SunJan152012
Scripture: PSALM 139:1-6, 13-18
My sources this morning are Parade magazine and YouTube. Some of the best stuff is there. They’re windows on the world.
First Parade. The most recent issue has an interview with the actor Daniel Radcliffe, he of Harry Potter fame. I’m guessing it won’t surprise you if I say I’m drawn to remarks and thoughts about religion, and Radcliffe says something in that interview that is very much worth exploring. When he’s asked whether he was raised in a particular religion, he says this: “My dad believes in God, I think. I’m not sure if my mom does. I don’t. I have a problem with religion or anything that says, ‘We have all the answers,’ because there’s no such thing as ‘the answers.’ We’re complex. We change our minds on issues all the time. Religion leaves no room for human complexity” (Jan. 8, 2012, p. 12).
We’ll come back to this in a bit. But first let’s take a visit to YouTube for a related observation. You may have seen a recent video that’s gone viral, a poem by a young guy named Jefferson Bethke, with the title “Why I hate religion but love Jesus” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IAhDGYlpqY&sns=fb). This is the way it begins: “What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion? . . . Religion might preach grace, but another thing they practice . . . See, the problem with religion is it never gets to the core.” He goes on to point up the weaknesses and hypocrisies of religion: “There’s a problem if people only know you’re a Christian by your Facebook. I mean in every other aspect of life, you know that logic’s unworthy. It’s like saying you play for the Lakers just because you bought a jersey . . . Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums. See, one’s the work of God, and one’s a man-made invention. See, one is the cure, but the other is the infection . . . Religion puts you in bondage while Jesus sets you free. Religion makes you blind, but Jesus makes you see.”
And who’s to argue: in many ways both of them are right. You can’t go through the kind of change and decline the larger church is going through without wondering if we may have missed the boat.
But I still don’t think you’ll be surprised if I want to argue the point a little with these two young men. They make different but related points. One, Radcliffe, says that there’s really no point in religion. Its problem, he says, is that it claims to have all the answers and leaves no room for human complexity. The other young man, Bethke, thinks that Jesus is OK but that religion bastardizes him and leads people astray from the very one they’re supposed to worship. Both of them, though, are pretty sure religion is next to worthless.
So acknowledging that they make a pertinent and worthwhile point, one we dare not slough off, let’s explore this some. Let’s begin with Radcliffe. And part of the way I want to respond is to let Radcliffe himself do it in his own words. For embedded in that same interview are the seeds of an answer to the very problem he mentions. A little later in the interview, after he blasts religion for its excessive and unwarranted certainty, he’s asked if he’s a romantic, and this is what he responds: “Yes. I don’t know where my romanticism comes from. My mom and dad would read to me a lot. Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, tales of chivalry and knights, things like that. Those are the stories I loved growing up. I still see something very romantic in the world that perhaps isn’t there [italics mine]” (p. 12). That’s one intriguing observation. And here’s the other pertinent thing he says: when the interviewer asks Radcliffe why he recently gave up booze, he answers, “[Because] my inner life was being drowned” (p. 18).
Now these are clearly not explicit answers to the issue we posed earlier about Radcliffe’s resistance to being religious. But let’s not give up yet. Because his later answers say something much more accurate and real about religion than do his first remarks attempting to explain why religion isn’t a part of his life. There’s far more truth in those subsequent observations than in his cranky dismissal of religion.
The thing about religion is this: it should have little or nothing to say with certainty. Any religion worth its salt is far more about mystery than it is about certainty. It’s far more steeped in poetry than it is in prose. It’s far more like music than it is like an owner’s manual to an iPod. Religion shouldn’t describe; it should dance. It shouldn’t pronounce; it should sing. It shouldn’t close doors; it should open them. It shouldn’t insist; it should say “WOW!”
I don’t want the kind of religion Radcliffe describes, either. It’s a travesty, an utter perversion of what it should be. But that’s what so many people think of when they think of religion: a narrow-minded, restrictive rule-book designed to clamp down on any real creativity or sense of awe. They think of it as obedience to a petty sense of order. They think of it as an obliteration of depth and soul and spirit.
When Radcliffe is asked why he gave up drinking, his answer is extremely perceptive. He says he did it because his “inner life was being drowned.” His inner life is exactly the stuff of religion. It’s precisely the address at which God takes up residence. Your core, your soul? If you pay attention, that’s the inner sanctum in which the Holy Presence inevitably moves and unmakes and remakes. In religion at its best, life bubbles with innerness. It awakens you from a dream that sends you on an errand that changes your life. It crackles with the same kind of expectancy and hope that animate Radcliffe’s romanticism. In religion, you’re pushed off the cliff to soar and glide and see all of life in a way you had never before seen it. In religion, you lean in to the “something more” that has not yet been fully revealed.
Certainty? No! Inner life? Yes! A romantic pull to our deepest yearnings for love and hope and peace and joy? Yes, yes, yes! That inner life and longing are the rich earth in which the Spirit grows. “O Lord, you have searched me and known me,” says the psalm we heard earlier. “You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You . . . are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. . . . Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it. . . . For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (139:1-6, 13-14).
Now this divine knowledge of our inmost thoughts may not be entirely good news. None of us wants our every keystroke on our phone and computer stolen. And I’m not sure I’d be entirely happy to have all those secrets known if I were Jimmy Dimora. We all have parts of ourselves we’d rather keep hidden.
What the psalm reminds us, though, is that, in that inward place, where all those sometimes difficult and unpleasant things swirl around, God is there. Where we have done terrible wrongs, God says, “I forgive you.” Where we have lived in fear, God says, “Fear not.” Where we have failed to be what we could be, God says, “Go forth to flourish and bear rich fruit.” Where we have been obsessed with our own needs and wants, God says, “I have a mission for you.”
And all of that happens in that inner, yearning, romantic life that Radcliffe doesn’t want drowned. It happens in that inner place that knows it cannot entirely help itself. It happens in the middle of the night when we can’t go back to sleep and all the illusions and self-delusions fall away. Into that sometimes cavernous and desperate place comes a voice from beyond us, a voice we can never capture or know with utter certainty, a voice that says, “I know who you are; and even with all your compromises and failures and hypocrisies, I still adore you.”
That voice speaks in all sorts of ways: in the wave of the leaves, in the brush of the snow, in the caress of a lover, in the giggle of a baby. And it speaks not least in music. One of the ways in which Martin Luther King found comfort and solace was in the spirituals that were such a rich part of his life. He would melt into the words and music of “There Is a Balm in Gilead” or “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” And while the danger or threat or difficulty didn’t usually vanish, King nevertheless had a whole new perspective on it. To his inner life, a word from beyond him spoke, a word not unlike the romance of which Radcliffe speaks. It’s not that religion has all the answers. Religion at its best makes room for that inner voice filled with a relentless hope.
Nor does religion stop there. For that inner voice inevitably breaks forth in an outer call, as well. Once you’ve heard that inner voice, how can you stay still? There’s a charge laid upon us, to convey that acceptance and care in all sorts of ways. Maybe there’s a socially awkward child in your neighborhood who needs a friend. Maybe there’s a co-worker who’s just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Maybe you become aware of a dilapidated school in Cleveland or Nicaragua that needs resources. Maybe, as a church, we’re simply kicked in the gut with a need that cries out for a response from us.
Yes, religion, and Christianity in particular, can become misguided and lose its course. Yes, we can come across as too certain. But when all the gears are clicking, when we’re being true to the identity with which God has graced us, we know nothing is certain except that we are loved and that we are called to love. Extravagant love to transform lives: that’s what Jesus is about.
Does Jesus want to abolish religion like that, as the YouTube poet Bethke suggests? Does Jesus hate religion that’s open to mystery, steeped in grace, and devoted to a healing, restoring compassion? I hardly think so.
Radcliffe himself gets at this core in a remarkably vivid way. The subject of his girlfriend, Rosie Coker, comes up, and he says he’s not an easy person to love. He can be totally obsessed with his fantasy football team and he wonders how she stands it. “Rosie has to listen to me talking 24 hours a day about this team. ‘Should I take this player out, do you think, darling?’” And then he says something enormously telling. “She listens to it, and she loves me for my oddness, my awkwardness, all of those things that I hate about myself. She finds them cute. I guess that’s love” (p. 18).
And what I want to whisper to him is: that’s not only love; that’s God. That’s what’s at the heart of everything. What he says about his beloved, we say about the Holy One: God loves us for our oddness, our awkwardness, all of those things that we hate about ourselves. That’s simply who God is. That’s what the heart of the universe is all about: the One who made us loves us as we are.
And what I want to say to the poet Bethke in response to his diatribe about the church is: where else are we going to learn that truth that both he and Radcliffe find so crucial? In what way are we going to learn about the magical, inexplicable love that holds us close in every moment, if not for the church?
It’s easy to dis the church. It’s so full of flaws you’d think it would sink of the weight of its own sins. But for some utterly incomprehensible reason, the church survives and thrives. And it does so, even as it molts and changes, because that transcendent, resilient Word of God will not be stilled. May we be the church in all its glory. May we throw off certainty, bathe in holy mystery, and be sent forth, again and again, in the deepest of all romances, the work of holy love.