On True Religion

On True Religion:

A Sermon on James 1: 17-27

Saint Michael’s University Church

Isla Vista, California

August 30, 2009

The Rev. Nicole Janelle, Vicar and Chaplain

The Rev. Dr. Ronald David, Preacher

On September 5, 2007 I was in route to Charleston, South Carolina from Los Angeles.  Stopping over in Atlanta, Georgia, I found myself hovering near the Hudson bistro, bookstore and newsstand like an aircraft in a holding pattern.  The silvery jacket of Richard Dawkins’ recently published book, The God Delusion, had hijacked my attention.

I thought to myself, “Debbi,” my wife, “will sigh in exasperation if I buy another book.”  Always frugal, Debbi buys only what we need.  On occasion she will reluctantly relent and buy clothing for herself.  “Do you like it?”  She will ask while modeling before the mirror on the back of our bedroom door.  Before I can answer, Debbi is compelled to add, “Ross Dress-for-less . . . $12 on sale, down from $36 . . . a real steal!”

I buy books, and I do so without announcing their purchase or their price—even if I’ve bought them at a remarkable discount from Amazon.com.  Still, Debbi knows.  Only God knows how she knows.

Only God knows unless, of course, God is a delusion as Dawkins asserts on his silver-jacketed book.  This will be my justification when God reveals to Debbi that I’ve purchased yet another book: as a priest it is my duty to remain informed about the arguments made in the public domain against my God.

In fact, at the moment I decided to buy the book I wished that I had been wearing my clerical collar.  I declined the sales clerk’s offer to bag the book.  I wanted my fellow sojourners to notice not me but a priest carrying a book wherein the author calls to question the very existence of God.

I once heard it said that few people are persuaded rationally until they are first persuaded emotionally.  I believe that to be true . . . at least I know that it is true for me.  As a chaplain and supervisor in clinical pastoral education I try to be mindful of my emotional state.  In anticipation of delving into Dawkins’ treatise I pray for mindfulness, for ears to hear Dawkins’ story.  So, before cracking the spine on the God Delusion, but after reading the jacket abstract, here is the emotional state I found myself in, and the cognitive awareness evoked in that state: I was tingling with an excitement tinged with fear—an eagerness to engage in an existentially imperative dialogue or debate that at best would prove offensive.  Worse, it might undermine my faith.

My fear notwithstanding, I began to read Dawkins’ book, chapter by chapter.  But I had not yet read beyond the preface before realizing that The God Delusion was not about God at all.  Dawkins’ diatribe was about the institution and practice of religion.  Dawkins’ diatribe is about the harm done in God’s name by hypocritical, absurd, and brutal men.  It was not long before Dawkins reveals a rage and smugness that tests even my prayerful presence as a chaplain.  Still, I realize that beneath the blustery veneer, Richard Dawkins had not written a word about the immediate, ineffable, experience of anything transcendent, sacred, or holy.

I remembered my “encounter” with Dawkins as I reread today’s epistle from James.  Dawkins certainly does not heed James’ counsel: “You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God's righteousness.”  Quite the contrary, Dawkins is quick to speak with anger without any intention of apprehending or comprehending God’s reality and virtue.

But more than an inability to hold his tongue or quell his anger, it is abundantly evident that what Dawkins means when he writes about religion is not remotely related to what James means in today’s epistle. 

The words religion or religious appear only seven times in all of the New Testament (and not at all in the Old Testament).  The letter written by James, brother of Jesus of Nazareth, contains three of the seven references.  “If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.  Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

So, what does James mean when he writes about religion in the early life of the Christian community?  Among the many sources one might turn to in search of an answer, I think Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s study, The Meaning and End of Religion, is among the most comprehensive, coherent and compelling.  Briefly said, the religion about which James wrote was a personal, inward and immediate experience of the sacred, the holy.  Religion was, in effect, a visceral, perhaps intuitive experience that was the impetus to “first-order religious language . . . prayer, prophecy, proclamation, spontaneous utterances of love and joy . . .”[1]  This is to be distinguished from more contemporary and relatively recently evolved understandings of religions as “institutions, customs, laws, creeds, and theological systems . . .”[2]

The distinction is significant.  The “religion” of Dawkins’ time, of our time, is the outward and visible sign of the “religion” of James’ time, an inward, spiritual grace.  To be sure, it matters that the outward and visible sign may be a distortion and rank perversion of the spiritual grace that ought to inform and inspire religious practice.  The distortions and perversions are the root of the hypocrisy, absurdity, and brutality about and against which Dawkins justifiably rants.  It is the inward experience of grace that Dawkins, indeed too many of us, sadly lacks.

This lack—or better said, this amnesia and/or anesthesia for the inward experience of grace—cannot be overemphasized.  Rudolf Otto wrote in his now-classic treatise that bears the ironic title, The Idea of the Holy, “The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness.  Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no farther; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings.”[3]

We are or ought to be religious practitioners seeking to celebrate our lived experience of the numinous, of God, or seeking to reanimate our experience of God remembered.  If our religious practice is designed to merely conjure an idea or image of God, our efforts will likely be frustrated if not in vain.  And so it seems to be for Dawkins.

Again, Dawkins is not alone.  You have, no doubt, read or heard of the authors who have joined Dawkins in his screed, including Christopher Hitchens, author of God is not Great, William Lobdell, author of Losing My Religion, and Loyal Rue, author of Religion is not about God.  What they all share is a disappointment or outrage with organized religion, and an absence of “intrinsically religious feelings.”  And the absence of the experience of an inward, spiritual grace is profoundly consequential.

Consider Loyal Rue’s claim that religion “is about manipulating our brains so that we might think, feel, and act in ways that are good for us, both individually and collectively . . . we can say with confidence that the ultimate goal of human beings accords with that of all other life . . . that is, to maximize reproductive fitness.”[4]  Dawkins, a biologist and Darwinian evolutionist, no doubt would agree with Rue and both would run afoul of James, especially when one considers the plight of the “orphan and widow.”  In Rue and Dawkins’ world, care for the vulnerable and marginalized is an option.  Someone might easily decide that the orphan and widow, literal and figurative, are unfit for survival, and are drags on the human gene pool.  For the powerful, the privileged, the fortunate, and  the fit, health care for the orphan and widow is a debatable matter.

To the contrary, in today’s epistle James writes, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress . . .”  In James’ world, the orphans and widows worthiness is not contingent on their reproductive fitness.  They are all unconditionally beloved of God.  The truly religious, the person filled with the spirit of God, the person moved with reverence for God, is compelled to care for the orphan and widow.  Such care is not an option.  Such care is imperative.

Hence the commandment to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, and souls, and might, and to love our neighbor—including the most wretched and weak among us—to love them as though they are one with us, as in God they most surely are.

If our twenty-first century religion were the outward and visible sign of James’ first century religion—an inward, spiritual grace—Dawkins might have been “unstained by the world,” God would not have been a delusion, and I might not have felt obliged to buy a book at the airport in Atlanta.  Amen.