"The Good News of No Religion"

Reformers seek to encourage spirituality within their faith. Their followers often start new religions.

In the United States today,
the fastest growing group,
in terms of religious preference,
is the "Nones" -
that is,
those who state that they have no preference.
At least, it is the group that appears to be growing faster than any religious preference in particular.
Many of the traditional churches find this to be a very disturbing phenomenon,
and for some of the more conservative groups,
it may even be a sign of the end times.
Personally, I find it very encouraging.
I believe that if there is a God, and if God is anything at all like the picture I have of Her,
God is very pleased about this situation, too.
You see, God is not in the religion business!
That is one of the revelations from the movie, _Oh, God!_
starring George Burns as God
and John Denver as his present day prophet.
What I want to talk about and contemplate today
is the spiritual reality
that stands under and behind all religions and religious persuasions.
I want to talk about the spiritual leaders who have brought this reality to the attention of people,
and I want us to consider the ways in which religious movements have been based on human spirituality,
but all too often religious institutions have worked more for their rules and their own survival
than for the human spirituality that we all need.
I want to note, in more than passing on this Mothers' Day,
that many of us learned our spirituality from our mothers.
All human life is mediated through human procreation.
We were all born of woman.
Our understanding of the divine begins with the divine feminine,
even if we have come out of patriarchal religious traditions and institutions.
Christians have special devotion to Mary, the Mother of God.
Hindus and Buddhists have goddesses.
Judaism has the Binah (God's feminine wisdom)
and the Shekinah (God's grammatically feminine shining glory dwelling among the people).
Islam has the verses, now tragically labeled Satanic,
which directed the Muslims to continue the worship of the divine feminine in the form of the Three Goddesses in the Ka'aba.
Acceptance of the divine feminine seems to be a universal need of human spirituality,
and its revival in our time can be seen in many places and many ways.
The ordination of women to ministry is an expression of feminine spirituality
in our own Unitarian Universalist faith community
as well as many others.
The very strong reactions against it in more conservative and traditionalist religious organizations
is a sign for us
that the revival of veneration of the divine feminine
really may be a threat to patriarchal religious expression.
So I say,
Happy Mothers' Day
to all the human women here today,
to all of us because we are all born of woman,
and most of all
to our divine Mother,
the Goddess,
Mother Nature,
Mother Earth,
whatever name we may choose to give Her,
for the unconditional love in Her divine heart
is the source of life
and the food for our deepest spiritual hunger.
Again, Happy Mothers' Day to us all,
and to the Divine Mother of us all!
The sad story of the suppression of Her divine worship in Islam
is instructive for our purposes today.
I will tell the story as I understand it.
Please bear with me,
and don't hold me to a standard of strict historical accuracy.
More and more we are realizing that such accuracy is not really possible, anyway,
and a story's meaning is more important than its details.
Muhammad was epileptic.
He had grand mal seizures which were poorly understood in his time.
Following many of his seizures,
he was certain that God has spoken to him.
Beginning with his beloved wife, Khadijah,
people began to believe in him as a true prophet of God.
His words from God were memorized verbatim by his followers
and recited in their gatherings.
The word Qur'an means recitation.
Many of the recitations were directly concerned with the immediate life situation of the believers.
One of the situations addressed a lot was the opposition to his prophecy
by Muhammad's own tribe,
the Quraysh.
They controlled Mecca and the traditional pagan pilgrimages there.
Muhammad received a revelation that the three goddesses of Mecca were still to be venerated,
and their intercession was to be sought.
That revelation was included in the recitations of the Muslims in some places for as long as 200 years.
Muhammad offered a reform of the traditional religion of Arabia
that still met the needs of the people
and the traditions of the holy city of his tribe.
After his death, it was deemed important to universalize the text of the Qur'an,
and the leaders of the Muslim community, most notably Omar,
began the task of producing a written form of the Qur'an in Arabic
that would be the standard text
of a new religion.
Omar used many of the principles of textual criticism still in use today
to decide which oral traditions, which recitations, were authentic.
The written edition of the Qur'an produced under Omar's leadership
is the one in universal use among Muslims to this day.
One of the recitations deemed unworthy for inclusion, and now known as the Satanic Verses
(not to be confused with the contemporary novel by Salman Rushdie!)
was the revelation concerning the Three Goddesses.
What is instructive to us
is that the supposed founder of a new religion, Muhammad,
offered a renewal of spirituality
that was consolidated into a religion
by the leaders among his followers.
This is a recurring pattern in human spirituality.
Krishna had Arjuna.
Buddha had his followers in many different countries who adopted Buddhist philosophy but kept their traditional religions.
Moses had Aaron, his brother, who spoke for him in many different situations.
Jesus of Nazareth had Paul of Tarsus, and there lies the pattern that has most affected all of us.
It goes on and on to this very day.
Martin Luther had Philip Melanchthon.
Joseph Smith had Brigham Young.
Each of these examples would make a fascinating study in its own right,
but for today I want to spend a few minutes thinking about Jesus and Paul.
Clearly, from the Gospel record itself,
Jesus was a reformer of rabbinic Judaism.
He was closest to the Pharisees, the political and religious party of his time
most like the Democrats of our own time.
He thought the Pharisees went too far in many ways,
but he preached and taught mostly in their synagogues,
and he was most angered by their mistakes and excesses,
much the way religious people of all times become most aggravated by their disagreements with those who are most like themselves.
Many if not most of the reforms he sought were eventually incorporated into the prevailing form of Judaism that we know to this day.
Among his followers was his own brother, James,
who was clearly, again by the New Testament's own account,
the leader of the Jesus movement in its earliest years.
If James had continued to be the recognized leader,
the movement that became known as Christianity would probably have remained a form of Judaism,
recognized by the Roman Empire,
but never adopted by it.
The one who called himself the last and least of the Apostles,
Paul of Tarsus,
made the Jesus movement into a new religion.
He did not seek only the reforms of Pharasaic Judaism that Jesus had sought.
He made Christianity into a religion about Jesus,
with Jesus as its divine central figure,
according to the Pauline letters, second only to God Himself.
Paul's task as an Apostle
was to take the message of Jesus to the Gentiles, the non-Jews,
and his program was phenomenally successful.
The problem is
that his program converted the Jesus movement
into something that Jesus himself would not have recognized,
something by which he would have actually been appalled.
The idea of worshipping him
was something he forbade over and over.
The Gospel account was profoundly affected by Paul and his teachings,
but there were enough oral traditions about Jesus in circulation
that a well rounded portrait emerges,
for the believer, a real person who becomes a part of everyday life.
That real person spoke many messages that the world needs to hear to this day.
He said nothing about many things that some of his followers emphasize in our political discourse:
Nothing about abortion or gay marriage, nothing about property rights or patriotism
can be found in his teachings.
He said a great deal about social justice and the needs of the poor.
He spoke about the importance of caring and love in every community.
His emphasis was always on the rights of the vulnerable.
The pattern of a spiritual leader
seeking to reform the religious traditions of his own people
is clear in the case of Jesus.
Equally, one of his followers making that reform into a new religion
is also part of the pattern.
In many cases,
the new religion is far more successful than the old one.
The stories we are aware of in any case
are the success stories.
Human history does record some failures,
but their stories are usually told by those who prevailed against them.
That is one of many grains of salt that we need to use
as we study the stories of the development of human spirituality as we have received them.
I hope you can see the pattern I'm talking about in terms of human spirituality versus religion.
Our brains are hard wired to see patterns and to believe in those patterns
whether the patterns are there in objective reality or not.
Our brains are also hard wired to believe in God or gods,
regardless of the realities or lack thereof.
Our own Unitarian Universalist faith seeks to find meaning and hope
in any and every religious tradition among our sisters and brothers of the human family.
We have some unique advantages in our time.
We offer no particular religion for people to adopt.
We are sometimes called the "almost church".
It is possible that we may appeal especially to the "nones" - those who claim to have no religious preference.
If we are able to communicate clearly who we are and what we offer,
we are poised to join the fastest growing spiritual movements in all of human history.
People always need to feed their spiritual lives.
In good times and bad,
we all need something to believe in.
As Unitarian Universalists, we offer the good news of no religion,
yet a rich and fullfilling spiritual life
within caring spiritual communities.
Considering the history of religions,
we do need to be careful.
It would be possible to see our spiritual movement
become a new religion of no religion.
There is precedent for that to happen, after all.
Marx and Engels developed a method of sociological, political and economic analysis that has never been equalled.
They had a follower who made their method into a religion:
Lenin established an orthodoxy that ruled Russia and her clients for over 70 years.
The religion of Communism became one of the most powerful and brutally enforced systems of doctrine in history.
I have no fear that Unitarian Universalism would or could follow such a path,
but there are forms of non-religion in our time
that are so strongly anti-religion
that they could become like a religion themselves.
So the good news of no religion
is for us both a source of hope
and a warning.
Our hope is to bring spirituality without the trappings of religion.
It is a deep need of our time,
and we are uniquely able to meet the need.
At the same time,
we need to be aware that we are not better as an almost church
than the churches of more traditional faiths that surround us.
We bear witness to tolerance and acceptance,
and we are not alone.
Many churches in our time
place more emphasis on caring for people
than enforcing their doctrines.
Many people in more traditional churches
are likewise people of good will,
and we will find sisters and brothers who will work with us toward a better day among them,
whether they become Unitarian Universalists or not.
Best of all,
we bring hope to all kinds of people
because we welcome them all into our spiritual communities.
Atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Pagans, and many others are represented in our churches,
and we all learn from each other.
Accepting people from all religions
means promoting none of them,
and that may be the best news of all.
Amen.
Blessed be.
So mote it be.