Sermon

INTRODUCTION: A minister starts out his presentation to a group of youth, by pointing to a jar full of jelly beans that he had brought with him. He asks them to guess how many jelly beans are in the jar; then, on a big pad of paper he writes down their estimates.

Next to those estimates, he helps them make another list: their favorite songs. He writes those down as they state them.

When both lists are complete, he reveals the actual number of jelly beans in the jar. The whole class looks at the list and compares how close they came to being right.

Then he turns to the list of favorite songs – not the jelly bean count estimates – but the song list. He asks, “Which one of these songs is closest to being right?” The students join in protest: there is no “right answer.” A favorite song is purely a personal matter.

Now he asks, “Okay. So when we decide what to believe about our religious faith, is it more like guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, or more like choosing your favorite song?”

What would you say? He always gets the same answer: Choosing one's faith is more like choosing a favorite song, than getting right the number of jelly beans in the jar. Let me put that another way: Choosing one’s faith is more like choosing a favorite song, than believing an array of claims to fact.

In the matter of choosing a song, a whole lot of very personal and unique events go into the music we choose. They are based upon our story as persons.

For example, when I was growing up, my brother who was ten years older than I, liked country music, which meant that when riding in his car and working at his automotive repair place, the radio was always playing, what? Good-old-whining-crying-in-my-beer-she-done-me-wrong songs, otherwise known as “country music.” Guess what: I still like good old, crying in my beer, she done me wrong songs to this very day…especially, the George Jones’ kind with a twang and a whine.

I also grew up in a Pentecostal Holiness Church where we sang gospel music during every service. We even had a family quartet, with mother on the piano, Dad on bass, and the rest of us singing the various parts based on whether our voices had changed yet. To this good day, it’s amazing to me the number of gospel tunes I still know every word to.

But then I went to the University, and I joined the Methodist Church, and went to music recitals, and began to appreciate a totally different kind of music and hymnody, and sometime later going on the board of the State of Texas’ oldest opera company. It was a journey from whining-and-crying-country music to appreciating some of the most gorgeous music the world has ever produced.

So if you ask me, what is my favorite music, you should not be surprised to hear my answer is, “Yes.”

That answer is not based upon the fact that I grew up on country and gospel, or that I learned while in college and graduate school to appreciate classical music, or that I’ve been to chamber music concerts from Jerusalem to St. Martins-in-the Fields in London, and long forgotten performances in New York, Washington, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Dallas and Ft. Myers. But it all started with the rhythms and sounds I heard while in my mother’s womb as she played on the piano at a little Pentecostal Holiness Church in Clinton, Oklahoma, which seems for far from the Taoist meditation music I listened to only this morning.

But if there is anything that I hope All Faiths teaches us, it is that the church of our heritage had a part in shaping who we are today, and we should respect it and appreciate it, even if it were not all a positive experience.

Louie Armstrong was once asked by an enterprising reporter, which, of all the different kinds of music, he liked best. He answered, “There are really only two kinds of music: good and bad. I love good music.”

The same is true about religion: good and bad…but with this important proviso: it may be good now, but bad later…good when you’re young, bad when you’re old; and neither good, nor bad, sometimes. It’s always a personal decision.

So when we talk about reason and faith, there is one very perplexing truth we should understand: faith is not about believing historical fact…the actual number of jelly beans in the jar.

Now you may think that’s a given and no need to discuss it further, but in the world we live and work in, I promise you that there is an enormous amount of oxygen exhaled in support of the “facts” of faith.

Remember the creeds: I believe this happened and that happened and this is going to happen. Every Sunday morning there are sermons that will attempt to persuade everyone present that the real basis of faith is to literally believe that certain time specific occurrences occurred ages ago. To join some of those churches requires believing those “facts” to be so.

Most of us here would probably appeal to reason and say one thing about that: There’s no proof for those “facts” that would stand up to any kind of modern, critical analysis and examination. None of them ever happened in actual fact; and for certain none of them constitute a world-saving event in the cosmos or on the planet – whether Moses or Muhammad, Jesus or the Buddha.

And if religion is all about fact – who died and who lived…who died how and who lived how – and if faith is believing what someone said, that someone said, that someone said, that was finally written in a book decades and scores of years later, then woe is us. Because reason and history, especially historical criticism…barely tell us in a credible, critically sustainable way any of the most significant events of religious history, such as:

n that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, that he was crucified by Pilate and that he arose from the grave after being dead for three days…

n nor is there any critically sustainable evidence to support Islam’s claim that Muhammad was visited by an angel in a cave and given the holy Qur’an by God, and though he was illiterate, we are now to live by its every written word and invocation.

Now those are the jelly-bean-counting facts of faith. Neither are there credible pieces of evidence for the beautiful story of the Buddha being restrained by his kingly father from interacting with the common populace, but who sneaked out anyway and saw old people, dead people and starving people. It so challenged him that he renounced his life of privilege for a poverty stricken journey to find enlightenment. There’s no evidence to support that, period.

And if religion…if faith…is subjected to bean-counting fact, then none of the world’s great religions, and any modern variations of them, actually happened. Jesus didn’t walk on the waters of the Sea of Galilee, Moses didn’t part the Red Sea, Muhammad didn’t entertain angels, the Buddha didn’t sit under the banyan tree, and Joseph Smith didn’t find golden tablets.

But also please hear this: Knowing that those aren’t “facts” and spending time preaching it won’t get you more than two hoots in a holler. What I mean by that is that spending time trying to turn the great faiths of the world into facts, or spending time trying to prove they aren’t true facts, is an exercise we all may have to go through in life. And having done that certainly has a lot to do with our ongoing journey…but fact based religion, or better yet, fact-based-historical religion, most certainly is not a destination, and neither is it the kind of hand hold to hold on to in time of need.

Put another way: faith is not fact…like knowing the exact number of jelly beans in a jar. No, it’s like choosing your favorite music, based on where you’ve been, with whom you’ve been, and where you are now. In other words, it’s very, very personal.

So then how possibly can reason help us if all it does is tell us our jelly bean count was wrong? What possible good will it do to keep saying, no, no, no, to every thing in the past, so we can avoid finding a way to say, “Yes, yes, yes” to the present. It’s like Congressman Mack’s health plan ideas: “No, no, no.” Great idea, Congressman. So why don’t you give up your government health insurance and the Mack family bank account, and try it.

Too many times, those of us on a liberal religious journey get confused and look at our religious heritage as Catholics or Jews or Muslims, or Buddhists and we reject them because they keep saying we have to believe in the number of actual jelly beans in the jar. That’s unfair to that faith. It’s why I reject atheism as an alternative to faith. It’s basically a “no.” It correctly rejects the incorrect number of beans in the jar, but so what. What is left? Faith to live and die by, is not to be found in believing so-called facts of faith. Rather, it’s making a leap of faith and then growing wings. We act in faith, and miracles of love happen.

As we make the great circle of life, we search for access to the cosmos…for an option that resonates with life as we live it…as we sing, pray and meditate…as we live and laugh and love…as we cry, and along the way make mistakes…when we zigged, when we should have zagged…when we zagged when we should have zigged -- but by falling and getting up again (one step, not two), by failing and succeeding (one step, not two), by collecting star dust and moon beams and roses and pretty petals, by dreaming and hoping, reaching and grasping, we come to a place in life that isn’t like anybody else’s. It’s our music…our song…our hope…our faith…our belief. And we join our voices in a chorus that reaches up into the heavens and bounces from planet to planet, proclaiming that this is the day that we say, we know that we know that we know…not how many jelly beans are in the jar, but how life has been lived to this good day…and how we hope to live it to our very last breath.

That means that when we make our choices about faith, there will be some uncertainty…some changing…but that’s okay. We can live with it.

It’s like some who are so concerned as to whether there is life after death. Personally, I can’t think of anyone at the moment who is ready to volunteer to find out. We can live with a little doubt, and a little uncertainty.

Faith without doubt gives us suicide bombers whose acts assault the very heart of the Qur’an. Faith without doubt gives us Topeka, Kansas Baptists at funerals violating the dignity and memory of young women and men who have served their country. Faith without doubt becomes divisive, partisan, and disruptive to the things we as human beings treasure: love, care for others, and concern for the Whole of which we’re a part.

Conversely, doubt without faith is the cynical smirk, the all-knowing critic, the hostile reaction to any voice of faith response – the fundamentalist atheist, who knows that only his way or her way is the way.

Let me pause for a moment: I had such a good time planning the themes of the sermons for October. There are so many incredible things going on in our world. It would be a spiritual experience to get together one night a week to watch the series, “The Elegant Universe,” and hear how much is being explored and discovered. What an incredible world we live in…not because of the facts, but because of the richness of our lives that inform who we are and the choices that we make.

So today on this last day of the last day of the High Holy Days, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, we raise our voices to say, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” And it was those same scribes of Israel who also wrote, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

There’s a wonderful story I want to repeat that happened some years ago. I was coordinating a men’s meeting in a United Methodist Church. We had a guest speaker who had gone through 17 major surgeries, three of which were organ transplants. He had also successfully run the 100 mile Iron Man contest in Hawaii. And he still ran at least eight miles every day.

So when he finished telling his amazing story, we were a little incredulous at all he had done and gone through. Finally, some one asked, “Well, John, did you have a religious faith to sustain you during all of this?”

He paused for a moment, and then said, “I guess you could say, I have a “Cow Pasture Theology.”

We looked appropriately unclear as to what that meant. Then he explained, “My life is like walking across a pasture in which there are a lot of cows: Sometimes you step in it and sometimes you don’t.”

And so have we as we made our faith choices. In so doing, we’ve made selections that have been discordant, inappropriate, or wrong for us; but we’ve lived through them. Now we face this day. Can we live it with hope and courage and love? It’s a choice we make, and in so doing, we have a community of faith that will affirm us and support us along the way.

[1] A sermon given September 27, as the third in a series entitled: “Addressing the Mystery,” at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation of Ft. Myers, FL, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, Minister.