"What Our Nice Church Is Doing Here"[1]

INTRODUCTION: There’s a story told about the artist Pablo Picasso. One day, it seems Picasso returned home just as a burglary was occurring. The thief got away, but Picasso told the police he could do a sketch of him. The police later said that, basing the intruder's appearance on Picasso's cubist drawing, they could have arrested a nun, a washing machine, or the Eiffel Tower!

            So how do we describe All Faiths? What is it that goes on here? What are we doing here? Why are we here? For what purpose do we attend? One of the most oft-stated reasons for our attendance and participation, at least initially, is that:

I. We are sorting out our theological belief system and self-understanding.

Most of us had some kind of theological beginning, whether it was a catechism, a Sunday School, a bar or bat mitzvah. We were willing participants in that process, and accepted what we were told, more or less.

But at some point, we asked a question? And the answer that was given, or the one that seemed to be implied, didn’t compute. That was the beginning of our journey to here today.

For me, it was the most innocuous of questions to my father, when I was in the 3^rd grade. He and my mother were the pastors of a little Pentecostal Holiness Church in Corpus Christi, Texas. After Sunday morning services, the rest of the family went home in my brother’s car and I stayed with Dad until those attending services had left, and I then rode with him.

As we were driving home, we passed a Baptist church. There were several people leaving the church building, and I noticed that some of them were smoking.

In our Holiness tradition, smoking was a cardinal sin. I had heard all the stories about people “being saved and quitting smoking,” and those who had backslid and went back to smoking. Being saved and smoking couldn’t happen.

So seeing these Baptists smoking, I said to my father, “Daddy, will Baptists go to heaven?”

I don’t remember what he said, other than he went all the way around the world to get home, when he could have just stepped next door. Though I don’t remember his exact words, his answer was sorta, kinda-like, almost, maybe they will. Strangely enough, the impact it had upon me was to realize for the first time that there might be other ways to heaven besides our ways. Tobacco-smoking Baptists might even make it. And if that be so, who knows what else was possible? In a very embryonic fashion, I realized that people can believe differently and still be okay.

We’ve all moved beyond the 3^rd grade, and consequently, our questions are much different. We still are surrounded with churches and temples and mosques – all of whom believe differently. It’s not that we disagree with their beliefs; rather, we’re saying that the questions have changed, which means the answers have as well. The world isn’t cursed, we aren’t all sinners, and life inside or outside of the church can be beautiful.

The questions we now face are incredibly complex. We’ve only begun in the past 500 years to see deep into the cosmos. It was in the early part of the 16^th century that Nicholas Copernicus concluded that the prevailing view that the Earth was the center of the Universe was wrong – a view central to the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. He correctly deduced that Planet Earth rotates around the Sun, not vice versa.

A second example: Were we to take the time to count the stars visible to the naked eye in the sky, there are approximately 8,500. Those in themselves are magnificent, as any of us who’ve looked into a starry, starry sky can attest.

But in 1610, Galileo Galilei, looking through a very primitive telescope, or “spyglass” as he called it, peered for the first time into the depths of the heavens and determined that there were millions of other celestial bodies. The word “awesome” was first given definition.

It was only 85 years or so ago that Edwin Hubble determined that the millions upon millions of stars in the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy were not the whole Universe. In fact, today we know that there are not only billions of stars in the universe, but billions of galaxies. And if that sounds amazing, consider that each of these galaxies contains billions of stars. That means that there are more than ten billion trillion stars in the universe.

And back on our beautiful little planet, only 151 years ago, Darwin published his Origin of Species and in so doing drew a connection between our species and all other living things.

And it was hardly 100-years ago that Einstein published his revolutionary insights on the Universe, transforming our views of time, space, and light.

And on the list could go; but suffice to say that these ways of understanding our Universe of necessity force us to readdress how we understand ourselves in relation to the Whole of which we are a Part. New self-understandings of our world and Universe, when elevated into philosophical principle, and applied to theological self-understanding, should result in new ways of looking at ourselves and our world.

            It’s one of the reasons we have an ongoing Building Your Own Theology course, which brings to bear the religions of the world in the light of the reality before which we all stand. What do we believe about it all now?

Examining those questions is one of the reasons we come to this particular religious congregation…to sort it all out and come to our own self-understanding.

II. We understand that we are connected not only to each other, but to all living things.

Darwin faced two huge hurdles among the religious public when his theory was published. First, he rejected the notion that the world was created in six-days as the first creation story of Genesis presents. Incredibly, a significant segment of Christianity still holds to that view today.

The second hurdle he faced was even more difficult for many in the Church. It was the notion that human being was not “made in the image of God,” but evolved from ape-like creatures over a period of millions of years. 

That was also a frontal assault on a cherished belief of most religions…that we each had an eternal soul that would live forever. To give that up and accept that we were muscle and blood and skin and bones was untenable to contemplate. That animals like the monkeys and chimpanzees were evolutionary cousins was equally horrifying.

            But the far greater implication of Darwin for us is that we are connected, not only to all human kind, but to everything that is, including plants, fish and birds. And because we are connected, and owe our heritage in part to those from which we came, it means that we must exercise concern and care for each and all of them.

Not to believe that enables some of the abuses that occur when cause is so far removed from effect. In the course I teach at the University, we’ve been studying the criminal success of Big Tobacco in marketing their deadly products. We saw video of five CEO’s in which they were asked if they believed cigarettes caused lung cancer; they each, without exception, said, “No.” And yet, correspondence that was later retrieved demonstrated that they all were well aware of the health risks of the products they sold. And none of them smoked!

So how could these upstanding corporate leaders contribute to the deaths of 475,000 Americans every year? Because, they were so far distanced from the causes – which were their policies – and the effects, which were smokers. As those managers sat in their corporate offices and board rooms, they never saw the victims of their policies, which were those coughing, wheezing, struggling to breathe, and dying.

I believe that if anyone ought to go to jail for feeding the addictions of Americans, it ought to be the tobacco company executives and their advertising agencies. While we’re doing that, we could legalize marijuana, make heroin and cocaine available by prescription, and maintain those policies for three years, which would give us time to clean up the mess we’ve made on the Mexican border. And in doing so, deal a huge blow to criminal drug rings and dealers.

Why else are we here?

III. Because we seek to connect to that from which we came and to which we go.

I had a friend once, who got into drugs and was sent to the Federal Reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma. I went to visit him, and since I was studying for the ministry, I felt compelled to try and convert him to my Protestant version of Christianity (he had been reared Roman Catholic).

I went through the how-to-be-saved-in-three-easy-steps litany that I had been taught, but it didn’t work. Richard stopped me and said that he had tried to pray, but he didn’t feel anything. He said he then prayed, “God, if you’re real, make it rain for just a minute.” It didn’t rain.

As I was driving back home, I realized that instead of a convert, I had almost been converted. I thought, what would it have hurt for God to have sent a little rain shower so that Richard could find Jesus?

Though that was a naïve perspective of God, it does point up the inner desire we have to make a connection with our Source, with a Higher Power, with Something that’s more than we are.

I remember Dr. Scott Peck in one of his books explaining a two-year-olds tantrums by saying that it is a horrible shock to a newborn’s system to leave the warm embrace of their mother’s womb. They pop into a world of bright lights, burning eye drops, circumcisions, and worst of all, the cutting of the umbilical cord between them and their mothers. They are no longer connected.

And for two years, they cry and mother comes…with milk, cooing, and changing their diaper. And when she holds them in her arms, it’s almost a womblike feeling. They want so much for that warm cocoon to remain.

But even that changes. They start to walk and no longer are carried. There’s less hugging and holding, and now when they cry, some times nothing happens. No one runs in to see what’s wrong. And mother even says no. And they don’t like it and don’t want it and they want all the world to know they don’t. They’re no longer connected.

That’s a little bit like we are in this Universe. We’re about halfway from the center of the Galaxy, which is a massive Black Hole. Out there in space, it’s a dark and cold place. Once we thought we were the Center of the Universe, and that its creator had magically made us and all that is. Then we learned that no, the sun was the center; oops, the real center is in a galaxy of a billion stars; oops again – our galaxy is only one of a billion other galaxies – double oops: there is a Universe out there of whose dimensions we really have no way to calculate.

No wonder we want to go back to our earth-centric world, and to believe that Jesus died for us, or Moses received the law for us, or Muhammad the Qur’an.

But we know that in the same way that we will never be a two years old again, neither can we slip back into that ancient, mythological way of viewing the world.

So why are we here? Antoine du Saint Exupery, a novelist of the first half of the last century, who went down in a plane during World War II flying over Italy, once wrote,

“We live not by things, but by the meanings of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.”

So when we sing hymns, and repeat ancient prayers and practices, we are not reverting to a past mythology; rather, we are passing on the passwords.

CONCLUSION.

Do you know the difference between heaven and hell? I read recently that:

Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are English, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and everything is organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the English are the cooks, the Germans are the police, the French are the mechanics, the Swiss are the lovers, and everything is organized by the Italians.

I say all of that to say this:

All Faiths is where you can believe what you want to believe, as long as you extend that right to everyone else, but not because beliefs are unimportant, but because each person’s belief is so incredibly important that we would never think of requiring anyone to say they believe what they don’t believe simply because we or others believe it.

Shalom. Salaam Aleikum.  Amen. And Blessed Be.