READINGS

Exodus 20: 12 (#5 of the 10 Commandments)

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

Gospel of Thomas 16 (saying)

Jesus said, "Men think, perhaps, that it is peace which I have come to cast upon the world. They do not know that it is dissension which I have come to cast upon the earth: fire, sword, and war. For there will be five in a house: three will be against two, and two against three, the father against the son, and the son against the father. And they will stand solitary."

Matthew 10: 34

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 10.35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 10.36 and a man's foes will be those of his own household.

“He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 10.38 and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 10.39 He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.”

The Religious Case Against Belief, James P. Carse

Why a religious case against belief?

In the current and quite popular assessment of religion, there is one thing conspicuously missing: religion itself. The popular argument states that those who do believe in God, or Allah, have fallen ‘under a spell’ worked on them by clever but fraudulent thinkers. Or that religious belief was once useful to the evolution of human culture but is now an impediment to mature societal advance. What is more, believers are not just wrong; they are also dangerous. So-called true believers – those so convinced of the rectitude of their convictions they are eager to die, or to kill, for them – have brought once inconceivable havoc to the human community [revealing] that God is not good.

For all their righteous passion, however, what these critics are attacking is not religion, but a hasty caricature of it. Quite simply, being a believer does not itself make one religious; being religious does not require that one be a believer. This improbable distinction has been hidden by the tenacious notion that religion is chiefly a collection of beliefs. This leads to the absurd perception that one could, for example, come to a full understanding of what it means to be a Jew by carefully listing everything Jews are thought to “believe.” After the first inquires, we would discover that there is little agreement within [say] Christianity and within Islam as to how the core of each faith is to be articulated.

Why a religious case against belief?

To counterpose religion and belief is to make possible a deeper insight into both. The challenge is not to make religion intelligible but to use knowledge religiously. Aristotle wrote that knowledge begins in wonder. [Perhaps the spiritual life is to grasp and live so as to understand] that knowledge also ends in wonder.

SERMON

I have had people ask me if my father was a Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, or Baptist, and I tell them no, he was an Optimist. Dad was President of the local Optimist Club, the service club. He was also an Elk, a proud and majestic species though they move only with their own kind in herds. For a short time he was a Shriner, but not long enough to drive one of those small motorcycles in a parade.

My Dad made casket shells for a living, and I work in a related business. I christen, marry, and bury, and preach in-between to mark the time from cradle to grave. I make time marking time as surely as did my casket shell making father, who once came up from our central Indiana hometown to Grand Rapids for a furniture show since the casket shells are sold to furniture makers for the outfitting of their interiors.

My Dad and I had an even relationship growing up, but we did grow a bit distant as I became an adult. Dad was what believers call an unbeliever. Believers would call me, his son, an unbeliever, too. He didn’t much care for institutional religion, not because he had a disdain for religion like many of its cultured despisers today, but because he found churches hypocritical. “The people there say they believe one thing, but act like they believe something else,” I recall hearing him say once. He never elaborated on that, and once I was in the ministry I was afraid to ask what it might mean. Maybe he was even a bit disturbed by my life choice since now his son, whom he loved, would be the chief representative of the institution which apparently could only uphold unbearable hypocrisy. I think he was afraid I would become one of the self-righteous believers who judge so harshly those who believe and live differently than they do. I hope I haven’t, become either a believer or self-righteous.

Maybe this sermon is part of giving him a response after all these years, and after his death in 1991. In some ways our mothers are symbols of the nurturing glue of affection that holds all existence together, whether in its abundance as shown by some mothers or in its absence by others. And in some ways our fathers are symbols of the order and structure to existence, again in abundance through those fathers who take on this role seriously and consistently, and in its absence by those who cannot take it on or flee from it. Freud was right, that we project our experience of parents onto existence out there, and find God remarkably to be made in the image of Dad as Nature is in the image of Mom! My Dad still symbolizes in part the order and structure of all things, and so a sermon in response to his perplexity is both projection and challenge. Even from the grave his presence remains! And on the whole, I’m okay with that.

In large part because I think he really taught me valuable lessons about the life of faith even though most church goers would consider him and me unbelievers, he because of the intentional absence of church from his life. He taught me deep and abiding things about the life of faith by his refusal to put up with the hypocrisy of church. Church cannot be about belief, because the church is populated by finite human beings who cannot ever live up to the standards that beliefs set. I don’t know that this is the lesson he meant to teach, but it is the one I learned. People declare they believe in Jesus Christ and treat others in the most un-Christ-like way. People insist that God is love and they hate. People pray - asking God to forgive them their trespasses as they forgive those who trespass against them – and they expect God to be forgiving even when they are not.

Measured by belief the life of faith leads either to hypocrisy or self-loathing, or both! Every church is full of hypocrites only if one thinks that a church is or should be identified primarily by its beliefs, and the life of faith is about perfectly translating beliefs into lived life. The first thing my unbelieving father taught me about faith was ironic. Faith is not formed and composed primarily by beliefs, because no person can ever live successfully the fullness of a belief. And, beliefs change. No one is sufficiently Christ-like. No one loves completely and fully. No one forgives as they hope to be forgiven. And everyone changes, and their beliefs change. Faith is not about making a list of beliefs held by an individual or a church.

Quite simply, being a believer does not itself make one religious; being religious does not require that one be a believer. This improbable distinction has been hidden by the tenacious notion that religion is chiefly a collection of beliefs. This leads to the absurd perception that one could, for example, come to a full understanding of what it means to be a Jew by carefully listing everything Jews are thought to “believe.” After the first inquires, we would discover that there is little agreement within [say] Christianity and within Islam as to how the core of each faith is to be articulated.

Faith is about trust, and only at best, secondarily about belief. And trust is something my father tried to cultivate in his relationships, as deeply and intentionally as he could. The family owned casket shell company had about 60 employees and Dad was second in command, being Vice President, Plant Manager, and the only Salesman. The family that ran the company had hired Dad first as a Bookkeeper, but he quickly became the indispensable face of the company because the family owners, the customers, and the men in the factory itself, all trusted Dad. He cultivated that at work, in his friendships with the other fathers in the neighborhood, and his friends he kept from grade school to the grave. Dad was dependable, and when he made mistakes, admitted them, took the blame for them, ask forgiveness, and sought how the error could be made right.

In other words, Dad could change. That’s the second thing he taught me about the life of faith. It has to be about forgiveness, accepting blame, trying to right the wrong, and changing.

I think that’s why he didn’t much like church, at least the ones that were in our small town. The people of a church rooted in beliefs formed in the past and considered not in need of repair or updating or change, could so easily see the same in their lives. Believers in Richmond, Indiana abhorred and shunned change. To Dad, then, they were untrustworthy. You couldn’t count on them realizing that no one lives completely and truly what they say they believe. You couldn’t count on them for admitting their mistakes and changing their behaviors, when what they held as of ultimate worth was error-free, correct belief that never changes!

I think the life of faith is about establishing trusting relationships, failing, asking forgiveness, changing things that are wrong and seeking to reestablish trust. Over and over and over again. I think the spiritual life requires change. And I think God is that storehouse of Affection in this existence that holds up, bears, and carries life forward in its change such that trust can be created again and again and again.

Dad was also about allegiances. He went out of his way to make sure that those who depended upon him were supported in their endeavors. When a friend opened up a toy store, Dad bought all of our toys there, even when we didn’t have a lot of money and he could get them much cheaper at K-Mart. He was loyal to the family who owned the casket shell company, and even when the company could not longer compete and had to close its doors, Dad was there to the last day. He gave his heart to his family, to his business, to his friends, and to his community, volunteering in all facets of community life, from politics to service organizations to civic causes. He was well-known in our little Indiana town by the activities he pursued that exemplified his allegiance to the flourishing of human beings.

But, all allegiance has its shadow side, too, and so did Dad. His allegiances were too narrow, and he suffered from the same narrowness of affection that has plagued our country, and in specific ways in the mid-20th century. He did not contest the racial ugliness and division and oppression, the ethnic and religious contentiousness, the way society tyrannizes men and women who are gay, or the way we divide ourselves economically, and in terms of opportunity and interaction. Sometimes he loved his narrow allegiances more than a liberating Affection. And in his trust he was naïve, and several times gave his trust to those who would never have returned it. And he did not wrestle with the ways disillusionment, overt and covert, attacks an individual’s perception of his life’s purpose and aim. He needed a way to restore his soul when it was weary from the hypocrisies all around him, and even the ones he unknowingly kept alive.

And that’s another thing he taught me about the life of faith. First, that it is about trust, much, much more than about what you believe. Secondly, that it is about changing, especially forgiveness and righting wrongs wrought or those wrought upon us. Thirdly, it is about forming and maintaining allegiances, and knowing that whatever God is, it is that lure in existence to widen our allegiances far past the narrownesses we tend to put ourselves and others into. And finally, that the life of faith is about restoring the soul. It is about caskets and death, or about drinking in life; whether you see the cup of life as empty or as something that runneth over. It is about retrieving the heart from a hardness forged by the hurt and pain we can inflict upon ourselves and one another. It is about defending the mind from the absolute certainties we unwittingly allow ourselves to think we possess.

If history, if marking time, tells us nothing more about human nature, it does reveal this: We need to be ever watchful for the hardening of the heart and the closing of the mind. For we will step into caskets sometimes even before walking through and lying down in green pastures.

Jesus wisdom and life was not a significant part of my growing up, as you might imagine. And so I read the Christian Scriptures a bit differently than those raised in them. They are cryptic in parts, and certainly in the part relating to how one should consider one’s father. Honor him, reads the Hebrew Scripture which becomes the Old Testament to Christians, and in the New Testament Jesus’ message sets child against father, and divides the household as a sword divides dinner’s main dish. And so if, indeed, religion and faith are solely, or even primarily about belief, than this is a contradiction. Honor your father, or hate your father, which is the correct belief? You cannot follow both perfectly and become anything less than hypocritical or self-loathing, because there are contradictory beliefs here containing an impossibility.

But, what if faith is not solely or primarily about belief? What if we all admit that all are hypocrites because we are finite and make mistakes and hurt others, intentioned or not? We love things that aren’t worthy of our allegiances, and we claim an Ultimate certainty we do not possess. And this, humanity has done from the dawn of time. We have bargained away trust for the pottage of absolute certainty which none owns. We have sold off the Affection beneath our allegiances for a return too narrow and lifeless. And we have done this for every generation, such that disillusionment can become a permanent way of life. We can think that is the truth. We can step into the casket that my father, and other fathers before him, made to house dead bodies. We can live inside of caskets as generations before us have.

Or, we can be liberated and live. We can divide ourselves from the household of humanity as it has lived hatefully before. We can dissent from the divisive and corrosive ways of the past, purge the commerce of our times from the enmity that has a long history, and live by broadened hearts and free minds. Not all of the past was so sinister and gloomy. There have been in all cultures and times declarations of a better way, and those who lived that better way. Cultivating the generous spirit will honor father, because it will form us as individuals and not machines created by the old and bitter parts of the past. Cultivating an allegiance to the Affection that builds trust amongst all, will both set us apart from yesterday while honoring the best memory of father that any human being can hold.

Freud was right, we do project our experiences of our fathers and crown that projection as Deity. But, we can break free from the projections we bow down to, and we can live differentiated and liberated. There abides a freedom and unity of the Spirit expressed through a love for all souls. My father never said that but I can say it, and see some of him in it, and seek to live it as a way to remember and honor him.

Amen.