Church will change. Of that I am certain. But this issue includes a deep dimension relevant to all religious communities. Protect the primacy of individual experience over an institution’s drive to conceal its doing and seal itself away. And know that the aim of religious community is not to establish the community of the pure, because no such thing exists and to propose it as the purpose of religious fellowship is to propose there can be anything humanly created that is not touched by change, by the prospect of its own betterment and by the unfolding promise to every human being that is contained in the dawning future. And it is this truth that prepares the way for a love that graces our days. AMEN. |
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