[Intro to this post.]  Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is offensive.

It starts dreary and goes gory. The brave honesty and loving kindness of Jesus is absent. Undeserved agony is the only story. Then, in the end, poof! He’s all cleaned up and fresh again, miraculously.

It offends as Christianity does, making Jesus fit its scheme: An inscrutable God sends his own son to suffer and die for the sins we do in order to save us from the even more hideous hell He supposedly intends for those who won’t believe in this preposterous plan.

Instead of critiquing this, the controversy is whether the Jews look bad, having “killed Christ,” even though Jesus and his guys were Jews too. Jews should be neither guilty nor proud. Should we be mad at Italians now because Romans whipped Jesus then? Absurd. What should rouse our ire now is cruelty on any innocent. Denying another his or her right to life, torturing and killing anyone (not just one divine one) – these are offenses our enlightened humanistic democracies have mostly risen above.

That parents would shriek at children glimpsing a distant breast, yet send their innocents to see Gibson’s horrid spectacle, makes me grieve and worry for the spiritual health of our country. That people would flock to this but avoid the far more important (and violent) “Fog of War” shows a fascination with violence without responsibility for it. Jesus was one of thousands so-killed. Last century we burned to death hundreds of thousands. That we recently invaded those who never attacked us, looking for weapons only we had, and plan more wars, makes me wonder if our largely Christian culture emulates the one who said “love thy neighbor” or those who staked him.

[Start of original sermon, "Passion’s Fog"]

Passion can fog the mind. We can get so roused or riled we no longer think clear or heed our conscience. We can get so swept up in lust, love or anger we think of nothing else. We can get so full of zeal we barely notice or care what it does to others. I’m not against passion. We need passion to enliven us. Like Rod Stewart’s song says, “Even the president needs some passion, passion.” The mild twinges of passion we get from watching movies or the TV is a faint touch of the powerful feelings we may need from time to time just to keep our systems in dynamic hormonal balance. TV and movies are the modern version of story telling and hearing, bringing us fear, anger, revulsion, excitement, arousal, resolve, and so forth. We need passion, but we know it can fog our mind.

That’s why I’m so concerned about the twisted values and lessons coming out of this Easter season’s popular movie, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” Gibson stands to make some seven hundred million dollars – so popular is this feast of cruelty. Millions will look to it for lessons in spirituality. Busloads of children will be shown this horrid spectacle and be told it is for “fixing their sins” that this happened. Many say this creates faith; I say it creates fog.

I pause before saying why to also say I like most Christians just fine. They tend to be decent people in general. Some who claim to be saved – seem so. Their lives get fixed up and their spirit is bright. I value the decent values Christianity has established in our culture, values I share, like compassion, kindness, and truth speaking.

I was raised up a Catholic Christian, but left that religion at age 15. Though I have also come to appreciate Eastern religious perspectives and practices, admire Humanist thought, and have gladly been a Unitarian Universalist minister for thirty years, I have gratitude for much of Christianity’s influence in me and our culture. But because I’ve always been somewhat of an independent thinker, and have had the unusual luxury of being supported and encouraged to think and speak freely in a liberal religious setting, I have also developed, not just skepticism, but criticism of some aspects of Christianity. These are exemplified in Gibson’s movie and the meaning it is supposed to have.

I can’t recommend you see it. It’s a dreary degrading film, a descent into unremitting cruelty and gore galore. It is the twelve Stations of the Cross pushed in your face via cinematic excess. Those seeing it are being advised of the real message – Jesus died for our sins. Both the movie and the meaning offend.

I can recommend “The Fog of War,” an extended interview with Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense during Vietnam, illustrated with photos and movies of our various wars last century. McNamara provides a great service to our world by facing the hard trials of statecraft and the horrid facts of war. All who think we should wage war, and all who think we shouldn’t, should see this important and alarming movie.

I’d like to put the two movies together on this Palm Sunday in an effort to help your Easter this spring be more about rebirth than re-death. To do this I will look at the violence depicted in the two movies in order to look past it to the goodness and glory in life and us.

No doubt, violence and suffering are a part of life. All experience both, though some are steeped in them. Religions can offer solace for suffering, or sanction inflicting it. Religions can scorn violence, or summon it. Though the world’s great religious teachers have been profoundly kind, the religions that they inspired have sometimes not. Early Christianity practiced radical kindness. The apostles and saints accepted death rather than inflict it. Some of the religions it supplanted were horribly cruel. Christian monks, nuns, and hospitals brought great peace, solace, and healing to civilization. The early symbol of Christianity was the fish – sign of unexpected, unearned abundance.

Latter Christianity often lost this. The central symbol became the cross – sign of undeserved, unjust suffering. By centering on this, all the truthfulness, inclusiveness, and kindness of Jesus get lost in a story that needs a victim and a victimizer. To put on The Passion Play both a Jesus and a Roman soldier are needed. Yes, the saints were martyred, but yes, so were many innocents in the Inquisition, Crusades, and Holy Wars. Somehow, having that central symbol calls forth quasi crucifixions. I call it “the shadow of the cross.”

The controversies that surround Gibson’s movie miss the point. We hear the controversy is whether the Jews look bad, having “killed Christ,” even though Jesus and his guys were Jews too. Jews now should be neither guilty nor proud of what Jews did then. Should we be mad at Italians now because Romans whipped Jesus then? Absurd.

What should rouse our ire now is cruelty on any innocent. Righteous indignation grown to murderous arrogance is wrong whenever it occurs by whoever commits it. Denying another his or her right to life, torturing and killing anyone (not just one divine one) – these are offenses our enlightened humanistic democracies have mostly risen above. We are rightly repulsed at terrorist murders. Even if the cause seemed sensible or the doing of it brave, we cannot condone the killing of those who did no wrong, of those who just happened to be in a hated category.

We were shocked and offended to the core when Saudi Arabian Islamic zealots murdered almost three thousand innocent people on 9-11. But were we shocked and offended at the thousands of innocent people we then killed in sloppy retaliation? When we grieve for our boys being killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do we also grieve for their boys, or girls, or parents, or culture? No, our limits of concern tend to go only to us and ours, not they and theirs. American regret for Vietnam tends to go only to the horrid fifty seven thousand Americans killed, not the all the more horrid million more people who were also killed.

It’s ironic that our largely Christian culture should so easily slip into murderous violence on innocents when the person who Christianity supposedly centers on was so kind. He expressly taught, “Love thy neighbor,” and “turn the other cheek.” When asked how many times we should turn the other cheek, he replied, “seventy times seven.”

When we lashed out in fear and revenge after 9-11 we didn’t even target the right people. We hurried to invade those who never attacked us, looking for weapons only we had, threatened nuclear reprisals, and announced plans for more wars elsewhere. Our largely Christian culture is largely proud of this, flapping flags in approval.

I don’t think Christians are conscious of the cruelty they condone. They flock to see “The Passion of the Christ” and watch poor Jesus get shredded and spiked but don’t go beyond fascination with violence to renunciation of it, putting us in a dangerous fog. It wasn’t Jesus who created the fog but those who came after, from Paul to today’s TV preachers. They impose a bizarre scheme on poor Jesus: An inscrutable God sends his own son to suffer and die for the sins we do in order to save us from the even more hideous hell He supposedly intends for those who won’t believe in this preposterous plan.

I know criticizing this seems offensive to those who hold this belief dear. Despite my objection, many find solace and spirituality in this widespread belief. But I am of the Unitarian tradition, which has never accepted the theological but non-scriptural trinity and sees Jesus as he saw himself – praying to God, not playing God. I am also of the Universalist tradition, which has long objected to the whole human notion of hell and instead finds scriptural and intuitive reason for a loving God – rather than an inscrutable and mean one. And I am of the Humanist tradition, which values all human beings, not just one divine one.

I agree with God, when in Genesis One S’he declares energy, matter, plants, animals, and humans – males and females – to be “good.” I know we don’t always live up to our goodness, but I don’t believe in any inherent fallen nature or inherited Original Sin, as is supposed from Genesis Two and Three. Looking for the bad in us is a self-fulfilling, self-justifying, and self-perpetuating philosophy and psychology. It seems to lead to a faith so devoid of ethics, the more fallen we get, the more saved we feel.

This twist can lead to twisted results. That parents would shriek at children glimpsing Janet Jackson’s distant breast, yet send them to see Gibson’s horrid spectacle, makes me grieve and worry for the spiritual health of our country. What are the children to think of the guilt-inducing trick: that they are responsible for his agony, but ultimately that’s OK? That people would flock to this but avoid the far more important (and violent) “Fog of War” shows a fascination with violence without responsibility for it.

Jesus was one of thousands so-killed. Last century we burned Japanese civilians to death by the hundreds of thousands, killing over half the residents in two thirds of their cities. That we recently invaded Iraq, who never attacked us, looking for weapons only we had, and plan more wars, makes me wonder if our largely Christian culture emulates the one who said “love thy neighbor” or unconsciously acts like those who staked him.

I would ask Christians who might read or see this to consider the paradox and irony of their picking Jesus but then not trying to act as humanely as he did. I would further ask that they find and watch “Fog of War” and consider seriously McNamara’s important issue: that we have not grappled with the rules of war, nor have we asked ourselves if we want to bring the incredibly violent scope of war from the 20th century into the 21st. The unjust torture inflicted on Jesus, horrid and reprehensible as it was, was personal and limited. The unjust agony inflicted on civilian populations (as well as the soldiers themselves) in last century’s wars magnifies Jesus’ agony by the millions.

Would we rationalize that away or simply turn the other way? Would we not care that it goes on – and that our recently announced plans are for it to go on and on – unless it’s our buildings that fall? Would we protect ourselves from seeing the flag-draped coffins of our boys returning home to their graves in order to not realize what we’re doing?

Americans probably don’t even know and perhaps wish to forget our horrendous firebombing of Japanese cities prior to using atomic bombs on them, deliberately napalming to death most of the residents of most of their cities. Some Americans say “better them than us,” thinking attacking the civilian population is a legitimate tactic of war. But, if fair on them, then fair on us. If we don’t live up to the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” we tend to promote its shadow, “As ye do unto others so will it be done unto you.”

The wife of Norman Morrison, Quaker peace protestor who immolated himself on Pentagon steps, said this: “Human beings must stop killing other human beings.”

McNamara, aware of the violence from “the war to end all wars” to our current one, representative of all of us, could not explain the shallow rationales and egregious results of war; all he could do was to say it gets out of hand, that it becomes the “fog of war.”

We know that all human beings are built of a selection process that would kill rather than be killed. Usually, people are peaceful, but provoked, most humans can become killers. We know also that in most societies the aggressive warrior and the bossy religious zealot periodically want to take over and make everyone play their games.

It might be that those in fundamentalist-dominated Islamic societies are stuck with their religion and their religious nuts, but we don’t have to be in ours, though we increasingly are. Bizarre preachers dominate Sunday morning TV and most religious radio with far-fetched scenarios drawn from disparate Bible passages and their own flamboyant imaginations, praising the passion movie and foretelling the grand final conflagration that will bring the “Prince of Peace” back. What used to be innocuous whackos have become influential ones, buoyed by a society of nodding agreers, advising a sanctimonious president [G.W. Bush], urging our country be “under God.”

Kind-hearted Christians don’t seem to have much say or sway these days. Nor do secular Americans. Believing matters more than doing. Faith trumps rationality. Piety parades. What in the name of Christ has Christianity become?

“Christ” was not Jesus’ last name. It was a title applied later, an interpretation of various scripture passages and that event. Does believing we are fallen but are redeemed by Jesus make us good without our having to be good? I know many report they want to be good because they have faith. I believe them. But isn’t being a Christian more than having faith? Or is faith itself enough no matter what we do? Can we wage wars and still feel sanctimonious if we just believe in the scheme Paul and others made up and the lies our president told us?

I’m with Thomas Jefferson in being wary of religion. Religions are not above human reproach. Religions aren’t made good and right just because they claim to be. We need to be both heart-full and intelligent about religion. Jefferson took his scissors to the Bible, cutting out all the added miracle stories and commentary about Jesus, paring it down to the sayings of Jesus.

Even though I criticize some aspects of Christianity, I like others and I like Christians. On balance, I’m glad our western civilization has picked Jesus as teacher and inspiration. Jesus was not one to engage in gruesome violence or wage wars. He seemed to care for people in and of themselves, not because they were in some despised category. He reached out to the poor, the prostitute, and the tax collector. He even was said to have said, “in the least of these, there you will find me also.”

This is not different from one way to understand the meaning of YHWH: I am that I am. God is the self of the one you look at. God is the self of the insignificant foreigner, even the enemy. (Even if we don’t love our enemies, respecting them goes a long way to mend the divide.) Theologians, mullahs, or preachers do not own or limit God. Emerson called it a perversion “that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury.” Death is not escaped by believing in the cross.

Must those who see the crucifixion as the good thing define Christianity? Our passion should be to abhor any crucifixion of any one. Adding more crosses to the modern Apian Way makes us neither powerful nor righteous.

What a different world there could be if Christianity were to drop the whole rush to idolize execution and create Armageddon, drop it for the madness it is and instead see the Second Coming as the knowing of God in all. Seeing divinity (or at least worth) in “the least of these” could open the collective floodgates of love that would pour forth into humanity and its future unexpected abundance and miraculous community. Of late, it appears liberal Christians, non-theistic religions like Buddhism, and humanistic secular people are doing better at this than the three fanatical monotheistic religions are.

We need to drop wrath and return to the goods of God as defined in Genesis One. We need rebirth, not re-death. As there are more trout in the streams, more security and sustenance for the human family, more freedom for all, and more joy in our hearts – so will the fog of our misplaced passions dissipate in the warm glow of our singular sun. Passion’s fog will burn off by our being more honest and loving in our lives – like Jesus was in his.

Reverend Brad Carrier, for the Unitarian Universalist’s of Grants Pass, April 4, 2004, C

Filed under: Sermons by brad
No Comments »

We all will eventually die; moralists in congress want to make sure we’ll die slowly and expensively. Piously pretending to protect our human dignity, they instead rob us of it, commanding we subject our private lives to their national drug laws and presumptuous morality, no matter what we want. Lawmakers may deny the right to decide to die, but people usually have had the power to do so, when and how they choose.

As a funeral director and clergyman, I’ve seen lots of people die. Some died in dignity, in the company of loving family. Others had to hide. Financially exhausted, they sought to save the family farm from being sold in order to pay for a few more weeks of weary delay. Desperate, they committed suicide, leaving a mess for others. Alone, they could not tell their family, nor say their good byes, nor be helped by their doctor.

I was with my friend Harry and his family when he died recently. Fortunately, he lived here in Oregon, where he could have asked for compassionate help, if he so chose. As it was, he didn’t, partly because Oregon also allowed him to smoke medical marijuana. Harry liked pot; it eased his pains and improved his moods. Puritans in Washington D.C. would arrogantly outlaw both of these rights. Tom Coburn (R OK) bluntly declared, “we do not have the right to die.” Another Republican added, “we have the right to pray for relief, but not to provide or opt for it.”

Seeking to open pain management to a wider and stronger array of controlled substances is a decent and commendable goal; using that as an excuse and cover to overrule state’s rights, and criminalize people’s rights in their realms of living and dying, is not. Even though we supposedly have a “live-and-let-live” society, and the 10th Amendment grants to the states those functions not expressly reserved to the federal government, the Uniform Substances Control Act of 1970 has become a top-down repression on our whole society. The federal prison system has doubled since then, largely to lock up marijuana growers. Now, the Drug Enforcement Administration would police all doctor/patient interactions to make sure no one deliberately dies when they want. The side “benefit” would be, no state (like Oregon) would be able to experiment with or relax draconian and counterproductive national drug laws.

If a “slippery slope” towards imposed euthanasia is what the issue is, pass laws specifically against that. Otherwise, we are on a slippery slope towards a police state that denies all their right to explore variations in the use of personal recreational substances, and/or careful, compassionate, private deaths. We’ll have rooms full of dying but not dead bodies, pumping profits into the medical industry. (Most medical profits occur in the last weeks and months before death.) People would never be allowed to enjoy any drugs of their choice, not in their life, nor at their death.

Living like we want and dying when we choose are abilities Nature and Nature’s God builds into us, which our Bill of Rights once respected and protected. In what America is becoming under the “care” of Republicans and conservative Democrats, we’ll only have the “rights” to pray for relief, and pay for the futile delay.

(Rev.) Brad Carrier

Filed under: Sermons by brad
No Comments »

The Problem of Religion and the Promise of Creation

Have you noticed that the three great monotheistic religions of the world are also the three great problem makers in the world? Is God the problem? Does God want these vast forces to wage war with the others? We’re told lately that society has gotten too secular, too wayward, and that we should return to our religions and have more faith. But should we? Haven’t religions often been the source of problems – from stifling knowledge to torturing non-believers? Haven’t religions insisted on preposterous claims and made many to believe they must believe to be religious? Haven’t religions insisted on faith as the mark of one’s religiosity? Does sanctimony substitute for sensibility? Do we let piety protect power? Is thinking for one’s self and coming to other conclusions a bad thing? Is being skeptical of religious claims and shenanigans a sign of not enough faith, or is it the dawning of a renewed faith in our own abilities and responsibilities too long neglected?

It is especially the fundamentalist forces in these three great religions that drive their societies to madness. Fundamentalist zealots in Islam dominate their society. From bossy mullahs to murderous attackers, insistence on the harsh aspects of the Muslim faith drives a growing tendency to war. Fundamentalist rabbis in Israel dominate their society. They claim the same old self-serving problematic scripture passages that foster racial hatred, land grabs, and racist superiority/inferiority again, just as they have for thousands of years. Fundamentalist ministers and priests in America seek once again to impose their narrow harsh views of Christianity on Americans, exacerbating the polarization and injustices of both sides of the holy land and supporting a sanctimonious president in his messianic delusion of imposing virtues in others by warring on them.

Considering that all three great monotheistic religions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, all base their scriptures on the books of what we call the “Old Testament” one might tend to think those books are themselves are fraught with dangerous misdirection. And they are. “Believing in the Bible” wastes our minds and points us to the same old troubles of the past. We’re told these are all God’s words to humanity, fully distorting the obvious truth that they are some human’s words about God, history, yearning, failure, fervency, etc. They range from the sad to the sublime, from the boring to the inspiring, from the hideous to the most honorable. To take every passage as God’s word is a great mistake. This neglects, confuses, and impedes our own thinking ability and humanity’s vast store of other wisdom (which scripture and literature itself is also a mixed blessing at best).

Of particular note in our American society is the fervency with which many Christians defend what they call “Creationism.” Based on the Garden of Eden story in Genesis, the first book in the Bible, this account depicts Adam being formed in a garden, and Eve from him, both free and happy in the abundant garden until they eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and so suddenly cover their formerly naked bodies in shame, hide from God, and get cast out to lives of toil and trouble. This goes on to form the scriptural basis of the Doctrine of Original Sin, meaning we’re fallen and flawed, and need the redemptive power of grace via Jesus’ sacrifice, which we must have faith in for it to work. Such Creationists angrily renounce the teaching of evolution in science classes, clinging to this recent and fantastical story of Adam and Eve. They resent the far more ancient and lasting view of time, space, and evolution that science has assembled and is refining.

What’s amazing is that the Garden of Eden story is the second creation story in the Old Testament. It is preceded by the first creation story, Genesis One, a very evolutionary story. In this account, Elohim God (singular and plural, male and female) creates light and calls it “good,” water and calls it “good,” land, “good,” fishes, “good,” animals, “good,” and humans (“males and females he made them in his own image” goes the odd passage) also called by God, “good.” Taken all together, these six stages of creation are called by God “very good.” Having created the natural universe and called it all good, God goes on to say to replenish it, have dominion, and to eat “fruits, nuts, and herbs that bear their seed.” End of account. No demand for worship. No shame. No alienation.

Ask most people what they think the fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden was and they’ll say, “sex.” Ironic, eh? They had sexual identity before eating of the forbidden fruit. Only after eating of it do they realize they are naked and so cover themselves in shame. The tree was the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” It is under a different name for God, YHWH, a singular and masculine name. Eating of that fruit leads to their shame, their hiding from God, God’s wrath, their expulsion, and the beginning of the story of alienation. What was defined as good by God in Genesis One gets shifted into being evil in Genesis Two/Three under the advice of the subtle serpent. Sex was not the sin, but shame of sex is the sign of being tricked into the confusion of just what is good and just what is evil.

Neither passage creates reality except as people believe it. By centering on the fall and the supposed Original Sin, religions have ignored the Original Goods. In other parts of the Bible there are beautiful descriptions of the “cedars of Lebanon.” What cedars of Lebanon? There are only rocks left. Greece too was once forested but fell to the ax, then the goat, to return to dessert. In Iraq today all three religious forces are helping create hell in the same place that the Garden of Eden was supposed to have been. Stubborn, narrow, angry, presumptuous, belligerent religious forces each push their fanatic faiths on the others, all forgetting and forsaking the Original Goods as defined by God in Genesis One. The ancient goodness of sunlight into chlorophyll compressed into oil is warred over in order to waste it in a glut of consumerist emptiness. Thinking Humvees are the good life, we forget and forsake the real good life that always was and yet could be.

So, I wonder, what reason or rationalization do these three great monotheistic religions offer for their take on Genesis One? It is the very root of their scriptures. It sits there in the combined canon ignored or excused away. If nature is good, if we of nature are also good, if all together it is valued by God as “very good,” how can they go on resenting science (which studies these goods) and tricking people into not trusting their own thinking and conscience, and instead giving over their gullibility to what often has been and appears once more to be what amounts to the subtle deceiver cloaked in religious garb? Are there better goods than the Original Goods – like power, fame, and stuff? Is subjugating women to men’s control a good thing? Is giving up our better thinking for faith, acquiescence, and obedience a good thing? Is warring for oil to waste it a good thing? Do mullahs, ministers, and rabbis really know what is good, or could they be feeding us the confusion of good and evil again? How can we claim to love the Creator when we don’t really love Creation? Just how good can the goods be? What if we were so religious we affirmed ourselves, cared for each other, and loved our world?
Brad Carrier, January 20, 2004

Filed under: Sermons by brad
No Comments »