Sermon
February 12, 2017
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
A STORY ABOUT RELIGION
I was with a large group of people gathered to learn about Hinduism from several Hindu college students.
I was one of the college multifaith chaplains and this was our program called Interfaith Table: each month, a diverse group would come together to eat food prepared by a different religious group and then learn from them about their tradition.
For their presentation, the Hindu students had first chosen to perform for us in full costume the story traditionally told around the Hindu festival of Diwali, the story of Rama and Sita. Then they’d chosen a “fishbowl” discussion format: we sat on the outside and listened while the Hindu students talked among themselves about their religious tradition.
We watched them light up as they spoke with one another about similarities and differences in their religious practice, sometimes because of family styles, other times because of cultural differences. They talked about their preferences among the many gods and goddesses, such as the goddess of learning, Saraswati, whom they would often invoke during their studies…or perhaps the powerful Durga, or Vishnu the preserver. They spoke of rituals they’d perform at certain special occasions. One ritual involved cracking walnuts over a threshold, and as one of them told the myth behind the ritual, her friend remarked in sudden understanding, “I didn’t know that’s why we do that!”
Deep connections to family were woven throughout their discussion of these symbols, stories, and rituals, and I remembered one of the roots of the word “religion”: ligare, to bind together, as in the word “ligament.”
I remembered what I had learned early in my religious studies classes that, whereas Christian-dominant Westerners see religion as all about belief/doctrine, non-“Western” religions are often more focused on the ritual, the experiential. Their experience of symbols, stories, and rituals bind them together – like belief can – but differently so.
So, when it came time for questions, I asked these Hindu students: “What would you say to someone who asked you if you ‘actually’ believed that these gods and goddesses really exist?”
They looked at each other and all said:
It’s not really a question that makes sense to us. We don’t really think about whether they exist “for real” or not. …In a way, it doesn’t really matter.
Some “Westerners” would respond with confusion, even frustration: “Don’t they want to be rational, not superstitious?” We UUs certainly value reason, don’t we?
But we’ll table that question for a minute…
GOD IS ONE?
I felt kind of bad titling this sermon with the provocative title, “God is Not One.” It’s not my title, but that of a book by religion scholar Stephen Prothero. I particularly felt bad about this title because the reverse statement, “God is One” is a famous statement by one of our cherished Unitarian ancestors, and martyrs, Francis Davíd. But that was in reference to the Christian Trinity…
When I speak of “God is Not One,” I am referencing the statement often heard these days by well-meaning people that “all religions are really the same.”
As one common analogy puts it, “all religious and spiritual paths are simply different routes up the same mountain to the same peak.”
These kinds of statements are usually well-meaning – they are about finding common ground in order to encourage cooperation and avoid war. Or, on the other hand, they are about dismissing all religion as foolish at best and poisonous at worst. To that, I’d say that religions have been forces of both good and evil.
ON RELIGION
Religion is a force far too large and powerful to ignore.
“More than 9 out of 10 Americans believe in God, and, with the notable exception of Western Europe, the rest of the world is furiously religious,” as Stephen Prothero puts it. And religion is not just a personal matter but affects economic, cultural, political, and social systems. And religion is not going away anytime soon: Islam’s numbers have skyrocketed over the last century.
“Even if religion makes no sense to you,” as Prothero says, “you need to make sense of religion to make sense of the world…Rather than…lump[ing] all religions together in one trash can or treasure chest, we must start with a clear-eyed understanding of the fundamental differences in both belief and practice between Islam and Christianity, Confucianism and Hinduism.”
SPLITTERS AND LUMPERS
Stephen Prothero is what you could call a splitter. In all of life, there are lumpers and splitters. Lumpers, such as the popular religious scholar Karen Armstrong, see differences as surmountable and emphasize commonalities. Splitters like Prothero emphasize difference and complexity, and resist simple schemes.
Lumping and splitting each has its drawbacks: Lumping can often water things down to a point where there is no longer any meaning. Splitting can lead to unnecessary complexity and a failure to see similarities.
We need both.
Today, I am emphasizing splitting, in part because I think, as Unitarian Universalists, we can have a tendency to assume we all ultimately believe the same things when in truth there are significant differences among us which we could benefit from exploring.
A RELISH FOR DIVERSITY
So, the view that “God is Not One” has within it a relish for diversity.
The theologian Paul Knitter describes this preference for diversity:((Much of the content of this sermon is drawn from Paul Knitter’s work Introducing Theologies of Religions, a very valuable book.))
Whether you’re talking about atoms or molecules or plants or animals or humans – or truths – you can’t get away from diversity. …Yes, different things can be interrelated, connected, and brought into unifying relationships, but never to the point where you lose diversity. Diversity will always…[have] the last word…over unity….Otherwise, life and its evolution not only would get dull but would wither away. Remove diversity and you remove vitality.
So when we ask that different religions come together on so-called common ground we risk damaging important diversity.
DIFFERENCES
So, just how different are the various religions?
Even just in terms of divinity, there is great diversity. Some believe in One God (or, to complicate it, in the case of some Christians: a three-part God, or, like the Catholics, one God but many saints). Most Buddhists and Jains believe in no god, and many Pagans and Hindus believe in thousands of gods and goddesses. Is God a warrior like Hinduism’s Kali, or a peace-loving wanderer like Jesus? Is God someone with whom you have a personal relationship?
Philosopher of religion Ninian Smith talks about the seven dimensions of religion, and each religion emphasizes a few dimensions over the others.
As I’ve mentioned, Christianity emphasizes the doctrinal. Taoism and Buddhism emphasize experience. For Hinduism and Judaism, narrative. Islam and Yoruba, ritual. Confucianism is the ethical.
Some religions completely neglect one or more dimension. There are many practicing Jews who do not believe in God, for example. Hindus most sacred text is the Vedas, but rarely does a Hindu care about the meaning of the words; what matters are their sounds, and the sacred power they convey. Imagine that!
Stephen Prothero distinguishes the religions based on their different conceptions of the problem, the solution, and the technique. I won’t go over each of those for each tradition, but I put a stack of one-page handouts next to the chalkboard if you are interested.
So, according to Prothero, most Christians see sin as the problem, and salvation from sin as the religious goal. Whereas Buddhists see suffering as the problem. And you could minimize that difference by saying that sin and suffering are really the same. But remember that for many Christians, suffering may draw you closer to God, and Jesus is worshipped for his embrace of suffering. Whereas, for Buddhists, liberation from suffering is the goal.
And there is diversity within every religious tradition as well. There are some Christians who oppose this idea that God requires suffering, even that God required Jesus’s suffering for our salvation. But these Christians are still very different from Buddhists, especially when you look at their differing approaches to solving the problem. The Buddhist concepts of no-self and emptiness can be particularly difficult for Christians to comprehend, for example.
As for Islam, it advises Muslims on their secular as well as sacred life, seeing no separation between the two, with instructions in the Q’uran not only about ritual worship, but also about how to lend money, divide estates, and punish criminals.
Yoruba is a religion originating in Africa. It is hard to estimate the number of Yoruba practitioners, but even conservative estimates of 100 million adherents place Yoruba among the world’s top six religions. Yoruba is about remembering our individual destiny we have forgotten, with the help of superhuman beings known as orishas, through the practices of divination, sacrifice, and spirit/body possession. To some of us, this may sound ridiculous or even frightening, but why? There may be just as “odd” practices or concepts in the traditions with which we are more familiar.
So, “God Is Not One” in part because we are not one. We are all humans, but our cultures are incredibly different.
WE ARE NOT ONE
Saying that all religions are really the same is almost like saying that our cultures are all really the same…or that there is one common language underneath all languages. Things are always lost in translation. Distinct languages have completely different alphabets, sounds, and grammatical structures.
If we said that all religions are about love and justice, not only would we be wrong, but we couldn’t safely assume what love really means in other languages and cultures. Even nonverbal language is not the same across cultures. The theologian George Lindbeck says:
Translating a word or concept from one religion into the language of another is like taking a mathematical formula and using it in poetry.
DIFFERENT LENSES
This brings us to postmodernism (don’t go to sleep on me; I think postmodernism is fascinating!)
Postmodernism is suspicious of any truth claim that is seen as capital “T” Truth, often even something as supposedly fact-based as science. Any time a postmodernist meets a narrative that claims to be universal, she or he will deconstruct it and show how it is inherently shaped by one particular, finite, cultural filter.
In other words, we all have different lenses.
And the more we don’t expose ourselves to other lenses, the harder it will be for us to see our own lens as a lens instead of reality – because it is all we know!
As the comparative religious scholar Max Müller said, “He who knows one, knows none.”
If we aren’t aware that we are inevitably seeing the world through a lens, then if we think we have identified common ground with someone, that ground is probably more ours than common. We are probably still on our own turf.
EXPANDING YOUR MIND
Postmodernists go even further and say that religions cannot all be describing the same experience in different words because – here’s that deep postmodernist stuff: because there is no real pure experience.
The frameworks we have for the world – language and images – actually determine the experiences we have. I’ll say that one more time, because if you haven’t considered it before, it really stretches the mind: The frameworks we have for the world determine the experiences we have. In fact, we cannot have experiences without these frameworks.
DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES
So, according to this view: people of different religions do not diversely describe the same experience, rather they have different experiences.
So, if we are saying all of this about the religions, what can be said about what the religions are supposedly pointing to…(the Ultimate, God, Meaning, the Sacred, etc)?
One theologian, Mark Heim, gives three possibilities:((…as explained in Paul Knitter’s work Introducing Theologies of Religions, a very valuable book that inspired more of this sermon, in fact, than Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One.))
1) There is only One Ultimate. So, basically, the other religions are just wrong.
2) There is only One Ultimate, which is present equally in all religions. This is like the analogy of the blind men who each are touching a different part of an elephant and thinking that part is the elephant.
Okay, and here’s number 3, which might continue to stretch your mind:
3) There is a multiplicity of Ultimates.
…Not in the sense that there are many Gods, but that there is plurality within Ultimate Reality – a community of differences in relationship, which mirrors the way we have to be in the world, right? And this idea mirrors the idea that there might be multiple, parallel universes.
Kind of intense stuff, right?
In terms of what will happen in the future with religion, Heim believes that some religious competition is good. Now listen to this statement from Heim and tell me whether you think he could be speaking of Unitarian Universalism!
The inevitable, but possibly fruitful form of ‘competition’ among the faiths [will consist in] seeing which can most adequately take into account the distinctive testimony of others…The faith that proves able to do this for the widest possible range of compelling elements from other traditions will not only be enriched itself, but will offer strong warrants for its own truth
Paul Knitter adds:
If there is to be any final prize in such a competition, it will go to the religion that can best call the other religions together.
They are not in fact talking about Unitarian Universalists, but could they be? I don’t agree that there should or will be one “winner” religion; I still stand with the value of diversity.
But I do ask, as a church that includes the diversity of many religions, how do we relate to that diversity?
THE BELOVED COMMUNITY OF UNITY AND DIVERSITY
One image that arises is that of a neighborhood of diverse houses and backyards, around which good fences make good neighbors. Let’s not take down our fences and build some religious commons meant to please everyone.
Instead, let’s live into who we are, and let’s lean over each other’s fences to talk. Let’s become really open and curious about the unusual aromas of our neighbor’s cooking, or their odd habits in the middle of the night. And perhaps this listening will help us tend our own plot of land better, maybe by borrowing some of what we envy, but maybe also by becoming even more nuanced in and confident in our choices.
And then let’s all go to a town meeting together, and discuss the diverse ways we can understand and heal our beautiful and broken world.
Because that’s what we have in common.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon