Rev. Susan Maginn
The Golden Rule
January 18, 2009
Wy'east UU Congregation
Portland, OR

From today's lectionary: Psalm 139:1-6, 13-16

... you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue...you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

WE ARE FIELDS BEFORE EACH OTHER by St. Thomas Aquinas

How is it they live for eons in such harmony -
the billions of stars -
when most men can barely go a minute
without declaring war in their mind against someone they know.
There are wars where no one marches with a flag,
though that does not keep casualties
from mounting.
Our hearts irrigate this earth.
We are fields before
each other.
How can we live in harmony?
First we need to
know
we are all madly in love
with the same
God.

The sermon begins...

'You knit me together in my mother's womb...when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.'

What I love about Psalm 139 is that the divine is present and powerful while also being accepting and loving.

I talked to a friend yesterday who told me that this is her favorite psalm - that when she was a troubled teenager, struggling with her homosexuality, this psalm was a good companion for her. As she read it she knew that she and her sexuality were 'wonderfully made' and that the presence of God was with her as she struggled make sense of it all.

The second reading is from one of the most influential of Christian theologians, Thomas Aquinas. He asks, "How can we live in harmony?"

It is good to grapple with such a question on the eve of Martin Luther King Day. He asked this question - how can we live in harmony - not just the harmony of making nice and getting along but a harmony that comes from radical justice among radical equals. He knew that he and all human beings are 'wonderfully made' and worthy of equality.

"How can we live in harmony?" It is a beautiful question, but I think many of us would rightly wonder if a religious setting is really the place for such pondering. After all religious people have been able to justify horrendous acts of violence and point to God with a bloody finger saying, "I did it all for the love of God. This is what I have to do as a faithful person."

A quick glance at Christian history shows the devastation of the native people in the Americas, the Crusades, the Spanish inquisition and the many deaths during the Protestant reformation, all in the name of religion.

Who is responsible for all this bloodshed? Is religion to blame? Is the human hunger for power to blame? Is God to blame?

Back in the fourth century Constantine, the Emperor of Rome, chose Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. In the view of many Jews and early Christians, this was seen as a huge accomplishment at first. After all, the Roman Empire had been intimidating, torturing and killing those who worshiped the God of Israel - Jews and Christians alike, for centuries - crucifying Jews like Jesus and later feeding members of Christian communities to the lions before cheering Roman crowds.

Interestingly, Constantine did not choose Christianity to be the official religion of the Empire because he himself was Christian. Rather, he saw a political problem in the Roman Empire and he was convinced that the monotheistic God of Israel was the solution.

The political problem was that the empire was weakening. Constantine thought that if the Empire worshipped one god instead of the dozens of gods in the Roman pagan religion, then the people would be unified and the empire would be strengthened.

Constantine is far from the only leader to pull this kind of move, to use religion for political gain. It is brilliant really. Religion is well suited for the job as a force for orienting people toward a transcending experience. But such a ruler's power play should not be confused as the heart of religion or the heart of the Jewish or Christian understanding of God. This is the human need for power abusing the heart of religion. This happens when a political leader lacks their own vision and then distorts the heart of religion as a way to unite and divide people for personal political gain.

In the last couple weeks I have seen the film "Milk" and also watched again the documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk". It was shocking - again - to see actual footage of church leaders stepping into the pulpit and saying something to the affect of 'the gay people want your children', meaning gay people want to make your children gay or gay people want to sexually abuse your children. And also saying 'Being gay is not natural. God did not make people like this.' These are the arguments and the lies that we are still facing in the conscious of our country in the fight for equality in marriage, for gay families who want to adopt, for people who want their basic rights protected regardless of whether they come out as gay or not.

When religion is used in such a way, people are left with an understanding of religion as being something that fuels an egotistic passion for self-righteousness and justifies fear and hatred of the other.

The heart of Christianity and the heart of all the world religions is love, charity and compassion for the other. This is what every major religion has in common. They all have some version of 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you', the golden rule.

Confuscious was first to teach this, about five centuries before Jesus lived. He wrote, "Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you."

There is a story of a rabbi who said that a pagan came to him saying that he would convert to Judaism if the rabbi could recite the heart of Judaism while he stood on one leg. The rabbi stood on one leg and said, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the heart of the Torah. The rest is commentary. Now, go and study it." And what he meant by 'go and study it' is that as you read the teachings you must read it through the lens of the Golden Rule.

St. Augustine says this as well - that as you read scripture you should not leave the text until you have studied it long enough to come to a deeper understanding of charity.

And, you know, this is a tall order for some of these scriptures that are so vengeful - it indeed takes great effort to follow such a course of study. But if we take up such a challenge, to stay with a passage until we have a deeper understanding of charity, then we are becoming spiritually prepared for the rigorous practice of finding compassion in a violent world.

The heart of religion is so much more difficult than just judging others like a middle school clique and then taking lethal weapons to recess.

Compassion means to feel with the other. We focus on the other and as we do, we go beyond our ego, our defenses and fears. When our ego is transcended, we are in the presence of the divine.

The word holy in Hebrew is Kaddosh and it means otherness. We are in the presence of the Holy when we are connecting not so much with our selves and our own comforts, but with the other: the otherness of the stranger and the otherness of a transcending God.

But when I saw that footage in "The Times of Harvey Milk", I thought, "That's it..." That is exactly why I see so many people turned off and even afraid of religion. If all I knew of religion were people like this guy saying 'the gays want your children' and the countless others like him espousing hatred and xenophobia as a legitimate religious path, I too would want to run as far as I could from anything having to do with religion.

I have heard so many people say that they are spiritual but not religious. When I ask them about what that means for them, about the difference between the two, many people mention their repulsion to the violence done in the name of religion, implicitly saying that they would not want to align themselves with something that has a history of causing pain.

When we watch the power plays like those of rulers like Constantine and we listen to sermons about how some people are made in God's image and others are not, when we hear about the 72 virgins waiting for Islamic suicide bombers, we see that all of this extremism is political blood first and foremost. It is the relentless human ego's quest for power and as the people become more and more desperate to win, that is when the true meaning of the religion is distorted to justify bloodshed and rile the passions for human greed and power.

Unfortunately, that bloody distortion of religion is all many people know of religion. The loudest voices we might hear in favor of religion are those extremists across the globe who are calling for domination and destruction. It makes sense that so many people would assume that this bloody path to power is the path of religion.

Karen Armstrong is a religious scholar who is fed up with seeing the beautiful heart of religion loose out to religious extremists and fundamentalists. She is stepping out of her scholar's role and into global activism - partnering with the UN and organizing religious leaders from around the world to create a Charter for Compassion. It will be completed this year. If you would like to be a part of this process, do check out the website. (charterforcompassion.com)

The charter is designed to present a united front to diagnose religious extremism in its earliest forms so this it cannot gain momentum. Such an effort will be important in the coming years as the down turning economy evolves with an emerging sense of scarcity and fear. Our human instinct will be to hold fast to our own instead of reaching out to those beyond our circle of family and friends, beyond our comfort zone toward charity and compassion.

Aquinas says, "How do we find harmony? First we need to know we are all madly in love with the same God." First we need to know what we all love. That love has the ability to unite us, if we are ready. This is a path toward the heart of religion.

So be it.

Amen.

Let us pray...

Spirit of life, source of all, in you we live and move and have our being.

We give thanks for the beauty and complexity of our lives. May we have the resilience and the faith to stand for the heart of religion, for compassion and charity, that they may be reborn in our hearts and in the wider world. Amen.