in Grand Rapids, Michigan, October 5, 2003
Copyright ©
“Shock and Awe,” Rev. James L. Evans,
Sightings, April 17, 2003
Awe is basically a religious term. It combines feelings of reverence with affection or even adoration. Awe is mostly a positive experience. It is part worship and part wonder. Awe is the awareness that comes when we find ourselves in the presence of a power that transcends this world. This power is primarily a creative fore, a nurturing and loving force. Being in the presence of this life affirming, life-giving force evokes in us a startling awareness of our fortunate place in the universe.
Isaiah 58: 1-14
[This is one of the Torah readings for Yom Kippur, in which the Lord, through the prophet Isaiah, describes a fast that is proper for the Day of Atonement]
Yet, they [the house of Jacob] seek me daily, and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God. They ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God. Why have we fasted, and thou seest it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and thou takest no knowledge of it? Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure, and oppress all your workers. Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight, and to hit with wicked fist. Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a man to humble himself? Is it to bow down his head like a rush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from the human family? Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be at your guard… If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. And the Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your desire with good things, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.
Sermon
One of the great experiences in my life as a minister occurred when one of my former churches lent its facilities to the local Jewish orthodox synagogue for a year and a half. It was my initial first-hand experience with Yom Kippur, which begins today at sundown, the Day of Atonement, concluding the Days of Awe and marking the Jewish New Year celebration. As a Unitarian Universalist we are suspended equidistant between the poles of creedal Christianity and traditional Judaism. Historically we arose out of creedal Christianity eventually to establish free religious communities where men and women can be bound together in a solemn agreement to protect the sanctity of individual freedom on matters of faith. While our historical lineage is Christian, our theological lineage is much closer to Judaism, although we are not nearly as connected to the enactment and meaning of ritual as are the Jews. Rabbis have been my closest clergy colleagues in several of the areas in which we have lived. I remember standing at the entrance of my former church’s sanctuary, standing room only in a very large room, and listening to the shofar, the ram’s horn, which is blown in Jewish services at this time of the year. It is haunting, and the echoes reverberate in the eardrum and linger in the imagination. It is not the horn from a living creature of course, but one which has been sacrificed, at least in ancient times it was! I now know why this is the most important holiday to the Jews, and why the term “the days of awe” is used to describe it.
Many were deeply offended by the military calling the blitz bombing of Iraq “shock and awe.” The capacity of human beings to reign down destruction upon one another is the proper occasion to use the visceral word, “shock,” but not a religious word like “awe.” Now are the days of awe! But we reduce the scope of a religious word to the proportions of human violence, as we have been doing to the religious impulse in human being since the dawn of time.
Because of the 20th century’s appreciation of archaeology, brought home to us last year in the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, it has been important to contemplate the beginnings of religion. How did religion arise? Many speculate that it began in fear. At the dawn of human consciousness, perhaps even coinciding with the emergence of self-awareness and the recognition of mortality, arose the fear of our own demise, the fear from which all other fears originate, and the suspicion that the world conspires with our fears.
Yesterday afternoon I stood gazing out our kitchen window to the landscaped steps below, and a calico cat crouching near a clump of evergreen bushes. I have a deep-seated fear of cats, considered in ancient Egypt as gods. Mine is not a debilitating fear, but it is strong enough for me to protest the family desire to get one. I don’t want to feel that deep uncomfortableness in our own home.
This cat slowly, ever so slowly, stretched back upon its raised haunches, its ears pricked up, its head swiveling as if it were the hand of a beauty queen waving, and then, wham! It sprung upon something, wrestled it out of the bushes, a mouse, which it whipped back and forth in its jaw until the little critter was limp and the cat could let it down on the ground. It munched this morsel as a ravenous party-goer would delectable portions of finger food, and then wiped its paws clean and strolled along its way.
Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous 19th century line so often used to describe Darwin’s observations of Nature, came into my mind immediately: “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” The fear I attribute to felines is really a deeper, larger fear that lingers unnoticed. The vicious brutality of that beautiful creature bolsters my argument for no cats in the house. I think that as long as cats aren’t around the fear will not be either. But my fear is not of felines, but of life itself and the natural world’s disinterest in my personal survival and even the survival of our entire species. The poet Tennyson declared an unsettling truth in the same poem: “I care for nothing, all shall go,” Nature says!
What was the origin of religion? None of us will ever know, but many declare that when human beings first came to an awareness of themselves and their world they simultaneously understood the true dangers surrounding them. Maybe they didn’t see a cat crunch a mouse and think about its larger meanings. Maybe it was an earthquake, thunder and lightening, volcanoes, the warm sun being extinguished at the end of the day, the change of the seasons, or a predator devouring their kin. Was this fear the origin of religion, engendering in them what we call the awe we sought to thrust into the heart of the Iraq? The first human beings evolved into self-consciousness, looked to the mountains and saw their littleness and fragility. They looked to the heavens and saw their impotence. And they were afraid.
And in their fear they created the sacrifice. Forces beyond them created their lives. Forces beyond them could take it away. Thus was born the sacrifice. They gave life back to those forces, those gods, out of the fear that not to do so would be tantamount to participating in their own destruction. Some say this was the origin of religion. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, out of human fear, arose the sacrifice, which the later Hebrews would use as part of Yom Kippur and, still later, the Christians would adapt to describe God’s intentions in sending Jesus to be sacrificed for our sins: “… but you shall offer a burnt offering to the Lord,” a rabbi will read over the next day as part of Yom Kippur, “a pleasing odor: one young bull, one ram, seven male lambs a year old; they shall be to you without blemish.” (Numbers 29:8) “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16) The central religious impulse and the highest sentiments in humanity, declares those religious perspectives arising from fear, is expressed through the ritual of sacrifice.
It is human to ask the unanswerable and fashion a reasonable solution, and this is one. Violence begets fear, and fear begets a reply of violence, the sacrifice, and sacrificial violence begets a righting of the world. The fear of our own demise gets squared away, evened up, righted, made whole again, atoned for. Days of shock and awe indeed!
What if fear is not the origin of awe? What if sacrifice is not the expression of our most basic response to existence? What if there is in human nature, from our beginnings, a religious impulse that is deeper than fear, broader and more abiding than our worries, our dreads, our panics, and our trepidations? What if the violence of sacrifice, conceived of as the most religious response to our existence, isn’t at all what awe is, and isn’t the supreme act expressive of our deepest religious impulse?
What if, when these infants and young and older children, whom we have christened this morning, were born, along with the emotions that can’t be seen and the personality that can’t be seen, there was also created a religious impulse? What if there arose in them at creation a capacity to respond to the world deeper than fear? And it is our inability or unwillingness to engage that impulse that leads us to resign awe to the violence wrought of fear. Why is it that when babies are born they are often, when possible, placed upon the heaving chest of the exhausted mother? Why are babies so often cuddled and held, and it is a source of regret when they are not, and so very often, looked upon with what could only be described as awe? Could it be that we are looking at the divine likeness of which we too are born, which is deeper than fear and stronger and more abiding than violence and death?
As modern events today reveal religion can no longer be conceived of primarily or exclusively through the sacrifice. The religious impulse must needs be conceived of as something deeper than the fear of our own demise. Religion can no longer sacrifice understanding on the altar of theological pride. Religion can no longer sacrifice compassion on the altar of true belief. Religion can no longer sacrifice human life on the altar of one’s certainty of what God’s wants and will are. Religion must needs be conceived of as something deeper than sacrifice, stronger and more abiding than fear.
A religious faith wherein sacrifice is at the center of its ritual or its theology proclaims a deep truth about human being. We are plopped into a natural world, “red in tooth and claw,” and the fear that isprovoked deep within us is genuine. But, there is something deeper still, a spirit over which even death has no dominion. Sacrifice born of fear and violence must needs yield to a life of the spirit born and raised through a life of love. This is a deeper, greater, and more lasting truth, that is lifted up when children are christened and celebrated when new year’s come.
Is not this the fast that I choose: If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. And the Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your desire with good things, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.
AMEN.