“LOVE, Yes! HATE, No! RELIGIOUS HATE: Hell No!”[1]

INTRODUCTION: Carl Jung, the great contemporary of Sigmund Freud, once said that he had never provided therapy for anyone over the age of 35, whose problem was not spiritual. In confirmation of that, Joyce and I had separate extended holistic health sessions with Michael Montoya, in Sedona, Arizona, this past summer. He said that he had conducted more than 1,000 such sessions, and without exception, each person was longing for a connection to a greater Connection.

Which brings us to this good day, a very special juncture in the religious calendar of two of the world’s great religions: Islam and Judaism. Islam just concluded its 30 day observance of Ramadan this past Thursday; then last Wednesday night practicing Jews began the observance of the Jewish New Year, which ushered in its High Holy Days.

Both events and practices are practical expressions of what Jung and Montoya were describing: That inner need many of us recognize as a desire to connect to the Great Connection…to be in sync with the Universal Reality before which we all stand…or more simply, as religious faith would express it, to feel the presence of God.

But isn’t it amazing though that in the midst of such lofty searches, and such elevated aspirations, that here on the continent of North America on the Southeastern peninsula known as Florida, in the university community of Gainesville, much of the past week, especially for the media, was spent not in reporting on the devotional or spiritual practices of Muslims finishing Ramadan, or in Jews beginning the High Holy Days; rather, the media were camped out on the lawn of a church in Gainesville, trying to determine whether its pastor would go through with his planned “International Burn the Koran [sic] Day.” Even though the president of the United States, the commander of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, the American Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, plus religious and civic leaders from all over, all joined in, urging him not to go through with his planned exercise in sacrilege against Islam.

May I suggest that whether we like it or not, such concerns reflect the newly realized strength of Islam. Just 20 years ago, when America invaded Iraq and Kuwait the first time, there were constant jokes about camel jockeys, and inappropriate descriptions of Islam. But not now. In fact, new statistics suggest that Islam has surpassed Christianity numerically. Those once ridiculed now hold the levers of leadership in many nations around the world. With those numbers and the power that their new position has brought them, has also come respect. The point is that America can ill-afford in this global world to have its public perception of Islam be so dimwitted that we would build bonfires on which to burn the Qur’an. Nor can we afford for someone so ill-informed as Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida – who hasn’t even read the Qur’an – to create such a firestorm of opposition.

But as one of my students at FGCU argued last Thursday, in America, doesn’t someone like Pastor Jones have the “right” to say or do anything about any religion, if he so chooses. Doesn’t the freedom of religion enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and the first ten amendments to it that we know as the Bill of Rights – don’t those guarantee Jones or anybody else the constitutional right to say or do whatever they please to the scriptures of another religion? I mean, isn’t this America, the land of the free where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness reign. Who gives a care what others think. We’re the biggest, baddest, most in debt nation in the world. We can do anything we want, right!

My student said the freedom to do what Jones threatened to do is what we mean by religious freedom. She went further to maintain that it would be okay also to burn the Bible. In fact, no sacred scriptures of any religion are protected against bonfire burning, she argued.

As I listened to her, and attempted to create a meaningful interchange in the classroom, I realized I was also charting new territory for myself. I had always been the one who was speaking out for the absolute rights guaranteed in the 1^st Amendment.

As I’ve related many times, I speak as someone who led a successful fight in Oklahoma County to get the County Commissioners to rescind their firing the director of libraries because he would not remove a particular book on sex from the shelves – a classic freedom issue. A few years later, with the ACLU providing legal counsel, I was the chief plaintiff in a suit that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully protesting the presence of the Christian cross in Edmond, Oklahoma’s city seal. Ditto for protesting school board policy allowing only Christian ministers to lead prayers at high school football games, and Christian only baccalaureate services planned by the School Board.

So for certain, I treasure the freedoms enshrined in the first amendment, especially religious freedom. But what we all are learning in America in this the early years of the 21^st century…or more specifically, what we are learning in a religiously diverse and increasingly complex world is, that things have changed. America is not the predominantly White, Judeo-Christian nation we once were. We have to pay attention to what others think. Like the old Dodge automobile commercials, “This changes everything.” We are of necessity being forced to revisit what we once meant by religious freedom. In so doing, here are some of its new parameters:

The first is that we no longer have the right to ridicule someone’s religious faith or desecrate their holy book, anymore than we can ridicule their ethnicity or the color of their skin. There was a time when the Ku Klux Klan not only got away with murder and oppression against black Americans, but they also used an invective against Jews that would have made Hitler proud. That doesn’t happen today. And when it does, there are penalties to pay. We have come to realize even in America that the spreading of messages of hate are the precursor to acts of hate – Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazism is the prime example.

What the Pastor Jones episode has brought front and center for America is an awareness that the globe has gotten much smaller. And it’s said to us Americans that we don’t have the right to blaspheme or commit sacrilege against any of the religions of the world. We live too close together. There are too many of so many of us.

I’m suggesting that in our new world we recognize that it is no longer acceptable for cartoonists in Denmark or America to caricature the prophet Muhammad. Either find something else to satire, or get another job.

But especially, it is no longer acceptable for an American Christian pastor to think he has the right, a constitutional right, to desecrate the sacred scriptures of any religion. Those acts are now out of bounds…they are unacceptable in any civilized sense. The world has changed, and in our increasingly diverse nation, religious intolerance is not acceptable. We’ve moved on.

That is not to say, however, that religions are not subject to criticism. Catholicism’s policies and practices towards women and gays are reprehensible and should be held up to the light of day for public criticism until something changes. Practices of Muslim leaders and sub leaders resulting in the stoning of women or their beheading should be vehemently resisted. Mormons who force children to marry older men need to be vigorously prosecuted.

But that is distinctly different from frontal assaults on a religion’s viability and validity. Remodeling a house is not the same as demolishing it. Calling for reforms of a religion is not calling it of the devil or attempting to destroy its sacred texts, both of which Pastor Jones has done.

All of which gets back to the point raised initially: What religions are about for most of their adherents is finding a way to make a deeper connection to the Universe of which we are a part.

There seems to be that within us that wants to understand our place in the scheme of things, to know who we are and where we came from, to connect to that original source from which we all sprang.

ANALYSIS

For Unitarians, one way of addressing that desire for understanding is to talk in terms of anthropology and cosmology. We all know that the theory of the universe most accepted by the scientific community and its cosmologists is that at some distant point in time – maybe 15 billion years ago – there was an explosion in what we now know as the Universe. It was of a magnitude beyond our capacity to measure. Out of that "Big Bang," came the 100 billion galaxies and their solar systems that defy tallying. And in one of those galaxies – the Milky Way – and in one of its solar systems – and on our planet Earth – a distinct form of perpetuating species evolved.

Out of the murky waters of geologic time, a series of living organisms eked forward, who slowly crawled out of the primeval muck onto land, and created the prototypes from which we ascended. Our primitive ancestors gradually evolved over periods of millions of years into the species we know today as Homo sapiens, or human beings.

Life for those early ancestors must have been terrifying. Death, disease, disaster, flood, drought, lightening, hurricane, tornado: all permeated existence, filling it with mystery and terror. There seemed to be no reason, no purpose to existence. Instead, just around the corner loomed another encounter with that which had no name, and no identity. It possessed the power to ruin and destroy the lives of the good and the bad, the weak and the powerful. No one was immune. Everywhere they turned, an ever present and destructive Force was lurking. It was something to be feared, to be in awe of.

Then somewhere in time, a brilliant leap forward was made. We realized that we could connect to that Force, that Original Source, that Mystery that engulfed us. Part of that process of connecting was to give it a name: God. As in the contemporary Hindu religion, there were countless numbers of gods for every facet of life.

What naming the Mystery did was to take the first step in removing it from the terrorist list. Further, once a name and identity were given, rituals and ceremonies to appease and solicit their blessings were developed. A priestly order evolved. Temples were built. Whole nations were dedicated in their devotion to a particular god or gods. And all the religions of the world, whether they worshipped many gods, tribal gods, or only one god, the pattern was the same: Here was the way to reconnect to our original source.

There was a time in Western Judaeo-Christian culture, when God was located in the heavens, in a level above the natural level – the supernatural. He oversaw the earth from his perch in the sky. Heaven was up there. Hell was down there. And Earth was in between.

But as our understanding of the Universe has expanded, up and down, above and below, natural and supernatural, are no longer credible categories. We have found that our Universe is so immense, that it exceeds and transcends our ability to describe it. The lack of limits to space boggles the imagination.

Stephen Hawking, probably our most renowned contemporary physicist, has coauthored a new book, in which he cites the high probability that there is not just one Universe, but Multiverses, with their own galaxies and black holes and infinite space.

But the answer to living is not invented but detected. It’s to love what we already have here. It’s understanding the connections we have to that which is as precious as life itself.

CONCLUSION.

I offered a title to my sermon that said “Yes to love, no to hate, and hell no to religious hate.” Here is what yes to love means in practical terms:

1. Yes to taking care of our planet – the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the life we share this planet with. Those are spiritual concerns that root in our most intimate connections. What we are doing to our planet with global warming…what we are doing in places like the Gulf of Mexico…those deny and defy our spiritual connection.

2. Yes to recognizing that our bodies are a gift from the Universe. Maintaining a rhythm to living that’s in sync with the patterns of this part of the Universe is an important spiritual practice. In other words, loving our selves is a spiritual principle.

3. Yes to believing in the importance of loving relationships. Truly loving relationships require investments of time and tenderness, care and concern. But the return is a unique bonding that is one of the greatest gifts we as a species have been given.

4. Yes to treating others with respect is the truest test of the validity of any faith. There has not been any remedy found or any religious understanding greater than that of loving our neighbor as our self.

5. Finally, to say yes to all the religions of the world in their search to connect to our common Source. In religious language, to be at peace with God is another way of describing our species long journey to finding ways to be in sync with the rhythms and harmonies of the Universe.

So yes to our planet – the air, the water, the land, its inhabitants. Yes to recognizing the gift our bodies represent. Yes to loving relationships. And yes to loving others.

Shalom, Salaam Aleikum, Amen, and Blessed Be.