“The Liberal Religious Beliefs

That Make A Difference!”[1] 

INTRODUCTION: Young Johnny came home from having attended Sunday School at a local Christian Church. His mother asked him, “How was it?” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Fine.” His mother asked for more, so Johnny said, “We learned about this neat space alien named Moses, who came to rescue his buddies who were slaves in an interplanetary prison in Egypt. Moses released a whole bunch of drone attacks on the prison and freed all of his buddies. As they ran to get away, the drones had this cool app that bombed a river dry, so that everyone could race across the river bed just before it wiped out Darth Vader Pharaoh and his gang.” Johnny looked up at his mother and said, “It was a really cool story.”

His mother looked back at him, not knowing how to respond. After all, it was Sunday School. Finally, she asked him, “Johnny, is that really what they taught you?” Johnny somewhat sheepishly replied, “You wouldn’t believe what they really told us!”

The truth is that many of us grew up on stories of Israel’s fantastic deliverance from Egypt which fuels the Passover event, the miraculous burning for eight days of the menorah in the temple which we recall at Hanukkah, or the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem at Christmas.

The point though is not to try and place the Exodus from Israel in a modern context, as Johnny did; nor to critique the historical accuracy of the Hanukkah event; or to try and to determine if there was a real star in the heavens shining on Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago.

That misses the point. No matter who did what, when, where, and why they did it is not the issue which we face. Our possibilities and our futures are not determined because of what happened in the ancient past; but because of it, we have an incredibly promising present.

 Which is why the first liberal religious belief that makes a difference is this:

I.

THE PAST ENRICHES OUR FUTURE!

Please let me illustrate what I mean: My son, Brett, has for the past almost two years been involved in the creation and design of an Internet startup corporation for the commercial real estate industry. From afar, I’ve learned more about that process than I had ever imagined existed. But at Thanksgiving, I learned that early this November, his team had a huge creative breakthrough that has revolutionized everything they’ve been working on.

Brett told me he remarked to his research and development director in San Francisco, “Gosh! What if we could have discovered this a year ago? What a difference it would have made!”

But Arvin, a transplant from India, with an MBA from Harvard, said, “No, Brett, we were only able to make this breakthrough because of all that happened in the past two years.”

Now they, their Internet designers in Dallas, their software construction people in India, and their marketers in New York, have all been enabled to race at warp speed, not because they were doing something wrong, but because of everything they were doing wrong and right, when they were doing it, and why they were doing it, and with whom they were doing it – when suddenly things jelled and it catapulted them forward into another dimension in their endeavor.

If you would for a moment, compare that process to your spiritual journey and to the liberal religious person you are today. I’m sure that many of you can look back upon your theological journey…sometimes with appreciation…sometimes with pain…and sometimes with amazement. Regardless, we could not be at the place we are without having traveled that spiritual road.

No one else has gone through what you have gone through. It’s uniquely, and personally rich to you.

The same holds for me.  When I was almost 17, I had a spiritually transforming experience that changed my life. As I described it then, “I got saved.” At that beginning stage of my intentional faith journey, I understood “getting saved” to mean that I had been forgiven for my many years of serious sinning, because I had confessed them, repented of them, and asked God to save me from them, through Jesus Christ our Lord. (And everyone said, Amen!)

At the place where I lived, and the time that it happened, and the level of self-awareness to which I had been exposed, that experience as I described it worked perfectly for me. It put me in a different space and place, with different friends, different plans, and different desires for my life.

But as I made my journey of faith, I moved unintentionally from that initial starting point. So much so, that some years later, I realized that virtually everything I had once believed about Christianity as historical fact, was nowhere close to the current reality of which I was a part. Everything had changed. The future was open.

When I realized that, I might have said something like, “Gosh! What if I could have known this back then? What a difference it would have made!”

Not true! I was only able to make the change because of where I had come from and the lessons disclosed on that multi-years’ journey. The past enriched the present.

So when you come to All Faiths, we don’t teach nor encourage that you reject your past; rather, that you appreciate its good, learn from its bad, and appropriate it all into the opportunity you have now. As a faith community, we believe each of us is free to be the person of faith, hope and love that we choose to be.

In our religious journey, we are free to be whomever we choose to be! There are no restrictions, liabilities, nor cosmic punishments. Plus, we can change our beliefs as time and experience teach us.

So the first liberal religious belief that we cherish is very simple: Our differing religious paths enrich us all. We honor them and affirm them. They are an important part of the mix on the journey we are now undertaking.

II.

THE BEST LIVES ARE THOSE LIVED FOR OTHERS.

This is ultimately what the message of the great religions is really all about: If you really want to be fulfilled and happy…if you really want life to be a bag of Miss Joyce’s chocolate chip cookies…then start thinking of somebody else…start taking time to look the grocery store clerk at Publix in the eye and tell her or him, “Thank you” and you’re glad they’re here to help during this busy holiday season…or increase the size of your tip to the wait staff at the restaurant, and let her or him know they did a great job…or write a commendation for the person at COSTCO who came racing over to help you put all the stuff you purchased in the car. That’s what our freedom to be is all about: we’re free to help others.

When Steve and Chris Fisher were building their beautiful home in northwest Cape Coral, Chris insisted upon a double oven. Steve asked, “Why in the world do two people living alone in this house need a double oven?” Chris still insisted.

Guess what? Both Steve and Chris use it every week to cook the meat for the veterans and the homeless who go to the once a week meal for the homeless at All Souls Episcopal in N. Ft. Myers. Chris said there’s not an inch of space left in their double oven while it’s cooking. Who would have thought it!

            Mahatma Gandhi said, "Even Jesus would not appear to a hungry man save in the form of bread." That’s another way of saying that spiritually enlightened people understand that we are not about being in the majority; rather, we choose because of our liberal religious faith to be counted in the minority…with the poor, the oppressed, the immigrant, the homeless, the sick, and the hungry. We choose to be liberal theologically, and to insist on liberal values being incorporated into the political spectrum.        

            True and mature spiritual enlightenment has a dimension of depth to it that hurts when others hurt and cries when others cry. It seeks the redress of evil and calls for the addressing of wrong.

CONCLUSION.

One of the few persons I really knew who came anywhere near sainthood, was Dr. John Peters, the founder of World Neighbors, a small self-help development organization in Oklahoma City, founded in 1951. Dr. Peters had been a United Methodist chaplain during World War II in the Phillipines. Once as they stormed one of those many beaches, and during a rare break in the shelling, he stopped to take a breath. One of the raw young recruits from the hills of Kentucky yelled, "Chaplain, guess what?” “What?” Chaplain Peters answered. “I ain't supposed to be here," he said. Chaplain Peters laughed and said he wasn’t sure he was either. The soldier crawled over and showed him the letter he had received on ship that morning, before they stormed ashore. It was from his local draft board back home. They said there had been an error and he should not have been drafted, and that plans were being implemented to return him home.

            The two of them had a good laugh, and then the mortars began coming in again, and right before Chaplain Peters very eyes, the young man who was not supposed to be there was hit hard in the chest by a fragment. Chaplain Peters yelled for a medic but chaos was everywhere, and he had to hold the young man in his arms as the blood pumped out of his chest onto the chaplain’s arms. With that boy in his arms, John Peters lifted up his eyes to heaven and vowed one day to come back to the countries he had been a part of invading, but this time with something other than military hardware…which led to the founding in 1951 of World Neighbors, and their first project was in the Phillipines.

            I didn’t know that story when I first met Dr. Peters. I later learned that he was a Yale Ph.D. theologian. I saw him drive into the parking lot in a Volkswagon bug that he could barely get in and out of. When I went to his home to have dinner with him and his wife, I discovered that they lived in a small three room apartment, with one bedroom and one bath.

            Because of my questions, I learned from his wife that in 41 years she had never traveled with John on his constant trips overseas, because the two of them couldn’t afford it, and she was unwilling for World Neighbors to pay for her travel. She also said she had fretted a lot about being left at home so much…in their little apartment…with only one bedroom…one bathroom…and a Volkswagen bug to drive.

            But she said, triumphantly, she had just returned from her first trip overseas with John after all those years. It seems that she had been left a small trust fund by her family. When the assetts and income totalled enough for her to pay her own plane fare, she drew it out and accompanied Dr. Peters on a trip to India.

            When I asked her how it went, she told me the story of leaving Calcutta, India early one morning and heading for the airport. She said as they were driving down the highway, she looked out into the fields nearby and saw scores of women, men and children, standing up, taking their clothes off and wringing the morning’s dew into containers. That had been their bed for the night. The dew, their water for drinking and washing. And most probably, the field was their toilet. Automobile transportation was a dream that would never have entered their minds.

            Mrs. Peters vowed as she saw them that she would never again complain about having only a three room apartment, with only one bedroom and one bathroom to live in, and only a Volkswagon Beetle to drive.

At All Faiths, we are free to choose what we believe. We call that the “vertical” dimension of faith. We also believe that faith places a great responsibility upon us to identify with those who have less, those who are the least of our brothers and sisters. That’s the “horizontal” dimension of believing. It’s where we live. It’s how we interact. It’s who we are.

  Namaste. Shalom. Salaam Aleikum. Amen. And blessed be.