I'd planned to start with a joke, but then Kaaren's sister called. Kaaren's side of the conversation was all I could hear: "Oh Honey, that's terrible. I'm so sorry. What can I do?" On the other end of the phone, Kaaren's sister, Ingrid, told her that her friend and neighbor had just committed suicide.
Her name was Sara. She and her partner Rachel were among the first to welcome Ingrid's family to the block. "They're great," said Ingrid on one of her first phone calls after moving into the neighborhood. "They're both our age and better yet, they have 'Let's Not Elect Him this Time Either' bumper stickers on their cars!" They were kind, smart and funny--good folk, who became good friends.
But these good friends were struggling with a lot. Numerous pressures intersected in a terrible and tragic way.
Sara and Rachel were trying to have a child, with Sara carrying the baby. The process was harder than expected, not so much because of the complicated medical procedure but the way the doctors, nurses and technicians treated them. Lacrosse, Wisconsin has islands of liberal neighborhoods and communities, but those islands are surrounded by, and sometimes seemingly submerged by, a giant sea of Midwestern conservative values and religiosity. Not all, but many of the medical professionals assisting Sara and Rachel with their pregnancy process let their disapproval seep through. Shame should not be part of trying to have a baby, but others apparently felt it should be a part of Sara's and Rachel's experience. They often left the hospital bitter and insulted rather than in touch with their joy. Then the miscarriage. Sara's sadness and anger were magnified by the disapproval they had experienced. "Well, they got what they wanted," said Sara, speaking from her pain. "They all can breath easier now-that's one child saved from lesbian parents." I, like most of you, can barely imagine what this must have been like for them. How do you blow off something like this? How do you deal with knowing that on some deep and pervasive level, society is celebrating your failure to have a child?
It didn't take long for an angry depression to set in for Sara, complicated and amplified by an overloaded and stressed life. Like many of us, Sara and her partner had jobs that competed with family life. Sara was a professor on tenure track, which meant long hours and little home time. Her partner Rachel had a good job that fit her skills and paid a decent wage, but it was 45 minutes away. The long hours combined with the long commute meant that Rachel's attention; energy and time were also work-directed, not family-directed. A miscarriage had happened, a tragic, deeply painful event. Our American culture of over-work left them with little time to process, talk and heal as a couple. And so they struggled through their pain separately, alone. When they were together, fights increased, as did the distance between them.
And then the election. Her friends were surprised at how personally Sara took George Bush's win. As we all know, conservative moral and religious voters turned out to be the surprise swing votes. One of the main reasons the religious right got so many conservative religious folk out to vote was that, in addition to voting for president, there were also many anti-gay and anti-gay marriage measures on state and local ballots. So, in a very real sense, it was hatred of gays and lesbians that tipped the scales. I think it was New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman who said Bush rode into office this second time on the coattails of our country's continuing tradition of homophobia. This was more than an interesting sociological fact for Sara. It became a personal affront, a message aimed directly at her saying, "We Americans don't want you. You are the antithesis of morality, goodness, and worth. We wish you would disappear!"
Now keep in mind that Sara was a strong, successful and sophisticated woman-- an accomplished women's studies professor and committed political activist who was no stranger to hateful and homophobic remarks. But somehow, with everything else going on in her life, this homophobia took on overwhelming power. For Sara, there was something not only angering but hopeless in watching reporters politely interview anti-gay activists and politicians, listen to their explicitly hateful language and then, at the end of it all, thank them for their thoughts with a great big smile. Sara grew very angry at first, then over time very quiet.
Two months later, to the shock of her friends and to the absolute devastation of her lifetime partner, she killed herself.
After they found Sara's body, a police chaplain was sent to the scene. Apparently he had a hard time understanding what Rachel meant when she described herself as Sara's "life-time partner"-or maybe he just didn't want to understand. "I'm sorry, I'm just not getting it," he'd say. "Let's try it one more time. Tell me what exactly is your relationship with the deceased?" Finally, in tears and on the edge of screaming, Rachel said sternly, "She was my wife! I just lost my wife. My love is dead." And then she walked away having to sit by herself until friends arrived.
Now my question for all of us this morning is, "Where is the sin in all this?"
I want to be very careful here. I'm not asking, "Why did Sara kill herself?" As we all know, the factors that lead one to this terrible choice are many, mysterious and too complicated to untangle into a simple straight line. The cause is something we can't ever really unravel. But I do think we can ask about the sin. Indeed, if we are to honor the dignity of this woman's life, I think we MUST ask, "Where was the sin in all this?"
Paul Tillich's advice, as we heard in the readings, is to look into the depths, to look deep inside to locate what and where sin is. There, he says, lies the reality that originally gave rise to the concept and there lies the reality that is relevant to us today. So one way of getting at our question is to try to imagine what "reality" Sara found when she turned inward.
For the evangelists that pepper our radio and TV stations, for the fundamentalist Christians that write in to our own Rochester newspaper, for "America's pastor" Billy Graham, and even for our current President and many of his closest staff, the answer is clear. Simply put, they imagine that Sara looked deep into her inner core and soul and found corruption to be her reality, a deep and dark stain of original sin due to her fallen humanity. Her corruption, in their minds, was made even darker by the additional burden of her sexual preference which from their perspective was an affront to God and disobedience to his divine law. In other words, for fundamentalists and conservative religion, the sin was somehow in her being. If Sara could only have looked hard enough, honestly enough and deeply enough, she would have seen that the sin of her story lay in her love for her partner.
Which of course is repulsive and even more importantly, clearly a lie. It is a made-up projection. It's simply not true. And we know this because, as Ingrid, Sara's partner Rachel, and Sara's other friends will tell you when Sara plumbed her depths, her gut, her soul and her heart, what she saw and struggled with was not darkness, disobedience or filth, but isolation, separation, and aloneness.
And here -in this discrepancy between what our culture imagines about Sara and what Sara's loved ones know--lies one of the greatest dangers facing our society today. We have become so soaked in and skewed by the fundamentalist understanding of sin that we can no longer see the real pain and the truly life-threatening dynamics facing each and every one of us. It's not something that gets press time. It's not something politicians warn us about. It's not something that gets named when we talk about the soul of America being in danger. But it should be!! We as a culture are absolutely obsessed with the idea of sin as corruption and disobedience. It is arguably THE defining characteristic of not only our culture's religious outlook, but also its public policy decisions-a defining characteristic that leaves us blind and bound to priorities that are death producing rather than life giving. And if you doubt this, you need only recall a few of the recent public policy choices of our government leaders.
In the face of 3-4 million jobs lost and 35 million people living in poverty, the federal, state and local leaders of this country find their moral compasses most alarmed by gay marriage. This, we are told, is what's threatening our families. This is supposedly what's weakening marriages and making it harder for husbands and wives to feel connected to each other and their kids: gays and lesbians wanting to marry. Forget about both parents having to work 50-60 hour jobs. Forget about poor working parents needing to work two jobs to survive. Forget about parents having jobs that don't provide adequate health care. No, it's those depraved gay folk. That's what we really need to do something about if we want to protect our families! I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but I simply don't know any other word to describe this perspective than pathological. This isn't a logic-guided perspective. This isn't a compassion driven perspective. This is a sin-skewed perspective.
Another example: Prayer in schools and the desire to teach creationism. Over and over, these two issues eclipse inadequate and unequal funding in education. Forget that 15-year-old out-of-date textbook Tommy has in his hand; what he really needs is to be able to pray and learn about how a Christian God created the world. Again, this is not a logic-guided perspective. This isn't a compassion-driven perspective. This is a sin-skewed perspective.
I don't imagine many of us have taken the time to carefully read President Bush's 2005 budget proposal. But we should. His budget calls for cutbacks in low-income housing grants, veterans' benefits, and the National Institute of Health, but it significantly increases money and government resources for anti-obscenity initiatives. Forget the healing efforts of the National Institute of Health; what we really need to worry about is making sure our citizens have a harder time downloading porn off the Internet. This isn't a logic-guided perspective or a compassion-driven perspective. This is a sin-skewed perspective.
Research shows over and over that sex education about condoms and safe sex helps lower the cases of sexually transmitted diseases, especially AIDS, but our politicians invoke the higher authority of God's law about not having sex before marriage. They tell us in a number of different ways that the ends simply don't justify the means: What does it really gain us if we save a million people's bodies from AIDS by giving them access to a method that will cost them their very souls? I will repeat it just one more time: this is not a logic-guided perspective or a compassion-driven perspective. This is a sin-skewed perspective.*
A sin-skewed perspective, friends, that we, our country and our world can no longer afford. It is literally killing us, by allowing AIDS, allowing poverty, allowing work that turns us into cogs with no time to be human -- and by demonizing people to such a degree that they simply give up.
Which brings me to us. Part of my sermon today-as I just said-is to highlight how we can no longer afford the fundamentalist understanding of sin. But equally important and deeply related is the point that we as Unitarian Universalists cannot afford to simply be critics of sin. I take Paul Tillich's challenge very seriously. Remember, he says religious liberals are called not so much to criticize or eliminate the idea of sin, but to redefine it. Actually that's not completely accurate--"rediscover it" are his exact words. But either way, it's a suggestion that makes many of us uneasy.
And none of us should feel bad about admitting that uneasiness. It's been part of our religious tradition for at least the past 100 years, if not far longer. Simply put, the standard Unitarian Universalist attitude-some might say genetic predisposition-toward sin is one of elimination, not rehabilitation. Most of us have wanted nothing to do with the idea. We amass facts and logic to prove that sin is an outdated, superstitious, unhelpful and even harmful framework for understanding the human condition. One might even say that when it comes to sin, we Unitarian Universalists are the John Kerrys of the spiritual world. Bear with me and I think you'll agree.
I'm sure you remember how during the presidential campaign, commentator after commentator pointed out that the debates between President Bush and Senator Kerry really came down to a debate between frameworks and facts. In general, President Bush's strategy was to frame the debate and repeat slogans or catchphrases over and over. John Kerry took another tactic. Instead of presenting alternative frameworks, he criticized and tried to undermine Bush's frameworks with logic and facts. Bush would throw out the phrase "war on terror;" Kerry would reply with facts about how this war was doing more damage than good. Bush stated his vision that there is an "axis of evil" out there; Kerry countered with details and distinctions to show how such a framework was simplistic. Bush claimed and affirmed the label "pro-life;" Kerry talked about needing to consider the facts of each particular case. Over and over, Bush offered frameworks; Kerry criticized those frameworks with facts and logic.
And what happened? Kerry lost!
It was a hard lesson, but the election taught political liberals that frameworks trump facts every time. Like it or not, it seems to be a peculiarity of our species that frameworks control what facts we notice and remember, more so than facts determine what frameworks we accept or reject. Or to put it another way, in a battle over ideas, you can't just criticize an idea to make it go away; you have to recapture it, redefine it and reclaim that idea as your own.
Which is exactly what I think we religious liberals need to learn and take seriously in our battle against the current pathological and destructive understanding of sin that dominates our culture today. What the people of the world need from religious liberals is not more high-minded, well-argued and borderline-condescending--criticisms about how silly a concept sin is. No, the world needs to hear our alternative version of sin. They need a choice!! A life-giving choice! One that finally speaks to the real pain and struggles going on in their souls and in their lives.
Which brings us to the wonderful words of Mary Oliver.
You do not have to be good. [she tells us]
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles
Through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Her message is clear. No matter what the fundamentalists say, repentance is not the path to healing what ails us. She's telling us that what Life desires for us-even demands of us-is not cleanliness, but re-connection; not purity, but the rebuilding of relationships; not obedience, but the breaking free from deadly isolation. She's telling us, in other words, that sin is not about corruption, it's about separation.
And what's even more important for us to realize is that this emphasis on reconnection has always been what Unitarian Universalists have been about. We've just forgotten it. Somewhere along the line, we UUs slowly but surely became myopic in our commitments, focusing on freedom and the protection of individual choice above and even to the exclusion of everything else, forgetting that, first and foremost, we are a relational religion. Historically, friends, our reason for being has never been simply to protect and affirm the right of individuals to pick their own religious path; no, our higher calling, our most important mission has been the task of helping human beings reconnect to their deeper selves, to each other, to the needs of the world and to the mysterious and sacred holiness that flows through all of those relationships. This is possibly the core piece of our religious identity and power: we stand in the long line of religious liberals who have given their lives to help the world understand that religion is not about cleanliness, it is about connection.
And so, do Unitarian Universalists believe that people exist in a state of sin? Friends, you bet we do. Just look down deep inside--as Paul Tillich tells us to do--and you yourself will find the pain of isolation and a deep hunger for connection. Like a good religious liberal, Tillich writes, "Sin is separation. To be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation. What haunts and hurts us is not some black mark of unworthiness, but the knowledge that we are estranged from something to which we really belong, and with which we should be united." And so when I-as a Unitarian Universalist-look at Sara's story, I most certainly see a tragedy riddled with sin. I see her life stained by the sin of a society that made it hard every step of the way for her to be connected joyfully and freely with her sexuality and deepest self. I see her life stained by the sin of a screwed-up culture that's made it normal to work so many hours that she and her partner didn't really have a fighting chance to find the time to connect and work through their deep pain together. And I see her life stained by the sin of a shallow and "me-focused" culture that encourages all of us to feel a greater connection to consumerism than to the pain and needs of the oppressed, hurting and poor.
And I suspect-whether or not you are personally comfortable with the word sin yet-that you also see this deadly separation in Sara's story. It's what makes you a religious liberal; it's what makes you a Unitarian Universalist. The challenge before all of us, friends, is to help the rest of the world rethink their blinding and destructive definitions of sin, so they can see these deadly disconnects too--and maybe even join with us to mend and heal them.
May it be so. Amen
All Paul Tillich quotes and references are from his sermon "You are Accepted," found in his book The Shaking of the Foundations.
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