December 10, 2006

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

December 10, 2006

Our Eternal Messiah Complex

Karen Armstrong in her newest book, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, goes into some detail to show how the idea of the messiah came into the religious concepts of the ancient Hebrews. The Greek and Persian worlds were then in their ascendancies, and dominated much of the Middle East. It was, she notes, a clash of civilizations, not unlike what we are witnessing today around the world, but for us most clearly seen in the Middle Eastern cultures and peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and the Palestinians. In the 3rd Century BCE, the people of Jerusalem, as Armstrong puts it, were horrified by the Greek influence, especially the secular tenor of the city life. The Jews were trapped between two worlds, the old and the new. It was a time of upheaval; they begin to entertain hopes of independence under their own messiach [sic].

This is the beginning within the Judeo-Christian history of the idea of a savior; a warrior king who would come and liberate the chosen people of God; and, idea that is further developed in the story of the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Messiah in Hebrew means the anointed one; Jesus is the Greek corruption of the Hebrew name Joshua. Jesus was actually Joshua, or savior, or anointed one.

A messiah, then, is one chosen by God for a divine purpose, and for the ancient Hebrew people, the purpose was saving the nation of Israel. That mission or purpose has not changed for modern Jews, though idea of a messiah as single person who is a warrior king who would be sent to save the nation is no longer widely held by many Jews, except some very conservative or fundamental sects of Judaism which still hold to this belief.

The idea of a messiah, though, is older than Judaism, older even than the Greeks. In terms of Western Civilization, the earliest confirmable idea of a savior god or messiah, comes from ancient Egypt, during 18th Dynasty of pharaohs—this is the time of Akhenaton and his son the boy king, Tutankhamen--King Tut. (FYI-There will be a King Tut exhibit coming to the Franklin Science Institute in Philadelphia in 2007, the first Tut tour in eighteen years.)

There are no less than fifteen such savior gods to be found in the religions of the ancient world, the pagan world. Probably there were far more, but they are lost to the ashes of history. These savior gods are one of the themes that the great world religions teacher Joseph Campbell explored in his classic book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In Egypt they had more than one, there was Shed, but most famous was Osiris. In Greece, he was Dionysus; in Italy, he was Bacchus; in Syria, Adonis; in Persia, Mithras.

We can safely say that for as long as there have been humans who have sought safety, security, even hope, there has been a longing for a person to provide those things. It may be that we are all born with a longing for a savior, if no more than we are born with a need for care and nurture. After all, we are born helpless. We need almost constant care for the first four or five years of our lives, and varying levels of care for several more years. We are a species born into dependency; and for many of us that level of dependency never ends. Fortunately, most of us get on into our personal independence well enough to care for ourselves physically, but we all arrive at different stages of our emotional or spiritual dependency. Let me stress, that this is neither bad nor good; it is what it is; it is what we make of it; it is what we need it to be, as well.

We all at times, in certain situations, find ourselves looking for someone to save us, or at least save us from a specific situation. I find myself in such situations, even now I find myself in one, when I feel the mind’s eye revolving over the group in hopes that one person there will rise up and save the day. We all look outside ourselves at times for someone to save the day.

Mothers and fathers, of course, are our first saviors. They are the ones we first idolize for their abilities to save us from all kinds of difficulties, starting with the most fundamental of hunger and safety, on to keeping us from harm when a bully lives next door for example.

Speaking of parental salvation, Dave Barry noted there is a big difference between men and women in this. He said with deep feeling for this difference: If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life--without even considering if there are men on base.

We are rescued so often in our formative years, almost daily, that we develop an early need for such rescue. If we have very loving, doting parents, we certainly get a full dose, and if we do not have such consistent caring, we often develop an even greater need for someone to watch over and protect us. After all, to quote the former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, the world is a dangerous place.

The world is in fact a dangerous place, though in many ways far less dangerous for us than it was two to five thousand years ago when many of the savior gods were worshipped. And, of course, Jesus is still worshipped as a savior God by millions of Christians.

We have, it seems to me, a history and a biology that predisposes us to a need for a messiah, for an anointed one to save us. Further, I do not believe we will ever lose our need to look outside ourselves in hope for someone to help us, sometimes to even save us from ourselves. That is what millions are doing when they turn to AA, or therapy, or religion. Sometimes we recognize that we do not have the ability or power to save ourselves, and actively seek a source of our salvation, be that a person, a group, a god.

The idea of some thing or some one to save us rests within our families, but is also reflected largely in our community and national governmental structures.

Monarchy developed and gained unprecedented strength as a form of governance in large measure out of people idealizing in the King and/or Queen the perfection of wisdom and leadership, in fact, all the attributes of a savior god. In the Greek and Roman days, the kings were frequently elevated from human to divine, to further strengthen their powers of protection and to secure well being, wealth, and happiness.

In Europe the medieval establishment of the divine right of kings had as its foundation this early Greek and Roman pattern of belief and practice.

We of this modern age also have seen how leaders can be elevated out of crisis. Witness Rudolph Guiliani, who was mayor of New York City when the terrorist acts of 9/11 happened in 2001, and for President Bush, who moved from president to savior overnight. There have been numerous articles in the newspapers and magazines that talk about Bush as a kind of savior and those talking about his coming to see himself as the savior of the American people. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were also thusly charged by the media of their day. This is a chicken-egg debate. Which comes first? The need or the experience?

Mary Oliver, the poet, wrote in her poem Two Kinds of Deliverance:

I don’t know

lots of things but I know this: next year

when spring

flows over the starting point I’ll think I’m going to

drown in the shimmering miles of it and then

one or two birds will fly me over

the threshold.

We do not always know, perhaps most of the time we do not know, what we are looking for in any situation. We do not always see what we are seeking in another person, either. But I believe we often are seeking a messiah of one kind or another.

Here is something I have learned about my own beliefs, which is this: Every new member of this congregation holds a certain messiah potential. Do I mean by that that I think each new member will save our congregation in some complete or holistic fashion? Absolutely not, yet I know that what brought us here, and what maintains and moves us forward resides in you.

I also know that for many of you that belief rests in your faith in me as your minister, and in thee leaders you have elected/selected to guide this community.

Neither of idea is wrong, for it is in reality a combination. The religious community, any congregation, and certainly our congregation, is made up of many messiahs, many long-term and many momentary saviors. This past couple of weeks I have called on about a dozen of you to help me through a difficult time. I look to you for your wisdom, for you honesty, for your ability to help save me from a difficult situation. But I find that you keep telling me what I keep telling you! That the strength and wisdom to do the hard things in life rests within, and from the community.

Why is it that we have to keep being reminded of this truth? The answer lies in part because of our eternal messiah complex. Few of us, except the monomaniacs of the world, believe we have all the strength and power we need to get through the tough stuff of life.

I have found that saviors come in all forms. It is amazing how often children can be found in this role. When I was teaching elementary school in the early seventies, another teacher me told this story:

My eight-year-old grandson Johnny was waiting in line at an ice cream stand and hanging on to the hand of his three-year-old cousin Mark. "I want vanilla!" Mark yelled impatiently. "Vanilla!"

The stand was out of vanilla, but the older boy handled the situation with all the skill of a child psychologist, and saved the day. He bought two strawberry cones and handed one to his cousin, saying,

"Here you are--pink vanilla!"

There was never a great organization, religion, or country founded without such leadership.

Messiahs, though, are usually believed to be divine, or often become divine out of their great skill; at least this is what the religious stories of the world tell us. Not surprisingly, most of those divines, including Jesus, are born of virgins, impregnated by a god, during the time of the winter solstice. Do you feel the cold, dark, dreary, leafless pall of winter in this? I do, and it makes sense that at this time of year hope would have been the most precious emotion of the ancients.

We all need to be saved, at least from time to time. Many of us need to be saved from ourselves. We all need to be saved from the evil that arises in the world. What we have to be wary of though is that our saviors not become our controllers. That is always a danger when we place too much trust and hope and expectation into a ruler or a savior. They all too often do begin to see themselves as saviors whose actions may not be questioned. That is the psychologists’ understanding of a messiah complex.

We need each other, but we also need to trust that we have within us wisdom to make choices that will either benefit or harm us and others. If our idea of messiah is simply about finding an easy way out, then we are looking for a pretty paltry kind of salvation.

Jesus, while I do not believe he was divine, a god, I do believe he has the qualities that I as a Unitarian Universalist can accept in a messiah. His words were always about trust and love and acceptance; not about war and waging the eternal battle of human difference. Jesus taught his followers to have faith; faith in themselves and in questioning what was in his time given as unquestionable religious truth.

This is our commission, then, as a people of faith, as individuals always facing the struggles of living decent and upright lives. My friends, have faith, question any and all things labeled truth, love yourself and love one another. And, do not, above all, expect to do it all alone. Look for support, even as people have for millennia looked for a messiah, for we always will have more and better of life out of our relationships.

Alone we each have a piece of the eternal and divine puzzle of existence, together we can make a picture of meaning that can save us all.

So be it

December 17, 2006 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

December 17, 2006

An Old Story

Our annual children’s holiday service is an important tradition of this congregation. A reminder that one of the reasons we value our religious community is that it is such a vital part of our children’s learning experience. We recognize that as parents, and as a faith community dedicated to our children, that we are helping to grow the spirits/minds/souls (as you will) of our young ones. It takes very little reminder for all of us to recall the challenges of our own childhoods, the joys and the pain, to know that we always hold the experiences of our youth in our deepest being throughout our lives.

I talked to an elderly relative by marriage a few years ago who had recently moved into a retirement community. Her face was absolutely radiant as she was telling me how happy she was that she finally was in a community where she had friends. In the telling, she laid out, as the foundation of her joy, the fact that as a child and through her teens she had had very few friends; this haunted her all through much of her life as a condition, since her husband’s work forced frequent relocations. But finally, in her seventies, the old story of her life had gotten a new chapter. Now she finally had good friends in her retirement. I could have cried at the undertone of deep sadness she addressed telling me her good news. The deepest hurt, though, was not the lack of friendships in her adult years nearly so much as the lack of them when she was a little girl. She had been ostracized because of a difference of religion from most of the children in the village of her youth, but also because of poverty and the inability to do much of what others could. It is an old story. Old in that for her it is a painful experience of childhood she has carried for over seventy years. Old, too, because so many people have experienced social isolation for centuries, indeed millennia.

No one needs to be told how important it is for most children to feel they belong, to feel a part of the group, to have a sense of connection to the larger community. This is all the more important when one’s family is in some way outside the so-called “main stream.” Children of liberally religious or non-religious families often find themselves on the outside. This can be an extremely painful experience that can mark a child for life, as it did my elderly relative; it can put a wrinkle in the child’s mind/spirit that can impact much of what they do as they grow into adulthood; often negatively.

The rural area where I grew up was very conservative religiously, politically, even agriculturally (old practices died hard). We were overwhelmingly Protestants who had distinct distrust of the various sects in our area. But being anything was far superior to being nothing—at least in terms of religion. There was a man with two children who was an avowed atheist, who would not let his children participate in Christmas pageants and programs that dominated in those 1950s school years where I grew up. Those two children were pariahs in the school, as the parents were in the community. Now the father did nothing more than exercise his family’s right to religious freedom, in their case freedom from religion, but they paid a heavy price for it. I would not be in the least surprised to find that one or both of those children became born-again Christians as a reaction to that painful childhood.

How different it might have been for that family if they had had a religious community like ours where they could believe what they felt was true, without having to live as outsiders.

These December holidays often cause many UUs and non-religious people some struggles with what it means to celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah. In the main, we UUs don’t believe in the miracle of the virgin birth of the baby God, nor in the miracle of one day of oil lasting eight days. So if the holidays are meant to be celebrations of these miracles, the question is, why do we bother? It is very simple; we continue to celebrate these holidays because they are part of our traditions.

It’s an old story, this trying to jibe our beliefs with our traditions. One that has been going on since human beings first made religious rituals a part of community.

We see it clearly in our holiday rites and rituals. The overwhelmingly common use of light, of fires and candles, especially at this time of the winter solstice. This tradition of honoring light and rebirth has been handed down to us since the days long ago of prehistoric human gatherings. The evergreen trees, holly, and ivy are a further testament to this old story about the long eons of miraculous human survival.

These religious rites we to honor here this morning, with lighting our chalice and candles, and of acting out an old story, are really hand-me-down rites. Hand-me-down rites that have been molded and remolded by one religion after another, each keeping the essential elements down through the ages. The rites are recast into a meaningful celebration of human life and human survival for each succeeding religion. We do not have to believe in any of the various religious rituals; we do not have to believe in any of the ways of celebrating this fundamental belief in the value of human life in order to appreciate the deeper reasons for the celebrations.

Every religious tradition is about birth, struggle, or death. While we of this age feel less of the basal connection to survival, we do feel the connections of these traditions to our families, to our history and heritage.

Our holiday celebrations are more about these family connections than about belief. Because family is far more important than belief. We need to feel connected to family, and friends, and to other like-minded or related souls.

These thirty-nine children you saw here in their holiday program (which, by the way, is not all of our UUSMC children, and included none of the older junior or senior youth), these children are even now absorbing into their being the elements of strength that will see them through their lives. For here, in this Unitarian Universalist congregation, they know they belong, and that we value them, that we want to see and hear them. This religious family of faith is strengthening their spirits. That is in itself also an old story.

The story of Joseph and Mary is for us one of the oldest stories of family. A poor young Jewish couple, burdened by an occupying government’s requirements, struggling to make ends meet, and the oldest miracle of human existence: the birth of a baby. That they survive is a far greater miracle that we of modern times usually appreciate, for childbirth was often fatal in those days, even without the added strain of such a journey. That they find at the end of the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem compassion from the innkeeper, who offers the stable for shelter; that the child survives ought to be enough. But humans are storytellers, so elaborations happen.

It is an old story: Two people meet, create new life, and survive against great odds. A wonderful old story. One we will keep telling in celebrations now to infinity. Blessed be the old stories.

Amen