The Top Ten Religious News Stories of 2007

a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine and the Rev. Claire Phillips-Thoryn

on Sunday, January 13, 2008

at The First Parish in Lincoln

To listen to this sermon click here.

“When your soul awakens, you begin to truly inherit your life.

You leave the kingdom of fake surfaces and slip deeper into the true adventure

of who you are and who you are called to become.”

– John O’Donohue (1954-2008)

READING:

As both prelude and context for the sermon Claire and I are about to give on the top ten religious news stories of 2007, this reading is a summary of five stories from last year that the editor of The Week magazine thinks we all need to keep in mind going forward:    

Last summer, more than 40% of our country was dealing with drought.  The Southwest has faced seven years of rainless skies, lower snow packs, and warmer temperatures.  There are deep “bathtub rings” around Lake Mead and Lake Powell.  And the Southeast faced the worst drought in a century.

When a highway bridge between Minneapolis and St. Paul collapsed on August 1st, we learned that engineers had given 74,000 other bridges in the U.S. the same rating as the one that collapsed: “structurally deficient.”  Congress allocated $1 billion to inspect and repair the deficient bridges – about $13,500 per bridge.

The gay population of Nebraska jumped 71% from 2000 to 2005.  In Kansas, the number of people who said they were gay went up 68%.  The reason: more gay people are “coming out” in places where they once stayed in the closet.

The Department of Homeland Security has started work on a 700-mile “wall” along our 1,952 mile-long border with Mexico.  The biggest opposition so far comes from local farmers and ranchers because the project is cutting off parts of their land and blocking their access to the Rio Grande.

In India, Tata Motors is introducing the People’s Car with a sticker price of $2,500.  Some economists predict that more than 150 million Indians will buy cars over the next 12 years.  China is expected to have 140 million cars on its roads by 2020.  “If all this comes to pass,” climate experts say, “it will be impossible to make meaningful, worldwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”

To come up with our own choices for the top ten religious news stories of 2007,

Claire and I clipped stories all year long, then compared what we had with several lists,

including those by the Religion Newswriters Association and Time Magazine.

Only four stories were on both of those two lists,

which is a testament to how much religion was in the news last year,

and Claire and I have put those four stories on our list, along with some others.

But we’ve also thrown in several stories that weren’t on anybody else’s list.

So here are our choices, alternating between us on a count-down from ten to one:           

10.  The hottest Google search in 2007 beginning with the words “Who is...” was “Who is God?”

(Roger)

Last year, more of us used search engines to surf the Internet for information than ever before –

we set a record in November: 8.1 billion searches that month,

and among searches beginning with “Who is...” number one was “Who is God?”

Number ten was “Who is Satan?”

In between God and Satan were “Who is Jesus?”, “Who is Buckethead?”, and “Who is calling?”

If you are now wondering, despite yourself, who Buckethead is,

he’s a rock guitar player known for wearing a white plastic mask

and a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head when he performs.

But I digress.

Back to God.

I wondered what the sites at the top of Google’s “Who is God?” list would actually have to say.

One of them offers six “personality traits” of God:

God is knowable, approachable, creative, forgiving, honest, and capable.

Another notes that God has many names, from Zeus to Odin and from Allah to the Great Spirit,

and that same site says that God loves justice and exercises kindness.

So, all in all, not too bad...

9. Catholic Church makes amends; issues 10 Commandments for the road (Claire)

The Roman Catholic Church almost always lands on any top 10 religious news story, because of its powerful, far-reaching influence.  The Church is still dealing with the fall-out of the widespread priest sex abuse scandal.  In 2007, the total cost of this terrible case of fallibility and deception reached 2.1 billion dollars. (#10 RN)

Even so, the Church presses on, and in 2007 the Vatican issued a list of “10 Commandments for Drivers,” titled Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road.  Time magazine noted that according to the document, driving brings out the "primitive" side of man and cars can be "an occasion of sin." The guidelines call for such things as respecting speed limits and not using cell phones behind the wheel. Praying while driving is allowed and even encouraged.

The way we treat each strangers and friends on the road is as important as how we treat them in person.  I know I wish more people believed that “Thou Shalt Not Tailgate.”

8.  Will there be a return to civility in public discourse?  (Roger)

Story #8 is a question, and it isn’t on any other list, but I wanted it on ours.

Last spring, Don Imus used a racist slur on his radio talk show –

it was aimed at the African-American players on Rutgers’ women’s basketball team.

Imus was famous for saying outrageous things on the air,

and sad to say, it’s one reason why so many people listened to his show,

but this time a firestorm of protest that kept building forced NBC to get rid of him.

An observer in The New York Times wrote that “there has to be an Imus event every once in a while,”

a violation of civility and decency so offensive

that it brings about a moment of clarity.

Imus apologized, both publically and privately to the women on the basketball team.

And after several months of what might be real contrition on his part, ABC put him back on the air.

But it remains to be seen whether there can really be a return civility

in what people say in the workplace, on the Internet, on the air and in print.

There is an Internet expression: “don’t feed the troll.”

A troll, in Internet slang, is someone who posts ugly messages in an online community bulletin board –

a nasty rumor, offensive language, outrageous remarks.

“Don’t feed the troll” means: just ignore this person.

But some people love it.

Ann Coulter is one of our country’s most famous trolls,

but people keep buying her books and inviting her to speak.

And people on the Internet say things they would never say to someone face-to-face,

sometimes with tragic consequences: young people have committed suicide

because of ugly things said about them on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Is this a religious news story?

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

So – don’t feed the troll.

7.  Stem cells can now be created from adult skin cells. (Claire)

As a deacons meeting this past week, someone joked that, “Catholics believe life begins at conception. Jews believe life begins at the moment of birth.  And Protestants believe life begins when your kids move out of the house and take the dog with them.” 

The religious debate about when life begins will probably continue forever, but 2007 gave birth to a new twist in the debate thanks to scientific discoveries.  Part of this debate is the use of stem cells to further scientific research into curing diseases like Alzeimer’s, Huntington’s, and even cancer.  Stem cells have until 2007 only been able to be harvested from embryos.  However, this past November, news broke that scientists in Japan and Wisconsin had been able to convert a human skin cell into a stem cell. 

These cells behave seemingly exactly like stem cells harvested from an embryo, but have not ever been a part of an embryo nor could become one, thus making the ethical complications of stem cells a moot point.  No embryos need to be killed to allow stem cell research to continue. This discovery is a win-win for religion and science.

6.  The pro-democracy uprising led by Buddhist monks in Burma (Roger)

Last September, thousands of Buddhist monks marched barefoot through city streets

all over Burma/Myanmar, leading the biggest anti-government protests in two decades.

Many of the monks marched with their begging bowls held upside down.

The begging bowl is a symbol of the bond between ordinary Buddhists and the monks:

the people make sure the monks don’t go hungry in a literal sense,

and the monks make sure the people don’t go hungry in a spiritual sense.

So when they marched with their begging bowls held upside down,

they were symbolically breaking the bond between themselves and the rulers and the military;

in essence, they were ex-communicating them by refusing to accept food from them.

There are almost as many monks as soldiers in Myanmar,

and symbolism of this protest was so powerful that the government simply crushed it – 

thousands of monks have vanished since late September.

An number of them were killed.

One of their leaders – who is 24 years old – escaped to Thailand

by dying his hair blond and wearing a crucifix when he crossed the border.

As of today, no one knows whether anything good will ever come from the protest he helped lead.

5.  The Ongoing Rift in the Episcopal Church (Claire)

This story was Time magazine’s #5 and the Religion Newswriters’ #3 and #7.  Time called the news from the Episcopal church a “slow-motion trainwreck.”  Roger and I mentioned this issue last year and I have a bad feeling we might talk about it again next year.  If you haven’t been reading the news for the past four years, the Anglican communion continues to “disintegrate over the issue of gay Christians.” In an attempt to make peace with conservatives, the leading bishops announced they would back away from their support of the openly gay bishop Rev. Gene Robinson and from their support of same gender marriage. 

Unappeased, conservative churches are still leaving the denomination. In December an entire diocese in California dropped out.  As churches leave, the battle begins for their property.  The congregations argue the property belongs to them; the larger body of the Episcopal Church say the property belongs to the denomination, and the members of the congregation have no claim to it. The battle is emotional—and it isn’t just about money, it is also about the separation of church and state.  Meanwhile some churches are are choosing to align themselves with the Anglican bishops in Africa and South America. 

Time magazine points out that if you look at the global Episcopalian/Anglicaln world, “a majority of [Episcopalians] are on the conservative side, and a majority of the money is on the liberal side.”

It’s a mess, and it isn’t going away.

4.  The attack of the atheists

Several books belittling belief in God were big best-sellers last year –

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation,

and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens.

These authors are all impressive thinkers who also happen to be atheists.

But The New York Times, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books all panned their books.

The authors were called “fundamentalists” of a different stripe

because for them, religion is the villain in every case,  and their attacks on God

are just as overheated as the religious fundamentalists’ attacks on secular culture.

The Times accused Dawkins of “shirking the intellectual hard work.”

Reading their books, I wondered:

have any of them ever bothered to read a single 20th Century theologian? 

Because the way of thinking about God they love to belittle in their books

has been out of fashion for decades.

Alfred North Whitehead, who taught both math and philosophy at Harvard,

gave modern-day believers a faith fit for our times eighty years ago.

Somewhere between ten and thirty percent of the members and friends of this church are atheists –

probably on the high end of those percentages,

and you deserve better game than you got from these guys.

3.  Mother Teresa’s “Crisis of faith”

Mother Teresa, the Saint of the Gutters, lived for decades with the poor and the dying in Calcutta.  Her life of ministry was so powerful, so profound, that after her death she was immediately raised up for sainthood in the Catholic church.  She was an example of the best work that can come from a life of faith—selfless, loving, ceaseless. Her letters were published in 2007, surprising many people with the depth of her doubts.  As a young girl, Jesus had come to her and asked her to do his work.  And then Jesus disappeared from her heart, and from her spirit. She wrote with heartbreak that her prayers found only “emptiness and darkness,” her soul was an “ice block” and eventually she stopped praying.  Like Jesus on the cross, her letters and confessions asked: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Her soul felt God and Jesus as a great absence, and her spiritual dryness was a darkness and suffering that lasted for fifty years.  This news comes as a shock to all those who revered Teresa as an example of a true Christian life.  Mother Teresa—the most faithful, the greatest believer—was in fact struggling with her faith and beliefs all along. 

One theologian and minister told Time magazine that these revelations “may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. [They are] a ministry to people who ha[ve] experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone.”

Even saints have had doubts.  Even saints have prayed and heard only silence.  Even saints have sought love and found only darkness.  When we too, find ourselves in the dark night of soul, our hearts an ice block in our chest, Mother Teresa is a friend beside us, a reminder that all of us that while our faith may falter, our search for what is good and true can go on.

2.  Global warming and Green evangelicals

The presidential candidates aren’t talking much about global warming,

but preachers are – and some leading evangelical ministers have finally joined in. 

It took them a while because most evangelicals have leaned to the Republican side of the aisle,

and Republicans, until recently, have questioned the science behind global warming,

creating a kind of national paralysis on the subject.

But evangelical preachers started calling for action,

reminding their congregations that the earth is God’s own creation,

and it’s care is our sacred trust.

Climate change is an issue that will need the cooperation of every country in the world,

and the world’s religions can really make a difference,

because as Bill Coffin said in his sermon here several years ago,

“it is time for the churches to re-wed nature to nature’s God.”

“The earth is the Lord’s,” and reverence for the earth is required from every person of faith.

Reverence for the earth is what will focus and sustain us on this issue over the long haul.

And that’s what our evangelical brothers and sisters really get.

1. Faith and Politics

This story was the Religion Newswriters’ stories #1 and #2, and Time’s #2, and several other news sources had different pieces of this topic in multiple spots in their top ten lists, so Roger and I decided to lump them all together and put this on the top of our list. Paul Marshall of the Hudson Institute recently wrote: “We live in an increasingly religious world in which faith and belief affect every dimension of our existence, so our politicians better talk about it. Religion does not exist in isolation. It concerns and shapes our fundamental view of the nature of human life and how it is and should be lived.”  Religion is how human beings try to make sense of what it means to be human. Politics, at its heart, beyond the speeches and the campaigns, is how we humans try to figure out how we can best live together.  So stump speeches will never be without a little God-talk.  What we saw in 2007 was the issue of faith coming even more to the forefront.

The Democratic Party has admitted it turned off many of people of faith in its last campaigns, and is making a conscious effort to win faith-based voters in 2008.  Much has been made of the candidates’ religious affilations—Clinton a Methodist, Obama a member of the United Church of Christ.  Meanwhile on the other side of the fence, the Republicans have ordained Southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee winning votes and denying evolution.  Mitt Romney gave what some called a “JFK speech” in which he tried to dispell the notion that his Mormon faith would undermine his presidency.  In his speech he supported religious freedom, yet also implied that people without a religion were lacking patriotism. We’ll see if that message was received positively by the conservative evangelical voters in the primaries.

Earlier in 2007, U.S. Representative Pete Stark, a Unitarian Universalist from California, let it be known that he is an atheist, the only “out” atheist in Congress. 

2007 saw the issue of faith in politics become a bigger and bigger topic, and it is not going away. Our religion influences our values, and our values guide our voting.  So we know that the candidates’ religious lives will influence their policies and their leadership. What worries me is that thin line between speaking openly about a life of faith, and playing the religion card to get votes.  The American voter has much to discern in the coming year.  Whatever the religions of the candidates, we voters need to be sure about our values, our beliefs, our hopes for the future of this country, when we head into the voting booth.  

As we wave goodbye to 2007 and step into 2008, I pray that our nation and our world will be able to reflect on the events of last year, learn from our mistakes, celebrate our discoveries, and continue to work for peace and justice.  Amen.

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