A Theological Argument for Abortion

Davidson Loehr

24 February 2008

STORY: The Boy Who Loved Hamsters

      Once there was a boy who loved hamsters.  He badgered and badgered his parents until they finally did two things, one good and one not too smart.  They bought him a hamster cage, food, and a hamster.  That was good.  But they bought him two hamsters.  This wasn’t smart, because two hamsters don’t stay just two for very long.  Hamsters are very friendly animals.  And before long, he no longer had two hamsters, he had twenty. 

      But this boy loved hamsters, so he saw it as a good thing.  He went to his parents protesting that the cage was too small, so they needed to buy him a much bigger cage.  They did, and the hamsters kept doing what hamsters do.  Before long, he didn’t have twenty hamsters, he had three hundred!  They started buying food in ten-pound bags.

      Still, the boy loved hamsters, so this was fine.  But they had overgrown their cage, were running all over the house, hiding under and in the beds, crawling out from under pillows just as you were falling asleep. 

      “We need bigger cages, and many more of them,” he pleaded to his parents.  “And a special place in the back yard where we can keep all the cages.”  The parents yielded, and soon there was a kind of tenement rising in the backyard, with cages organized into blocks with little streets between them.  The boy and a couple friends pushed a wheelbarrow down between the cages, throwing food into the rapidly increasing hamster population.  There were way too many to play with now.  It was all they could do to feed them.  They began buying food in hundred-pound bags.

      Before long, there weren’t three hundred hamsters, but about fifty thousand of them!  They escaped from the cages, from the yard, and were running all over town, getting into everyone’s house, hiding under everyone’s bed and under everyone’s pillows.  The town people didn’t like this.

      A town meeting was called, but the boy was ready for them.  “I really love hamsters,” he said, “but I understand you don’t want them running loose through your town.  So the solution is to build a large boat, with several floors, and float it out in the Lake for these lovely, fluffy little hamsters.  Then I can take a rowboat out each day to give them food.”

      Somehow, he was persuasive, and the town actually built a huge boat.  Before long there were millions of hamsters on the big boat.  But now nobody could count them.  They were breeding so fast they were getting crowded, and the more crowded they got, the meaner they got, so that it was no longer safe to get onto the boat to play with them — not that anybody could really play with millions of hamsters anyway! 

      Each day, the boy who loved hamsters rowed out to the big ship in his rowboat filled with hamster food, which they were now buying by the ton, and shoveled food over the sides of the ship before rowing back to shore. Still, he loved hamsters, and loved the idea of knowing there were so many of them out there, even if he had no contact with them any more.

      While no one could count the hamsters any more, everyone in town could get a sense of their growing numbers just by watching the big boat sink lower and lower into the water every day.  There were millions and millions of them onboard now.

      Finally, the big boat sank into the Lake, taking all the hamsters with it.  The boy who loved hamsters was very sad, and he called another town meeting. 

      “The problem,” he said, “was that the boat wasn’t big enough.  We need to build a bigger boat — and more boats.  And we should buy our own company to make hamster food, it will be cheaper.  I’ve done some research, and if we fire about five hundred public school teachers and double the class size in public schools, and stop repairing the roads quite so often, we can afford to do it.  And we must do it, because I really love hamsters.  And after all, hamsters are God’s children, too.”

      If you were on the city council, what would you say to the boy who loved hamsters? 

PRAYER:

      It’s so much harder to love humans than to love pets.  Pets are easy: cages, food, a little contact when we’re around, and if they have any internal needs, they seem to take care of them.  It’s like love with training wheels.

      But to love humans - that can be so much harder!  Food and safety are just the start.  Then there’s cherishing them, having the emotional and psychological energy to care for their spirits; then education, day-to-day caring, character formation, years of working to help empower them, make them feel cherished, like children of God, the sons and daughters of the universe, Life’s longing for itself.  The caring seems to go all the way down to where and how they live, these people we love.  We challenge them, and forgive them; empower them to find their own voice, then learn to respect them when their empowered opinions differ from our own.

      All of our lives seem like do-it-yourself kits that need the active help of others to be assembled well - others like family, friends, communities and society.  The web is woven wide and fine, and we lose our connection with it at our peril. 

      There is a limit to the number of pets for which we can care well, and an even more important limit to the number of people for whom we can care well.  There is the rub.  Love doesn’t just magically spill over and grow to cover all the emotional demands placed on us.  We must first be nourished and cared for, or we’ll have little to offer to others.  It is so much harder than just loving pets.  Let us learn to love, and learn to know the limits of our ability to love: to care for ourselves while caring for others.  For we are all tied together, and if we cannot hold ourselves up, we cannot hold others up, either. 

      Jesus once said we should love others as we love ourselves, so being able to love ourselves comes first.  Let us not assume that loving others is as simple as just feeling loving feelings about them.  Let us try to remember that love begins at home - then, as we become filled, it can grow outward toward others.  But first we learn to love ourselves as children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.  Let us remember that must come first. 

SERMON: A Theological Argument for Abortion

      I’m going to do something I’ve not really done here before: I’m going to give you a theological argument, supporting both birth control and abortion. I’m doing this because as a theologian, I believe that the issues of birth control and abortion are, at their most fundamental levels, not issues of individual rights, but theological issues, and that support for either side must ultimately be presented in the form of a defensible theological argument.

      If the option of pro-choice is to be a religious position, eventually, it will have to be argued that there are times and cases when God demands an abortion. Not simply permits, not closes His or Her eyes to, but demands it.

      The fundamental position of both the Roman Catholic church and the pro-life movement in general is that the most important of all considerations is the brute fact of a single individual human life. Every single human life, simply by virtue of being a human life, is considered to be sacred at every stage of development, even at conception. And more sacred than any other consideration. It is the quantity of life that is being defended, and not quality of life. This is consistent, historically, throughout most of the Catholic Church’s positions, and throughout most consistent pro-life arguments, as well.

      This is how and why a Pope can stand in any large and desolate metropolitan city, looking in the faces of thousands and millions of women and children who are born to beg, born to sell their bodies and their souls in order to stay alive, born to die of starvation and disease–this is how he can look at those people, and tell them that it is a sin to practice birth control. Because the Bible and God command that we “choose life”, and the word “life” means individual human lives, every single one we can produce.

      So birth control is seen as a sin against God, and cannot be permitted.

      Likewise with abortion. As the Christian writer Tertullian said eighteen centuries ago in his brilliant and terse formula, “That is a person which will be a person: you have the fruit already in the seed.”  And if it is to become a person, then from the start, that individual life is the sole focus of God’s concern, and either to actively stop conception from taking place, as birth control does, or to actively terminate the development of that zygote and fetus into another human being, as abortion does, is seen as a sin, a horrible crime, and must be stopped at all costs. As a theologian might put it, “God demands it.”

      This is why those who think of themselves as pro-life have such zeal and such fervor and such a deep commitment to stopping what they see as a murderous crime against not only the individual conceptions, fetuses and children, but against God Himself. But now let’s look more closely at this.

      If one human life is good, then two are better, and a million are better yet, and the six billion we have on the earth now are miracles of life to be welcomed and encouraged. But why stop with only six billion?  Why not six trillion? The question is not when to stop population growth, but how it can ever be stopped.

      How can the Roman Catholic church or pro-life people ever be in favor of birth control or abortion?  No matter when it happens, the argument against it will be the same. People committed to the pro-life position will be called on to explain by what authority the new individual human lives are to be denied existence or terminated in their development. If an individual life, in and of itself, is always good, no matter how many children the mother has had by what age, no matter how many are crowded into a single woman’s life, a family’s life, or the squalor of inner-city ghettos, then how could anyone committed to “pro-life” ever argue for birth control or abortion? 

      Even if there were six trillion people, it would still be terminating the development of an individual human life, still be opposing our own will and our own values to God’s–assuming, of course, that these people have this God-business right in the first place.

      Now many people would just say to leave God out of it, that this God is only a projection used by churches and politicians to control people.  And it is certainly true that what passes for “God” is often little more than the hand puppet of charismatic preachers and politicians.  But the issue of religious responses to life has to include a theological statement in God-language, because that’s how most people think.

      This is such a complex topic, there are a lot of dimensions to it I can’t even consider today:

      * I can’t talk, for instance, about our government’s  support of anti-abortion and anti-birth-control policies that will guarantee that third world countries will never threaten us economically or militarily, and will instead become breeding tanks for desperate, cheap, illiterate labor.

      * I can’t talk about the semi-alternative of adoption, and the fact that this becomes a strongly racial issue immediately as, in this country, it may be true that healthy white middle class babies are wanted for adoption, but not many Black babies, and not many babies from mothers addicted to Crack cocaine.  Or the fact that pushing powerless women to carry a baby to term, then give it up for adoption is very close to turning poor women into breeding stock for more affluent people - and that’s an immoral proposition.

      * And I can’t talk about the patriarchal agendas that lie behind both the conservative pro-lifers and the male-dominated Roman Catholic Church, where women have not, in twenty centuries, been able to become full people in their own right, and where forced breeding laws help keep them suppressed.

      * Or the fact that while conservative churches talk as though abortion were murder, no church recognizes either an abortion or a miscarriage as the death of a human being that deserves a funeral or ritual blessings - as many heartbroken Catholic parents have learned in the most painful way.  As far as I know, no religion in history has.  So no matter what churches may say, the behavior of the churches looks like their abortion stance isn’t pro-life at all, but is primarily intended to keep women in their place as homemakers and breeders, controlled by the kind of men who have turned God into their hand puppet.  It’s an offense to all honest religion.   

      You can think of many other important areas on this subject, any one of which could give rise to a dozen books and a hundred sermons, a bunch of parades and more than a few violent and bloody fights. But I will return to just the theological argument that sometimes God demands both birth control and abortions.

      My model for this argument comes from the Roman Catholic Church, from a papal encyclical called Rerum Novarum, written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. It has been updated by the church three times, in 1931, 1961, and 1991, to modernize the language and polish a few of the concepts.

      As students of religion, political science, or labor movements will know, I have not picked an obscure papal encyclical. This is perhaps the most important thirty pages in the entire history of Christianity on the subject of religion’s relationship to laws that affect humans. This little document did more to change the social structures of the western world than the entire so-called “Social Gospel Movement” of which Protestant churches are so proud. It enabled changes in attitude that were absolutely fundamental, in getting both churches and governments to change child labor laws and help establish workers’ unions all over the world. And it did it because it was, at bottom, a theological argument of the first order, an argument about what human life is, and what it demands, or what God demands.

       For nineteen centuries, the Roman Catholic Church had not cared about the fact that people at the bottom of the economic ladder have always been paid just enough to keep them alive. In fact, over and over again, the same passage from the Bible had been used to justify this state of affairs. It was the passage from Genesis, after Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, when God told Adam “by the sweat of your brow you shall live.”  And so, the Church would repeat, life is hard, but that’s the way God planned it.

      What Pope Leo XIII did in 1891 was to use the same Bible passage to justify the opposite position, and to lay the foundation for workers’ unions which the Church would support through its offices. Leo did it simply by emphasizing a different word in the sentence. “By the sweat of your brow,” he said, “you shall live!”  And what, he asked, does it mean, “to live”?  Does it mean merely to exist, to subsist at starvation level?  Does it mean to live like lower animals do, or maybe like rats or cockroaches do?  Are we promised, by this God of the Bible, only the absolute lowest possible quality of life?  Is the mere quantity of life, the mere fact that we breathe all that religion offers?  Is it, to keep it in the language of theism, all that God demands, the absolute minimum quality of life?  Is it only about how many are alive, rather than how they are living?  Is it like the story of the boy who loved hamsters - but without even bothering to feed them or give them a safe place to live?

      No, said Pope Leo, it is not life like a lower animal which this God of the Bible demands for us. It is the life of a human being. And not the absolute minimal life of a human being, either. Pope Leo’s God demanded that our labors enable us to live fully, to realize the full potential of human beings. That means time for education, time for leisure, time for relaxation with friends and family, time not only to bear life like a burden, but as well to enjoy it, to live it, like free and empowered human beings.

      Leo contrasted humans with lower animals, which he called “brutes.”  Now hear this remarkable Pope’s words as he describes the “brute”: 

      The brute has no power of self-direction, but is governed by two chief instincts…. These instincts are self-preservation and the propagation of the species…. But with [humans] it is different indeed…. It is the mind, or the reason, which is the chief thing in us who are human beings; it is this which makes human beings human, and distinguishes them essentially and completely from the brute. (“Rerum Novarum,” in Seven Great Encyclicals, New York: Paulist Press, 1963, p. 3) 

      And what is the role of the Church in all of this?  “Its desire is that the poor, for example, should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should better their condition in life; and for this it strives,”  wrote this Pope. (p. 14)  And if conditions existed which robbed humans of the possibility of living like humans rather than brutes, if people found themselves in  

“conditions that were repugnant to their dignity as human beings… if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex or age–in these cases there can be no question that within certain limits, it would be right to call in the help and authority of the law [to do what] is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the danger.”  

      And why?  Why must the Church and the law do these things?  Because God demands it!  Demands it, because humans must be given living conditions which allow them to develop fully to the limits of their potential as educated, intelligent, creative, and joyful people. It is for that they were created, and conditions which make that impossible are not merely wrong, they are evil.

      Each creature must be allowed to live to the fullest extent possible for that kind of creature, and you can get a dependable idea of what is possible for it by looking at what it has done under ideal conditions. And when you have understood the fullest potential of a species, you have understood what, in theological terms, is God’s will for it. Then, when conditions within our control keep a person from ever growing into their full potential, then the Church, and all people with religious sensitivities, must try to remove those conditions. And why?  Because God demands it. I have mixed ordinary language and theological language here, but I will trust that you can understand what I’m saying.

      This essay, written 117 years ago, changed the position of the Church, a position which it had held and enforced for nineteen centuries. Even traditions which have existed since the beginning of the religion can be changed, as our understanding of the fullest potential of life is expanded. In other words, the fact that things have always been done a certain way is not necessarily an argument for continuing to do them that way.   And now we can bring this full circle.

      Times have changed. The population of the world has increased almost exponentially since 1891, even moreso since the era when the Bible was written. The deadly effect of overpopulation and under-education on the possibility of living like human beings has never existed the way it does today. The pressures on single mothers and working families without the support of large extended families or social support has never been this consistently brutal.  Neither the religious scriptures of the West nor established theological traditions have yet had to address this changed situation.

      But now they do. And both the fact and the threat of more births and of more human beings is now among the chief conditions that make it impossible for many, many people - both mothers and children - ever to have the chance of living like empowered, cherished human beings. They will be driven instead, as Pope Leo said of the “brutes”, by only two instincts: self-preservation, and more breeding.

      Would you like to see what it looks like when human beings live only like animals, driven only by self-preservation and propagation of the species?  Go to Mexico City. Or Chicago. Or Detroit. Or New York City. Go to the ghettos, the slums, the shantytowns of the world, and you will see the evil conditions, and the results of those evil conditions.

      Do you want to see it up close, one-on-one?  Look at teen-aged girls pregnant with their second or third child, trapped in a system from which most will never escape. Nor are there are many kinds of employment open to many of these women. With grade-school educations, what are they to do?  They can be prostitutes and their boyfriends can be pimps, drug pushers and drug takers, or exploited laborers living at the edge of starvation and kept there by a system which can demand from them what it chooses and give them no more than it must.

      The Church’s desire, wrote Pope Leo, “is that the poor … should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should better their condition in life; and for this it strives.” And further, if conditions arise “that [are] repugnant to their dignity as human beings… if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex or age–in these cases there can be no question that within certain limits, it would be right to call in the help and authority of the law [to do what] is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the danger.”

      By the very reasoning which the Roman Catholic Church itself has used in its most famous and powerful document for social change, the grotesque overpopulation in many parts of the world is an evil which must be opposed because it is anti-life and unholy. It is destroying even the possibility that these people will ever rise above the level of the “brutes” and become human beings.

      And this applies first to the people we already have, not those who aren’t yet born.  If we can’t cherish and empower the most fragile people we have - and so often that means teen-aged girls and single mothers - then we have no more right than the boy who said he loved hamsters to bring any more lives into a world we have failed or refused to make safe and humane for them. 

      It is perhaps the first time in history that those who want to defend their position as religious must begin to recognize that both birth control and abortion are not the enemies of religion, but are instead friends. Birth control is not just an economic necessity today, but a religious one, as well. God demands it, because people cannot live like human beings in the squalor of the slums and shantytowns in which they will forever be defined, like brutes, by the basic animal instincts of self-preservation and breeding - and, of course, economic exploitation.

      The world doesn’t need more people; it’s already badly overcrowded.  We have doubled the population of the world in less than forty years, which is close to breeding like hamsters.  But breeding isn’t a high calling.  Anything can breed.  The higher calling is asking whether we can be proper stewards of the life we would bring forth.  If we can’t, it is wrong to let our higher calling be smothered by the fertile productions of the much lower calling of merely breeding.  We are meant for more than that, and are urged - commanded - not to settle for less. 

      That boy did not love hamsters.  He only loved the idea of hamsters, and the idea of owning hamsters.  He didn’t love real hamsters, because you don’t put creatures you love into miserable, crowded, filthy ghettos that keep them your captives until they die.  That’s selfish abuse, not grown-up love.  Love demands that we stop bringing forth so much life that we can’t cherish and empower our offspring.  This is true both for woman and for societies, and needs to shape our societal laws about sex education, birth control and abortion. 

      And when sex education doesn’t exist, when birth control fails, and the only hope left for a woman, a family, a ghetto, a city, or a world is an abortion, when an abortion is the only means left of removing a condition which threatens to return this human or these humans to the level of mere brutes, then the church, the state, and all who are really pro-life must, by God, not only condone those abortions, but help the people to get them, safely and easily. God demands it. 

The Parable of the Vineyard Workers

Davidson Loehr

10 February 2008

PRAYER:

      Here in the midst of the miracle of life, we come to see if there might be a secret to it, a way of living that pays us in a better kind of currency.

      Not pay in dollars, but in satisfaction, by helping us find more life, fuller life, more gratifying and grateful life.

      Over and over, week after week, we come here to be reminded of the yearnings that hold the key to our hearts and souls.

      And we come back because we know it isn’t as simple as just taking someone else’s authoritative answer.  We come to hear and feel what might some day become part of our own answer to the perennial questions of who we are, what is worth believing, and how we should live. 

      The search itself is as sacred as it is frustrating, and it can bless each of us who show up to do the work of self-examination.  There is hope there.  And, thank goodness, there is also time.  There is time for us to learn better how best to live.  There is time for us.

      Amen. 

SERMON: The Parable of the Vineyard Workers

      Jesus’ parable of the vineyard workers (Mt 20:1-15, adapted here from the Scholars Version done by the Jesus Seminar) is one of the most intriguing religious stories I know, and one of the hardest to pin down to a single interpretation.  So I want to talk about it with you this morning.  The Jesus Seminar rated it the third highest among the parables most likely to be authentic - in other words, a story Jesus actually told in something like this form. 

      I won’t assume you know the story, so will begin by reading it to you:

      For the kingdom of God is like a vineyard owner who went out the first thing in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard.  After agreeing to pay the workers a denarius, he sent them into his vineyard.

      And coming out around 9 a.m. he saw others loitering in the marketplace and he said to them, “You go into the vineyard too, and I’ll pay you whatever is fair.”  So they went.

      Around noon he went out again, and at 3 p.m., and repeated the process.  About 5 p.m. he went out and found others loitering about and says to them, “Why did you stand around here idle the whole day?”

      They reply, “Because no one hired us.”

      He tells them, “You go into the vineyard too.”

      When evening came the owner of the vineyard tells his foreman: “Call the workers and pay them their wages starting with those hired last and ending with those hired first.”

      Those hired at 5 p.m. came up and received a denarius each.  Those hired first approached thinking they would receive more.  But they also got a denarius apiece.  They took it, but began to grumble against the proprietor, saying, “These men hired last worked only an hour but you paid them the same that you paid those of us who did most of the work during the heat of the day.”

      The employer said to one of them, “Did I cheat you?  Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?  Can’t I do whatever I like with my money?  Or are you giving me the evil eye because I am generous?”  

      In other words, the vineyard owner hired people for a twelve-hour workday (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.).  Some worked all twelve hours, some worked as little as one hour, but he paid them all a full day’s wage (the denarius was the silver coin that was considered a fair day’s wage for workers).  Those who came at the last hour were delighted, but those who had worked a whole day in the hot sun were angry, even though he paid them a full day’s wage, which was what he said he’d pay them. 

      As you can tell, it’s not easy to know what to make of this.  It doesn’t seem at all equitable.  Conservative Christians often say that the silver coin represents heaven.  Though some of those who wrote the gospels forty to ninety years after Jesus died did have him talking about heaven, Jesus was a Jew who never talked about heaven or hell, just focusing on this life here and now. 

      When you start reading some of the interpretations that people give this parable, they are absolutely all over the board, which should give you the nerve to give the story your own best interpretation.  I want to share some of the ways Christians try to make sense of this odd story, then talk about what Jesus meant by it, and then wonder what we might do with it. 

      One online skit for two clowns says the point is that we should be happy with what we have - since all the workers agreed to work for a denarius: that silver coin. These clowns say they are hired by churches to come do skits to reinforce the bible lesson.

One of the many large Calvary Churches in the country says that in the Parable, the denarius is Heaven, the glorious payment of God for a whole life’s work of a believer.

God pays with the same coin to those working for 80 years in the church or to the one who repents at the last minute of his life.

But this is fair, they say — for after all, everybody gets to live up above the sky with God in heaven forever.  So since the reward is infinite, there is no injustice.  That’s at least clever. 

      An Anabaptist Christian reading doesn’t make it about heaven, but about serving God in this life.  This man says:  “So, having considered all this, wouldn’t you prefer to be a one-hour worker? Not me! I love the Boss too much!  I pity the one-hour worker! He only has an hour to be about his Father’s business.”

      He says the point of the parable is Ungratefulness, and ends by saying, “Let’s be so busy serving we don’t have an interest in whining!”  This is pretty close to a big Happy Face reading, though I don’t think the original vineyard workers would have bought it. 

      But what seems worth keeping is that notion that those who spend more of their lives doing God’s work are to be envied because they served high ends rather than shallow or selfish ends.  For this interpreter, the silver coin, the denarius, means serving the highest ideals with your life.  We all want to do this, and while those who only did it for an hour had a glorious hour, it only lasted an hour instead of a whole life.  This man talks about serving life-giving ideals as serving God, and that’s easy to understand whether you’d want to call it serving God or not. 

      Another commentator says the point of the parable is about answering the call when it comes.  For those of us in liberal religion, what that “call” really means is like what the theologian Howard Thurman meant when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” 

      Those who use God-talk to talk about these things will call that serving God.  But it doesn’t matter what you call that attitude, as long as you can call it forth. 

      A lot of interpreters get hung up on the money part, and need to spin it to save face for God, because if this is about money, it sounds like God isn’t very fair.  One didn’t want to engage this argument, so just said the point of the parable is that there is no room in heaven for people who just want more money or those who are jealous of the few who didn’t have to work very hard for their money.

      And this leads to one of my favorite interpretations - favorite in a perverse kind of way - from Paul A. Cleveland, a professor of economics and business administration at Birmingham-Southern College, a man who has converted to the late Milton Friedman’s economic gospel.

      He says the point of the parable concerns “The Danger of Presuming the Right to be Treated Graciously.”

      “No one has the right to force someone else to deal with them in a merciful and compassionate way,” he says.

      What he calls government entitlement programs - like welfare, social security, education and health care - are often called social justice, but he says this parable shows that they are not just, and not what God intends for us. 

      Furthermore, it’s wrong to have the government provide any social services or welfare, because this “assumes that people have the right to be treated mercifully and that this right is properly established by taking property away from taxpayers.”

      In short, “The attempt to establish mercy and charity on earth via the law is not a Christian concept.”

      This is the gospel of Milton Friedman.  Next month, I’ll devote several sermons to looking at the worldwide effects Friedman’s fundamentalist economic ideas have had on the world since at least 1972, when I spend some time on Naomi Klein’s good but disturbing new book The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism.  But if you buy an economics of unrestrained greed, it’s no problem to believe that Jesus agrees with you.  The truth is, you can interpret these and other stories almost any way you like.  How you read them will be determined not by the stories, but by the spirit that possesses and guides you.  Your interpretation is usually more about you than about the story.  So when we hear these different interpretations, we’re not necessarily learning much about the story, though we’re learning about the interpreters, what they know and what sort of spirit drives them. 

      The last of these Christian interpretations I wanted to bring you is more in the “can you believe this?” category.  It was posted to a chat list, not on this parable, but on the one that follows it.  Here’s what the person said: 

      “I need help for a drama workshop on the Matthew 21 parable of the vineyard where the workers kill the owner’s son. Our church has two workshops per evening, one for younger children and one for older children. Any ideas? I’m burned out.” 

      Just from these few examples, you should get confidence to try your own reading of this odd parable and all other moral, ethical and religious stories.  You couldn’t do worse than some of these, and would probably come up with a reading that you’d have a much better chance of incorporating into your own life.

      Now let’s talk about what Jesus meant by the parable.  Jesus, we have to remember, was not a Christian, and didn’t talk about heaven or hell.  He was a Jew, and talked about living more wisely and fully here and now.  So the silver coin wouldn’t represent heaven or any sort of afterlife.  And it wouldn’t have anything to do with rewarding Christians, because Christianity wouldn’t be invented until several decades after he died.  But the silver coin did represent what Jesus called the kingdom of God.

      As I said last week, this was a common phrase used by lots of people at the time — Jews, Romans and later Christians — to mean the ideal world, the best kind of world.  Originally, it was all here and now, not elsewhere and later. 

      And Jesus’ definition of this ideal world was shocking in its simplicity and its radical nature.  He said the kingdom of God was one in which we all saw ourselves as children of God, and saw everyone else as children of God as well, no matter what social or economic class they belonged to, and then we all acted on the knowledge that we are all the beloved children of God.  So the kingdom of heaven was defined by behaviors, not beliefs.  I think this is one of the marks of Jesus’ profundity.  Most of history’s great moral, ethical and religious thinkers have said the same:  Confucius, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha and Socrates no less than Jesus.  But this is not the way religions usually teach, then or now, as you know.  They usually give you an identity defined not by behaviors, but by following prescribed beliefs, sacraments and ritual practices. 

      And Jesus was clear that this kingdom was not supernatural, wasn’t a thing yet to come through some magic.  He said the kingdom wasn’t something that was “coming,” that you couldn’t point to it.  It was already here, he said, within and among us, as soon as we see who we are in the kingdom - children of God - and act like it toward others.  Like the Buddha, Socrates and other great thinkers he knew nothing about, Jesus put the ball in our court, whereas Christianity - unlike Jesus - gave the ball, the authority, to the Church.  Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is a kingdom of radical love and compassion between all.  And you’re living in it as soon as you act like it.  You get paid in full the minute you finally get it.  You know people who’ve lived that way for decades, and you must envy them, as I do.  And you know others who have finally mellowed, or matured, into that quality recently.  It transforms their life, whenever they get it. 

      If we see it early, we can have most of our life lived in this way.  But even if we don’t get it until very late, we get the same quality of life, the same payment, just not as many years of it.  So far, Jesus’ meaning is the best of the bunch.  It is quite a pretty and poignant vision, but there are some things to question about it.

      Jesus was young.  He did his short ministry in his early 30s (some of the scholarly estimates now are that Jesus was probably born between about 5-7 BC, and may have been executed around the year 30).  Does his vision sound realistic, that the world would dissolve into love?  Does this sound like he had an adequate picture of human nature in the real world, or has he left out some terribly important things - like selfishness and power?

      Dreams of peace and justice always seem to forget about power, as Jesus also seems to have done.  Maybe it’s because those who dream about peace and justice seldom have any real power, so they assign too great an importance to mere ideas.  They act as though those with power will just give up as soon as we start being loving.  But history doesn’t support that.  It shows they tend to see us as patsies, and take even more advantage of us, doesn’t it?  Don’t tyrants love most of all those who will forgive them? 

      Even within a family or a relationship, his radical notion of forgiveness and love can only work where there is mutual love and respect. Practiced unilaterally, it can be very dangerous.  As I’ve said before, if you want to see a place filled with people who practice loving their enemies and treating violence with forgiveness, go to a battered women’s shelter. 

      That kind of love and forgiveness can work within a loving and respectful relationship.  Haven’t we all been opened, awakened, by someone in our lives who could forgive us something for which we couldn’t forgive ourselves, and love us anyway?  It really can transform you into a more loving person.  But if we’re dealing with very selfish, narcissistic or sociopathic people, it just makes us a sucker, and they’ll take merciless advantage of us.

      That certainly seems true in politics, economics, history, work relationships and many personal relationships, doesn’t it?  Can we say that Jesus’ vision, as beautiful and idealistic as it was, seems terribly naïve, and that his dream of an ideal world forgot about the people who aren’t so inclined, and will take their advantages where they can get them?

      After all, even in his story, those who worked only one hour had to know it was unfair to be paid for a full day.  They just didn’t care.  Neither do today’s CEO’s making nearly five hundred times as much as their workers.  They’ll take what they can get, gladly.  And they’ll always be able to find professors of economics and business who will swear that’s just what Jesus intended.  Jesus’ kingdom of God was a utopian vision, and it’s perhaps worth remembering that the word “utopia” (Greek utopos) actually means “no place.”

      All that said, however, there are still some things that are right and profound in this parable of Jesus’.

      It isn’t about money, it isn’t about beliefs, and it isn’t about heaven.  Jesus’ kingdom of God is about behavior, not belief.  That’s what makes it a universal vision.  It’s about finding a more compassionate, holistic way of seeing ourselves and others, so that we can begin to see ourselves as sacred creatures, put here for only a short time, challenged to find ways to make the time more fulfilling, so we can look back and say by God, I’m glad I lived that way!

      That’s the silver coin that we seek.  It’s one of the biggest reasons people come to the worship services of different religions.  Even though we may not be much into magic or supernaturalism, many people come to sanctuaries like this each week hoping for a miracle:  a word, a phrase, an image, an idea, a story or a connection that can open a door for us into a bigger living space. 

      The questions are always:

1. Who am I, really?

2. What am I serving?

3. Is it worthy of me?

4. If so, am I allowing it a commanding role?  Serving it heart mind and soul?

      In some ways, this complex parable of Jesus’ presents most of our problem today.  We’re looking for the best way to live, individually and together.  We believe it can transform the quality of our life if we’re serving the kind of ideals we should be serving.  We know we can see the light we’ve been looking for at any time of life - the first hour or the eleventh hour, as this story puts it.  And getting it right can make all the difference.  We know all this. 

      But what’s the story that will do it?  Jesus said it was a world of radical love and forgiveness.  I’ve wondered out loud with you whether this might have been the fairly naïve utopian vision of a very young prophet - for he seems to have left out any considerations of power, selfishness and ambition.  This left a vacuum that history has filled with centuries of corruption, violence and war sponsored by the churches, and a toxic self-righteousness that has poisoned many families, including some of yours. 

      Some of life’s problems really do have simple and unambiguous answers that apply to almost everyone: we must work, we must eat, we must either play fair or gradually lose the respect of everyone we know, and so on.

      But some questions require personalized answers, and the questions in this story are among them.  If the “silver coin” is a life you’re glad you’re living this way, have you found it?  How would you describe it?  If you haven’t found it, what do you think it would be?  Do you agree with Jesus’ prescription?  (You don’t have to; arguing with teachers is an honored Jewish custom.)  If not, how would you define the “kingdom of God?”  What makes you come alive, what makes you feel beloved by God or by Life?

      You see, we’re standing here in this marketplace of life, and all these potential employers are coming around, offering us what may be good offers, what may be Faustian bargains.  The clowns are here, saying to just put on a happy face and be glad for what you have, no questions asked by golly.

      Another says, “Oh, you’re not going to get much now, but if you’re obedient and don’t make waves, then some day you will win big, even if it isn’t until after you’ve died.”

      The Friedman economist is here shouting, “Shut up and work!  You don’t deserve anything the masters don’t choose to give you!”  Some say the work is so satisfying you won’t even mind not getting paid.

      Then there’s Jesus, with his idea that if we love one another and love our enemies too and learn to forgive, everything will be fine.

      Finally, this preacher comes along who wonders if Jesus was too young and too naïve, if just unilateral loving and forgiving doesn’t also make us easy marks for selfish or abusive people who’ll use us like patsies for their own ends.

      But like so many good stories, this one is about life.  The best stories are always about us, and we are all there in that market place of ideas about how to spend our lives, what kind of silver coin we think is worth our time, our trust, our life.

      What about you?  What currency could you work for that would make you feel that if this isn’t the kingdom of God, it’ll do until the real thing comes along?  How do you find your own path between the whiners and gripers on the one hand, and the abused patsies on the other?

      Another day has started.  It’s already the fifth hour.  What’s worth working for with your heart, with your hands, and with your life?

Davidson Loehr

PRAYER:

Let us have humility in our lives, but let us also not underestimate our own power and authority. For we have far more power and authority in our lives than we imagine.

The Danish poet Piet Hein put this into a short poem some years ago, when he wrote:

 

I am a humble artist, molding my earthly clod,

Adding my labor to Nature’s, simply assisting God.

Not that my effort is needed, yet somehow I understand

My Maker has willed it that I too should have unmolded clay in my hand.

Let us try to keep fear and false humility from making us bow before pretended authorities when we should question them – in politics, in religion, and in our daily lives.

It is a bold claim, that we too should have unmolded clay in our hands, that we too can co-create our lives and our world. Yet it is one of the most fundamental truths of psychology, politics and religion.

Let us have appropriate humility, and let us have appropriate confidence and power. For there is so much to do, and we must do it together. Amen.

SERMON: The Kingdom of God is Like….

 

I only realized yesterday afternoon while sitting outside at Central Market working on this sermon where it was really going. I had thought it was about two parables, the two that are probably the most likely to be authentic parables of Jesus: the Good Samaritan story, and his odd comment that the kingdom of God is like leaven.

Then as I put together what I knew of the background and context from the bible and the early first century, I saw they were both spoken to a very specific context that doesn’t really fit us well today, that Jesus’ original message not only wasn’t too helpful, but wasn’t very true or wise either.

We look at figures like Jesus, or Mother Teresa, Mohammad, all our religious and cultural heroes, through rose-colored, often romantic and nostalgic glasses, and sometimes just clearing away the haze also clears away the romantic nostalgia.

That’s what doing a scholarly study of any religion often does. We say we don’t want to check our brains at the door, but sometimes that turns into the question of whether we would rather be disillusioned, or illusioned. At the divinity school I attended – and I suspect this is true of all good divinity schools – it wasn’t unusual to hear graduate students say by their second or third year that learning about religion had shattered whatever beliefs they had come in with. The romanticism ends as you learn just what human creations all religions and all sacred scriptures really are. The bible was written by hundreds of people, each with their own theological and political agenda, not by God or Jesus. The Koran was too, went through many editions, and borrowed thousands of words from the Jewish and Christian scriptures, among others. And so on. That’s very empowering, freeing you from a more naïve sense of religion, but it’s also disturbing.

I’ve been a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar since 1991, and that’s where I have learned most of what I know about Jesus. This a group of mostly bible scholars started in 1985 to bridge the gap between what scholars have known about the bible and Jesus for over a century, and what people in the streets and in the pews are told about it. They’ve described that gap as larger than the Grand Canyon. They assembled scholars of the bible and Christian history, and spent eight years having them research every single saying attributed to Jesus, and write papers on whether it should be considered authentic. They assigned every single saying attributed to Jesus – whether in the gospels or any other early literature – and having the experts write papers on sayings that came within their field of knowledge. Sometimes, this meant over an hour of listening and arguing about two lines of Greek text. Most people would think this added a whole new dimension to the concept of “boring.”

They did this by knowing a lot of the history, how the gospels were written – they weren’t written until forty to ninety years or so after Jesus died – by comparing them with older sayings from Jewish teachers and secular sayings of the time. When they published their book The Five Gospels: the Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus in December 1993, they reported that they thought only about 18% of the sayings attributed to Jesus were authentic, and only 60% of the scholars were sure that the Good Samaritan story, one of the most famous, was authentic in that form. Only 60%. And that made it the second highest parable they considered to be authentic. The highest-rated parable only got 62% of the scholars voting for it, and that was a very short sentence that doesn’t even sound like a parable, where Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is like leaven that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” (Matthew 13:33b).

I remember talking with a very bright Catholic priest attending one of our Seminar meetings, saying the irony was that he was so nourished by what he learned there, but then he’d have to go home and make sure he didn’t tell the people in his church what he had learned, because it would disillusion them. That’s only one of the reasons I’m not a Catholic priest. I think that while no one likes being disillusioned, it’s finally better than being illusioned. It’s liberating, and that word comes from the same root as “liberal,” which is why I’m one of those, too. I think that being shaken out of our childhood beliefs is the first step toward finding beliefs that can serve us as adults, and it’s a struggle everyone should have a chance at. But that’s one of the reasons I’m a Unitarian rather than some other kind of preacher.

So today, I want to talk about two of Jesus’ parables that may or may not be wise – you’ll decide for yourself. Next week I’ll talk about the third most likely-to-be-authentic parable, which is kind of rude, even ugly, that you’ll almost never hear anyone preach on or agree with, and I’ll suggest that it really is profound and wise, just as I think Jesus meant it.

First, let’s talk about what parables are. They are not nice stories, and they’re not polite. They are the most radical and disturbing kind of story there is, and Jesus did them as well or better than anyone. One good biblical scholar, the Catholic John Dominic Crossan – the co-founder of the Jesus Seminar – has said that a parable is a slap in the face to the audience hearing it, and if it isn’t a slap in the face, it isn’t a parable. Its purpose is not to tell them what to do, how to behave. Its purpose is to subvert the worldview of the audience, to deny some of its most basic assumptions. The stories are disturbing, so they’re usually watered down to make them nice.

It’s easy to see all of this by looking at one of the most famous of Jesus’ parables: the Good Samaritan story.

It sounds pretty straightforward, but it isn’t. A Jew is mugged walking along a dangerous road, a couple Jews see him there and cross over to the other side rather than stopping to help, then a Samaritan comes by, stops, helps, takes him to an inn, and pays the innkeeper to care for him until he’s recovered. The editor of the gospel added the line after the story, “Go and do likewise,” which would not have been part of the original story. But we need to know some history in order to understand how it’s a parable. The Jews and Samaritans absolutely hated each other at the time. In about the year 6, Samaritans threw human remains into the courtyard of the big temple in Jerusalem, to defile it. The very idea of a good Samaritan was as offensive as the idea of a story about “the good serial murderer.” Part of the message of the Good Samaritan story was not only that your own kind often won’t help you, but the most radical, the most parabolic, message is that Jesus was telling his Jewish audience that the help they need can only come from the last person on earth they want help from. This would have been a fairly disgusting story to Jesus’ fellow Jews – and remember, Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian. Christianity hadn’t been invented yet.

We need to hear this parable – and the one about the leaven – in the same light as when Jesus said that a prophet isn’t honored by his own people, as Jesus wasn’t. What he’s telling his fellow Jews in the Good Samaritan story is that the help they need won’t come from the people they like, but can only come from the one they hate – in other words, Jesus. It’s his most autobiographical parable. Scholars believe he was from Galilee, though in one gospel he is also referred to as a Samaritan.

It’s an insulting story in which Jesus is also exalting himself – like the claim from the gospel of John that has him saying “I am the Way, no one can come to God except through me.” It’s terribly arrogant, a world away from his humbler saying that no one is good but God alone.

I want you to imagine what this would have sounded and looked like. Jesus was a homeless man. He had no home, no steady job, had no wife or children, he begged for his food, and taught his disciples to beg for their food – and even told them to eat whatever was offered to them, which would include non-kosher foods like pork and shellfish. The people who knew him didn’t respect him, and one story in the New Testament shows that his own mother thought he was crazy. And this is the man telling them that only he can help them! Today, we would give such a person a diagnosis. I’ll come back to the Good Samaritan, but want to go to the other one for a few minutes.

The highest-ranked parable is that little one-sentence one I mentioned earlier, that “The kingdom of God is like leaven that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” 62% of the Fellows in the Jesus Seminar said they were sure it was authentic, and about 90% said it probably was.

Believe it or not, it’s message is a lot like the Good Samaritan parable. At one of our meetings, I asked Dominic Crossan how on earth this was a slap in the face, or even a parable. He reminded me that the audience was Jewish, and that the high holy days of the religion are celebrated with unleavened bread. Jesus was saying, “The kingdom of God is like what you’ve left out.” That’s what a parable does.

Today we make our bread with yeast that we buy in those little packages. It’s dry, clean, and has that wonderful smell when the bread is baking. But the leaven of the ancient world was pretty vulgar stuff. They made it by leaving a hunk of bread in a dark damp place until it was covered with mold, and stank. And the word for leaven was used as a metaphor. I’ve read that everywhere the word is used in the Hebrew scriptures, it means something corrupt, unclean, unholy.

Why would Jesus say the kingdom of God – which meant the ideal world, the best kind of world – was like something unclean and vulgar? Well, remember that Jesus was regarded as unclean and vulgar. He was a homeless man who traveled with the outcasts of society, who begged for their food. In one gospel, he is even described as a glutton and a drunkard. And he was saying the kingdom of God is like him and his followers. The Jews of his day didn’t agree, and not many of us would either.

Few of us travel around with homeless people who beg for their food, and prostitutes, and I suspect few of us would accept the idea that they are the kingdom of God. Just like the people in Jesus’ audience, we still like to be around people like us. If homeless people or prostitutes came here on Sunday begging for food, I’d hope we would be courteous, but I don’t think we would cozy up to them during coffee hour. Even someone who wore a pro-life button or a pro-Bush button here would create at least uneasy silences, wouldn’t they? So sticking with our kind of people is as true of us as it was of Jesus’ unappreciative audience two thousand years ago.

Are you beginning to feel the kind of slap in the face these parables were? They were powerful, rude stories that could get you killed. Socrates only questioned the things his society taught; Jesus attacked them.

And that little parable about the kingdom of God being like moldy, smelly leaven. What an odd idea, that the ideal world is like unholy corruption! Today, that could make you think the kingdom of God must be a lobbyists’ convention in Washington DC. It might look like heaven to lobbyists and the corporations who own them, but it wouldn’t to most of us.

That’s why we sanitize these stories in churches and polite conversation, change them and make them all nice. The rules of sermon-writing seem to including keeping even the most disturbing messages within polite and comfortable boundaries. So some preachers will say that, well, the Samaritan story is really saying we shouldn’t leave people out, or we should help people who need help. But you really didn’t need a religious story to make that point, did you? If you didn’t already know that, something is very wrong, isn’t it?

I’ve heard a good preacher say that the point of the story is a lot like saying that we’re more complete if we can incorporate our shadow sides. He mentioned that the psychologist Carl Jung had made that critique of all of Christianity, which is true. Jung said Christianity had tried to leave out the shadow, leave out the selfish and bad parts of us, tried to define goodness as the absence of all evil. But Jung said no, it isn’t about being good; it’s about being whole, being integrated, and unless we claim and own the rotten parts, we’ll almost certainly project them out onto other people and attack them there. So the secret to the integrated personality – as Jung and this preacher said – is hidden in the dirty, uncomfortable things we’ve tried to leave out of it, and if we can add them back where they belong, we have the chance of growing into a fuller person, rising to our full height. This is a nice modern psychological message, and I think it’s true. But is this anything like the message Jesus meant? No. Jesus wasn’t a Jungian, but it’s the way we try to clean up rude stories that are attributed to our religious heroes, because we may go to see R- or X-rated movies, but on Sunday we want the sermons rated G.

When preachers use parables like this in sermons, they almost always clean them up and get away from the truly disturbing message they originally had. They’re not interested in what Jesus meant that was disturbing. They’re more interested in what they can say that’s clever and helpful. So we might say that well, the kingdom of God means a complete world, and that when we leave parts out, it keeps us from a truly integrated, authentic life. That’s nice, and also true. And also about as superficial as it gets, isn’t it?

Or we could preach on it by saying that the ideal world isn’t available from within gated communities surrounded by desperate ghettos, or self-righteous circles of those who think themselves superior to others and whose sense of superiority has cut them off from their common humanity with others. Those are also good sermons, and also true.

These are the kinds of games we play with a lot of religious stories, as you know if you’ve attended many churches. It’s the game of how most sermons are written. You already know the answer is going to be that Jesus was right, so they just have to figure out how to get you there this week. But look how much this distorts the original story, especially when the original story is such a crude and insulting parable. Sometimes, it feels almost like the Nickelodeon version of a Freddy Krueger movie.

This is part of what makes the old religious words and stories such odd candidates for trying to shed light on the world we’re actually living in. There is so much translation involved. We read Shakespeare and struggle with the odd-sounding Shakespearean English, because there is so much wisdom packed in those funny noises. But talking about a kingdom of God, and leaven, or even ancient hatreds between Samaritans and Jews – which were tribes as closely related as first cousins? Why talk that way? Do we have to learn all this outdated stuff to make our way through life?

No, we don’t. In fact, we need to translate it into plain talk so we can know what we think we’re talking about. And we need to think about whether we agree with what this man is saying. It doesn’t matter who said it, just whether it seems to be wise and useful. So what’s this mean that we need to care about?

Now let me play devil’s advocate and wonder out loud whether the original versions of these two parables are even very wise. Remember, I’m not trying to tell you what to believe, only trying to make you interested in finding out what you believe.

Does the help we need often come from people we hate? No. Mostly, it comes from people we know, or at least people with whom we can identify. Do “our kind of people” generally ignore and abandon us when we’ve been beaten down? Not in my experience. The most sensitive of them usually ask where it hurts, and whether they can do anything to help. There are certainly painful cases of psychopathic parents or partners that can be quite tragic, but overwhelmingly we can trust those who know us better than those who don’t, can’t we?

And do we need to add corrupt, moldy things to get decent food or a decent life? The image of smelly moldy leaven could have worked two thousand years ago. But it doesn’t work now, when the smell of yeast in baking bread is one of the nicest smells in the world. So is there anything about the parable that is relevant to our world?

Why would we want to invite people we don’t like into our community? It can sound quite idealistic, but would many of us really want to do it – at least more than just once, for show? Why should we want that kind of stress? The Jews of Jesus’ time didn’t. They weren’t persuaded by his story, and probably thought it was a vulgar idea. But then look around today, when some of the loudest conservative Christians don’t like the idea either. They have become notorious for trashing Muslims, trashing gays and lesbians, trashing assertive women, trashing anyone who isn’t like them, consigning them all to the roles of the unclean and impure. The most fanatical Muslims do the same. And our own behavior shows that we strongly prefer being around our kind of people, doesn’t it? Just look around. So whatever Jesus was addressing seems to be part of human nature, then now and probably always.

Let me add one more wrinkle, one more ambiguity, to take away some of the false authority and charisma of our favorite “wise” sayings. Parables are really just used like proverbs and bromides, like “A stitch in time saves nine.” And we apply them in a thousand ways that have nothing at all to do with the original meaning, like sewing torn clothing before the rip spreads and you have nine times as much work to mend it. We have used that old saw in a thousand ways that would have mystified the original seamstress who must have coined it about mending clothes. We have a whole mental library of these sayings, many of them contradicting many others, and we pull them out to fit the situation at hand. So we’ll say “He who hesitates is lost,” then “Fools rush in”, or “Look before you leap,” then “No guts, no glory.” “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” and “Out of sight, out of mind.”

These aren’t really sources of wisdom, as much as they are catchy little sound bytes we can slap on life to feel like we understand it. Slapping a brand-name bromide on life is a way of taming life. We use the sayings we’ve heard – not because they’re wiser than Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or other sayings, but just because they’re familiar. That’s how most of Jesus’ sayings are used, too. We use Jesus’ stories in the same way, kind of slapping them on for a needed sound byte – like “being a good Samaritan” – without ever understanding or caring what Jesus actually meant by them in his very different time, context, and agenda.

It’s a measure of how much our traditional religions have become marginalized in our search for understanding today. Saying we want to be a good Samaritan doesn’t have anything to do with Jesus’ teachings; it’s just a handy way to say we want to be decent toward those who are in need.

Now, for the question most of you are wondering about: how on earth can this sermon end? I’ll try it this way. The main purpose of education, including learning more about religion, is not to make us more fearful and obedient; it’s to empower us to question even the structure and foundation of the world as we’ve been taught it.

When you make a creative use of an old story to find a way to understand your life, who gets credit? Does it mean the original storyteller was really wise, even if you’ve completely changed his message? Or that you’re really clever? Or that we’re all in this together, may each have a part of the whole, that to leave out any part, however small, may be to diminish us?

Does this give new meaning to Jesus’ old stories, or does it show some of them to have been unwise, even self-important and arrogant? Do you want to give credit to Jesus, to the creative opportunities offered by ambiguous old stories, or to yourself for using them to see patterns in the world around you? Does it help you appreciate the role a church can play in keeping us exposed to stories that can help us find our way through life?

Is it, as that Catholic priest said, disillusioning: the sort of thing you should be protected from, by me and all other preachers? Or is it empowering, even if a bit sobering? If sermons are supposed to bring Good News that helps to awaken and empower you, to remind you that you too are a child of God and part of the hope of the world, then was this a sermon?

Welcome to the church where you can find religion almost every Sunday, but where it nearly always comes to you in kit form, with some assembly required.