MEETING OF THE MINDS A sermon preached by Galen Guengerich All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City February 3, 2013 Today is the most important Sunday of the year for the National Football League and its fans. Tonight s faceoff between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens culminates a season-long campaign by the league s 32 teams to win the Vince Lombardy Trophy, awarded to the winner of the Super Bowl. According to a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 27% of Americans believe God plays a role in determining which team wins a sporting event. Twice that number more than half of all Americans believe God rewards athletes who have faith with good health and success. If God were a patriarchal puppet master, which God is not, God would certainly face a conundrum tonight. The 49ers prodigiously talented quarterback Colin Kaepernick has Bible verses tattooed on his arms, while the Ravens equally talented linebacker Ray Lewis frequently talks about his Christian faith. For those of us who have revised our understanding of God, the outcome of tonight s contest has nothing to do with divine favor. The purpose that unifies each team is not devotion to a puppet master God, but determination to get the football over the goal line as many times as possible. Since the head coaches of the two teams happen to be brothers, the contest on the field is contest enough. The Super Bowl is not a test of divine favor, but a clash of human purpose. Just as players on a football team unite to serve a common purpose on a football field, so do human beings on other fields of endeavor. The iconoclastic author and urbanist Jane Jacobs, who revolutionized the field of urban planning, applies this principle to our nation as a whole. In her 2004 book Dark Age Ahead, published two years before her death, Jacobs says that our nation has cohered around four central unifying purposes over the course of its history. During the founding period, the unifying purpose was political independence, which gave rise to the quest for individual liberty. Independence and liberty, she says, were succeeded by two conflicting versions of freedom: the political freedom of states rights, offshoot of independence, and the social freedom of abolition of slavery, offshoot of liberty. After the Civil War resolved, for a time, the conflict between these two concepts of freedom, a second broad cultural purpose developed, known as manifest destiny. America s expansion across the North American continent was fueled by a widespread belief that we could redeem this old world by creating a new heaven on earth. As the turn of the twentieth century approached, America became united by a third unifying purpose, a commitment to reform. Americans sought to perfect their ~ 1 ~
society, Jacobs says, by eliminating child labor, extending the vote to women, combating corruption and fraud, embracing public health measures, outlawing monopolies, initiating environmental conservation, and protecting the rights of laborers. This reforming spirit culminated in President Franklin Roosevelt s proclamation of the Four Freedoms, which link economic aims (the freedom from want) to human rights (the freedom from fear). After the twin traumas of the Great Depression and the Second World War, America unified around a fourth purpose: full employment. This insistence is enshrined in the so-called dual mandate of the Federal Reserve: full employment and price stability. For her part, Jacobs believes full employment and the quest for economic prosperity generally has been the unifying purpose of American life ever since. If football teams and nations cohere around unifying purposes, so presumably do religious groups. Unfortunately, religious groups often cohere around commitments that aren t reasonable and purposes that aren t constructive. The result is what the singer and songwriter Greg Graffin calls bad religion, which happens to be the name of the punk band Graffin formed more than 30 years ago. Over the course of 20 albums, the band has worked to expose bad religion in both its ecclesiastical and political forms. Graffin, who somehow managed to pick up a PhD in zoology from Cornell along the way, has also co-authored two books about religion and science, one about whether belief in God is good, bad, or irrelevant, and the other about faith, science, and bad religion in a world without God. Even at their baddest, religious groups cohere around a unifying purpose. Graffin s song Meeting of the Minds chronicles three pitched battles in Western history, two of which were religious. The first came during the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 of the Common Era. Christians who believed Jesus was the divine son of God confronted those who believed he was a uniquely-inspired, but nonetheless human, prophet of God. Sadly, those who championed the magical explanation for Jesus influence prevailed. The decision of the Council, now known as the Nicene Creed, remains the most widely used creed among Christians today. When belief in the supernatural trumps belief in reason and experience, the result, Graffin suggests, is bad religion. I agree. The second battle chronicled in the song Meeting of the Minds concerns the trial in 1925 of a Tennessee science teacher named John Scopes. He was accused of teaching evolution, which was against state law. The trial pitted three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, arguing for the prosecution, against the famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, though the verdict was later overturned on a technicality. Even so, the Scopes trial ignited a culture war between fundamentalists and modernists in America, a war that still rages on. Graffin s point in the song extends beyond the obvious conclusion that some religious decisions and purposes are better than others. Religious convictions develop, and moral purposes take shape, Graffin writes in the chorus ~ 2 ~
At the meeting of the minds. Reading of the times. Open the blinds. To our complicated lives. We all need some kind of creed to lead us to light. When Graffin says we need some kind of creed, I take him to mean some unifying purpose that operates in the realm of the transcendent. It takes account of the meaning not of a game or a nation, but of everything: the meaning of life itself. This transcendent purpose opens a window onto the complexity of our lives and world, reads the meaning of our times, and gives us a sense of where to go to find the light. When a group of people develop a transcendent purpose in a meeting of the minds, religion happens. Is the result good religion, or is it bad religion? The answer depends, in part, on whether you have to slam the window back shut in order to believe it. Truth be told, Graffin seldom focuses if at all on good religion. When Bad Religion comes to town in late March for a concert at Terminal 5, I m hoping to have a conversation with Graffin about good religion about a revised understanding of God and an enlightened practice of religion. In the meantime, we will shortly convene the 194 th annual meeting of our congregation the most important day of our church year. It s worth asking how you and I understand good religion. What s our unifying purpose? When we gather for a meeting of the minds, what shared commitment opens a window onto the complexity of our lives and world? How do we read the times? Where do we see light? Inside the front cover of your order of service, you ll find our unifying purpose. It begins with a simple statement: All Souls is a religious community. The three bullets that follow say what we mean by religious, how we understand ourselves as a community, and what difference we intend this religious community to make in our lives and our world. The first bullet says what we mean when we describe ourselves as religious: In the experience of worship, we gather to contemplate the mystery of God, interpret the wisdom of religion, and explore the insights of science. Our purpose is to awaken our sense of the sacred and renew our resolve to transform ourselves and our world. The distinctive quality of a religious community as compared to other kinds of communities is the experience of worship, when we evoke our sense of being part of some comprehensive whole. In worship, we contemplate the mystery of God. Though others may describe the experience differently, God is our name for the experience of being extensively connected to everything to all that is present, as well as all that is past and all that is possible. We also interpret the wisdom of religion. We take up the challenge of holding fast to what is true and letting go of what is false. This effort is made easier because we also explore the insights of science as part of our worship, which sets us apart from most other religious traditions. We take scientific research as seriously as we take religious wisdom. ~ 3 ~
The purpose of worship, and of our religious community as a whole, is two-fold: to awaken our sense of the sacred, of being extensively connected to everything, and to transform ourselves and our world. Everything we do as a religious community serves the goal of transforming our lives and our world. Religion holds up a comprehensive vision of the good and moves toward it. Religion is about transformation. The second bullet explains how we understand ourselves as a community: As human beings, we all emerge from the same Source and share the same Destiny. As a community of faith, we make shared commitments and offer mutual support. As individuals, we each bear responsibility for our own beliefs and actions. In this part of our statement of purpose, we acknowledge our debt to our Unitarian and Universalist forebears, who insisted that we all come from one source (the Unitarian emphasis) and we all share one destiny (the Universalist emphasis). In our present-day experience as a congregation, what we have in common unites us into a community of faith; the ways we differ free us to be individuals. Many religious communities define themselves by common assent to an orthodox creed or an authoritative scripture. We do not. Instead, we identify ourselves by the character of our religious community, which rests on the twin pillars of shared commitments and individual responsibilities. The third bullet expresses what we expect of ourselves and each other within this religious community: We practice a discipline of gratitude, by which we acknowledge our utter dependence on the people and world around us, and we practice an ethic of gratitude, by which we accept our obligation to nurture others and the world in return. With these words, we bear witness to our belief that religion is a way of life. That s why we call it the practice of religion. Religion is a way of life that transforms our lives and our world. The distinctive hallmark of our faith is our deep awareness of how utterly we depend upon the people and world around us, and how utterly they depend upon us. Gratitude is the sign that our religion is good, and that we are moving toward light. And good religion has never been more needed than it is now. Jane Jacobs titled her book Dark Age Ahead because she believed the overweening emphasis on consumerism could not sustain our nation as its unifying purpose. In fact, she believed the quest for economic prosperity would tear us apart. People would focus on consumption rather than family wellbeing. Universities would provide credentials rather than real education. Economics would dominate politics, and government would cater mainly to special interests. No one would care about the physical resources on which we depend. When the ideology of the economy dominates our world today as fully as the ideology of religion dominated the Middle Ages, she says, look for another Dark Age ahead. The third pitched battle chronicled in Graffin s song, by the way, is the battle between the market and the government. The best antidote to bad ideology, in my view, is good religion. It will lead us to light. Good religion reminds us that our unifying purpose is not transactional but transcendent. In the ways that matter most, our bottom line as individuals and as a nation is determined not by competition but by connection. As human beings, we come from the ~ 4 ~
same source and share the same destiny. We are responsible to each other and for each other. This awareness convenes our meeting of the minds and dictates our reading of the times. With this recognition, we open the blinds to our complicated lives. As our unifying purpose, it will lead us to light. If we follow this path, we will win the only trophy that truly matters in the only game that ultimately counts. ~ 5 ~