Des Moines Unitarian Church

August 6, 2006

 

 

WHAT’S IN IT FOR US?  CHRISTIANITY AND COMMUNITY

Mary R. Sawyer

 

Two hundred years ago, it would have been absurd to ask “What’s in Christianity for Unitarians?” The roots of both Unitarianism and Universalism are solidly in the Christian tradition, but over the past century and a half, and especially in recent decades, Unitarian-Universalists have developed branches that bear little resemblance to the original tree. Indeed, here in the Midwest, one must search among the foliage with some deliberation to find those few leaves of Christianity that still show signs of life.  

 In my congregation, Christianity is not something I hear talked about very much—at least, not in an especially positive way. My congregation is not unique. Christianity is included in our educational programs along with other world religions. Ministers occasionally cite passages from the Bible in their sermons or refer to the works of Christian theologians and ethicists. The month of December, especially, invites reflection about the message of Jesus. So it’s not that the Christian religion is completely absent from our Unitarian experience.

 But I don’t hear members discussing Christianity among themselves as a spiritual resource. We talk about Buddhism and Hinduism and paganism and humanism. But if I hear people claiming Christianity as a spiritual resource, it is most often in whispered tones. There is a certain inhibition about openly affirming this cultural and theological affinity. It has seemed to me that we walk on eggshells when it comes to Christianity.  I would go so far as to suggest that, in Unitarian circles, there are Christians “in the closet.” Since we all know that “closets” are antithetical to community, I have felt that this situation merits some examination.

(Now, it may be that what I have just described does not apply to this congregation; if that is so, please indulge me while I talk about those other Unitarians!)

The first observation we might make is that most of us grew up in Christian churches.  Some of us were Catholic,…some were Protestant,… perhaps even a few were Mormon. Some of us who were raised Protestant grew up in relatively liberal mainline churches. Others grew up in very conservative, judgmental churches. Some who were Catholic grew up in stern, authoritative churches, while others experienced the relatively more gentle Vatican II Church.

 We left our churches for a variety of reasons.

Some found the scriptures of Christianity to be so full of contradictions and absurdities as to be unpalatable. In fact, the Bible is rather like a potluck; there were some bad cooks in the kitchen, and not all the food is edible.  At the same time, there is much on the table that is nourishing, as our readings for today demonstrate. Of course, if you grew up Catholic, chances are you were not invited or encouraged to read the Bible. If you grew up Protestant, you may have been told that the King James version is the only credible translation. If you grew up a fundamentalist Protestant, you were told that every word in the Bible is the revealed word of God, that there is no error in the Bible and therefore it is to be accepted literally and at face value.

How, then, to explain the multiplicity of translations of the Bible, only a few of which are included in this display? 

Probably the largest numbers of us have come to Unitarianism after rejecting church doctrines that we deemed to be unscientific and irrational. Some have come bearing such deep wounds from our entanglement with institutional Christianity that we can scarcely bear to hear the language of the religion. (If that is true of any of you here this morning, I admire your courage in coming to this service.)

But not everyone easily relinquishes something that was so central to our socialization process and moral development. In my own case, I first went to a Unitarian church some 14 or 15 years ago, in the early 1990s. After visiting a few times, I began experiencing a certain dis-ease. As I pondered the why of this, the realization came to me that I simply wasn’t ready to give up Jesus.  So I joined the Catholic Church instead.

 I had long been attracted to the spirituality and social justice activism of Catholics I had known and worked with. In addition, this was the most multicultural Church in existence. I was aware there were problems with Catholicism: I resisted joining for a long time, because I knew that if I joined I would then have to struggle with whether to leave. So I joined; I struggled; and I left. I came to a point where I could no longer tolerate the patriarchy, the “Father” language, the doctrine, and the homophobia. I went back to the Unitarians.

I remained at the Ames Fellowship because it was a welcoming congregation that was free of doctrine and that supported most avenues of spiritual seeking—and because the minister encouraged and supported me while I wrote a book about Christian community. That is to say, he reassured me that I didn’t have to give up Jesus in order to be a Unitarian.

As I acknowledge that Christianity is important to me, I want to stress that I am talking about the religion of Christianity, not the institution: That’s an important distinction. Furthermore, I am talking about Christianity as I understand it. I emphasize this to say that I am not a dogmatist. I do not receive Christianity as it is given to me by any institution or body of officials who claim to have the exclusive “truth” of Christianity. And I hope I do not insist that others understand it the same way I do. This position, I think, is compatible with the Unitarian principle of free inquiry.

 The religion of Christianity is not homogeneous in its expressions any more than is Judaism, or Islam, or Buddhism, or any other religion. No matter what fundamentalists may say, there are many different Christianities, as I can attest from my own experience.

I grew up in a small town in rural Nebraska. There were eight churches in this town that had only one elementary school. There were 16 students in my class. From the sixth through the eighth grades, my best friend—actually, my only friend—was a boy who was the son of a local Pentecostal minister. Russell and I were inseparable. We spent recesses together, ate lunch together, studied together, walked home from school together.

The first day of high school, my world was turned upside down. Russell refused to speak to me. Whenever I saw him, he turned his back to me. The second day was the same, and the next day and the next. He never spoke to me the entire semester. Finally, I asked a girl who was a member of his church if she knew why he was doing this. She explained that Russell’s father had forbade him to have any contact with me, because “we were getting older, and my mother was not a Christian.” His father had made a judgment about my mother’s lifestyle, and the “sins” of my mother were projected on to me.

Even at 14, the logic of my heart knew that something was wrong with this Christianity—an insight that failed to temper the pain that his actions caused me.

Another minister in town decided that if I was sinful, I was nonetheless savable. He set out to “bring me to Jesus.”  But this was not a Christianity that I found meaningful either.  The formula of “confessing my sins, accepting Jesus, and being saved for eternity” never worked for me. (Perhaps I was inoculated against it by the book of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson that resided on my bed stand throughout my high school years.)

Not that I didn’t take Christianity seriously. I did. I believed passionately that we were all the children of God; I never thought of Jesus as an only child. When I began college and became aware of people who called themselves Christian actively practicing racial discrimination, I was stunned: It was such an egregious violation of the basic tenet of the worth of all people. My response was to become involved in the civil rights movement, which, in turn, brought letters from the evangelical minister in my hometown telling me how sinful it was to associate with “colored” people and assuring me that I would surely burn in hell if I didn’t stop. 

But by this time, Martin Luther King, Jr. had become my spiritual guide and the movement had become my church. Here was this prophetic, black Baptist preacher articulating a theology of justice and equality that resonated with my own understanding of what Christianity was about.

For the next ten years, I declined to belong to any institutional church, and when I did return, it was to a black congregation. What kept me in the Black Church for many years was the extraordinary combination of pathos and melancholy produced by tragedy and trauma; the joy and celebration at having survived; and the absolute confidence that Jesus was with them…guiding, protecting, loving them—even as they were despised and scorned by the rest of society. It was this tradition of the Black Church, more than all of his studies and degrees, that prepared Dr. King to lead a movement against racism, militarism, and economic injustice in this society—to seek, in terms that he was fond of, “the Beloved Community.”

It was this spiritual bedrock and ethos—not doctrine or talk about heaven—that drew me to the church. Not that doctrine and the afterlife were not also a part of black worship. But it was from the Black Church that I came to more fully understand community as the very core of Christianity, and to understand at a visceral level that Christianity was a religion of and for the oppressed. 

Later on, as I researched how Christianity was understood and practiced among other ethnic minority populations in our society, I found this same core emphasis on community. Partly the emphasis came from the older indigenous religions of Africans and Native Americans. Partly it came from having shared the common experience of oppression. But partly it came from the discernment that the Christianity imposed on them by colonizers was a false Christianity, and that the real message of Jesus was the message of justice, love, and inclusive community.

Jesus was not a Christian and he was not a member of any church. He was a Jew who spoke and acted in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. He was a critic of the Jewish religious establishment and the inequalities their practices created. He was counter-cultural and anti-hierarchy. He inverted the prevailing world-view, saying that those on the bottom were, in the eyes of God, the most precious. He reached out to women, ethnic minorities, the economically poor, the sick—to all those whose humanity was denied by the privileged and powerful in society. It was, as Rosemary Radford Ruether puts it, “to these may kinds of ‘poor’ that the Jesus movement announced its glad tidings of ‘good news to the poor,’ the setting at liberty of ‘the oppressed.’”(Luke 4:18).

            The “good news” was, that at that very moment—with the very pronouncement of change, the very introduction of this concept—the divisions of society were being overcome “through the graciousness of God.” (Ruether). Both the means for transcending these divisions and the end result were contained in one word: Community. Jesus was intent on building inclusive community. It was through this experience of genuine community—of just and loving relationships—that God, in turn, was experienced. It was through participation in this new creation that one was “saved” and that one entered into the “kingdom of God.”

            For a time, the followers of Jesus sought to embody this radical vision—this “spirit-community” tradition of Christianity. But over the next decades and centuries, other interpretations developed. Different groups of Christians embraced different accounts of Jesus’ ministry and practiced competing forms of popular Christianity. When, in the fourth century, the Roman emperor converted to Christianity and declared it to be the official religion of the Empire, the first question that had to be addressed was which of these versions was the correct version. So the religious leaders, that is, the bishops—all of whom were male—were brought together and instructed to decide what people had to believe in order to meet the test of being real Christians.

The bishops wrote a creed, which many of us grew up reciting: This creed declares that Jesus was born, Jesus died, Jesus was resurrected. Curiously—and disastrously—it says nothing about what Jesus did while on earth. It says nothing about creating community. Of course, not all Christians understand the notions of “resurrection” and “salvation” in the same way.

Many Christians turn to metaphorical understandings of crucifixion and resurrection:  Most of us have “tomb” experiences at one time or another in our lives—times of feeling abandoned, misunderstood, depressed, and despairing—and often for very valid reasons. Yet, there is hope: the stone can be rolled away; healing and growth occur; loving relationships make life once again meaningful and worthwhile. This is true not just on an individual basis, but for entire peoples and nations.

Surely “hope” is a vital concept in any spirituality.

At the same time, the traditional, literal expression of this theology works for a lot of people. It eliminates ambiguity, provides a sense of security, and enables them to cope with the vicissitudes of life. It does what religion does: It provides meaning and addresses ultimate concerns. Most people, I daresay, who embrace this theology of sacrifice, individualism, and otherworldly reward have no clue what abuses it has legitimated.  

            In contrast to the spirit-community tradition, this official, orthodox version of Christianity reintroduced hierarchies of clergy and lay people; men and women; the wealthy and the poor; the worthy and the not worthy; the saved and the damned. It was, at its very core, anti-community. This version of Christianity is the version that was used to justify war against so-called infidels, enslavement of people with dark skin, conquest of peoples whose lands were rich with gold and silver (or oil), and deprivation of women’s rights.

             But the spirit-community tradition of Christianity has nevertheless endured. We find it in some of the medieval contemplative communities and mystics, in the Pietistic wing of the Protestant Reformation that produced the Universalists, among Baptists and Quakers and Unitarians in colonial America. We find it in the slave religion of Africans brought here against their will, in the socialist Social Gospel movements of the late 1800s and mid-1900s, in the Resistance Movement in Nazi Germany, and in the reforms initiated by Pope John the Twenty-third.  We find it in the civil rights and anti-colonial movements of the 1950s and ‘60s, the Underground Church of the Berrigan brothers, and the contemporary Welcoming movement of gay and lesbian Christians. Occasionally, we find spirit-community Christianity in a local church congregation, or we find it in small Christian communities outside the church structure, the members of which Bishop John Spong refers to as “believers in exile.” 

 In these and many other ways, the Christianity of domination and exclusion has been challenged and the counter-cultural Christianity of Jesus affirmed. As C. Eric Lincoln has put it, “The genius of the Christian religion is that it always manages to survive its distortions.”

Beginning in the late 1960s, these relational understandings of Christianity became the basis for the development of what was termed “liberation theology.”  Liberation theologies constituted a direct challenge to orthodox theologians. Up to this time, most theology had been written by European and Euro-American men of privilege who took for granted that their theology was universal. Liberation theology introduced the idea of “particularity,” arguing that every theology arises out of the particular social and political experiences of a particular people. White, male, heterosexual theology that for centuries had been used to justify European colonization and genocide was not a theology that worked for people of color or peasants or women or any other group that had suffered from the imperial Christianity of the established Church.

Liberation theologies—African American, Latino, Korean, South African—advanced the notions that, in fact, God’s agenda was freedom and Jesus was the liberator. Consequently, every believer was morally obliged to be engaged in political and economic activism for the sake of justice—which in turn brings salvation. For those who called themselves Christian but were a part of the privileged class, this meant standing in solidarity with the oppressed, applying one’s resources and power to the creation of an equitable society.

Like their predecessors, however, the first liberation theologies were written by heterosexual men; the oppressions of sexism and heterosexism were glaring omissions in their agendas of social change. Very soon, feminist theologies began to emerge. White feminists initially focused on the sin of sexism, while African American women and Latinas pointed to the triple sins of racism, sexism, and classism in their life experiences.

 Feminist biblical scholars undertook their own creative, hermeneutical, explorations to challenge the assumptions and claims of patriarchial Christianity. God, they argued, was no more Father than Mother, no more masculine than feminine. Scripture, they pointed out, describes God metaphorically as being “like a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings.” The characteristic of God having to do with Wisdom, they noted, was described in the Old Testament as being feminine and was given the name of “Sophia.”

The historic claims of the Church that God willed women to be subordinate to men and that women were in fact inferior to men, feminists argued, is a social—not divine—construction that has been preserved because it served the interests of men. Some women, rejecting the monarchical language of the “kingdom of God,” began using the term “kin-dom” to express their understanding of Christianity as a relational religion. (This innovation was adopted by a Catholic group called “Priests for Equality,” which uses the phrase “kin-dom of God” throughout their translation of the Bible.)

Feminist ministers now offer feminist interpretations of scripture and doctrine. The issue, they suggest, for example, is not whether Jesus was born of a Virgin. The point is, all human beings—male and female—can be impregnated by the Spirit of the Divine, and all human beings can give birth to words and deeds that are incarnations of the Spirit of Love, Justice and Peace. (Credit Cindy McCalmont.)

Feminist theologians—men and women alike—draw a parallel between the treatment of women and the treatment of the Earth: both are being raped and pillaged. The ecological theologies now being written call us to be co-creators with God as we defend and protect the Earth, her creatures, and her ecosystems. Both literally and figuratively, this is the path of our salvation.

 Now, some of these ideas may seem rather extreme. Many of these theological innovations undoubtedly are, in the conventional sense of the term, heretical. Heresy, of course, is what Church authorities allege whenever someone dares to deviate from orthodox theology—that is, from whatever the Church says is correct belief.

  In a recent issue of the Ames Fellowship newsletter, however, Brian Eslinger defines a heretic as “one who chooses.” I like this definition. In my view, the Christian heretics of the past forty years have given us wonderfully rich ways of thinking about Christianity—ways that are liberating and healing—which, it has seemed to me, is all and everything that Jesus was about.

So. What’s in Christianity for us? I would argue, a whole lot. Personally, I find much to draw from in this tradition as I seek to live the principles of Unitarian-Universalism. The converse is also true: being a Unitarian enables me to be a better Christian. I have to tell you, though, that as I say that, I feel a bit vulnerable, because of the connotation that the word Christian has regrettably come to have. (Actually, I usually identify myself as a black Methodist Catholic Unitarian spiritual seeker.) 

But I stand with Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned activist and orator who fought passionately to eradicate the evil of slavery.  In doing so, Douglass thundered in righteous indignation against Christian ministers and churches that condoned and perpetuated the system of slavery. Yet, Douglass himself was a licensed preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. When challenged about this seeming contradiction, Douglass responded that it was his Bible as much as anyone else’s, and that he would not relinquish it for the reason that others’ had misused it to justify hatred and violence.

No more am I prepared to yield Christianity to a contemporary political-religious faction that in the name of this religion condemns humanists, feminists, and gays and lesbians; threatens our religious and civil liberties; and wages war on innocent civilians in another land while depriving children, the sick, and the poor in our own society of food, shelter, education, and health care. This is not Christianity as I understand it. Nor am I inclined to dismiss a tradition whose wisdom commends us to create and sustain communities of justice, compassion, and peace.

On the chance that others may share some of these sentiments, I invite further conversation and reflection. As different one’s of us praise the Buddha, thank the Goddess, study the prophets, or trust in science…let us also make room for those who choose to walk with Jesus.