Beyond Humanism
a sermon given by Steve Johnson
on Sunday, April 30, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
READINGS:
1. Our first reading this morning is from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” first published in 1789. It’s called “The Divine Image,” one of several poems that comprise “Songs of Innocence.”
The Divine Image
To Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is God our father dear:
And Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is Man his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
2. The scripture reading today is taken from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount. It contains some of the most familiar lines in the New Testament, which perhaps not coincidentally are some of the most humanist-friendly in all the scriptures.
And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him. And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,
"Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
"Blessed are those who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
"Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
"Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
"Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
"Blessed are those which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Roger asked me if I would talk this morning about Humanism. He believes there are more than a few Humanists out there in the pews, and he’s been known to hold me up as Exhibit A, like some rare Malagasy lemur: “Here’s a Humanist who can compose and then get through the delivery of a pastoral prayer. You see, it isn’t so hard.” (Don’t be fooled. It is hard. But in truth it’s not that hard and indeed, as so many of you have demonstrated over the years, it can be quite a special experience. So when Roger asks you, please consider saying “yes.”)
In the last week I’ve discovered one of the many meanings of irony: There’s nothing like a sermon on Humanism to put the fear of God in you.
Let’s go back a bit in time. It’s 1967 and I’m in the chapel of the Mount Hermon School sitting in a pew quite like ours, though sadly minus the pink cushions. I’m surrounded by 660 boys, all of us deeply flawed. 637 of us are thinking about girls. (This seemed perfectly OK until I had a daughter.) Why weren’t we thinking about God, for God’s sake? Because we were all Humanists? Arguably we were. And perhaps most of us here today are, too.
As I began to think about this sermon a question occurred to me -- where do Jesus and Humanism intersect? Answer: On the Web of course. So I Googled “Jesus and Humanism” and here’s the first entry that popped up:
"All who have given themselves to the pleasures of the flesh, all who have given themselves to the new modes of Humanism and Modernism set down for ensnarement of the human race by Satan, all those who close their ears to Our voices, shall burn!"
Jesus, May 28, 1975
This didn’t sound at all promising. So I quickly surfed out of there, wondering what other trouble we Humanists might be in. Not merely with Satan, but perhaps with the IRS, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms … The usual suspects.
The next piece I happened upon was a sermon dear to evangelicals entitled “10 Shekels and a Shirt” by a minister named Paris Reidhead, apparently a fellow traveler and contemporary of Albert Schweitzer. Reidhead had a real bone to pick with individuals and organizations “practicing Humanism behind a mask of Christianity.” He defines Humanism as:
“… a philosophical statement that declares the end of all being is the happiness of man. The reason for existence is man’s happiness.”
Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? What are the sources of happiness, anyway? For many of us they include love and kindness, peace and justice, beauty and nature, all of which are venerated by most of the world’s religions. Is there a problem here?
Well, yes, apparently there is. “10 Shekels and a Shirt” goes on to liken Humanism to “utilitarian religion and expedient Christianity?” I had to read that twice. Did he say “utilitarian” or “Unitarian” religion? Not that there’s a big difference, of course, but it did suggest a song …..(sung) “Those Unitarians, they’re so utilitarian, so utilitarian (etc.)”
But let’s cut to the chase. 5,831 words into the sermon – and I know this because my computer happily counted all of them -- Reidhead offers this synopsis of his beef with Humanism:
“Christianity says ‘The end of all being is the glory of God.’ Humanism says, ‘The end of all being is the happiness of man.’ And one was born in (down) Hell, the deification of man; and the other was born in Heaven, the glorification of God!”
Well, if the happiness of humankind and utilitarian Unitarianism are the problem, then a lot of us have got it bad. We can probably waive the jury – We’re guilty as charged, your Honor. Case closed, next case.
But what apparently didn’t occur to Brother Reidhead is that Humanism needn’t stop with the happiness of humankind.
****
Humanism has roots that date back 2500 years – in the West to Socrates and in the East to Confucius. Socrates believed that sound values have their origins in learning how to think for oneself. Confucius believed that "a society ought to work for the benefit of all its members," that virtue has much to do with loving humankind.
Humanism’s next big entrance occurred as a philosophical and literary movement during the Renaissance, where its principal emphasis was human capability. It emphasized what we now think of as the Humanities, and a return to classical ideals. Out of the movement came a reconsideration of the scriptures, and many of the ideas that spawned the Reformation.
But it was in 19th century America that two parallel phenomena gave rise to much of what we think of today as Humanist thought. The first was right here in greater Lincoln where the New England Transcendentalists emerged in the 1830’s, led by a Unitarian minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism was in part a reaction against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of Unitarianism. As Dana Robbat reminded me the other day, it had its roots in romantic German philosophy, and in the English poets, notably Coleridge and Wordsworth. Principal among its beliefs were that God is immanent in man and nature, and that intuition and personal experience are the highest sources of knowledge.
Less than 10 years later Charles Darwin appeared in the Midwest and laid out his theory – it’s just a theory mind you – of evolution. Evolutionary thought in turn gave rise to a movement that began to reject the Bible as the source of revealed truth.
This created a quandary for Unitarianism, which at that time looked a lot like liberal Christianity. Most Unitarians still believed that Jesus was an important incarnation of the divine. But Unitarians had begun to question miracles and the resurrection. At the Harvard Divinity School lecture in 1838, Emerson caused an uproar when he endorsed worship of the teachings of Jesus, not the person, and urged students to look to their own intuition as their spiritual compass. By most accounts the faculty were horrified, the students delighted.
***
What’s important to remember is that Humanism was not then and is not now synonymous with atheism. Far from it. There are many religious Humanists. Religious and secular Humanists alike agree that little should be accepted on faith alone. But nothing about Humanism explicitly precludes a belief in God … at least God writ large.
It has been said that the number of Humanists in UU congregations is somewhere between 40 and 60 percent. That’s probably conservative, if we include “spiritual Humanists” in our definition. As we know from experience, and as we hear most weeks from this very pulpit, spirituality need be neither irrational nor supernatural. For many there is a deep spirituality in the commitment to love and truth, justice and compassion, nature and beauty.
But is that spirituality enough to sustain us through the truly bad times? A dear friend and long time member of this church said to me the other evening that reading the Lenten Booklet had left him quite sad, sad that he didn’t find signs or words of faith deep enough to sustain us through the dark periods, faith that would assure us that “everything is going to be alright.” I’m not sure I agree with my friend. I think that for most of us Humanism is merely a point of departure to places much deeper, places and faiths that truly anchor us in even the roughest of waters.
An American writer named Dorothy Gilman wrote: “It’s when we’re given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves.” Back at the Mount Hermon School in the late 60’s I was given that choice. I was introduced to a book entitled “Honest to God.” Authored by an Anglican bishop named John Robinson, it draws on the thinking of some of the most influential religious thinkers of the 20th century. It had a profound effect on my thinking, enough so that it drove me to study religion in college, and briefly to study divinity at Edinburgh.
I vividly recall Robinson’s words: “God is, by definition, ‘ultimate reality.’ And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality really exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like ... Thus, the fundamental theological question is not in establishing the 'existence' of God as a separate entity but in pressing through, in ultimate concern to …[what Paul Tillich called] 'the ground of our being'.”
Robinson goes on: “God is not 'out there'. He is in Bonhoeffer's words 'the ‘beyond in the midst of our life,' a depth of reality reached ‘not on the borders of life but at its centre' …” “Belief in God is the trust …that to give ourselves to the uttermost in love is not to be confounded, but to have 'accepted' that love is the ground of our being ... And the specifically Christian view of the world is asserting that the final definition of this reality … since it is the very ground of our being, is 'the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord'.”
Whether in going “beyond Humanism” we wish to take that step into the realm of revealed Christian faith is not for this sermon to question. For some here today that relationship with Jesus as Christ is very much the “ultimate reality. And for some it is not. But one of the many beauties of the First Parish is that this important divergence of belief is not a source of division. The coming together of Congregationalists and Unitarians here almost 65 years ago stands as a testament to that agreement to disagree. And our foundations have not been torn asunder because of it.
***
In 1901 William James wrote to a friend:
"The fountainhead of all religion lies in the mystical experiences of the individual. All our theology [is only] superimposed … [These experiences] convince us there is a sphere of life larger and more powerful than our usual consciousness. They help us to live, they melt our hearts, and communicate significance and value to everything."
And that from a scientist. It is just such a mystical experience that is a subject of “Sunday Morning,” the poem excerpted on the front of your Order of Service. It begins with a woman in her dressing gown taking “coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.” A bright green cockatoo on the rug mingles with the coffee and oranges and sunlight to “… dissipate the holy rush of ancient sacrifice./She dreams a little, and she feels the dark/Encroachment of that old catastrophe.” The morning is still “like wide water … Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet/Over the seas, to silent Palestine/Dominion of the blood and sepulcher.”
Is this a Humanist, quietly delighting in the small pleasures of Sunday morning, but haunted by the age-old mystery, Jesus’ “ancient sacrifice”? Or is she haunted by the guilt of not being in church? Or both? In either case, Stevens writes: “Why should she give her bounty to the dead?/What is divinity if it can come/Only in silent shadows and in dreams?/Shall she not find in comforts of the sun/In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else/in any balm or beauty of the earth/Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?/Divinity must live within herself …”
What is a Humanist to make of such mysteries? A similar mystery is presented in William Blake’s ‘The Divine Image’ where the poet quietly insists that Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love – virtues extolled in the Sermon on the Mount – cannot exist except as they are incarnate in the face and form of humankind.
More troubling to a Humanist, however, is that in “Songs of Experience” Blake offers up the flip-side of “The Divine Image.” There he finds not the goodness in humanity, but the opposite: “Cruelty has a human heart/And Jealousy a human face/Terror the human form divine/And Secrecy the human dress.” Which of Blake’s images of humanity does he mean us to embrace?
Reading the poems back to back is meant to capture the duality that has been present in Western thought for centuries – body and soul, head and heart, good and evil, innocence and experience. But Blake is after something more than that stark contrast. Not just the naive idealism of the little child or the blighted cynicism of the skeptic, but what he called "achieved innocence.”
The question Blake poses, I think, is how do we reconcile our ideals with our experience, to achieve an innocence that is active in the world, not deploring but seeking to change what is wrong with humankind. We can't blame it on God. We need to start closer to home – within ourselves, within these pews, within our community, within the world. And that, I believe, is our mission.
Mario Cuomo once said – and I’m paraphrasing – a guest sermonist is like the body at an Irish wake: you’re needed, but no-one expects you to say very much. I fear I’ve said both too much and too little. But there’s no going back. It’s time to go forth into this perfect day, to find the “ground of our being,” beyond Humanism.
And may compassion be our compass, joy our strength, and peace our passion, now and always.
Amen.