Sermon Dec 12, 2004
“Unlearning”
In The Way of Chuang Tzu, a book by one of
the early Taoist masters, the author asks:
“How does the true man of Tao
Walk through walls without obstruction,
Stand in fire without being burnt?”
He
answers:
Not because of cunning or daring;
Not because he has learned,
But because he has unlearned.”
I
must admit that this is one of my favorite Taoist quotes. In fact, it is the quote that I often use in
my final lectures in my college courses.
It may seem strange to give a lesson about unlearning to finish off a semester, what with the academy’s
emphasis on gathering facts and statistics; but I think learning to unlearn is
an essential part of critical thinking.
What
do I mean by “learning to unlearn”?
Well,
in my classes I warn the students that for the rest of their lives, they will
find themselves thrust into situations where people teach them or expect them
to do things in a certain way; and many times the way they will be taught to do
things just doesn’t make much sense.
For
instance, there is the story of a woman preparing a holiday ham. Each year she dutifully sliced off the two
ends of the ham before popping it into the oven. Someone asked her why she cut off the ends of the ham, and she
replied, “Well, that’s how my mother always did it.”
Her
curiosity provoked, she called her mother to ask why she always cut off the
ends of the ham. “Well,” her mom
replied, “Because my mother always did.”
The mystery deepened.
The
woman then called her elderly grandmother and asked her why she always cut off
the ends of the ham. “Oh, honey,” the
grandmother exclaimed, “I didn’t have a big enough pan to fit it in.”
There’s
a good practical truth here. We do a
lot of things that made sense once, but the reason for doing them has long
since disappeared.
A
good place to start looking at our own lives is to ask why we do what we do and
whether it makes any sense anymore.
But
what does this have to do with us, unless some of you are planning some sort of
strange and unnecessary surgery on your Christmas dinner?
I
think that the process of religious growth is very often a process of
unlearning.
Most
of us were raised within particular religious denominations and with very
established ideas about God. Many
times, as we grow older and see more of life, these same ideas become a
hindrance to faith and even become barriers to belief at all.
I
remember one of my earliest religious traumas.
I must have been about five years old and was laying in bed one night
thinking about God. I decided to ask
God to move a shadow on the wall, to prove to me that he really existed (God
was a “he” at that time, of course). It
seemed reasonable. Ask God to do
something and of course, he would do it.
I have no idea what Sunday School lesson I had just endured, but I can
imagine it was the one about “ask and you shall receive”. Well I asked. And I waited. I asked
again and starred hard at the wall to see if the shadow would move. I don’t remember how many times I asked or
how long I waited, but nothing happened.
Then I started to cry.
My
mother came in to see what the matter was and I told her. She smiled and explained to me it didn’t
work that way. I don’t recall exactly
what she said, but it boiled down to this:
God isn’t a gum-ball machine:
pop in a prayer, out comes the answer.
It
may seem like a simple enough concept, but I’m not sure all religion has
grasped this. You still hear on the TV
about how if you only have enough faith, all things are possible. And if what you ask doesn’t happen, you
obviously didn’t have enough faith. The
gum-ball machine is never broken; your quarter must have been bent. I think they have some unlearning to do.
Most
of us were raised with very strange ideas about God: God is omnipotent; that
is, he (he was still a he) can do anything he wants, he controls everything
that happens. And he never makes a
wrong decision. He also knows
everything that has ever happened, is happening now, and ever will happen. Every decision he makes is perfectly loving,
perfectly just, perfectly wise, and perfectly holy. And all at the same time.
And
if things go wrong in your life, either you sinned and are being chastised out
of love or, depending on your denomination, are being punished as an expression
of God’s holiness. Either that, or its
all part of some perfect plan that you just don’t understand.
No
wonder people have trouble believing in God.
What is that song title, “You’re just too good to be true?”
But
this idea of God permeates the thinking of anybody who has been raised in
Christianity.
I
remember years ago reading Harold Kushner’s book, Why Bad things Happen to Good People. He posed the dilemma:
How can God be both good and in control of all things? If God is in control of everything that happens,
he can’t be good (God’s still a he); but if he is good, he cannot be in control
of everything. Kushner’s conclusion:
God doesn’t control everything.
Immediately
my Christian background kicked into full gear.
“What the heck kind of God is that?” I fumed, “Who ever heard of a God
who isn’t in control?” The Christian
idea of God was so deeply rooted in my thinking that the kind of God that
Kushner proposed was absolutely inconceivable to me. I had some unlearning to
do.
Of
course, Rabbi Kushner has the advantage of being, well, a rabbi. He hasn’t benefited from two thousand years
of Christianity’s interaction with Greek philosophy; an interaction that has
shaped its idea of God into something that no longer makes sense of reality,
and can only answer our questions with trite phrases like, “It’s a mystery,
just accept it.”
No,
Rabbi Kushner is stuck with a God who is not in complete control over
everything that happens. Sometimes his
God doesn't even know what’s going on.
He may have occasionally helped ancient Israel out of a mess, but he
never seemed to be able to prevent them from getting into one in the first
place. Nor can Rabbi Kushner’s God stop
anyone else from doing bad things.
So
Christians, with their concept of God, ask things like, “What was God doing
during the Holocaust?” They wonder how they can reconcile that horror with
their idea of God’s love and justice and, more importantly, with their idea of
God’s power.
I
suspect Rabbi Kushner would agree with my new answer to that question (I’ve
unlearned a little since I read his book).
What was God doing during the holocaust? God was weeping.
There
is one aspect of Greek philosophy that Christianity never picked up on. It is one of the few parts of Aristotle’s
philosophy that I like, but it was something Christians decided was
inconsistent with revelation.
That
was the idea that matter has always existed, or what philosopher’s call, the
eternity of matter. Christians reject
this notion because it seemed to set up a second power that had to be dealt
with in the world; that is, the power or nature of matter.
They
didn’t want a god who was reduced to working with the materials at hand; who at
best could shape matter, but was unable to overcome its fundamental
nature. They didn’t want a God who was
limited by anything. Now the idea of a
God who can’t do anything he or she wants may bother some, but maybe that’s
part of unlearning.
On
the other hand, the Jews had the idea that matter always existed. In Genesis One, when it says that the Spirit
of God moved across the face of the deep;
“the Deep” or in Hebrew, Tehom,
was the primordial ocean of Chaos, a strange, undifferentiated mix of elements
out of which the world emerged.
In
Genesis God does not create matter, God shapes it; God imposes order upon
it. And God is limited by its
nature.
For
instance, humans don’t magically appear, they are shaped from the earth. And they always retain an aspect of
earthiness; so the psalmist says, when speaking about our foolishness, “God remembers
our frame; that we are but dust.”
In
early Christian thought, humans are spiritual beings trapped in a body. In Jewish thought we are energized matter,
mud that has been animated. And we are
mud that is forever seeking to return to the earth from which it was drawn; mud
that is forever expressing its muddiness.
That’s
why sin is not some strange event for the Jews, the result of some the fall of
humanity, an ancient rift with the divine.
It is a natural expression of who we are, of the downward pull of our
nature.
Then
what do we do about sin? Another song
comes to mind. “Pick yourself up, dust
yourself off, and start all over again.”
Simple. We’re going to mess up
because of who we are. Get over it and
get back in the game.
Nor
do the Jews imagine that God is in control of every human activity or the
activity of every part of this creation.
Of
course, in Genesis One, God manages to impose order over the power of Chaos in
a mere six days. But he’s really tired
afterward. Even so, the account
obviously exaggerates God’s power and is intended to do that. It’s worship, not science. In the actual history of Israel, God seems
only able to, at best, nudge things a little now and then.
When
you think of it, the idea that God can at best tweak a reluctant world,
fiddling here or there, fits better with our modern understanding of
evolution. Think about it! It’s been fourteen and a half billion years
since the Big Bang, and what is the end product of all that activity? Us.
The Studebakers of creation.
What a testimony to the powerlessness of the divine!
The
idea of a tinkering God also fits better with our own experience. Moral and spiritual growth is not some
sudden transformation. It is a long,
difficult process, a slogging through the mud of our own nature.
And
unlike Christianity, Judaism never denies the reality of the world as something
that exists apart from God, as something that at best God can tinker with,
planting an idea here or a hope there.
But, at the same time, God is constantly frustrated by the recalcitrance
of humanity; by our moral inertia, by a humanity that persists in its stupidity
and takes generations to learn things that in hindsight would seem obvious to a
six year old.
If
you want more evidence of the powerlessness of the divine, look around. Look at a race posed now, maybe more than
ever, on the brink of its own self-annihilation. What is our losing battle against nuclear proliferation about or
our concern over the spread of biological weapons? They are an attempt to delay the terrible realization of our
self-destructive tendencies.
Maybe
we’ll win that battle and maybe we won’t.
Greater empires than ours have fallen into chaos, centuries of light
have been eclipsed by times of darkness, over and over advanced cultures have
degenerated into barbarism; they can again.
But
then where is the power of the divine?
If it’s not to annihilate evil or to even prevent it, where is it to be
found? Does the divine have any power?
Time
and again in Israel’s history, some hero arose, some individual stood up, and
helped Israel throw off a yoke of oppression.
Time and again prophets arose, and confronted Israel with messages of
justice and compassion. Time and again,
according to Jewish tradition, they were killed by the powers of oppression;
but their message lived.
Over
and over throughout history, individuals, inspired by hope, by dreams of
justice, have called humanity to something better, to a more noble way of
life. As often as not, their message
fell upon deaf ears, but somehow it endured, and bore fruit.
This
is a subtle form of power. It is the
power to persist in the face of defeat, a power that stubbornly clings to truth
in the presence of a sea of lies, a power that refuses to be cowed by overwhelming
force, a power that hopes in the face of despair, that insists on living even
when surrounded by death. And it is a
power that gives birth to goodness and peace, in the midst of evil and
violence.
More
than anything, it is a power that lacks the form of power, any of the
attributes of power, yet it is a power that cannot be extinguished. It is a presence for good in an intransigent
and reluctant world.
It
may never overcome evil, it may never ultimately transform the world into a
place of peace and joy; but it is a power that will endure and will continue to
nudge a reluctant humanity toward something better, even if they never
listen.
Why are we here? The fact that we are here is testimony to that power. We are here because we hope, despite
everything. We are here because we are
willing to continue the fight, despite experiencing defeat after defeat. We are here because despite being burned by
religion, and sometimes badly burned, we refuse to give up the possibility of
being touched by the power that nudges humanity toward something better,
something more noble.
We
are here because in a world that seems set in its opposition to the divine,
that refuses to hear the whispers of the Spirit, we chose to align ourselves
with that power and to listen to its pleas.