CONSULTING THE FAITHFUL. A sermon preached by Galen Guengerich All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City March 17, 2013

Transcription

1 CONSULTING THE FAITHFUL A sermon preached by Galen Guengerich All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City March 17, 2013 Several weeks ago, I found myself in Dublin, Ireland on Ash Wednesday, the day in the Christian calendar that begins a pre-easter period of reflection and restraint known as Lent. I decided to attend the Choral Evensong service at St. Patrick s Cathedral, which is Ireland s largest church and serves as the national cathedral of the Church of Ireland. Like the Church of England, the Church of Ireland is incidentally Anglican the incident being King Henry VIII s hissy fit with the pope in 1534 over Henry s desire to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, which the pope refused to do, prompting Henry to install himself as head of the church. Subtleties aside, Anglicans remain in close theological harmony with Roman Catholics. As I entered the cathedral, I felt overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the place, my spirit subdued by the looming dark in the high vaults of the nave. The Gothic structure, completed in the late 12 th century, had the emotional impact upon me that its architects intended. As the time for worship approached, candles were lit throughout the nave and in the chancel, suffusing the space with a heartening glow. Then the music began, and the sound of unaccompanied human voices soared through the void as it had for centuries. The choir sang music composed by Thomas Tallis, the renowned 15 th -century English composer. Miserere nostri Domine, they sang: Have mercy upon us, Lord. The sentiment seemed right for Ash Wednesday. Once in a while, we need to be reminded that we are small and prone to stray. Listening to music that s been around for five hundred years in a cathedral that s stood for nearly a thousand helps put us in our place. When the music stopped, the talking began. My experience of the sublime began to fall apart. The scripture lessons for the day obscure texts from a prophet, a gospel, and an epistle seemed perversely unrelated to Ash Wednesday, or the needs of the people who had gathered for worship, or the issues in the world beyond the cathedral walls. The homily was a blessedly-brief mashup of the scripture texts, and then the congregation was invited to voice its faith by reciting the Nicene Creed, adopted by Christians in the fourth century. It remains the standard of faith for most Christians today. I listened to the people around me recite the creed, with its odd mix of the irrelevant and the impossible. I thought of the Greek physician Galen, the so-called father of medicine. He lived nearly two thousand years ago, during the period when the ideas in the Nicene Creed took shape. Galen certainly made advances in physiology and surgery, but I m glad my own physicians no longer consult his recommendations when I ~ 1 ~

2 need medical care. Galen championed bloodletting, among other archaic practices. For my part, I put the virgin birth and the resurrection of the dead in the same category. They too are relics of a bygone era. Apparently, lots of other people felt the same on Ash Wednesday even members of the Church of Ireland. In St. Patrick s Cathedral in Dublin, there were a total of forty people present on Ash Wednesday: 13 priests and choristers in the chancel, all of them men, and 27 people in the congregation, most of them women. The scriptures and stories and creeds have remained the same for nearly two thousand years, but the world has changed. Fewer and fewer people are listening. Most churches in Western Europe are nearly empty. Many churches in the US are emptying. Even some fundamentalist traditions are faltering. In those places where the practice of religion remains strong, including Africa and South America, surveys consistently show that people remain loyal to their congregations less because of the creed than because of the community. In many cases, the practice of religion as traditionally understood has become an exercise in irrelevance. In order for faith to remain viable without changing, it must grow ever more insular. On Tuesday, 115 men gathered in secret to decide who among them would become the most powerful religious leader in the world. Seventy-two years old on average, none of these men supposedly has ever been married. None of them supposedly has children. None of them supposedly has been physically intimate with another human being for at least half a century, on average. In most cases, their housing has been provided and their daily needs attended to by others for decades. None of them has a disabled son or daughter. None of them has a terminally-ill spouse. None of them has a child who has been expelled from school or a spouse who refuses to go to rehab. None of them has an ex-wife. None of them pays alimony or child support. None of them has ever tried to make a marriage work. None of them has ever had to choose between ending a pregnancy and closing off other options. None of them has ever needed an abortion because he was raped. I could go on approximately forever. But you get the point. Here s the irony: this lack of experience isn t viewed as a liability among those who chose the most powerful religious leader in the world, but as a necessity. In other words, any man who has had any of these experiences is thereby disqualified from being the most powerful religious leader in the world. In this sense, the papacy is the supposed triumph of innocence over the stain of experience the conceit of the virgin birth extended to the exercise of religious leadership. Make no mistake: I m not saying that a priest or minister must have had all possible experiences in order to be effective. If that were true, none of us could serve in the role. Rather, I m saying that the lack of certain fundamental human experiences shouldn t be championed as an essential qualification. It s like saying that you re qualified to do surgery only if you ve never been in an operating room. ~ 2 ~

3 That said, given the options, the cardinals could have done worse in making their selection. Francis is the first pope to emerge from the Jesuit order, now the largest of the Catholic orders. Founded in the sixteenth century as the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits focus mainly on education and missionary work. For this reason, the Jesuits tend to be less doctrinaire and more pragmatic in their approach than other orders. The new pope decided to take the name Francis, thus building a bridge to the Franciscan order, the other leading Catholic order. St. Francis of Assisi, the 13 th -century monk who founded the Franciscan order, was famous for his devotion to animals and to nature. He also made a trip during the Fifth Crusade to Egypt, where he became convinced that Muslims should be treated as friends rather than as enemies. Like his namesake, Pope Francis is being portrayed as a simple man, modest and humble. After his election, he took the bus with the other Cardinals instead of riding in the papal limousine. He handled his own baggage and vestments. If he were a US president, he d be Jimmy Carter. If we examine the man behind the labels, however, we see why Cardinal Bergoglio passed the papal litmus test. He has been a strident opponent of women s reproductive rights and of gay rights: no contraception, no abortion, no gay relationships, and no gay marriage. In addition, he has been dogged by accusations that he was complicit with the military government of Argentina during a period of violent repression and genocide in the 1970s. No one questions whether the Catholic Church hierarchy was complicit, which it was. The question is whether, as head of the church, Bergoglio either actively or passively cooperated with the government, as some say he did. Argentina provides a troubling test case for the impact Pope Francis might have in areas of the world where Catholicism is strong. Writing in Friday s New York Times, the Argentine novelist Martin Caparros says that Francis election underlines the assumption that the center of Catholicism is shifting to the world s poorer regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. And yet in his own country, the poor are migrating en masse to Pentecostal and other Christian churches that are more charismatic and less institutionally compromised than the Old Lady from Rome. Perhaps Pope Francis election will reverse that shift. But if it does, Caparros says, I dread the effect that this unexpected divine favor will have on my country Here [in Argentina], as everywhere, the Vatican is a main lobbying force for conservative, even reactionary, issues. An Argentine pope can bring this power to uncharted heights. The pope is the most powerful religious leader in the world. No one else even comes close. As so-called Vicar of Christ and as supposed pastor to the entire Christian Church, the Pope has untrammeled power. According to Catholic doctrine, the Pope enjoys, by divine institution, supreme, full, immediate, and universal power in the care of souls. Imagine what would happen if the pope used his power not to promote the doctrinal curiosities of the 4 th century but rather to face down the destructive tendencies ~ 3 ~

4 of the 21 st century. Even within his own theology, the pope has the freedom to do what s right. Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old, God says through the prophet Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth. The pope could decide that forcing women to bear children is an assault on human dignity. The pope has the power to do that. He could decide that demonizing men who love other men and women who love other women demonizes part of God s creation, which even God pronounced good. The pope has the power to do that. He could recognize that women do most of the teaching and nurturing in this world, both within the church and without, and that to deny them equal dignity and office should be anathema. The pope has the power to do that. Truth be told, it would be better if the pope did the right thing for the right reason. What happens when you base your moral commitments on a supposedly authoritative revelation from a supposedly supernatural God? Truth often gets denied, justice often gets distorted, and human dignity often gets disregarded. Endless human suffering happens. Instead, we should trust moral commitments that arise from human agency. Our Unitarian Universalist purposes and principles echo the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, insisting that human agency is the moral point of fulcrum. The wise use of human freedom requires us to undertake a responsible search for truth and meaning, uphold the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. The good news is that many of the 1.2 billion souls in the Catholic Church are too busy doing God s work to pay much attention to the letter of the laws promulgated by the pope and the Vatican. Millions of children around the world receive an education because Catholic teachers care enough to educate them. Tens of millions of refugees and displaced persons around the world receive food and medical treatment because Catholic relief workers care enough to come to their aid. Priests and nuns around the world minister tirelessly to wounded spirits and broken hearts within their congregations, all the while hoping not to run afoul of the doctrine police. Writing in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, the Catholic historian Garry Wills says of the pope: The farther he floats up, away from the real religious life of Catholics, the more he will confirm his historical status as a monarch in a time when monarchs are no longer believable. Wills goes on to say: When Cardinal Ratzinger was asked, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, if he was disturbed that many Catholics ignored papal teaching, he said he was not, since truth is not determined by a majority vote. But, Wills says, that is precisely how the major doctrines like those on the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection were fixed in creeds: at councils like that of Nicaea, by the votes of hundreds of bishops, themselves chosen by the people, before popes had any monopoly on authority. Belief then rose up from the People of God, and ~ 4 ~

5 was not pronounced by a single oracle. The dissident Catholic theologian John Henry Newman summarized this approach succinctly in the title of a book he published in 1859: On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine. The cardinals did not consult the faithful before they chose their new pope, and my guess is that Pope Francis won t consult the faithful either. But he might. He might begin to take his flock and their suffering as seriously as he takes the creeds and the doctrines. He might do the right thing for women and for gays, as well as for priests and nuns, and for all the souls under his care. If he consults the suffering of the faithful and takes their counsel to heart, change will come to the Catholic Church. I remain hopeful, though my optimism is based not on the probability of change but on the possibility of change. The God I serve unites all that is past with all that is possible. The life of the divine unfolds at the point of fulcrum where new things happen: where free women and men search for truth, advance justice, and promote dignity in all human relations. My prayer for Pope Francis is that something other than the past will become possible for him, for the souls under his care, and for all of us. ~ 5 ~