sermon: "Listener's Choice"

[bronze_ribbons]

assigned theme: "Moral Authority – Religious vs. Secular: Are moral issues more or less justified if based on religious authority?"

"Listener's Choice?"
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville
29 October 2006

To quote from today's meditation poem ["Sarah's Choice" by Eleanor Wilner, which I'd read aloud earlier in the service]

…how shall we tell
the victims from the saints,
the torturers from the agents of God?

"How shall we tell," indeed? We are in the middle of what the proverb calls "interesting times": there's no shortage of torturers claiming that their work is necessary to save lives, and all too many individuals who believe killing themselves in the process of murdering others is the ultimate tribute to God. Sadly, this is hardly a new phenomenon: I've been listening a lot to Sting's new CD, where he reads from a letter written by Elizabethan composer John Dowland, and it's been reminding me how dangerous and problematic it could be to appear "different" in sixteenth-century England -- in his case, as a Catholic. There was a substantial amount of espionage, execution, and other security-minded activities taking place back then, and although I like my music 400 years old, I can't help wishing our current climate didn't echo 400-year-old inclinations towards intolerance.

Election Day is just nine days away, and early voting has been underway for almost two weeks. I drove past a Presbyterian church marquee last night that urged its readers to vote with care, and at my home church's Halloween ball, a friend and I ended up discussing the "Vote No on 1" sign that's prominently displayed on church grounds. While we're both against the amendment, we don't quite agree on the presence of the sign: he feels that, in the way it's phrased, it's the church ordering people to vote a specific way, and that crosses a line that makes him very uncomfortable. He said he wouldn't object to a sign that simply said, "We support all families"-- that is, something presented as a welcoming statement rather than an imperative.

I do understand where he's coming from; I get squirmy myself when other members of our church assume that everyone is anti-death penalty, anti-war, anti-TennCare cuts, pro-increases in education funding, etcetera. At the same time, I also believe one of the strengths of the Unitarian Universalist movement is its pairing of social concerns with actual actions -- that our congregations historically emphasize deeds rather than creeds. As such, I'm frankly happier with a sign that says "Vote No on 1" than one that risks being disregarded as a generic platitude -- and, although I'm a firm advocate for the separation of church and state when it comes to public policy and law, I also believe that religious institutions have not only the right but in fact the obligation to comment on current events and lobby for change. I believe that in our personal lives, the mandates of whichever religious authorities we choose to subscribe to do in fact take precedence over the decrees of secular authorities; therefore, if there is a conflict between what I understand God would have me do and what my congressman or mayor or president declares to be my duty, God will take precedence. There's a wonderful passage in one of the Anne of Green Gables books where a fiercely conservative Presbyterian woman speaks about her fiancé, who happens to be a liberal. "And of course," she laments, "there is no hope of making a Conservative of him. But at least he is a Presbyterian. So I suppose I shall have to be satisfied with that."

Her neighbor asks, "Would you marry him if he were a Methodist?"

"No, I would not. Politics is for this world, but religion is for both."

However, all this is far too easy for me to claim: I happen to believe in a reasonable and forgiving God whose style is decidedly benign and relatively hands-off, one who doesn’t expect me to sacrifice myself or those I love in defense of his name or as proof of my devotion to him. (He does expect more of me than I'm often prepared or willing to give, but that's a sermon for some other Sunday.) I don't have detailed theological proofs to offer you in defense of this belief, and therefore have no expectation that you will or ought to share it: although I consider myself a pragmatic, hardnosed intellectual in almost every other realm of my life, this is one area where faith took charge of the metaphorical steering wheel before I even knew I was on the road. It's one of those core beliefs around which the rest of my universe makes sense, and it isn't negotiable: I didn't always believe it, and I didn't consciously choose to believe it, but I can't see myself consciously choosing to believe any of the alternatives, no matter how urgent or sophisticated the arguments happen to be in their favor.

And this is where the difficulty resides, when terms such as "religious authority" are used: of whose religious authority do we speak? Over fifteen years ago, I sat in a classroom at the University of Chicago and listened to Eleanor Wilner read the poem I read to you today. Just a few weeks ago, I sat in a synagogue and listened to a rabbi admit that the tale of Abraham and Isaac still gives him the fidgets, because it's not an easy story to digest. If someone today were to hold a knife to a child, and to justify it as a request of God, they'd be diagnosed as mentally ill and locked away as a danger to society. Yet we have God on record -- at least, in the major sources of the major traditions -- telling Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son.

What God intended by this is very much open to debate. I have neither the time today nor the training to do justice to the countless interpretations of this story, but I find it fascinating that there are in fact innumerable commentaries on it. I sometimes think that the game of "telephone" is an apt analogy for God's communications with humans: There's what God said, which gets garbled by what someone said God said, which often gets muddled by what one might have been expecting God to say.

And thus I say to you: although I am not automatically opposed to the invocation of religious authority in public debates, I am adamantly opposed to so-called religious authority when it is wielded as a means of stifling dissent or imagination. Put another way, I believe religious authorities are not necessarily out of line should they choose to act as advisors and/or leaders even on secular and civil matters: the Danish churches preaching against German initiatives during World War II comes to mind, as do the ongoing efforts of the Unitarian Universalist Association in support of marriage equality. It is critical, however, that individuals take responsibility for which authorities they choose to trust and to heed. To accept the variety of spiritual paths available within Unitarian Universalism does not mean all the paths are themselves acceptable or appropriate as one's personal directives; in affirming and promoting our third principle, that of encouraging spiritual growth among each other, it is essential that we recognize different people thrive on different spiritual nutrients: the God whose presence is a comfort and inspiration to me is far too relativistic for many of my friends and relatives, not feminist or female enough for others, and the fact that I think he exists at all is baffling, weird, and at times even threatening to another set of others.

Along those lines, I'd like to share with you a story from a book called The Tent of Abraham, which explores how the saga of Abraham appears in the Torah, the Quran, and the Bible. It includes an alternate version of "Why Hagar Left" by Rabbi Phyllis Berman. In her vision of the story, Sarah and Hagar are close-knit friends rather than mistress and slave. They help each other outwit the pharaoh and raise Ishmael together, and it's a happy, contented household until, right before the birth of Isaac, Abraham starts having dreams "about a commanding, transcendent, lordly God." When he tells Sarah and Hagar about God ordering him to have all the males in their household circumcised, the women are outraged at what they perceive to be mutilation. "It made no sense, they thought, and yet Abraham was so certain that it was what God wanted. Finally and reluctantly, they agreed, and the circumcisions were done."

The story continues:

But from that moment on, a gulf opened between the two women and Abraham. If he could dream such weird dreams, such dangerous and outrageous dreams, who knew what might be next?

And yet all this was put aside when Sarah delivered a healthy baby boy. To this son the three of them gave the name Isaac -- "Laughing One" -- because the news of his coming had caused them all to laugh with delight.

The family of five continued to grow in love and prosperity, until one morning Sarah awoke from a terrible dream. She was so distressed that she told it to Hagar: In her nightmare, Abraham had had another dream. This time God had told him to take his firstborn son to a nearby mountain and, like so many of their neighbors, who believed that sacrificing living beings insured continued fertility, sacrifice him. As Sarah told of the dream, she began to cry. Her body shook and her voice broke.

Hagar put her arms around Sarah. "Beloved Sarah, it is just a dream," said Hagar.

"Beloved Hagar, it is just a dream," said Sarah.

"It is just a dream of a dream," said each woman to the other.

But the dream came to Sarah once again, and then once more. "Three times!" she said to Hagar. "It will no longer leave me in the morning. Remember when Abraham dreamed that God wanted our oldest son circumcised? Is it so impossible that he might dream that God wants him to sacrifice our oldest son?"

Sarah and Hagar didn't know what to think; since the circumcision, they were not so confident about Abraham and the voices he chose to listen to. "What can we do if Abraham decides to take our Ishmael to sacrifice him?" they cried. And so they sat and talked and planned and plotted through the day and into the night, just as they had done so many years before, in the pharoah's palace.

And once again, they agreed on an idea, this time to protect Ishmael from Abraham's potential dream. The plan is one we know well: it's the one we read about in the Torah. If Sarah were to tell Abraham this preposterous story about Ishmael teasing Isaac and demand that Abraham send Ishmael and Hagar away form the household, he would have to believe her, because he knew without a doubt how bound together the women and the boys had been. So he would send Hagar and Ishmael away.

It was a terrible plan, a heartbreaking one, but one that would keep Ishmael alive and out of Abraham's reach.

We all know what happened. Sarah did tell Abraham that she and Isaac could no longer stand to live with Hagar and Ishmael. Abraham couldn't understand it, but Sarah was so insistent that Abraham agreed, with a heavy heart, to send them away.

The night before Hagar and Ishmael were to go, the two women sat up, alternately weeping and reminiscing, and, each in her own hand, they filled two scrolls with writing. In each was the real story of their love and friendship through all the years they had lived together. Hagar placed her scroll in Sarah's hands, to give to a daughter-in-law or other female relative. Sarah put her parchment in Hagar's hands for the same purpose.

So it was that Hagar and Ishmael left the household and went out into the desert. How they survived there and made a life for themselves is a story for another day. It's enough to say that they lived a good and long life. Ishmael had many children and won a great deal of respect among those with whom he settled.

Sarah was never the same after Hagar and Ishmael went their own way. She became withdrawn and lonely, barely consoling herself with mothering the growing Isaac. Although she believed her deception had saved Ishmael's life, it had taken from her most of her life energy.

You can imagine, then, how shocked, how outraged she was many years later when, indeed, Abraham did have the dream she had seen in her own vision. For in his dream, Abraham did hear God commanding him to take his son, his only son, his beloved son, Isaac, up to Mount Moriah and to sacrifice him on that day. But at the last moment, God sent a ram to take Isaac's place on the altar.

When Abraham and Isaac returned home after this terrifying journey, Sarah was on her deathbed, grief-stricken once more and half-crazed that everyone she had ever loved would be lost to her. When she saw that Isaac had returned, miraculously alive, she blessed him and gave him the parchment that Hagar had written.

"This scroll," Sarah said, "is my gift to your wife if you should marry. I don't expect to live long enough to give it to her myself, but there is a story she and her offspring must know."

So it was…that Isaac presented Rebekah with this mysterious gift from his mother, Sarah; Rebekah eventually gave it to her daughter-in-law Leah, who gave it to her daughter Dina, and so it passed from generation to generation through the ages. When the actual scrolls disappeared, women just told the story to their daughters and granddaughters, to their nieces and their cousins. …through all the generations this story has been passed on from woman to woman -- to daughter, to niece, to granddaughter, to sister, to cousin. Never to men.

Rabbi Berman concludes, "Yet now I have told it where men can also hear. For perhaps, at last, women and men together can learn from the story."

And now I too have shared this tale, with you. Please understand that I'm not asking you to believe or reject any of the versions of the story you've heard today. It's not my place to ask you to believe or reject the sources from which such stories and their variations come. In the end, it is and will be entirely up to you which God, if any, you choose as the cornerstone of your faith and the authority to whom you must answer -- but, what I can do, and indeed feel compelled to do, is to share with you alternative transcriptions of God's telephone games with us humans -- not only to make sense of the voices of God, but also those of our fellow seekers and worshippers.

May your conversations and arguments with the universe bring you not only bewilderment and not just exasperation, but also--eventually--clarity, inspiration, and joy. Amen and alleluia.