Bridgeport
When members are added to the official roster of the Church, there is a certain timeliness in attempting to formulate some of the reasons why we gather together; why we are concerned with the church as a continuing institution, why we feel that the church as a right to state its claims for your personal support and why our Universalist church has a unique function, in addition to reasons which most religious organizations hold in common. Therefore, when I speak to you of the necessity of religious fellowship, the reference is both to the organized religion in general and this Universalist Church in particular.
Organized religion is necessary because we must have something to live on. Religion must be concerned with the material necessities of life. Historically, the better part of religions have always been so concerned. Isaiah reminds the people of his day that although they have conducted religious fasts, they still have not sensed the presence of God. Isaiah says to them, the fast that will most honor God is the fast that is undertaken in order to share bread with the hungry. He says, vs. 7 ff., “Is not the fast to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him and not hide yourself from your own flesh? Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer, you shall cry, and he will say, 'Here I am.'”
This practical application of religion is unmistakably the key to the great prophetic literature of the Hebrews. Religion is organized so that people will have some food to eat, some clothes when they need covering, and care when they are ill.
Whatever one might think about Jesus (man, God, or legend), there is no escaping his constant concern for the day-to-day needs of persons. The legend of the feeding of the five thousand is symbolic of the truth that if you expect persons to be concerned about non-material things, you must see that at least the minimum material needs are answered; or, better still that persons have the opportunity to acquire these necessities for themselves.
This awareness that the organized church is obligated to meet human need permeates the early history of Christianity. It seems quite clear from many of the New Testament documents that the Elders or Presbyters of the early Church were required to care for sick and needy persons. In the letter of James we read, “Is anyone ill? Let him summon the presbyters of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil.” Or, as in 1st Peter, “Elders, be shepherds to your flock.”
Do you remember the novel Anthony Adverse? As an infant he was left in the little niche of a certain door of the convent, a bell was rung, then a sister appeared and took the lonely bundle of humanity into protecting and affectionate arms. The Church of the early, Middle, and later times responded with continuing concern for human beings. The convents and monasteries functioned not only as cloisters and retreats for those persons who shut themselves away from the world so that they [could] worship God continually, but also as hospitals for the care of the sick, the wounded and the weary travellers, as well as nurseries for unwanted babies.
That emphasis continued. Today many of the hospitals were founded, and some still maintained by organized religious groups. Many churches maintain agencies where hungry may be fed.
You may well ask, “Very Good, but is there a practical application today?” The needy are cared for by city or state welfare agencies who are equipped with the power of taxation to finance burdens this church couldn’t possibly assume. Other agencies, such as Family Societies or other community associations provide the type of professional assistance that the churches just aren’t equipped to organize.
Today’s complex urban life has changed the function of the church somewhat, although we still seldom have any surplus in our local “benevolent” account. There are usually enough small emergencies so that the sums you donate quarterly are put to good use.
In Argentina, the Catholic Church is the sole agency in charge of the administration of all charities. That is rare in our world. The church should review its position. It must ask itself, does the church give persons something to live on?
The church, even a tiny one like ours, still has a duty to give people something to live on. Power is the ability to exert influence to bring about a desired result.
We have the power to give people something to live on, first of all by maintaining and strengthening our denominational efforts to serve persons’ needs. The Clara Barton, Joslin diabetic camps, the work of the Universalist Service Committee in Japan, and Virginia, its cooperating efforts with UNESCO agencies, all the extensions of the local church are giving persons something to live on. The continuance of that effort is dependent on the maintaining of our religious fellowship and the support that is given by you to this ancient ethical obligation of organized religion.
Then, too, our ethical responsibility and our use of power face even more complex and difficult testing today. Life is just not as simple as inviting a hungry person home to dinner today.
It’s becoming almost trite to say that most of the people alive on earth today will go to bed hungry tonight. But it’s not trite to the millions with aching stomachs. The point of immediate frustration is that we cannot give our dinner leftovers to a hungry Indian or Arab tribesman. We don’t know any. Most of us have been troubled by the enormous food surpluses that pile up in our country. There’s some serious disarrangement in a world where the grain elevators in one country just cannot contain the surplus wheat and in another country persons starve on the streets. When that condition exists, religion no longer maintains its basic premise of giving people something to live on. Isaiah’s ancient words about not seeing God until we share our bread and our protection, should occasionally twinge our feelings of guilt.
Just as in our local church affairs, we must set up the machinery to accomplish our goals, so with this complex world problem. We must support the political machinery which will give people something to live on. Until some better plan is mapped and implemented, we must support this United Nations in its efforts to see that more persons in our world have food, shelter and medicine.
Whatever honest open influences we can bring to bear on our governmental agencies and representatives could be exerted to provide people something to live on. E.G., If the United States refuses to grant India a large loan so that they may develop industrial facilities, then the India people probably will accept what the Soviet Union offers. When people cry for Bread, we can, like Marie Antoinette, if we wish, be blind or scornful of their need and say, “Let them eat cake.” But in that event we should not be surprised to discover that they are hostile to democracies. That is a basic political reality today; it has always been a fundamental of real religion. Not only must we recognize the reality of the 17th vs. 5th Deuter., “thou shall not kill,” we must make a positive application of this negative commandment, we must preserve life.
If religious institutions do not urge persons, inspire them to use their rightful power to bring this about, then the foundation is being slighted, “religion must give people something to live on.”
Religious fellowship is necessary also because it answers another need that we all have – someone to live with. One cannot escape the conviction as he reads the historic patterns of religion, that religions is a social necessity, providing human beings with meaningful fellowship. The word itself means a “bringing together.” Not only has the church provided a social framework for family life throughout the ceremonials of marriage, birth and death, but also the spirit of community shines through the layers of dogma and partisan quarrels.
Religion says, not the “survival of the fittest,” but that “he that loses his life shall find it.” Something Jesus said (MATT 5/23 24) is as simple and direct that we have no right to evade or misinterpret his quite startling viewpoint. “So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” All the poetic chants, complex creeds, dignified liturgies, philosophical sermons retreat into the shadow of insignificance when compared with this deceivingly simple advice of Jesus. He said that unless there is harmonious fellowship, person to person, it’s a waste of time to worship God. If his advice were followed, one of two things might happen, the churches might all close their doors forever, or the churches might become the redemptive agency of mankind.
So I submit that another condition that makes religious fellowship necessary is that we have someone to live with. That is, there shall exist understanding communication in fellowship one with another; that there shall exist a religious situation where we know and where we are known.
This has been another historic strand in the life of the Church. From time to time in religious history groups feel this need of fellowship and they begin community life together. Many of the early churches of the Apostles were organized on a community basis, where all persons invested their possessions in a common holding; where each person received his individual needs and all worked for the community.
This Christian Communism has been tried many times in the succeeding centuries. One needs but to petition the various religious orders or in our country the Oneida Community, the Hopedale Community, organized by the Universalist Adin Ballou, or the Brook Farm effort of the N.E. 18th century intellectuals. Today, in our world, the Mennonite and Hutterite brethren are illustrations of this attempt to put into practice the religious need of fellowship, of having someone to live with.
Again, the realities of social change, our estimate of probable consequences, make most of us feel that the religious community, organized in the family or on a communistic basis, is just not going to come about in our world today. Most of us would believe that there are obvious flaws, from many points of view in this type of living arrangement.
But this reservation should not blind us to the very real needs we have for the fellowship of understanding. Unless religion can manage to create again this communication between persons of its group, then religion is falling down lamentably on the job. Charles Francis Potter, author of the exciting biography The Preacher and I, brings this home with a painful barb when telling a story about one of his Universalist pastorates. In this Universalist church of which he speaks, (and we could drive by in less than 2 hours), Mrs. Potter introduced one lady to a quiet little old lady who had been in the same part of the church. The first lady said, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” The second lady answered, “Well, perhaps, I’ve been sitting in this pew behind you for the last 20 years.”
In our fellowship, few of us live in the same neighborhoods. We must create this face-to-face feeling of oneness, of fellowship in our church relations together, first of all because it is a human need, second our religious organization cannot survive without it.
Irving Berlin, the song-writer touches the hearts of most Americans in his songs. It is said of him, “Berlin’s genius lies in his gift for outshining the emotional emanations proceeding from huge masses of his countrymen, then being able to express in words and music what they would love to have expressed for them.” Harry Ruby, another songwriter, once remarked, “Believe me, Irving Berlin can’t write. His songs are hits merely because he has a drag with 150 million people.”
So too in our fellowship if we are able to live up to the best of religion, it will express for us things which lie too deep for words, too joyous for laughter, too profound for tears. We will have someone to live with. To put it another way, we will be identified with a religious community. We will be part of a shared life – shared by the sense that together we will be able to reduce misunderstandings among ourselves and because of enthusiasm spread that feeling of understanding beyond our own boundaries. When our religious life is a shared one, there will be a softening of angry feelings which take command of us at times. We will be able to empathize, that is, feel the emotions of others, as they bring their joys and sorrows into the circle.
In the Talmud (Michna Abot) Rabbi Joshua ben Perabya is quoted in the following maxim: “Provide yourself with a teacher, and acquire for yourself a companion and judge every person sympathetically.” That is what can happen in an religious group; it is what must happen in order to bind it together – we must learn in friendship and mutual sharing of emotionally charged experience.
I cannot take time to ask you to reflect on more than one additional reason for the necessity of religious fellowship. We need something to live by. Perhaps you will recall that last week I tried to assert my belief that one of the marks of maturity was this vision of values, this core of meaning called religious faith. In our fellowship this sense of vision carries obligations not usually present in religion; Universalists must always take one additional step of faith. Universalists must be sure enough of their individual convictions and personal interpretation of life’s experience so that they can comfortably tolerate disagreement.
A great deal of the excited agitation and anger over differences of opinion in religion originate in the matter of security in one’s own convictions. The person who has reached religious convictions of depth, is convinced that the faith he holds is adequate for prosperity and depression, war and peace, joy and sorrow, birth and death – such a person will not be greatly disturbed because others, whether of his own church or not, hold different views. It is only when we are quite unsure of our beliefs, when we are afraid that discussion and thought will tear loose the roots of our faith that we become fearful of the heretic and scared of the public operation of opinion differences in a democratically governed organization.
But our faith to live by must be stronger even than that. To us, there is no warfare between science and theology; only the need to find a meaningful symbolism of word and art that will express the potential power of science to increase the achievement of human values.
A faith big enough to be truly understanding must recognize that its wide-flung arms of appreciation must now include a whole world. Smiling Buddha: to some people I suppose the Buddha is a curio and interesting object like an antique. Yet our faith must be big enough now so that we recognize not only in Sunday worship, but in our inward experience that Smiling Buddha is an expression of religion held dear by millions of persons. While we hold to our Christian Universalism, (as some of you), or our emerging, naturalistic Universalism (as I) would recognize that for others the Buddha, or the crucifix, or the turning toward Mecca are symbols of faith which other people live by.
Thus I would plead that each of us sees religious fellowship as an inspiration; to see that people have something to live on; as the fellowship reality that people have someone to live with; and as the imaginative & individual recognition that all persons need a faith to live by. a.
No comments:
Post a Comment