Open Source Religion
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Rally Sunday, September 17, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
“Might it be time for people of good faith to allow that God’s map is vast,
with room on it for both a center and an edge? While the center may be the place
where the stories of the faith are preserved, the edge is the place where the best of them happened.”
– Barbara Brown Taylor
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is from a new book by Barbara Brown Taylor, who is one of my favorite authors. She is a former Episcopal priest and has been named one of the twelve best preachers of our time; she left the priesthood to teach religion at a small college in Georgia, and when she left her parish, she spent a lot of time “wandering in the wilderness,” which for her meant opening herself to spiritual ideas that were not on the table when she was an active Episcopal priest. Here is a little of what she says about her “wilderness” experience:
Like any other [spiritual] map, mine had both a center and an edge. At the center stood the church... The edge was where the lights from the sanctuary did not pierce the darkness anymore. There were no printed programs or friendly ushers out there. There was just the unscripted encounter with the undomesticated God...
According to the bible, both the center and the edge are essential to the spiritual landscape, although they are as different from one another as they can be. The wilderness of Sinai provided the people of Israel with an experience of God that was distinct from their experience in the Temple in Jerusalem. Much that is certain at the center is up for grabs in the wilderness, while much that is real in the wilderness turns out to be far too feral for the center.
[In my own wilderness wanderings,] I met people of other faiths and of no faith at all who were doing more ‘to do justice, and to love kindness’ than many of us who know where to find that verse in the bible. I read books that had never shown up on my seminary reading list, which raised keen questions about the origins of Christianity and the veracity of scripture. For the first time, I noticed how many books of the bible are at glorious odds with one another...
If my time in the wilderness taught me anything, it is that faith in God has both a center and an edge and that each is necessary for the soul’s health. While the center may be the place where the stories of the faith are preserved, the edge is the place where the best of them happened.” (p. 171-177)
2. Our second reading is a selection of verses from chapter 16 of the book of Exodus. Moses has led the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt into the wilderness deserts of Sinai. They are on their way to “the promised land,” but they are on foot, there is very little water or food, and after a few weeks the people have begun to “murmur” against Moses: “You have brought us out into this wilderness to starve this whole congregation to death!” they tell him. God overhears their murmuring and responds this way:
The Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day... At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread...”
In the evening quail came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost, on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. Gather as much of it as each of you needs to provide for those in your own tents.”
So they gathered, some more, some less. Morning after morning they gathered it, each as much as he needed to eat; and when the sun grew hot, it would melt. [They] named it manna; it was like coriander seed, white, and it tasted like a wafer made with honey.
Let me begin by asking for a quick show of hands:
how many of you have ever used Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia?
and have any of you who use it ever written an article for it, or edited an existing one?
If Wikipedia is just a weird-sounding word for you, here’s a quick sketch.
It’s a free, on-line encyclopedia which was launched just five years ago.
It includes, as of this morning, over 1,383,000 articles –
the Encyclopedia Brittanica, by comparison, has 120,000 articles in its most complete edition.
Wikipedia is an example of the open source movement on the Internet –
its articles are written by thousands of volunteers,
it is one of the most popular sites on the Web,
and it does not favor a Ph.D. over a bright fifteen-year-old.
Because it is young and many of its contributors are in their twenties and thirties,
it does tend to favor the present over the past:
the article on St. Augustine, which is good, is shorter than the article on Britney Spears.
But you can also find good articles on global warming, Sudoku, and instructions for curing the hiccups.
There’s a complete guide to the ships of the U.S. Navy.
And there is a page listing errors in the Britannica which have been corrected in Wikipedia.
Its 39-year-old founder, Jimmy Wales, says that his mission
is to give a free encyclopedia to every person on the planet in their own language –
Wikipedia is already available in more than 200 languages.
It’s doing all of this as a non-profit organization with five paid employees
and a budget of $750,000, most of which comes in small donations from people who use it.
The open source movement was started by a global network of computer programmers
who had one thing in common: they all hated Microsoft Windows.
Their idea was to create software with no proprietary secrets so they could collaborate.
They didn’t hide the way their programs worked so that anyone could change the underlying code,
and their hope was that the software would get better
thanks to multiple points of view and combined experience.
So last summer as I drove through a landscape with far horizons, I found myself wondering:
what would happen if you applied open-source thinking to religion?
We probably all have religious codes embedded in us, for better or worse –
beliefs and holy laws we try to live by and a few we wish we could get rid of.
What if we allowed our religious beliefs and our ideas about right and wrong
to grow and deepen as part of an open-source collaboration?
what if some of our embedded religious codes even got re-written,
as mine were when I was in divinity school?
Would our faith get better and stronger thanks to multiple points of view and combined experience?
Or would we end up dazed and confused, with no clear spiritual sense of who we are?
Ending up dazed and confused is the danger.
But a spiritual fusion of the best each of us brings is the opportunity.
And I think that’s what happens in this church.
I wish you could have been a fly on the wall at our deacons’ meeting last Wednesday evening.
It was their first meeting of the new church year,
and they went around the room, taking about five minutes each,
to talk about what matters to them spiritually – what beliefs make them tick.
They come from different religious starting points, as we all do,
but what they create when they’re together is a spiritual synthesis,
a coming together of different points of view into a shared faith.
The same thing happens every year in our Lenten Booklet – and in some way, right here every week.
So we may well be a living, breathing example of an open-source church.
The readings we turn to every Sunday are from the Hebrew bible and the Christian gospels,
the writings of Plato, the lessons of Eastern religions, and the best contemporary writers.
We know that words like mystery, reverence, and faith are somehow close to the heart of things.
We also honor science, reason, and the love of truth.
When Barbara Brown Taylor left the church and put away her clerical collar,
she spent time with people of other faiths and with people “with no faith at all
who were doing more to ‘do justice and love kindness’
than many of us who know where to find that verse in the bible.”
She read books that “had never shown up on [her] seminary reading list.”
In her own way, she joined the open source movement.
She realized that the church had not told her the whole truth – but she doesn’t blame it for that.
She believes that our souls need the church – and our souls need time in the wilderness.
“Each is necessary for the soul’s health.”
It has been fashionable for the past fifteen years or so to say, “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious.”
When people say that, they mean that their spiritual beliefs are based not on tradition or dogma
but on their own personal experience and understanding.
They don’t like “organized religion.”
But if they are onto something valuable in their personal quest, and if it is going to survive them,
it needs a place to go, a place to hold it and pass it on.
“Religion” – at its best – is organized spirituality.
So spirituality and religion are each necessary for the other’s health.
I love Barbara Brown Taylor’s take on this:
“Faith in God has both a center and an edge, and each is necessary for the soul’s health.
While the center may be the place where the stories of the faith are preserved,
the edge is the place where the best of them happened.”
The experiences that form our spiritual selves may happen somewhere on the edge,
and the center – the church – is where our experiences are saved and re-told.
Some of the best stories from the edge are in the story of the exodus –
the forty-year pilgrimage by the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt to the promised land.
The experiences they had in the desert shaped their faith,
it took four of the first five books of the bible to tell all the stories,
and the stories are very human – often they are downright embarrassing.
Because the Israelites were not happy campers – they were chronic complainers.
And you can’t really blame them.
They were, after all, in the middle of nowhere – desert, as far as the eye could see.
After a hard, hot day on foot, water and food were sometimes nowhere to be found.
After a few weeks of that, some people were wishing they had never left Egypt.
Even slavery was better than this – at least you had a real bed and a hot meal.
So they started murmuring and muttering against Moses.
The question at the heart of this story is: Is God with us or not?
Every one of us asks that question at least once in our lives.
When you’re in the middle of one of life’s hard tests, you wonder: is God with me or not?
We have all done our own share of murmuring and muttering.
In Exodus 16, God hears it and says, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you...”
And the next morning, when the dew lifts, there is a flaky substance on the ground, as fine as frost.
No one except Moses knew what it was.
He told the people to gather as much as they needed for their own tents, and no more, which they did.
And when the sun rose, what was left melted away.
It tasted like a wafer made with honey, and they named it manna.
We’re told that it sustained them for the next forty years.
In the story, the manna means at least two things.
First, it means survival – it’s food. It’s about staying alive.
But the manna is also meant to answer the question: “Is God with us or not?”
Now, over the years lots of people have unpacked this story; they want to know: what really happened?
There are at least three schools of thought.
One believes that the manna was miracle – it was a daily proof of God’s grace and providence.
Another school wanted a reasonable explanation that doesn’t require belief in a miracle,
and they claim that manna was a natural product of the Sinai desert – you just had to look for it.
(The theory here, if you’re curious, is that the cicadas which live in the tamarisk thickets of the desert
drink in the sap and secrete a sweet resin which falls from the bushes onto the ground.)
The third school of thought is the open source response: God uses what’s available to get the job done.
You make a place at the table for both ways of thinking.
It’s like saying: I believe in God and I believe in evolution – evolution is how God got the job done.
In Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday, which will more than repay the time you spend reading it,
you are given a day in the life of a London neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne.
Henry is privileged, thoughtful, very good at what he does, a devoted husband and father.
In one scene he quotes a line from the final paragraph of Darwin’s Origin of the Species:
“There is grandeur in this view of life.”
He knows that in the first printing, Darwin included a Creator God in that paragraph,
“but his heart wasn’t in it and he ditched Him in later editions.”
Henry remembers walking by a river with his daughter, Daisy, sipping coffee on a cold day,
and Daisy “quoted to him an opening verse by her favorite poet, Philip Larkin:
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
He told Daisy “that if he ever got the call, he’d make use of evolution.”
“What better creation myth?” he said to her. “An unimaginable sweep of time,
numberless generations spawning complex living beauty out of inert matter,
driven on by natural selection and environmental change,
with the tragedy of forms continually dying,
and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities –
and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.”
They were standing, father and daughter, on a stone bridge at the junction of two streams.
“Daisy laughed and put down her cup to applaud.
And she says, ‘Now that’s genuine old-time religion,
when you say it happens to be demonstrably true.’” (p. 54-55)
We all want what we believe, whatever it is, to be true.
There are, of course, stories that are literally true, and stories that are just eternally true.
In either case, the best stories happen out on the edge of things.
And the reason we know about them is that they are told and re-told at the center –
in schools and universities, in museums of history, science, and art,
in symphony halls, and yes, in churches.
Churches like this one.
There is grandeur in this view of life.
Thank you for making yourself part of it.
Amen.
____________________________________________
Notes:
1. To learn more about Wikipedia, see The New Yorker, July 31, 2006, p. 36ff, or go to http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact
2. The most obvious problem for any open source approach is: how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? The president of Encyclopedia Britannica has said that without stronger oversight, Wikipedia will “decline into a hulking mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and many times, unreadable articles.” At the very least, you could end up with a dozen different but strongly-held opinions and a very casual relationship with the truth. The good news, when the door is wide open, is that you get a lot of fresh air.
The bad news is that people who actually know what they’re talking about may not be heard
The people at Wikipedia are aware of this danger and the site is watched by hundreds of volunteer “admins” for everything from foul language to false and over-the-top claims. For example, they had a major dispute over an article on global warming. A climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey helped write the original article, but people who don’t believe global warming is a problem kept editing the article, watering down what it said about the greenhouse effect. The original writers would then “revert” the article to its original form, and the battle went back and forth until an arbitration committee was called in.
At first, the loudest voices won – which belonged to the people who argued that the original article was too “singular and narrow” in its point of view. But on review, the committee reinstated the essence of the original with the best of the edits from hundreds of sources, and the climate modeller now believes it is the best page on global warming anywhere on the Internet.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales, the 39-year-old founder of Wikipedia, has said that the Encyclopedia Britannica “will be crushed out of existence within five years.” That’s obviously a brash and arrogant thing to say – and yet, as Dylan sang years ago, the times they are a-changin’. – Roger