Good Morning! Happy New Year! I'm sure most of you were up past midnight dancing and drinking. Still, you're all here in Church this morning. So am I. I guess we're church people.
It feels like New Year's Day. Behind us is not only 2005, but a whole era of our church - in front of us isn't just 2006 but a new era. Our previous Church leadership has resigned and our upcoming Church leadership has not yet begun. So, Where does that leave us? Nowhere.
And who better to preside over the eye of this pastoral hurricane than me? Not only am I one of the few members of Judson who never went to seminary, I'm not even Christian. Truth be told I hardly have any religious convictions at all.
Though, like the definition of a Christian that was considered in the new testimony, I try to live decently as Russell puts it "According to my lights" that is, by my mental ability, knowledge and understanding.
I was 25 years old when I attended my first church service. I arrived early and stayed late - Cheri was the director of music, my girlfriend, and my ride.
I didn't know any of the hymn melodies so I tried to fake it. I tried to read along but I didn't know the first thing about reading music - I kept getting lost. The words were something about angel's feet or something. Is everybody looking at me? I caught myself rocking a couple of times like we used to do in our synagogue growing up. Stand up - be seated - What page are we on now? Cheri couldn't help me she was up there conducting the choir.
Afterward, Cheri asked me, "Well, what did you think?"
"It was very nice" I said.
"But how was it?"
"You did a great job, Cheri. Way to go!"
"I mean, did you feel anything?"
She was hoping the exposure to church would wake me up and I'd be saved or at least be on the way. No such luck.
Still, given my handicap I've done pretty well. Cheri and I got married a couple of years later. If anything she became more devout - ultimately pursuing a graduate degree at seminary. I not only accompanied Cheri to church here at Judson, I ultimately became a member - I even accepted a position on the Church's board of directors.
When I joined Judson in 2000 I announced that I wasn't Christian - just in case anyone was confused. I'm not trying to pass as a Christian. What am I doing here, then? I know the answer to that one. I'm here because the woman I married loves church. If she were into motorcycles I'd be on a Harley right now. But she loves church so I'm here. We've been coming here for over 10 years but my core beliefs - the deep down stuff - remain unchanged.
I suppose I have changed - from a non-practicing Jew to a practicing non-Christian.
What does it take to be a Christian these days anyway?
Bertrand Russell boils it down to three things, belief in God, belief in the afterlife and belief in the ultimate human greatness if not divinity of Christ.
That's a pretty low bar for Christian membership, and probably not sufficient. Are those the only required beliefs? Are there actions required too? Whether it's accepting Christ as a personal savior or being baptized, what's left depends what kind of Christian you are - it depends on where you are in the hierarchy of religiosity.
The Hierarchy of Religiosity - isn't that great? I made that up myself!
Think about it - If levels of "chuchiness" are grouped in a hierarchy, then we'd have at the lowest (or most specific) layer of the hierarchy people who have very specific sets of requirements for membership, take for example Baptists who require beliefs in not only Christ's greatness, but his sacrifice, virgin birth, etc. and who encourage full emersion baptizing. A bit higher in the hierarchy are plain old Baptists without such strict requirements, then protestants above that, then simply Christians, above that members of monotheistic religions, and so on. Judaism is off to the side, as are other religions.
Wherever you live on the hierarchy, somebody's on a deeper, more specific layer than you and that person is way too into his religion. And those guys on a higher, more general layer? They're missing the wonder and power and the point, frankly, of what you understand so deeply to be true. (They just don't get it). Anyone to the side is a heretic or at the very least wrong.
For example, if you're a Baptist, who are your heretics? Methodists? Oh, those Methodists! Well, at least they're not Catholics. And Catholics, at least they're Christian. You get the idea.
Speaking of Catholics, did you know that the first objection to prayer in the schools didn't come from the Godless ACLU, but from Catholics who objected to scriptural lessons being led by non-clergy? When we as a nation appreciated the Catholics' issue we moved up the hierarchy in our tolerance. We understood the Catholics' objection even if we didn't all agree with it.
Next up above Christianity - our Judao-Christian values - we always leave out the third Abrahamic faith, Islam, for some reason. At least we all believe in one God. It's hard for many of us to be civil to those that don't satisfy at least that requirement.
In fact, George Bush, the elder, once said that atheists shouldn't be considered citizens.
No really, he did. In 1987, George Bush Sr. said: " I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. … This is one nation under God."
Wow. Still, George Bush, Sr. made it up to the next rung of tolerance. You're okay as long as you believe in God, even if you're not Christian.
Above Godly in the hierarchy is "spiritual". I often hear people say that they're against "organized religion" but quickly add that they're spiritual nonetheless. What does it mean to say "God without religion"? It means I believe in God (however I define it) but not in the way that members of mainstream religions do - or it means I believe in God (however I define it) without community or perhaps even without ritual. It's more a general fuzzy feeling that God's out there or is everywhere or is in everything or…well you get the idea. You don't have to go to church every week or believe in the traditional bearded-man-on-the-throne God to be spiritual.
Spiritual - that's the litmus test. Whether Christian or Jew, Hindu, or atheist, we'll be all right as long as we can all agree that there's a force in the universe - one with intention, a creative energy, if you will, that surrounds us - in which with prayer or meditation we lose our sense of self and become one with nature...ah! Actually, I don't believe that, either.
I suppose I live on the layer above spiritual. I waffle over whether that's a shortcoming or a strength. At least I'm not in the layer above me - those amoral people. Whew. What's their problem? Or the guys above them - Whoa!
When I say I'm not spiritual, I don't mean to disparage people who are. It's not as if I haven't ever had transformative, even mystical, experiences - they're just the exception not the norm. I may attribute them to misfiring neurons, but that doesn't mean I haven't had them.
For example, years ago I visited a retrospective of painter Ad Reinhardt at the Museum of Modern art. The final room of the exhibit was reserved for Reinhardt's black paintings - like the one reproduced on the covers of your bulletins this morning. A whole room with nothing but black paintings looked pretty cool to me. The room was nearly empty of people. I took my time and gazed at one of the paintings. After a while I had a kind of fuzzy otherworldly feeling and felt myself being drawn into the painting - it was a kind of out of body experience. As I stood there I came to be aware of something that I would have known if I had read up more on the artist - that the black paintings were not black after all but made up of large squares of color that were almost-but-not-quite black. The difference between the colors was so subtle that until I was two feet away staring right at them for a few minutes I didn't even realize there were multiple colors there at all.
It's like that with me and Christianity - not the out-of-body part, but the subtly. Hovering up in the stratospheric non-spiritual layer of the hierarchy I wouldn't expect to appreciate the rich complexity of this religion. I do because while my, well, "soul" for lack of a better term hovers up here in the non-spiritual level, my body is way down here in this church.
I've had plenty of opportunity to gaze at Christianity as I gazed at that painting and make out the subtle differences between Christians. The picture on the cover of the bulletin is not an Ad Reinhardt work after all, - It's just a black rectangle. A glance, even a good hard look at Christianity can yield just as egregious an oversimplification.
It would be fun to stereotype Christians as bucktoothed ignoramuses who all see images of Mary in their pancakes, but I cannot - Christianity like humanity itself is much more lush and complex than that - I've seen it up close.
Staring at an abstract expressionist painting doesn't make me an art historian just as being immersed in a church doesn't make me a Christian, but in both cases I came away changed.
Without becoming Christian, by loving a Christian woman and experiencing Church with her I have absorbed some of Christianity's fascinating culture.
Are any of you like this, too? I'm not against organized religion it turns out. I'm steeped in it. I'm inside it and outside it at the same time.
Being mixed up ended up helping me. Is everybody's problem that they don't appreciate the nuances of the other's culture? So everybody's problem is that they cannot see beyond their own corner of the history of ideas?
There are wins and losses on the road to total tolerance. It may seem like we've been losing ground lately, but I see that we're going in the right direction. So let's move the line of tolerance up a notch - high enough so that we aspiritual people are under it. Maybe we're not ready for the next notch yet. Tolerating doesn't mean agreeing with or being silent about. It means that we're all here together trying to live decently by our lights. We're spread out seeking in different directions in the same universe. Let's agree to share with the rest of the group when we've found something interesting, can't we?
What's everybody's problem? I don't know, but at long as we recognize that it's everybody's problem, we'll be okay.
Ancient Testimony: Ecclesiastes 1: 12-18, Proverbs 4: 5-9
Modern Testimony: Bertrand Russell: Why I Am Not a Christian
