February 15, 2004                                                                               Rev. Dr. C. DiNovo

IF THERE IS A GOD, WHY IS ORGANIZED RELIGION SO REACTIONARY?      

  1 Corinthians 15:12-20;  Luke 6:17-26

This is the third part of a three-part series that I’ve been doing concerning questions that Christians are asked often. The first one was “If there is a God, Why is there suffering?” Last week’s was “If there is a God, Where are the miracles?” and the one we probably get asked the most is “If there is a God, Why is organized religion so reactionary? I’m going to start off with a couple of video clips and a story.

The first video clip is from the “Life of Brian”, a terrific movie, by Monty Python that every Christian should be forced to watch. This scene concerns the blessed be the peacemakers the be attitude section and there’s a crowd around the mountain and there’s somebody on the outside of the crowd saying “I can’t hear what he’s saying, what’s he saying, what’s he saying?” and the news comes back person by person and somebody turns his head I think he just said, “Blessed by the cheese makers”. Video clip no. 2 is from a show called Codco and for those of you who like the show “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” and Mary Walsh and Cathy Jones, you’ll know that Cathy and Mary came from Codco and this was a Mary Walsh sequence. She was dressed as a nun and teaching a class of parochial girls all dressed in their little minis, all sitting and the nun came out with a strap and whacks it against the desk and says “sit up straight”, girls sit up straight, “face forward”, girls face forward. “Put your hands on the desk where I can see them”, girls put their hands on the desk where she can see them. “What did I teach you last week?” Girls terrified, too frightened to even answer. “Come on, one of you”. The middle little girl puts her hand up and says “Miss, Jesus is love”.

I love that because in those two video clips, you get part of the answer to why are the churches and organized religion is so reactionary because I believe fully that is what the great bulk of the Christian church has done with the teachings of Jesus. They either misheard them, never read them to begin with or else they totally and completely missed the point.

The third story is one that is very recent. We were at a community ministers meeting on Friday and Peter Short, our new moderator, a wonderful man was there and he told a story about his days at Emmanuel under a Theology Professor named Hans Gunther. Now of course you know with a name like Hans Gunther, you know that he is German and he was German during the Second World War and went AWOL from the Nazi army before having a number of adventures and ending up at Emmanuel and he said that every time he opened his mouth and spoke with a German accent, he felt he needed to give an apology and an explanation. I think as Christians as Peter said to us, we all speak with an accent like that. And the first thing as Christians we need to do, especially when someone asks us that kind of questions is apologize on behalf of the entire history of the Christian Church even now, even today.

The next thing we have to do is to say is why we are Christians not like those other Christians and we have to hold up at that point, the history of our own United Church. We have to hold it up boldly and we have to say, “This is the Church that did these things”. This is a Church that was the first mainline denomination to ordain women in 1936. This is the Church which was the first Christian Church in the world to apologize to aboriginal people for the incredible, incredible devastation that we have caused them. This is the first Church that ordained openly Gay and Lesbian people in 1988 and had the guts to do it and lost a third of its members over it. This is the Church that has just now come out and spoken in favour of same sex marriage. This is that Church and we are proud of all of those things. We feel those acts are biblical and Christian and we uphold them and say, “This is what makes us different from those other Christians” and we do that. We do that just after we apologize for the history that led up to this. So that’s first.

And then the good news. This is the good news. This is the calling and Beatitudes good news because you know that if you actually heard those words that we just read, you heard all about justice, all about love and all about the defeat of death. The end of death. I think sometimes Church is a little bit like marriage and I’ll explain why. I think we all start with falling in love and the honeymoon and then somewhere along the line in some marriages, we forget about the honeymoon and we wake up next to someone and we just go through the routine of love without the real love, the real ecstasy, the real joy and the real bliss of that relationship. Church gets to be a little like that, institutionalized. Religion gets to be a little bit like that, all of them. All of them, even the Buddhist, think of Sri Lanka. They forget, we forget, why we’re here in the first place. That moment of joy, bliss, ecstasy and wonder. That is why we come to Church at all. So I’d just like to share that with you, my own joy, bliss, ecstasy and wonder at being a Christian in this day, in this time, in this place. Why are we ecstatic? Why are we joyful? Why is it such bliss to call ourselves Christian? Because we know just like Jesus said in the beatitudes, that justice will be done. That no matter what failures we see in this life, that no matter what effort we put out and that seems to get no return, that justice will be done. We know, we know we Christians that heaven will be on earth one day, that all people will see each other all people, all people as brothers and sisters. That we will all love each other as if we were the true children of God, each one of us, brothers and sisters, no matter what we look like, no matter how much money we earn or don’t earn. No matter what the colour of our skin, no matter what our gender or any of the other identities we carry with us. We know this to be a fact. We know it. Jesus told us. We don’t have to worry about it. God is a God of justice and justice will be done. The evil will be brought to justice and every act of faith and righteousness and love will be held up and honoured. It will not one of it go wasted.

The second part of this. Death has been defeated. You know I don’t believe that, I hear myself saying the words and I’m thinking come on, we’re worm food, we going to die. You know I’m going to die. This is going to come to and end. And even worse, I’m not going to see those I’ve already lost that I love. I’m going to miss them and I’m never going to see them again. You know that’s a joke, that’s pie in the sky when you die.

Last week I talked about miracles and the difference between miracles and magic. You know that was the passage about Jesus throwing the net into the water and pulling up the fish. I said who cares about the fish, who cares about the fish? The real miracle in that story is Jesus was standing right there and they didn’t get it. They thought the miracle was the fish, it was just magic. They didn’t get that Christ was standing right in the midst of them, they missed that one. That was the true miracle. And it’s just like us now and I know that there’s a range of theological opinion about the literal meaning of the resurrection of Christ. But I stand before you and I pulled it, absolutely Christ was raised literally, walked the earth in his body, absolutely. Just a magic act, nothing really. But the real miracle is your existence right here now. You know like I said last week that the chances of your DNA, your personality and your person is one in billions. There was never anyone like you, there will never be anyone like you. Is that not a miracle? Is the very existence of our universe not a true miracle. Who needs it, why did it happen? It’s a true miracle. Is not the existence of this world a true miracle. Could the God, the source of all love who did all of that not raise a First Century Jewish Rabbi? Of course, he could, of course she could. Of course, God could. That’s magic, that’s just a slight of hand, that’s nothing. That’s nothing. That’s just the first of a many, many, many, many miracles. The true miracle of that was not that Jesus walked after death, the true miracle of that was that all death was defeated that day, all death, your death, my death. And you know, just every so often, I believe it myself. Every so often I pinch myself, I do believe it. I do believe I’ll see my loved ones again after death. I do believe we’ll all meet again around that heavenly feast. I do believe that that which is me will somehow go on eternally. I do believe it just for a second and then of course you sink back into being human. But just for a second, I get it. Imagine if we lived our lives as though we actually believed it all the time. Imagine that, I’d go running out of my house in the morning and say, “death has been defeated”. You know on the subway you’d stop people and say “did you know what, did you know you’re not going to die, did you know that”. And do you know what effect that would have? We would cease to be afraid. We would no longer know fear of any sort. That is what a true Christian is. We all fall short on that. But that is what a true Christian is, someone who is absolutely fearless because if you don’t fear death, you don’t fear anything. You don’t fear the powers and the principalities of this world. You don’t fear anything. And just for a second, in prayer in faith, you come here just for an hour a week, just to hear that news. Just so that we might begin, just begin to get a glimmer of what true faith looks like. Death has been defeated, your death, my death. It’s over, it’s done with, don’t worry about it anymore. You know how you can tell a true Christian? There the ones who are absolutely joyous. And in those moments in your life, when you experience astounding, ecstatic, blissful joy, that is the moment that you are closest to Christ, without a question. Without a question, and I don’t care how you do it, that is when you’re closest to Christ because that is our gift from Christ. That fearless, wondrous, ecstatic joy.

So the beatitudes, Christ sounding like Che Guevera. Don’t worry about it, the rich are defeated, don’t worry about it. Paul, saying if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a Christian, pure and simple. We are resurrection people. We believe exactly what Paul said. I hope that death is over for us, for everyone. Gone, done, finished and nothing to do with what we do by the way. Nothing to do with what we do or do not do. It has only to do with what Christ did. That is the answer of faith. So it doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest sinner in the world. It does not matter. Death for everyone was defeated, otherwise the cross is meaningless and the resurrection even more so. And just for a second, just for a second, I invite each one of you just to imagine that that is so.

I thought we’d do something that’s not in the bulletin. I always say this and I say it over and over again and I sound like a broken record. When we do the Lord’s Prayer, and I always say let’s do it as if we’ve never said it before because when you say words, when institutionalized religion does things over and over again, sometimes you forget why you’re doing it. And you forget the glimpse of ecstasy, you forget the joy that inspired it in the first place.

I would like to turn to Page 918 and we’re going to say the United Church Creed as if we’ve never said it before because you know it says it all. It’s the one at the bottom of the page and I would invite you to look at it and let’s stand. Let’s honour it, let’s honour these words and let’s hear them as if for the very first time:

We are not alone

We live in God’s World

We believe in God who has created and is creating, who has come in Jesus, the word made flesh to reconcile and make new

Who works in us and others by the Spirit

We trust in God

We are called to be the Church, to celebrate God’s presence, to live with respect in Creation, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil

To proclaim Jesus crucified and risen, our judge and our hope in life and death, in life beyond death.

God is with us.

We are not alone.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Thank you.

/sermons/Feb1504