All Saint's Day sermon (late)

 

Celebration of the Saints

1 Kings 5:1-5; 8:1-13

John 2:19-21

10/31/21

               In the passage that we read today from 1 Kings, we hear of the amazing plans of Solomon for the building of the temple.  We also hear in that last line the intent of the temple.  “Then Solomon said, ‘The Lord said that he would live in a dark cloud, but I have indeed built you a lofty temple as a place where you can live forever.’”   We don’t tend to think of God as living in a temple, as living in a building, as residing in a specific place at all.  If we do, I think we envision heaven as the place where God lives.  But this is not really a biblical understanding.  And it is certainly not an Old Testament understanding.  The Israelites truly and deeply believed that God resided in the temple, in the Holy of Holies: the innermost part of the temple: in the Ark of the Covenant.  This was where God LIVED and could be found. 

               I invite you to think about that for a moment.  How would our faith, our practice of faith change if we believed God actually lived in the church, for example?  What would you do differently if we believed that this building was God’s HOUSE? 

               And then the next question is, if we believed that God lived here in this building and then the building was destroyed, especially by people we believed to be enemies, how would that impact you?  What would you do?  What would WE do? 

               That is in fact what happened to the Israelites.  For them the temple was sacred, absolutely holy in the highest sense of that word.  It was perfect, it was God’s home.  And then it was destroyed.  Twice it was destroyed.  And both times that destruction was beyond devastating.  It challenged everything they believed, everything they understood.  Did this mean that God was destroyed too?  Did it mean that God had left the “home” they had made for God?  And if so had God left them, too?

               They had come to a very unhealthy place in their understanding.  God had wanted a relationship with the Israelites.  But instead, they had made it into a set of rites, rituals and regulations.  But that became their core value, their core understanding.  And when that was destroyed?

               We all have beliefs, we all have “sacred cows” in our understandings and in our theology, but also in our mind sets.  Things that we cling to absolutely.  Those beliefs that we cling to become our grounding, our base.  They become foundational for us; core beliefs that effect everything else about the way we view the world.  They affect what information we can take in, what information we reject.  They also blind us to other pieces of information.  They blind us, many times to inconsistencies and to flaws in the arguments that support those beliefs.  They blind us to obvious truths that would challenge our way of thinking. 

But the thing is, sacred cows cannot survive in this world.  Anything other than God that we make into an idol is bound to fall, that we declare absolute, that we decide is “truth” cannot survive, ultimately.  Maybe not in our lifetimes, but everything that we make into an idol, or that we decide is unshakeable, or absolute will be challenged.  And when the beliefs or the idols or the sacred cows become challenged, as all sacred cows will, we will have a choice we must make. 

There are four ways people usually respond when their core beliefs are challenged. 

               The first is to continue to deny what has challenged our understanding.  This can only be done up to a certain point, but people do this.  Even when it is obvious to everyone around them that they are doing that, people still do this.  For example, if you were raised to believe that people who are rich have it because they deserve it, and people who are poor don’t have things because they don’t deserve to have good things, then these beliefs might be challenged the first time that you actually get to know a poor person, or someone who grew up in abject poverty.  Even so, I hear people find ways to cling to their old belief systems: “Well, this person is the exception”.  “Well, but MOST people who are poor are different.”  Or they discover how much harm someone who is rich has really done to those under them in order to climb that particular ladder.  Same deal: “Well, that action was the exception.  They don’t normally act that way.” 

               When I was in Ohio there was another clergy couple in our Presbytery who also went through a terrible scandal.  The male pastor was brought up on ecclesiastical charges for sexually abusing a bunch of different boys from three different Presbyteries around the country.  These boys were now all men, the pastor was past the statute of limitations so could not be brought up on criminal charges, but these boys were pressing ecclesiastical charges.  The pastor renounced jurisdiction, which means he gave up his ordination, in order to shut down the process so that no one would hear the charges or be able to confront him.  But the three Presbyteries involved decided this was unfair to the victims.  They hosted “listening” sessions that would simply allow the victims to share their experiences with this pastor.  When the charges were first brought, most people supported the pastor.  They denied the possibility that their beloved, charming, charismatic pastor could ever be found guilty of something like this.  But with the listening sessions man after man came forward to share their story.  And those these men had not previously known each other (some from California, some from Florida and now some in Ohio), their stories all had strong similarities and were all intensely painful.  Once those stories were out, it became much, much harder to deny the charges.  But his wife continued to hold on to her belief in his innocence.  She could not allow her core faith in her husband’s innocence to be shaken, despite the evidence. 

The second response that a person may have in the face of the face of a core belief being challenged is that a person may change lesser beliefs around the core belief in order to hold up their core belief.  I saw this with Martha Stewart.  People believed in her. Many idolized her. So when she was found guilty of insider trading, people changed other ideas they had in order to keep Martha Stewart as the idol she had been for so many.  “Oh, that’s not such a bad thing,” they decided.  Or “Well, she wasn’t really guilty.”  Or, “well, people make mistakes”.  And they forget that if it had been a poor, unknown person making that same “mistake”, they would have wanted them put away for life.

               However, if the situation is too big, too overwhelming, neither of these responses can be upheld.  Such was the case with the destruction of the temple.  It was far too clear and obvious that the temple had been destroyed for any denial to be long lasting.  So then again, they had a bigger choice to make about the cognitive dissonance they were experiencing.  One possible response is to throw out the whole belief system.  Some people decide that because a core understanding has been found to be flawed, the whole thing has to go.  We see this response in many situations.  When I was doing my dissertation on fundamentalism, as you know from a few weeks ago, I interviewed some people who had left fundamentalism to become atheists.  For these folk, they would find something in scripture that contradicted something else in scripture (like, for example, the order of creation in Genesis 1 versus the order of creation in Genesis 2, or Jesus’ constant confrontation and overturning of some of the old biblical laws: like the law of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” which he completely threw out saying “But I say to you, do not return evil for evil. But if someone slaps one cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”, etc.) then their core belief in a literal and inerrant scripture becomes challenged.  The reaction of some, then, is to throw out the entire faith.  “If this is wrong, the whole thing must be wrong.”

Another example I’ve often encountered is with the core belief that God is in charge of everything, and that everything happens for a reason.  If God is all-powerful and then something too terrible to be dealt with happens, what is a core belief for many is shaken.  If I believe that God can take control or is in control of everything, then I may have been able to say, “everything happens for a reason” when my brother died or when I lost my job.  But when an event such as the Holocaust happens?  Or when I know a child who is raped or tortured?  When I encounter first hand the thousands of people who die from starvation or dehydration?  Then the ability to say “well, God was in charge” and “everything happens for a reason” can be challenged.  The result for many who go through this experience is also one of choosing to reject faith completely.  There can’t be a God at all, certainly not a loving God, if these kinds of terrible things happen and God does not prevent them.

In the secular world, we see this happen when an idol is found to be human. When a politician or movie star or pastor is caught in a scandal that is so horrific that it cannot be denied, people may throw out the person all together.  They will flip from seeing the person as all good to seeing the person as all evil.  There is no in-between.  There is no humanity to be accounted for.  They were perfect.  And now they are the devil. 

Finally, the last, and obviously the most healthy response to that cognitive dissonance, to an irrefutable challenge to our core beliefs is to go through the grief and pain of adjusting them.  Can we make that choice to change how we think, to readjust our beliefs to include the new information?  This is the hardest self-reflective work that we will ever have to do in our lifetimes: to actually be willing to look at foundational beliefs, to accommodate information we did not have before, to change.  I cannot overstate how hard this is for people.  The grief involved in a complete mind-set change is so large that most people simply cannot do it.  It takes amazing strength, courage and wisdom to be able to look at new information and consider that we may have been wrong.

I think about the people who believed with absolute conviction that Hitler was doing a good thing for his people, and what they must have felt after WWII.  Were they able to see that they had in fact been wrong?  Were they able to change?  Where they able to see the evil in their own understandings?  Or did they die declaring he was right, or misunderstood, or that we just were focusing on the wrong thing?   Did they deny the evil he did?  Say it hadn’t really happened at all?  Did they deny the inhumanity of the concentration camps?  Or continue in prejudice, blind thinking?  Were they able to change?

We know that some were.  I think about Corrie Ten Boom’s writing about some of the guards she met when the Holocaust had ended.  I think about their confessions to her with sorrow and deep regret about the parts they played.  But how hard that must have been for them!  How hard for any of us to realize we have participated in something harmful, or destructive.  I’m reminded once again of Professor Dumbledore’s commentary at the end of the Harry Potter series about the evil Voldemort.   He said that even this evil man could heal, he could heal all the horrible, awful things he had done.  He could find “salvation” but only if he were willing to face what he had done and to feel remorse for it.  He also admitted that the pain of that remorse would be worse than he could imagine.  But it would save him.  Being willing to see and understand would save him.  But it would not come without a pain he was unwilling to experience. 

               Today we celebrate the saints.  And we tend to mean two things by this in the Presbyterian Church.  The first is those people who have gone ahead of us whom we honor.  When I think of the saints in my life, the people in my life whom I deeply respect, admire, look up to; they are, consistently, people who are willing to do the hard internal work of really looking at themselves, their core beliefs, and all of their actions throughout their lives that have come out of those core beliefs.  They are willing to turn, or go a different direction, when they have found that their most sacredly held beliefs have led them astray.  They are people, like Jack, who are willing to adjust, change, and go a different way.

               The other thing we in the church mean by “the saints” is all those whom we have cared about and valued who have passed before us.  Because we believe and understand that they are all children of God, all loved by God, all valued by God.  They have added to our lives, not always in a good way, but always they have added something, something we could learn from if not rest in.  They have made us who we are, they have made the church what it is.  They have struggled and suffered as we now struggle at times and suffer at times.  And their legacy informs ours and who we are and who we are becoming.  We remember them in all their humanity, in all their ideas that we now know to have been false, all their core beliefs that we have now come to see were flawed and limited.  Our remembering them can help us to be gentle with our own flawed beliefs.  Our remembering the building of the temple and the hope they placed in this building that was destroyed can help us to have compassion for those who remain stuck in their ideas, but also for ourselves when we are struggling to change.  It can also give us the courage to change: Remembering can give us the courage and strength to be willing to change our ideas when they are challenged. 

               So, on this All Saints Day, I call you to remember.  Remember a temple people thought housed God.  Remember that it fell.  Remember that the people had to choose how to respond when their core beliefs, their sacred cows, were destroyed.  Remember the saints we have known and their core beliefs that were challenged or shattered during their life times or afterwards.  And then remember to be gentle with yourself when you are faced with new information.  You have choices about how to respond.  Will we grow?  Will we learn?  Growing and learning will make our lives easier.  But know this good news: that even when we don’t, when we cannot stretch or cannot grow, God will still love us, hold us, and carry us into tomorrow.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.